The Hill of Venus
never be! Then you went away--and I was engulfed in darkness. When we
met at Rome I realized what I had done! Yet in the very effort to keep
you far, I drew you near! Thus Fate had willed it! When we met at
Fonte Gaia, I knew what in one sunset of Avellino I had merely
dreamed: my love for you lived--in all my life the one abiding light.
Longing and horror racked me! She is cold, and foul, and false, that
White Lady--and the gifts she offers turn to poison in the grasp. But
it was that other who conquered,--your White Lady,--not mine! She was
ever a generous enemy, and in taking you from me, she has given me
back my love!"
She had been looking at him with wide piteous eyes, even as a child
might do. On a sudden she covered her face, dropped into a seat among
the bays and myrtles, and broke into wild weeping.
The strong sense of bondage came back with a fuller force as though to
menace her with the fateful realism of her lot. A hand seemed to sweep
down and wave her back with a meaning so sinister that she had the
feeling of standing on the brink of a mysterious sea, whose waves sang
to her a song of peril, of misery and desire in the dim green twilight
of some coral dungeon. The lure of the unknown beat upon her eyes,
while love and hate, like attendant spirits, beckoned her onward with
a weird, perpetual clamor.
Francesco tried in vain to soothe her, calling her by all the
endearing names of the past, and pressing her closely to his heart.
"I do not understand," she cried, sobbing convulsively. "I have wished
no one ill! Ever have I desired only fairness and love, and fullness
of sweet life. And the beauty I seek is befouled by my seeking, my
love has stained my beloved; and when I clutch at life, life crumbles
within my grasp. Wherein has my quest been wrong?"
"Not wrong," he said unsteadily--"not wrong,--I trust!"
She looked at him bewildered.
"I, too, would turn from that agonizing God upon the Cross to paths
where roses bloom," Francesco replied, heavy-hearted. "I have been
walking amid shadows, and I have lost the way."
She caught at his hand and drew it piteously to her lips, but made no
attempt to retain it.
"I am that Proserpina who has lost the spring," she said, raising her
haunting eyes to his. "Yet one comfort is left me still,--one stay,
that shall not fail!"
"And that?"
There was a strange expression about her face, but she was silent.
A shudder seized him with the swift suspicion of her meaning.
"You shall not!" he cried almost roughly. "You shall not! I, too,--did
I give way to that fierce longing,--you shall not yield to that
crawling weakness!"
But Ilaria interrupted him.
"Oh! my dear, I meant not that!" she said. "Of weakness I might reck
little, of the hurt to you I should reck much. There is that in my
heart for you which shall keep me safe henceforth from what would
grieve you!"
"What is it then?" he asked relieved. "The comfort,--the stay,--of
which you spoke?"
She smiled through her tears; the old-time smile.
"I do not see your life," he said anxiously. "What is it--what shall
it be? Till that be known to me, Ilaria, I shall not know rest or
peace. You are beautiful,--too beautiful for this licentious court!
Here you cannot remain--alone!"
"I fear the twilight," she said, with a shudder. "There is but one
goal for me, and, when the hour comes, you shall lead me there.
Proserpina will turn Lady of Shadows in very truth, and move veiled
through her rose garden."
"But why must this thing be?" he queried with a choking sensation. "I,
too, have sinned--"
"Of sin I know nothing," said Ilaria mournfully, "I apprehend neither
the word, nor the thing!"
"Then why this last extremity?"
"Will you not understand?" she interposed petulantly. "Your presence
here has shown me once for all that I may not continue to walk in the
old way; I may not walk in yours, and I would not have you walk in
mine! You wavered towards it of late! Once upon a time I should have
rejoiced; now my spirit is full of fear."
She crept close to him and looked up at him with tremulous lids.
He caught her to him with all the old-time love in his eyes. All
fears, all misgivings, all doubts of the woman he loved, were utterly
blotted out in their embrace, and over Ilaria's features there flitted
the gleam of a long forgotten happiness.
Her look was far away. Of a sudden she turned to Francesco.
"Will you remain at Naples?"
He gave a shrug.
"Days--weeks--who can tell? A Ghibelline victory may turn the tide."
"I have something to say to you," she said, her face very close to
his. "I have long wished to say it: beware of Raniero!"
"I have done him no wrong!"
She made a gesture as one throwing up a libation.
"Fonte Gaia!"
He felt her breath fanning his cheek.
Seized with a sudden madness he threw his arms about her, and kissed
her.
Where the roads branched off they parted, after a long passionate
embrace. Ilaria returned to the palace, while Francesco bent his
footsteps towards the bay, shimmering in the light of the higher risen
moon.
He heard her go singing through the garden, a soft chant d'amour that
would have gone wondrously to flute and cithern. It died away slowly
amid the trees like an elf's song coming from woodlands in the
moonlight.
His soul was sobbing within him. He felt his purpose, his resolutions
waver. The crisis of his life had come. Alone with Ilaria at Naples!
Raniero away,--indulging his lusts!
He had feared this meeting, feared it above all things in heaven or
earth!
Again they were abroad, the gods of yore. They rode the wind; they
laughed in the far reaches of the sky; they whispered in his heart.
To love her! To possess her!
The thought had suddenly leaped into his brain, taking its first
clearly defined form, recoiling upon him, dazzling his eyes.
For this he had lived; for this he had suffered!
And now?
A deeper question came, like a wind in a fog; a fearsome thing. Why
should this love be sin? This love,--the one pure emotion in all his
life?
In the spiritual darkness which encompassed Francesco, the fire of his
old love for Ilaria had leaped high upon the altar of his sacrifice.
For her he had kept himself pure, for her he had starved his soul,
while his love smouldered in the dark chambers of his heart.
For hours Francesco was as a man possessed, moving through them
drearily, as through crowding phantoms, struggling to suppress an
imperious craving that tormented him for release.
It was late when he retraced his steps towards his inn.
Gigantic cypresses bordered the way, ranged like dark torch-bearers at
a funeral. Their entwined tips, continually caught by the wind from
the sea, remained bent like heads drooped in sorrow. White statues of
gods gleamed spectre-like in the dark shades. In the laurel thickets
glow-worms flickered like funeral tapers. The heavy scent of the
magnolias recalled the odor of balsam used for anointing the dead. The
waters of the fountain, trickling from an overhanging rock, fell into
the sea, drop by drop, like silent tears, as though a nymph were
weeping in the cave above, bewailing her sisters, some dark Elysium,
the subterranean groves of shadows, the burial grounds of dead gods.
But even sleep brought only one persistent vision to Francesco: a
reach of laughing waters, now turquoise, now sapphire, now upheaving
into a mighty translucent wave, that curled swiftly towards him, and,
quivering within, the face of Ilaria, upturned to his own.
CHAPTER III
AN INTERLUDE
Meantime, the atmosphere of this secular court was not distasteful to
Francesco. The love of poetry and the arts which had made Naples in
the twelfth century the literary centre of Europe, still lingered; and
he found pleasant intercourse on lines along which he had long been
lonely.
Of Ilaria he saw little. She carried herself with a strange, new
dignity and seemed to avoid him even more sedulously than he had
planned to avoid her. He heard her spoken of as among the chief
beauties of the court. The Regent, it was said, had shown her marks of
especial favor, the more noteworthy as the Frangipani were on the side
of the empire, fighting against Clement and Charles of Anjou. But his
only opportunity of seeing her was at the court functions, which it
was his duty to attend. To men of Francesco's temperament the absent
has a more constraining force than the present; the dream-Ilaria, with
her wavering smile, had borne, it would seem, more intimate relations
to his life than the woman he watched from afar. But his restlessness
increased with the certainty that Ilaria avoided him; a circumstance
their meeting had not led him to fear.
Thus a week dragged on.
The African wind, which carries with it clouds of hot sand from the
depths of the Sahara, was raging in the upper regions of the air. On
earth there was still absolute calm. The leaves of the palm and the
branches of the mimosa hung motionless; the sea alone was agitated.
Huge, formless ridges swelled up here and there, dashing themselves
against the shore. The west was shrouded in dense gloom, and the sun,
in the metallic, cloudless haze, was seen dimly, as through a smoked
opal.
The Castello of Astura in the distant plains of Torre del Greco shone
white against the black smoke that rose from Vesuvius as from some
mighty furnace, spreading out in the shape of a long cloud from
Castellamare to Posilippo. For weeks the mountain had displayed a
sinister activity, and at night the red fires were visible far away,
over land and sea, like the glow of some great subterranean furnace.
The peaceful altar of the gods had been transformed into the terrible
torch of the Eumenides.
There were dire forebodings of coming disaster in the air and in the
winds. At Torre del Greco penitential processions made the rounds of
the sun-baked streets, with lighted candles, subdued chanting and loud
sobbing. In Resina and Portici dull terror reigned. And the glare of
the August sun had become almost insufferable, as it fell full over
the waters to the pencilled line of the southern horizon, where a long
circle divided the misty, shimmering dove-color of the Tyrrhene Sea
from the hazy skies.
Then, like the knell of doom, the tidings of the fatal battle of
Tagliacozzo were wafted to Naples. Conradino's army had been utterly
routed. Charles of Anjou was the victor of the day.
The fate of the Swabian youth and that of his companions was still a
matter of surmise. They had fled from the battle-field. No one knew
the direction of their flight.
And for days Francesco went about as one dazed. The Neapolitans
laughed his exhortations to scorn, and seemed to invite the interdict
rather than to submit to the Vulture of Provence.
He was ruminating over the situation, wishing for some inspiration,
wishing for Ilaria, and noting idly how the soft siesta lights played
upon the sea, when Francesco perceived a little pleasure barque
skirting the coast, and heading apparently for his favorite
spot,--where he had met Ilaria on coming to Naples. As the breeze
impelled it nearer, music floated over the waters. A few moments, and
he descried within the boat three of the most charming of the younger
women of the court, with their attendant cavaliers. He eyed the little
boat longingly, as it approached like some swift sprite of the sea. It
was at hand now, moored to the tiny wharf, and one of the women called
out gaily:
"Messer Eremito, we have found your cell!"
"And like many hermits," laughed Stefano Maconi, "he appears to
welcome the intrusion."
"To be welcomed by Messer Francesco," suggested another, "we should be
on the barque which Charon is rowing across the Styx."