Under the Witches' Moon: A Romantic Tale of Mediaeval Rome
"I, too, have not been idle. We must lull them in security! We must
appear utterly paralyzed. Our terror will increase their boldness.
Their ultimate object is still hidden. We must be wary. The Lord
Alberic must be informed. We must spike the bait."
"I have despatched a trusty messenger in the guise of a peasant to the
shrine of the Archangel," Tristan interposed.
"God grant that he arrive not too late," Odo replied. "And now, my son,
listen to my words. A great soul and a stout heart must he have who
sets himself to such a task as is before you! We are surrounded by the
very fiends of Hell in human guise. Speak to no one of what you have
seen. If you are in need of counsel, come to me!"
Odo raised his hands, pronouncing a silent blessing over the kneeling
visitor and Tristan departed, dazed and trembling, wide-eyed and with
pallid lips.
As he passed Mount Aventine the dark-robed form of a hunchback suddenly
rose like a ghost from the ground beside him and, approaching Tristan,
muttered some words in an unintelligible jargon. Believing he was
dealing with a beggar, Tristan was about to dismiss the ill-favored
gnome with a gift, which the latter refused, motioning to Tristan to
incline his ear.
With an ill-concealed gesture of impatience Tristan complied, but his
strange interlocutor had hardly delivered himself of his message when
Tristan recoiled as if he had seen a snake in the grass before him,
every vestige of color fading from his face.
"At the Lateran?" he chokingly replied to the whispered confidence of
the hunchback.
The latter nodded.
"At the Lateran."
Ere Tristan could recover from his surprise, his informant had
disappeared among the ruins.
For some time he stood as if rooted to the spot.
It was too monstrous--too unbelievable and yet--what could prompt his
informant to invent so terrible a tale?
At midnight, two nights hence, the consecrated wafer was to be taken
from the tabernacle in the Lateran!
Perchance he had spoken even to one of the sect who had, at the last
moment, repented of his share in the contemplated outrage.
If it were granted to him to deliver Rome and the world from this
terror! A strange fire gleamed in his eyes as he returned to Castel San
Angelo.
Himself, he would keep the watch at the Lateran and foil the plot.
CHAPTER XI
BY LETHE'S SHORES
Basil the Grand Chamberlain was giving one of his renowned feasts in
his villa on the Pincian Mount. But on this evening he had limited the
number of his guests to two score. On his right sat Roger de Laval,
the guest of honor, on his left the Lady Hellayne. Over the company
stretched a canopy of cloth of gold. The chairs were of gilt bronze,
their arms were carved in elaborate arabesques. The dishes were of
gold; the cups inlaid with jewels. There was gayety and laughter. Far
into the night they caroused.
Hellayne's face was the only apprehensive one at the board. She was
pale and worn, and her countenance betrayed her reluctance to be
present at a feast into the spirit of which she could not enter. She
was dimly conscious of the fact that Basil devoured her with his eyes
and her lord seemed to find more suited entertainment with the other
women who were present than with his own wife. Only by threats and
coercion had he prevailed upon her to attend the Grand Chamberlain's
banquet. With a brutality that was part of his coarse nature he now
left her to shift for herself, and she tolerated Basil's unmistakable
insinuations only from a sense of utter helplessness.
Her beauty had indeed aroused the host's passion to a point where he
threw caution to the winds. The exquisite face, framed in a wealth
of golden hair, the deep blue eyes, the marble whiteness of the skin,
the faultless contours of her form--an ensemble utterly opposed to the
darker Roman type--had aroused in him desires which soon swept away
the thin veneer of dissimulation and filled Hellayne with a secret
dread which she endeavored to control. Her thoughts were with the man
by whom she believed herself betrayed, and while life seemed to hold
nothing that would repay her for enduring any longer the secret agonies
that overwhelmed her, it was to guard her honor that her wits were
sharpened and, believing in the adage that danger, when bravely faced,
disappears, she entered, though with a heavy heart, into the vagaries
of Basil, but, like a premonition of evil, her dread increased with
every moment.
And now the host announced to his guests his intention of leaving Rome
on the morrow for his estate in the Rocca, where an overpunctilious
overseer demanded his presence.
Raising his goblet he pledged the beautiful wife of the Count de Laval.
It was a toast that was eagerly received and responded to, and even
Hellayne was forced to appear joyous, for all that her heart was on the
point of breaking.
She raised her goblet, a beautiful chased cup of gold, in
acknowledgment. But she did not see the ill-omened smile that flitted
over the thin lips of Basil, and she wished for Tristan as she had
never wished for him before.
After a time the guests quitted the banquet hall for the moonlit
garden, and Basil's attentions became more and more insistent. It was
in vain Hellayne's eyes strained for her lord. He was not to be found.--
It was on the following morning when the horrible news aroused
the Romans that the young wife of the strange lord from Provence
had, during the night, suddenly died at the banquet of the Grand
Chamberlain. From a friar whom he chanced to pass on his way to the
Lateran Tristan received the first news.
Fra Geronimo's face was white as death, and his limbs shook as with a
palsy. He had been the confessor of the Lady Hellayne, the only visitor
allowed to come near her.
"Have you heard the tidings?" he cried in a quavering voice, on
beholding Tristan.
"What tidings?" Tristan returned, struck by the horror in the friar's
face.
"The Lady Hellayne is dead!" he said with a sob.
Tristan stared at him as if a thunderbolt had cleft the ground beside
him. For a moment he seemed bereft of understanding.
"Dead?" he gasped with a choking sensation. "What is it you say?"
"Well may you doubt your ears," the friar sobbed. "But Mater
Sanctissima, it is the truth! Madonna Hellayne is dead. They found her
dead--early this morning--in the vineyard of the Lord Basil."
"In the vineyard of the Lord Basil?" came back the echo from Tristan's
lips.
"There was a feast, lasting well into the night. The Lady Hellayne took
suddenly ill. They fetched a mediciner. When he arrived it was all
over."
"God of Heaven! Where is she now?"
"They conveyed her to the palace of the Lord Laval, to prepare her for
interment."
Without a word Tristan started to break away from the friar, his head
in a whirl, his senses benumbed. The latter caught him betime.
"What would you do?"
Tristan stared at him as one suddenly gone mad.
"I will see her."
"It is impossible!" the friar replied. "You cannot see her."
From Tristan's eyes came a glare that would have daunted many a one of
greater physical prowess than his informant.
"Cannot? Who is to prevent me?"
"The man whom fate gave her for mate," replied the friar.
"That dog--"
"A brawl in the presence of death? Would you thus dishonor her memory?
Would she wish it so?"
For a moment Tristan stared at the man before him as if he heard some
message from afar, the meaning of which he but faintly guessed.
Then a blinding rush of tears came to his eyes. He shook with the agony
of his grief regardless of those who passed and paused and wondered,
while the friar's words of comfort and solace fell on unmindful ears.
At last, heedless of his companion, heedless of his surroundings,
heedless of everything, he rushed away to seek solitude, where he would
not see a human face, not hear a human voice.
He must be alone with his grief, alone with his Maker. It seemed to
him he was going mad. It was all too monstrous, too terrible, too
unbelievable.
How was it possible that one so young, so strong, so beautiful, should
die?
Friar Geronimo knew not. But his gaze had caused Tristan to shiver as
in an ague.
He remembered the discourse of Basil and his companion in the galleries
of the Emperor's Tomb.
Twice was he on the point of warning Hellayne not to attend Basil's
banquet.
Each time something had intervened. The warning had remained unspoken.
Would she have heeded it?
He gave a groan of anguish.
Hellayne was dead! That was the one all absorbing fact which had taken
possession of him, blotting out every other thought, every other
consideration.
She was dead--dead--dead! The hideous phrase boomed again and
again through his distracted mind. Compared with that overwhelming
catastrophe what signified the Hour, the Why and the When. She was
dead--dead--dead!
For hours he sat alone in the solitudes of Mount Aventine, where no
prying eyes would witness his grief. And the storm which had arisen and
swept the Seven Hilled City with the vehemence of a tropical hurricane
seemed but a feeble echo of the tempest that raged within his soul.
She was dead--dead--dead. The waves of the Tiber seemed to shout it as
they leapt up and dashed their foam against the rocky declivities of
the Mount of Cloisters. The wind seemed now to moan it piteously, now
to shriek it fiercely, as it scudded by, wrapping its invisible coils
about him and seeming intent on tearing him from his resting place.
Towards evening he rose and, skirting the heights, descended into the
city, dishevelled and bedraggled, yet caring nothing what spectacle he
might afford. And presently a grim procession overtook the solitary
rambler, and at the sight of the black, cowled and visored forms that
advanced in the lurid light of the waxen tapers, Tristan knelt in the
street with head bowed till her body had been borne past. No one heeded
him. They carried her to the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, and
thither he followed presently, and, in the shadow of one of the pillars
of the aisle, he crouched, while the monks chanted the funeral psalms.
The singing ended the friars departed, and those who had formed the
cortege began to leave the church. In an hour he was alone, alone with
the beloved dead, and there on his knees he remained, and no one knew
whether, during that horrid hour, he prayed or blasphemed.
It may have been toward the third hour of the night when Tristan
staggered up, stiff and cramped, from the cold stone. Slowly, in a
half-dazed condition, he walked down the aisle and gained the door of
the church. He tried to open it, but it resisted his efforts, and he
realized it was locked for the night.
The appreciation of his position afforded him not the slightest dismay.
On the contrary, his feelings were rather of relief. At least there
was none other to share his grief! He had not known whither he should
repair, so distracted was his mind, and now chance or fate had settled
the matter for him by decreeing that he should remain.
Tristan turned and slowly paced back, until he stood beside the great,
black catafalque, at each corner of which a tall wax taper was burning.
His steps rang with a hollow sound through the vast, gloomy spaces of
the cold and empty church. But these were not matters to occupy his
mind in such a season, no more than the damp, chill air which permeated
every nook and corner. Of all of these he remained unconscious in the
absorbing anguish that possessed his soul.
Near the foot of the bier there was a bench, and there he took his seat
and, resting his elbows on his knees, took his dishevelled head between
his trembling hands. His thoughts were all of her whose poor, murdered