the people's delight. She reached
Brescia to hear that Vicenza had fallen. The city was like a landscape
smitten black by the thunder-cloud. Vittoria found Countess Ammiani at
her husband's tomb, stiff, colourless, lifeless as a monument attached
to the tomb.

CHAPTER XXXV

CLOSE OF THE LOMBARD CAMPAIGN--VITTORIA'S PERPLEXITY

The fall of Vicenza turned a tide that had overflowed its barriers with
force enough to roll it to the Adriatic. From that day it was as if a
violent wind blew East over Lombardy; flood and wind breaking here
and there a tree, bowing everything before them. City, fortress, and
battle-field resisted as the eddy whirls. Venice kept her brave colours
streaming aloft in a mighty grasp despite the storm, but between Venice
and Milan there was this unutterable devastation,--so sudden a change,
so complete a reversal of the shield, that the Lombards were at first
incredulous even in their agony, and set their faces against it as at a
monstrous eclipse, as though the heavens were taking false oath of its
being night when it was day. From Vicenza and Rivoli, to Sommacampagna,
and across Monte Godio to Custozza, to Volta on the right of the Mincio,
up to the gates of Milan, the line of fire travelled, with a fantastic
overbearing swiftness that, upon the map, looks like the zig-zag
elbowing of a field-rocket. Vicenza fell on the 11th of June; the
Austrians entered Milan on the 6th of August. Within that short time the
Lombards were struck to the dust.

Countess Ammiani quitted Brescia for Bergamo before the worst had
happened; when nothing but the king's retreat upon the Lombard capital,
after the good fight at Volta, was known. According to the king's
proclamation the Piedmontese army was to defend Milan, and hope was not
dead. Vittoria succeeded in repressing all useless signs of grief in
the presence of the venerable lady, who herself showed none, but simply
recommended her accepted daughter to pray daily. "I can neither confess
nor pray," Vittoria said to the priest, a comfortable, irritable
ecclesiastic, long attached to the family, and little able to deal with
this rebel before Providence, that would not let her swollen spirit
be bled. Yet she admitted to him that the countess possessed resources
which she could find nowhere; and she saw the full beauty of such
inimitable grave endurance. Vittoria's foolish trick of thinking for
herself made her believe, nevertheless, that the countess suff