awe-struck gaze. But there was no flush of victory in Otto's face, no
gladness in his eyes as, sick at the sight, he turned away. His eyes
returned to the woman whose half-averted face shone out in the glow of
the conflagration. Never had it seemed to him so mystic, so unearthly,
so fair.
The storm was drawing nearer; the thunder bellowed louder through the
heavens, the lightning flashes grew ever brighter; the great bell from
the Capitol, the lesser bells of Rome, still shrieked forth their
insistent clamour on the sultry air.
She silently drew near him, fixing him with her wondrous eyes.
At that moment the lightning rent the clouds and flashed on her pale
face. A peal of thunder, now quite overhead, shook earth and sky,
rolling through the air in majestic reverberations. Slowly it died away
into the great silence, now again rent and broken by the German
catapults, by the renewed shouts of the defenders and assailants. Up to
this moment Stephania had still hoped that Castel San Angelo would defy
the united assaults of the storming Saxons; suddenly, however, a shriek
broke from her lips, she turned away from the window and hid her face in
her hands. Then she rushed to where Otto was witnessing the progress of
the assault and fell on her knees before him.
"Save him!" she moaned, raising her white clasped hands in despairing
entreaty. "Save him! Save him!"
He raised her and, looking into her face, he read therein remorse and
helpless entreaty. He knew that the moment was irrevocable for both,
final and solemn as death. He felt he must break the pregnant silence,
yet no word came to his lips. The more he forced his will, to find a
solution, the more conscious he became of his own powerlessness and the
depth of the abyss which must divide them for ever more.
"Save him, Otto--save him!" she moaned, stretching out her arms towards
him,--"You alone can--you alone."
He receded from her.
"I could not save him, even if I would!"
But the woman became frantic in her fear.
The consciousness of the terrible wrong which Crescentius had suffered
at her hands, though the most subtle scrutiny of her heart failed to
accuse her of a deed, unworthy herself, the unwitting instrument of
Fate, added to her despair. She must save the Senator of Rome, even if
she should herself pay the penalty of the crime of high treason, of
which he stood accused.
"You will not have it said that you crushed your foe under your heels,"
she cried. "You are too kind, too generous,--Otto! The Senator's
resistance is broken. He could not rise a fourth time, if he would--you
have conquered. Otto,--for my sake,--by the memory of the past--"
He raised his arms. Now he was himself.
"Stop!" he said. "Why conjure up that memory which you have so cruelly
poisoned and defiled? There was nothing,--even to life itself,--that I
would not have given to you in exchange for your love--"
"But that it was not mine to give!" she moaned. "Can you not see?"
"You should have remembered that, ere you slowly but surely wove your
net of deception round my heart. I loved you! Foe of mine, as I knew
you to be, I trusted you! See, how you have requited this trust! See,
what you have made of me! You but entered my life to wreck it! Once I
loved the hours and the days and the nights and the stars, now my heart
is a burnt-out volcano. And you who have taken all my life from me, now
come to me crying for mercy for him, who showed such wondrous mercy for
me! And you too--you! Did no pity ever enter your heart, when you saw
that you were mercilessly chaining my life to despair? And after you
revealed yourself his instrument,--Stephania, are you so mad as to
think, that I would save the man who insidiously wrecked my life?"
Almost frozen with horror Stephania had listened to the voice she loved
so well. The card she had played, the appeal to his generous nature,
had lost. She might have foreseen it. But her wondrous beauty still
exercised its fatal spell. The moments were flying. She must save
Crescentius from Eckhardt's wrath.
"You once told me that you loved me," she spoke with choked, dry throat.
"You accuse me of having deceived you--ah! how little versed you are in
reading a woman's heart!"
And approaching him as of old, she took his hands into hers.
"What do you mean?" Otto replied, while her touch sent the hot blood
hurtling through his veins. "Some new conceit, to gain your end?"
She shook her head, while she gazed despairingly toward the Senator's
last defence.
"This is not the time," she gasped. "On every moment hangs a life!
Otto, save him! Save him for my sake! Can you not see that I love you?
Think you, else I should be here? Can you not see that this is my last
atonement? Oh, do not let me be guilty of this too! Save him,--save
him, ere it is too late!" she moaned, kneeling without releasing his
hands, on which she rested her head. "Save him,--save him, King
Otto--or his blood be on your head!"
"On my head? On my head?" exclaimed Otto. "Heaven that has witnessed
your unfathomable treachery can never ratify this invocation! Never!
Never!"
She glanced up despairingly.
"Otto--he knows all! All! I saw it in his looks--though he never
spoke.--He knows--that--I love you!"
"Then you do love me?" Otto replied with large wondering eyes.
"Ask your own heart,--it will answer for mine!"
"Then if you love me,--be mine,--my wife,--my queen!"
"How can I answer you at this moment, how can I? Look yonder,--the
stockades are afire,--your Saxons are scaling the walls,---Otto,--will
you have it said that you killed him to possess me?"
He snatched his hands away from her.
"But how can I save him, Stephania?--Collect your woman's wit! How can
I?"
"Oh, how they swarm on the parapets!" she moaned. "Mercy, King
Otto,--ere it be too late!"
"Let not the King know the mercy in Otto's heart," he replied between
irresolution and resentment. "But how can I reach Eckhardt? And think
you my messenger would move him? Think you, he would listen to me?"
"You are the sovereign! The King! Have you none that you can send,
that you can trust? None, fleet of foot and discreet?"
Otto pondered.
Stephania's gaze was riveted on his face, as the eye of the criminal
about to be condemned, hangs on the countenance of his judge, who speaks
the sentence. At this moment loud shouts came through the storm. The
Germans were hoisting new ladders for the assault. In the glare of the
conflagration and the incessant lightning they could be discerned
swarming like ants.
Castel San Angelo appeared doomed indeed.
Otto pushed Stephania into a recess, then he made one bound towards the
door. In the anteroom sat Benilo, the Chamberlain. His usually placid
countenance seemed in the throes of a tremendous strain. Which way
would the scales sink in the balance? A straw might turn the tide of
Fate. Benilo waited. He held the last card in the great game. He would
only play it at the last moment.
As Otto appeared on the threshold, he glanced up, then arose hurriedly.
"Victory is crowning your arms, King Otto!" he fawned, pointing in the
region of the assault. "Soon your hereditary foe will be a myth--a--"
Otto waved his hand impatiently.
"Hasten to Castel San Angelo,--take the secret passage!--You may yet
arrive in time to place this order in Eckhardt's hands!--Hurry--on every
moment hangs a life."
"A life," gasped the Chamberlain. "Whose life?"
"The Senator's!"
"Ah! It is the order for his execution!" Benilo extended his hand, to
receive the scroll, while a strange fire gleamed in his eyes. He had
waited wisely.
"It is the order for Eckhardt,--to spare him! Hasten! Lose not a
moment! Through the secret passage!"
Benilo stared in Otto's face as if he thought he had gone mad.
"Spare Crescentius? Your enemy? Spare the viper, that has thrice stung
you with its poison fang?"
"I implore you by our friendship,--go!--I will explain all to you at a
fitter hour;--now there is not time."
"Spare Crescentius!" Benilo repeated as if he were still unable to grasp
the meaning.
"The Senator's men will lay no impediment in your way,--and to my
Germans you are known.--You will,--you must--arrive in time--I pray you
hasten--be gone--"
A sudden light of understanding seemed to flash athwart Benilo's pale
features. Through the open door he had seen a woman's gown.
Snatching up his skull-cap, he placed the order intrusted to him inside
his doublet.
"I hasten," he spoke. "Not a moment shall be lost!"
And rushing out of the chamber, he disappeared.
Stephania had listened in awestruck wonder. What was the friend of the
Senator, the man who had counselled the uprising, doing in the imperial
ante-chamber at this hour? But,--perchance this was but another mesh in
the great web of intrigue, which the Romans had spun round their
unsuspecting foes. Perhaps,--she trembled, as she thought out the
thought,--he was to seize the King, if Crescentius was victorious. He
had never left the youth.--Had the Chamberlain become his sovereign's
jailer? The ideas rushed confusedly through her brain, where but the
one faint hope still glimmered, that Crescentius would escape his doom.
When Otto entered, she held out both hands to him.
"How can I thank you!"
He warded them off, and stepped to the window, whence the progress of
the assault could be watched in the intermittent flashes of lightning.
The raging storm had temporarily drowned the signals and cries of the
combatants, but though the clouds hung low and heavily freighted over
the city, not a drop of rain fell. The lightning became more incessant;
soon it seemed as if the entire horizon was ablaze and the thunder
bellowed in one continuous roar over the Seven Hills.
Stephania had stepped to Otto's side.
"I must go," she said with indescribable mournfulness in her tones. "My
place is by his side! Living--or dead! Farewell, King Otto, and
forgive--if you can!"
She stretched out her hands towards him. It seemed to him, as if a dark
veil was suddenly drawn before his eyes. Despite the lightning there was
nothing but a great darkness around him. His victory would cause a
wider, more abysmal gulf between them than his defeat.
If she went from him in this hour, he knew they would never meet on
earth again.
At her words he turned and vainly endeavouring to steady his voice, he
spoke.
"Stephania,--I cannot let you go! Remain here, until the worst is over!
It would mean certain death to you, if my men discovered you,--and
perhaps you would hardly escape a similar fate at the hands of your own
countrymen."
She shook her head.
"My place is by his side,--no matter what befall! If I am
killed,--never was death more welcome! Farewell, Otto--farewell--"
Her voice broke. She covered her face with her hands and sobbed
piteously.
He drew them down with gentle force.
"It is not my purpose to detain you here! All I ask of you, is to wait,
until my order has had time to reach Eckhardt. After the Senator has
yielded,--you may go to him,--I will then myself have you escorted to
Castel San Angelo. For the sake of the past,--wait!"
"The past! The past! That can never, never be revived!" she moaned.
"Oh, that I were dead, that I were dead!"
He took her in his arms.
"My love,--my own,--I cannot hear you speak thus--take courage! I have
long forgiven you!"
Her head rested on his shoulders. For a moment they seemed to have
forgotten the world and all around them.
Suddenly the rush of mailed feet resounded in the ante-room. The door of
the chamber was unceremoniously thrust open and Haco, captain of the
imperial guard, entered the apartment, recoiling almost as quickly as he
had done so, at the unexpected sight which met his gaze.
"How dare you?" Otto accosted him with flaming eyes, while Stephania had
retreated into the shadows, covering her face, which was pale as death,
with her hands.
Eckhardt's envoy prostrated himself before the King.
"I crave the King's pardon--it was my Lord Eckhardt's command to carry
straight and unannounced the tidings to the King's ear--your hosts have
stormed Castel San Angelo! Your enemy is no more!"
"Rise!" thundered Otto, while Stephania had rushed with a pitiful moan
of anguish from her retreat, and was gazing at the messenger, as if life
and death sat on his lips. "What do you mean?"
But ere the man could answer, a terrible shriek by his side caused Otto
to start. Stephania had rushed to the window. Following the direction
of her gaze, his heart sank within him with the weight of his own
despair.
A body was seen swinging from the ramparts,--it needed neither
soothsayer nor prophet to explain what had befallen.
Eckhardt had kept his oath.
"When the imperial Chamberlain told him that you were here with the
King," Haco addressed the woman, who stared with wide-eyed despair from
one to the other, "Crescentius charged in person the invading hosts.
Struck down twice, he staggered again to his feet, fighting like a
madman in the face of certain death and against fearful odds. When he
fell the third time, Eckhardt ordered him suspended from the
battlements--to save him the trouble of rising again!" the captain
concluded in grim humour.
"What of my pardon for the Senator?" gasped Otto.
"I know of no pardon," replied Haco.
"The pardon of which Benilo was the bearer," Otto repeated.
Haco stared at the King, as if he thought him demented.
"It was the order for the Senator's execution, which the Chamberlain
placed in Eckhardt's hand," he replied, "to take place immediately upon
his capture."
"Ah! This is your work then!" Stephania broke the terrible silence,
which hung over them like suspended destinies,--creeping towards Otto
and pointing to the ramparts of Castel San Angelo, on which the imperial
standard was being hoisted. "This you have done to me!--You have lied
to me, detaining me here when I should have been with him,--whose dying
hour I have filled with a despair that all eternity cannot
alleviate,--let me go--I tell you, let me go! Fiend! traitor,--let me
go!"
She fought him in wild despair.
Otto had barred her way. Releasing her, he looked straight into her
eyes.
"Your own heart tells you, Stephania, this is the work of a
traitor,--not mine!"
She gazed at him one moment. She knew his words to be true. But she
would not listen to the voice of reason, when her conscience doubly
smote her.
"Let me go!" she shrieked. "Let me go! My place is by the side of him
you have foully slain,--murdered--after luring me away from him in his
dying hour."
"You know not what you say, Stephania. Your grief has maddened you! Is
not the word of the King assurance enough, that he himself is the victim
of some as yet unfathomable deceit? By the memory of my mother I swear
to you--I never wrote that order! Remain here until I hear from
Eckhardt,--your safety--"
"Who tells you that I wish to be saved?" she cried like a lioness at
bay. "Remain here with you, whose hands are stained with his blood?
Not another moment! You have no claim on Stephania! A crimson gulf has
swallowed up the past and his shade divides us in death as it has
divided us in life! You shall never boast that you have conquered the
wife of the Senator of Rome!"
"Stephania."
He raised his arms entreatingly.
She sprang at him to gain the entrance to the Venus panel, which he
covered with his person. For a moment he held her at bay, then she
pushed him aside, rushed past him and disappeared in the dark passage,
the door of which closed behind her with a sharp clang. She vanished in
the subterranean gloom.
Haco had silently witnessed the scene.
Otto seemed to have forgotten his presence, when turning he found
himself face to face with the trusty Saxon.
"Did you say--execution?" he addressed the man, his brain whirling.
"Signed by the King!" came the laconic reply.
"You may go! Bid Eckhardt repair hither at the earliest!"
Haco departed. Broken in mind and spirit Otto remained alone. Victory
had crowned his cause,--but Death reigned in his heart.
*CHAPTER XVI*
*THE FORFEIT*
Crescentius was dead. Stephania's fate was left to the surmise of the
victors. Since she had parted from Otto in that eventful night, no one
had seen the beautiful wife of the luckless Lord of Castel San Angelo.
Eckhardt was gloomier than ever. The storm of the ancient mausoleum had
been accomplished with a terrible loss to the victors. The Romans, awed
for a time into submission, showed ever new symptoms of dissatisfaction,
and it was evident that in the event of a new outbreak, the small band
constituting the emperor's bodyguard would not be able to hold out
against the enmity of the conquered. The monkish processions continued
day and night, and as the Millennium drew nearer and nearer the frenzied
fervour of the masses rose to fever height. Fear and apprehension
increased with the impending hour, the hour that should witness the End
of Time and the final judgment of God. Since the storm of Castel San
Angelo, Otto had locked himself in his chamber in the palace on the
Aventine. No one save Benilo, Eckhardt and Sylvester, the silver-haired
pontiff, had access to his person. Benilo had so far succeeded in
purging himself from the stain of treason, which clung to him since the
summary execution of Crescentius, that he had been entirely restored
into Otto's confidence and favour. It was not difficult for one, gifted
with his consummate art of dissimulation, to convince Otto, that in the
heat of combat, the passions inflamed to fever-heat, his general had
mistaken the order; and Eckhardt, when questioned thereon, exhibited
such unequivocal disgust, even to the point of flatly refusing to
discuss the matter, that Benilo appeared in a manner justified, the more
so, as the order itself could not be produced against him, Eckhardt
having cast it into the flames. His vengeance had not however been
satisfied with the death of Crescentius alone, for on the morning after
the capture of the fortress, eleven bodies were to be seen swinging from
the gibbets on Monte Malo, the carcasses of those who in a fatal hour
had pledged themselves to the Senator's support.
So far the Chamberlain's victory seemed complete.
Crescentius and the barons inimical to his schemes were destroyed.
There now remained but Otto and Eckhardt, and a handful of Saxons; for
the main body of the army had marched Northward with Count Ludeger of
the Palatinate, who had exhausted every effort to induce Otto to follow
him. Had Crescentius beaten off Eckhardt's assault, Benilo would in
that fatal night have consigned his imperial friend to the dungeons of
Castel San Angelo. For this he had assiduously watched in the
ante-chamber. At a signal a chosen body of men stationed in the gardens
below were to seize the German King and hurry him through the secret
passage to Hadrian's tomb.
There now remained but one problem to deal with. With the removal of
the last impediment, arrived on the last stepping stone to the
realization of his ambition, Benilo could offer Theodora what in the
delirium of anticipated possession he had promised, with no intention of
fulfilling. He had not then reckoned with the woman's terrible temper,
he had not reckoned with the blood of Marozia. She had by stages roused
her discarded lover's jealousy to a delirium, which had vented itself in
the mad wager, which he must win--or perish.
But one day remained until the full of the moon, but one day within
which Theodora might make good her boast. Benilo, who had her carefully
watched, knew that Eckhardt had not revisited the groves, he had even
reason to believe that Theodora had abandoned every effort to that end.
Was she at last convinced of the futility of her endeavour? Or had she
some other scheme in mind, which she kept carefully concealed? The
Chamberlain felt ill at ease.
As for Eckhardt, he should never leave the groves a living man. Victor
or vanquished, he was doomed. Then Otto was at his mercy. He would
deal with the youth according to the dictates of the hour.
When Benilo had on that morning parted from Otto in the peristyle of the
"Golden House" on the Aventine, he knew that sombre exultation, which
follows upon triumph in evil. Hesitancies were now at an end. No longer
could he be distracted between two desires. In his eye, at the memory
of the woman, for whom he had damned himself, there glowed the fire of a
fiendish joy. Not without inner detriment had Benilo accustomed himself
for years to wear a double face. Even had his purposes been pure, the
habit of assiduous perfidy, of elaborate falsehood, could not leave his
countenance untainted. A traitor for his own ends, he found himself
moving in no unfamiliar element, and all his energies now centred
themselves upon the achievement of his crime, to him a crime no longer
from the instant that he had irresistibly willed it.
On fire to his finger-tips, he could yet reason with the coldest clarity
of thought. Having betrayed his imperial friend so far, he must needs
betray him to the extremity of traitorhood. He must lead Eckhardt on to
the fatal brink, then deliver the decisive blow which should destroy
both. But a blacker thought than any he had yet nurtured began to stir
in his mind, raising its head like a viper. Could he but discover
Stephania! Then indeed his triumph would be complete!
On that point alone Otto had maintained a silence as of the grave even
towards the Chamberlain, to whom he was wont to lay bare the innermost
recesses of his soul. Never in his presence had he even breathed
Stephania's name. Yet Benilo had seen the wife of the Senator in the
King's chamber in the eventful night of the storm of Castel San Angelo,
and his serpent-wisdom was not to be decoyed with pretexts, regarding
the true cause of Otto's illness and devouring grief.
But lust-bitten to madness, the thoughts uppermost in Benilo's mind
reverted ever to the wager,--to the woman. Theodora must be his, at any,
at every cost. But one day now remained till the hour;--he winced at
the thought. Vainly he reminded himself that even therein lay the
greater chance. How much might happen in the brief eternity of one day;
how much, if the opportunities were but turned to proper account. But
was it wise to wait the fatal hour? He had not had speech with Theodora
since she had laid the whip-lash on his cheek. The blow still smarted
and the memory of the deadly insult stung him to immediate action. Once
more he would bend his steps to her presence; once more he would try
what persuasion might do; then, should fortune smile upon him, should
the woman relent, he would have removed from his path the greater peril,
and be prepared to deal with every emergency.
How he lived through the day he knew not. Hour after hour crawled by,
an eternity of harrowing suspense. And even while wishing for the day's
end, he dreaded the coming of the night.
While Benilo was thus weighing the chances of success, Theodora sat in
her gilded chamber brooding with wildly beating heart over what the
future held in its tightly closed hand. The hour was approaching, when
she must win the fatal wager, else--she dared not think out the thought.
Would the memory of Eckhardt sleep in the cradle of a darker memory,
which she herself must leave behind? As in response to her unspoken
query a shout of laughter rose from the groves and Theodora listened
whitening to the lips. She knew the hated sound of Roxane's voice; with
a gesture of profound irritation and disgust, she rose and fled to the
safety of her remotest chamber, where she dropped upon an ottoman in
utter weariness. Oh! not to have to listen to these sounds on this
evening of all,--on this evening on which hung the fate of her life!
Her mind was made up. She could stand the terrible strain no longer.
One by one she had seen those vanish, whom in a moment of senseless
folly she had called her friends. Only one would not vanish; one who
seemed to emerge hale from every trap, which the hunter had laid,--her
betrayer,--her tormentor, he who on this very eve would feast his eyes
on her vanquished pride, he, who hoped to fold her this very night in
his odious embrace. The very thought was worse than death. To what a
life had his villainy, his treachery consigned her! Days of anguish and
fear, nights of dread and remorse! Her life had been a curse. She had
brought misfortune and disaster upon the heads of all, who had loved
her; the accursed wanton blood of Marozia, which coursed through her
veins, had tainted her even before her birth. There was but one
atonement--Death! She had abandoned the wager. But she had despatched
her strange counsellor, Hezilo, to seek out Eckhardt and to conduct him
this very night to her presence. How he accomplished it, she cared not,
little guessing the bait he possessed in a knowledge she did not
suspect. She would confess everything to him,--her life would pay the
forfeit;--she would be at rest, where she might nevermore behold the
devilish face of her tormentor.
With a fixed, almost vacant stare, her eyes were riveted on the door, as
if every moment she expected to see the one man enter, whom she most
feared in this hour and for whom she most longed.
"This then is the end! This the end!" she sobbed convulsively, setting
her teeth deep into the cushions in which she hid her face, while a
torrent of scalding tears, the first she had shed in years, rushed from
her half-closed eyelids.
From the path she had chosen, there led no way back into the world.
She had played the great game of life and she had lost.
She might have worn its choicest crown in the love of the man whom she
had deceived, discarded, betrayed, and now it was too late.
But if Eckhardt should not come?
If the harper should not succeed?
Again she relapsed into her reverie. She almost wished his mission
would fail. She almost wished that Eckhardt would refuse to again
accompany him to the groves. Again she relived the scene of that night,
when he had laid bare her arm in the search for the fatal birth-mark.
The terrible expression which had passed into his eyes had haunted her
night and day. A deadly fear of him seized her.
She dared not remain. She dared not face him again. The very ground
she trod seemed to scorch her feet. She must away.
The morrow should find her far from Rome.
The thought seemed to imbue her with new energy and strength. How she
wished this night were ended! Again the shouts and laughter from the
gardens beneath her window broke on her ear. She closed the blinds to
exclude the sounds. But they would not be excluded. Ever and ever they
continued to mock her. The air was hot and sultry even to suffocation:
still she must prepare the most necessary things for her journey, all
the precious gems and stones which would be considered a welcome
offering at any cloister. These she concealed in a mantle in which she
would escape unheeded and unnoticed from these halls, over which she had
lorded with her dire, evil beauty.
She had scarcely completed her preparations when the sound of footsteps
behind the curtain caused her to start with a low outcry of fear.
Everything was an object of terror to her now and she had barely
regained her self-possession when the parting draperies revealed the
hated presence of Benilo.
For a moment they faced each other in silence.
With a withering smile on his thin, compressed lips, the Chamberlain
bowed.
"I was informed you were awaiting some one," he said with ill-concealed
mockery in his tones. "I am here to witness your conquest, to pay my
forfeit,--or to claim it."
Theodora with difficulty retained her composure; yet she endeavoured to
appear unconcerned and to conceal her purpose. Her eyelids narrowed as
she regarded the man who had destroyed her life. Then she replied:
"There is no wager."
Benilo started.
"What do you mean?"
"There was once a man who betrayed his master for thirty pieces of
silver. But when his master was taken, he cast the money on the floor
of the temple, went forth and hanged himself."
"I do not understand you."
A look of unutterable loathing passed into her eyes.
"Enough that I might have reconquered the man,--the love I once
despised, had I wished to enter again into his life, the vile thing I
am--"
Benilo leered upon her with an evil smile.
"How like Ginevra of old," he sneered. "Scruples of conscience, that
make the devils laugh."
She did not heed him. One thought alone held uppermost sway in her
mind.
"To-morrow," she said, "I leave Rome for ever."
With a stifled curse the Chamberlain started up.
"With him? Never!"
"I did not say with him."
"No!" he retorted venomously. "But for once the truth had trapped the
falsehood on your tongue."
She ignored his brutal speech. He watched her narrowly. As she made no
reply he continued:
"Deem you that I would let you go back to him, even if he did not spurn
you, the thing you are? You think to deceive me by telling me that the
hot blood of Marozia has been chilled to that of a nun? A lie! A
thousand lies! Your virtue! This for the virtue of such as you," and he
snapped his fingers into her white face. "The virtue of a serpent,--of
a wanton--"
There was a dangerous glitter in her eyes.
Her voice sounded hardly above a whisper as she turned upon him.
"Monster, you--who have wrecked my life, destroyed its holiest ties and
glory in the deed! Monster, who made my days a torture and my nights a
curse! I could slay you with my own hands!"
He laughed; a harsh grating laugh.
"What a charming Mary of Magdala!"
Her voice was cold as steel.
"Benilo,--I warn you--stop!"
But his rage, at finding himself baffled at the last moment, caused the
Chamberlain to overstep the last limits of prudence and reserve. With
the stealthy step of the tiger he drew nearer.
"You tell me in that lying, fawning voice of yours that to-morrow you
will leave Rome,--to go to him? To give him the love which is
mine,--mine--by the redeemed gauge of the sepulchre? And I tell you,
you shall not! Mine you are,--and mine you shall remain! Though," he
concluded, breathing hard, "you shall be meek enough, when, learning
from my own lips what manner of saint you are, he has cast you forth in
the street, among your kind! And I swear by the host, I will go to him
and tell him!"
She advanced a step towards him, her eyes glowing with a feverish
lustre. Her white hands were upon her bosom as if to calm its
tempestuous heaving.
He heeded it not, feasting his eyes on her great beauty with the
inflamed lust of the libertine.
"I will save you the trouble," she said calmly, "I will tell him
myself."
"And what will you tell him? That he has espoused one of the harlot
brood of Marozia, one, who has sold his honour--defiled his bed--"
"And slain the fiend who betrayed her!"
A wild shriek, a tussle,--a choked outcry,--she struck--once, twice,
thrice:--for a moment his hands wildly beat the air, then he reeled
backward, lurched and fell, his head striking the hard marble floor.
The bloody weapon fell from Theodora's trembling hands.
"Avenged!" she gasped, staring with terrible fascination at the spot
where he lay.
Benilo had raised himself upon his arm, filing his wild bloodshot eyes
on the woman. He attempted to rise,--another moment, and the death
rattle was in his throat. He fell back and expired.
There was no pity in Theodora's eyes, only a great, nameless fear as she
looked down upon him where he lay. It had grown dark in the chamber.
The blue moon-mist poured in through the narrow casement, and with it
came the chimes from remote cloisters, floating as it were on the
silence of night, cleaving the darkness, as it is cloven by a falling
star. Theodora's heart was beating, as if it must break. Lighting a
candle she softly opened the door and made her way through a labyrinth
of passages and corridors in which her steps re-echoed from the high
vaulted ceilings. Farther and farther she wandered away from the
inhabited part of the building, when her ear suddenly caught a metallic
sound, sharp, like the striking of a gong.
For a moment she remained rooted to the spot, staring straight before
her as one dazed. Then she retraced her steps towards the Pavilion,
whence came singing voices and sounds of high revels.
Sometime after she had left her chamber, two Africans entered it, picked
up the lifeless body of the Chamberlain, and, after carrying it to a
remote part of the building, flung it into the river.
The yellow Tiber hissed in white foam over the spot, where Benilo sank.
The mad current dragged his body down to the slime of the river-bed,
picked it up again in its swirl, tossed it in mocking sport from one
foam-crested wave to another, and finally flung it, to rot, on some
lonely bank, where the gulls screamed above it and the gray foxes of the
Maremmas gnawed and snapped and snarled over the bleached bones in the
moonlight.
*CHAPTER XVII*
*NEMESIS*
While these events, so closely touching his own life, transpired in the
Groves of Theodora, while a triple traitor met his long-deferred doom,
and a trembling woman cowered fear-struck and tortured by terrible
forebodings in her chambers, Eckhardt sat in the shaded loggia of his
palace, brooding over the great mystery of his life and its impending
solution; meditating upon his course in the final act of the weird
drama. But one resolution stood out clearly defined in all the chaos of
his thoughts. He would not leave Rome ere he had broken down behind him
every bridge leading back into the past.
It had been a day such as the oldest inhabitants of Rome remembered none
at this late season. The very heavens seemed to smoke with heat. The
grass in the gardens was dry and brittle, as if it had been scorched by
passing flames. A singularly profound stillness reigned everywhere,
there being not the slightest breeze to stir the faintest rustle among
the dry foliage.
How long Eckhardt had thus been lost in vague speculations on the
impending crisis of his life he scarcely knew, when the sound of
footsteps approaching over the gravel path caused him to shake off the
spell which was heavy upon him, and to peer through the interstices of
the vines in quest of the new-comer who wore the garb of a monk, the
cowl drawn over his face either for protection against the heat, or to
evade recognition. Yet no sooner had he set foot in the vineshaded
loggia, than Eckhardt arose from his seat, eager, breathless.
"At last!" he gasped, extending his hand, which the other grasped in
silence. "At last!"
"At last!" said Hezilo.
The word seemed fraught with destinies.
"Is the time at hand?" queried Eckhardt.
"To-night!"
A groan broke from the Margrave's lips.
"To-night!"
Then he beckoned his visitor to a seat.
"I have come to fulfil my promise," spoke Hezilo.
"Tell me all!"
Hezilo nodded; yet he seemed at a loss how to commence. After a pause he
began his tale in a voice strangely void of inflection, like that of an
automaton gifted with speech.
Dwelling briefly on the events of his own life from the time of his
arrival in Rome with the motherless girl Angiola, on her chance meeting
with Benilo and the latter's pretence of interest in his child, Hezilo
touched upon the Chamberlain's clandestine visits at the convent, where
he had placed her, upon the girl's strange fascination for the courtier,
the latter's promises and advances, culminating in Angiola's abduction.
After having betrayed his credulous victim, the Chamberlain had revealed
himself the fiend he was by causing her to be concealed in an old ruin,
and, to secure immunity for himself, he had her deprived of the sight of
her eyes. In a voice resonant with the echoes of despair, Hezilo
described the long and fruitless hunt for his lost child, of whose
whereabouts the disconsolate nuns at the convent disclaimed all
knowledge, till chance had guided him to the place of Angiola's
concealment, in the person of an old crone, whom he had surprised among
the ruins of the ill-famed temple of Isis, whither she carried food to
the blind girl at certain hours of the day. At the point of his dagger
he had forced a confession and by a sufficiently large bribe purchased
her silence regarding his discovery. The rest was known to Eckhardt, who
had witnessed Angiola's rescue from her dismal prison, as he had been
present in her dying hour.
There was a long silence between them. Then Hezilo continued his
account. Step for step he had fastened himself to the heels of the
betrayer of his child, whose name the crone had revealed to him. Again
and again he might have destroyed the libertine, had he not reserved him
for a more summary and terrible execution. He had discovered Benilo's
illicit amour with one Theodora, a woman of great beauty but of
mysterious origin, who had established her wanton court at Rome. As a
wandering minstrel Hezilo had found there a ready welcome, and had in
time gained her confidence and ear.
Eckhardt's senses began to reel as he listened to the revelations now
poured into his ears. Much, which the confession of the dying wretch in
the rock-caves under the Gemonian stairs had left obscure, was now
illumined, as a dark landscape by lightnings from a distant cloud-bank.
Ginevra's smouldering discontent with Eckhardt's seeming lack of
ambition, her inordinate desire for power,--the Chamberlain's covert
advances and veiled promises, aided by his chance discovery of her
descent from Marozia; their conspiracy, culminating in the woman's
simulated illness and death; the substitution of a strange body in the
coffin, which had been sealed under pretence of premature
decay,--Ginevra's flight to a convent, where she remained concealed till
after Eckhardt's departure from Rome:--from stage to stage Hezilo
proceeded in his strange unimpassioned tale, a tale which caused his
listener's brain to spin and his senses to reel.
The monk conducting the last rites, having chanced upon the fraud, had
been promised nothing less than the Triple Tiara of St. Peter as reward
for his silence and complicity, as soon as Ginevra should have come into
her own. Continuing, Hezilo touched upon Ginevra's reappearance in Rome
under the name of Theodora; on the Chamberlain's betrayal of the woman.
He dwelt on the events leading up to the wager and the forfeit, the
woman's share in luring Eckhardt from the Basilica, and Benilo's attempt
to poison him at the fateful meeting in the Grotto. He concluded by
pointing out the Chamberlain's utter desperation and the woman's mortal
fear,--and Eckhardt listened as one dazed.
Then Hezilo briefly outlined his plans for the night.
Eckhardt's destruction had been decreed by the Chamberlain and nothing
short of a miracle could save him. The utmost caution and secrecy were
required. Benilo, whose attention would be divided between Theodora and
Eckhardt, was to be dealt with by himself. The blood of his child cried
for vengeance. Thus Eckhardt would be free to settle last accounts with
the woman.
Burying his head in his hands the strong man wept like a disconsolate
child, his whole frame shaken by convulsive sobs, and it was some time,
ere he regained sufficient composure to face Hezilo.
"It will require all your courage," said the harper, rising to depart.
"Steel your heart against hope or mercy! I will await you at sunset at
the Church of the Hermits."
And without waiting the Margrave's reply, Hezilo was gone.
Eckhardt felt like one waking from a terrible dream, the oppression of
which remains after its phantoms have vanished. The suspense of waiting
till dusk seemed almost unendurable. Now that the hour seemed so nigh,
the dread hour of final reckoning, there was a tightening agony at
Eckhardt's heart, an agony that made him long to cry out, to weep, to
fling himself on his knees and pray, pray for deliverance, for oblivion,
for absolute annihilation. Walking up and down the vineshaded loggia,
he paused now and then to steal a look at the flaming disk of the sun,
that seemed to stand still in the heavens, while at other times he
stared absently into the gnarled stems, in whose hollow shelter the
birds slept and the butterflies drowsed.
Even as the parted spirit of the dead might ruthfully hover over the
grave of its perished mortal clay, so Eckhardt reviewed his own forlorn
estate, torturing his brain with all manner of vain solutions.
This night, then,--the night which quenched the light of this agonizing
day, must for ever quench his doubts and fears. He drew a long breath.
A great weariness weighed down his spirit. An irresistible desire for
rest came over him. The late rebellion, brief but fierce, the constant
watch at the palace on the Aventine, the alarming state of the young
King, who was dying of a broken heart, the futility of all counsel to
prevail upon him to leave this accursed city, the lack of a friend, to
whom he might confide his own misgivings without fear of betrayal,--all
these had broken down his physical strength, which no amount of bodily
exertion would have been able to accomplish.
After a time he resumed his seat, burying his head in his hands.
The air of the late summer day was heavy and fragrant with the peculiar
odour of decaying leaves, and the splashing of the fountain, which sent
its crystal stream down towards Santa Maria del Monte, seemed like a
lullaby to Eckhardt's overwrought senses. Night after night he had not
slept at all; he had not dared to abandon the watch on Aventine for even
a moment. Now nature asserted her rights.
Lower and lower drooped his aching lids and slowly he was beginning to
slip away into blissful unconsciousness. How long he had remained in
this state, he scarcely knew, when he was startled, as by some unknown
presence.
Rousing himself with an effort and looking up, he was filled with a
strange awe at the phenomenon which met his gaze. Right across the
horizon that glistened with pale green hues like newly frozen water,
there reposed a cloud-bank, risen from the Tyrrhene Sea, black as the
blackest midnight, heavy and motionless like an enormous shadow fringed
with tremulous lines of gold.
This cloud-bank seemed absolutely stirless, as if it had been thrown, a
ponderous weight, into the azure vault of heaven. Ever and anon silvery
veins of lightning shot luridly through its surface, while poised, as it
were immediately above it, was the sun, looking like a great scarlet
seal, a ball of crimson fire, destitute of rays.
For a time Eckhardt stood lost in the contemplation of this fantastic
sky-phenomenon. As he did so, the sun plunged into the engulfing
darkness. Lowering purple shadows crept across the heavens, but the
huge cloud, palpitating with lightnings, moved not, stirred not, nor
changed its shape by so much as a hair's breadth.
It appeared like a vast pall, spread out in readiness for the state
burial of the world, the solemn and terrible moment: The End of Time.
Fascinated by an aspect, which in so weird a manner reflected his own
feelings, Eckhardt looked upon the threatening cloud-bank as an evil
omen. A strange sensation seized him, as with a hesitating fear not
unmingled with wonder, he watched the lightnings come and go.
A shudder ran through his frame as he paced up and down the
white-pillared Loggia, garlanded with climbing vines, roses and passion
flowers, dying or decayed.
"Would the night were passed," he muttered to himself, and the man who
had stormed the impregnable stronghold of Crescentius quailed before the
impending issue as a child trembles in the dark.
At the hour appointed he traversed the solitary region of the
Trastevere. The vast silence, the vast night, were full of solemn
weirdness. The moon, at her full, soared higher and higher in the
balconies of the East, firing the lofty solitudes of the heavens with
her silver-beams. But immobile in the purple cavity of the western
horizon there lay that ominous cloud, nerved as it were with living
lightnings, which leaped incessantly from its centre, like a thousand
swords, drawn from a thousand scabbards.
The deep booming noise of a bell now smote heavily on the silence.
Oppressed by the weight of unutterable forebodings, Eckhardt welcomed
the sound with a vague sense of relief. At the Church of the Hermits he
was joined by the harper and together they rapidly traversed the region
leading to the Groves. In the supervening stillness their ears caught
the sound of harptones, floating through the silent autumnal night.
The higher rising moon outlined with huge angles of light and shadow the
marble palaces, which stood out in strong relief against a transparent
background and the Tiber, wherein her reflections were lengthened into a
glittering column, was frosted with silvery ripples.
At last they reached the entrance of the groves.
"Be calm!" said Eckhardt's guide. "Let nothing that you may see or hear
draw you from the path of caution. Think that, whatever you may suffer,
there are others who may suffer more! Silence! No questions now!
Remember--here are only foes!"
The harper spoke with a certain harsh impatience, as if he were himself
suffering under a great nervous strain, and Eckhardt, observing this,
made no effort to engage him in conversation, aside from promising to be
guided by his counsel. He felt ill at ease, however, as one entering a
labyrinth from whose intricate maze he relies only on the firm guidance
of a friend to release him.
They now entered the vast garden, fraught with so many fatal memories.
At the end of the avenue there appeared the well-remembered pavilion,
and, avoiding the main entrance, the harper guided Eckhardt through a
narrow corridor into the great hall.
A faint mist seemed to cloud the circle of seats and the high-pitched
voices of the revellers seemed lost in infinite distance. In no mood to
note particulars, Eckhardt's gaze penetrated the dizzy glare, in which
ever new zones of light seemed to uprear themselves, leaping from wall
to wall like sparkling cascades. As in the throes of a terrible
nightmare he stood riveted to the spot, for at that very moment his eyes
encountered a picture which froze the very life-blood in his veins.
In the background, revealed by the parting draperies there stood,
leaning against one of the rose-marble columns, the image of Ginevra.
Her robe of crimson fell in two superb folds from the peaks of her bosom
to her feet. The marble pallor of her face formed a striking contrast
to the consuming fire of her eyes, which seemed to rove anxiously,
restlessly over the diminished circle of her guests. The most execrable
villain of them all,--Benilo,--had at her hands met his long-deferred
doom. Those on whom she had chiefly relied for the realization of her
strange ambition now swung from the gibbets on Monte Malo,--their
executioner Eckhardt. Strange irony of fate! From those remaining, who
polluted the hall with their noisome presence, she had nothing to hope,
nothing to fear.
And this then was the end!
It required Hezilo's almost superhuman efforts to restrain Eckhardt from
committing a deed disastrous in its remotest consequences to himself and
their common purpose. For in the contemplation of the woman who had
wrecked his life, a tide of such measureless despair swept through
Eckhardt's heart, that every thought, every desire was drowned in the
mad longing to visit instant retribution on the woman's guilty head and
also to close his own account with life. But the mood did not endure.
A strange delirium seized him; the woman's siren-beauty entranced and
intoxicated him like the subtle perfume of some rare exotic; mingled
love and hate surged up in his heart; he dared not trust himself, for
even though he resented, he could not resist the fatal spell of former
days. The absence of Benilo, of whose doom he was ignorant, inspired the
harper with dire misgivings. After peering with ill-concealed
apprehension through the shadowy vistas of remote galleries, he at last
whispered to Eckhardt, to follow him, and they were entering a dimly
lighted corridor, leading into the fateful Grotto, which Eckhardt had
visited on that well-remembered night, when a terrific event arrested
their steps, and caused them to remain rooted to the spot.
A blinding, circular sweep of lightning blazed through the windows of
the pavilion, illumining it from end to end with a brilliant blue glare,
accompanied by a deafening crash and terrific peal of thunder which
shook the very earth beneath. A flash of time,--an instant of black,
horrid eclipse,--then, with an appalling roar, as of the splitting of
huge rocks, the murky gloom was rent, devoured and swept away by the
sudden bursting forth of fire. From twenty different parts of the great
hall it seemed at once to spring aloft in spiral coils. With a wild cry
of terror those of the revellers who had not outright been struck dead
by the fiery bolt, rushed towards the doors, clambering in frenzied fear
over the dead, trampling on the scorched disfigured faces of the dancing
girls, on whose graceful pantomime they had feasted their eyes so short
a time ago.
There was no safety in the pavilion, which a moment had transformed into
a seething furnace. Volumes of smoke rolled up in thick, suffocating
clouds, and the crimson glare of the flames illumined the dark night-sky
far over the Aventine.
Half mad with fear from the shrieks and groans of the dying, which
resounded everywhere about her, Theodora stood rooted to the spot, still
clinging to the great column. Over her face swept a strange expression
of loathing and exultation. Her eyes wandered to the red-tongued
flames, that leaped in eddying rings round the great marble pillars,
creeping every second nearer to the place where she stood, and in that
one glance she seemed to recognize the entire hopelessness of rescue and
the certainty of death.
For a moment the thought seemed terrifying beyond expression. None had
thought of her,--all had sought their own safety! She laughed a laugh
of uttermost, bitter scorn.
At last she seemed to regain her presence of mind. Turning, she started
to the back of the great pavilion, with the manifest object of reaching
some private way of egress, known but to herself. But her intention was
foiled. No sooner had she gone back than she returned--this exit too
was a roaring furnace. In terrible reverberations the thunder bellowed
through the heavens, which seemed one vast ocean of flame; the elements
seemed to join hands in the effort at her destruction:--So be it! It
would extinguish a life of dishonour, disgrace and despair.
A haughty acceptance of her fate manifested itself in her stonily
determined face. It would be atonement--though the end was terrible!
Suddenly she heard a rush close by her side. Looking up, she beheld the
one she dreaded most on earth to meet, saw Eckhardt rushing blindly
towards her through smoke and flames, crying frantically:
"Save her! Save her!"
Her wistful gaze, like that of a fascinated bird, was fixed on the
Margrave's towering stature.
She tarried but a moment.
At the terrible crisis, on one side a roaring furnace,--on the other the
man whom of all mortals she had wronged past forgiveness, her courage
failed her. Remembering a secret door, leading to a tower, connected
with a remote wing of the pavilion, where she might yet find safety, she
dashed swift as thought through the panel, which receded at her touch,
and vanished in the dark corridor beyond. Without heeding the dangers
which might beset his path, Eckhardt flew after her through the gloom,
till he found himself before a spiral stairway, at the terminus of the
passage. A faint glimmer of light from above penetrated the gloom, and
following it, he was startled by a faint outcry of terror, as on the
last landing, to which he madly leaped, he found himself once more face
to face with the woman, whom even at this moment he loved more in the
certainty of having lost her, than ever in the pride and ecstasy of
possession.
Seemingly hemmed in by an obstacle, the nature, which he knew not, she
stood before him paralyzed with horror. As his hand went out towards
her, the gesture seemed to break the spell, and uttering a despairing
shriek, she sprang towards a door behind the landing and rushed out.
Eckhardt's breath stopped.
A moment,--he heard an outcry of inexpressible horror,--a struggle, then
a hollow dash. Hardly conscious of his own actions he uttered a shrill
whistle, when the door of the tower was broken down, and the stairs were
suddenly crowded with the soldiers of the imperial guard, whom the
conflagration had brought to the scene.
"What woman was that?" exclaimed their leader, pointing to the place
whence Theodora had made the fatal leap.
"Whoever she is--she must be dashed to pieces," replied his companion,
rushing up the stairs to the trap-door and throwing his lighted torch
down the murky depths. But the light was soon lost in the profound
gloom.
"A rope! A rope! She must not, she shall not die thus!" cried Eckhardt
in mad, heart-rending despair.
"Here is one, but it is not long enough!" exclaimed the captain of the
guard, hardly able to conceal his mortification at finding himself face
to face with his general.
"Hark! She groans! Help! Help me!" exclaimed Eckhardt, and tearing
his cloak into strips, he fastened them together. The work was swiftly
completed. These strips fastened to the rope and securely knotted,
Eckhardt tied around his waist, and though the leader of the men-at-arms
sought to dissuade him from his desperate purpose, he started down,
clinging and swinging over a dreadful depth.
The captain of the guard swung the torch down after him as far as
possible, but soon the light grew misty, the voices above indistinct,
and it seemed to Eckhardt as if he were encompassed by a black mist.
Still he continued his descent. His next sensation was that of an
intolerable stench and a burning heat in the hand, caused no doubt by
friction with the rope. A difficulty in breathing, increased darkness
and singing noises in his ears were successive sensations; he began to
feel dizzy and a dread assailed him, that he was about to swoon and
abandon his hold. Suddenly he felt the last notch of the rope and, not
knowing what depth remained, argued that any further effort was in vain.
Extending first one arm, then another, he groped wildly about, striving
to shout for light; but his voice died in the gloom. Gasping and almost
stifled as he was, he made one last desperate effort, when suddenly his
groping hand grasped something, which appeared to him either like hair
or weeds. At this critical moment the captain of the guard sent down a
lamp, which he had procured. It fell hissing in the mire, but it
afforded him sufficient light to see that the object of his search lay
buried in the slime, and that she was gasping convulsively. Eckhardt's
strength was now almost spent, but this sight seemed to restore it all.
Noting a projecting ledge of stone lower down, he leaped upon it and was
thus obliged to abandon his hold on the rope. Eckhardt seized the woman
by the gown, dragged her from the mire and making a desperate leap,
regained the ledge, then signalled to those above to draw him up by
jerking the rope.
Motionless she lay on his arm and it was only by twisting it in a
peculiar manner round the rope, that he was enabled to support the
terrible burden. For a time they hung suspended over the abyss, yet
they were gradually nearing the top. If he could only endure the agony
of his twisted limbs a little longer, both were safe. He could not
shout, for he felt that suffocation must ensue; his eyes and ears seemed
bursting as from some stunning weight; and a deadly faintness seemed to
benumb his limbs. Suddenly, as by some miracle, the burden seemed
lightened, though he felt it still reclining in his arms. A wonderful
support seemed to raise up his own sinking frame, then all grew bright
and numerous faces strained down on him. In a few moments he was on a
level with the floor and many arms stretched out, to help him land.
Heedless of the roaring sea of fire in the pavilion, they carried the
wretched woman to the landing, where they laid her on the floor,
attempting, for a time in vain, to restore her. She seemed suffering
from some severe internal injury and her lips bubbled with gore. At
length she opened her eyes and with a shriek of agony made signs that
she was suffocating and desired to be raised. Eckhardt, who stood
beside her, raised her, and as he did so, she regarded him with a wild
and piteous gaze and murmured his name in a tone which went to the heart
of all.
As he bent over her, she made a convulsive effort to rise.
"I have slain the fiend, who came between us--forgive me if you can--"
she muttered, then gasping: "Heaven have mercy on my soul!" she fell
back into Eckhardt's arms.
At a sign from the Margrave the men-at-arms withdrew, leaving him alone
with his gruesome burden.
After they had descended, he bent over the prostrate form, he had loved
so well, touching with gentle fingers the soft, dark hair, which lay
against his breast. Once,--he recalled the mad delirium of holding her
thus close to his heart. Now there was something dreary, weird, and
terrible in what would under other conditions have been unspeakable
rapture. A chill as of death ran through him as he supported the dying
woman in his arms. Her silken robe, her perfumed hair, the cold contact
of the gems about her,--all these repelled him strangely; his soul was
groaning under the anguish, his brain began to reel with a nameless,
dizzy horror.
At last she stirred. Her body quivered in his hold, consciousness
returned for a brief moment, and, with a heavy sigh, she whispered as
from the depths of a dream:
"Eckhardt!"
A fierce pang convulsed the heart of the unhappy man. He started so
abruptly, that he almost let her drop from his supporting arms. But his
voice was choked; he could not speak.
A groan,--a convulsive shudder,--a last sigh,--and Theodora's spirit had
flown from the lacerated flesh.
In silent anguish Eckhardt knelt beside the body of the woman, heedless
of the hurricane which raged without, heedless of the flames, which,
creeping closer and closer, began to lick the tower with their crimson
tongues. At last, aroused by the warning cries of the men-at-arms
below, Eckhardt staggered to his feet with the dead body, and scarcely
had he emerged from the tower, when a terrible roar, a deafening crash
struck his ear. The roof and walls of the great pavilion had fallen in
and millions of sparks hissed up into the flaming ether.
For a moment Eckhardt paused, stupefied by the sheer horror of the
scene. The pavilion was now but a hissing, shrieking pyramid of flames;
the hot and blinding glare almost too much for human eyes to endure.
Yet so fascinated was he with the sublime terror of the spectacle that
he could scarcely turn away from it. A host of spectral faces seemed to
rise out of the flames and beckon to him, to return,--when a tremendous
peal of thunder, rolling in eddying vibrations through the heavens,
recalled him to the realization of the moment, and gave the needful spur
to his flagging energies. Raising his aching eyes, Eckhardt saw
straight before him a gloomy archway, appearing like the solemn portal
of some funeral vault, dark and ominous, yet promising relief for the
moment. Stumbling over the dead bodies of Roxane and Roffredo and
several other corpses strewn among fallen blocks of marble, and every
now and then looking back in irresistible fascination on the fiery
furnace in his rear, he carried his lifeless burden to the nearest
shelter. He dared not think of the beauty of that dead face, of its
subtle slumbrous charm, and stung to a new sense of desperation he
plunged recklessly into the dark aperture, which seemed to engulf him
like the gateway of some magic cavern. He found himself in a circular,
roofless court, paved with marble, long discoloured by climate and age.
Here he tenderly laid his burden down, and kneeling by Ginevra's side,
bid his face in his hands.
A second crash, that seemed to rend the very heavens, caused Eckhardt at
last to wake from his apathy of despair. A terrible spectacle met his
eyes. The east wall of the tower, in which Ginevra had sought refuge
and found death, had fallen out; the victorious fire roared loudly round
its summit, enveloping the whole structure in clouds of smoke and jets
of flame; whose lurid lights crimsoned the murky air like a wide Aurora
Borealis. But on the platform of the tower there stood a solitary human
being, cut off from retreat, enveloped by the roaring element, by a sea
of flame!
With a groan of anguish, Eckhardt fixed his straining eyes on the dark
form of Hezilo the harper, whom no human intervention could save from
his terrible doom. Whether his eagerness, to avenge his dead child or
her betrayer, had carried him too far, whether in his fruitless search
for the Chamberlain he had grown oblivious of the perils besetting his
path, whether too late he had thought of retreat,--clearly defined
against the lurid, flame-swept horizon his tall dark form stood out on
the crest of the tower;--another moment of breathless horrid suspense
and the tower collapsed with a deafening crash, carrying its lonely
occupant to his perhaps self-elected doom.
All that night Eckhardt knelt by the dead body of his wife. When the
bleak, gray dawn of the rising day broke over the crest of the Sabine
hills he rose, and went away. Soon after a company of monks appeared
and carried Theodora's remains to the mortuary chapel of San Pancrazio,
where they were to be laid to their last and eternal rest.
*CHAPTER XVIII*
*VALE ROMA*
It was the eve of All Souls Day in the year nine hundred ninety
nine,--the day so fitly recalling the fleeting glories of summer, of
youth, of life, a day of memories and tributes offered up to the
departed.
Afar to westward the sun, red as a buckler fallen from Vulcan, still
cast his burning reflections. On the horizon with changing sunset tints
glowed the departing orb, brightening the crimson and russet foliage on
terrace and garden walls. At last the burning disk disappeared amid a
mass of opalescent clouds, which had risen in the west; the fading
sunset hues swooned to the gray of twilight and the breath of scanty
flowers, the odour of dead leaves touched the air with perfume faint as
the remembered pathos of autumn. No breeze stirred the dead leaves
still clinging to their branches, no sound broke the silence, save from
a cloister the hum of many droning voices. Now and then the air was
touched with the fragrance of hayfields, reclaimed here and there upon
the Campagna, and mists were slowly descending upon the snow-capped peak
of Soracte. In the dim purple haze of the distance the circle of walls,
a last vestige of the defence of the ancient world, stood a sun-browned
line of watch-towers against the horizon. From their crenelated ramparts
at long distances, a sentinel looked wearily upon the undulating stretch
of vacant, fading green.
In the portico of the imperial palace on the Aventine sat Eckhardt,
staring straight before him. Since the terrible night, which had
culminated in the crisis of his life, the then mature man seemed to have
aged decades. The lines in his face had grown deeper, the furrows on
his brow lowered over the painfully contracted eyebrows. No one had
ventured to speak to him, no one to break in upon his solitude. The
world around him seemed to have vanished. He heard nothing, he saw
nothing. His heart within him seemed to be a thing dead to all the
world,--to have died with Ginevra. Only now and then he gazed with
longing, wistful glances towards the far-off northern horizon, where the
Alps raised their glittering crests,--a boundary line, not to be
transgressed with impunity. Would he ever again see the green, waving
forests of his Saxon-land, would his foot ever again tread the
mysterious dusk of the glades over which pines and oaks wove their
waving shadows, those glades once sacred to Odhin and the Gods of the
Northland? Those glades undefiled by the poison-stench of Rome? How he
longed for that purer sphere, where he might forget--forget? Can we
forget the fleeting ray of sunlight, that has brightened our existence,
and departing has left sorrow and anguish and gloom?
Eckhardt's heart was heavy to breaking.
As evening wore on, it was evident, that there was some new, great
commotion in the city. From every quarter pillars of dun smoke rose up
in huge columns which, spreading fan-like, hung sullenly in the yellow
of the sunset. Houses were burning. Swords were out. In the distance
straggling parties could be seen, hurrying hither and thither.
"There is a devil's carnival brewing, or I am forsworn," muttered the
Margrave as he arose and entered the palace. There he ordered every gate
to be closed and barricaded. He knew Roman treachery, and he knew the
weakness of the garrison.
The roar of the populace grew louder and nearer, minute by minute.
Eckhardt had hardly reached the imperial antechamber, ere the crest of
the Aventine fairly swarmed with a rebellious mob, whose numbers were
steadily increasing. Already they outnumbered the imperial guard a
hundred to one.
It soon became evident, that their clamour could not be appeased by
peaceful persuasion. Disregarding Eckhardt's protests, Otto had made
one last effort to try the spell of his person upon the Romans;--but
hootings and revilings had been the only reply vouchsafed by the rabble
of Rome to the son of Theophano.
"Where is Benilo? We will speak to Benilo,--the friend of the people!"
they shouted, and when he failed to appear, they cried: "They have slain
him, as they slew Crescentius," and a shower of stones hailed against
the walls of the palace.
Otto escaped unscathed. Once more in his chamber he broke down. His
powers were waning; his resistance spent. The death of Crescentius,--the
loss of Stephania filled him with unutterable despair. He thought of
the mysterious death of Benilo, whose gashed body some fisherman had
discovered in the Tiber, and whose real character Eckhardt's account of
his crimes and misdeeds had at last revealed to him. He knew now that
he had been the dupe of a traitor, who had systematically undermined the
lofty structure of his dreams, whose fall was to bury under its ruins
the last of the glorious Saxon dynasty,--a traitor, who had deliberately
set about to break the heart whose unspoken secret he had read. And
this was the end!
"Hark! The Romans are battering at the gates!" Haco, the captain of the
guard, addressed Eckhardt, entering breathlessly and unannounced.
"Where they shall batter long enough," Eckhardt growled fiercely. "The
gates are triple brass and bolted! Hold the yelping curs in check, till
we are ready!"
Haco departed and Eckhardt now prepared Otto for the necessity of
flight. All Rome was in arms against them! This time it was not the
Senator. The people themselves were bent upon Otto's capture or death.
Resistance was madness. Without a word Otto yielded. Sick, body and
soul, he cared no longer. A slow fever seemed to consume him, since
Stephania had gone from him. The malady was past cure,--for he wished
to die. The mute grief of the stricken youth went to Eckhardt's heart.
Of his own despair he dared not even think at this hour, when the
destinies of a dynasty weighed upon his shoulders, weighed him down:--he
must get Otto safely out of Rome--at any, at every cost.
"Hark, below!"
An uproar of voices and heavy blows against the portals rang up to their
ears.
Eckhardt seized a torch and, sword in hand, opened the secret panel.
"The back way,--the garden,--'tis for our lives!" he whispered to Otto,
who had hastily thrown a dark mantle over his person which might serve
to evade detention in case they met some chance straggler. The panel
closed behind them and Eckhardt locked every door in the long corridor,
through which they passed, to delay pursuit. They descended a flight of
stairs, and found themselves in a hall, which through a ruined portico,
terminated in a garden. Here Eckhardt extinguished the torch and they
paused and listened.
Before them lay a deserted garden with marble statues and weed-grown
terraces. The gravel walks were strewn with tiny twigs and leaves of
faded summer, and stained in places with a dark green mould. There was
the soft splash of water trickling from huge mossy vases, and here and
there through a break in the foliage, peered an arrowy shaft of
moonlight.
Here they were to await the arrival of Haco and his men. Suddenly the
glint of a halberd beyond the wall caught Eckhardt's ever watchful eye;
he counted three in succession on the other side of the wall. The
Romans seemed bent to deprive them of their only way of flight.
Eckhardt glanced about. The wall on the western side seemed unguarded.
Here the Aventine fell in a steep declivity towards the Tiber. Eckhardt
perceived there was but one course and took it instantly.
At this moment Haco and his men-at-arms emerged with drawn swords from
the laurel thickets, in whose concealment they had awaited their leader
and King. Motioning to Otto and his companions to imitate his
movements, Eckhardt crouched down and stole cautiously along the edge of
the wall. Meanwhile the tumult without was increased by the hoarse
braying of a horn. Men could be seen rushing about with drawn swords or
any other weapons close at hand, staves, clubs and sticks, shouting and
yelling in direst confusion.
Amidst this uproar the small band reached the edge of the Tiber and
their repeated signals caused a boat rowed by a gigantic fellow to
approach. The oarsman, however, insisted on his pay before he would
take them across.
After they had safely reached the opposite shore they bound and gagged
the owner of the craft, to insure his secrecy. Then the party sped up a
narrow lane and paused before a ruinous house which, to judge from its
black and crumbling beams, seemed to have been recently destroyed by
fire. Here they waited until one of the party secured their steeds.
During all this time Otto had not spoken a word.
Now that he was about to mount the steed, which was to bear him from
Rome for ever, he turned with one last heart-breaking look toward the
city.
A desire, fierce as that of hunger, wearing as that of sleep, filled
him,--the desire of death.
At last he rode away with the others.
The night grew darker. The sky was full of clouds and the wind shrieked
through the spectral branches of the pines. The travellers pursued their
way along the well beaten tracks of the Flaminian Way, keeping a
constant look-out for surprises. They re-crossed the Tiber at a ford
above the city, and then only they brought their steeds to a more
leisurely gait.
Gradually the ground began to ascend.
A turn in the road brought them to a high plateau. Its rising knolls
were crowned with broad and ancient plane-trees, in the midst of which
towered a gibbet, from which swung the bodies of two malefactors,
recently executed. Otto shuddered at the omen. Death on every
turn,--death at every step. The moon at fitful intervals cast from
between the rifts in the clouds a feeble radiance upon desolate fields.
A company of hungry crows rose at the approach of the horsemen from the
stubble, filled the air with their cawing and flapped their way swiftly
out of sight. At that moment a horseman galloped past with great
rapidity, seeming eagerly to scan the cavalcade. He was closely muffled
and had vanished in the night, ere he could be hailed or recognized.
Rome swiftly vanished behind them. After passing the last scattered
houses on the outskirts, they finally reached the open Campagna. The
darkness increased and the night wore every appearance of proving a
dismal one. The wind was high and swept the clouds wildly over the face
of the moon.
In silence they proceeded on their way, until they espied a low range of
hills, white on the summits with lightning. A dense wood skirted the
road on the left for several miles. But as far as the eye could
penetrate the murky twilight, no human being, no human habitation
appeared.
In the ruins of an old monastery they spent the night, and for the first
in three, Otto slept. But his sleep did not refresh him, nor restore
his strength. Throughout his fitful slumbers, he saw the pale face of
Stephania, the face, which with so mad a longing he had dreamed into his
heart, the heart she had broken, but which loved her still.
Gloomily the morning light of the succeeding day broke upon the Roman
Campagna. The sun was hidden behind a lowering sky and fitful gusts of
wind swept the great, barren expanse. Undaunted, though their hearts
were filled with dire misgivings, the small band continued their march,
northward, ever northward,--towards the goal of their journey, the
Castel of Paterno, perched on the distant slopes of Soracte.
*Book the Third*
*Our Lady
of Death*
"As I came through the desert, thus it was,
As I came through the desert: From the right
A shape came slowly with a ruddy light,
A woman with a red lamp in her hand,
Bareheaded and barefooted on that strand.
A large black sign was on her breast that bowed,
A broad black band ran down her snow-white shroud.
That lamp she held, was her own burning heart,
Whose blood-drops trickled step by step apart."
--_James Thomson_.
*CHAPTER I*
*PATERNO*
The sun was nigh the horizon, and the whole west glowed with exquisite
colour, reflected in the watery moors of the Campagna, as a troop of
horsemen approached the high tableland skirting the Cimminian foothills.
Not a human being was visible for many miles around; only a few wild
fowl fluttered over the pools and reedy islets of the marshes and the
lake of Bolsena gleamed crimson in the haze of the sunset.
The boundless, undulant plain spread before them, its farms, villas and
aqueducts no less eloquent of death than the tombs they had passed on
the silent Via Appia. The still air and the deep hush seemed to speak
to man's soul as with the voice of eternity. On the left of the
horsemen yawned a deep ravine, from which arose towering cliffs, crowned
with monasteries and convents. On their right lay the mountain chains
of the Abruzzi, resembling dark and troubled sea-waves, and to southward
the view was bounded by the billowy lines of the Sabine hills, rolling
infinitely away. Beyond they saw the villages scattered through the
gray Campagna and in the farthest distance the mountain shadows began to
darken over the roofs of ancient Tusculum and that second Alba which
rises in desolate neglect above the vanished palaces of Pompey and
Domitian.
It was the day on which is observed the poetic Festa dell' Ottobrata, a
festival of pagan significance, with the archaic dance and garlanded
processions of harvest and vintage, when the townsfolk go out into the
country, to look upon the mellow tints of autumn, to walk in the
vineyards, to taste the purple grapes, and to breathe the fragrance,
filling the air with odours finer than the flavour of wine. The fields
were mellowed to yellow stubble and the creepers touched by the first
chill of autumn hung in crimson garlands along the russet hedges. Here
and there, among the stately poplars loomed up farmhouses with thatched
roofs, which from afar resembled pointed haystacks on the horizon. At
intervals among the crimson and russet leafage rose a spectral cypress,
like a sombre shadow. In the haze of the distance crooked olive-trees
raised their branches in tints of silver-gray. The air was still, but
for an occasional hum of insect life. The faint, white outlines of the
Apennines shone brilliant and glistening in the evening glow. The
travellers passed Camaldoli with its convents reared upon high, almost
inaccessible cliffs; the cloisters of Monte Cassino had vanished behind
them in silvery haze. They approached Paterno by a road skirted with
villas and gardens, with ancient statues and shady alleys. The
proximity of the mountains made the air chill; here and there a ray of
sunlight filtered through the branches of the plane-trees.
High Paterno towered above, among its rocks and steeps.
Ever since their flight from Rome, Otto had been in the throes of a
benumbing lethargy, which had deprived him of interest in everything,
even life itself. Vain had been his companions' effort to rouse him
from his brooding state, vainly had they pointed out to him the beauties
of the landscape. Was it the ghost of Johannes Crescentius, the Senator
of Rome, that was haunting the son of Theophano?
After having crossed a swinging bridge, which swayed to and fro under
the weight of their iron mail, they arrived at a narrow causeway, above
which, like some contemplative spirit above the conflicting problems of
life, rose the cloisters, environing the ancient Castel of Paterno.
Eckhardt knocked at the barred gate with the hilt of his sword,
whereupon a monk appeared at the window of a tower above the portcullis,
and after reconnoitring, set some machinery in motion, by which the
portcullis was raised. They then found themselves in a long, narrow
causeway cut in the rock. The monk who had admitted them disappeared;
another ushered them into the great hall of the cloister. The air was
full of the lingering haze of License, and traces of devotional
paintings on the weather-beaten walls appeared like fragments of prayers
in a world-worn mind.
The hall had been made from a natural cavern and was of an exceedingly
gloomy aspect, being of great extent, with deep windows only on one
side, hewn in the solid granite. It was at intervals crossed by arches,
marking the termination of several galleries leading to remoter parts of
the monastery. In the centre was a long stone table, hewn from the rock;
a pulpit, supported on a pillar was similarly sculptured in the wall.
Five or six pine-wood torches, stuck at far intervals in the granite,
shed a dismal illumination through the gloom, enhanced rather than
diminished by the glow of red embers on a vast hearth at the farthest
extremity of the hall.
Eckhardt was about to prefer his request to the monk, who had conducted
them hither, when he was interrupted by the entrance of the abbot and a
long train of monks from their devotions. The monks advanced in solemn
silence, their heads sunk humbly on their breasts; their superior so
worn with vigils and fasts, that his gaunt and powerful frame resembled
a huge skeleton. He was the only one of the group who uttered a word of
welcome to his guests.
After having ordered Haco to attend to the wants of his lord, Eckhardt
sought a conference with the abbot on matters which lay close to his
heart. For his sovereign was ill--and his illness seemed to defy human
skill. The abbot listened to Eckhardt's recital of the past events, but
his diagnosis was far from quieting the latter's fears.
"You learn to speak and think very dismally among these great, sprawling
pine forests," Eckhardt said moodily, at the conclusion of the
conference.
"We learn to die!" replied the monk with melancholy austerity.
Consideration for his sovereign's safety, however, prompted Eckhardt,
who had been informed that straggling bands of their pursuers had
followed them to the base of the hill, to continue that same night under
guidance of a monk, the ascent to the almost impregnable heighths of
Castel Paterno. Here Otto and his small band were welcomed by Count
Tammus, the commander, who placed himself and his men-at-arms at the
disposal of the German King.
*CHAPTER II*
*MEMORIES*
Otto found himself in a state chamber, whose gloomy vastness was
lighted, or rather darkened by one single taper. Through the high oval
windows in the deep recess of the wall peered an errant ray of
moonlight, which illumined the quaint monastic paintings on the walls,
and crossing the yellow candle-light, imbued them with a strange ghostly
glare.
When his host had ministered to his comfort and served him with the
frugal fare of the cloister, Otto hinted his desire for sleep, and his
trusty Saxons entered on their watch before their sovereign's chamber.
At last, left alone, Otto listened with a heavy heart to the monotonous
tread of the sentries. It seemed to him as if he could now take a
survey of the events of his life, and pass sentence upon it with the
impartiality of the future chronicler. Recollection roused up
recollection; and as in a panorama, the scenes of his short, but
eventful career passed in review before his inner eye. He thought of
what he was, contrasting it painfully with all he might have been. The
image of the one being, for whom his soul yearned in its desolation,
with the blinding hunger of man for woman and woman's love, rose up
before his eyes, and for the first time he thought of death,--death,--in
its full and ghastly actuality.
What was it, this death? Was it a sleep? Merely the absence, not the
privation of those powers and senses, called life? What sort of passage
must the thinking particle pass through, whatever it may be,--ere it
stood naked of its clay? The breaking of the eyes in darkness,--what
then succeeded? Would the thinking atom survive,--would it become the
nothing that it was?
The aspect of the chamber was not one to dispel the gloomy visions that
haunted him. It was scantily furnished in the crude style of the tenth
century, with massive tables and chairs. A curious tapestry of eastern
origin, representing some legend of the martyrs, divided it from an
adjoining cabinet serving at once as an oratory and sleeping apartment.
A low fire, burning in the chimney to dispel the miasmas of the marshes,
shed a crimson glow over the chamber and its lonely inmate.
For a long time those who watched before his door heard him walk
restlessly up and down. At last weariness came over him and he threw
himself exhausted into a chair. Then the haunting memory of Stephania
conjured up before his half-dreaming senses an alluring, shimmering Fata
Morgana--a castle on one of those far-away Apulian head-lands, with
their purpling hills in the background and the scent of strange flowers
in the air. On many a summer morning they should walk hand in hand
through the Laburnum groves, and find their love anew. But the amber
sheen of the landscape faded into the violet of night. The vision faded
into nothingness. A peal of thunder reverberated through the
heavens,--Otto started with a moan, rose, and staggered to his couch.
[Illustration: "The haunting memories of Stephania."]
He closed his eyes; but sleep would not come.
Where was she now? Where was Stephania? Weeks had passed, since they
had last met. It seemed an eternity indeed! He should have remained in
Rome, till he was assured of her fate! She had left him with words of
hatred, of scorn, bitter and cruel. And yet! How gladly he would have
saved the man, his mortal enemy, forsooth, had it lain in his power.
Gladly?--No! The man who had thrice forsworn, thrice broken his faith,
deserved his doom. Now he was dead. But Rome was lost. What mattered
it? There was but one devouring thought in Otto's mind. Where was
Stephania? The mad longing for her became more intense with every
moment. Now that the worst had come to pass, now that the stunning blow
had fallen, he must rouse himself, he must rally. He must combat this
fever, which was slowly consuming him; he must find her, see her once
more on earth, if but to tell her how he loved her, her and no other
woman. Would the pale phantom of Crescentius still stand between
them,--still part them as of yore? Not if their loves were equal. His
hands were stainless of that blood. On the morrow he would despatch
Haco to Rome. Surely some one would have seen her; surely some one knew
where the wife of the Senator of Rome was hiding her sorrow,--her grief.
The dim light of the ceremonial lamp, which burned with a dull, veiled
flame before an image of the crucified Christ, flickered, as if fanned
by a passing breath.
There was deep silence in the king's bed-chamber, and the drawn tapestry
shut out every sound from without.
Noiselessly a secret panel in the wall opened behind Otto's couch.
Noiselessly it closed in the gray stone. Then an exquisite white hand
and arm were thrust through the draperies and the lovely face of
Stephania beamed on the sleeping youth. She was pale as death, but the
transparency of her skin and the absolute perfection of her form and
features made her the image of an Olympian Goddess. Her dark hair,
bound by a fillet of gold, enhanced the marble pallor of the exquisite
face.
Never had the wonderful eyes of Stephania seemed so full of fire and of
life. Stooping over the sleeper, she softly encircled his head with her
snowy arms and pressed a long kiss on the dry, fevered lips.
With a moan Otto opened his eyes. For a moment he stared as if he faced
an apparition from dream-land.--His breath stopped, then he uttered a
choked outcry of delirious joy, while his arms tightly encircled the
head which bent over him.
"At last! At last! At last! Oh, how I have longed, how I have pined
for you! Stephania--my darling--my love--tell me that you do not hate
me--but is it you indeed,--is it you? How did you come here--the
guards,--Eckhardt,--"
He paused with a terrible fear in his heart, ever and ever caressing the
dark head, the beloved face, whose eyes held his own with their magnetic
spell. She suffered his kisses and caresses while stroking his damp
brow with soothing hand. Then with a grave look she enjoined silence and
caution, crept to the door of the adjoining room and locked it from
within.
"They guard you so well, not a ghost could enter," she said with the
sweet smile of by-gone days.
He arose and drew the curtains closer. Then he sat down by her side.
"How came you here, Stephania?" he whispered with renewed fear and
dread. "If you are discovered,--God have mercy on you,--and me!"
She shook her head.
"I have followed you hither from Rome,--I passed you on the night of
your flight. Count Tammus, the commander of Paterno, at one time the
friend of the Senator of Rome, has offered me the hospitality of the
castelio. No one knows of my presence here, save an old monk, who
believes me some itinerant pilgrim, in search of the End of Time," she
whispered with her far-away look. "The End of Time."
"They say it is close at hand," Otto replied, holding her hands tightly
in his. "Oh, Stephania, how beautiful you are! That which has broken my
spirit, seems not to have touched your life!"
"My life is dead," she replied. "What remains,--remains through you.
Therefore time has lacked power. But that which has been and is no
more, stands immovable before my soul."
He gazed at her with large fear-struck eyes.
"Then--your heart is no longer mine?"
The grasp of the hands in his own tightened.
"Would I be here, silly dreamer? I love you--my heart knows no change.
It loved but once--and you!"
All the happiness, slumbering in the deep eyes of the son of Theophano,
burst forth as in a glorious aureole of light.
"Then you have never--"
She raised her hand forbiddingly.
"I could not give to him who is gone that which I gave to you! When we
first met I was your foe. I hated you with all the hate which a Roman
has for the despoiler of his lands. When I gave you my love,--which,
alas, was not mine to give, I did so, a powerless instrument of Fate.
Side by side have we trod life's narrow path,--neither of us could turn
to right or left without standing accounted to the other. It was not
ours to say love this one or that other. We were brought together by
that same mysterious force, to which it is vain to cry halt. We
knew,--I knew,--that it must, sooner or later, carry us to doom and
death; but resistlessly the whirlwind had taken us up in its glistening
cloud: Thus are we lost;--you and I!"
He listened to her with a great fear in his soul.
"How cold your hands are, my love," he whispered. "Cold as if the flow
of blood had ceased. Can you feel how it rushes through my veins,--so
hot--so boiling hot?"
"You have the fever! Therefore my hands appear cold to you. But,--you
spoke truly,--in my hand is death,--and death is cold! Life I have
none,--you have taken it from me!"
"Stephania!"
It sounded like the last outcry of a broken heart.
"Why recall that which could not be averted? Were it mine to change it,
oh, that I could!"
"Do you really wish it?"
"I wish but your happiness. Can you doubt?"
"I do not doubt. I love you!"
"Stephania--my darling,--my all!"
And he kissed her eyes, her lips, her hair, and she suffered his
caresses as one wrapt in a blissful dream.
"I learned you were stricken with the fever,--the last defence left to
us by nature against our foes. I have come, to watch over you, to care
for you,--to nurse you back to health,--to life--"
"And you braved the dangers that beset your path on every turn?"
"How should I fear,--with such love in my heart for you!"
"Then you--will remain?" he whispered, his very life in his eyes.
"For a time," she answered, in a halting tone, which passed not
unremarked.
"And then?" he queried.
Her head sank.
"I know not!"
"Then I will tell you, my own love! We will return to Rome together,
you and I; Stephania, the empress of the West,--would not that reconcile
your Romans,--appease their hate?"
Stephania gazed for a moment thoughtfully at Otto, then she shook her
head.
"I fear," she replied after a pause, "we shall nevermore return to
Rome."
As she spoke, her soft fingers stroked caressingly the youth's head,
which rested on her bosom, while her right hand remained tightly clasped
in his.
"I do not understand you," he said with a pained look.
"Do not let us speak of it now," she replied. "You are ill;--the fever
burns in your blood. It likes you well, this Roman fever,--and yet you
persist in returning hither ever and ever,--as to your destiny--"
"You are my destiny, Stephania! I cannot live without you! Had you not
come, I should have died! God, you cannot know how I love you, how I
worship you, how I worship the very air you breathe. Stephania! On
that terrible, never-to-be-forgotten day, when your words planted death
in my heart, he, who of all my Saxons hates you with a hatred strong and
enduring as death, warned me of you! 'Must you love a Roman,' he said
to me--'and of all Romans, Stephania, the wife of the Senator? Once in
the toils of the Sorceress, you are lost! Nothing can save you.'--Can I
say to my heart, you shall love this one,--or you shall not love this
one? Shall I say to my soul, you shall harbour the image of this one,
but that other shall be to you even as a barred Eden, guarded by the
angel with the flaming sword? I have seen the maidens of my native
land; I have seen the women of Rome;--but my heart was never touched
until we met. My soul leaped forth to meet your own, when first we
stood face to face in the chapel of the Confessor. Stephania,--my love
for you is so great that I fear you."
"And why should you fear me? Were I here, did I not love you?"
"My life has been a wondrous one," he spoke after a pause. "From
dazzling sun-kissed heights I have been hurled into the blackest abyss
of despair. And what is my crime? Wherein have I sinned? I have loved
a woman,--a woman wondrous fair,--Stephania!"
"You have loved the wife of the Senator of Rome!"
His eyes drooped. For a time neither spoke.
"Thrice have I crossed the Alps, to see, to rule this fabled land,--and
now I want but rest,--peace,--Stephania--" he said with a heart-breaking
smile.
"You are tired, my love," replied the beautiful Roman. "From this hour,
I shall be your leech,--I shall be with you, to share your solitude,--to
watch over you till the dread fever is broken. And then--"
"And then?" he repeated with anxious look.
"But will you not weary of me?" she said, avoiding the question.
He drew her close to him.
"My sweetheart---my own--"
"And you will not fear, you will trust and obey me?"
"Were you to give me poison with your own hands, I would drain the
goblet without fear or doubt."
Stephania had arisen. She was pale as death.
"If love were all!" she muttered. "If love were all!"
Then she drew the curtains closer and extinguished the light.
*CHAPTER III*
*THE CONSUMMATION*
Some weeks had elapsed since Otto's arrival at Paterno. But the fever
which consumed the son of Theophano had not yielded to the skill of the
monkish mediciners, though a change for the better had been noticed
after the first night of the King's arrival. But it lasted only a short
time and all the danger symptoms returned anew. The monks shook their
heads and the hooded disciples of Aesculapius conversed in hushed
whispers, regarding the strange ailment, which would not cede before
their antidotes. But they continued their unavailing efforts to save
the life of the last of the glorious Saxon dynasty, the grandson of the
vanquisher of the Magyars, the son of the vanquisher of the Saracens.
It was a bleak December evening.
At sunset a mist rose from the fields and the clouds grew heavier with
every hour. The rain-drops hung on the branches of the plane-trees,
until an occasional stir sent them pattering down.
Otto lay within, asleep.
In the door-way sat Eckhardt, muffled in a cloak. Near-by, half
recumbent under a blanket, the cowl drawn over his face, sat the leech,
his eyes fixed upon the log-fire on the hearth, as it sent showers of
sparks into the murky darkness. In their search for fire-wood the monks
had brought from the edge of a neighbouring mill-pond the debris of a
skiff, whose planks had for years been alternately soaked in water and
dried in the sun. When tossed upon the blaze of forest branches, these
fragments emitted an odour sweet as oriental spices and their flames
brightened with prismatic tints. But to the leech's brooding gaze their
lurid embers seemed touched with the spell of some unholy incantation.
Without the sick-chamber two sentries, chilled and drowsy, leaned
against a column supporting the low vaulting, their halberds clasped
between their folded arms.
After a pause of some duration, Eckhardt arose and entering Otto's
chamber bent over the couch on which he lay. After having convinced
himself by the youth's regular breathing that he was resting and did not
require his attendance, the Margrave strode from the sick-chamber. The
fever was intermittent; now it came, now it left the youth's body. But
the pale wan face and the sunken eyes gave rise to the gravest fears.
Night came swiftly and with it the intense hush deepened. Only the
pattering of rain-drops broke the stillness. In the sick-chamber
nothing was to be heard save the regular breathing of the sleeper.
Thus the hours wore on. After the monk and Eckhardt had departed for
the night, the secret panel opened noiselessly and Stephania entered the
apartment with a strange expression of triumph and despair in her look.
She glanced round, but her eyes passed unheedingly over their
surroundings; she saw only that there was no one in the chamber, that no
one had seen her enter. There was something utterly desperate in that
glance. Noiselessly she stepped to the narrow oval window gazing out
into the mist-veiled landscape.
But it seemed without consciousness.
A single thought seemed to have frozen her brain.
She stepped to Otto's couch and for a moment bent over him.
Then she retreated, as if seized with a secret terror.
For a few moments she stood behind him, with closed eyes, her face
almost stony with dread and the fear of something unknown.
Near the bed there stood a pitcher which the monks replenished every
evening with water cold from a mountain spring. Approaching it, she
took a powder from her bosom and shook it into it, every grain. Then
she turned the pitcher round and round, to mix the fine powder, which
stood on the surface. Suddenly she started, and set it down, while
scalding tears slowly coursed down her pale cheeks. Desperate thoughts
crowded thickly on her brain, as her stony gaze was riveted on the
water, whose crystal clearness had not been clouded by the subtle
poison.
"Between us stands the shade of Crescentius," she muttered. "Still I can
not cease to love him,--each bound to each,--together, yet perpetually
divided,--our love a flower that the hand of death will gather."
Again there was a long, intense hush. She crept to Otto's bed and knelt
down by his side, hiding her wet face on her bare arms.
"When he is dead," she continued speaking softly, so as not to wake him,
"the unpardonable sin will be condoned.--Otto, Otto,--how I love
you,--if I loved you less,--you might live--"
At these words he stirred in the cushions. A deep sigh came from his
lips, as if the mountain of a heavy dream had been lifted from his
breast.
She drew back terrified, but noting that he did not open his eyes, she
spoke with a moan of weariness:
"How often thus in my dreams have I seen his dead face--"
Again she bent over the sleeper. Now she could not discern a breath. A
strange dread seized her, and her face became as wan and haggard as that
of the fever-stricken youth. Obeying a sudden impulse she removed the
pitcher of water, placing it in a remote niche. Then she crept back to
Otto's couch.
"Is he dead?" she whispered, as if seized by a strange delirium. "Is he
dead? I know not,--yet none knows,--but I! None,--but I!"
She gave a start, as if she had discovered a listener, glanced wildly
about the room, at each familiar object in the chamber, and met Otto's
eyes.
She raised herself with a gasp of terror, as he grasped her hand.
"Who is dead?" he asked. "And who is it, that alone knows it?"
She stroked the soft fair hair from his clammy brow.
"You are delirious, my love," she whispered. "No one is dead;--you have
been dreaming."
"I thought I heard you say so," he replied wearily.
The horror and bewilderment at his awakening at this moment of all, when
she required all her strength for her purpose, left her dazed for a
moment.
The clock struck the second hour after midnight. The sound cut the air
sharply, like a stern summons. It seemed to demand: Who dares to watch
at this hour of death?
Otto had again closed his eyes. Delirium had regained its sway. He was
whispering, while his fingers scratched on the cover of his couch, as if
he were preparing his own grave.
Again he relapsed into a fitful slumber, filled with dreams and visions
of the past.
He stands at the banks of the Rhine. The night is still. The moon is
in her zenith, her yellow radiance reflected in the calm majestic tide
of the river. He hears the sighing, droning swish of the waters; the
sinuous dream-like murmuring of the waves resolving into tinkling
chimes, far-away and plaintive, that steal up to him in the moon mists,
ravishing his soul. In cadenced, languorous rhythm the song of the
Rhine-daughters weeps and wooes through the night; their shimmering
bodies gleam from the waters in a silvery sphere of light; they seem to
beckon to him--to call to him--to lure him back--
"Home! Home!" he cries from the depths of his dream; then his voice
becomes inarticulate and sinks into silence.
New phantoms crowded each other, a shifting phantasmagoria of the very
beings who at that dreadful hour were most vividly fixed in his mind.
And among them stood out the image of the woman, who was kneeling at his
side, the woman he loved above all women on earth. Again his lips
moved. He called her by name, with passionate words of love.
"Let me not die thus, Stephania! Leave me not in this dreary abyss!
Oh! Drive away those infernal spectres that stare in my face," and his
words became wild and confused, as all these phantoms seemed to rush on
him together, forming lurid groups, flaming and tremulous, like
prolonged flashes of lightning, but growing fainter and fainter as they
died away, when every faculty of the young sufferer seemed utterly
suspended.
Dark clouds passed over the moon.
The wind blew in fierce gusts, howling like an imprisoned beast between
the chinks of the wall. Then the night relapsed once more into silence,
and in intermittent pauses large drops of rain could be heard, splashing
from the height of the roof upon the ringing flagstones. To Stephania's
listening ear it seemed like a dreadful pacing to and fro of spirits
meditating on the past. She dragged herself to a seat in a recess of
the wall, whence she could watch the sufferer and minister to his wants.
Another fit of delirium seized Otto. Restlessly he tossed on his
pillows. Again a dream murmured his own impending fate into his ears.
Again he is in Aix-la-Chapelle. Again he beholds Charlemagne seated
erect in his chair as in that memorable night when he visited the dead
emperor in the crypts. He touches the imperial vestments; the crown
glitters in the smoky flare of the torches. But through the heavy
Arabian perfumes of the emperor's fantastic shroud penetrates the odour
of the corpse.
The night wore on.
Recovering consciousness, Otto knew by the dying candle, by the strokes
of the clocks from adjacent cloisters, that hours had passed into
eternity, and that it was long past midnight. It was very still. The
tread of the sentries was no longer heard. Through the window were seen
pale blue flashes of lightning in a remote cloudbank, as on that
memorable night in the temple of Neptune at Rome. The dull rumbling of
distant thunder seemed to come from the bowels of the earth.
His head ached, his mouth was parched, thirst tormented him. He dimly
remembered the pitcher of water. Who had removed it? Why had it been
taken away? He tried to rise, to drag himself to the wall, but his
strength was not equal to the task. He fell back in the cushions where
for a time he lay motionless. Then a moan broke from his lips, which
startled the figure seated by the bed. Opening his eyes Otto gazed into
the pale face of Stephania. She started up with a low cry,--as from a
trance. Waking and watching had benumbed her senses.
Now from her own suffering she lifted to Otto her face, wherein was
reflected the great love she bore him.
He looked at her with all the love of his soul in his eyes.
"I am dying," he spoke calmly, "I know it."
An outcry of mortal anguish broke from her lips.
"No, no, no!" she moaned, entwining him with her arms. "Otto, my
love--you will live,--live--live-- Can you fancy us parted," she
sobbed, "one from the other for ever? Or can you go from me and leave me
to the great loneliness of the world? To me all on earth, but you,
seems a fleeting shadow; but in this hour, I think only of the greater
pang of my own fate, and pray that in another world I may be judged more
mercifully,--even by you."
For some moments they remained locked in close embrace.
"Kiss me!" he whispered hungrily. "Kiss me, Stephania!"
She drew back.
"My kisses are cold, Otto, cold as those of a dead love."
"Kiss me, Stephania," he moaned, "kiss me, even if your kisses were
death itself."
She breathed hard, as he held to her with all his might.
"A dead hand is drawing me downward, hold me up, Otto!" she gasped.
"Hold me up! Do not let me go! Do not let me go!"
And she kissed him, until he was almost delirious, drawing him close to
her heart.
"Now you are mine--mine--mine!" she whispered, kissing him again and
again, while his fingers were buried in the soft, silken wealth of her
hair.
"The hour is brief,--life is short and uncertain--oh, let the hour be
ours! Let us drain the glittering goblet to the dregs! Then we may
cast it from us and say we have been happy! Death has no terror for us!
I am thirsty, Stephania,--give me the pitcher."
She trembled in every limb.
"Do not let me go! Hold me, Otto,--do not let me go!" she almost
shrieked, entwining him so tightly with her arms that he could scarcely
breathe.
"I feel the fever returning--the water--Stephania--"
"Do not let me go!" she begged with mortal dread.
"I am burning up."
He struggled in her arms to rise, gasping:
"Water--Water!"
And he pointed to the niche, where he had espied the pitcher.
She almost dropped him, as raising himself he pushed her from him. Her
head swam giddily and she felt a feebleness in all her limbs; shudders
of icy cold ran through her, followed by waves of heat, that sickened
and suffocated her. But she paid little heed to these sensations.
Stephania felt death in her heart, she strove to sustain herself, but
failing in the effort, fell moaning across his couch.
Otto had fallen back on his pillows with eyes closed. He was spared the
sight of the terrible agony of the woman he loved. At last she clutched
the pitcher and staggering feebly forward, step by step, she pushed back
her hair from her brows and softly called his name.
He opened his eyes, but did not speak.
Trembling in every limb she bent over him and placing one hand under his
head raised him to a sitting posture, glancing fear-struck round the
chamber. She thought she had heard the tread of approaching steps.
Greedily Otto grasped the vessel, pressing his hot hands over the
woman's which held it to his lips. Greedily he drank the poisoned
beverage, while a heart-breaking moan came from Stephania's lips. He
heard it not. He sank back into the cushions, while she knelt down by
his side, weeping as if her heart would break.
The Senator of Rome was avenged.
Avenged? On whom? Whose tortures were the greater, if a spirit still
possessed the power to suffer? Alas! It was not the death of her lord
and husband she had avenged! She had sacrificed the love which filled
her heart to the Infernals!
While these reflections were whirling through her maddened brain, the
fatal poison was coursing serpent-like through Otto's veins, and
creeping to his head. For a time he lay still; then he began to move
uneasily in his pillows, his breathing became laboured, he beat the
covers with his hands. Then he moaned, as in the last agony, and
Stephania, to whom every sound of suffering from his lips was as a
thousand deaths, knelt by his side, unable to avert her gaze from the
youth, dying by the hand he loved and trusted.
Fixedly she stared at the inert form on the bed. Then only the full
realization of her deed seemed to burst upon her brain. She clutched
despairingly at the cover, beneath which lay his restless form, his face
averted, the face she so loved, yet feared, to see.
"Otto!" she moaned, "Otto!"
Her voice broke. She suddenly withdrew her hands and looked at them in
horror, those white, beautiful hands, that had mixed the fatal draught.
Then with a bewildered, vacant smile she beamed on her victim.
Otto had lost consciousness. Nothing stirred in the chamber. Profound
silence reigned unbroken, save for the slow chime of a distant bell,
tolling the hour.
Was he dead? Had the light of the eyes, she loved so well, gone out for
ever?
Her hand hovered fearfully above him, as if to drive away the grim
spectre of death. At last, nerving herself with a supreme effort, she
touched with trembling hand the cover that hid him from view. Lifting
it tearfully, she turned it back softly,--softly, murmuring his name all
the time.
Then she stooped down close, and closer yet. Her red lips touched the
purple ones; she stroked the damp and clammy brow, and thrust her
fingers into his soft hair. A moan came from his lips. Then, fastening
her white robe more securely about her, and stepping heedfully on
tip-toe, she passed out of the chamber. With uncertain step she glided
along the corridor, a ghostly figure, with a white, spectral face and
fevered eyes. At the foot of the spiral stairway she paused, gazing
eagerly around.
Stepping to a low casement she peered into the night. Flickering lights
and shadows played without; the late moon had disappeared, leaving but a
silvery trail upon the sky, to faintly mark her recent passage among the
stars. Everything was still. Only the plaintive cry of an owl echoed
from afar. Her sandalled feet sounded on the stone-paved floor, like the
soft pattering of falling leaves in autumn. Unsteadily she moved along
the gray discoloured wall towards the secret panel, known but to
herself. Soon her perplexed wandering gaze found what it sought, and
Stephania disappeared, as if the stones had receded to receive her.
*CHAPTER IV*
*THE ANGEL OF THE AGONY*
The morning of the following day broke hazy and threatening. But as the
hours wore on, the sky, which had been overcast, brightened slowly and
in that instant's change the earth became covered with a radiance of
sunshine and the heavens seemed filled with ineffable peace.
It was late in the day, when Otto woke from his lethargy. Hour after
hour he had raved without recovering consciousness. His breathing grew
weaker. He was thought to be in his last agony. Little by little the
vigour of his youth had reasserted itself, little by little he had
opened his eyes. His sight had become dimmed from the effects of the
poison, and his reason seemed to sway and to totter; the fevered flow of
blood, the wild beating of his temples, caused everything around him to
scintillate in a crimson haze and flit before his vision with fitful
dazzling gleams. But his eyes seemed fixed steadily in a remote recess
of the room.
Those surrounding his couch had believed him nearing dissolution, and
when he opened his eyes, Otto looked upon the faces of those who had
guided his steps ever since he set his foot upon Italian soil, Eckhardt,
Count Tammus, and Sylvester, the silver-haired pontiff who had come from
Rome. Their faces told him the worst. He attempted to raise himself in
his cushions, but his strength failed him, and he fell heavily back.
Anew his ideas became confused and his gaze resumed its former
fixedness.
His lips moved and Eckhardt, who bent over him, to listen, turned white
with rage.
"Again her accursed name," he growled, turning to the monk by his side.
"Stephania--where is Stephania?" moaned the dying youth.
A voice almost a shriek rent the silence.
"I am here,--Otto,--I am here!"
A shadow passed before the eyes of the amazed visitors in the
sick-chamber, a shadow which seemed to come out of the wall itself, and
the wife of the Senator of Rome staggered towards Otto's couch, who made
a feeble effort to stretch out his hands toward her. He could not raise
them. They were like lead. She rushed to his side, ere Eckhardt could
prevent, and with a sob fell down before the couch and grasped them
tightly in her own.
The petrified amazement, which had pictured itself in the features of
those assembled, at the unexpected apparition, gave vent to a flurry of
whispers and conjectures during which Eckhardt, with face drawn and
white and haggard, had rushed through the outer chamber to the door.
"Guards!" he thundered, "Guards!"
Two spearmen appeared in the doorway.
"Seize this woman and throw her over the ramparts!" the Margrave said
with a voice whose calm formed a fearful contrast to the blazing fury in
his eyes.
The men-at-arms approached with hesitation, but Sylvester barred their
progress with uplifted arm.
"Vengeance is the Lord's!" he turned to Eckhardt, whose eyes, aflame
with wrath, seemed the only living thing in his stony face.
A terrible laugh broke from the Margrave's lips.
"His mad pleadings saved her once! Now, all the angels in heaven and
demons in hell combined shall not save her from her doom!" he replied to
the Pontiff. "Seize her, my men! She has killed your king! Over the
ramparts with her!"
They dared deny obedience no longer. Approaching the couch they laid
hands on the kneeling woman. But the sight of violence for a moment so
incensed the prostrate form in the cushions, that he started up, as he
had done in the vigour of his health.
With eyes glowing with fever and wrath, Otto leaped from the bed,
planting himself before the prostrate form of the woman.
"Back!" he cried. "The first who lays hand on her dies by my hand, a
traitor! Down on your knees before the Empress of the Romans!"
Terror and amazement accomplished Stephanie's salvation.
Even Eckhardt was stunned. He knelt with the rest with averted face.
"Leave the room!" Otto turned to the men-at-arms, and with heads bowed
down they strode from the sick chamber and resumed their watch outside.
What did it all mean? The presence of the Senator's wife at their
sovereign's bedside, Eckhardt's contradictory demeanour, Otto's strange
words; mystified they shook their heads, glad the terrible task had been
spared them.
Otto's exertion was followed by a complete collapse, and he fell back in
a swoon. After a time he seemed to rally. Without assistance he sat up
straight and rigid, and turned towards the woman, whose wan face and
sunken eyes made her fatal beauty all the more terrible.
"Tell me--shall I live till night?" he whispered.
And as she hid her face from him with a sob, he continued:
"Do not deceive me! I am not afraid!"
His voice broke. Every one in the room knelt down weeping. Sylvester
tried to answer, but in vain. Hiding his face in his hands, the pontiff
sobbed aloud.
"Softly--softly--" Otto whispered to Stephania, then turning towards the
sky he whispered:
"How beautiful!"
The morning clouds were growing rosy; the twilight had become warm and
mellow. The first beam of the sun appeared over the rim of the horizon.
The dying youth held his face with closed eyes towards the light. A
faint shiver ran through his body and with a last effort he stretched
out his arms, as if he would have rushed to meet the rising orb.
Suddenly he was seized by a convulsion; the veins swelled on neck and
temples.
"Water--water!" he gasped choking.
Stephania knew the symptoms. Pale as death she staggered to her feet,
filled a cup with clear spring water and held it to his lips.
Otto, grasping her hand with the cup, drank thirstily from the ice-cold
draught.
Then his head fell back. A last murmur came from his half-open lips:
"Stephania,--Stephania--"
Then his life went out. With a moan of heart-rending anguish she closed
his eyes. The face of the youth, kissed by the early rays of the
December sun, took on a look as of one sleeping. His soul, freed from
earthly love, had entered on its eternal repose.
Johannes Crescentius was avenged.
Eckhardt had watched the last moments of his king. In the awful
presence of Death, he had restrained a new outburst of passion against
the woman, who had so utterly made that dead youth her own. But he had
sworn a terrible oath to himself, that she should pay the penalty, if
that life went out,--it would be cancelling the last debt he owed on the
accursed Roman soil.
And no sooner had the light faded from Otto's eyes, no sooner had they
been closed under the soft touch of Stephania's hand, than Eckhardt
rushed anew to the door and the terrible voice of the Margrave thundered
through the stillness of the death-chamber:
"Guards! Throw this woman over the ramparts! She has killed your
King!"
Again the guards rushed into the chamber. The terrible denunciation had
stirred their zeal. Stephania, kneeling by Otto's couch, never stirred,
but as the men-at-arms, over-awed by the spectacle that met their gaze,
paused for a moment, the sound of falling crystal, breaking on the
floor, startled the silver-haired pontiff.
He had seen enough.
Stepping between Stephania and her would-be slayers he waved them back.
Then he picked up a fragment of the empty flask.
"This phial," he spoke to Eckhardt, "is of the same shape and size as
one discovered in a witch's grave, when they were digging the
foundations for the monastery of St. Jerome!"
And he strode towards the woman and laid his hands on her head.
"She will soon answer before a higher tribunal," said the monk of
Aurillac.
"Father," she whispered, holding the hands of the corpse in her own,
while her head rested on her arms,--"I cannot see,--stoop down,--and let
me whisper--"
"I am here, daughter, close--quite close to you."
He inclined his ear to her mouth and listened. But though her lips
moved, no words would come.
After a moment or two of intense stillness, she whispered, raising her
head.
"It is bright again! They are calling me! We will go together to that
far, distant land of peace. I am with you, Otto--hold me up, I cannot
breathe--"
Gently Sylvester lifted her head.
"Otto,--my own love--forgive--" she gasped. A convulsive shudder passed
through her body and she fell lifeless over the dead body of her victim.
Stephania's proud spirit had flown.
Sylvester muttered the prayer for the departed, and staggered to his
feet.
Eckhardt pointed to her lifeless clay. In his livid face burnt
relentless, unforgiving wrath.
"Throw that woman over the ramparts!" he turned to his men. "She shall
not have Christian burial!"
Anew Sylvester intervened.
"Back!" he commanded the guards. "Judge not,--that ye may not be
judged. What has passed between those two--lies beyond the pale of
human ken. He alone, who has called, has the right to judge them! She
died absolved.--May God have mercy on her soul!"
As weeping those present turned to leave the death-chamber, Eckhardt
bent over the still, dead face of Otto.
"I will hold the death-watch," he turned to Sylvester. "Have the bier
prepared! To-morrow at dawn we start. We return to our Saxon-land,--we
go back across the Alps. In the crypts of Aix-la-Chapelle the grandson
of the great Otto shall rest; he shall sleep by the side of the great
emperor, whom he visited ere he came hither; Charlemagne's phantom has
claimed him at last. Rome shall not have a lock of his hair!"
"As you say--so shall it be!" replied Sylvester, his gaze turning from
Otto to the lifeless clay of Stephania.
Softly he raised her dead body and laid it side by side with that of
Theophano's son, joining their hands.
"Though they shall sleep apart in distant lands, their souls are one in
the great beyond, that holds no mysteries for the departed."
From the chapel of the cloister at the foot of the hill, stealing
through the solemn stillness of the December morning, came the chant of
the monks:
"Quando corpus morietur,
Fac ut animae donetur
Paradisi gloria."
*CHAPTER V*
*RETURN*
The Eve of the Millennium stood upon the threshold of Time.
The veiled sun of midwinter was rising and his early rays filled the
blue balconies of the East with curtains of gold. From the slopes of
Paterno a strange procession was to be seen winding its way down into
the plains below. It was the remnant of the German host, carrying the
bier with the body of the third Otto towards its distant, final
resting-place. Eckhardt and Haco jointly headed the mournful cortege,
which after reaching the plain, entered the northern road. Behind them
lay Civita Castellana, the walls of the ancient citadel towering high
above the town, which lay in the centre of a net-work of deep ravines.
To their right the Sabine hills extended in long, airy lines and the
wooded heights of Pellachio and San Gennaro rose to the south-east.
Before them Viterbo with her hundred towers lay dark and frowning inside
her bristling walls; and to northward, surmounted by its mighty
cathedral dome, on a conical hill, above the great lake of Bolsena, the
gray town of Montefiascone rose out of the wintry haze.
Continually harassed by the Romans the small band hewed their way
through their pursuers who abandoned their onslaughts only when the
Germans reached the Nera and beheld the Campanile of St. Juvenale rising
above Narni.
Slowly the imperial cortege passed through the ancient town and was soon
lost in the purple mists, which enshrouded mountain and valley.
Rome lay behind them, the source of their tears and sorrows.
Onward, ever onward they rode towards the glittering crests of the Alps,
the solemn twilight of the Hercynian forest, towards the distant banks
of the Rhine and the crypts of Aix-la-Chapelle.