The Hill of Venus
and gathered up his scant belongings. A last look round the walls he
had learned to love, then he crept softly out into the corridor.
Everywhere he met the rush and hubbub of hurried preparation for
departure. No one heeded him. The hall below seemed to yawn beneath
him like a black pit as he descended.
Crossing the courtyard amidst throngs of pages, squires, and
pursuivants, he made for the stables, saddled his steed, and rode out
by the postern, unheeded, unchallenged.
The land of his heart's desire had vanished behind him, like the
fairy-land of golden sunset dreams that fades away when darkness
comes.
CHAPTER VII
THE PASSAGE
Francesco rode out into the scented night and the round yellow moon
rode with him. Strange things were happening beneath that moon; in the
crucible of destiny a new life was forming, new feelings arising on
the ashes of the old. And Francesco's heart was slowly undergoing a
change as he rode through the night into a season of darkness,
inevitable, irrevertible.
Ahead of him the great road stretched white in the moonlight, a broad
ribbon which lost itself among hills and in the shadows of trees. In
his ears was the thunder of his horse's feet, pounding insistent
clamor into the quiet of the night. He would have desired wings for
his steed; the wind of the speed of his going swept cool against his
face. The night was gray around him, a velvet moon-steeped darkness,
odorous with the fragrance of breaking earth. Far away the
deep-throated bay of a dog rose and died across the world. A bell
note, thinned by distance to a faint dream sound, stole over silent
hill and dale; peace seemed to wrap the world round as in a cloister
garden. With every mile that now carried him farther away from his
Eden, from his garden of dreams, from his lost youth, new scenes
unrolled themselves before him. Off in the wide Apulian plains lights
twinkled here and yonder, wakeful eyes of watchfulness among the
hills. He passed pale glimmering bogs, where lonely herons brooded,
and wide barren heaths, over which the road led straight as an arrow's
flight.
As the miles reeled away under him, his restlessness began to increase
with the sweep of his horse's stride. Vague forms seemed to slip by
him in the shadows; in every bush beside the road he saw white faces
lurking. Strange, half-formed impressions of the new life he was about
to enter upon, haunted him; strange forms in monkish garbs seemed to
pass him in the gloom of the night and vanish silently as ghosts.
Later he could not tell if he had seen them, or if they had been but
the excrescences of his fevered brain. For always, when he had
endeavored to rouse himself and look about him sanely, the road
stretched before him white and desolate.
The weight of the hours past, yet more the presage of those to come,
had crushed Francesco's spirit with merciless relentlessness. He was
yet too young to realize the healing power of time, how it bears
forgetfulness on its kindly wings, how its shadow becomes finally a
shield, by which the keen daggers of remembrance are blunted and
turned aside. He did not know that the human soul can suffer only so
far, that greater miseries efface the memory of the lesser. The irony
of his parting from Ilaria, to him forever lost, her cruel words, had
stabbed his soul to the quick, and to himself he appeared to have
entered into a dismal, dreary land, a boundless valley of shadows.
As he rode on, at a wild and reckless pace, the only human being on
that wide expanse, all sense of pain and misery left the son of
Gregorio Villani for the time, even all consciousness of the region
which he traversed. He could not stop; it seemed an iron weight would
crush him to earth, while, at the same time, a force against which he
could not struggle drove him on. His brain seemed to be on fire; balls
of flame danced before his eyes; while he looked upon them, they
turned to faces grinning from out a blood-red mist. The faces drew
closer and melted into one, Ilaria's face, as he had seen it last,
white in its marble-cold disdain, with scarlet lips and flaming
poppies in her dark scented hair.
Then the mist in his eyes cleared suddenly, and he saw the figure
below the face, wreathed in a floating web of moonlight, through which
white limbs gleamed, while the dusky hair streamed behind it as a
cloud. Again, as he looked, the form was flying from him upon a great
white horse. And as it flew, it looked back at him with laughing,
witch-like eyes, Ilaria's eyes, as he was wont to see them, and in its
hand it bore a wan pale flame which was his soul. And, with the
fleeting vision, there came to him the realization that he had forever
lost that for which all men strive, which all men hold most dear: life
and love; and all his being leaped to the fierce desire to break the
oath that bound him to that other sphere,--the Church. But fast as his
good steed went, with ears laid back and neck outstretched and body
flattened to the desperate headlong stride, that great white horse
went faster, bearing ever just beyond his reach the slender form
veiled in misty moonbeams, the face with the laughing eyes and the
marble-cold disdain.
He laughed aloud in answer, caught up in the whirlwind of his furious
speed; heaven and earth held nothing for him but the frenzy of desire.
Fire of life, the life he had cast from him, coursed through his
veins; the chase was life itself, exultant, all-conquering, sublime.
He had no eyes for the road ahead. Ahead was the darkness of the great
forests. A stride, and he was within their shadows. The moon was
blotted out by the blackness of the trees; and with it had faded the
vision, gone like a wreath of smoke, or a dream that is lost in
darkness. Francesco reeled in his saddle; his steed thundered on, the
reins loose upon its neck, through the damp silence of the wood, where
night hung heavy, thence out into the open, where again the road
gleamed white and desolate beneath the moon.
And at last the moon was gone and the light went out of the world, and
he knew himself for a soul cast into outer darkness. His mind was
blank. He knew not whether he lived or died, nor did he care. He lived
in a nebulous void of gray unconsciousness, horribly empty of all
thought and all sensation.
And thus he rode onward on the road to his destiny.
End of Book the First.
Book the Second
THE PILGRIMAGE
CHAPTER I
THE VIGIL OF SANTA MARIA ASSUNTA
On the summit of a conical hill, rising above the great amphitheatre
of forests that skirt the sunny Apulian plains, upon the ruins of a
temple to Apollo and in a grove sacred to Venus here, in the sixth
century had arisen the model of western monasticism, the cloisters of
Monte Cassino.
From its sun-kissed heights the view extended on one side towards
Arpinum where the Prince of Roman orators was born, on the other,
towards Aquinum, already famous as the birth-place of Juvenal.
Scarcely a pope or emperor of note there was who had not been
personally connected with its history. From its mountain crags it had
seen Goths, Lombards, Saracens and Normans devastate the land, had
witnessed the death struggle between Guelph and Ghibelline, the
discomfiture of Rome, and the extinction of imperial dynasties.
Up to the chapter house of the great Order of Benedict of Nursia,
enthroned upon that predestined height, Francesco slowly and wearily
made his way. After a night, even more restless than the preceding
one, he had journeyed all day, wishing, yet dreading, to behold his
ultimate goal. And as he slowly rode up the hill his heart sank with
the sheer weight of his misery.
It was evening.
An immense silence, full of sadness, had fallen upon the world. The
distant mountains were lost in a dome of roseate fire, which reached
almost to the horizon, bordered by a line of pallid gold. Only in the
west, like the very Host, the sun, shrouded in golden mists, hung in
the heavens over the mystery of the sea. Slowly the light was
changing. It was the moment of Benediction. Great tongues of flame
stole into the firmament; the hills took fire from the splendor of the
skies. Across the world lay the shadow of the Mountain. The earth
seemed as a smoking censer.
As one wrapped in a dream, Francesco gazed across the land. Far and
away in the Umbrian plains a fire shone like a star fallen to earth;
then another and another. Castellazzara flamed on the mountain;
Proceno, Aquapendente, Elciola and Paladino in the plains. Torre
Alfina high in the mountains lighted her beacon; San Lorenzo in the
valley answered it. Every hamlet chanted "Magnificat" and the hills
answered: "Salve Regina!"
It was the Vigil of Santa Maria Assunta.
From the cloisters above came the sound of many droning voices. They
seemed to intensify the stillness, rather than to disturb it.
At last he paused before the great southern entrance to the cloisters.
He pulled rein, but did not dismount. He was suddenly overwhelmed with
a feeling strong enough to bow his head and to call from his lips a
deep, heartbroken groan. After three days of freedom unspeakably
blessed he was now to enter the gates which would shut him in away
from the world of life, away from the world of men, perhaps for all
his remaining existence. Three brief days! That short time had
dispelled from his spirit the dull crust of insensibility, with which
he had striven to clothe it. He was once more to be laid bare to the
lash of inward rebellion from which he shrank in horror. A pardoned
prisoner recondemned to death,--it was easily compared to the life to
which he must voluntarily resign himself; that endless existence of
religious slavery from whose soul-crushing monotony there was no
escape, but death.
Why no escape? Francesco stood there alone in the falling darkness.
None in the cloisters had been advised of his coming. He might
yet--With a tightening of the lips he leaped from his horse and gave
the customary signal.
After a wait of brief duration a lay-brother appeared, opened the
gates and Francesco Villani entered the precincts of Monte Cassino.
Without stating the reasons of his presence, he requested to be
forthwith conducted into the presence of the Prior, and the monk,
after having cared for Francesco's steed, and attended to his behest,
returned after a short time and bade him follow. Arrived at the
Prior's apartment, his guide knocked for admission. The door swung
inward and Francesco entered alone.
The Prior had just finished a special devotion in a small oratory
adjoining his chamber and was now seated before a massive oaken table,
on which there lay a curiously illuminated parchment, from whose azure
and golden initials Francesco's eyes turned shudderingly to the form
of Romuald, Prior of Monte Cassino.
His great and powerful frame was so worn with vigils and fasts that it
seemed like that of a huge skeleton. He regarded the youth, whose
courtly garb and manners would not have remained unremarked even in
the most brilliant assembly, with an air of austerity mingled with
apathy, which age and long solitude might well have engendered and,
after a few brief words of welcome such as took little from
Francesco's sense of forlornness, he bade the youth be seated.
Without attempt at delay or circumlocution the son of the Grand
Master placed his father's letter in the Prior's hands, while he
turned his face from this living Memento Mori in the garb which
henceforth must be evermore his own.
Francesco seated himself upon a settle, while the Prior weighed the
letter absently in his hand as one undecided whether or not to
acquaint himself with its contents. At last he broke the seal and,
with the aid of a torch whose flickering light drew Francesco's