Under the Witches' Moon: A Romantic Tale of Mediaeval Rome
you such love in return as mortals have never known. I am as one in a
trance--I cannot see--I cannot think! I, the woman born to command--am
begging--imploring--I care not what you do with me--what becomes of me.
Take me!--I am yours--body and soul!"
Her face was lighted up by the pale rays of the moon. But, though
his senses were steeped in a delirium that almost took from him his
manhood, the gloom but deepened on Tristan's brow, while with moist
hungry lips she kissed him, again and again.
At last, seemingly on the verge of merging his whole being into her
own, he succeeded in extricating himself from the steely coils of those
white arms.
"Lady Theodora," he said in cold and constrained tones, "I am too poor
to return even in part such priceless favors of the Lady Theodora's
love!"
Stung in her innermost soul by his words, trembling from head to foot
with the violence of her emotions, she panted in a passion of anger and
shame.
"You dare? This to me? Since then you will not love me--take this--"
Above him, in her hand, gleamed his own unsheathed dagger.
Tristan with a supple movement caught the white wrist and wrenched the
weapon from her.
"The Lady Theodora is always true to herself," he said with cutting
irony, retreating from her in the direction of the lake.
She threw out her arms.
"Tristan--Tristan--forgive me! Come back--I am not myself."
He paused.
"And were you Aphrodite, I should spurn your love,--I should refuse to
kiss the lips, which a slave, a churl has defiled."
"You spurn me," she laughed deliriously. "Perchance, you are right. And
yet," she added in a sadder tone, "how often does fate but grant us
the dream and destroy the reality. Go--ere I forget, and do what I may
repent of. Go! My brain is on fire. I know not what I am saying. Go!"
As Tristan turned without response, a gleam of deadly hatred shone from
her eyes. For a long time she stood motionless by the kiosk, staring
as one in a trance down the long cypress avenue, whose shadows had
swallowed up Tristan's retreating form.
The spectral rays of the moon broke here and there through the dense,
leafy canopy, and dream-like the distant sounds of harps and flutes
were wafted through the stillness of the starlit southern night.
CHAPTER IX
THE NET OF THE FOWLER
The appearance of Basil who had emerged from the kiosk and regarded
Theodora with a look in his pale, passion distorted features that
seemed to light up recesses in his own heart and soul which he himself
had never fathomed, caused the woman to turn. But she looked at the
man with an almost unknowing stare. Notwithstanding a self-control
which she rarely lost, she had not found herself. The incredible had
happened. When she seemed absolutely sure of the man, he had denied
her. Her ruse had been her undoing. For Hellayne's presence had
been neither accidental, nor had Hellayne herself brought it about.
The messenger who had summoned Tristan had skillfully absolved both
commissions. He was to have brought the woman to the tryst, that she
might, with her own eyes, witness her rival's triumph. In her flight
she had vanquished Theodora.
Stealthily as a snake moves in the grass, Basil came nearer and nearer.
When he had reached Theodora's side he took the white hand and raised
it, unresisting, to his lips. His eyes sought those of the woman, but a
moment or two elapsed ere she seemed even to note his presence.
He bent low. There was love, passion, adoration in his eyes and there
was more. Theodora had over-acted her part. He had seen the fire
in her eyes and he knew. It was more than the determination to make
Tristan pliable to her desires in the great hour when she was to enter
Castel San Angelo as mistress of Rome. He saw the abyss that yawned at
his own feet, and in that moment two resolves had shaped themselves in
Basil's mind, shadowy, but gaining definite shape with each passing
moment, and, while his fevered lips touched Theodora's hand, all the
evil passions in his nature leaped into his brain.
Suddenly Theodora, glancing down at him, as if she for the first time
noted his presence, spoke.
"Acknowledge, my lord, that I have attained my ends! For, had
it not been for the appearance of that woman, I should have
conquered--ay--conquered beyond a doubt."
But when she looked at him she hardly recognized in him the man she
knew, so terribly had rage and jealousy distorted his countenance.
"How can I gainsay that you have conquered, fairest Theodora," he said,
"when I heard the soft accents of your endearments and your panting
breath, as you drowned his soul in fiery kisses? 'Tis but another
poor fool swallowed up in the unsatisfied whirlpool of your desires,
another victim marked for the holocaust that is to be. But why did the
Lady Theodora cry out and bring the tender love scene to a close all
unfinished?"
"By pale Hekaté, I had almost forgot the woman! Why did I permit her
to go without strangling her on the spot?" she cried, the growing
anger which the man's speech had aroused, brought to white heat in the
reminder.
"The honor of being strangled by the fair hands of the Lady Theodora
may be great," sneered Basil. "Yet I question if the Lady Hellayne
would submit without a struggle even to so fair an opponent."
"Why do you taunt me?" Theodora flashed.
"Why?" he cried. "Because I witnessed another reaping the fruit of
the deeds I have sown--another stealing from me the love of the woman
I have possessed,--one, too, held in silken bondage by another's wife.
Rather would I plunge this knife into my own heart and--"
Theodora's bosom heaved convulsively.
"Put up your dagger, my lord," she said, with a wave of her hand. "For,
ere long, it shall drink its fill. Strange it is that I--the like of
whose beauty, as they tell me, is not on earth--should be conquered by
a woman from the North--that the fires of the South should be quenched
by Northern ice. I could almost wish that matters had run differently
between her and myself, for she is brave, else had she not faced me as
she did."
"What else can you look for, Lady Theodora, from one sprung from such a
race?" replied the man sullenly. "I tell you, Lady Theodora, if you do
not ward yourself against her, she will vanquish you utterly, body and
soul."
"The future shall decide between us. I am still Theodora, and it will
go hard with you, if you interpret my will according to your own
desires. I foresee that we shall have need of all our resources when
the hour tolls that shall see Theodora set upon the throne that is her
own, and then--let deeds speak, not words."
"Since when have you found occasion to doubt the sureness of my blade,
Lady Theodora?" answered Basil, a dark look in his furtive eyes.
"Peace, my lord!" interposed Theodora. "Why do you raise up the ghost
of that which has been between us? Bury the past, for the last throw
that is in the hands of destiny ends the game which has been played
round this city of Rome these many weary days."
"And had you, Theodora, of a truth won over this Tristan," came the
dark reply, "so that one hour's delight in your arms would have caused
him to forget the world about him--what of me who has given to you the
love, the devotion of a slave?"
At the words Theodora flung wide her shimmering arms and cried:
"I tell you, my lord, that as I hold you and every man captive on whom
my charms have fallen, so shall I hold in chains the soul of this
Tristan, even though he resist--to the last."
"Full well do I know the potency of your spell," answered Basil with
lowering eyes, "and, I doubt me, if such is the case. Nevertheless,
I warn you, Lady Theodora, not to place too great a share of this
desperate venture on the shoulders of one you have never proved."
A contemptuous smile curved Theodora's lips as she rose from her seat.
With a single sweep her draperies fell from her like mist from a
snow-clad peak, and for the space of a moment there was silence, broken
only by Basil's panting breath. At last Theodora spoke.
"Man's honor is so much chaff for the burning, when the darts of love
pierce his brain. With beauty's weapons I have fought before, and once
again the victory shall be mine!"
There was an ominous light in Basil's eyes.
"Beware, lest the victory be not purchased with the blood of one whom
your fickleness has chosen to sit in the empty seat of the discarded.
At the bidding of a mad passion have you been defeated."
A flood of words surged irresistibly to Basil's lips, but at the sight
of Theodora's set face the words froze in the utterance. But when the
woman stared into space, her face showing no sign that she had even
heard his speech, he continued:
"And when you are stretched out on a bed of torment and call for death
to ease your pain, let the bitterest pang be that, had you enlisted my
blade and cherished the devotion I bore you, this night's work would
have set the seal of victory on our perilous venture."
"Blinded I have been," said Theodora, a strange light leaping to her
eyes, "to all the devotion which now I begin to fathom more clearly.
Answer me then, my lord! Is it only to slake the pangs of mad jealousy
that you taunt me with words which no man has dared to speak--and live?"
The sheen of a drawn dagger flashed above his head. Basil faced the
death that lurked in Theodora's uplifted arm and he replied in an
unmoved voice:
"Lady Theodora, if you harbor one single doubt in your mind of him who
has worked your will on those you consigned to their doom and laid
their proud heads low in the dust of the grave, let your blade descend
and quit me according to what I have deserved. Nay--Lady Theodora," he
continued, as her white arm still hovered tense above him, "it is quite
evident your love I never had, your trust I have lost! Therefore send
my soul to the dim realms of the underworld, for I have no longer any
desire for life."
He was gazing up at her with eyes full of passionate devotion, when
of a sudden the blade dropped from her grasp, tinkling on the stone
beneath, and, burying her face in her hands, Theodora burst into an
agony of tears that shook her form with piteous sobbing.
"By all the saints, dear lady, weep not," Basil pleaded, placing gentle
hands upon her shoulders. "Rather let your dagger do its work and drink
my blood, than that grief should thus undo you."
"Truly had some evil spirit entered into me," she spoke at length in
broken accents, "else had I not so madly suspected one whose devotion
to me has never wavered. Can you forgive me, my lord, most trusted and
doubted of my friends?"
With a fierce outcry the man cast himself at her feet, and, bending
low, kissed her hands, while, in tones, hoarse with passion, he
stammered:
"Let me then prove my love, Lady Theodora, most beautiful of all women
on earth! Set the task! Show me how to win back that which I have
lost! Let me become your utter slave."
And, so saying, he swept the unresisting woman into his grasp, and as
her body lay motionless against his breast the sight of her lips so
close to his own sent the hot blood hurtling through his fevered brain.
Theodora shuddered in his embrace.
He kissed her, again and again, and her wet lips roused in him all the
demoniacal passions of his nature.
"Speak," he stammered, "what must I do to prove to you the love which
is in my heart--the passion that burns my soul to crisp, as the fires
of hell the souls of the damned?"
Theodora's eyes were closed, as if she hesitated to speak the words
that her lips had framed. He, Tristan, had brought her to this pass.
He had denied, insulted her, he had made a mock of her in the eyes of
this man, who was kneeling at her feet, bond slave of his passions. By