The Sorceress of Rome

Burying his head in his hands the strong man wept like a disconsolate child, his whole frame shaken by convulsive sobs, and it was some time, ere he regained sufficient composure to face Hezilo.

"It will require all your courage," said the harper, rising to depart. "Steel your heart against hope or mercy! I will await you at sunset at the Church of the Hermits."

And without waiting the Margrave's reply, Hezilo was gone.

Eckhardt felt like one waking from a terrible dream, the oppression of which remains after its phantoms have vanished. The suspense of waiting till dusk seemed almost unendurable. Now that the hour seemed so nigh, the dread hour of final reckoning, there was a tightening agony at Eckhardt's heart, an agony that made him long to cry out, to weep, to fling himself on his knees and pray, pray for deliverance, for oblivion, for absolute annihilation. Walking up and down the vineshaded loggia, he paused now and then to steal a look at the flaming disk of the sun, that seemed to stand still in the heavens, while at other times he stared absently into the gnarled stems, in whose hollow shelter the birds slept and the butterflies drowsed.

Even as the parted spirit of the dead might ruthfully hover over the grave of its perished mortal clay, so Eckhardt reviewed his own forlorn estate, torturing his brain with all manner of vain solutions.

This night, then, – the night which quenched the light of this agonizing day, must for ever quench his doubts and fears. He drew a long breath. A great weariness weighed down his spirit. An irresistible desire for rest came over him. The late rebellion, brief but fierce, the constant watch at the palace on the Aventine, the alarming state of the young King, who was dying of a broken heart, the futility of all counsel to prevail upon him to leave this accursed city, the lack of a friend, to whom he might confide his own misgivings without fear of betrayal, – all these had broken down his physical strength, which no amount of bodily exertion would have been able to accomplish.

After a time he resumed his seat, burying his head in his hands.

The air of the late summer day was heavy and fragrant with the peculiar odour of decaying leaves, and the splashing of the fountain, which sent its crystal stream down towards Santa Maria del Monte, seemed like a lullaby to Eckhardt's overwrought senses. Night after night he had not slept at all; he had not dared to abandon the watch on Aventine for even a moment. Now nature asserted her rights.

Lower and lower drooped his aching lids and slowly he was beginning to slip away into blissful unconsciousness. How long he had remained in this state, he scarcely knew, when he was startled, as by some unknown presence.

Rousing himself with an effort and looking up, he was filled with a strange awe at the phenomenon which met his gaze. Right across the horizon that glistened with pale green hues like newly frozen water, there reposed a cloud-bank, risen from the Tyrrhene Sea, black as the blackest midnight, heavy and motionless like an enormous shadow fringed with tremulous lines of gold.

This cloud-bank seemed absolutely stirless, as if it had been thrown, a ponderous weight, into the azure vault of heaven. Ever and anon silvery veins of lightning shot luridly through its surface, while poised, as it were immediately above it, was the sun, looking like a great scarlet seal, a ball of crimson fire, destitute of rays.

For a time Eckhardt stood lost in the contemplation of this fantastic sky-phenomenon. As he did so, the sun plunged into the engulfing darkness. Lowering purple shadows crept across the heavens, but the huge cloud, palpitating with lightnings, moved not, stirred not, nor changed its shape by so much as a hair's breadth.

It appeared like a vast pall, spread out in readiness for the state burial of the world, the solemn and terrible moment: The End of Time.

Fascinated by an aspect, which in so weird a manner reflected his own feelings, Eckhardt looked upon the threatening cloud-bank as an evil omen. A strange sensation seized him, as with a hesitating fear not unmingled with wonder, he watched the lightnings come and go.

A shudder ran through his frame as he paced up and down the white-pillared Loggia, garlanded with climbing vines, roses and passion flowers, dying or decayed.

"Would the night were passed," he muttered to himself, and the man who had stormed the impregnable stronghold of Crescentius quailed before the impending issue as a child trembles in the dark.

At the hour appointed he traversed the solitary region of the Trastevere. The vast silence, the vast night, were full of solemn weirdness. The moon, at her full, soared higher and higher in the balconies of the East, firing the lofty solitudes of the heavens with her silver-beams. But immobile in the purple cavity of the western horizon there lay that ominous cloud, nerved as it were with living lightnings, which leaped incessantly from its centre, like a thousand swords, drawn from a thousand scabbards.

The deep booming noise of a bell now smote heavily on the silence. Oppressed by the weight of unutterable forebodings, Eckhardt welcomed the sound with a vague sense of relief. At the Church of the Hermits he was joined by the harper and together they rapidly traversed the region leading to the Groves. In the supervening stillness their ears caught the sound of harptones, floating through the silent autumnal night.

The higher rising moon outlined with huge angles of light and shadow the marble palaces, which stood out in strong relief against a transparent background and the Tiber, wherein her reflections were lengthened into a glittering column, was frosted with silvery ripples.

At last they reached the entrance of the groves.

"Be calm!" said Eckhardt's guide. "Let nothing that you may see or hear draw you from the path of caution. Think that, whatever you may suffer, there are others who may suffer more! Silence! No questions now! Remember – here are only foes!"

The harper spoke with a certain harsh impatience, as if he were himself suffering under a great nervous strain, and Eckhardt, observing this, made no effort to engage him in conversation, aside from promising to be guided by his counsel. He felt ill at ease, however, as one entering a labyrinth from whose intricate maze he relies only on the firm guidance of a friend to release him.

They now entered the vast garden, fraught with so many fatal memories. At the end of the avenue there appeared the well-remembered pavilion, and, avoiding the main entrance, the harper guided Eckhardt through a narrow corridor into the great hall.

A faint mist seemed to cloud the circle of seats and the high-pitched voices of the revellers seemed lost in infinite distance. In no mood to note particulars, Eckhardt's gaze penetrated the dizzy glare, in which ever new zones of light seemed to uprear themselves, leaping from wall to wall like sparkling cascades. As in the throes of a terrible nightmare he stood riveted to the spot, for at that very moment his eyes encountered a picture which froze the very life-blood in his veins.

In the background, revealed by the parting draperies there stood, leaning against one of the rose-marble columns, the image of Ginevra. Her robe of crimson fell in two superb folds from the peaks of her bosom to her feet. The marble pallor of her face formed a striking contrast to the consuming fire of her eyes, which seemed to rove anxiously, restlessly over the diminished circle of her guests. The most execrable villain of them all, – Benilo, – had at her hands met his long-deferred doom. Those on whom she had chiefly relied for the realization of her strange ambition now swung from the gibbets on Monte Malo, – their executioner Eckhardt. Strange irony of fate! From those remaining, who polluted the hall with their noisome presence, she had nothing to hope, nothing to fear.

And this then was the end!

It required Hezilo's almost superhuman efforts to restrain Eckhardt from committing a deed disastrous in its remotest consequences to himself and their common purpose. For in the contemplation of the woman who had wrecked his life, a tide of such measureless despair swept through Eckhardt's heart, that every thought, every desire was drowned in the mad longing to visit instant retribution on the woman's guilty head and also to close his own account with life. But the mood did not endure. A strange delirium seized him; the woman's siren-beauty entranced and intoxicated him like the subtle perfume of some rare exotic; mingled love and hate surged up in his heart; he dared not trust himself, for even though he resented, he could not resist the fatal spell of former days. The absence of Benilo, of whose doom he was ignorant, inspired the harper with dire misgivings. After peering with ill-concealed apprehension through the shadowy vistas of remote galleries, he at last whispered to Eckhardt, to follow him, and they were entering a dimly lighted corridor, leading into the fateful Grotto, which Eckhardt had visited on that well-remembered night, when a terrific event arrested their steps, and caused them to remain rooted to the spot.

A blinding, circular sweep of lightning blazed through the windows of the pavilion, illumining it from end to end with a brilliant blue glare, accompanied by a deafening crash and terrific peal of thunder which shook the very earth beneath. A flash of time, – an instant of black, horrid eclipse, – then, with an appalling roar, as of the splitting of huge rocks, the murky gloom was rent, devoured and swept away by the sudden bursting forth of fire. From twenty different parts of the great hall it seemed at once to spring aloft in spiral coils. With a wild cry of terror those of the revellers who had not outright been struck dead by the fiery bolt, rushed towards the doors, clambering in frenzied fear over the dead, trampling on the scorched disfigured faces of the dancing girls, on whose graceful pantomime they had feasted their eyes so short a time ago.

There was no safety in the pavilion, which a moment had transformed into a seething furnace. Volumes of smoke rolled up in thick, suffocating clouds, and the crimson glare of the flames illumined the dark night-sky far over the Aventine.

Half mad with fear from the shrieks and groans of the dying, which resounded everywhere about her, Theodora stood rooted to the spot, still clinging to the great column. Over her face swept a strange expression of loathing and exultation. Her eyes wandered to the red-tongued flames, that leaped in eddying rings round the great marble pillars, creeping every second nearer to the place where she stood, and in that one glance she seemed to recognize the entire hopelessness of rescue and the certainty of death.

For a moment the thought seemed terrifying beyond expression. None had thought of her, – all had sought their own safety! She laughed a laugh of uttermost, bitter scorn.

At last she seemed to regain her presence of mind. Turning, she started to the back of the great pavilion, with the manifest object of reaching some private way of egress, known but to herself. But her intention was foiled. No sooner had she gone back than she returned – this exit too was a roaring furnace. In terrible reverberations the thunder bellowed through the heavens, which seemed one vast ocean of flame; the elements seemed to join hands in the effort at her destruction: – So be it! It would extinguish a life of dishonour, disgrace and despair.

A haughty acceptance of her fate manifested itself in her stonily determined face. It would be atonement – though the end was terrible!

Suddenly she heard a rush close by her side. Looking up, she beheld the one she dreaded most on earth to meet, saw Eckhardt rushing blindly towards her through smoke and flames, crying frantically:

"Save her! Save her!"

Her wistful gaze, like that of a fascinated bird, was fixed on the Margrave's towering stature.

She tarried but a moment.

At the terrible crisis, on one side a roaring furnace, – on the other the man whom of all mortals she had wronged past forgiveness, her courage failed her. Remembering a secret door, leading to a tower, connected with a remote wing of the pavilion, where she might yet find safety, she dashed swift as thought through the panel, which receded at her touch, and vanished in the dark corridor beyond. Without heeding the dangers which might beset his path, Eckhardt flew after her through the gloom, till he found himself before a spiral stairway, at the terminus of the passage. A faint glimmer of light from above penetrated the gloom, and following it, he was startled by a faint outcry of terror, as on the last landing, to which he madly leaped, he found himself once more face to face with the woman, whom even at this moment he loved more in the certainty of having lost her, than ever in the pride and ecstasy of possession.

Seemingly hemmed in by an obstacle, the nature, which he knew not, she stood before him paralyzed with horror. As his hand went out towards her, the gesture seemed to break the spell, and uttering a despairing shriek, she sprang towards a door behind the landing and rushed out.

Eckhardt's breath stopped.

A moment, – he heard an outcry of inexpressible horror, – a struggle, then a hollow dash. Hardly conscious of his own actions he uttered a shrill whistle, when the door of the tower was broken down, and the stairs were suddenly crowded with the soldiers of the imperial guard, whom the conflagration had brought to the scene.

"What woman was that?" exclaimed their leader, pointing to the place whence Theodora had made the fatal leap.

"Whoever she is – she must be dashed to pieces," replied his companion, rushing up the stairs to the trap-door and throwing his lighted torch down the murky depths. But the light was soon lost in the profound gloom.

"A rope! A rope! She must not, she shall not die thus!" cried Eckhardt in mad, heart-rending despair.

"Here is one, but it is not long enough!" exclaimed the captain of the guard, hardly able to conceal his mortification at finding himself face to face with his general.

"Hark! She groans! Help! Help me!" exclaimed Eckhardt, and tearing his cloak into strips, he fastened them together. The work was swiftly completed. These strips fastened to the rope and securely knotted, Eckhardt tied around his waist, and though the leader of the men-at-arms sought to dissuade him from his desperate purpose, he started down, clinging and swinging over a dreadful depth.

The captain of the guard swung the torch down after him as far as possible, but soon the light grew misty, the voices above indistinct, and it seemed to Eckhardt as if he were encompassed by a black mist. Still he continued his descent. His next sensation was that of an intolerable stench and a burning heat in the hand, caused no doubt by friction with the rope. A difficulty in breathing, increased darkness and singing noises in his ears were successive sensations; he began to feel dizzy and a dread assailed him, that he was about to swoon and abandon his hold. Suddenly he felt the last notch of the rope and, not knowing what depth remained, argued that any further effort was in vain. Extending first one arm, then another, he groped wildly about, striving to shout for light; but his voice died in the gloom. Gasping and almost stifled as he was, he made one last desperate effort, when suddenly his groping hand grasped something, which appeared to him either like hair or weeds. At this critical moment the captain of the guard sent down a lamp, which he had procured. It fell hissing in the mire, but it afforded him sufficient light to see that the object of his search lay buried in the slime, and that she was gasping convulsively. Eckhardt's strength was now almost spent, but this sight seemed to restore it all. Noting a projecting ledge of stone lower down, he leaped upon it and was thus obliged to abandon his hold on the rope. Eckhardt seized the woman by the gown, dragged her from the mire and making a desperate leap, regained the ledge, then signalled to those above to draw him up by jerking the rope.

Motionless she lay on his arm and it was only by twisting it in a peculiar manner round the rope, that he was enabled to support the terrible burden. For a time they hung suspended over the abyss, yet they were gradually nearing the top. If he could only endure the agony of his twisted limbs a little longer, both were safe. He could not shout, for he felt that suffocation must ensue; his eyes and ears seemed bursting as from some stunning weight; and a deadly faintness seemed to benumb his limbs. Suddenly, as by some miracle, the burden seemed lightened, though he felt it still reclining in his arms. A wonderful support seemed to raise up his own sinking frame, then all grew bright and numerous faces strained down on him. In a few moments he was on a level with the floor and many arms stretched out, to help him land. Heedless of the roaring sea of fire in the pavilion, they carried the wretched woman to the landing, where they laid her on the floor, attempting, for a time in vain, to restore her. She seemed suffering from some severe internal injury and her lips bubbled with gore. At length she opened her eyes and with a shriek of agony made signs that she was suffocating and desired to be raised. Eckhardt, who stood beside her, raised her, and as he did so, she regarded him with a wild and piteous gaze and murmured his name in a tone which went to the heart of all.

As he bent over her, she made a convulsive effort to rise.

"I have slain the fiend, who came between us – forgive me if you can – " she muttered, then gasping: "Heaven have mercy on my soul!" she fell back into Eckhardt's arms.

At a sign from the Margrave the men-at-arms withdrew, leaving him alone with his gruesome burden.

After they had descended, he bent over the prostrate form, he had loved so well, touching with gentle fingers the soft, dark hair, which lay against his breast. Once, – he recalled the mad delirium of holding her thus close to his heart. Now there was something dreary, weird, and terrible in what would under other conditions have been unspeakable rapture. A chill as of death ran through him as he supported the dying woman in his arms. Her silken robe, her perfumed hair, the cold contact of the gems about her, – all these repelled him strangely; his soul was groaning under the anguish, his brain began to reel with a nameless, dizzy horror.

At last she stirred. Her body quivered in his hold, consciousness returned for a brief moment, and, with a heavy sigh, she whispered as from the depths of a dream:

"Eckhardt!"

A fierce pang convulsed the heart of the unhappy man. He started so abruptly, that he almost let her drop from his supporting arms. But his voice was choked; he could not speak.

A groan, – a convulsive shudder, – a last sigh, – and Theodora's spirit had flown from the lacerated flesh.

In silent anguish Eckhardt knelt beside the body of the woman, heedless of the hurricane which raged without, heedless of the flames, which, creeping closer and closer, began to lick the tower with their crimson tongues. At last, aroused by the warning cries of the men-at-arms below, Eckhardt staggered to his feet with the dead body, and scarcely had he emerged from the tower, when a terrible roar, a deafening crash struck his ear. The roof and walls of the great pavilion had fallen in and millions of sparks hissed up into the flaming ether.

For a moment Eckhardt paused, stupefied by the sheer horror of the scene. The pavilion was now but a hissing, shrieking pyramid of flames; the hot and blinding glare almost too much for human eyes to endure. Yet so fascinated was he with the sublime terror of the spectacle that he could scarcely turn away from it. A host of spectral faces seemed to rise out of the flames and beckon to him, to return, – when a tremendous peal of thunder, rolling in eddying vibrations through the heavens, recalled him to the realization of the moment, and gave the needful spur to his flagging energies. Raising his aching eyes, Eckhardt saw straight before him a gloomy archway, appearing like the solemn portal of some funeral vault, dark and ominous, yet promising relief for the moment. Stumbling over the dead bodies of Roxané and Roffredo and several other corpses strewn among fallen blocks of marble, and every now and then looking back in irresistible fascination on the fiery furnace in his rear, he carried his lifeless burden to the nearest shelter. He dared not think of the beauty of that dead face, of its subtle slumbrous charm, and stung to a new sense of desperation he plunged recklessly into the dark aperture, which seemed to engulf him like the gateway of some magic cavern. He found himself in a circular, roofless court, paved with marble, long discoloured by climate and age. Here he tenderly laid his burden down, and kneeling by Ginevra's side, bid his face in his hands.

A second crash, that seemed to rend the very heavens, caused Eckhardt at last to wake from his apathy of despair. A terrible spectacle met his eyes. The east wall of the tower, in which Ginevra had sought refuge and found death, had fallen out; the victorious fire roared loudly round its summit, enveloping the whole structure in clouds of smoke and jets of flame; whose lurid lights crimsoned the murky air like a wide Aurora Borealis. But on the platform of the tower there stood a solitary human being, cut off from retreat, enveloped by the roaring element, by a sea of flame!

With a groan of anguish, Eckhardt fixed his straining eyes on the dark form of Hezilo the harper, whom no human intervention could save from his terrible doom. Whether his eagerness, to avenge his dead child or her betrayer, had carried him too far, whether in his fruitless search for the Chamberlain he had grown oblivious of the perils besetting his path, whether too late he had thought of retreat, – clearly defined against the lurid, flame-swept horizon his tall dark form stood out on the crest of the tower; – another moment of breathless horrid suspense and the tower collapsed with a deafening crash, carrying its lonely occupant to his perhaps self-elected doom.

All that night Eckhardt knelt by the dead body of his wife. When the bleak, gray dawn of the rising day broke over the crest of the Sabine hills he rose, and went away. Soon after a company of monks appeared and carried Theodora's remains to the mortuary chapel of San Pancrazio, where they were to be laid to their last and eternal rest.

CHAPTER XVIII

VALE ROMA

It was the eve of All Souls Day in the year nine hundred ninety nine, – the day so fitly recalling the fleeting glories of summer, of youth, of life, a day of memories and tributes offered up to the departed.

Afar to westward the sun, red as a buckler fallen from Vulcan, still cast his burning reflections. On the horizon with changing sunset tints glowed the departing orb, brightening the crimson and russet foliage on terrace and garden walls. At last the burning disk disappeared amid a mass of opalescent clouds, which had risen in the west; the fading sunset hues swooned to the gray of twilight and the breath of scanty flowers, the odour of dead leaves touched the air with perfume faint as the remembered pathos of autumn. No breeze stirred the dead leaves still clinging to their branches, no sound broke the silence, save from a cloister the hum of many droning voices. Now and then the air was touched with the fragrance of hayfields, reclaimed here and there upon the Campagna, and mists were slowly descending upon the snow-capped peak of Soracté. In the dim purple haze of the distance the circle of walls, a last vestige of the defence of the ancient world, stood a sun-browned line of watch-towers against the horizon. From their crenelated ramparts at long distances, a sentinel looked wearily upon the undulating stretch of vacant, fading green.

In the portico of the imperial palace on the Aventine sat Eckhardt, staring straight before him. Since the terrible night, which had culminated in the crisis of his life, the then mature man seemed to have aged decades. The lines in his face had grown deeper, the furrows on his brow lowered over the painfully contracted eyebrows. No one had ventured to speak to him, no one to break in upon his solitude. The world around him seemed to have vanished. He heard nothing, he saw nothing. His heart within him seemed to be a thing dead to all the world, – to have died with Ginevra. Only now and then he gazed with longing, wistful glances towards the far-off northern horizon, where the Alps raised their glittering crests, – a boundary line, not to be transgressed with impunity. Would he ever again see the green, waving forests of his Saxon-land, would his foot ever again tread the mysterious dusk of the glades over which pines and oaks wove their waving shadows, those glades once sacred to Odhin and the Gods of the Northland? Those glades undefiled by the poison-stench of Rome? How he longed for that purer sphere, where he might forget – forget? Can we forget the fleeting ray of sunlight, that has brightened our existence, and departing has left sorrow and anguish and gloom?