Transcriber's Note: Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and
bold text by =equal signs=.
Under the Witches' Moon
THE ROMANCES
OF
NATHAN GALLIZIER
* * * * *
_Each, one volume, 12mo, cloth, illustrated.
Net $1.35; carriage paid, $1.50_
Castel del Monte
The Sorceress of Rome
The Court of Lucifer
The Hill of Venus
The Crimson Gondola
* * * * *
Under the Witches' Moon
_12mo, cloth, illustrated. Net $1.50;
carriage paid, $1.65_
* * * * *
THE PAGE COMPANY
53 BEACON STREET, BOSTON, MASS.
[Illustration: "It was that of a man coming towards her" (_See page
143_)]
Under the
Witches' Moon
A Romantic Tale
_of_ Mediaeval Rome
_BY
Nathan Gallizier_
Author of "The Crimson Gondola," "The Hill of Venus,"
"The Court of Lucifer," "The Sorceress of Rome,"
"Castel del Monte," Etc.
[Illustration]
THE PAGE COMPANY
BOSTON MDCCCCXVII
_Copyright, 1917,_
BY THE PAGE COMPANY
_All rights reserved_
First Impression, October, 1917
THE COLONIAL PRESS
C. H. SIMONDS CO., BOSTON, U. S. A.
_"To some Love comes so splendid and so soon,
With such wide wings and steps so royally,
That they, like sleepers wakened suddenly,
Expecting dawn, are blinded by his noon.
"To some Love comes so silently and late,
That all unheard he is, and passes by,
Leaving no gift but a remembered sigh,
While they stand watching at another gate.
"But some know Love at the enchanted hour,
They hear him singing like a bird afar,
They see him coming like a falling star,
They meet his eyes--and all their world's in flower."
ETHEL CLIFFORD_
CONTENTS
BOOK THE FIRST
Chapter Page
I. The Fires of St. John 3
II. The Weaving of the Spell 13
III. The Dream Lady of Avalon 20
IV. The Way of the Cross 30
V. On the Aventine 38
VI. The Coup 46
VII. Masks and Mummers 60
VIII. The Shrine of Hekaté 67
IX. The Game of Love 79
X. A Spirit Pageant 90
XI. The Denunciation 97
XII. The Confession 102
BOOK THE SECOND
I. The Grand Chamberlain 115
II. The Call of Eblis 128
III. The Crystal Sphere 134
IV. Persephoné 146
V. Magic Glooms 152
VI. The Lure of the Abyss 160
VII. The Face in the Panel 167
VIII. The Shadow of Asrael 173
IX. The Feast of Theodora 187
X. The Chalice of Oblivion 204
BOOK THE THIRD
I. Wolfsbane 221
II. Under the Saffron Scarf 230
III. Dark Plottings 240
IV. Face to Face 250
V. The Cressets of Doom 259
VI. A Meeting of Ghosts 269
VII. A Bower of Eden 279
VIII. An Italian Night 289
IX. The Net of the Fowler 299
X. Devil Worship 307
XI. By Lethe's Shores 314
XII. The Death Watch 323
XIII. The Convent in Trastevere 335
XIV. The Phantom of the Lateran 341
BOOK THE FOURTH
I. The Return of the Moor 351
II. The Escape from San Angelo 356
III. The Lure 367
IV. A Lying Oracle 377
V. Bitter Waters 384
VI. From Dream to Dream 389
VII. A Roman Medea 402
VIII. In Tenebris 413
IX. The Conspiracy 419
X. The Broken Spell 427
XI. The Black Mass 440
XII. Sunrise 453
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Page
"It was that of a man coming towards her." (_See page 143_)
_Frontispiece_
"A strange look passed into Theodora's eyes" 83
"Pelting the dancing girls for idle diversion" 192
"Thrown her saffron scarf over the prostrate youth" 236
BOOK THE FIRST
UNDER THE WITCHES' MOON
CHAPTER I
THE FIRES OF ST. JOHN
It was the eve of St. John in the year of our Lord Nine Hundred
Thirty-Five.
High on the cypress-clad hills of the Eternal City the evening sun had
flamed valediction, and the last lights of the dying day were fading
away on the waves of the Tiber whose changeless tide has rolled down
through centuries of victory and defeat, of pride and shame, of glory
and disgrace.
The purple dusk began to weave its phantom veil over the ancient
capital of the Cæsars and a round blood-red moon was climbing slowly
above the misty crests of the Alban Hills, draining the sky of its
crimson sunset hues.
The silvery chimes of the Angelus, pealing from churches and convents,
from Santa Maria in Trastevere to Santa Maria of the Aventine, began to
sing their message of peace into the heart of nature and of man.
As the hours of the night advanced and the moon rose higher in the
star-embroidered canopy of the heavens, a vast concourse of people
began to pour from shadowy lanes and thoroughfares, from sanctuaries
and hostelries, into the Piazza Navona. Romans and peasants from the
Campagna, folk from Tivoli, Velletri, Corneto and Terracina, pilgrims
from every land of the then known world, Africans and Greeks, Lombards
and Franks, Sicilians, Neapolitans, Syrians and Kopts, Spaniards and
Saxons, men from the frozen coast of Thulé and the burning sands of
Arabia, traders from the Levant, sorcerers from the banks of the Nile,
conjurers from the mythical shores of the Ganges, adventurers from the
Barbary coast, gypsies from the plains of Sarmatia, monks from the
Thebaide, Normans, Gascons and folk from Aquitaine.
In the Piazza Navona booths and stalls had been erected for the sale of
figs and honey, and the fragrant products of the Roman osterié.
Strings of colored lanterns danced and quivered in the air. The fitful
light from the torches, sending spiral columns of resinous smoke into
the night-blue ether, shed a lurid glow over the motley, fantastic
crowd that increased with every moment, recruited from fishermen,
flower girls, water-carriers and herdsmen from the Roman Campagna.
Ensconced in the shadow of a roofless portico, a relic of the ancient
Circus Agonalis, which at one time occupied the site of the Piazza
Navona, and regarding the bewildering spectacle which presented itself
to his gaze, with the air of one unaccustomed to such scenes, stood
a stranger whose countenance revealed little of the joy of life that
should be the heritage of early manhood.
His sombre and austere bearing, the abstracted mood and far-away look
of the eyes would have marked him a dreamer in a society of men who had
long been strangers to dreams. For stern reality ruled the world and
the lives of a race untouched alike by the glories of the past and the
dawn of the Pre-Renaissance.
He wore the customary pilgrim's habit, almost colorless from the
effects of wind and weather. Now and then a chance passer-by would
cast shy glances at the lone stranger, endeavoring to reconcile his age
and his garb, and wondering at the nature of the transgression that
weighed so heavily upon one apparently so young in years.
And well might his countenance give rise to speculation, were it but
for the determined and stolid air of aloofness which seemed to render
futile every endeavor to entice him into the seething maelstrom of
humanity on the part of those who took note of his dark and austere
form as they crossed the Piazza.
Tristan of Avalon was in his thirtieth year, though the hardships
of a long and tedious journey, consummated entirely afoot, made him
appear of maturer age. The face, long exposed to the relentless rays
of the sun, had taken on the darker tints of the Southland. The nose
was straight, the grey eyes tinged with melancholy, the hair was of
chestnut brown, the forehead high and lofty. The ensemble was that of
one who, unaccustomed to the pilgrim's garb, moves uneasily among his
kind. Yet the atmosphere of frivolity, while irritating and jarring
upon his senses, did not permit him to avert his gaze from the orgy of
color, the pandemonium of jollity, that whirled and piped and roared
about him as the flow of mighty waters.
One of many strange wayfarers bound upon business of one sort or
another to the ancient seat of empire, whose worldly sceptre had long
passed from her palsied grip to the distant shores of the Bosporus,
Tristan had arrived during the early hours of the day in the feudal and
turbulent witches' cauldron of the Rome of the Millennium.
And with him constituents of many peoples, from far and near, had
reached the Leonine quarter from the Tiburtine road, after months of
tedious travel, to worship at the holy shrines, to do penance and to
obtain absolution for real or imaginary transgressions.
From Bosnia, from Servia and Hungary, from Negropont and the islands
of the Greek Archipelago, from Trebizond and the Crimea it came
endlessly floating to the former capital of the Cæsars, a waste drift
of palaces and temples and antique civilizations, for the End of Time
was said to be nigh, and the dread of impending judgment lay heavily
upon the tottering world of the Millennium.
A grotesque and motley crowd it was, that sought and found a temporary
haven in the lowly taverns, erected for the accommodation of perennial
pilgrims, chiefly mean ill-favored dwellings of clay and timber,
divided into racial colonies, so that pilgrims of the same land and
creed might dwell together.
A very Babel of voices assailed Tristan's ear, for the ancient sonorous
tongue had long degenerated into the lingua Franca of bad Latin, though
there were some who could still, though in a broken and barbarous
fashion, make themselves understood, when all other modes of expression
failed them.
All about him throbbed the strange, weird music of zitherns and lutes
and the thrumming of the Egyptian Sistrum. The air of the summer night
was heavy with the odor of incense, garlic and roses. The higher
risen moon gleamed pale as an alabaster lamp in the dark azure of
the heavens, trembling luminously on the waters of a fountain which
occupied the centre of the Piazza Navona.
Here lolled some scattered groups of the populace, discussing the
events of the day, jesting, gesticulating, drinking or love-making.
Others roamed about, engaged in conversation or enjoying the antics of
two Smyrniote tumblers, whose contortions elicited storms of applause
from an appreciative audience.
A crowd of maskers had invaded the Piazza Navona, and the uncommon
spectacle at last drew Tristan from his point of vantage and caused
him to mingle with the crowds, which increased with every moment,
their shouts and gibes and the clatter of their tongues becoming
quite deafening to his ears. Richly decorated chariots, drawn by
spirited steeds, rolled past in a continuous procession. The cries of
the wine-venders and fruit-sellers mingled with the acclaim of the
multitudes. Now and then was heard the fanfare of a company of horsemen
who clattered past, bound upon some feudal adventure.
Weary of walking, distracted by the ever increasing clamor, oppressed
with a sense of loneliness amidst the surging crowds, whose festal
spirit he did not share, Tristan made his way towards the fountain and,
seating himself on the margin, regardless of the chattering groups,
which intermittently clustered about it, he felt his mood gradually
calm in the monotony of the gurgling flow of the water, which spurted
from the grotesque mouths of lions and dolphins.
The stars sparkled in subdued lustre above the dark, towering cypresses
which crowned the adjacent eminence of Monte Testaccio, and the
distant palaces and ruins stood forth in distinctness of splendor and
desolation beneath the luminous brightness of the moonlit heavens.
White shreds of mist, like sorrowing spirits, floated above the winding
course of the Tiber, and enveloped in a diaphanous haze the cloisters
upon St. Bartholomew's Island at the base of Mount Aventine.
For a time Tristan's eyes roamed over the kaleidoscopic confusion which
met his gaze on every turn. His ear was assailed by the droning sound
of many voices that filled the air about him, when he was startled by
the approach of two men, who, but for their halting gait, might have
passed unheeded in the rolling sea of humanity that ebbed and flowed
over the Piazza.
Basil, the Grand Chamberlain, was endowed with the elegance of the
effeminate Roman noble of his time. Supple as an eel, he nevertheless
suggested great physical strength. The skin was of a deep olive tinge.
The black, beady eyes were a marked feature of the countenance.
Inscrutable and steadfast in regard, with a hint of mockery and
cynicism, coupled with an abiding alertness, they seemed to penetrate
the very core of matter.
He wore a black mantle reaching almost to his feet. Of his features,
shaded by a hood, little was to be seen, save his glittering minx-eyes.
These he kept alternately fixed upon the crowds that surged around him
and on his companion, a hunchback garbed entirely in black, from the
Spanish hat, which he wore slouched over his face, to the black hose
and sandals that encased his feet. A large red scar across the low
forehead heightened the repulsiveness of his countenance. There was
something strangely sinister in his sunken, cadaverous cheeks, the low
brow, the inflamed eyelids, and his limping gait.
Without perceiving or heeding the presence of Tristan they paused as by
some preconcerted signal.
As the taller of the two pushed back the hood of his pilgrim garb, as
if to cool his brow in the night breeze, Tristan peered into a face not
lacking in sensuous refinement. Dark supercilious eyes roved from one
object to another, without dwelling long on any particular one. There
was somewhat of a cynical look in the downward curve of the eyebrows,
the thin straight lips and the slightly aquiline nose, which seemed to
imbue him with an air of recklessness and daring, that ill consorted
with his monkish garb.
Their discourse was at first almost unintelligible to Tristan. The
language of the common people had, at this period of the history of
Rome, not only lost its form, but almost the very echo of the Latin
tongue.
After a time, however, Tristan distinguished a name, and, upon
listening more attentively, the burden of the message began to unfold
itself.
"Why then have you ventured out of your hell-hole of iniquity, when
discovery means death or worse?" said Basil, the Grand Chamberlain. "Do
the keeps and dungeons of the Emperor's Tomb so allure you? Or do you
trust in some miraculous delivery from its vermin-haunted vaults?"
At these words Rome's most dreaded bravo, Il Gobbo of the Catacombs,
snarled contemptuously.
"You are needlessly alarmed, my lord. They will not look for Il Gobbo
in this company, though even a mole may walk in the shadow of a saint."
Basil regarded the speaker with mingled pity and contempt.
"There is room for all the world in Rome and the devil to boot."
Il Gobbo chuckled unpleasantly.
"Besides--folk about here show a great reverence for a holy garb--"
"Always with fitting reservations," interposed the Grand Chamberlain
sardonically. "I have had it in mind at some time or other to relieve
the Grand Penitentiary. The good man's lungs must be well nigh bursting
with the foul air down there by the Tomb of the Apostle. He will
welcome a rest!"
"Requiescat," chanted the bravo, imitating the nasal tone of the clergy.
Basil nodded approval.
"He at one time did me the honor of showing some concern in my
spiritual welfare. Know you what I replied?"--
The bravo gave a shrug.
"'Father,' I said, when he urged me to confess, 'pray shrive some one
worthier than myself. But--if you must needs have a confession--I shall
whisper into your holy ear so many interesting little episodes, so many
spicy peccadillos, and--to enhance their interest--mention some names
so high in the grace of God--'"
"And the reverend father?"
"Looked anathema and vanished"--
Basil paused for a moment, after which he continued with a sigh:
"It is too late! The Church is to be purified. Not even the pale shade
of Marozia will henceforth be permitted to haunt the crypts of Castel
San Angelo--merely for the sake of decorum. There is nothing less well
bred than memory!"
For a moment they relapsed into silence, watching the shifting crowds,
then Basil continued:
"Compared with this virtuous boredom the last days of Ugo of Tuscany
were a carnival. One could at least speed the travails of some one who
required swift absolution."
"Can you contrive to bring about this happy state?" queried Il Gobbo.
"It is always the unexpurgated that happens," Basil replied
sardonically.
"I hope to advance in your school," Il Gobbo interposed with a smile.
"I have long had you in mind. If you are in favor with yourself you
will become an apt pupil. Remember! He who is dead is dead and long
live the survivor."
"In very truth, my lord, breath is the first and last thing we draw--"
rejoined the bravo, evidently not relishing the thought that death
might be standing unseen at his elbow.
"Who would end one's days in odious immaculacy," Basil interposed
grandiloquently, "even though you will not incur that reproach from
those who know you from report, or who have visited your haunts? But
to the point. There are certain forces at work in Rome which make
breathing in this fetid air a rather cumbersome process."
"I doubt me if they could teach your lordship any new tricks," Il Gobbo
replied, somewhat dubiously.
The Grand Chamberlain smiled darkly.
"Good Il Gobbo, the darkest of my tricks you have not yet fathomed."
"Perchance then the gust of rumor blows true about my lord's palace on
the Pincian Hill?"
"What say they about my palatial abode?" Basil turned suavely to the
speaker.
There was something in the gleam of his interrogator's eyes that caused
Il Gobbo to hesitate. But his native insolence came to the rescue of
his failing courage.
"Ask rather, what do they not say of it, my lord! It would require less
time to recite--"
"Nevertheless, I am just now in a frame of mind to shudder soundly.
These Roman nights, with their garlic and incense, are apt to befuddle
the brain,--rob it of its power to plot. Perchance the recital of these
mysteries would bring to mind something I have omitted."
The bravo regarded the speaker with a look of awe.
"They whisper of torture chambers, where knife and screw and pulley
never rest--of horrors that make the blood freeze in the veins--of
phantoms of fair women that haunt the silent galleries--strange wails
of anguish that sound nightly from the subterranean vaults--"
"A goodly account that ought vastly to interest the Grand
Penitentiary--were it--with proper decorum--whispered in his ear. It
would make him forget--for the time at least--the dirty Roman gossip.
Deem you not, good Il Gobbo?"
"I am not versed in such matters, my lord," replied the bravo, ill at
ease. "Perhaps your lordship will now tell me why this fondness for my
society?"
"To confess truth, good Il Gobbo, I did not join you merely to meditate
upon the pleasant things of life. Rather to be inspired to some
extraordinary adventure such as my hungry soul yearns for. As for the
nature thereof, I shall leave that to the notoriously wicked fertility
of your imagination."
The lurid tone of the speaker startled the bravo.
"My lord, you would not lay hands on the Lord's anointed?"
Il Gobbo met a glance that made the blood freeze in his veins.
"Is it the thing you call your conscience that ails you, or some sudden
indigestion? Or is the bribe not large enough?"
The bravo doggedly shook his head.
"Courage lieth not always in bulk," he growled. "May my soul burn to
a crisp in the everlasting flames if I draw steel against the Lord's
anointed."
"Silence, fool! What you do in my service shall not burden your soul!
Have you forgotten our compact?"
"That I have not, my lord! But since the Senator of Rome has favored me
with his especial attention, I too have something to lose, which some
folk hereabout call their honor."
"Your honor!" sneered the Grand Chamberlain. "It is like the skin of an
onion. Peel off one, there's another beneath."
"My skin then--" the bravo growled doggedly. "However--if the lord
Basil will confide in me--"
"Pray lustily to your patron saint and frequent the chapel of the
Grand Penitentiary," replied Basil suavely, beckoning to Il Gobbo to
follow him. "But beware, lest in your zeal to confess you mistake my
peccadillos for your own."
With these words the two worthies slowly retraced their steps in the
direction of Mount Aventine and were soon lost to sight.
CHAPTER II
THE WEAVING OF THE SPELL
After they had disappeared Tristan stood at gaze,
puzzled where to turn, for the spectacle had suddenly changed.
New bands of revellers had invaded the Piazza Navona, and it seemed
indeed as if the Eve of St. John were assuming the character of the
ancient Lupercalia, for the endless variety of costumes displayed
by a multitude assembled from every corner of Italy, Spain, Greece,
Africa, and the countries of the North, was now exaggerated by a wild
fancifulness and grotesque variety of design.
Tristan himself did not escape the merry intruders. He was immediately
beset by importunate revellers, and not being able to make himself
understood, they questioned and lured him on, imploring his good
offices with the Enemy of Mankind.
Satyrs, fauns and other sylvan creatures accosted him, diverting
their antics, when they found themselves but ill repaid for their
efforts, and leaving the solitary stranger pondering the expediency of
remaining, or wending his steps toward the Inn of the Golden Shield,
where he had taken lodging upon his arrival.
These doubts were to be speedily dispelled by a spectacle which
attracted the crowds that thronged the Piazza, causing them to give
way before a splendid procession that had entered the Navona from the
region of Mount Aventine.
Down the Navona came a train of chariots, preceded by a throng of
persons, clad in rich and fantastic Oriental costumes, leaping, dancing
and making the air resound with tambourines, bells, cymbals and gongs.
They kept up an incessant jingle, which sounded weirdly above the
droning chant of distant processions of pilgrims, hermits and monks,
traversing the city from sanctuary to sanctuary.
The occupants of these chariots consisted of a number of young women in
the flower of youth and beauty, whose scant apparel left little to the
imagination either as regarded their person or the trade they plied.
The charioteers were youths, scarcely arrived at the age of puberty,
but skilled in their profession in the highest degree.
The first chariot, drawn by two milk-white steeds of the Berber breed,
was inlaid with mother-of-pearl, with gilded spokes and trappings that
glistened in the light of a thousand colored lanterns and torches, like
a vehicle from fairyland. The reins were in the hands of a youth hardly
over sixteen years of age, garbed in a snow white tunic, but the skill
with which he drove the shell-shaped car through the surging crowds
argued for uncommon dexterity.
Tristan, from his station by the fountain, was enabled to take in
every detail of the strange pageant which moved swiftly towards him, a
glittering, fantastic procession, as if drawn out of dreamland; and so
enthralled were his senses that he did not note the terrible silence
which had suddenly fallen upon the multitude.
As a half-slumbering man may note a sudden brilliant gleam of sunshine
flashing on the walls of his chamber, Tristan gazed in confused
bewilderment, when suddenly his stupefied senses were aroused to hot
life and pulsation, as he fixed his straining gaze on the supreme fair
form of the woman in the first car, standing erect like a queen,
surveying her subjects.
In the silence of a great multitude there is always something ominous.
But Tristan noted it not. Indeed he was deaf and blind to everything,
save the apparition in the shell-shaped car, as it bounded lightly over
the unevenly laid tufa of the Navona.
Was it a woman, or a goddess? A rainbow flame in mortal shape, a spirit
of earth, air, water or fire?
He saw before him a woman combining the charm of the girl with the
maturity of the thirties, dark-haired, exquisitely proportioned, with
clear-cut features and dark slumbrous eyes.
She wore a diaphanous robe of pale silk gauze. Her wonderful arms,
white as the fallen snow, were encircled by triple serpentine coils
of gold. Else, she was unadorned, save for a circlet of rubies which
crowned the dusky head.
Her sombre eyes rested drowsily on the swarming crowds, while a smile
of disdain curved the small red mouth, as her chariot proceeded through
the frozen silence.
Suddenly her eye caught the admiring gaze of Tristan, who had indeed
forgotten heaven and earth in the contemplation of this supremest
handiwork of the Creator. A word to the charioteer and the chariot came
to a stop.
Tristan and the woman faced each other in silence, the man with an
ill-concealed air of uneasiness, such as one may experience who finds
himself face to face with some unknown danger.
With utter disregard for the gaping crowds which had gathered around
the fountain she bent her gaze upon him, surveying him from head to
foot.
"Who are you?" she spoke at last, and he, confused, bewildered,
trembling, gazed into the woman's supremely fair face and stammered:
"A pilgrim!"
Her lips parted in a smile that revealed two rows of small white, even
teeth. There was something unutterable in that smile which brought the
color to Tristan's brow.
"A Roman?"
"From the North!"
"Why are you here?"
"For the salvation of my soul!"
He blushed as he spoke.
Again the strange smile curved the woman's lips, again the inscrutable
look shone in her eyes.
"For the salvation of your soul!" she repeated slowly after him. "And
you so young and fair. Ah! You have done some little wickedness, no
doubt?"
He started to reply, but she checked him with a wave of her hand.
"I do not wish to be told. Do you repent?"
Tristan's throat was dry. His lips refused utterance. He nodded
awkwardly.
"So much the worse! These little peccadillos are the spice of life!
What is your name?"
She repeated it lingeringly after him.
"From the North--you say--to do penance in Rome!"
She watched him with an expression of amusement. When he started back
from her, a strange fear in his heart, a wave of her hand checked him.
"Let me whisper a secret to you!" she said with a smile.
He felt her perfumed breath upon his cheek.
Inclining his ear he staggered away from her dizzy, bewildered.
Presently, with a dazzling smile, she extended one white hand and
Tristan, trembling as one under a spell, bent over and kissed it. He
felt the soft pressure of her fingers and his pulse throbbed with a
strange, insidious fire, as reluctantly he released it at last.
Raising his eyes, he now met her gaze, absorbing into his innermost
soul the mesmeric spell of her beauty, drinking in the warmth of those
dark, sleepy orbs that flashed on him half resentfully, half mockingly.
Then the charioteer jerked up the reins, the chariot began to move.
Like a dream the pageant vanished--and slowly, like far-away thunder,
the voice of the multitudes began to return, as they regarded the lone
pilgrim with mingled doubt, fear and disdain.
With a start Tristan looked about. He was as one bewitched. He felt he
must follow her at all risks, ascertain her name, her abode.
Dashing through the crowds that gave way before him, wondering and
commenting upon the unseemly haste of one wearing so austere a garb,
Tristan caught a last glimpse of the procession as it entered the
narrow gorge that lies between Mount Testaccio and Mount Aventine.
With a sense of great disappointment he slowly retraced his steps,
walking as in the thrall of a strange dream, and, after inquiring the
direction of his inn of some wayfarers he chanced to meet, he at last
reached the Inn of the Golden Shield, situated near the Flaminian Gate,
and entered the great guest-chamber.
The troubled light of a melancholy dusk was enhanced by the glimmer of
stone lamps suspended from the low and dirty ceiling.
Notwithstanding the late hour, the smoky precincts were crowded with
guests from many lands, who were discussing the events of the day. If
Tristan's wakeful ear had been alive to the gossip of the tavern he
might have heard the incident in the Navona, in which he played so
prominent a part, discussed in varied terms of wonder and condemnation.
Tristan took his seat near an alcove usually reserved for guests of
state. The unaccustomed scene began to exercise a singular fascination
upon him, stranger as he was among strangers from all the earth, their
faces dark against the darker background of the room. Brooding over
a tankard of Falernian of the hue of bronze, which his oily host had
placed before him, he continued to absorb every detail of the animated
picture, while the memory of his strange adventure dominated his mind.
Tristan's meagre fund of information was to be enriched by tidings of
an ominous nature. He learned that the Pontiff, John XI, was imprisoned
in the Lateran Palace, by his step-brother Alberic, the Senator of Rome.
While this information came to him, a loyal son of the Church, as a
distinct shock, Tristan felt, nevertheless, strangely impressed with
the atmosphere of the place. Even in the period of her greatest decay,
Rome seemed still the centre of the universe.
Thus he sat brooding for hours.
When, with a start, he roused himself at last, he found the vast
guest-chamber well-nigh deserted. The pilgrims had retired to their
respective quarters, small, dingy cells, teeming with evil odors, heat
and mosquitoes, and the oily Calabrian host was making ready for the
morrow.
The warmth of the Roman night and the fatigue engendered after many
leagues of tedious travel on a dusty road, under the scorching rays of
an Italian sky, at last asserted itself and, wishing a fair rest to his
host, who was far from displeased to see his guest-chamber cleared for
the night, Tristan climbed the crooked and creaking stairs leading to
the chamber assigned to him, which looked out upon the gate of Castello
and the Tiber, where it is spanned by the Bridge of San Angelo.
The window stood open to the night air, on which floated the perfumes
from oleander and almond groves. The roofs of the Eternal City formed a
dark, shadowy mass in the deep blue dusk, and the cylindrical masonry
of the Flavian Emperor's Tomb rose ominously against the deep turquoise
of the night sky.
Soon the events of the day and the scenes of the evening began to melt
into faint and indistinct memories.
Sleep, deep and tranquil, encompassed Tristan's weary limbs, but in his
dreams the events of the evening were obliterated before scenes of the
past.
CHAPTER III
THE DREAM LADY OF AVALON
Like a disk of glowing gold the sun had set upon hill
and dale. The gardens of Avalon lay wrapt in the mists of evening. Like
flowers seemed the fair women who thronged the winding paths. From
fragrant bosquets, borne on the wings of the night wind came the faint
sounds of zitherns and lutes.
He, too, was there, mingling joyous, carefree, with the rest, gathering
the white roses for the one he loved. Dimly he recalled his delight, as
he saw her approach in the waning light through the dim ilex avenue, an
apparition wondrous fair in the crimson haze of slowly departing day,
entering his garden of dreams. With strangely aching heart he saw them
throng about her in homage and admiration.
At last he knelt before her, kissing the white hand that lay passive
within his own.
How wonderful she was! Never had he seen anything like her, not even
in this land of flowers and of beautiful women. Her hair was warm
as if the sun had entered into it. Her skin had the tints of ivory.
The violet eyes with the long drooping lashes seemed to hold the
memories of a thousand love thoughts. And the small, crimson mouth, so
witch-like, so alluring, seemed to hold out promise of fulfilment of
dizzy hopes and desires.
"It is our golden hour," she smiled down at him, and the white fingers
twined the rose in her hair, wove a girdle of blossoms round her
exquisite, girlish form.
To Tristan she seemed an enchantment, an embodied rose. Never had he
seen her so fair, so beautiful. On her lips quivered a smile, yet there
was a strange light in her eyes, that gave him pause, a light he had
never seen therein before.
She beckoned him away from the throng. "Come where the moonlight
dreams."
Her smile and her wonderful eyes were his beacon light. He rose to his
feet and took her hand. And away they strayed from the rest of the
crowd, far away over green lawns, emerald in the moonlight, with, here
and there, the dark shadow of a cypress falling across the silvery
brightness of their path. Little by little the gardens were deserted.
Fainter and fainter came the sounds of lutes and harps. The shadows of
the grove now encompassed them, as silently they strode side by side.
"This is my Buen Retiro," she spoke at last. "Here we may rest--for
awhile--far from the world."
They entered the rose-bower, a wilderness, blossoming with roses and
hyacinths and fragrant shrubs--a very paradise for lovers.--
The bells of a remote convent began to chime. They smote the silence
with their silvery peals. The castle of Avalon lay dark in the
distance, shadowy against the deep azure of the night sky.
When the chimes of the Angelus had died away, she spoke.
"How wonderful is this peace!"
Her tone brought a sudden chill to his heart.
As she moved forward, he dropped his wealth of flowers and held out his
hands entreatingly.
"Dearest Hellayne," he said, "tarry but a little longer--"
She seemed to start at his words, and leaned over the back of the stone
bench, which was covered with climbing roses. And suddenly under this
new light, sad and silent, she seemed no longer his fair companion of
the afternoon, all youth, all beauty, all light. Motionless, as if
shadowed by some dire foreboding, she stood there and he dared not
approach. Once he raised his hand to take her own. But something in her
eyes caused the hand to fall as with its own weight.
He could not understand what stayed him, what stayed the one supreme
impulse of his heart. He did not understand what checked the words that
hovered on his lips. Was it the clear pure light of the eyes he loved
so well? Was it some dark power he wot not of?
At last he broke through his restraint.
"Hellayne--" he whispered low. "Hellayne--I love you!"
She did not move.
There was a deep silence.
Then she answered.
"Oh, why have you said the word!"
What did she mean? He cried, trembling, within himself. And now he was
no longer in the moonlit rose-bower in the gardens of Avalon, but in a
dense forest. The trees meeting overhead made a night so black, that he
saw nothing, not even their gnarled trunks.
Hellayne was standing beside him. A pale moonbeam flickered through the
interwoven branches.
She pointed to the castle of Avalon, dim in the distance. He made a
quick forward step to see her face. Her eyes were very calm.
"Let us go, Tristan!" she said.
"My answer first," he insisted, gazing longingly, wistfully into the
eyes that held a night of mystery.
"You have it," she said calmly.
"It was no answer," he pleaded, "from lover to lover--"
"Ah!" she replied, in her voice a great weariness which he had never
noted before. "But here are neither loves nor lovers.--Look!"
And he looked.
Before them lay a colorless and lifeless sea, under the arch of a
threatening sky. Across that sky dark clouds, with ever-changing
shapes, rolled slowly, and presently condensed into a vague shadowy
form, while the torpid waves droned a muffled and unearthly dirge.
He covered his eyes, overcome by a mastering fear of that dread shape
which he knew, yet knew not.
He knelt before her, took the hands he loved so well into his own and
pressed upon them his fevered lips.
"I do not understand--" he moaned.
She regarded him fixedly.
"I am another's wife--"
His head drooped.
"When my eyes first met yours they begged that my love for you might
find response in your heart," he said, still holding on to those
marvellous white hands. "Did you not accept my worship?"
She neither encouraged nor repulsed him by word or gesture. And he
covered her hands with burning kisses. After his passionate outburst
had died to silence she spoke quietly, tremulously.
"Tristan," she began, and paused as if she were summoning courage to do
that which she must. "Tristan, this may not be."
"I love you," he sobbed. "I love you! This is all I know! All I shall
ever know. How can I support life without you? heart of my heart--soul
of my soul?--What must I do, to win you for my own--to give you
happiness?"
A negative gesture came in response.
"Is sin ever happiness?"
"The priests say not! And yet--our love is not sinful--"
"The priests say truth." Hellayne interposed calmly.
He felt as if an immense darkness, the chaos of a thousand spheres,
suddenly encompassed him, threatening to plunge him into a bottomless
abyss of despair.
Then he made a quick forward step. Her face was close to his. Wide eyes
fastened upon him in a compelling gaze.
"Tell me!" he urged, his own eyes lost in those unfathomable
wells of dreams. "When love is with you--does aught matter? Does
sin--discovery--God himself--matter?"
With a frightened cry she drew back.
But those steady, questioning eyes, sombre, yet aflame, compelled the
shifting violet orbs.
"Tell me!" he urged again, his face very close to her face.
"Naught matters," she whispered faintly, as if under a spell.
Then her gaze relinquished his, as she looked dreamily out upon the
woods. There was absolute silence, lasting apace. It was the stillness
of a forest where no birds sing, no breezes stir. Then a twig snapped
beneath Hellayne's foot. He had taken her to his heart and, his strong
arms about her, kissed her eyes, her mouth, her hair. She suffered his
caresses dreamily, passively, her white arms encircling his neck.
Suddenly he stiffened. His form was as that of one turned to stone.
In the shadow of the forest beneath a great oak, hooded, motionless,
stood a man. His eyes seemed like glowing coals, as they stared at
them. Hellayne did not see them, but she felt the tremor that passed
through Tristan's frame. The mantle's hood was pulled far down over the
man's face. No features were visible.
And yet Tristan knew that cowled and muffled form. He knew the eyes
that had surprised their tryst.
It was Count Roger de Laval.
The muffled shadow was gone as quickly as it had come.
It was growing ever darker in the forest, and when he looked up again
he saw that Hellayne's white roses were scattered on the ground. Her
scarf of blue samite had fallen heedlessly beside them. He lifted it
and pressed it to his lips.
"Will you give it to me?" he said tremulously. "That it may be with me
always--"
There was no immediate response.
At last she said slowly:
"You shall have it--a parting gift--"
He seized her hands. They lay passively within his own.
There was a great fear in his eyes.
"I do not understand--"
She loosened the roses from her hair and garb before she made reply.
Silently, like dead leaves in autumn, the fragrant petals dropped one
by one to earth. Hellayne watched them with weary eyes as they drifted
to their sleep, then, as she held the last spray in her hand, gazing
upon it she said:
"When you gave them to me, Tristan, they were sweet and fresh, the
fairest you could find. Now they have faded, perished, died--"
He started to plead, to protest, to silence her, but she continued:
"Ah! Can you not see? Can you not understand? Perchance," she added
bitterly, "I was created to adorn the fleeting June afternoon of your
life, and when this scarf is torn and faded as these flowers, let the
wind carry it away,--like these dead petals at our feet--"
She let fall the withered spray, but he snatched it ere it touched the
ground.
"I love you," he stammered passionately. "I love you! Love you as no
woman was ever loved. You are my world--my fate-- Hellayne! Hellayne!
Know you what you say?"--
She gazed at him, with eyes from which all life had fled.
"I am another's," she said slowly. "I have sinned in loving you, in
giving to you my soul. And even as you stood there and held me in your
arms, it flashed upon me, like lightning in a dark stormy night--I saw
the abyss, at the brink of which we stand, both, you and I."--
"But we have done no wrong--we have not sinned," he protested wildly.
She silenced him with a gesture of her beautiful hands.
"Who may command the waters of the cataract, go here,--or go there?
Who may tell them to return to their lawful bed? I have neither power
nor strength, to resist your pleading. You have been life and love to
me, all,--all,--and all this you are to-day. And therefore must we
part,--part, ere it be too late--" she concluded with a wild cry of
anguish, "ere we are both engulfed in the darkness."--
And he fell at her feet as if stunned by a thunderbolt.
"Do not send me away--" he pleaded, his voice choked with anguish. "Do
not send me from you."
"You will go," she said softly, deaf to his prayers. "It is the supreme
test of your love, great as I know it is."
"But I cannot leave you, I cannot go, never to see you more--" and he
grasped the cool white hands of the woman as a drowning man will grasp
a straw.
She did not attempt, for the time, to take them from him. She looked
down upon him wistfully.
"Would you make me the mock of Avalon?" she said. "Once my lord
suspects we are lost. And, I fear, he does even now. For his gaze has
been dark and troubled. And I cannot, will not, expose you to his
cruelty. You know him not as I do--"
"Even therefore will I not leave you," he interposed, looking into
the sweet face. "He has not been kind to you. His pride was flattered
by your ready surrender, and your great beauty is but one of the many
dishes that go to satiate his varied appetites. Of the others you know
naught--"
She gave a shrug.
"If it be so," she said wearily, "so let it be. Nevertheless, I know
whereof I speak. This thing has stolen over us like a madness. And,
like a madness, it will hurl us to our doom."
Though he had seen the dark, glowering face among the branches, he
said nothing, not to alarm her, not to cause her fear and misgiving.
He loved her spotless purity as dearly as herself. To him they were
inseparable.
His head fell forward on her hands. Her fingers played in his soft
brown hair.
"What would you have me do?" he said, his voice choked by his anguish.
"Go on a pilgrimage to Rome, to obtain forgiveness, as I shall visit
the holy shrines of Mont Beliard and do likewise," she said, steadying
her voice with an effort. "Let us forget that we have ever met--that we
have ever loved,--or remember that we loved--a dream."--
"Can love forget so readily?" he said, bitter anguish and reproach in
his tones.
She shook her head.
"It is my fate,--for better--or worse--no matter what befall. As for
you--life lies before you. Love another, happier woman, one that is
free to give--and to receive. As for me--"
She paused and covered her face with her hands.
"What will you do?" he cried in his over-mastering anguish.
A faint, far-off voice made reply.
"I shall do that which I must!"
He staggered away from her. She should not see the scalding tears that
coursed down his cheeks. But, as he turned, he again saw the dark and
glowering face, the brow gloomy as a thunder-cloud, of the Count
de Laval. But again it was not he. It was the black-garbed, lithe
stranger, the companion of the hunchback, who was regarding Hellayne
with evil, leering eyes.
He wanted to cry out, warn her, entreat her to fly.--
But it was too late.
Like a bird that watches spellbound the approach of the snake, Hellayne
stood pale and trembling--her cheeks white as death--her eyes riveted
on the evil shape that seemed the fiend. But he, Tristan, also was
encompassed by the same spell. He could not move--he could not cry out.
With a bound, swift and noiseless as the panther's, he saw the sinewy
stranger hurl himself upon Hellayne, picking her up like a feather and
disappear in the gloom of the forest.
With a cry of horror, bathed from head to foot in perspiration, Tristan
started from his slumber.
The moonbeams flooded the chamber. The soft breeze of the summer night
stole through the open casement.
With a moan as of mortal pain he sat up and looked about.
Was he indeed in Rome?
Had it been but a dream, this echo of the past, this visualized parting
from the woman he had loved better than life?
Was he indeed in Rome, to do as she had bid him do, not in the misty,
flower-scented rose-gardens of Avalon in far Provence?--
And she--Hellayne--where was she at this hour?
Tristan stroked his clammy brow with a hot, dry hand. For a moment the
memories evoked by the magic wand of the God of Sleep seemed to banish
all consciousness of the present. He cast a fleeting, bewildered glance
at the dim, distant housetops, then fell back among his cushions,
his lips muttering the name of her who had filled his dream with her
never-to-be-forgotten presence, wondering and questioning if they
would ever meet again. Thus he tossed and tossed.
After a time he became still.
Once again consciousness was blotted out and the dream realm reigned
supreme.
CHAPTER IV
THE WAY OF THE CROSS
It was late on the following morning when Tristan
waked. The sun was high in the heavens and the perfumes from a thousand
gardens were wafted to his nostrils. He looked about bewildered. The
dream phantoms of the night still held his senses captive, and it was
some time ere he came to a realization of the present. In the dream of
the night he had lived over a scene in the past, conjuring back the
memory of one who had sent him on the Way of the Cross. The pitiless
rays of the Roman sun, which began to envelop the white houses and
walls, brought with them the realization of the present hour. He had
come to Rome to do penance, to start life anew and to forget. So she
had bade him do on that never-to-be forgotten eve of their parting. So
she had willed it, and he had obeyed.
How it all flooded back to him again in waves of anguish, the memory of
those days when the turrets of Avalon had faded from his aching sight,
when, together with a motley pilgrims' throng, he had tramped the dusty
sun-baked road, dead to all about him save the love that was cushioned
in his heart. How that parting from Hellayne still dominated all other
events, even though life and the world had fallen away from him and he
had only prayer for oblivion, for obliteration.
Yet even Hellayne's inexorable decree would not have availed to speed
him on a pilgrimage so fraught with hopelessness, that during all
that long journey Tristan hardly exchanged word or greeting with his
fellow pilgrims. It was her resolve, unfalteringly avowed, to leave the
world and enter a convent, if he refused to obey, which had eventually
compelled. Her own self-imposed penance should henceforth be to live,
lonely and heartbroken, by the side of an unbeloved consort, while
Tristan atoned far away, in the city of the popes, at the shrines of
the saints.
At night, when Tristan retired, at dawn, when he arose, Hellayne's
memory was with him, and every league that increased the distance
between them seemed to heighten his love and his anguish. But human
endurance has its limits, and at last he was seized by a great torpor,
a chill indifference that swept away and deadened every other feeling.
There was no longer a To-day, no longer a Yesterday, no longer a
To-morrow.
Such was Tristan's state of mind, when from the Tiburtine road he
first sighted the walls and towers of Rome, without definite purpose
or aim, drawn along, as it were, towards an uncertain goal by Fate's
invisible hand. Utterly indifferent as to what might befall among the
Seven Hills, he was at times dimly conscious of a presentiment that
ultimately he would end up his own days in one of those silent places
where all earthly hopes and desires are forever stilled. So much was
clear to him. Like the rest of the pilgrims who had wended their way to
St. Peter's seat, he would complete the circuit of the holy shrines,
kiss the feet of the Father of Christendom, do such penance as the
Pontiff should impose, and then attach himself to one party or another
in the pontifical city which held out hope for action, since the return
to his own native land was barred to him for evermore.
How he would bear up under the ordeal he did not know. How he would
support life away from Hellayne, without a word, a message, without
the assurance that all was well with her, whether now, his own fate
accomplished, others thronged about her in love and adulation,--he knew
not.
For the nonce he was resolved to let new scenes, new impressions sweep
away the great void of an aching heart, lighten the despair that filled
his soul.
In approaching the Eternal City he had felt scarcely any of the
elevation of spirit which has affected so many devout pilgrims. He
knew it was the seat of God's earthly Vice-regent, the capital of the
universal kingdom of the Church. He reminded himself of this and of the
priceless relics it contained, the tombs of the Apostles St. Peter and
St. Paul, the tombs of so many other martyrs, pontiffs and saints.
But in spite of all these memories he drew near the place with a
sinking dread, as if, by some instinct of premonition, he felt himself
dragged to the Cross on which at last he was to be crucified.
Many a pilgrim may have seen Rome for the first time with an
involuntary recollection of her past, with the hope that for him, too,
the future might hold the highest greatness.
Certainly no ambitious fancy cast a halo of romantic hope over the
great city as Tristan first saw her ancient walls. He felt safe enough
from any danger of greatness. He had nothing to recommend him. On the
contrary, something in his character would only serve to isolate him,
creating neither admiration nor sympathy.
All the weary road to Rome, the Rome he dreaded, had he prayed for
courage to cast himself at the feet of the Vicar of Christ. He did not
think then of the Pope, as of one of the great of the earth, but simply
as of one who stood in the world in God's place. So he would have
courage to seek him, confess to him and ask him what it was it behooved
him to do.
Thus he had walked on--with stammering steps, bruising his feet
against stones, tearing himself through briars--heeding nothing by the
way.
And now, the journey accomplished, he was here in supreme loneliness,
without guidance, human or divine, thrown upon himself, not knowing how
to still the pain, how to fill the void of an aching heart.
Would the light of Truth come to him out of the encompassing realms of
Doubt?
When Tristan descended into the great guest-chamber he found it almost
deserted. The pilgrims had set out early in the day to begin their
devotions before the shrines. The host of the Golden Shield placed
before his sombre and silent guest such viands as the latter found most
palatable, consisting of goat's milk, stewed lamb, barley bread and
figs, and Tristan did ample justice to the savory repast.
The heat of the day being intense, he resolved to wait until the sun
should be fairly on his downward course before he started out upon his
own business, a resolution which was strengthened by a suggestion from
the host, that few ventured abroad in Rome during the Siesta hours, the
Roman fever respecting neither rank nor garb.
Thus Tristan composed himself to patience, watching the host upon his
duties, and permitting his gaze to roam now and then through the narrow
windows upon the object he had first encountered upon his arrival: the
brown citadel, drowsing unresponsive in the noon-tide glow, a monument
of mystery and dark deeds, the Mausoleum of the Flavian Emperor--or, as
it was styled at the period of our story, the Castle of the Archangel.
From this stronghold, less than a decade ago, a woman had lorded it
over the city of Rome, as renowned for her evil beauty as for the
profligacy and licentiousness of her court. In time her regime had been
swept away, yet there were rumors, dark and sinister, of one who had
succeeded to her evil estate. None dared openly avow it, but Tristan
had surprised guarded whispers during his long journey. Some accounted
her a sorceress, some a thing wholly evil, some the precursor of the
Anti-Christ. And he had never ceased to wonder at the tales which
enlivened the camp-fires, the reports of her beauty, her daring, her
unscrupulous ambition.
On the whole, Tristan's prospects in Rome seemed barren enough. Service
might perchance be obtained with the Senator, who would doubtlessly
welcome a stout arm and a true heart. This alternative failing, Tristan
was utterly at sea as to what he would do, the prescribed rounds of
obediences before the shrines and the penances accomplished. He felt as
one who has lost his purpose in life, even before he had been conscious
of his goal.
The strange incidents of his first night in Rome had gradually faded
from Tristan's mind with the re-awakening memory of Hellayne, never
once forgotten, but for the moment drowned in the deluge of strange
events that had almost swept him off his feet.
As the sun was veering towards the west and the lengthening shadows,
presaging dusk, began to roll down from the hills it suffered Tristan
no longer in the Inn of the Golden Shield. He strode out and made for
the heart of Rome.
The desolate aspect of high-noon had changed materially. Tristan began
to note the evidences of life in the Pontifical City. Merchants,
beggars, monks, men-at-arms, condottieri, sbirri,--the followers of the
great feudal houses, hurried to and fro, bent upon their respective
pursuits, and above them, silent and fateful in the evening glow,
towered the Archangel's Castle, the tomb of a former Master of the
World. It reared its massive honey-colored bulk on the edge of the
yellow Tiber and beyond rose the dark green cypresses of the Pincian
Hill. Innumerable spires, domes, pinnacles and towers rose, red-litten
by the sunset, into the stilly evening air. Bells were softly tolling
and a distant hum like the bourdon note of a great organ, rose up from
the other side of the Tiber, where the multitudes of the Eternal City
trod the dust of the Cæsars into the churches of the Cross.
Interminable processions traversed the city amidst anthems and chants,
for, on this day, masses were being sung and services offered up in the
Lateran Basilica, the Mother Church of Rome, in honor of Him who cried
in the wilderness.
In silent awe and wonder Tristan pursued his way towards the heart of
the city. And, as he did so, the spectacle which had unfolded itself to
his gaze became more varied and manifold on every turn.
The lone pilgrim could not but admit that the shadows of worldly
empire, which had deserted her, still clung to Rome in her ruins, even
though to him the desolation which dominated all sides had but a vague
and dreamlike meaning.
Even at this period of deepest darkness and humiliation the world
still converged upon Rome, and in the very centre of the web sat the
successor of St. Peter, the appointed guardian of Heaven and Earth.
The chief pagan monuments still existed: the Pantheon of Agrippa and
the Septizonium of Alexander Severus; the mighty remains of the ancient
fanes about the Forum and the stupendous ruins of the Colosseum. But
among them rose the fortress towers of the Roman nobles. Right there,
before him, dominating the narrow thoroughfare, rose the great fortress
pile of the Frangipani, behind the Arch of the Seven Candles. Farther
on the Tomb of Cæcilia Metella presented an aspect at once sinister
and menacing, transformed as it now was into the stronghold of the
Cenci, while the Cætani castle on the opposite side attracted a sort of
wondering attention from him.
This then was the Rome of which he had heard such marvelous tales!
The city of palaces, basilicas and shrines had sunk to this! Her
magnificent thoroughfares had become squalid streets, her monuments
were crumbled and forgotten, or worse, they were abused by every
lawless wretch who cared to seize upon them and build thereon his
fortress or palace. A dismal fate indeed to have fallen to the former
mistress of the world! Far better, he thought, to be deserted and
forgotten utterly, like many a former seat of empire, far better to
be overgrown with grass and dock and nettle, to be left to dream and
oblivion than to survive in low estate as had this city on the banks of
the Tiber.
With these reflections, engendered no less by the air of desolation
than by the occasional appearance of armed bands of feudal soldiery who
hurled defiance at each other, Tristan found himself drawn deeper and
deeper into the heart of Rome, a hotbed of open and silent rebellion
against the rule of any one who dared to lord it over the degenerate
descendants of the former masters of the world. Here representatives
of the nations of all the earth jostled one another and the poor dregs
of Romulus; or peoples of wilder aspect from Persia or Egypt, within
whose mind floated mysterious Oriental wisdom, bequeathed from the dawn
of Time. And as the scope of Tristan's observation widened, the demon
of disillusion unfolded gloomy wings over the far horizon of his soul.
And the Tiber rolled calmly on below, catching in its turbid waves the
golden sunset glow.
Now and then he encountered the armed retinue of some feudal baron
clattering along the narrow ill-paved streets, chasing pedestrians into
adjacent doorways and porticoes and pursuing their precipitate retreat
with outbursts of banter and mirth.
Unfamiliar as Tristan was with the factions that usurped the dominion
of the Seven Hills, the escutcheons and coats-of-arms of these
marauding parties meant little to him. Now and then however it would
chance that two rival factions clashed, each disputing the other's
passage. Then, only, did he become alive to the dangers that beset the
unwary in the city of the Pontiff, and a sudden spirit of recklessness
and daring, born of the moment, prompted the desire to plunge into
this seething vortex, if but to purchase temporary oblivion and relief.
He faced the many dangers of the streets, loitering here and there and
curiously eyeing all things, and would eventually have lost himself,
when the mantle of night began to fall on the Seven Hills, had he not
instinctively remarked that the ascending road removed him from the
river.
CHAPTER V
ON THE AVENTINE
When Tristan at last regained his bearings, he found himself among the
convents and cloisters on Mount Aventine. His eyes rested wearily on
the eddying gleam of the Tiber as it wound its coils round the base
of the Mount of Cloisters, thence they roamed among the grass and
weed-grown ruins of ancient temples and crumbling porticoes, which rose
on all sides in the silent desolation.
Just then a last gleam of the disappearing sun touched the bronze
figure of the Archangel on the summit of Castel San Angelo, imbuing
it for an instant with a weird effect, as though the ghost of some
departed watchman were waving a lighted torch aloft in the heavens.
Then the glow faded before a dead grey twilight, which settled solemnly
over the melancholy landscape.
The full moon was rising slowly. Round and large she hung, like a
yellow shield, on the dark, dense wall of the heavens. In the distance
the faint outlines of the Alban Hills and the snow-capped summit of
Monte Soracté were faintly discernible in the night mists. In the
background the ill-famed ruins of the ancient temple of Isis rose into
the purple dusk. The Tiber, in the light of the higher rising moon,
gleamed like a golden ribbon. The gaunt masonry of the Septizonium of
Alexander Severus was dimly rimmed with light, and streaks of amber
radiance were wandering up and down the shadowy slopes of the Mount of
Cloisters, like sorrowing ghosts bound upon some sorrowful errand.
All sense of weariness had suddenly left Tristan. A compelling
influence, stronger than himself, seemed to urge him on as to the
fulfillment of some hidden purpose.
Once or twice he paused. As he did so, he became aware of the
extraordinary, almost terrible stillness, that encompassed him. He felt
it enclosing him like a thick wall on all sides. Earth and the air
seemed breathless, as if in the throes of some mysterious excitement.
The stars, flashing out with the brilliant lustre of the south, were
as so many living eyes eagerly gazing down on the solitary human being
whose steps led him into these deserted places. The moon herself seemed
to stare at him in open wonderment.
At last he found himself before the open portals of the great Church of
Santa Maria of the Aventine. From the gloom within floated the scent
of incense and the sound of chanting. He could see tapers gleaming on
the high altar in the choir. Women were passing in and out, and a blind
beggar sat at the gate.
Moved more by curiosity than the desire for worship, Tristan entered
and uncovered his head. The Byzantine cupola was painted in vermilion
and gold. The slender pillars of white marble were banded with silver
and inlaid with many colored stones. The basins for holy water were of
black marble, their dark pools gleaming with the colors of the vault.
Side chapels opened on either hand, dim sanctuaries steeped in mystery
of incense-saturated dusk.
The saints and martyrs in their stiff, golden Byzantine dalmaticas
seemed to endow each relic with an air of mystery. The beauty and the
mystery of the place touched Tristan's soul. As in a haze he seemed
again to see the pomp and splendor of the sanctuaries of far-away,
dream-lost Avalon.
Tristan took his stand by one of the great pillars, and, setting his
back to it, looked round the place. There were some women in the
sanctuary, engaged in prayer. Tristan watched them with vacant eyes.
Suddenly he became conscious that one of these worshippers was not
wholly absorbed in prayer under her hood. Two watchful eyes seemed to
consider him with a suggestiveness that no man could mistake, and her
thoughts seemed to be very far from heaven.
Once or twice Tristan started to leave the sanctuary, but some
invisible hand seemed to detain him as with a magic hold.
In due season the woman finished her devotions and stood with her
hood turned back, looking at Tristan across the church. Her women had
gathered about her and outside the gates Tristan saw the spear points
of her guard. Turning, with a glance cast at him over her shoulder, she
swept in state out of the church, her women following her, all save one
tall girl, who loitered at the door.
Suddenly it flashed upon Tristan, as he stood there with his back
leaning against the pillar. Was not this the woman he had met by the
fountain, the woman who had spoken strange words to him in the Navona?
Had she recognized him? Her eyes had challenged him unmistakably when
first they had met his own, and now again, as she left the church. They
puzzled Tristan, these same eyes. Far in their depths lurked secrets he
dreaded to fathom. Her scented garments perfumed the very aisles.
Tristan was roused from his reverie by a woman's hand plucking at his
sleeve. By his side stood a tall girl. She was very beautiful, but her
eyes were evil. She looked boldly at Tristan and gave her message.
"Follow my mistress," were her words.
Tristan looked at her, his face almost invisible in the gloom. Only the
moonlight touched his hair.
"Whom do you serve?" he replied.
"The Lady Theodora!" came the answer.
Tristan's heart froze within him. Theodora--the woman who had succeeded
to Marozia's dread estate!
In order to conceal his emotions he brought his face closer to the fair
messenger, forcing his voice to appear calm as he spoke.
"What would your mistress with me?"
The girl glanced up at him, as if she regarded the question strangely
superfluous.
"You are to come with me!" she persisted, touching his arm.
Tristan's mouth hardened as he considered the message, without
relinquishing his station by the pillar.
What was he to Theodora--Theodora to him? She was a woman, evil,
despite her ravishing beauty, so he had gathered during the days of
his journey. The spell she had cast over him on the previous evening
had vanished before the memory of Hellayne. Her sudden appearance, her
witch-like beauty had, for the time, unmanned him. The hardships and
privations of a long journey had, for the moment, caused his senses
to run rampant, and almost hurled him into the arms of perdition. Yet
he had not then known. And now he remembered how they all had fallen
away from him, as from one bearing on his person the germs of some
dread disease. The terrible silence in the Navona seemed visualized
once again in the silence which encompassed him here. Yet she was all
powerful, so he had heard. She ruled the men and the factions. In some
vague way, he thought, she might be of service to him.
Tossed between two conflicting impulses, Tristan slowly followed the
girl from the church and, crossing the great, moonlit court that lay
without, entered the gardens which seemed to divide the sanctuary from
some hidden palace. Mulberry trees towered above the lawns, studded
with thick, ripening fruit. Weeping ashes glittered in the moonlight.
Cedars and oaks cast their shade over broad beds of mint and thyme.
The girl watched Tristan closely, as she walked beside him, making no
effort to conceal her own charms before eyes which she deemed endowed
with the power of judgment in matters of this kind. Her mistress had
not put her trust in her in vain. She studied Tristan's race in order
to determine, whether or not he would waver in his resolve and--she
began to speak to him as they crossed the gardens with a simplicity, an
interest that was well assumed.
"A good beginning indeed!" she said. "You are in favor, my lord! To
have seen her fair face is no small boast, but to be summoned to her
presence--I cannot remember her so gracious to any one, since--" she
paused suddenly, deliberately.
Tristan regarded her slantwise over his shoulder, without making
response. At last, irritated, he knew not why, he asked curtly: "What
is your mistress?"
The girl's glance wandered over the great trees and flowers that
overshadowed the plaisaunce.
"She bears her mother's name," she replied with a shrug, "and, like her
mother, the blood that flows in her veins is mingled with the fire that
glitters in the stars in heaven, a fire affording neither light nor
heat, but serving to dazzle, to bewilder.--I am but a woman, but--had I
your chance of fortune, my lord, I should think twice, ere I bartered
it for a vow, an empty dream."
He gave her a swift glance, wondering at her woman's wit, yet resenting
her speech.
"You would prosper?" she queried tentatively at last, casting about in
her mind, how she might win his confidence.
"I have business of my own," he replied, evading her question.
She looked up at him, her eyes trembling into his.
"How tall and strong you are! I could almost find it in my heart to
love you myself!"
The flattery seemed so spontaneous that it would have puzzled one
possessed of greater guile than Tristan to have uncovered her cunning.
Nor was Tristan unwilling to seem strong to her; for the moment he was
almost tempted to continue questioning her regarding her mistress.
"You may make your fortune in Rome," the girl said with a meaning smile.
"How so?"
"Are you blind? Do you not know a woman's ways? My mistress loves a
strong arm. You may serve her."
"That is not possible!"
The girl stared at him and for the moment dropped the mask of innocence.
"What was possible once, is possible again," she said.
Then she added:
"Are you not ambitious?"
"I have a task to perform that may not permit of two masters! Why are
you so concerned?"
The question came almost abruptly.
"I serve my lady!" she said, edging towards him. "Is it so strange a
thing to serve a woman?"
They had left the garden and had arrived before a high stone wall that
skirted the precincts of Theodora's palace. Cypresses and bays raised
their tops above the stones. Great cedars cast deep shadows. In the
wall there was a door studded with heavy iron nails. The girl took a
key that dangled from her girdle, unlocked the door and beckoned to
Tristan to enter.
Tristan stood and gazed. In the light of the moon which drenched all
things he saw a garden in which emerald grass plots alternated with
beds of strange-tinted orchids, flowers purple and red. At the end
of the plaisaunce there opened an orange thicket and under the trees
stood a woman clad in crimson, her white arms bare. She wore sandals of
silver, and her dusky hair was confined in a net of gold.
As Tristan was about to yield to the overmastering temptation the
memory of Hellayne conquered all other emotions. He turned back from
the door and looked full into the girl's dark eyes.
"You will speak to your mistress for me," he said to her, casting a
swift glance into the moonlit garden.
The girl looked at him with a puzzled air, but did not stir.
"What am I to say to her?" she said.
"That I will not enter these gates!"
"You will not?"
"No!" He snapped curtly.
"Fool! How you will regret your speech!"
Her face changed suddenly like a fickle sky, and there was something in
her eyes too wicked for words.
Without vouchsafing a reply, Tristan turned and lost himself in the
desolation of Mount Aventine.
The night marched on majestically.
The moon and her sister planets passed through their appointed spheres
of harmonious light and law, and from all cloisters and convents
prayers went up to heaven for pity, pardon and blessing on sinful
humanity that had neither pity, pardon nor blessing for itself, till,
with magic suddenness, the dense purple skies changed to a pearly grey,
the moon sank pallidly beneath the earth's dark rim and the stars were
extinguished one by one.
Morning began to herald its approach in the freshening air.
Tristan still slept on his improvised couch, a marble slab he had
chosen when he discovered that he had lost his way in the wilderness
of the Aventine. His head on his arm he lay quite still among the
flowers, wrapt in a sort of dizzy delirium in which the forms of
Theodora and Hellayne strangely intermingled, until the riddles of life
were blotted out together with the riddles of Fate.
CHAPTER VI
THE COUP
Tristan spent the greater part of the day visiting the churches and
sanctuaries, offering up prayers for oblivion and peace. His heart
was heavy within him. Like the stray leaf that has been torn from
its native branch and flutters resistlessly, aimlessly hither and
thither, at the mercy of the chance breeze, nevermore to return to
its sheltering bough, so the lone wanderer felt himself tossed about
by the waves of destiny, a human derelict without a haven where he
might escape the storms of life. Guiltless in his own conscience of
an imputed sin, in that his love for Hellayne had been pure and holy,
Tristan could find little comfort in the enforced penance, while his
hungry heart cried out for her who had so willed it. And, as with weary
feet he dragged himself through the streets of the pontifical city, he
vaguely wondered, if his would ever be the peace of the goal. In the
darkness in which he walked, in the perturbation of his mind, he longed
more than ever to open his heart to some one who would understand and
counsel and guide his steps.
The Pontiff being a prisoner in the Lateran, Tristan's ardent wish to
confide in the successor of St. Peter had suffered a sudden and a keen
disappointment. There were but Odo of Cluny, Benedict of Soracté or
the Grand Penitentiary, holding forth in the subterranean chapel at
St. Peter's, to whom he might turn for ease of mind, and a natural
reluctance to lay bare the holiest thoughts man may give to woman,
restrained him for the nonce from seeking these channels.
Thus three days had sped, yet naught had happened to indicate that
events would shape the course so ardently desired by Tristan.
It was there, on one of the terraces crowning the splendid heights
of immortal Rome, with a view of the distant Sabine and Alban hills,
fading into the evening dusk, that the memory of the golden days of
Avalon returned to him in waves of anguish that almost mastered his
resolve to begin life anew under conditions that seemed insupportable.
Again Hellayne was by his side, as in dream-forgotten Avalon. Again
side by side they wandered where the shattered columns of old grey
temples, all that remained of a sunny Greek civilization of which they
knew nothing, crowned the heights above the lazy lapping waves of the
tideless Tyrrhenian sea. There, for whole hours would they sit, the air
full of the scent of orange and myrtle; under almond trees, covered
with blossoms that sprinkled the emerald ground like rosy snowflakes,
and watch the white sails of the far feluccas that trailed the waves
in monotonous rhythm to or from the sunlit shores of Africa. The
distant headlands looked faint and dreamy, and the sparkling sea broke,
gurgling, foaming among the rocks at their feet, as it had broken at
the feet of other lovers who had sat there centuries ago, when those
shattered columns had been white in their freshness and the temples had
been wreathed with the garlands of youth. And the eternal waves said to
them what they had said to the dead and forgotten; and the fickle winds
sang to them what they had sung to the fair and the nameless, and they
stretched forth their hands, and saw but the sea and the sun.
And they knew not the deity to whom those temple columns had been
raised, just as he knew not to whose worship those fallen columns had
been erected, nor guessed they who had knelt at the holy shrines.
And as they sat there, the man and the woman, their eyes probing the
depths of living sapphire, they would watch the restless sea-weed that
seemed to coil and uncoil like innumerable blue snakes upon a bed of
bright blue flames, and the luminous mosses that trembled like blue
stars ceaselessly towards the surface that they never, never reached.
And down there in the crystal palaces they would fancy that they saw
faces as of glancing mermen, even as the lovers of older days had seen
passing Tritons and the scaly children of Poseidon.
And again she would croon those sad melancholy songs that came from
her lips like faint echoes of Aeolian harps. Now she flung them upon
the air in bursts of weird music, to the accompaniment of a breaking
wave, songs so passionate and elemental that they seemed the cry of
these same radiant waters when churned by the storm into fury. Or they
might have been such wailings as spirits imprisoned in old sea caves
would utter to the hollow walls, or which the ghosts of ship-wrecked
crews might send forth from the rocks where they had perished. Or again
they might suggest some earthly passion, love, jealousy, the cry of a
longing heart, till the dirge seemed to wear itself out and the soul of
the listener seemed to sail out of the tempest into bright and peaceful
waters like those that skirted dream-lost Avalon, scarcely rippled by
the faint breeze of summer, breaking in long unfurling waves among the
rocks at their feet. Thus they used to sit long hours, heart listening
to heart, soul clinging to soul, while she bared her throat to the
scent-laden breezes that fanned her and looked out on the dazzling
horizon--till a lightning flash from the clear azure splintered the
dream and broke two lives.
For a long time Tristan gazed about, vainly trying to order his
thoughts. Could he but forget! Would but the present engulf the past!--
His adventure at the Church of Santa Maria of the Aventine and his
chance meeting with Theodora recurred to him at intervals throughout
the day, and he could not but admit that the reports of the woman's
beauty were far from exaggerated. Perchance, if the memory of Hellayne
had been less firmly rooted in his soul, he, too, might, like many
another, have sought solace at the forbidden fount. However, he was
resolved to avoid her, for he had seen something in the swift glance
she had bestowed upon him that discoursed of matters it behooved him to
beware of. And yet he wondered how she had received his denial, she,
whom no man had denied before. Then this memory also faded before the
exigencies of the hour.
The sun had sunk to rest in a sky of turquoise, crimson and gold, when
Tristan found himself standing on the eminence where seven decades
later Crescentius, the Senator of Rome, was to build the Church of
Santa Maria in Ara Coeli.
Leaning on a broken pillar, Tristan watched the evening light as it
spread a veil of ethereal splendor over the Seven Hills and there came
to him a strange feeling of remoteness as to one standing upon some
hill-set shrine.
Far beneath him lay the Forum. White columns shone roseate in the dying
light of day.
Wrapt in deep thoughts and meditations, Tristan descended the stairs
leading from the summit whence in after time the name of Santa Maria in
Ara Coeli--Holy Mother at the Altar of Heaven--was to ring in the ears
of thousands like a beautiful rhythmic chant, and after a time he found
himself in the Piazza fronting the Lateran.
Seized with a sudden impulse he entered the church.
Slowly the worshippers began to assemble. Their numbers increased to
almost a hundred, though they seemed but as so many shadows in the vast
nave. There was something in their faces, touched by the uncertain
glimmer of the tapers and lamps, that filled him with awe, as if he
were standing among the ghosts of the past.
At last the holy office commenced.
A very old priest, whose features Tristan could not distinguish, began
to chant the Introitus, in deep long drawn notes. Through the narrow
windows filtered the light of the rising moon. It did little more
than stain the dusk. Over the sombre high altar hung the white ivory
figure of the Christ, bowed, sagged, in the last agony. A few blood-red
poppies were the only flowers upon the altar. The fumes of incense rose
in spiral columns to the vaulted ceiling.
The Kyrie had been chanted, the Gloria in Excelsis Deo. Later the Host
was consecrated and the cup before the kneeling worshippers, and the
priest was turning to those near him who, as was still the custom in
those days, were present to communicate in both kinds.
To each came from his lips the solemn words:
"Corpus Domini Nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam ad Vitam
aeternam!"
He dipped his fingers in the cup, cleansing them with a little wine. He
consumed the cleansings and turned to read the antiphony with resonant
voice.
"I saw the heavens opened and Jesus at the right hand of God. Lord
Jesus receive their spirit and lay not this sin to their charge!"
Then, with hands folded over his breast, he moved towards the altar in
the centre, touched it with his lips, and, turning once more to the
people, said:
"Dominus Vobiscum!"
"Et cum spiritu tuo," was not answered.
For at that moment rough shouts were heard and through a side door,
near a chapel, a body of ruffians rushed into the Basilica, their faces
vizored and masked.
With shouts and oaths they made their way towards the altar. The
worshippers scattered, the mail-clad ruffians smiting their way
through their kneeling ranks up to the altar where stood the form of a
youth clad in pontifical vestments, pale but calm in the face of the
impending storm.
It was Pope John XI., held prisoner in the Lateran by Alberic, the
Senator of Rome. Tristan had not noted his presence during the
ceremony. Now, like a revelation, the import of the scene flashed upon
his mind.
Bearing Tristan down by the sheer weight of their numbers, they rushed
upon the Pontiff, stripped him of his pallium and chasuble, leaving him
but one sacred vestment, the white albe.
Unable to reach the Pontiff's side, unable to aid him, Tristan stood
rooted to the spot, an impotent witness of the most heinous sacrilege
his mind could picture, almost turned to stone.
Before Tristan's very eyes, before the eyes of the worshippers, who
outnumbered the ruffians ten to one, an outrage was being committed at
which the fiends themselves would shudder. Violence was being done to
the Father of Christendom in his own city, and the craven cowards had
but their own safety in mind.
Just what happened Tristan could not immediately remember. For, as he
rushed towards the spot where he saw the Pontiff struggling helplessly
against his assailants, he was violently thrust back and the ruffians
made their way towards a side chapel with their captive. Thus he found
himself helplessly borne along in the darkness, and thrust out into the
night. Tristan fell beneath their feet and was for a moment so utterly
stunned that he could not rise.
As in a dream he heard the leader of the band give a command to his
followers. They mounted their steeds which were tethered outside and
tramped away into the night.
The sudden appearance of an armed band in the sacred precincts of the
Lateran had so terrified and cowed the crowd of worshippers that even
when the doors of the Basilica were left unguarded, not one ventured to
give assistance. Like shadows they fled into the night.
When Tristan regained some sort of consciousness he looked about in
vain for aid.
Dimly he remembered that the ruffians were mounted, and by the time he
summoned succor they would have stowed their captive safely away in one
of their castellated fortresses, where one might search for him in vain
forever more.
The Piazza in front of the Lateran was deserted. Not a human being was
to be seen. Tristan pursued his way through waste spaces that offered
no clue. He rushed through narrow and deserted streets, abandoned of
the living. He felt like shouting at the top of his voice: "Romans
awake! They have abducted the Pontiff." But, stranger as he was, and
dreading lest he might share John's fate or worse, he withstood the
impulse and at last found himself upon the Bridge of San Angelo before
the fortress tomb of the former master of the world, dreaming in the
surrounding desolation. Before the massive bronze gate cowered a
man-at-arms, drowsing over his pike.
Without a moment's hesitation, Tristan shook the drowsy guardian of the
Angel's Castle into blaspheming alertness.
"They have abducted the Pontiff!" he shouted, without releasing his
clutch on the gaping Burgundian. "Sound the alarums! Even now it may be
too late!"
The man in the brown leather jerkin and steel casque stared
open-mouthed at the speaker.
"The Lord Alberic is within--" he stammered at last, with an effort to
shake off the drowsiness that held his senses captive.
"Then rouse him in the devil's name," shouted Tristan.
The last words had their effect upon the stolid Northman. After the
elapse of some precious moments Alberic himself emerged from the
Emperor's Tomb and Tristan repeated his account of the outrage, little
guessing the rank of him with whom he was standing face to face.
But now they were confronted with a dilemma which it seemed would put
all Tristan's efforts to naught.
Who were the leaders of the party that had abducted the Pontiff? For
thereon hinged their success of intercepting the outlaws.
Tristan's description of the leader did not seem to make any marked
impression on the Senator of Rome.
He questioned Tristan with regard to their coat-of-arms or other
heraldic emblems. But the author of the outrage had shown sufficient
foresight to avoid a hazardous display. There seemed but one
alternative; to scour the city of Rome in the uncertain hope of
intercepting the outlaws, if they were still within the walls.
Tristan attached himself to the senatorial party, joining in the
pursuit. At first their task seemed hopeless indeed. Those they
met and questioned had seen no armed band, or, if they had, denied
all knowledge thereof. The frowning masonry of the Cenci, Savelli,
Frangipani, and Odescalchi, which they passed in turn, returned but an
inscrutable reply to their questioning glances.
For a time they continued their fruitless quest. But as if an outrage
so horrible had ignited the very air about them, they soon found people
stirring, shutters opening and shadowy figures issuing from dark
doorways, while folk were running and shouting to one another:
"The Pontiff has been abducted!"
Between cries of rage and shouts of command and indecision on the part
of the leader, who knew not in which direction to pursue, an hour had
elapsed, when they suddenly heard the clatter of hoofs. A company of
horsemen came galloping down the street. Alberic's suspicions that the
ruffians would prefer carrying their victim by devious byways to one
or the other of their Roman lairs, rather than attempt to leave the
city in the teeth of the Senator's guard, seemed realized. Oaths and
sharp orders broke the silence of the night.
It was amongst a gigantic pile of ruins, apart from all habitations
of the living, that they came to a halt. To a gaunt brick-built tower
they drew close, knocking against the iron-studded door, but ere those
within could open, they were surrounded, outnumbered ten to one.
Tristan was the first to bound in amongst them.
His eyes quivered upon the steel-clad form of the leader of the band.
At the next moment a blow from Tristan's fist struck him down and, ere
he could recover himself, he had been bound, hand and foot, and turned
over to the Senator's guards.
His followers, despairing of success, made a sudden dash through the
ranks of the people who had been attracted by the melee, riding down a
number, injuring and maiming many.
The Senator of Rome ranged his men, now re-inforced by the Prefect's
guard, round the drooping form of John, while a howling and shouting
mob, ready to wreak vengeance on the first object it encountered in its
path, followed in their wake as they made their way towards the Lateran.
An hour later, in a high vaulted, dimly lighted chamber of the
Archangel's Castle, Tristan, the pilgrim, and Alberic, the Senator of
Rome, faced each other for the second time.
In the course of the pursuit of the ruffians in which he participated,
Tristan had been casually informed of the rank of him who led the
Senatorial guard in person and when, their object accomplished, he
started to detach himself from the men-at-arms, Alberic had foiled his
intention by commanding him to accompany him to the fortress-tomb where
he himself held forth.
Seated opposite each other, each seemed to scan the other's
countenance before a word was spoken between them.
Alberic's regard of the man who seemed utterly unconscious of the
importance of the service he had rendered the Senator betokened
approval, and his eyes dwelt for some moments on the frank and open
countenance of this stranger, perchance contrasting it inwardly with
the complex nature of those about his person in whom he could trust but
so long as he could tempt them with earthly dross, and who would turn
against him should a higher bidder for their favor appear.
Tristan's first impression of the son of Marozia was that of one born
to command. Dark piercing eyes were set in a face, stern, haughty, yet
strangely beautiful. Alberic's tall, slender figure, dressed in black
velvet, relieved by slashes of red satin, added to the impressiveness
of his personality. Upon closer scrutiny Tristan could discover a
marked resemblance between the man before him and his half-brother, the
ill-fated Pontiff, whom, for political reasons, or considerations of
his personal safety, he kept prisoner in the pontifical palace.
But there was yet another present, who apparently took little heed
of the stranger, engaged as he seemed in the perusal of a parchment,
spread out upon a table before him,--Basil, the Grand Chamberlain.
A whispered conversation had taken place between the Senator and
his confidential adviser, for this was Basil's true station in the
senatorial household. In the evil days of Marozia's regime he had
occupied the same favored position at the Roman court, and, when
Alberic's revolt had swept the regime of Ugo of Tuscany and Marozia
from Roman soil, the son had attached to himself the man who had shown
a marked sagacity and ability in the days that had come to a close.
Basil's complex countenance proved somewhat more of an enigma to the
silent on-looker than did the Senator's stern, though frank face.
He was garbed in black, a color to which he seemed partial. A flat cap
of black velvet with a feather curled round the brim, above a doublet
of black velvet, close fitting, the sleeves slashed, to show the
crimson tunic underneath. The trunk hose round the muscular legs were
of black silk and gold thread, woven together and lined with sarsenet.
His feet were encased in black buskins with silver buckles, and puffed
silk inserted in the slashings of the leather.
The whole suggestion of the dark, sable figure was odd. It was exotic,
and the absence of a beard greatly intensified the impression.
The face, as Tristan saw it by the light of the taper, was
expressionless--a physical mask.
At last Alberic broke the silence, turning his eyes full upon the man
who met his gaze without flinching.
"You have--at your own risk--saved Rome and Holy Church from a calamity
the whole extent of which we may not even surmise, had the Pontiff
been carried away by the lawless band of Tebaldo Savello. We owe you
thanks--and we shall not shirk our duty. You are a stranger. Who are
you and why are you here?"
To the same questions that another had put to him on the memorable
eve of his arrival, in the Piazza Navona, Tristan replied with equal
frankness. His words bore the stamp of truth, and Alberic listened to a
tale passing strange to Roman ears.
And, unseen by Tristan, something began to stir in the dark,
unfathomable eyes of Basil, as some unknown thing stirs in deep waters,
and the hidden thing therein, to him who saw, was hidden no longer.
Some nameless being was looking out of these windows of the soul. One
looking at him now would have shrank away, cold fear gripping his heart.
For a moment, after Tristan had finished his tale, there was silence.
Alberic had risen and, seemingly unconscious of the presences in his
chamber, was perambulating its narrow confines until, of a sudden, he
stopped directly before Tristan.
"These penances completed, whereof you speak--do you intend returning
to the land of your birth?"
A blank dismay shone in Tristan's eyes. Not having referred to the
nature of the transgression, for which he was to do penance, and obtain
absolution, he found it somewhat difficult to answer Alberic's question.
"This is a matter I had not considered," he replied with some
hesitancy, which remained not unremarked by the Senator.
Alberic was a man of few words, and he possessed a discernment far
beyond his years. At the first glance at this stranger whom fate had
led across his path, he had known that here was one he might trust,
could he but induce him to become his man.
He held out his hand.
"I am going to be your friend and I mean to requite the service you
have done the Senator, ere the dawn of another day breaks in the sky.
There is a vacancy in the Senator's guard. I appoint you captain of
Castel San Angelo."
Ere Tristan could sufficiently recover from his surprise to make reply,
another voice was audible, a voice, soft and insinuating--the voice of
Basil, the Grand Chamberlain.
"My lord--the chain of evidence against Gamba is not completed. In
fact, later developments seem to point to an intrigue of which he is
but the unwitting victim--"
Alberic turned to the speaker.
"The proofs, my Lord Basil, are conclusive. Gamba is a traitor
convicted of having conspired with an emissary of Ugo of Tuscany, to
deliver the Archangel's Castle into his hands. He is sentenced--he
shall die--as soon as we discover his abode--"
Basil's face had turned to ashen hues.
"What mean you, my lord? Gamba is awaiting sentence in the dungeon
where he has been confined, ever since his trial--"
"The cage is still there," Alberic interposed sardonically. "The bird
has flown."
"Escaped?" stammered the Grand Chamberlain, rising from his seat
and raising his furtive eyes to those of the Senator. "Then he has
confederates in our very midst--"
"We shall know more of this anon," came the laconic reply. "Will you
accept the trust which the Senator of Rome offers you?" Alberic turned
from the Grand Chamberlain to Tristan.
The latter found his voice at last.
"How shall I thank you, my lord!" he said, grasping the Senator's hand.
"Grant me but a week, wherein to absolve the business upon which I
came--and I shall prove myself worthy of the lord Alberic's trust!"
"So be it," the son of Marozia replied. "A long deferred pilgrimage to
the shrines of the Archangel at Monte Gargano will take me from Rome
for the space of a month or more. I should like to be assured that this
keep is in the hands of one who will not fail me in the hour of need!
My Lord Basil--greet the new captain of Castel San Angelo--"
Approaching almost soundlessly over the tiled floor, the Grand
Chamberlain extended his hand to Tristan, offering his congratulations
upon his sudden advancement.
Whatever it was that flashed in Basil's eyes, it was gone as quickly as
it had come. His thin lips parted in an inscrutable smile as Tristan,
with a bend of the head, acknowledged the courtesy.
For a moment, following his acceptance, Tristan was startled at his own
decision. Another would have felt it to be an amazing streak of luck.
Tristan was frightened, though his misgivings vanished after a time.
Owing to the lateness of the hour and the insecurity of the streets
Alberic offered Tristan the hospitality of his future abode for the
night and the latter gladly accepted.
After Basil had departed, he remained closeted with the Senator for the
space of an hour or more. What transpired between these two remained
guarded from the outer world, and it was late ere the sentinel on the
ramparts saw the light in the Senator's chamber extinguished, wondering
at the nature of the business which detained the lord Alberic and the
tall stranger in the pilgrim's garb.
CHAPTER VII
MASKS AND MUMMERS
Amid the ruin of cities and the din of strife during the tenth century
darkness closed in upon the Romans, while the figures of strange
despots emerged from obscurity only to disappear as quickly into the
night of oblivion. Little of them is known, save that they ruled the
people and the pope with merciless severity, and that the first one of
them was a woman.
The beautiful Theodora the older was the wife of Theophylactus, Consul
and Patricius of Rome, but the permanence of her power seemed to have
been due entirely to her own charm and personality.
Her daughter Marozia, with even greater beauty, greater fascination
and greater gift of daring, played even a more conspicuous part in
the history of her time. She married Alberic, Count of Spoleto, whose
descendants, the Counts of Tusculum, gave popes and mighty citizens to
Rome. One of their palaces is said to have adjoined the Church of S. S.
Apostoli, and came later into the possession of the powerful house of
Colonna.
Alberic of Spoleto soon died and Marozia, as the chronicles tell
us, continued as the temporal ruler of the city and the arbitress
of pontifical elections. She held forth in Castel San Angelo, the
indomitable stronghold of mediaeval Rome.
In John X. who, in the year 914, had gained the tiara through Theodora,
she found a man of character, whose aim and ambition were the dominion
of Rome, the supremacy of the Church.
By the promise of an imperial crown, the pope gained Count Ugo of
Tuscany to his party, but Marozia outwitted him, by giving her hand to
his more powerful half-brother Guido, then Margrave of Tuscany.
John X., after trying for two years, in spite of his enemies, to
maintain his regime from the Lateran, at last fell into their hands and
was either strangled or starved to death in the dungeons of Castel San
Angelo.
After the death of Guido, Marozia married his half-brother Ugo. The
strange wedding took place in the Mausoleum of the Emperor Hadrian,
where a bridal hall and nuptial chamber had been arranged and adorned
for them.
From the fortress tomb of the Flavian Emperor, Ugo lorded it over the
city of Rome, earning thereby the hatred of the people and especially
of young Alberic, his ambitious step-son, the son of Marozia and Count
Alberic of Spoleto.
The proud youth, forced one day to serve him as a page, with
intentional awkwardness, splashed some water over him and in return
received a blow. Mad with fury, Alberic rushed from Castel San Angelo
and summoned the people to arms. The clarions sounded and the fortress
tomb was surrounded by a blood-thirsty mob. In no time the actors
changed places. Ugo escaped by means of a rope from a window in the
castello and returned to Tuscany, leaving behind him his honor, his
wife and his imperial crown, while the youth Alberic became master of
Rome, cast Marozia into a prison in Castel San Angelo and kept his
half-brother, John XI., a close prisoner in the Lateran.
But the imprisonment of Marozia, and her mysterious disappearance from
the scenes of her former triumphs and baleful activity did not end the
story of the woman regime in Rome.
There lived in a palace, built upon the ruins of nameless temples
and sanctuaries, and embellished with all the barbarous splendor of
Byzantine and Moorish arts, in the remote wilderness of Mount Aventine,
a woman, who, in point of physical charms, ambition and daring had not
her equal in Rome since the death of Marozia. Theodora the younger, as
she is distinguished from her mother, the wife of Theophylactus, by
contemporary chroniclers, was the younger sister of Marozia.
The boundless ambition of the latter had left nothing to achieve for
the woman who had reached her thirtieth year when Alberic's revolution
consigned her sister to a nameless doom.
Strange rumors concerning her were afloat in Rome. Strange things were
whispered of her palace on Mount Aventine, where she assembled about
her the nobility of the city and the surrounding castelli, and soon
her court vied in point of sumptuousness and splendor with the most
splendid and profligate of her time.
Her admirers numbered by thousands, and her exotic beauty caused new
lovers to swell the ranks of the old with every day that passed down
the never returning tide of time.
Some came openly and some came under the cover of night, heavily
muffled and cloaked: spendthrifts, gamblers, gallants, men of fashion,
officers of the Senator's Court, poets, philosophers, and the feudal
lords of the Campagna.
Wealthy debauchees from the provinces, princes from the shores of
the Euxine, Lombard and Tuscan chiefs, Northmen from Scandinavia and
Iceland, wearing over their gnarled limbs the soft silken tunics of
Rome, Greeks, sleek, furtive-eyed, rulers from far-off Cathay, wearing
coats of crimson with strange embroidery from the scented East, men
from the isles of Venetia and the stormy plains of Thessaly, men with
narrow slanting eyes from the limitless steppes of Sarmatia, blond
warriors from the amber coasts of the Baltic, Persian princes who
worshipped the Sun, and Moors from the Spanish Caliphate of Cordova;
chieftains from the Lybian desert, as restive as their fiery steeds;
black despots from the hidden heart of Africa, with thick lips and
teeth like ivory, effete youths from Sicily and the Ionian isles,
possessed of the insidious beauty of the Lesbian women, adventurers
from Samarkand and Bokhara, trading in strange wares and steeped in
odor of musk and spices; Hyperboreans from the sea-skirt shores of an
ever frozen unimaginable ocean;--from every land under the sun they
came to Rome, for the sinister fame of Theodora's beauty, the baleful
mystery that surrounded her, and her dark repute proved powerful
incentives to curiosity, which soon gave way to overmastering passion,
once the senses had been steeped in the intoxicating atmosphere of the
woman's presence.
And, indeed, her physical charms were such as no mortal had yet
resisted whom she had willed to make her own. Her body, tall as a
column, was lustrous, incomparable. The arms and hands seemed to have
been chiselled of ivory by a master creator who might point with pride
to the perfection of his handiwork--the perfection of Aphrodité, Lais
and Phryné melted into one. The features were of such rare mould and
faultless type that even Marozia had to concede to her younger sister
the palm of beauty. The wonderful, deep set eyes, with their ever
changing lights, now emerald, now purple, now black; the straight,
pencilled brows, the broad smooth forehead and the tiny ears, hidden in
the wealth of her raven hair, tied into a Grecian knot and surmounted
by a circlet of emeralds, skillfully worked into the twining bodies of
snakes with ruby eyes; the satin sheen of the milk-white skin whose
ivory pallor was tinted with the faintest rose-light that never changed
either in heat or in cold, in anger or in joy: such was the woman
whose long slumbering, long suppressed ambition, coupled with a daring
that had not its equal, was to be fanned into a raging holocaust after
Marozia's untimely demise.
Concealing her most secret hopes and ambitions so utterly that even
Alberic became her dupe, Theodora threw herself into the whirl of life
with a keen appreciation of all its thrilling excitement. Vitally
alive with the pride of her sex and the sense of its power, she found
in her existence all the zest of some breathlessly fascinating game.
Men to her were mere pawns. She regarded them almost impersonally, as
creatures to taunt, to tempt, to excite, to play upon. Deliberately and
unstintingly she applied her arts. She delighted to see them at her
feet, but to repel them as the mood changed, with exasperating disdain.
Love to her was a word she knew but from report,--or, from what she had
read. She knew not its meaning, nor had she ever fathomed its depths.
To revel through delirious nights with some newly-chosen favorite
of the moment, who would soon thereafter mysteriously disappear, to
be tossed from the embrace of one into the arms of another; in the
restless, fruitless endeavor to kill the pain of life, the memory
of consciousness, to fill the void of a heart, that, alive to the
shallowness of existence, clutches at the saving hope of power, to
rule and to crush the universe beneath her feet, a dream, vague, vain,
unattainable: this desire filled Theodora's soul.
Her soul was burning itself to cinders in its own fires,--those baleful
fires that had proven the undoing of her equally beautiful sister.
Alone she would pace her gilded chambers, feverishly, unable to think,
driven hither and thither by the demons of unrest, by the disquietude
of her heart. Desperately she threw herself into whatever excitement
offered.
But it was always in vain.
She found no respite. Ever and ever a reiterant, restless craving
gnawed, like a worm, at her heart.
As she approached the thirtieth year of her life, Theodora had grown
more dazzling in beauty. Her body had assumed the wonderful plasticity
of marble. Her eyes had become more unfathomable, more wondrously
changeful in hues, like the iridescent waters of the sea.
Living as she did in an age where a morbid trend pervaded the world,
where the approach of the Millennium, though no one of the present
generation would see the day, was heralded as the End of Time; living
as she did in the darkest epoch of Roman history, Theodora felt the
utter inadequacy of her life, a hunger which nothing but power could
assuage.
Slowly this desire began to grow and expand. She wished to wield her
will, not only on men's emotions, but upon their lives as well. Perhaps
even the death of Marozia, with its paralyzing influence over her soul,
the captivity in the Lateran of her sister's son, and the hateful rule
of Alberic, would not have brought matters to a focus, had not the
appearance upon the stage of a woman, who, in point of beauty, spirit
and daring bade fair to constitute a terrible rival, roused all the
dormant passions in Theodora's soul and when Roxana openly boasted
that she would wrest the power from the hands of her rival and rule in
the Emperor's Tomb in spite of the Pontiff, of Alberic and Marozia's
blood-kin, the soul of Theodora leaped to the challenge of the other
woman and she craved for the conflict as she had never longed for
anything in her life, save perchance, a love of which she had but
possessed the base counterfeit.
No one knew whence Roxana had come, nor how long she had been in Rome,
when an incident at San Lorenzo in Lucina had brought the two women
face to face. Both, with their trains, had simultaneously arrived
before the portals of the sanctuary when Roxana barred Theodora's way.
Some mysterious instinct seemed to have informed each of the person
and ambition of the other. For a moment they faced each other white
to the lips. Then Roxana and her train had entered the church, and as
she passed the other woman, a deadly challenge had flashed from her
blue eyes into Theodora's dark orbs. The populace applauded Roxana's
daring, and, in order to taunt her rival, she had established her court
on desert Aventine, assembling about her the disgruntled lovers of
Theodora and others, whom her disdain had driven to seek oblivion and
revenge.
The land of Roxana's birth was shrouded in mystery. Some reported her
from the icy regions of the North, others credited her with being the
fugitive odalisque of some Eastern despot, a native of Kurdistan, the
beauty and fire of whose women she possessed to a high degree.
Such was Roxana, who had challenged Theodora for the possession of the
Emperor's Tomb.
CHAPTER VIII
THE SHRINE OF HEKATÉ
Athwart the gleaming balconies of the east the morning sun shone
golden and the shadows of the white marble cornices and capitals and
jutting friezes were blue with the reflection of the cloudless sky.
Far below Mount Aventine the soft mists of dawn still hovered over the
seven-hilled city, whence the distant cries of the water carriers and
fruit venders came echoing up from the waking streets.
A fugitive sunbeam stole through a carelessly closed lattice of a
chamber in the palace of Theodora, and danced now on the walls, bright
with many a painted scene, now on the marble inlaid mosaic of the
floor. Now and then a bright blade or the jewelled rim of a wine cup of
eastern design would flash back the wayward ray, until its shaft rested
on a curtained recess wherein lay a faintly outlined form. Tenderly
the sunbeams stole over the white limbs that veiled their chiselled
roundness under the blue shot webs of their wrappings, which, at the
capricious tossing of the sleeper, bared two arms, white as ivory and
wonderful in their statuesque moulding.
The face of the sleeper showed creamy white under a cloud of dark,
silken hair, held back in a net of gold from the broad smooth forehead.
Dark, exquisitely pencilled eyebrows arched over the closed,
transparent lids, fringed with lashes that now and then seemed to
flicker on the marble pallor of the cheeks, and the proudly poised head
lay back, half buried in the cushions, supported by the gleaming white
arms that were clasped beneath it.
Then, as if fearful of intruding on the charms that his ray had
revealed, the sunbeam turned and, kissing the bosom that swelled and
sank with the sleeper's gentle breathing, descended till it rested on
an overhanging foot, from which a carelessly fastened sandal hung by
one vermilion strap.
Of a sudden a light footfall was audible without and in an instant the
sleeper had heard and awakened, her dark eyes heavy with drowsiness,
the red lips parted, revealing two rows of small, pearly teeth, with
the first deep breath of returning consciousness.
At the sound one white hand drew the silken wrappings over the limbs,
that a troubled slumber and the warmth of the Roman summer night had
bared, while the other was endeavoring to adjust the disordered folds
of the saffron gossamer web that clung like a veil to her matchless
form.
"Ah! It is but you! Persephoné," she said with a little sigh, as a
curtain was drawn aside, revealing the form of a girl about twenty-two
years old, whose office as first attendant to Theodora had been firmly
established by her deep cunning, a thorough understanding of her
mistress' most hidden moods and desires, her utter fearlessness and a
native fierceness, that recoiled from no consideration of danger.
Persephoné was tall, straight as an arrow, lithe and sinuous as a
snake. Her face was beautiful, but there was something in the gleam
of those slightly slanting eyes that gave pause to him who chanced to
cross her path.
She claimed descent from some mythical eastern potentate and was a
native of Circassia, the land of beautiful women. No one knew how she
had found her way to Rome. The fame of Marozia's evil beauty and her
sinister repute had in time attracted Persephoné, and she had been
immediately received in Marozia's service, where she remained till the
revolt of Alberic swept her mistress into the dungeons of Castel San
Angelo. Thereupon she had attached herself to Theodora who loved the
wild and beautiful creature and confided in her utterly.
"Evil and troubled have been my dreams," Theodora continued, as the
morning light fell in through the parted curtains. "At the sound of
your footfall I started up--fearing--I knew not what--"
"For a long time have I held out against his pleadings and commands,"
Persephoné replied in a subdued voice, "knowing that my lady slept. But
he will not be denied,--and his insistence had begun to frighten me. So
at last I dared brave my lady's anger and disturb her--"
"Frighten you, Persephoné?" Theodora's musical laughter resounded
through the chamber. "You--who braved death at these white hands of
mine without flinching?"
She extended her hands as if to impress Persephoné with their beauty
and strength.
Whatever the circumstance referred to, Persephoné made no reply. Only
her face turned a shade more pale.
The draped figure had meanwhile arisen to her full height, as she
stretched the sleep from her limbs, then, her question remaining
unanswered, she continued:
"But--of whom do you speak? A new defiance from Roxana? A new insult
from the Senator of Rome? I would have it understood," this with a
slight lift of the voice, "that even were the end of the world at hand,
of which they prate so much of late, and heaven and earth to crumble
into chaos, I would not be disturbed to listen to shallow plaints and
mock heroics."
"It is neither the one nor the other," replied Persephoné with an
apprehensive glance of her slanting eyes over her shoulder, "but my
Lord Basil, the Grand Chamberlain. He waits without where the eunuchs
guard your slumber, and his eyes are aflame with something more than
impatience--"
At the mention of the name a subtle change passed over the listener's
face, and a sombre look crept into her eyes as she muttered:
"What can he be bringing now?"
Then, with a sudden flash, she added, tossing back her beautiful head:
"Let the Lord Basil wait! And now, Persephoné, remove from me the
traces of sleep and set the couches in better order."
Silently and quickly the Circassian sprang forward and rolled back the
curtains from the lattices, letting a stronger but still subdued light
enter the chamber, revealing, as it did, many a chased casket, and
mirrors of polished steel and bronze, and lighting up exquisite rainbow
hued fabrics, thrown carelessly over lion-armed chairs, with here and
there an onyx table wonderfully carved.
The chamber itself looked out upon a terrace and garden, a garden
filled with such a marvellous profusion of foliage and flowers, that,
looking at it from between the glistening marble columns surrounding
the palace, it seemed as though the very sky above rested edgewise on
towering pyramids of red and white bloom. Awnings of softest pale blue
stretched across the entire width of the spacious outer colonnade,
where a superb peacock strutted majestically to and fro, with
boastfully spreading tail and glittering crest, as brilliant as the
gleam of the hot sun on the silver fringe of the azure canopies, amidst
the gorgeousness of waving blossoms that seemed to surge up like a sea
to the very windows of the chamber.
Filling an embossed bowl with perfumed water, Persephoné bathed the
hands of her mistress, who had sunk down upon a low, tapestried
couch. Then, combing out her luxuriant hair, she bound it in a
jewelled netting that looked like a constellation of stars against the
dusky masses it confined. Taking a long, sleeveless robe of amber,
Persephoné flung it about her subtle form and bound it over breast and
shoulders with a jewelled band. But Theodora's glance informed her that
something was still wanting and, following the direction of her gaze,
Persephoné's eye rested on a life-size statue of Hekaté that stood with
deadly calm on its inexorable face and slightly raised hands, from one
of which hung something that glittered strangely in the subdued light
of the recess.
Obeying Theodora's silent gesture, Persephoné advanced to the image and
took from its raised arm a circlet fashioned of two golden snakes with
brightly enamelled scales, bearing in their mouths a single diamond,
brilliant as summer lightning. This she gently placed on her mistress'
head, so that the jewel flamed in the centre of the coronet, then,
kneeling down, she drew together the unlatched sandals.
Persephoné's touch roused her mistress from a day dream that had set
her features as rigid as ivory, as she surveyed herself for a moment
intently in a great bronze disk whose burnished surface gave back her
flawless beauty line for line.
In Persephoné's gaze she read her unstinted admiration, for, beautiful
as the Circassian was, she loved beauty in her own sex, wherever she
found it.
Theodora seemed to have utterly forgotten the presence of the Grand
Chamberlain in the anteroom, yet, in an impersonal way, her thoughts
occupied themselves with the impending tete-a-tete.
Her life had been one constant round of pleasure and amusement, yet she
was not happy, nor even contented.
Day by day she felt the want of some fresh interest, some fresh
excitement, and it was this craving probably, more than innate
depravity, which plunged her into those disgraceful and licentious
excesses that were nightly enacted in the sunken gardens behind her
palace. Lovers she had had by the scores. Yet each new face possessed
for her but the attraction of novelty. The favorite of the hour had
small cause to plume himself on his position. No sooner did he believe
himself to be secure in the possession of Theodora's love, than he
found himself hurled into the night of oblivion.
A strange pagan wave held Rome enthralled. Italy was in the throes of
a dark revulsion. A woman, beautiful as she was evil, had exercised
within the past decade her baleful influence from Castel San Angelo.
Theodora had taken up Marozia's tainted inheritance. Members of a
family of courtesans, they looked upon their trade as a hereditary
privilege and, like the ancient Aspasias, these Roman women of the
tenth century triumphed primarily by means of their feminine beauty
and charms over masculine barbarism and grossness. It was an age
of feudalism, when brutal force and murderous fury were the only
divinities whom the barbarian conqueror was compelled to respect.
Lombards and Huns, Franks and Ostrogoths, Greeks and Africans, the
savage giants issuing from the deep Teutonic forests, invading the
classic soil of Rome, became so many Herculeses sitting at the feet of
Omphalé, and the atmosphere of the city by the Tiber--the atmosphere
that had nourished the Messalinas of Imperial Rome--poured the flame of
ambition into the soul of a woman whose beauty released the strongest
passions in the hearts of those with whom she surrounded herself, in
order to attain her soul's desire. To rule Rome from the fortress
tomb of the Flavian emperor was the dream of Theodora's life. It had
happened once. It would happen again, as long as men were ready to
sacrifice at the shrines of Hekaté.
Unbridled in her passions as she was strong in her physical
organization, an unbending pride and an intensity of will came to
her aid when she had determined to win the object of her desire. In
Theodora's bosom beat a heart that could dare, endure and defy the
worst. She was a woman whom none but a very bold or ignorant suitor
would have taken to his heart. Perchance the right man, had he appeared
on the stage in time, might have made her gentle and quelled the
wild passions that tossed her resistlessly about, like a barque in a
hurricane.
Suddenly something seemed to tell her that she had found such a one.
Tristan's manly beauty had made a strong appeal upon her senses. The
anomaly of his position had captivated her imagination. There was
something strangely fascinating in the mystery that surrounded him,
there was even a wild thrill of pleasure in the seeming shame of loving
one whose garb stamped him as one claimed by the Church. He had braved
her anger in refusing to accompany Persephoné. He had closed his eyes
to Theodora's beauty, had sealed his ears to the song of the siren.
"A man at last!" she said half aloud, and Persephoné, looking up from
her occupation, gave her an inquisitive glance.
The splash of hidden fountains diffused a pleasant coolness in the
chamber. Spiral wreaths of incense curled from a bronze tripod into the
flower-scented ether. The throbbing of muted strings from harps and
lutes, mingling with the sombre chants of distant processions, vibrated
through the sun-kissed haze, producing a weird and almost startling
effect.
After a pause of some duration, apparently oblivious of the fact
that the announced caller was waiting without, Theodora turned to
Persephoné, brushing with one white hand a stray raven lock from the
alabaster forehead.
"Can it be the heat or the poison miasma that presages our Roman fever?
Never has my spirit been so oppressed as it is to-day, as if the gloomy
messengers from Lethé's shore were enfolding me in their shadowy
pinions. I saw his face in the dream of the night"--she spoke as if
soliloquizing--"it was as the face of one long dead--"
She paused with a shudder.
"Of whom does my lady speak?" Persephoné interposed with a swift glance
at her mistress.
"The pilgrim who crossed my path to his own or my undoing. Has he been
heard from again?"
A negative gesture came in response.
"His garb is responsible for much," replied the Circassian. "The city
fairly swarms with his kind--"
The intentional contemptuous sting met its immediate rebuke.
"Not his kind," Theodora flashed back. "He has nothing in common with
those others save the garb--and there is more beneath it than we wot
of--"
"The Lady Theodora's judgment is not to be gainsaid," the Circassian
replied, without meeting her mistress' gaze. "Do they not throng to her
bowers by the legion--"
"A pilgrimage of the animals to Circé's sty--each eager to be
transformed into his own native state," Theodora interposed
contemptuously.
"Perchance this holy man is in reality a prince from some mythical,
fabled land--come to Rome to resist temptation and be forthwith
canonized--"
Persephoné's mirth suffered a check by Theodora's reply.
"Stranger things have happened. All the world comes to Rome on one
business or another. This one, however, has not his mind set on the
Beatitudes--"
"Nevertheless he dared not enter the forbidden gates," the Circassian
ventured to object.
"It was not fear. On that I vouch. Perchance he has a vow. Whatever it
be--he shall tell me--face to face--and here!"
"But if the holy man refuse to come?"
Theodora's trained ear did not miss the note of irony in the
Circassian's question.
"He will come!" she replied laconically.
"A task worthy the Lady Theodora's renown."
"You deem it wonderful?"
"If I have read the pilgrim's eyes aright--"
"Perchance your own sweet eyes, my beautiful Persephoné, discoursed to
him something on that night that caused misgivings in his holy heart,
and made him doubt your errand?" Theodora purred, extending her white
arms and regarding the Circassian intently.
Persephoné flushed and paled in quick succession.
"On that matter I left no doubt in his mind," she said enigmatically.
There was a brief pause, during which an inscrutable gaze passed
between Theodora and the Circassian.
"Were you not as beautiful as you are evil, my Persephoné, I should
strangle you," Theodora at last said very quietly.
The Circassian's face turned very pale and there was a strange light
in her eyes. Her memory went back to an hour when, during one of the
periodical feuds between Marozia and her younger sister, the former
had imprisoned Theodora in one of the chambers of Castel San Angelo,
setting over her as companion and gaoler in one Persephoné, then in
Marozia's service.
The terrible encounter between Theodora and the Circassian in the
locked chamber, when only the timely appearance of the guard saved each
from destruction at the hands of the other, as Theodora tried to take
the keys of her prison from Persephoné, had never left the latter's
mind. Brave as she was, she had nevertheless, after Marozia's fall,
entered Theodora's service, and the latter, admiring the spirit of
fearlessness in the girl, had welcomed her in her household.
"I am ever at the Lady Theodora's service," Persephoné replied, with
drooping lids, but Theodora caught a gleam of tigerish ferocity
beneath those silken lashes that fired her own blood.
"Beware--lest in some evil hour I may be tempted to finish what I left
undone in the Emperor's Tomb!" she flashed with a sudden access of
passion.
"The Lady Theodora is very brave," Persephoné replied, as, stirred by
the memory, her eyes sank into those of her mistress.
For a moment they held each other's gaze, then, with a generosity
that was part of her complex nature, Theodora extended her hand to
Persephoné.
"Forgive the mood--I am strangely wrought up," she said. "Cannot you
help me in this dilemma, where I can trust in none?"
"There dwells in Rome one who can help my lady," Persephoné replied
with hesitation; "one deeply versed in the lore and mysteries of the
East."
"Who is this man?" Theodora queried eagerly.
"His name is Hormazd. By his spells he can change the natural event of
things, and make Fate subservient to his decrees."
"Why have you never told me of him before?"
"Because the Lady Theodora's will seemed to do as much for her as
could, to my belief, the sorcerer's art!"
The implied compliment pleased Theodora.
"Where does he abide?"
"In the Trastevere."
"What does he for those who seek him?"
"He reads the stars--foretells the future--and, with the aid of strange
spells of which he is master, can bring about that which otherwise
would be unattainable--"
"You rouse my curiosity! Tell me more of him."
An inscrutable expression passed over Persephoné's face.
"He was Marozia's trusted friend."
A frozen silence reigned apace.
"Did he foretell that which was to happen?" Theodora spoke at last.
"To the hour!"
"And yet--forewarned--"
"Marozia, grown desperate in the hatred of her lord, derided his
warnings."
"It was her Fate. Tell me more!"
"He has visited every land under the sun. From Thulé to Cathay his
fame is known. Strange tales are told of him. No one knows his age. He
seems to have lived always. As he appears now he hath ever been. They
say he has been seen in places thousand leagues apart at the same time.
Sometimes he disappears and is not heard of for months. But--whoever
he may be--whatever he may be engaged in--at the stroke of midnight
that he must suspend. Then his body turns rigid as a corpse, bereft of
animation, and his spirit is withdrawn into realms we dare not even
dream of. At the first hour of the morning life will slowly return. But
no one has yet dared to question him, where he has spent those dread
hours."
Theodora had listened to Persephoné's tale with a strange new interest.
"How long has this Hormazd--or whatever his name--resided in Rome?" she
turned to the Circassian.
"I met him first on the night on which the lady Marozia summoned him to
the summit of the Emperor's Tomb. There he abode with her for hours,
engaged in some unholy incantation and at last conjured up such a
tempest over the Seven Hills, as the city of Rome had not experienced
since it was founded by the man from Troy--"
Persephoné's historical deficiency went hand in hand with a
superstition characteristic of the age, and evoked no comment from one
perchance hardly better informed with regard to the past.
"I well remember the night," Theodora interposed.
"We crept down into the crypts, where the dog-headed Egyptian god keeps
watch over the dead Emperor," Persephoné continued. "The lady Marozia
alone remained on the summit with the wizard--amidst such lightnings
and crashing peals of thunder and a hurricane the like of which the
oldest inhabitants do not remember--"
"I shall test his skill," Theodora spoke after a pause. "Perchance he
may give me that which I have never known--"
"My lady would consult the wizard?" Persephoné interposed eagerly.
"Such is my intent."
"Shall I summon him to your presence?"
"I shall go to him!"
In Persephoné's countenance surprise and fear struggled for mastery.
"Then I shall accompany my lady--"
"I shall go alone and unattended--"
"It is an ill-favored region, where the sorcerer dwells--"
An inscrutable look passed into Theodora's eyes.
"Can he but give me that which I desire I shall brave the hazard, be it
ever so great."
The last words were uttered in an undertone. Then she added imperiously:
"Go and summon the lord Basil and bid two eunuchs attend him hither!
And do you wait with them within call behind those curtains."
Then, as Persephoné silently piled cushions behind her in the
lion-armed chair and withdrew bowing, Theodora murmured to herself:
"Hardly can I trust even him in an hour so fraught with darkness and
peril. Yet strive as he will, he may not break the chains his passion
has woven around his senses."
CHAPTER IX
THE GAME OF LOVE
The pattering of footsteps resounded on the marble floor of the
corridor and the hangings once more parted, revealing the form of a
man sombre even in the shadows which seemed part of the darkness that
framed his white face.
With eyes that never left the woman's graceful form the visitor slowly
advanced and, concealing his chagrin at having been kept waiting like a
slave in the anteroom, bent low over Theodora's hand and raised it to
his lips.
She had seated herself on a divan which somewhat shaded her face and
invited him with a mute gesture to take his seat beside her. Persephoné
and the eunuchs had left the chamber.
"Fain would I have departed, Lady Theodora, when the maid Persephoné,
who has the devil in her eyes, told me that the Lady Theodora slept,"
Basil spoke as, with the light of a fierce passion in his eyes, he sank
down beside the wondrous form, and his hot breath fanned her shoulder.
"But my tidings brook no delay. Closer, fairest lady, that your ear
alone may hear this new perplexity that does beset us, for it concerns
that which lies closest to our heart, and the time is brief--"
"I cannot even guess your tidings," replied Theodora, withdrawing
herself a little from his burning gaze. "For days mischance has emptied
all her quivers at me, leaving me not a dart wherewith to strike."
"It is as a bolt from the clear blue," interposed the Grand
Chamberlain. "Yet--how were we to reckon with that which did happen?
Every detail had been carefully planned. In the excitement and turmoil
which roared and surged over the Navona the task could not fail of its
accomplishment and he who was to speed the holy man to his doom had but
to plunge into that seething vortex of humanity to make his escape.
Surely the foul fiend was abroad on that night and stalked about
visibly to our undoing. For not a word have I been able to get out of
Il Gobbo who raves that at the very moment when he was about to strike,
St. John himself towered over him, paralyzed his efforts, and gave him
such a blow as sent him reeling upon the turf. Some say,"--the speaker
added meditatively, "it was a pilgrim--"
"A pilgrim?" Theodora interposed, a sudden gleam in her eyes. "A
pilgrim? What was he like?"
"To Il Gobbo he appeared no doubt of superhuman height, else had he not
affrighted him. For the bravo is no coward--"
"A pilgrim, you say," Theodora repeated, meditatively.
"Whosoever he is," Basil continued after a pause, "he seems to scent
ample entertainment in this godly city. For, no doubt it was the same
who thwarted by his timely appearance the abduction of the Pontiff by
certain ruffians, earning thereby much distinction in the eyes of the
Senator of Rome who has appointed him captain of Castel San Angelo--and
Gamba in whom we placed our trust has fled. If he is captured--if he
should confess--"
The color had died out of Theodora's cheeks and she sat bolt upright as
a statue of marble, gazing into the shadows with great wide eyes, as in
a low voice, hardly audible even to her visitor, she said:
"God! Will this uncertainty never cease? What is to be done?
Speak!--For I confess, I am not myself today."--
Basil hesitated, and a sudden flame leaped into his eyes as they
devoured the beauty of the woman beside him, and raising to his lips
the hand that lay inert on the saffron-hued cushion, he replied:
"The lady Theodora has many who do her bidding, yet is the heart of
none as true as his, who is even now sitting beside her. Therefore ask
of me whatever you will and, if a blade be needed, your slightest favor
will fire me to any deed,--however unnameable."--
Lower the man bent, until his hot breath scorched her pale cheeks. But
neither by word nor gesture did she betray that she was conscious of
his nearer approach as, in a calm voice, she replied:
"Full well do I know your zeal and devotion, my lord Basil. Yet there
hangs in the balance the keen and timely stroke that shall secure for
me the dominion of the Seven Hills and the Emperor's Tomb. For failure
would bring in its wake that which would be harder to endure than
death itself. Therefore," she added slowly, "I would choose one whose
devotion is only equalled by his blind indifference to that which I am
minded to bring about; not one only fired with a passion, which when
cooled might leave nothing but fear and hesitation behind."--
"Has all that has passed between us left you with so ill an opinion
of me?" Basil replied, drawing back somewhat ostentatiously. "There
are few that can be trusted with that which must be done--and trusted
blades are scarce."
"The more reason that we choose wisely and well," came the reply in
deliberate tones. "How much longer must I suffer the indignity which
this stripling dares to put upon his own flesh and blood,--upon myself,
who has striven for this dominion with all the fire of this restless
soul? How much longer must I sit idly by, pondering over the mystery
that enshrouds Marozia's untimely end? How much longer must I tremble
in abject fear of him whom the Tuscan's churlishness has set up in
yonder castello and who conspires with my rival to gain his sinister
ends?"
"By what sorcery she holds him captive, I cannot tell," Basil
interposed. "Yet, if we are not on our guard, we shall awaken one day
to the realization that even the faint chance which remains to us now
has passed from our hands. I doubt not but that Roxana will enlist the
services of the stranger who in the space of a week, during the lord
Alberic's absence, will lord it over the city of Rome!"
With a smothered cry of hate, that drove from Theodora's face every
trace of her former mood, she bounded upright.
"What demon of madness possesses you, my lord Basil, to taunt me with
your suspicions?" she flashed.
Basil had sped his shaft at random, but he had hit the mark.
In suave and insinuating tones, without relinquishing his gaze upon the
woman, he replied:
"I voice but my fears, Lady Theodora, and the urgency of assembling
your friends under the banners of your house. What is more natural," he
continued with slow and sinister emphasis, "than for a beautiful woman
to harbor the desire for conquest, and to profit from so auspicious a
throw of fate as the stranger's espousing her part against an equally
beautiful, hated rival? Is not the inference justified, that, ignorant
of the merits of the feud, which has been raging these many months, he
will take the part of the one whose beauty had compelled the Senator's
unwitting tribute--as it were?"
He paused for a moment, watching the woman before him from under
half-shut lids, then continued slowly:
"Roxana is consumed with the desire to stake soul and body upon
attaining her ends, humbling her rival in the dust and set her foot
upon her neck. Time and again has she defied you! At the banquet she
gave in honor of the Senator of Rome, when one of the guests lamented
the Lady Theodora's absence from the festal board, she openly boasted,
that in youth as well as in beauty, in strength as in love,
she would vanquish Marozia's sister utterly--and when one of the
guests, commenting upon her boast, suggested with a smile that in the
time of the Emperor Gallus women fought in the arena, she bared her
arms and replied: 'Are there no chambers in this demesne where a woman
may strangle her rival?'"
[Illustration: "A strange look passed into Theodora's eyes"]
Theodora had listened to Basil's recital, white to the lips. Her bosom
heaved and a strange fire burnt in her eyes as she replied:
"Dares she utter this boast, woman to woman?"--
Basil, checking himself, gave a shrug.
"Misinterpret not my words, dearest lady," he said solicitously. "It
is to warn you that I came. Alberic's attitude is no longer a secret.
Roxana is leaving no stone unturned to drive you from the city, to
encompass your death--and Alberic is swayed by strange moods. Roxana
is growing bolder each day and the woman who dares challenge the Lady
Theodora is no coward."
A strange look passed into Theodora's eyes.
"Three days hence," she said, "I mean to give a feast to my friends,
if," she continued with lurid mockery, "I can still number such among
those who flock to my bowers. I shall ask the Lady Roxana to grace the
feast with her presence--"
A puzzled look passed into Basil's eyes.
"Deem you she will come?"
Theodora's lips curved in a smile.
"You said but just now, my lord, the woman who dares challenge Theodora
is no coward--"
"Yet--as your guest--suspecting--knowing--"
"I doubt not, my lord, she is well informed," Theodora interposed
with the same inscrutable smile. "Yet--if she is as brave as she is
beautiful--she will come--doubt not, my lord--she will come--"
"Nevertheless, I question the wisdom," Basil ventured to interpose. "A
sudden spark--from nowhere--who will quench the holocaust?"
"When Roxana and Theodora meet,--woman to woman--ah, trust me, my lord,
it will be a festive occasion--one long to be remembered. Perchance
you, my lord, who boast of a large circle know young Fabio of the
Cavalli--a comely youth with the air and manners of a girl. Persephoné,
my Circassian, could strangle him."
"I know the youth, Lady Theodora," Basil interposed with a puzzled air.
"What of him?"
"He once did me the honor to imagine himself in love with me. Did he
not pursue me with amorous sighs and burning glances and oaths--my
lord--such oaths! Cerberus would wince in Tartarus could he hear but
one of them--"
Basil's lips straightened and his eyelids narrowed.
"Pardon, Lady Theodora, if I do not quite follow the trend of your
reminiscent mood--"
Theodora smiled.
"You will presently, my lord--believe me--you will presently. When
I became satiated with him I sent him on his way and straightway he
sought my beautiful rival. I am told she is very fond of him--"
A strange nervousness had seized Basil.
"I shall bid him to the feast," Theodora continued. "'Twere scant
courtesy to request the Lady Roxaná's presence without that of her
lover. And more, my lord. Since you boast your devotion to me in such
unequivocal terms--your task it shall be to bring as your honored
guest the valiant stranger who took so brave a part in aiding the Lord
Alberic to regain his prisoner, and who, within a week, is to be the
new captain of Castel San Angelo."--
Basil was twitching nervously.
"Lady Theodora, without attempting to fathom the mood which prompts
the request, am I to traverse the city in quest of a churl who has
hypnotized the Lord Alberic and has destroyed our fondest hopes?"--
"That it shall be for myself to decide, my Lord Basil," Theodora
replied with her inscrutable smile. "I do not desire you to fathom my
mood, but to bring to me this man. And believe me, my Lord Basil--as
you value my favor--you will find and bring him to me!"
Half turning she flung a light vesture from off her bosom and the faint
light showed not the set Medusa face that meditated unnameable things,
but eyes alight with desire and a mouth quivering for kisses.
As he gazed, Basil was suddenly caught in the throes of his passion.
He clutched at the ottoman's carved arms, striving to resist the tide
of emotion that tossed him like a helpless bark in its clutches and,
suddenly bearing down every restraint, his arms went round the supple
form as he crushed her to him with a wild uncontrolled passion, bending
her back, and his eyes blazed with a baleful fire into her own, while
his hot kisses scorched her lips.
She struggled violently, desperately in his embrace, and at last
succeeded, bruised and crushed, in releasing herself.
"Beast! Coward!" she flashed, "Can you not bridle the animal within
you? I have it in mind to kill you here and now."
Basil's face was ashen. His eyes were bloodshot. The touch of her lips,
of her hands, had maddened him. He groaned, and his arms fell limply by
his side. Presently he raised his head and, his eyes aflame with the
madness of jealousy, he snarled:
"So I did not go amiss, when I long suspected another in the bower of
roses. Who is he? Tell me quickly, that I may at least assuage this
hatred of mine, for its measure overflows."
His hand closed on his dagger's hilt that was hidden by his tunic, but
Theodora rose and her own eyes flashed like naked swords as with set
face she said:
"Have you not yet learned, my lord, how vain it is to probe the
clouds of my mind for the unseen wind that stirs behind its curtains?
Aye--crouch at my feet, you miserable slave, gone mad with the dream of
my favor possessed and wake to learn, that, as Theodora's enchantments
compel all living men, nevertheless she gives herself unto him she
pleases. I tell you, you jealous fool, that, although I serve the
goddess of night yonder, never till yesterday was my heart touched by
the divine enchantments of Venus, nor have the lips ever closed on
mine, that could kindle the spark to set my breast afire with longing."
"Ah me!" she continued, speaking as though she thought aloud. "Will
Hekaté ever grant me to find amongst these husks of passion and
plotting that great love whereof once I dreamed, that love which I am
seeking and which ever flits before me, disembodied and unattainable,
like a ghost in the purple twilight? Or, must I wander, ever loved yet
unloving, until I am gathered to the realms of shadows, robbed of my
desire by Death's cold hand?"
She paused, her lips a-quiver, the while Basil watched her with
half-closed eyes, filled with sudden and ominous brooding.
"Who is the favored one?" he queried darkly, "who came and saw and
conquered, while others of long-tried loyalty are starving at the
fount?"
She gave him an inscrutable glance, then answered quickly:
"A man willing to risk life and honor and all to serve me as I would be
served."
Basil gave her a baffled look.
"Can he achieve the impossible?"
Theodora gave a shrug.
"To him who truly loves nothing is impossible. You are the trusted
friend of the Senator who encompasses my undoing--need I say more?"
"Were I not, Lady Theodora, in seeming,--who knows, but that your blood
would long have dyed this Roman soil, or some dark crypt contained your
wonderful beauty? Bide but the time--"
An impatient wave of Theodora's hand interrupted the speaker.
"Time has me now! Will there ever be an end to this uncertainty?"
"You have not yet told me the name of him whose sudden advent on the
stage has brought about so marvellous a transformation," Basil said
with an air of baffled passion and rage.
"What matters the name, my lord?" Theodora interposed with a sardonic
smile.
"A nameless stranger then," he flashed with a swiftness that staggered
even the woman, astute as she was.
"I said not so--"
"A circumstance that should recommend him to our consideration," he
muttered darkly. "I shall find him--and bring him to the feast--"
There was something in his voice that roused the tigress in the woman.
"By the powers of hell," she turned on the man whose fatal guess had
betrayed her secret, "if you but dare touch one hair of his head--"
Basil raised his hand disdainfully.
"Be calm, Lady Theodora! The Grand Chamberlain soils not his steel with
such carrion," he said with a tone of contempt that struck home. "And
now I will be plain with you, Lady Theodora. All things have their
price. Will you grant to me what I most desire in return for that which
is ever closest to your heart?"
Theodora gave a tantalizing shrug.
"Like the Fata Morgana of the desert, I am all things to all men," she
said. "Remember, my lord, I must look for that which I desire wherever
I may find it, since life and the future are uncertain."
There was a silence during which each seemed intent upon fathoming the
secret thoughts of the other.
It was Basil who spoke.
"What of that other?"
Theodora had arisen.
"Bring him to me--three days hence--as my guest. Thrice has he crossed
my path.--Thrice has he defied me!--I have that in store for him at
which men shall marvel for all time to come!"
Basil bent over the white hand and kissed it. Then he took his leave.
Had he seen the expression in the woman's eyes as the heavy curtains
closed behind him, it would have made the Grand Chamberlain pause.
Theodora passed to where the bronze mirror hung and stood long before
it, with hands clasped behind her shapely head, wrapt in deepest
thought.
And while she gazed on her mirrored loveliness, an evil light sprang up
in her eyes and all her mouth's soft lines froze to a mould of dreaming
evil, as she turned to where the image of Hekaté gazed down upon her
with inhuman calm upon its face, and, holding out shimmering, imploring
arms, she cried:
"Help me now, dread goddess of darkness, if ever you looked with love
upon her whose prayers have been directed to you for good and for evil.
Fire the soul of him I desire, as he stands before me, that he lose
reason, honor, and manhood, as the price of my burning kisses--that he
become my utter slave."
She clapped her hands and Persephoné appeared from behind the curtains.
"For once Fate is my friend," she turned with flashing eyes to the
Circassian. "Before his departure to the shrines of the Archangel,
Alberic has appointed this nameless stranger captain of Castel San
Angelo. Go--find him and bring him to me! Now we shall see," she added,
"if all this beauty of mine shall prevail against his manhood. Your
eyes express doubt, my sweet Persephoné?"
Theodora had raised herself to her full height. She looked regal
indeed--a wonderful apparition. What man lived there to resist such
loveliness of face and form?
Persephoné, too, seemed to feel the woman's magic, for her tone was
less confident when she replied:
"Such beauty as the Lady Theodora's surely the world has never seen."
"I shall conquer--by dread Hekaté," Theodora flashed, flushed by
Persephoné's unwitting tribute. "He shall open for me the portals of
the Emperor's Tomb, he shall sue at my feet for my love--and obtain his
guerdon. Not a word of this to anyone, my Persephoné--least of all, the
Lord Basil. Bring the stranger to me by the postern--"
"But--if he refuse?"
There was something in Persephoné's tone that stung Theodora's soul to
the quick.
"He will not refuse."
Persephoné bowed and departed, and for some time Theodora's dark
inscrutable eyes brooded on the equally inscrutable face of the goddess
of the Underworld, which was just then touched by a fugitive beam of
sunlight and seemed to nod mysteriously.
CHAPTER X
A SPIRIT PAGEANT
When, on the day succeeding his appointment Tristan returned to the
Inn of the Golden Shield he felt as one in a trance. Like a puppet of
Fate he had been plunged into the seething maelstrom of feudal Rome.
He hardly realized the import of the scene in which he had played so
prominent a part. He had acted upon impulse, hardly knowing what it was
all about. Dimly at intervals it flashed through his consciousness,
dimly he remembered facing two youths, the one the Senator of Rome--the
other the High Priest of Christendom, even though a prisoner in the
Lateran. Vaguely he recalled the words that had been spoken between
them, vaguely he recalled the fact that the Senator of Rome had
commended him for having saved the city, offering him appointment,
holding out honor and preferment, if he would enter his service.
Vaguely he remembered bending his knee before the proud son of Marozia
and accepting his good offices.
In the guest-chamber Tristan found pilgrims from every land assembled
round the tables discoursing upon the wonders and perils hidden in the
strange and shifting corridors of Rome. Not a few had witnessed the
scene in which he had so conspicuously figured and, upon recognizing
him, regarded him with shy glances, while commenting upon the
prevailing state of unrest, the periodical seditions and outbreaks of
the Romans.
Tristan listened to the buzz and clamor of their voices, gleaning here
and there some scattered bits of knowledge regarding Roman affairs.
He could now review more calmly the events of the preceding day.
Fortune seemed to have favored him indeed, in that she had led him
across the path of the Senator of Rome.
Thus Tristan set out once again, to make the rounds of worship and
obedience. These absolved, he wandered aimlessly about the great city,
losing himself in her ruins and gardens, while he strove in vain to
take an interest in what he beheld, rather distracted than amused by
the Babel-like confusion which surrounded him on all sides.
Nevertheless, once more upon the piazzas and tortuous streets of Rome,
his pace quickened. His pulses beat faster. At times he did not feel
his feet upon those stony ways which Peter and Paul had trod, and many
another who, like himself, had come to Rome to be crucified. People
stared at his dark and sombre form as he passed. Now and then he was
retarded by chanting processions, that wound their interminable coils
through the tortuous streets, pilgrims from all the world, the various
orders of monks in the habits peculiar to their orders, wine-venders,
water-carriers, men-at-arms, sbirri, and men of doubtful calling.
Sacred banners floated in the sunlit air and incense curled its
graceful spiral wreaths into the cloudless Roman ether.
Surely Rome offered a wide field for ambition. A man might raise
himself to a certain degree by subservience to some powerful prince,
but he must continue to serve that prince, or he fell and would never
aspire to independent domination, where hereditary power was recognized
by the people and lay at the foundation of all acknowledged authority.
It was only in Central Italy, and especially in Romagna and the States
of the Church, where a principle antagonistic to all hereditary claims
existed in the very nature of the Papal power, so that any adventurer
might hope, either by his individual genius or courage, or by services
rendered to those in authority, to raise himself to independent rule or
to that station which was only attached to a superior by the thin and
worn-out thread of feudal tenure.
Rome was the field still open to the bold spirit, the keen and
clear-seeing mind. Rome was the table on which the boldest player was
sure to win the most. With every change of the papacy new combinations,
and, consequently, new opportunities must arise. Here a man may, as
elsewhere, be required to serve, in order at length to command. But, if
he did not obtain power at length, it was his fault or Fortune's, and
in either event he must abide the consequences.
Revolving in his mind these matters, and wondering what the days to
come would hold, Tristan permitted himself to wander aimlessly through
the desolation which arose on all sides about him.
Passing by the Forum and the Colosseum, ruins piled upon ruins, he
wandered past San Gregorio, where, in the garden, lie the remains of
the Servian Porta Capena, by which St. Paul first entered Rome. The Via
Appia, lined with vineyards and fruit-trees, shedding their blossoms
on many an ancient tomb, led the solitary pilgrim from the memories of
the present to the days, when the light of the early Christian Church
burned like a flickering taper hidden low in Roman soil.
The ground sweeping down on either side in gentle, but well-defined
curves, led the vision over the hills of Rome and into her valleys.
Beneath a cloudless, translucent sky the city was caught in bold shafts
of crystal light, revealing her in so strong a relief that it seemed
like a piece of exquisite sculpture.
Fronting the Coelian, crowned with the temple church of San Stefano
in Rotondo, fringed round with tall and graceful poplars, rose the
immeasurable ruins of Caracalla's Baths, seeming more than ever the
work of titans, as Tristan saw them, shrouded in deep shadows above
the old churches of San Nereo and San Basilio, shining like white
huts, a stone's throw from the mighty walls. Beyond, as a beacon of
the Christian world in ages to come, on the site of the ancient Circus
of Nero, arose the Basilica of Constantine, still in its pristine
simplicity, ere the genius of Michel Angelo, Bramanté and Sangallo
transformed it into the magnificence of the present St. Peter's.
For miles around stretched the Aurelian walls, here fallen in low
ruins, there still rising in their proud strength. Weathered to every
shade of red, orange, and palest lemon, they still showed much of
their ancient beauty near the closed Latin gate. High towers, arched
galleries and battlements cast a broad band of shade upon a line of
peach trees whose blossoms had opened out to the touch of the summer
breeze.
Beneath Tristan's feet, unknown to him, lay the sepulchral chambers of
pagan patricians, and the winding passage tombs of the Scipios. Out of
the sunshine of the vineyard Tristan's curiosity led him into the dusk
of the Columbaria of Pomponius Hylas, full of stucco altar tombs. He
descended into the lower chambers with arched corridors and vaulted
roofs where, in the loculi, stood terra-cotta jars holding the ashes
of the freedmen and musicians of Tiberius with their servants, even to
their cook.
Returning full of wonder to the golden light of day, Tristan retraced
his steps once again over the Appian Way. Passing the ruined Circus
of Maxentius, across smooth fields of grass, he saw the fortress tomb
of Cæcilia Metella, set grandly upon the hill. It appeared to break
through the sunshine, its marble surface of a soft cream color, looking
more like the shrine of some immortal goddess of the Campagna than the
tomb of a Roman matron.
And, as he wandered along the Appian Way, past the site of lava
pools from Mount Alba, remains of ancient monuments lay thicker
by the roadside. Prostrate statues appeared in a setting of wild
flowers. Sculptured heads gazed out from half-hidden tombs, while one
watch-tower after another rose out of the undulating expanse of the
Campagna.
To Tristan the memories of an ancient empire which clung to the place
held but little significance.
Here emperors had been carried by in their litters to Albano.
Victorious generals returning in their chariots from the south, drove
between these avenues of cypress-guarded tombs to Rome. The body of
the dead Augustus had been brought with great following from Bovilæ to
the Palatine, as before him Sulla had been borne along to Rome amid
the sound of trumpets and tramp of horsemen. Near the fourth milestone
stood Seneca's villa, where he received his death warrant from an
emissary of Nero, and nearby was that of his wife who, by her own
desire, bravely shared his fate.
And, last to haunt the Appian Way in the spirit pageant of the Golden
Age, a memory destined to lie dormant till the dawn of the Renaissance,
was Paul the Apostle, the tent-maker from Tarsus, who entered Rome
while Nero reigned in the white marble city of Augustus and suffered
martyrdom for the Faith.
It was verging towards evening when Tristan's feet again bore him past
the stupendous ruins of the Colosseum, through the roofless upper
galleries of which streamed the light of the sinking sun.
After reaching the Forum, almost deserted by this hour, save for a few
belated ramblers, he seated himself on a marble block and tried to
collect his thoughts, at the same time drinking in the picture which
unrolled itself before his gaze.
If Rome was indeed, as the chroniclers of the Middle Ages styled her,
"Caput Mundi," the Forum was the centre of Rome. From this centre
Rome threw out and informed her various feelers, farther and farther
radiating in all directions, as she swelled out with greatness, drawing
her sustenance first from her sacred hills and groves, then from the
very marbles and granites of the mountains of Asia and Africa, from the
lives of all sorts of peoples, races and nations. And like the Emperor
Constantine, as we are told by Ammianus Marcellinus, on beholding the
Forum from the Rostra of Domitian, stood wonder-stricken, so Tristan,
even at this period of decay, was amazed at the grandeur of the ruins
which bore witness to Rome's former greatness.
The sound of the Angelus, whose silvery chimes permeated the tomb-like
stillness, roused Tristan from his reveries.
He arose and continued upon his way, until he found himself in the
square fronting the ancient Basilica of Constantine.
Notwithstanding the fact that it was a Vigil of the Church, popular
exhibitions of all sorts were set upon the broad flagstones before
St. Peter's. Street dancing girls indulged on every available spot in
those gliding gyrations, so eloquently condemned by the worthy Ammianus
Marcellinus of orderly and historical memory. Booths crammed with
relics of doubtful authenticity, baskets filled with fruits or flowers,
pictorial representations of certain martyrs of the Church, basking
in haloes of celestial light, tempted in every direction the worldly
and unworldly spectators. Cooks perambulated, their shops upon their
backs, merchants shouted their wares, wine-sellers taught Bacchanalian
philosophy from the tops of their casks; poets recited spurious
compositions which they offered for sale; philosophers indulged in
argumentations destined to convert the wavering, or to perplex the
ignorant. Incessant motion and noise seemed to be the sole aim and
purpose of the crowd which thronged the square.
Nothing could be more picturesque than the distant view of the joyous
scene, this Carnival in Midsummer, as it were.
The deep red rays of the westering sun cast their radiance, partly
from behind the Basilica, over the vast multitude in the piazza. In
unrivalled splendor the crimson light tinted the water that purled from
the fountain of Bishop Symmachus. Its roof of gilded bronze, supported
by six porphyry columns, was enclosed by small marble screens on which
griffins were carved, its corners ornamented by gilded dolphins and
peacocks in bronze. The water flowed into a square basin from out
of a bronze pine cone which may have come from Hadrian's Mausoleum.
Bathed in the brilliant glow the smooth porphyry colonnades reflected,
chameleon-like, ethereal and varying hues. The white marble statues
became suffused with delicate rose, and the trees gleamed in the
innermost of their leafy depths as if steeped in the exhalations of a
golden mist.
Contrasting strangely with the wondrous radiance around it, the bronze
pine-tree in the centre of the piazza rose up in gloomy shadow,
indefinite and exaggerated. The wide facade of the Basilica cast its
great depth of shade into the midst of the light which dominated the
scene.
Tristan stood for a time gazing into the glowing sky, then he slowly
made his way towards the Basilica, the edifice which commemorated the
establishment of Christianity as the state religion of Rome, as in its
changes it has reflected every change wrought in the spirit of the new
worship up to the present hour.
CHAPTER XI
THE DENUNCIATION
The Basilica of Constantine no longer retained its pristine splendor,
its pristine purity as in the days, ere the revival of paganism by the
Emperor Julian the Apostate had put a sudden and impressive check upon
the meretricious defilement of the glory, for which it was built.
The exterior began to show signs of decay. The interior, too, had
changed with the inexorable trend of the times. The solemn recesses
were filled with precious relics. Many hued tapers surrounded the
glorious pillars, and eastern tapestries wreathed their fringes round
the massive altars.
As Tristan entered the incense-saturated dusk of St. Peter's, the first
part of the service had just been concluded. The last faint echoes from
the voices in the choir still hovered upon the air, and the silent
crowds of worshippers were still grouped in their listening attitudes
and absorbed in their devotions.
The only light was bestowed by the evening sun, duskily illuminating
the emblazoned windows, or by the glimmer of lamps in distant
shrines, hung with sable velvet and attended each by its own group of
ministering priests.
Struck with an indefinable awe Tristan looked about. At first he only
realized the great space, the four long rows of closely set columns,
and the great triumphal arch which framed the mosaics of the apse,
where Constantine stood in the clouds offering his Basilica to the
Saviour and St. Peter. Then he looked towards the sacred shrines
above the Apostle's grave, where lamps burned incessantly and cast a
dazzling halo above the high altar, reflected in the silver paving of
the presbytery and on the golden gates and images of the Confessio.
Immediately behind the altar was revealed a long panel of gold, studded
with gems and ornaments, with figures of Christ and the Apostles, a
native offering from the Emperor Valentinian III. The high altar and
its brilliant surroundings were seen from the nave between a double row
of twisted marble columns, white as snow. A beam covered with plates of
silver united them and supported great silver images of the Saviour,
the Virgin and the Apostles with lilies and candelabra.
To their shrines, to do homage, had in time come the Kings from all
the earth: Oswy, King of the Northumbrians, Cædwalla, King of the
West Saxons, Coenred, King of the Mercians, and with him his son
Sigher, King of the East Saxons. Even Macbeth is said to have made
the pilgrimage. Ethelwulf came in the middle of the ninth century,
and with him came his son Alfred. In the arcades beneath the columned
vestibule of the Basilica, tomb succeeded tomb. Here the popes were
buried, Leo I, the Great, being first in line, the Saxon Pilgrim Kings,
the Emperors Honorius III and Theodosius II, regarding whom St. John
Chrysostomus has written: "Emperors were proud to stand in the hall
keeping guard at the fisherman's door."
During the interval between the divisions of the service, Tristan,
like many of those present, found his interest directed towards the
relics, which were inclosed in a silver cabinet with crystal doors and
placed above the high altar. Although it was impossible to obtain a
satisfactory view of these ecclesiastical treasures, they nevertheless
occupied his attention till it was diverted by the appearance of a
monk in the habit of the Benedictines, who had mounted the richly
carved pulpit fixed between two pillars.
As far as Tristan was enabled to follow the trend of the sermon it
teemed with allusions to the state of society and religion as it
prevailed throughout the Christian world, and especially in the city
of the Pontiff. By degrees the monk's eloquence took on darker and
more terrible tints, as he seemed slowly to pass from generalities to
personal allusions, which increased the fear and mortification of the
great assembly with every moment.
From the shadows of the shrine, where he had chosen his station,
Tristan was enabled to mark every shade of the emotions which swayed
the multitudes and, as his eyes roamed inadvertently towards the chapel
of the Father Confessor, he saw a continuous stream of penitents enter
the dark passage leading towards the crypts, many of whom were masked.
Turning his head by chance, Tristan's glance fell upon two men who had
apparently just entered the Basilica and paused a few paces away, to
listen to the words which the monk hurled like thunderbolts across the
heads of his listeners. Despite their precaution to wear masks, Tristan
recognized the Grand Chamberlain in the one, while his companion, the
hunchback, appeared rather uncomfortable in the sanctified air of the
Basilica.
Hitherto Odo of Cluny's attacks on the existing state had been general.
Now he glanced over the crowd, as if in quest of some special object,
as with strident voice he declaimed:
"Repent! Death stands behind you! The flag of your glory shall cease
to wave on the towers of your strong citadel. Destruction clamors at
your palace gates, and the enemy that cometh upon you unaware is an
enemy that none shall vanquish or subdue, not even they who are the
mightiest among the mighty. Blood stains the earth and the sky. Its
red waves swallow up the land! The heavens grow pale and tremble! The
silver stars blacken and decay, and the winds of the desert make lament
for that which shall come to pass, ere ever the grapes be pressed or
the harvest gathered. It is a scarlet sea wherein, like a broken and
deserted ship, Rome flounders, never to rise again--"
He paused for a moment and caught his breath hard.
"The Scarlet Woman of Babylon is among us!" he cried. "Hence! accursed
tempter. Thou poisoner of peace, thou quivering sting in the flesh,
destroyer of the strength of manhood! Theodora!--thou abomination--thou
tyrannous treachery! What shall be done unto thee in the hour of
darkness? Put off the ornaments of gold, the jewels, wherewith thou
adornest thy beauty, and crown thyself with the crown of endless
affliction. For thou shalt be girdled about with flame and fire shall
be thy garment. Thy lips that have drunk sweet wine shall be steeped
in bitterness! Vainly shalt thou make thyself fair and call upon thy
legion of lovers. They shall be as dead men, deaf to thine entreaties,
and none shall respond to thy call! None shall hide thee from shame
and offer thee comfort! In the midst of thy lascivious delights shalt
thou suddenly perish, and my soul shall be avenged on thy sins,
queen-courtesan of the earth!"
Scarcely had the last word died to silence when a blinding flash of
lightning rent the gloom followed by a tremendous crash of thunder
that shook the great edifice to its foundation. The bronze portals
opened as of their own accord and a terrific gust of wind extinguished
every light in the thousand-jetted candelabrum. Impenetrable darkness
reigned--thick, suffocating darkness, as the thunder rolled away in
grand, sullen echoes.
There was a momentary lull, then, piercing the profound gloom, came
the cries and shrieks of frightened women, the horrible, selfish
scrambling, struggling and pushing of a bewildered multitude. A
veritable frenzy of fear seemed to possess every one. Groans and sobs,
entreaties and curses from those, who, intent on saving themselves,
were brutally trying to force a passage to the door, the heart-rending,
frantic appeals of the women--all these sounds increased the horror
of the situation, and Tristan, blind, giddy and confused, listened to
the uproar about him with somewhat of the affrighted, panic-stricken
compassion that a stranger in hell might feel, while hearkening to the
ceaseless plaints of the self-tortured damned.
Lost in a dim stupefaction of wonderment, Tristan remained where he
stood, while the crowds rushed from the Basilica. As he was about to
follow in their wake, his gaze was attracted towards the chapel of the
Grand Penitentiary, from which came a number of masked personages while
he, to whose keeping were confided crimes of a magnitude that seemed
beyond the extensive powers of absolution, was barely visible under the
cowl, which was drawn deeply over his forehead.
The thought occurred to Tristan to seek the ear of the Confessor, in as
much as the Pontiff to whom he had hoped to lay bare his heart could
not grant him an audience.
The lateness of the hour and the uncertainty of the fate of the Monk
of Cluny prevented him from following the prompting of the moment and,
staggering rather than walking, Tristan made for the portals of St.
Peter's and walked unseeing into the gathering dusk.
CHAPTER XII
THE CONFESSION
The storm had abated, but the sheen of white lightnings to southward
and the menacing growl of distant thunder that seemed to come from the
bowels of the earth held out promise of renewed upheavals of disturbed
nature.
The streets of Rome were comparatively deserted with the swiftly
approaching dusk, and it occurred to Tristan to seek the Monk of Cluny
in his abode on Mount Aventine whither he had doubtlessly betaken
himself after his sermon in the Basilica of St. Peter's. For ever and
ever the memory of lost Hellayne dominated his thoughts, and, while he
poured out prayers for peace at the shrines of the saints, with the
eyes of the soul he saw not the image of the Virgin, but of the woman
for the sake of whom he had come hither and, having come, knew not
where to find that which he sought.
From a passing friar Tristan learned the direction of Mount Aventine,
where, among the ruins near the newly erected Church of Santa Maria of
the Aventine, Odo of Cluny abode. Tristan could not but marvel at the
courage of the man whose life was in hourly jeopardy and who, in the
face of an ever present menace could put his trust so completely in
Heaven as to brave the danger without even a guard.--
Taking the road indicated by the friar, Tristan pursued his solitary
path. In seeking the Monk of Cluny his purpose was a twofold one,
certainty with regard to his own guilt, in having loved where love was
a crime, and counsel with regard to the woman who, he instinctively
felt, would not stop at her first innuendos.
As Tristan proceeded on his way his feelings and motives became more
and more perplexed, and so lost was he in thought that, without heeding
his way or noting the scattered arches and porticoes, he lost himself
in the wilderness of the Mount of Cloisters. The hush was intensified
rather than broken by the ever louder peals of thunder, which
reverberated through the valleys, and the Stygian darkness, broken at
intervals by vivid flashes of lightning, seemed to hem him in, as a
wall of basalt.
Gradually all traces of a road vanished. On both sides rose woody
acclivities, covered with ruins and melancholy cypresses, whose
spectral outlines seemed to stretch into gaunt immensity, in the sheen
of the lightnings which grew more and more frequent. The wind rose
sobbingly among the trees, and a few scattered rain-drops began to warn
Tristan that a shelter of any sort would be preferable to exposing
himself to the onslaught of the elements.
Entering the first group of ruins he came to, he penetrated through
a series of roofless corridors and chambers into what seemed a dark
cylindrical well at the farther extremity of which there gleamed an
infinitesimal light. Even through the clamor of the storm that raged
outside there came to him the sound of voices from the interior.
Impelled as much by curiosity as by the consideration of his own safety
Tristan crept slowly towards the aperture. As he did so, the light
vanished, but a crimson glow, as of smouldering embers, succeeded,
and heavy fumes of incense, wafted to his nostrils, informed him that
his fears regarding the character of the abode were but too well
founded. He cowered motionless in the gloom until the storm had abated,
determined to return at some time to discover what mysteries the place
concealed.
A fresher breeze had sprung up, driving the thunderclouds to northward,
and from a clear azure the stars shone in undimmed lustre upon the
dreaming world beneath.
For a moment Tristan stood gazing at the immense desolation, the
wilderness of arches, shattered columns and ivy-covered porticoes. The
hopelessness of finding among these relics of antiquity the monk's
hermitage impressed itself at once upon him. Pausing irresolutely,
he would probably have retraced his steps, had he not chanced to see
some one emerge from the adjacent ruins, apparently bound in the same
direction.
Whether it was a presentiment of evil, or whether the fear bred of
the region and the hour of the night prompted the precaution, Tristan
receded into the shadows and watched the approaching form, in whom he
recognized Basil, the Grand Chamberlain. He at once resolved to follow
him and the soft ground aided the execution of his design.
The way wound through a veritable labyrinth of ruins, nevertheless
he kept his eyes on the tall dark form, stalking through the night
before him. At times an owl or bat whirled over his head. With these
exceptions he encountered no living thing among the ruins to break the
hush of the sepulchral desolation.
The distance between them gradually diminished. Tristan saw the other
turn to the right into a wilderness of grottoes, the tortuous corridors
of which were at times almost choked up with weeds and wild flowers,
but when he reached the spot, there was no vestige of a human presence.
Basil had disappeared as if the earth had swallowed him.
Possessed by a sudden fear that some harm might be intended the monk
and remembering certain veiled threats he had overheard against his
life, he proceeded more slowly and cautiously by the dim light of the
stars.
Before long he found himself before a flight of grass grown steps that
led up to a series of desolate chambers which, although roofless
and choked with rank vegetation, still bore traces of their ancient
splendor. These corridors led to a clumsy door, standing half ajar,
from beyond which shone the faint glimmer of a light.
After having reached the threshold Tristan paused.
High, oval-shaped apertures admitted light and air at once, and the
dying embers of a charcoal fire revealed a chamber, singularly void of
all the comforts of existence. Almost in the centre of this chamber,
before a massive stone table, upon which was spread a huge tome, sat
the Monk of Cluny, shading his eyes with his right hand and reading
half aloud.
For a few moments Tristan regarded the recluse breathlessly, as if he
dreaded disturbing his meditations, when Odo suddenly raised his eyes
and saw the dark form standing in the frame of the door.
The look which he bestowed upon Tristan convinced the latter
immediately of the doubt which the monk harbored regarding the quality
of his belated caller, a doubt which he deemed well to disperse before
venturing into the monk's retreat.
Therefore, without abandoning his position, he addressed the inmate of
the chamber and, as he spoke, the tone of his voice seemed to carry
conviction, that the speaker was sincere.
"Your pardon, father," Tristan stammered, "for one who is seeking you
in an hour of grave doubt and misgiving."
The monk's ear had caught the accent of a foreign tongue. He beckoned
to Tristan to enter, rising from the bench on which he had been seated.
"You come at a strange hour," he said, not without a note of suspicion,
which did not escape Tristan. "Your business must be weighty indeed
to embolden one, a stranger on Roman soil, to penetrate the desolate
Aventine when the world sleeps and murder stalks abroad."
"I am here for a singular purpose, father,--having obeyed the impulse
of the moment, after listening to your sermon at St. Peter's."
"But that was hours ago," interposed the monk, resting his hand on the
stone table, as he faced his visitor.
"I lost my way--nor did I meet any one to point it," Tristan replied,
as he advanced and kissed the monk's hand reverently.
"What is your business, my son?" asked the monk.
Tristan hesitated a moment. At last he spoke.
"I came to Rome not of my own desire,--but obeying the will of another
that imposed the pilgrimage. I have sinned, father--and yet there are
moments, when I would almost glory in that which I have done. It was
my purpose, while at St. Peter's to confess to the Grand Penitentiary.
But--I know not why--I chose you instead, knowing that you would give
truth for truth."
The monk regarded his visitor, wondering what one so young and
possessed of so frank a countenance might have done amiss.
"You are a pilgrim?" he queried at last.
"For my sins--"
"Of French descent, yet not a Frenchman--"
Tristan started at the monk's penetration.
"From Provence, father," he stammered, "the land of songs and flowers--"
"And women--" the monk interposed gravely.
"There are women everywhere, father."
"There are women and women. Perchance I should say 'Woman.'"
Tristan bowed his head in silence.
The monk cast a penetrating glance at his visitor. He understood the
gesture and the silence with that quick comprehension that came to him
who was to reform Holy Catholic Church from the abuse of decades--as an
intuition.
"But now, my son, speak of yourself," said the monk after a pause.
"I lived at the court of Avalon, the home of Love and Troubadours."
"Of Troubadours?" the monk interposed dreamily. "A worldly lot--given
to extolling free love and what not--"
"They may sing of love and passion, father, but their lives are pure
and chaste," Tristan ventured to remonstrate.
"You are a Troubadour?" came the swift query.
"In my humble way." Tristan replied with bowed head.
The monk nodded.
"Go on--go on!"
"At the court of Avalon I met the consort of Count Roger de Laval. He
was much absent, on one business or another,--the chase--feuds with
neighboring barons.--He chose me to help the Lady Hellayne to while
away the long hours during his absence--"
"His wife! What folly!"
"The Count de Laval is one of those men who would tempt the heavens
themselves to fall upon him rather than to air himself beneath them.
That his fair young wife, doing his will among men given to the chase
and drinking bouts, and the society of tainted damsels, should long for
something higher, she, whom he regarded with the high air of the lord
of creation--that she should dare dream of some intangible something,
for which she hungered, and craved and starved--"
"If you are about to confess, as I conceive, to a wrong you have done
to this same lord," interposed the monk, "your sin is not less black if
you paint him you have wronged in odious tints."
"Nevertheless I am most sorry to do so, father," Tristan interposed,
"else could I not make you understand to its full extent his folly and
conceit by placing me, a creature of emotion, day by day beside so
fair a being as his young wife. Therefore I would explain."
"It needs some explanation truly!" the monk said sternly.
"The Count de Laval is a man whose conceit is so colossal, father, that
he would never think it possible that any one could fail in love and
admiration at the shrine which he built for himself. A man of supreme
arrogance and self-righteousness."
"Sad, indeed--" mused the monk.
"Our thoughts were pagan, drifting back to the days when the world was
peopled with sylvan creatures--with the deities of field and stream--"
"Mere heathen dreams," interposed the monk. "Go on! Go on!"
"I then felt within myself the impulse to throw forth a minstrelsy
prophetic of a new world resembling that old which had vanished. It was
not to be a mere chant of wrath or exultation--it was to sound the joy
of the earth, of the air, of the sun, of the moon and the stars,--the
song of the birds, the perfume of the flowers--"
"Words that have but little meaning left in this stern world wherein we
dwell--"
"They had meaning for me, father. Also for her. They were to both of
us a bright and mystical ideal, in the fumes of which we steeped our
souls,--our very selves, till our natures seemed to know no hurt,
seemed incapable of evil--"
"Alas--the greater the pity!"
"I was sure of myself. She was sure of me. I loved her. Her presence
was to me as some intoxication of the soul--some rare perfume that
captivates the senses, raising the spirit to heights too rarefied for
breath--"
"And you fell?"
The words came from the monk's lips, slowly, inexorably, as the knell
of fate.
"I--all, but fell!" stammered Tristan. "One day in a chamber far
removed from the inhabited part of the castle we sat and read. And
suddenly she laid her face close to mine and with eyes in whose mystic
depths lurked something more than I had ever seen in them before asked
why, through Fate's high necessity, two should forever wander side by
side, longing for each other--their longing unsatisfied--when the hour
was theirs--"
Again Tristan paused.
The monk regarded him in silence.
"You fell?" the question came again.
"In that moment, father, I was no more myself, no more the one whose
art is sacred and alone upon the mountain summit of his soul. Its
freedom and aspirations were no more. I was undone, a tumbled, wingless
thing. My pride had fled. Long, long I looked into her eyes, and when
she put her wonderful white arms about me, I, in a dizzy moment of
desire, dropped my face to hers. Then was love all uttered. Straightway
I arose. I clasped her in my arms. I kissed--I kissed her--"
The monk regarded him sternly, yet not unkindly.
"It was a sin. Yet--there is more?"
Tristan's hands were clasped.
"One evening in the rose garden--at dusk--the evening on which she sent
me from her--bade me go to Rome to obtain forgiveness for a sin of
which I could not repent."
The monk nodded. "Go on! Go on!"
"The world had fallen away from us. We stood in a grove, our arms about
each other. Suddenly I saw a face. I withdrew my arm, overwhelmed by
all the shame of guilt. The face vanished and, passion overmastering
once more, we touched our lips anew. It was the last time we were to
see each other. I left behind the wondrous silken hair my hands had
touched in our last mad caress. I left behind that tender face and
form. She made no attempt to follow, or to call me back. I hastened
to my chamber, and there I fought anew with all that evil impulse of
my youth, to face the shame, as long as joy endured. If I had sinned
in mind against my high ideal might I not some day recover it and be
purified?"
"What of God and Holy Church?" queried the monk.
"To them I gave no heed, but to my honor. This upheld me."
The monk gave a nod.
"I left Avalon. It seemed as if without her my life were ebbing away. I
joined a pilgrim party, and now my pilgrimage is ended. What must I do
to still this inward craving that will not leave my soul at peace?"
He ended in a sob.
The monk had relapsed into deep thought, and Tristan's eyes were
riveted on the ascetic form in silent dread, as to what would be the
verdict.
At last Odo broke the heavy silence.
"You have committed a grievous sin--adultery--nay, speak not!" he said,
as Tristan attempted to remonstrate against the dire accusation. "The
seed of every act slumbers in the mind ere its pernicious shoots are
manifest in deeds. He who looks upon a woman with the desire to possess
her has already committed adultery with her. Yet--not one in a thousand
would have done so nobly under such temptation!"
The monk's voice betrayed some feeling as he placed his hand on
Tristan's bowed head.
"I shall consider what penances are most fit for one who has
transgressed as you have, my son. It is for your future life--perchance
Holy Orders--"
Tristan raised his head imploringly.
"Not that, father,--not that! I am not fit!"
The monk regarded him quizzically.
"The lust of the eye is mighty and the fever of the world still burns
in your veins, my son, rebelling against the passion that chastens and
purifies. Nevertheless, the Church desires no enforced service. She
wishes to be served through love, not with aversion and fear. Continue
to do penance, implore His forgiveness, and that He may take from you
this worldly desire."
Kissing anew the hand which the monk extended, Tristan arose, after Odo
had made upon him the holy sign.
"I shall obey your behest," he said in a low, broken voice, then
withdrew, while the Monk of Cluny returned to his former pursuit,
unconscious that another had witnessed and overheard the strange
confession from a recess in the wall.
As one in a trance Tristan left the Monk of Cluny, his heart filled
with gratitude for the man who, in the midst of a world of strife and
unrest, had listened to his tale and had not dealt harshly with him,
but had received him sympathetically, even while rebuking the offence.
While the penances imposed upon him were not severe, Tristan chafed
nevertheless under the restraint they laid upon his soul.
What was his future life to be? What new vistas would open before him?
What new impressions would superimpose themselves upon the memories of
the past--the memory of Hellayne?
As he passed the church of Santa Maria of the Aventine, Tristan saw
the portals open. Puzzled over the problems he was face in the days to
come, he entered the dim shadows of the sanctuary.
All that night Tristan knelt in solitary prayer.
The great church was empty and silent, unlit save for the lamp upon the
altar. There Tristan kept his vigil, his tired, tearful eyes upon the
crucifixion, searching his own heart.
The night of silence brought him no vision and shed no light upon his
path. The pale dawn found him still upon his knees before the altar,
his eyes upon the drooping form of the crucified Christ.
Thus the monks found him when they entered for early Matins. At last he
arose, in his sombre eyes a touching resignation and infinite regret.
END OF BOOK THE FIRST
BOOK THE SECOND
CHAPTER I
THE GRAND CHAMBERLAIN
Castel San Angelo, the Tomb of the Flavian Emperor, seemed rather to
have been built for a great keep, a breakwater as it were to stem the
rush of barbarian seas which were wont to come storming down from
the frozen north, than for the resting-place of the former master
of the world. Its constructors had aimed at nothing less than its
everlastingness. So thick were its bastioned walls, so thick the
curtains which divided its inner and outer masonry, that no force of
nature seemed capable of honeycombing or weakening them.
Hidden within its screens and vaults, like the gnawings of a foul and
intricate cancer, ran dark passages which discharged themselves here
and there into dreadful dungeons, or secret places not guessed at in
the common tally of its rooms.
These oubliettes were hideous with blotched and spotted memories,
rotten with the dew of suffering, eloquent in their terror and
corruption and darkness of the cruelty which turned to these walls for
security. The hiss and purr of subterranean fires, the grinding of low,
grated jaws, the flop and echo of stagnant water that oozed from a
stagnant inner moat into vermin-swarming, human-haunted cellars: these
sounds spoke even less of grief than the hellish ferment in the souls
of those who had lorded it in this keep since the fall of the Western
Empire.
On this night there hung an air of menace about the Mausoleum of the
Flavian Emperor which seemed enhanced by the roar and clatter of
the tempest that raged over the seven-hilled city. Snaky twists of
lightning leaped athwart the driving darkness, and deafening peals of
thunder reverberated in deep, booming echoes through the inky vault of
the heavens.
In one of the upper chambers of the huge granite pile, which seemed to
defy the very elements, in a square room, dug out of the very rock,
containing but one window that appeared as a deep wedge in the wall,
piercing to the sheer flank of the tower, there sat, brooding over a
letter he held in his hand, Basil, the Grand Chamberlain.
The drowsy odor of incense, smouldering in the little purple shrine
lamp, robbed the air of its last freshness.
A tunic of dark velvet, fur bound and girt with a belt of finest
Moorish steel, was relieved by an undervest of deepest crimson. Woven
hose to match the tunic ended in crimson buskins of soft leather. The
mantle and the skull cap which he had discarded lay beside him on the
floor, guarded by a tawny hound of the ancient Molossian breed.
By the fitful light of the two waxen tapers, which flickered dismally
under the onslaught of the elements, the inmate of the chamber slowly
and laboriously deciphered the letter. Then he placed it in his
doublet, lapsing into deep rumination, as one who is vainly seeking to
solve a problem that defies solution.
Rising at last from his chair Basil paced the narrow confines of the
chamber, whose crimson walls seemed to form a fitting background for
the dark-robed occupant.
Outside, the storm howled furiously, flinging gusty dashes of rain and
hail against the stone masonry and clattering noisily with every blow
inflicted upon the solid rock.
When, spent by its own fury, the hurricane abated for a moment, the
faint sound of a bell tolling the Angelus could be heard whimpering
through the night.
When Basil had left Theodora after their meeting at the palace, there
had been a darker light in his eyes, a something more ominous of evil
in his manner. While his passion had utterly enslaved him, making
him a puppet in the hands of the woman whose boundless ambition must
inevitably lead her either to the heights of the empire whereof she
dreamed, or to the deepest abyss of hell, Basil was far from being
content to occupy a position which made him merely a creature of her
will and making. To mount the throne with the woman whose beauty had
set his senses aflame, to rule the city of Rome from the ramparts of
Castel San Angelo, as Ugo of Tuscany by the side of Marozia, this was
the dream of the man who would leave no stone unturned to accomplish
the ambition of his life.
In an age where certain dark personalities appeared terribly sane to
their contemporaries, their occult dealings with powers whose existence
none questioned must have seemed terribly real to themselves and to
those who gazed from afar. When the mad were above the sane in power,
and beyond the reach of observation, there was no limit to their
baleful activity.
Basil, from the early days of his youth, had lived in a world of evil
spirits, imaginary perhaps for us, but real enough for those who might
at any moment be at his mercy. Stimulating his mad desire with the
potent drug which the Saracens had brought with them from the scented
East, he pushed his hashish-born imaginings to the very throne of
Evil. His ambition, which was boundless, and centred in the longed for
achievement of a hope too stupendous even for thought, had intimately
connected him with those whose occult researches put them outside the
pale of the Church, and the power he wielded in the shadowy world of
demons was as unchallenged as that which he felt himself wielding in
the tangible world of men.
Among the people there was no end to the dark stories of magic and
poison, some of them real enough, that were whispered about him, and
many a belated rambler looked with a shudder up to the light that
burned in a chamber of his palace on the Pincian Hill till the wee,
small hours of the night. Had he been merely a practitioner of the
Black Arts he would probably long since have ended his career in the
dungeons of Castel San Angelo. But he was safe enough as one of the
great ones of the world, the confidant of the Senator of Rome; safe,
because he was feared and because none dared to oppose his baleful
influence.
Basil pondered, as if the solution of the problem in his mind had at
last presented itself, but had again left him, unsatisfied, in the
throes of doubt and fear.
Rising from his seat he again unfolded the letter and peered over its
contents.
"Can we regain the door by which we have entered?" he soliloquized.
"Can we conquer the phantom that haunts the silent chambers of the
brain? Were it an eye, or a hand, I could pluck it off. However, if I
cannot strangle it, I can conquer it! Shall it forever blot the light
of heaven from my path? Shall I forever suffer and tremble at this
impalpable something--this shade from the abyss--of hell--that is
there--yet not there?"
He paused for a moment in his perambulation, gazing through the narrow
unglazed window into the storm-tossed night without. Now and then a
flash of lightning shot athwart the inky darkness, lighting up dark
recesses and deep embrasures. The sullen roar of the thunder seemed to
come from the bowels of the earth.
And as the Grand Chamberlain walked, as if driven by some invisible
demon, the great Molossian hound followed him about with a stealthy,
noiseless gait, raising its head now and then as if silently inquiring
into its master's mood.
When at length he reseated himself, the huge hound cowered at his feet
and licked its huge paws.
The mood of the woman for whom his lust-bitten soul yearned as it had
never yearned for anything on earth, her words of disdain, which had
scorched his very brain, and, above all, the knowledge that she read
his inmost thoughts, had roused every atom of evil within his soul.
This state of mind was accentuated by the further consideration that
she, of all women whom he had sent to their shame and death, was not
afraid of him. She had even dared to hint at the existence of a rival
who might indeed, in time, supersede him, if he were not wary.
For some time Basil had been vaguely conscious of losing ground in the
favor of the woman whom no man might utterly trust save to his undoing.
The rivalry of Roxaná, who, like her tenth-century prototypes, was but
too eager to enter the arena for Marozia's fateful inheritance, had
poured oil on the flames when Theodora had learned that the Senator
of Rome himself was frequenting her bowers, and she was not slow to
perceive the agency that was at work to defeat and destroy her utterly.
By adding ever new fuel to the hatred of the two women for each other
Basil hoped to clear for himself a path that would carry him to the
height of his aspirations, by compelling Theodora to openly espouse
him her champion. Sooner or later he knew they would ignite under each
other's taunts, and upon the ruins of the conflagration he hoped to
build his own empire, with Theodora to share with him the throne.
Alberic had departed for the shrines of the Archangel at Monte Gargano.
Intent upon the purification of the Church and upon matters pertaining
to the empire, he was an element that needed hardly be reckoned with
seriously. A successful coup would hurl him into the dungeons of his
own keep, perchance, by some irony of fate, into the very cell where
Marozia had so mysteriously and ignominiously ended her career. Once
in possession of the Mausoleum, the Germans and Dalmatians bought and
bribed, he would be the master--unless--
Suddenly the huge beast at his feet raised its muzzle, sniffing the air
and uttering a low growl.
A moment later Maraglia, the Castellan of Castel San Angelo, entered
through a winding passage.
"What brings you here at this hour, with your damned butcher's face?"
Basil turned upon the newcomer who had paused when his gaze fell upon
the Molossian.
The brutal features of Maraglia looked ghastly enough in the flickering
light of the tapers and Basil's temper seemed to deepen their ashen
pallor.
"My lord--it is there again,--in the lower gallery--near the cell where
the Lady Marozia was strangled--"
"By all the furies of Hell! Since when are you in the secrets of the
devil?"
"Since I held the noose, my Lord Basil," replied the warden of the
Emperor's Tomb doggedly. "Though I knew not at the time whose breath
was being shortened. It was all too dark--a night just like this--"
"Perchance your memory, going back to that hour, has retained something
more than the mere surmise," Basil glowered from under the dark,
straight brows. "How many were there?"
"There were three--all masked, my lord. But their voices were their
own--"
"You possess a keen ear, my man, as one, accustomed to dark deeds and
passages, well should," Basil interposed sardonically. "Deem you, in
your undoubted wisdom, the lady has returned and is haunting her former
abode? Once upon a time she was not wont to abide in estate so lowly.
And, they say, she was beautiful--even to her death."
"And well they may," Maraglia interposed. "I saw her but twice. When
she came, and before she died."
"Before she died?"
"And the look she bent upon him who led the execution," Maraglia
continued thoughtfully. "She spoke not once. Dumb and silent she went
to the fishes. When the Lord Alberic arrived, it was all too late--"
"All too late!" Basil interposed sardonically. "The fishes too were
dumb. Profit by their example, Maraglia. Too much wisdom engenders
death."
"The death rattle of one sounds to my ears just like that of another,
my lord," Maraglia replied, quaking under the look that was upon him.
"And the voices of the few who still abide are growing weaker day by
day."
"They shall not much longer annoy your delicate ears," Basil replied.
"The Senator who has found this abode somewhat too draughty has
departed for the holy shrines, to do penance for the death of his
mother. He suspects all was not well. He would know more. Perchance the
Archangel may grant him a revelation. Meanwhile, we must to work. The
new captain appointed by the Senator enters his service on the morrow.
A holy man, much given to contemplation over the mysteries of love. His
attention must be diverted. Every trace of life must be extinct--this
very night. No proofs must be allowed to remain. Meanwhile, what of the
apparition whereof you rave?"
"It is there, my lord, as sure as my soul lives," replied the
castellan. "A shapeless something, preceded by a breath, cold as from a
newly dug grave."
"A shapeless something, say you? Whence comes it and where goes it? For
whose diversion does it perambulate?"
"The astrologer monk perchance who improvises prophecies."
"Then let his improvising damn himself," replied Basil sullenly. "To
call himself inspired and pretend to read the stars! How about his
prophecy now?"
"He holds to it!"
"What! That I have less than one month to live?"
"Just that--no more!"--
Basil gave the speaker a quick glance.
"What niggardly dispensation and presumption withal! This fellow to
claim kinship with the stars! To profess to be in their confidence, to
share the secrets of the heavens while he is smothered by darkness,
utter and everlasting. The heavens mind you, Maraglia! My star! It is a
star of darker red than Mars and crosses Hell--not Heaven! In thought I
watch it every night with sleepless eyes. Is it not well to cleanse the
earth of such lying prophets that truth may have standing room? Where
have you lodged him?"
"In the Hermit's cell--"
"Well done! Thereby he shall prove his asceticism. Let practised
abstinence save him in such a pass! He shall eat his words--an
everlasting banquet. A fat astrologer--by the token--as I hear, was he
not?"
"He was fat when he entered."
"Wretch! Would you starve him? Remember the worms and the fishes--your
friends. Would you cheat them? Hath he foretold his end?"
"Ay--by starvation."
"He lies! You shall take him in extremis and, with your knife in his
throat, give him the lie. An impostor proved. What of the night?"
"It rains and thunders."
"Why should we mind rain and thunder? Lead me to this madman, and,
incidentally, to this phantom that keeps him company. Why do you gape,
Maraglia? Move on! I follow!"
Maraglia was ill at ease, but he dared not disobey. Taking up one
of the candles, he led the way, trembling, his face ashen, his teeth
chattering, as if in the throes of a chill.
Through a panel door in the wall they descended a winding stairway,
leaving the dog behind. The flight conducted them to a private postern,
well secured and guarded inside and out. As they issued from this the
howl of blown rain met and staggered them. Looking up at the cupola of
basalt from the depths of that well of masonry, it seemed to crack and
split in a rush of fusing stars. Basil's mad soul leapt to the call
of the hour. He was one with this mighty demonstration of nature. His
brain danced and flickered with dark visions of power. He appeared to
himself as an angel, a destroying angel, commissioned from on high to
purge the world of lies.
"Take me to this monk!" he screamed through the thunder.
Deep in the foundation of the northeastern crypts the miserable
creature was embedded in a stone chamber as utterly void and empty as
despair. The walls, the floor, the roof were all chiselled as smooth as
glass. There was not a foothold anywhere even for a cat, neither door,
nor traps, nor egress, nor window of any kind save where, just under
the ceiling, the grated opening by which he had been lowered, admitted
by day a haggard ghost of light. And even that wretched solace was
withdrawn as night fell, became a phantom, a diluted whisp of memory,
sank like water into the blackness, and left the fancy suddenly naked
in the self-consciousness of hell. Then the monk screamed like a madman
and threw himself towards the flitting spectre. He fell on the smooth
surface of the polished rock and bruised his limbs horribly. Yet the
very pain was a saving occupation. He struck his skull and revelled in
the agonizing dance of lights the blow procured him. But one by one
they blew out; and in a moment dead negation had him by the throat
again, rolling him over and over, choking him under enormous slabs of
darkness. Gasping, he cursed his improvidence, in not having glued his
vision to the place of the light's going. It would have been something
gained from madness to hold and gloat upon it, to watch hour by hour
for its feeble redawn. Among all the spawning monstrosities of that
pit, with only the assured prospect of a lingering death before him,
the prodigy of eternal darkness quite overcrowded that other of thirst
or starvation.
Yet the black gloom broke, it would seem, before its due. Had he
annihilated time and was this death? He rose rapturously to his feet
and stood staring at the grating, the tears gushing down his sunken
cheeks. The bars were withdrawn, in their place a dim lamp was intruded
and a face looked down.
"Barnabo--are you hungry and a-thirst?"
The voice spoke to him of life. It was the name he had borne in the
world and he wondered who from that world could be addressing him.
He answered quaveringly.
"Of a truth, I am hungry and a-thirst."
"It is a beatitude," replied the voice suavely. "You shall have your
fill of justice."
"Justice!" screamed the prisoner. "I fear it is but an empty phrase."
"Comfort yourself," said the other. "I shall make a full measure of it!
It shall bubble and sparkle to the brim like a goblet of Cyprian. Know
you the wine, monk? A cool fragrant liquid, that gurgles down the arid
throat and brings visions of green meadows and sparkling brooks--"
"I ask no mercy," cried the monk, falling on his knees and stretching
out his lean arms. "Only make an end of it--of this hellish torment."
"Torment?" came the voice from above. "What torment is there in the
vision of the wine cup--or, for that matter, a feast on groaning tables
under the trees? Are you not rich in experiences, Barnabo,--both of
the board and of love? Remember the hours when she lay in your arms,
innocent, save of original sin? Ah! Could she see you now, Barnabo--how
you have changed! No more the elegant courtier that wooed Theodora ere
despair drove you to don the penitential garb and, like Balaam's ass,
to raise your voice and prophesy! Deem you--as fate has thrown her into
these arms of mine--memory will revive the forgotten joys of the days
of long ago?"
"Mercy--demon!" gasped the monk. His swollen throat could hardly shape
the words.
Basil laughed and bent lower.
"Answer me then--you who boast of being inspired from above--you
who listen to the music of the spheres in the dead watches of the
night--tell me then, you man of God--how long am I to live?"
"Monster, relieve me of your sight!" shrieked the unhappy wretch.
"It is the light," mocked Basil. "The light from above. Raise your
voice, monk, and prophesy. You who would hurl the anathema upon Basil,
the Grand Chamberlain, who arrogated to yourself the mission to
purge the universe and to summon me--me--before the tribunal of the
Church--tell me, you, who aspired to take to his bed the spouse of the
devil, till the white lightnings of her passion seared and blasted your
carcass,--tell me--how long am I to live?"
An inarticulate shriek came from within.
"By justice--till the dead rise from their graves."
"Live forever--on an empty phrase?" Basil mocked. "Are you, too,
provisioned for eternity?"
He held out his hand as if he were offering the starving wretch food.
The monk fell on his knees. His lips moved, but no sound was audible.
"Perchance he hath a vision," Basil turned to Maraglia who stood
sullenly by.
"Oh, dull this living agony."
"How long am I to live?"
"Now, hear me, God," screamed the monk. "Let not this man ever again
know surcease from torment in bed, at board, in body or in mind. Let
his lust devour him, let the worm burrow in his entrails, the maggot in
his brain! May death seize and damnation wither him at the moment when
he is nearest the achievement of his fondest hopes!"
Basil screamed him down.
An uncontrollable terror had seized him.
"Silence, beast, or I shall strangle you!"
"Libertine, traitor, assassin--may heaven's lightnings blast you--"
For a moment the two battled in a war of screeching blasphemy.
At the next moment the grate was flung into place, the light whisked
and vanished, a door slammed and the Stygian blackness of the cell
closed once more upon the moaning heap in its midst.
Basil's eyes gleamed like live coals as he turned to Maraglia, who,
quaking and ashen, was babbling a prayer between white lips.
"Make an end of him!" he snarled. "He has lived too long. And now, in
the devil's name, lead the way above!"
A flash of lightning that seemed to rend the very heavens illumined for
a moment the dark and tortuous passage, its sheen reflected through
the narrow port-holes on the blackness of the walls. It was followed
by a peal of thunder so terrific that it shook the vast pile of the
Emperor's Tomb to its foundations, clattering and roaring, as if a
thousand worlds had been rent in twain.
Maraglia, who had preceded the Grand Chamberlain with the taper,
uttered a wild shriek of terror, dropped the light, causing it to be
extinguished and his fleeting steps carried him down a night-wrapped
gallery as fast as his limbs would carry him, utterly indifferent to
Basil's fate in the Stygian gloom.
Paralyzed with terror, the Grand Chamberlain stared into the inky
blackness. For a moment it had seemed to him as if a breath from an
open grave had indeed been wafted to his nostrils.
But it was neither the thunder, nor the lightning, neither the swish of
the rain nor the roar of the hurricane, that had prompted Maraglia's
outcry and precipitate flight and his abject terror, as we shall see.
CHAPTER II
THE CALL OF EBLIS
In the lurid flash that had illumined the gallery, lighting up rows of
cells and deep recesses, Basil had seen, as if risen from the floor,
a black, indefinable shape, wrapped in a long black mantle, the hood
of which was drawn over its face. Through its slits gleamed two eyes,
like live coals. Of small stature and apparently great age, the bent
apparition supported itself by a crooked staff, the fleshless fingers
barely visible under the cover of the ample sleeve, and resembling the
claws of some bird of prey.
At last the terror which the uncanny apparition inspired changed to its
very counterpart, as, defiance in his tone, the Grand Chamberlain made
a forward step.
"Who goes there?--Friend or foe of the Lord Basil?"--
His voice sounded strange in his own ears.
A gibbering response quavered out of the gloom.
"What matters friend or foe as long as you grasp the tenure of power?"
Basil breathed a sigh of relief.
"I ought to know that voice. You are Bessarion?"
"I have waited long," came the drawling reply.
There was a pause brief as the intake of a breath.
"What do you demand?"--
"You shall know in time."
"In time comes death!"
"And more!"
"It is the hour that calls!"
"Are you prepared?"
"Show me what you can do!"
"For this I am here! Are you afraid?"
The air of mockery in the questioner's tone cut the speaker to the
quick.
In the intermittent flashes of lightning Basil saw the shapeless form
cowering before him in the dusk of the gallery, barring the way. But
again it mingled quickly with the darkness.
"Of whom?" Basil queried.
There was another pause.
"Of the Presence!"
"That craven hound Maraglia has upset the light," muttered Basil. "I
cannot see you."
"Can you not feel my presence?" came the gibbering reply.
"Even so!"
"Know you what high powers of night control your life--what dark-winged
messengers of evil fly about you?"
"Your words make my soul flash like a thunder cloud."
"And yet does your power stand firm?"
"It rests on deep dug dungeons, where the light of heaven does not
intrude. I spread such fear in men's white hearts as the craven have
never known."
A faint chuckle came in reply.
"Only last night I saw you in the magic crystal sphere in which I read
the dire secrets of Fate. Above your head flew evil angels. Beneath
your horse's hoofs a corpse-strewn path."
"The time is not yet ripe."
"Time does not wait for him who waits to dare."
An evil light flashed from Basil's eyes.
"What can you do?"
Response came as from the depths of a grave.
"I shall conjure such shapes from the black caves of fear as have not
ventured forth since madness first began to prowl among the human race,
when the torturing dusk drowns every helpless thing in livid waves of
shadow. It is the spirit of your sire that draws the evil legions to
you."
Basil straightened in surprise.
"What know you of him?" he exclaimed. "Dull prayers and fasts and
penances, not such freaks as this, were the only things he thought of."
From the cowled form came a hiss.
"Fool! Not that grunting and omnivorous swine who took the cowl, begat
you! Your veins run with fiery evil direct from its fountainhead. No,
no,--not he!"
"Not he?" shrieked the Grand Chamberlain. "If I am not his progeny,
then whose?"
"Some mighty lord's."
"The Duke of Beneventum?"
"One greater yet."
"King Berengar?"
"One adored by him as his liege."
"Ha! I guess it now! It was Otto the Great, he whose fury gored the
heart of the Romans."
"One greater still."
"Earth hath no greater lord."
"Is there not heaven above and hell below? Your sire rules the millions
who have donned fear's stole forever. He is lord of lords, where all
the lips implore and none reply."
A flash of lightning gleamed through the gallery.
A shadow passed over Basil's countenance, like a swift sailing cloud.
Darkness supervened, impenetrable, sepulchral.
"Well may you cower," gibbered the shape in its inexorable monotone.
"For you came into this life among the death-fed mushrooms that grow
where murder rots. The moon-struck wolves howled for three nights, and
ill-omened birds flapped for three days around the tower where she who
gave you life breathed her last."
A fitful muttering as of souls in pain seemed to pervade the
night-wrapped galleries, with sultry storm gusts breathing inarticulate
evil. No light save the white flash of the lightning revealed now and
then the uncanny form of the speaker. The smell of rotting weeds came
through the crevices of the wall.
When Basil, spell-bound, found no tongue, the dark shape continued:
"Wrapped in midnight's cloak, nine witches down in the castle moat sang
a baptismal hymn of horror as you saw the light. As mighty brazen wings
sounded the roaring of the tempest-churned seas. And above you stood
he who holds the keys to thought's dark chambers, he in whose ranks
the sullen angels serve, whose shadowy dewless wings cast evil on the
world. And I am he whose palace rings with the eternal Never!"
Frozen with terror Basil listened.
The thunder growled ever louder. A vampire's bark stabbed the darkness;
the shriek of witches rose above the tempest, there was a rattling of
bones as if skeletons were rising from their graves. All round the
Emperor's Tomb the ghouls were prowling, and the soulless corpses were
as restless as the fleshless souls that whimpered and moaned in the
night. Giant bats flew to and fro like evil spirits. The great peals
shook the huge pile from vault to summit. The running finger of the
storm scribbled fiery, cabalistical zigzags on the firmament's black
page. And in every peal, louder and louder as the echoes spread, Basil
seemed to hear his name shrieked by the weird powers of darkness, till,
half mad with terror, he cried:
"Away! Away! Your presence flings dark glare like glowing lava--"
"I come across the night," replied the voice, "ere death has made you
mine! Deserve the doom that is prepared for those who do my bidding.
You have shot into my heart a ray of blackest light--"
Basil held out his hands, as if to ward off some unseen assailant.
"Whirl back into the night--" he shrieked, but the voice resumed,
mocking and gibbering.
"Only a coward will shrink from the dreadful boundaries between things
of this earth and things beyond this earth. I have sought you by night
and by day--as fiercely as any of those athirst pant round hell's mock
springs! In the great vaults of wrath, in the sleepless caverns, whose
eternal darkness is only lighted by pools of molten stone that bathe
the lost, where, in the lurid light, the shadows dance--I sit and
watch the lakes of torment, taciturn and lone. I summon you to earthly
power--to the fulfillment of all your heart desires!"--
The voice ceased. All the elements of hell seemed to roar and shriek
around the battlemented walls.
There was a pause during which Basil regained his composure.
At last the dread shadow was looming across his path. An undefined awe
crept over him, such as dark chasms instill; an awe at his own self.
He would fain have been screened from his own substance. By degrees he
welcomed the tidings with a dark rapture. In himself lay the substance
of Evil. It was not the Angel of Light that ruled the reeling universe.
It was the shadow of Eblis looming dark and terrible over the lives of
men. Long before he had ever guessed what rills of flaming Phlegethon
ran riot in his veins, had he not felt his pulses swell with joy at
human pain, had he not played the fiend untaught? Could not the
Fiend, as well as God, live incarnate in human clay? Was not the earth
the meeting ground of Heaven and Hell? And why should not he, Basil,
defying Heaven, be Hell's incarnation?--
Ay--but the day of death and the day of reckoning! Would his parentage
entail eternal fire, or princely power and sway in the dark vaults of
nameless terror? Should he quail or thrill with awful exaltation?
"And--in return for that which I offer up--King of the dark red
glare--will you give to me what I crave--boundless power and the woman
for which my soul is on fire?"
"Have you the courage to snatch them from the talons of Fate?" came
back the gibbering reply.
A blinding flash of lightning was succeeded by an appalling crash of
thunder.
"From Hell itself!" shrieked Basil frenzied. "Give me Theodora and I
will fill the cup of torture that I have seized on your shadowy altars,
and quaff your health at the terrific banquet board of Evil in toasts
of torment--in wine of boundless pain!"
In the quickly succeeding flashes of lightning the dark form seemed to
rise and to expand.
"I knew you would not fail me! Come!"
For a moment Basil hesitated, fingering the hilt of his poniard.
"Where would you lead me?" he queried, his tone far from steady. "How
many of these twilights must I traverse before I see him whom you
serve?"
"That you shall know to-night!"
In the deep and frozen silence which succeeded the terrible peals of
thunder their retreating footsteps died to silence in the labyrinthine
galleries of the Emperor's Tomb.
Only the dog-headed Anubis seemed to stare and nod mysteriously.
CHAPTER III
THE CRYSTAL SPHERE
Outwardly and in daylight there was nothing noticeable about the sixth
house in the Lane of the Sclavonians in Trastevere beyond the fact that
it was a dwelling of a superior kind to those immediately surrounding
it, which were chiefly ill-favored cottages of fishermen and boatmen,
and had about it an air of almost sombre retirement.
It stood alone within a walled court, containing a few shrubs. The
windows were few, high and narrow, and the front bore a rather
forbidding appearance. One ascending to the flat roof would have found
it to command on the left a desolate view of a square devoted to
executions, and on the right a scarcely more cheerful prospect over the
premises belonging to the convent of Santa Maria in Trastevere. Had
the visitor been farther able to penetrate into the principal chamber
of the first floor, on the night of the scene about to be related, he
might indeed have found himself well repaid for his trouble.
This chamber, which was of considerable size and altogether devoid of
windows, being lighted during the daytime by a skylight, carefully
blinded from within, was now duskily illumined by a transparent device
inlaid into the end wall and representing the beams of the rising moon
gleaming from a sky of azure. The extremity of the room, which fronted
the symbol, was semi-circular and occupied by a narrow table, before
which moved a tall, shadowy form that paused now and then before a
fire of fragrant sandal wood, which burned in a brazen tripod, passing
his fingers mechanically, as it would seem, through the bluish flame.
In its unsteady flicker the strange figures on the walls, which had
defied the decree of Time, seemed to nod fantastically when touched by
a fitful ray.
This was Hormazd, the Persian, the former confidant and counsellor of
Marozia, in the heyday of her glory. In those days he had held forth
in a turret chamber on the summit of Castel San Angelo, where he would
read the stars and indulge his studies in the black arts to his heart's
content. Driven forth by Alberic, after Marozia's fall, the Persian had
taken up his abode in the Trastevere, where he continued to serve those
who came to him for advice, or on business that shunned the light of
day.
Now and then the Oriental bent his tall, spare form over a huge tome
which lay open upon the table, the inscrutable, ascetic countenance
with the deep, brilliant eyes seemingly plunged in deep, engrossing
thought, but in reality listening intently, as for the approach of some
belated caller.
The soft patter of hurried footsteps on the floor of the corridor
without soon rewarded his attention. The rustle of a woman's silken
garments caused him to give a start of surprise. A heavy curtain was
raised and she glided noiselessly into his presence.
The woman's face was covered with a silken vizor, but her coronet of
raven hair no less than the matchless figure, outlined against the
crimson glow, at once proclaimed her rank.
The first ceremony of silent greeting absolved, the Persian's visitor
permitted the black silken cloak which had enveloped her from head to
toe, to fall away, revealing a form exquisitely proportioned. The ivory
pallor of the throat, which rose like a marble column from matchless
shoulders, and the whiteness of the bare arms, seemed even enhanced by
the dusky background whose incense-laden pall seemed to oppress the
very walls.
"I am trusting you to-night with unreserved confidence," the woman
spoke in her rich, vibrant voice. "Many serve me from motives of
selfishness and fear. Do you serve me, because I trust you."
She laid her white hand frankly upon his arm and the Persian, isolated
above and below the strongest impulses of humanity, shivered under her
touch.
"What is it you desire?" he questioned after a pause.
"If you possess the knowledge with which the vulgar credit you," the
woman said slowly, not without an air of mockery in her tone, "I hardly
need reveal to you the motives which prompted this visit! You knew
them, ere I came, even as you knew of my coming!"
"You speak truly," said Hormazd slowly, now completely master of
himself. "For even to the hour it was revealed to me!"
The woman scanned him with a searching look.
"Yet I had confided in none!" she said musingly. "Tell me then who I
am!"
"You are Theodora!"
"When have we met before?"--
"Not in this life, but in a previous existence. Our souls touched then,
predestined to cross each other on a future plane."
She removed her silken vizor and faced him.
The dark eyes at once challenged and besought. No sculptor could have
chiselled those features on which a divinity had recklessly squandered
all it had to bestow for good or for evil. No painter could have
reproduced the face which had wrought such havoc in the hearts of men.
Like summer lightnings in a dark cloudbank, all the emotions of the
human soul seemed to have played therein and left it again, forging it
in the fires of passion, but leaving it more beautiful, more mysterious
than before.
The Oriental regarded her in silence, as she stood before him in the
flickering flame of the brazier.
"In some previous existence, you say?" she said with dreamy interest.
"Who was I then--and who were you?"
"Two driftless spirits on the driftless sea of eternity," he replied
calmly. "Foredoomed to continue our passage till our final destiny be
fulfilled."
"And this destiny is known to you?"
"Else I had watched in vain. But you--queen and sorceress--do you
believe in the message?"
She pondered.
"I believe," she said slowly, "that we make for ourselves the destiny
to which hereafter we must submit. I believe that some dark power can
foretell that destiny, and more--compel it!"--
Hormazd bowed ever so slightly. There was a dawning gleam of satire in
his brilliant eyes, a glimpse which was not lost on her.
Again the question came.
"What is it you desire?"
Theodora gave an inscrutable smile that imparted to her features a
singular softness and beauty, as a ray of sunlight falling on a dark
picture will brighten the tints with a momentary warmth of seeming life.
"I was told," she spoke slowly, as if trying to overcome an inward
dread, "that you are known in Rome chiefly as being the possessor of
some mysterious internal force which, though invisible, is manifest to
all who place themselves under your spell! Is it not so?"
The Persian bowed slightly.
"It may be that I have furnished the Romans with something to talk
about besides the weather; that I have made a few friends, and an
amazing number of enemies--"
"The latter argues in your favor," Theodora interposed. "They say,
furthermore, that by this same force you are enabled to disentangle the
knots of perplexity that burden the overtaxed brain."
Hormazd nodded again and the sinister gleam of his eyes did not escape
Theodora's watchful gaze.
"If this be so," the woman continued, "if you are not an impostor who
exhibits his tricks for the delectation of the rabble, or for sordid
gain--exert your powers upon me, for something, I know not what, has
frozen up the once overflowing fountain of life."
The Oriental regarded her intently.
"You have the wish to be deluded--even into an imaginary happiness?"
Theodora gave a start.
"You have expressed what I but vaguely hinted. It may be that I
am tired"--she passed her hand across her brow with a troubled
gesture--"or puzzled by some infinite distress of living things.
Perchance I am going mad--who knows? But, whatever the cause, you,
if report be true, possess the skill to ravish the mind away from
its trouble, to transport it to a radiant Elysium of illusions and
ecstasies. Do this for me, as you have done it for another, and,
whatever payment you demand, it shall be yours!"
She ceased.
Faintly through the silence came the chimes of convent bells from the
remote regions of the Aventine, pealing through the fragrant summer
night above the deep boom of distant thunder that seemed to come as
from the bowels of the earth.
Hormazd gave his interrogator a swift, searching glance, half of pity,
half of disdain.
"The great eastern drug should serve your turn," he replied
sardonically. "I know of no other means wherewith to stifle the voice
of conscience."
Theodora flushed darkly.
"Conscience?" she flashed in resentful accents.
The Persian nodded.
"There is such a thing. Do you profess to be without one?"
Theodora's eyes endeavored to pierce the inscrutable mask before her.
The ironical curtness of the question annoyed her.
"Your opinion of me does little honor to your wisdom," she said after a
pause.
"A foul wound festers equally beneath silk and sack-cloth," came the
dark reply.
"How know you that I desire relief from this imaginary malady?"
The Oriental gave a shrug.
"Why does Theodora come to the haunts of the Persian? Why does she ask
him to mock and delude her, as if it were his custom to make dupes of
those who appeal to him?"
"And are they not your dupes?" Theodora interposed, her face a deeper
pallor than before.
"Of that you shall judge after I have answered your questions," Hormazd
returned darkly. "There are but two things in life that will prompt a
woman like Theodora to seek aid of one like myself."--
"You arouse my curiosity!"
"Disappointment in power--or love!"
There was a silence.
"Will you help me?"
She was pleading now.
The Oriental sparred for time. It was not his purpose to commit himself
at once.
"I am but one who, long severed from the world, has long recognized
its vanities. My cures are for the body rather than the soul."
Theodora's face hardened into an expression of scorn.
"Am I to understand that you will do nothing for me?" she said in a
tone which convinced the Persian that the time for dallying was past.
The words came slowly from his lips.
"I can promise you neither self-oblivion nor visionary joys. I possess
an internal force, it is true, a force which, under proper control,
overpowers and subdues the material, and by exerting this I can, if
I think it well to do so, release your soul, that inner intelligence
which, deprived of its mundane matter, is yourself, from its house of
clay and allow it a brief interval of freedom. But--what in that state
its experience may be, whether joy or sorrow, I cannot foretell."
"Then you are not the master of the phantoms you evoke?"
"I am merely their interpreter!"
She looked at him steadfastly as if pondering his words.
"And you profess to be able to release the soul from its abode of clay?"
"I do not profess," he said quietly. "I can do so!"
"And with the success of this experiment your power ceases? You cannot
tell whether the imprisoned creature will take its course to the
netherworld of suffering, or a heaven of delight?"
"The liberated soul must shift for itself."
"Then begin your incantations," Theodora exclaimed recklessly. "Send
me, no matter where, so long as I escape from this den of the world,
this dungeon with one small window through which, with the death rattle
in our throats, we stare vacantly at the blank, unmeaning horror of
life. Prove to me that the soul you prattle of exists, and if mine can
find its way straight to the mainsprings of this revolving creation, it
shall cling to the accursed wheels and stop them, that they may grind
out the torture of life no more."
She stood there, dark, defiant, beautiful with the beauty of the fallen
angel. Her breath came and went quickly. She seemed to challenge some
invisible opponent.
The tall sinewy form by her side watched her as a physician might watch
in his patient the workings of a new disease, then Hormazd said in low
and tranquil tones:
"You are in the throes of your own overworked emotions. You are seeking
to obtain the impossible--"
"Why taunt me?" she flashed. "Cannot your art supply the secret in
whose quest I am?"
The Persian bowed, but kept silent.
Again, with the shifting mood, the rare, half-mournful smile shone in
Theodora's face.
"Though you may not be conscious of it," she said, laying her white
hand on his trembling arm, "something impels me to unburden my heart to
you. I have kept silence long."
Hormazd nodded.
"In the world one must always keep silence, veil one's grief and force
a smile with the rest. Is it not lamentable to think of all the pent-up
suffering, the inconceivably hideous agonies that remain forever
unrevealed? Youth and innocence--"
Theodora raised her arm.
"Was I ever--what they call--innocent?" she interposed musingly. "When
I was young--alas, how long it seems, though I am but thirty--the dream
of my life was love! Perchance I inherited it from my mother. She was a
Greek, and she possessed that subtle quality that can never die. What I
was--it matters not. What I am--you know!"
She raised herself to her full height.
"I long for power. Men are my puppets. And I long for love! I have
sought it in all shapes, in every guise. But I found it not. Only
disillusion--disappointment have been my share. Will my one desire be
ever fulfilled?"
"Some day you shall know," he said quietly, keeping his dark gaze upon
her.
"I doubt me not I shall! But--when and where? Tell me then, you who
know so much! When and where?"
Hormazd regarded her quizzically, but made no immediate reply.
After a time she continued.
"Some say you are the devil's servant! Show me then your power. Read
for me my fate!"
She looked at him with an air of challenge.
"It was not for this you came," the Persian said calmly, meeting the
gaze of those mysterious wells of light whose appeal none had yet
resisted whom she wished to bend to her desires.
The woman turned a shade more pale.
"Then call it a whim!"
"What will it avail?"
Her eyes flashed.
"My will against--that other."
A flash of lightning was reflected on the dark walls of the chamber.
The thunder rolled in grand sullen echoes down the heavens.
She heard it not.
"What are you waiting for?" she turned to Hormazd.
There was a note of impatience in her tone.
"You are of to-day--yet not of to-day! Not of yesterday, nor to-morrow.
To some in time comes love--"
"But to me?"
His voice sank to a frozen silence.
She stood, gazing at him steadily. She was very pale, but the smile of
challenge still lingered on her lips.
"But to me?" she repeated.
He regarded her darkly.
"To you? Who knows?--Some day--"
"Ah! When my fate has chanced! Are you a cheat then, like the rest?"
He was silent, as one in the throes of some great emotion. She took a
step towards him. He raised both hands as if to ward her off. His eyes
saw shapes and scenes not within the reach of other's ken.
"Tell me the truth," she said calmly. "You cannot deceive me!"
Hormazd sprinkled the cauldron with some white powder that seethed and
hissed as it came in contact with the glowing metal and began to emit a
dense smoke, which filled the interior of the chamber with a strange,
pungent odor.
Then he slowly raised one hand until it touched Theodora. Dauntless
in spirit, her body was taken by surprise, and as his clammy fingers
closed round her own she gave an involuntary start. With a compelling
glance, still in silence, he looked into her face.
A strange transformation seemed to take place.
She was no longer in the chamber, but in a grove dark with trees and
shrubbery. A dense pall seemed to obscure the skies. The atmosphere was
breathless. Even as she looked he was no longer there. Great clouds of
greenish vapor rolled in through the trees and enveloped her so utterly
as to shut out all vision. It was as if she were alone in some isolated
spot, far removed from the ken of man. She was conscious of nothing
save the insistent touch of his hand upon her arm.
Gradually, as she peered into the vapors, they seemed to condense
themselves into a definite shape. It was that of a man coming towards
her, but some invisible agency seemed ever to retard his approach. In
fact the distance seemed not to lessen, and suddenly she saw her own
self standing by, vainly straining her gaze into space, indescribable
longing in her eyes.
A flash of lightning that seemed to rend the vault of heaven was
followed by so terrific a peal of thunder that it seemed to shake the
very earth.
A shriek broke from Theodora's lips.
"It is he! It is he!" she cried pointing to the curtain. Hormazd
turned, hardly less amazed than the woman. He distinctly saw, in the
recurrent flash, a face, pale and brooding, framed by the darkness, of
which it seemed a part.
At the next moment it was gone, as if it had melted into air.
Theodora's whole body was numb, as if every nerve had been paralyzed.
The Persian was hardly less agitated.
"Is it enough?" she heard Hormazd's deep voice say beside her.
She turned, but, though straining her eyes, she could not see him. The
flame in the tripod had died down. She was trembling from head to foot.
But her invincible will was unshaken.
"Nay," she said, and her voice still mocked. "Having seen the man my
soul desires, I must know more. The end! I have not seen the end! Shall
I possess him? Speak!"
"Seek no more!" warned the voice by her side. "Seek not to know the
end!"
She raised herself defiantly.
"The end!"
He made no reply. She saw the white vapors forming into faces. The hour
and the place of the last vision were not clear. She saw but the man
and herself, standing together at some strange point, where time seemed
to count for naught.
Between them lay a scarf of blue samite.
After a protracted silence a moan broke from Theodora's lips.
The Persian took no heed thereof. He did not even seem to hear. But,
beneath those half-closed lids, not a movement of the woman escaped his
penetrating gaze. Though possessed with a vague assurance of his own
dark powers, controlled by his nerve and coolness, Hormazd could read
in that fair, inscrutable face far more than in the magic scrolls.
And as he scanned it now, from under half-shut lids, it was fixed and
rigid as marble, pale, too, with an unearthly whiteness. She seemed to
have forgotten his presence. She seemed to look into space, yet even as
he gazed, the expression of that wonderfully fair face changed.
Theodora's eyes were fierce, her countenance bore a rigid expression,
bright, cold, unearthly, like one who defies and subdues mortal pain.
The tools of love and ambition are sharp and double-edged, and Hormazd
knew it was safer to trust to wind and waves than to the whims of woman.
But already her mood had changed and her face had resumed its habitual
expression of inscrutable repose.
"Is it the gods or the devil who sway and torture us and mock at our
helplessness?" she turned to the Oriental, then, without waiting his
reply, she concluded with a searching glance that seemed to read his
very heart.
"Report speaks true of you. Unknowingly, unwittingly you have pointed
the way. Farewell!"
Long after she had disappeared Hormazd stared at the spot where her
swiftly retiring form had been engulfed by the darkness. Then, weighing
the purse, which she had left as an acknowledgment of his services, and
finding it sufficiently heavy to satisfy his avarice, the Persian stood
for a time wrapped in deep thoughts.
"That phantom at least I could not evoke!" he muttered to himself. "Who
dares to cross the path of Hormazd?"
The thunder seemed to answer, for a crash that seemed to split the
seven hills asunder caused the house to rock as with the force of an
earthquake.
With a shudder the Persian extinguished the fire in the brazier and
retreated to his chamber, while outside thunder and lightning and rain
lashed the summer night with the force of a tropical hurricane.
CHAPTER IV
PERSEPHONÉ
It was not Tristan's other self, conjured by the Persian from the
mystic realms of night which Theodora had seen outlined against the
dark curtain that screened the entrance into the Oriental's laboratory.
The object of her craving had, indeed, been present in the body,
seeking in the storm that suddenly lashed the city the shelter of an
apparently deserted abode. Thus he had unwittingly strayed into the
domain of the astrologer, finding the door of his abode standing ajar
after Theodora had entered.
A superstition which was part and parcel of the Persian's character,
caused the latter to regard the undesired presence in the same light
as did Theodora, the more so as, for the time, it served his purpose,
although, when the woman had departed, he was puzzled no little over
a phenomenon which his skill could not have conjured up. Tristan had
precipitately retreated, so soon as the woman's outcry had reached his
ear, convinced that he had witnessed some unholy incantation which must
counteract the effect of the penances he had just concluded and during
the return from which the tempest had overtaken him.
Thoroughly drenched he arrived at the Inn of the Golden Shield and
retired forthwith, wondering at the strange scene which he had
witnessed and its import.
Tristan arose early on the following day.
On the morrow he was to enter the service of the Senator of Rome, who
had departed on his pilgrimage to the shrines of Monte Gargano.
Tristan resolved to make the most of his time, visiting the sanctuaries
and fitly preparing himself to be worthy of the trust which Alberic had
reposed in him. Yet his thoughts were not altogether of the morrow.
Once again memory wandered back to the sunny days in Provence, to the
rose garden of Avalon, and to one who perchance was walking alone in
the garden, along the flower-bordered paths where he had found and lost
his greatest happiness.--
Persephoné meanwhile had not been idle. It pleased her for once to
propitiate her mistress, and through her own spies she had long been
informed of Tristan's movements, being not altogether averse to
starting an intrigue on her own account, if her mistress should fail
sufficiently to impress the predestined victim. Her own beauty could
achieve no less.
Drawing a veil about her head and shoulders so as effectually to
conceal her features, she proceeded to thread her way through the
intricate labyrinth of Roman thoroughfares. When she reached her
destination she concealed herself in a convenient lurking place from
which she took care not to emerge till she had learned all she wished
from one who had dogged Tristan's footsteps all these weary days.
"What do you want with me?" asked the latter somewhat disturbed by her
sudden appearance, as he came out of the little temple church of San
Stefano in Rotondo on the brow of the Cælian Hill.
Persephoné had raised her veil and in doing so had taken care to reveal
her beautiful white arms.
"I am unwelcome doubtless," she replied, after a swift glance had
convinced her that there was no one near to witness their meeting.
"Nevertheless you must come with me--whether you will or no. We Romans
take no denial. We are not like your pale, frozen women of the North."
Subscribing readily to this opinion, Tristan felt indignant,
nevertheless, at her self-assurance.
"I have neither time nor inclination to attend upon your fancies," he
said curtly, trying to pass her. But she barred his passage.
"As for your inclination to follow me," Persephoné laughed--"that is a
matter for you to decide, if you intend to prosper in your new station."
She paused a moment, with a swift side glance at the man. Persephoné
had not miscalculated the effect of her speech, for Tristan had started
visibly at her words and the knowledge they implied.
"As for your time," Persephoné continued sardonically, "that is another
matter. No doubt there are still a few sanctuaries to visit," she said
suggestively, with tantalizing slowness and a tinge of contempt in
her tones that was far from assumed. "Though I am puzzled to know why
one of your good looks and courage should creep like a criminal from
shrine to shrine, when hot life pulsates all about us. Are your sins so
grievous indeed?"
She could see that the thrust had pierced home.
"This is a matter you do not understand," he said, piqued at her
persistence. "Perchance my sins are grievous indeed."
"Ah! So much the better," Persephoné laughed, showing her white teeth
and approaching a step closer. "The world loves a sinner. What it
dislikes is the long-faced repentant transgressor. You are a man after
all--it is time enough to become a saint when you can no longer enjoy.
Come!"
And the white arm stole forth and a white hand took hold of his mantle.
Every word of the Circassian seemed to sting Tristan like a wasp. His
whole frame quivered with anger at her taunts, but he scorned to show
it, and putting a strong constraint upon his feelings he only asked
quietly:
"What would you with me? Surely it was not to tell me this that you
have tracked me hither."
Persephoné thought she had now brought the metal to a sufficiently
high temperature for fusion. She proceeded to mould it accordingly.
Nevertheless she was determined to gain some advantage for herself in
executing her mistress' behest.
"I tracked you here," she said slowly, "because I wanted you! I wanted
you, because it is in my power to render you a great service. Listen,
my lord,--you must come with me! It is not every man in Rome who would
require so much coaxing to follow a good-looking woman--"
She looked very tempting as she spoke, but her physical charms were
indeed sadly wasted on the pre-occupied man before her, and if she
expected to win from him any overt act of admiration or encouragement,
she was to be woefully disappointed.
"I cannot follow you," he said. "My way lies in another direction.
Besides--you have said it yourself--I am now in the service of another."
"That is the very reason," she interposed. "Have you ever stopped to
consider the thousand and one pitfalls which your unwary feet will
encounter when you--a stranger--unknown--hated perchance--attempt to
wield the authority entrusted to you? What do you know of Rome that you
should hope to succeed when he, who set you in this hazardous place,
cannot quell the disturbances that break out between the factions
periodically?"
"And why should you be disposed to confer upon me such a favor?"
Tristan asked with instinctive caution. "I am a stranger to you. What
have we in common?"
Persephoné laughed.
"Perchance I am in love with you myself--ever since that night when you
would not enter the forbidden gates. Perchance you may be able to serve
me in turn--some day. How cold you are! Like the frozen North! Come!
Waste no more time, if you would not regret it forevermore."--
There was something compelling in her words that upset Tristan's
resolution.
Still, he wavered.
"You have seen my mistress," Persephoné resumed, "the fairest woman
and the most powerful in Rome--a near kinswoman, too, of your new
master--the Senator."
The words startled Tristan.
"It needs but a word from her to make you what she pleases," she
continued, as they delved into the now darkening streets. "She is
headstrong and imperious and does not brook resistance to her will."
Tristan remembered certain words Alberic had spoken to him at their
final parting. It behooved him to be on his guard, yet without making
of Theodora an open enemy. "Be wary and circumspect," had been the
Senator's parting words.
"Did the Lady Theodora send you for me?" he asked, with some anxiety in
his tone. "And how did you know where to find me in a city like this?"
"I know a great many things--and so does my mistress," Persephoné made
smiling reply. "But she does not choose every one to be as wise as she
is. I will answer both your questions though, if you will answer one
of mine in return. The Lady Theodora did not mention you by name,"
Persephoné prevaricated, "yet I do not think there is another man in
Rome who would serve her as would you.--And now tell me in turn.--Deem
you not, she is very beautiful?"
"The Lady Theodora is very beautiful," Tristan replied with a
hesitation that remained not unremarked. "Yet, what is there in common
between two strangers from the farthest extremities of the earth?"
"What is there in common?" Persephoné smiled. "You will know ere an
hour has sped. But, if you would take counsel from one who knows, you
will do wisely to ponder twice before you choose--your master. Silence
now! Step softly, but follow close behind me! It is very dark under the
trees."
They had arrived on Mount Aventine. Before them, in the dusk, towered
the great palace of Theodora.
After cautioning him, Persephoné led Tristan through a narrow door in a
wall and they emerged in a garden. They were now in a fragrant almond
grove where the branches of the trees effectually excluded the rays of
the rising moon, making it hardly possible to distinguish Persephoné's
tall and lithe form.
Presently they emerged upon a smooth and level lawn, shut in by a
black group of cedars, through the lower branches of which peeped the
crescent moon and, turning the corner of a colonnade, they entered
another door which opened to Persephoné's touch and admitted them into
a long dark passage with a lamp at the farther end.
"Stay here, while I fetch a light," Persephoné whispered to Tristan
and, gliding away, she presently returned, to conduct him through a
dark corridor into another passage, where she stopped abruptly and,
raising some silken hangings, directed him to enter.
"Wait here. I will announce you."--
CHAPTER V
MAGIC GLOOMS
Floods of soft and mellow light dazzled Tristan's eyes at first, but
he soon realized the luxurious beauty of the retreat into which he had
been ushered. It was obvious that, despite a decadent age, all the
resources of wealth had been drawn upon for its decoration. The walls
were painted in frescoes of the richest colorings and represented the
most alluring scenes. Around the cornices, relics of imperial Rome,
nymphs and satyrs in bas-relief danced hand in hand, wild woodland
creatures, exultant in all the luxuriance of beauty and redundancy of
strength; and yonder, where the lamp cast its softest glow upon her,
stood a marble statue of Venus Anadyomené, her attitude expressive of
dormant passion lulled by the languid insolence of power and tinged
with an imperious coquetry, the most alluring of all her charms.
Tristan moved uneasily in his seat, wishing that he had not come,
wondering how he had allowed himself to be thus beguiled, wondering
what it was all about, when a rustling of the hangings caused him to
turn his head. There was no more attraction now in bounding nymph or
marble enchantress. The life-like statue of Venus was no longer the
masterpiece of the chamber for there, in the doorway, appeared Theodora
herself.
Tristan rose to his feet, and thus they stood, confronting each other
in the subdued light--the hostess and her guest--the assailant and the
assailed.
Theodora trembled in every limb, yet she should have remained the
calmer of the two, inasmuch as hers could scarcely have been the
agitation of surprise. Such a step indeed, as she had taken, she had
not ventured upon without careful calculation of its far reaching
effect. Determined to make this obstinate stranger pliable to her
desires, to instill a poison into his veins which must, in time, work
her will, she had deliberately commanded Persephoné to conduct him to
this bower, the seductive air of which no one had yet withstood.
Theodora was the first to speak, though for once she hardly knew how
to begin. For the man who stood before her was not to be moulded by a
glance and would match his will against her own. Such methods as she
would have employed under different circumstances would here and now
utterly fail in their intent. For once she must not appear the dominant
factor in Rome, rather a woman wronged by fate, mankind and report. Let
her beauty do the rest.
"I have sent for you," she said, "because something tells me that I
can rely implicitly on your secrecy. From what I have seen of you, I
believe you are incapable of betraying a trust."
Theodora's words had the intended effect. Tristan, expecting reproach
for his intentional slight of her advances, was thrown off his guard
by the appeal to his honor. His confusion at the sight of the woman's
beauty, enhanced by her gorgeous surroundings, was such that he did but
bow in acknowledgment of this tribute to his integrity.
Theodora watched him narrowly, never relinquishing his gaze, which
wandered unconsciously over her exquisite form, draped in a diaphanous
gown which left the snowy arms and hands, the shoulders and the round
white throat exposed.
"I have been told that you have accepted service with the Lord Alberic,
who has offered to you, a stranger, the most important trust in his
power to bestow."
Tristan bowed assent.
"The Lord Alberic has rewarded me, far beyond my deserts, for ever so
slight a service," he replied, without referring to the nature of the
service.
Theodora nodded.
"And you--a stranger in the city, without counsellor--without friend.
Great as the honor is, which the Senator has conferred upon you--great
are the pitfalls that lurk in the hidden places. Doubtlessly, the
Lord Alberic did not bestow his trust unworthily. And, in enjoining
above all things watchfulness--he has doubtlessly dropped a word of
warning regarding his kinswoman," here Theodora dropped her lids, as
if she were reluctantly touching upon a distasteful subject, "the Lady
Theodora?"
As suddenly as she had dropped her lids as suddenly her eyes sank into
the unwary eyes of Tristan. The scented atmosphere of the room and the
woman's nearness were slowly creeping into his brain.
"The Lord Alberic did refer to the Lady Theodora," he stammered, loth
to tell an untruth, and equally loth to wound this beautiful enigma
before him.
"I thought so!" Theodora interposed with a smile, without permitting
him to commit himself. "He has warned you against me. Admit it, my Lord
Tristan. He has put you on your guard. And yet--I fain would be your
friend--"
"The Lord Alberic seems to count you among his enemies," Tristan
replied. The mention of an accepted fact could not, to his mind, be
construed into betraying a confidence.
Theodora smiled sadly.
"The Lord Alberic has been beguiled into this sad attitude by one who
was ever my foe, perchance, even his. Time will tell. But it was not
to speak of him that I summoned you hither. It is because I would
appear lovable in your eyes. It is, because I am not indifferent to
your opinion, my Lord Tristan. Am I not rash, foolish, impulsive, in
thus placing myself in the power of one who may even now be planning
my undoing? One who on a previous occasion so grievously misjudged my
motives as to wound me so cruelly?"
The woman's appeal knocked at the portals of Tristan's heart. Would
she but state her true purpose, relieve this harrowing suspense. She
had propounded the question with a deepening color, and glances that
conveyed a tale. And it was a question somewhat difficult to answer.
At last he spoke, stammeringly, incoherently:
"I shall try to prove myself worthy of the Lady Theodora's confidence."
She seemed somewhat disappointed at the coldness of his answer,
nevertheless her quick perception showed her where she had scored a
point, in making an inroad upon his heart. And her critical eye could
not but approve of the proud attitude he assumed, the look that had
come into his face.
She edged a little closer to him and continued in a subdued tone.
"A woman is always lonely and helpless--no matter what may be her
station. How liable we are to be deceived or--misjudged. But I knew
from the first that I could trust you. Do you remember when we first
met in the Navona?"
Again the warm crimson of the cheek, again the speaking flash from
those luring eyes. Tristan's heart began to beat with a strange
sensation of excitement and surprise. To love this wonder of all
women--to be loved by her in return--life would indeed be one mad
delirium.
"How could I forget it?" he said, more warmly than he intended, meeting
her gaze. "It was on the day when I arrived in Rome."
Her eyes beamed on him more benevolently than ever.
"I saw you again at Santa Maria of the Aventine. I sent for you," she
said, with drooping lids, "because I so wanted some one to confide
in. I have no counsellor,--no champion--no friend. The object of
hatred to the rabble which stones those to-day before whom it cringed
yesterday--I am paying the penalty of the name I bear--kinship to one
no longer among the living. But you scorned my messenger. Why did you?"
She regarded Tristan with expectant, almost imploring eyes. She saw him
struggling for adequate utterance. Continuing, she held out to him her
beautiful hands. Her tone was all appeal.
"I want you to feel that Theodora is your friend. That you may turn to
her in any perplexity that may beset you, that you may call upon her
for counsel whenever you are in doubt and know not what to do. And oh!
I want you to know above all things how much you could be to me, did
you but trust--had not the drop of poison instilled by the Senator set
you against the one woman who would make you great, envied above all
men on earth!"
Tristan bent over Theodora's hands and kissed them. Cool and trusting,
yet with a firm grasp, they encircled his burning palms and their
whiteness caused his senses to reel.
"In what manner can I be of service to the Lady Theodora?" he spoke at
last, unable to let go of those wonderful hands that sent the hot blood
hurtling to his brain.
Theodora's face was very close to his.
As she spoke, her perfumed breath softly fanned his cheeks.
She spoke with well-studied hesitancy, like a child that, in preferring
an overbold request, fears denial in the very utterance.
"It is a small thing, I would ask," she said in her wonderfully
melodious voice. "I would once again visit the places where I have
spent the happy days of my childhood, the galleries and chambers of
the Emperor's Tomb. You start, my Lord Tristan! Perchance this speech
may sound strange to the ears of one who, though newly arrived in Rome,
has heard but vituperations showered upon the head of a defenceless
woman, who, if not better, is at least not worse than the rest of her
kind. Yes--" she continued, returning the pressure of his fingers
and noting, not without inward satisfaction, a soft gleam that had
dispelled the sterner look in his eyes, "those were days of innocence
and peace, broken only when the older sister, my equal in beauty,
began to regard me as a possible rival. Stung by her taunts I leaped
to her challenge and the fight for the dominion of Rome was waged
between us with all the hot passion of our blood, Marozia conquered,
but Death stood by unseen to crown her victory. The Mount of Cloisters
is my asylum. The gates of the Emperor's Tomb are sealed to me forever
more. Why should Alberic, disregarding the ties of blood, fear a
woman--unless he hath deeply wronged her, even as he has wronged
another who wears the crown of thorns upon earth?"
Theodora paused, her lids half-shut as if to repress a tear; in reality
to scan the face of him who found her tale most strange indeed.
And, verily, Tristan was beginning to feel that he could not depend
upon himself much longer. The subdued lights, the heavy perfume, the
room itself, the seductive beauty of this sorceress so near to him that
her breath fanned his cheeks, the touch of her hands, which had not
relinquished his own, were making wild havoc with his senses and reason.
Like many a gentle and inexperienced nature, Tristan shrank from
offending a woman's delicacy, by even appearing to question the truth
of her words, and he doubted not but that here was a woman who had
been sinned against much more than she had sinned, a woman capable
of gentler, nobler impulses than were credited to her in the common
reckoning. It required indeed a powerful constraint upon his feelings
not to give way to the starved impulse that drove him to forget past,
present and future in her embrace.
A sad smile played about the small crimson mouth as Theodora, with a
sigh, continued:
"I have quaffed the joys of life. There is nothing that has remained
untasted. And yet--I am not happy. The fires of unrest drive me hither
and thither. After years of fiercest conflict, with those of my own
sex and age, who consider Rome the lawful prey of any one that may
usurp Marozia's fateful inheritance, I have had a glimpse of Heaven--a
Heaven that perchance is not for me. Yet it aroused the desire for
peace--happiness--love! Yes, my Lord Tristan, love! For though I have
searched for it in every guise, I found it not. Will the hour every
toll--even for me? Deem you, my Lord Tristan, that even one so guilt
lost as Theodora might be loved?"
"How were it possible," he stammered, "for mortal eyes to resist such
loveliness?"
His words sounded stilted in his ears. Yet he knew if he permitted the
impulse to master him he would be swept away by the torrent.
The woman also knew, and woman-like she felt that the poison rankled in
his veins. She must give it time to work. She must not precipitate a
scene that might leave him sobered, when the fumes had cleared from his
brain.
Putting all the witchery of her beauty into her words she said, with a
tinge of sadness:
"I fear I am trespassing, my Lord Tristan. It is so long, since I have
unveiled the depths of my heart. Forget the request I have made. It may
conflict with your loyalty to my Lord Alberic. I shall try to foster
the memories of the place which I dare not enter--"
She had ventured all upon the last throw, and she had conquered.
"Nay, Lady Theodora," Tristan interposed, with a seriousness that
even staggered the woman. "There is no such clause or condition in the
agreement between the Lord Alberic and myself. It is true," he added in
a solemn tone, "he has warned me of you, as his enemy. Report speaks
ill of you. Nevertheless I believe you."
"I thank you, my Lord Tristan," she said, releasing his hands.
"Theodora never forgets a service. Three nights hence I am giving a
feast to my friends. You will not fail me?"
"I am happy to know," he said, "that the Lady Theodora thinks kindly
of me. I shall not fail her. And now"--he added, genuine regret in his
tone--"will the Lady Theodora permit me to depart? The hour waxes late
and there is much to be done ere the morrow's dawn."
Theodora clapped her hands and Persephoné appeared between the curtains.
"Farewell, my Lord Tristan. We shall speak of this again," she said,
beaming upon him with all the seductive fire of her dark eyes, and he,
bowing, took his leave.
When Persephoné returned, she was as much puzzled at the inscrutable
smile that played about her mistress' lips as she had been at Tristan's
abstracted state of mind, for, hardly noting her presence, he had
walked in silence beside her to the gate, and had there taken silent
leave.--
CHAPTER VI
THE LURE OF THE ABYSS
The sun had sunk to rest in fleecy clouds of crimson and gold.
The clear and brilliant moonlight of Italy enveloped hill and dale,
bathing in its effulgence the groves, palaces and ruins of the Eternal
City. The huge pile of the Colosseum was bathed in its rosy glow,
raising itself in serene majesty towards the beaming night sky.
A few hours later a great change had come over the heavens. The wind
had sprung up and had driven the little downy clouds of sunset into
a great, black mass, which it again tore into flying tatters that it
swept before it. The moon rose and raced through the dun and silver.
Below it, in the vast spaces of the deserted amphitheatre, from whose
vomitories pale ghosts seemed to flit, the big boulders and rain-left
pools looked dim and misty. Night had cast her leper's cloak on nature
and the moon seemed the leprous face.
Deepest silence reigned, broken only by the occasional hoot of an owl,
or the swishing of a bat that whirled its crazy flight in and out the
labyrinthine corridors.
By the largest of these boulders stood the dark cloaked form of a man.
As the moon-thrown shadows of the clouds swept over him and the rude
rock by which he stood looking up at the sky, his black mantle flapped
in the wind and clung to his limbs, making him look even taller than he
was.
At the feet of Basil cowered the huge Molossian hound. As the wind
grew stronger and the clouds above assumed more fantastic shapes, it
raised its head and gave voice to a low whine. On the distant hillocks
a myriad dusky flames seemed to writhe and hiss and dart through tinted
moon-gleams.
Three times he whistled--and in the misty, moonlit expanse countless
forms, as weird as himself, seemed to rise and form a great circle
about him.
Were they the creatures of his brain which had at last given way in the
excitement of the hour? Were they phantoms of mist and moon, wreathing
round him from the desolate marshes? Or were they real beings of flesh
and blood, congregations of crime and despair, mad with the misery of a
starving century, the horrors of serfdom and oppression that had united
in the great reel of a Witches' Sabbat?
Round him they circled, at first slowly,--like the curls of a marsh,
then faster and ever faster, till his eyes could scarcely follow them
as they rotated about him in their horrible dance of madness and sin.
Black clouds raced over the moon. The reddish gleam of a forked tongue
of fire illumined the dark heavens, and thunder went pealing down the
hills. Suddenly out of the underbrush arose a black form, about the
height and breadth of a man, but without the distinct outlines of
one. Basil's face grew white as death, and his gaze became fixed as
he clutched at the rock for support. But the next moment he seemed to
gain his reassurance from the knowledge that he had seen this phantom
before. The dog lay at his feet and continued its low tremulous whine.
"You have kept the tryst," gibbered the bent form as it slowly
approached, supporting itself upon a crooked staff of singular height.
"Else were I not the man to compel fate to do my bidding," responded
the Grand Chamberlain. "Fear can have no part in the compact which
binds us. I have live things under my feet that clog my steps and grow
more stubborn day by day."--
"Deem you, you can keep your footing in the black lobbies of hell?"
gibbered the cowled form. "For you will need all your courage, if you
would reach the goal!"
Basil, for a moment, faced his shadowy interlocutor in silence. There
was a darker light in his eyes when he spoke.
"Give me but that which my soul desires and I shall run the gauntlet
unflinchingly. I shall brace my courage to the dread experiment."
A fierce gust of wind shook the cypresses and holm oaks into shuddering
anxiety.
"You are about to embark upon an enterprise more perilous than any man
now living has ever ventured upon," spoke the cowled form. "Your soul
will travel through the channels, through which the red and fiery tide
rolls up when the volcano wakes. Each time it wakes the lava washes
over the lost souls, which, chained to rings in the black rock, glow
like living coals, but leaves them whole, to undergo their fate anew.
Do you persist?"
"Give me what I desire--"
"Ay--so say they all--but to grovel in the dust before the Unknown
Presence which they have defied."
"Who are you to taunt me with a fear my soul knows not?" Basil turned
to the black-robed form, stretching out his hand as if to touch his
mantle.
A magnetic current passed through his limbs that caused him to drop his
arm with a cry of pain.
Forked lightnings leaped from one cloud-bank to another.
Distant thunder growled and died among the hills.
"I have seen the fall of Nineveh and Babylon. I was present at the
destruction of the Holy City by the legions of Titus, I witnessed the
burning of Rome by Nero and the fall of the temple of Serapis. I stood
upon Mount Calvary under the shadow of the world's greatest tragedy."
The voice of the speaker died to silence.
Basil's hand went to his head, as if he wished to assure himself
whether he was awake or in the throes of some mad dream.
It is a narrow boundary line, that divides the two great realms of
sanity and madness. And the limits are as restless as those of two
countries divided from each other by a network of shifting rivers. What
belonged to the one overnight may belong to the other to-morrow.
An overmastering dread had seized upon Basil at the speech of the
uncanny apparition. Was not he, too, pushing his excursions now into
the one realm, now into the other? And who would know in which of the
two to seek for him?
"Have you indeed wandered upon earth ever since those days?" he
stammered, once more slave to his superstition.
The apparition nodded.
"I have drunk deep from the black wells of despair. I have raised the
shadowy altars of him who was cast out of the heavens, higher and
higher, till they almost touch the throne of the Father."
"Your master then is Lucifer--"
"Cannot the Fiend as well as God live incarnate in human clay? Is not
the earth the meeting ground of Heaven and Hell? Why should not Basil,
the Grand Chamberlain, be Hell's incarnation?"--
"What then must I do to deserve the crimson aureole?"
"Espouse the cause of him who rules the shadows. He will give to you
what your soul desires. One of the shadowy congregation that rules the
world through fear, make quick wings for Time, that crawls through
eternity like a monstrous snake, while with starved desire your eyes
glare at the fleeting things of life--dominion, power and love, that
you may snatch from fate! Only by becoming one of us can your soul
slake its thirst. Speak--for my time is brief--"
When Basil turned towards the bent form of the speaker his gaze fell
upon a gleaming knife which Bessarion had produced from under the loose
folds of his gown.
For a moment the two stood face to face. Neither spoke, each seemingly
intent upon fathoming the thoughts of the other. The wind hissed and
screamed through the corridors of the Colosseum.
It was Basil who broke the silence.
"What is it, you want?"
"Bare your left arm!"
There was a natural hollow in the rock, that the weather had scooped
out in the stone altar.
Basil obeyed.
The gibbering voice rose again above the silence.
"Hold it over the basin!"
The lightnings twisted and streamed like silvery adders through the
dark vaults of the heavens, and terrific peals of thunder shook the
shuddering world in its foundations.
The bent form raised the knife.
Three drops of blood dripped, one by one, into the hollow of the stone.
Bessarion chanted some words in an unintelligible jargon as, with a
claw-like hand, he bound up the wound in Basil's arm.
"At midnight--in the Catacombs of St. Calixtus--you will stand face to
face with the Presence," the apparition spoke once more.
The next moment, after a fantastic salutation, he had vanished, as if
the earth had swallowed him, behind a projecting rock.
Basil remained for a time in deep rumination. The Molossian hound
rose up from the ground as soon as the adept of the black arts had
disappeared, and, sitting on its haunches, gazed inquisitively into its
master's face.
Suddenly it uttered a growl.
At the next moment the misshapen form of an African Moor crouched at
the feet of the Grand Chamberlain. Noiselessly and swiftly as a panther
he had sped through the waste spaces of the amphitheatre, and even
Basil could not overcome a feeling of revulsion as he gazed into the
hairy, bestial features of Daoud, whom he employed when secrecy and
despatch were essential to the success of a venture.
Red inflamed eyelids gleamed from a face whose cadaverous tints seemed
enhanced by wiry black hair that hung in disordered strands from under
a broad Spanish hat. Daoud was undersized in stature, but possessed
prodigious strength, and the size of his hands argued little in favor
of him who had incurred the disfavor of his master or his own.
This monster in human guise Basil had acquired from a certain nobleman
in the suite of the Byzantine ambassador extraordinary to the Holy See.
Basil looked up at the moon which just then emerged from the shadow of
a cloud. Then he gave a nod of satisfaction.
"Your promptness argues well for your success," he turned to his runner
who was cowering at his feet, the ashen face with the blinking and
inflamed eyes raised to his master. "Know you the road to southward, my
good Daoud?"
The Moor gave a nod and Basil proceeded.
"You must depart this very night. Take the road that leads by Benevento
to the Shrines of the Archangel. You will overtake the Senator and
deliver into his hands this token. You will return forthwith and bring
to me--his answer. Do I make myself quite clear to your understanding,
my good Daoud?"
The Moor fell prostrate and touched Basil's buskin with his forehead.
"Up!" the latter spurned the kneeling brute. "To-morrow night must find
you in the Witches' City."
With these words he placed into the Moor's hand a small article,
carefully tied and sealed.
The twain exchanged a mute glance of mutual understanding, then Daoud
gave a bound, darted forward and shot away like an arrow from the bow.
Almost instantly he was out of sight.
The hound bounded after him but, obedient to his master's call,
instantly returned to the latter's feet.
For some time Basil remained near the rock where the weird ceremony had
taken place.
"The Rubicon is passed," he muttered. "The stars--or the abyss."
Then, slowly quitting the stupendous ruins of the Amphitheatre, he took
the direction of the Catacombs of St. Calixtus.
CHAPTER VII
THE FACE IN THE PANEL
On the following day Tristan entered upon his duties as captain of the
Senator's guard.
The first person upon whom he chanced on his rounds at the Lateran
was the Grand Chamberlain, who inquired affably how his penitences
were progressing and expressed the hope that he had received final
absolution, and that his sins would not weigh too heavily upon his
soul. Basil commended him for his zeal in the cause of the Senator,
hinting incidentally that his duties between the Lateran and Castel San
Angelo need not deprive him of the society of the fair Roman ladies,
who would welcome the stranger from Provence and would doubtlessly
enmesh his heart, if it were not well guarded. He then proceeded to
caution Tristan with respect to his exalted prisoner. Numerous attempts
at abduction had been made from time to time, Tristan having, by his
prowess and daring, prevented the last, emanating doubtlessly from the
Pontiff's nearest kith and kin. The men under him could be fully relied
upon. Nevertheless, it behooved him to be circumspect.
After a time Basil departed, and Tristan went about his business,
inspecting the guard and familiarizing himself with the place where he
was to keep his first watch.
The level beams of the evening sun filled the Basilica of St. John in
Laterano. There were pearl lights and lights of sapphire; falling
radiances of emerald and blood-red; vague translucent greens, that
seemed to tremble under spiral clouds of incense.
Now the sun was sinking behind Mount Janiculum. The clouds at the
zenith of the heavens were rose-hued, but it was growing dark in the
valleys, and the great church began to take on sombre hues. It seemed
to frown upon him, to warn him not to enter, an impression he was long
afterwards to remember, as he strode through the high-vaulted corridors.
He hesitated, till the sound of a distant chant reached his ear. With
a sort of fascination he could not account for, he watched the advance
of the slowly gathering gloom, as an increasing greyness stole into the
chapels.
Evening was about to take the veil of night.
The light left the stained-glass windows and the church grew darker and
darker. The altar steps lay now in purple shadows that were growing
deeper and denser each moment.
Shadowy forms seemed to be moving about in the sanctuaries. Soon a monk
entered with a taper, lighting the lights before some remote shrines.
Tristan could not distinguish his features, for the light was very dim.
Yet it enabled him to see that there were a few belated worshippers in
the church.
After a time the great nave was deserted. As the lone monk passed
quickly through a sphere of thin light, Tristan gave a start. It seemed
a ghost in a cassock that had vanished in the sacristy. He told himself
that the impression was absurd, but he could not throw it off. He
had caught a momentary glimpse of a face that had no human likeness,
and the way in which the cassock had flapped about the limbs of the
fleeting form seemed to suggest that it clothed a frame that had lost
its flesh.
Superstitious fear began to creep over him. He felt that he must
seek the open, escape the haunting incense-saturated pall, these dim
sepulchral chapels. Such light as there was, save what emanated from
the candles on the altar, came from a stone lamp which cast its glimmer
on the vanishing form.
In every corner of the vast nave now lay fast gathering darkness. The
figures of the saints seemed vague and formless. The altar loomed dim
in the shadows.
All these things Tristan noted.
The whole interior of the church was now steeped in the dense pall of
night, illumined only by the faint radiance of the lamp upon the altar,
which seemed rather to intensify than to lift the gloom.
A faint footfall was audible behind the carven screen, near the
entrance to the chapels. A figure, almost lost in the gloom, glided
into the nave, and shadows were falling about him like thin veils.
It was an unusual hour for monks to be abroad. None the less, he
seemed sure of himself, for he proceeded without hesitation to the
altar, shrouded as it was in utter darkness, but for the light of one
faint taper, which gleamed afar, like a star in the nocturnal heavens,
driving the gloom a few paces from the carven stone. There the shrouded
form seemed to melt into the very pall of night that weighed heavily
upon the time-stained walls of the Mother Church of Rome.
At first Tristan thought it was some belated penitent seeking
forgiveness for his sins, but when the dark-robed form did not return
he strode towards the altar to see if he might perchance be of
assistance to him.
When Tristan reached the altar steps he could discover no trace of a
human being, though he searched every nook and corner and peered into
every chapel, examined every shrine.
Seized with a strange restiveness he began to pace up and down before
the altar steps. He was far from feeling at ease. He remembered the
warning of the Grand Chamberlain. He remembered the strange tales he
had heard whispered of the Pontiff's prison house.
Tristan suddenly paused.
He thought he heard sibilant whispers and the low murmur of voices from
behind the screen at the eastern transept of the Capella, and at once
he began assembling the things in his mind which might beset him in the
hour of darkness.
The Chapel of the Most Holy Saviour of the Holy Stairs, the Scala
Santa of the present day, adjoins the Lateran Church. At the period
of which we write it was still the private chapel of the popes in the
Patriarchium, and was called the Sancta Sanctorum on account of the
great number of precious relics it enshrines.
To this chapel Tristan directed his steps, oppressed by some mysterious
sense of evil. By a judicious disposition of the men under his command
he had, after a careful survey of the premises, placed them in such a
manner that it would be impossible for any one to gain access to the
stairs leading to the Pontiff's chamber.
Had it been a hallucination of his senses conjured up by his sudden
fear?
Not a sound broke the stillness. Only the echoes of his own footsteps
reverberated uncannily from the worn mosaics of the floor. In the dim
distance of the corridors he saw a shadow moving to and fro. It was the
guard before the entrance to a side-chapel of the Basilica.
What caused Tristan to pause in the night gloom of the corridor leading
to the Pontifical Chapel he did not know. He seemed as under a strange
spell. At a distance from him of some five feet, in the decorated wall,
there was a dark panel some two feet in height and of corresponding
breadth, looking obliquely towards the Pontifical Chapel. The panel
contained a small round opening, a spy-hole which communicated with a
secret chamber in the thickness of the wall.
A slight rustling noise came from behind the masonry. Tristan heard it
quite distinctly. It suggested the passing of naked feet over marble.
Suddenly, noiselessly the panel parted.
A sudden gleam of white, blinding light shot into the chapel like a
spear of silver.
Tristan paused with a start, looking swiftly and inquiringly at the
black slit in the wall and as he did so the spear of light shifted a
little in its passing.
A face, white with the pallor of death, ghastly and hideous as a corpse
that has retained upon its set features the agony of dying, peered out
from blackness into blackness.
A tremor shook Tristan's frame from head to toe. He could not have
cried out, had he wished to. He felt as one grazed by a lightning bolt.
Then, in a flash that made his heart and soul shudder within him, he
knew.
He had seen looking at him a face--the clean shaven face of a man. But
it was not human. It bore the terrible stigmata of the unquenchable
fire; an abominable vision of the lust that cannot be satiated, the
utter, unconquerable, fiendish malevolence of Hell. A harsh, raven-like
croak broke the stillness, and at the sound of that cry the terrible
face vanished with the swiftness of a trick. Instead, a long arm,
clothed in a black sleeve, stole through the opening. A flash, keen
as that of the lightning, cut the air and a dagger struck the mosaic
floor at Tristan's feet with such force that its point snapped after
shattering the stone, drawing fire from the impact.
Bounding back, Tristan uttered a shrill cry of terror, but when he
looked in the direction of the panel only dim dun dusk met his eyes.
Rushing frantically from the corridor he now called with all his might.
His outcries brought the guards to the scene. Briefly, incoherently,
almost mad with terror, he told his tale. They listened with an air of
amazement in which surprise held no small share. Then they accompanied
him back to the chapel.
Arriving near the spot he was about to point to the dagger, to
corroborate his wild tale. But the dagger had disappeared. Only the
shattered marble of the floor lent testimony and credence to his words.
On the following morning an outcry of horror arose from all quarters of
Rome.
On the night which preceded it, the Holy Host had been taken from the
Pontifical Chapel in the Lateran.
CHAPTER VIII
THE SHADOW OF ASRAEL
It was ten in the morning.
Deep silence reigned in the strange walled garden on the Pincian Hill
that surrounded the marble villa of the Grand Chamberlain. Only the
murmur of the city below and the soft sounds of bells from tower and
campanile seemed to break the dreamlike stillness as they began to toll
for High Mass.
In a circular chamber lighted only by lamps, for there were no windows,
and daylight never penetrated there, before an onyx table covered with
strange globes and philtres, sat Basil.
The walls of the chamber were of wood stained purple. The far wall
was hidden by shelves on which were many rolls of vellum and papyrus,
spoils of pagan libraries of the past. There were the works of monks
from all the monasteries of Europe, illuminated by master hands, the
black letter pages glowing with red and gold, almost priceless even
then. In one corner of the room stood an iron chest, secured by locks.
What this contained no one even dared to guess.
As the chimes from churches and convents reached his ears, Basil's face
paled. Something began to stir in the dark unfathomable eyes as some
unknown thing stirs in deep water. Some nameless being was looking out
of those windows of the soul. Yet the rest of the face was unruffled
and expressionless, and the contrast was so horrible that a spectator
would have shrank away, cold fear gripping his heart, and perhaps a cry
upon his lips.
Basil had closed the heavy bronze doors behind him when he had entered
from the atrium. The floor of colored marbles was flooded with the
light from the bronze lamps. Before him was a short passage, hardly
more than an alcove, terminating in a door of cedarwood behind a purple
curtain.
In the dull yellow gleam of the lamps the chamber seemed cold, full of
chill and musty air.
In a moment however the lamps seemed to burn more brightly, as Basil's
eyes became adjusted to their lights.
There was the silence of the tomb. The lamps burnt without a flicker,
for there was not a breath of air to disturb their steady glow. The
plan of the room, its yellow lights, its silence, its entire lack of
correspondence with the outside world, was Basil's own. He had designed
it as a port, as it were, whence to put out to sea upon the tide of his
ever-changing moods in the black barque of sin.
For some time he remained alone in the silent room, dreaming and
brooding over greatness and power, that terrible megalomania that is
the last and rarest madness of all.
He had read of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian, of Heliogabalus, whose
madness passed the bounds of the imaginable. Like gold and purple
clouds, bursting with sombre light and power, they had passed over Rome
and were gone.
Then thoughts of the popes came to him, those supreme rulers of the
temporal and spiritual world whose dominion had been so superb, since
they first began to crown the emperors, one hundred and thirty-five
years ago.
In a monstrous and swiftly moving panorama they passed through a brain
that worked as if it were packed in ice. And yet one and all had gone
into the dark. The power of none had been lasting and complete.
But into his reverie stole a secret glow, into his blood an intense,
ecstatic quickening. For them the hour had tolled. Each step in life
was but one nearer the grave. Not so was it to be with him.
A black fire began to burn round his heart, coiling there like a
serpent, as he thought of the illumination that was his, the promise
he had received--deep down in the crypts of the Emperor's Tomb and
again in the Catacombs of St. Calixtus. And he had fallen down and
worshipped, had given his soul to Darkness and abjured the Light.
Satan should rule again on earth. For this had been revealed to him
by the High Priest of Satan himself, then in a vision by the Lord of
Evil. To penetrate the mysteries of Hell with his whole heart and soul,
to strike chill terror into the hearts of those who worshipped at the
altars of Christ, had become Basil's ambition for which he would live
and die.
Basil sat dreaming and gloating over his coming glory; a glory in which
the woman whose beauty had stung him with maddening desire should
share, even if he had to drag her before the dark throne upon which sat
the Unspeakable Presence. The yellow light of the lamps fell upon his
unnatural and mask-like face as he sat rigid in his chair hypnotized by
Hell.
Christ had thrown his great Cross upon the feasts and banquets of the
gods. On his head was a crown of thorns and the Stigmata upon his hands
and feet. And the goblets of red gold had lost their brightness. The
pagan gods were stricken dumb. They had faded away in vapor and were
gone.
And with them the fierce joy of living had left the world. Christ
reigned upon earth, implanting conscience in the souls of men, that
robbed ecstasy of its fruition and infused the most delicious cup
touched with the Aliquid Amari of the poet.
Basil paced the narrow confines of the room, and from his lips came the
opening stanza of that dreadful parody of the Good Friday hymn sung by
the votaries of Satan: "Vexilla Regis Prodeunt Inferni."
Already the banners of the advancing hosts were in the sky. Soon--soon
would he appear himself--the Lord of Darkness!
The room suddenly grew very chill, as if the three dread winds of
Cocytus were blowing through the chamber.
There was a slim rod of copper suspended from the wall, close to the
couch of dull grey damask upon which he had been reclining. He pulled
it and somewhere away in the villa a gong sounded. A moment later a
drab man, lean as a skeleton and bald as an egg, with slanting eyes in
an ashen face and a stooping gait, came gliding noiselessly into the
lamplit room. He wore a long black cassock, which covered his fleshless
form from head to toe.
"Has no one called?" Basil turned to his factotum.
"A stranger," came the sepulchral reply. "He bade me give you this!"
Basil took the scroll which his famulus handed to him and cut the cord.
A fiendish smile passed over his face and lighted up the dark, sinister
eyes. But quickly as the mood had come it left. It fell from him as a
dropped cloak.
He stood upright, supporting himself on the onyx table, while Horus,
who only understood in a dull dim way his master's moods, assisting
him in all his villainies, but confessing his own share to a household
priest, stood impassively by.
"Give me some wine!" Basil turned to the sinister Major Domo, and the
latter disappeared and returned with a jug of Malvasian.
The Grand Chamberlain grasped the jug which Horus had brought him and
held it with shaking fingers to his mouth. When he had drank deep he
dismissed his famulus, struck a flint and burnt the scroll to pallid
ashes. Then he staggered out into the hall of colored marbles and
through it to the garden doors.
The bronze gates trembled as they swung back upon their hinges, and as
the full noon of the quiet garden burst upon Basil's eyes he fancied he
saw the fold of a dark robe disappear among the cypresses.
And now the hot air of high noon wrapped him round with its warm
southern life, flowing over the lithe body within the silken doublet,
drawing away the inward darkness and the vaulting flames within his
soul and reminding his sensuous nature that the future held gigantic
promise of love and power.
The great tenor and alto bells of St. John in Lateran were beating the
echoes to silver far away. The roofs and palaces, domes and towers of
Rome, were bathed in sunlight as he advanced to the embrasure in the
wall and once more surveyed the city.
The heat shimmered down and, through the quivering sunlit air, the
colors of the buildings shone like pebbles at the bottom of a pool and
the white ruins glowed like a mirage of the desert.
An hour later, regardless of the vertical sun rays that beat down
upon the tortuous streets of the city with unabated fervor, the Grand
Chamberlain rode through the streets of Rome, attended by a group of
men-at-arms with the crest of the Broken Spear in a Field of Azure
embroidered upon their doublets.
As the cavalcade swept through the crowded streets, with their
pilgrims from all parts of the world, the religious in their habits,
men-at-arms, flower-sellers, here and there the magnificent chariot of
a cardinal, many of the people lowered their eyes as Basil cantered
past on his black Neapolitan charger, trapped with crimson. More than
one made the sign of the horn, to avert the spell of the evil eye.
When Basil reached the Lateran he found a captain of the noble guard
with two halberdiers in their unsightly liveries guarding the doors.
They saluted and Basil inquired whether the new captain of the guard
was within.
"The Lord Tristan is within," came the reply, and Basil entered,
motioning to his escort to await his return outside.
The Grand Chamberlain traversed several anterooms, speaking to one
or the other of the senatorial guard, and on every face he read
consternation and fear. Little groups of priests stood together in
corners, whispering among each other; the whole of the Lateran was
aroused as by a secret dread. Such deeds, though they were known to
have occurred, were never spoken of, and the priests of the various
churches that had suffered desecration wisely kept their own counsel.
In this, the darkest age in the history of Rome, when crime and lust
and murder lurked in every corner, an outrage such as this struck every
soul with horror and awe. It was unthinkable, unspeakable almost,
suggesting dark mysteries and hidden infamies of Hell, which caused the
blood to run cold and the heart to freeze.
When Basil had made his way through the crowded corridors, receiving
homage, though men looked askance at him as he passed, he came to a
chamber usually reserved for a waiting room in times when the Pontiff
received foreign envoys or members of the priesthood and nobility; a
privilege from which the unfortunate prisoner in the Lateran was to be
forever debarred.
Basil entered this chamber, giving orders that he was to be in no wise
disturbed until he called and those outside heard him lock and bar the
door from within.
In the exact centre of the wall, reaching within two feet of the
ground, there was a large picture of St. Sebastian, barbarously painted
by some unknown artist.
Basil approached the picture and pressed upon the flat frame with all
his strength. There was a sudden click, a whirring, as of the wheels of
a clock. Then the picture swung inward, revealing a circular stairway
of stone, mounting upward. Without replacing the panel door, Basil
mounted the stairs for nearly a hundred steps, until he came to a door
upon which he beat with the hilt of his poniard.
An answering knock came from within, and the door opened. Basil entered
a small chamber, lighted from above by a window in a small dome.
A bat-like figure stood before a table covered with strange
manuscripts. As Basil entered, a thin black arm emerged from the
folds of the gown, which the inmate of the chamber wore. Then, with a
quick bird-like movement, an immensely thin hand twisted like a claw,
wrinkled, yellow and of incredible age, was stretched out toward the
newcomer.
On the second finger of this claw was a certain ring. Basil bent and
kissed the ring. There was another deft and almost imperceptible
movement. When the hand reappeared the ring was gone.
"It has been done?" Basil turned to the dark-robed form in bated
whispers.
The voice that answered seemed to come from a great distance. The lips
in the waxen face scarcely moved. They parted, that was all. Yet the
words were audible and distinct.
"It was done. Last night."
"You were not seen?"
"I wore the mask."
"Is it here?" Basil queried, his eyes flickering with a faint
reflection of that hate which had blazed in them earlier in the day.
"It is not here."
"Where is it?"
"You shall know to-night!"
The light faded out of Basil's eyes.
"What of the new captain?"
"His presence is a menace."
In Basil's eyes gleamed a sombre fire.
"I, too, owe him a grudge. In good time!"
"The time is Now!"
"Patience!" replied the Grand Chamberlain. "He will work his own
undoing. We dare not harm him yet."
"Only a miracle saved him last night."
"Are there not other churches in Rome?"--
"Ay!" mouthed the black form. "But the time of the great sacrifice
draws near--"
"I knew not it was so near at hand," interposed Basil with a start.
"The Becco Notturno demands a bride!"
"How am I to help you in these matters?"
"Am I to counsel the Lord Basil?" sneered the shape. "You drew the
crimson ball."
"When is it to be?"
"Three weeks from to-night. Mark you--a stainless dove!"
Basil nodded, an evil smile upon his lips.
"It shall be as you say! As for that other--I am minded to try his
mettle--"
"So be it!" said the shape. "Leave me now! You will hear from me. My
familiars are everywhere."
Without another word Basil arose and left the chamber. In the corridor
below he met Tristan.
"I know all," he cut short the speech of the new captain of the guard.
"All Rome is full of it. How did it happen? And where?"
"Attracted by a noise as of slippered feet passing over marble, I
entered the corridor of the Sacred Stairs, when one of the panels
parted. A devilish apparition stood within, throwing the beam of its
lantern into the chapel. When a chance ray of light disclosed my
presence the shape of darkness hurled a poniard. It missed me, thanks
be to Our Lady, struck the mosaic of the floor and broke in two."
"You have the pieces?" Basil queried affably and with much concern.
"I ran to the end of the gallery, shouting to my men," Tristan replied.
"When we returned the blade had disappeared."
"Where was it?" Basil queried with much concern and soon they faced the
shattered mosaic.
Basil examined the spot minutely.
"From yonder panel, you say?" he turned to Tristan.
"The third from the Capella," came the ready reply.
"Have you searched the premises?"
"From cellar to garret."--
"And discovered nothing?"
"Nothing."
"What of the panel?"
"It defies our combined efforts."
"Strange, indeed."
Basil strode to the wall and struck the spot indicated by Tristan with
the hilt of his poniard. Then he tested the wall on either side.
"Can your ear detect any difference in sound?"
A negative gesture came in response, and with it a puzzled look passed
into Tristan's eyes.
"Have you seen the Pontiff?"
"We reported the matter to His Holiness."
"And?"
"His Holiness raised his eyes to heaven and said: 'Even God's Vicar has
no jurisdiction in Hell!'"
"Was that all he said?"
"That was all!"
There was a silence during which Basil seemed to commune with himself.
"It is indeed a matter of grave concern," he said at last. "Treason
stalks everywhere. I will send for my Spanish Captain, Don Garcia. He
may be of assistance to you."
And Basil turned and walked down the corridor.
After a time Tristan walked out upon the terrace looking toward the
Coelian Hill.
A brilliant light beat upon domes and spires and pinnacles, and flooded
the august ruins of the Cæsars on the distant Palatine and the thousand
temples of the Holy Cross with scintillating radiance which poured down
from the intense blue of heaven.--
The long lights of the afternoon were shifting towards the eventide,
giving place to a limpid and colorless light that silvered the adjacent
olive groves.
Tristan roused himself with a start. The sense of moving like a ghost
among a world of ghosts had left him. He was once more awake and aware.
But even now his sorrow, his fears, his hopes of winning again to some
safe harbor in the storm tossed Odyssey of his life, were numbed. They
lay heavy within him, but without urgency or appeal.
What did it matter after all? Life was a little thing, a forlorn
minstrel that evoked melancholy strains from a pipe of oaten straw.
Life was a little thing, nor death a great one. For his part he would
not be loth to take his poppies and fall asleep.
At one time or another such moods must come to all of us and be
endured. We must enter into the middle country, that dull Sahara of the
soul, a broad belt of barren land where no angels seem to walk by our
side, nor can the false voices of demons lure us to our harm.
This is the land where we are imprisoned by the deeds of others and
never by our own. What we do ourselves will send us to Heaven or to
Hell; but not to the middle country where the plains of disillusion are.
At last the sunset came.
The ashen color of the olive-trees flashed out into silver, the
undulating peaks of the Sabine Mountains became faintly flushed and
phantom fair, as in a tempest of fire the sun sank to rest. The groves
of ilex and arbutus seemed to tremble with delight, as the long red
heralds touched their topmost boughs.
The whole landscape seemed to smile a farewell to departing day. The
chimes of the Angelus trembled on the purple dusk.
Night came on apace.
Tristan re-entered the Lateran Basilica, set the watch and arranged
with Don Garcia to spend the night in the sacristy, while Don Garcia
was to guard the approaches to the Pontifical Chapel to prevent a
recurrence of the horrible sacrilege of the preceding night.
One by one the worshippers left the vast nave of the church. After a
time the sacristans closed the heavy bronze doors and extinguished the
lights, all but the one upon the altar.
When they, too, had departed, and deepest silence filled the sacred
spaces, Tristan emerged from a side chapel and took his station near
the entrance to the sacristy, where, on the preceding night, he had
seen the shadow disappear.
How long he had been there in dread and wonder he did not know, when
two cloaked and hooded figures emerged slowly out of the gloom. He
could not tell whence they came or whether they had been there all the
time. They bent their steps towards the sacristy and, as they were
about to pass Tristan in his hiding-place, they paused as if conscious
of another presence.
"As we proceed in this matter," whispered the one voice, "I grow
fearful. You know my relations to the Senator--"
"Your anxiety moves me not," croaked the other voice. "Deem you to
attain your ends by mortal means?"
The voice caused Tristan to shudder as with an ague, though he saw not
him who spoke.
"What of yourself?" whispered the first speaker.
"Have you forgotten," came the hoarse reply, "that either I am
soulless, or else my spirit, damned from its beginning, will scarce be
saved by the grace of Him I dare not name! You are defiled in the very
conversing with me."
The tone in which these words were spoken, either defied answer, or, if
a response was made, it did not reach Tristan's ears as they slowly,
noiselessly, proceeded upon their way.
Tristan vaguely listened for the echo of their retreating footsteps
as, passing behind the altar, they disappeared, as if the earth had
swallowed them.
Now he was seized with a terrible fear. What, if they were to repeat
the sacrilege? He thought he recognized the voice of the first speaker;
but this no doubt was but a trick of his excited imagination.
Determined to prevent so terrible a crime, he crept cautiously down
the narrow passage through which they had disappeared. Six steps he
counted, then he found himself in a room which seemed to be part of
the sacristy, yet not a part, for a postern stood open through which
gleamed the misty moonlight.
There was little doubt in Tristan's mind that they had passed out
through this postern which had been left unguarded, and he found his
conjectures confirmed, when his eye, accustoming itself to the radiance
without, saw two misty figures passing along the road that leads past
the Coelian Hill through fields of ruins.
Taking care so they would not be attracted by the sound of his steps,
Tristan crept in the shadows of roofless columns, shattered porticoes
and dismantled temples, half hidden amid the dark foliage that sprang
up among the very fanes and palaces of old. At times he lost sight
of his quarry. Again they would rise up before him like evil spirits
wandering through space.
As Tristan continued in his pursuit, he began to be beset by dire
misgivings.
The twain had vanished as utterly as if the earth had swallowed them
and he paused in his pursuit to gain his bearings. Had he followed two
phantoms or two beings in the flesh? Had he abandoned his watch for two
penitents who had perchance been locked in the church?
What might not be happening at the Lateran at this very moment! How
would Don Garcia construe his absence?
A tremor passed through his limbs. He started to retrace his steps, but
some unknown agency compelled him onward.
Penetrating the gloomy foliage, Tristan found himself before a large
ruin, grey and roofless, from the interior of which came, muffled and
indistinct, the sound of voices.
Two men were stealthily creeping beneath the shadow of a wall that
extended for some distance from the ruin.
Both wore long monkish garbs and were muffled from head to toe. Over
their faces they wore vizors with slits for eyes and mouth. One of the
twain was spare, yet muscular. His companion walked with a stooping
gait and supported himself by a staff.
The light which had attracted Tristan, emanated from a lantern which
they had placed on the ground and which they could shade at will, but
which cast its fitful glimmer over the grass plot, revealing what
appeared to be a grave, from which the mould had been thrown up. At a
short distance there stood a black and stunted yew tree. Before this
they paused.
Now, from under his black cassock, the taller produced a strange
object, the nature of which Tristan was unable to discover by the
fitful light of the moon.
No sooner was it revealed to his companion, than the latter began to
chant a weird incantation, in which he who held the strange object
joined.
Louder and more strident grew their voices, and, notwithstanding the
warmth of the summer night, Tristan felt an icy shudder permeate his
whole being while, with a strange fascination, he watched the twain.
Now he who supported himself by a staff uttered a shrill inarticulate
outcry, and, producing a long, gleaming knife from under his cassock,
stabbed the thing viciously, while his voice rose in mad, strident
screams:
"Emen Hetan! Emen Hetan! Palu! Baalberi! Emen Hetan!"
The fit of madness seemed to have caught his companion. Producing a
knife similar to that of the other he, too, stabbed the object he held
in his hand, shrieking deliriously:
"Agora! Agora! Patrisa! Agora!"
An hour was to come when Tristan was to learn the terrible import
of the apparently meaningless jumble which struck his ear with mad
discordance.
Suddenly he felt upon himself the insane gleam of two eyes, peering
from the slits of the bent figure's mask.
There was a death-like stillness, as both looked towards the intruder.
Tristan would have fled, but his feet seemed rooted to the spot. His
energies were paralyzed as under the influence of a terrible spell.
The stooping form raised aloft a small phial. A bluish vapor floated
upward, in thin spiral curls.
The effect was instantaneous. Tristan was seized by a great drowsiness.
His limbs refused to support him. He no longer felt the ground under
his feet. His hand went to his head and, reeling like a drunken man,
he fell among the tall weeds that grew in riotous profusion around the
ancient masonry.
The setting moon shone out from behind a fleecy cloud, and in the
pallid crimson of her light the ill-famed ruins of the ancient temple
of Isis rose weird and ghostly in the summer night.
CHAPTER IX
THE FEAST OF THEODORA
A fairy-like radiance pervaded the great pavilion in the sunken gardens
of Theodora on Mount Aventine.
It was a vast circular hall, roofed in by a lofty dome of richest
malachite, from the centre of which was suspended a huge globe of
fire, flinging blood-red rays on the amber colored silken carpets and
tapestries that covered floors and walls. The dome was supported by
rows upon rows of tall tapering crystal columns, clear as translucent
water and green as the grass in spring, and between and beyond these
columns were large oval shaped casements set wide open to the summer
night, through which the gleam of a broad lake, laden with water
lilies, could be seen shimmering in the yellow radiance of the moon.
The centre of the hall was occupied by a long table in the form of a
horseshoe, upon which glittered vessels of gold, crystal and silver
in the sheen of the revolving globe of fire, heaped with all the
accessories of a sumptuous banquet, such as might have been spread
before the ancient gods of Olympus in the heyday of their legendary
prime.
Strange scents assailed the nostrils: pomegranate and frankincense,
myrrh, spikenard and saffron, cinnamon and calamus mingled their
perfume with the insidious distillations of the jasmine, and spiral
clouds of incense rose from tripods of bronze to the vaulted ceiling.
Inside the horseshoe, black African slaves, attired in fantastic
liveries of yellow and blue, crimson and white, orange and green,
carried aloft jewelled flagons and goblets, massive gold dishes and
great platters of painted earthenware.
There were wines from Cyprus and Malvasia, from Montepulciano and the
sunny slopes of Hymettus, Chianti and Lacrymae Christi.
The almost incredible brilliancy of the assembled company, contrasting
with the fantastic background, caught the eye as with a stab of pain,
held the gaze for a single instant of frozen incredulity, then gripped
the throat in a choking sensation by reason of its wonder.
Lounging on divans of velvet and embroidered satin from the looms of
fabled Cathay, set in the old Roman fashion round the table, eating,
drinking, gossiping and occasionally bursting into wild snatches of
song, were a company of distinguished looking personages, richly
and brilliantly attired, bent upon enjoying the pleasures offered
by the immediate hour. All who laid claim to any distinction in the
seven-hilled city were there, the lords of the Campagna and of the
adjacent fiefs of the Church. Strangers from all parts of the inhabited
globe were there, steeping their bewildered brain in the splendors
that assailed their eyes on every point; from Africa and Iceland, from
Portugal and India, from Burgundy and Aquitaine, from Granada and from
Greece, from Germania and Provence, from Persia and the Baltic shores.
Their fantastic and semi-barbaric costumes seemed to enhance the
grotesque splendor of the banquet hall.
The Romans were acquainting their guests with the exalted rank of
the woman who ruled the city as surely as ever had Marozia from the
Emperor's Tomb. And the strangers listened wide-eyed and with bated
breath.
Near the raised dais which Theodora was to occupy, at the head of
the table, there were three couches reserved for guests who, like the
hostess, had not yet arrived.
Below these, by the side of a martial stranger with the air of one
who would fain sweep the board clear of his neighbors on either
hand, devouring his food in fierce silence, sat the Prefect of Rome,
endeavoring to expound the qualities of his countrymen to the silent
guest, interspersing his encomiums now and then with a rapturous eulogy
of Theodora.
"Monstrous times have robbed us Romans of the power of the sword.
But they cannot rob us of the power of the spirit, which will endure
forever."
The stranger replied with a stony stare of contempt.
Beside the Lord Atenulf of Benevento sat a tall girl with heavy coils
of blue black hair, eyes that smouldered with a sombre light, curved
carnation lips set in a perfect, oval face, and seeming more scarlet
than they were, owing to her ivory pallor, the tint of the furled
magnolia bud which is, perhaps, only seen to perfection in Italy and
especially in Rome.
She looked at the grave-faced guest with quickened eyes.
Snatching some vine leaves from a pyramid of grapes, as purple as the
tapestries of Tyre, she arose and laying her hand on the stranger's
arm, said laughingly:
"Oh, what a brow! Dark as a thundercloud in June. Let me crown you with
the leaves of the vine! Perchance the hour will evoke the mood!"
She twisted the leaves into a wreath and dropped them lightly on his
head. The eyes of the silent guest, set in a face of sanguine color,
leered viciously, with the looks of one who believes himself, however
mistakenly, master of himself. There was a contemptuous curl about his
lips. They were thick lips and florid.
"Ah!" he turned to the girl in a barbarous jargon, "you are one of
those who go veiled in the streets."
And as he spoke his eyes leered with yet livelier malice.
The girl shrank back.
"Those who go veiled know more than ordinary folk," she replied, then
mingled with the other guests.
A young woman of great beauty, with light hair and blue eyes, sat
beside young Fabio of the Cavalli. Her bare arms, white as snow, and of
exquisite contour, encircled his neck, while he drank and drank. Now
and then she sipped of the wine, Lacrymae Christi from Viterbo, of the
greenish straw color of the chrysoberyl.
Some one had put red poppy leaves in Roxana's hair, and as she sat by
the side of the youth, she had the air and appearance of a Corybante.
Now and then she gave a glance at the purple curtain in the background,
and one who watched her closely might have seen a strange sparkle in
the depths of her clear blue eyes. With a look of disappointment she
turned away, as not a ripple of air stirred the curtain's heavy fold.
Then her arms stole anew round the youth, who drained one goblet after
another, as if each succeeding one yielded up a new secret to him.
Roxana marked it well.
Her eyes danced to his, whenever Fabio's gaze stole towards the purple
curtain which screened the mysterious garden beyond, in which the spray
of a fountain cast silvery showers into branch-shadowed thickets,
hidden retreats and silent, leafy alcoves, where flowers swooned in the
moonlight and gave up their perfume for love.
From the immobile sable hangings the youth's eyes wandered back to
Roxana's face, but there lurked something strange in their depths.
"Am I not more beautiful than Theodora?" whispered the woman by his
side, extending her marble arms before her lover.
"You are beautiful, my Roxana," he stammered. "But Theodora is the most
beautiful woman on earth."
Roxana turned very white at his words.
"She has challenged me to come to her feast," she said in a low tone,
audible only to Fabio. "Let her look to herself!"
And her eyes were alight with the desire of the meeting.
On an adjoining couch reclined the huge jelly of a man who looked like
Pan, enormously swollen and bloated. His paunch bellied out over the
table like a full blown sail. His face was stained with many a night
of wine. The mulberry eyes twinkled merrily. The swollen lips babbled
incessantly.
It was the Lord Boso of Caprara.
"They say that seven devils were cast out of Magdalene--" he turned to
Roxana--
The Lord of Norba interposed.
"De mortuis nil nisi bene! Natura abhorret vacuum! I drink to the
thirst to come!"
And he raised his goblet and tossed it off.
The Lord Atenulf rose to his feet, swaying and supporting himself with
one hand on the table. His great swollen face, big as a ham, creased
itself into merriment.
"Let the wine ferret out the thirst!" he shouted, and drained off his
tankard.
"Argus hath a hundred eyes! A butler ought to have a hundred hands!"
shouted the Lord of Camerino. "Wine,--slaves! Wine,--fill up in the
name of Lucifer!"
"My tongue is peeling!"
"Wine! Wine!"
The Africans filled up the empty tankards.
"Privatio praesupponit habitum!" opined the Prefect of Rome.
"We drink to Life and the fleeting Hour."
"Pereat Mors."
And the goblets clanged.
"Who speaks of Death?" shrieked young Fabio of the Cavalli, attempting
to rise. The wine was taking effect on his brain.
Roxana drew him back on the couch beside her.
"Fill the goblets! A brimmer of Chianti, red as blood--"
"Or the poppies in Roxana's hair!"
"Wine from Samos--sweetened with honey."
"A decoction of Nectar and Ambrosia."
The strangers who crowded the vast hall began to join in the mirth and
jollity of their Roman hosts, their Oriental apathy or frozen stolidity
melting slowly in the fumes of the wines.
A curtain had parted and a bevy of girls clad in diaphanous gowns of
finest silver gauze made their way into the banquet hall and took their
seats, as choice directed, beside the guests. Peals of laughter echoed
through the vaulted dome, and excited voices were raised in clamorous
disputations and contentious arguments. The wine began to flow more
lavishly. The assembled guests grew more and more careless of their
utterances. They flung themselves full length upon their luxurious
couches, now pulling out handfuls of flowers from the tall malachite
jars that stood near, and pelting the dancing girls for idle diversion,
now summoning the attendant slaves to refill their wine cups, while
they lay lounging at ease among the silken cushions.
There was a moment's silence, sudden, unexplained, like the presage of
some dark event.
The slow solemn boom of a bell sounded the hour of midnight.
The voices had ceased.
With one accord, as though drawn by some magnetic spell, all turned
their eyes towards the purple curtain through which Theodora had just
entered, and, rising from their seats, they broke into boisterous
welcome and acclaim. Young Fabio of the Cavalli whose flushed face
had all the wanton, effeminate beauty of a pictured Dionysos, reeled
forward, goblet in hand and, tossing the wine in the air, so that it
splashed down at his feet, staining his garments, he shouted:
"Vanish dull moon and be ashamed, for a fairer planet
rules the midnight sky! To Theodora--the Queen of Love!"
[Illustration: "Pelting the dancing girls for idle diversion"]
He staggered a few paces towards her, holding the empty goblet in
his hand. His hair tossed back from his brows and entangled in a
half-crushed wreath of vine-leaves, his garments disordered, his
demeanor that of one possessed of a delirium of the senses, he stared
at the wonderful apparition when, meeting Theodora's icy glance, he
started as if he had been suddenly stabbed. The goblet fell from his
hand and a shudder ran through his supple frame.
By the side of the Grand Chamberlain, who was garbed in black from head
to toe, Theodora descended the steps that led from the raised platform
into the brilliant hall.
Greeting her guests with her inscrutable smile, she moved as a queen
through a crowd of courtiers, the changing lights of crimson and green
playing about her like living flame, her head, wreathed with jewelled
serpents, rising proudly erect from her golden mantle, her eyes
scintillating with a gleam of mockery which made them look so lustrous,
yet so cold.
Thus she strode towards the dais, draped in carnation-colored silks and
surmounted by an arch of ebony.
For the space of a moment she paused, surveying her guests. A film
seemed to pass over her eyes as her gaze rested upon one who had slowly
arisen and was facing her in white silence.
With a slight bend of the head Roxana acknowledged Theodora's silent
greeting; then, amidst loud shouts of acclaim she sank languidly upon
her couch, trying to soothe young Fabio, who had raised his fallen
goblet and held it out to a passing slave. The latter refilled it with
wine, which he gulped down thirstily, though the purple liquid brought
no color to his drawn and ashen cheek.
Theodora paid no heed to the youth's discomfiture, but Roxana's face
was white as death, and her lips were set as the lips of a marble mask
as she gazed towards the ebony arch, upon which the eyes of all present
were riveted.
With a rustle as of falling leaves Theodora's gorgeous mantle had
released itself from its jewelled clasps, and had slowly fallen on the
perfumed carpet at her feet.
A sigh quivered audibly through the hall, whether of joy, hope, desire
or despair it was difficult to tell. The pride and peril of matchless
loveliness was revealed in all its fatal seductiveness and invincible
strength. In irresistible perfection she stood revealed before her
guests in a robe of diaphanous silver gauze, which clung like a pale
mist about the wonderful curves of her form and seemed to float about
her like a summer cloud. Her dazzling white arms were bare to the
shoulders. A silver serpent with a head of sapphires girdled her waist.
Sinking indolently among the silken cushions of the dais, where she
gleamed in her wonderful whiteness like a glistening pearl, set in
ebony, Theodora motioned to her guests to resume their places at the
board.
She was instantly obeyed.
The Grand Chamberlain took what appeared to be his accustomed seat
at her right, the seat at her left remaining vacant. For a moment
Theodora's gaze rested thereon with a puzzled air, then she seemed to
pay no farther heed.
But a close observer might have noted a shade of displeasure on the
brow of the Grand Chamberlain, which no attempt at dissimulation could
dispel.
A triumphant peal of music, the clash of mingled flutes, hautboys,
tubas and harps rushed through the dome like a wind sweeping in from
tropical seas.
Basil turned to Theodora with a searching glance.
"One couch still awaits its guest."
She nodded languidly.
"Tristan--the pilgrim. He is late. Know you aught of him, my lord?"
There was an air of mockery in her tone, not unmingled with concern.
Basil's thin lips straightened.
"Perchance the holy man hath other sheep in mind. What is he to you,
Lady Theodora? Your concern for him seems of the suddenest."
"What is it to you, my lord?" she flashed in return. "Am I accountable
to you for the moods that sway my soul?"
A mocking laugh startled both the Grand Chamberlain and Theodora.
Low as the words between them had been spoken, they had reached the ear
of Roxana. Watchful of every shade of expression in Theodora's face,
she was resolved to take up the gauntlet her hated rival had thrown to
her, to draw her out of her defences into open conflict, for which she
longed with all the fire of her soul. Determined to wrest the dominion
of Rome from Marozia's beautiful sister, she was resolved to stake her
all, counting upon the effect of her wonderful beauty and her physical
perfection, which was a match for Theodora's in every point.
This desire on Roxana's part was precipitated by the strange demeanor
of young Fabio of the Cavalli. From the moment Theodora had entered
the banquet hall his fevered gaze had devoured her wonderful beauty.
A feverish restlessness had taken possession of the youth and he had
rudely repelled Roxana when she tried to soothe his wine-besotten brain.
"Perchance," she turned to Theodora, "remembering how Circé of old
changed her lovers into swine, the sainted pilgrim no longer worships
at Santa Maria of the Aventine."
Theodora started at the sound of her rival's hated voice as if an asp
had stung her.
"Perchance the well-known blandishments of our fair Roxana might
accomplish as much, if report speaks true," she replied, returning the
smouldering challenge in the other woman's eyes.
"And why not?" came the purring response. "Am I not your match in body
and soul?"
Every vestige of color had faded from Theodora's cheeks. For a moment
the two women seemed to search each other's souls, their bosoms
heaving, their eyes alight with the desire for the conflict.
Roxana slowly arose and strode toward the vacant seat at Theodora's
left.
"When you circled the Rosary on yesternight, fairest Theodora," she
purred, "was he not there--waiting for you?"
Instead of Theodora, it was Basil who made reply.
"Of whom do you speak?"
Again the silvery ripple of Roxana's laughter floated above the din.
"Perchance, my Lord Basil, our fair Theodora should be able to
enlighten you on that point--"
"Of whom do you speak?" Basil turned to the woman.
There was something ominous in his eyes. His face was pale.
Theodora regarded him contemptuously, her dark slumbrous eyes turning
from him to the woman.
"Beware lest I be tempted to strangle you," she spoke in a low tone,
her white hands opening and closing convulsively.
"Like Persephoné, your Circassian,--in the Emperor's Tomb?" came the
taunting reply.
Theodora's face was white as lightning.
"I should not leave the work undone!"
"Neither should I," came the purring reply, as Roxana extended her
wonderful hands and arms. "Meanwhile--will you not inform your guests
of the story of the pilgrim, who wellnigh caused Marozia's sister to
enter a nunnery?"
A group of listeners had gathered about.
Basil was swaying to and fro in his seat with suppressed fury.
"One convent at least would be damned from gable to refectory," he
muttered, emptying the tankard which one of the Africans had just
replenished.
Theodora regarded him icily. Her inscrutable countenance gave no hint
of her thoughts. She did not even seem to hear the questions which fell
thick and fast about her, but there was something in the velvet depths
of her eyes that would have caused even the boldest to tremble in the
consciousness of having incurred her anger.
The Lord of Norba reeled towards the couch, where Roxana had taken her
seat, blinking out of small watery eyes and flirting with his lordly
buskins.
"How came it about?"
"What was he like?"
Theodora turned slowly from the one to the other. Then with a voice
vibrant with contempt she said:
"A man!"
"And you were counting your beads?" shouted the Lord Atenulf in so
amazed a tone, that the guests broke out into peals of laughter.
"It was then it happened," Roxana related, without relating.
"How mysterious," shivered some one.
"Will you not tell us?" Roxana challenged Theodora anew.
Their eyes met. Roxana turned to her auditors.
"Our fair Theodora had been suddenly touched by the spirit," she began
in her low musical voice. "Withdrawing from the eyes of man she gave
herself up to holy meditations. In this mood she nightly circled the
Penitent's Rosary at Santa Maria of the Aventine, praying that the
saint might take compassion upon her and deliver unto her keeping a
perfect, saintly man, pure and undefiled. And to add weight to her
own prayers, we, too, circled the Rosary; Gisla, Adelhita, Pamela and
myself. And we prayed very earnestly."
She paused for a moment and looked about, as if to gauge the impression
her tale was producing on the assembled guests. Her smiling eyes swept
the face of Theodora who was listening as intently as if the incident
about to be related had happened to another, her sphinx-like face
betraying not a sign of emotion.
"And then?"
It was Basil's voice, hoarse and constrained.
"Then," Roxana continued, "the miracle came to pass before our very
eyes. Behind one of the monolith pillars there stood one in a pilgrim's
garb, young and tall of stature. His gaze followed our rotations, and
each time we circled about him our fair Theodora offered thanks to the
saint for granting her prayer--"
She paused and again her gaze mockingly swept Theodora's sphinx-like
face.
"And then?" spoke the voice of Basil.
"When our devotions had come to a close," Roxana turned to the speaker,
"Theodora sent Persephoné to conduct the saintly stranger to her
bowers. And then the unlooked for happened. The saintly stranger fled,
like Joseph of old. He did not even leave his garb."
There was an outburst of uproarious mirth.
"But do these things ever happen?" fluted the Poet Bembo.
"In the realms of fable," shouted the Lord of Norba.
"Now men have become wiser."
"And women more circumspect."
Theodora turned to the speaker.
"Perchance traditions have been merely reversed."
"Some recent events do not seem to support the theory," drawled the
Grand Chamberlain.
Theodora regarded him with her strange inscrutable smile.
"Who knows,--if all were told?"
"The fact remains," Roxana persisted in her taunts, "that our fair
Theodora's power has its limits; that there is one man at least whom
she may not drug with the poison sweetness of her song."
In Theodora's eyes gleamed a smouldering fire, as she met the
insufferable taunts of the other woman.
"Why do you not try your own charms upon him, fairest Roxana?" she
turned to her tormentor. "Charms which, I grant you, are second not
even to mine."
Roxana's bosom heaved. A strange fire smouldered in her eyes.
"And deem you I could not take him from you, if I choose?" she replied,
the pupils of her eyes strangely dilated.
"Not if I choose to make him mine!" flashed Theodora.
Roxana's contemptuous mirth cut her to the quick.
"You have tried and failed!"
"I have neither tried nor have I failed."
"Then you mean to try again, fairest Theodora?" came the insidious,
purring reply.
"That is as I choose!"
"It shall be as I choose."
"What do you mean, fairest Roxana?"
"I mean to conquer him--to make him mine--to steep his senses in so
wild a delirium that he shall forget his God, his garb, his honor. And,
when I have done with him, I shall send him to the devil--or to you,
fairest Theodora--to finish, what I began. This to prove you a vain
boaster, who has failed to make good every claim you have put forth--"
Theodora was very pale. In her voice there was an unnatural calm as she
turned to the other woman.
"You have boasted, you will make this austere pilgrim your own, body
and soul--you will cast the tatters of his soiled virtue at my feet.
I did not desire him. But now"--her eyes sank into those of the other
woman, "I mean to have him,--and I shall--with you, fairest Roxana, and
all your power of seduction against me! I shall have him--and when I
have done with him, not even you shall desire him--nor that other, whom
you serve--"
Both women had risen to their feet and challenged each other with their
eyes.
"By the powers of darkness, you shall not!" Roxana returned, pale to
the lips.
"Take him from me--if you can!" Theodora flashed. "I shall conquer
you--and him!"
At this point the Grand Chamberlain interposed.
"Were it not wise," he drawled, looking from the one to the other, "to
acquaint this holy man with the perils that beset his soul, since the
two most beautiful and virtuous ladies in Rome seem resolved to guide
him on his Way of the Cross?"
There was a moment of silence, then he continued in the same drawl,
which veiled emotions he dared not reveal in this assembly.
"Deem you, the man who journeyed hundreds of leagues to obtain
absolution for having kissed a woman in wedlock has aught to fear from
such as you?"
Ere Theodora could make reply the tantalizing purring voice of Roxana
struck her ear.
"Surely this is no man--"
"A man he is, nevertheless," Basil retorted hotly. "One night I
wandered out upon the silent Aventine. Losing myself among the ruins,
I heard voices in the abode of the Monk of Cluny. Fearing, lest some
one should attempt to harm this holy friar," he continued, with a side
glance at Theodora, "I entered unseen. I overheard his confession."
There was profound silence.
It seemed too monstrously absurd. Absolution for a kiss!
Roxana spoke at last, and her veiled mockery strained her rival's
temper to the breaking point. Her words stung, as needles would the
naked flesh.
"Then," she said with deliberate slowness, "if our fair Theodora
persist in her unholy desire, what else is there for me to do but to
take him from her just to save the poor man's soul?"
Theodora's white hands yearned for the other woman's throat.
"Deem you, your charms would snare the good pilgrim, should I will to
make him mine?" she flashed.
"Why not?" Roxana purred. "Shall we try? Are you afraid?"--
"Of you?" Theodora shrilled.
A strange fire burnt in Roxana's eyes.
"Of the ordeal! Once upon a time you took from me the boy I loved. Now
I shall take from you the man you desire!"
"I challenge you!"
"To the death!" Roxana flashed, appraising her rival's charms against
her own. Her further utterance was checked by the sudden entrance of
one of the Africans, who prostrated himself before Theodora, muttering
some incoherent words at which both the woman and Basil gave a start.
"Have him thrown into the street," Basil turned to Theodora.
"Have him brought in," Theodora commanded.
For the space of a few moments intense silence reigned throughout the
pavilion. Then the curtains at the farther end parted, admitting two
huge Africans, who carried between them the seemingly lifeless form of
a man.
An imperious gesture of Theodora directed them to approach with their
burden, and a cry of surprise and dismay broke from her lips as she
gazed into the white, still features of Tristan.
He was unconscious, but faintly breathing, and upon his garb were
strange stains, that looked like blood. The Africans placed their
burden on the couch from which Roxana had arisen, and Theodora summoned
the Moorish physician Bahram from the lower end of the table, where he
had indulged in a learned dispute with a Persian sage. The other guests
thronged about, curious to see and to hear.
The Grand Chamberlain changed color when his gaze first lighted on
the prostrate form and he felt inclined to make light of the matter
hinting at the effect of Italian wines upon strangers unaccustomed
to the vintage. The ashen pallor of Tristan's cheeks had not remained
unremarked by Theodora, as she turned from the unconscious victim of a
villainy to the man beside her, whom in some way she connected with the
deed.
Basil's comment elicited but a glance of contempt as, approaching the
couch whereon he lay, Theodora eagerly watched the Moorish physician
in his efforts to revive the unconscious man. Tristan's teeth were so
tightly set that it required the insertion of a steel bar to pry them
apart.
Bahram poured some strong wine down the throat of the still unconscious
man, then placed him in a sitting position and continued his efforts
until, with a violent fit of coughing, Tristan opened his eyes.
It was some time, however, until he regained his faculties sufficiently
to manifest his emotions, and the bewilderment with which his gaze
wandered from one face to the other, would have been amusing had not
the mystery which encompassed his presence inspired a feeling of awe.
The Moorish physician, upon being questioned by Theodora, stated, some
powerful poison had caused the coma which bound Tristan's limbs and
added, in another hour he would have been beyond the pale of human
aid. More than this he would not reveal and, his task accomplished, he
withdrew among the guests.
From the Grand Chamberlain, whose stony gaze was riveted upon him,
Tristan turned to the woman who reclined by his side on the divan. His
vocal chords seemed paralyzed, but his other faculties were keenly
alive to the strangeness of his surroundings. Perceiving his inability
to reply to her questions, Theodora soothed him to silence.
Vainly endeavoring to speak, Tristan partook but sparingly of the
refreshments which she offered to him with her own hands. She was
now deliberately endeavoring to enmesh his senses, and her exotic,
wonderful beauty could not but accomplish with him what it had
accomplished with all who came under its fatal spell. An insidious,
sensuous perfume seemed to float about her, which caused Tristan's
brain to reel. Her bare arms and wonderful hands made him dizzy. Her
eyes held his own by their strange, subtle spell. Unfathomed mysteries
seemed to lurk in their hidden depths. Without endeavoring to engage
him in conversation, much as she longed to question him on certain
points, she tried to soothe him by passing her cool white hands over
his fevered brow. And all the time she was pondering on the nature of
his infliction and the author thereof, as her gaze pensively swept the
banquet hall.
The guests had, one by one, returned to their seats. Theodora also had
arisen, after having made Tristan comfortable on the couch assigned to
him.
Unseen, the heavy folds of the curtain behind her parted. A face peered
for a moment into her own, that seemed to possess no human attributes.
Theodora gave a hardly perceptible nod and the face disappeared.
The Grand Chamberlain took his seat by her side and Roxana flinging
Theodora a glittering challenge seated herself beside Tristan.
CHAPTER X
THE CHALICE OF OBLIVION
A delirium of the senses such as he had never experienced to this
hour began to steal over Tristan, as he found himself seated between
Theodora, the fairest sorceress that ever triumphed over the frail
spirit of man--and Roxana, who was whispering strange words into his
bewildered ears.
Across the board the gloomy form of the Grand Chamberlain in his sombre
attire loomed up like a shadow of evil in a garden of strangely tinted
orchids.
How the time passed on, he could not tell. Peals of laughter resounded
now and then through the vaulted dome and voices were raised in
clamorous disputations that just sheered off the boundary-line of
actual quarrel.
Theodora seemed to pay but little heed to Tristan. Roxana had coiled
her white arms about him and, whenever he raised his goblet, their
hands touched and a stream of fire coursed through his veins. Only now
and then Theodora's drowsy eyes shot forth a fiery gleam from under
their heavily fringed lids.
Roxana smiled into her rival's eyes and, raising a goblet of wine to
her lips, kissed the brim and gave it to Tristan with an indescribably
graceful swaying motion of her whole form that reminded one of a tall
white lily, bowing to the breeze.
Tristan seized the cup eagerly, drank from it and returned it and, as
their hands touched again, he could hardly restrain himself from giving
way to a transport of passion. He was no longer himself. His brain
seemed to reel. He felt as if he would plunge into the crater of a
seething volcano without heeding the flames.
Even Hellayne's pale image seemed forgotten for the time.
The guests waxed more and more noisy, their merriment more and more
boisterous. Many were now very much the worse for their frequent
libations, and young Fabio particularly seemed to display a desire to
break away from all bonds of prudent reserve.
He lay full length on his silken divan, singing little snatches of
song to himself and, pulling the vine-wreath from his tumbled locks,
as though he found it too cumbersome, he flung it on the ground amid
the other debris of the feast. Then, folding his arms lazily behind
his head, he stared straight and fixedly at Theodora, surveying every
curve of her body, every slight motion of her head, every faint
smile that played upon her lips. She was listening with an air of
ill-disguised annoyance to Basil, whose wine-inflamed countenance and
passion-distorted features left little to the surmise regarding his
state of mind.
On the couch adjoining the one of Fabio of the Cavalli reclined a
nobleman from Gades, who, having partaken less lavishly of the wine
than the rest of the guests, was engaged in a dispute with the burly
stranger from the North, whose temper seemed to have undergone little
change for the better for his having filled his paunch.
In the barbarous jargon of tenth century Latin they commented upon
Theodora, upon the banquet, upon the guests and upon Rome in general,
and the Spaniard expressed surprise that Marozia's sister had failed to
revenge Marozia's death, contenting herself to spend her life in the
desert wastes of Aventine, among hermits, libertines and fools.
Notwithstanding his besotten mood Fabio had heard and understood every
word the stranger uttered. Before he, to whom his words was addressed
could make reply, he shouted insolently:
"Ask Theodora why she is content to live in her enchanted groves
instead in the Emperor's Tomb, haunted by the spectre of strangled
Marozia!"
A terrible silence followed this utterance. The eyes of all present
wandered towards the speaker. The Grand Chamberlain ground his teeth.
Every vestige of color had faded from his face.
"Are you afraid?" shouted Fabio, raising himself upon his elbows and
nodding towards Theodora.
The woman turned her splendid, flashing orbs slowly upon him. A chill,
steely glitter leaped from their velvety depths.
"Pray, Fabio, be heedful of your speech," said she with a quiver in her
voice, curiously like the suppressed snarl of a tigress. "Most men are
fools, like yourself, and by their utterance shall they be judged!"
Fabio broke out into boisterous mirth.
"And Theodora rules with a rod of iron. Even the Lord Basil is but a
toy in her hands! Behold him,--yonder."
Basil had arisen, his hand on the hilt of his poniard. Theodora laid
her white hand upon his arm.
"Nay--" she said sweetly, "this is a matter for myself to settle."
"A very anchorite," the mocking voice of Fabio rose above the silence.
A young noble of the Cætani tried to quiet him, but in vain:
"The Lord Basil is no monk."
"Wherefore then his midnight meditations in the devil's own chapel
yonder, in which our fair Theodora officiates as Priestess of Love?"
"Midnight meditations?" interposed the Spaniard, not knowing that he
was treading on dangerous ground.
"Ask Theodora," shouted Fabio, "how many lovers are worshipping at her
midnight shrine!"
The silence of utter consternation prevailed. Glances of absolute
dismay went round the table, and the stillness was as ominous as the
hush before a thunderclap. Fabio, apparently struck by the sudden
silence, gazed lazily from out the tumbled cushions, a vacant, besotten
smile upon his lips.
"What fools you are!" he shouted thickly. "Did you not hear me? I
bade you ask Theodora," and suddenly he sat bolt upright, his face
crimsoning as with an access of passion, "why the Lord Basil creeps in
and out her palace at midnight like a skulking slave? Ask him why he
creeps in disguise through the underground passage. Ay--stranger," he
shouted to Tristan, "you are near enough to our lady of Witcheries. Ask
her how many lovers have tasted of the chalice of oblivion?"
Another death-like silence ensued.
Even the attendants seemed to move with awed tread among the guests.
Theodora and Roxana had risen almost at the same time, facing each
other in a white silence.
Roxana extended her snow-white arms towards Theodora.
"Why do you not reply to your discarded lover?" she taunted her rival.
"Shall I reply for him? You have challenged me, and I return your
challenge! I am your match in all things, Lady Theodora. In my veins
flows the blood of kings--in yours the blood of courtesans. There is
not room on earth for both of us. Does not your coward soul quail
before the issue?"
Theodora turned to Roxana a face, white as marble, her eyes
preternaturally brilliant. "You shall have your wish--even to the
death. But--before the dark-winged messenger enfolds you with his sable
wings you shall know Theodora as you have never known her--nor ever
shall again."
From the woman Theodora turned to the man.
"Fabio," she said in her sweet mock-caressing tone, "I fear you have
grown altogether too wise for this world. It were a pity you should
linger in so narrow and circumscribed a sphere."
She paused and beckoned to a giant Nubian who stood behind her chair.
"Refill the goblets!"
Her behest executed she clinked goblets with Roxana. An undying hate
shone in the eyes of the two women as they raised the crystal goblets
to their lips.
Theodora hardly tasted of the purple beverage. Roxana eagerly drained
her cup, then she kissed the brim and offered the fragrant goblet to
Tristan, as her eyes challenged Theodora anew.
Ere he could raise it to his lips, Theodora dashed the goblet from
Tristan's hands and the purple wine dyed the orange colored carpet like
dark stains of blood.
White as lightning, her eyes ablaze with hidden fires, her white hands
clenched, Roxana straightened herself to her full height, ready to
bound at Theodora's throat, to avenge the insult and to settle now and
here, woman to woman, the question of supremacy between them, when she
reeled as if struck by a thunderbolt. Her hands went to her heart and
without a moan she fell, a lifeless heap, upon the floor.
Ere Tristan and the other guests could recover from their
consternation, or fathom the import of the terrible scene, a savage
scream from the couch upon which Fabio reclined, turned the attention
of every one in that direction.
Fabio, suddenly sobered, had risen from his couch and drained his
goblet. It rolled upon the carpet from his nerveless grasp. For a
moment his arms wildly beat the air, then he reeled and fell prone upon
the floor. His staring eyes and his face, livid with purple spots,
proclaimed him dead, even ere the Moorish physician could come to his
aid.
Theodora clapped her hands, and at the signal four giant Nubians
appeared and, taking up the lifeless bodies, disappeared with them in
the moonlit garden outside.
The Grand Chamberlain, rising from his seat, informed the guests that
a sudden ailment had befallen the woman and the man. They were being
removed to receive care and attention.
Though a lingering doubt hovered in the minds of those who had
witnessed the scene, some kept silent through fear, others whose brains
were befuddled by the fumes of the wine gave utterance to inarticulate
sounds, from which the view they took of the matter, was not entirely
clear.
The shock had restored to Tristan the lost faculty of speech. For a
moment he stared horrified at Theodora. Her impassive calm roused in
him a feeling of madness. With an imprecation upon his lips he rushed
upon her, his gleaming dagger raised aloft.
But ere he could carry out his intent, Theodora's clear, cold voice
smote the silence.
"Disarm him!"
One of the Africans had glided stealthily to his side, and the steel
was wrenched from Tristan's grip.
"Be silent,--for your life!" some one whispered into his ear.
Suddenly he grew weak. Theodora's languid eyes met his own, utterly
paralyzing his efforts. A smile parted her lips as, without a trace of
anger, she kissed the ivory bud of a magnolia and threw it to him.
As one in a trance he caught the flower. Its fragrance seemed to creep
into his brain, rob his manhood of its strength. Sinking submissively
into his seat he gazed up at her in wondering wistfulness. Was there
ever woman so bewilderingly beautiful? A strange enervating ecstasy
took him captive, as he permitted his eyes to dwell on the fairness
of her face, the ivory pallor of her skin, the supple curves of her
form. As one imprisoned in a jungle exhaling poison miasmas loses all
control over his faculties, feeling a drowsy lassitude stealing over
him, so Tristan gave himself up to the spell that encompassed him,
heedless of the memories of the past.
Now Theodora touched a small bell and suddenly the marble floor yawned
asunder and the banquet table with all its accessories vanished
underground with incredible swiftness. Then the floor closed again. The
broad centre space of the hall was now clear of obstruction and the
guests roused themselves from their drowsy postures of half-inebriated
languor.
Tristan drank in the scene with eager, dazzled eyes and heavily beating
heart. Love and hate strangely mingled stole over him more strongly
than ever, in the sultry air of this strange summer night, this night
of sweet delirium in which all that was most dangerous and erring in
his nature waked into his life and mastered his better will.
Outside the water lilies nodded themselves to sleep among their
shrouding leaves. Like a sheet of molten gold spread the lake over the
spot where Roxana and Fabio had found a common grave.
Surrounding this lake spread a garden, golden with the sleepy radiance
of the late moon, and peacefully fair in the dreaminess of drooping
foliage, moss-covered turf and star-sprinkled violet sky. In full
view, and lighted by the reflected radiance flung out from within, a
miniature waterfall tumbled headlong into a rocky recess, covered and
overgrown with lotus-lilies and plumy ferns. Here and there golden
tents glimmered through the shadows cast by the great magnolia trees,
whose half-shut buds wafted balmy odors through the drowsy summer
night. The sounds of flutes, of citherns and cymbals floated from
distant bosquets, as though elfin shepherds were guarding their fairy
flocks in some hidden nook. By degrees the light grew warmer and more
mellow in tint till it resembled the deep hues of an autumn sunset,
flecked through the emerald haze, in the sunken gardens of Theodora.
Another clash of cymbals, stormily persistent, then the chimes of
bells, such as bring tears to the eyes of many a wayfarer, who hears
the silvery echoes when far away from home and straightway thinks of
his childhood days, those years of purest happiness.
A curious, stifling sensation began to oppress Tristan as he listened
to those bells. They reminded him of strange things, things to which he
could not give a name, odd suggestions of fair women who were wont to
pray for those they loved, and who believed that their prayers would be
heard in heaven and would be granted!
With straining eyes he gazed out into the languorous beauty of the
garden that spread its emerald glamour around him, and a sob broke from
his lips as the peals of the chiming bells, softened by degrees into
subdued and tremulous semitones, the clarion clearness of the cymbals
again smote the silent air.
Ere Tristan, in his state of bewilderment, could realize what was
happening, the great fire globe in the dome was suddenly extinguished
and a firm hand imperiously closed on his own, drawing him along, he
knew not whither.
He glanced about him. In the semi-darkness he was able to discern
the sheen of the lake with its white burden of water lilies, and the
dim, branch-shadowed outlines of the moonlit garden. Theodora walked
beside him, Theodora, whose lovely face was so perilously near his
own, Theodora, upon whose lips hovered a smile of unutterable meaning.
His heart beat faster; he strove in vain to imagine what fate was in
store for him. He drank in the beauty of the night that spread her
star-embroidered splendors about him, he was conscious of the vital
youth and passion that throbbed in his veins, endowing him with a keen
headstrong rapture which is said to come but once in a lifetime, and
which in the excess of its folly will bring endless remorse in its
wake.
Suddenly he found himself in an exquisitely adorned pavilion of painted
silk, lighted by a lamp of tenderest rose lustre and carpeted with
softest amber colored pile. It stood apart from the rest, concealed
as it were in a grove of its own, and surrounded by a thicket of
orange-trees in full bloom. The fragrance of the white waxen flowers
hung heavily upon the air, breathing forth delicate suggestions of
languor and sleep. The measured cadence of the waterfall alone broke
the deep stillness, and now and then the subdued and plaintive thrill
of a nightingale, soothing itself to sleep with its own song in some
deep-shadowed copse.
Here, on a couch, such as might have been prepared for Titania,
Theodora seated herself, while Tristan stood gazing at her in a sort
of mad, fascinated wonderment, and gradually increasing intensity of
passion.
The alluring smile and the quick brightening of the eyes, so rare a
thing with him who, since he had left Avalon, was used to wear so calm
and subdued a mask, changed his aspect in an extraordinary manner. In
an instant he seemed more alive, more intensely living, pulsing with
the joy of the hour. He felt as if he must let the natural youth in his
veins run riot, as Theodora's beauty and the magic of the night began
to sting his blood.
Theodora's eyes danced to his. She had marked the symptoms and knew.
Her eyes had lost their mocking glitter and swam in a soft languor,
that was strangely bewitching. Her lips parted in a faint sigh and a
glance like are shot from beneath her black silken lashes.
"Tristan!" she murmured tremulously and waited. Then again: "Tristan!"
He knelt before her, passion sweeping over him like a hurricane, and
took her unresisting hands in his.
"Theodora!" he said, bending over her, and his voice, even to his own
ears had a strange sound, as if some one else were speaking. "Theodora!
What would you have of me? Speak! For my heart aches with a burden of
dark memories conjured up by the wizard spell of your eyes!"
She gently drew him down beside her on the couch.
"Foolish dreamer!" she murmured, half mockingly, half tenderly. "Are
love and passion so strange a thing that you wonder--as you sit here
beside me?"
"Love!" he said. "Is it love indeed?"
He uttered the words as if he spoke to himself, in a hushed, awe-struck
tone. But she had heard, and a flash of triumph brightened her
beautiful face.
"Ah!" and she dropped her head lower and lower, till the dark perfumed
tresses touched his brow. "Then you do love me?"
He started. A dull pang struck his heart, a chill of vague uncertainty
and dread. He longed to take her in his arms, forget the past, the
present, the future, life and all it held. But suddenly a vague
thought oppressed him. There was the sense that he was dishonoring
that other love. However unholy it had been, it was yet for him a real
and passionate reality of his past life, and he shrank in shame from
suppressing it. Would it not have been far nobler to have fought it
down as the pilgrim he had meant to be than to drown its memory in a
delirium of the senses?
And--was this love indeed for the woman by his side? Was it not mere
passion and base desire?
As he remained silent the silken voice of the fairest woman he had ever
seen once more sent its thrill through his bewildered brain in the
fateful question:
"Do you love me, Tristan?"
Softly, insidiously, she entwined him with her wonderful white arms.
Her perfumed breath fanned his cheeks; her dark tresses touched his
brow. Her lips were thirstily ajar.
He put his arms about her. Hungrily, passionately, his gaze wandered
over her matchless form, from the small feet, encased in golden
sandals, to the crowning masses of her dusky hair. His heart beat with
loud, impatient thuds, like some wild thing struggling in its cage, but
though his lips moved, no utterance came.
Her arms tightened about him.
"You are of the North," she said, "though you have hotter blood in
your veins. Now under our yellow sun, and in our hot nights, when the
moon hangs like an alabaster lamp in the sky, a beaten shield of gold
trembling over our dreams--forget the ice in your blood. Gather the
roses while you may! A time will come when their soft petals will have
lost their fragrance! I love you--be mine!"
And, bending towards him, she kissed him with moist, hungry lips.
He fevered in her embrace. He kissed her eyes--her hair--her lips--and
a strange dizziness stole over him, a delirium in which he was no
longer master of himself.
"Can you not be happy, Tristan?" she whispered gently. "Happy as other
men when loved as I love you!"
With a cold sinking of the heart he looked into the woman's perfect
face. His upturned gaze rested on the glittering serpent heads that
crowned the dusky hair, and the words of Fabio of the Cavalli knocked
on the gates of his memory.
"Happy as other men when they love--and are deceived," he said, unable
to free himself of her entwining arms.
"You shall not be deceived," she returned quickly. "You shall
attain that which your heart desires. Your dearest hope shall be
fulfilled,--all shall be yours--all--if you will be mine--to-night."
Tristan met her burning gaze, and as he did so the strange dread
increased.
"What of the Grand Chamberlain?" he queried. "What of Basil, your
lover?"
Her answer came swift and fierce, as the hiss of a snake.
"He shall die--even as Roxana--even as Fabio, he who boasted of my
love! You shall be lord of Rome--and I--your wife--"
Her words leaped into his brain with the swift, fiery action of a
burning drug. A red mist swam before his eyes.
"Love!" he cried, as one seized with sudden delirium. "What have I to
do with love--what have you, Theodora, who make the lives of men your
sport, and their torments your mockery? I know no name for the fever
that consumes me, when I look upon you--no name for the ravishment that
draws me to you in mingled bliss and agony. I would perish, Theodora.
Kill me, and I shall pray for you! But love--love--it recalls to my
soul a glory I have lost. There can be no love between you and me!"
He spoke wildly, incoherently, scarcely knowing what he said. The
woman's arms had fallen from him. He staggered to his feet.
A low laugh broke from her lips, which curved in an evil smile.
"Poor fool!" she said in her low, musical tones, "to cast away that for
which hundreds would give their last life's blood. Madman! First to
desire, then to spurn. Go! And beware!"
She stood before him in all her white glory and loveliness, one white
arm stretched forth, her bosom heaving, her eyes aflame. And Tristan,
seized with a sudden fear, fled from the pavilion, down the moonlit
path as if pursued by an army of demons.
A man stepped from a thicket of roses, directly into his path. Heedless
of everything, of every one, Tristan endeavored to pass him, but the
other was equally determined to bar his way.
"So I have found you at last," said the voice, and Tristan, starting
as if the ground had opened before him, stared into the face of the
stranger at Theodora's board.
"You have found me, my Lord Roger," he said, after recovering from his
first surprise. "Here I may injure no one--you, my lord, least of all!
Leave me in peace!"
The stranger gave a sardonic laugh.
"That I may perchance, when you have told me the truth--the whole
truth!"
"Ask, my lord, and I will answer," Tristan replied.
"Where is the Lady Hellayne?"--
The questioning voice growled like far off thunder.
Tristan recoiled a step, staring into the questioner's face as if he
thought he had gone mad.
"The Lady Hellayne?" he stammered, white to the lips and with a dull
sinking of the heart. "How am I to know? I have not seen her since I
left Avalon--months ago. Is she not with you?"
The Lord Laval's brow was dark as a thunder cloud.
"If she were with me--would I be wasting my time asking you concerning
her?" he barked.
"Where is she, then?" Tristan gasped.
"That you shall tell me--or I have forgotten the use of this knife!"
And he laid his hand on the hilt of a long dagger that protruded from
his belt.
Tristan's eyes met those of the other.
"My lord, this is unworthy of you! I have never committed a deed I
dared not confess--and I despise your threat and your accusation as
would the Lady Hellayne, were she here."
Steps were heard approaching from the direction of the pavilion.
"I am a stranger in Rome. Doubtless you are familiar with its ways.
Some one is coming. Where shall we meet?"
Tristan pondered.
"At the Arch of the Seven Candles. Every child can point the way. When
shall it be?"
"To-morrow,--at the second hour of the night. And take care to speak
the truth!"
Ere Tristan could reply the speaker had vanished among the thickets.
For a moment he paused, amazed, bewildered. Roger de Laval in Rome! And
Hellayne--where was she? She had left Avalon--had left her consort. Had
she entered a convent? Hellayne--where was Hellayne?
Before this dreadful uncertainty all the events of the night vanished
as if they had never been.
For a long time Tristan remained where Roger de Laval had left him.
The cool air from the lake blew refreshingly on his heated brow. A
thousand odors from orange and jessamine floated caressingly about
him. The night was very still. There, in the soft sky-gloom, moved the
majestic procession of undiscovered worlds. There, low on the horizon,
the yellow moon swooned languidly down in a bed of fleecy clouds. The
drowsy chirp of a dreaming bird came softly now and again from branch
shadowed thickets, and the lilies on the surface of the lake nodded
mysteriously to each other, as if they were whispering a secret of
another world.
At last the moon sank out of sight and from afar, softened by the
distance, the chimes of convent bells from the remote regions of the
Aventine were wafted through the flower scented summer night.
END OF BOOK THE SECOND
BOOK THE THIRD
CHAPTER I
WOLFSBANE
The early summer dawn was creeping over the silent Campagna when
Tristan reached the Inn of The Golden Shield.
As one dazed he had traversed the deserted, echoing streets in the
mysterious half-light which flooded the Eternal City; a light in which
everything was sharply defined yet seemed oddly spectral and ghostlike.
Deep down in his heart two emotions were contending, appalling in their
intensity and appeal. One was an agonized fear for the woman he loved
with a love so unwavering that his love was actually himself, his whole
being, the sacrament that consecrated his life and ruled his destiny.
She had left Avalon; she had left him to whom she had plighted her
troth. Where was she and why was Roger de Laval in Rome?
An icy fear gripped his heart at the thought; a nameless dread and
horror of the terrible scene he had witnessed at the midnight feast of
Theodora.
For a time he was as one obsessed, hardly master of himself and his
actions. In an age where scenes such as those he had witnessed were
quickly forgotten the death of Roxana and young Fabio created but
little stir. Rome, just emerging from under the dark cloud of Marozia's
regime, in the throes of ever-recurring convulsions, without a helmsman
to guide the tottering ship of state, received the grim tidings with a
shrug of apathy; and the cowed burghers discussed in awed whispers the
dread power of one whose vengeance none dared to brave.
Tristan's unsophisticated mind could not so easily forget. He had
stood at the brink of the abyss, he had looked down into the murky
depths from which there was no escape once the fumes had conquered the
senses and vanquished resistance. With a shudder he called to mind,
how utterly and completely he had abandoned himself to the lure of the
sorceress, how little short of a miracle had saved him. She had led him
on step by step, and the struggle had but begun.
No one was astir at the inn.
He ascended the stairs leading to his chamber. The chill of the night
was still lingering in the dusky passages. He lighted the taper of a
tiny lamp that burnt before an image of the Mother of Sorrows in a
niche.
Then he sank upon his couch. His vitality seemed to be ebbing and his
mind clouding before the problems that began to crowd in upon him.
Nothing since he left Avalon, nothing external or merely human, had
stirred him as had his meeting with Theodora. It had roused in him
a dormant, embryonic faculty, active and vivid. What it called into
his senses was not a mere series of pictures. It created a visual
representation of the horrified creature, roused from the flattering
oblivion of death to memory and shame and dread, nothing really
forgotten, nothing past, the old lie that death ends all pitifully
unmasked.
He shuddered as he thought of the consequences of surrender from which
a silent voice out of the far off past had saved him--just in time.
His life lay open before him as a book, every fact recorded, nothing
extenuated.
A calm, relentless voice bade him search his own life, if he had done
aught amiss. He had never taken or desired that which was another's.
Yet his years had been a ceaseless perturbation. There had been endless
and desperate clutchings at bliss, followed by the swift discovery that
the exquisite light had faded, leaving a chill gloaming that threatened
a lonely night. And if the day had failed in its promise what would the
night do?
His soul cried out for rest, for peace from the enemy; peace, not this
endless striving. He was terrified. In the ignominious lament there
was desertion, as if he were too small for the fight. He was demanding
happiness, and that his own burden should rest on another's shoulders.
How silent was the universe around him! He stood in tremendous, eternal
isolation.
Pale and colorless as a moonstone at first the ghostly dawn had
quickened to the iridescence of the opal, flaming into a glory of gold
and purple in the awakening east.
And now the wall in the courtyard was no longer grey. A faint, clear,
golden light was beginning to flow and filter into it, dispelling, one
by one, the dark shadows that lurked in the corners. Somewhere in the
distance the dreamer heard the shrill silver of a lark, and a dull
monotonous sound, felt rather than heard, suggested that sleeping Rome
was about to wake.
And then came the sun. A long golden ray stabbed the mists and leaped
into his chamber like a living thing. The little sanctuary lamp before
the image of the Blessed Virgin glowed no more.
After a brief rest Tristan arose, noting for the first time with a
degree of chagrin that his dagger had not been restored to him.
It was day now. The sun was high and hot. The streets and thoroughfares
were thronged. A bright, fierce light beat down upon dome and spire
and pinnacle, flooding the august ruins of the Cæsars and the thousand
temples of the Holy Cross with brilliant radiance from the cloudless
azure of the heavens. Over the Tiber white wisps of mist were rising.
Beyond, the massive bulk of the Emperor's Tomb was revealed above the
roofs of the houses, and the olive groves of Mount Janiculum glistened
silvery in the rays of the morning sun.
It was only when, refreshed after a brief rest and frugal refreshments,
Tristan quitted the inn, taking the direction of Castel San Angelo,
that the incidents leading up to his arrival at the feast of Theodora
slowly filtered through his mind.
Withal there was a link missing in the chain of events. From the time
he had left the Lateran in pursuit of the two strangers everything
seemed an utter blank. What mysterious forces had been at work
conveying him to his destiny, he could not even fathom and, in a state
of perplexity, such as he had rarely experienced, he pursued his way,
paying little heed to the life and turmoil that seethed around him.
Upon entering Castel San Angelo he was informed that the Grand
Chamberlain had arrived but a few moments before and he immediately
sought the presence of the man whose sinister countenance held out
little promise of the solution of the mystery.
In an octagon chamber, the small windows of which, resembling
port-holes, looked out upon the Campagna, Basil was fretfully
perambulating as Tristan entered.
After a greeting which was frosty enough on both sides, Tristan briefly
stated the matter which weighed upon his mind.
The Grand Chamberlain watched him narrowly, nodding now and then by
way of affirmation, as Tristan related the experience at the Lateran,
referring especially to two mysterious strangers whom he had followed
to a distant part of the city, believing they might offer some clue to
the outrage committed at the Lateran on the previous night.
Basil regarded the new captain with a mixture of curiosity and gloom.
Perchance he was as much concerned in discovering what Tristan knew
as the latter was in finding a solution of the two-fold mystery.
After having questioned him on his experience, without offering any
suggestion that might clear up his visitor's mind, Basil touched upon
the precarious state of the city and its hidden dangers.
Tristan listened attentively to the sombre account, little guessing its
purpose.
"Much have I heard of the prevailing lawless state," he interposed at
last, "of dark deeds hidden in the silent bosom of the night, of feud
and rebellion against the Church which is powerless to defend herself
for the want of a master-hand that would evoke order out of chaos."
The dark-robed figure by his side gave a grim nod.
"Men are closely allied to beasts, giving rein to their desires and
appetites as the tigers and hyenas. It is only fear that will restrain
them, fear of some despotic invisible force that pervades the universe,
whose chiefest attribute is not so much creative as destructive. It is
only through fear you can rule the filthy rabble that reviles to-day
its idol of yesterday."
There was an undercurrent of scorn in Basil's voice and Tristan saw,
as it were, the lightning of an angry or disdainful thought flashing
through the sombre depths of his eyes.
"What of the Lady Theodora?" Tristan interposed bluntly.
Basil gave a nameless shrug.
"She bends men's hearts to her own desires, taking from them their
will and soul. The hot passion of love is to her a toy, clasped and
unclasped in the pink hollow of her hand."
And, as he spoke, Basil suited the gesture to the word, closing his
fingers in the air and again unclosing them.
"As long as she retains the magic of her beauty so long will her sway
over the Seven Hills endure," he added after a brief pause.
"What of the woman who paid the penalty of her daring?" Tristan
ventured to inquire.
Basil regarded the questioner quizzically.
"There have been many disturbances of late," he spoke after a pause.
"Roxana's lust for Theodora's power proved her undoing. Theodora will
suffer no rival to threaten her with Marozia's fate."
"I have heard it whispered she is assembling about her men who are
ready to go to any extreme," Tristan interposed tentatively, thrown off
his guard by Basil's affability of manner.
The latter gave a start, but recovered himself.
"Idle rumors. The Romans must have something to talk about. Odo of
Cluny is thundering his denunciations with such fervid eloquence that
they cannot but linger in the rabble's mind."
"The hermit of Mount Aventine?" Tristan queried.
"Even he! He has a strange craze, a doctrine of the End of Time, to
be accomplished when the cycle of the sæculum has run its course. A
doctrine he most furiously proclaims in language seemingly inspired,
and which he promulgates to farther his own dark ends."
"A theory most dark and strange," Tristan replied with a shudder, for
he was far from free of the superstition of the times.
Basil gave a shrug. His tone was lurid.
"What shall it matter to us, who shall hardly tread this earth when the
fateful moment comes?"
"If it were true nevertheless?" Tristan replied meditatively.
A sombre fire burnt in the eyes of the Grand Chamberlain.
"Then, indeed, should we not pluck the flowers in our path, defying
darkness and death and the fiery chariot of the All-destroyer that is
to sweep us to our doom?"
Tristan shuddered.
Some such words he had indeed heard among the pilgrim throngs without
clearly grasping their import. They had haunted his memory and had,
for the time at least, laid a restraining hand upon his impulses.
But the mystery of the Monk of Cluny weighed lightly against the
mystery of the woman who held in the hollow of her hand the destinies
of Rome.
Basil seemed to read Tristan's thoughts.
Reclining in his chair, he eyed him narrowly.
"You, too, but narrowly escaped the blandishments of the Sorceress,
blandishments to which many another would have succumbed. I marvel at
your self-restraint, not being bound by any vow."
The speaker paused and waited, his eyes lying in ambush under the dark
straight brows.
The memory still oppressed Tristan and the mood did not escape Basil,
who stored it up for future reckoning.
"Perchance I, too, might have succumbed to the Lady Theodora's beauty,
had not something interposed at the crucial moment."
"The memory of some earlier love, perchance?" Basil queried with a
smile.
Tristan gave a sigh. He thought of Hellayne and the impending meeting
with Roger de Laval.
His questioner abandoned the subject. Master in dissimulation he had
read the truth on Tristan's brow.
"Pray then to your guardian saint, if of such a one you boast," he
continued after a pause, "to intervene, should temptation in its most
alluring form face you again," he said with deliberate slowness. "You
witnessed the end of Fabio of the Cavalli?"--
Tristan shuddered.
"And yet there was a time when he called all these charms his own, and
his command was obeyed in Theodora's gilded halls."
"Can love so utterly vanish?" Tristan queried with an incredulous
glance at the speaker.
Basil gave a soundless laugh.
"Love!" he said. "Hearts are but pawns in Theodora's hands. Her
ambition is to rule, and he who can give to her what her heart desires
is the favorite of the hour. Beware of her! Once the poison of her
kisses rankles in your blood nothing can save you from your doom."
Basil watched the effect of his words upon his listener and for the
nonce he seemed content. Tristan would take heed.
When Tristan had taken his leave a panel in the wall opened noiselessly
and Il Gobbo peered into the chamber.
Basil locked and bolted the door which led into the corridor, and the
sinister, bat-like form stepped out of its dark frame and approached
the inmate of the chamber with a fawning gesture.
"If your lordship will believe me," he said in a husky undertone, "I am
at last on the trail."
"What now?"
"I may not tell your nobility as yet."
"Do you want another bezant, dog?"
"It is not that, my lord."
"Then, who does he consort with?"
"I have tracked him as a panther tracks its prey--he consorts with no
one."
"Then continue to follow him and see if he consorts with any--woman."
"A woman?"
"Why not, fool?"
"But had your nobility said there was a woman--"
"There always is."
"Your nobility let him go--and yet--one word--"
"I must know more, before I strike. I knew he would come. There is more
to this than we wot of. Theodora is infatuated with his austerity. He
has jilted her and she smarts under the blow. She will move heaven and
earth to bring him to her feet. Meanwhile there are weightier matters
to be considered. Perchance I shall pay you an early call in your noble
abode. Prepare fitly and bid the ghosts troop from their haunted caves.
And now be off! Your quarry has the start!"
Il Gobbo bowed grotesquely and receded backward towards the panel which
closed soundlessly behind him.
Basil remained alone in the octagon cabinet.
He strode slowly towards one of the windows that faced to southward and
gazed long and pensively out upon the undulating expanse of the Roman
Campagna.
"Three messengers, yet none has returned," he muttered darkly. "Can it
be that I have lost my clutch on destiny?"