END OF BOOK THE SECOND
The early summer dawn was creeping over the silent Campagna when Tristan reached the Inn of The Golden Shield.
As one dazed he had traversed the deserted, echoing streets in the mysterious half-light which flooded the Eternal City; a light in which everything was sharply defined yet seemed oddly spectral and ghostlike.
Deep down in his heart two emotions were contending, appalling in their intensity and appeal. One was an agonized fear for the woman he loved with a love so unwavering that his love was actually himself, his whole being, the sacrament that consecrated his life and ruled his destiny.
She had left Avalon; she had left him to whom she had plighted her troth. Where was she and why was Roger de Laval in Rome?
An icy fear gripped his heart at the thought; a nameless dread and horror of the terrible scene he had witnessed at the midnight feast of Theodora.
For a time he was as one obsessed, hardly master of himself and his actions. In an age where scenes such as those he had witnessed were quickly forgotten the death of Roxana and young Fabio created but little stir. Rome, just emerging from under the dark cloud of Marozia's regime, in the throes of ever-recurring convulsions, without a helmsman to guide the tottering ship of state, received the grim tidings with a shrug of apathy; and the cowed burghers discussed in awed whispers the dread power of one whose vengeance none dared to brave.
Tristan's unsophisticated mind could not so easily forget. He had stood at the brink of the abyss, he had looked down into the murky depths from which there was no escape once the fumes had conquered the senses and vanquished resistance. With a shudder he called to mind, how utterly and completely he had abandoned himself to the lure of the sorceress, how little short of a miracle had saved him. She had led him on step by step, and the struggle had but begun.
No one was astir at the inn.
He ascended the stairs leading to his chamber. The chill of the night was still lingering in the dusky passages. He lighted the taper of a tiny lamp that burnt before an image of the Mother of Sorrows in a niche.
Then he sank upon his couch. His vitality seemed to be ebbing and his mind clouding before the problems that began to crowd in upon him.
Nothing since he left Avalon, nothing external or merely human, had stirred him as had his meeting with Theodora. It had roused in him a dormant, embryonic faculty, active and vivid. What it called into his senses was not a mere series of pictures. It created a visual representation of the horrified creature, roused from the flattering oblivion of death to memory and shame and dread, nothing really forgotten, nothing past, the old lie that death ends all pitifully unmasked.
He shuddered as he thought of the consequences of surrender from which a silent voice out of the far off past had saved him—just in time.
His life lay open before him as a book, every fact recorded, nothing extenuated.
A calm, relentless voice bade him search his own life, if he had done aught amiss. He had never taken or desired that which was another's. Yet his years had been a ceaseless perturbation. There had been endless and desperate clutchings at bliss, followed by the swift discovery that the exquisite light had faded, leaving a chill gloaming that threatened a lonely night. And if the day had failed in its promise what would the night do?
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 another's shoulders. How silent was the universe around him! He stood in tremendous, eternal isolation.
Pale and colorless as a moonstone at first the ghostly dawn had quickened to the iridescence of the opal, flaming into a glory of gold and purple in the awakening east.
And now the wall in the courtyard was no longer grey. A faint, clear, golden light was beginning to flow and filter into it, dispelling, one by one, the dark shadows that lurked in the corners. Somewhere in the distance the dreamer heard the shrill silver of a lark, and a dull monotonous sound, felt rather than heard, suggested that sleeping Rome was about to wake.
And then came the sun. A long golden ray stabbed the mists and leaped into his chamber like a living thing. The little sanctuary lamp before the image of the Blessed Virgin glowed no more.
After a brief rest Tristan arose, noting for the first time with a degree of chagrin that his dagger had not been restored to him.
It was day now. The sun was high and hot. The streets and thoroughfares were thronged. A bright, fierce light beat down upon dome and spire and pinnacle, flooding the august ruins of the Cæsars and the thousand temples of the Holy Cross with brilliant radiance from the cloudless azure of the heavens. Over the Tiber white wisps of mist were rising. Beyond, the massive bulk of the Emperor's Tomb was revealed above the roofs of the houses, and the olive groves of Mount Janiculum glistened silvery in the rays of the morning sun.
It was only when, refreshed after a brief rest and frugal refreshments, Tristan quitted the inn, taking the direction of Castel San Angelo, that the incidents leading up to his arrival at the feast of Theodora slowly filtered through his mind.
Withal there was a link missing in the chain of events. From the time he had left the Lateran in pursuit of the two strangers everything seemed an utter blank. What mysterious forces had been at work conveying him to his destiny, he could not even fathom and, in a state of perplexity, such as he had rarely experienced, he pursued his way, paying little heed to the life and turmoil that seethed around him.
Upon entering Castel San Angelo he was informed that the Grand Chamberlain had arrived but a few moments before and he immediately sought the presence of the man whose sinister countenance held out little promise of the solution of the mystery.
In an octagon chamber, the small windows of which, resembling port-holes, looked out upon the Campagna, Basil was fretfully perambulating as Tristan entered.
After a greeting which was frosty enough on both sides, Tristan briefly stated the matter which weighed upon his mind.
The Grand Chamberlain watched him narrowly, nodding now and then by way of affirmation, as Tristan related the experience at the Lateran, referring especially to two mysterious strangers whom he had followed to a distant part of the city, believing they might offer some clue to the outrage committed at the Lateran on the previous night.
Basil regarded the new captain with a mixture of curiosity and gloom. Perchance he was as much concerned in discovering what Tristan knew as the latter was in finding a solution of the two-fold mystery. After having questioned him on his experience, without offering any suggestion that might clear up his visitor's mind, Basil touched upon the precarious state of the city and its hidden dangers.
Tristan listened attentively to the sombre account, little guessing its purpose.
"Much have I heard of the prevailing lawless state," he interposed at last, "of dark deeds hidden in the silent bosom of the night, of feud and rebellion against the Church which is powerless to defend herself for the want of a master-hand that would evoke order out of chaos."
The dark-robed figure by his side gave a grim nod.
"Men are closely allied to beasts, giving rein to their desires and appetites as the tigers and hyenas. It is only fear that will restrain them, fear of some despotic invisible force that pervades the universe, whose chiefest attribute is not so much creative as destructive. It is only through fear you can rule the filthy rabble that reviles to-day its idol of yesterday."
There was an undercurrent of scorn in Basil's voice and Tristan saw, as it were, the lightning of an angry or disdainful thought flashing through the sombre depths of his eyes.
"What of the Lady Theodora?" Tristan interposed bluntly.
Basil gave a nameless shrug.
"She bends men's hearts to her own desires, taking from them their will and soul. The hot passion of love is to her a toy, clasped and unclasped in the pink hollow of her hand."
And, as he spoke, Basil suited the gesture to the word, closing his fingers in the air and again unclosing them.
"As long as she retains the magic of her beauty so long will her sway over the Seven Hills endure," he added after a brief pause.
"What of the woman who paid the penalty of her daring?" Tristan ventured to inquire.
Basil regarded the questioner quizzically.
"There have been many disturbances of late," he spoke after a pause. "Roxana's lust for Theodora's power proved her undoing. Theodora will suffer no rival to threaten her with Marozia's fate."
"I have heard it whispered she is assembling about her men who are ready to go to any extreme," Tristan interposed tentatively, thrown off his guard by Basil's affability of manner.
The latter gave a start, but recovered himself.
"Idle rumors. The Romans must have something to talk about. Odo of Cluny is thundering his denunciations with such fervid eloquence that they cannot but linger in the rabble's mind."
"The hermit of Mount Aventine?" Tristan queried.
"Even he! He has a strange craze, a doctrine of the End of Time, to be accomplished when the cycle of the sæculum has run its course. A doctrine he most furiously proclaims in language seemingly inspired, and which he promulgates to farther his own dark ends."
"A theory most dark and strange," Tristan replied with a shudder, for he was far from free of the superstition of the times.
Basil gave a shrug. His tone was lurid.
"What shall it matter to us, who shall hardly tread this earth when the fateful moment comes?"
"If it were true nevertheless?" Tristan replied meditatively.
A sombre fire burnt in the eyes of the Grand Chamberlain.
"Then, indeed, should we not pluck the flowers in our path, defying darkness and death and the fiery chariot of the All-destroyer that is to sweep us to our doom?"
Tristan shuddered.
Some such words he had indeed heard among the pilgrim throngs without clearly grasping their import. They had haunted his memory and had, for the time at least, laid a restraining hand upon his impulses.
But the mystery of the Monk of Cluny weighed lightly against the mystery of the woman who held in the hollow of her hand the destinies of Rome.
Basil seemed to read Tristan's thoughts.
Reclining in his chair, he eyed him narrowly.
"You, too, but narrowly escaped the blandishments of the Sorceress, blandishments to which many another would have succumbed. I marvel at your self-restraint, not being bound by any vow."
The speaker paused and waited, his eyes lying in ambush under the dark straight brows.
The memory still oppressed Tristan and the mood did not escape Basil, who stored it up for future reckoning.
"Perchance I, too, might have succumbed to the Lady Theodora's beauty, had not something interposed at the crucial moment."
"The memory of some earlier love, perchance?" Basil queried with a smile.
Tristan gave a sigh. He thought of Hellayne and the impending meeting with Roger de Laval.
His questioner abandoned the subject. Master in dissimulation he had read the truth on Tristan's brow.
"Pray then to your guardian saint, if of such a one you boast," he continued after a pause, "to intervene, should temptation in its most alluring form face you again," he said with deliberate slowness. "You witnessed the end of Fabio of the Cavalli?"—
Tristan shuddered.
"And yet there was a time when he called all these charms his own, and his command was obeyed in Theodora's gilded halls."
"Can love so utterly vanish?" Tristan queried with an incredulous glance at the speaker.
Basil gave a soundless laugh.
"Love!" he said. "Hearts are but pawns in Theodora's hands. Her ambition is to rule, and he who can give to her what her heart desires is the favorite of the hour. Beware of her! Once the poison of her kisses rankles in your blood nothing can save you from your doom."
Basil watched the effect of his words upon his listener and for the nonce he seemed content. Tristan would take heed.
When Tristan had taken his leave a panel in the wall opened noiselessly and Il Gobbo peered into the chamber.
Basil locked and bolted the door which led into the corridor, and the sinister, bat-like form stepped out of its dark frame and approached the inmate of the chamber with a fawning gesture.
"If your lordship will believe me," he said in a husky undertone, "I am at last on the trail."
"What now?"
"I may not tell your nobility as yet."
"Do you want another bezant, dog?"
"It is not that, my lord."
"Then, who does he consort with?"
"I have tracked him as a panther tracks its prey—he consorts with no one."
"Then continue to follow him and see if he consorts with any—woman."
"A woman?"
"Why not, fool?"
"But had your nobility said there was a woman—"
"There always is."
"Your nobility let him go—and yet—one word—"
"I must know more, before I strike. I knew he would come. There is more to this than we wot of. Theodora is infatuated with his austerity. He has jilted her and she smarts under the blow. She will move heaven and earth to bring him to her feet. Meanwhile there are weightier matters to be considered. Perchance I shall pay you an early call in your noble abode. Prepare fitly and bid the ghosts troop from their haunted caves. And now be off! Your quarry has the start!"
Il Gobbo bowed grotesquely and receded backward towards the panel which closed soundlessly behind him.
Basil remained alone in the octagon cabinet.
He strode slowly towards one of the windows that faced to southward and gazed long and pensively out upon the undulating expanse of the Roman Campagna.
"Three messengers, yet none has returned," he muttered darkly. "Can it be that I have lost my clutch on destiny?"
Once again the pale planets of night ruled the sky, when Tristan emerged from his inn and took the direction of the Palatine.
All memories of his meeting with the Lord Basil had faded before the import of the coming hour, when he was to stand face to face with him who held in his hand the fate of two beings destined for each other from the beginning of time and torn asunder by the ruthless hand of Fate.
There was not a sound, save the echo of his own footsteps, as Tristan wound his way through the narrow streets, high cliffs of ancient houses on either side, down which the white disk of the moon penetrated but a yard or two.
At the foot of the Palatine Hill, cutting into the moonlight, the Colosseum rose before him, gaunt, vast, sinister, a silhouette of enormous blackness, pierced as with innumerable empty eyes flooded by greenish, ghostly moonlight. Necromancers and folk practising the occult arts dwelled in ancient houses built with the honey-colored Travertine, stolen from the Hill of the Cæsars. It was said that strange sounds echoed from the arena at night; that the voices of those who had died for the faith in the olden days could be heard screaming in agony at certain periods of the moon.
Gigantic masses of gaunt masonry rose around him as, with fleet steps, he traversed the deserted thoroughfares. In the greenish moonlight he could discern the tumbled ruins of arches and temples scattered about the dark waste. His gaze also encountered the frowning masonry of more recent buildings. The castellated palace of one of the Frescobaldi had been reared right across that ancient site, including in its massive bulk more than one monument of imperial days.
As he approached the region of the Arch of the Seven Candles, as the Arch of Titus with its carving of the Jewish Candelabrum borne in triumph was then called, Tristan walked more warily.
The reputed dangers of the Campo Vaccino knocking at the gates of his memory, he loosened the sword in his scabbard.
He had, by this time, arrived at the end of the street, that curves towards the Arch of Titus, which commands the avenue of lone holm-oaks, leading towards the Appian Way.
Suddenly a man emerged from the shadows. He was armed with sword and buckler, his body was covered with hauberk of mail and he wore the conical steel casque in vogue since Norman arms served as the military model.
Roger and Tristan confronted each other, the former's face tense, drawn, white; the latter with calm eyes in which there was the light of a great regret. An expression not easy to read lay in Laval's eyes, eyes that scanned Tristan from under half-shut lids.
"So you have come?" the stranger said brutally, after a brief and painful pause.
"I have never broken my word," Tristan replied.
"Well spoken! I shall be plain and brief, if you will own the truth."
"I have nothing to conceal, my lord."
Roger's eyes gleamed with yet livelier malice.
"Where is the Lady Hellayne? Where is my wife?"
"As God lives, I know not. Yet—I would give my life, to know."
"Indeed! You may be given that chance. You are frank at least—"
"I may have wronged you in heart, my lord,—but never in deed—" Tristan replied.
"What I have seen, I have seen," the other snarled viciously. "Perchance this silent devotion accounts also for many other things."
"I do not understand, my lord."
"Soon after your flight the Lady Hellayne departed, without a word."
"So you were pleased to inform me."
"I was not pleased," spat out Laval. "How do you explain her flight?"
"I do not explain, my lord. I have not seen or heard from the Lady Hellayne since I left Avalon."
"Then you still aver the lie?"
Tristan raised himself to his full height.
"I am speaking truth, my lord. Why, indeed, should she have left you without even a word?"
Roger eyed the man before him as a cat eyes a captured bird at a foot's distance of mock freedom.
"Why, indeed, save for love of you?"
Tristan raised his hands.
"Deep in my heart and soul I worship the Lady Hellayne," he said. "For me she had but friendship. Else were I not here!"
"A sainted pilgrim," sneered the Count, "in the Groves of Enchantment. And for such a one she left her liege lord."
His mocking laughter resounded through the ruins.
"You wrong the Lady Hellayne and myself. Of myself I will not speak. As concerns her—"
"Of her you shall not speak! Save to tell me her abode."
"Of her I shall speak," Tristan flashed. "You are insulting your wife—"
"Take care lest worse befall yourself," snarled Laval, advancing towards the object of his wrath.
Tristan's look of contempt cut him to the quick.
"You think to bully me as you bully your menials," he said quietly. "I do not fear you!"
"Why, then, did you leave Avalon, if it was not fear that drove you?" drawled Laval, his eyes a mere slit in the face, drawn and white.
The utter baseness and conceit in the speaker's nature were so plainly revealed in his utterance that Tristan replied contemptuously:
"It was not fear of you, my lord, but the Lady Hellayne's expressed desire that brought me to Rome."
"The Lady Hellayne's desire? Then it was she who feared for you?"
"It was not fear for my body, but my soul."
"Your soul? Why your soul?"
"Because my love for her was a wrong to you, my lord,—even though I loved her but in thought."—
"On that night in the garden—you embraced in thought?"
The leer had deepened on the speaker's face.
"A resistless something impelled—"
"And you a fair and pleasant-featured youth, beside Roger de Laval—her husband. And now you are here doing penance at the shrines, at the Lady Theodora's shrine?"
"What I am doing in Rome does not concern you, my lord," Tristan interposed firmly. "I did not attend the Lady Theodora's feast of my own choice—"
"Nor were you in her pavilion of your own choice. Yet a pinch more of penance will set that right also."
"I take it, my lord, that I have satisfied your anxiety," Tristan replied, as he started to pass the other.
Laval caught him roughly by the shoulder.
"Not so fast," he cried. "I shall inform you when I have done with you—"
Tristan's face was white, as he peered into the mask of cunning that leered from the other's countenance. Perchance he would not have heeded the threat had it not been for his anxiety on Hellayne's account. He suspected that Laval knew more than he cared to tell.
"For the last time I ask, where is the Lady Hellayne?"
The Count's form rose towering above him, as he threw the words in Tristan's face.
"For the last time I tell you, my lord, I know not," Tristan replied, eye in eye. "Though I would gladly give my life to know."
"Perchance you may. I have been told the Lady Hellayne is here in Rome. Wherefore is she here? Can it be the spirit that prompted the pilgrimage to her lost lover? Will you take oath, that you have not seen her?"
The speaker's eyes blazed ominously.
Tristan raised his head.
"I will, my lord, upon the Cross!"
Roger's heavy hand smote his cheek.
"Liar!"—
A woman who at that moment crept in the shadows of the Arch of Titus saw Tristan, sword in hand, defending himself against a man apparently much more powerful than himself. For a moment or two she gazed, bewildered, not knowing what to do. Tristan at first seemed to stand entirely on the defensive, but soon his blood grew hot and, in answer to his adversary's lunge, he lunged again. But the other held a dagger in his left hand and with it easily parried the blade. The next pass she saw Tristan reel. She could bear no more and rushed screaming towards some footmen with torches who were standing outside a dark and heavily shuttered building.
Tristan and Roger de Laval rushed at each other with redoubled fury. Both had heard the cry and their blows rang out with echoing clatter, filling the desolate spaces with a sound not seldom heard there in those days. It was a struggle of sheer strength, in which the odds were all against Tristan. He began to yield step by step. Soon a yet fiercer blow of his antagonist must bring him down to his knees, and he fell back farther, as a veritable rain of blows fell upon him.
Four men followed by a woman rushed to the scene.
"Haste! Haste!" she cried frantically. "There is murder abroad!"
She fancied she should behold the younger man already vanquished by his more vigorous enemy. On the contrary, he seemed to have regained his strength and was now pressing the other with an agility and vigor that outweighed the strength of maturity on the part of his adversary.
All was clear in the bright moonlight, as if the sun had been blazing down upon them, and, as the woman leaped forward, she beheld Tristan's assailant gain some advantage. He was pressed back along the Arch towards the spot where she stood.
What now followed she could not see. It was all the work of a moment. But the next instant she saw the elder man raise his arm as if to strike with his dagger. Tristan staggered and fell, and the other was about to strike him through when, with a wild, frantic outcry of terror, she rushed between them, arresting the blow ere it could fall.
"Hellayne!"
A cry in which Tristan's smothered feelings broke through every restraint winged itself from the mouth of the fallen man.
"Tristan!" came the hysterical response.
Roger had hurled his wife aside, his eyes flaming like live coals under their bushy brows.
Those whom Hellayne had summoned to Tristan's aid, when she first arrived on the scene of the conflict, unacquainted with the cause of the quarrel and doubtful which side to aid, stood idly by, since with Tristan's fall there seemed to be no farther demand for their services, nor did Roger's towering stature invite interference.
In the heat of the conflict with its attendant turmoil none of those immediately concerned had remarked a procession approaching from the distance which now emerged from the shadow of the great arch into the moonlit thoroughfare.
It was headed by four giant Nubians, carrying a litter on silver poles, from between the half-shut silken curtains of which peered the face of a woman. In its wake marched a score of Ethiopians in fantastic livery, their broad, naked scimitars glistening ominously in the moonlight.
The litter and its escort arrived but just in time. Ere Laval's blade could pierce the heart of his prostrate victim, Theodora had leaped from her litter and thrown her saffron scarf over the prostrate youth.
With all the outlines of her beautiful form revealed through the thin robe of spangled gauze she faced the irate aggressor and her voice cut like steel as she said:
"Dare to touch him beneath this scarf! This man is mine."
Laval drew back, but his glaring eyes, his parted lips and his labored breath argued little in favor of the fallen man, even though the blow was, for the moment, averted.
With foam-flecked lips he turned to Theodora.
"This man is mine! His life is forfeit. Stand back, that I may wipe this blot from my escutcheon."
Theodora faced the speaker undauntedly.
Ere he could reply, a woman's voice shrieked.
"Save him! Save him! He is innocent! He has done naught amiss!"
Hellayne, whom the Count had hurled against the masonry of the arch, bruising her until she was barely able to support herself, at this moment threw herself between them.
"Thrown her saffron scarf over the prostrate youth"
"Thrown her saffron scarf over the prostrate youth"
"Who is this woman?" Theodora turned to Tristan's assailant. "Who is this woman?" Hellayne's eyes silently questioned Tristan.
Laval's sardonic laughter pealed through the silence.
"This lady is my wife, the Countess Hellayne de Laval, noble Theodora, who has followed her perjured lover to Rome, so they may do penance in company," he replied sardonically. "His life is forfeit. His offence is two-fold. Within the hour he swore he knew naught of her abode. But—since you claim him,—by ties this scarf proclaims—take him and welcome! I shall not anticipate the fate you prepare for your noble lovers!"
The two women faced each other in frozen silence, in the consciousness of being rivals. Each knew instinctively it would be a fight between them to the death.
Theodora surveyed Hellayne's wonderful beauty, appraising her charms against her own, and Hellayne's gaze swept the face and form of the Roman.
Tristan had scrambled to his feet, his face white with shame and rage. From Theodora, in whose eyes he read that which caused him to tremble in his inmost soul, he turned to Hellayne.
"Oh, why have you done this thing, Hellayne, why?—oh, why?"
Roger de Laval laughed viciously.
"It was indeed not to be expected that the Lady Hellayne would find her recalcitrant lover in the arms of the Lady Theodora."
With an inarticulate outcry of rage Tristan was about to hurl himself upon his opponent, had not Theodora placed a restraining hand upon him, while her dark eyes challenged Hellayne.
All the revulsion of his nature against this man rose up in him and rent him. All the love for Hellayne, which in these days had been floating on the wings of longing, soared anew.
But his efforts at vindication in this strangest of all predicaments were put to naught by the woman herself.
"Hear me, Hellayne—it is not true!" he cried, and paused with a choking sensation.
Hellayne stood as if turned to stone.
Then her eyes swept Tristan with a look of such incredulous misery that it froze the words that were about to tumble from his lips.
With a wail of anguish she turned and fled down the moonlit path like a hunted deer.
"Up and after her!" Laval shouted to the men whom Hellayne had summoned to the scene and these, eager to demonstrate their usefulness, started in pursuit, Roger leading, ere Tristan could even make a move to interfere.
Hellayne had fled into the open portals of a church at the end of the street. She tottered and fell. Crawling through the semi-darkness she gasped and leaned against a pillar. She saw a small side chapel, where, before an image of the Virgin, guttered a brace of tapers. But ere she reached the shrine her pursuers were upon her. As, with a shriek of mortal fear she fell, she gazed into the brutal features of Roger de Laval. His lips were foam-flecked, revealing his wolfish teeth.
It was then her strength forsook her. She fell fainting upon the hard stone floor of the church.—
For a pace Tristan and Theodora faced each other in silence.
It was the woman who spoke.
Her voice was cold as steel.
"I have saved your life, Tristan! The weapon which my slaves have taken from you awaits the call of its rightful claimant."
She reentered her litter while Tristan stood by, utterly dazed. But, when the slaves raised the silver poles, she gave him a parting glance from within the curtains that seemed to electrify his whole being.
After the litter-bearers and their retinue had trooped off, Tristan remained for a time in the shadow of the Arch of the Seven Candles.
He knew not where to turn in his misery, nor what to do.
In the same hour he had found and lost his love anew.
It was past the hour of midnight.
In a dimly lighted turret chamber in the house of Hormazd the Persian there sat two personages whose very presence seemed to enhance the sinister gloom that brooded over the circular vault.
The countenance of the Grand Chamberlain was paler than usual and there was a slight gathering of the eyebrows, not to say a frown, which in an ordinary mortal might have signified little, but in one who had so habitual a command of his emotions, would indicate to those who knew him well an unusual degree of restlessness. His voice was calm however, and now and then a bland smile belied the shadows on his brow.
At times his gaze stole towards a dimly lighted alcove wherein moved a dark cowled figure, its grotesque shadow reflected in distorted outlines upon the floor.
"The Moor tarries over long," Basil spoke at last.
"So do the ends of destiny," replied a voice that seemed to come from the bowels of the earth.
"He is fleeter than a deer and more ferocious than a tiger," the Grand Chamberlain interposed. "Nothing has ever daunted him, nor lives the man who would thwart him and live. Can you tell me where he is now?"
"Patience!" came the sepulchral reply. "The magic disk reveals all things! Anon you shall know."
Informed by daily gossip and the reports of his innumerable spies, Basil was aware of a growing belief among the people that the power he wielded was not altogether human, and he would have viewed it with satisfaction even had he not shared it. Seeing in it an additional force helpful to the realization of his ambition, he had thrown himself blindly into the vortex of black magic which was to give to him that which his soul desired.
In this chamber, filled with strange narcotic scents and the mysterious rustling of unseen presences, by which he believed it to be peopled, with the aid of one who seemed the personified Principle of Evil, Basil assembled about him the forces that would ultimately launch him at the goal of his ambition.
This devil's kitchen was the portal to the Unseen, the shrine of the Unknown, the observatory of the Past and the Future, and the laboratory of the Forbidden. There were dim and mysterious mirrors, before which stood brazen tripods whose fumes, as they wreathed upward, gleamed with dusky fires. It was in these mirrors that the wizard could summon the dead and the distant to appear darkly, in scarcely definable glimpses. But he could also produce apparitions more vivid, more startling and more beautiful. Once, in the dark depths of the chamber, Basil had seen a woman's phantom apparition suddenly become strangely luminous, her garments glowing like flames of many colors, that shifted and blent and alternated in ceaseless dance and play, waving and trembling in unearthly glory, till she seemed to be of the very flame herself. The reflection of the world of shadows was upon her; its splendors were wrapping her round like a mantle. He watched her with bated breath, not daring to speak. And brighter, ever brighter, dazzling, ever more dazzling, had grown the flaming phantom, till the wondrous transfiguration reached the height of its beauty and its terror. Then the phantom of murdered Marozia, evoked at his expressed desire from the land of shadows, had faded, dying slowly away in the mysterious depths of the mirror, as the fires that produced it sank and died in white ashes.
There could be no doubt. It was the emissary of Darkness himself who held forth in this dim, demon-haunted chamber where he had so often listened to the record of his awful visions. He had made him see in his dreadful ravings the great vaults of wrath, where dwelt the dread power of Evil. He had made him see the King of the Hopeless Throngs on his black basaltic throne in the terrific glare-illumined caves, where Michael had cast him and where Pain's roar rises eternally night and day. He had made him see the great Lord of the Doomed Shadows, receiving the homage of those dreadful slaves, those terror-spreading angels of woe whose hand flings destruction over the earth and sea and air, while flames were fawning and licking his feet with countless tongues.
And then he had shown to him a spirit mightier and more subtle than any of those great wild destroyers who rush blindly through nature, a spirit who starts in silence on her errand, whom none behold as, creeping through the gloom, she undermines, unties and loosens all the pillars of creation, with no more sign nor sound than a black snake in the tangled grass, till with a thunder that stuns the world the house of God comes crashing down—dread Hekaté herself.
Was there any crime he had left undone?
His subterranean prisons in which limbs unlearned to bend and eyes to see concealed things whose screams would make the flesh of a ghost creep, if flesh one had.
But now there was a darker light in Basil's eyes, a something more ominous of evil in his manner. The wizard's revelation had possessed his soul and his whole terrible being seemed intensified. With the patience of one conscious of a superhuman destiny he waited the summons that was to come to him, even though his soul was consumed by devouring flames.
For he had come yet upon another matter; an inner voice, whose appeal he dared not ignore, had informed him long ago of his waning power with Theodora. From the man wont to command he had fallen to the level of the whimpering slave, content to pick up such morsels as the woman saw fit to throw at his feet. Only on the morning of this day, which had gone down the never returning tide of time, a terrible scene had passed between them. And he knew he had lost.
Basil had been an unseen witness of Theodora's and Tristan's meeting in the sunken gardens on the Aventine. Every moment he had hoped to see the man succumb to charms which no mortal had yet withstood upon whom she had chosen to exert them, and on the point of his poniard sat Death, ready to step in and finish the game. From the fate he had decreed him some unknown power had saved Tristan. But Basil, knowing that Theodora, once she was jilted by the object of her desire, would leave nothing undone to conquer and subdue, was resolved to remove from his path one who must, sooner or later, become a successful rival. By some miraculous interposition of Providence Tristan had escaped the fate he had prepared for him on the night when he had tracked the two strangers from the Lateran. He had had him conveyed for dead to the porch of Theodora's palace. But Fate had made him her mock.
Never had Basil met Theodora in a mood so fierce and destructive as on the morning after she had destroyed Roxana and her lover, and had, in turn, been jilted by Tristan. And, verily, Basil could not have chosen a more inopportune time to press his suit or to voice his resentment and disapprobation. Theodora had driven every one from her presence and the unwelcome suitor shared the fate of her menials. Her dark hints had driven the former favorite to madness, for his passion-inflamed brain could not bear the thought that the love he craved, the body he had possessed, should be another's, while he was drifting into the silent ranks of the discarded. He knew for a surety that Theodora was not confiding in him as of old. Had she somehow guessed the dread mystery of the crypts in the Emperor's Tomb, or had some demon of Hell whispered it into her ear during the dark watches of the night?
A flash of lightning followed by a terrific peal of thunder roused him from his reveries. The storm which had threatened during the early hours of the evening now roared and shrieked round the tower and the very elements seemed in accord with the dark plottings in Hormazd's chamber.
"How much longer must I wait ere the fiends will reveal their secrets?" Basil at last turned to the exponent of the black arts.
The wizard paused before the questioner.
"To what investigation shall we first proceed?"
"You must already have divined my thoughts."
"I knew the instant you arrived. But there is an incompleteness which makes my perceptions less exact than usual."
"Where are my messengers? To the number of three have I sped. None has returned."
The Oriental touched a knob and the lamps were suddenly extinguished, leaving the room illumined by the red glow of the oven. Then he bade his visitor fix his eyes on the surface of the disk.
"Upon this you will presently behold two scenes."
He poured a few drops of something resembling black oil upon the disk, which at once spread in a mirror-like surface. Then he began to mutter some words in an Oriental tongue, and lighted a few grains of a chemical preparation which emitted an odor of bitter aloë. This, when the flames had subsided, he threw upon the oil which at the contact became iridescent.
Basil looked and waited in vain.
The conjurer exhausted all the selections which he thought appropriate. The oil gradually lost the changing aspect it had acquired from the burning substance, and returned to its dull murky tints, and the interest which had appeared on Basil's features gave place to a contemptuous sneer.
"Are you, after all, but a trickster who would impose his art upon the unwary?"
The magician did not reply to this insult, nor did it seem to affect him visibly.
"We must try a mightier spell," he said, "for hostile forces are in conjunction against us."
By a small tongs he raised from the fire the metallic plate that had been lying upon it. Its surface presented the appearance of oxidized silver with a deep glow of heat.
Upon this he claimed to be able to produce the picture of past or future events, and many scenes had been reflected upon the magic shield.
He now poured upon it a spoonful of liquid which spread simmering and became quickly dissipated in light vapors. Then he busied himself with scattering over the plate some grains that looked like salt which the heated metal instantly consumed.
At the end of a few moments he experienced what resembled an electric or magnetic shock. His frame quivered, his lips ceased to repeat the muttered incantations, his hand firmly grasped the tongs by which he raised the metal aloft, now made brighter by the drugs just consumed, and upon which appeared a white spot, which enlarged till it filled the lower half of the plate.
What it represented it was difficult to say. It might have been a sheet or a snow drift. Basil felt an indefinable dread, as above it shimmered forth the vague resemblance of a man on horseback, apparently riding at breakneck speed.
Slowly his contour became more distinct. Now the horseman appeared to have reached a ford. Spurring his steed, he plunged into the stream whose waters seemed for a time to carry horse and rider along with the swift current. But he gained the opposite shore, and the apparition faded slowly from sight.
"It is the Moor!" cried Basil in a paroxysm of excitement. "He has forded the rapids of the Garigliano. Now be kind to me O Fate—let this thing come to pass!"
He gave a gasp of relief, wiping the beads from his brow.
The cowled figure now walked up to the central brazier, muttering words in a language his visitor could not understand. Then he bade Basil walk round and round it, fixing his eyes steadily upon the small blue flame which danced on the surface of the burning charcoal.
When giddiness prevented his continuing his perambulation he made him kneel beside the brazier with his eyes riveted upon it.
Its fumes enveloped him and dulled his brain.
The wizard crooned a slow, monotonous chant. Basil felt his senses keep pace with it, and presently he felt himself going round and round in an interminable descent. The glare of the brazier shrank and diminished, invaded from outside by an overpowering blackness. Slowly it became but a single point of fire, a dark star, which at length flamed into a torch. Beside him, with white and leering face, stood the dark cowled figure, and below him there seemed to stretch intricate galleries, strangled, interminable caves.
"Where am I?" shrieked the Grand Chamberlain, overpowered by the fumes and the fear that was upon him.
"Unless you reach the pit," came the dark reply, "farewell forever to your schemes. You will never see a crown upon your head."
"What of Theodora?" Basil turned to his companion, choking and blinded.
"If the bat-winged fiends will carry you safely across the abyss you shall see," came the reply.
A rush as of wings resounded through the room, as of monstrous bats.
"Gehenna's flame shall smoothe her brow," the wizard spoke again. "When Death brings her here, she shall stand upon the highest steps, in her dark magnificence she shall command—a shadow among shadows. Are you content?"
There was a pause.
The storm howled with redoubled fury, flinging great hailstones against the time-worn masonry of the wizard's tower.
"Then," Basil spoke at last, his hands gripping his throat with a choking sensation, "give me back the love for which my soul thirsts and wither the bones of him who dares to aspire to Theodora's hand."
The wizard regarded him with an inscrutable glance.
"The dark and silent angels, once divine, now lost, who do my errands, shall ever circle round your path. Everlasting ties bind us, the one to the other. Keep but the pact and that which seems but a wild dream shall be fulfilled anon. They shall guide you through the dark galleries of fear, till you reach the goal."
"Your words are dark as the decrees of Fate," Basil replied, as the fumes of the brazier slowly cleared in his brain and he seemed to emerge once more from the endless caverns of night, staring about him with dazed senses.
"You heed but what your passion prompts," the cowled figure interposed sternly, "oblivious of that greater destiny that awaits you! It is a perilous love born in the depths of Hell. Will you wreck your life for that which, at best, is but a fleeting passion—a one day's dream?"
"Well may you counsel who have never known the hell of love!" Basil cried fiercely. "The fiery torrent that rushes through my veins defies cold reason."
The cowled figure nodded.
"Many a ruler in whose shadow men have cowered, has obeyed a woman's whim and tamely borne her yoke. Are you of those, my lord?"
"I have set my soul upon this thing and Fate shall give to me that which I crave!" Basil cried fiercely.
The wizard nodded.
"Fate cannot long delay the last great throw."
"What would you counsel?" the Grand Chamberlain queried eagerly, peering into the cowled and muffled face, from which two eyes sent their insane gleam into his own.
"Send her soul into the dark caverns of fear—surround her with unceasing dread—let the ghosts of those you have sent butchered to their doom surround her nightly pillow, whispering strange tales into her ears,—then, when fear grips the maddened brain and there seems no rescue but the grave—then peals the hour."
Basil gazed thoughtfully into the wizard's cowled face.
"When may that be?"
"I will gaze into the silent pools of my forbidden knowledge with the dark spirits that keep me company. I have mysterious rules for finding day and hour."
"I cannot expel the passion that rankles in my blood," Basil interposed darkly. "But I will tear out my heart strings ere I shirk the call. An emperor's crown were worth a tenfold price, and ere I, too, descend to the dread shadows, I mean to see it won."
"These thoughts are idle," said the wizard. "Only the weak plumb the depths of their own soul. The strong man's bark sails lightly on victorious tides. Your soul is pledged to the Powers of Darkness."
"And by the fiends that sit at Hell's dark gate, I mean to do their bidding," Basil replied fiercely. "Else were I indeed the mock of destiny. Tell me but this—how did you obtain a knowledge at which the fiend himself would pale?"
The wizard regarded him for a moment in silence.
"You who have peered behind the curtain that screens the dreadful boundaries—you who have seen the pale phantom of Marozia, whom you have sent to her doom,—how dare you ask?"
Basil had raised both hands as if to ward off an evil spirit.
"This, too, then is known to you? Tell me! Was what I saw a dream?"
"What you have seen—you have seen," the cowled form replied enigmatically. "The cocks are crowing—and the pale dawn glimmers in the East."
Throwing his mantle about him, Basil left the turret chamber and, after creeping down a narrow winding stair, he made for his villa on the Pincian Hill.