The Tribune had not attempted to detain him—­had not interrupted him.  He felt that the young noble had thought—­acted as became him best.  He followed him with his eyes.

“And thus,” said he gloomily, “Fate plucks from me my noblest friend and my justest counsellor—­better man Rome never lost!”

Such is the eternal doom of disordered states.  The mediator between rank and rank,—­the kindly noble—­the dispassionate patriot—­the first to act—­the most hailed in action—­darkly vanishes from the scene.  Fiercer and more unscrupulous spirits alone stalk the field; and no neutral and harmonizing link remains between hate and hate,—­until exhaustion, sick with horrors, succeeds to frenzy, and despotism is welcomed as repose!

Chapter 5.IV.  The Hollowness of the Base.

The rapid and busy march of state events has led us long away from the sister of the Tribune and the betrothed of Adrian.  And the sweet thoughts and gentle day-dreams of that fair and enamoured girl, however full to her of an interest beyond all the storms and perils of ambition, are not so readily adapted to narration:—­their soft monotony a few words can paint.  They knew but one image, they tended to but one prospect.  Shrinking from the glare of her brother’s court, and eclipsed, when she forced herself to appear, by the more matured and dazzling beauty, and all-commanding presence, of Nina,—­to her the pomp and crowd seemed an unreal pageant, from which she retired to the truth of life,—­the hopes and musings of her own heart.  Poor girl! with all the soft and tender nature of her dead brother, and none of the stern genius and the prodigal ambition,—­the eye-fatiguing ostentation and fervour of the living—­she was but ill-fitted for the unquiet but splendid region to which she was thus suddenly transferred.

With all her affection for Rienzi, she could not conquer a certain fear which, conjoined with the difference of sex and age, forbade her to be communicative with him upon the subject most upon her heart.

As the absence of Adrian at the Neapolitan Court passed the anticipated date, (for at no Court then, with a throne fiercely disputed, did the Tribune require a nobler or more intelligent representative,—­and intrigues and counter-intrigues delayed his departure from week to week), she grew uneasy and alarmed.  Like many, themselves unseen, inactive, the spectators of the scene, she saw involuntarily further into the time than the deeper intellect either of the Tribune or Nina; and the dangerous discontent of the nobles was visible and audible to her in looks and whispers, which reached not acuter or more suspected ears and eyes.  Anxiously, restlessly, did she long for the return of Adrian, not from selfish motives alone, but from well-founded apprehensions for her brother.  With Adrian di Castello, alike a noble and a patriot, each party had found a mediator, and his presence grew