Page:Maurice Hewlett--Little novels of Italy.djvu/171

golden gauze, the poplar buds were pink and brown, the chestnuts had all their candles afire; larks by dozens were abroad in the clear sky. Below the old Rocca del Capitan Vecchio—a grizzled and blind block of masonry on a spur of limestone, which held not a few of Ezzelin's secrets—two miles from Nona, stood a company of boys and girls in white garments, their laps full of flowers. Their shrill song of welcome hailed the riders, and to the same hopeful music they went on. The towers were all standing in those days, the battlements intact; at every gate stood a guard. The Cathedral of the Santi Apostoli had no Apostles; its great front was a cube of unfinished brick; but colonnades ran in all the streets, row after row of beautifully ordered arches; over them were jutting cornices enriched with dancing children, sea monsters, tritons, dolphins, nymphs blowing conches, Nereus, Thetis, and all their sleek familiars, moulded in red clay. The fountain shone, the displayed Graces jetted their crystal store; from every window hung carpets, on every tower a gonfalon, from every church belfry came the riot of bells. The people were massed at the gates, at the windows, on roofs and loggias and balconies—a motley of orange and blue, crimson and green. Soldiers lined the ways, priests with banners were on the steps of their churches. "Evviva, Amilcare! Evviva, Madonna Inglese!" ran like a river of sound from the gates about the streets, until, in the Piazza Grande, where the Signoria waited in the solemn estate of brocade and ermine, the volume of it had the throbbing roll of breakers on a cliff. Thud upon