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.
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