Part 32

After having crossed a swinging bridge, which swayed to and fro under the weight of their iron mail, they arrived at a narrow causeway, above which, like some contemplative spirit above the conflicting problems of life, rose the cloisters, environing the ancient Castel of Paterno. Eckhardt knocked at the barred gate with the hilt of his sword, whereupon a monk appeared at the window of a tower above the portcullis, and after reconnoitring, set some machinery in motion, by which the portcullis was raised. They then found themselves in a long, narrow causeway cut in the rock. The monk who had admitted them disappeared; another ushered them into the great hall of the cloister. The air was full of the lingering haze of License, and traces of devotional paintings on the weather-beaten walls appeared like fragments of prayers in a world-worn mind.

The hall had been made from a natural cavern and was of an exceedingly gloomy aspect, being of great extent, with deep windows only on one side, hewn in the solid granite. It was at intervals crossed by arches, marking the termination of several galleries leading to remoter parts of the monastery. In the centre was a long stone table, hewn from the rock; a pulpit, supported on a pillar was similarly sculptured in the wall. Five or six pine-wood torches, stuck at far intervals in the granite, shed a dismal illumination through the gloom, enhanced rather than diminished by the glow of red embers on a vast hearth at the farthest extremity of the hall.

Eckhardt was about to prefer his request to the monk, who had conducted them hither, when he was interrupted by the entrance of the abbot and a long train of monks from their devotions. The monks advanced in solemn silence, their heads sunk humbly on their breasts; their superior so worn with vigils and fasts, that his gaunt and powerful frame resembled a huge skeleton. He was the only one of the group who uttered a word of welcome to his guests.

After having ordered Haco to attend to the wants of his lord, Eckhardt sought a conference with the abbot on matters which lay close to his heart. For his sovereign was ill--and his illness seemed to defy human skill. The abbot listened to Eckhardt's recital of the past events, but his diagnosis was far from quieting the latter's fears.

"You learn to speak and think very dismally among these great, sprawling pine forests," Eckhardt said moodily, at the conclusion of the conference.

"We learn to die!" replied the monk with melancholy austerity.

Consideration for his sovereign's safety, however, prompted Eckhardt, who had been informed that straggling bands of their pursuers had followed them to the base of the hill, to continue that same night under guidance of a monk, the ascent to the almost impregnable heighths of Castel Paterno. Here Otto and his small band were welcomed by Count Tammus, the commander, who placed himself and his men-at-arms at the disposal of the German King.

*CHAPTER II*

*MEMORIES*

Otto found himself in a state chamber, whose gloomy vastness was lighted, or rather darkened by one single taper. Through the high oval windows in the deep recess of the wall peered an errant ray of moonlight, which illumined the quaint monastic paintings on the walls, and crossing the yellow candle-light, imbued them with a strange ghostly glare.

When his host had ministered to his comfort and served him with the frugal fare of the cloister, Otto hinted his desire for sleep, and his trusty Saxons entered on their watch before their sovereign's chamber.

At last, left alone, Otto listened with a heavy heart to the monotonous tread of the sentries. It seemed to him as if he could now take a survey of the events of his life, and pass sentence upon it with the impartiality of the future chronicler. Recollection roused up recollection; and as in a panorama, the scenes of his short, but eventful career passed in review before his inner eye. He thought of what he was, contrasting it painfully with all he might have been. The image of the one being, for whom his soul yearned in its desolation, with the blinding hunger of man for woman and woman's love, rose up before his eyes, and for the first time he thought of death,--death,--in its full and ghastly actuality.

What was it, this death? Was it a sleep? Merely the absence, not the privation of those powers and senses, called life? What sort of passage must the thinking particle pass through, whatever it may be,--ere it stood naked of its clay? The breaking of the eyes in darkness,--what then succeeded? Would the thinking atom survive,--would it become the nothing that it was?

The aspect of the chamber was not one to dispel the gloomy visions that haunted him. It was scantily furnished in the crude style of the tenth century, with massive tables and chairs. A curious tapestry of eastern origin, representing some legend of the martyrs, divided it from an adjoining cabinet serving at once as an oratory and sleeping apartment. A low fire, burning in the chimney to dispel the miasmas of the marshes, shed a crimson glow over the chamber and its lonely inmate.

For a long time those who watched before his door heard him walk restlessly up and down. At last weariness came over him and he threw himself exhausted into a chair. Then the haunting memory of Stephania conjured up before his half-dreaming senses an alluring, shimmering Fata Morgana--a castle on one of those far-away Apulian head-lands, with their purpling hills in the background and the scent of strange flowers in the air. On many a summer morning they should walk hand in hand through the Laburnum groves, and find their love anew. But the amber sheen of the landscape faded into the violet of night. The vision faded into nothingness. A peal of thunder reverberated through the heavens,--Otto started with a moan, rose, and staggered to his couch.

He closed his eyes; but sleep would not come.

Where was she now? Where was Stephania? Weeks had passed, since they had last met. It seemed an eternity indeed! He should have remained in Rome, till he was assured of her fate! She had left him with words of hatred, of scorn, bitter and cruel. And yet! How gladly he would have saved the man, his mortal enemy, forsooth, had it lain in his power. Gladly?--No! The man who had thrice forsworn, thrice broken his faith, deserved his doom. Now he was dead. But Rome was lost. What mattered it? There was but one devouring thought in Otto's mind. Where was Stephania? The mad longing for her became more intense with every moment. Now that the worst had come to pass, now that the stunning blow had fallen, he must rouse himself, he must rally. He must combat this fever, which was slowly consuming him; he must find her, see her once more on earth, if but to tell her how he loved her, her and no other woman. Would the pale phantom of Crescentius still stand between them,--still part them as of yore? Not if their loves were equal. His hands were stainless of that blood. On the morrow he would despatch Haco to Rome. Surely some one would have seen her; surely some one knew where the wife of the Senator of Rome was hiding her sorrow,--her grief.

The dim light of the ceremonial lamp, which burned with a dull, veiled flame before an image of the crucified Christ, flickered, as if fanned by a passing breath.

There was deep silence in the king's bed-chamber, and the drawn tapestry shut out every sound from without.

Noiselessly a secret panel in the wall opened behind Otto's couch. Noiselessly it closed in the gray stone. Then an exquisite white hand and arm were thrust through the draperies and the lovely face of Stephania beamed on the sleeping youth. She was pale as death, but the transparency of her skin and the absolute perfection of her form and features made her the image of an Olympian Goddess. Her dark hair, bound by a fillet of gold, enhanced the marble pallor of the exquisite face.

Never had the wonderful eyes of Stephania seemed so full of fire and of life. Stooping over the sleeper, she softly encircled his head with her snowy arms and pressed a long kiss on the dry, fevered lips.

With a moan Otto opened his eyes. For a moment he stared as if he faced an apparition from dream-land.--His breath stopped, then he uttered a choked outcry of delirious joy, while his arms tightly encircled the head which bent over him.

"At last! At last! At last! Oh, how I have longed, how I have pined for you! Stephania--my darling--my love--tell me that you do not hate me--but is it you indeed,--is it you? How did you come here--the guards,--Eckhardt,--"

He paused with a terrible fear in his heart, ever and ever caressing the dark head, the beloved face, whose eyes held his own with their magnetic spell. She suffered his kisses and caresses while stroking his damp brow with soothing hand. Then with a grave look she enjoined silence and caution, crept to the door of the adjoining room and locked it from within.

"They guard you so well, not a ghost could enter," she said with the sweet smile of by-gone days.

He arose and drew the curtains closer. Then he sat down by her side.

"How came you here, Stephania?" he whispered with renewed fear and dread. "If you are discovered,--God have mercy on you,--and me!"

She shook her head.

"I have followed you hither from Rome,--I passed you on the night of your flight. Count Tammus, the commander of Paterno, at one time the friend of the Senator of Rome, has offered me the hospitality of the castelio. No one knows of my presence here, save an old monk, who believes me some itinerant pilgrim, in search of the End of Time," she whispered with her far-away look. "The End of Time."

"They say it is close at hand," Otto replied, holding her hands tightly in his. "Oh, Stephania, how beautiful you are! That which has broken my spirit, seems not to have touched your life!"

"My life is dead," she replied. "What remains,--remains through you. Therefore time has lacked power. But that which has been and is no more, stands immovable before my soul."

He gazed at her with large fear-struck eyes.

"Then--your heart is no longer mine?"

The grasp of the hands in his own tightened.

"Would I be here, silly dreamer? I love you--my heart knows no change. It loved but once--and you!"

All the happiness, slumbering in the deep eyes of the son of Theophano, burst forth as in a glorious aureole of light.

"Then you have never--"

She raised her hand forbiddingly.

"I could not give to him who is gone that which I gave to you! When we first met I was your foe. I hated you with all the hate which a Roman has for the despoiler of his lands. When I gave you my love,--which, alas, was not mine to give, I did so, a powerless instrument of Fate. Side by side have we trod life's narrow path,--neither of us could turn to right or left without standing accounted to the other. It was not ours to say love this one or that other. We were brought together by that same mysterious force, to which it is vain to cry halt. We knew,--I knew,--that it must, sooner or later, carry us to doom and death; but resistlessly the whirlwind had taken us up in its glistening cloud: Thus are we lost;--you and I!"

He listened to her with a great fear in his soul.

"How cold your hands are, my love," he whispered. "Cold as if the flow of blood had ceased. Can you feel how it rushes through my veins,--so hot--so boiling hot?"

"You have the fever! Therefore my hands appear cold to you. But,--you spoke truly,--in my hand is death,--and death is cold! Life I have none,--you have taken it from me!"

"Stephania!"

It sounded like the last outcry of a broken heart.

"Why recall that which could not be averted? Were it mine to change it, oh, that I could!"

"Do you really wish it?"

"I wish but your happiness. Can you doubt?"

"I do not doubt. I love you!"

"Stephania--my darling,--my all!"

And he kissed her eyes, her lips, her hair, and she suffered his caresses as one wrapt in a blissful dream.

"I learned you were stricken with the fever,--the last defence left to us by nature against our foes. I have come, to watch over you, to care for you,--to nurse you back to health,--to life--"

"And you braved the dangers that beset your path on every turn?"

"How should I fear,--with such love in my heart for you!"

"Then you--will remain?" he whispered, his very life in his eyes.

"For a time," she answered, in a halting tone, which passed not unremarked.

"And then?" he queried.

Her head sank.

"I know not!"

"Then I will tell you, my own love! We will return to Rome together, you and I; Stephania, the empress of the West,--would not that reconcile your Romans,--appease their hate?"

Stephania gazed for a moment thoughtfully at Otto, then she shook her head.

"I fear," she replied after a pause, "we shall nevermore return to Rome."

As she spoke, her soft fingers stroked caressingly the youth's head, which rested on her bosom, while her right hand remained tightly clasped in his.

"I do not understand you," he said with a pained look.

"Do not let us speak of it now," she replied. "You are ill;--the fever burns in your blood. It likes you well, this Roman fever,--and yet you persist in returning hither ever and ever,--as to your destiny--"

"You are my destiny, Stephania! I cannot live without you! Had you not come, I should have died! God, you cannot know how I love you, how I worship you, how I worship the very air you breathe. Stephania! On that terrible, never-to-be-forgotten day, when your words planted death in my heart, he, who of all my Saxons hates you with a hatred strong and enduring as death, warned me of you! 'Must you love a Roman,' he said to me--'and of all Romans, Stephania, the wife of the Senator? Once in the toils of the Sorceress, you are lost! Nothing can save you.'--Can I say to my heart, you shall love this one,--or you shall not love this one? Shall I say to my soul, you shall harbour the image of this one, but that other shall be to you even as a barred Eden, guarded by the angel with the flaming sword? I have seen the maidens of my native land; I have seen the women of Rome;--but my heart was never touched until we met. My soul leaped forth to meet your own, when first we stood face to face in the chapel of the Confessor. Stephania,--my love for you is so great that I fear you."

"And why should you fear me? Were I here, did I not love you?"

"My life has been a wondrous one," he spoke after a pause. "From dazzling sun-kissed heights I have been hurled into the blackest abyss of despair. And what is my crime? Wherein have I sinned? I have loved a woman,--a woman wondrous fair,--Stephania!"

"You have loved the wife of the Senator of Rome!"

His eyes drooped. For a time neither spoke.

"Thrice have I crossed the Alps, to see, to rule this fabled land,--and now I want but rest,--peace,--Stephania--" he said with a heart-breaking smile.

"You are tired, my love," replied the beautiful Roman. "From this hour, I shall be your leech,--I shall be with you, to share your solitude,--to watch over you till the dread fever is broken. And then--"

"And then?" he repeated with anxious look.

"But will you not weary of me?" she said, avoiding the question.

He drew her close to him.

"My sweetheart---my own--"

"And you will not fear, you will trust and obey me?"

"Were you to give me poison with your own hands, I would drain the goblet without fear or doubt."

Stephania had arisen. She was pale as death.

"If love were all!" she muttered. "If love were all!"

Then she drew the curtains closer and extinguished the light.

*CHAPTER III*

*THE CONSUMMATION*

Some weeks had elapsed since Otto's arrival at Paterno. But the fever which consumed the son of Theophano had not yielded to the skill of the monkish mediciners, though a change for the better had been noticed after the first night of the King's arrival. But it lasted only a short time and all the danger symptoms returned anew. The monks shook their heads and the hooded disciples of Aesculapius conversed in hushed whispers, regarding the strange ailment, which would not cede before their antidotes. But they continued their unavailing efforts to save the life of the last of the glorious Saxon dynasty, the grandson of the vanquisher of the Magyars, the son of the vanquisher of the Saracens.

It was a bleak December evening.

At sunset a mist rose from the fields and the clouds grew heavier with every hour. The rain-drops hung on the branches of the plane-trees, until an occasional stir sent them pattering down.

Otto lay within, asleep.

In the door-way sat Eckhardt, muffled in a cloak. Near-by, half recumbent under a blanket, the cowl drawn over his face, sat the leech, his eyes fixed upon the log-fire on the hearth, as it sent showers of sparks into the murky darkness. In their search for fire-wood the monks had brought from the edge of a neighbouring mill-pond the debris of a skiff, whose planks had for years been alternately soaked in water and dried in the sun. When tossed upon the blaze of forest branches, these fragments emitted an odour sweet as oriental spices and their flames brightened with prismatic tints. But to the leech's brooding gaze their lurid embers seemed touched with the spell of some unholy incantation.

Without the sick-chamber two sentries, chilled and drowsy, leaned against a column supporting the low vaulting, their halberds clasped between their folded arms.

After a pause of some duration, Eckhardt arose and entering Otto's chamber bent over the couch on which he lay. After having convinced himself by the youth's regular breathing that he was resting and did not require his attendance, the Margrave strode from the sick-chamber. The fever was intermittent; now it came, now it left the youth's body. But the pale wan face and the sunken eyes gave rise to the gravest fears.

Night came swiftly and with it the intense hush deepened. Only the pattering of rain-drops broke the stillness. In the sick-chamber nothing was to be heard save the regular breathing of the sleeper.

Thus the hours wore on. After the monk and Eckhardt had departed for the night, the secret panel opened noiselessly and Stephania entered the apartment with a strange expression of triumph and despair in her look. She glanced round, but her eyes passed unheedingly over their surroundings; she saw only that there was no one in the chamber, that no one had seen her enter. There was something utterly desperate in that glance. Noiselessly she stepped to the narrow oval window gazing out into the mist-veiled landscape.

But it seemed without consciousness.

A single thought seemed to have frozen her brain.

She stepped to Otto's couch and for a moment bent over him.

Then she retreated, as if seized with a secret terror.

For a few moments she stood behind him, with closed eyes, her face almost stony with dread and the fear of something unknown.

Near the bed there stood a pitcher which the monks replenished every evening with water cold from a mountain spring. Approaching it, she took a powder from her bosom and shook it into it, every grain. Then she turned the pitcher round and round, to mix the fine powder, which stood on the surface. Suddenly she started, and set it down, while scalding tears slowly coursed down her pale cheeks. Desperate thoughts crowded thickly on her brain, as her stony gaze was riveted on the water, whose crystal clearness had not been clouded by the subtle poison.

"Between us stands the shade of Crescentius," she muttered. "Still I can not cease to love him,--each bound to each,--together, yet perpetually divided,--our love a flower that the hand of death will gather."

Again there was a long, intense hush. She crept to Otto's bed and knelt down by his side, hiding her wet face on her bare arms.

"When he is dead," she continued speaking softly, so as not to wake him, "the unpardonable sin will be condoned.--Otto, Otto,--how I love you,--if I loved you less,--you might live--"

At these words he stirred in the cushions. A deep sigh came from his lips, as if the mountain of a heavy dream had been lifted from his breast.

She drew back terrified, but noting that he did not open his eyes, she spoke with a moan of weariness:

"How often thus in my dreams have I seen his dead face--"

Again she bent over the sleeper. Now she could not discern a breath. A strange dread seized her, and her face became as wan and haggard as that of the fever-stricken youth. Obeying a sudden impulse she removed the pitcher of water, placing it in a remote niche. Then she crept back to Otto's couch.

"Is he dead?" she whispered, as if seized by a strange delirium. "Is he dead? I know not,--yet none knows,--but I! None,--but I!"

She gave a start, as if she had discovered a listener, glanced wildly about the room, at each familiar object in the chamber, and met Otto's eyes.

She raised herself with a gasp of terror, as he grasped her hand.

"Who is dead?" he asked. "And who is it, that alone knows it?"

She stroked the soft fair hair from his clammy brow.

"You are delirious, my love," she whispered. "No one is dead;--you have been dreaming."

"I thought I heard you say so," he replied wearily.

The horror and bewilderment at his awakening at this moment of all, when she required all her strength for her purpose, left her dazed for a moment.

The clock struck the second hour after midnight. The sound cut the air sharply, like a stern summons. It seemed to demand: Who dares to watch at this hour of death?

Otto had again closed his eyes. Delirium had regained its sway. He was whispering, while his fingers scratched on the cover of his couch, as if he were preparing his own grave.

Again he relapsed into a fitful slumber, filled with dreams and visions of the past.

He stands at the banks of the Rhine. The night is still. The moon is in her zenith, her yellow radiance reflected in the calm majestic tide of the river. He hears the sighing, droning swish of the waters; the sinuous dream-like murmuring of the waves resolving into tinkling chimes, far-away and plaintive, that steal up to him in the moon mists, ravishing his soul. In cadenced, languorous rhythm the song of the Rhine-daughters weeps and wooes through the night; their shimmering bodies gleam from the waters in a silvery sphere of light; they seem to beckon to him--to call to him--to lure him back--

"Home! Home!" he cries from the depths of his dream; then his voice becomes inarticulate and sinks into silence.

New phantoms crowded each other, a shifting phantasmagoria of the very beings who at that dreadful hour were most vividly fixed in his mind. And among them stood out the image of the woman, who was kneeling at his side, the woman he loved above all women on earth. Again his lips moved. He called her by name, with passionate words of love.

"Let me not die thus, Stephania! Leave me not in this dreary abyss! Oh! Drive away those infernal spectres that stare in my face," and his words became wild and confused, as all these phantoms seemed to rush on him together, forming lurid groups, flaming and tremulous, like prolonged flashes of lightning, but growing fainter and fainter as they died away, when every faculty of the young sufferer seemed utterly suspended.

Dark clouds passed over the moon.