Under the Witches' Moon: A Romantic Tale of Mediaeval Rome
A brilliant light beat upon domes and spires and pinnacles, and flooded
the august ruins of the Cæsars on the distant Palatine and the thousand
temples of the Holy Cross with scintillating radiance which poured down
from the intense blue of heaven.--
The long lights of the afternoon were shifting towards the eventide,
giving place to a limpid and colorless light that silvered the adjacent
olive groves.
Tristan roused himself with a start. The sense of moving like a ghost
among a world of ghosts had left him. He was once more awake and aware.
But even now his sorrow, his fears, his hopes of winning again to some
safe harbor in the storm tossed Odyssey of his life, were numbed. They
lay heavy within him, but without urgency or appeal.
What did it matter after all? Life was a little thing, a forlorn
minstrel that evoked melancholy strains from a pipe of oaten straw.
Life was a little thing, nor death a great one. For his part he would
not be loth to take his poppies and fall asleep.
At one time or another such moods must come to all of us and be
endured. We must enter into the middle country, that dull Sahara of the
soul, a broad belt of barren land where no angels seem to walk by our
side, nor can the false voices of demons lure us to our harm.
This is the land where we are imprisoned by the deeds of others and
never by our own. What we do ourselves will send us to Heaven or to
Hell; but not to the middle country where the plains of disillusion are.
At last the sunset came.
The ashen color of the olive-trees flashed out into silver, the
undulating peaks of the Sabine Mountains became faintly flushed and
phantom fair, as in a tempest of fire the sun sank to rest. The groves
of ilex and arbutus seemed to tremble with delight, as the long red
heralds touched their topmost boughs.
The whole landscape seemed to smile a farewell to departing day. The
chimes of the Angelus trembled on the purple dusk.
Night came on apace.
Tristan re-entered the Lateran Basilica, set the watch and arranged
with Don Garcia to spend the night in the sacristy, while Don Garcia
was to guard the approaches to the Pontifical Chapel to prevent a
recurrence of the horrible sacrilege of the preceding night.
One by one the worshippers left the vast nave of the church. After a
time the sacristans closed the heavy bronze doors and extinguished the
lights, all but the one upon the altar.
When they, too, had departed, and deepest silence filled the sacred
spaces, Tristan emerged from a side chapel and took his station near
the entrance to the sacristy, where, on the preceding night, he had
seen the shadow disappear.
How long he had been there in dread and wonder he did not know, when
two cloaked and hooded figures emerged slowly out of the gloom. He
could not tell whence they came or whether they had been there all the
time. They bent their steps towards the sacristy and, as they were
about to pass Tristan in his hiding-place, they paused as if conscious
of another presence.
"As we proceed in this matter," whispered the one voice, "I grow
fearful. You know my relations to the Senator--"
"Your anxiety moves me not," croaked the other voice. "Deem you to
attain your ends by mortal means?"
The voice caused Tristan to shudder as with an ague, though he saw not
him who spoke.
"What of yourself?" whispered the first speaker.
"Have you forgotten," came the hoarse reply, "that either I am
soulless, or else my spirit, damned from its beginning, will scarce be
saved by the grace of Him I dare not name! You are defiled in the very
conversing with me."
The tone in which these words were spoken, either defied answer, or, if
a response was made, it did not reach Tristan's ears as they slowly,
noiselessly, proceeded upon their way.
Tristan vaguely listened for the echo of their retreating footsteps
as, passing behind the altar, they disappeared, as if the earth had
swallowed them.
Now he was seized with a terrible fear. What, if they were to repeat
the sacrilege? He thought he recognized the voice of the first speaker;
but this no doubt was but a trick of his excited imagination.
Determined to prevent so terrible a crime, he crept cautiously down
the narrow passage through which they had disappeared. Six steps he
counted, then he found himself in a room which seemed to be part of
the sacristy, yet not a part, for a postern stood open through which
gleamed the misty moonlight.
There was little doubt in Tristan's mind that they had passed out
through this postern which had been left unguarded, and he found his
conjectures confirmed, when his eye, accustoming itself to the radiance
without, saw two misty figures passing along the road that leads past
the Coelian Hill through fields of ruins.
Taking care so they would not be attracted by the sound of his steps,
Tristan crept in the shadows of roofless columns, shattered porticoes
and dismantled temples, half hidden amid the dark foliage that sprang
up among the very fanes and palaces of old. At times he lost sight
of his quarry. Again they would rise up before him like evil spirits
wandering through space.
As Tristan continued in his pursuit, he began to be beset by dire
misgivings.
The twain had vanished as utterly as if the earth had swallowed them
and he paused in his pursuit to gain his bearings. Had he followed two
phantoms or two beings in the flesh? Had he abandoned his watch for two
penitents who had perchance been locked in the church?
What might not be happening at the Lateran at this very moment! How
would Don Garcia construe his absence?
A tremor passed through his limbs. He started to retrace his steps, but
some unknown agency compelled him onward.
Penetrating the gloomy foliage, Tristan found himself before a large
ruin, grey and roofless, from the interior of which came, muffled and
indistinct, the sound of voices.
Two men were stealthily creeping beneath the shadow of a wall that
extended for some distance from the ruin.
Both wore long monkish garbs and were muffled from head to toe. Over
their faces they wore vizors with slits for eyes and mouth. One of the
twain was spare, yet muscular. His companion walked with a stooping
gait and supported himself by a staff.
The light which had attracted Tristan, emanated from a lantern which
they had placed on the ground and which they could shade at will, but
which cast its fitful glimmer over the grass plot, revealing what
appeared to be a grave, from which the mould had been thrown up. At a
short distance there stood a black and stunted yew tree. Before this
they paused.
Now, from under his black cassock, the taller produced a strange
object, the nature of which Tristan was unable to discover by the
fitful light of the moon.
No sooner was it revealed to his companion, than the latter began to
chant a weird incantation, in which he who held the strange object
joined.
Louder and more strident grew their voices, and, notwithstanding the
warmth of the summer night, Tristan felt an icy shudder permeate his
whole being while, with a strange fascination, he watched the twain.
Now he who supported himself by a staff uttered a shrill inarticulate
outcry, and, producing a long, gleaming knife from under his cassock,
stabbed the thing viciously, while his voice rose in mad, strident
screams:
"Emen Hetan! Emen Hetan! Palu! Baalberi! Emen Hetan!"
The fit of madness seemed to have caught his companion. Producing a
knife similar to that of the other he, too, stabbed the object he held
in his hand, shrieking deliriously:
"Agora! Agora! Patrisa! Agora!"
An hour was to come when Tristan was to learn the terrible import
of the apparently meaningless jumble which struck his ear with mad
discordance.
Suddenly he felt upon himself the insane gleam of two eyes, peering
from the slits of the bent figure's mask.
There was a death-like stillness, as both looked towards the intruder.
Tristan would have fled, but his feet seemed rooted to the spot. His
energies were paralyzed as under the influence of a terrible spell.
The stooping form raised aloft a small phial. A bluish vapor floated
upward, in thin spiral curls.
The effect was instantaneous. Tristan was seized by a great drowsiness.
His limbs refused to support him. He no longer felt the ground under
his feet. His hand went to his head and, reeling like a drunken man,
he fell among the tall weeds that grew in riotous profusion around the
ancient masonry.
The setting moon shone out from behind a fleecy cloud, and in the
pallid crimson of her light the ill-famed ruins of the ancient temple
of Isis rose weird and ghostly in the summer night.
CHAPTER IX
THE FEAST OF THEODORA
A fairy-like radiance pervaded the great pavilion in the sunken gardens
of Theodora on Mount Aventine.
It was a vast circular hall, roofed in by a lofty dome of richest
malachite, from the centre of which was suspended a huge globe of
fire, flinging blood-red rays on the amber colored silken carpets and
tapestries that covered floors and walls. The dome was supported by
rows upon rows of tall tapering crystal columns, clear as translucent
water and green as the grass in spring, and between and beyond these
columns were large oval shaped casements set wide open to the summer
night, through which the gleam of a broad lake, laden with water
lilies, could be seen shimmering in the yellow radiance of the moon.
The centre of the hall was occupied by a long table in the form of a
horseshoe, upon which glittered vessels of gold, crystal and silver
in the sheen of the revolving globe of fire, heaped with all the
accessories of a sumptuous banquet, such as might have been spread
before the ancient gods of Olympus in the heyday of their legendary
prime.
Strange scents assailed the nostrils: pomegranate and frankincense,
myrrh, spikenard and saffron, cinnamon and calamus mingled their
perfume with the insidious distillations of the jasmine, and spiral
clouds of incense rose from tripods of bronze to the vaulted ceiling.
Inside the horseshoe, black African slaves, attired in fantastic
liveries of yellow and blue, crimson and white, orange and green,
carried aloft jewelled flagons and goblets, massive gold dishes and
great platters of painted earthenware.
There were wines from Cyprus and Malvasia, from Montepulciano and the
sunny slopes of Hymettus, Chianti and Lacrymae Christi.
The almost incredible brilliancy of the assembled company, contrasting
with the fantastic background, caught the eye as with a stab of pain,
held the gaze for a single instant of frozen incredulity, then gripped
the throat in a choking sensation by reason of its wonder.
Lounging on divans of velvet and embroidered satin from the looms of
fabled Cathay, set in the old Roman fashion round the table, eating,
drinking, gossiping and occasionally bursting into wild snatches of
song, were a company of distinguished looking personages, richly
and brilliantly attired, bent upon enjoying the pleasures offered
by the immediate hour. All who laid claim to any distinction in the
seven-hilled city were there, the lords of the Campagna and of the
adjacent fiefs of the Church. Strangers from all parts of the inhabited
globe were there, steeping their bewildered brain in the splendors
that assailed their eyes on every point; from Africa and Iceland, from
Portugal and India, from Burgundy and Aquitaine, from Granada and from
Greece, from Germania and Provence, from Persia and the Baltic shores.
Their fantastic and semi-barbaric costumes seemed to enhance the
grotesque splendor of the banquet hall.
The Romans were acquainting their guests with the exalted rank of
the woman who ruled the city as surely as ever had Marozia from the