Part 30

"You tell me in that lying, fawning voice of yours that to-morrow you will leave Rome,--to go to him? To give him the love which is mine,--mine--by the redeemed gauge of the sepulchre? And I tell you, you shall not! Mine you are,--and mine you shall remain! Though," he concluded, breathing hard, "you shall be meek enough, when, learning from my own lips what manner of saint you are, he has cast you forth in the street, among your kind! And I swear by the host, I will go to him and tell him!"

She advanced a step towards him, her eyes glowing with a feverish lustre. Her white hands were upon her bosom as if to calm its tempestuous heaving.

He heeded it not, feasting his eyes on her great beauty with the inflamed lust of the libertine.

"I will save you the trouble," she said calmly, "I will tell him myself."

"And what will you tell him? That he has espoused one of the harlot brood of Marozia, one, who has sold his honour--defiled his bed--"

"And slain the fiend who betrayed her!"

A wild shriek, a tussle,--a choked outcry,--she struck--once, twice, thrice:--for a moment his hands wildly beat the air, then he reeled backward, lurched and fell, his head striking the hard marble floor.

The bloody weapon fell from Theodora's trembling hands.

"Avenged!" she gasped, staring with terrible fascination at the spot where he lay.

Benilo had raised himself upon his arm, filing his wild bloodshot eyes on the woman. He attempted to rise,--another moment, and the death rattle was in his throat. He fell back and expired.

There was no pity in Theodora's eyes, only a great, nameless fear as she looked down upon him where he lay. It had grown dark in the chamber. The blue moon-mist poured in through the narrow casement, and with it came the chimes from remote cloisters, floating as it were on the silence of night, cleaving the darkness, as it is cloven by a falling star. Theodora's heart was beating, as if it must break. Lighting a candle she softly opened the door and made her way through a labyrinth of passages and corridors in which her steps re-echoed from the high vaulted ceilings. Farther and farther she wandered away from the inhabited part of the building, when her ear suddenly caught a metallic sound, sharp, like the striking of a gong.

For a moment she remained rooted to the spot, staring straight before her as one dazed. Then she retraced her steps towards the Pavilion, whence came singing voices and sounds of high revels.

Sometime after she had left her chamber, two Africans entered it, picked up the lifeless body of the Chamberlain, and, after carrying it to a remote part of the building, flung it into the river.

The yellow Tiber hissed in white foam over the spot, where Benilo sank. The mad current dragged his body down to the slime of the river-bed, picked it up again in its swirl, tossed it in mocking sport from one foam-crested wave to another, and finally flung it, to rot, on some lonely bank, where the gulls screamed above it and the gray foxes of the Maremmas gnawed and snapped and snarled over the bleached bones in the moonlight.

*CHAPTER XVII*

*NEMESIS*

While these events, so closely touching his own life, transpired in the Groves of Theodora, while a triple traitor met his long-deferred doom, and a trembling woman cowered fear-struck and tortured by terrible forebodings in her chambers, Eckhardt sat in the shaded loggia of his palace, brooding over the great mystery of his life and its impending solution; meditating upon his course in the final act of the weird drama. But one resolution stood out clearly defined in all the chaos of his thoughts. He would not leave Rome ere he had broken down behind him every bridge leading back into the past.

It had been a day such as the oldest inhabitants of Rome remembered none at this late season. The very heavens seemed to smoke with heat. The grass in the gardens was dry and brittle, as if it had been scorched by passing flames. A singularly profound stillness reigned everywhere, there being not the slightest breeze to stir the faintest rustle among the dry foliage.

How long Eckhardt had thus been lost in vague speculations on the impending crisis of his life he scarcely knew, when the sound of footsteps approaching over the gravel path caused him to shake off the spell which was heavy upon him, and to peer through the interstices of the vines in quest of the new-comer who wore the garb of a monk, the cowl drawn over his face either for protection against the heat, or to evade recognition. Yet no sooner had he set foot in the vineshaded loggia, than Eckhardt arose from his seat, eager, breathless.

"At last!" he gasped, extending his hand, which the other grasped in silence. "At last!"

"At last!" said Hezilo.

The word seemed fraught with destinies.

"Is the time at hand?" queried Eckhardt.

"To-night!"

A groan broke from the Margrave's lips.

"To-night!"

Then he beckoned his visitor to a seat.

"I have come to fulfil my promise," spoke Hezilo.

"Tell me all!"

Hezilo nodded; yet he seemed at a loss how to commence. After a pause he began his tale in a voice strangely void of inflection, like that of an automaton gifted with speech.

Dwelling briefly on the events of his own life from the time of his arrival in Rome with the motherless girl Angiola, on her chance meeting with Benilo and the latter's pretence of interest in his child, Hezilo touched upon the Chamberlain's clandestine visits at the convent, where he had placed her, upon the girl's strange fascination for the courtier, the latter's promises and advances, culminating in Angiola's abduction. After having betrayed his credulous victim, the Chamberlain had revealed himself the fiend he was by causing her to be concealed in an old ruin, and, to secure immunity for himself, he had her deprived of the sight of her eyes. In a voice resonant with the echoes of despair, Hezilo described the long and fruitless hunt for his lost child, of whose whereabouts the disconsolate nuns at the convent disclaimed all knowledge, till chance had guided him to the place of Angiola's concealment, in the person of an old crone, whom he had surprised among the ruins of the ill-famed temple of Isis, whither she carried food to the blind girl at certain hours of the day. At the point of his dagger he had forced a confession and by a sufficiently large bribe purchased her silence regarding his discovery. The rest was known to Eckhardt, who had witnessed Angiola's rescue from her dismal prison, as he had been present in her dying hour.

There was a long silence between them. Then Hezilo continued his account. Step for step he had fastened himself to the heels of the betrayer of his child, whose name the crone had revealed to him. Again and again he might have destroyed the libertine, had he not reserved him for a more summary and terrible execution. He had discovered Benilo's illicit amour with one Theodora, a woman of great beauty but of mysterious origin, who had established her wanton court at Rome. As a wandering minstrel Hezilo had found there a ready welcome, and had in time gained her confidence and ear.

Eckhardt's senses began to reel as he listened to the revelations now poured into his ears. Much, which the confession of the dying wretch in the rock-caves under the Gemonian stairs had left obscure, was now illumined, as a dark landscape by lightnings from a distant cloud-bank. Ginevra's smouldering discontent with Eckhardt's seeming lack of ambition, her inordinate desire for power,--the Chamberlain's covert advances and veiled promises, aided by his chance discovery of her descent from Marozia; their conspiracy, culminating in the woman's simulated illness and death; the substitution of a strange body in the coffin, which had been sealed under pretence of premature decay,--Ginevra's flight to a convent, where she remained concealed till after Eckhardt's departure from Rome:--from stage to stage Hezilo proceeded in his strange unimpassioned tale, a tale which caused his listener's brain to spin and his senses to reel.

The monk conducting the last rites, having chanced upon the fraud, had been promised nothing less than the Triple Tiara of St. Peter as reward for his silence and complicity, as soon as Ginevra should have come into her own. Continuing, Hezilo touched upon Ginevra's reappearance in Rome under the name of Theodora; on the Chamberlain's betrayal of the woman. He dwelt on the events leading up to the wager and the forfeit, the woman's share in luring Eckhardt from the Basilica, and Benilo's attempt to poison him at the fateful meeting in the Grotto. He concluded by pointing out the Chamberlain's utter desperation and the woman's mortal fear,--and Eckhardt listened as one dazed.

Then Hezilo briefly outlined his plans for the night.

Eckhardt's destruction had been decreed by the Chamberlain and nothing short of a miracle could save him. The utmost caution and secrecy were required. Benilo, whose attention would be divided between Theodora and Eckhardt, was to be dealt with by himself. The blood of his child cried for vengeance. Thus Eckhardt would be free to settle last accounts with the woman.

Burying his head in his hands the strong man wept like a disconsolate child, his whole frame shaken by convulsive sobs, and it was some time, ere he regained sufficient composure to face Hezilo.

"It will require all your courage," said the harper, rising to depart. "Steel your heart against hope or mercy! I will await you at sunset at the Church of the Hermits."

And without waiting the Margrave's reply, Hezilo was gone.

Eckhardt felt like one waking from a terrible dream, the oppression of which remains after its phantoms have vanished. The suspense of waiting till dusk seemed almost unendurable. Now that the hour seemed so nigh, the dread hour of final reckoning, there was a tightening agony at Eckhardt's heart, an agony that made him long to cry out, to weep, to fling himself on his knees and pray, pray for deliverance, for oblivion, for absolute annihilation. Walking up and down the vineshaded loggia, he paused now and then to steal a look at the flaming disk of the sun, that seemed to stand still in the heavens, while at other times he stared absently into the gnarled stems, in whose hollow shelter the birds slept and the butterflies drowsed.

Even as the parted spirit of the dead might ruthfully hover over the grave of its perished mortal clay, so Eckhardt reviewed his own forlorn estate, torturing his brain with all manner of vain solutions.

This night, then,--the night which quenched the light of this agonizing day, must for ever quench his doubts and fears. He drew a long breath. A great weariness weighed down his spirit. An irresistible desire for rest came over him. The late rebellion, brief but fierce, the constant watch at the palace on the Aventine, the alarming state of the young King, who was dying of a broken heart, the futility of all counsel to prevail upon him to leave this accursed city, the lack of a friend, to whom he might confide his own misgivings without fear of betrayal,--all these had broken down his physical strength, which no amount of bodily exertion would have been able to accomplish.

After a time he resumed his seat, burying his head in his hands.

The air of the late summer day was heavy and fragrant with the peculiar odour of decaying leaves, and the splashing of the fountain, which sent its crystal stream down towards Santa Maria del Monte, seemed like a lullaby to Eckhardt's overwrought senses. Night after night he had not slept at all; he had not dared to abandon the watch on Aventine for even a moment. Now nature asserted her rights.

Lower and lower drooped his aching lids and slowly he was beginning to slip away into blissful unconsciousness. How long he had remained in this state, he scarcely knew, when he was startled, as by some unknown presence.

Rousing himself with an effort and looking up, he was filled with a strange awe at the phenomenon which met his gaze. Right across the horizon that glistened with pale green hues like newly frozen water, there reposed a cloud-bank, risen from the Tyrrhene Sea, black as the blackest midnight, heavy and motionless like an enormous shadow fringed with tremulous lines of gold.

This cloud-bank seemed absolutely stirless, as if it had been thrown, a ponderous weight, into the azure vault of heaven. Ever and anon silvery veins of lightning shot luridly through its surface, while poised, as it were immediately above it, was the sun, looking like a great scarlet seal, a ball of crimson fire, destitute of rays.

For a time Eckhardt stood lost in the contemplation of this fantastic sky-phenomenon. As he did so, the sun plunged into the engulfing darkness. Lowering purple shadows crept across the heavens, but the huge cloud, palpitating with lightnings, moved not, stirred not, nor changed its shape by so much as a hair's breadth.

It appeared like a vast pall, spread out in readiness for the state burial of the world, the solemn and terrible moment: The End of Time.

Fascinated by an aspect, which in so weird a manner reflected his own feelings, Eckhardt looked upon the threatening cloud-bank as an evil omen. A strange sensation seized him, as with a hesitating fear not unmingled with wonder, he watched the lightnings come and go.

A shudder ran through his frame as he paced up and down the white-pillared Loggia, garlanded with climbing vines, roses and passion flowers, dying or decayed.

"Would the night were passed," he muttered to himself, and the man who had stormed the impregnable stronghold of Crescentius quailed before the impending issue as a child trembles in the dark.

At the hour appointed he traversed the solitary region of the Trastevere. The vast silence, the vast night, were full of solemn weirdness. The moon, at her full, soared higher and higher in the balconies of the East, firing the lofty solitudes of the heavens with her silver-beams. But immobile in the purple cavity of the western horizon there lay that ominous cloud, nerved as it were with living lightnings, which leaped incessantly from its centre, like a thousand swords, drawn from a thousand scabbards.

The deep booming noise of a bell now smote heavily on the silence. Oppressed by the weight of unutterable forebodings, Eckhardt welcomed the sound with a vague sense of relief. At the Church of the Hermits he was joined by the harper and together they rapidly traversed the region leading to the Groves. In the supervening stillness their ears caught the sound of harptones, floating through the silent autumnal night.

The higher rising moon outlined with huge angles of light and shadow the marble palaces, which stood out in strong relief against a transparent background and the Tiber, wherein her reflections were lengthened into a glittering column, was frosted with silvery ripples.

At last they reached the entrance of the groves.

"Be calm!" said Eckhardt's guide. "Let nothing that you may see or hear draw you from the path of caution. Think that, whatever you may suffer, there are others who may suffer more! Silence! No questions now! Remember--here are only foes!"

The harper spoke with a certain harsh impatience, as if he were himself suffering under a great nervous strain, and Eckhardt, observing this, made no effort to engage him in conversation, aside from promising to be guided by his counsel. He felt ill at ease, however, as one entering a labyrinth from whose intricate maze he relies only on the firm guidance of a friend to release him.

They now entered the vast garden, fraught with so many fatal memories. At the end of the avenue there appeared the well-remembered pavilion, and, avoiding the main entrance, the harper guided Eckhardt through a narrow corridor into the great hall.

A faint mist seemed to cloud the circle of seats and the high-pitched voices of the revellers seemed lost in infinite distance. In no mood to note particulars, Eckhardt's gaze penetrated the dizzy glare, in which ever new zones of light seemed to uprear themselves, leaping from wall to wall like sparkling cascades. As in the throes of a terrible nightmare he stood riveted to the spot, for at that very moment his eyes encountered a picture which froze the very life-blood in his veins.

In the background, revealed by the parting draperies there stood, leaning against one of the rose-marble columns, the image of Ginevra. Her robe of crimson fell in two superb folds from the peaks of her bosom to her feet. The marble pallor of her face formed a striking contrast to the consuming fire of her eyes, which seemed to rove anxiously, restlessly over the diminished circle of her guests. The most execrable villain of them all,--Benilo,--had at her hands met his long-deferred doom. Those on whom she had chiefly relied for the realization of her strange ambition now swung from the gibbets on Monte Malo,--their executioner Eckhardt. Strange irony of fate! From those remaining, who polluted the hall with their noisome presence, she had nothing to hope, nothing to fear.

And this then was the end!

It required Hezilo's almost superhuman efforts to restrain Eckhardt from committing a deed disastrous in its remotest consequences to himself and their common purpose. For in the contemplation of the woman who had wrecked his life, a tide of such measureless despair swept through Eckhardt's heart, that every thought, every desire was drowned in the mad longing to visit instant retribution on the woman's guilty head and also to close his own account with life. But the mood did not endure. A strange delirium seized him; the woman's siren-beauty entranced and intoxicated him like the subtle perfume of some rare exotic; mingled love and hate surged up in his heart; he dared not trust himself, for even though he resented, he could not resist the fatal spell of former days. The absence of Benilo, of whose doom he was ignorant, inspired the harper with dire misgivings. After peering with ill-concealed apprehension through the shadowy vistas of remote galleries, he at last whispered to Eckhardt, to follow him, and they were entering a dimly lighted corridor, leading into the fateful Grotto, which Eckhardt had visited on that well-remembered night, when a terrific event arrested their steps, and caused them to remain rooted to the spot.

A blinding, circular sweep of lightning blazed through the windows of the pavilion, illumining it from end to end with a brilliant blue glare, accompanied by a deafening crash and terrific peal of thunder which shook the very earth beneath. A flash of time,--an instant of black, horrid eclipse,--then, with an appalling roar, as of the splitting of huge rocks, the murky gloom was rent, devoured and swept away by the sudden bursting forth of fire. From twenty different parts of the great hall it seemed at once to spring aloft in spiral coils. With a wild cry of terror those of the revellers who had not outright been struck dead by the fiery bolt, rushed towards the doors, clambering in frenzied fear over the dead, trampling on the scorched disfigured faces of the dancing girls, on whose graceful pantomime they had feasted their eyes so short a time ago.

There was no safety in the pavilion, which a moment had transformed into a seething furnace. Volumes of smoke rolled up in thick, suffocating clouds, and the crimson glare of the flames illumined the dark night-sky far over the Aventine.

Half mad with fear from the shrieks and groans of the dying, which resounded everywhere about her, Theodora stood rooted to the spot, still clinging to the great column. Over her face swept a strange expression of loathing and exultation. Her eyes wandered to the red-tongued flames, that leaped in eddying rings round the great marble pillars, creeping every second nearer to the place where she stood, and in that one glance she seemed to recognize the entire hopelessness of rescue and the certainty of death.

For a moment the thought seemed terrifying beyond expression. None had thought of her,--all had sought their own safety! She laughed a laugh of uttermost, bitter scorn.

At last she seemed to regain her presence of mind. Turning, she started to the back of the great pavilion, with the manifest object of reaching some private way of egress, known but to herself. But her intention was foiled. No sooner had she gone back than she returned--this exit too was a roaring furnace. In terrible reverberations the thunder bellowed through the heavens, which seemed one vast ocean of flame; the elements seemed to join hands in the effort at her destruction:--So be it! It would extinguish a life of dishonour, disgrace and despair.

A haughty acceptance of her fate manifested itself in her stonily determined face. It would be atonement--though the end was terrible!

Suddenly she heard a rush close by her side. Looking up, she beheld the one she dreaded most on earth to meet, saw Eckhardt rushing blindly towards her through smoke and flames, crying frantically:

"Save her! Save her!"

Her wistful gaze, like that of a fascinated bird, was fixed on the Margrave's towering stature.

She tarried but a moment.

At the terrible crisis, on one side a roaring furnace,--on the other the man whom of all mortals she had wronged past forgiveness, her courage failed her. Remembering a secret door, leading to a tower, connected with a remote wing of the pavilion, where she might yet find safety, she dashed swift as thought through the panel, which receded at her touch, and vanished in the dark corridor beyond. Without heeding the dangers which might beset his path, Eckhardt flew after her through the gloom, till he found himself before a spiral stairway, at the terminus of the passage. A faint glimmer of light from above penetrated the gloom, and following it, he was startled by a faint outcry of terror, as on the last landing, to which he madly leaped, he found himself once more face to face with the woman, whom even at this moment he loved more in the certainty of having lost her, than ever in the pride and ecstasy of possession.

Seemingly hemmed in by an obstacle, the nature, which he knew not, she stood before him paralyzed with horror. As his hand went out towards her, the gesture seemed to break the spell, and uttering a despairing shriek, she sprang towards a door behind the landing and rushed out.

Eckhardt's breath stopped.

A moment,--he heard an outcry of inexpressible horror,--a struggle, then a hollow dash. Hardly conscious of his own actions he uttered a shrill whistle, when the door of the tower was broken down, and the stairs were suddenly crowded with the soldiers of the imperial guard, whom the conflagration had brought to the scene.

"What woman was that?" exclaimed their leader, pointing to the place whence Theodora had made the fatal leap.

"Whoever she is--she must be dashed to pieces," replied his companion, rushing up the stairs to the trap-door and throwing his lighted torch down the murky depths. But the light was soon lost in the profound gloom.

"A rope! A rope! She must not, she shall not die thus!" cried Eckhardt in mad, heart-rending despair.

"Here is one, but it is not long enough!" exclaimed the captain of the guard, hardly able to conceal his mortification at finding himself face to face with his general.

"Hark! She groans! Help! Help me!" exclaimed Eckhardt, and tearing his cloak into strips, he fastened them together. The work was swiftly completed. These strips fastened to the rope and securely knotted, Eckhardt tied around his waist, and though the leader of the men-at-arms sought to dissuade him from his desperate purpose, he started down, clinging and swinging over a dreadful depth.