The Hill of Venus
himself to be one Count Rupert of Teck, a bondsman of the Swabian
branch of the Hohenstauffen, near whose castle his own was situated.
In their cause he had fought Margaret of Flanders and King Ottokar of
Bohemia, William of Holland and Charles of Anjou. After the fateful
day of Benevento, where Manfred, the poet-king, had lost crown and
life against the Provencals, he had withdrawn into the fastnesses of
Central Italy, collecting about him a company of malcontents, such as
follow from afar the camp-fires of an army, and had founded a mythical
dukedom of uncertain territory among the Apennines, to chasten the
world with his club and bruise the devil and all his progeny. From his
stronghold the Duke of Spoleto, as Rupert of Teck more sonorously
styled himself, harassed alike the Pope, the Pope's minion and the
Guelphs. But of all whose watch-towers frowned from inaccessible
heights upon the Roman Campagna, he bore a special and indelible
grudge to the lords of Astura, the cause and nature of which he did
not see fit to disclose.
Francesco listened spellbound to the account of the duke's greatness.
He had his own code of laws, and there was no appeal from his
decision. In the ravine below, a torrent, thundering over moss-grown
boulders, sang a fitting accompaniment to the duke's apotheosis. Far
to the south Soracte towered against the gold of the evening sky. By
his side a cistus was in bloom, its petals falling upon the long grass
and the broken stone.
In the valley the peasantry were returning from Vespers. The silvery
chimes of the Angelus, from some convent concealed in the forest
deeps, smote the silence of evening. Deep to the confines of the dusky
sky glimmered the far Tyrrhenian Sea, washing shores remote with
sheets of foam. Black cliffs, craggy and solemn, frowned upon the sea.
The far heights bristled with woodland, dark under the setting sun.
Not once did Francesco interrupt the guttural account his host gave of
his campaigns, until the Duke of Spoleto referred to the Frangipani.
Some evil fate seemed indeed to have predestined his meeting with the
Lord of Astura, and while his late encounter with the brother of
Raniero lacked the personal element, Francesco's intuition informed
him that, sooner or later, the slumbering spark of an enduring hatred
would be fanned into a devouring flame.
Francesco's apparently irrelevant question with regard to the origin
of his host's acquaintance with the lords of Astura caused the Duke of
Spoleto to utter a great oath.
"Ha!" he exclaimed, "and shall I not pluck out the heart of the devil,
who--"
He suddenly checked himself.
"Though an avowed Ghibelline," he said, "I trust him not! His brother
Latino lords it over Velletri: Archbishop and Grand Inquisitor in one,
he deals out blessings and musty corn, while he mutters the prayer of
the Fourth Innocent in the Lateran: Perdatis hujus Babylonii nomen et
reliquias, progeniem atque germen,--a truly Christian prayer!"
"There is a third!" Francesco interposed with meaning.
"You know him?" shouted the duke. "A twig of the old tree,--a
libertine, who would barter his soul for thirty pieces of silver! From
yonder hill you may see their lair, suspended on a rock beyond the
Cape of Circe."
The speaker suddenly paused and, turning to Francesco, gave a vicious
pull at the latter's garb.
"Cast off your tatters," he roared, and the sound of his great voice
reechoed through the glen. "Join us in a Devil's Ave! Your limbs were
made for something better than to dangle in the noose of a Frangipani.
Or,--if the garb is pleasing in your sight you may wear it over a suit
of chain-mail and lead us in the fray with lance and shield! It will
greatly promote our cause,--above and below!"
And the stout duke grasped Francesco by the shoulders, affectionately,
and shook him till his bones creaked.
Francesco repressed the outcry which the pain drove to his lips. A
spasm of deepest bitterness passed over his face, as he said:
"It may not be;--at least not now! I have a special mission to
perform. The time may come--who knows? Then I will seek you in your
forest glades. I have not always been that thing--a monk!"
The word had passed his lips beyond recall.
Rupert of Teck regarded him quizzically.
"Purge your own pasture and let the Devil take care of his own! Why
subordinate your soul to chains forged of men?"
The day was waning when Francesco accompanied his host back to the
ruin. An arched doorway with broken pillars led to a low room, roofed
with rough timber. There was an improvised bed of bracken in one
corner, where he was to rest for the night, for the Duke of Spoleto
would not hear of his departure before dawn.
"It were perilous even for one familiar with the roads to traverse the
forests at night; there are more rogues about than you wot of," he
said. "On the morrow I will myself guide you to the road you seek!"
Francesco accepted the offer and hospitality of the Duke of Spoleto
gratefully, for he was neither physically nor mentally disposed to
continue his journey at once. They entered the ruin together, while
the band of the duke chose their resting-place outside on the emerald
greensward.
Night came apace with a round moon swimming in a sky of dusky azure,
studded with a myriad glistening stars.
There was a great loneliness upon Francesco's soul.
He lay awake a long time. He heard the night wind in the forest trees
and the occasional murmur of a voice, that seemed to be making a long
prayer. He was moving in the world of men now. Yet all the love seemed
to have left his life and all his struggles to have ended in
bitterness. In the hour of his trial Ilaria had failed him, had hid
her face from him behind the mask of scorn. He had little hope of
sleep, for there were thoughts moving in his brain, tramping like
restless sentinels to and fro. The night seemed full of ghostly voices
crying to him out of the dark. He heard Ilaria's voice, even as he had
heard it when she taunted him at Avellino; her laughter in the dells
of Vallombrosa echoed in his heart. He remembered the days when he had
heard her sing with the voice he loved so well; for him she would sing
no more. He found himself wondering in his heart if she would weep if
he died. Perhaps her scorn would melt away when she learned that he
had gone from earth forever.
Francesco passed the greater part of the night open-eyed, for the
memories of the past drove the sleep from his aching eyes. A soft
breeze played in the branches of the giant oaks, and among the roses
which clambered about the walls of the ruin. Slim cypresses streaked
the misty grass, where a little pool caught the light of the moon.
Soon the dawn came, a silvery haze rising in the east. The cypresses
caught the streaming light, gliding from tree to tree; in the meadows
fluttered golden mists. The far woods glistened and seemed to tongue
forth flame. A trumpet sounded. The duke's band rose to meet the sun.
After having partaken of a morning repast, such as the duke's stores
afforded, Francesco took leave of his host, who assigned to him a
guide, to conduct him to the broad highway to Rome. But, at parting,
the burly duke admonished Francesco to break the fetters forged in
hell and to turn to him in his hour of need.
The world was full of the splendor of the awakened day. The waves of
the mountain torrent were touched with opalescent lights, as they
swept through the gorge below.
Francesco's guide was a godly little man with a goat's beard and a
nose like the snout of a pike. For a goatherd he was amazingly learned
in matters of religion and in his knowledge of the names and
attributes of the saints. He halted frequently, knelt down, prayed and
kissed a little holly-wood cross that he carried. His beard wagged
through long processions of the saints, but St. Joseph of Arimathaea
was honored with his especial confidence.
Francesco had never seen such an example of secular godliness before,
and began to be impatient with the old fellow, who bobbed down so
frequently, looking like a goat squatting upon its haunches, and
mumbling over a great beard. All this devotion was excellent in its
way; but Francesco's religion was running into action, and the old man
loitered and told the miles like beads upon his rosary.
He decided to rid himself of the fellow as soon as the goatherd had
served his purpose, for this verminous piety was like the drawing of a
dirty clout across the fresh flavor of a May morning.
Where four roads crossed, they parted, and Francesco, cantering along
the high-road, little guessed that the wary duke had assigned to him
this especial guide to disgust him with his own garb and calling.
CHAPTER VII
ROME!
The chimes of the Angelus were borne to him on the soft breeze of
evening, when, on the third day of his journey, Francesco caught sight
of the walls and towers of Rome. As he drew rein on the crest of a low
hill, the desolate brown wastes of the Campagna stretched before him,
mile upon mile to northward, towards the impenetrable forests of
Viterbo.
Before him rose the huge half-ruined wall of Aurelian, battered by
Goth and Saracen and imperial Greek; before him towered the
fortress-tomb of the former master of the world, vast and impregnable.
Here and there above the broken crenelations of the city's battlements
rose dark and massive towers, square and round, marking the fortified
mansions of the Roman nobles.
In the evening light the towers seemed encircled as by a halo. The
machicolated heights, the encircling ramparts, the stern tomb of the
Emperor Hadrian rose proudly impregnable into the golden air of
evening, a massive witness to the power of a Church, literally
militant here below. Under the broad Aelian bridge, built centuries
ago, rolled the turbid waves of the Tiber, and upon the bridge itself
a stream of humanity, hardly less intermittent, was moving. Francesco,
having buried his sword and shield under a grass-grown ruin beyond
the city walls, rode dazed and wondering into the sun-kissed splendors
of pontifical Rome.
Gradually the sun sank, the valley of the Tiber filled with golden
lights, moving along little by little, travelling slowly up the
emerald hillocks, covering the bluish mountains of Alba with a golden
flush, crowning the thousand churches and palaces with a rosy sheen,
then dying away into the pale, amber horizon, rosy where it touched
the distant hills, bluish where it merged imperceptibly with the upper
sky. Bluer and bluer became the hills, deeper and deeper that first
faint amber. The valleys were filled with gray-blue mist, against
which the Seven Hills stood out dark, cold and massive.
There was a sudden stillness, as when the last chords of a great
symphony have died away. The yellow waters of the Tiber eddied sullen
and mournful round the ship-shaped island, along by Vesta's temple,
beneath the cypressed Aventine.
After having secured temporary lodging at a tavern bearing the sign of
the Mermaid, over against the tower of Nona, near the bridge of San
Angelo, Francesco wandered out into the streets of Rome.
The inn was old, as the times of Charlemagne, and was a favorite
stopping-place for travellers coming from the north. The quarter was
at that time in the hands of the powerful house of the Pierleoni,
whose first Pope, Anacletus, had been dead a little over a century,
and who, though they lorded the castle and many towers and fortresses
in Rome, had not succeeded in imposing their anti-pope upon the Roman
people against the will of Bernard of Clairvaux.
Francesco wandered through the crooked, unpaved streets, in and out of
gloomy courts, over desolate wastes and open places. There was a
crisis at hand in the strife of the factions. Every one went armed,