The Hill of Venus

How long, it seemed to Ilaria, since she had leaned over the parapets of Avellino, had watched the sunset light fade into the night! And one night of all, how slowly the moon had risen! How white the magnolias had shimmered, while the distant Liris sang his slumber song! How the red roses burned in the moonlight, as she stole down the path to meet him!

How long ago was it? Now, she could remember every detail of that night; how she started when a sleeping bird uttered a dream note among the leafy boughs, how she listened to her own heart-beats, how she found herself caught up in Francesco's arms.

All her youth, all her days had been poisoned by the thought of what she had done. Resolutely, day after day, month after month, had she fought against the demon of remorse. She had shut eyes and ears to the haunting spectre of the past. And now, steadily, pitilessly, she went back, step for step, through the hell of her past life, the mockery that was bitterer than death, the horror of loneliness, the slow, grinding, relentless agony of her nights and days.

The crowding phantoms of the past would not release her from their shadowy grip. Why had he again come into her life? Why had he again crossed her path?

Staggering, he released her at last, took a backward step and covered his face with his hands.

"I have tried not to lay hands on a thing that it is not mine to touch."

She pointed to his garb. A wondering look passed into her eyes.

At first he noted it not, in the thrall of his own emotions. Then, as she touched him lightly upon the arm, he understood.

"I am here, the legate of Clement, carrying the Interdict, unless Naples acknowledges the supremacy of the Church! For this I have laid aside the cowl!"

Ilaria shivered. He was still a monk, – after all.

There was nothing she could do to help him. That was the bitterest thing of all!

Silence seemed to bind the world into a golden swoon.

"Francesco," she cried, almost with a sob.

He came nearer and took her hands again.

"Let us go down among the terraces!" she said in a whisper. "Let us forget the loud, insistent clamor of the world. Let us be quite still, – as if we were among the poppy-flowers!"

By some strange echoing of the mind the idyls of past days woke like the songs of birds after a storm of rain. Her whole soul yearned out with a wistfulness borne of infinite regret.

Silently they walked down the flower-bordered path.

The panorama from the spot was enchanting. Far below lay the blue waters of the bay; out to seaward lay ancient Baiae with her thousand palaces and the forest of masts at Puteoli; beyond these Sorento and the shimmering islands, bathed by the boundless sea. The vaporous cloud from Vesuvius hung like a cone of snow in the still blue atmosphere.

The foreground was no less enchanting. All round the pavilion lay a verdant, luxuriant wilderness. The mysterious silence of noon brooded over the whole landscape; only a faint hum of life came up from the city. All else was still. Not a living creature seemed to breathe within ear-shot.

He led her to where a fountain plashed in the sun and stone steps ringed a quiet pool.

In the silence she bent over him, her hand on his dark hair.

The tonsure burned her fingers like living fire.

"Why have you done this thing?"

He felt the scorn in her voice; he felt the swift repellence of her body.

Francesco raised his face to that of the woman. It was very pale from the fierceness of the struggle to keep down even the suspicion of emotional sentimentality.

"You ask why I have done this thing?" he spoke dryly at last. "The hour has come when I must tell you, Ilaria! Not that it can steer the vessel of our lives into different channels, – but that at last I may stand vindicated in your sight. I am the son of Gregorio Villani, Grand Master of the Order of St. John. My mother died at my birth. I was raised at the Court of Avellino. So powerful was the influence of my father, that, notwithstanding the protests of the Holy See, he placed his offspring at a Ghibelline court. There came a day when I was summoned to the bedside of my father at San Cataldo. What passed between us during that interview, neither you nor any one on earth may know. I went into his room a happy, care-free youth. I came out the shadow of my former self, – a monk. One year I lived among shadows in the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino. There I took the vows which made me a prisoner, far more closely bound than you can know; for death alone shall release me from a life which has grown to be a torture. I became a monk half from pity, half from fear. The pity is almost gone; the fear has left me long ago. After a time I was called to Rome. The Church I love not! I am unfit to remain in her service. The monks are to me a hateful body. Willingly, gladly, would I see my scapular replaced by the tunic for my coffin. Yet death is not for me to hope for, or even to dream of, – and in vain I ask, what holds the future?"

Ilaria's head had drooped over his; her eyes wandered blindly over the ground. Then a warm drop fell to the stone at her feet.

During his recital the very soul in Francesco seemed to have withered with dread, and he seemed to shrivel up bodily and to grow feeble and old and wilted, as a leaf that the frost has touched.

"The memory pains you," she said at last.

He bit his lips.

"Deem you, I forget when I am silent? But it is not the thing itself that haunts me! It is the fact that I have lost the power over myself – "

"You have suffered – "

"It is the fact that I have come to the end of my courage, – to the point where I find myself a coward!"

"Surely there is a limit to what one may bear – "

"And he who has once reached that limit never knows when he may reach it again!"

He looked up with a sudden piteous catching of the breath.

"What will you do?" she spoke after a pause.

He held her hands in a close, passionate clasp. A silence that seemed to have no end had fallen about them.

"My allotted task," he said at last, in a voice more dead than alive.

"No, – no, – no – !" she started up suddenly. "Cannot you see, – will you never understand – oh! the bitterness, the misery of it all!"

She clung to him with all her might.

"Come away with me! What have you to do with this dead world of priests and monks! They are full of the dust of bygone ages! Come out of this plague-ridden Church, – come with me into the sunlight! I love you – I have always loved you, – always – "

She bent blindly towards him.

"Take me away from here, – Francesco, – take me away from here! Since I came here my feet seem to have grown heavy with this lotus-laden air. At times it sweeps over me like desperation, – I lose the faculty of thinking, I lose the power over myself!"

"I thought you were at Astura!" he said tentatively, the affair in the Red Tower flashing through his consciousness.

She gave a quick start.

"I am a woman, and I stand alone! I have lived in hell ever since I set foot in Astura. Almost have I lost the courage to look life in the face. How I have wanted you!" she continued, with a wan, wistful smile. "Ever I see you standing against the background of a great silence, a silence that engulfs, that maddens, that kills! And you will go from me, leave me a prey to this gray, suffocating loneliness, which hovers as a pall over my soul! I am nothing to Raniero! He seeks his pleasures elsewhere! The lure of the body drove him to me, – it has vanished, – thank God even for that! I should die in his embrace. He knows that I loathe him, that my soul spurns him! And he knows that I love you! Yet, though he has forfeited every right, human and divine, he grudges my love to another. For days and days he left me alone within the gray walls of Astura, until in a fit of desperation I left one night, and came here, to forget. His insults began in Rome. He went so far as to bring his mistress to the Frangipani palace. I have heard it whispered there is a curse on Astura. 'Astura – mala terra, – maledetta!' A beggar uttered these words, whom Raniero struck for obstructing his path, on the day when we arrived!"

A sudden blood-red cloud seemed to come before Francesco's eyes. With a voice bare of intonation, he recited his own adventure in the Red Tower, voicing his suspicions and fears.

Ilaria betrayed no surprise.

"He has never forgiven Fonté Gaia," she said, with drooping head. "And yet he was untrue to me even then! From that hour matters began to grow worse. Recklessly he cast the last semblance of decorum to the winds. When I protested against living under the same roof with his mistress, he smilingly brought me to Astura, leaving me, as he said, in undisturbed possession. My youth destroyed, my soul poisoned, I accepted my fate! I am the lady of the Frangipani! Sold, and bought, and paid for!"

Ilaria had made mere truth of the matter, neither justifying nor embellishing. Her clear, bleak words were the more pathetic for their very simpleness.

With a great cry, he took her in his arms, kissed her dusky tresses, kissed her flower-soft face. The dimmed sunlight, falling in upon them, enveloped them as with a halo.

"And you are happy here?" he spoke at last.

She gave a shrug.

"Here as elsewhere it is a phantom scene," she said, with her wan smile. "But if the fellowship of phantoms be ordained, it is well that they be like those of Naples, radiant."

"Am I too, then, a phantom like the rest?"

Like an echo a voice said:

"A phantom – like the rest."

"And is he – a phantom too?"

She looked up into his eyes.

"Raniero – "

"That other – "

Her face was very pale.

"Why do you dwell on him?"

"Are you not Queen of Phantoms, – Proserpina, – Lady of Shadows, you – as in the masque at Avellino?"

She shivered in his arms. He pressed her more closely to his heart.

"It was a long time ago!"

"And then as now you moved in a masque, in which I have no part."

A long silence enfolded them. She nestled close to him.

"I am tired, – very tired," she crooned, as a child about to fall asleep. "Francesco, help me to forget the years! I am afraid!"

"Afraid?"

"Of myself! Sometimes I dare not be alone at night! No, – no, – it is not that! The inner darkness! There is no weeping there, – only silence, – silence, – and the gathering gloom!"

She held his hands in her own.

"But for this," she cried with passionate pressure, "I should long have cursed God and died – "

Her voice died away in the empty stillness without response.

"It is peace I crave," she said wearily, "a peace, such as broods over a sunset world!"

"The peace of a dying day!" he replied. "The peace I seek is of a day that stoops not to evening."

"And this peace, – have you found it?"

Her eyes were fixed gravely on his own.

"I am as one who gropes in twilight by a path half seen, towards a goal he does not know. Not for me the peace of the goal! But there is peace also of the quest: a peace I would not forego!"

They had arisen and walked for a time in silence, seeking the remoter regions of the garden. The softened siesta lights gave to the distant hills an aspect of pearl and jasper.

It was drawing towards sunset; red banners streaked the amethyst of the western sky.

A saffron mist enveloped the curves of Vesuvius, shot with gold and crimson, merging in dusky purple. In the plains the fertile fields reclaimed round the base of Castiglioné gleamed russet with vines, gray with olives. Beyond the grim walls of distant Astura stretched the chalk-lands of Torre del Greco.

As they walked side by side, Francesco felt the rhythmic life in Dana's body. The wan, appealing face was close to his. An instant, and the passion of the sky leaped into it. Theirs was the calm of a still pool, which hovers till the wind breaks it into the myriad agitations of life. He drew her towards him; her head resting on his shoulder, as if there she had found a home.

The evening star shone out in the fading sky.

The dusk was travelling towards the night.

Creation shivered towards a deeper dream.

The summer moon had risen, shedding its magic light over the Gulf of Naples.

The very soul of Francesco was thrilled by the harmony around him; the harmony in the moon's golden trail, which fell upon the waters, a blazing path, reaching from Posilippo to the rim of the horizon, harmony in the soft murmur of the sea, and the light breeze which carried, together with the salt freshness of the sea-air, sweet perfumes from the shores of Sorento with their lemon and orange groves; harmony in the silvery curves of Vesuvius, wrapped in luminous mists, its rugged cone emitting a white smoke, which trailed along the upper zones of the air, the summit of the mountain flaring up from time to time, like dying embers consecrated to the gods, the gods who had died, had risen again, and had again expired.

"How wondrous lovely the night!" Francesco at last turned to his silent companion. "All nature seems as one magic blossom – "

"My blossom-season is past," she answered very lightly.

"It is always blossom-season where Proserpina treads," said Francesco, his eyes fixed on the face he loved so well.

"You look almost as you did, when we were both happy."

"Is it so long ago? Yes, I am old, Ilaria. Our youth seems far, far away!"

"Perhaps I too am not old enough, to be young! Our youth – " she paused with a sob.

Francesco gazed at her solicitously.

"Even here?"

She gave him a wan, small smile.

"Just now, one might forget!"

"It is a great art, to forget," said Francesco tenderly. "You need it, Ilaria! What sufferings have been yours!"

She returned his look.

He understood.

Ilaria saw the pain written on his brow, as he looked at her with tenderness undisguised. She felt his spirit lying openly before her, as when they were both at the Court of Avellino.

"From the look on your forehead," she said softly, "you have lived long in your cell, since last we met! So it was meant, I think, from the beginning!"

"Assuredly so it was meant," he replied. "But I am very sorrowful, for I see not what was meant for you!"

She smiled at him, as if to reassure.

"If Fate has guided my life ill, not yours the fault," she said soothingly.

In her, reserve still obtained, yet without a trace of her late perplexing defiance. Asperity had given way to a great gentleness.

"Yet," Francesco hesitated, – "I am tormented by one thought: that for you it had perchance been better, if – "

He paused with drooping eyes, then continued:

"I could not profit by the dispensation of Clement and remain a true man. But you – " and again he paused.

A flash of her old-time perverseness lighted up Ilaria's sad eyes.

"Why pause?" she asked, arching her brow. "You mean that which is moral disaster for one, might be salvation for the other? And that, since my salvation should be dearer to you than your own – "

She broke out into quizzical mirth. But she was swiftly grave again, though tremulous.

"I, too, have lost myself in the quest of happiness," she said, clasping and unclasping her white fingers. "Dread and desire have beaten me hither and thither! Great waves have tossed me! On the very day of your departure from Avellino the Viceroy asked me whom I would wed! Your name leaped to my lips. I told him I would have none other. Even as I spoke the dread seized me! I said to myself: this thing can never be! Then you went away – and I was engulfed in darkness. When we met at Rome I realized what I had done! Yet in the very effort to keep you far, I drew you near! Thus Fate had willed it! When we met at Fonté Gaia, I knew what in one sunset of Avellino I had merely dreamed: my love for you lived – in all my life the one abiding light. Longing and horror racked me! She is cold, and foul, and false, that White Lady – and the gifts she offers turn to poison in the grasp. But it was that other who conquered, – your White Lady, – not mine! She was ever a generous enemy, and in taking you from me, she has given me back my love!"

She had been looking at him with wide piteous eyes, even as a child might do. On a sudden she covered her face, dropped into a seat among the bays and myrtles, and broke into wild weeping.

The strong sense of bondage came back with a fuller force as though to menace her with the fateful realism of her lot. A hand seemed to sweep down and wave her back with a meaning so sinister that she had the feeling of standing on the brink of a mysterious sea, whose waves sang to her a song of peril, of misery and desire in the dim green twilight of some coral dungeon. The lure of the unknown beat upon her eyes, while love and hate, like attendant spirits, beckoned her onward with a weird, perpetual clamor.

Francesco tried in vain to soothe her, calling her by all the endearing names of the past, and pressing her closely to his heart.

"I do not understand," she cried, sobbing convulsively. "I have wished no one ill! Ever have I desired only fairness and love, and fullness of sweet life. And the beauty I seek is befouled by my seeking, my love has stained my beloved; and when I clutch at life, life crumbles within my grasp. Wherein has my quest been wrong?"

"Not wrong," he said unsteadily – "not wrong, – I trust!"

She looked at him bewildered.

"I, too, would turn from that agonizing God upon the Cross to paths where roses bloom," Francesco replied, heavy-hearted. "I have been walking amid shadows, and I have lost the way."

She caught at his hand and drew it piteously to her lips, but made no attempt to retain it.

"I am that Proserpina who has lost the spring," she said, raising her haunting eyes to his. "Yet one comfort is left me still, – one stay, that shall not fail!"

"And that?"

There was a strange expression about her face, but she was silent.

A shudder seized him with the swift suspicion of her meaning.

"You shall not!" he cried almost roughly. "You shall not! I, too, – did I give way to that fierce longing, – you shall not yield to that crawling weakness!"

But Ilaria interrupted him.

"Oh! my dear, I meant not that!" she said. "Of weakness I might reck little, of the hurt to you I should reck much. There is that in my heart for you which shall keep me safe henceforth from what would grieve you!"

"What is it then?" he asked relieved. "The comfort, – the stay, – of which you spoke?"

She smiled through her tears; the old-time smile.

"I do not see your life," he said anxiously. "What is it – what shall it be? Till that be known to me, Ilaria, I shall not know rest or peace. You are beautiful, – too beautiful for this licentious court! Here you cannot remain – alone!"

"I fear the twilight," she said, with a shudder. "There is but one goal for me, and, when the hour comes, you shall lead me there. Proserpina will turn Lady of Shadows in very truth, and move veiled through her rose garden."

"But why must this thing be?" he queried with a choking sensation. "I, too, have sinned – "

"Of sin I know nothing," said Ilaria mournfully, "I apprehend neither the word, nor the thing!"

"Then why this last extremity?"

"Will you not understand?" she interposed petulantly. "Your presence here has shown me once for all that I may not continue to walk in the old way; I may not walk in yours, and I would not have you walk in mine! You wavered towards it of late! Once upon a time I should have rejoiced; now my spirit is full of fear."

She crept close to him and looked up at him with tremulous lids.

He caught her to him with all the old-time love in his eyes. All fears, all misgivings, all doubts of the woman he loved, were utterly blotted out in their embrace, and over Ilaria's features there flitted the gleam of a long forgotten happiness.

Her look was far away. Of a sudden she turned to Francesco.

"Will you remain at Naples?"

He gave a shrug.

"Days – weeks – who can tell? A Ghibelline victory may turn the tide."

"I have something to say to you," she said, her face very close to his. "I have long wished to say it: beware of Raniero!"

"I have done him no wrong!"

She made a gesture as one throwing up a libation.

"Fonté Gaia!"

He felt her breath fanning his cheek.

Seized with a sudden madness he threw his arms about her, and kissed her.

Where the roads branched off they parted, after a long passionate embrace. Ilaria returned to the palace, while Francesco bent his footsteps towards the bay, shimmering in the light of the higher risen moon.

He heard her go singing through the garden, a soft chant d'amour that would have gone wondrously to flute and cithern. It died away slowly amid the trees like an elf's song coming from woodlands in the moonlight.

His soul was sobbing within him. He felt his purpose, his resolutions waver. The crisis of his life had come. Alone with Ilaria at Naples! Raniero away, – indulging his lusts!

He had feared this meeting, feared it above all things in heaven or earth!

Again they were abroad, the gods of yore. They rode the wind; they laughed in the far reaches of the sky; they whispered in his heart.

To love her! To possess her!

The thought had suddenly leaped into his brain, taking its first clearly defined form, recoiling upon him, dazzling his eyes.

For this he had lived; for this he had suffered!

And now?

A deeper question came, like a wind in a fog; a fearsome thing. Why should this love be sin? This love, – the one pure emotion in all his life?

In the spiritual darkness which encompassed Francesco, the fire of his old love for Ilaria had leaped high upon the altar of his sacrifice. For her he had kept himself pure, for her he had starved his soul, while his love smouldered in the dark chambers of his heart.

For hours Francesco was as a man possessed, moving through them drearily, as through crowding phantoms, struggling to suppress an imperious craving that tormented him for release.

It was late when he retraced his steps towards his inn.

Gigantic cypresses bordered the way, ranged like dark torch-bearers at a funeral. Their entwined tips, continually caught by the wind from the sea, remained bent like heads drooped in sorrow. White statues of gods gleamed spectre-like in the dark shades. In the laurel thickets glow-worms flickered like funeral tapers. The heavy scent of the magnolias recalled the odor of balsam used for anointing the dead. The waters of the fountain, trickling from an overhanging rock, fell into the sea, drop by drop, like silent tears, as though a nymph were weeping in the cave above, bewailing her sisters, some dark Elysium, the subterranean groves of shadows, the burial grounds of dead gods.

But even sleep brought only one persistent vision to Francesco: a reach of laughing waters, now turquoise, now sapphire, now upheaving into a mighty translucent wave, that curled swiftly towards him, and, quivering within, the face of Ilaria, upturned to his own.

CHAPTER III

AN INTERLUDE

MEANTIME, the atmosphere of this secular court was not distasteful to Francesco. The love of poetry and the arts which had made Naples in the twelfth century the literary centre of Europe, still lingered; and he found pleasant intercourse on lines along which he had long been lonely.

Of Ilaria he saw little. She carried herself with a strange, new dignity and seemed to avoid him even more sedulously than he had planned to avoid her. He heard her spoken of as among the chief beauties of the court. The Regent, it was said, had shown her marks of especial favor, the more noteworthy as the Frangipani were on the side of the empire, fighting against Clement and Charles of Anjou. But his only opportunity of seeing her was at the court functions, which it was his duty to attend. To men of Francesco's temperament the absent has a more constraining force than the present; the dream-Ilaria, with her wavering smile, had borne, it would seem, more intimate relations to his life than the woman he watched from afar. But his restlessness increased with the certainty that Ilaria avoided him; a circumstance their meeting had not led him to fear.

Thus a week dragged on.

The African wind, which carries with it clouds of hot sand from the depths of the Sahara, was raging in the upper regions of the air. On earth there was still absolute calm. The leaves of the palm and the branches of the mimosa hung motionless; the sea alone was agitated. Huge, formless ridges swelled up here and there, dashing themselves against the shore. The west was shrouded in dense gloom, and the sun, in the metallic, cloudless haze, was seen dimly, as through a smoked opal.