The Sorceress of Rome

  *CHAPTER VIII*

  *THE GOTHIC TOWER*

  Deep quiet reigned in the city, when a man, enveloped in a mantle, whosedimly shadowed form was outlined against the massive, gray walls ofConstantine's Basilica glided slowly and cautiously from among theblocks of stone scattered round its foundations and advanced to thefountain which then formed the centre of the square, where the Obelisknow stands. There he stopped and, concealed by the obscurity of thenight and the deeper shadows of the monument, glanced furtively about,as if to be sure that he was unobserved. Then drawing his sword, hestruck three times upon the pavement, producing at each stroke lightsparks from its point. This signal, for such it was, was forthwithanswered. From the remote depths of the ruins the cry of thescreech-owl was thrice in succession repeated, and, guided by theringing sound, a second figure emerged from the weeds, which were insome places the height of a man. Obeying the signal of the first comer,the second, who was likewise enveloped in a mantle, silently joined himand together they proceeded half-way down the Borgo Vecchio, then turnedto the right and entered a street, at the remote extremity of whichthere was a figure of the Madonna with its lamp.

  Onward they walked with rapid steps, traversed the Borgo Santo Spiritoand followed the street Della Lingara to where it opens upon the churchRegina Coeli. After having pursued their way for some time in silencethey entered a narrow winding path, which conducted them through adeserted valley, the silence of which was only broken by the occasionalhoot of an owl or the fitful flight of a bat. In the distance could beheard the splashing of water from the basin of a fountain, half obscuredby vines and creepers, from which a thin, translucent stream was pouringand bubbling down the Pincian hillsides in the direction of SantaTrinita di Monte.

  They lost themselves in a maze of narrow and little frequented lanes,until at last they found themselves before a gray, castellated building,half cloister, half fortress, rising out of the solitudes of theFlaminian way, before which they stopped. Over the massive door werepainted several skeletons in the crude fashion of the time, standingupright with mitres, sceptres and crowns upon their heads, holdingfalling scrolls, with faded inscriptions in their bony grasp.

  The one, who appeared to be the moving spirit of the two, knocked in apeculiar manner at the heavy oaken door. After a wait of some durationthey heard the creaking of hinges. Slowly the door swung inward andclosed immediately behind them. They entered a gloomy passage. Anumber of owls, roused by the dim light from the lantern of the warden,began to fly screeching about, flapping their wings against the wallsand uttering strange cries. After ascending three flights of stairs,preceded by the warden, whose appearance was as little inviting as hisabode, they paused before a chamber, the door of which their guide hadpushed open, remaining himself on the threshold, while his two visitorsentered.

  "How is the girl?" questioned the foremost in a whisper, to which thewarden made whispered reply.

  Beckoning his companion to follow him, the stranger then passed into theroom, which was dimly illumined by the flickering light of a taper.Throwing off his mantle, Eckhardt surveyed with a degree of curiositythe apartment and its scanty furnishings. Nothing could be more drearythan the aspect of the place. The richly moulded ceiling was festoonedwith spiders' webs and in some places had fallen in heaps upon thefloor. The glories of Byzantine tapestry had long been obliterated byage and time. The squares of black and white marble with which thechamber was paved were loosened and quaked beneath the foot-steps andthe wide and empty fireplace yawned like the mouth of a cavern.

  Straining his gaze after the harper who was bending over a couch in aremote corner of the room, Eckhardt was about to join him when Heziloapproached him.

  "Would you like to see?" he asked, his eyes full of tears.

  Eckhardt bowed gravely, and with gentle foot-steps they approached a bedin the corner of the room, on which there reposed the figure of a girl,lying so still and motionless that she might have been an image of wax.Her luxurious brown hair was spread over the pillow and out of thisframe the pinched white face with all its traces of past beauty lookedout in pitiful silence. One thin hand was turned palm downward on thecoverlet, and as they approached the fingers began to work convulsively.

  Hezilo bent over her, and touched her brow with his lips.

  "Little one," he said, "do you sleep?"

  The girl opened her sightless eyes, and a faint smile, that illuminedher face, making it wondrously beautiful, passed over her countenance.

  "Not yet," she spoke so low that Eckhardt could scarcely catch thewords, "but I shall sleep soon."

  He knew what she meant, for in her face was already that look whichcomes to those who are going away. Hezilo looked down upon her insilence, but even as he did so a change for the worse seemed to come tothe sick girl, and they became aware that the end had begun. He triedto force some wine between her lips, but she could not swallow, and now,instead of lying still, she continued tossing her head from side toside. Hezilo was undone. He could do nothing but stand at the head ofthe bed in mute despair, as he watched the parting soul of his child sobits way out.

  "Angiola--Angiola--do not leave me--do not go from me!" the harper criedin heart-rending anguish, kneeling down before the bed of the girl andtaking her cold, clammy hands into his own. Impelled by a power hecould not resist, Eckhardt knelt and tried to form some words to reachthe Most High. But they would not come; he could only feel them, and herose again and took his stand by the dying girl.

  She now began to talk in a rambling manner and with that strength whichcomes at the point of death from somewhere; her voice was clear but witha metallic ring. What Eckhardt gathered from her broken words, was astory of trusting love, of infamous wrong, of dastardly crime. And theharper shook like a branch in the wind as the words came thick and fastfrom the lips of his dying child. After a while she became still--sostill, that they both thought she had passed away. But she revived on asudden and called out:

  "Father,--I cannot see,--I am blind,--stoop down and let me whisper--"

  "I am here little one, close--quite close to you!"

  "Tell him,--I forgive-- And you forgive him too--promise!"

  The harper pressed his lips to the damp forehead of his child but spokeno word.

  "It is bright again--they are calling me--Mother! Hold me up--I cannotbreathe."

  Hezilo sank on his knees with his head between his hands, shaken byconvulsive sobs, while Eckhardt wound his arm round the dying girl, andas he lifted her up the spirit passed. In the room there was deepsilence, broken only by the harper's heart-rending sobs. He staggeredto his feet with despair in his face.

  "She said forgive!" he exclaimed with broken voice. "Man--you have seenan angel die!"

  "Who is the author of her death?" Eckhardt questioned, his hands sotightly clenched, that he almost drove the nails into his own flesh.

  If ever words changed the countenance of man, the Margrave's questiontransformed the harper's grief into flaming wrath.

  "A devil, a fiend, who first outraged, then cast her forth blinded, todie like a reptile," he shrieked in his mastering grief. "Surely Godmust have slept, while this was done!"

  There was a breathless hush in the death-chamber.

  Hezilo was bending over the still face of his child. The dead girl laywith her hands crossed over her bosom, still as if cut out of marble andon her face was fixed a sad little smile.

  At last the harper arose.

  Staggering to the door he gave some whispered instructions to theindividual who seemed to fill the office of warden, then beckonedsilently to Eckhardt to follow him and together they descended thenarrow winding stairs.

  "I will return late--have everything prepared," the harper at partingturned to the warden, who had preceded them with his lantern. Thelatter nodded gloomily, then he retraced his steps within, locking thedoor behind him.

  Under the nocturnal starlit sky, Eckhardt breathed
more freely. For atime they proceeded in silence, which the Margrave was loth to break.He had long recognized in the harper the mysterious messenger who inthat never-to-be-forgotten night had conducted him to the groves ofTheodora, and who he instinctively felt had been instrumental in savinghis life. Something told him that the harper possessed the key to theterrible mystery he had in vain endeavoured to fathom, yet his thoughtsreverted ever and ever to the scene in the tower and to the dead girlAngiola, and he dreaded to break into the harper's grief.

  They had arrived at the place of the Capitol. It was deserted. Not ahuman being was to be seen among the ruins, which the seven-hilled citystill cloaked with her ancient mantle of glory. Dark and foreboding thecolossal monument of the Egyptian lion rose out of the nocturnal gloom.The air was clear but chill, the starlight investing the gray andtowering form of basalt with a more ghostly whiteness. At the sight ofthe dread memory from the mystic banks of the Nile, Eckhardt could notsuppress a shudder; a strange oppression laid its benumbing hand uponhim.

  Involuntarily he paused, plunged in gloomy and foreboding thoughts, whenthe touch of the harper's hand upon his shoulder caused him to startfrom his sombre reverie.

  Drawing the Margrave into the shadow of the pedestal, which supportedthe grim relic of antiquity, Hezilo at last broke the silence. He spokeslowly and with strained accents.

  "The scene you were permitted to witness this night has no doubtconvinced you that I have a mission to perform in Rome. Our goal is thesame, though we approach it from divergent points. They say man's fateis pre-ordained, irrevocable, unchangeable--from the moment of hisbirth. A gloomy fantasy, yet not a baseless dream. By a strangesuccession of events the thread of our destiny has been interwoven, andthe knowledge which you would acquire at any cost, it is in my power tobestow."

  "Of this I felt convinced, since some strange chance brought us face toface," Eckhardt replied gloomily.

  "'Twas something more than chance," replied the harper. "You too feltthe compelling hand of Fate."

  "What of the awful likeness?" Eckhardt burst forth, hardly able torestrain himself at the maddening thought, and feeling instinctivelythat he should at last penetrate the web of lies, though ever so finelyspun.

  The harper laid a warning finger on his lips.

  "You deemed her but Ginevra's counterfeit?"

  "Ginevra! Ginevra!" Eckhardt, disregarding the harper's caution,exclaimed in his mastering agony. "What know you of her? Speak! Tellme all! What of her?"

  "Silence!" enjoined his companion. "How know we what these ruinsconceal? I guided you to the Groves at the woman's behest. Whatinterest could she have in your destruction?"

  Eckhardt was supporting himself against the pedestal of the Egyptianlion, listening as one dazed to the harper's words. Then he broke into ajarring laugh.

  "Which of us is mad?" he cried. "Wherein did I offend the woman? Sheplied but the arts of her trade."

  "You are speaking of Ginevra," replied the harper.

  "Ginevra," growled Eckhardt, his hair bristling and his eyes flaming asthose of an infuriated tiger while his fingers gripped the hilt of hisdagger.

  "You are speaking of Ginevra!" the harper repeated inexorably.

  With a moan Eckhardt's hands went to his head. His breast heaved; hisbreath came and went in quick gasps.

  "I do not understand,--I do not understand."

  "You made no attempt to revisit the Groves," said the harper.

  Eckhardt stroked his brow as if vainly endeavouring to recall the past.

  "I feared to succumb to her spell."

  "To that end you had been summoned."

  "I have since been warned. Yet it seemed too monstrous to be true."

  "Warned? By whom?"

  "Cyprianus, the monk!"

  The harper's face turned livid.

  "No blacker wretch e'er strode the streets of Rome. And he confessed?"

  "A death-bed confession, that makes the devils laugh," Eckhardt replied,then he briefly related the circumstances which had led him into thedeserted region of the Tarpeian Rock and his chance discovery of themonk, whose strange tale had been cut short by death.

  "He has walked long in death's shadow," said the harper. "Fate was tookind, too merciful to the slayer of Gregory."

  There was a brief pause, during which neither spoke. At last the harperbroke the silence.

  "The hour of final reckoning is near,--nearer than you dream, the hourwhen a fiend, a traitor must pay the penalty of his crimes, the hourwhich shall for ever more remove the shadow from your life. The taskrequired of you is great; you may not approach it as long as a breath ofdoubt remains in your heart. Only certainty can shape your unrelentingcourse. Had Ginevra a birth-mark?"

  Eckhardt breathed hard.

  "The imprint of a raven-claw on her left arm below the shoulder."

  Hezilo nodded. A strange look had passed into his eyes.

  "There is a means--to obtain the proof."

  "I am ready!" replied Eckhardt with quivering lips.

  "If you will swear on the hilt of this cross, to be guarded by mycounsel, to let nothing induce you to reveal your identity, I will helpyou," said the harper.

  Eckhardt touched the proffered cross, nodding wearily. His heart washeavy to breaking, as the harper slowly outlined his plan.

  "The woman has been seized by a mortal dread of her betrayer,--the manwho wrecked her life and yours. No questions now,--this is neither thehour or the place! In time you shall know, in time you shall be free toact! Acting upon my counsel, she has bid me summon to her presence asooth-sayer, one Dom Sabbat, who dwells in the gorge between MountsTestaccio and Aventine. To him I am to carry these horoscopes andconduct him to the Groves on the third night before the full of themoon."

  The harper's voice sank to a whisper, while Eckhardt listenedattentively, nodding repeatedly in gloomy silence.

  "On that night I shall await you in the shadows of the temple of Isis.There a boat will lie in waiting to convey us to the water stairs of herpalace."

  The harper extended his hand, wrapping himself closer in his mantel.

  "The third night before the full of the moon!" he said. "Leave me now, Iimplore you, that I may care for my dead. Remember the time, the place,and your pledge!"

  Eckhardt grasped the proffered hand and they parted.

  The harper strode away in the direction of the gorge below MountAventine, while Eckhardt, oppressed by strange forebodings, shaped hiscourse towards his own habitation on the Caelian Mount.

  Neither had seen two figures in black robes, that lingered in theshadows of the Lion of Basalt.

  No sooner had Eckhardt and Hezilo departed, than they slowly emerged,standing revealed in the star-light as Benilo and John of the Catacombs.For a moment they faced each other with meaning gestures, then they toostrode off in the opposite directions, Benilo following the harper onhis singular errand, while the bravo fastened himself to the heels ofthe Margrave, whom he accompanied like his own shadow, onlyrelinquishing his pursuit when Eckhardt entered the gloomy portals ofhis palace.