The Hill of Venus

"You carry a lusty belly," replied the dame, whose eyes had a hungry boldness, while she offered the bottle to her interlocutor.

The duke took a liberal draught. Francesco frowned.

Then the three chaffered with obvious good humor, touching upon many topics, which sounded strange to Francesco's ears.

They touched upon the wonders of the swamps, wild beasts, wolves and bears; they conversed of the outlaws of Arezzo, whose leader was said to be a woman; of the stone that bled on Passion Sunday, of the mysterious almond-tree at Treviso, that bore fruit showing the impress of the face of the Christ.

The duke seemed remarkably well versed in all matters pertaining to Church or state. When he stopped for a pull at the stone bottle, the two women laughed, taking alternate bites from an apple and munching the pulp with a voracious movement of the jaws.

Francesco thought them queer wayfarers, for they in turn stared at him, then at each other and laughed, looking at Francesco's grave face as if it were the quaintest thing on earth.

"Saints! What a sweet gentleman!" said the taller of the two, "and to see such a one in the spider's web!"

And as she sighed, her eyes discoursed to Francesco something that savored not of the Church.

The fat vagrant offered him the bottle, while her companion's eyes sent him a tentative offer of friendliness, half timid, half bold.

Francesco passed it by with a flash of the eyes to the horizon, and a straight setting of the chin.

After having parted from the two rowdies in the fantastic cloaks, the duke and Francesco continued upon their way.

"There is freedom only on the mountain-heights," the duke said, as they arrived at a crossing, marked by a huge stone cross. "If this truth ever dawns upon you, if ever your soul shrinks from the greed and hypocrisy of the world, if you tire of bloodshed in the name of the Cross and of villainy glorified by the name of Christ – the camp of the Duke of Spoleto will receive you, standing face to face with God alone."

With a hearty hand-shake they parted, and Francesco followed the road pointed out to him by his companion of the morning hours.

He had taken reluctant leave of the burly champion of a lost cause, whose very presence seemed to breathe the undefiled air of his great northern forests, undefiled by the trend of human feet, the echoes of human strife.

And as Francesco gave a parting look to the high hills with the glitter of their birch-trees, he suddenly experienced an unexplainable melting of his resentment against Ilaria.

Something that he could neither describe nor account for, came into his heart, a subtle emotion, that was like a faint perfume, or the sound of music from afar. He had hated her for her cold pride when he left his home; yet, into this tawny cloud of hate flashed the vivid streak of a sudden recollection.

Every faint zephyr reminded him of her charm; transfused itself into the mellow brilliancy of her beauty, and Francesco suddenly surprised himself by taking her part against himself.

And, what was more, he experienced a curiously pleasing sensation in the act, and in this impulse towards tenderness discovered things that were strange and long forgotten.

It was now the drowsy noon of day, and the wood was full of shadows and of stealthy, creeping sunlight.

He rested for a pace, then, refreshed by the siesta, he rode onward, other thoughts beginning to throng his mind.

He was entering a sphere of action.

Hitherto his life had been as that of a recluse. The peace of the cloister had enveloped him as a mighty cloak of safety. It had dominated him even to the point of total paralysis of his energies. Of the purpose of his journey he was still in ignorance. Yet, an inner voice whispered to him that it was the clarion call of the Church Militant that had called him out of his repose.

There could be no further compromise between the warring factions.

The death-struggle between Guelph and Ghibelline had reached its highest crest. Henceforth he would be the soldier of the Church. A chasm, no eternity could bridge, would gape between himself and the friends of his youth. Thus Fate had willed it. Hurled into a seething vortex, he was swept onward by the resistless tide.

Now and again moments of resonant incredulity beat upon his brain. Why had his guiltless youth been condemned, why had he been sold into bondage?

For a moment he started, retreating precipitately into the shadows.

On the far bank of the river, whose glittering coils wound through the emerald depths of the valley, there, among the aspens, he descried a company of horsemen, waiting, spears erect, helmets glittering, the wind tossing the dark manes of their horses.

After a time they rode onward, and he, too, cautiously pursued his solitary path.

Evening had come.

The rose had faded from the sky; but the horizon was flooded with pale gold, in which shone the pellucid evening star. The air was filled with the sweet chimes of innumerable bells.

A group of towers rising above the distant hills cut sharply into the glory of the sky.

Yonder lay Viterbo amidst her encircling walls: thence those carolling chimes, that so strangely stirred him, were singing their message of peace.

His eyes were fixed afar.

Would he turn back? —

The west was smoking with golden vapors. The forests receding on either hand revealed the hills and summits of the pontifical city. The old Longobard walls curved away on each hand, for a long distance, high and grim, with battlements and towers, bare and menacing.

For a moment Francesco paused; his eyes in the tracks of the sinking sun, his lips tightly set, the nails of his hands driven into his own flesh.

Then with head high and erect, never a muscle betraying the anguish of his soul, he rode into the gates of Viterbo.

CHAPTER IV

THE PAWN OF THE CHURCH

WHEN Francesco arrived on the height it was the hour of the closing of the city-gates and he took lodging at an inn situated near the city walls.

He caught his breath the next morning at the imposing aspect of the place.

In the young sunshine its many towers were no longer phantom intruders on the sky, but a dominant fact. The machicolated heights, the encircling ramparts, the stern outlines of the fortress-palace of the pope, rose proudly impregnable in the air.

On the broad highways from Umbria, Tuscany and Romagna, even at this early hour, an almost endless stream of humanity was moving. Many a clerk and prelate was there, superbly arrayed, mounted on steeds gay with princely trappings. Fair women took in the freshness of the day. Pilgrims with staff and shell trudged merrily or wearily on. Jewish merchants, serious of face, bore packs containing valuable merchandise. For Viterbo lay on the highway, linking Northern and Southern Italy, and Europe, in motion on its way to Rome, moved incessantly through its streets. The image of Rome, in her desolation, recurred, vague as a ghost, to Francesco's mind and vanished before this city of the present, unhaunted as yet by memories, rising radiant in the morning air.

Treading the streets, the life which he for the past weeks had so eagerly accepted, suddenly seemed alien to the whole old order of thoughts and feelings which Francesco represented.

Mechanically almost he dropped on his knees before an altar, gazing at the pictured face of a kneeling woman whose eyes were filled with pure compassion. Nevertheless, he allowed himself to be diverted by the interest of his surroundings, while moving towards the presence of the head of Christendom.

Pope Clement IV gave audience in a high apartment, overlooking the winding road to Rome. The sunlight, streaming through the window arch, revealed the man with much distinctness.

The Pontiff was slight and delicate of build. His face bore the stamp of a high order of intellect; his features were those of an aristocrat. Disease of body was plainly portrayed by his shadowy cheeks, much lined for his fifty-odd years. Disease of soul showed none the less plainly in a troubled lift of the eyebrows, that imparted to the face a look of search, expecting yet perhaps desiring no answer. The countenance withal was unmistakably of the legal cast, self-contained, alert, studious. On the whole, Francesco's first impression upon being conducted into the presence of the Father of Christendom, was of the unconscious dignity of high place, blended with something too complex for analysis.

Many cardinals and princes of the Church, many orders of monks, noblemen and foreign ambassadors were assembled in the audience-chamber of the Pontiff. There was a restlessness among them, which immediately impressed itself upon the newcomer.

Surrounding the pontifical dais were Antonio Pignatello, Cardinal of Cosenza and private secretary to His Holiness; Don Stefano, General of the Carthusians, Master Raimondo, General of the Dominicans, and an individual who was incessantly fingering his beads, whose bent countenance, sallow features, sunken eyes, thin lips and claw-like talons revealed a combination of hypocrisy and cunning, such as but one man could lay claim to, and he the champion of Pope Clement IV, Charles of Anjou, brother of King Louis of France.

"Yet – notwithstanding your plea, you have not yet seen the towers of the Holy City established on earth among the children of men," the Pontiff turned to the Provencal.

"I have had no visions," replied the latter with a quick lift of the eyes.

"Nor I, beloved son," said the Pontiff, "save as the spectacle of life is an ever changing vision. Have you any conception, I wonder, of its interest and significance in these latter days?"

"Let me remind you, Holy Father, Benevento lies behind us," snarled the champion of the Church. "Would your black crows have carried the day without the chivalry of Provence?"

The Pontiff ignored the insolence of the speech.

"Truly – Benevento lies behind us," he said. "Nevertheless I may not say, here is the hand of God, and there it is withheld. The schism has widened; the way of the truth is more obscure than ever; the Church has grown to be the very scorn of men, because of the instruments she employs, – she is forced to employ!"

The Pontiff's tone had grown hard and there was a steely glitter in his gray eyes.

Charles of Anjou fingered his beads more swiftly, while his thin lips stretched into a hard, straight line.

"'The end justifies the means!' has long been the maxim of the princes of the Church," he said, while his eyes seemed to rest on the tips of his buskins, protruding from under the monkish garb he affected.

The Pontiff hastened to explain.

"One may not cleanse a pigsty with a silver fork. Yet – shall the Patrimony of St. Peter be sacked and burned in the name of the Cross? Shall violence, cunning and greed reign unchecked, that the Beast may be glorified?"

"Yet the Beast may not gird its loins without drink or food, – and the Halo makes but a thin mantle!" snarled the Pontiff's crusader.

Clement raised a thin, emaciated hand.

"What a mass of falsehoods and hypocritical phrases have again assailed our ear! Our dearly beloved son in Christ boasts of his love and veneration for the Church, while those under his command are pillaging the sanctuaries!"

The beads passed nervously through Anjou's fingers.

"These reproaches, Holy Father," he said with a sepulchral voice, "touch me very deeply. The host must be fed, and their zeal for the cause of Holy Church may lead them to mistake the cornfields of the righteous!"

The Pontiff bowed.

"Your crusades against the infidels seem to have blurred your vision, beloved son!"

"You speak of my youthful glories, Holy Father," replied Charles of Anjou with a leer. "Many years have since gone by, and they sleep with my youthful sins!"

"That must be a wide berth that enables them to find place side by side," retorted the Pontiff.

Then, with a nameless shrug, he turned to the Cardinal of Cosenza.

"Has the messenger returned from Astura?"

Instead of the Cardinal, Anjou made reply.

"Wherein would treason benefit the Frangipani? They hold their castle as fief of the Empire, and the coffers of the Church are dolefully empty."

The Pontiff turned to the speaker.

"Treason, – beloved son? A harsh word indeed! Were breaking with a sinful past to be stigmatized in such wise, our indulgences would indeed go begging and St. Peter tire at his watch!"

Charles of Anjou gave a significant shrug.

"Will the Frangipani exchange a distant master for one hovering over their rock?"

The Pontiff waved the question aside.

"The bait were hardly tempting!"

The small eyes of Anjou met those of the Pontiff.

"What is the bribe?" he queried brutally.

Clement raised his hands in abhorrence. A lawyer and a diplomat, the Frenchman's brutal frankness jarred on his nerves.

"What of Astura as his own – to have and to hold?" he said at last with bated breath.

A sudden sinister gleam from Anjou's eyes betokened his understanding.

"The dead are all immortal," he said with a shrug.

A sudden commotion, the sound of voices in the antechamber, produced a momentary lull in the conversation, and at the beck of the Pontiff the Cardinal of Cosenza rose to inquire into the cause of the disturbance.

After a time he returned and whispered some words into Clement's ears.

The Pontiff was seen to start; and to look from one to the other of those present. Then he nodded and, through the door of the audience-chamber, Francesco was ushered into the august presence of the Father of Christendom.

He was received with a courteous quiet, the Pontiff and those about him regarding him curiously.

Francesco advanced at a signal from the Cardinal of Cosenza, who acted as master of ceremonies, knelt and kissed the Pontiff's feet. He felt somewhat dazed by the unwonted presence and awaited in silence the Pontiff's question. In a fleeting glance he had taken in his surroundings, but as, when he rose from his kneeling position, his gaze encountered that of the Pontiff's minion, there swept over him such a wave of rage, horror and shame, that all the color left his face, and his hands were clenched, as if he would spring at the cowled form by the Pontiff's side and strangle him. He restrained himself with an effort, but the gesture had not passed unremarked by Anjou, who was engaged in sedulously counting his beads and fingering the Leaden Lamb about his neck, while he drew the cowl somewhat deeper over his face.

Francesco, turning to the Pontiff, was struck by the reticent shrewdness in Clement's eyes, the expression of his face, the calm, unmoved poise of body and head.

It crossed his consciousness in a flash that it was possible for this man to impress his will upon a world, no matter if that world rebelled.

"Your name?" the Pontiff spoke at last.

"Francesco Villani," came the reply, given with bated breath.

Clement stared into space as one endeavoring to recall a memory.

"Villani, – Villani – " he muttered to himself with an absent air. "Where have we heard the name before?"

The Cardinal of Cosenza leaned forward, his lips at Clement's ear.

The Pontiff nodded.

"We remember, – we remember, – the illegitimate offspring of Gregorio Villani, Grand Master of the Knights of the Hospital!"

The words had been spoken with intent of being heard by all present.

Francesco straightened himself to his full height.

His eyes blazed as he faced the Pontiff.

"Your Holiness need not proclaim my father's shame to the ears of Christendom! Let it suffice, that I am atoning for his fault, – if fault it was!"

There was a heavy silence, during which the Pontiff and Charles of Anjou exchanged significant glances.

They had not remained unremarked by Francesco, and the spark of rebellion which had slumbered in his soul all these long and weary months was fanned to devouring flame, as with inexpressible loathing his gaze rested upon the man who was the abomination of Christendom, the instrument of the Pontiff.

"What proof have we that you are atoning for the transgressions of one who passed from earth in mortal sin?" the Pontiff queried after a pause, while a fatuous smile played about Anjou's lips.

"The garb I wear," Francesco flashed. "The garb your Holiness has imposed!"

The Pontiff regarded him quizzically.

"You have served your novitiate?"

"At Monte Cassino!"

"How fares the Prior? It is many moons since we have visited his mountain-heights!"

Francesco gave a brief account of his life at the cloister, up to the time when he had received the summons to Rome.

Clement listened warily, the lawyer in his expression uppermost.

"You come from Rome?"

Francesco shivered at the memory.

"From Rome!" he replied curtly.

"What of the city?"

"King Conradino lords the Capitol!"

"You have seen the Pretender?"

"We have stood face to face."

"What is he like?"

Francesco gazed from Clement to Anjou

"A man!"

The Pontiff nodded, as if he approved the observation.

In the man Francesco had long discovered the judicial mind, and the discreet intelligence of the trained statesman.

From the shadows the Pontiff was warily regarding the sun-steeped features of the young monk.

At last, his voice sinking down to its accustomed calm, he said, as if feeling his ground:

"Does the new life satisfy your soul?"

The restless, ceaseless pain of longing again knocked at Francesco's heart, and with it returned the old spirit of rebellion, which had possessed him in the days of his novitiate at Monte Cassino. And, unconsciously, he repeated the words of the Duke of Spoleto:

"Men make a patchwork quilt of life, and call the patchwork religion and law."

An audible gasp was wafted to his ears.

Clement opened his hand and dropped the little crucifix, which he had been fingering during their talk, with a gesture of rejection, on the floor behind him. The palm of the hand, still stretched and open, bore sharp red marks. The point of the cross had evidently just been pressed into it with convulsive energy.

"Obedience is holiness," the Pontiff said at last, with a sweep of his hand.

Francesco discovered himself unwittingly gazing in the direction of Anjou. The Pontiff intercepted the look. Perhaps there was a reason for his question which Francesco was far from guessing, as he suavely said:

"You do not conceive, my son, that the Church can err in the choice of her instruments?"

"I have heard of some striking instances of the readiness of the servants of the Church," he replied with a straight look at Anjou, "to suppress the spirit when it suited them to do so."

At these words a change, visible even in the shadows, crossed the features of the Provencal leader.

"The spirit is capable of various interpretations," he snarled with a vicious glare at the young monk, whose air of loathing had stung him to the quick.

"But not the instrument," Francesco retorted hotly.

Clement at this point thought fit to interpose, yet not without a sting of rebuke to the brother of Louis of France.

"The Church requires not her subjects to think for her, nor to interpret her spirit. What she exacts, is unfaltering obedience!"

There was something in the Pontiff's tone which startled Francesco. He was conscious that Clement avoided touching on the business of his summons to Rome, as if to force him to betray his own trend of mind. Yet he shrank unwittingly from uttering the words which hovered on his lips. He felt instinctively there was no mercy within these walls, and at the thought he was seized with a secret dread.

The silence at last grew irksome. Francesco felt a cold hand clutching at his heart.

If the sacrifice had been in vain! If he had been tricked into selling his birthright, tricked into bartering his happiness for a shroud! He felt the flood-gates of his memory re-open; he felt the portals of the past, which had been locked and barred, swing back upon their hinges, grating deep down into his soul. The mad longing for the world bounded back into his heart.

Still the Pontiff did not speak.

"I have been summoned from Monte Cassino," Francesco at last spoke with an assumption of courage which he was far from feeling. "I am waiting the commands of your Holiness!"

The Pontiff nodded.

"These are grievous times indeed; the Church must needs summon her faithful about her, to become militant in her service!"

"What would your Holiness have me do?" said Francesco.

"The service that will be demanded of you is to be commensurate with the boon you have come to ask at our hands," Clement replied at last.

For a moment Francesco stared speechless at the Pontiff. Clement had read the very depths of his soul.

"When I entered the monastic life," he said at last, "it was stipulated that at the expiration of a certain period the burden should be lightened."

"Conditions?" replied Clement, with a slight contraction of the brows. "The Church demands unconditional surrender! Are you so very anxious to be relieved of the garb which befits the servant of God?"

"There are various ways to serve the Church," Francesco replied in a hard voice.

Clement bent serious brows upon him.

"We must subdue the mind for the sake of the mind! The boon you are about to ask might be granted – in return for some signal service to the Church!"

Francesco's eyelids narrowed.

"And this service, – what is it?"

He saw the Pontiff and Charles of Anjou exchange glances.

What new traffic were they about to propose to him?

He looked about the circle of ecclesiastics.

He met but the reflection of the Pontiff's quizzical glances.

"We require a special envoy to Naples, to calm the minds of the disaffected. Our choice has fallen upon you. On the result of your mission depends the granting of the boon."

Francesco made no reply.

What could he urge in his own behalf that was not defeated in the utterance?

He was no match for Clement in subtlety and, though he could not fathom the reasons governing Clement's choice of himself to treat, as he surmised, with the Neapolitans, he recognized therein the desire on the part of the Pontiff to strike his enemies through one of their own.

"What are the commands of your Holiness?" he said at last.

"You will receive your instructions from the Cardinal of Cosenza," the Pontiff replied calmly.

"Your audience is concluded," the latter whispered into Francesco's ear. He approached the pontifical dais as one in a dream; and, after the customary genuflection and the ceremony of kissing the Pontiff's feet, he passed out of the audience-chamber into the sun-fraught air of noon, the Pontiff's "Go in peace!" still ringing in his ears.

The personality of Clement had not passed from him without a deep impress. Here was a man created in the type of his predecessors, Alexander IV and Urban IV, a man who shrank from nothing that would advance the cause of the Church.

Thinking of the audience which had just come to a close, a heavy sense of defeat weighed Francesco down. His resistance had been utterly swept away; in vain had he waited for a power that did not come to uplift him and release.

The chasm between the life of the present and the life of the past gaped ever wider. By some invincible force he was being hurried onward to a dark and uncertain goal.

In the language of the East, he had his fate bound about his neck. There was no escape for him. Vainly as he might cast about him for an anchor, he saw nothing encompassing him but a great void. From the old life he was barred forevermore. The future appeared as a country bleak and unredeemed.

Towards evening he rode out of the gates of Viterbo. From its mountain height the pontifical palace frowned upon the world below with stern defiance, its architecture expressive of the asceticism, defensive of the soldier, rather, than the asceticism, contemplative of the saint.

Thus he rode out into the deepening dusk.

CHAPTER V

THE RED TOWER

WITH the first pulse of dawn in the East, Francesco was up and astir with the zest of the hour. The woods were full of golden vapor, of dew and the chanting of birds. A stream sang under the boughs, purling and foaming over a broad ledge of stone into a misty pool. A blue sky glimmered above the glistening tree-tops; the dwindling wood-ways quivered with the multitudinous madrigals of the dawn.