Under the Witches' Moon: A Romantic Tale of Mediaeval Rome

"Can you not be happy, Tristan?" she whispered gently. "Happy as other men when loved as I love you!"

With a cold sinking of the heart he looked into the woman's perfect face. His upturned gaze rested on the glittering serpent heads that crowned the dusky hair, and the words of Fabio of the Cavalli knocked on the gates of his memory.

"Happy as other men when they love – and are deceived," he said, unable to free himself of her entwining arms.

"You shall not be deceived," she returned quickly. "You shall attain that which your heart desires. Your dearest hope shall be fulfilled, – all shall be yours – all – if you will be mine – to-night."

Tristan met her burning gaze, and as he did so the strange dread increased.

"What of the Grand Chamberlain?" he queried. "What of Basil, your lover?"

Her answer came swift and fierce, as the hiss of a snake.

"He shall die – even as Roxana – even as Fabio, he who boasted of my love! You shall be lord of Rome – and I – your wife – "

Her words leaped into his brain with the swift, fiery action of a burning drug. A red mist swam before his eyes.

"Love!" he cried, as one seized with sudden delirium. "What have I to do with love – what have you, Theodora, who make the lives of men your sport, and their torments your mockery? I know no name for the fever that consumes me, when I look upon you – no name for the ravishment that draws me to you in mingled bliss and agony. I would perish, Theodora. Kill me, and I shall pray for you! But love – love – it recalls to my soul a glory I have lost. There can be no love between you and me!"

He spoke wildly, incoherently, scarcely knowing what he said. The woman's arms had fallen from him. He staggered to his feet.

A low laugh broke from her lips, which curved in an evil smile.

"Poor fool!" she said in her low, musical tones, "to cast away that for which hundreds would give their last life's blood. Madman! First to desire, then to spurn. Go! And beware!"

She stood before him in all her white glory and loveliness, one white arm stretched forth, her bosom heaving, her eyes aflame. And Tristan, seized with a sudden fear, fled from the pavilion, down the moonlit path as if pursued by an army of demons.

A man stepped from a thicket of roses, directly into his path. Heedless of everything, of every one, Tristan endeavored to pass him, but the other was equally determined to bar his way.

"So I have found you at last," said the voice, and Tristan, starting as if the ground had opened before him, stared into the face of the stranger at Theodora's board.

"You have found me, my Lord Roger," he said, after recovering from his first surprise. "Here I may injure no one – you, my lord, least of all! Leave me in peace!"

The stranger gave a sardonic laugh.

"That I may perchance, when you have told me the truth – the whole truth!"

"Ask, my lord, and I will answer," Tristan replied.

"Where is the Lady Hellayne?" —

The questioning voice growled like far off thunder.

Tristan recoiled a step, staring into the questioner's face as if he thought he had gone mad.

"The Lady Hellayne?" he stammered, white to the lips and with a dull sinking of the heart. "How am I to know? I have not seen her since I left Avalon – months ago. Is she not with you?"

The Lord Laval's brow was dark as a thunder cloud.

"If she were with me – would I be wasting my time asking you concerning her?" he barked.

"Where is she, then?" Tristan gasped.

"That you shall tell me – or I have forgotten the use of this knife!"

And he laid his hand on the hilt of a long dagger that protruded from his belt.

Tristan's eyes met those of the other.

"My lord, this is unworthy of you! I have never committed a deed I dared not confess – and I despise your threat and your accusation as would the Lady Hellayne, were she here."

Steps were heard approaching from the direction of the pavilion.

"I am a stranger in Rome. Doubtless you are familiar with its ways. Some one is coming. Where shall we meet?"

Tristan pondered.

"At the Arch of the Seven Candles. Every child can point the way. When shall it be?"

"To-morrow, – at the second hour of the night. And take care to speak the truth!"

Ere Tristan could reply the speaker had vanished among the thickets.

For a moment he paused, amazed, bewildered. Roger de Laval in Rome! And Hellayne – where was she? She had left Avalon – had left her consort. Had she entered a convent? Hellayne – where was Hellayne?

Before this dreadful uncertainty all the events of the night vanished as if they had never been.

For a long time Tristan remained where Roger de Laval had left him. The cool air from the lake blew refreshingly on his heated brow. A thousand odors from orange and jessamine floated caressingly about him. The night was very still. There, in the soft sky-gloom, moved the majestic procession of undiscovered worlds. There, low on the horizon, the yellow moon swooned languidly down in a bed of fleecy clouds. The drowsy chirp of a dreaming bird came softly now and again from branch shadowed thickets, and the lilies on the surface of the lake nodded mysteriously to each other, as if they were whispering a secret of another world.

At last the moon sank out of sight and from afar, softened by the distance, the chimes of convent bells from the remote regions of the Aventine were wafted through the flower scented summer night.

END OF BOOK THE SECOND

BOOK THE THIRD

CHAPTER I

WOLFSBANE

The early summer dawn was creeping over the silent Campagna when Tristan reached the Inn of The Golden Shield.

As one dazed he had traversed the deserted, echoing streets in the mysterious half-light which flooded the Eternal City; a light in which everything was sharply defined yet seemed oddly spectral and ghostlike.

Deep down in his heart two emotions were contending, appalling in their intensity and appeal. One was an agonized fear for the woman he loved with a love so unwavering that his love was actually himself, his whole being, the sacrament that consecrated his life and ruled his destiny.

She had left Avalon; she had left him to whom she had plighted her troth. Where was she and why was Roger de Laval in Rome?

An icy fear gripped his heart at the thought; a nameless dread and horror of the terrible scene he had witnessed at the midnight feast of Theodora.

For a time he was as one obsessed, hardly master of himself and his actions. In an age where scenes such as those he had witnessed were quickly forgotten the death of Roxana and young Fabio created but little stir. Rome, just emerging from under the dark cloud of Marozia's regime, in the throes of ever-recurring convulsions, without a helmsman to guide the tottering ship of state, received the grim tidings with a shrug of apathy; and the cowed burghers discussed in awed whispers the dread power of one whose vengeance none dared to brave.

Tristan's unsophisticated mind could not so easily forget. He had stood at the brink of the abyss, he had looked down into the murky depths from which there was no escape once the fumes had conquered the senses and vanquished resistance. With a shudder he called to mind, how utterly and completely he had abandoned himself to the lure of the sorceress, how little short of a miracle had saved him. She had led him on step by step, and the struggle had but begun.

No one was astir at the inn.

He ascended the stairs leading to his chamber. The chill of the night was still lingering in the dusky passages. He lighted the taper of a tiny lamp that burnt before an image of the Mother of Sorrows in a niche.

Then he sank upon his couch. His vitality seemed to be ebbing and his mind clouding before the problems that began to crowd in upon him.

Nothing since he left Avalon, nothing external or merely human, had stirred him as had his meeting with Theodora. It had roused in him a dormant, embryonic faculty, active and vivid. What it called into his senses was not a mere series of pictures. It created a visual representation of the horrified creature, roused from the flattering oblivion of death to memory and shame and dread, nothing really forgotten, nothing past, the old lie that death ends all pitifully unmasked.

He shuddered as he thought of the consequences of surrender from which a silent voice out of the far off past had saved him – just in time.

His life lay open before him as a book, every fact recorded, nothing extenuated.

A calm, relentless voice bade him search his own life, if he had done aught amiss. He had never taken or desired that which was another's. Yet his years had been a ceaseless perturbation. There had been endless and desperate clutchings at bliss, followed by the swift discovery that the exquisite light had faded, leaving a chill gloaming that threatened a lonely night. And if the day had failed in its promise what would the night do?

His soul cried out for rest, for peace from the enemy; peace, not this endless striving. He was terrified. In the ignominious lament there was desertion, as if he were too small for the fight. He was demanding happiness, and that his own burden should rest on another's shoulders. How silent was the universe around him! He stood in tremendous, eternal isolation.

Pale and colorless as a moonstone at first the ghostly dawn had quickened to the iridescence of the opal, flaming into a glory of gold and purple in the awakening east.

And now the wall in the courtyard was no longer grey. A faint, clear, golden light was beginning to flow and filter into it, dispelling, one by one, the dark shadows that lurked in the corners. Somewhere in the distance the dreamer heard the shrill silver of a lark, and a dull monotonous sound, felt rather than heard, suggested that sleeping Rome was about to wake.

And then came the sun. A long golden ray stabbed the mists and leaped into his chamber like a living thing. The little sanctuary lamp before the image of the Blessed Virgin glowed no more.

After a brief rest Tristan arose, noting for the first time with a degree of chagrin that his dagger had not been restored to him.

It was day now. The sun was high and hot. The streets and thoroughfares were thronged. A bright, fierce light beat down upon dome and spire and pinnacle, flooding the august ruins of the Cæsars and the thousand temples of the Holy Cross with brilliant radiance from the cloudless azure of the heavens. Over the Tiber white wisps of mist were rising. Beyond, the massive bulk of the Emperor's Tomb was revealed above the roofs of the houses, and the olive groves of Mount Janiculum glistened silvery in the rays of the morning sun.

It was only when, refreshed after a brief rest and frugal refreshments, Tristan quitted the inn, taking the direction of Castel San Angelo, that the incidents leading up to his arrival at the feast of Theodora slowly filtered through his mind.

Withal there was a link missing in the chain of events. From the time he had left the Lateran in pursuit of the two strangers everything seemed an utter blank. What mysterious forces had been at work conveying him to his destiny, he could not even fathom and, in a state of perplexity, such as he had rarely experienced, he pursued his way, paying little heed to the life and turmoil that seethed around him.

Upon entering Castel San Angelo he was informed that the Grand Chamberlain had arrived but a few moments before and he immediately sought the presence of the man whose sinister countenance held out little promise of the solution of the mystery.

In an octagon chamber, the small windows of which, resembling port-holes, looked out upon the Campagna, Basil was fretfully perambulating as Tristan entered.

After a greeting which was frosty enough on both sides, Tristan briefly stated the matter which weighed upon his mind.

The Grand Chamberlain watched him narrowly, nodding now and then by way of affirmation, as Tristan related the experience at the Lateran, referring especially to two mysterious strangers whom he had followed to a distant part of the city, believing they might offer some clue to the outrage committed at the Lateran on the previous night.

Basil regarded the new captain with a mixture of curiosity and gloom. Perchance he was as much concerned in discovering what Tristan knew as the latter was in finding a solution of the two-fold mystery. After having questioned him on his experience, without offering any suggestion that might clear up his visitor's mind, Basil touched upon the precarious state of the city and its hidden dangers.

Tristan listened attentively to the sombre account, little guessing its purpose.

"Much have I heard of the prevailing lawless state," he interposed at last, "of dark deeds hidden in the silent bosom of the night, of feud and rebellion against the Church which is powerless to defend herself for the want of a master-hand that would evoke order out of chaos."

The dark-robed figure by his side gave a grim nod.

"Men are closely allied to beasts, giving rein to their desires and appetites as the tigers and hyenas. It is only fear that will restrain them, fear of some despotic invisible force that pervades the universe, whose chiefest attribute is not so much creative as destructive. It is only through fear you can rule the filthy rabble that reviles to-day its idol of yesterday."

There was an undercurrent of scorn in Basil's voice and Tristan saw, as it were, the lightning of an angry or disdainful thought flashing through the sombre depths of his eyes.

"What of the Lady Theodora?" Tristan interposed bluntly.

Basil gave a nameless shrug.

"She bends men's hearts to her own desires, taking from them their will and soul. The hot passion of love is to her a toy, clasped and unclasped in the pink hollow of her hand."

And, as he spoke, Basil suited the gesture to the word, closing his fingers in the air and again unclosing them.

"As long as she retains the magic of her beauty so long will her sway over the Seven Hills endure," he added after a brief pause.

"What of the woman who paid the penalty of her daring?" Tristan ventured to inquire.

Basil regarded the questioner quizzically.

"There have been many disturbances of late," he spoke after a pause. "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 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, bewild