, they could get no further for the bristling hedge of swords
and spears which waited. But to this the timid ones replied with reason
that they did not want them in at all. Various guests began to take it
in their heads that this was not the entertainment they had come for;
and in an access of the strange panic which is liable to plunge even the
most sober crowd into blind folly, if nothing worse, collected their
valuables and their attendants and prepared incontinently to fly from
the house. Greatly their wrath raged when Marius refused to let them
out. They muttered that the heads of upstarts were easily turned by a
little power, and they had rather be slain in the open than butchered
like rats in their hole.

And at this, the first hint of insubordination among his forces, Marius
became no longer the easy-going gallant whom most of them had known, but
a being new and strange. He sprang to the mastery of the situation by,
as it were, divine right, a right which was his by grace of the power
that had trained him to face and control crises such as these. He
treated these high-born lords and ladies as though they had been squads
of mutinous recruits; he lashed them with his glance; he no longer
requested, he ordered. His voice held a rasp which none had ever heard,
and which brought them from displeased dignity to instant and abject
obedience. He spared none,--faded voluptuary, whining graybeard, nor
restive youth; in an hour he had bullied and frightened them into
working like galley-slaves, and all the house was under the iron
discipline of his camp.

* * * * *

In her chamber, Varia, in all her terror and loneliness, was forgotten.
About her was an insistent clamor of confusion; she stood in the middle
of the room, dazed and overwhelmed by it, the light flowing softly over
her. Now and again a shouted order was flung across the tumult; with
this there began presently to mingle sounds from without. In the
corridor words flew by her, whose meaning she scarcely comprehended.

"They have taken a tree to batter down the door--"

"My lord Marius saith we are _not_ to use the boiling pitch until he
gives command."

"He was crossing the court and an arrow fell from heaven and smote him."

"Thou liest, fool! It came in at a window!"

And almost in her ears, so close it seemed, a masterful voice shouted:

"Where is that fat beast Hito who hath the keys?" and was gone like
smoke.

And H