Under the Witches' Moon: A Romantic Tale of Mediaeval Rome
"Roxana's lust for Theodora's power proved her undoing. Theodora will
suffer no rival to threaten her with Marozia's fate."
"I have heard it whispered she is assembling about her men who are
ready to go to any extreme," Tristan interposed tentatively, thrown off
his guard by Basil's affability of manner.
The latter gave a start, but recovered himself.
"Idle rumors. The Romans must have something to talk about. Odo of
Cluny is thundering his denunciations with such fervid eloquence that
they cannot but linger in the rabble's mind."
"The hermit of Mount Aventine?" Tristan queried.
"Even he! He has a strange craze, a doctrine of the End of Time, to
be accomplished when the cycle of the sæculum has run its course. A
doctrine he most furiously proclaims in language seemingly inspired,
and which he promulgates to farther his own dark ends."
"A theory most dark and strange," Tristan replied with a shudder, for
he was far from free of the superstition of the times.
Basil gave a shrug. His tone was lurid.
"What shall it matter to us, who shall hardly tread this earth when the
fateful moment comes?"
"If it were true nevertheless?" Tristan replied meditatively.
A sombre fire burnt in the eyes of the Grand Chamberlain.
"Then, indeed, should we not pluck the flowers in our path, defying
darkness and death and the fiery chariot of the All-destroyer that is
to sweep us to our doom?"
Tristan shuddered.
Some such words he had indeed heard among the pilgrim throngs without
clearly grasping their import. They had haunted his memory and had,
for the time at least, laid a restraining hand upon his impulses.
But the mystery of the Monk of Cluny weighed lightly against the
mystery of the woman who held in the hollow of her hand the destinies
of Rome.
Basil seemed to read Tristan's thoughts.
Reclining in his chair, he eyed him narrowly.
"You, too, but narrowly escaped the blandishments of the Sorceress,
blandishments to which many another would have succumbed. I marvel at
your self-restraint, not being bound by any vow."
The speaker paused and waited, his eyes lying in ambush under the dark
straight brows.
The memory still oppressed Tristan and the mood did not escape Basil,
who stored it up for future reckoning.
"Perchance I, too, might have succumbed to the Lady Theodora's beauty,
had not something interposed at the crucial moment."
"The memory of some earlier love, perchance?" Basil queried with a
smile.
Tristan gave a sigh. He thought of Hellayne and the impending meeting
with Roger de Laval.
His questioner abandoned the subject. Master in dissimulation he had
read the truth on Tristan's brow.
"Pray then to your guardian saint, if of such a one you boast," he
continued after a pause, "to intervene, should temptation in its most
alluring form face you again," he said with deliberate slowness. "You
witnessed the end of Fabio of the Cavalli?"--
Tristan shuddered.
"And yet there was a time when he called all these charms his own, and
his command was obeyed in Theodora's gilded halls."
"Can love so utterly vanish?" Tristan queried with an incredulous
glance at the speaker.
Basil gave a soundless laugh.
"Love!" he said. "Hearts are but pawns in Theodora's hands. Her
ambition is to rule, and he who can give to her what her heart desires
is the favorite of the hour. Beware of her! Once the poison of her
kisses rankles in your blood nothing can save you from your doom."
Basil watched the effect of his words upon his listener and for the
nonce he seemed content. Tristan would take heed.
When Tristan had taken his leave a panel in the wall opened noiselessly
and Il Gobbo peered into the chamber.
Basil locked and bolted the door which led into the corridor, and the
sinister, bat-like form stepped out of its dark frame and approached
the inmate of the chamber with a fawning gesture.
"If your lordship will believe me," he said in a husky undertone, "I am
at last on the trail."
"What now?"
"I may not tell your nobility as yet."
"Do you want another bezant, dog?"
"It is not that, my lord."
"Then, who does he consort with?"
"I have tracked him as a panther tracks its prey--he consorts with no
one."
"Then continue to follow him and see if he consorts with any--woman."
"A woman?"
"Why not, fool?"
"But had your nobility said there was a woman--"
"There always is."
"Your nobility let him go--and yet--one word--"
"I must know more, before I strike. I knew he would come. There is more
to this than we wot of. Theodora is infatuated with his austerity. He
has jilted her and she smarts under the blow. She will move heaven and
earth to bring him to her feet. Meanwhile there are weightier matters
to be considered. Perchance I shall pay you an early call in your noble
abode. Prepare fitly and bid the ghosts troop from their haunted caves.
And now be off! Your quarry has the start!"
Il Gobbo bowed grotesquely and receded backward towards the panel which
closed soundlessly behind him.
Basil remained alone in the octagon cabinet.
He strode slowly towards one of the windows that faced to southward and
gazed long and pensively out upon the undulating expanse of the Roman
Campagna.
"Three messengers, yet none has returned," he muttered darkly. "Can it
be that I have lost my clutch on destiny?"
CHAPTER II
UNDER THE SAFFRON SCARF
Once again the pale planets of night ruled the sky, when Tristan
emerged from his inn and took the direction of the Palatine.
All memories of his meeting with the Lord Basil had faded before the
import of the coming hour, when he was to stand face to face with him
who held in his hand the fate of two beings destined for each other
from the beginning of time and torn asunder by the ruthless hand of
Fate.
There was not a sound, save the echo of his own footsteps, as Tristan
wound his way through the narrow streets, high cliffs of ancient houses
on either side, down which the white disk of the moon penetrated but a
yard or two.
At the foot of the Palatine Hill, cutting into the moonlight, the
Colosseum rose before him, gaunt, vast, sinister, a silhouette of
enormous blackness, pierced as with innumerable empty eyes flooded
by greenish, ghostly moonlight. Necromancers and folk practising the
occult arts dwelled in ancient houses built with the honey-colored
Travertine, stolen from the Hill of the Cæsars. It was said that
strange sounds echoed from the arena at night; that the voices of those
who had died for the faith in the olden days could be heard screaming
in agony at certain periods of the moon.
Gigantic masses of gaunt masonry rose around him as, with fleet steps,
he traversed the deserted thoroughfares. In the greenish moonlight he
could discern the tumbled ruins of arches and temples scattered about
the dark waste. His gaze also encountered the frowning masonry of more
recent buildings. The castellated palace of one of the Frescobaldi had
been reared right across that ancient site, including in its massive
bulk more than one monument of imperial days.
As he approached the region of the Arch of the Seven Candles, as the
Arch of Titus with its carving of the Jewish Candelabrum borne in
triumph was then called, Tristan walked more warily.
The reputed dangers of the Campo Vaccino knocking at the gates of his
memory, he loosened the sword in his scabbard.
He had, by this time, arrived at the end of the street, that curves
towards the Arch of Titus, which commands the avenue of lone holm-oaks,
leading towards the Appian Way.
Suddenly a man emerged from the shadows. He was armed with sword and
buckler, his body was covered with hauberk of mail and he wore the
conical steel casque in vogue since Norman arms served as the military
model.
Roger and Tristan confronted each other, the former's face tense,
drawn, white; the latter with calm eyes in which there was the light
of a great regret. An expression not easy to read lay in Laval's eyes,
eyes that scanned Tristan from under half-shut lids.
"So you have come?" the stranger said brutally, after a brief and
painful pause.
"I have never broken my word," Tristan replied.
"Well spoken! I shall be plain and brief, if you will own the truth."
"I have nothing to conceal, my lord."
Roger's eyes gleamed with yet livelier malice.
"Where is the Lady Hellayne? Where is my wife?"
"As God lives, I know not. Yet--I would give my life, to know."
"Indeed! You may be given that chance. You are frank at least--"
"I may have wronged you in heart, my lord,--but never in deed--"
Tristan replied.
"What I have seen, I have seen," the other snarled viciously.
"Perchance this silent devotion accounts also for many other things."
"I do not understand, my lord."
"Soon after your flight the Lady Hellayne departed, without a word."
"So you were pleased to inform me."
"I was not pleased," spat out Laval. "How do you explain her flight?"
"I do not explain, my lord. I have not seen or heard from the Lady
Hellayne since I left Avalon."
"Then you still aver the lie?"
Tristan raised himself to his full height.
"I am speaking truth, my lord. Why, indeed, should she have left you
without even a word?"
Roger eyed the man before him as a cat eyes a captured bird at a foot's
distance of mock freedom.
"Why, indeed, save for love of you?"
Tristan raised his hands.
"Deep in my heart and soul I worship the Lady Hellayne," he said. "For
me she had but friendship. Else were I not here!"
"A sainted pilgrim," sneered the Count, "in the Groves of Enchantment.
And for such a one she left her liege lord."
His mocking laughter resounded through the ruins.
"You wrong the Lady Hellayne and myself. Of myself I will not speak. As
concerns her--"
"Of her you shall not speak! Save to tell me her abode."
"Of her I shall speak," Tristan flashed. "You are insulting your
wife--"
"Take care lest worse befall yourself," snarled Laval, advancing
towards the object of his wrath.
Tristan's look of contempt cut him to the quick.
"You think to bully me as you bully your menials," he said quietly. "I
do not fear you!"
"Why, then, did you leave Avalon, if it was not fear that drove you?"
drawled Laval, his eyes a mere slit in the face, drawn and white.
The utter baseness and conceit in the speaker's nature were so plainly
revealed in his utterance that Tristan replied contemptuously:
"It was not fear of you, my lord, but the Lady Hellayne's expressed
desire that brought me to Rome."
"The Lady Hellayne's desire? Then it was she who feared for you?"
"It was not fear for my body, but my soul."
"Your soul? Why your soul?"
"Because my love for her was a wrong to you, my lord,--even though I
loved her but in thought."--
"On that night in the garden--you embraced in thought?"
The leer had deepened on the speaker's face.
"A resistless something impelled--"
"And you a fair and pleasant-featured youth, beside Roger de Laval--her
husband. And now you are here doing penance at the shrines, at the Lady
Theodora's shrine?"
"What I am doing in Rome does not concern you, my lord," Tristan
interposed firmly. "I did not attend the Lady Theodora's feast of my
own choice--"
"Nor were you in her pavilion of your own choice. Yet a pinch more of
penance will set that right also."
"I take it, my lord, that I have satisfied your anxiety," Tristan
replied, as he started to pass the other.
Laval caught him roughly by the shoulder.
"Not so fast," he cried. "I shall inform you when I have done with
you--"
Tristan's face was white, as he peered into the mask of cunning that
leered from the other's countenance. Perchance he would not have heeded
the threat had it not been for his anxiety on Hellayne's account. He