Under the Witches' Moon: A Romantic Tale of Mediaeval Rome

CHAPTER XII
THE CONFESSION

The storm had abated, but the sheen of white lightnings to southward and the menacing growl of distant thunder that seemed to come from the bowels of the earth held out promise of renewed upheavals of disturbed nature.

The streets of Rome were comparatively deserted with the swiftly approaching dusk, and it occurred to Tristan to seek the Monk of Cluny in his abode on Mount Aventine whither he had doubtlessly betaken himself after his sermon in the Basilica of St. Peter's. For ever and ever the memory of lost Hellayne dominated his thoughts, and, while he poured out prayers for peace at the shrines of the saints, with the eyes of the soul he saw not the image of the Virgin, but of the woman for the sake of whom he had come hither and, having come, knew not where to find that which he sought.

From a passing friar Tristan learned the direction of Mount Aventine, where, among the ruins near the newly erected Church of Santa Maria of the Aventine, Odo of Cluny abode. Tristan could not but marvel at the courage of the man whose life was in hourly jeopardy and who, in the face of an ever present menace could put his trust so completely in Heaven as to brave the danger without even a guard. —

Taking the road indicated by the friar, Tristan pursued his solitary path. In seeking the Monk of Cluny his purpose was a twofold one, certainty with regard to his own guilt, in having loved where love was a crime, and counsel with regard to the woman who, he instinctively felt, would not stop at her first innuendos.

As Tristan proceeded on his way his feelings and motives became more and more perplexed, and so lost was he in thought that, without heeding his way or noting the scattered arches and porticoes, he lost himself in the wilderness of the Mount of Cloisters. The hush was intensified rather than broken by the ever louder peals of thunder, which reverberated through the valleys, and the Stygian darkness, broken at intervals by vivid flashes of lightning, seemed to hem him in, as a wall of basalt.

Gradually all traces of a road vanished. On both sides rose woody acclivities, covered with ruins and melancholy cypresses, whose spectral outlines seemed to stretch into gaunt immensity, in the sheen of the lightnings which grew more and more frequent. The wind rose sobbingly among the trees, and a few scattered rain-drops began to warn Tristan that a shelter of any sort would be preferable to exposing himself to the onslaught of the elements.

Entering the first group of ruins he came to, he penetrated through a series of roofless corridors and chambers into what seemed a dark cylindrical well at the farther extremity of which there gleamed an infinitesimal light. Even through the clamor of the storm that raged outside there came to him the sound of voices from the interior.

Impelled as much by curiosity as by the consideration of his own safety Tristan crept slowly towards the aperture. As he did so, the light vanished, but a crimson glow, as of smouldering embers, succeeded, and heavy fumes of incense, wafted to his nostrils, informed him that his fears regarding the character of the abode were but too well founded. He cowered motionless in the gloom until the storm had abated, determined to return at some time to discover what mysteries the place concealed.

A fresher breeze had sprung up, driving the thunderclouds to northward, and from a clear azure the stars shone in undimmed lustre upon the dreaming world beneath.

For a moment Tristan stood gazing at the immense desolation, the wilderness of arches, shattered columns and ivy-covered porticoes. The hopelessness of finding among these relics of antiquity the monk's hermitage impressed itself at once upon him. Pausing irresolutely, he would probably have retraced his steps, had he not chanced to see some one emerge from the adjacent ruins, apparently bound in the same direction.

Whether it was a presentiment of evil, or whether the fear bred of the region and the hour of the night prompted the precaution, Tristan receded into the shadows and watched the approaching form, in whom he recognized Basil, the Grand Chamberlain. He at once resolved to follow him and the soft ground aided the execution of his design.

The way wound through a veritable labyrinth of ruins, nevertheless he kept his eyes on the tall dark form, stalking through the night before him. At times an owl or bat whirled over his head. With these exceptions he encountered no living thing among the ruins to break the hush of the sepulchral desolation.

The distance between them gradually diminished. Tristan saw the other turn to the right into a wilderness of grottoes, the tortuous corridors of which were at times almost choked up with weeds and wild flowers, but when he reached the spot, there was no vestige of a human presence. Basil had disappeared as if the earth had swallowed him.

Possessed by a sudden fear that some harm might be intended the monk and remembering certain veiled threats he had overheard against his life, he proceeded more slowly and cautiously by the dim light of the stars.

Before long he found himself before a flight of grass grown steps that led up to a series of desolate chambers which, although roofless and choked with rank vegetation, still bore traces of their ancient splendor. These corridors led to a clumsy door, standing half ajar, from beyond which shone the faint glimmer of a light.

After having reached the threshold Tristan paused.

High, oval-shaped apertures admitted light and air at once, and the dying embers of a charcoal fire revealed a chamber, singularly void of all the comforts of existence. Almost in the centre of this chamber, before a massive stone table, upon which was spread a huge tome, sat the Monk of Cluny, shading his eyes with his right hand and reading half aloud.

For a few moments Tristan regarded the recluse breathlessly, as if he dreaded disturbing his meditations, when Odo suddenly raised his eyes and saw the dark form standing in the frame of the door.

The look which he bestowed upon Tristan convinced the latter immediately of the doubt which the monk harbored regarding the quality of his belated caller, a doubt which he deemed well to disperse before venturing into the monk's retreat.

Therefore, without abandoning his position, he addressed the inmate of the chamber and, as he spoke, the tone of his voice seemed to carry conviction, that the speaker was sincere.

"Your pardon, father," Tristan stammered, "for one who is seeking you in an hour of grave doubt and misgiving."

The monk's ear had caught the accent of a foreign tongue. He beckoned to Tristan to enter, rising from the bench on which he had been seated.

"You come at a strange hour," he said, not without a note of suspicion, which did not escape Tristan. "Your business must be weighty indeed to embolden one, a stranger on Roman soil, to penetrate the desolate Aventine when the world sleeps and murder stalks abroad."

"I am here for a singular purpose, father, – having obeyed the impulse of the moment, after listening to your sermon at St. Peter's."

"But that was hours ago," interposed the monk, resting his hand on the stone table, as he faced his visitor.

"I lost my way – nor did I meet any one to point it," Tristan replied, as he advanced and kissed the monk's hand reverently.

"What is your business, my son?" asked the monk.

Tristan hesitated a moment. At last he spoke.

"I came to Rome not of my own desire, – but obeying the will of another that imposed the pilgrimage. I have sinned, father – and yet there are moments, when I would almost glory in that which I have done. It was my purpose, while at St. Peter's to confess to the Grand Penitentiary. But – I know not why – I chose you instead, knowing that you would give truth for truth."

The monk regarded his visitor, wondering what one so young and possessed of so frank a countenance might have done amiss.

"You are a pilgrim?" he queried at last.

"For my sins – "

"Of French descent, yet not a Frenchman – "

Tristan started at the monk's penetration.

"From Provence, father," he stammered, "the land of songs and flowers – "

"And women – " the monk interposed gravely.

"There are women everywhere, father."

"There are women and women. Perchance I should say 'Woman.'"

Tristan bowed his head in silence.

The monk cast a penetrating glance at his visitor. He understood the gesture and the silence with that quick comprehension that came to him who was to reform Holy Catholic Church from the abuse of decades – as an intuition.

"But now, my son, speak of yourself," said the monk after a pause.

"I lived at the court of Avalon, the home of Love and Troubadours."

"Of Troubadours?" the monk interposed dreamily. "A worldly lot – given to extolling free love and what not – "

"They may sing of love and passion, father, but their lives are pure and chaste," Tristan ventured to remonstrate.

"You are a Troubadour?" came the swift query.

"In my humble way." Tristan replied with bowed head.

The monk nodded.

"Go on – go on!"

"At the court of Avalon I met the consort of Count Roger de Laval. He was much absent, on one business or another, – the chase – feuds with neighboring barons. – He chose me to help the Lady Hellayne to while away the long hours during his absence – "

"His wife! What folly!"

"The Count de Laval is one of those men who would tempt the heavens themselves to fall upon him rather than to air himself beneath them. That his fair young wife, doing his will among men given to the chase and drinking bouts, and the society of tainted damsels, should long for something higher, she, whom he regarded with the high air of the lord of creation – that she should dare dream of some intangible something, for which she hungered, and craved and starved – "

"If you are about to confess, as I conceive, to a wrong you have done to this same lord," interposed the monk, "your sin is not less black if you paint him you have wronged in odious tints."

"Nevertheless I am most sorry to do so, father," Tristan interposed, "else could I not make you understand to its full extent his folly and conceit by placing me, a creature of emotion, day by day beside so fair a being as his young wife. Therefore I would explain."

"It needs some explanation truly!" the monk said sternly.

"The Count de Laval is a man whose conceit is so colossal, father, that he would never think it possible that any one could fail in love and admiration at the shrine which he built for himself. A man of supreme arrogance and self-righteousness."

"Sad, indeed – " mused the monk.

"Our thoughts were pagan, drifting back to the days when the world was peopled with sylvan creatures – with the deities of field and stream – "

"Mere heathen dreams," interposed the monk. "Go on! Go on!"

"I then felt within myself the impulse to throw forth a minstrelsy prophetic of a new world resembling that old which had vanished. It was not to be a mere chant of wrath or exultation – it was to sound the joy of the earth, of the air, of the sun, of the moon and the stars, – the song of the birds, the perfume of the flowers – "

"Words that have but little meaning left in this stern world wherein we dwell – "

"They had meaning for me, father. Also for her. They were to both of us a bright and mystical ideal, in the fumes of which we steeped our souls, – our very selves, till our natures seemed to know no hurt, seemed incapable of evil – "

"Alas – the greater the pity!"

"I was sure of myself. She was sure of me. I loved her. Her presence was to me as some intoxication of the soul – some rare perfume that captivates the senses, raising the spirit to heights too rarefied for breath – "

"And you fell?"

The words came from the monk's lips, slowly, inexorably, as the knell of fate.

"I – all, but fell!" stammered Tristan. "One day in a chamber far removed from the inhabited part of the castle we sat and read. And suddenly she laid her face close to mine and with eyes in whose mystic depths lurked something more than I had ever seen in them before asked why, through Fate's high necessity, two should forever wander side by side, longing for each other – their longing unsatisfied – when the hour was theirs – "

Again Tristan paused.

The monk regarded him in silence.

"You fell?" the question came again.

"In that moment, father, I was no more myself, no more the one whose art is sacred and alone upon the mountain summit of his soul. Its freedom and aspirations were no more. I was undone, a tumbled, wingless thing. My pride had fled. Long, long I looked into her eyes, and when she put her wonderful white arms about me, I, in a dizzy moment of desire, dropped my face to hers. Then was love all uttered. Straightway I arose. I clasped her in my arms. I kissed – I kissed her – "

The monk regarded him sternly, yet not unkindly.

"It was a sin. Yet – there is more?"

Tristan's hands were clasped.

"One evening in the rose garden – at dusk – the evening on which she sent me from her – bade me go to Rome to obtain forgiveness for a sin of which I could not repent."

The monk nodded. "Go on! Go on!"

"The world had fallen away from us. We stood in a grove, our arms about each other. Suddenly I saw a face. I withdrew my arm, overwhelmed by all the shame of guilt. The face vanished and, passion overmastering once more, we touched our lips anew. It was the last time we were to see each other. I left behind the wondrous silken hair my hands had touched in our last mad caress. I left behind that tender face and form. She made no attempt to follow, or to call me back. I hastened to my chamber, and there I fought anew with all that evil impulse of my youth, to face the shame, as long as joy endured. If I had sinned in mind against my high ideal might I not some day recover it and be purified?"

"What of God and Holy Church?" queried the monk.

"To them I gave no heed, but to my honor. This upheld me."

The monk gave a nod.

"I left Avalon. It seemed as if without her my life were ebbing away. I joined a pilgrim party, and now my pilgrimage is ended. What must I do to still this inward craving that will not leave my soul at peace?"

He ended in a sob.

The monk had relapsed into deep thought, and Tristan's eyes were riveted on the ascetic form in silent dread, as to what would be the verdict.

At last Odo broke the heavy silence.

"You have committed a grievous sin – adultery – nay, speak not!" he said, as Tristan attempted to remonstrate against the dire accusation. "The seed of every act slumbers in the mind ere its pernicious shoots are manifest in deeds. He who looks upon a woman with the desire to possess her has already committed adultery with her. Yet – not one in a thousand would have done so nobly under such temptation!"

The monk's voice betrayed some feeling as he placed his hand on Tristan's bowed head.

"I shall consider what penances are most fit for one who has transgressed as you have, my son. It is for your future life – perchance Holy Orders – "

Tristan raised his head imploringly.

"Not that, father, – not that! I am not fit!"

The monk regarded him quizzically.

"The lust of the eye is mighty and the fever of the world still burns in your veins, my son, rebelling against the passion that chastens and purifies. Nevertheless, the Church desires no enforced service. She wishes to be served through love, not with aversion and fear. Continue to do penance, implore His forgiveness, and that He may take from you this worldly desire."

Kissing anew the hand which the monk extended, Tristan arose, after Odo had made upon him the holy sign.

"I shall obey your behest," he said in a low, broken voice, then withdrew, while the Monk of Cluny returned to his former pursuit, unconscious that another had witnessed and overheard the strange confession from a recess in the wall.

As one in a trance Tristan left the Monk of Cluny, his heart filled with gratitude for the man who, in the midst of a world of strife and unrest, had listened to his tale and had not dealt harshly with him, but had received him sympathetically, even while rebuking the offence. While the penances imposed upon him were not severe, Tristan chafed nevertheless under the restraint they laid upon his soul.

What was his future life to be? What new vistas would open before him? What new impressions would superimpose themselves upon the memories of the past – the memory of Hellayne?

As he passed the church of Santa Maria of the Aventine, Tristan saw the portals open. Puzzled over the problems he was face in the days to come, he entered the dim shadows of the sanctuary.

All that night Tristan knelt in solitary prayer.

The great church was empty and silent, unlit save for the lamp upon the altar. There Tristan kept his vigil, his tired, tearful eyes upon the crucifixion, searching his own heart.

The night of silence brought him no vision and shed no light upon his path. The pale dawn found him still upon his knees before the altar, his eyes upon the drooping form of the crucified Christ.

Thus the monks found him when they entered for early Matins. At last he arose, in his sombre eyes a touching resignation and infinite regret.

END OF BOOK THE FIRST

BOOK THE SECOND

CHAPTER I
THE GRAND CHAMBERLAIN

Castel San Angelo, the Tomb of the Flavian Emperor, seemed rather to have been built for a great keep, a breakwater as it were to stem the rush of barbarian seas which were wont to come storming down from the frozen north, than for the resting-place of the former master of the world. Its constructors had aimed at nothing less than its everlastingness. So thick were its bastioned walls, so thick the curtains which divided its inner and outer masonry, that no force of nature seemed capable of honeycombing or weakening them.

Hidden within its screens and vaults, like the gnawings of a foul and intricate cancer, ran dark passages which discharged themselves here and there into dreadful dungeons, or secret places not guessed at in the common tally of its rooms.

These oubliettes were hideous with blotched and spotted memories, rotten with the dew of suffering, eloquent in their terror and corruption and darkness of the cruelty which turned to these walls for security. The hiss and purr of subterranean fires, the grinding of low, grated jaws, the flop and echo of stagnant water that oozed from a stagnant inner moat into vermin-swarming, human-haunted cellars: these sounds spoke even less of grief than the hellish ferment in the souls of those who had lorded it in this keep since the fall of the Western Empire.

On this night there hung an air of menace about the Mausoleum of the Flavian Emperor which seemed enhanced by the roar and clatter of the tempest that raged over the seven-hilled city. Snaky twists of lightning leaped athwart the driving darkness, and deafening peals of thunder reverberated in deep, booming echoes through the inky vault of the heavens.

In one of the upper chambers of the huge granite pile, which seemed to defy the very elements, in a square room, dug out of the very rock, containing but one window that appeared as a deep wedge in the wall, piercing to the sheer flank of the tower, there sat, brooding over a letter he held in his hand, Basil, the Grand Chamberlain.

The drowsy odor of incense, smouldering in the little purple shrine lamp, robbed the air of its last freshness.

A tunic of dark velvet, fur bound and girt with a belt of finest Moorish steel, was relieved by an undervest of deepest crimson. Woven hose to match the tunic ended in crimson buskins of soft leather. The mantle and the skull cap which he had discarded lay beside him on the floor, guarded by a tawny hound of the ancient Molossian breed.

By the fitful light of the two waxen tapers, which flickered dismally under the onslaught of the elements, the inmate of the chamber slowly and laboriously deciphered the letter. Then he placed it in his doublet, lapsing into deep rumination, as one who is vainly seeking to solve a problem that defies solution.

Rising at last from his chair Basil paced the narrow confines of the chamber, whose crimson walls seemed to form a fitting background for the dark-robed occupant.

Outside, the storm howled furiously, flinging gusty dashes of rain and hail against the stone masonry and clattering noisily with every blow inflicted upon the solid rock.

When, spent by its own fury, the hurricane abated for a moment, the faint sound of a bell tolling the Angelus could be heard whimpering through the night.

When Basil had left Theodora after their meeting at the palace, there had been a darker light in his eyes, a something more ominous of evil in his manner. While his passion had utterly enslaved him, making him a puppet in the hands of the woman whose boundless ambition must inevitably lead her either to the heights of the empire whereof she dreamed, or to the deepest abyss of hell, Basil was far from being content to occupy a position which made him merely a creature of her will and making. To mount the throne with the woman whose beauty had set his senses aflame, to rule the city of Rome from the ramparts of Castel San Angelo, as Ugo of Tuscany by the side of Marozia, this was the dream of the man who would leave no stone unturned to accomplish the ambition of his life.

In an age where certain dark personalities appeared terribly sane to their contemporaries, their occult dealings with powers whose existence none questioned must have seemed terribly real to themselves and to those who gazed from afar. When the mad were above the sane in power, and beyond the reach of observation, there was no limit to their baleful activity.

Basil, from the early days of his youth, had lived in a world of evil spirits, imaginary perhaps for us, but real enough for those who might at any moment be at his mercy. Stimulating his mad desire with the potent drug which the Saracens had brought with them from the scented East, he pushed his hashish-born imaginings to the very throne of Evil. His ambition, which was boundless, and centred in the longed for achievement of a hope too stupendous even for thought, had intimately connected him with those whose occult researches put them outside the pale of the Church, and the power he wielded in the shadowy world of demons was as unchallenged as that which he felt himself wielding in the tangible world of men.

Among the people there was no end to the dark stories of magic and poison, some of them real enough, that were whispered about him, and many a belated rambler looked with a shudder up to the light that burned in a chamber of his palace on the Pincian Hill till the wee, small hours of the night. Had he been merely a practitioner of the Black Arts he would probably long since have ended his career in the dungeons of Castel San Angelo. But he was safe enough as one of the great ones of the world, the confidant of the Senator of Rome; safe, because he was feared and because none dared to oppose his baleful influence.

Basil pondered, as if the solution of the problem in his mind had at last presented itself, but had again left him, unsatisfied, in the throes of doubt and fear.

Rising from his seat he again unfolded the letter and peered over its contents.

"Can we regain the door by which we have entered?" he soliloquized. "Can we conquer the phantom that haunts the silent chambers of the brain? Were it an eye, or a hand, I could pluck it off. However, if I cannot strangle it, I can conquer it! Shall it forever blot the light of heaven from my path? Shall I forever suffer and tremble at this impalpable something – this shade from the abyss – of hell – that is there – yet not there?"

He paused for a moment in his perambulation, gazing through the narrow unglazed window into the storm-tossed night without. Now and then a flash of lightning shot athwart the inky darkness, lighting up dark recesses and deep embrasures. The sullen roar of the thunder seemed to come from the bowels of the earth.

And as the Grand Chamberlain walked, as if driven by some invisible demon, the great Molossian hound followed him about with a stealthy, noiseless gait, raising its head now and then as if silently inquiring into its master's mood.

When at length he reseated himself, the huge hound cowered at his feet and licked its huge paws.

The mood of the woman for whom his lust-bitten soul yearned as it had never yearned for anything on earth, her words of disdain, which had scorched his very brain, and, above all, the knowledge that she read his inmost thoughts, had roused every atom of evil within his soul. This state of mind was accentuated by the further consideration that she, of all women whom he had sent to their shame and death, was not afraid of him. She had even dared to hint at the existence of a rival who might indeed, in time, supersede him, if he were not wary.

For some time Basil had been vaguely conscious of losing ground in the favor of the woman whom no man might utterly trust save to his undoing. The rivalry of Roxaná, who, like her tenth-century prototypes, was but too eager to enter the arena for Marozia's fateful inheritance, had poured oil on the flames when Theodora had learned that the Senator of Rome himself was frequenting her bowers, and she was not slow to perceive the agency that was at work to defeat and destroy her utterly.

By adding ever new fuel to the hatred of the two women for each other Basil hoped to clear for himself a path that would carry him to the height of his aspirations, by compelling Theodora to openly espouse him her champion. Sooner or later he knew they would ignite under each other's taunts, and upon the ruins of the conflagration he hoped to build his own empire, with Theodora to share with him the throne.

Alberic had departed for the shrines of the Archangel at Monte Gargano. Intent upon the purification of the Church and upon matters pertaining to the empire, he was an element that needed hardly be reckoned with seriously. A successful coup would hurl him into the dungeons of his own keep, perchance, by some irony of fate, into the very cell where Marozia had so mysteriously and ignominiously ended her career. Once in possession of the Mausoleum, the Germans and Dalmatians bought and bribed, he would be the master – unless —

Suddenly the huge beast at his feet raised its muzzle, sniffing the air and uttering a low growl.

A moment later Maraglia, the Castellan of Castel San Angelo, entered through a winding passage.

"What brings you here at this hour, with your damned butcher's face?" Basil turned upon the newcomer who had paused when his gaze fell upon the Molossian.

The brutal features of Maraglia looked ghastly enough in the flickering light of the tapers and Basil's temper seemed to deepen their ashen pallor.

"My lord – it is there again, – in the lower gallery – near the cell where the Lady Marozia was strangled – "

"By all the furies of Hell! Since when are you in the secrets of the devil?"

"Since I held the noose, my Lord Basil," replied the warden of the Emperor's Tomb doggedly. "Though I knew not at the time whose breath was being shortened. It was all too dark – a night just like this – "

"Perchance your memory, going back to that hour, has retained something more than the mere surmise," Basil glowered from under the dark, straight brows. "How many were there?"

"There were three – all masked, my lord. But their voices were their own – "

"You possess a keen ear, my man, as one, accustomed to dark deeds and passages, well should," Basil interposed sardonically. "Deem you, in your undoubted wisdom, the lady has returned and is haunting her former abode? Once upon a time she was not wont to abide in estate so lowly. And, they say, she was beautiful – even to her death."

"And well they may," Maraglia interposed. "I saw her but twice. When she came, and before she died."

"Before she died?"

"And the look she bent upon him who led the execution," Maraglia continued thoughtfully. "She spoke not once. Dumb and silent she went to the fishes. When the Lord Alberic arrived, it was all too late – "

"All too late!" Basil interposed sardonically. "The fishes too were dumb. Profit by their example, Maraglia. Too much wisdom engenders death."

"The death rattle of one sounds to my ears just like that of another, my lord," Maraglia replied, quaking under the look that was upon him. "And the voices of the few who still abide are growing weaker day by day."

"They shall not much longer annoy your delicate ears," Basil replied. "The Senator who has found this abode somewhat too draughty has departed for the holy shrines, to do penance for the death of his mother. He suspects all was not well. He would know more. Perchance the Archangel may grant him a revelation. Meanwhile, we must to work. The new captain appointed by the Senator enters his service on the morrow. A holy man, much given to contemplation over the mysteries of love. His attention must be diverted. Every trace of life must be extinct – this very night. No proofs must be allowed to remain. Meanwhile, what of the apparition whereof you rave?"

"It is there, my lord, as sure as my soul lives," replied the castellan. "A shapeless something, preceded by a breath, cold as from a newly dug grave."

"A shapeless something, say you? Whence comes it and where goes it? For whose diversion does it perambulate?"

"The astrologer monk perchance who improvises prophecies."

"Then let his improvising damn himself," replied Basil sullenly. "To call himself inspired and pretend to read the stars! How about his prophecy now?"

"He holds to it!"

"What! That I have less than one month to live?"

"Just that – no more!" —

Basil gave the speaker a quick glance.

"What niggardly dispensation and presumption withal! This fellow to claim kinship with the stars! To profess to be in their confidence, to share the secrets of the heavens while he is smothered by darkness, utter and everlasting. The heavens mind you, Maraglia! My star! It is a star of darker red than Mars and crosses Hell – not Heaven! In thought I watch it every night with sleepless eyes. Is it not well to cleanse the earth of such lying prophets that truth may have standing room? Where have you lodged him?"