The Hill of Venus
servants of the Church," he replied with a straight look at Anjou, "to
suppress the spirit when it suited them to do so."
At these words a change, visible even in the shadows, crossed the
features of the Provencal leader.
"The spirit is capable of various interpretations," he snarled with a
vicious glare at the young monk, whose air of loathing had stung him
to the quick.
"But not the instrument," Francesco retorted hotly.
Clement at this point thought fit to interpose, yet not without a
sting of rebuke to the brother of Louis of France.
"The Church requires not her subjects to think for her, nor to
interpret her spirit. What she exacts, is unfaltering obedience!"
There was something in the Pontiff's tone which startled Francesco. He
was conscious that Clement avoided touching on the business of his
summons to Rome, as if to force him to betray his own trend of mind.
Yet he shrank unwittingly from uttering the words which hovered on his
lips. He felt instinctively there was no mercy within these walls, and
at the thought he was seized with a secret dread.
The silence at last grew irksome. Francesco felt a cold hand clutching
at his heart.
If the sacrifice had been in vain! If he had been tricked into selling
his birthright, tricked into bartering his happiness for a shroud! He
felt the flood-gates of his memory re-open; he felt the portals of the
past, which had been locked and barred, swing back upon their hinges,
grating deep down into his soul. The mad longing for the world bounded
back into his heart.
Still the Pontiff did not speak.
"I have been summoned from Monte Cassino," Francesco at last spoke
with an assumption of courage which he was far from feeling. "I am
waiting the commands of your Holiness!"
The Pontiff nodded.
"These are grievous times indeed; the Church must needs summon her
faithful about her, to become militant in her service!"
"What would your Holiness have me do?" said Francesco.
"The service that will be demanded of you is to be commensurate with
the boon you have come to ask at our hands," Clement replied at last.
For a moment Francesco stared speechless at the Pontiff. Clement had
read the very depths of his soul.
"When I entered the monastic life," he said at last, "it was
stipulated that at the expiration of a certain period the burden
should be lightened."
"Conditions?" replied Clement, with a slight contraction of the brows.
"The Church demands unconditional surrender! Are you so very anxious
to be relieved of the garb which befits the servant of God?"
"There are various ways to serve the Church," Francesco replied in a
hard voice.
Clement bent serious brows upon him.
"We must subdue the mind for the sake of the mind! The boon you are
about to ask might be granted--in return for some signal service to
the Church!"
Francesco's eyelids narrowed.
"And this service,--what is it?"
He saw the Pontiff and Charles of Anjou exchange glances.
What new traffic were they about to propose to him?
He looked about the circle of ecclesiastics.
He met but the reflection of the Pontiff's quizzical glances.
"We require a special envoy to Naples, to calm the minds of the
disaffected. Our choice has fallen upon you. On the result of your
mission depends the granting of the boon."
Francesco made no reply.
What could he urge in his own behalf that was not defeated in the
utterance?
He was no match for Clement in subtlety and, though he could not
fathom the reasons governing Clement's choice of himself to treat, as
he surmised, with the Neapolitans, he recognized therein the desire on
the part of the Pontiff to strike his enemies through one of their
own.
"What are the commands of your Holiness?" he said at last.
"You will receive your instructions from the Cardinal of Cosenza," the
Pontiff replied calmly.
"Your audience is concluded," the latter whispered into Francesco's
ear. He approached the pontifical dais as one in a dream; and, after
the customary genuflection and the ceremony of kissing the Pontiff's
feet, he passed out of the audience-chamber into the sun-fraught air
of noon, the Pontiff's "Go in peace!" still ringing in his ears.
The personality of Clement had not passed from him without a deep
impress. Here was a man created in the type of his predecessors,
Alexander IV and Urban IV, a man who shrank from nothing that would
advance the cause of the Church.
Thinking of the audience which had just come to a close, a heavy sense
of defeat weighed Francesco down. His resistance had been utterly
swept away; in vain had he waited for a power that did not come to
uplift him and release.
The chasm between the life of the present and the life of the past
gaped ever wider. By some invincible force he was being hurried onward
to a dark and uncertain goal.
In the language of the East, he had his fate bound about his neck.
There was no escape for him. Vainly as he might cast about him for an
anchor, he saw nothing encompassing him but a great void. From the old
life he was barred forevermore. The future appeared as a country bleak
and unredeemed.
Towards evening he rode out of the gates of Viterbo. From its mountain
height the pontifical palace frowned upon the world below with stern
defiance, its architecture expressive of the asceticism, defensive of
the soldier, rather, than the asceticism, contemplative of the saint.
Thus he rode out into the deepening dusk.
CHAPTER V
THE RED TOWER
With the first pulse of dawn in the East, Francesco was up and astir
with the zest of the hour. The woods were full of golden vapor, of dew
and the chanting of birds. A stream sang under the boughs, purling and
foaming over a broad ledge of stone into a misty pool. A blue sky
glimmered above the glistening tree-tops; the dwindling wood-ways
quivered with the multitudinous madrigals of the dawn.
A strange calm encompassed him, as he rode down the castle hill into a
wood of ilex where the dawn freshness still lingered. The rebellious
temper of his mood sank like a sea beneath the benediction of a god.
His was not a soul that bartered through carven screens for penitence
and peace. His face caught a radiance from the vaultings of the trees.
Around him ran wooded hills, streams and pastures, dusted thick with
flowers. The odors of dawn burdened the breeze. In the distance the
purple heights of Viterbo faded into the azure of the sky.
Southward he rode, towards Circe's land. The far heights bristled with
woodlands, shimmering with magic mystery under the rising sun. The
forest spires were smitten with a glamor of gold. Precipice and wooded
heights were solitary as the sea itself.
Francesco had left Viterbo exalted, liberated, glad. The prospect of
high endeavor had lifted him out of his melancholy. His mind, overawed
by the spirit, was for the time set free from that intellectual
restlessness and moral incertitude, which against his will had grown
up in him in the atmosphere wherein he moved.
He was the messenger of the Church, bound for the Neapolitan court on
a mission aiming to restore the Southern Italian cities to the control
of him who was the Vicar of Christ on earth. For a moment even the
paradox did not distress him. Enough that he was under marching
orders, that the walls of Monte Cassino lay far behind him. Surely the
time was coming when loyalty to Church and country would be as one! If
he might only meet some great outward test, he mused, some great
trial, in which, to his own mind, as to the world, his convictions
might shine forth!
All he saw and heard confirmed the dark insinuations of the Duca di
Spoleto; yet the fact of decision had soothed his bewilderment, and
there was hope of action ahead. Meantime he allowed himself to react
passively on the impressions of the way. He was entertained with
making acquaintances all along the route. Nothing in his graceful
aspect betrayed the religious, and people, not suspecting his errand
talked to him with the frankness to which excited times give birth. On
all lips there was the same tale; the cause of the League of Italian
cities against the Pope was filling young and old with chivalric
passion. From the lower undulations of Tuscany, through the valleys of
the Apennines, in the levels of Emilia, everywhere waved the
Florentine banner, blood red, with its flashing motto: "Libertas." It
fanned the fire of a patriotism which he was compelled to recognize as
pure, of that proud spirit of independence and hatred of oppression
which has created the free cities of Italy. Not for the last time
united protest against foreign tyranny was stilling petty strife and
evoking the national consciousness, which even Dante was vainly to
long for. And Francesco's spirit was swift to respond to the call. How
otherwise? Was he not young? Was he not, too, a man, to whom country
and race were dear?
But as he continued upon his way, as with his steady advance the
forests gradually thinned and he began the descent into the plains of
the Campagna, the image of Ilaria was constantly before him. Where was
she? What was she doing? The thought brought with it a troubled
bewilderment. Possessed like himself of a love of beauty, like himself
consumed by a restlessness tremulous for something not quite clearly
understood, this fine and beautiful creature would be ill at ease in
the rough life of the feudal castle. That in the one case the
restlessness might be reaching upwards, in the other, downwards.
Francesco was too loyal to surmise. What good days they had known, he
and she! Together they had watched the play of light on the mountain
slopes, or over the great faint-gleaming lands within the soft curve
of whose farthest blue they could divine the sea; together the two
dark heads had bent over some vellum roll of Lariella's favorite poet.
And again she stood before him; the perfectly arched eyebrows, the
wide forehead, the sweet curves that had dimpled in girlish days
beneath a shadowy crown, greeted him from a dusky frame. With the
increased perfection of her person went, he soon perceived, a trained
and practised instinct for all the graces of life. As she had appeared
to him in Rome, she had been more charming than ever before.
Too charming, alas! to remain unapproached by desire,--and too
reckless, perchance, to resist!
With a jerk he reined in his steed.
Of a sudden, the fears that had been squirming below consciousness
heaved up their heads and Francesco heard himself cry aloud:
"God! If one's lady of the stars should prove a wanton!"--
The uttered words struck cold upon his ear. He had stopped abruptly,
throwing his open palm against the rough bark of a tree. The hurt
mixed with the sound of his own voice.
Dismounting, he permitted the disturbed animal to graze in an adjacent
meadow-land; then, invaded by the terror of the fact, he flung himself
face downward, pressing his cheek into the wet grass, recalling every
too significant word and look of the Proserpina of yore, thrilled in
his senses by her last glance at him and troubled by a passion he
despised. Slowly to the first pain, with which the image of his
dream-lady faded, there succeeded another. The friend of his youth,
the one woman he loved,--what was befalling her? Was she happy? Had
the memory of the past faded from her mind? This pain was sharper than
the other, though Francesco knew it not. It healed the pang of fleshly
desire.
He called to his steed, mounted, and rode on with a new gravity.
According to his curious wont in concrete experience, his relations
with Ilaria became the index to wider questionings.
The old spell had been renewed, with a difference, and Francesco found
himself trembling on the verge of a genuine passion. Through the