Under the Witches' Moon: A Romantic Tale of Mediaeval Rome
suspected that Laval knew more than he cared to tell.
"For the last time I ask, where is the Lady Hellayne?"
The Count's form rose towering above him, as he threw the words in
Tristan's face.
"For the last time I tell you, my lord, I know not," Tristan replied,
eye in eye. "Though I would gladly give my life to know."
"Perchance you may. I have been told the Lady Hellayne is here in
Rome. Wherefore is she here? Can it be the spirit that prompted the
pilgrimage to her lost lover? Will you take oath, that you have not
seen her?"
The speaker's eyes blazed ominously.
Tristan raised his head.
"I will, my lord, upon the Cross!"
Roger's heavy hand smote his cheek.
"Liar!"--
A woman who at that moment crept in the shadows of the Arch of Titus
saw Tristan, sword in hand, defending himself against a man apparently
much more powerful than himself. For a moment or two she gazed,
bewildered, not knowing what to do. Tristan at first seemed to stand
entirely on the defensive, but soon his blood grew hot and, in answer
to his adversary's lunge, he lunged again. But the other held a dagger
in his left hand and with it easily parried the blade. The next pass
she saw Tristan reel. She could bear no more and rushed screaming
towards some footmen with torches who were standing outside a dark and
heavily shuttered building.
Tristan and Roger de Laval rushed at each other with redoubled fury.
Both had heard the cry and their blows rang out with echoing clatter,
filling the desolate spaces with a sound not seldom heard there in
those days. It was a struggle of sheer strength, in which the odds were
all against Tristan. He began to yield step by step. Soon a yet fiercer
blow of his antagonist must bring him down to his knees, and he fell
back farther, as a veritable rain of blows fell upon him.
Four men followed by a woman rushed to the scene.
"Haste! Haste!" she cried frantically. "There is murder abroad!"
She fancied she should behold the younger man already vanquished by his
more vigorous enemy. On the contrary, he seemed to have regained his
strength and was now pressing the other with an agility and vigor that
outweighed the strength of maturity on the part of his adversary.
All was clear in the bright moonlight, as if the sun had been blazing
down upon them, and, as the woman leaped forward, she beheld Tristan's
assailant gain some advantage. He was pressed back along the Arch
towards the spot where she stood.
What now followed she could not see. It was all the work of a moment.
But the next instant she saw the elder man raise his arm as if to
strike with his dagger. Tristan staggered and fell, and the other
was about to strike him through when, with a wild, frantic outcry of
terror, she rushed between them, arresting the blow ere it could fall.
"Hellayne!"
A cry in which Tristan's smothered feelings broke through every
restraint winged itself from the mouth of the fallen man.
"Tristan!" came the hysterical response.
Roger had hurled his wife aside, his eyes flaming like live coals under
their bushy brows.
Those whom Hellayne had summoned to Tristan's aid, when she first
arrived on the scene of the conflict, unacquainted with the cause of
the quarrel and doubtful which side to aid, stood idly by, since with
Tristan's fall there seemed to be no farther demand for their services,
nor did Roger's towering stature invite interference.
In the heat of the conflict with its attendant turmoil none of those
immediately concerned had remarked a procession approaching from the
distance which now emerged from the shadow of the great arch into the
moonlit thoroughfare.
It was headed by four giant Nubians, carrying a litter on silver poles,
from between the half-shut silken curtains of which peered the face of
a woman. In its wake marched a score of Ethiopians in fantastic livery,
their broad, naked scimitars glistening ominously in the moonlight.
The litter and its escort arrived but just in time. Ere Laval's blade
could pierce the heart of his prostrate victim, Theodora had leaped
from her litter and thrown her saffron scarf over the prostrate youth.
With all the outlines of her beautiful form revealed through the thin
robe of spangled gauze she faced the irate aggressor and her voice cut
like steel as she said:
"Dare to touch him beneath this scarf! This man is mine."
Laval drew back, but his glaring eyes, his parted lips and his labored
breath argued little in favor of the fallen man, even though the blow
was, for the moment, averted.
With foam-flecked lips he turned to Theodora.
"This man is mine! His life is forfeit. Stand back, that I may wipe
this blot from my escutcheon."
Theodora faced the speaker undauntedly.
Ere he could reply, a woman's voice shrieked.
"Save him! Save him! He is innocent! He has done naught amiss!"
Hellayne, whom the Count had hurled against the masonry of the arch,
bruising her until she was barely able to support herself, at this
moment threw herself between them.
"Who is this woman?" Theodora turned to Tristan's assailant. "Who is
this woman?" Hellayne's eyes silently questioned Tristan.
Laval's sardonic laughter pealed through the silence.
"This lady is my wife, the Countess Hellayne de Laval, noble Theodora,
who has followed her perjured lover to Rome, so they may do penance in
company," he replied sardonically. "His life is forfeit. His offence
is two-fold. Within the hour he swore he knew naught of her abode.
But--since you claim him,--by ties this scarf proclaims--take him and
welcome! I shall not anticipate the fate you prepare for your noble
lovers!"
The two women faced each other in frozen silence, in the consciousness
of being rivals. Each knew instinctively it would be a fight between
them to the death.
Theodora surveyed Hellayne's wonderful beauty, appraising her charms
against her own, and Hellayne's gaze swept the face and form of the
Roman.
Tristan had scrambled to his feet, his face white with shame and rage.
From Theodora, in whose eyes he read that which caused him to tremble
in his inmost soul, he turned to Hellayne.
"Oh, why have you done this thing, Hellayne, why?--oh, why?"
Roger de Laval laughed viciously.
"It was indeed not to be expected that the Lady Hellayne would find her
recalcitrant lover in the arms of the Lady Theodora."
With an inarticulate outcry of rage Tristan was about to hurl himself
upon his opponent, had not Theodora placed a restraining hand upon him,
while her dark eyes challenged Hellayne.
All the revulsion of his nature against this man rose up in him and
rent him. All the love for Hellayne, which in these days had been
floating on the wings of longing, soared anew.
But his efforts at vindication in this strangest of all predicaments
were put to naught by the woman herself.
"Hear me, Hellayne--it is not true!" he cried, and paused with a
choking sensation.
Hellayne stood as if turned to stone.
Then her eyes swept Tristan with a look of such incredulous misery that
it froze the words that were about to tumble from his lips.
With a wail of anguish she turned and fled down the moonlit path like a
hunted deer.
"Up and after her!" Laval shouted to the men whom Hellayne had summoned
to the scene and these, eager to demonstrate their usefulness, started
in pursuit, Roger leading, ere Tristan could even make a move to
interfere.
Hellayne had fled into the open portals of a church at the end of the
street. She tottered and fell. Crawling through the semi-darkness she
gasped and leaned against a pillar. She saw a small side chapel, where,
before an image of the Virgin, guttered a brace of tapers. But ere she
reached the shrine her pursuers were upon her. As, with a shriek of
mortal fear she fell, she gazed into the brutal features of Roger de
Laval. His lips were foam-flecked, revealing his wolfish teeth.
It was then her strength forsook her. She fell fainting upon the hard
stone floor of the church.--
For a pace Tristan and Theodora faced each other in silence.
It was the woman who spoke.
Her voice was cold as steel.
"I have saved your life, Tristan! The weapon which my slaves have taken
from you awaits the call of its rightful claimant."
She reentered her litter while Tristan stood by, utterly dazed. But,
when the slaves raised the silver poles, she gave him a parting glance
from within the curtains that seemed to electrify his whole being.
After the litter-bearers and their retinue had trooped off, Tristan
remained for a time in the shadow of the Arch of the Seven Candles.
He knew not where to turn in his misery, nor what to do.
In the same hour he had found and lost his love anew.
CHAPTER III
DARK PLOTTINGS
It was past the hour of midnight.
In a dimly lighted turret chamber in the house of Hormazd the Persian
there sat two personages whose very presence seemed to enhance the
sinister gloom that brooded over the circular vault.
The countenance of the Grand Chamberlain was paler than usual and there
was a slight gathering of the eyebrows, not to say a frown, which in
an ordinary mortal might have signified little, but in one who had so
habitual a command of his emotions, would indicate to those who knew
him well an unusual degree of restlessness. His voice was calm however,
and now and then a bland smile belied the shadows on his brow.
At times his gaze stole towards a dimly lighted alcove wherein moved
a dark cowled figure, its grotesque shadow reflected in distorted
outlines upon the floor.
"The Moor tarries over long," Basil spoke at last.
"So do the ends of destiny," replied a voice that seemed to come from
the bowels of the earth.
"He is fleeter than a deer and more ferocious than a tiger," the Grand
Chamberlain interposed. "Nothing has ever daunted him, nor lives the
man who would thwart him and live. Can you tell me where he is now?"
"Patience!" came the sepulchral reply. "The magic disk reveals all
things! Anon you shall know."
Informed by daily gossip and the reports of his innumerable spies,
Basil was aware of a growing belief among the people that the power
he wielded was not altogether human, and he would have viewed it with
satisfaction even had he not shared it. Seeing in it an additional
force helpful to the realization of his ambition, he had thrown himself
blindly into the vortex of black magic which was to give to him that
which his soul desired.
In this chamber, filled with strange narcotic scents and the mysterious
rustling of unseen presences, by which he believed it to be peopled,
with the aid of one who seemed the personified Principle of Evil, Basil
assembled about him the forces that would ultimately launch him at the
goal of his ambition.
This devil's kitchen was the portal to the Unseen, the shrine of the
Unknown, the observatory of the Past and the Future, and the laboratory
of the Forbidden. There were dim and mysterious mirrors, before which
stood brazen tripods whose fumes, as they wreathed upward, gleamed with
dusky fires. It was in these mirrors that the wizard could summon the
dead and the distant to appear darkly, in scarcely definable glimpses.
But he could also produce apparitions more vivid, more startling and
more beautiful. Once, in the dark depths of the chamber, Basil had
seen a woman's phantom apparition suddenly become strangely luminous,
her garments glowing like flames of many colors, that shifted and
blent and alternated in ceaseless dance and play, waving and trembling
in unearthly glory, till she seemed to be of the very flame herself.
The reflection of the world of shadows was upon her; its splendors
were wrapping her round like a mantle. He watched her with bated