"We will go this way,"--and, turning at right angles, led back toward the tumult.
"Marsyas," she said, with more impatience than reproach, "and thou art an Essene! How I reproach myself!"
But he smiled uncomfortably, and kept on.
The wail of instruments, wild and discordant, the blowing of horns, the pulsation of drums, seemed suddenly to unite as they approached. Above the clamor and squeal of cymbals and pipes, voices were lifted, loud and strained as if striving to be heard above the uproar. Some of them merely shouted, most of them were singing, not one but many songs; shrieks and laughter shrilled through it all, and once in a while the musical tone of a rich throat triumphant above the noise bespoke the presence of gift with frenzy.
The tumult was not now distant, and Marsyas did not wish Junia's further aid. His search after Flora was not a thing to be published abroad. He glanced at the lights, looked about for a less circuitous route, and, with a word to her, plunged through the brake toward the revel.
Before she had thought to protest, the forefront of a procession penetrated from the side of the aisle and, streaming across, broke through the green on the other side.
The first were flamens, Greek, Roman and Egyptian, robed in the pallium and carrying the lituus--first, if the order of procession had been observed, but before them, and about them bounded a harlequinade of baboons, centaurs, goats, swine--loose, ill-fashioned disguises that only robbed their wearers of human form and did not achieve the animal semblance. Among them were slighter figures of lizards, snails on active pretty limbs, toads, beetles--glittering, sinuous things that surpassed the heavier figures in agility and boldness. After them came a great cornucopia of gold, banded with spiral garlands of roses, studded with jewels and drawn on low ivory wheels by snow-white mule-colts. Out of the shell-tinted mouth of the great horn, and luxuriously bedded on a gauze of gold cast over the flowers and fruits, was the rosy figure of a little boy, with pearly wings bound to his shoulders.
Only thus far was any semblance of order distinguishable in the procession. The wave of uproar suddenly assumed overwhelming proportions; the aisle was inundated with frenzy.