The Hill of Venus
"I shall tell him myself,--and in your presence."
"You will not quarrel?" she said anxiously, holding out her hands to
him.
He clasped the soft white fingers fiercely in his own, then pressed
them to his throbbing heart. In the distance voices were heard
calling, clamoring.
For some moments they gazed at each other in silence, then she said:
"They are calling me! I must return to my task of sorrow!"
"Strange words for a queen--" he said with an attempt at merriment.
"Queen of the Shades," she replied. "And I long for life--life--life!
With all it has to give, with all it can bestow!"
A strange, witch-like fire had leaped into her eyes. Her lips,
thirstily ajar, revealed two rows of white even teeth, and in that
moment she looked so alluringly beautiful, that Francesco in a fever
of passion threw his arms about her and kissed her passionately again
and again, with moist, hungry lips.
"Will you not come?" she whispered, after having utterly abandoned
herself to his embrace.
He shook his head.
"I have no part in this! I will await you here!"
The voices sounded nearer. Now could be distinguished the cry:
"Proserpina--Proserpina!"
She turned reluctantly, with a last glance at him, and hastened back
towards the revels.
Francesco watched the slender, girlish form, until she had mingled
with the shadows of the trees. Then, with a low cry of anguish, he
leaned against the balustrade and covered his face with his hands.--
And now the pageant began to gather in the garden, a pageant of Love
in a guise such as might have been conceived by Petrarca,--a mediaeval
divertissement, such as the courts of thirteenth century Italy were
wont to delight in. And Francesco, slowly waking from a disordered
reverie, leaned over the balustrade, straining his gaze towards the
clearing, whence peals of laughter and music of citherns and cymbals
heralded the approach of a procession, which in point of
fantasticality did indeed honor to those who had contrived it.
It was a pageant of the Gods, the outgrowth and conception of a mind,
not yet set adrift by the speculative theory and philosophy of a Dante
or Petrarca, a mind still hovering between Roman austerity and
Hellenic mystery.
As the procession emerged from the inner courtyard, a level ray of
moonlight fell upon attires wherein seemed blended the gayest fantasy
of all times: Juno frowning jealously on the bowed figure of her Lord;
Mars and Venus, and Pluto, his dark face rising over folds of sombre
purple, beside the magically fair Proserpina. After these there came
groups of languid lovers of all ages; enchanters and victims: Orpheus
and Eurydice, Jason and Medea, Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristram and
Iseult. Bound with great ropes of blossom or chains of tinsel, they
moved sadly, crushed and sighing, behind the chariot of the King of
Sighs. And he, the dismal ruler, seemed the personified memory of a
figure in the lower church at Assisi, driven shrinking towards the pit
by Giotto's grave angels of penance.
Round that chariot gathered fantastic shapes, clad in dim, floating
garments, their faces concealed by gray masks on which the unknown
artist had stamped an expression, now of wild dismay, now of grinning
triumph, a presage, it would seem, of the Dreams and Errors, and the
Wan Delusions, whom Petrarca conceived to be the closest companions of
the lord of the mortal race.
Exclamations of delight from the balconies of the castle, where dusky
groups of spectators were dimly discernible, broke the dream stillness
of the night.
From his vantage point on the terrace Francesco's burning gaze,
riveted on the pageant, followed the graceful swaying form of
Proserpina with the pale face and lustrous eyes upturned to him, while
the procession circled round the terrace, and a Wan Delusion,
following directly in her wake, flung up her shadowy arms and groaned.
For these mediaeval folk threw themselves into the pageant with the
dramatic impulse native to place and time. Incited by the tragedy of
Benevento, still quivering through men's memory, and the apprehension
of future clouded horizons, this occasion probably meant to many of
them, as to Ilaria Caselli, the rejection rather than the assumption
of a disguise, the free expression through the imaginative form, so
natural to them, of the allegiance to passion in which their life was
passed. Each acting his or her part, they moved slowly through the
garden, Orpheus gazing back wildly in search of Eurydice, Circe
chanting low spells, Tristram touching his harp strings, his eyes upon
Iseult, and all at will sighing and moaning and pointing in pathetic
despair to the chains that bound them, and the arrows that transfixed.
Presently they gathered round a fountain, which, in the centre of a
rose-garden, sent up its iridescent spray in the silver moonlight, and
Tristram, stepping to the side of it, began to sing a Canzona, almost
like a church chant, artificially lovely in the intermingling of the
imagery of Night and of the Dawn. Orpheus and Circe followed with a
Canzona which struck Francesco's ear with music new, yet charged with
echoes of much that he had suffered during the past eventful days.
With the cadenza of the last stanzas the glow of torches had faded,
and the revellers moved towards the opposite wall, whence Francesco
was watching one by one, as they disappeared within a low doorway,
leading to an inner stair. As they emerged upon the summit each
reveller bore a lighted torch which hardly quivered in the still,
balmy air of the summer night. A moment's confusion, and the entire
pageant began to advance in single file against the dusky night-sky in
which the moon, now soaring high above the trees, gleamed with a
strange lustre. Above the garden they moved as above the far dim
world, not earthly men and women in seeming, but phantoms of the air.
The car of Pluto was illumined from within, and the red light struck
with almost ghostly effect the gray faces and garments of the
Delusions. The actors were hushed into silence by the unearthly beauty
of the scene.
Francesco, from across the garden, watched with eyes heavy and weary,
the Triumph of the Gods. As Proserpina came in sight, her pale face
flashed on him by the light of the torches carried by Pluto. It was
strangely alluring in its marble pallor, the dusky hair wreathed with
jasmine stars. Francesco was seized in the grip of sudden terror. The
lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes were passing visibly before
him under the violet night-sky. In a mad, delirious impulse, he thrust
out his arm, the moonlight striking full upon his face. The revellers
paused for an instant, then extended their arms with welcoming shouts.
Proserpina, as she came near, threw a flowery chain round his neck.
Breathless, dazed, Francesco saw them move away, the blood throbbing
wildly in his temples.
The moon had passed her zenith when the revellers, having twice
circled the walls, descended once more into the garden and dispersed,
each at his or her own will, through the demesne. Terraces illumined
by torch-light, afforded ample opportunity for wandering, and the
ilex-wood which covered the castle hill, was a lure for the more
venturesome. The castle itself had flung wide its portals, and a
collation was being served within until a late hour. The gay company
that so recently traversed the gardens had swiftly flown from one
haunt of pleasure to the other. Most of the participants in the
pageant, however, preferred to remain out-doors. Proserpina, Goddess
of the Underworld, and the Delusions seemed still to extend their
dreamy sway over the whole company. Day-light selves had disappeared,
carrying with them any teasing pricks of conscience, and the greater
number of the maskers continued through the night to play their parts
without reserve.
When Francesco had ensconced himself on the terrace to witness the
revels, he had given no thought to the continuation of the same. He
wandered through the labyrinthine walks with troubled mind, every now
and then shrinking, a listener both unwilling and unwelcome, from
sounds that assailed his ear from rose-bower and cypress-wall. Yet the
setting of beauty rendered his repugnance languid. He seemed to feel a
detaining hand upon him that would not let him escape. Life had ever
been, even in his happiest moods, as a masque, lived in a dream. But
to-night the masque had seemed very real. The weird loveliness of the
pageant had enthralled his soul, had brought home to him with new and
intense poignancy the dark fate which lurked in the background.
Aimlessly he strolled on, aimlessly he lost himself in the
labyrinthine maze, hoping, yet fearing, to meet Ilaria Caselli.
He had noted now and again a girlish figure flitting around his
pathway, in an open space, where a murmuring water flowed. It came out
into the starlight and he recognized White Oenone.
She swayed towards him timidly.
"Though Paris be lost to me, are there not other shepherds in the
glades of Ida?"
Her tones blended with the murmur of the stream.
The tumult of sense swept over him. He saw her white smiling face so
close to his, in the faint light of the moon her hair shone golden.
Then he gave a start and thought of Ilaria, and of her strange
request.
"Ay--but thy Paris will return, fair nymph," he replied courteously.
"For the Greek knights have won Troy-Town at last, and the false witch
who lured him from thy side, has sailed for Argos."
He turned away, noting the shade of disappointment in her face. His
steps were aimless no longer. Ilaria was not in the rose-garden, nor
would he find her on the terraces through which the flickering
torch-light gleamed. He hastened onward towards the ilex-wood which
bordered on one side close to the castle. In the dense shadow two dim
figures stood. He knew without seeing that one was Ilaria.
"Ilaria!" he called.
She started, took a step towards him, then paused.
On her face he noted the same dazed, half-bewildered look which he had
discovered thereon in the pageant.
"Ilaria!" he called once more. His voice had still the same purity of
tone as in his childhood.
She came to him slowly, holding out both hands.
"Take me away!" she whispered with a shudder.
Then, from the deeper shadow of the wood, there stepped a form of
remarkable elegance, advancing with the graceful, but assumed,
demeanor of a man immured in his own conceit. He was tall, with a
well-poised head of the purely Latin type. The face was long, but
unusually handsome; of olive hue with regular features, that revealed
many generations of aristocratic ancestry. The nostrils were
delicately chiselled, the eyebrows high and narrow, the thin, cynical
lips revealed the sensualist. There was nothing in the countenance of
Raniero Frangipani to dismay the observer, until one looked at the
eyes. They were narrow and intensely black, filled with a baleful
brilliance that feared no man, yet revealed to view a soul utterly
depraved.
The Frangipani having changed his masque, was clothed in the richest
apparel of the time. Long hose of crimson silk encased the legs,
rising from soft shoes of the same color. A coat of black silk,
embroidered with golden flowers, and the Broken Loaf, the emblem of
his house, was confined at the waist with a golden belt, to which was
affixed a poniard with an exquisitely jewelled hilt. He advanced with
the graceful yet arrogant swing of the bred courtier, yet his handsome
face was not pleasant to behold, as he turned to Francesco with an
insolent air:
"I think, Messer Villani, you will find the rose-garden more agreeable
than the wood!"
Francesco looked at him coldly.
"I am here at the request of Madonna Ilaria," he replied quietly.