THE GRAIL OF LOVE
FRANCESCOwas astir early with the coming of the dawn. The grass was drenched with dew, the woods towered heavenwards with a thousand golden peaks. In the valleys the stream echoed back the light.
Francesco was very solemn about the eyes. He looked as one who took little joy in life, but worked to forget and to ease his heart of its great pain. He watched the sun climb over the leafy hills, saw the clouds trend the heavens, heard the thunder of the streams. There was life in the day and wild love in the woods. Yet from this world of passion and delight he was as an exile, rather a pilgrim, fettered by a heavy vow. He was to bear the Grail of Love through all these wilds, yet might never look thereon, nor quench his thirst.
He met Ilaria in the garden, took her head between his hands, and kissed her upon the lips. She clung close to him and smiled, yet her looks were distraught; she seemed fearful of looking in his eyes.
"I have saddled the horses," he said laconically.
She read the heroism in his heart; the bitterness of the faith she compelled from him. The truth troubled and shamed her.
Francesco strapped the wallet and water flask to his saddleand lifted Ilaria to her steed. Then they crossed the stream and, riding northwards, plunged into the woods.
All that day Francesco strove and struggled with his youth, his heart beating fast and loud under his steel-hauberk. Love was at his side, robed in crimson and green; Ilaria's hair blinded him more than the noon-brightness of the sun. And as for her eyes, he dared not look therein, lest they should tempt him to deceive his honor. The silence enfolded them as though they were half fearful of each other's thoughts.
Francesco spoke little, keeping his distance, as though mistrusting his own tongue. As for Ilaria, the same passionate perverseness possessed her heart, and, though she pitied Francesco, she pitied him silently and from afar.
The following night they lodged in a beech wood, where dead leaves spread a dry carpet under the boughs. Francesco made a bed of leaves at the foot of a great tree. He spread a cloak underneath for Ilaria's comfort, then started away, as though to increase the distance between them.
"Francesco!" she cried suddenly, looking slantwise at his face.
He turned and stood waiting.
"You have given me your cloak!"
"It will keep the chill air from you!"
"What of yourself?"
"I shall not need it!" he said. "I shall not sleep to-night. I will keep watch and guard you! Have no fear!"
She sighed and hung her head as she sat down at the foot of the tree. Francesco's deep and unselfish love shamed her more and more. Yet his very patience with her hardened her discontent. Had he rebelled and conquered her against her will, she would have followed him to the ends of the earth.
Francesco, with a last look, left her there and strode away to a point where he might see, though not speak to her. A full moon climbed in the east and the wide lands were smittenwith her mystery. The valleys were as lakes of glimmering mist, the hills like icy pinnacles gleaming towards the stars. The forest glades were white under the moon; the trees tall, sculptured obelisks, their trunks as of ebony inlaid with pearl wherever the moonlight splashed the bark. The silence of the wilderness was as the silence of a windless sea.
Francesco wandered in the woods, his heart full of the strange, haunting beauty of the autumnal night. The stars spoke to him of Ilaria; the trees had her name unuttered on their lips. What was this woman that she should bring such bitterness into his life? Were there not others in the world as fair as she, with lips as red and eyes as deep? Strangeness—mystery! She was one with the moon; a goddess shrined in the gloom of forests dim. White and immaculate, beautifully strange, she seemed as an elf child fated to doom men to despair, to their own undoing.—
Francesco passed back and found her asleep under the trees. He stood beside her and gazed on the sleeping face. There was silent faith in that slumber; trust in the man who guarded her honor. The moonlight streamed on the upturned face, shining like ivory amid the gleam of her dusky hair. How white her throat was, how her bosom rose and fell with the soft white hands folded thereon.
A sudden warmth flooded Francesco's heart; and youth cried in him for youth. Should this beauty be mured in stone, this red rose be hid by convent trees? Was she not flesh and blood, born to love and to be loved in turn,—and what was life but love and desire?
He crept near on his knees, hung over her breathlessly, gazing on her face. God, but to wake her with one long kiss, to feel those white arms steal around his neck! They were alone, the two of them, under the stars. For many minutes Francesco hung there like a man tottering on a crag betwixt sea and sky. Passion whimpered in him; his heart beatfast. Yet even as he crouched over Ilaria asleep, some dream or vision seemed to trouble her soul. Her hands stirred; her lids quivered; the breath came fast betwixt her lips. A shadow as of pain passed over the moonlit face. Francesco, kneeling motionless, heard her utter a low name, saw tears glistening on her cheeks; she was weeping in her sleep.
Pity, the strong tenderness of his nobler self, his great love for the girl of his youth, rushed back into the deeps as a wave from a cliff. He rose up; the shadows flying from his heart as bats afraid of their own flight. He knelt at the foot of the tree and covered his face with his hands.—
On the following evening they saw the sea, a wild streak of troubled gold under the kindling cressets of the west. Beneath them lay a valley full of tangled shrubs and windworn trees. Westward rose a great rock, thrusting its huge black bastions out into the sea. Upon this rock rose the towers and pinnacles of San Nicandro, smitten with gold, wrapped in mysterious vapor. Into the east stretched a wilderness of woods, dun and desolate, welcoming the night.
Francesco and Ilaria rode out from the woods towards the sea, while in the west the sun sank into a bank of burning clouds. The trees were wondrous green in the slant light; the whole land seemed bathed in strange, ethereal glory. San Nicandro upon its headland stood like black marble above the far glimmerings of the sea.
Francesco rode with his eyes fixed on the burning clouds. Ilaria was watching him with strange unrest. Since that first night in the woods he had held aloof from her, had spoken little, had wrapped himself in his iron pride. Yet at times, when his eyes had unwittingly met hers, she had seen the sudden gleam therein of a strong desire. She had watched the color rise in Francesco's sunburnt face; the deep-drawn sighs that ebbed and flowed under the steel hauberk. Though his mouth was as granite, though he hid his heart from her, she knewfull well that he loved her to the death. The fine temper of his faith had humiliated, even angered her. Though his silent despair defied her vanity with heroic silence, his courage made her miserable from sheer sympathy and shame.
They crossed a small stream and came to a sandy region, where stunted myrtles clambered over the rocks, and tamarisks, tipped as with flame, waved in the wind. Storm-buffeted and dishevelled pines stood gathered upon the hillock. The region was sombre and very desolate; silent, save for the low piping of the wind.
Neither Francesco nor Ilaria had spoken since they had left the woods and sighted San Nicandro upon its rocky height. Suddenly he pointed with his hands towards the cliffs, the light of the setting sun streaming upon his white and solemn face.
"Yonder lies San Nicandro," he said to her.
There was a species of defiance in the cry, as though the man's soul challenged fate. His heart's cords were wrung with misery. Ilaria quailed inwardly, like one ashamed; her lips quivered; her eyes for the nonce were in peril of tears.—
"Yonder lies San Nicandro," she echoed in an undertone. "There I may be at peace. I shall not forget—"
"Nor I," he said, with grim emphasis.
A narrow causeway curled upwards towards the tower on the rock. The sea had sunk behind the cliff, the sky had faded to a misty gray. Ilaria's eyes were on the walls of San Nicandro and she seemed lost in musings as they rode side by side.
"Francesco," she said suddenly, as they neared the sea, "think not hard of me! Strife and unrest are everywhere. It is better to escape the world!"
"Better perhaps," he said, with his eyes upon the clouds.
"Forget that there is such a woman as Ilaria," she said. "I, too, shall strive to forget the past."—
"Who can forget?" he muttered. "While life lasts, memory lives on!"
They had come to the causeway, where the track wound like a black snake towards the golden heights. Not a sound was there save the distant surging of the sea. The distorted trees thrust out their hands and seemed to cry an eternal "Vale" to the two upon the road.
At the foot of the causeway, Francesco turned his horse.
"Go in peace!" he said, his voice vibrating with inward emotion, her image haunting his heart, like a fell dream at night.
She stretched out a hand.
"Francesco—you will not leave me yet?"
"Ah!" he cried with sudden great bitterness, "is it so easy to say farewell?"
His strong despair swept over her like a wind. She sat mute and motionless upon her horse, gazing at him helplessly as one half dazed. On the cliffs above, San Nicandro beckoned with the great cross above its topmost pinnacle.
Ilaria shivered, struggled with herself, perverse as of yore.
"What am I, that you should desire me?" she said. "I have but little beauty, and am growing old. Leave me, Francesco, and forget me! Forget and forgive! I have no heart to struggle with the world!"
Francesco was white to the lips, as he stiffened his manhood to meet the wrench.
"God knows how I have loved you,—how I love you still!"
"Francesco," she said, leaning towards him from the saddle.
He gave a hoarse cry and covered his face with his hands.
"For pity's sake," he said, "say no more to me! It is enough!"—
They had reached the gate.
He pricked his horse with his spurs, wheeled from her anddashed down the road without a look. His face was as the face of a man who rode to meet his death.
"Francesco!" she cried to him, as she saw him plunge to a gallop, saw the shield between his shoulders dwindle into the night.
"Francesco!" she cried again, a sudden loneliness seizing on her heart. "Francesco, come back! Francesco—"
The cry was in vain, for he would not listen, deeming her pity more grievous than her scorn. Despair spurred him on; the black night called.
Ilaria watched him vanish into the increasing gloom, while on the cliffs San Nicandro stood, like the great gate of death.
DEAD LEAVES
THROUGHbleak and desolate stretches Francesco spurred his steed, as if to outstrip his mastering agony.
Ilaria had gone from him. Nothing mattered any longer. He had no longer the sense that there could be duty for him. Even in his wish for freedom there was cowardice; his soul cried out for rest, for peace from the enemy; peace, not this endless striving. He was terrified. In the ignominious lament there was desertion, as if he were too small for the fight. He was demanding happiness, and that his own burden should rest on other shoulders. To his demand Fate had cried its unrelenting No. How silent was the universe about him! He stood in sheer and tremendous eternal isolation.
Ruin was everywhere, black, saturnine, solemn. The flames of Ninfa in the Pontine marshes, of distant Alba dyed the night crimson, while Norba, the papal robber-nest on the ragged crest of the Lepinian mountain, bristled behind her cyclopean walls. The Provencals had been here,—the Pontiff's champion. A strange silence encompassed the world. The wind had passed. The storm blasts moaned no more.
Ever to southward Francesco held his course, towards the mountain fastnesses, which harbored the Duke of Spoleto.To him he would open his heart, enlist his services in the cause of Conradino and his friends. Himself he would join the ranks of the discarded, for, to his life, there was but one purpose now, and that accomplished, he would go whence none might bid him return.
As Francesco rode through the darkening woods, through the desolate stretches, he bowed his head and was heavy of heart. The bleak trees along the storm-swept sea were outlined against the deeper gold of a memory, a melancholy afterglow, weird yet tender. Childhood and youth came back once again; Ilaria's sweet eyes and the dusky sheen of her hair.
Ilaria! Ilaria!
For the nonce he forgot the grim, grinding present, forgot the tens and thousands, who had been here, had laid waste the land, driving clouds of dust from the ashes under their horses' feet.
As night came on apace, the full moon hung tangled in a knot of pines. The turrets and bastions of Norba stood black against the shimmer of the night.
Drawing rein on the brow of a hill, he saw a river gleaming below in the valley, shining like silver set in ebony, as it coursed through the blackened country. He hardly knew the region, so great was the havoc and desolation wrought by Anjou.
His eyes roved over the desolate stretches, the sepulchral trees, the sun-scorched grass. Francesco seemed as one dizzy, his face the face of a starved ascetic. His eye strained towards the towering crags where the Duke of Spoleto held solitary court. The light of the moon still wavered through the gloom. To the north rose the dome of the great pine-forests, and into the opaque darkness of the giant-firs Francesco spurred his steed.
Onward he rode as a man who has battled at night through a stormy sea. And ever as he rode his heart hungered forIlaria, for that dusky head bowed down beneath the pathos of the past. He remembered her in a hundred scenes; her deep eyes haunted him, her rich voice pealed through the silent avenues of his thoughts. And while his lips moved in silent prayer that he might again look upon Ilaria's face, a dreary hopelessness bowed him down with the certainty that on earth they should meet no more.
The moon had risen higher, and the forests spread their green canopies against her silver disk.
Francesco shook himself free from the benumbing agony of his heart. A firm resolution was burning in his eyes; his very soul seemed enhaloed about his face, as he rode at breakneck speed through the silent forest-aisles. He was guided by the shadowy contours of the distant hills, for he had noted their shapes on that summer day, when he journeyed from Viterbo into Terra di Lavoro. To the west gaunt crags rose above the trees, towering pinnacles, huge and grim, natural obelisks cleaving the blue. It was past midnight when he saw water glimmering in a blackened hollow. The moon went down and the light went out of the world. Francesco tethered his steed to one of the giants of the forest and slept till the east was forging a new day in its furnace of gold.
The gray mists of the hour before dawn made the forests gaunt like an abode of the dead. Francesco opened his eyes, heard the birds wake in brake and thicket. He saw the red deer scamper, frightened, into the glooms, and the rabbits scurrying among the bracken.
The face of the sky grew gray with waking light, and the hold of the stars and of night relaxed on wood and meadow. The gaunt trees stood without a rustling leaf in a stupor of silence. A vast hush held, as if the world knelt at orisons. Soon ripple on ripple of light surged from the hymning east. About him rose the slopes of a valley, set tier upon tier with trees, nebulous, silent, in the hurrying light.
His feet weighted with the shackles of an impotent fear, Francesco remounted his steed. About him the flowers were thick as on some rich tapestry; the scent of the dawn was as the incense of many temples. As he rode, his steed shook showers of dew from the feathery turf. Foxgloves rose like purple rods amid the snow webs of the wild daisy. Tangled domes of dog-rose and honeysuckle lined the blurred track, and there were countless harebells lying like a deep blue haze under the green shadows of the grass.
Francesco had ridden for some hours and a craving for food began to assert itself. He had not touched a morsel since he had left Ilaria, and now he began to look about for some wayside tavern, the hut of a charcoal burner or some other evidence of human life. He began to fear that he had gone astray in the dusk of the forests, for not a sign did he encounter pointing to the camp of the duke.
A voice, coming from somewhere, caused him suddenly to start and rein in his steed with a jerk. The animal snorted, as if it scented danger, and Francesco loosened the sword in the scabbard anticipating an ambush, when he pushed it back with a puzzled look. Before a wayside shrine, almost entirely concealed by weeds, there knelt a grotesque figure at orisons. He either had not heard the tramp of Francesco's steed, or ignored it on purpose, for not until the latter called to him did he turn, and with much relief Francesco recognized his former guide from the camp of the Duke of Spoleto.
"Where is the camp of the duke?" he queried curtly, impatient with the man's exhibition of secular godliness.
"Many miles away," replied he of the goat's-beard, as he arose and kissed a little holly-wood cross that he carried.
"Lead me to it!"
The godly little man flopped again, scraped some dust together with his two hands, spat upon it, then smeared his forehead with the stuff, uttering the names of sundry saints.
Francesco had come to the end of his patience.
"Get up, my friend," he said, "we have had enough praying for one day!"
The goatherd offered to anoint him with dust and spittle, pointing a stumpy forefinger, but Francesco was filled with disgust. He caught the man by the girdle and lifted him to his feet.
"Enough of this!" he said. "Is the devil so much your master?"
The goatherd blinked red-lidded and pious eyes, while he scanned the horizon. Then he pointed with his holly staff to a blue hill that rose against the eastern sky.
"How far?" queried Francesco.
The goatherd was anointing himself with spittle.
"Each mile in these parts grows more evil," he said, tracing the sign of the cross. "It behooves a Christian to be circumspect!"
Francesco prodded him with his scabbard.
"How far?"
"Some ten leagues," replied the gnome. "The day is clear, and the place looks nearer than it is!"
It occurred to Francesco that there must be some human abode close by, as the goatherd, entirely familiar with the region, would not wander too far from habitations of the living. And upon having made known his request, the little man preceded him at a lively pace. At a lodge in the forest deeps they halted, and here Francesco and his guide rested during the hot hours of noon, partaking of such food as the liberality of their host, an old anchorite, set before them.
After men and steed had rested, they set out anew.
The goatherd's inclination to invoke untold saints, whenever there seemed occasion and whenever there was not, was curbed by a hard line round Francesco's lips, and they plunged into the great silence. A sense of green mysteryencompassed them, as they traversed the green forest-aisles. The sky seemed to have receded to a greater distance. Everywhere the smooth dark trunks converged upon one another, sending up a tangle of boughs that glittered in the soft sheen of the sunlight. Withered bracken stood in thin silence, and here and there a dead bough lay like a snake with its head raised to strike.
The silence was immense, and yet it was a stillness that suggested sounds. It resembled the silence of a huge cavern, out of which came strange whisperings; innumerable crepitations seemed to come from the dead leaves. Francesco fancied he could hear the trees breathing, and from afar he caught the wild note of a bird.
The sun was low when they came at last to the edge of the forest and saw a hill rise steeply against the sky. It was covered with silver birches, whose stems looked like white threads in the level light of the setting sun. And rising against the sky-line from amidst the fretwork of birch-boughs Francesco saw the well-remembered outlines of the ruined tower wherein he had spent a memorable night.
The valley before them was flooded with golden light, and, as they crossed it, Francesco felt a curious desire for physical pain, something fierce and tangible to struggle with, to drown the ever-pulsing memory of the woman who had gone from him.
As the dusk deepened they went scrambling up the hillside amid the birches, whose white stems glimmered upwards into the blue gloom of the twilight. Francesco's thoughts climbed ahead of him, hurrying to deal with the unknown dangers that might be awaiting him. He had to dismount, pull his steed after him; but the scramble upwards gave him the sense of effort and struggle that he needed. It was like scaling a wall to come to grips with an enemy, whose wild eyes and sword-points showed between the crenelations.
At last they had reached the high plateau. A dog barked. The wood suddenly swarmed with bearded and grotesque forms. They did not recognize in Francesco the monk who had spent a night in their midst. The goatherd had maliciously disappeared, as if to revenge himself for his interrupted orisons. With glowering faces they thronged around Francesco, a babel of voices shouting questions and threatening the intruder.
He waved them contemptuously aside, and his demeanor seemed to raise him in their regards.
At his request to be forthwith conducted into the presence of the duke, one pointed to a low building at the edge of the plateau. Wisps of smoke curled out of it and vanished into the night.
"The duke and the Abbot are at orisons," the man said with a grimace, the meaning of which was lost upon Francesco. "He will not return before midnight."
"I will await him here," said the newcomer, dismounting and leading his steed to a small plot of pasture, where the grass was tall and untrodden. Then, spent as he was, he requested food and drink, and as he joined the band of outlaws, listening to their jokes and banter, he thought he could discern among them many a one whom Fate had, like himself, buffeted into a life, not of his forming, not of his choice.
THE ABBEY OF FARFA
THEgreat vaults of the Abbey of Farfa resounded with glee and merriment.
Before a low, massive stone table, resembling a druidical altar, surrounded by giant casks filled with the choicest wines of Italy, Greece and Spain, there sat the Duke of Spoleto and the Abbot Hilarius, discoursing largely upon the vanities of the world, and touching incidentally upon questions pertaining to the welfare of Church and State. A single cresset shed an unsteady light over the twain, while a lean, cadaverous friar glided noiselessly in and out the transepts, obsequiously replenishing the beverage as it disappeared with astounding swiftness in the feasters' capacious stomachs. And each time he replenished the vessels, he refilled his own with grim impartiality, watching the Abbot and his guest from a low settle in a dark recess.
The vault was of singular construction and considerable extent. The roof was of solid stone masonry and rose in a wide semicircular arch to the height of about twelve feet, measured from the centre of the ceiling to the ground floor.
The transepts were divided by obtusely pointed arches, resting on slender granite pillars, and the intervening space was filled up with drinking vessels of every conceivable shape and size.
The Abbot of Farfa was a discriminating drinker, boastingof an ancestral thirst of uncommonly high degree, the legacy of a Teutonic ancestor who had served the Church with much credit in his time.
They had been carousing since sunset.
The spectral custodian had refilled the tankards with amber liquid. Thereof the Abbot sipped understandingly.
"Lacrymae Christi," he turned to the duke. "Vestrae salubritati bibo!"
The duke raised his goblet.
"Waes Hael!" and he drained its contents with a huge gulp.
"I would chant twenty psalms for that beverage," he mused after a while.
The Abbot suggested "Attendite Populi!"—"It is one of the longest," he said, with meaning.
"Don't trifle with a thirsty belly," growled the duke. "In these troublous times it behooves men to be circumspect!"
"Probatum est," said the Abbot. "It is a noble vocation! Jubilate Deo!"
And he raised his goblet.
The Duke of Spoleto laid a heavy hand upon his arm.
"It is a Vigil of the Church!"
The Abbot gave himself absolution on account of the great company.
"There's no fast on the drink!" he said with meaning. "Nor is there better wine between here and Salamanca!"
The duke regarded his host out of half-shut watery eyes.
"My own choice is Chianti!"
"A difference of five years in purgatory!"
Thereupon the duke blew the froth of his wine in the Abbot's face.
"Purgatory!—A mere figure of speech!"
The Abbot emptied his tankard.
"The figures of speech are the pillars of the Church!"
He beckoned to the custodian.
"Poculum alterum imple!"
The lean friar came and disappeared noiselessly.
They drank for a time in heavy silence. After a time the Abbot sneezed, which caused Beelzebub, the Abbot's black he-goat, who had been browsing outside, to peer through the crescent-shaped aperture in the casement and regard him quizzically.
The duke, who chanced to look up at that precise moment, saw the red inflamed eyes of the Abbot's tutelar genius, and, mistaking the goat for another presence, turned to his host.
"Do you not fear," he whispered, "lest Satan may pay you a visit during some of your uncanonical pastimes?"
"Uncanonical!" roared the Abbot. "I scorn the charge! I scorn it with my heels! Two masses daily,—morning and evening—Primes,—Nones,—Vespers,—Aves,—Credos,—Paters—"
"Excepting on moonlight nights," the duke blinked.
"Exceptis excipiendis," replied the Abbot.
"Sheer heresy!" roared the duke. "The devil is apt to keep an eye on such exceptions. Does he not go about like a roaring lion?"
"Let him roar!" shouted the Abbot, bringing his fist down upon the table, and looking about in canonical ire, when the door opened noiselessly and in its dark frame stood Francesco.
He had waited at the camp for the return of the duke until his misery and restlessness had mastered every other sensation. Sleep, he felt, would not come to his eyes, and he craved for action. He should have liked nothing better than to mount his steed on the spot, ride single-handed into Anjou's camp and redeem his honor in the eyes of those who regarded him a bought instrument of the Church. The memory of Ilaria wailed through the dark chambers of his heart. He felt atthis moment, more than ever, what she had been to him, and to himself he appeared as a derelict, tossed on a vast and shoreless sea.
For a moment he gazed as one spellbound at the drinkers, then he strode up to the duke and shook him soundly.
"To the rescue, my lord duke!" he shouted, in the excess of his frenzy, till the vaults re-echoed his cry from their farthest recesses. "Conradino has been betrayed by the Frangipani!"
At the sound of the name he hated above all on earth, the duke's nebulous haze fell from him like a mantle.
With a great oath he arose.
"Where is the King?"
"They have taken him to Rome,—or Naples,—or to some fortress near the coast," Francesco replied.
"Into whose hands was he delivered?"
"Anjou's admiral,—Robert of Lavenna!"
The duke paused a moment, as if endeavoring to bring order into the chaos of his thoughts. He scanned Francesco from head to toe, as if there was something about the latter's personality which he could not reconcile with his previous acquaintance.
At last Francesco's worldly habit flashed upon him.
"What of the Cross?" he flashed abruptly.
"There is blood upon it!" retorted Francesco.
"All is blood in these days," the duke said musingly. "Are you with us?"—
"I have broken the rosary!"—
The duke extended his broad hand, in which Francesco's almost disappeared as he closed upon it.
There was a great wrath in his eyes.
"We ride at sun-rise!"
"Our goal?"—
"To Naples!"—
The dawn was streaking the east with faint gold, and transient sunshafts touched the woods, when Francesco stood before the doorway of his lodge of pine boughs. The men of the Duke of Spoleto were gathering in on every side, some girding their swords, others tightening their shield-straps, as they came.
The duke ordered a single horn to sound the rally.
The glade was full of stir and action. Companies were forming up, shoulder to shoulder; spears danced and swayed; horses steamed in the brisk morning air.
At last the tents sank down, and, as the sun cleared the trees, the armed array rolled out from the woods into a stretch of open land, that sloped towards the bold curves of a river.
On that morning Francesco felt almost happy, as his fingers gripped his sword and he cantered along by the side of the duke. The great heart of the world seemed to beat with his.
"The day of reckoning has come at last!" he said to the leader of the free lances.
The duke's features were hard as steel. Yet he read the other's humor and joined him with the zest of the hour.
"You smile once more!" said the grim lord of the woods, turning to the slender form in the saddle.
"I shall smile in the hour when the Frangipani lies at my feet," Francesco replied with heaving chest. "It is good to be strong!"
The duke's horsemen were scouring ahead, keeping cover, scanning the horizon for the Provencals. By noon they had left the open land, plunged up hills covered thick with woods. The duke's squadrons sifted through, and he halted them in the woods under the brow of the hill.
Below lay a broad valley running north and south, chequered with pine-thickets and patches of brushwood. On a hill in the centre stood a ruined tower. Towards the south a broad loop of the river closed the valley, while all around on the mistyhills shimmered the giants of the forest, mysterious and silent. The duke's outriders had fallen back and taken cover in the thickets. Down the valley could be seen a line of spears, glittering snake-like towards the tower on the hill. Companies of horse were crossing the river, pushing up the slopes, mass on mass. In the midst of the flickering shields and spears blew a great banner with the Fleur-de-Lis.
It was a contingent of Charles of Anjou, which had been on the march since dawn. They had thrown their advance guard across the river and were straggling up the green slopes, while the main host crossed the ford.
The sound of a clarion re-echoed from crag to crag: and down towards the river played the whirlwind, with dust and clangor and the shriek of steel. Spears went down like trampled corn. The battle streamed down the bloody slope, for nothing could stand that furious charge.
The river shut in the broken host, for the ford was narrow, not easy of passage. From the north came the thundering ranks of horse, and on the south the waters were calm and clear. The Provencals, streaming like smoke blown from a fire by a boisterous wind, were hurled in rout upon the water. They were hurled over the banks, slain in the shallows, drowned in struggling to cross at the ford. Some few hundred reached the southern bank, and scattered fast for the sanctuary of the woods.
In less than half an hour from the first charge the duke's men had won the day. They gave no quarter; slew all who stood.
The duke rode back up the hill, Francesco by his side, amid the cheers of his men.
Southwest they rode towards the sea, their hundred lances aslant under the autumnal sky. They were as men challenging a kingdom with their swords, and they tossed their shields in the face of fate. The audacity of the venture set the hotblood spinning in their hearts. To free Conradino from Anjou's clutches; to hurl damnation in the mouth of the Provencals.
As for Francesco, he was as a hound in leash. His sword thirsted in its scabbard; he had tasted blood, and was hot for the conflict.
On the fourth day they came upon the ruins of Ninfa, a town set upon a hill in a wooded valley. Vultures flapped heavenward as they rode into the gate; lean, red-eyed curs snarled and slinked about the streets. Francesco smote one brute through with his spear, as it was feeding in the gutter on the carcass of a child. In the market square the Provencals had made such another massacre as they had perpetrated in Alba. The horrible obscenity of the scene struck the duke's men dumb as the dead. The towns-folk had been stripped, bound face to face, left slain in many a hideous and ribald pose. The vultures' beaks had emulated the sword. The stench from the place was as the breath of a charnel house, and the duke and his men turned back with grim faces from the brutal silence of that ghastly town.
Near one of the gates a wild, tattered figure darted out from a half-wrecked house, stood blinking at them in the sun, then sped away, screaming and whimpering at the sight of the duke, as though possessed with a demon. It was a woman, still retaining the traces of her former great beauty, gone mad, yet the only live thing they found in the town.
The duke had reined in his steed at the sight, gone white to the roots of his hair. Then he covered his face with his hands, and Francesco heard him utter a heart-rending moan.
When his hands fell, after a lapse of time, he seemed to have aged years in this brief space.
"Forward, my men," he shouted with iron mouth. "The Frangipani shall not complain of our swords!"
They passed out of Ninfa through the opposite gate. At dark they reached the moors, and soon the entire host swept silently into the ebony gloom of the great forests, which seemed sealed up against the moon and stars.
RETRIBUTION
BENEATHthe dark cornices of a thicket of wind-stunted pines stood a small company of men, looking out into the hastening night. The half-light of evening lay over the scene, rolling wood and valley into a misty mass, while the horizon stood curbed by a belt of heavy thunder-clouds. In the western vault, a vast rent in the wall of gray shot out a blaze of translucent gold that slanted like a spear shaft to a sullen sea.
The walls of Astura shone white and ghostly athwart the plains. Sea-gulls came screaming to the cliffs. Presently out of the blue bosom of an unearthly twilight a vague wind arose. Gusts came, clamored, and died into nothingness. The world seemed to shudder. A red sword flashed sudden out of the skies and smote the hills. Thunder followed, growling over the world. The lurid crater of Vesuvius poured gold upon the sea, whose hoarse underchant mingled with the fitful wind.
A storm came creeping black out of the west. The sea grew dark. The forests began to weave the twilight into their columned halls. A sudden gust came clamoring through the woods. The myriad boughs tossed and jerked against the sky, while a mysterious gloom of trees rolled back against the oncoming night.
The men upon the hill strained their eyes towards the sea, where the white patch of a sail showed vaguely through thegathering gloom. Their black armor stood out ghostly against the ascetic trunks of the trees. Grim silence prevailed, and so immobile was their attitude, that they might have been taken for stone images of a dead, gone age.
The wind cried restlessly amid the trees, gusty at intervals, but tuning its mood to a desolate and constant moan. The woods seemed full of a vague woe and of troubled breathings. The trees seemed to sway to one another, to fling strange words with the tossing of hair and outstretched hands. The furze in the valley, swept and harrowed, undulated like a green lagoon.
Between the hills and the cliff lay the marshes, threaded by a meagre stream that quavered through the green. A poison mist hung over them despite the wind. The mournful clangor of a bell came up from the valley, with a vague sound as of voices chanting.
After a time the bell ceased pulsing. In its stead sounded a faint eerie whimper, an occasional shrill cry that startled the moorlands, leaped out of silence like a bubble from a pool where death has been.
The men were shaken from their strained vigilance as by a wind. The utter gray of the hour seemed to stifle them, then a sound stumbled out of the silence and set them listening. It dwindled and grew again, came nearer: it was the smite of hoofs in the wood-ways. The rider dismounted, tethered his foam-flecked steed to a tree and stumbled up to where the Duke of Spoleto and Francesco stood, their gaze riveted upon the ghostly masonry of Astura.
Panting and exhausted he faced the twain.
"They have all died on the scaffold," he said with a hoarse, rasping voice. "The Swabian dynasty is no more."
With a cry and a sob that shook his whole being, Francesco covered his face with his hands.
For a moment the duke stared blankly at the speaker.
"And the Frangipani?" he asked, his features ashen-gray and drawn.
The messenger pointed to Astura.
"There is feasting and high glee: the Pontiff's bribe was large."—
Francesco trembled in every limb.
"Such a day was never seen in Naples," the messenger concluded with a shudder. "To a man they died under the axe—the soil was dyed crimson with their blood."
There was a silence.
The messenger pointed to the sea, which had melted into the indefinite background of the night.
Dim and distant, like a pearl over the purple deeps, one sail after another struck out of the vague west. They came heading for the land, the black hulls rising and falling against the tumultuous blackness of the clouds.
A red gleam started suddenly from the waves. A quick flame leaped up like a red finger above the cliff.
The duke ignited a pine-wood torch. The blue resinous light spluttered in the wind.
Three times he circled it above his head, then he flung it into the sea.
"Bernardo Sarriano and the Pisan galleys," he turned to Francesco. "They are heading for the Cape of Circé."
A shout of command rang through the woods.
As with phantom cohorts the forest-aisles teemed with moving shadows.
A ride of some five miles lay between them and the Cape of Circé. Much of that region was wild forest land and moor; bleak rocky wastes let into woods and gloom. Great oaks, gnarled, vast, terrible, held giant sway amid the huddled masses of the underbrush. Here the wild boar lurked and the wolf hunted. But for the most it was dark and calamitous, a ghostly wilderness forsaken by man.
As they rode along they struck the occasional trail of the Crusaders of the Church. A burnt hamlet, a smoking farmhouse with a dun mist hanging over it like a shroud, and once they stumbled upon the body of a dead girl. They halted for a brief space to give her burial. The duke's men dug a shallow grave under an oak and they left her there and went on their way with greater caution.
"There is one man on earth to whom I owe a debt," the duke, leading the van beside Francesco, turned to the latter, "a debt that shall be paid this night, principal and interest."
Francesco looked up into the duke's face, and by the glare of the now more frequent lightnings he saw that it was drawn and gray.
"There lies his lair," the duke pointed to the white masonry of Astura, as it loomed out of the night, menacing and spectral, as a thunderbolt hissed into the sea, and again lapsed into gloom. "Betrayer of God and man,—his hour is at hand!"—
The duke's beard fairly bristled as he uttered these words, and he gripped the hilt of his sword as if he anticipated a conflict with some wild beast of the forest, some mythical monster born of night and crime.
Francesco made no reply. He was bowed down beneath the gloom of the hour, oppressed with unutterable forebodings. He too had an account to settle: yet, whichever way the tongue inclined in the scales, life stretched out from him as a sea at night. He dared not think of Ilaria, far away in the convent of San Nicandro by the sea; yet her memory had haunted him all day, knocked at the gates of his consciousness, dominated the hours. Compared with the ever present sense of her loss, all in life seemed utterly trifling, and he longed for annihilation only.
Yet a kindred note which he sounded in the duke's soul found him in a more receptive mood for the latter's confidences;once life had seemed good to him; he had thought men heroes, the world a faerie place. Thoughts had changed with time, and that for which he once hungered he now despised. Cursed with perversities, baffled and mocked, the eternal trivialities of life made the soul sink within him. Not all are mild earth, to be smitten and make no moan. There are sea spirits that lash and foam, fire spirits that leap and burn,—was he to be cursed because he was born with a soul of fire?
They were now in the midst of the great wilderness. On all sides myriads of trees, interminably pillared; through their tops the wind sighed and pined like the soft breath of a sleeping world. Away on every hand stretched oblivious vistas, black under multitudinous green spires.
The interminable trees seemed to vex the duke's spirit, as their trunks crowded the winding track and seemed to shut in the twain as with a never ending barrier. And behind them, with the muffled tread of a phantom army, came the duke's armed array striding through the night.
"Have you too suffered a wrong at the hands of the Frangipani?" Francesco at last broke the silence, turning to his companion.
The latter jerked the bridle of his charger so viciously that the terrified animal reared on its haunches and neighed in protest.
"Man, know you whereof you speak?" the duke snarled, as he came closer to Francesco. "He has made the one woman the Duke of Spoleto ever loved—a wanton!"—
They pushed uphill through the solemn shadows of the forest. A sound like the raging of a wind through a wood came down to them faintly from afar. It was a sullen sound, deep and mysterious as the hoarse babel of the sea, smitten through with the shrill scream of trumpets, like the cry of gulls above a storm. Yet in the aisles of the pine forest it was still as death.
Then, like a spark struck from flint and steel falling upon tinder, a red glare blazed out against the background of the night. A horn blared across the moorlands; the castle bell began to ring, jerkily, wildly, a bell in terror. Yellow gleams streaked the fretted waters, and again the trumpet challenged the dark walls, like the cry of a sea-bird driven by the storm.
The duke and Francesco looked meaningly at each other. The sound needed no words to christen it; they knew that the Pisans had attacked. They heard the roar and the cries from the rampart, the cataractine thunder of a distant battle.
Pushing on more swiftly as the woods thinned, the din grew more definite, more human, more sinister in detail. It stirred the blood, challenged the courage, racked conjecture with the infinite chaos it portended. Victory and despair were trammelled up together in its sullen roar; life and death seemed to swell it with the wind sound of their wings. It was stupendous, chaotic, a tempest cry of steel and passions inflamed.
The duke's face kindled to the sound as he shouted to his men to gallop on. Yet another furlong, and the spectral trunks dwindled, the sombre boughs seemed to mingle with the clouds, while gray, indefinite before them, engulfing the lightnings of heaven, loomed the great swell of the Tyrrhene, dark and restless under the thunderclouds, that came nearer and nearer. Ghostly the plains of Torre del Greco stretched towards the Promontory of Circé, and, solitary and impregnable, the Castello of Astura rose upon its chalk-cliffs, white in the lightnings which hissed around its summit.
The duke's men had come up, forming a wide semicircle around the leaders. At their feet opened a deep ravine, leading into the plain; half a furlong beyond, although it seemed less than a lance's throw across, rose the castle of the Frangipani, washed by the waves of the Tyrrhene. The Pisans had attacked the southern acclivity, and the defenders, rousedfrom their feast of blood, had poured all their defences towards the point of attack, leaving the northern slope to look to itself.
As they rode down the ravine there came from the bottom of the valley the sharp yelp of a dog. It was instantly answered by a similar bark from the very top of the castello.
"No two dogs ever had the same voice," the duke turned to Francesco. "They must be hell-hounds, whom the fiend has trained to one tune. But what is that yonder? A goat picking its way?"
"A goat walking on its hind legs!"
"Are there horns on its head?"
"No!"—
"Then it is not the Evil One! Forward, my men!"
The pause that preceded the breaking of the storm had been unnaturally long. Save for the gleam of the lightnings, the waters had grown to an inky blackness. There came one long moment, when the atmosphere sank under the weight of a sudden heat. Then the ever increasing thunder rushed upon the silence with a mighty roar and out of the west, driven by the hurricane, came a long line of white waves, that rose as they advanced, till the very Tritons beat their heads and the nymphs scurried down to greener depths.
And now a sudden streak of fire hissed from the clouds, followed by a crash as if all the bolts of heaven had been let off at once. From the ramparts of Astura came cries of alarm, the din of battle, the blaring of horns, the shouting of commands.
The duke and Francesco had dismounted and were gazing up towards the storm-swept ramparts. Shrieks and curses rolled down upon them like the tumbling of a cascade.
Then they began to scale the ledge, the path dwindling to a goat's highway.
Above them rose a sheer wall on which there appeared notclinging space for a lizard. The abyss below was ready to welcome them to perdition if their feet slipped.
After a brief respite they continued, the duke's men scrambling up behind them, looking like so many ants on the white chalk-cliffs. The air was hot to suffocation; the storm roared, the thunder bellowed in deafening echoes through the skies, and the heavens seemed one blazing cataract of fire, reflected in the throbbing mirror of the sea.
They had reached a seam in the rock, where they paused for a moment to let their brains rest. There was hardly room for the duke and Francesco on the ledge, so narrow was the rocky shelf, and the latter was pushing close against the wall when he was suddenly forced to look up. He heard the din of the encounter above. The Pisans, having attacked the Frangipani from the south, were driving them out at the north. Suddenly two bodies whizzed by him, thrust over the ramparts in the fierceness of the assault. Another came; he seemed to have jumped for life, for he kept feet foremost for a distance through the air, before he began to whirl. These fell clear of the scaling party, and were impaled on the broken tops of the stunted trees, that bossed the side of the precipice. One came so near the duke that his flight downward almost blew him off his narrow perch. His head struck the ledge, while his body caught in the bushes, hung a moment, then dashed after its comrades below.
Just then the end of a rope fell dangling by their side, let down from the ramparts above. The duke tried to grasp it, but it shifted beyond the gap. Down the rope came a man, then another; they both gained a foothold on the narrow ledge. No sooner were their feet on it, than the duke sent them headlong to the bottom. Then grasping the rope without waiting to see if a third or fourth were coming down, he shouted to Francesco to follow. Perilous as was the task, it was no more so than to follow the steep and narrow goat'strail, and in a brief space of time they swung into a courtyard which was deserted. Anticipating no attack on this side, the defenders of Astura had turned their whole attention to the southern slope, where the Pisans were scaling the walls. The roar of the conflict seemed to grow with the roar of the hurricane, and, as one by one the duke's men leaped into the dark square, and the muster was complete, Count Rupert turned to Francesco.
"I feared lest they might clean out the nest before our arrival," he said, then, pointing to a distant glare of torches, he gave the word. They caught the unwary defenders in the rear. No quarter was to be given; the robber brood of Astura was to be exterminated.
"Conradino!" was the password, and above the taunts and cries of Frangipani's hirelings it filled the night with its clamor, rode on the wings of the storm, like the war-cry of a thousand demons.
Notwithstanding the fact that a few of the most daring among the Pisan admiral's men had scaled the ramparts and, leaping into the Frangipani's stronghold, had tried to pave a way for those lagging behind, their companions-in-arms were in dire straits. For those of Astura poured boiling pitch upon the heads of the attacking party, hurled rocks of huge dimensions down upon them which crushed into a mangled mass scores of men, unable to retain the vantage they had gained under the avalanche of arrows, rocks and fire.
In a moment's time the situation was changed.
Noiselessly as leopards, the duke's men fell upon their rear, raising their war-cry as they leaped from the shadows. Those on the ramparts, forced to grapple with the nearer enemy, abandoned their tasks. The Pisans, profiting by the lull, swarmed over the walls. Taken between two parties, a deadly hand-to-hand conflict ensued. Above the din and the roar of the hurricane, of the clashing of arms, above the criesof the wounded, the death-rattle of the dying, sounded the voice of the Duke of Spoleto.
"Onward, my men! Kill and slay!"
Side by side the duke and Francesco leaped into the thickest of the fray, both animated by the same desire to come face to face with the lords of Astura, spurning a lesser enemy.
For a time they seemed doomed to disappointment. Had the Frangipani been slain?
The zest of the conflict pointed rather to their directing the defence. Else their mercenaries would have left Astura to its fate.
Suddenly an unearthly voice startled the combatants.
"Guard, devil, guard!"
There was the upflashing of a sword, and a hoarse challenge frightened the night.
Giovanni Frangipani saw a furious face glaring dead white from under the shadow of a shield.
He stopped in his onward rush, blinked at the duke as one gone mad.
"Damnation, what have we here?"
"By the love of God, I have you now!"
"Fool, are you mad?"
The hoarse voice echoed him, the eyes flashed fire.
"Guard, ravisher,—guard!"
"Ten thousand devils! Who are you?"
"Your obedient servant,—the Duke of Spoleto!"
The Frangipani growled like a trapped bear.
He raised his sword, put forward his shield.
"On with you, dog!" he roared. "Join your wanton under the sod!"
"Ha, say you so?" cried the duke, closing in.
Their swords flashed, yelped, twisted in the air. A down cut hewed the dexter cantrel from the Frangipani's shield. His face with a gashed cheek glared at the duke from under hisupreared arm. So close were they that blood spattered in the duke's face as the Frangipani blew the red stream from his mouth and beard.