The Sorceress of Rome

CHAPTER II

THE QUEEN OF NIGHT

Aweek had passed since Otto's arrival in Rome. Eckhardt, wrapped in his own dark fancies, had only appeared at the palace on the Aventine when compelled to do so in the course of his newly resumed duties. The terrible presentiment which had haunted him night and day since he left the gray, bleak winter skies of his native land, had become intensified during the past days. Day and night he brooded over the terrible fascination of those eyes which had laid their spell upon him, over the amazing resemblance of the apparition to the one long dead in her grave. And the more he pondered the heavier grew his heart within him, and vainly he groped for a ray of light upon his dark and lonely path, vainly for a guiding hand to conduct him from the labyrinth of doubt and fear.

It had been a warm and sultry day. Towards evening dark clouds had risen over the Tyrrhene Sea and spread in long heavy banks across the azure of the sky. Sudden squalls of rain swept down at short intervals, driving the people into shelter. All the life of the streets took refuge in arcades or within dimly lighted churches. Soon the slippery marble pavements were deserted, and the water from the guttered roofs dripped dolefully into overflowing cisterns. A strange atmosphere of discomfort and apprehension lay over the city.

The storm increased as evening fell. From the seclusion of the gloomy chamber he occupied in the old weather-beaten palace of the Pierleoni, Eckhardt looked out into the growing darkness. The clouds chased each other wildly and the driving rain obliterated every outline.

How long he had thus stood, he did not know. A rattle of hailstones against the window, a gust of wind, which suddenly blew into his face, and the lurid glare of lightning which flashed through the ever-deepening cloud-bank, roused Eckhardt from his reverie to a sense of reality. The lamp on the table shed a fitful glare over the surrounding objects. Now the deep boom of thunder reverberating through the hills caused him to start from his listless attitude. Just as he turned, the lamp gave a dismal crackle and went out, leaving him in Stygian gloom. With an exclamation less reverent than expressive, Eckhardt groped his way through the darkness, vainly endeavouring to find a flint-stone. A flash of lightning which came to his aid not only revealed to him the desired object, but likewise a tall, shadowy form standing on the threshold. From the dense obscurity which enshrouded him, Eckhardt could not, in the intermittent flashes of lightning, see the stranger's features, but a singular, and even to himself quite inexplicable perversity of humour, kept him silent and unwilling to declare his presence, although he instinctively felt that the strange visitor, whoever he was, had seen him. Meanwhile the latter advanced a pace or two, paused, peered through the gloom and spoke with a voice strangely blended with deference and irony:

"Is Eckhardt of Meissen present?"

Without once taking his eyes from the individual, whose dark form now stood clearly revealed in the lightning flashes, which followed each other at shorter intervals, the same strange obstinacy stiffened Eckhardt's tongue, and concealed in the gloom, he still held his peace. But the stranger drew nearer, till in height and breadth he seemed suddenly to overshadow the Margrave, and once again the voice spoke:

"Is Eckhardt of Meissen present?"

"I am here!" the latter replied curtly, rising out of the darkness, and striking the flint-stones, he succeeded, after some vain efforts, in relighting the lamp. As he did so, a tremendous peal of thunder shook the house and the stranger precipitately retreated into the shadow of the doorway.

"You are the bearer of a message?" Eckhardt turned towards him, with unsteady voice. The stranger made no move to deliver what the other seemed to expect.

"Everything in death has its counterpart in life," he replied with a calm, passionless voice which, by its very absence of inflection, thrilled Eckhardt strangely. "If you have the courage – follow me!"

Without a word the Margrave placed upon his head a skullcap of linked mail, and after having adjusted his armour, turned to the mysterious messenger.

"Who bade you speak those words?"

"One you have seen before."

"Where?"

"Your memory will tell you."

"Her name?"

"You will hear it from her own lips."

"Where will you lead me?"

"Follow me and you will see."

"Why do you conceal your face?"

"To hide the blush for the thing called man."

The stranger's enigmatic reply added to Eckhardt's conviction that this night of all was destined to clear the mystery which enshrouded his life.

A mighty struggle, such as he had never before known, seemed to rend his soul, as with throbbing heart he followed his strange guide on his mysterious errand. Thus they sped through the storm-swept city without meeting one single human being. At the top of the Esquiline they came to a momentary standstill, for the storm raged with a force that nothing could resist. Leaning for a moment against a ruined portico, Eckhardt gazed westward over the night-wrapt city. In the driving rain he could scarcely distinguish the huge structures of the Flavian Amphitheatre and the palaces on the Capitoline hill. The Janiculan Mount stood out like a darker storm-cloud against the lowering sky, and the air was filled with a dull moan and murmur like the breathing of a sleeping giant. On the southern slope of the hill the wind attacked them with renewed fury, and the blasts howled up the Clivus Martis and the Appian Way. The region seemed completely deserted. Only a solitary travelling chariot rolled now and then, clattering, over the stones.

The road gradually turned off to the right. The dark mass to their left was the tomb of the Scipios and there in front, hardly visible in the darkness of night, rose the arch of Drusus, through which their way led them. Eckhardt took care to note every landmark which he passed, to find the way, should occasion arise, without his guide. The latter, constantly preceding him, took no note of the Margrave's scrutiny, but continued unequivocally upon his way, leaving it to Eckhardt to follow him, or not.

A blinding flash of lightning illumined the landscape far away to the aqueducts and the Alban hills, followed by a deafening peal of thunder. The uproar of the elements for a time shook Eckhardt's resolution.

Just then he heard the clanging of a gate.

An intoxicating perfume of roses and oleander wooed his bewildered senses as his guide conducted him through a labyrinthine maze of winding paths. Only an occasional gleam of lightning revealed to the Margrave that they traversed a garden of considerable extent. Now the shadowy outlines of a vast structure, illumined in some parts, appeared beyond the dark cypress avenue down which they strode at a rapid pace.

Suddenly Eckhardt paused, addressing his guide: "Where am I, and why am I here?"

The stranger turned, regarding him intently. Then he replied:

"I have nothing to add to my errand. If you fear to follow me, there is yet time to retreat."

Had he played upon a point less sensitive, Eckhardt might have turned his back even now upon the groves, whose whispering gloom was to him more terrible than the din of battle, and whose mysterious perfumes exercised an almost bewildering effect upon his overwrought senses.

A moment's deliberation only and Eckhardt replied:

"Lead on! I follow!"

He was now resolved to penetrate at every hazard the mystery which mocked his life, his waking hours and his dreams.

On they walked.

Here and there, from branch-shadowed thickets gleamed the stone-face of a sphinx or the white column of an obelisk, illumined by the lightnings that shot through the limitless depth of the midnight sky. The storm rustled among the arched branches, driving the dead and dying leaves in a mad whirl through the wooded labyrinth.

At last, Eckhardt's strange guide stopped before a cypress hedge of great height, which loomed black in the night, and penetrating through an opening scarce wide enough for one man, beckoned to Eckhardt to follow him. As the latter did so he stared in breathless bewilderment upon the scene which unfolded itself to his gaze.

The cypress hedge formed the entrance to a grotto, the interior of which was faintly lighted by a crystal lamp of tenderest rose lustre.

For a moment Eckhardt paused where he stood, then he touched his head with both hands, as if wondering if he were dreaming or awake. If it was not the work of sorcery, if he was not the victim of some strange hallucination, if it was not indeed a miracle – what was it? He gazed round, awe-struck, bewildered. His guide had disappeared.

The denizen of the grotto, a woman reclining on a divan, like a goddess receiving the homage of her worshippers, was the image of the one who had gone from him for ever, and the longer his gaze was riveted on this enchanting counterfeit of Ginevra, the more his blood began to seethe and his senses to reel.

Slowly he moved toward the enchantress, who from her half-reclining position fixed her eyes in a long and questioning gaze upon the new-comer, a gaze which thrilled him through and through. He dared not look into those eyes, which he felt burning into his. His head was beginning to spin and his heart to beat with a strange sensation of wonderment and fear. Never till this hour had he seen Ginevra's equal in beauty, and now that it broke on his vision, it was with the face, the form, the hair, the eyes, the hands, of the woman so passionately loved. Only the face was more pale – even with the pallor of death, and there was something in the depths of those eyes which he had never seen in Ginevra's. But the light, the perfume, the place and the seductive beauty of the woman before him, garbed as she was in a filmy, transparent robe of silvery tissue, which clung like a pale mist about the voluptuous curves of her body, flowing round her like the glistening waves of a cascade, began to play havoc with his senses.

"Welcome, stranger, in the Groves of Enchantment," she spoke, waving her beautiful snowy arms toward her visitor. "I rejoice to see that your courage deserves the welcome."

There was an undercurrent of laughter in her musical tones, as she pointed to a seat by her side. Unable to answer, unable to resist, Eckhardt moved a few paces nearer. His brain whirled. For a moment Ginevra's image seemed forgotten in the contemplation of the rival of her dead beauty. A wild, desperate longing seized him. On a sudden impulse he turned away, in a dizzy effort to escape from the mesmeric gleam of those sombre, haunting eyes, which pierced the very depths of his soul. Fascinated, at the same time repelled, his very soul yearned for her whose embrace he knew was destruction and he was filled with a strange sudden fear. There was something terrible in the steadfast contemplation which the woman bestowed upon him, – something that seemed to lie outside the pale of human passions, and the pallor of her exquisite face seemed to increase in proportion as the devouring fire of her eyes burnt more intensely.

"Are you afraid of me?" she laughed, raising her arms and holding them out toward him.

Still he hesitated. His breast heaved madly as his eyes met those, which swam in a soft languor, strangely intoxicating. Her lips parted in a faint sigh.

"Eckhardt," she said tremulously, "Eckhardt."

Then she paused as if to watch the effect of her words upon him.

Mute, oppressed by indistinct hovering memories, Eckhardt fed his gaze on her seductive fairness, but a terrible pain and anguish gnawed at his heart. Not only the face, even the voice was that of Ginevra.

"Everything in death has its counterpart in life: " —

That had been the pass-word to her presence.

One devouring look – and forgetting all fear and warning and all presence of mind he rushed towards that flashing danger-signal of beauty, that seemed to burn the very air encompassing it, that living image of his dead wife, and with wild eyes, outstretched arms and breathless utterance, he cried: "Ginevra!"

She whom he thus called turned toward him, as he came with the air of a madman upon her, and her marvellous loveliness, as she raised her dark eyes questioningly to his, checked his impetuous haste, held him tongue-tied, bewildered and unmanned.

And truly, nothing more beautiful in the shape of woman could be imagined than she. Her fairness was of that rare and subtle type which has in all ages overwhelmed reason, blinded judgment and played havoc with the passions of men.

Well did she know her own surpassing charm and thoroughly did she estimate the value of her fatal power to lure and to madden and to torture all whom she chose to make the victim of her almost resistless attraction. Her hair, black as night, was arranged loosely under a jewelled coif. Her eyes, large and brilliant, shone from under brows delicately arched. Her satin skin was of the creamy, colourless, Southern type, in startling contrast to the brilliant scarlet of the small bewitching mouth.

Beautiful and delicate as the ensemble was, there was in that enchanting face a lingering expression, which a woman would have hated and a man would have feared.

"Ginevra!" Eckhardt cried, then he checked himself, for, her large eyes, suddenly cold as the inner silence of the sea, surveyed him freezingly, as though he were some insolently obtrusive stranger. But her face was pale as that of a corpse.

"Ginevra!" he faltered for the third time, his senses reeling and he no longer master of himself. "Surely you know me – Eckhardt, – him whose name you have just called! Speak to me, Ginevra – speak! By all the love I have borne for you – speak, Ginevra, – speak!"

A shadow flitted through the background and paused behind Theodora's couch. Neither had seen it, though Theodora shuddered as if she had felt the strange presence of something uncalled, unbidden.

A strange light of mockery, or of annoyance, gleamed in the woman's eyes. Her crimson lips parted, showing two rows of even, small white teeth, then a gleam of amusement shot athwart her face, raising the delicately pencilled corners of the eye-brows, as she broke into a soft peal of careless mocking laughter.

"I am not Ginevra," she said. "Who is Ginevra? I am Theodora – the Queen of Love."

Again, as she saw his puzzled look, she gave way to her silvery, mocking mirth, while her eyes flung him a glittering challenge to approach. Eckhardt had recovered partial control over his feelings and met her taunting gaze steadfastly and with something of sadness. His face had grown very pale and all the warmth and rapture had died out of his voice, when he spoke again.

"I am Eckhardt," he said quietly, with the calm of a madman who argues for a fixed idea, – "and you are Ginevra – or her ghost – I know not which. Why did you return to the world from your cold and narrow bed in the earth and shun the man who worships you as one worships an idol? Is it for some transgression in the flesh that your soul cannot find rest?"

An ominous shuffling behind her caused Theodora to start. She turned her head as if by chance and when again she faced Eckhardt, she was as pale as death. Noting her momentary embarrassment, Eckhardt made a resolute step toward her, catching her hands in his own. He was dazed.

"Is this your welcome back in the world, Ginevra?" he pleaded with a passionate whisper. "Have you no thought what this long misery apart from you has meant? Remember the old days, – the old love, – have pity – speak to me as of old."

His voice in its very whisper thrilled with the strange music that love alone can give. His eyes burnt and his lips quivered. Suddenly he seemed to wake to a realization of the scene. He had been mocked by a fatal resemblance to his dead wife. His heart was heavy with the certainty, but the spell remained.

Without warning he threw himself on his knees, holding her unresisting hands in his.

"Demon or Goddess," he faltered, and his voice, even to his own ears, had a strange sound. "What would you have with me? Speak, for what purpose did you summon me? Who are you? What do you want with me?"

Her low laugh stirred the silence into a faint tuneful echo.

"Foolish dreamer," she murmured half tenderly, half mockingly. "Is it not enough for you to know that you have been found worthy to join the few chosen ones to whom this earthly paradise is not a book with seven seals? Like your sad-eyed, melancholy countrymen, you would analyze the essence of love and try to dissolve it into its own heterogeneous particles. If you were given the choice of the fairest woman you would descend into the mouldering crypts of the past, to unearth the first and last Helen of Troy. Ah! Is it not so? You Northmen prefer a theoretical attachment to the body of living, breathing, loving woman?"

He looked at her surprised, perplexed, and paused an instant before he made reply. Was she mocking him? Did she speak truth?

"Surely so peerless an enchantress, with admirers so numerous, cannot find it worth her while to add a new worshipper to the idolatrous throng?" he answered.

"Ah! Little you know," she murmured indolently, with a touch of cold disdain in her accents. "My worshippers are my puppets, my slaves! There is not a man amongst them," she added, raising her voice, "not a man! They kiss the hand that spurns their touch! As for you," she added, leaning forward, so that the dark shower of her hair brushed his cheek and her drowsy eyes sank into his own, "As for you – you are from the North. – I love a nature of strongly repressed and concentrated passion, of a proud and chilly temper. Like our volcanoes they wear crowns of ice, but fires unquenchable smother in their depths. And – might not at a touch from the destined hand the flame in your heart leap forth uncontrolled?"

Eckhardt met the enchantress' look with one of mingled dread and intoxication. She smiled, and raising a goblet of wine to her lips, kissed the brim and gave it to him with an indescribably graceful swaying gesture of her whole form, which resembled a tall white lily bending to the breeze. He seized the cup eagerly and drank thirstily from it. Again her magic voice, more melodious than the sounds of Æolian harps thrilled his ears and set his pulses to beating madly.

"But you have not yet told me," she whispered, while her head drooped lower and lower, till her dark fragrant tresses touched his brow, "you have not yet told me that you love me?"

Was it the purple wine that was so heavy on his senses? Heavier was the drowsy spell of the enchantress' eyes. Eckhardt started up. His heart ached with the memory of Ginevra, and a dull pang shot through his soul. But the spell that was upon him was too heavy to be broken by human effort. Nothing short of the thunder of Heaven could save him now.

Theodora's words chimed in his ear, while her hands clasped his own with their soft, electrifying touch. With a supreme effort he endeavoured to shake off the spell, into whose ravishment he was being slowly but surely drawn, his efforts at resistance growing more feeble and feeble every moment.

Again the voice of the Siren sent its musical cadence through his brain in the fateful question:

"Do you love me?"

Eckhardt attempted to draw back, but could not.

Entwining her body with his arms, he devoured her beauty with his eyes. From the crowning masses of her dusky hair, over the curve of her white shoulders and bosom, down to the blue-veined feet in the glistening sandals, his gaze wandered hungrily, searchingly, passionately. His heart beat with wild, mad desire, but, though his lips moved, no words were audible.

She too, was silent, apparently watching the effect of her spell upon him, sure of the ultimate fateful result. In reality she listened intently, as if expecting some unwelcome intrusion, and once her dark fear-struck eyes tried to penetrate the deep shadows of the grotto. She had heard something stir, – and a mad fear had seized her heart.

Eckhardt, unconscious of the woman's misgivings, gazed upon her as one dazed. He felt, if he could but speak the one word, he would be saved and yet – something warned him that, if that word escaped his lips, he would be lost. Half recumbent on her couch, Theodora watched her victim narrowly. A smile of delicate derision parted her lips, as she said: