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Updated: June 3, 2025
In spite of his sun-browned skin and the barbarous ornaments that covered him, the figure in the center of the red-robed group was a Caucasian perhaps an American a fellow countryman. And now the boys noticed with a shudder that in the hands of each of the red-robed men was a knife of some sort of stone perhaps flint.
We have ourselves, perhaps not an hour before, sauntered through squares and dawdled beneath porticos like those which we see filled with the red-robed and plumed citizens and patricians, the Jews and ruffians whom Pinturicchio's parti-coloured men-at-arms are dispersing to make room for the followers of Æneas Sylvius; or clambered up rough lanes, hedged in between oak woods and oliveyards, which we might almost swear were the very ones through which are winding Sodoma's cavalcades of gallantly dressed gentlemen, with their hawks and hounds, and negro jesters and apes and beautiful pages, cantering along on shortnecked little horses with silver bits and scarlet trappings, on the pretence of being the Kings from the East, carrying gold and myrrh to the infant Christ.
The feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel had come and gone, bringing processions and music, with a Madonna under a gold baldacchino, to glorify the little deserted chapel on the height. Eleanor had watched the crowds and banners, the red-robed Compagni di Gesu, the white priests, and veiled girls, with a cold averted eye.
You conceive of the place as it must have looked in those old, brave, wicked days, filled all with knights, with red-robed cardinals and clanking men at arms, with fair ladies and grave senators, slinking bravos and hired assassins and all so gay with silk and satin and glittering steel and spangling gems.
It had a marvellous paper of branching trees and parrots and red-robed Chinamen, in the taste of the morning room downstairs, a carved four-post bed, a grate adorned with purplish Dutch tiles, an array of family miniatures over the mantelpiece, and on a neighbouring wall a rack of old swords and rapiers.
But even as the red-robed men raised their knives in unison and were about to give them the downward lunge that would extinguish the life of their feeble victim and as the other priests and the audience turning toward the setting sun, chanted louder and more vociferously a startling interruption occurred. "By the holy poker you're not going to kill that old man while I can prevent it."
Then came another flash of lighting, keen as the blade of a sword, and she saw. There, outlined against the darkness of the archway, red-robed and terrible, stood Violet. Her right hand was flung up above her head, and in her grasp was a knife that she must have taken from the table.
They formed an escort to a pitiable figure. That of a white bearded man who was bent with years and whose eyes gazed vacantly about him as he stumbled along between the red-robed dignitaries. But it was not his age and not his feebleness that made the boys' hearts beat quicker and caused a galvanic shock to shoot through them. The man was white. There was no doubt about it.
He began, patiently, with her cylinder-shaped yellow-brown, orange-spotted caterpillar, on the purple passion flowers in our garden; he watched it change into a dark-brown chrysalis marked with a few pale spots; he saw emerge from this the red-robed lady herself, with her long fulvous forewings, and her shorter hind wings smocked with black velvet, and her under-frock flushed with pinkish orange and spangled with silver.
In all that vast Council Chamber there was no movement, save the slight commotion among a group of red-robed senators farthest from the throne, who were forcibly detaining the Senator Marcantonio Giustiniani, and the imperative gesture from the dais which had waved him back and hushed his involuntary exclamation of horror.
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