few minutes the clatter of their arms and the jingle of their spurs,
alone disturbed the stillness of the wide and gloomy plains across
which they made towards Terracina. Montreal was recalling with bitter
resentment his conference with Rienzi; and, proud of his own sagacity
and talent for scheming, he was humbled and vexed at the discovery that
he had been duped by a wilier intriguer. His ambitious designs on Rome,
too, were crossed, and even crushed for the moment, by the very means
to which he had looked for their execution. He had seen enough of the
Barons to feel assured that while Stephen Colonna lived, the head of the
order, he was not likely to obtain that mastery in the state which, if
leagued with a more ambitious or a less timid and less potent signor,
might reward his aid in expelling Rienzi. Under all circumstances, he
deemed it advisable to remain aloof. Should Rienzi grow strong, Montreal
might make the advantageous terms he desired with the Barons; should
Rienzi's power decay, his pride, necessarily humbled, might drive him
to seek the assistance, and submit to the proposals, of Montreal.
The ambition of the Provencal, though vast and daring, was not of a
consistent and persevering nature. Action and enterprise were dearer to
him, as yet, than the rewards which they proffered; and if baffled
in one quarter, he turned himself, with the true spirit of the
knight-errant, to any other field for his achievements. Louis, king of
Hungary, stern, warlike, implacable, seeking vengeance for the murder of
his brother, the ill-fated husband of Joanna, (the beautiful and guilty
Queen of Naples--the Mary Stuart of Italy,) had already prepared himself
to subject the garden of Campania to the Hungarian yoke. Already his
bastard brother had entered Italy--already some of the Neapolitan states
had declared in his favour--already promises had been held out by the
northern monarch to the scattered Companies--and already those fierce
mercenaries gathered menacingly round the frontiers of that Eden of
Italy, attracted, as vultures to the carcass, by the preparation of war