Gilbert sprang up almost as soon as he saw them, for he knew that, not being travellers, they could hardly be anything but highwaymen. His own men were on their feet as soon as he, while the muleteer guide disappeared round the hut quietly and swiftly, like a mouse when a cat is in sight. Gilbert made straight for his horses, followed by Dunstan and the groom; but before he could reach them, two of the riders had jumped the ditch from the road and intercepted him, while the others rode on toward the shed to carry off his horses. His sword was out in a flash, his men were beside him, their weapons in their hands, and the grimy riders drew theirs also; it was like a little storm of steel in the bright air. The Englishman's long blade whirled half a circle above his head; the blow would beat down the horseman's guard and draw blood, too.
But in mid-air his wrist was seized in the sudden grasp of sinewy fingers, and the friar was already between him and his adversary, warning the other off with his outstretched hand. The loose sleeve had slipped back from his wrist, baring a brown, emaciated arm and elbow upon which the swollen veins seemed to twist and climb like leafless vines upon a withered tree. His lips were white, his eyes blazed, and his voice was suddenly harsh and commanding.
"Back!" he cried, almost savagely.
To Gilbert's very great astonishment, the single word produced an instantaneous and wonderful effect. The riders lowered their weapons, looked at one another, and then sheathed them; the others, who were loosing Gilbert's horses and mules, suddenly desisted at the sound of the friar's voice. Then the one nearest to Gilbert, who was a shade less grimy than the rest, and who wore in his cap a feather from a pheasant's tail, slipped to the ground, and bending low under his tattered brown cloak, took the hem of the monk's frock in his right hand and kissed it fervently. Gilbert stood aside, leaning upon his unsheathed sword, and his wonder grew as he looked on.
"We ask your pardon, Fra Arnoldo," cried the chief, still kneeling. "How could we guess that you were breakfasting out here this morning? We thought you far in the north."
"And therefore thought yourselves free to rob strangers and steal cattle, and cut one anothers' throats?"
"This is probably a part of the civilization of a republic," observed Gilbert, with a smile.
But the highwaymen, all dismounted now, came crowding to the feet of Arnold of Brescia in profound, if not lasting, contrition, and they begged a blessing of the excommunicated monk.
Chapter IX
Gilbert lodged at the sign of the Lion, over against the tower of Nona, by the bridge of Sant' Angelo. The inn was as old as the times of Charlemagne, when it had been named in honour of Pope Leo, who had crowned him emperor. But the quarter was at that time in the hands of the great Jewish race of Pierleoni, whose first antipope, Anacletus, had not been dead many years, and who, though they still held the castle and many towers and fortresses in Rome, had not succeeded in imposing the antipope Victor upon the Roman people, against the will of Bernard of Clairvaux.
Rome lay along the river, in those days, like wreckage and scum thrown up on the shore of a wintry sea. Some twenty thousand human beings were huddled together in smoky huts, most of which were built against the outer walls and towers of the nobles' strongholds-a miserable population, living squalidly in terrible times, starving while the nobles fought with one another, rising now and then like a vision of famine and sword to take back by force the right of life which force had almost taken from them. Gilbert wandered through the crooked, unpaved streets, in and out of gloomy courts and over desolate wastes and open places, the haunts of ravenous dogs and homeless cats that kept themselves alive on the choice pickings of the city's garbage. He went armed and followed by his men, as he saw that other gentlemen of his condition did, and when he knelt in a church to hear mass or to say a prayer, he was careful to kneel with his back to the wall or to a pillar, lest some light-handed worshipper should set a razor to his wallet strings or his sword-belt.
At his inn, too, he lived in a state of armed defence against every one, including the host and the other guests; and the weekly settlement was a weekly battle between Dunstan, who paid his master's scores, the little Tuscan interpreter, and Ser Clemente, the innkeeper, in which the Tuscan had the most uncomfortable position, finding himself placed buffer-like between the honest man and the thief, and exposed to equally hard hitting from both. Rome was poor and dirty and a den of thieves, murderers, and all malefactors, dominated alternately by a family of half-converted Jews, who terrorized the city from strong points of vantage, and then, on other days, by the mob that followed Arnold of Brescia when he appeared in the city, and who would have torn down stone walls with their bare hands at his merest words, as they would have faced the barons' steel with naked breast. At such times men left their tasks-the shoemaker his last, the smith his anvil, the crooked tailor his bench-to follow the northern monk to the Capitol, or to some church where he was to speak to them; and after the men came the women, and after the women the children, all drawn along by the mysterious attraction which they could neither understand nor resist. The tramping of many feet made a dull bass to the sound of many human voices, high and low, crying out lustily for 'Arnold, a Senate, and the Roman Republic'; and then taking up the song of the day, which was a ballad of liberty, in a long minor chant that broke into a jubilant major in the burden-the sort of song the Romans have always made in time of change, the kind of ballad that goes before the end of a kingdom, like a warning voice of fate.
On such days, when the mob went howling and singing after its idol, southwards to the Capitol or even to the far Lateran where Marcus Aurelius sat upon his bronze horse watching the ages go by, then Gilbert loved to wander in the opposite direction, across the castle bridge and under the haunted battlements of Sant' Angelo, where evil Theodora's ghost walked on autumn nights when the south wind blew, and through the long wreck of the fair portico that had once extended from the bridge to the basilica, till he came to the broad flight of steps leading to the walled garden-court of old Saint Peter's. There he loved to sit musing among the cypresses, wondering at the vast bronze pine— cone and the great brass peacocks which Symmachus had brought thither from the ruins of Agrippa's baths, wherein the terrible Crescenzi had fortified themselves during more than a hundred years. Sitting there alone, while Dunstan puzzled his uncertain learning over deep-cut inscriptions of long ago, and Alric, the groom, threw his dagger at a mark on one of the cypress trees, hundreds of times in succession, and rarely missing his aim, Gilbert felt, in the silence he loved, that the soul of Rome had taken hold of his soul, and that in Rome it was good to live for the sake of dreaming, and that dreaming itself was life. The past, with his mother's sins, his own sorrows, the friendship of the boy Henry, the love of Queen Eleanor, were all infinitely far removed and dim. The future, once the magic mirror in which he had seen displayed the glory of knightly deeds which he was to do, was taken up like a departing vision into the blue Roman sky. Only the present remained, the idle, thoughtful, half-narcotic present, with a mazy charm no man could explain, since so far as any bodily good was concerned there was less comfort to be got for money, more fever to be taken for nothing, and a larger element of danger in everyday life in Rome than in any city Gilbert had traversed in his wanderings. Yet he lingered and loved it rather for what it denied him than for what it gave him, for the thoughts it called up rather than for the sights it offered, for that in it which was unknown, and therefore dear to dwell upon, rather than for the sadness and the darkness and the evil that all men might feel.