Rome lay around. The
carnival lights yet flared, the carnival noise beat, beat. This was a
deserted strip, an islet between restless seas.
Ian and Alexander stood upon trodden earth and grass, about them the
yet encumbering ruins of an ancient building, pillars and architraves
and capitals, broken friezes and headless caryatids. Here was the
river, here the ancient street. They breathed in the air, they looked
at the sky, but then at Rome. Somewhere a trumpet was fiercely crying.
Like an impatient hand, like a spurred foot, it tore the magician's
fabric of the past few hours.
Ian laughed. "We had best rub our eyes!" To the fine hearing there was
a catch of the breath, a small dancing hope in his laughter. "_Or,
Glenfernie, shall we dream on?_"
But the other opened his eyes upon things like the Kelpie's Pool and
the old room in the keep where a figure like himself read letters that
lied. He saw in many places a figure like himself, injured and fooled,
stuck full of poisoned arrows. The figure grew as he watched it, until
it overloomed him, until he was passionately its partisan. He said no
word, but he flung the smoking torch yet held in hand among the ruins,
and, leaving Ian and his black and silver, plunged down the slope to
the old, old street along which now poured a wave of carnival.
CHAPTER XXVIII
The laird of Glenfernie lay in the flowering grass, beneath a
pine-tree, rising lonely from the Roman Campagna.
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