The Sorceress of Rome. Gallizier Nathan
you no solace to give to me, no light upon the dark path, I am about to enter upon, – the life of the cloister, where I shall end my days?"
There was a long pause. Surprise seemed to have struck the monk dumb. Eckhardt's heart beat stormily in anticipation of the anchorite's reply.
"But," a voice sounded from the gloom, "have you the patience, the humility, which it behooves the recluse to possess, and without which all prayers and penances are in vain?"
"Show me how I can humble myself more, than at this hour, when I renounce a life of glory, ambition and command. All I want is peace, – that peace which has forsaken me since her death!"
His last words died in a groan.
"Peace," repeated the monk. "You seek peace in the seclusion of the cloister, in holy devotions. I thought Eckhardt of too stern a mould, to be goaded and turned from his duty by a mere whim, a pale phantom."
A long silence ensued.
"Father," said the Margrave at last, speaking in a low and broken voice, "I have done no act of wrong. I will do no act of wrong, while I have control over myself. But the thought of the dead haunts me night and day. Otto has no further need of me. Rome is pacified. The life at court is irksome to me. The king loves to surround himself with perfumed popinjays, discarding the time-honoured customs of our Northland for the intricate polity of the East. – There is no place for Eckhardt in that sphere of mummery."
For a few moments the monk meditated in silence.
"It grieves me to the heart," he spoke at last, "to hear a soldier confess to being tempted into a life of eternal abnegation. I judge it to be a passing madness, which distance and work alone can cure. You are not fitted in the sight of God and His Mother for the spiritual life, for in Mezentian thraldom you have fettered your soul to a corpse in its grave, a sin as black as if you had been taken in adultery with the dead. Remain in Rome no longer! Return to your post on the boundaries of the realm. There, – in your lonely tent, pray nightly to the Immaculate One for her blessing and pass the day in the saddle among the scattered outposts of your command! The monks of Rome shall not be festered by the presence among them of your fevered soul, and you are sorely needed by God and His Son for martial life."
"Father, you know not all!" Eckhardt replied after a brief pause, during which he lay prostrate, writhing in agony and despair. "From youth up have I lived as a man of war. – To this I was bred by my sire and grandsire of sainted memory. I have always hoped to die on some glorious field. But it is all changed. I, who never feared mortal man, am trembling before a shadow. My love for her, who is no more, has made me a coward. I tremble to think that I may not find her in the darkness, whither soon I may be going. To this end alone I would purchase the peace, which has departed. The thought of her has haunted me night and day, ever since her death! How often in the watches of the night, on the tented field, have I lain awake in silent prayer, once more to behold her face, that I can never more forget!"
There was another long pause, during which the monk cast a piercing glance at the prostrate soldier. Slowly at last the voice came from the shadows.
"Then you still believe yourself thus favoured?"
"So firmly do I believe in the reality of the vision, that I am here to ask your blessing and your good offices with the Prior of St. Cosmas in the matter closest to my heart."
"Nay," the monk replied as if speaking to himself, "if you have indeed been favoured with a vision, then were it indeed presumptuous in one, the mere interpreter of the will divine, to oppose your request! You have chosen a strict brotherhood, though, for when your novitiate is ended, you will not be permitted to ever again leave the walls of the cloister."
"Such is my choice," replied Eckhardt. "And now your blessing and intercession, father. Let the time of my novitiate be brief!"
"I will do what I can," replied the monk, then he added slowly and solemnly:
"Christ accepts your obedience and service! I purge you of your sins in the name of the Trinity and the Mother of God, into whose holy keeping I now commit you! Go in peace!"
"I go!" muttered the Margrave, rising exhausted from his long agony and staggering down the dark aisles of the church.
Eckhardt's footsteps had no sooner died away in the gloom of the high-vaulted arches, than two shadows emerged from behind a pillar and moved noiselessly down towards the refectory.
In the dim circle of light emanating from the tapers round the altar, they faced each other a moment.
"What ails the Teuton?" muttered the Grand Chamberlain, peering into the muffled countenance of the pseudo-confessor.
"He upbraids the fiend for cheating him of the smile of a corpse," the monk Cyprianus replied with strangely jarring voice.
"And yet you fear I will lose my wager?" sneered the Chamberlain.
The monk shrugged his shoulders.
"They have a proverb in Ferrara: 'He who may not eat a peach, may not smell at it.'"
"And you were not revealed to him, you, for whom he has scoured the very slime of the Tiber?" Benilo queried, ignoring the monk's facetiousness.
"'Tis sad to think, what changes time has wrought," replied the latter with downcast eyes. "Truly it behooves us to think of the end, – the end of time!"
And without another word the monk passed down the aisles and his tall form was swallowed in the gloom of the Church of the Hermits.
"The end!" Benilo muttered to himself as he thoughtfully gazed after the monk. "Croak thou thine own doom, Cyprianus! One soul weighs as much as another in the devil's balance!"
With these words Benilo passed through the portals of the church and was soon lost to sight among the ruins of the Aventine.
CHAPTER VIII
CASTEL SAN ANGELO
Night had spread her pinions over the ancient capital of the Cæsars and deepest silence had succeeded the thousand cries and noises of the day. Few belated strollers still lingered in the deserted squares. Under the shadows of the Borgo Vecchio slow moving figures could be seen flitting noiselessly as phantoms through the marble ruins of antiquity, pausing for a moment under the high unlighted arches, talking in undertones and vanishing in the night, while the remote swell of monkish chants, monotonous and droning, died on the evanescent breezes.
Round Castel San Angelo, rising, a giant Mausoleum, vast and sombre out of the solitudes of the Flaminian Way, night wove a more poetic air of mystery and quiet, and but for the tread of the ever wakeful sentinels on its ramparts, the colossal tomb of the emperor Hadrian would have appeared a deserted Memento Mori of Imperial Rome, the possession of which no one cared to dispute with the shades of the Cæsars or the ghosts of the mangled victims, which haunted the intricate labyrinth of its subterranean chambers and vaults.
A pale moon was rising behind the hills of Albano, whose ghostly rays cast an unsteady glow over the undulating expanse of the Roman Campagna, and wove a pale silver mounting round the crest of the imperial tomb, whose towering masses seemed to stretch interminably into the night, as if oppressed with their own memories.
What a monstrous melodrama was contained in yonder circular walls! They wore a comparatively smiling look only in the days when Castel San Angelo received the dead. Then according to the historian Procopius, the immense three-storied rotunda, surmounted by a pyramidal roof had its sides covered with Parian marble, intersected with columns and surmounted with a ring of Grecian statues. The first story was a quadrangular basement, decorated with festoons and tablets of funeral inscriptions, colossal equestrian groups in gilt bronze at the four corners.
Within the memory of living generation, this pile had been the theatre of a tragedy, almost unparalleled in the annals of Rome, the scene of the wildest Saturnalia, that ever stained the history of mediæval state. An incongruous relic of antique profligacy and the monstrosities of the lower empire, drawing its fatal power from feudal institutions, Theodora, a woman illustrious for her beauty and rank, had at the dawn of the century quartered herself in Castel San Angelo. From there she exercised over Rome a complete tyranny, sustained against German