“Red is my colour,” the girl answered rather defiantly.
The Marchese laughed gratingly.
Filippo dined with the Lorenzoni on the night of the ball. He wore the red lucco, but had declined to crown himself with laurel. His gaudy Muse, however, had no such scruples, and her black curls were wreathed with silver leaves. The Prince was not the only guest; there was a slender, flaxen-haired girl from New York dressed after Botticelli’s Judith, an artillery captain as Lorenzo dei Medici, and another man, a Roman, in the grey of the order of San Francesco.
“Poppa left for Monte this morning,” Mamie explained over the soup. “He reckoned dressing up was just foolishness, but the fact is armour is hot and heavy, and he would have had to pass from trousers into greaves. He has not got the right kind of legs for parti-coloured hosen, someway.”
The Piazza della Signoria was crowded as it had been on that dreadful May day when Girolamo’s broken body was burnt to ashes there; as it was on the afternoon of the Pazzi conspiracy, when a bishop was hanged from one of the windows of the old Palazzo. But the old order had changed, giving place to new even here, and the people had come now merely to see the fine dresses; there was no thought of murder, though there might be some picking of pockets. The night was still and cold, and the white, round moon that had risen above the roof of the Loggia dei Lanzi shone, unclouded, upon the restless human sea that divided here and there to let the carriages and motors pass. The guests entered by the side door nearest the Uffizi, and carabinieri kept the way clear. The crowd was dense thereabouts, and the people pushed and jostled one another, leaned forward, and stood on tiptoe to see the brocaded ladies in their jewelled coifs and the men, hooded and strange, in their gay mediæval garb.
The Marchesa’s cloth of gold drew the prolonged “Oh!” of admiration that is only accorded to the better kind of fireworks, and hearing it, she smiled, well satisfied. Mamie followed with Filippo. Her dress of rose-coloured brocade was exquisite. It clung to her and seemed to be her one and only garment; one could almost see the throb of her heart through the thin stuff. She let her furred cloak fall as she got out of the car and then drew it up again about her bare arms and shoulders.
“Who is the black-curled scarlet thing?”
“Beatrice.”
“What! half naked! She is more like one of the donnine in the Decameron.”
Her Dante, overhearing, hurried her up the steps. His eyes were bright with anger in the shadow of his hood, but they changed and darkened as he caught sight of one girl’s face in the crowd. At the foot of the grand staircase he turned, muttering some excuse and leaving Mamie and her mother to go up alone, and hurried back and out into the street. He stood aside as though to allow some newcomers to pass in. The girl he had come to see was close to him, but she was half hidden behind a carabiniere’s broad epauletted shoulders.