The Hill of Venus
"Rome is as Ghibelline at this hour as if the Pope had lived forever
at Viterbo!"
The Duke of Spoleto shrugged.
"A passing fever! Many a one's soul is in sympathy with one's snout!"
"You do not love the cowl," Francesco ventured, with a sidelong glance
at his companion, whose nose was in the air as if he sniffed countless
monasteries and convents.
After a time the Duke of Spoleto growled.
"If the world were so perilous a place, were it not more manly to go
out and conquer it than to hide from it like a girl that bars the door
of the room? What if Christ and the apostles had shut themselves up in
stone cells, the grim silence, the half-starved sanctity of the
cloister? What has it done for the world? Men make a patchwork quilt
of life and call the patchwork religion and law!"
He threw the challenge into the balance of his discontent.
Knitting his brows, he continued:
"Speak not of the Church to me! We are bidden to perceive therein the
body of the Lord Christ! But what is it we see? The most complete
mechanism for controlling men, manipulated by human intelligence! You
bid me regard the monks in Italy as holy people in the midst of an
evil world?"
He paused with a dramatic gesture.
"Rank heresy!" he bellowed, answering his own question. "A Church with
no lust of temporal power is unthinkable. The Church requires a
statesman for a leader, not a saint! Behold your saintly Clement at
Viterbo, invoking the divine wrath upon the heads of the just
claimants of these realms! Cast off the garb which disgraces your
manhood! Mount a steed, challenge the devil, and slay dragons!"
Francesco felt heavy at heart.
An inner voice had long apprised him that the duke had recognized the
man beneath the garb, and that he was addressing his confidences to
the ghost of Francesco's self.
Now and then he surprised a sidelong glance, directed towards himself,
as if his burly companion were appraising his manhood, his muscles and
his strides.
His surmise fell not far short of the mark, for after a brief silence
the lord of the woods spat vigorously.
"And howsoever did you happen into the cloth?" he blurted with a blunt
directness, as if eager to dispose of the question.
"That is a long story," Francesco replied. "He, however, who suffered
the most thereby, was least concerned in the cause!"--
The duke nodded, as if the matter were perfectly clear to him.
"You were promised special rewards and dispensations?"
Francesco's look of surprise informed the duke of the nature of the
answer before he spoke.
"He who would sup with the Devil must needs have a long spoon!" the
duke roared sententiously, and apparently well pleased with his own
penetration.
They now travelled upon a more densely populated tract; they passed
wayfarers and pilgrims; great folk on horseback with little folk
licking their stirrup.
They passed an old crone at the roadside, eating her meagre meal out
of a basket. Her fingers were like claws; her eyes were half-shut and
she had wisps of hair on her chin. When she saw the twain, she
scratched her chin with a talon and begged Francesco for a blessing,
which the latter gave, while the duke shouted:
"Shave your chin, old fool! Shave your chin!"
Two hairy beggars, brandishing cudgels, emerged from the thicket.
No sooner did they lay eyes on the duke, than they bounded down the
road and out of sight.
The Duke of Spoleto smote his thighs and laughed like a woodpecker.
They passed two howl-women, making for a near-by castle and practising
their doleful chants.
The duke greeted them with a grotesque bow.
"Why so joyful, fascinating graces?" he bellowed through his auburn
bristles. "Is the fiend assembling a chorus in these regions, to lead
it in procession to hell? I commend his taste!"
The howl-women gibbered some inarticulate response and blew down the
road, to the great delight of the duke.
A fat reeve with heavy saddle-bags and a fiery face whipped a
mouse-colored nag right about and departed the way he came, as soon as
he spied the duke in the distance.
The duke's mirth increased as the mud-sticker, as he called him, took
to flight. He seemed vastly pleased with the respect he inspired.
At last, at a cross-road, they came upon two women in red cloaks and
gaudy tunics, seated on the greensward, with a certain dubious
alertness about the eyes, that glimmered between hunger and
discontent. By their side in the grass lay a viol; they seemed to have
chosen the spot to rest.
As the duke and his companion approached, the twain watched them with
a peculiar, hard-eyed intentness, glanced at each other, and smiled.
"Whither away, my dear?" said the taller of the two. "It is fair
weather for a journey!"--
The duke bowed profusely.
"Fair weather for a good thirst," he replied, nodding at the stone
bottle which reposed in the capacious lap of the speaker.
"You carry a lusty belly," replied the dame, whose eyes had a hungry
boldness, while she offered the bottle to her interlocutor.
The duke took a liberal draught. Francesco frowned.
Then the three chaffered with obvious good humor, touching upon many
topics, which sounded strange to Francesco's ears.
They touched upon the wonders of the swamps, wild beasts, wolves and
bears; they conversed of the outlaws of Arezzo, whose leader was said
to be a woman; of the stone that bled on Passion Sunday, of the
mysterious almond-tree at Treviso, that bore fruit showing the impress
of the face of the Christ.
The duke seemed remarkably well versed in all matters pertaining to
Church or state. When he stopped for a pull at the stone bottle, the
two women laughed, taking alternate bites from an apple and munching
the pulp with a voracious movement of the jaws.
Francesco thought them queer wayfarers, for they in turn stared at
him, then at each other and laughed, looking at Francesco's grave face
as if it were the quaintest thing on earth.
"Saints! What a sweet gentleman!" said the taller of the two, "and to
see such a one in the spider's web!"
And as she sighed, her eyes discoursed to Francesco something that
savored not of the Church.
The fat vagrant offered him the bottle, while her companion's eyes
sent him a tentative offer of friendliness, half timid, half bold.
Francesco passed it by with a flash of the eyes to the horizon, and a
straight setting of the chin.
After having parted from the two rowdies in the fantastic cloaks, the
duke and Francesco continued upon their way.
"There is freedom only on the mountain-heights," the duke said, as
they arrived at a crossing, marked by a huge stone cross. "If this
truth ever dawns upon you, if ever your soul shrinks from the greed
and hypocrisy of the world, if you tire of bloodshed in the name of
the Cross and of villainy glorified by the name of Christ--the camp of
the Duke of Spoleto will receive you, standing face to face with God
alone."
With a hearty hand-shake they parted, and Francesco followed the road
pointed out to him by his companion of the morning hours.
He had taken reluctant leave of the burly champion of a lost cause,
whose very presence seemed to breathe the undefiled air of his great
northern forests, undefiled by the trend of human feet, the echoes of
human strife.
And as Francesco gave a parting look to the high hills with the
glitter of their birch-trees, he suddenly experienced an unexplainable
melting of his resentment against Ilaria.
Something that he could neither describe nor account for, came into
his heart, a subtle emotion, that was like a faint perfume, or the
sound of music from afar. He had hated her for her cold pride when he
left his home; yet, into this tawny cloud of hate flashed the vivid
streak of a sudden recollection.
Every faint zephyr reminded him of her charm; transfused itself into
the mellow brilliancy of her beauty, and Francesco suddenly surprised
himself by taking her part against himself.
And, what was more, he experienced a curiously pleasing sensation in
the act, and in this impulse towards tenderness discovered things that
were strange and long forgotten.
It was now the drowsy noon of day, and the wood was full of shadows
and of stealthy, creeping sunlight.
He rested for a pace, then, refreshed by the siesta, he rode onward,
other thoughts beginning to throng his mind.
He was entering a sphere of action.
Hitherto his life had been as that of a recluse. The peace of the
cloister had enveloped him as a mighty cloak of safety. It had
dominated him even to the point of total paralysis of his energies. Of
the purpose of his journey he was still in ignorance. Yet, an inner
voice whispered to him that it was the clarion call of the Church
Militant that had called him out of his repose.
There could be no further compromise between the warring factions.
The death-struggle between Guelph and Ghibelline had reached its
highest crest. Henceforth he would be the soldier of the Church. A
chasm, no eternity could bridge, would gape between himself and the
friends of his youth. Thus Fate had willed it. Hurled into a seething
vortex, he was swept onward by the resistless tide.
Now and again moments of resonant incredulity beat upon his brain.
Why had his guiltless youth been condemned, why had he been sold into
bondage?
For a moment he started, retreating precipitately into the shadows.
On the far bank of the river, whose glittering coils wound through the
emerald depths of the valley, there, among the aspens, he descried a
company of horsemen, waiting, spears erect, helmets glittering, the
wind tossing the dark manes of their horses.
After a time they rode onward, and he, too, cautiously pursued his
solitary path.
Evening had come.
The rose had faded from the sky; but the horizon was flooded with pale
gold, in which shone the pellucid evening star. The air was filled
with the sweet chimes of innumerable bells.
A group of towers rising above the distant hills cut sharply into the
glory of the sky.
Yonder lay Viterbo amidst her encircling walls: thence those carolling
chimes, that so strangely stirred him, were singing their message of
peace.
His eyes were fixed afar.
Would he turn back?--
The west was smoking with golden vapors. The forests receding on
either hand revealed the hills and summits of the pontifical city. The
old Longobard walls curved away on each hand, for a long distance,
high and grim, with battlements and towers, bare and menacing.
For a moment Francesco paused; his eyes in the tracks of the sinking
sun, his lips tightly set, the nails of his hands driven into his own
flesh.
Then with head high and erect, never a muscle betraying the anguish of
his soul, he rode into the gates of Viterbo.
CHAPTER IV
THE PAWN OF THE CHURCH
When Francesco arrived on the height it was the hour of the closing of
the city-gates and he took lodging at an inn situated near the city
walls.
He caught his breath the next morning at the imposing aspect of the
place.
In the young sunshine its many towers were no longer phantom intruders
on the sky, but a dominant fact. The machicolated heights, the
encircling ramparts, the stern outlines of the fortress-palace of the
pope, rose proudly impregnable in the air.
On the broad highways from Umbria, Tuscany and Romagna, even at this
early hour, an almost endless stream of humanity was moving. Many a
clerk and prelate was there, superbly arrayed, mounted on steeds gay
with princely trappings. Fair women took in the freshness of the day.
Pilgrims with staff and shell trudged merrily or wearily on. Jewish
merchants, serious of face, bore packs containing valuable
merchandise. For Viterbo lay on the highway, linking Northern and