The Sorceress of Rome

After having exhausted all the pent-up fervour of his soul Eckhardt was about to rise, little strengthened and less convinced of the efficacy of his prayer, when his eyes were fixed upon the tall apparition of a woman, who stood in the shadow of the cypress trees and seemed to regard him with a strange mixture of awe and mournfulness. With parted lips and rigid features, the life's blood frozen in his veins, Eckhardt stared at the apparition, his face covered with a pallor more deadly than that of the phantom, if phantom indeed it was. A long white shroud fell in straight folds from her head to her feet, but the face was exposed, and as he gazed upon it, at once so calm and so passionate, so cold and yet so replete with life, – he knew it was Ginevra who stood before him. Her eyes, strangely undimmed by death, burnt into his very soul, and his heart began to palpitate with a mad longing. Spreading out his arms in voiceless entreaty, the half-choken outcry: "Ginevra! Ginevra!" came from his lips, a cry in which was mingled at once the most supreme anguish and the most supreme love.

But as the sound of his voice died away, the apparition had vanished, and seemed to have melted into air. Only a lizard sped over the stone in the moonlight and in the branches of the cypress trees above resounded the scream of some startled night-bird. Then everything faded in vague unconsciousness, across which flitted lurid lights and a face that suddenly grew dim in the strange and tumultuous upheaval of his senses. The single moment had seemed an hour, so fraught with strange and weird impressions.

Dazed, half-mad, his brow bathed in cold dew, Eckhardt staggered to his feet and glanced round like one waking from a dream. The churchyard of San Pancrazio was deserted. Not another human being was to be seen. Surely his senses, strangely overwrought though they were, had not deceived him. Here, – close beside him, – the apparition had stood but a moment ago; with his own eyes he had seen her, yet no human foot had trampled the fantastic tangle of creepers, that lay in straggling length upon the emerald turf. He lingered no longer to reason. His brain was in a fiery whirl. Like one demented, Eckhardt rushed from the church-yard. There was at this moment in his heart such a pitiful tumult of broken passions, hopelessness and despair, that the acute, unendurable pain came later.

As yet, half of him refused to accept the revelation. The very thought crushed him with a weight of rocks. Amid the deceitful shadows of night he had fallen prey to that fear from which the bravest are not exempt in such surroundings. The distinctness of his perception forbade him to doubt the testimony of his senses. Yet, what he had seen, was altogether contrary to reason. A thousand thoughts and surmises, one wilder than the other, whirled confusedly through his brain. A great benumbing agony gnawed at his heart. That, which he in reason should have regarded as a great boon began to affect him like a mortal injury. By fate or some mysterious agency he had been permitted to see her once more, but the yearning had increased, for not a word had the apparition vouchsafed him, and from his arms, extended in passionate entreaty, it had fled into the night, whence it had arisen.

Accustomed to the windings of the churchyard, Eckhardt experienced little difficulty in finding his way out. He paced through the wastes of Campo Marzio at a reckless speed, like a madman escaped from his guards. His brain was aflame; his cheeks, though deadly pale, burned as from the hidden fires of a fever. The phenomenon had dazzled his eyes like the keen zigzag of a lightning flash. Even now he saw her floating before him, as in a luminous whirlwind, and he felt, that never to his life's end could he banish her image from his heart. His love for the dead had grown to vastness like those plants, which open their blossoms with a thunder clap. He felt no longer master of himself, but like one whose chariot is carried by terrified and uncontrollable steeds towards some steep rock bristling precipice.

Gradually, thanks to the freshness of the night-air, Eckhardt became a little more calm. Feeling now but half convinced of the reality of the vision, he sought by the authentication of minor details to convince himself that he was not the victim of some strange hallucination. But he felt, to his dismay, that every natural explanation tell short of the truth, and his own argumentation was anything but convincing.

In the climax of wonderment Eckhardt had questioned himself, whether he might not actually be walking in a dream; he even seriously asked himself whether madness was not parading its phantoms before his eyes. But he soon felt constrained to admit, that he was neither asleep nor mad. Thus he began gradually to accept the fact of Ginevra's presence, as in a dream we never question the intervention of persons actually long dead, but who nevertheless seem to act like living people.

The moon was sinking through the azure when Eckhardt passed the Church of the Hermits on Mount Aventine. The portals were open; the ulterior dimly lighted. The spirit of repentance burned at fever heat in the souls of the Romans. From day-break till midnight, and from midnight till day-break, there rose under the high vaulted arches an incessant hum of prayer. The penitential cells, the vaults underneath the chapels, were never empty. The crowds which poured into the city from all the world were ever increasing, and the myriad churches, chapels and chantries rang night and day with Kyrie Eleison litanies and sermons, purporting to portray the catastrophe, the hail of brimstone and fire, until the terrified listeners dashed away amid shrieks and yells, shaken to the inmost depths of their hearts with the fear that was upon them.

There were still some belated worshippers within, and as Eckhardt ascended the stone steps, he was seized with an incontrollable desire to have speech with Nilus, the hermit of Gaëta, who, he had been told, was holding forth in the Church of the Hermits. To him he would confess all, that sorely troubled his mind, seeking his counsel and advice. The immense blackness within the Basilica stretched vastly upward into its great arching roof, giving to him who stood pigmy-like within it, an oppression of enormity. Black was the centre of the Nave and unutterably still. A few torches in remote shrines threw their lugubrious light down the aisles. The pale faces of kneeling monks came now and then into full relief, when the scant illumination shifted, stirred by ever so faint a breath of air, heavy with the scent of flowers and incense.

Almost succumbing under the strain of superstitious awe, exhausted in body and mind by the strange malady, which had seized his soul, his senses reeling under the fumes of incense and the funereal chant of the monks, his eyes burning with the fires of unshed tears, Eckhardt sank down before the image of the Mother of God, striving in vain to form a coherent prayer.

How long he had thus remained he knew not. The sound of footsteps in the direction of the North transept roused him after a time to the purpose of his presence. Following the direction indicated to him by one of the sacristans, Eckhardt groped his way through the dismal gloom towards the enclosure where Nilus of Gaëta was supposed to hold his dark sessions. By the dim light of a lamp he perceived in the confessional the shadowy form of a monk, and approaching the wicket, he greeted the occupant with a humble bend of the head. But, what was visible of the monk's countenance was little calculated to relieve the oppression which burdened Eckhardt's soul.

From the mask of the converted cynic peered the eyes of a fanatic. The face was one, which might have suggested to Luca Signorelli the traits of his Anti-Christ in the Capella Nuova at Orvieto. In the deep penetrating eyes was reflected the final remorse of the wisdom, which had renounced its maker. The face was evil. Yet it was a face of infinite grief, as if mourning the eternal fall of man.

Despite the advanced hour of night the monk was still in his seat of confession, and the mighty leader of the German host, wrapt in his long military cloak, knelt before the emaciated anchorite, his face, manner and voice all betraying a great weariness of mind. A look of almost bodily pain appeared in Eckhardt's stern countenance as, at the request of the monk, who had receded within the gloom of the confessional, he recounted the phenomena of the night, after having previously acquainted him with the burden of his grief.

The monk listened attentively to the weird tale and shook his head.

"I am most strangely in my senses," Eckhardt urged, noting the monk's gesture. "I have seen her, – whether in the body, or the spirit, I know not, – but I have seen her."

"I have listened, my son," said the monk after a pause, in his low sepulchral voice. – "Ginevra loved you, – so you say. What could have wrought a change in her, such as you hint? For if she loved you in life, she loves you in death. Why should she – supposing her present – flee from your outstretched arms? If your love could compel her to return from the beyond, – why should it lack the power to make the phantom give response?"

"Could I but fathom that mystery, – could I but fathom it!"

"Did you not speak to her?"

"My lips but uttered her name!"

"I am little versed in matters of this kind," the monk replied in a strange tone. "'Tis but the natural law, which may not be transgressed with impunity. Is your faith so small, that you would rather uproot the holiest ties, than deem yourself the victim of some hallucination, mayhap some jeer of the fiend? Dare you raise yourself on a pedestal, which takes from her her defenceless virtue, cold and silent as her lips are in death?"

Every word of the monk struck Eckhardt's heart with a thousand pangs. A deep groan broke from his lips.

"Madman that I was," he muttered at last, "to think that such a tale was fit for mortal ears."

Then he turned to the monk.

"Have you no solace to give to me, no light upon the dark path, I am about to enter upon, – the life of the cloister, where I shall end my days?"

There was a long pause. Surprise seemed to have struck the monk dumb. Eckhardt's heart beat stormily in anticipation of the anchorite's reply.

"But," a voice sounded from the gloom, "have you the patience, the humility, which it behooves the recluse to possess, and without which all prayers and penances are in vain?"

"Show me how I can humble myself more, than at this hour, when I renounce a life of glory, ambition and command. All I want is peace, – that peace which has forsaken me since her death!"

His last words died in a groan.

"Peace," repeated the monk. "You seek peace in the seclusion of the cloister, in holy devotions. I thought Eckhardt of too stern a mould, to be goaded and turned from his duty by a mere whim, a pale phantom."

A long silence ensued.

"Father," said the Margrave at last, speaking in a low and broken voice, "I have done no act of wrong. I will do no act of wrong, while I have control over myself. But the thought of the dead haunts me night and day. Otto has no further need of me. Rome is pacified. The life at court is irksome to me. The king loves to surround himself with perfumed popinjays, discarding the time-honoured customs of our Northland for the intricate polity of the East. – There is no place for Eckhardt in that sphere of mummery."

For a few moments the monk meditated in silence.

"It grieves me to the heart," he spoke at last, "to hear a soldier confess to being tempted into a life of eternal abnegation. I judge it to be a passing madness, which distance and work alone can cure. You are not fitted in the sight of God and His Mother for the spiritual life, for in Mezentian thraldom you have fettered your soul to a corpse in its grave, a sin as black as if you had been taken in adultery with the dead. Remain in Rome no longer! Return to your post on the boundaries of the realm. There, – in your lonely tent, pray nightly to the Immaculate One for her blessing and pass the day in the saddle among the scattered outposts of your command! The monks of Rome shall not be festered by the presence among them of your fevered soul, and you are sorely needed by God and His Son for martial life."

"Father, you know not all!" Eckhardt replied after a brief pause, during which he lay prostrate, writhing in agony and despair. "From youth up have I lived as a man of war. – To this I was bred by my sire and grandsire of sainted memory. I have always hoped to die on some glorious field. But it is all changed. I, who never feared mortal man, am trembling before a shadow. My love for her, who is no more, has made me a coward. I tremble to think that I may not find her in the darkness, whither soon I may be going. To this end alone I would purchase the peace, which has departed. The thought of her has haunted me night and day, ever since her death! How often in the watches of the night, on the tented field, have I lain awake in silent prayer, once more to behold her face, that I can never more forget!"

There was another long pause, during which the monk cast a piercing glance at the prostrate soldier. Slowly at last the voice came from the shadows.

"Then you still believe yourself thus favoured?"

"So firmly do I believe in the reality of the vision, that I am here to ask your blessing and your good offices with the Prior of St. Cosmas in the matter closest to my heart."

"Nay," the monk replied as if speaking to himself, "if you have indeed been favoured with a vision, then were it indeed presumptuous in one, the mere interpreter of the will divine, to oppose your request! You have chosen a strict brotherhood, though, for when your novitiate is ended, you will not be permitted to ever again leave the walls of the cloister."

"Such is my choice," replied Eckhardt. "And now your blessing and intercession, father. Let the time of my novitiate be brief!"

"I will do what I can," replied the monk, then he added slowly and solemnly:

"Christ accepts your obedience and service! I purge you of your sins in the name of the Trinity and the Mother of God, into whose holy keeping I now commit you! Go in peace!"

"I go!" muttered the Margrave, rising exhausted from his long agony and staggering down the dark aisles of the church.

Eckhardt's footsteps had no sooner died away in the gloom of the high-vaulted arches, than two shadows emerged from behind a pillar and moved noiselessly down towards the refectory.

In the dim circle of light emanating from the tapers round the altar, they faced each other a moment.

"What ails the Teuton?" muttered the Grand Chamberlain, peering into the muffled countenance of the pseudo-confessor.

"He upbraids the fiend for cheating him of the smile of a corpse," the monk Cyprianus replied with strangely jarring voice.

"And yet you fear I will lose my wager?" sneered the Chamberlain.

The monk shrugged his shoulders.

"They have a proverb in Ferrara: 'He who may not eat a peach, may not smell at it.'"

"And you were not revealed to him, you, for whom he has scoured the very slime of the Tiber?" Benilo queried, ignoring the monk's facetiousness.

"'Tis sad to think, what changes time has wrought," replied the latter with downcast eyes. "Truly it behooves us to think of the end, – the end of time!"

And without another word the monk passed down the aisles and his tall form was swallowed in the gloom of the Church of the Hermits.

"The end!" Benilo muttered to himself as he thoughtfully gazed after the monk. "Croak thou thine own doom, Cyprianus! One soul weighs as much as another in the devil's balance!"

With these words Benilo passed through the portals of the church and was soon lost to sight among the ruins of the Aventine.

CHAPTER VIII

CASTEL SAN ANGELO

Night had spread her pinions over the ancient capital of the Cæsars and deepest silence had succeeded the thousand cries and noises of the day. Few belated strollers still lingered in the deserted squares. Under the shadows of the Borgo Vecchio slow moving figures could be seen flitting noiselessly as phantoms through the marble ruins of antiquity, pausing for a moment under the high unlighted arches, talking in undertones and vanishing in the night, while the remote swell of monkish chants, monotonous and droning, died on the evanescent breezes.

Round Castel San Angelo, rising, a giant Mausoleum, vast and sombre out of the solitudes of the Flaminian Way, night wove a more poetic air of mystery and quiet, and but for the tread of the ever wakeful sentinels on its ramparts, the colossal tomb of the emperor Hadrian would have appeared a deserted Memento Mori of Imperial Rome, the possession of which no one cared to dispute with the shades of the Cæsars or the ghosts of the mangled victims, which haunted the intricate labyrinth of its subterranean chambers and vaults.

A pale moon was rising behind the hills of Albano, whose ghostly rays cast an unsteady glow over the undulating expanse of the Roman Campagna, and wove a pale silver mounting round the crest of the imperial tomb, whose towering masses seemed to stretch interminably into the night, as if oppressed with their own memories.

What a monstrous melodrama was contained in yonder circular walls! They wore a comparatively smiling look only in the days when Castel San Angelo received the dead. Then according to the historian Procopius, the immense three-storied rotunda, surmounted by a pyramidal roof had its sides covered with Parian marble, intersected with columns and surmounted with a ring of Grecian statues. The first story was a quadrangular basement, decorated with festoons and tablets of funeral inscriptions, colossal equestrian groups in gilt bronze at the four corners.

Within the memory of living generation, this pile had been the theatre of a tragedy, almost unparalleled in the annals of Rome, the scene of the wildest Saturnalia, that ever stained the history of mediæval state. An incongruous relic of antique profligacy and the monstrosities of the lower empire, drawing its fatal power from feudal institutions, Theodora, a woman illustrious for her beauty and rank, had at the dawn of the century quartered herself in Castel San Angelo. From there she exercised over Rome a complete tyranny, sustained against German influence by an Italian party, which counted amongst its chiefs Adalbert, Count of Tuscany, the father of this second Messalina. Her fateful beauty ruled Church and state. Theodora caused one pontiff after another to be deposed and nominated eight popes successively. She had a daughter as beautiful and as powerful as herself and still more depraved. Marozia, as she was called, reigned supreme in Castel San Angelo and caused the election of Sergius III, Anastasius III and John X, the latter a creature of Theodora, who had him appointed to the bishopric of Ravenna. Intending to deprive Theodora and her lover, the Pope, of the dominion of Rome, Marozia invaded the Lateran with a band of ruffians, put to the sword the brother of the Pope, and incarcerated the pontiff, who died in prison either by poison or otherwise. Tradition relates that his corpse was placed in Theodora's bed, and superstition believes that he was strangled by the devil as a punishment for his sins.

Left as widow by the premature death of the Count of Tusculum and married to Guido, Prince of Tuscany, Marozia, after the demise of her second husband, was united by a third marriage to Hugo of Provence, brother of Guido. Successively she placed on the pontifical throne Leo VI and Stephen VIII, then she gave the tiara to John XI, her younger son. One of her numerous offspring imprisoned in the same dungeon both his mother and his brother, the Pope, and then destroyed them. Rumour hath it, however, that a remote descendant, who had inherited Marozia's fatal beauty, had been mysteriously abducted at an early age and concealed in a convent, to save her from the contamination and licentiousness, which ran riot in the blood of the women of her house. She had been heard of no more and forgotten long ago.

After the changes and vicissitudes of half a century the family of the Crescentii had taken possession of Castel San Angelo, keeping their state in the almost impregnable stronghold, without which the possession of Rome availed but little to any conqueror. It was a period marked by brutal passions and feudal anarchy. The Romans had degenerated to the low estate of the barbarian hordes, which had during the great upheaval extinguished the light of the Western empire. The Crescentii traced their origin even to that Theodora of evil fame, who had perished in the dungeons of the formidable keep, and Johannes Crescentius, the present Senator and Patricius, seemed wrapt in dark ruminations, as from the window of a chamber in the third gallery he looked out into the night, gazing upon the eddying Tiber below, bordered by dreary huts, thinly interspersed with ilex, and the barren wastes, from which rose massive watch-towers. Far away to Southward sloped the Alban hills. From the dark waving greens of Monte Pincio the eye, wandering along the ridge of the Quirinal, reached to the mammoth arches of Constantine's Basilica, to the cypress bluffs of Aventine. Almost black they looked at the base, so deep was their shade, contrasted with the spectral moon-light, which flooded their eminences.

The chamber in which the Senator of Rome paced to and fro, was large and exceedingly gloomy, being lighted only by a single taper which threw all objects it did not touch into deep shadow. This fiery illumination, casting its uncertain glimmer upon the face of Crescentius, revealed thereon an expression of deepest gloom and melancholy and his thoughts seemed to roam far away.

The workings of time, the traces of furious passions, the lines wrought by care and sorrow were evident in the countenance of the Senator of Rome and sometimes gave it in the eyes of the physiognomist an expression of melancholy and devouring gloom. Only now and then there shot athwart his features, like lightning through a distant cloud-bank, a look of more strenuous daring – of almost terrifying keenness, like the edge of a bare and sharpened sword.

The features of Johannes Crescentius were regular, almost severe in their classic outlines. It was the Roman type, softened by centuries of amalgamation with the descendants of the invading tribes of the North. The Lord of Castel San Angelo was in the prime of manhood. The dark hair was slightly touched with gray, his complexion bronzed. The gray eyes with their glow like polished steel had a Brutus-like expression, grave and impenetrable.

The hour marked the close of a momentous interview. Benilo, the Grand Chamberlain, had just left the Senator's presence. He had been the bearer of strange news which, if it proved true, would once more turn the tide of fortune in the Senator's favour. He had urged Crescentius to make the best of the opportunity – the moment might never return again. He had unmasked a plot, the plausibility of which had even staggered the Senator's sagacious mind. At first Crescentius had fiercely resented the Chamberlain's suggestions, but by degrees his resistance had lessened and after his departure the course outlined by Benilo seemed to hold rut a strange fascination.

After glancing at the sand-clock on the table Crescentius ascended the narrow winding stairs leading to the upper galleries of the formidable keep, whose dark, blackened walls were lighted by tapers in measured intervals, and made his way through a dark passage, until he reached the door of an apartment at the opposite end of the corridor. He knocked and receiving no response, entered, closing the door noiselessly behind him.

On the threshold he paused taking in at a glance the picture before him.

The apartment was of moderate size. The lamp in the oratory was turned low. The windows facing the Campagna were open and the soft breeze of night stole into the flower-scented room. There was small semblance of luxury about the chamber, which was flanked on one side by an oratory, on the other, by a sleeping room, whose open door permitted a glimpse of a great, high bed, hung with draperies of sarcenet.

On a couch, her head resting on her bare, white arms reclined Stephania, the consort of the Senator of Rome. Tenderly the night wind caressed the soft dark curls, which stole down her brow. Her right hand supported a head exquisitely beautiful, while the fingers of the left played mechanically with the folds of her robe. Zoë, her favourite maiden, sat in silence on the floor, holding in her lap a red and blue bird, which now and then flapped its wings and gave forth a strange cry. All else was silent within and without.