Under the Witches' Moon: A Romantic Tale of Mediaeval Rome
swift glance into the moonlit garden.
The girl looked at him with a puzzled air, but did not stir.
"What am I to say to her?" she said.
"That I will not enter these gates!"
"You will not?"
"No!" He snapped curtly.
"Fool! How you will regret your speech!"
Her face changed suddenly like a fickle sky, and there was something in
her eyes too wicked for words.
Without vouchsafing a reply, Tristan turned and lost himself in the
desolation of Mount Aventine.
The night marched on majestically.
The moon and her sister planets passed through their appointed spheres
of harmonious light and law, and from all cloisters and convents
prayers went up to heaven for pity, pardon and blessing on sinful
humanity that had neither pity, pardon nor blessing for itself, till,
with magic suddenness, the dense purple skies changed to a pearly grey,
the moon sank pallidly beneath the earth's dark rim and the stars were
extinguished one by one.
Morning began to herald its approach in the freshening air.
Tristan still slept on his improvised couch, a marble slab he had
chosen when he discovered that he had lost his way in the wilderness
of the Aventine. His head on his arm he lay quite still among the
flowers, wrapt in a sort of dizzy delirium in which the forms of
Theodora and Hellayne strangely intermingled, until the riddles of life
were blotted out together with the riddles of Fate.
CHAPTER VI
THE COUP
Tristan spent the greater part of the day visiting the churches and
sanctuaries, offering up prayers for oblivion and peace. His heart
was heavy within him. Like the stray leaf that has been torn from
its native branch and flutters resistlessly, aimlessly hither and
thither, at the mercy of the chance breeze, nevermore to return to
its sheltering bough, so the lone wanderer felt himself tossed about
by the waves of destiny, a human derelict without a haven where he
might escape the storms of life. Guiltless in his own conscience of
an imputed sin, in that his love for Hellayne had been pure and holy,
Tristan could find little comfort in the enforced penance, while his
hungry heart cried out for her who had so willed it. And, as with weary
feet he dragged himself through the streets of the pontifical city, he
vaguely wondered, if his would ever be the peace of the goal. In the
darkness in which he walked, in the perturbation of his mind, he longed
more than ever to open his heart to some one who would understand and
counsel and guide his steps.
The Pontiff being a prisoner in the Lateran, Tristan's ardent wish to
confide in the successor of St. Peter had suffered a sudden and a keen
disappointment. There were but Odo of Cluny, Benedict of Soracté or
the Grand Penitentiary, holding forth in the subterranean chapel at
St. Peter's, to whom he might turn for ease of mind, and a natural
reluctance to lay bare the holiest thoughts man may give to woman,
restrained him for the nonce from seeking these channels.
Thus three days had sped, yet naught had happened to indicate that
events would shape the course so ardently desired by Tristan.
It was there, on one of the terraces crowning the splendid heights
of immortal Rome, with a view of the distant Sabine and Alban hills,
fading into the evening dusk, that the memory of the golden days of
Avalon returned to him in waves of anguish that almost mastered his
resolve to begin life anew under conditions that seemed insupportable.
Again Hellayne was by his side, as in dream-forgotten Avalon. Again
side by side they wandered where the shattered columns of old grey
temples, all that remained of a sunny Greek civilization of which they
knew nothing, crowned the heights above the lazy lapping waves of the
tideless Tyrrhenian sea. There, for whole hours would they sit, the air
full of the scent of orange and myrtle; under almond trees, covered
with blossoms that sprinkled the emerald ground like rosy snowflakes,
and watch the white sails of the far feluccas that trailed the waves
in monotonous rhythm to or from the sunlit shores of Africa. The
distant headlands looked faint and dreamy, and the sparkling sea broke,
gurgling, foaming among the rocks at their feet, as it had broken at
the feet of other lovers who had sat there centuries ago, when those
shattered columns had been white in their freshness and the temples had
been wreathed with the garlands of youth. And the eternal waves said to
them what they had said to the dead and forgotten; and the fickle winds
sang to them what they had sung to the fair and the nameless, and they
stretched forth their hands, and saw but the sea and the sun.
And they knew not the deity to whom those temple columns had been
raised, just as he knew not to whose worship those fallen columns had
been erected, nor guessed they who had knelt at the holy shrines.
And as they sat there, the man and the woman, their eyes probing the
depths of living sapphire, they would watch the restless sea-weed that
seemed to coil and uncoil like innumerable blue snakes upon a bed of
bright blue flames, and the luminous mosses that trembled like blue
stars ceaselessly towards the surface that they never, never reached.
And down there in the crystal palaces they would fancy that they saw
faces as of glancing mermen, even as the lovers of older days had seen
passing Tritons and the scaly children of Poseidon.
And again she would croon those sad melancholy songs that came from
her lips like faint echoes of Aeolian harps. Now she flung them upon
the air in bursts of weird music, to the accompaniment of a breaking
wave, songs so passionate and elemental that they seemed the cry of
these same radiant waters when churned by the storm into fury. Or they
might have been such wailings as spirits imprisoned in old sea caves
would utter to the hollow walls, or which the ghosts of ship-wrecked
crews might send forth from the rocks where they had perished. Or again
they might suggest some earthly passion, love, jealousy, the cry of a
longing heart, till the dirge seemed to wear itself out and the soul of
the listener seemed to sail out of the tempest into bright and peaceful
waters like those that skirted dream-lost Avalon, scarcely rippled by
the faint breeze of summer, breaking in long unfurling waves among the
rocks at their feet. Thus they used to sit long hours, heart listening
to heart, soul clinging to soul, while she bared her throat to the
scent-laden breezes that fanned her and looked out on the dazzling
horizon--till a lightning flash from the clear azure splintered the
dream and broke two lives.
For a long time Tristan gazed about, vainly trying to order his
thoughts. Could he but forget! Would but the present engulf the past!--
His adventure at the Church of Santa Maria of the Aventine and his
chance meeting with Theodora recurred to him at intervals throughout
the day, and he could not but admit that the reports of the woman's
beauty were far from exaggerated. Perchance, if the memory of Hellayne
had been less firmly rooted in his soul, he, too, might, like many
another, have sought solace at the forbidden fount. However, he was
resolved to avoid her, for he had seen something in the swift glance
she had bestowed upon him that discoursed of matters it behooved him to
beware of. And yet he wondered how she had received his denial, she,
whom no man had denied before. Then this memory also faded before the
exigencies of the hour.
The sun had sunk to rest in a sky of turquoise, crimson and gold, when
Tristan found himself standing on the eminence where seven decades
later Crescentius, the Senator of Rome, was to build the Church of
Santa Maria in Ara Coeli.
Leaning on a broken pillar, Tristan watched the evening light as it
spread a veil of ethereal splendor over the Seven Hills and there came
to him a strange feeling of remoteness as to one standing upon some
hill-set shrine.
Far beneath him lay the Forum. White columns shone roseate in the dying
light of day.
Wrapt in deep thoughts and meditations, Tristan descended the stairs
leading from the summit whence in after time the name of Santa Maria in
Ara Coeli--Holy Mother at the Altar of Heaven--was to ring in the ears
of thousands like a beautiful rhythmic chant, and after a time he found
himself in the Piazza fronting the Lateran.
Seized with a sudden impulse he entered the church.
Slowly the worshippers began to assemble. Their numbers increased to
almost a hundred, though they seemed but as so many shadows in the vast
nave. There was something in their faces, touched by the uncertain
glimmer of the tapers and lamps, that filled him with awe, as if he
were standing among the ghosts of the past.
At last the holy office commenced.
A very old priest, whose features Tristan could not distinguish, began
to chant the Introitus, in deep long drawn notes. Through the narrow
windows filtered the light of the rising moon. It did little more
than stain the dusk. Over the sombre high altar hung the white ivory
figure of the Christ, bowed, sagged, in the last agony. A few blood-red
poppies were the only flowers upon the altar. The fumes of incense rose
in spiral columns to the vaulted ceiling.
The Kyrie had been chanted, the Gloria in Excelsis Deo. Later the Host
was consecrated and the cup before the kneeling worshippers, and the
priest was turning to those near him who, as was still the custom in
those days, were present to communicate in both kinds.
To each came from his lips the solemn words:
"Corpus Domini Nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam ad Vitam
aeternam!"
He dipped his fingers in the cup, cleansing them with a little wine. He
consumed the cleansings and turned to read the antiphony with resonant
voice.
"I saw the heavens opened and Jesus at the right hand of God. Lord
Jesus receive their spirit and lay not this sin to their charge!"
Then, with hands folded over his breast, he moved towards the altar in
the centre, touched it with his lips, and, turning once more to the
people, said:
"Dominus Vobiscum!"
"Et cum spiritu tuo," was not answered.
For at that moment rough shouts were heard and through a side door,
near a chapel, a body of ruffians rushed into the Basilica, their faces
vizored and masked.
With shouts and oaths they made their way towards the altar. The
worshippers scattered, the mail-clad ruffians smiting their way
through their kneeling ranks up to the altar where stood the form of a
youth clad in pontifical vestments, pale but calm in the face of the
impending storm.
It was Pope John XI., held prisoner in the Lateran by Alberic, the
Senator of Rome. Tristan had not noted his presence during the
ceremony. Now, like a revelation, the import of the scene flashed upon
his mind.
Bearing Tristan down by the sheer weight of their numbers, they rushed
upon the Pontiff, stripped him of his pallium and chasuble, leaving him
but one sacred vestment, the white albe.
Unable to reach the Pontiff's side, unable to aid him, Tristan stood
rooted to the spot, an impotent witness of the most heinous sacrilege
his mind could picture, almost turned to stone.
Before Tristan's very eyes, before the eyes of the worshippers, who
outnumbered the ruffians ten to one, an outrage was being committed at
which the fiends themselves would shudder. Violence was being done to
the Father of Christendom in his own city, and the craven cowards had
but their own safety in mind.
Just what happened Tristan could not immediately remember. For, as he
rushed towards the spot where he saw the Pontiff struggling helplessly
against his assailants, he was violently thrust back and the ruffians
made their way towards a side chapel with their captive. Thus he found
himself helplessly borne along in the darkness, and thrust out into the