The Sorceress of Rome

"The rake! The ingrate!" growled Bracciano, "after my men opened the traps, in which the Vicar of the Church had caught him."

"Nay! If you gape at man's ingratitude, your mouth will be wide enough, ere you die, my lord," spoke Pandulph with a sardonic laugh. "And men in our day stand no more on precedence in plots than in love affairs, – do they, my lord Benilo?"

"Nay, I'll dispute no man's right to be hanged or quartered before me – least of all yours, my Lord Pandulph," the Chamberlain replied venomously.

"My lord Benilo," replied Pandulph, "you are, when drunk, the greatest ruffian in Christendom, and the biggest knave when sober. Bring in more tankards, and we will not look for day till midnight booms again on the old tower of San Sebastian! I call for full brimmers, varlets, – bring your largest cups! We will drink another toast five fathoms deep in wine, strong enough to melt Cleopatra's pearls, and to a jollier dame than Egypt's queen."

The servitors flew out and in. In a few moments the table was replenished with huge drinking cups, silver flagons and all the heavy impediments of the army of Bacchus.

"We drink to the Fair Lady of the Groves, – and in her presence, too!" shouted the Lord of Spoleto, raising his goblet anew. "Why is she not among us? They say," he turned to Benilo with a sneer, "that you are so jealous of the charms of your bird of paradise, that you have forbidden her to appear before your friends."

Roaring peals of laughter crowned Pandulph's speech.

Benilo saw the absurdity of anger, but he felt it nevertheless.

"She chooses not to leave her bower even to look on you, my Lord Pandulph. I warrant you, she has not slept all night, listening to your infernal din."

A renewed outburst of mirth was the response.

"Then you will permit us to betake ourselves forthwith to her gilded chamber to implore pardon on our knees for disturbing her rest."

"Well spoken – by the boot of St. Benedict!" roared Guido of Vanossa.

"You may measure my foot and satisfy yourself that I am able to wear it," shouted the Lord of Civitella. "On our knees we will crawl to the Sanctuary of our Goddess, – on our knees!"

"But before we start on our pilgrimage, we will drain a draught long as the bell-rope of the Capitol," bellowed the Lord of Bracciano.

"Fill up the tankards!" exclaimed the Lord of Spoleto. "My goblet is as empty as an honest man's purse, – and one of my eyes is sober yet."

"Do not take it to heart!" spoke Guido of Vanossa, whose eyes were full of tears and wine. "You will not die in the jolly fellow's faith!" And with unsteady voice he began to sing a stanza in dog-Latin:

"Dum Vinum potamusFratelli cantiamoA Bacco sia Onore!Te Deum laudamus!"

"Would your grace had a better voice, you have a good will!" stammered the lord of Sinigaglia. "'Tis ample time to repent when you can do no better. Besides – if you are damned, it is in rare good company!"

"Ay! Saint and Sinner come to the same end!" gurgled the Lord Pandulph, ogling the purple Falernian.

"Fill up your goblets! Though it be a merry life to lead, I doubt if it will end in so cheery a death!" said Benilo, his eye wandering slowly from one to the other.

"Fill up the goblets!" shouted the Lord of Spoleto, rising and supporting his bulky carcass on the heavy oaken table.

With a sleepy leer he blinked at the guests.

"Down on your knees," he roared suddenly, his former intent reverting to him. "To the Sanctuary of the Goddess! On our knees we will implore her to receive us into her favour."

A strange spirit of recklessness had seized Benilo. Instead of resenting or resisting the proposition, he was the first to get down on all fours. His example had an electrifying effect. Although they swayed to and fro like sail-boats on angry sea-waves, all those still sober enough imitated the Chamberlain amid cheers and grunts, and slowly the singular procession, led by Benilo, set in motion with the expressed purpose of invading Theodora's apartments, which were situated beyond the great hall. The Lord Pandulph resembled some huge bear as on all fours he hobbled across the mosaic floor beside the Lord of Bracciano, who panted, grunted and swore and called on the saints, to witness his self-abasement. Being gouty and stout, he was at one time seized with a cramp in his leg and struck out vigorously with the result of striking the Lord of Civitella squarely in the jaw, whereupon the latter, toppling over, literally flooded the hall with profanity and surplus wine. The other ten hobbled behind the leaders, cursing their own folly, but enjoying to a degree the novelty of the pageant.

Thus they had traversed the great hall at a speed as great as their singular mode of locomotion and their intoxicated condition would permit. The background of the hall was but dimly lighted; the great curtain strung between the two massive pillars, which guarded the entrance into Theodora's apartments, excluded the glow of the multi-coloured lamps, strung in regular intervals in the corridor beyond.

Benilo was the first to reach the curtain. Resting one hand on the floor, he raised the other, after the manner of a dog, trying to push its folds aside, when they suddenly and noiselessly parted. Something hissed through the air, striking the object of its aim a stinging blow in the face – a cry of pain and rage, and Benilo, who had sprung to his feet, stood face to face with Theodora. At the same moment the lights in the great hall were turned on to a full blaze, revealing in its entire repelling atrocity the spectacle of the drunken revellers, who, upon experiencing a sudden check to their further progress, had come to a sluggish halt, some of them unable to retain their balance and toppling over in their tracks.

"Beasts! Swine!" hissed the woman, her eyes ablaze with wrath, the whip which had struck Benilo in the face, still quivering in her infuriated grasp. "Out with you – out!"

The sound of a silver whistle, which she placed between her lips, brought some five or six giant Africans to the spot. They were eunuchs, whose tongues had been torn out, and who, possessing no human weakness, were ferocious as the wild beasts of their native desert. Theodora gave them a brief command in their own tongue and ere the amazed revellers knew what was happening to them, they found themselves picked up by dusky, muscular arms and unceremoniously ejected from the hall, those lying in a semi-conscious stupor under the tables sharing the same fate.

CHAPTER XIII

DEAD LEAVES

While the Nubians set about in cleaning the hall and removing the last vestiges of the night's debauch, Theodora faced Benilo with such contempt in her dark eyes, that for a moment the Chamberlain's boasted insolence almost deserted him, and though seething with rage at the chastisement inflicted upon him he awaited her speech in silence. She faced him, leaning against a marble statue, her hands playing nervously with the whip.

"For once I have discovered you in your true station, the station of the foul, crouching beast, to which you were born, had not some accident played into the devil's hands by giving you the glittering semblance of the snake," she said slowly and with a disdain ringing from her words, which cut even his debased nature to the core. "I have whipped you, as one whips a cur: do you still desire me for your wife?"

With lips tightly compressed he looked down, not daring to meet her fierce gaze of hatred, which was burning into his very brain.

"I see little reason for changing my mind," he replied after a brief pause, while as he spoke his cheek seemed to burn with shame, where the whip had struck it, and her evil, terrible beauty, exposed in her airy night-robe, roused all the wild demoniacal passions in his soul.

The whip trembled in her hands.

"And you call yourself a man!" she said with a withering look of contempt, under which he winced.

Then she continued in a hard and cheerless voice, wherein spoke more than simple aversion, a voice that seemed as it were petrified with grief, with remorse and hatred of the man who had been the cause of her fall.

"Listen to me, Benilo, – mark well my words. What I have been, you know: the beloved, the adored wife of a man, who would have carried me through life's storms under the shelter of his love, – a man, who would have shed the last drop of his life's blood for Ginevra, – that was. For two years we lived in happiness. I had begged him never to lift the veil which shrouded my birth, – a wish he respected, a promise he kept. In the field and at court he pursued the even tenor of his way, – happy and content with my love. Then there crept into our home a hypocrite, a liar, a fiend, who could mock the devils in hell to scorn. He stands there, – Benilo, his name, – a foul thing, who shrank from nothing to gain his ends. Some fiend revealed to him the awful secret of Ginevra's birth, a secret which he used to draw her step by step from the man she loved, to perpetrate a deceit, the cunning of which would put the devils to blush. He promised to restore to her what is her own by right of her birth. He roused in her all the evil which ran riot in her blood, and when she had given herself to him, he revealed himself the lying fiend he was. Stung by the furies of remorse, which haunted her night and day, – in her despair the woman made her love the prize, wherewith to purchase that for which she had broken the holiest ties. But those she made happy were beasts, – enjoying her favour, giving nothing in return. My heart is sick of it, – sick of this sham, sick of this baseness. Heaven once vouchsafed me a sinner's glimpse of paradise, of a home of purity and peace where indeed I might have been a queen, – a queen so different from the one who rules a gilded charnel-house."

Benilo had listened in silent amazement. He failed to sound the drift of Theodora's speech. The whip-lash burned on his cheek. Her sudden dejection gave him back some of his former courage.

"I believe Theodora is discovering that she once possessed a conscience," he said with a sardonic smile. "How does the violent change agree with you?" he drawled insolently, for the first time raising his eyes to hers.

She appeared not to heed the question, but nodding wearily she said:

"I am not myself to-night. Despite all which has happened, I stand here a suppliant before the man who has ruined my life. I have something else to say."

"Then I fear you have played your game and lost," he said brutally.

Theodore interrupted his speech with a gesture, and when she spoke, a shade of sadness touched her halting tones.

"Last night he came to me in my dream. – I will never forget the expression with which he regarded me. I am weary of it all, – weary unto death."

"Unfortunately our wager does not concern itself with sleep-walking – though it seems your only chance of luring your over-scrupulous mate to your bower."

The woman started.

"Surely, you do not mean to hold me to the wager?"

He smiled sardonically.

"Considering the risk I run in this affair – why not? Eckhardt is a man of action – so is Benilo, – who has performed the rare miracle of compelling the grave to return to his arms Ginevra, a queen indeed, – of her kind."

Surely some extraordinary change had taken place in the bosom of the woman before him. She received the thrust without parrying it.

"I see," he continued after a brief pause, "Eckhardt proves too mighty a rock, even for Theodora to move!"

"His will is strong – but all night in his lonely cell he called Ginevra's name."

"You are well informed. Why not take the veil yourself, – since a life of serene placidity seems so suddenly to your taste?"

"And where is it written that I shall not?" she questioned, looking him full in the eye. Benilo winced. If she would but quarrel. He felt insecure in her present mood.

"Here – on the tablets of my memory, where a certain wager is recorded," he replied.

She turned upon him angrily.

"It is you who forced me to it against my will. – I took up your gauntlet, stung by your biting ridicule, goaded by your insults to a weak and senseless folly."

"Then you acknowledge yourself vanquished?"

"I am not vanquished. What I undertake, I carry through – if I wish to carry it through."

"It has to my mind ceased to be a matter of choice with you," drawled the Chamberlain. "In three days Eckhardt's fate will be sealed, – as far as this world of ours is concerned. You see, your chances are small and you have no time to lose."

"Day after to-morrow – holy Virgin – so soon?" gasped Theodora.

"You have inadvertently called on one whose calls you have not of late returned," sneered the Chamberlain, with insolent nonchalance.

"Day after to-morrow," Theodora repeated, stroking her brow with one white hand. "Day after to-morrow!"

"Do not despair," Benilo drawled sardonically. "Much can happen in two days."

She did not seem to hear him. Her thoughts seemed to roam far away. Then they returned to earth. For a moment she studied the man before her in silence, then dropping the whip, she stretched out her hand to him.

"Release me from this wager," she pleaded, "and all shall be forgotten and forgiven."

He did not touch the hand. It fell.

"Theodora," he whispered hoarsely. "You will never know how I love you! I am not as evil as I seem. But there are moments when I lose control and madness chokes my better self, in the hopeless hunt for your love. Theodora – bury the past! Give up this baleful existence – live with me again."

She laughed a shrill laugh.

"Your concubine! And you have the courage to ask this?"

"You know I love the very ground you tread on."

"Is that all you have to tell me?"

"Is not that enough?"

"No – it is not enough!" she replied with flashing eyes. "Between us stand the barriers of eternity!"

He paled.

"Do not dismiss me like this. It is far more cruel than you know. If you kill my hope, you leave me a prey to the devils of jealousy and madness, – the evil things of your own creation! Come back to me! I only ask the love you gave me once, – the love you thought you gave me, – a grain, a crumb."

She turned her face away.

"Never again! Never again!"

The fevered blood raced swiftly from his cheek. For a moment he watched her in silence, his eyes like slits in his hard, pale face, then he turned on his heel and laughed aloud.

A shudder she could not repress crept over the woman's soft, white skin.

"Benilo!" she called to him. He turned and came slowly back.

"Benilo," she continued nervously, "release me from this wager! I cannot go on – I cannot. If he is bent upon leaving the world, let him retire in peace and do not stir the misery which lies couchant in the hidden depths of his soul. He has suffered enough, – more than enough, – more than should fall to one man's lot. Do not drive me to madness, – I cannot do it – I cannot."

"Your thoughts are only for him. For me you have nothing," he replied fiercely.

"I owe him everything – nothing to you!"

"Then go to him, to release you, – I will not!"

"I cannot do it! Be merciful!"

The Chamberlain bowed and answered mockingly.

"It rests with you!"

"With me?"

"Acknowledge your defeat!"

"What do you mean?" she asked with rising fear.

Benilo shrugged his shoulders.

"We made a wager – the loser pays."

"But the forfeit?" she cried in terror. "You would not claim – you would not chain me to you for ever?"

He regarded her with a slow triumphant smile and answered cruelly:

"Forever? At one time the thought had less terrors for you!"

She disregarded his sarcasm, continuing in the same plaintive tone of entreaty, which was music in Benilo's ear.

"But surely – you do not mean it! You would not profit by a woman's angry folly. I was mad, – insane, – I knew not what I said, what I did! Benilo, I will admit defeat, – failure, – anything, – only release me from this fearful wager. I ask you as a man, – have pity on me!"

"What pity have you lavished on me?"

"Were you deserving of pity?"

"My love – "

"Your love! What is your love, but the lust of the wild beast?" she exclaimed, flying into a passion, but instantly checking herself.

"Think of it, Benilo," she urged in desperation, "I could conquer, if I would. Once Eckhardt lays eyes on me, I can lead him to my will. Never can I forget the look he gave me when I faced him before my own tomb in the churchyard of San Pancrazio. Never will that wild expression of despair and longing, which spoke to me from his mute eyes, fade from my memory. Whether he believed that I was a pale, mocking phantom – what he imagined that I was, I know not – I could win him, if I would."

"Then win him!" snarled Benilo, through his straight thin lips.

"No! No!" she cried piteously. "Eckhardt is noble. He believed in me, – he trusted me. He believes me dead. He has no inkling of the vile thing I am! I listened to his prayer to the Virgin – once more he asked to see the face of the woman he had loved above everything on earth. And you ask me to tear the veil from his eyes and drag him down into the sloth and slime of my existence! His faith falls upon me like a knotted scourge, – his love – a blow upon my guilty head. He gave me life-long love in payment for a lie; he gave me love unwavering and true beyond the grave. When I think of it all – I long to die of shame! You caused me to believe he was dead, – that he had fallen defending the Eastern March. I thanked Heaven for the message; I envied him his eternal rest. It was one of your black deceits, – perhaps one of your mildest. Let it pass! But again to enter into his life – No! no!" she moaned. "By the God of Love – I will not!"

She gave a wild moan and covered her face with her hands. Benilo looked on in silence, scarce crediting the proof of sight and sound. Once – twice he moved his lips, ere speech would flow.

"You have but to choose," he said. "Come to me – my wife or concubine, – I care not which, and I pledge you my word, he shall die! I have but spared him until I sounded your humour!"

She shivered, and raised her hands as if to conjure away some apparition.

"No – no – never!" she gasped. "You would not dare! You would not dare! You are but frightening me! Have pity on me and let me go!"

"I do not detain you! Go if you will, but remember the wager!"

Her head drooped, while Benilo drew nearer, bending his exultant eyes on her wilted form, and in the passion which mastered him, he grasped her wrists and drew her hands apart, then kissed her passionately upon the lips.

With a hunted cry, she wrenched herself away, and leaping backward, faced him, her voice choked with panting fury:

"Fool! Devil! Coward! Could you not respect a woman's grief for the degradation you have forced upon her? Dog! I might have paid your forfeit had I died of shame! But now – I will not!" She snapped her fingers in his face. "This for your wager! This for an oath to you – the vermin of the earth!"

Benilo took a backward step, awed by the flaming madness in her eyes.

"Take care!" he growled threateningly.

"The vermin that crawls in the dust, I say," she reiterated panting, "the dust – the dust! Better a thousand deaths than the brute love you offer! Between us it is a duel to the death! I will win him back, – if I have to barter my evil beauty for eternal damnation, – if our entwined souls burn to crisp in purgatory, – I will win him back, revealing myself to him the foul thing I am, – and by way of contrast sing your praises, my Lord Benilo – believe me, – the devils themselves shall be wroth with jealousy at my song."

There was something in the woman's eye, which staggered the Chamberlain.

"You would not dare!" he exclaimed aghast.

"I dare everything! You have challenged me and now your coward soul quails before the issue! – You would have me recede, – go! I've done with you!"

"Not yet," Benilo replied, with his sinister drawl – edging nearer the woman. "I have something else to say to you! Your words are but air! You have measured your strength with mine and failed! Go to your old time love! Tell him you found a conscience, – tell him where you found it, – and see if he allows you leisure to confess all your other peccadilloes, trifling though they be! Still – the risk is equal. I have a mind to take the chance! Once more, Theodora, – confess yourself defeated, – acknowledge that the champion is beyond your reach – be mine – and the wager shall be wiped out!"

She recoiled from him, raising her hands in unfeigned horror and cried:

"Never – never."

Benilo shrugged his shoulders.

"As you will!"

"Then you would have me make him untrue to his vows? You would have me add this sin too, to my others?"

He laughed sardonically, while he feasted his eyes on her great beauty.

"It will not add much to the burden, I ween."

She gave him one look, in which fear mingled with contempt and turned to go, when with a spring, stealthy as the panther's, he overtook her, and pinning down her arms, bent back the proud head and once more pressed his lips upon the woman's.

With a cry like a wounded animal she released herself, pushed him back with the strength of her vigorous youth and spat in his face.

"Do you still desire me?" she hissed with flaming eyes.

He sprang at her with a furious oath, but his outstretched fingers grasped the air. Theodora had vanished. Recoiling from the towering forms of the Africans, who guarded the corridor leading to her apartments, Benilo staggered blindly back into the dark deserted halls. Here he found himself face to face with Hezilo the harper, who seemed to rise out of the shadows like some ill-omened phantom.

"If you waver now," the harper spoke with his strange unimpassioned voice, – "you are lost!"

The Chamberlain stopped before the harper's arresting words.

"What can I do?" he groaned with a deep breath. "My soul half sinks beneath the mighty burden I have heaped upon it, it quails before the fatal issue."

"You have measured your strength with the woman's," replied the harper. "She has felt the conquering whip-hand. Onward! Unflinchingly! Relentlessly! She dare not face the final issue!"

"I need new courage, as the dread hour approaches!" Benilo replied, his breath coming fast between his set teeth. "And from your words, your looks, I drink it!"

"Then take it from this also: If now you fail hardly the grave would be a refuge."

Benilo peered up at his strange counsellor.

"Man or devil, – who are you to read the depths of the soul of man?" he queried amazed, vainly endeavouring to penetrate the vizor, which shaded the harper's face.

"Perhaps neither," a voice answered which seemed to come from the remotest part of the great hall, yet it was Hezilo the harper, who spoke, "Perchance some spirit, permitted to return to earth to goad man to his final and greatest fall."

"It shall be as you say!" Benilo spoke, rousing himself. "Onward! Relentlessly! Unflinchingly!"

He staggered from the hall.

"Perhaps I too should have flagged and failed, had not one thought whispered hope to me in the long and solitary hours which fill up the interstices of time," muttered the harper, gazing after the Chamberlain's vanishing form.

The voices died to silence. The pale light of dawn peered into the deserted hall.

CHAPTER XIV

THE PHANTOM AT THE SHRINE

At last the evening had come, when Eckhardt was for ever to retire from the world, to spend the remainder of his days in prayers and penances, within the dismal walls of the cloister. The pontiff himself was to officiate at the high ceremony, which was to close the last chapter in the great general's life. Daylight was fading fast, and the faint light, which still glimmered through the western windows of St. Peter's Basilica had long since lost its sunset ruddiness and was little more than a pale shadow. The candles, their mighty rival departed, blazed higher now in merry fitfulness, delighting to play in grotesque imagery over the monkish faces, which haunted the gloom.

One end of the Basilica was now luminous with the pale glow of innumerable slender tapers of every length, ranged in gradated order round the altar. Their mellow radiance drove the gloom a quarter of the way down the cathedral. The massive bronze doors at the farther end were still shut and locked. The only way of entering the church was through the sacristy, by way of the north transepts, to which only the monks had access. No sound that should ring out within these mighty walls to-night could reach the ears of those who might be in the streets without.