The Sorceress of Rome

"And Stephania prefers this request?" Otto faltered, turning pale.

"Stephania – the consort of the Senator of Rome."

There was a pause.

Through the overhanging branches glimmered the pale disk of the moon. A soft breeze stirred the leaves of the trees. There was a hushed breathlessness in the air. Fantastic, dream-like, light and shadows played on the majestic tide of the Tiber, and all over the high summits of the hills mysterious shapes, formed of purple and gray mists, rose up and crept softly downward, winding in and out the valleys, like wandering spirits, sent on some hidden, sorrowful errand.

Gazing up wistfully, Stephania saw the look of pain in Otto's face.

"I ask what I have," she said softly, "because I know the temper of my countrymen."

"What would you make of me?" he replied. "On this alone my heart is set. Take it from me, – I would drift an aimless barque on the tide of time."

She shook her head but avoided his gaze.

"You aim to accomplish the impossible. Crows do not feed on the living, and the dead do not rise again. Ah! How, if your miracle does not succeed?"

Otto drew himself up to his full height.

"Gloria Victis, – but before my doom, I shall prove worthy of myself."

Suddenly a strange thought came over him.

"Stephania," he faltered, "what do you want with me?"

"I want you to be frankly my foe," exclaimed the beautiful wife of Crescentius. "You must not pass by like this, without telling me that you are. You speak of a past. Sometimes I think it were better, if there had been no past. Better burn a corpse than leave it unburied. All the friends of my dreams are here, – their shades surround us, – in their company one grows afraid as among the shroudless dead. It is impossible. You cannot mean the annihilation of the past, you cannot mean to be against Rome – against me!"

Otto faced her, pale and silent, vainly striving to speak. He dared not trust himself. As he stepped back, she clutched his arm.

"Tell me that you are my enemy," she said, with heart-broken challenge in her voice.

"Stephania!"

"Tell me that you hate me."

"Stephania – why do you ask it?"

"To justify my own ends," she replied. Then she covered her face with her hands.

"Tell me all," she sobbed. "I must know all. Do you not feel how near we are? Are you indeed afraid to speak?"

She gazed at him with moist, glorious eyes.

Striding up and down before the woman, Otto vainly groped for words.

"Otto," she approached him gently, "do you believe in me?"

"Can you ask?"

"Wholly?"

"What do you mean?"

"I thought, – feared, – that you suffered from the same malady as we Romans."

"What malady?"

"Distrust."

There was a pause.

"The temple is beautiful in the moonlight," Stephania said at last. "They tell me you like relics of the olden time. Shall we go there?"

Otto's heart beat heavily as by her side he strode down the narrow path. They approached a little ruined temple, which ivy had invaded and overrun. Fragments lay about in the deep grass. A single column only remained standing and its lonely capital, clear cut as the petals of a lily, was outlined in clear silhouette against the limpid azure.

At last he spoke – with a voice low and unsteady.

"Be not too hard on me, Stephania, for my love of the world that lies dead around us. I scarcely can explain it to you. The old simple things stir strange chords within me. I love the evening more than the morning, autumn better than spring. I love all that is fleeting, even the perfume of flowers that have faded, the pleasant melancholy, the golden fairy-twilight. Remembrance has more power over my soul than hope."

"Tell me more," Stephania whispered, her head leaning back against the column and a smile playing round her lips. "Tell me more. These are indeed strange sounds to my ear. I scarcely know if I understand them."

He gazed upon her with burning eyes.

"No – no! Why more empty dreams, that can never be?"

She pointed in silence to the entrance of the temple.

Otto held out both hands, to assist her in descending the sloping rock. She appeared nervous and uncertain of foot. Hurriedly and agitated, anxious to gain the entrance she slipped and nearly fell. In the next moment she was caught up in his arms and clasped passionately to his heart.

"Stephania – Stephania," he whispered, "I love you – I love you! Away with every restraint! Let them slay me, if they will, by every death my falsehood deserves, – but let it be here, – here at your feet."

Stephania trembled like an aspen in his strong embrace, and strove to release herself, but he pressed her more closely to him, scarcely knowing that he did so, but feeling that he held the world, life, happiness and salvation in this beautiful Roman. His brain was in a whirl; everything seemed blotted out, – there was no universe, no existence, no ambition, nothing but love, – love, – love, – beating through every fibre of his frame.

The woman was very pale.

Timidly she lifted her head. He gazed at her in speechless suspense; he saw as in a vision the pure radiance of her face, the star-like eyes shining more and more closely into his. Then came a touch, soft and sweet as a rose-leaf pressed against his lips and for one moment he remembered nothing. Like Paris of old, he was caught up in a cloud of blinding gold, not knowing which was earth, which heaven.

For a moment nothing was to be heard, save the hard breathing of these two, then Otto held Stephania off at an arm's length, gazing at her, his soul in his eyes.

"You are more beautiful than the angels," he whispered.

"The fallen angels," was her smiling reply.

Then with a quick, spontaneous movement she flung her bare arms round his neck and drew him toward her.

"And if I did come toward you to prophesy glory and the fulfilment of your dreams?" she murmured, even as a sibyl. "You alone are alive among the dead! What matters it to me that your love is hopeless, that our wings are seared? My love is all for the rejected! I love the proud and solitary eagle better than the stained vulture."

He felt the fire of the strange insatiate kiss of her lips and reeled. It seemed as if the Goddess of Love in the translucence of the moon, had descended, embracing him, mocking to scorn the anguish that consumed his heart, but to vanish again in the lunar shadows.

"Stephania – " he murmured reeling, drunk with the sweetness of her lips.

Never perhaps had the beautiful Roman bestowed on mortal man such a glance, as now beamed from her eyes upon the youth. The perfume of her hair intoxicated his senses. Her breath was on his cheek, her sweet lips scarce a hand's breath from his own.

Had Lucifer, the prince of darkness, himself appeared at this moment, or Crescentius started up like a ghost from the gaping stone floor, Stephania could scarcely have changed as suddenly as she did, to the cold impassive rigidity of marble. Following the direction of her stony gaze, Otto beheld emerging as it were from the very rocks above him a dark face and mailed figure, which he recognized as Eckhardt's. Whether or not the Margrave was conscious of having thus unwittingly interrupted an interview, – if he had seen, his own instincts at once revealed to him the danger of his position. Eckhardt's countenance wore an expression of utter unconcern, as he passed on and vanished in the darkness.

For a moment Otto and Stephania gazed after his retreating form.

"He has seen nothing," Otto reassured her.

"To-morrow," she replied, "we meet here again at the hour of the Angelas. And then," she added changing her tone to one of deepest tenderness, "I will test your love, – your constancy, – your loyalty."

They faced each other in a dead silence.

"Do not go," he faltered, extending his hands.

She slowly placed her own in them. It was a moment upon which hung the fate of two lives. Otto felt her weakness in her look, in the touch of her hands, which shivered, as they lay in his, as captive birds. And the long smothered cry leaped forth from his heart: What was crown, life, glory – without love! Why not throw it all away for a caress of that hand? What mattered all else?

But the woman became strong as he grew weak.

"Go!" she said faintly. "Farewell, – till to-morrow."

He dropped her hands, his eyes in hers.

Giving one glance backward, where Eckhardt had disappeared, Stephania first began to move with hesitating steps, then seized by an irresistible panic, she gathered up her trailing robe and ran precipitately up the steep path, her fleeting form soon disappearing in the moonlight.

Otto remained another moment, then he too stepped out into the clear moonlit night. In silent rumination he continued his way toward the Aventine.

Past and future seemed alike to have vanished for him. Time seemed to have come to a stand-still.

Suddenly he imagined that a shadow stealthily crossed his path. He paused, turned – but there was no one.

Calmly the stars looked down upon him from the azure vault of heaven.

And like a spider in his web, Johannes Crescentius sat in Castel San Angelo.

CHAPTER VIII

THE GOTHIC TOWER

Deep quiet reigned in the city, when a man, enveloped in a mantle, whose dimly shadowed form was outlined against the massive, gray walls of Constantine's Basilica glided slowly and cautiously from among the blocks of stone scattered round its foundations and advanced to the fountain which then formed the centre of the square, where the Obelisk now stands. There he stopped and, concealed by the obscurity of the night and the deeper shadows of the monument, glanced furtively about, as if to be sure that he was unobserved. Then drawing his sword, he struck three times upon the pavement, producing at each stroke light sparks from its point. This signal, for such it was, was forthwith answered. From the remote depths of the ruins the cry of the screech-owl was thrice in succession repeated, and, guided by the ringing sound, a second figure emerged from the weeds, which were in some places the height of a man. Obeying the signal of the first comer, the second, who was likewise enveloped in a mantle, silently joined him and together they proceeded half-way down the Borgo Vecchio, then turned to the right and entered a street, at the remote extremity of which there was a figure of the Madonna with its lamp.

Onward they walked with rapid steps, traversed the Borgo Santo Spirito and followed the street Della Lingara to where it opens upon the church Regina Coeli. After having pursued their way for some time in silence they entered a narrow winding path, which conducted them through a deserted valley, the silence of which was only broken by the occasional hoot of an owl or the fitful flight of a bat. In the distance could be heard the splashing of water from the basin of a fountain, half obscured by vines and creepers, from which a thin, translucent stream was pouring and bubbling down the Pincian hillsides in the direction of Santa Trinita di Monte.

They lost themselves in a maze of narrow and little frequented lanes, until at last they found themselves before a gray, castellated building, half cloister, half fortress, rising out of the solitudes of the Flaminian way, before which they stopped. Over the massive door were painted several skeletons in the crude fashion of the time, standing upright with mitres, sceptres and crowns upon their heads, holding falling scrolls, with faded inscriptions in their bony grasp.

The one, who appeared to be the moving spirit of the two, knocked in a peculiar manner at the heavy oaken door. After a wait of some duration they heard the creaking of hinges. Slowly the door swung inward and closed immediately behind them. They entered a gloomy passage. A number of owls, roused by the dim light from the lantern of the warden, began to fly screeching about, flapping their wings against the walls and uttering strange cries. After ascending three flights of stairs, preceded by the warden, whose appearance was as little inviting as his abode, they paused before a chamber, the door of which their guide had pushed open, remaining himself on the threshold, while his two visitors entered.

"How is the girl?" questioned the foremost in a whisper, to which the warden made whispered reply.

Beckoning his companion to follow him, the stranger then passed into the room, which was dimly illumined by the flickering light of a taper. Throwing off his mantle, Eckhardt surveyed with a degree of curiosity the apartment and its scanty furnishings. Nothing could be more dreary than the aspect of the place. The richly moulded ceiling was festooned with spiders' webs and in some places had fallen in heaps upon the floor. The glories of Byzantine tapestry had long been obliterated by age and time. The squares of black and white marble with which the chamber was paved were loosened and quaked beneath the foot-steps and the wide and empty fireplace yawned like the mouth of a cavern.

Straining his gaze after the harper who was bending over a couch in a remote corner of the room, Eckhardt was about to join him when Hezilo approached him.

"Would you like to see?" he asked, his eyes full of tears.

Eckhardt bowed gravely, and with gentle foot-steps they approached a bed in the corner of the room, on which there reposed the figure of a girl, lying so still and motionless that she might have been an image of wax. Her luxurious brown hair was spread over the pillow and out of this frame the pinched white face with all its traces of past beauty looked out in pitiful silence. One thin hand was turned palm downward on the coverlet, and as they approached the fingers began to work convulsively.

Hezilo bent over her, and touched her brow with his lips.

"Little one," he said, "do you sleep?"

The girl opened her sightless eyes, and a faint smile, that illumined her face, making it wondrously beautiful, passed over her countenance.

"Not yet," she spoke so low that Eckhardt could scarcely catch the words, "but I shall sleep soon."

He knew what she meant, for in her face was already that look which comes to those who are going away. Hezilo looked down upon her in silence, but even as he did so a change for the worse seemed to come to the sick girl, and they became aware that the end had begun. He tried to force some wine between her lips, but she could not swallow, and now, instead of lying still, she continued tossing her head from side to side. Hezilo was undone. He could do nothing but stand at the head of the bed in mute despair, as he watched the parting soul of his child sob its way out.

"Angiola – Angiola – do not leave me – do not go from me!" the harper cried in heart-rending anguish, kneeling down before the bed of the girl and taking her cold, clammy hands into his own. Impelled by a power he could not resist, Eckhardt knelt and tried to form some words to reach the Most High. But they would not come; he could only feel them, and he rose again and took his stand by the dying girl.

She now began to talk in a rambling manner and with that strength which comes at the point of death from somewhere; her voice was clear but with a metallic ring. What Eckhardt gathered from her broken words, was a story of trusting love, of infamous wrong, of dastardly crime. And the harper shook like a branch in the wind as the words came thick and fast from the lips of his dying child. After a while she became still – so still, that they both thought she had passed away. But she revived on a sudden and called out:

"Father, – I cannot see, – I am blind, – stoop down and let me whisper – "

"I am here little one, close – quite close to you!"

"Tell him, – I forgive – And you forgive him too – promise!"

The harper pressed his lips to the damp forehead of his child but spoke no word.

"It is bright again – they are calling me – Mother! Hold me up – I cannot breathe."

Hezilo sank on his knees with his head between his hands, shaken by convulsive sobs, while Eckhardt wound his arm round the dying girl, and as he lifted her up the spirit passed. In the room there was deep silence, broken only by the harper's heart-rending sobs. He staggered to his feet with despair in his face.

"She said forgive!" he exclaimed with broken voice. "Man – you have seen an angel die!"

"Who is the author of her death?" Eckhardt questioned, his hands so tightly clenched, that he almost drove the nails into his own flesh.

If ever words changed the countenance of man, the Margrave's question transformed the harper's grief into flaming wrath.

"A devil, a fiend, who first outraged, then cast her forth blinded, to die like a reptile," he shrieked in his mastering grief. "Surely God must have slept, while this was done!"

There was a breathless hush in the death-chamber.

Hezilo was bending over the still face of his child. The dead girl lay with her hands crossed over her bosom, still as if cut out of marble and on her face was fixed a sad little smile.

At last the harper arose.

Staggering to the door he gave some whispered instructions to the individual who seemed to fill the office of warden, then beckoned silently to Eckhardt to follow him and together they descended the narrow winding stairs.

"I will return late – have everything prepared," the harper at parting turned to the warden, who had preceded them with his lantern. The latter nodded gloomily, then he retraced his steps within, locking the door behind him.

Under the nocturnal starlit sky, Eckhardt breathed more freely. For a time they proceeded in silence, which the Margrave was loth to break. He had long recognized in the harper the mysterious messenger who in that never-to-be-forgotten night had conducted him to the groves of Theodora, and who he instinctively felt had been instrumental in saving his life. Something told him that the harper possessed the key to the terrible mystery he had in vain endeavoured to fathom, yet his thoughts reverted ever and ever to the scene in the tower and to the dead girl Angiola, and he dreaded to break into the harper's grief.

They had arrived at the place of the Capitol. It was deserted. Not a human being was to be seen among the ruins, which the seven-hilled city still cloaked with her ancient mantle of glory. Dark and foreboding the colossal monument of the Egyptian lion rose out of the nocturnal gloom. The air was clear but chill, the starlight investing the gray and towering form of basalt with a more ghostly whiteness. At the sight of the dread memory from the mystic banks of the Nile, Eckhardt could not suppress a shudder; a strange oppression laid its benumbing hand upon him.

Involuntarily he paused, plunged in gloomy and foreboding thoughts, when the touch of the harper's hand upon his shoulder caused him to start from his sombre reverie.

Drawing the Margrave into the shadow of the pedestal, which supported the grim relic of antiquity, Hezilo at last broke the silence. He spoke slowly and with strained accents.

"The scene you were permitted to witness this night has no doubt convinced you that I have a mission to perform in Rome. Our goal is the same, though we approach it from divergent points. They say man's fate is pre-ordained, irrevocable, unchangeable – from the moment of his birth. A gloomy fantasy, yet not a baseless dream. By a strange succession of events the thread of our destiny has been interwoven, and the knowledge which you would acquire at any cost, it is in my power to bestow."

"Of this I felt convinced, since some strange chance brought us face to face," Eckhardt replied gloomily.

"'Twas something more than chance," replied the harper. "You too felt the compelling hand of Fate."

"What of the awful likeness?" Eckhardt burst forth, hardly able to restrain himself at the maddening thought, and feeling instinctively that he should at last penetrate the web of lies, though ever so finely spun.

The harper laid a warning finger on his lips.

"You deemed her but Ginevra's counterfeit?"

"Ginevra! Ginevra!" Eckhardt, disregarding the harper's caution, exclaimed in his mastering agony. "What know you of her? Speak! Tell me all! What of her?"

"Silence!" enjoined his companion. "How know we what these ruins conceal? I guided you to the Groves at the woman's behest. What interest could she have in your destruction?"

Eckhardt was supporting himself against the pedestal of the Egyptian lion, listening as one dazed to the harper's words. Then he broke into a jarring laugh.

"Which of us is mad?" he cried. "Wherein did I offend the woman? She plied but the arts of her trade."

"You are speaking of Ginevra," replied the harper.

"Ginevra," growled Eckhardt, his hair bristling and his eyes flaming as those of an infuriated tiger while his fingers gripped the hilt of his dagger.

"You are speaking of Ginevra!" the harper repeated inexorably.

With a moan Eckhardt's hands went to his head. His breast heaved; his breath came and went in quick gasps.

"I do not understand, – I do not understand."

"You made no attempt to revisit the Groves," said the harper.

Eckhardt stroked his brow as if vainly endeavouring to recall the past.

"I feared to succumb to her spell."

"To that end you had been summoned."

"I have since been warned. Yet it seemed too monstrous to be true."

"Warned? By whom?"

"Cyprianus, the monk!"

The harper's face turned livid.

"No blacker wretch e'er strode the streets of Rome. And he confessed?"

"A death-bed confession, that makes the devils laugh," Eckhardt replied, then he briefly related the circumstances which had led him into the deserted region of the Tarpeian Rock and his chance discovery of the monk, whose strange tale had been cut short by death.

"He has walked long in death's shadow," said the harper. "Fate was too kind, too merciful to the slayer of Gregory."

There was a brief pause, during which neither spoke. At last the harper broke the silence.

"The hour of final reckoning is near, – nearer than you dream, the hour when a fiend, a traitor must pay the penalty of his crimes, the hour which shall for ever more remove the shadow from your life. The task required of you is great; you may not approach it as long as a breath of doubt remains in your heart. Only certainty can shape your unrelenting course. Had Ginevra a birth-mark?"

Eckhardt breathed hard.

"The imprint of a raven-claw on her left arm below the shoulder."

Hezilo nodded. A strange look had passed into his eyes.

"There is a means – to obtain the proof."

"I am ready!" replied Eckhardt with quivering lips.

"If you will swear on the hilt of this cross, to be guarded by my counsel, to let nothing induce you to reveal your identity, I will help you," said the harper.

Eckhardt touched the proffered cross, nodding wearily. His heart was heavy to breaking, as the harper slowly outlined his plan.

"The woman has been seized by a mortal dread of her betrayer, – the man who wrecked her life and yours. No questions now, – this is neither the hour or the place! In time you shall know, in time you shall be free to act! Acting upon my counsel, she has bid me summon to her presence a sooth-sayer, one Dom Sabbat, who dwells in the gorge between Mounts Testaccio and Aventine. To him I am to carry these horoscopes and conduct him to the Groves on the third night before the full of the moon."

The harper's voice sank to a whisper, while Eckhardt listened attentively, nodding repeatedly in gloomy silence.

"On that night I shall await you in the shadows of the temple of Isis. There a boat will lie in waiting to convey us to the water stairs of her palace."

The harper extended his hand, wrapping himself closer in his mantel.

"The third night before the full of the moon!" he said. "Leave me now, I implore you, that I may care for my dead. Remember the time, the place, and your pledge!"

Eckhardt grasped the proffered hand and they parted.

The harper strode away in the direction of the gorge below Mount Aventine, while Eckhardt, oppressed by strange forebodings, shaped his course towards his own habitation on the Caelian Mount.

Neither had seen two figures in black robes, that lingered in the shadows of the Lion of Basalt.

No sooner had Eckhardt and Hezilo departed, than they slowly emerged, standing revealed in the star-light as Benilo and John of the Catacombs. For a moment they faced each other with meaning gestures, then they too strode off in the opposite directions, Benilo following the harper on his singular errand, while the bravo fastened himself to the heels of the Margrave, whom he accompanied like his own shadow, only relinquishing his pursuit when Eckhardt entered the gloomy portals of his palace.