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.
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