Under the Witches' Moon: A Romantic Tale of Mediaeval Rome
"But now, my son, speak of yourself," said the monk after a pause.
"I lived at the court of Avalon, the home of Love and Troubadours."
"Of Troubadours?" the monk interposed dreamily. "A worldly lot--given
to extolling free love and what not--"
"They may sing of love and passion, father, but their lives are pure
and chaste," Tristan ventured to remonstrate.
"You are a Troubadour?" came the swift query.
"In my humble way." Tristan replied with bowed head.
The monk nodded.
"Go on--go on!"
"At the court of Avalon I met the consort of Count Roger de Laval. He
was much absent, on one business or another,--the chase--feuds with
neighboring barons.--He chose me to help the Lady Hellayne to while
away the long hours during his absence--"
"His wife! What folly!"
"The Count de Laval is one of those men who would tempt the heavens
themselves to fall upon him rather than to air himself beneath them.
That his fair young wife, doing his will among men given to the chase
and drinking bouts, and the society of tainted damsels, should long for
something higher, she, whom he regarded with the high air of the lord
of creation--that she should dare dream of some intangible something,
for which she hungered, and craved and starved--"
"If you are about to confess, as I conceive, to a wrong you have done
to this same lord," interposed the monk, "your sin is not less black if
you paint him you have wronged in odious tints."
"Nevertheless I am most sorry to do so, father," Tristan interposed,
"else could I not make you understand to its full extent his folly and
conceit by placing me, a creature of emotion, day by day beside so
fair a being as his young wife. Therefore I would explain."
"It needs some explanation truly!" the monk said sternly.
"The Count de Laval is a man whose conceit is so colossal, father, that
he would never think it possible that any one could fail in love and
admiration at the shrine which he built for himself. A man of supreme
arrogance and self-righteousness."
"Sad, indeed--" mused the monk.
"Our thoughts were pagan, drifting back to the days when the world was
peopled with sylvan creatures--with the deities of field and stream--"
"Mere heathen dreams," interposed the monk. "Go on! Go on!"
"I then felt within myself the impulse to throw forth a minstrelsy
prophetic of a new world resembling that old which had vanished. It was
not to be a mere chant of wrath or exultation--it was to sound the joy
of the earth, of the air, of the sun, of the moon and the stars,--the
song of the birds, the perfume of the flowers--"
"Words that have but little meaning left in this stern world wherein we
dwell--"
"They had meaning for me, father. Also for her. They were to both of
us a bright and mystical ideal, in the fumes of which we steeped our
souls,--our very selves, till our natures seemed to know no hurt,
seemed incapable of evil--"
"Alas--the greater the pity!"
"I was sure of myself. She was sure of me. I loved her. Her presence
was to me as some intoxication of the soul--some rare perfume that
captivates the senses, raising the spirit to heights too rarefied for
breath--"
"And you fell?"
The words came from the monk's lips, slowly, inexorably, as the knell
of fate.
"I--all, but fell!" stammered Tristan. "One day in a chamber far
removed from the inhabited part of the castle we sat and read. And
suddenly she laid her face close to mine and with eyes in whose mystic
depths lurked something more than I had ever seen in them before asked
why, through Fate's high necessity, two should forever wander side by
side, longing for each other--their longing unsatisfied--when the hour
was theirs--"
Again Tristan paused.
The monk regarded him in silence.
"You fell?" the question came again.
"In that moment, father, I was no more myself, no more the one whose
art is sacred and alone upon the mountain summit of his soul. Its
freedom and aspirations were no more. I was undone, a tumbled, wingless
thing. My pride had fled. Long, long I looked into her eyes, and when
she put her wonderful white arms about me, I, in a dizzy moment of
desire, dropped my face to hers. Then was love all uttered. Straightway
I arose. I clasped her in my arms. I kissed--I kissed her--"
The monk regarded him sternly, yet not unkindly.
"It was a sin. Yet--there is more?"
Tristan's hands were clasped.
"One evening in the rose garden--at dusk--the evening on which she sent
me from her--bade me go to Rome to obtain forgiveness for a sin of
which I could not repent."
The monk nodded. "Go on! Go on!"
"The world had fallen away from us. We stood in a grove, our arms about
each other. Suddenly I saw a face. I withdrew my arm, overwhelmed by
all the shame of guilt. The face vanished and, passion overmastering
once more, we touched our lips anew. It was the last time we were to
see each other. I left behind the wondrous silken hair my hands had
touched in our last mad caress. I left behind that tender face and
form. She made no attempt to follow, or to call me back. I hastened
to my chamber, and there I fought anew with all that evil impulse of
my youth, to face the shame, as long as joy endured. If I had sinned
in mind against my high ideal might I not some day recover it and be
purified?"
"What of God and Holy Church?" queried the monk.
"To them I gave no heed, but to my honor. This upheld me."
The monk gave a nod.
"I left Avalon. It seemed as if without her my life were ebbing away. I
joined a pilgrim party, and now my pilgrimage is ended. What must I do
to still this inward craving that will not leave my soul at peace?"
He ended in a sob.
The monk had relapsed into deep thought, and Tristan's eyes were
riveted on the ascetic form in silent dread, as to what would be the
verdict.
At last Odo broke the heavy silence.
"You have committed a grievous sin--adultery--nay, speak not!" he said,
as Tristan attempted to remonstrate against the dire accusation. "The
seed of every act slumbers in the mind ere its pernicious shoots are
manifest in deeds. He who looks upon a woman with the desire to possess
her has already committed adultery with her. Yet--not one in a thousand
would have done so nobly under such temptation!"
The monk's voice betrayed some feeling as he placed his hand on
Tristan's bowed head.
"I shall consider what penances are most fit for one who has
transgressed as you have, my son. It is for your future life--perchance
Holy Orders--"
Tristan raised his head imploringly.
"Not that, father,--not that! I am not fit!"
The monk regarded him quizzically.
"The lust of the eye is mighty and the fever of the world still burns
in your veins, my son, rebelling against the passion that chastens and
purifies. Nevertheless, the Church desires no enforced service. She
wishes to be served through love, not with aversion and fear. Continue
to do penance, implore His forgiveness, and that He may take from you
this worldly desire."
Kissing anew the hand which the monk extended, Tristan arose, after Odo
had made upon him the holy sign.
"I shall obey your behest," he said in a low, broken voice, then
withdrew, while the Monk of Cluny returned to his former pursuit,
unconscious that another had witnessed and overheard the strange
confession from a recess in the wall.
As one in a trance Tristan left the Monk of Cluny, his heart filled
with gratitude for the man who, in the midst of a world of strife and
unrest, had listened to his tale and had not dealt harshly with him,
but had received him sympathetically, even while rebuking the offence.
While the penances imposed upon him were not severe, Tristan chafed
nevertheless under the restraint they laid upon his soul.
What was his future life to be? What new vistas would open before him?
What new impressions would superimpose themselves upon the memories of
the past--the memory of Hellayne?
As he passed the church of Santa Maria of the Aventine, Tristan saw
the portals open. Puzzled over the problems he was face in the days to
come, he entered the dim shadows of the sanctuary.
All that night Tristan knelt in solitary prayer.
The great church was empty and silent, unlit save for the lamp upon the
altar. There Tristan kept his vigil, his tired, tearful eyes upon the
crucifixion, searching his own heart.
The night of silence brought him no vision and shed no light upon his
path. The pale dawn found him still upon his knees before the altar,
his eyes upon the drooping form of the crucified Christ.
Thus the monks found him when they entered for early Matins. At last he
arose, in his sombre eyes a touching resignation and infinite regret.
END OF BOOK THE FIRST
BOOK THE SECOND
CHAPTER I
THE GRAND CHAMBERLAIN
Castel San Angelo, the Tomb of the Flavian Emperor, seemed rather to
have been built for a great keep, a breakwater as it were to stem the
rush of barbarian seas which were wont to come storming down from
the frozen north, than for the resting-place of the former master
of the world. Its constructors had aimed at nothing less than its
everlastingness. So thick were its bastioned walls, so thick the
curtains which divided its inner and outer masonry, that no force of
nature seemed capable of honeycombing or weakening them.
Hidden within its screens and vaults, like the gnawings of a foul and
intricate cancer, ran dark passages which discharged themselves here
and there into dreadful dungeons, or secret places not guessed at in
the common tally of its rooms.
These oubliettes were hideous with blotched and spotted memories,
rotten with the dew of suffering, eloquent in their terror and
corruption and darkness of the cruelty which turned to these walls for
security. The hiss and purr of subterranean fires, the grinding of low,
grated jaws, the flop and echo of stagnant water that oozed from a
stagnant inner moat into vermin-swarming, human-haunted cellars: these
sounds spoke even less of grief than the hellish ferment in the souls
of those who had lorded it in this keep since the fall of the Western
Empire.
On this night there hung an air of menace about the Mausoleum of the
Flavian Emperor which seemed enhanced by the roar and clatter of
the tempest that raged over the seven-hilled city. Snaky twists of
lightning leaped athwart the driving darkness, and deafening peals of
thunder reverberated in deep, booming echoes through the inky vault of
the heavens.
In one of the upper chambers of the huge granite pile, which seemed to
defy the very elements, in a square room, dug out of the very rock,
containing but one window that appeared as a deep wedge in the wall,
piercing to the sheer flank of the tower, there sat, brooding over a
letter he held in his hand, Basil, the Grand Chamberlain.
The drowsy odor of incense, smouldering in the little purple shrine
lamp, robbed the air of its last freshness.
A tunic of dark velvet, fur bound and girt with a belt of finest
Moorish steel, was relieved by an undervest of deepest crimson. Woven
hose to match the tunic ended in crimson buskins of soft leather. The
mantle and the skull cap which he had discarded lay beside him on the
floor, guarded by a tawny hound of the ancient Molossian breed.
By the fitful light of the two waxen tapers, which flickered dismally
under the onslaught of the elements, the inmate of the chamber slowly
and laboriously deciphered the letter. Then he placed it in his
doublet, lapsing into deep rumination, as one who is vainly seeking to
solve a problem that defies solution.
Rising at last from his chair Basil paced the narrow confines of the
chamber, whose crimson walls seemed to form a fitting background for
the dark-robed occupant.