The Sorceress of Rome

CHAPTER IX

THE SNARE OF THE FOWLER

While these events transpired in Rome, a feverish activity prevailed in Castel San Angelo. In day time the huge mausoleum presented the same sullen and forbidding aspect as ever but without revealing a trace of the preparations, which were being pushed to a close within. Under cover of night the breaches had been repaired; huge balistae and catapults had been placed in position on the ramparts, and the fortress had been rendered almost impregnable to assault, as in the time of Vitiges, the Goth.

Events were swiftly approaching the fatal crisis. While Otto languished in the toils of Stephania, whose society became more and more indispensable to him, while with pernicious flattery Benilo closed the ear of the king to the cries of his German subjects and estranged him more and more from his leaders, his country, and his hosts, while Eckhardt vainly strove to arouse Otto to the perils lurking in his utter abandonment to Roman councillors and Roman polity, the Senator of Rome had introduced into Hadrian's tomb a sufficiently strong body of men, not only to withstand a siege, but to vanquish any force, however superior to his own, to frustrate any assault, however ably directed. While the German contingents remained on Roman soil he dared not engage his enemy in a last death-grapple for the supremacy over the Seven Hills, which Otto's war-worn veterans from the banks of the Elbe and Vistula had twice wrested from him. The final draw in the great game was at hand. On this day the envoys of the Electors would arrive in Rome to demand Otto's immediate return to his German crown-lands, whose eastern borders were sorely menaced by the ever recurring inroads of Poles and Magyars. In the event of Otto's refusing compliance with the Electoral mandate, Count Ludeger of the Palatinate was to relieve Eckhardt of his command and to lead the German contingents back across the Alps.

But it was no part of the Senator's policy to permit Otto to return. For while there remained breath in the youth, Rome remained the Fata Morgana of his dreams, and Crescentius remained the vassal of Theophano's son. He could never hope to come into his own as long as the life of that boy-king overshadowed his own. Therefore every pressure must be brought to bear upon the headstrong youth, to defy the Electoral mandate, to rebuff, to offend the Electoral envoys. Then, the great German host recalled, Eckhardt relieved of his command, Otto isolated In a hostile camp, Stephania should cry the watchword for his doom. The inconsiderable guard remaining would be easily vanquished and the son of Theophano, utterly abandoned and deserted, should fall an easy prey to the Senator's schemes, a welcome hostage in the dungeons of Castel San Angelo, for him to deal with according to the dictates of the hour. The task to urge Otto to this fatal step had been assigned to Benilo, but Crescentius was prepared for all emergencies arising from any unforeseen turn of affairs. He had gone too far to recede. If now he quailed before the impending issue, the mighty avalanche he had started would hurl him to swift and certain doom.

Since that fateful hour, when in a moment of unaccountable weakness Crescentius had listened to Benilo's serpent-wisdom, and had arrayed his own wife against the German King, the Senator of Rome had seen but little of Stephania. The preparations for the impending revolt of the Romans, in whose fickle minds his emissaries found a fertile soil for the seed of treason and discontent, engaged him night and day. He seemed present at once on the ramparts, in the galleries and in the vaults of his formidable keep. But when chance for a fleeting moment brought the Senator face to face with his consort, the meaning-fraught smile on the lips of Stephania seemed to assure him that everything was going well. Otto was lost to the world. Heaven and earth seemed alike blotted out for him in her presence. Together they continued to stroll among the ruins, while Stephania poured strange tales into the youth's ear, tales which crept to his brain, like the songs of the Sirens that lure the mariner among the crimson flowers of their abode. And Eckhardt despised the Romans too heartily to fear them, and even therein he revealed the heel of Achilles.

If the present day was gained, the Senator's diplomacy would carry victory from the field, and Benilo had well plied his subtle arts. Yet Crescentius was resolved to attend in person the audience of the envoys. He would with his own ears hear the King's reply to the Electors. If Benilo had played him false? He hardly knew why a lingering suspicion of the Chamberlain crept into his mind at all. But he shook himself free of the thought, which had for a moment clouded the future with its sombre shadow.

As the Senator of Rome hurriedly traversed the galleries of the vast mausoleum, he suddenly found himself face to face with Stephania.

Her face was pale and her eyes revealed traces of tears.

At the first words she uttered, Crescentius paused, surprise and gladness in his eyes.

"We are well met, my lord," she said, after a brief greeting, an unwonted tremor vibrating in her tones. "I have sought you in vain all the morning. Release me from the task you have imposed upon me! I cannot go on! I am not further equal to it. It is a game unworthy of you or me!"

The surprise at her words for a moment choked the Senator's utterance and almost struck him dumb.

"Imposed upon?" he replied. "I thought you had accepted the mission freely. Is the boy rebellious?"

"On the contrary! Were he so, perhaps I should not now prefer this request. He is but too pliant."

"He has made your task an easy one," Crescentius nodded meaningly.

"He has laid his whole soul bare to me; not a thought therein, ever so remote, which I have not sounded. I can not stand before him. My brow is crimsoned with the flush of shame. He gave me truth for a lie, – friendship for deceit. He deserves a better fate than the Senator of Rome has decreed for him."

Crescentius breathed hard.

"The weakness does you honour," he replied after a pause. "Perchance I should have spared you the task. I placed him in your hands, because I dared trust no one else. And now it is too late – too late!"

"It is not too late," replied Stephania.

Crescentius pointed silently to the ramparts, where a score of men were placing a huge catapult in position.

"It is not too late!" she repeated, her cheeks alternately flushing and paling. "To-day, my lord informed me, the King stands at the Rubicon. To-day he must choose, If it is to be Rome, if Aix-la-Chapelle. If he elects to return to the gray gloom of his northern skies, to the sombre twilight of his northern forests, let him go, my lord, – let him go! Much misery will be thereby averted, – much heart-rending despair!"

Crescentius had listened in silence to Stephania's pleading. There was a brief pause, during which only his heavy breathing was heard.

"His choice is made," he replied at last in a firm tone.

"I do not understand you, my lord!"

The Senator regarded his wife with singularly fixed intentness.

"The toils of the Siren Rome are too firm to be snapped asunder like a spider's web."

She covered her face with her hands. Her breath came and went with quick, convulsive gasps.

"It is shameful – shameful – " she sobbed. "Had I never lent myself to the unworthy task! How could you conceive it, my lord, how could you? But it was not your counsel! May his right hand wither, who whispered the thought into your ear!"

Crescentius winced. He felt ill at ease.

"Is it so hard to play the confessor to yonder wingless cherub?" he said with a forced smile.

Stephania straightened herself to her full height.

"When I undertook the shameless task, I believed the son of Theophano a tyrant, an oppressor, his hands stained with the best of Roman blood! Such your lying Roman chroniclers had painted him. I gloried in the thought, to humble a barbarian, whose vain-glorious, boastful insolence meditated new outrages upon us Romans. Yet his is a purer, a loftier spirit, than is to be found in all this Rome of yours! Were it not nobler to acknowledge him your liege, than to destroy him by woman's wiles and smiles?"

"I cannot answer you on these points," Crescentius spoke after a pause, during which the olive tints of his countenance had faded to ashen hues. "I regard those dreams, whose mock-halo has blinded you, in a different light. It is the wise man who rules the state, – it is the dreamer who dashes it to atoms. We have gone too far! I could not release you, – even if I would!"

Stephania breathed hard. Her hands were tightly clasped.

"It can bring glory to neither you, nor Rome," she said in a pleading voice. "Let him depart in peace, my lord, and I will thank you to my dying hour!"

"How know you he wishes to depart?"

"How know you he wishes to remain?"

"His destiny is Rome. Here he will live – and here he will die!" the Senator spoke with slow emphasis. "But we have not yet agreed upon the signal," he continued with cold and merciless voice. "After the departure of the envoys you will lead the King into his favourite haunts, the labyrinth of the Minotaurus, to the little temple of Neptune. There I will in person await him. When you see the gleam of spearpoints in the thickets, you will wave your kerchief with the cry: 'For Rome and Crescentius.' No harm shall befall the youth, – unless he resist. He shall have honourable conduct to the guest chamber, prepared for him, – below."

And Crescentius pointed downward with the thumb of his right hand.

Stephania's bosom rose and fell in quick respiration.

"I am not accustomed to prefer a request and be denied," she said proudly, her face the pallor of death. "Is this your last word, my lord?"

Crescentius met her gaze unflinchingly.

"It is my last," he replied. "Yet one choice remains with you: You may betray the King, – or the Senator of Rome!"

He turned to go, but something whispered to him to stay. At that moment he despised himself for having imposed upon his wife a task, against which Stephania's loftier nature had rebelled and he inwardly cursed the hour which had ripened the seed and him, who had sown it. Gazing after Stephania's retreating form, all the love he bore her surged up into his heart as he cried her name.

Arrested by his voice, Stephania turned and paused for a moment swift as thought, but in that moment she seemed to read the very depths of his soul and the utter futility of further entreaty. Without a word she ascended the spiral stairway leading to the upper galleries and re-entered her own apartments, while with long and wistful gaze Crescentius followed the vanishing form of his wife.

And it seemed as if the Senator's prophecy was to be fulfilled. At the reading of the Electoral manifesto, Otto had been seized with an uncontrollable fit of rage. He had torn the document to shreds and cast its fragments at the feet of the Bavarian duke, who acted as spokesman for his colleagues, the dukes of Thuringia, Saxony and Westphalia. Neither the arguments of the Electoral envoys, nor the violent denunciations of Eckhardt, who aired his hatred of Rome in language never before heard in the presence of a sovereign, could stand before Benilo's eloquent pleading. On his knees the Chamberlain implored the King not to abandon Rome and his beloved Romans. Vainly the German dukes pointed to the dangers besetting the realm, vainly to the inadequate defences of the Eastern March. With a majesty far above his years, Otto declared his supreme will to make Rome the capital of the earth, and to restore the pristine majesty of the Holy Roman Empire. Rome was his destiny. Here he would live, and here he would die. Rome was pacified. He required no longer the presence of the army. Let Bavaria and Saxony defend their own boundaries as best they might; let the Count Palatine lead his veteran hosts across the Alps. He would remain. This his reply to the Electors.

On the eve of that eventful day the German dukes departed, while the Count Palatine proceeded to Tivoli, to prepare the great armament for their winter march across the Alps. It had come to pass as Crescentius had predicted. The die was cast. Rome, the Siren, had conquered.

In the night following these events, Rome in her various quarters presented a strange aspect of secret activity.

In the fortresses of the Cavalli and Caetani lights flitted to and fro through the gratings in the main court. Benilo, the Chamberlain, might be seen stealing from the postern gate. Towards the ruins of the Coliseum men whose dress bespoke them of the lowest rank, were seen creeping from lanes and alleys. From these ruins at a later hour, glided again the form of the Grand Chamberlain. Later yet, – when a gray light is breaking in the east, the gates of Rome, by St. John Lateran, are open. Benilo is conversing with the Roman guard. The mountains are dim with a mournful and chilling haze when Benilo enters the palace on the Aventine.

CHAPTER X

THE TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE

Shaken to the inmost depths of his soul by a storm of forebodings, hope, fear and passion, Otto had shaken himself free from the throng of flattering friends and courtiers and had sought the solitude of his own chamber. He had dismissed the envoys of the Electors with the unalterable reply that he would not return to his gloomy Saxon-land. Let the Saxon dukes defend the borders of the realm, let them keep Poles and Slavs in check. His own destiny was Rome. Here he would live, and here he would die. Deeply offended, the German envoys had departed. The consequences might be far-reaching indeed. Tearing off his accoutrements and all insignia of office and rank, Otto flung himself on his couch in solitary seclusion. All had been against him, – save Benilo. Benilo alone understood him. Benilo alone encouraged the young king to follow out his destiny. Benilo alone had pointed out that the earth might be governed from the ancient seat of empire without detriment to any of the nations of the Holy Roman Empire. Benilo alone had demonstrated the necessity of Otto's presence in his chosen capital, whose heterogeneous elements would obey no lesser authority.

Weary and torn by conflicting emotions he at last sank down before the image of Mary and prayed to the Mother of God to guide his steps in the dark wilderness in which he found himself entangled. Thus transported out of himself far beyond the vociferous pageant of that exhausting day, Otto gave himself with all the mystical fervour of his Hellenic nature to visions of the future.

Thus the evening approached. Long before the hour appointed he slowly bent his steps towards the little temple of Neptune, crowning the olive-clad summits of Mount Aventine and overlooking the vale of Egeria and the meandering course of the Tiber. The clouds above, beautiful with changing sunset tints, mottled the broken surface of the river with hues of bronze and purple between the leaves of the creeping water-plants, which clogged the movement of the stream. On the river-bank the rushes were starred with iris and ranunculus.

The sun was declining in the horizon. A solemn stillness, like the presage of some divine event, held the pulses of the universe. A soft rose crept into the shimmer of the water, cresting the summits of far off Soracté. The transient, many-tinted glories of the autumn sunset were reflected in opalescent lights on the waves of the Tiber, and swept the landscape in one dazzling glow of gold and amber, strangely blending with the gold and russet of the autumn foliage. The floating smell of flowers invisible hovered on the air; a mystic yearning seemed to pervade all nature in that chill, melancholy odour, that puts men in mind of death. The soft masses of leaves decayed caused a brushing sound under the feet of the lonely rambler.

Round him in the silent woods burnt the magnificent obsequies of departing summer.

Fire-flies moved through the embalmed air, like the torches of unseen angels. The late roses exhaled their mystic odour, and silently like dead butterflies, here and there a wan leaf dropped from the branches.

At every step the wood became more lonely. It was as untroubled by any sound as an abandoned cemetery. Birds there were few, the shade of the laurel-grove being too dense and no song of theirs was heard. A grasshopper began his shrill cry, but quickly ceased, as if startled by its own voice. Insects alone were humming faintly in a last slender ray of sunlight, but ventured not to quit its beam for the neighbouring gloom. Sometimes Otto trended his path along wider alleys bordered by titanic walls of weird cypress, casting dark shade as a moonless night. Here and there subterranean waters made the moss spongy. Streams ran everywhere, chill as melted snow, but silently, with no tinkling ripples, as if muted by the melancholy of the enchanted wood. Moss stifled the sound of the falling drops and they sank away like the tears of an unspoken love.

For a moment; Otto lingered among a tangle of elder-bushes. The oblique sun rays filtering through the dense laurel became almost lunar, as if seen through the smoke of a funeral torch.

Along the edge of the road goats were contentedly browsing and a rugged sun-burnt little lad with large black eyes was driving a flock of geese. Storm clouds lined with gold were rising in the North over the unseen Alps, and high up in the clear sky there burned a single star.

Deep in thought, Otto passed the walls of the cloisters of St. Cosmas.

Onward he walked as in the memory of a dream.

Through the purple silence came faintly the chant of the monks:

At last the Ionic marble columns, softly steeped in the warmth of departing day, came into sight. Silence and coolness encompassed him. The setting sun still cast his glimmer on the capitals of the columns whose fine, illumined scroll work, contrasted with the penumbral shadows of the interior, seemed soft and bright as tresses of gold.

A hand softly touched Otto's shoulder. A voice whispered:

"If you would know all – come! Come and I will tell you the secret which never yet I have uttered to mortal man."

In the departing light, veiled by the thick cypresses and pale as the moon-beams, just as in the Egerian wilderness in the whiteness of summer-lightnings, she put her face close to his, her face white as marble, with its scarlet lips, its witch-like eyes.

On they walked in silence, hand in hand.

On they walked along the verge of a precipice, where none have walked before, resisting the vertigo and the fatal attraction of the abyss. If they should prove unequal to the strain, – overstep the magic circle?

Stephania was pale and trembled. She smiled, – but the smile troubled him, he scarce knew why. He tried to think it was the melancholy, caused by the wild and stormy look of the sunset and the loud cawing of the hereditary rooks, which seemed to croak an everlasting farewell to life and hope in the oaks of the convent.

Must he repulse the love that surged up to him in resistless waves?

Must he renounce the near for the far-away, the ideal, whose embodiment she was, for the commonplace?

Slowly the sun sank to rest in a sea of crimson and gold, a fiery funeral of foliage and flowers.

A clock boomed from a neighbouring tower. The heavy measured clang vibrated long through the stillness, quivering In the air, like a warning knell of fate.

Softly she drew him into the dusk of the pagan temple, drew him down beside her on one of the scattered fragments of antiquity, a dog-eared God of black Syenite from Egypt, which had shared the fate of its Latin equals.

But he could not sit beside – her.

Abruptly he rose; standing before her, the passion of the long fight surged up in him. Stephania sat motionless, and for a time neither spoke.

At last Otto broke the silence. His voice was strained as if he were suffering some great pain.

"I have come!" he said. "I have cut every bridge between present and past! I am here. – Have you thought of my appeal?"

"Oh, why do you torture me?" she replied half sobbing, "I venture to ask for a delay, and you arraign me as though I stood at the bar of judgment."

"It is our day of judgment," he replied. "It is the day when life confronts us with our own deeds, – when we must answer for them, when we must justify them. For if we are but triflers, we cannot stand in the face either of heaven or of hell!"

He bent down and took her hands in his.

"Stephania," he said, "I too have doubted, I too have wavered: – give me but one word of assurance, – my love for you is a wound which no eternity can cure."

She broke from him, to hide her weeping.

"Have you thought of the forfeit?" she faltered after a time.

"I would not forego the doom! – You alone are my light in this dark country of the world. Do not stifle the voice in your heart with reasons – "

"Reasons! Reasons!" she interrupted. "What does the heart know of reasons! Mine has long forgotten their pleadings – else, were I here?"

Something in her voice and gesture was like a lightning flash over a dark landscape. In an instant he saw the pit at his feet.

"What then," he faltered, "is this to lead to?"

"Some one has been with you," she said quickly. "These words were not yours."

He rallied with a fault smile.

"A pretext for not heeding them."

"Eckhardt has been with you! He has maligned me to you!"

"He has warned me against you!"

She turned very pale.

"And you heeded?"

"I am here, Stephania!"

The subtle perfume clinging to her gown mounted to his brain, choking back reason and resistance.

"Yet again I ask you, what is this to lead to? I am afraid of the future as a child of the dark!"

She held his hands tightly clasped.

"Oh!" she sobbed, "why will you torture me? I have borne much for our love's sake – but to answer you now is to relive it and I lack the strength."

He held her hands fast, his eyes in hers.

"No, Stephania," he said, "your strength never failed you when there was call on it, and our whole past calls on it now! Eckhardt tells me that the Romans hate me, – that they resent the love I bear them – oh, if it were true!"

Stephania gazed at him with wide astonished eyes.

"Ah! It is this then," she said with a sigh of relief. "A moment's thought must show you what passions are here at work. You must rise above such fears. As for us, – no one can judge between us, but ourselves. Shake off these dread fancies! There lies but one goal before us. You pointed the way to it once. Surely you would not hold me back from it now?"

Gently she drew him down by her side. Through the crevices in the roof glimmered the evening star.

She saw the conflict, which raged within him, the instinct to break away from her, who could never more be his own. She saw the fear which bound him to her, – she saw the great love he bore her, and she knew that he was hers soul and body, her instrument, her toy, – her lover if she so willed.

He spoke to her of his childhood in the bleak northern forests; of the black pines of Thuringia, of the snow-drifts, which froze his heart; of the sad sea horizons brooding infinitely away; of the gloomy abbey of Merséburg, in the Saxon-land, where the great Emperor Otto, his grandsire, was sleeping towards the day of resurrection, where under the abbot's guidance he had first been initiated into the magic of a sunnier clime. He spoke to her of his Greek mother, the Empress Theophano, whose great beauty was only rivalled by her own, and of that eventful night, when he descended into the crypts of Aix-la-Chapelle and opened the tomb of Charlemagne, then dead almost two hundred years. He told her how he had fought against this mad, unreasoning love, which had at first sight of her crept into his heart, urging naught in palliation of his offence, but like a flagellant laying bare his tortured flesh to a self-inflicted scourge. He begged her to decide for him, to guide him, lonely antagonist of destiny – dared he ask for more? She was the wife of the Senator of Rome.

As he ceased speaking, Otto covered his face with his hands, but Stephania drew them down and held them firmly in her own. Truly, if it was victory to accomplish the end, by drawing out a loving, confiding heart, the victory was with the vanquished. And with the memory of the compact she had sealed a wondrous pity flashed through the woman's soul, a mighty longing, to lift the son of the Greek Princess up into joyous peace! No thought of evil marred her pure desire, – alas! She knew not at that moment, that even in that pity lay his direst snare, and hers.