men; and
they take up the poor nameless body and bear it away quickly from the
sight of the coming day.

Then, as they disappear, the great bell of the Apostles' Church begins
to toll the morning Angelus, half an hour before sunrise,--three
strokes, then four, then five, then one, according to ancient custom,
and then after a moment's silence, the swinging peal rings out, taken up
and answered from end to end of the half-wasted city. A troop of
men-at-arms ride up to the great closed gate 'in rusty armour marvellous
ill-favoured,' as Shakespeare's stage direction has it, mud-splashed,
their brown cloaks half concealing their dark and war-worn mail, their
long swords hanging down and clanking against their huge stirrups, their
beasts jaded and worn and filthy from the night raid in the Campagna, or
the long gallop from Palestrina. The leader pounds three times at the
iron-studded door with the hilt of his dagger, a sleepy porter,
grey-bearded and cloaked, slowly swings back one half of the gate and
the ruffians troop in, followed by the waterman who has gone round the
fortress to avoid the dead body. The gate shuts again, with a long
thundering rumble. High up, wooden shutters, behind which there is no
glass, are thrown open upon the courtyard, and one window after another
is opened to the morning air; on one side, girls and women look out,
muffled in dark shawls; from the other grim, unwashed, bearded men call
down to their companions, who have dismounted and are unsaddling their
weary horses, and measuring out a little water to them, where water is a
thing of price.

The leader goes up into the house to his master, to tell him of the
night's doings, and while he speaks the Baron sits in a great wooden
chair, in his long gown of heavy cloth, edged with coarse fox's fur, his
feet in fur slippers, and a shabby cap upon his head, but a manly and
stern figure, all the same, slowly munching a piece of toasted bread and
sipping a few drops of old white wine from a battered silver cup.

Then Mass in the church, the Baron, his kinsmen, the ladies and the
women kneeling in the high gallery above the altar, the men-at-arms and
men-servants and retainers crouching below on the stone pavement; a
dusky multitude, with a gleam of steel here and there, and red flashing
eyes turned up with greedy longing towards the half-veiled faces of the
women, met perhaps, now and then, by a furtive answering glance from
under a veil or hoodlik