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Some days after this strange night, which calls to mind the Roman evenings in the days of Tiberius, Nero, and Heliogabalus, Lucrezia, clad in a robe of golden brocade, her train carried by young girls dressed in white and crowned with roses, issued from her palace to the sound of trumpets and clarions, and made her way over carpets that were laid down in the streets through which she had to pass.
They saw the galleys along the beach, which, lowering their awnings, displayed themselves decked with streamers and pennons that trembled in the breeze and kissed and swept the water, while on board the bugles, trumpets, and clarions were sounding and filling the air far and near with melodious warlike notes.
On Corpus Christi day the street was draped and a fair canopy stretched over the statue. The king himself walked in procession, bearing a white taper, his head uncovered in moult gran révérence; hautboys, clarions and trumpets played melodiously; cardinals, prelates, great seigneurs and nobles, each with his taper of white wax, followed, with the royal archers of the guard in their train.
"Yet may I look with heart unshook On blow brought home or missed Yet may I hear with equal ear The clarions down the List; Yet set my lance above mischance And ride the barriere Oh, hit or miss, how little 'tis, My Lady is not there!" A verse, in this connection, which may be a perversion of Mr. Kipling's meaning, but not so far from it, after all.
Where are the men whose voices ought to ring like clarions among the hosts of their brethren in the Free States of the North? Where is Lord Brougham, ex-apostle of the Diffusion of Knowledge, while the question is of enforced perpetual ignorance as the cement of that unhallowed structure with which this nineteenth century is to be outraged, if treason has its way?
This was the signal of the success of the conspiracy, agreed upon with the besiegers; and from the lines of the Liberal army the clarions rang in wild, exultant strains. Then the dense masses of the enemy's regiments marched forth; and as they approached, the doomed leaders saw their own followers go over and join them.
Fingers of light seemed lifting the edges of the blind. They gained strength as the candle waned, and presently at cock-crow, when unnumbered clarions proclaimed morning, grey dawn with golden eyes brightened upon a dead man and an ancient woman fast asleep beside him.
But the instant the car was opposite the duke and duchess and Don Quixote the music of the clarions ceased, and then that of the lutes and harps on the car, and the figure in the robe rose up, and flinging it apart and removing the veil from its face, disclosed to their eyes the shape of Death itself, fleshless and hideous, at which sight Don Quixote felt uneasy, Sancho frightened, and the duke and duchess displayed a certain trepidation.
Then when the sun had risen and clothed the world with love, the clarions of war were sounded throughout the city, and men made them ready to go forth in enmity before the Turks. And the legions of Persia came forth at the behest of their Shah, and their countless thousands hid the earth under their feet, and the air was darkened by their spears.
There was a solemn moment, the forty thousand believers there assembled shuddered as if they could feel the terrible yet delicious blast of the invisible sweeping over them when during the elevation the silver clarions sounded the famous chorus of angels which invariably makes some women swoon.
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