f throttling. The men who held the ropes were
French soldiers, and by broken Italian phrases and strokes from the
knotted end of the rope, they from time to time stimulated their
prisoners to beg. Two of them were obedient, and to every Florentine
they had encountered had held out their bound hands and said in piteous
tones--

"For the love of God and the Holy Madonna, give us something towards our
ransom! We are Tuscans: we were made prisoners in Lunigiana."

But the third man remained obstinately silent under all the strokes from
the knotted cord. He was very different in aspect from his two
fellow-prisoners. They were young and hardy, and, in the scant clothing
which the avarice of their captors had left them, looked like vulgar,
sturdy mendicants. But he had passed the boundary of old age, and could
hardly be less than four or five and sixty. His beard, which had grown
long in neglect, and the hair which fell thick and straight round his
baldness, were nearly white. His thickset figure was still firm and
upright, though emaciated, and seemed to express energy in spite of
age--an expression that was partly carried out in the dark eyes and
strong dark eyebrows, which had a strangely isolated intensity of colour
in the midst of his yellow, bloodless, deep-wrinkled face with its lank
grey hairs. And yet there was something fitful in the eyes which
contradicted the occasional flash of energy: after looking round with
quick fierceness at windows and faces, they fell again with a lost and
wandering look. But his lips were motionless, and he held his hands
resolutely down. He would not beg.

This sight had been witnessed by the Florentines with growing
exasperation. Many standing at their doors or passing quietly along had
at once given money--some in half-automatic response to an appeal in the
name of God, others in that unquestioning awe of the French soldiery
which had been created by the reports of their cruel warfare, and on
which the French themselves counted as a guarantee of immunity in their
acts of insolence. But as the group had proceeded farther into the
heart of the city, that compliance had gradually disappeared, and the
soldiers found themselves escorted by a gathering troop of men and boys,
who kept up a chorus of exclamations sufficiently intelligible to
foreign ears without any interpreter. The soldiers themselves began to
dislike their position, for, with a strong inclination to use their