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CHAPTER VIII
THE GOTHIC TOWER

Deep quiet reigned in the city, when a man, enveloped in a mantle, whose dimly shadowed form was outlined against the massive, gray walls of Constantine's Basilica glided slowly and cautiously from among the blocks of stone scattered round its foundations and advanced to the fountain which then formed the centre of the square, where the Obelisk now stands. There he stopped and, concealed by the obscurity of the night and the deeper shadows of the monument, glanced furtively about, as if to be sure that he was unobserved. Then drawing his sword, he struck three times upon the pavement, producing at each stroke light sparks from its point. This signal, for such it was, was forthwith answered. From the remote depths of the ruins the cry of the screech-owl was thrice in succession repeated, and, guided by the ringing sound, a second figure emerged from the weeds, which were in some places the height of a man. Obeying the signal of the first comer, the second, who was likewise enveloped in a mantle, silently joined him and together they proceeded half-way down the Borgo Vecchio, then turned to the right and entered a street, at the remote extremity of which there was a figure of the Madonna with its lamp.

Onward they walked with rapid steps, traversed the Borgo Santo Spirito and followed the street Della Lingara to where it opens upon the church Regina Coeli. After having pursued their way for some time in silence they entered a narrow winding path, which conducted them through a deserted valley, the silence of which was only broken by the occasional hoot of an owl or the fitful flight of a bat. In the distance could be heard the splashing of water from the basin of a fountain, half obscured by vines and creepers, from which a thin, translucent stream was pouring and bubbling down the Pincian hillsides in the direction of Santa Trinita di Monte.

They lost themselves in a maze of narrow and little frequented lanes, until at last they found themselves before a gray, castellated building, half cloister, half fortress, rising out of the solitudes of the Flaminian way, before which they stopped. Over the massive door were painted several skeletons in the crude fashion of the time, standing upright with mitres, sceptres and crowns upon their heads, holding falling scrolls, with faded inscriptions in their bony grasp.

The one, who appeared to be the moving spirit of the two, knocked in a peculiar manner at the heavy oaken door. After a wait of some duration they heard the creaking of hinges. Slowly the door swung inward and closed immediately behind them. They entered a gloomy passage. A number of owls, roused by the dim light from the lantern of the warden, began to fly screeching about, flapping their wings against the walls and uttering strange cries. After ascending three flights of stairs, preceded by the warden, whose appearance was as little inviting as his abode, they paused before a chamber, the door of which their guide had pushed open, remaining himself on the threshold, while his two visitors entered.

"How is the girl?" questioned the foremost in a whisper, to which the warden made whispered reply.

Beckoning his companion to follow him, the stranger then passed into the room, which was dimly illumined by the flickering light of a taper. Throwing off his mantle, Eckhardt surveyed with a degree of curiosity the apartment and its scanty furnishings. Nothing could be more dreary than the aspect of the place. The richly moulded ceiling was festooned with spiders' webs and in some places had fallen in heaps upon the floor. The glories of Byzantine tapestry had long been obliterated by age and time. The squares of black and white marble with which the chamber was paved were loosened and quaked beneath the foot-steps and the wide and empty fireplace yawned like the mouth of a cavern.

Straining his gaze after the harper who was bending over a couch in a remote corner of the room, Eckhardt was about to join him when Hezilo approached him.

"Would you like to see?" he asked, his eyes full of tears.

Eckhardt bowed gravely, and with gentle foot-steps they approached a bed in the corner of the room, on which there reposed the figure of a girl, lying so still and motionless that she might have been an image of wax. Her luxurious brown hair was spread over the pillow and out of this frame the pinched white face with all its traces of past beauty looked out in pitiful silence. One thin hand was turned palm downward on the coverlet, and as they approached the fingers began to work convulsively.

Hezilo bent over her, and touched her brow with his lips.

"Little one," he said, "do you sleep?"

The girl opened her sightless eyes, and a faint smile, that illumined her face, making it wondrously beautiful, passed over her countenance.

"Not yet," she spoke so low that Eckhardt could scarcely catch the words, "but I shall sleep soon."

He knew what she meant, for in her face was already that look which comes to those who are going away. Hezilo looked down upon her in silence, but even as he did so a change for the worse seemed to come to the sick girl, and they became aware that the end had begun. He tried to force some wine between her lips, but she could not swallow, and now, instead of lying still, she continued tossing her head from side to side. Hezilo was undone. He could do nothing but stand at the head of the bed in mute despair, as he watched the parting soul of his child sob its way out.

"Angiola – Angiola – do not leave me – do not go from me!" the harper cried in heart-rending anguish, kneeling down before the bed of the girl and taking her cold, clammy hands into his own. Impelled by a power he could not resist, Eckhardt knelt and tried to form some words to reach the Most High. But they would not come; he could only feel them, and he rose again and took his stand by the dying girl.

She now began to talk in a rambling manner and with that strength which comes at the point of death from somewhere; her voice was clear but with a metallic ring. What Eckhardt gathered from her broken words, was a story of trusting love, of infamous wrong, of dastardly crime. And the harper shook like a branch in the wind as the words came thick and fast from the lips of his dying child. After a while she became still – so still, that they both thought she had passed away. But she revived on a sudden and called out:

"Father, – I cannot see, – I am blind, – stoop down and let me whisper – "

"I am here little one, close – quite close to you!"

"Tell him, – I forgive – And you forgive him too – promise!"

The harper pressed his lips to the damp forehead of his child but spoke no word.

"It is bright again – they are calling me – Mother! Hold me up – I cannot breathe."

Hezilo sank on his knees with his head between his hands, shaken by convulsive sobs, while Eckhardt wound his arm round the dying girl, and as he lifted her up the spirit passed. In the room there was deep silence, broken only by the harper's heart-rending sobs. He staggered to his feet with despair in his face.

"She said forgive!" he exclaimed with broken voice. "Man – you have seen an angel die!"

"Who is the author of her death?" Eckhardt questioned, his hands so tightly clenched, that he almost drove the nails into his own flesh.

If ever words changed the countenance of man, the Margrave's question transformed the harper's grief into flaming wrath.

"A devil, a fiend, who first outraged, then cast her forth blinded, to die like a reptile," he shrieked in his mastering grief. "Surely God must have slept, while this was done!"

There was a breathless hush in the death-chamber.

Hezilo was bending over the still face of his child. The dead girl lay with her hands crossed over her bosom, still as if cut out of marble and on her face was fixed a sad little smile.

At last the harper arose.

Staggering to the door he gave some whispered instructions to the individual who seemed to fill the office of warden, then beckoned silently to Eckhardt to follow him and together they descended the narrow winding stairs.

"I will return late – have everything prepared," the harper at parting turned to the warden, who had preceded them with his lantern. The latter nodded gloomily, then he retraced his steps within, locking the door behind him.

Under the nocturnal starlit sky, Eckhardt breathed more freely. For a time they proceeded in silence, which the Margrave was loth to break. He had long recognized in the harper the mysterious messenger who in that never-to-be-forgotten night had conducted him to the groves of Theodora, and who he instinctively felt had been instrumental in saving his life. Something told him that the harper possessed the key to the terrible mystery he had in vain endeavoured to fathom, yet his thoughts reverted ever and ever to the scene in the tower and to the dead girl Angiola, and he dreaded to break into the harper's grief.

They had arrived at the place of the Capitol. It was deserted. Not a human being was to be seen among the ruins, which the seven-hilled city still cloaked with her ancient mantle of glory. Dark and foreboding the colossal monument of the Egyptian lion rose out of the nocturnal gloom. The air was clear but chill, the starlight investing the gray and towering form of basalt with a more ghostly whiteness. At the sight of the dread memory from the mystic banks of the Nile, Eckhardt could not suppress a shudder; a strange oppression laid its benumbing hand upon him.

Involuntarily he paused, plunged in gloomy and foreboding thoughts, when the touch of the harper's hand upon his shoulder caused him to start from his sombre reverie.

Drawing the Margrave into the shadow of the pedestal, which supported the grim relic of antiquity, Hezilo at last broke the silence. He spoke slowly and with strained accents.

"The scene you were permitted to witness this night has no doubt convinced you that I have a mission to perform in Rome. Our goal is the same, though we approach it from divergent points. They say man's fate is pre-ordained, irrevocable, unchangeable – from the moment of his birth. A gloomy fantasy, yet not a baseless dream. By a strange succession of events the thread of our destiny has been interwoven, and the knowledge which you would acquire at any cost, it is in my power to bestow."

"Of this I felt convinced, since some strange chance brought us face to face," Eckhardt replied gloomily.

"'Twas something more than chance," replied the harper. "You too felt the compelling hand of Fate."

"What of the awful likeness?" Eckhardt burst forth, hardly able to restrain himself at the maddening thought, and feeling instinctively that he should at last penetrate the web of lies, though ever so finely spun.

The harper laid a warning finger on his lips.

"You deemed her but Ginevra's counterfeit?"

"Ginevra! Ginevra!" Eckhardt, disregarding the harper's caution, exclaimed in his mastering agony. "What know you of her? Speak! Tell me all! What of her?"

"Silence!" enjoined his companion. "How know we what these ruins conceal? I guided you to the Groves at the woman's behest. What interest could she have in your destruction?"

Eckhardt was supporting himself against the pedestal of the Egyptian lion, listening as one dazed to the harper's words. Then he broke into a jarring laugh.

"Which of us is mad?" he cried. "Wherein did I offend the woman? She plied but the arts of her trade."

"You are speaking of Ginevra," replied the harper.

"Ginevra," growled Eckhardt, his hair bristling and his eyes flaming as those of an infuriated tiger while his fingers gripped the hilt of his dagger.

"You are speaking of Ginevra!" the harper repeated inexorably.

With a moan Eckhardt's hands went to his head. His breast heaved; his breath came and went in quick gasps.

"I do not understand, – I do not understand."

"You made no attempt to revisit the Groves," said the harper.

Eckhardt stroked his brow as if vainly endeavouring to recall the past.

"I feared to succumb to her spell."

"To that end you had been summoned."

"I have since been warned. Yet it seemed too monstrous to be true."

"Warned? By whom?"

"Cyprianus, the monk!"

The harper's face turned livid.

"No blacker wretch e'er strode the streets of Rome. And he confessed?"

"A death-bed confession, that makes the devils laugh," Eckhardt replied, then he briefly related the circumstances which had led him into the deserted region of the Tarpeian Rock and his chance discovery of the monk, whose strange tale had been cut short by death.

"He has walked long in death's shadow," said the harper. "Fate was too kind, too merciful to the slayer of Gregory."

There was a brief pause, during which neither spoke. At last the harper broke the silence.

"The hour of final reckoning is near, – nearer than you dream, the hour when a fiend, a traitor must pay the penalty of his crimes, the hour which shall for ever more remove the shadow from your life. The task required of you is great; you may not approach it as long as a breath of doubt remains in your heart. Only certainty can shape your unrelenting course. Had Ginevra a birth-mark?"

Eckhardt breathed hard.

"The imprint of a raven-claw on her left arm below the shoulder."

Hezilo nodded. A strange look had passed into his eyes.

"There is a means – to obtain the proof."

"I am ready!" replied Eckhardt with quivering lips.

"If you will swear on the hilt of this cross, to be guarded by my counsel, to let nothing induce you to reveal your identity, I will help you," said the harper.

Eckhardt touched the proffered cross, nodding wearily. His heart was heavy to breaking, as the harper slowly outlined his plan.

"The woman has been seized by a mortal dread of her betrayer, – the man who wrecked her life and yours. No questions now, – this is neither the hour or the place! In time you shall know, in time you shall be free to act! Acting upon my counsel, she has bid me summon to her presence a sooth-sayer, one Dom Sabbat, who dwells in the gorge between Mounts Testaccio and Aventine. To him I am to carry these horoscopes and conduct him to the Groves on the third night before the full of the moon."

The harper's voice sank to a whisper, while Eckhardt listened attentively, nodding repeatedly in gloomy silence.

"On that night I shall await you in the shadows of the temple of Isis. There a boat will lie in waiting to convey us to the water stairs of her palace."

The harper extended his hand, wrapping himself closer in his mantel.

"The third night before the full of the moon!" he said. "Leave me now, I implore you, that I may care for my dead. Remember the time, the place, and your pledge!"

Eckhardt grasped the proffered hand and they parted.

The harper strode away in the direction of the gorge below Mount Aventine, while Eckhardt, oppressed by strange forebodings, shaped his course towards his own habitation on the Caelian Mount.

Neither had seen two figures in black robes, that lingered in the shadows of the Lion of Basalt.

No sooner had Eckhardt and Hezilo departed, than they slowly emerged, standing revealed in the star-light as Benilo and John of the Catacombs. For a moment they faced each other with meaning gestures, then they too strode off in the opposite directions, Benilo following the harper on his singular errand, while the bravo fastened himself to the heels of the Margrave, whom he accompanied like his own shadow, only relinquishing his pursuit when Eckhardt entered the gloomy portals of his palace.

CHAPTER IX
THE SNARE OF THE FOWLER

While these events transpired in Rome, a feverish activity prevailed in Castel San Angelo. In day time the huge mausoleum presented the same sullen and forbidding aspect as ever but without revealing a trace of the preparations, which were being pushed to a close within. Under cover of night the breaches had been repaired; huge balistae and catapults had been placed in position on the ramparts, and the fortress had been rendered almost impregnable to assault, as in the time of Vitiges, the Goth.

Events were swiftly approaching the fatal crisis. While Otto languished in the toils of Stephania, whose society became more and more indispensable to him, while with pernicious flattery Benilo closed the ear of the king to the cries of his German subjects and estranged him more and more from his leaders, his country, and his hosts, while Eckhardt vainly strove to arouse Otto to the perils lurking in his utter abandonment to Roman councillors and Roman polity, the Senator of Rome had introduced into Hadrian's tomb a sufficiently strong body of men, not only to withstand a siege, but to vanquish any force, however superior to his own, to frustrate any assault, however ably directed. While the German contingents remained on Roman soil he dared not engage his enemy in a last death-grapple for the supremacy over the Seven Hills, which Otto's war-worn veterans from the banks of the Elbe and Vistula had twice wrested from him. The final draw in the great game was at hand. On this day the envoys of the Electors would arrive in Rome to demand Otto's immediate return to his German crown-lands, whose eastern borders were sorely menaced by the ever recurring inroads of Poles and Magyars. In the event of Otto's refusing compliance with the Electoral mandate, Count Ludeger of the Palatinate was to relieve Eckhardt of his command and to lead the German contingents back across the Alps.

But it was no part of the Senator's policy to permit Otto to return. For while there remained breath in the youth, Rome remained the Fata Morgana of his dreams, and Crescentius remained the vassal of Theophano's son. He could never hope to come into his own as long as the life of that boy-king overshadowed his own. Therefore every pressure must be brought to bear upon the headstrong youth, to defy the Electoral mandate, to rebuff, to offend the Electoral envoys. Then, the great German host recalled, Eckhardt relieved of his command, Otto isolated In a hostile camp, Stephania should cry the watchword for his doom. The inconsiderable guard remaining would be easily vanquished and the son of Theophano, utterly abandoned and deserted, should fall an easy prey to the Senator's schemes, a welcome hostage in the dungeons of Castel San Angelo, for him to deal with according to the dictates of the hour. The task to urge Otto to this fatal step had been assigned to Benilo, but Crescentius was prepared for all emergencies arising from any unforeseen turn of affairs. He had gone too far to recede. If now he quailed before the impending issue, the mighty avalanche he had started would hurl him to swift and certain doom.

Since that fateful hour, when in a moment of unaccountable weakness Crescentius had listened to Benilo's serpent-wisdom, and had arrayed his own wife against the German King, the Senator of Rome had seen but little of Stephania. The preparations for the impending revolt of the Romans, in whose fickle minds his emissaries found a fertile soil for the seed of treason and discontent, engaged him night and day. He seemed present at once on the ramparts, in the galleries and in the vaults of his formidable keep. But when chance for a fleeting moment brought the Senator face to face with his consort, the meaning-fraught smile on the lips of Stephania seemed to assure him that everything was going well. Otto was lost to the world. Heaven and earth seemed alike blotted out for him in her presence. Together they continued to stroll among the ruins, while Stephania poured strange tales into the youth's ear, tales which crept to his brain, like the songs of the Sirens that lure the mariner among the crimson flowers of their abode. And Eckhardt despised the Romans too heartily to fear them, and even therein he revealed the heel of Achilles.

If the present day was gained, the Senator's diplomacy would carry victory from the field, and Benilo had well plied his subtle arts. Yet Crescentius was resolved to attend in person the audience of the envoys. He would with his own ears hear the King's reply to the Electors. If Benilo had played him false? He hardly knew why a lingering suspicion of the Chamberlain crept into his mind at all. But he shook himself free of the thought, which had for a moment clouded the future with its sombre shadow.

As the Senator of Rome hurriedly traversed the galleries of the vast mausoleum, he suddenly found himself face to face with Stephania.

Her face was pale and her eyes revealed traces of tears.

At the first words she uttered, Crescentius paused, surprise and gladness in his eyes.

"We are well met, my lord," she said, after a brief greeting, an unwonted tremor vibrating in her tones. "I have sought you in vain all the morning. Release me from the task you have imposed upon me! I cannot go on! I am not further equal to it. It is a game unworthy of you or me!"

The surprise at her words for a moment choked the Senator's utterance and almost struck him dumb.

"Imposed upon?" he replied. "I thought you had accepted the mission freely. Is the boy rebellious?"

"On the contrary! Were he so, perhaps I should not now prefer this request. He is but too pliant."

"He has made your task an easy one," Crescentius nodded meaningly.

"He has laid his whole soul bare to me; not a thought therein, ever so remote, which I have not sounded. I can not stand before him. My brow is crimsoned with the flush of shame. He gave me truth for a lie, – friendship for deceit. He deserves a better fate than the Senator of Rome has decreed for him."

Crescentius breathed hard.

"The weakness does you honour," he replied after a pause. "Perchance I should have spared you the task. I placed him in your hands, because I dared trust no one else. And now it is too late – too late!"

"It is not too late," replied Stephania.

Crescentius pointed silently to the ramparts, where a score of men were placing a huge catapult in position.

"It is not too late!" she repeated, her cheeks alternately flushing and paling. "To-day, my lord informed me, the King stands at the Rubicon. To-day he must choose, If it is to be Rome, if Aix-la-Chapelle. If he elects to return to the gray gloom of his northern skies, to the sombre twilight of his northern forests, let him go, my lord, – let him go! Much misery will be thereby averted, – much heart-rending despair!"

Crescentius had listened in silence to Stephania's pleading. There was a brief pause, during which only his heavy breathing was heard.

"His choice is made," he replied at last in a firm tone.

"I do not understand you, my lord!"

The Senator regarded his wife with singularly fixed intentness.

"The toils of the Siren Rome are too firm to be snapped asunder like a spider's web."

She covered her face with her hands. Her breath came and went with quick, convulsive gasps.

"It is shameful – shameful – " she sobbed. "Had I never lent myself to the unworthy task! How could you conceive it, my lord, how could you? But it was not your counsel! May his right hand wither, who whispered the thought into your ear!"

Crescentius winced. He felt ill at ease.

"Is it so hard to play the confessor to yonder wingless cherub?" he said with a forced smile.

Stephania straightened herself to her full height.

"When I undertook the shameless task, I believed the son of Theophano a tyrant, an oppressor, his hands stained with the best of Roman blood! Such your lying Roman chroniclers had painted him. I gloried in the thought, to humble a barbarian, whose vain-glorious, boastful insolence meditated new outrages upon us Romans. Yet his is a purer, a loftier spirit, than is to be found in all this Rome of yours! Were it not nobler to acknowledge him your liege, than to destroy him by woman's wiles and smiles?"

"I cannot answer you on these points," Crescentius spoke after a pause, during which the olive tints of his countenance had faded to ashen hues. "I regard those dreams, whose mock-halo has blinded you, in a different light. It is the wise man who rules the state, – it is the dreamer who dashes it to atoms. We have gone too far! I could not release you, – even if I would!"

Stephania breathed hard. Her hands were tightly clasped.

"It can bring glory to neither you, nor Rome," she said in a pleading voice. "Let him depart in peace, my lord, and I will thank you to my dying hour!"

"How know you he wishes to depart?"

"How know you he wishes to remain?"

"His destiny is Rome. Here he will live – and here he will die!" the Senator spoke with slow emphasis. "But we have not yet agreed upon the signal," he continued with cold and merciless voice. "After the departure of the envoys you will lead the King into his favourite haunts, the labyrinth of the Minotaurus, to the little temple of Neptune. There I will in person await him. When you see the gleam of spearpoints in the thickets, you will wave your kerchief with the cry: 'For Rome and Crescentius.' No harm shall befall the youth, – unless he resist. He shall have honourable conduct to the guest chamber, prepared for him, – below."

And Crescentius pointed downward with the thumb of his right hand.

Stephania's bosom rose and fell in quick respiration.

"I am not accustomed to prefer a request and be denied," she said proudly, her face the pallor of death. "Is this your last word, my lord?"

Crescentius met her gaze unflinchingly.

"It is my last," he replied. "Yet one choice remains with you: You may betray the King, – or the Senator of Rome!"

He turned to go, but something whispered to him to stay. At that moment he despised himself for having imposed upon his wife a task, against which Stephania's loftier nature had rebelled and he inwardly cursed the hour which had ripened the seed and him, who had sown it. Gazing after Stephania's retreating form, all the love he bore her surged up into his heart as he cried her name.

Arrested by his voice, Stephania turned and paused for a moment swift as thought, but in that moment she seemed to read the very depths of his soul and the utter futility of further entreaty. Without a word she ascended the spiral stairway leading to the upper galleries and re-entered her own apartments, while with long and wistful gaze Crescentius followed the vanishing form of his wife.

And it seemed as if the Senator's prophecy was to be fulfilled. At the reading of the Electoral manifesto, Otto had been seized with an uncontrollable fit of rage. He had torn the document to shreds and cast its fragments at the feet of the Bavarian duke, who acted as spokesman for his colleagues, the dukes of Thuringia, Saxony and Westphalia. Neither the arguments of the Electoral envoys, nor the violent denunciations of Eckhardt, who aired his hatred of Rome in language never before heard in the presence of a sovereign, could stand before Benilo's eloquent pleading. On his knees the Chamberlain implored the King not to abandon Rome and his beloved Romans. Vainly the German dukes pointed to the dangers besetting the realm, vainly to the inadequate defences of the Eastern March. With a majesty far above his years, Otto declared his supreme will to make Rome the capital of the earth, and to restore the pristine majesty of the Holy Roman Empire. Rome was his destiny. Here he would live, and here he would die. Rome was pacified. He required no longer the presence of the army. Let Bavaria and Saxony defend their own boundaries as best they might; let the Count Palatine lead his veteran hosts across the Alps. He would remain. This his reply to the Electors.

On the eve of that eventful day the German dukes departed, while the Count Palatine proceeded to Tivoli, to prepare the great armament for their winter march across the Alps. It had come to pass as Crescentius had predicted. The die was cast. Rome, the Siren, had conquered.

In the night following these events, Rome in her various quarters presented a strange aspect of secret activity.

In the fortresses of the Cavalli and Caetani lights flitted to and fro through the gratings in the main court. Benilo, the Chamberlain, might be seen stealing from the postern gate. Towards the ruins of the Coliseum men whose dress bespoke them of the lowest rank, were seen creeping from lanes and alleys. From these ruins at a later hour, glided again the form of the Grand Chamberlain. Later yet, – when a gray light is breaking in the east, the gates of Rome, by St. John Lateran, are open. Benilo is conversing with the Roman guard. The mountains are dim with a mournful and chilling haze when Benilo enters the palace on the Aventine.