Under the Witches' Moon: A Romantic Tale of Mediaeval Rome
at abduction had been made from time to time, Tristan having, by his
prowess and daring, prevented the last, emanating doubtlessly from the
Pontiff's nearest kith and kin. The men under him could be fully relied
upon. Nevertheless, it behooved him to be circumspect.
After a time Basil departed, and Tristan went about his business,
inspecting the guard and familiarizing himself with the place where he
was to keep his first watch.
The level beams of the evening sun filled the Basilica of St. John in
Laterano. There were pearl lights and lights of sapphire; falling
radiances of emerald and blood-red; vague translucent greens, that
seemed to tremble under spiral clouds of incense.
Now the sun was sinking behind Mount Janiculum. The clouds at the
zenith of the heavens were rose-hued, but it was growing dark in the
valleys, and the great church began to take on sombre hues. It seemed
to frown upon him, to warn him not to enter, an impression he was long
afterwards to remember, as he strode through the high-vaulted corridors.
He hesitated, till the sound of a distant chant reached his ear. With
a sort of fascination he could not account for, he watched the advance
of the slowly gathering gloom, as an increasing greyness stole into the
chapels.
Evening was about to take the veil of night.
The light left the stained-glass windows and the church grew darker and
darker. The altar steps lay now in purple shadows that were growing
deeper and denser each moment.
Shadowy forms seemed to be moving about in the sanctuaries. Soon a monk
entered with a taper, lighting the lights before some remote shrines.
Tristan could not distinguish his features, for the light was very dim.
Yet it enabled him to see that there were a few belated worshippers in
the church.
After a time the great nave was deserted. As the lone monk passed
quickly through a sphere of thin light, Tristan gave a start. It seemed
a ghost in a cassock that had vanished in the sacristy. He told himself
that the impression was absurd, but he could not throw it off. He
had caught a momentary glimpse of a face that had no human likeness,
and the way in which the cassock had flapped about the limbs of the
fleeting form seemed to suggest that it clothed a frame that had lost
its flesh.
Superstitious fear began to creep over him. He felt that he must
seek the open, escape the haunting incense-saturated pall, these dim
sepulchral chapels. Such light as there was, save what emanated from
the candles on the altar, came from a stone lamp which cast its glimmer
on the vanishing form.
In every corner of the vast nave now lay fast gathering darkness. The
figures of the saints seemed vague and formless. The altar loomed dim
in the shadows.
All these things Tristan noted.
The whole interior of the church was now steeped in the dense pall of
night, illumined only by the faint radiance of the lamp upon the altar,
which seemed rather to intensify than to lift the gloom.
A faint footfall was audible behind the carven screen, near the
entrance to the chapels. A figure, almost lost in the gloom, glided
into the nave, and shadows were falling about him like thin veils.
It was an unusual hour for monks to be abroad. None the less, he
seemed sure of himself, for he proceeded without hesitation to the
altar, shrouded as it was in utter darkness, but for the light of one
faint taper, which gleamed afar, like a star in the nocturnal heavens,
driving the gloom a few paces from the carven stone. There the shrouded
form seemed to melt into the very pall of night that weighed heavily
upon the time-stained walls of the Mother Church of Rome.
At first Tristan thought it was some belated penitent seeking
forgiveness for his sins, but when the dark-robed form did not return
he strode towards the altar to see if he might perchance be of
assistance to him.
When Tristan reached the altar steps he could discover no trace of a
human being, though he searched every nook and corner and peered into
every chapel, examined every shrine.
Seized with a strange restiveness he began to pace up and down before
the altar steps. He was far from feeling at ease. He remembered the
warning of the Grand Chamberlain. He remembered the strange tales he
had heard whispered of the Pontiff's prison house.
Tristan suddenly paused.
He thought he heard sibilant whispers and the low murmur of voices from
behind the screen at the eastern transept of the Capella, and at once
he began assembling the things in his mind which might beset him in the
hour of darkness.
The Chapel of the Most Holy Saviour of the Holy Stairs, the Scala
Santa of the present day, adjoins the Lateran Church. At the period
of which we write it was still the private chapel of the popes in the
Patriarchium, and was called the Sancta Sanctorum on account of the
great number of precious relics it enshrines.
To this chapel Tristan directed his steps, oppressed by some mysterious
sense of evil. By a judicious disposition of the men under his command
he had, after a careful survey of the premises, placed them in such a
manner that it would be impossible for any one to gain access to the
stairs leading to the Pontiff's chamber.
Had it been a hallucination of his senses conjured up by his sudden
fear?
Not a sound broke the stillness. Only the echoes of his own footsteps
reverberated uncannily from the worn mosaics of the floor. In the dim
distance of the corridors he saw a shadow moving to and fro. It was the
guard before the entrance to a side-chapel of the Basilica.
What caused Tristan to pause in the night gloom of the corridor leading
to the Pontifical Chapel he did not know. He seemed as under a strange
spell. At a distance from him of some five feet, in the decorated wall,
there was a dark panel some two feet in height and of corresponding
breadth, looking obliquely towards the Pontifical Chapel. The panel
contained a small round opening, a spy-hole which communicated with a
secret chamber in the thickness of the wall.
A slight rustling noise came from behind the masonry. Tristan heard it
quite distinctly. It suggested the passing of naked feet over marble.
Suddenly, noiselessly the panel parted.
A sudden gleam of white, blinding light shot into the chapel like a
spear of silver.
Tristan paused with a start, looking swiftly and inquiringly at the
black slit in the wall and as he did so the spear of light shifted a
little in its passing.
A face, white with the pallor of death, ghastly and hideous as a corpse
that has retained upon its set features the agony of dying, peered out
from blackness into blackness.
A tremor shook Tristan's frame from head to toe. He could not have
cried out, had he wished to. He felt as one grazed by a lightning bolt.
Then, in a flash that made his heart and soul shudder within him, he
knew.
He had seen looking at him a face--the clean shaven face of a man. But
it was not human. It bore the terrible stigmata of the unquenchable
fire; an abominable vision of the lust that cannot be satiated, the
utter, unconquerable, fiendish malevolence of Hell. A harsh, raven-like
croak broke the stillness, and at the sound of that cry the terrible
face vanished with the swiftness of a trick. Instead, a long arm,
clothed in a black sleeve, stole through the opening. A flash, keen
as that of the lightning, cut the air and a dagger struck the mosaic
floor at Tristan's feet with such force that its point snapped after
shattering the stone, drawing fire from the impact.
Bounding back, Tristan uttered a shrill cry of terror, but when he
looked in the direction of the panel only dim dun dusk met his eyes.
Rushing frantically from the corridor he now called with all his might.
His outcries brought the guards to the scene. Briefly, incoherently,
almost mad with terror, he told his tale. They listened with an air of
amazement in which surprise held no small share. Then they accompanied
him back to the chapel.
Arriving near the spot he was about to point to the dagger, to
corroborate his wild tale. But the dagger had disappeared. Only the
shattered marble of the floor lent testimony and credence to his words.
On the following morning an outcry of horror arose from all quarters of
Rome.
On the night which preceded it, the Holy Host had been taken from the
Pontifical Chapel in the Lateran.
CHAPTER VIII
THE SHADOW OF ASRAEL
It was ten in the morning.
Deep silence reigned in the strange walled garden on the Pincian Hill
that surrounded the marble villa of the Grand Chamberlain. Only the
murmur of the city below and the soft sounds of bells from tower and
campanile seemed to break the dreamlike stillness as they began to toll
for High Mass.
In a circular chamber lighted only by lamps, for there were no windows,
and daylight never penetrated there, before an onyx table covered with
strange globes and philtres, sat Basil.
The walls of the chamber were of wood stained purple. The far wall
was hidden by shelves on which were many rolls of vellum and papyrus,
spoils of pagan libraries of the past. There were the works of monks
from all the monasteries of Europe, illuminated by master hands, the
black letter pages glowing with red and gold, almost priceless even
then. In one corner of the room stood an iron chest, secured by locks.
What this contained no one even dared to guess.
As the chimes from churches and convents reached his ears, Basil's face
paled. Something began to stir in the dark unfathomable eyes as some
unknown thing stirs in deep water. Some nameless being was looking out
of those windows of the soul. Yet the rest of the face was unruffled
and expressionless, and the contrast was so horrible that a spectator
would have shrank away, cold fear gripping his heart, and perhaps a cry
upon his lips.
Basil had closed the heavy bronze doors behind him when he had entered
from the atrium. The floor of colored marbles was flooded with the
light from the bronze lamps. Before him was a short passage, hardly
more than an alcove, terminating in a door of cedarwood behind a purple
curtain.
In the dull yellow gleam of the lamps the chamber seemed cold, full of
chill and musty air.
In a moment however the lamps seemed to burn more brightly, as Basil's
eyes became adjusted to their lights.
There was the silence of the tomb. The lamps burnt without a flicker,
for there was not a breath of air to disturb their steady glow. The
plan of the room, its yellow lights, its silence, its entire lack of
correspondence with the outside world, was Basil's own. He had designed
it as a port, as it were, whence to put out to sea upon the tide of his
ever-changing moods in the black barque of sin.
For some time he remained alone in the silent room, dreaming and
brooding over greatness and power, that terrible megalomania that is
the last and rarest madness of all.
He had read of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian, of Heliogabalus, whose
madness passed the bounds of the imaginable. Like gold and purple
clouds, bursting with sombre light and power, they had passed over Rome
and were gone.
Then thoughts of the popes came to him, those supreme rulers of the
temporal and spiritual world whose dominion had been so superb, since
they first began to crown the emperors, one hundred and thirty-five
years ago.
In a monstrous and swiftly moving panorama they passed through a brain
that worked as if it were packed in ice. And yet one and all had gone
into the dark. The power of none had been lasting and complete.
But into his reverie stole a secret glow, into his blood an intense,
ecstatic quickening. For them the hour had tolled. Each step in life
was but one nearer the grave. Not so was it to be with him.