The Hill of Venus
vessel of our lives into different channels,--but that at last I may
stand vindicated in your sight. I am the son of Gregorio Villani,
Grand Master of the Order of St. John. My mother died at my birth. I
was raised at the Court of Avellino. So powerful was the influence of
my father, that, notwithstanding the protests of the Holy See, he
placed his offspring at a Ghibelline court. There came a day when I
was summoned to the bedside of my father at San Cataldo. What passed
between us during that interview, neither you nor any one on earth may
know. I went into his room a happy, care-free youth. I came out the
shadow of my former self,--a monk. One year I lived among shadows in
the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino. There I took the vows
which made me a prisoner, far more closely bound than you can know;
for death alone shall release me from a life which has grown to be a
torture. I became a monk half from pity, half from fear. The pity is
almost gone; the fear has left me long ago. After a time I was called
to Rome. The Church I love not! I am unfit to remain in her service.
The monks are to me a hateful body. Willingly, gladly, would I see my
scapular replaced by the tunic for my coffin. Yet death is not for me
to hope for, or even to dream of,--and in vain I ask, what holds the
future?"
Ilaria's head had drooped over his; her eyes wandered blindly over the
ground. Then a warm drop fell to the stone at her feet.
During his recital the very soul in Francesco seemed to have withered
with dread, and he seemed to shrivel up bodily and to grow feeble and
old and wilted, as a leaf that the frost has touched.
"The memory pains you," she said at last.
He bit his lips.
"Deem you, I forget when I am silent? But it is not the thing itself
that haunts me! It is the fact that I have lost the power over
myself--"
"You have suffered--"
"It is the fact that I have come to the end of my courage,--to the
point where I find myself a coward!"
"Surely there is a limit to what one may bear--"
"And he who has once reached that limit never knows when he may reach
it again!"
He looked up with a sudden piteous catching of the breath.
"What will you do?" she spoke after a pause.
He held her hands in a close, passionate clasp. A silence that seemed
to have no end had fallen about them.
"My allotted task," he said at last, in a voice more dead than alive.
"No,--no,--no--!" she started up suddenly. "Cannot you see,--will you
never understand--oh! the bitterness, the misery of it all!"
She clung to him with all her might.
"Come away with me! What have you to do with this dead world of
priests and monks! They are full of the dust of bygone ages! Come out
of this plague-ridden Church,--come with me into the sunlight! I love
you--I have always loved you,--always--"
She bent blindly towards him.
"Take me away from here,--Francesco,--take me away from here! Since I
came here my feet seem to have grown heavy with this lotus-laden air.
At times it sweeps over me like desperation,--I lose the faculty of
thinking, I lose the power over myself!"
"I thought you were at Astura!" he said tentatively, the affair in the
Red Tower flashing through his consciousness.
She gave a quick start.
"I am a woman, and I stand alone! I have lived in hell ever since I
set foot in Astura. Almost have I lost the courage to look life in the
face. How I have wanted you!" she continued, with a wan, wistful
smile. "Ever I see you standing against the background of a great
silence, a silence that engulfs, that maddens, that kills! And you
will go from me, leave me a prey to this gray, suffocating loneliness,
which hovers as a pall over my soul! I am nothing to Raniero! He seeks
his pleasures elsewhere! The lure of the body drove him to me,--it has
vanished,--thank God even for that! I should die in his embrace. He
knows that I loathe him, that my soul spurns him! And he knows that I
love you! Yet, though he has forfeited every right, human and divine,
he grudges my love to another. For days and days he left me alone
within the gray walls of Astura, until in a fit of desperation I left
one night, and came here, to forget. His insults began in Rome. He
went so far as to bring his mistress to the Frangipani palace. I have
heard it whispered there is a curse on Astura. 'Astura--mala
terra,--maledetta!' A beggar uttered these words, whom Raniero struck
for obstructing his path, on the day when we arrived!"
A sudden blood-red cloud seemed to come before Francesco's eyes. With
a voice bare of intonation, he recited his own adventure in the Red
Tower, voicing his suspicions and fears.
Ilaria betrayed no surprise.
"He has never forgiven Fonte Gaia," she said, with drooping head. "And
yet he was untrue to me even then! From that hour matters began to
grow worse. Recklessly he cast the last semblance of decorum to the
winds. When I protested against living under the same roof with his
mistress, he smilingly brought me to Astura, leaving me, as he said,
in undisturbed possession. My youth destroyed, my soul poisoned, I
accepted my fate! I am the lady of the Frangipani! Sold, and bought,
and paid for!"
Ilaria had made mere truth of the matter, neither justifying nor
embellishing. Her clear, bleak words were the more pathetic for their
very simpleness.
With a great cry, he took her in his arms, kissed her dusky tresses,
kissed her flower-soft face. The dimmed sunlight, falling in upon
them, enveloped them as with a halo.
"And you are happy here?" he spoke at last.
She gave a shrug.
"Here as elsewhere it is a phantom scene," she said, with her wan
smile. "But if the fellowship of phantoms be ordained, it is well that
they be like those of Naples, radiant."
"Am I too, then, a phantom like the rest?"
Like an echo a voice said:
"A phantom--like the rest."
"And is he--a phantom too?"
She looked up into his eyes.
"Raniero--"
"That other--"
Her face was very pale.
"Why do you dwell on him?"
"Are you not Queen of Phantoms,--Proserpina,--Lady of Shadows, you--as
in the masque at Avellino?"
She shivered in his arms. He pressed her more closely to his heart.
"It was a long time ago!"
"And then as now you moved in a masque, in which I have no part."
A long silence enfolded them. She nestled close to him.
"I am tired,--very tired," she crooned, as a child about to fall
asleep. "Francesco, help me to forget the years! I am afraid!"
"Afraid?"
"Of myself! Sometimes I dare not be alone at night! No,--no,--it is
not that! The inner darkness! There is no weeping there,--only
silence,--silence,--and the gathering gloom!"
She held his hands in her own.
"But for this," she cried with passionate pressure, "I should long
have cursed God and died--"
Her voice died away in the empty stillness without response.
"It is peace I crave," she said wearily, "a peace, such as broods over
a sunset world!"
"The peace of a dying day!" he replied. "The peace I seek is of a day
that stoops not to evening."
"And this peace,--have you found it?"
Her eyes were fixed gravely on his own.
"I am as one who gropes in twilight by a path half seen, towards a
goal he does not know. Not for me the peace of the goal! But there is
peace also of the quest: a peace I would not forego!"
They had arisen and walked for a time in silence, seeking the remoter
regions of the garden. The softened siesta lights gave to the distant
hills an aspect of pearl and jasper.
It was drawing towards sunset; red banners streaked the amethyst of
the western sky.
A saffron mist enveloped the curves of Vesuvius, shot with gold and
crimson, merging in dusky purple. In the plains the fertile fields
reclaimed round the base of Castiglione gleamed russet with vines,
gray with olives. Beyond the grim walls of distant Astura stretched
the chalk-lands of Torre del Greco.
As they walked side by side, Francesco felt the rhythmic life in
Dana's body. The wan, appealing face was close to his. An instant,
and the passion of the sky leaped into it. Theirs was the calm of a
still pool, which hovers till the wind breaks it into the myriad
agitations of life. He drew her towards him; her head resting on his
shoulder, as if there she had found a home.
The evening star shone out in the fading sky.
The dusk was travelling towards the night.
Creation shivered towards a deeper dream.
The summer moon had risen, shedding its magic light over the Gulf of
Naples.
The very soul of Francesco was thrilled by the harmony around him; the
harmony in the moon's golden trail, which fell upon the waters, a
blazing path, reaching from Posilippo to the rim of the horizon,
harmony in the soft murmur of the sea, and the light breeze which
carried, together with the salt freshness of the sea-air, sweet
perfumes from the shores of Sorento with their lemon and orange
groves; harmony in the silvery curves of Vesuvius, wrapped in luminous
mists, its rugged cone emitting a white smoke, which trailed along the
upper zones of the air, the summit of the mountain flaring up from
time to time, like dying embers consecrated to the gods, the gods who
had died, had risen again, and had again expired.
"How wondrous lovely the night!" Francesco at last turned to his
silent companion. "All nature seems as one magic blossom--"
"My blossom-season is past," she answered very lightly.
"It is always blossom-season where Proserpina treads," said Francesco,
his eyes fixed on the face he loved so well.
"You look almost as you did, when we were both happy."
"Is it so long ago? Yes, I am old, Ilaria. Our youth seems far, far
away!"
"Perhaps I too am not old enough, to be young! Our youth--" she paused
with a sob.
Francesco gazed at her solicitously.
"Even here?"
She gave him a wan, small smile.
"Just now, one might forget!"
"It is a great art, to forget," said Francesco tenderly. "You need it,
Ilaria! What sufferings have been yours!"
She returned his look.
He understood.
Ilaria saw the pain written on his brow, as he looked at her with
tenderness undisguised. She felt his spirit lying openly before her,
as when they were both at the Court of Avellino.
"From the look on your forehead," she said softly, "you have lived
long in your cell, since last we met! So it was meant, I think, from
the beginning!"
"Assuredly so it was meant," he replied. "But I am very sorrowful, for
I see not what was meant for you!"
She smiled at him, as if to reassure.
"If Fate has guided my life ill, not yours the fault," she said
soothingly.
In her, reserve still obtained, yet without a trace of her late
perplexing defiance. Asperity had given way to a great gentleness.
"Yet," Francesco hesitated,--"I am tormented by one thought: that for
you it had perchance been better, if--"
He paused with drooping eyes, then continued:
"I could not profit by the dispensation of Clement and remain a true
man. But you--" and again he paused.
A flash of her old-time perverseness lighted up Ilaria's sad eyes.
"Why pause?" she asked, arching her brow. "You mean that which is
moral disaster for one, might be salvation for the other? And that,
since my salvation should be dearer to you than your own--"
She broke out into quizzical mirth. But she was swiftly grave again,
though tremulous.
"I, too, have lost myself in the quest of happiness," she said,
clasping and unclasping her white fingers. "Dread and desire have
beaten me hither and thither! Great waves have tossed me! On the very
day of your departure from Avellino the Viceroy asked me whom I would
wed! Your name leaped to my lips. I told him I would have none other.
Even as I spoke the dread seized me! I said to myself: this thing can