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

by Nathan Gallizier

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, bewildered, not knowing what to do. Tristan at first seemed to stand entirely on the defensive, but soon his blood grew hot and, in answer to his adversary's lunge, he lunged again. But the other held a dagger in his left hand and with it easily parried the blade. The next pass she saw Tristan reel. She could bear no more and rushed screaming towards some footmen with torches who were standing outside a dark and heavily shuttered building.

Tristan and Roger de Laval rushed at each other with redoubled fury. Both had heard the cry and their blows rang out with echoing clatter, filling the desolate spaces with a sound not seldom heard there in those days. It was a struggle of sheer strength, in which the odds were all against Tristan. He began to yield step by step. Soon a yet fiercer blow of his antagonist must bring him down to his knees, and he fell back farther, as a veritable rain of blows fell upon him.

Four men followed by a woman rushed to the scene.

"Haste! Haste!" she cried frantically. "There is murder abroad!"

She fancied she should behold the younger man already vanquished by his more vigorous enemy. On the contrary, he seemed to have regained his strength and was now pressing the other with an agility and vigor that outweighed the strength of maturity on the part of his adversary.

All was clear in the bright moonlight, as if the sun had been blazing down upon them, and, as the woman leaped forward, she beheld Tristan's assailant gain some advantage. He was pressed back along the Arch towards the spot where she stood.

What now followed she could not see. It was all the work of a moment. But the next instant she saw the elder man raise his arm as if to strike with his dagger. Tristan staggered and fell, and the other was about to strike him through when, with a wild, frantic outcry of terror, she rushed between them, arresting the blow ere it could fall.

"Hellayne!"

A cry in which Tristan's smothered feelings broke through every restraint winged itself from the mouth of the fallen man.

"Tristan!" came the hysterical response.

Roger had hurled his wife aside, his eyes flaming like live coals under their bushy brows.

Those whom Hellayne had summoned to Tristan's aid, when she first arrived on the scene of the conflict, unacquainted with the cause of the quarrel and doubtful which side to aid, stood idly by, since with Tristan's fall there seemed to be no farther demand for their services, nor did Roger's towering stature invite interference.

In the heat of the conflict with its attendant turmoil none of those immediately concerned had remarked a procession approaching from the distance which now emerged from the shadow of the great arch into the moonlit thoroughfare.

It was headed by four giant Nubians, carrying a litter on silver poles, from between the half-shut silken curtains of which peered the face of a woman. In its wake marched a score of Ethiopians in fantastic livery, their broad, naked scimitars glistening ominously in the moonlight.

The litter and its escort arrived but just in time. Ere Laval's blade could pierce the heart of his prostrate victim, Theodora had leaped from her litter and thrown her saffron scarf over the prostrate youth.

With all the outlines of her beautiful form revealed through the thin robe of spangled gauze she faced the irate aggressor and her voice cut like steel as she said:

"Dare to touch him beneath this scarf! This man is mine."

Laval drew back, but his glaring eyes, his parted lips and his labored breath argued little in favor of the fallen man, even though the blow was, for the moment, averted.

With foam-flecked lips he turned to Theodora.

"This man is mine! His life is forfeit. Stand back, that I may wipe this blot from my escutcheon."

Theodora faced the speaker undauntedly.

Ere he could reply, a woman's voice shrieked.

"Save him! Save him! He is innocent! He has done naught amiss!"

Hellayne, whom the Count had hurled against the masonry of the arch, bruising her until she was barely able to support herself, at this moment threw herself between them.

---

"Thrown her saffron scarf over the prostrate youth"

---

"Who is this woman?" Theodora turned to Tristan's assailant. "Who is this woman?" Hellayne's eyes silently questioned Tristan.

Laval's sardonic laughter pealed through the silence.

"This lady is my wife, the Countess Hellayne de Laval, noble Theodora, who has followed her perjured lover to Rome, so they may do penance in company," he replied sardonically. "His life is forfeit. His offence is two-fold. Within the hour he swore he knew naught of her abode. But—since you claim him,—by ties this scarf proclaims—take him and welcome! I shall not anticipate the fate you prepare for your noble lovers!"

The two women faced each other in frozen silence, in the consciousness of being rivals. Each knew instinctively it would be a fight between them to the death.

Theodora surveyed Hellayne's wonderful beauty, appraising her charms against her own, and Hellayne's gaze swept the face and form of the Roman.

Tristan had scrambled to his feet, his face white with shame and rage. From Theodora, in whose eyes he read that which caused him to tremble in his inmost soul, he turned to Hellayne.

"Oh, why have you done this thing, Hellayne, why?—oh, why?"

Roger de Laval laughed viciously.

"It was indeed not to be expected that the Lady Hellayne would find her recalcitrant lover in the arms of the Lady Theodora."

With an inarticulate outcry of rage Tristan was about to hurl himself upon his opponent, had not Theodora placed a restraining hand upon him, while her dark eyes challenged Hellayne.

All the revulsion of his nature against this man rose up in him and rent him. All the love for Hellayne, which in these days had been floating on the wings of longing, soared anew.

But his efforts at vindication in this strangest of all predicaments were put to naught by the woman herself.

"Hear me, Hellayne—it is not true!" he cried, and paused with a choking sensation.

Hellayne stood as if turned to stone.

Then her eyes swept Tristan with a look of such incredulous misery that it froze the words that were about to tumble from his lips.

With a wail of anguish she turned and fled down the moonlit path like a hunted deer.

"Up and after her!" Laval shouted to the men whom Hellayne had summoned to the scene and these, eager to demonstrate their usefulness, started in pursuit, Roger leading, ere Tristan could even make a move to interfere.

Hellayne had fled into the open portals of a church at the end of the street. She tottered and fell. Crawling through the semi-darkness she gasped and leaned against a pillar. She saw a small side chapel, where, before an image of the Virgin, guttered a brace of tapers. But ere she reached the shrine her pursuers were upon her. As, with a shriek of mortal fear she fell, she gazed into the brutal features of Roger de Laval. His lips were foam-flecked, revealing his wolfish teeth.

It was then her strength forsook her. She fell fainting upon the hard stone floor of the church.—

For a pace Tristan and Theodora faced each other in silence.

It was the woman who spoke.

Her voice was cold as steel.

"I have saved your life, Tristan! The weapon which my slaves have taken from you awaits the call of its rightful claimant."

She reentered her litter while Tristan stood by, utterly dazed. But, when the slaves raised the silver poles, she gave him a parting glance from within the curtains that seemed to electrify his whole being.

After the litter-bearers and their retinue had trooped off, Tristan remained for a time in the shadow of the Arch of the Seven Candles.

He knew not where to turn in his misery, nor what to do.

In the same hour he had found and lost his love anew.

---

[CHAPTER III]
DARK PLOTTINGS

It was past the hour of midnight.

In a dimly lighted turret chamber in the house of Hormazd the Persian there sat two personages whose very presence seemed to enhance the sinister gloom that brooded over the circular vault.

The countenance of the Grand Chamberlain was paler than usual and there was a slight gathering of the eyebrows, not to say a frown, which in an ordinary mortal might have signified little, but in one who had so habitual a command of his emotions, would indicate to those who knew him well an unusual degree of restlessness. His voice was calm however, and now and then a bland smile belied the shadows on his brow.

At times his gaze stole towards a dimly lighted alcove wherein moved a dark cowled figure, its grotesque shadow reflected in distorted outlines upon the floor.

"The Moor tarries over long," Basil spoke at last.

"So do the ends of destiny," replied a voice that seemed to come from the bowels of the earth.

"He is fleeter than a deer and more ferocious than a tiger," the Grand Chamberlain interposed. "Nothing has ever daunted him, nor lives the man who would thwart him and live. Can you tell me where he is now?"

"Patience!" came the sepulchral reply. "The magic disk reveals all things! Anon you shall know."

Informed by daily gossip and the reports of his innumerable spies, Basil was aware of a growing belief among the people that the power he wielded was not altogether human, and he would have viewed it with satisfaction even had he not shared it. Seeing in it an additional force helpful to the realization of his ambition, he had thrown himself blindly into the vortex of black magic which was to give to him that which his soul desired.

In this chamber, filled with strange narcotic scents and the mysterious rustling of unseen presences, by which he believed it to be peopled, with the aid of one who seemed the personified Principle of Evil, Basil assembled about him the forces that would ultimately launch him at the goal of his ambition.

This devil's kitchen was the portal to the Unseen, the shrine of the Unknown, the observatory of the Past and the Future, and the laboratory of the Forbidden. There were dim and mysterious mirrors, before which stood brazen tripods whose fumes, as they wreathed upward, gleamed with dusky fires. It was in these mirrors that the wizard could summon the dead and the distant to appear darkly, in scarcely definable glimpses. But he could also produce apparitions more vivid, more startling and more beautiful. Once, in the dark depths of the chamber, Basil had seen a woman's phantom apparition suddenly become strangely luminous, her garments glowing like flames of many colors, that shifted and blent and alternated in ceaseless dance and play, waving and trembling in unearthly glory, till she seemed to be of the very flame herself. The reflection of the world of shadows was upon her; its splendors were wrapping her round like a mantle. He watched her with bated breath, not daring to speak. And brighter, ever brighter, dazzling, ever more dazzling, had grown the flaming phantom, till the wondrous transfiguration reached the height of its beauty and its terror. Then the phantom of murdered Marozia, evoked at his expressed desire from the land of shadows, had faded, dying slowly away in the mysterious depths of the mirror, as the fires that produced it sank and died in white ashes.

There could be no doubt. It was the emissary of Darkness himself who held forth in this dim, demon-haunted chamber where he had so often listened to the record of his awful visions. He had made him see in his dreadful ravings the great vaults of wrath, where dwelt the dread power of Evil. He had made him see the King of the Hopeless Throngs on his black basaltic throne in the terrific glare-illumined caves, where Michael had cast him and where Pain's roar rises eternally night and day. He had made him see the great Lord of the Doomed Shadows, receiving the homage of those dreadful slaves, those terror-spreading angels of woe whose hand flings destruction over the earth and sea and air, while flames were fawning and licking his feet with countless tongues.

And then he had shown to him a spirit mightier and more subtle than any of those great wild destroyers who rush blindly through nature, a spirit who starts in silence on her errand, whom none behold as, creeping through the gloom, she undermines, unties and loosens all the pillars of creation, with no more sign nor sound than a black snake in the tangled grass, till with a thunder that stuns the world the house of God comes crashing down—dread Hekaté herself.

Was there any crime he had left undone?

His subterranean prisons in which limbs unlearned to bend and eyes to see concealed things whose screams would make the flesh of a ghost creep, if flesh one had.

But now there was a darker light in Basil's eyes, a something more ominous of evil in his manner. The wizard's revelation had possessed his soul and his whole terrible being seemed intensified. With the patience of one conscious of a superhuman destiny he waited the summons that was to come to him, even though his soul was consumed by devouring flames.

For he had come yet upon another matter; an inner voice, whose appeal he dared not ignore, had informed him long ago of his waning power with Theodora. From the man wont to command he had fallen to the level of the whimpering slave, content to pick up such morsels as the woman saw fit to throw at his feet. Only on the morning of this day, which had gone down the never returning tide of time, a terrible scene had passed between them. And he knew he had lost.

Basil had been an unseen witness of Theodora's and Tristan's meeting in the sunken gardens on the Aventine. Every moment he had hoped to see the man succumb to charms which no mortal had yet withstood upon whom she had chosen to exert them, and on the point of his poniard sat Death, ready to step in and finish the game. From the fate he had decreed him some unknown power had saved Tristan. But Basil, knowing that Theodora, once she was jilted by the object of her desire, would leave nothing undone to conquer and subdue, was resolved to remove from his path one who must, sooner or later, become a successful rival. By some miraculous interposition of Providence Tristan had escaped the fate he had prepared for him on the night when he had tracked the two strangers from the Lateran. He had had him conveyed for dead to the porch of Theodora's palace. But Fate had made him her mock.

Never had Basil met Theodora in a mood so fierce and destructive as on the morning after she had destroyed Roxana and her lover, and had, in turn, been jilted by Tristan. And, verily, Basil could not have chosen a more inopportune time to press his suit or to voice his resentment and disapprobation. Theodora had driven every one from her presence and the unwelcome suitor shared the fate of her menials. Her dark hints had driven the former favorite to madness, for his passion-inflamed brain could not bear the thought that the love he craved, the body he had possessed, should be another's, while he was drifting into the silent ranks of the discarded. He knew for a surety that Theodora was not confiding in him as of old. Had she somehow guessed the dread mystery of the crypts in the Emperor's Tomb, or had some demon of Hell whispered it into her ear during the dark watches of the night?

A flash of lightning followed by a terrific peal of thunder roused him from his reveries. The storm which had threatened during the early hours of the evening now roared and shrieked round the tower and the very elements seemed in accord with the dark plottings in Hormazd's chamber.

"How much longer must I wait ere the fiends will reveal their secrets?" Basil at last turned to the exponent of the black arts.

The wizard paused before the questioner.

"To what investigation shall we first proceed?"

"You must already have divined my thoughts."

"I knew the instant you arrived. But there is an incompleteness which makes my perceptions less exact than usual."

"Where are my messengers? To the number of three have I sped. None has returned."

The Oriental touched a knob and the lamps were suddenly extinguished, leaving the room illumined by the red glow of the oven. Then he bade his visitor fix his eyes on the surface of the disk.

"Upon this you will presently behold two scenes."

He poured a few drops of something resembling black oil upon the disk, which at once spread in a mirror-like surface. Then he began to mutter some words in an Oriental tongue, and lighted a few grains of a chemical preparation which emitted an odor of bitter aloë. This, when the flames had subsided, he threw upon the oil which at the contact became iridescent.

Basil looked and waited in vain.

The conjurer exhausted all the selections which he thought appropriate. The oil gradually lost the changing aspect it had acquired from the burning substance, and returned to its dull murky tints, and the interest which had appeared on Basil's features gave place to a contemptuous sneer.

"Are you, after all, but a trickster who would impose his art upon the unwary?"

The magician did not reply to this insult, nor did it seem to affect him visibly.

"We must try a mightier spell," he said, "for hostile forces are in conjunction against us."

By a small tongs he raised from the fire the metallic plate that had been lying upon it. Its surface presented the appearance of oxidized silver with a deep glow of heat.

Upon this he claimed to be able to produce the picture of past or future events, and many scenes had been reflected upon the magic shield.

He now poured upon it a spoonful of liquid which spread simmering and became quickly dissipated in light vapors. Then he busied himself with scattering over the plate some grains that looked like salt which the heated metal instantly consumed.

At the end of a few moments he experienced what resembled an electric or magnetic shock. His frame quivered, his lips ceased to repeat the muttered incantations, his hand firmly grasped the tongs by which he raised the metal aloft, now made brighter by the drugs just consumed, and upon which appeared a white spot, which enlarged till it filled the lower half of the plate.

What it represented it was difficult to say. It might have been a sheet or a snow drift. Basil felt an indefinable dread, as above it shimmered forth the vague resemblance of a man on horseback, apparently riding at breakneck speed.

Slowly his contour became more distinct. Now the horseman appeared to have reached a ford. Spurring his steed, he plunged into the stream whose waters seemed for a time to carry horse and rider along with the swift current. But he gained the opposite shore, and the apparition faded slowly from sight.

"It is the Moor!" cried Basil in a paroxysm of excitement. "He has forded the rapids of the Garigliano. Now be kind to me O Fate—let this thing come to pass!"

He gave a gasp of relief, wiping the beads from his brow.

The cowled figure now walked up to the central brazier, muttering words in a language his visitor could not understand. Then he bade Basil walk round and round it, fixing his eyes steadily upon the small blue flame which danced on the surface of the burning charcoal.

When giddiness prevented his continuing his perambulation he made him kneel beside the brazier with his eyes riveted upon it.

Its fumes enveloped him and dulled his brain.

The wizard crooned a slow, monotonous chant. Basil felt his senses keep pace with it, and presently he felt himself going round and round in an interminable descent. The glare of the brazier shrank and diminished, invaded from outside by an overpowering blackness. Slowly it became but a single point of fire, a dark star, which at length flamed into a torch. Beside him, with white and leering face, stood the dark cowled figure, and below him there seemed to stretch intricate galleries, strangled, interminable caves.

"Where am I?" shrieked the Grand Chamberlain, overpowered by the fumes and the fear that was upon him.

"Unless you reach the pit," came the dark reply, "farewell forever to your schemes. You will never see a crown upon your head."

"What of Theodora?" Basil turned to his companion, choking and blinded.

"If the bat-winged fiends will carry you safely across the abyss you shall see," came the reply.

A rush as of wings resounded through the room, as of monstrous bats.

"Gehenna's flame shall smoothe her brow," the wizard spoke again. "When Death brings her here, she shall stand upon the highest steps, in her dark magnificence she shall command—a shadow among shadows. Are you content?"

There was a pause.

The storm howled with redoubled fury, flinging great hailstones against the time-worn masonry of the wizard's tower.

"Then," Basil spoke at last, his hands gripping his throat with a choking sensation, "give me back the love for which my soul thirsts and wither the bones of him who dares to aspire to Theodora's hand."

The wizard regarded him with an inscrutable glance.

"The dark and silent angels, once divine, now lost, who do my errands, shall ever circle round your path. Everlasting ties bind us, the one to the other. Keep but the pact and that which seems but a wild dream shall be fulfilled anon. They shall guide you through the dark galleries of fear, till you reach the goal."

"Your words are dark as the decrees of Fate," Basil replied, as the fumes of the brazier slowly cleared in his brain and he seemed to emerge once more from the endless caverns of night, staring about him with dazed senses.

"You heed but what your passion prompts," the cowled figure interposed sternly, "oblivious of that greater destiny that awaits you! It is a perilous love born in the depths of Hell. Will you wreck your life for that which, at best, is but a fleeting passion—a one day's dream?"

"Well may you counsel who have never known the hell of love!" Basil cried fiercely. "The fiery torrent that rushes through my veins defies cold reason."

The cowled figure nodded.

"Many a ruler in whose shadow men have cowered, has obeyed a woman's whim and tamely borne her yoke. Are you of those, my lord?"

"I have set my soul upon this thing and Fate shall give to me that which I crave!" Basil cried fiercely.

The wizard nodded.

"Fate cannot long delay the last great throw."

"What would you counsel?" the Grand Chamberlain queried eagerly, peering into the cowled and muffled face, from which two eyes sent their insane gleam into his own.

"Send her soul into the dark caverns of fear—surround her with unceasing dread—let the ghosts of those you have sent butchered to their doom surround her nightly pillow, whispering strange tales into her ears,—then, when fear grips the maddened brain and there seems no rescue but the grave—then peals the hour."

Basil gazed thoughtfully into the wizard's cowled face.

"When may that be?"

"I will gaze into the silent pools of my forbidden knowledge with the dark spirits that keep me company. I have mysterious rules for finding day and hour."

"I cannot expel the passion that rankles in my blood," Basil interposed darkly. "But I will tear out my heart strings ere I shirk the call. An emperor's crown were worth a tenfold price, and ere I, too, descend to the dread shadows, I mean to see it won."

"These thoughts are idle," said the wizard. "Only the weak plumb the depths of their own soul. The strong man's bark sails lightly on victorious tides. Your soul is pledged to the Powers of Darkness."

"And by the fiends that sit at Hell's dark gate, I mean to do their bidding," Basil replied fiercely. "Else were I indeed the mock of destiny. Tell me but this—how did you obtain a knowledge at which the fiend himself would pale?"

The wizard regarded him for a moment in silence.

"You who have peered behind the curtain that screens the dreadful boundaries—you who have seen the pale phantom of Marozia, whom you have sent to her doom,—how dare you ask?"

Basil had raised both hands as if to ward off an evil spirit.

"This, too, then is known to you? Tell me! Was what I saw a dream?"

"What you have seen—you have seen," the cowled form replied enigmatically. "The cocks are crowing—and the pale dawn glimmers in the East."

Throwing his mantle about him, Basil left the turret chamber and, after creeping down a narrow winding stair, he made for his villa on the Pincian Hill.

---

[CHAPTER IV]
FACE TO FACE

Roger de Laval had chosen for his abode in Rome a sombre and frowning building not far from the grim ways of the Campo Marzo, half palace half fortalice, constructed about a huge square tower with massive doors. Like all palace fortresses of the time which might at any moment have to stand a siege, either at the hands of a city mob or at those of some rapacious noble, it contained in its vaulted halls and tower chambers all the requisites for protracted resistance as well as aggression. On the walls between flaunting banners hung the many quartered shields and the dark coats of chain, the tabards of the heralds and the leathern jerkins of the bowmen. On the shelves between the arches stood long rows of hauberks and shining steel caps. Dark tapestries covered the walls and the bright light of the Roman day fell muted through the narrow slits in the sombre masonry which served as windows.

It was not to seek his wife that Roger had come to Rome, and his meeting with Tristan in the gardens of Theodora had been purely accidental. While his vanity and selfishness had received a severe shock in Hellayne's departure, without even a farewell, he had not allowed an incident in itself so trifling to disturb the even tenor of his ways. He had loved to display her at his feasts as one displays some exceeding handsome plaything that gives pleasure to the senses; otherwise he and the countess had no common bond of interest. Hellayne was the only child of one of the most powerful barons of Provence, and had been given in marriage to the older man before she even realized what the bonds implied. Only after meeting Tristan had the awakening come, and youth sought youth.

That which brought every one to Rome in an age when Rome was still by common consent the centre of the universe, such as the Saxon Chronicles of the Millennium pronounce it, had also caused Roger de Laval to seek the Holy Shrines, not in quest of spiritual benefit, but of temporal aggrandizement, in the character of an investiture from the Vicar of Christ himself. His disappointment at finding the head of Christendom a prisoner in his own palace was perhaps only mitigated by the disclosure that he should have to rely upon his own fertility of mind for the realization of a long-fostered ambition.

On one of his visits to the Lateran, hoping to obtain an interview with the Pontiff, he had met Basil as representative of the Roman government, in the absence of Alberic, and a sinister attraction had sprung up between them in the consciousness that each had something to give the other lacked. This bond was even strengthened by Basil's promise to aid the stranger in the attainment of his desires, and at last Roger had confided in Basil the story of the shadow that had spread its gloomy pinions over the castle of Avalon. Basil had listened and suggested that the Lord Laval drown his sorrows at the board of Theodora. Therein the latter had acquiesced, with the result that he met Tristan on that night.

Hellayne was sitting alone by the window in a long silent gallery. She could not take her eyes off the restless outline of the clouds where head on head and face on face continued taking shape. In vain her teased brain tried to see but clouds. Two nights ago had not a horrid face grinned at her from out of these same clouds? The face of a wolf it had seemed. And it had taken human shape and changed to the face of the man who had brought her to this abode from the sanctuary where she had fallen by the shrine.

And yet, as she looked at the sun, whose beams were fast dwindling on the bar of the horizon, how she yearned to keep the light a little longer, if only a few short minutes. She could have cried out to the sun not to leave her so soon, again to wage her lonely war with the Twilight and with Fear. For during the hours of day her lord was away. Business of state he termed what took him from her side. With a leer he left and with a leer he was wont to return. And with him the memory of his meeting with Tristan!

She had found him again, the man she loved! Found him—but how? And Hellayne covered her burning eyes with her white hands.

This other woman who had stepped in between her and Tristan, who had laid a detaining hand upon his arm and had silently challenged her for his possession—what was she to him?

For three days and three nights the thought had tormented her even to the verge of madness. Had she sacrificed everything but to find him she loved in the arms of another? Silently she had borne the taunts of her lord, his insults, his vile insinuations. He did not understand. He never understood. What of it? In the great balance what mattered it after all?

She must see Tristan. She must hear the truth from his own lips. In vain she puzzled her brain how to reach him. She remembered his last outcry of protest. There was a mystery she must solve. Come what might, she was once more the woman who loved. And she was going to claim the payment of love!

As regarded that other, to whom she had bound herself, her conscience had long absolved her of an obligation that had been forced upon her. Had fate and fact not proved the thing impossible? Had fate not cast them again and again into each other's arms and made mock of their conscience? Nature had made them lovers, let it be the will of God or the devil.

And lovers till death should they be henceforth. He belonged to her. Away with faith—away with fear of this world, or the next. Away with all but the dear present, in which the brutality of others had set her free. For a moment her thoughts turned almost pagan.

Was she to return to the old, loveless life in that far corner of the earth, while he whom she loved took up a new existence in the centre of the world, loving another to whose ambition he might owe a great career? She needed indeed to sit in silence, she who had done daring things without a misgiving, as if impelled by a power not her own. She had done them, marvelling at her own courage, at her own faith in him she loved, and she had not faltered.

The torturing dusk was drowning every living thing in pallid waves of shadow. One by one, through the wan gallery in which she was locked, the motley spectres of night would pass in all their horrors, and begin their crazy, soundless nods and becks.

Suddenly she cowered back, shuddering, with her eyes fixed on the darkening depths of the gallery and her day dreams died, like pale ashes crumbling on the hearth.

Roger de Laval had entered and was regarding her with a malignant leer that almost froze the blood in her veins. She knew not what business had taken him abroad. Nevertheless was assured that some dark deed was slumbering in the depths of his soul.

"Are you thinking of your fine lover?" he said as he slowly advanced towards her. "You are grieved to have your thoughts broken into by your husband? No doubt you wish me dead—"

"Spare me this torture, my lord," she entreated. "I have answered a thousand times—"

"Then answer again—"

"I swear before God and the Saints he is guiltless. He knew not I was in Rome."

"Swear what you will! A woman's oath is but a wind upon one's cheek on a warm summer day—gone ere you have felt it. The oath of a woman who has followed her lover—"

"I have not done so!"

"You have done your best to make the world believe it."

"What of yourself?" There was a ring of scorn in her voice.

"You have brought me to shame!"

"What of the women you have shared with me?"

Hellayne's eyes met those of her tormentor.

"It is a man's part!"

"And you are a man!"

"One at least shall have cause to think so."

"Perchance you will have him murdered. Why not kill me, too? That, too, is a man's part."

He gave a great roar.

"And who says that I shall not?"

An icy fear, not for herself, but for Tristan, gripped her heart. She tried to hide it under a mantle of indifference.

"What have you ever done to make yourself beloved?"

"By Beelzebub—you—the runaway mistress of a fop—dares to question me—her rightful lord?"

"Who made the laws that bound me to your keeping? They are man-made, and God knows as little of them as he knows of you. It was your measureless conceit, your boundless egotism, that whispered to you that any woman should feel honored, should deem it the height of glory, to be your wife."

"And is it not?"

She shuddered.

"You never dreamed there might be something in the depths of my soul that cried out for more than the mere comforts and exigencies of existence! Something that craved love, companionship, and, above all, friendship. What have you done to waken this little slumbering voice which died in the shadow of your tremendous egotism?"

He stared at her.

"He has taught you this speech, by God!"

"He has awakened my true self! What was I to you but part of your magnificence, a thing to make your fellows envious—"

He roared. She continued:

"The one decent woman of your life—your world—"

His eyes glared.

"So then, this low-born churl is a better man than I?"

"At least he knew I had a soul of my own."

"Skillfully cultivated to his own sweet ends."

"His ends were innocent, else had he not fled."

"Knowing that you would follow him."

"He knew naught."

"That remains to be seen."

"It was you who brought us together!" she said with quiet scorn. "You were so sure in your pride and your power and of my own timidity that you thought it impossible that something might defy them. And you could not understand that another might be so much closer to my nature, or that I had a nature of my own. In those days I well remember, ere my heart had strayed too far, I tried to waken you to the great danger. I tried to speak of mine. But you would not be apprised of aught that would seem a concession to your pride. So we are come to this!"

Her eyes filled with tears.

"Come to what?" he thundered.

"My ruin—and your disgrace!"

His breast heaved.

"Of you I know nothing. As for myself—I suffer no disgrace. I am too much a man of sense for that. Not a soul but thinks that you are absent with my consent. A pilgrimage to Rome! Many a woman has, for her soul's good gone alone. Not a soul, I warrant, has thought of your connection with that fellow's plight. Not a soul but thinks that this is the sole cause of your disappearance. And when I, too, went I was careful to leave the rumor behind."

He stepped closer, his breath fanning her pale cheeks. She looked almost like a ghost in the grey twilight.

"And now—" he continued, licking his sensuous lips, "you are found—you are found—my beautiful wife—you are found—and—to the eyes of the world at least—unstained. One alone whose lips are sealed, knows."

Hellayne's lips tightened.

"And a woman."

A strange expression came into his face.

"Have you spied upon me, too?"

"You forget the meeting at the Arch."

"No woman will spread the story of a rival's claims!"

There was a pause, then he continued, with deliberate slowness:

"You shall come back with me—my beautiful Hellayne—my wife in name, if not in deed! And you shall submit to my caresses, knowing, as I do, how loathsome they are. And you shall smile—smile—and appear happy—my wife henceforth in name only. And you shall smile no less at what henceforth your lord's pleasure may be with other women—fair as yourself—and you shall grow old and grey, and the thing you call your soul shall die and wither up your beauty—and never a word shall pass your lips anent this chastisement. And at last you shall die—and be laid by—and not a soul shall ever be the wiser for your shame."

Hellayne covered her face with her hands.

"And if I should refuse to accept this fate?"

"Then you shall be flung into a nunnery."

"And if I refuse to become a nun?"

"Then your lover shall pay the price—with his blood instead of yours. Know you the woman he so madly loves?"

"It is a lie!" she shrieked.

There was a moment's silence.

"Her name is Theodora. Saw you ever fairer creature?"

"God!"

"I want your answer!" leered the man.

"I do not refuse!"

An evil smile curved his lips.

"I knew you would be reasonable—my fair Hellayne!"

His lips were parted in a fatuous smile. He pictured to himself the pain at the parting and indeed his satisfaction was so great that he decided to prolong it yet a little longer. How amusing it would be to watch the face of him who had dared to love Hellayne. Knowing as now he did all the motives for his actions, it gave him pleasure to think that he could mar the astonishing good fortune of this adventurer who had found employment in the service of Alberic by the intrusion of this passion for another woman. It would be real joy to see this creature of sentiment thus torn and tortured. And it was yet a greater joy to force Hellayne to witness the struggle, forced to smile at the conquest of her lover by another woman. And he would watch the pangs of their suffering till the day of his departure.

With her own blue eyes Hellayne should witness the love of him she had so madly followed, estranged by the beauty of Theodora, whose lure no mortal might resist.

After he had entered his own chamber, Hellayne flew like a mad thing down the gloom-haunted gallery. Could she but escape from this humiliation—even through death's doors—she would not shrink. She felt, if she remained, she would go mad.

It was true, then! Tristan loved another. The old love had been forgotten and cast aside! All her fears and misgivings returned in one mad whirl.

Frantically she tried to remove the heavy bolt when she was paralyzed by a demoniacal laugh that issued behind her and swooning she fell at the feet of the man whose name she bore.

---

[CHAPTER V]
THE CRESSETS OF DOOM

Never had Tristan's feelings been more hopelessly involved than since that eventful night by the Arch of the Seven Candles when, like a ghost of the past, Hellayne had once more crossed his path and had given his solemn pledge the lie. And the more Tristan's thoughts reverted to that fateful hour, when his oath seemed like so many words written upon water, and the man who believed him guilty held his life in the hollow of his hand, the greater grew his misery and unrest. Physically exhausted, mentally startled at the vehemence of his own feelings, he was suffering the relapse of a passion which he thought had burnt itself out, letting his mind drift back to the memory of happier days—days now gone forever.

Why had she followed him? What was she doing here? Was the old fight to be renewed? And withal happiness mingled with the pain.

In the midst of these thoughts came others.

Had she accompanied the Count Laval to Rome and were his questionings mere pretense, to surprise the unguarded confession of a wrong of which he knew himself sinless? Had she been here all these days, seeking him perchance, yet not daring to make her presence known?

And now where was she? Hardly found had he lost her? And see her he must—whatever the hazard, even to death. How much he had to say to her. How much he had to ask. Her presence had undone everything. Was the old life to begin again, only with a change of scenes?

He had read her love for him in her eyes, and he could have almost wished that moment to have been his last, ere the untimely arrival of Theodora saved him from the death stroke of his enraged enemy. For he had seen the light fade from Hellayne's blue eyes when she faced the other woman, and Laval's taunts had found receptive ears. Everything had conspired against him on that night, even to seeming the thing he was not, and with a heart heavy to breaking Tristan scoured the city of Rome for three days in quest of the woman, but to no avail.

His duties were not onerous and the city was quiet. No farther attempts had been made to liberate the Pontiff and the feuds between the rival factions seemed for the nonce suspended.

Nevertheless Tristan felt instinctively, that all was not well. Night after night Basil descended into the crypts of the Emperor's Tomb, sometimes alone, sometimes with one or two companions, men Tristan had never seen. Ostensibly the Grand Chamberlain visited the cells of certain prisoners of state, and one night Tristan ventured to follow him. But he was seized with so great a terror that he resolved to confide in Odo of Cluny, who possessed the entire confidence of the Senator of Rome, and be guided by his counsel.

In the meantime, like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky, the terrible thing had happened again. From the churches of Santa Maria in Trastevere and Santa Sabina of the Aventine, the Holy Host had been taken, notwithstanding the increased number of guards keeping watch in the sanctuaries.

Rome shivered in the throes of abject terror. People whispered in groups along the thoroughfares, hardly daring to raise their voices, and many asserted that the Antichrist had returned once more to earth and that the End of Time was nigh. Like a dread foreboding of evil it gripped Tristan's soul.

And day and night interminable processions of hermits and monks traversed the city with crosses and banners and smouldering incense. Their chants could be heard from the ancient Flaminian to the Appian Gate.

Once more the shades of evening laid their cool touch upon the city's fevered brow, and as the distant hills rose into a black mass against the sunset two figures emerged on the battlements of the Emperor's Tomb and gazed down on the dimmed outlines of the Pontifical City.

Before them lay a prospect fit to rouse in the hearts of all who knew its history an indescribable emotion. There, before them, lay the broad field of Rome, whereon the first ominous activities of the Old World's conquerors had been enacted. There in the mellow light of eve, lay the Latin land, once popular and rich beyond all quarters of the earth since the plain of Babylon became a desert, and now no less deserted and forlorn. And from the height from which these two looked down upon it, its shallow hills and ridges were truly minimized to the aspect of one mighty plain, increasing the vast sense of desolation. Rome—Rome alone—denied the melancholy story of disaster, utter and complete, the work of Goth and Hun and of malarial terror.

But now over all this solemn prospect was the luminous blue light of evening, fading to violet and palest yellow in the farthest west, where lay the Tyrrhene Sea.

Presently one of the two laid aside his cloak and, baring his arms to the kiss of the wind that crept softly about them, said in weary accents:

"Never in all my life, Father, have I known a day to pass as tardily as this, for to me the coming hour is fraught with evil that may abide with me forever, and my soul is eager to know its doom, yet shrinks from the sentence that may be passed."

Odo of Cluny looked into Tristan's weary face.

"I, too, have a presentiment of Evil, as never before," the monk replied, laying a gentle hand on his companion's shoulder. "There are things abroad in Rome—one dares not even whisper. The Lord Alberic chose an evil hour for his pilgrimage to Monte Gargano. Have you no tidings?"

"No tidings," reechoed Tristan gloomily.

Odo of Cluny nodded pensively.

"It seems passing strange. I know not why—" his voice sank to a whisper. "I mistrust the Grand Chamberlain. Whom can we trust? A poison wind is blowing over these hills—withering—destroying. The awful sacrilege at Santa Maria in Trastevere, following so closely upon the one at the Lateran, is but another proof that dark powers are at work—powers defying human ken—devils in human shape, doomed to burn to a crisp in the eternal fires."

"Meanwhile—what can we do?"

"Have you seen the Lord Basil?"—

"He was much concerned, examined the place in person, but found no clue."

"Are your men trustworthy?"

"I know not, Father! For a slight service I chanced to do the Lord Alberic he made me captain of the guard in place of one who had incurred his displeasure. My men are Swiss and Lombards, a Spaniard or two—some Calabrians—no Romans."

"Therein lies your salvation," interposed the Benedictine. "How many guard this tomb?"

"Some four score men—why do you ask?"

"I hardly know—save that there lurks some dark mystery behind the curtain. Let no man—nor woman—relax your watchfulness. There are tempests that destroy even the cedars of Lebanon," the monk continued with meaning. "And such a one may burst one night."

"Your words are dark, Father, and fill me with misgivings."

"And well they should," Odo interposed with a penetrating glance at the young captain. "For rumor hath it that another bird has strayed into the Lady Theodora's bower—"

Tristan colored under the monk's scrutiny.

"I was present at her feast. Yet I know not how I got there!"

The monk looked puzzled.

"Now that you have crossed the dark path of Marozia's sister I fear the ambushed gorge and the black arrow that sings from the hidden depths. Why seek the dark waters of Satan, when the white walls of Christ rise luminously before you?"

"What is the import of these strange words so strangely uttered?" Tristan turned to the monk with a puzzled air.

"That shall be made known to you in time. Treason lurks everywhere. Seal your ears against the Siren's song. Some say she is a vampire returned to earth, doomed to live on, as long as men are base enough to barter their soul for her kisses. And yet—how much longer? The Millennium draws nigh. The End of Time is near."

There was a pause. Tristan tried to speak, but the words would not come from his lips.

At last with an effort he stammered:

"At the risk of incurring your censure, Father—even to the palace of Theodora must I wend my steps to recover that which is my own."

And he informed the Monk of Cluny how he had lost his poniard and his scarf of blue Samite.

"Why not send one you trust to fetch them back?" protested the monk. "It is not well to brave the peril twice."

"Myself must I go, Father. For once and all time I mean to break her spell."

"Deem you to accomplish that which no man hath—and live?"

"There is that which shall keep my honor inviolate," Tristan replied.

The cloudless sky was shot with dreamy stars, and cooling breezes were wafted over the Roman Campagna. Through the stillness came the muffled challenges of the guard.

The twain crossed the ramparts of the Mausoleum in silence, holding to their way which led towards a postern, when suddenly, out of the battlements' embrazure, peered two gray, ghastly faces, which disappeared as suddenly. But Tristan's quick eye had marked them and, plucking at the monk's sleeve, he whispered:

"Look yonder, Father—where stand two forms that scan us eagerly. My bewildered brain refuses me the knowledge I seek, yet I could vouch the sight of them is somehow familiar to my eyes."

"That may well be," replied the monk. "For all this day long have I been haunted by the consciousness that our movements are being watched. Yet, I marvel not, for until Purgatory receive the soul of this accursed wanton, there is neither peace nor security for us. Her devilish hand may even now be informing all this dark plot, that seethes about us," Odo of Cluny concluded in apprehensive tones.

Presently they drew near the great gateway, before which the flicker of cressets showed a company of the guard, with breast plates and shields, their faces hidden by the lowered visors of their Norman casks. Among them they noted a wizened eunuch, who, after peering at them with his ferret-like eyes, pointed to a door sunk in the wall, the while he whispered something in Tristan's ear. Thereupon Odo and Tristan entered the guard chamber.

It was deserted.

Beneath the cressets' uncertain gleam, as they emerged beyond, stood the eunuch with the same ferret-like glance, pointing across the dim passage, to, where could be made out the entrance to a gallery. The group behind them stood immobile in the flickering light and the space about them was naught but a shadowy void. Yet, as they went, their ears caught the clink of unseen mail, the murmur of unseen voices, and Tristan gripped the monk's arm and said in husky tones:

"By all the saints,—we are fairly in the midst of Basil's creatures. An open foe I can face without shrinking, but I tell you this peril, ambushed in impenetrable night, saps my courage as naught else would. If but one battle-cry would shatter this numbing silence, one simple sword would flash, as it leaps from its scabbard, I should be myself again, ready to face any foe!"

They entered the half gloom of a painted gallery where dog-headed deities held forth in grotesque representation beside the crucified Christ. They stole along its whole deserted length until they reached a door, hardly discernible in the pictured wall. The lamps burned low, but in the centre of the marble floor a brazier sent up a brighter flame, filling the air with a fragrance as of sandal wood.

Tristan's hand groped for a spring along the outer edge of the door. At his touch a panel receded. Both he and the monk entered and the door closed noiselessly behind them. Tristan produced a candle and two flints from under his coat of mail. But ere he could light it by striking the flints, the approach of a dim light from the farther end of the tortuous gallery caused him to start, and both watched its approach with dread and misgiving.

Soon a voice fell on their ear, answered by another, and Tristan swiftly drew his companion into a shadowy recess which concealed them while it yet enabled them to hear every word spoken by the two.

"Thus we administer justice in Rome," said the one speaker, in whom Tristan recognized the voice of the Grand Chamberlain.

"Somewhat like in our own feudal chateaux," came back the surly reply.

Tristan started as the voice reached his ear. How came Roger de Laval here in that company?

"You approve?" said the silken voice.

"There is nothing like night and thirst to make the flesh pliable."

"Then why not profit thereby?—But are you still resolved upon this thing?"—

There was a pause. The voice barked reply:

"It is a fair exchange."

Their talk died to a vague murmur till presently the harsher voice rose above the silence.

"Well, then, my Lord Basil, if these matters be as you say,—if you will use your good offices with the Lady Theodora—"

"Can you doubt my sincerity—my desire to promote your interests—even to the detriment of my own?"

His companion spat viciously.

"He who sups with the devil must needs have a long spoon. What is to be your share?"

"Your meaning is not quite clear, my lord."

"Naught for naught!" Roger snarled viciously. "Shall we say—the price of your services?"

"My lord," piped Basil with an injured air, "you wrong me deeply. It is but my interest in you, my desire to see you reconciled to your beautiful wife—"

"How know you she is beautiful?" came the snarling reply.

"I, too, was an unseen witness of your meeting at the Arch of the Seven Candles," Basil replied suavely.

"Was all Rome abroad to gaze upon my shame?" growled Basil's companion. "Though—in a manner—I am revenged," he continued, through his clenched teeth. "Instead of giving her her freedom, I shall use her shrinking body for my plaything—I shall use her so that no other lover shall desire her. As for that low-born churl—"

With a low cry Tristan, sword in hand, made a forward lunge. The monk's grip restrained him.

"Madman!" Odo whispered in his ear. "Would you court certain death?"

The words of the twain had died to a whisper. Thus they were lost to Tristan's ear, though he strained every nerve, a deadly fear for Hellayne weighting down his soul.

The two continued their walk, passing so near that Tristan could have touched the hem of their garbs. Basil was importuning his companion on some matter which the latter could not hear. Laval's reply seemed not in accord with the Grand Chamberlain's plans, for his voice became more insistent.

"But you will come—my lord—and you will bring your beautiful Countess? Remember, her presence in Rome is no longer a secret. And—whatever the cause which prompted her—pilgrimage, would you have the Roman mob point sneering fingers at Roger de Laval?"—

"By God, they shall not!"

"Then the wisdom of my counsel speaks for itself," Basil interposed soothingly. "It is the one reward I crave."

There was a pause. Whatever of evil brooded in that brief space of time only these two knew.

"It shall be as you say," Roger replied at last, and from their chain mail the gleam of the lantern they carried evoked intermittent answer.

When their steps had died to silence Tristan turned to the monk. His voice was unsteady and there was a great fear in his eyes.

"Father, I need your help as have I never needed human help before. There is some devil's stew simmering in the Lord Basil's cauldron. I fear the worst for her—"

Odo shot a questioning glance at the speaker.

"The wife of the Count Laval?" he returned sharply.

"Father—you know why I am here—and how I have striven to tear this love from my heart and soul. Would she had not come! Would I had never seen her more—for where is it all to lead? For, after all, she is his wife—and I am the transgressor. But now I fear for her life. You have heard, Father. I must see her! I must have speech with her. I must warn her. Father—I promise—that shall be all—if you will but consent and find her—for I know not her abode."

"You promise—" interposed the monk. "Promise nothing. For if you meet, it will not be all. All flesh is weak. Entrust your message to my care and I shall try to do your bidding. But see her no more! Your souls are in grave peril—and Death stands behind you, waiting the last throw."

"Even if our souls should be forever stamped with their dark errors I must see her. I must know why she came hither—I must know the worst. Else should I never find rest this side of the grave. Father, in mercy, do my bidding, for gloom and misery hold my soul in their clutches, and I must know, ere the twilight of Eternity engulfs us both."

"We will speak of this anon," the Monk of Cluny interposed, as together they left the gallery, now sunk in the deepest gloom and, passing through the vaulted corridors, emerged upon the ramparts. No sign of life appeared in the twilight, cast by the towering walls, save where in the shadowy passages the dimmed lights of cressets marked the passing of armed men.

Below, the city of Rome began to take shape in the dim and ghostly starlight, thrusting shadowy domes and towers out of her dark slumber.

In the distance the undulating crests of the Alban Hills mingled with the night mists, and from the nearby Neronian Field came the croaking of the ravens, intensifying rather than breaking the stillness.

---

[CHAPTER VI]
A MEETING OF GHOSTS

A voice whose prompting he could not resist, impelled Tristan, after his parting from the Monk of Cluny, to follow the Grand Chamberlain, who had taken the direction of the Pincian Hill. His retreating form became more phantom-like in the misty moonlight, as viewed from the ramparts of the Emperor's Tomb. Nevertheless, mindful of the parting words of the monk, and filled with dire misgivings, Tristan set out at once. True to his determination, he procured a small lantern and a piece of coarse thick cloth, which he concealed under his cloak, then, by a solitary pathway, he followed the direction he had seen Basil take. The Bridge of San Angelo was deserted and not a human being was abroad.

After a time he arrived at a small copse, where Basil's form had disappeared from sight. Clearing away the underbrush, Tristan came to what seemed a fissure in a wall, which cast a tremendous shadow over the surrounding trees and bushes. Creeping in as far as he dared, he paused, then, with mingled emotions of expectancy and apprehension which affected him so powerfully that for a moment he was hardly master of his actions, he slowly and carefully uncovered his lantern, struck two flints and lighted the wick.

His first glance was intuitively directed to the cavity that opened beneath him.

Of Basil he saw no trace, notwithstanding he had seen him enter the cavity at the point where he himself had entered. Ere long however, he heard a thin, long-drawn sound, now louder, now softer; now approaching, now receding, now verging toward shrillness, now returning to a faint, gentle swell. This strange, unearthly music was interrupted by a succession of long, deep rolling sounds, which rose grandly about the fissures above, like prisoned thunderbolts striving to escape. Roused by the mystery of the place and the uncertainty of his own purpose, Tristan was, for a moment, roused to a pitch of such excitement that almost threatened to unsteady his reason. Conscious of the danger attending his venture, and the fearful legends of invisible beings and worlds, he was constrained to believe that demons were hovering around him in viewless assemblies, calling to him in unearthly voices, in an unknown tongue, to proceed upon his enterprise and take the consequences of his daring.

Thus he remained for a time, fearful of advancing or retracing his steps, looking fixedly into the trackless gloom and listening to the strange sounds which, alternately rising and falling, still floated around him. The fitful light of his lantern suddenly fell upon a shape that seemed to creep through one of the stone galleries. In the unsteady gleam it appeared from the distance like a gnome wandering through the bowels of the earth, or a forsaken spirit from purgatory.

Had it been but a trick of his imagination, or had his mortal eyes seen a denizen of the beyond? At last he aroused himself, trimmed with careful hand his guiding wick and set forth to penetrate the great rift.

He moved on in an oblique direction for several feet, now creeping over the tops of the foundation arches, now skirting the extremities of the protrusions in the ruined brickwork, now descending into dark, slimy, rubbish-choked chasms, until the rift suddenly diminished in all directions.

For a moment Tristan paused and considered. He was almost tempted to retrace his steps, abandoning the purpose upon which he had come. Before him stretched interminable gloom, brooding, he knew not over what caverns and caves, inhabited by denizens of night.

He moved onward, with less caution than he had formerly employed, when suddenly and without warning a considerable portion of brickwork fell with lightning suddenness from above. It missed him, else he should never had known what happened. But some stray bricks hurled him prostrate on the foundation arch, dislocating his right shoulder, and shattering his lantern into atoms. A groan of anguish rose to his lips. He was left in impenetrable darkness.

For a short time Tristan lay as one stunned in his dark solitude. Then, trying to raise himself, he began to experience in all their severity the fierce spasms, the dull gnawings that were the miserable consequences of the injury he had sustained. His arm lay numbed by his side, and for the space of some moments he had neither the strength nor the will to even move the sound limbs of his body.

But gradually the anguish of his body awakened a wilder and strange distemper in his mind, and then the two agonies, physical and mental, rioted over him in fierce rivalry, divesting him of all thoughts, save such as were aroused by their own agency. At length, however, the pangs seemed to grow less frequent. He hardly knew now from what part of his body they proceeded. Insensibly his faculties of thinking and feeling grew blank; he remained for a time in a mysterious, unrefreshing repose of body and mind, and at last his disordered senses, left unguided and unrestrained, became the victims of a sudden and terrible illusion.

The black darkness about him appeared, after an interval, to be dawning into a dull, misty light, like the reflection on clouds which threaten a thunderstorm at the close of day. Soon this atmosphere seemed to be crossed and streaked with a fantastic trellis work of white, seething vapor. Then the mass of brickwork which had fallen in, grew visible, enlarged to an enormous bulk and endowed with the power of locomotion, by which it mysteriously swelled and shrank, raised and depressed itself, without quitting for a moment its position near him. And then, from its dark and toiling surface, there rose a long array of dusky shapes, which twined themselves about the misty trellis work above and took the palpable forms of human countenances.

There were infantile faces wreathed with grave worms that hung round them like locks of slimy hair; aged faces dabbled with gore and slashed with wounds; youthful faces, seamed with livid channels along which ran unceasing tears; lovely faces distorted into the fixed coma of despairing gloom. Not one of these countenances exactly resembled the other. Each was stigmatized by a revolting character of its own. Yet, however deformed their other features, the eyes of all were preserved unimpaired. Speechless and bodiless they floated in unceasing myriads up to the fantastic trellis work, which seemed to swell its wild proportions to receive them. There they clustered in their goblin amphitheatre, and fixedly and silently they glared down, without exception, on the intruder's face.

Meanwhile the walls at the side began to gleam out with a light of their own, making jaded boundaries to the midway scenes of phantom faces. Then the rifts in their surface widened, and disgorged misshapen figures of priests and idols of the olden time, which came forth in every hideous deformity of aspect, mocking at the faces of the trellis work, while behind and over the whole soared shapes of gigantic darkness. From this ghastly assemblage there came not the slightest sound. The stillness of a dead and ruined world was about him, possessed of appalling mysteries, veiled in quivering vapors and glooming shadows.

Days, years, centuries seemed to pass, as Tristan lay gazing up in a trance of horror into this realm of peopled and ghostly darkness.

At last he staggered to his feet. He must find an egress or go mad. Slowly raising himself upon his uninjured arm, he looked vainly about for the faintest glimmer of light. Not a single object was discernible about him. Darkness hemmed him in, in rayless and triumphant obscurity.

The first agony of the pain having resolved itself into a dull changeless sensation, the vision that had possessed his senses was now, in a vast and shadowy form, present only to his memory, filling the darkness with fearful recollections and urging him on, in a restless, headlong yearning, to effect his escape from this lonely and unhallowed sepulchre.

"I must pass into light. I must breathe the air of the sky, or I shall perish in this vault," he muttered in a hoarse voice, which the fitful echoes mocked by throwing his words as it were, to each other, even to the faintest whisper of its last recipient.

Gradually and painfully he commenced his meditated retreat.

Tristan's brain still whirled with the emotion that had so entirely overwhelmed his mind, as, staggering through the interminable gloom, he set forth on his toilsome, perilous journey.

Suddenly however he paused, bewildered, in the darkness. He had no doubt mistaken the direction, and a gleam of light, streaming through the fissure of the rock, informed him that there were others in this abode of darkness, beside himself.

Had he come upon the object of his quest?

For a moment Tristan's heart stood still, then, with all the caution which the darkness, the danger of secret pitfalls and the risk of discovery suggested, he crept toward the crevice until the glow gradually increased. From the bowels of the earth, as it were, voices were now audible; they seemed to issue from the depths of a cavern directly below where Tristan stood. Groping his way carefully along the wall of rock, he at last reached the spot whence the light issued and presently started at finding himself before an aperture just wide enough to admit the body of a single man. A sort of perpendicular ladder was formed in the wall of narrow juttings of stone, and below these was the rock chamber from which the voices proceeded.

It was some time ere the confusion of his ideas and the darkness allowed Tristan to form any notion of the character of the locality, when it suddenly dawned upon him that he had strayed into a place regarding which he had heard and wondered much: the Catacombs of St. Calixtus.

This revelation was by no means reassuring, although the presence of others held out hope that he would discover an exit from this shadowy labyrinth.

For a moment Tristan remained as one transfixed, as he gazed from his lofty pinnacle into the shadowy vault below.

He saw a stone table, lighted with a single taper, in the centre of which lay an unsheathed dagger, and an object the exact character of which he could not determine in the half gloom, also a brazen bowl. About a dozen men in cloaks with black vizors stood around, and one, taller than the rest, the gleam of whose eyes shone through the slits of his mask, appeared to be concluding an address to his companions.

The words were indistinguishable to Tristan but, when the speaker had concluded, a dark murmur arose which subsided anon. Then those present crowded around the stone table. The taper was momentarily obscured by the intervening throng, and Tristan could not see the ceremony, though he could hear the muttered formula of an oath they seemed to be taking. What he did see caused the chill of death to run through his veins.

The group again receding, the man bared his left arm, raised the dagger on high and let it descend. Tristan saw the blood weltering slowly from the self-inflicted wound, trickling drop by drop into the brazen bowl, which another muffled figure was holding. Then each one present repeated the ceremony, he who was presenting the bowl being the last to mingle his blood with that of the rest.

Then another stepped forth and, raising the bloody knife on high, stabbed the object that lay upon the table. Some mysterious signs passed between them, meaningless words that struck Tristan's ear with the vague memory of a dimly remembered dream. Then he who seemed to be the speaker raised the object on high and, walking to a niche, concealed in the shadows, placed it in, what seemed to Tristan, a fissure in the rock.

Like ghosts returning to the bowels of the earth, they glided away, silently, soundlessly, and soon the silence of death hovered once again in the rock caverns of the Catacombs of St. Calixtus.

In breathless suspense, utterly oblivious of the injury he had sustained, Tristan gazed into the deserted rock chamber where the dim light of the taper still flickered in a faint breath of air wafted from without.

Hardly did the hearts of the Magi when the vision of the Star in the East first dawned upon their eyes experience a transport more vivid than that which animated Tristan when he found his terrible stress relieved.

But almost immediately a reaction set in and a dire misgiving extinguished the quick ray of hope that had lighted his heart, luring him on to escape from these caverns of Death.

By a strange mischance they had neglected to extinguish the taper. They might return at any moment and, his presence discovered, the doom in store for the intruder on their secret rites was not a matter of surmise. Composing himself to patience, Tristan waited, glaring as a caged tiger at the gates whose opening or closing might spell freedom or doom. At last, after a considerable lapse of time, moments that seemed eternity, he resolved to hazard the descent.

Slowly and painfully moving, with the pace and perseverance of a turtle, he writhed downward upon his unguided course until he reached the bottom of the cavern. Breathless with exhaustion after his breakneck descent, he waited in the shadow of a projecting rock. When the deep sepulchral silence remained undisturbed, he advanced toward the fissure in the rock where one of the muffled company had placed the mysterious object.

Tristan's quest was not at once rewarded. The shelving in the rock cavern, being irregular and almost indistinguishable, offered no clue to the mystery. A great fear was upon him, but he was determined, to discover the meaning of it all.

Suddenly he paused. A small cabinet of sandal wood, concealed behind the jutting stone, had caught his eye. It was painted to resemble the rock and the untrained eye would not linger upon it. A small keyhole was revealed, but the key had been taken away.

Tristan stood irresolute, with straining eyes and listening ear. Not a sound was audible. Even the piping of the night wind in the rock fissures seemed to have died to silence. With quick resolution he inserted one of the sharp-edged flints and gave a wrench.

When the top receded he could not repress an outcry. A chill coursed coldly through his veins. His breath came and went in sobs, as from one half drowned.

He only glanced at what was before him for the fraction of a second. But he knew what had made the very soul within him shudder and his bones grind, as if in mortal agony.

It was as though Hell itself had opened the gates. He staggered back in a paroxysm of horror.—

With a grim, set face Tristan closed the top of the cabinet and replaced it on the rocky ledge. Thus he stood, his face buried in his hands. Could the All-seeing God permit such an outrage and let the perpetrators live?

But there was no time for reflection. At any moment one of the muffled phantoms might return, and indeed he thought he heard steps approaching through one of the rock galleries. He crouched in breathless, agonized suspense, for it did not suffer him longer in these caverns of crime and death.

He dimly remembered the direction in which the nocturnal company had departed and, after some research, he discovered a narrow corridor that seemed to slope upward through the gloom. His lantern having been broken to atoms, the taper held out little promise of life beyond a brief space of time during which he must find the entrance of the cavern, if he did not wish to meet a fate even worse than death in the event of discovery.

Grimly resolved Tristan raised the flickering taper and entered the gallery on his left. The Stygian gloom almost extinguished the feeble light, though he noted every object he passed, every turn in the tortuous ascent.

After some time which seemed eternity he at last perceived a dim glow at the extremity of the gallery, and soon found himself before the outer cavity of the stone wall, in a region of the city that seemed miles removed from the place where he had entered.

It was near daybreak. The moon shone faintly in the grey heavens and a vaporous mist was sinking from shapeless clouds that hovered over the course of the Tiber.

Tristan looked about his solitary lurking place, but beheld no human being in its lonely recesses. Then his eyes fixed themselves with a shudder upon the glooming vault from which he had made his escape.

He was on the track of a terrible mystery, a mystery which shunned the light of day and of heaven. He must fathom it, whatever the risk. A strange new energy possessed him. His life at last seemed to have a purpose. He was no longer a rolling stone. There was work ahead. His future course stood out clearly defined, as Tristan turned his back upon the Catacombs of St. Calixtus and took the direction of the Aventine. To Odo, the Monk of Cluny, he must confide the terrible discovery he had made in the mephitic caverns of the Catacombs. To him he must turn for counsel, of which he stood sorely in need. And in some way which he could not account for to himself, Tristan felt as if the fate of Hellayne was bound up in these dreadful mysteries. At first the thought seemed absurd, but somehow it gained upon him and began to add new weight to his burden. Could he but see her! Could he but have speech with her. A great dread seized him at the thought of what might be her fate at the present hour. What would she think of him who seemed to have abandoned her in the hour of dire distress, when she needed him above all men on earth?

Did her intuition, did her heart inform her that he had roamed the city for days in the hope of finding her? Had her heart informed her that, like a spirit judged and condemned, he found neither rest nor peace in his vain endeavors to discover her abode? Was she sinking under her loneliness, perishing from uncertainty of her fate, doubts of his allegiance? To what perils and miseries had he exposed her, and to what end? He groaned in despair, as his mind reverted from the dark present to the happy past. A past, forever gone!—

A faint streak of light crept across the East, permeating the grey dawn with roseate hues as Tristan re-entered the Emperor's Tomb to partake of an hour or two of much needed rest, ere the business of the new-born day claimed him its own.

---

[CHAPTER VII]
A BOWER OF EDEN

After some hours of much needed rest Tristan started out to find the Monk of Cluny. The task he had set himself was not one easy of execution, since the Benedictine friar was wont to visit the Roman sanctuaries following the promptings of the spirit without adhering to a definite routine. Thus the greater part of the day was consumed in a futile quest of him of whose counsel he stood sorely in need.

At the hour of sunset Tristan set anew upon his quest. His feet carried him to a remote region of the city, and when he regained his bearings he found himself before the convent of Santa Maria del Priorata with its environing groves of oleander and almond trees.

The moon was floating like a huge pearl of silver through vast seas of blue. The sleeping flowers were closed, like half-extinguished censers, breathing faint incense on the night's pale brow. From some dark bough a nightingale was shaking down a flood of song. The fountains from their stone basins leaped moonward in the passion of their love and seemed to fall sobbing back to earth. The night air breathed hot and languorous across the gardens of the Pincian Mount. Lutes tinkled here and there. And the magic of the night thrilled Tristan's soul. As in a trance his gaze followed the white figure that was moving noiselessly down a moss grown path. A thick hedge of laurel concealed her now. Then she paused as if she, too, were enraptured by the magic of the night.

The moon illumined the central lawn and the whispering fountains. Tall cypresses seemed to intensify the shade. In the distance he could faintly discern the white balustrade, crowning a terrace where green alleys wound obscurely beneath the canopy of darkest oak, and moss and violet made their softest bed. In the very centre of it was a small domed temple, a shrine to Love.

Tristan's senses began to swoon. Was it a hallucination—was it reality? A moon maiden she seemed, made mortal for a night, to teach all comers love in the sacred grove.

"Hellayne! Hellayne!"

His voice sounded strange to his own ears.

As in a dream he saw her come towards him. She came so silent and so pale in the spectral light that he feared lest it was the spectre of his mind that came to meet him. And once more the voice cried "Hellayne!" and then they lay in each other's arms. All her reluctance, all her doubts seemed to have flown at the sound of her name from his lips.

"Hellayne! Hellayne!" he whispered deliriously, kissing her eyes, her hair, her sweet lips, and folding her so close to him, as if he would never again part from her he loved better than life. "At last I have found you! How came you here? Speak! Is it indeed yourself, or is it some mocking spirit that has borrowed your form?"

And again he kissed her and their eyes held silent commune.

"It is I who have just refound you!" she whispered, as he looked enraptured into the sweet girlish face, the face that had not changed since he had left Avalon, though she seemed to have become more womanly, and in her eyes lay a pathetic sorrow.

What a rapture there was in that clear tone. But she trembled as she spoke. Would he understand? Would he believe?

"But—why—why—are you here?" he stammered.

"I have sought you long."

"You have followed me? You are not then a nun?"

"You see I am not."

"But why—oh why,—have you done this thing?"

She made no answer.

"You are here in Rome—and he is here. And you did not know?"

"I knew!" she replied with a little nod, like a questioned child.

"You knew! And he believes that I knew!"

"That is a small matter, dear. For he knows, that you knew not."

The endearment startled him. It seemed to cast her faith upon him.

"What are you doing here?" he said.

"I came because I had to come! I had no choice—!"

"No choice! Then why did you send me away?"

She gave a little shrug.

"I knew not how much I loved you."

"And yet, dearest, you cannot remain here. You know his moods better than any one else—and you know if he finds us—for your own sake, dearest, you cannot remain."

In the warmth of his entreaty he had used as endearing words as she. They were precious to her ears.

"Let him come!" she said, nestling close to him. "Let him come and kill me!"

She glanced about. He pointed to the castellated building that rose darkly beyond the holm-oaks.

"Yonder—is yonder your abode?" he stammered.

Suddenly the woman in her gained the mastery.

"Oh no! No! No! Let us hide! Wretch that I am, to risk your life with mine."

She had flung herself upon him. Around them rioted roses in wild profusion. To him it seemed like a bosquet of Eden. Upon his breast she sobbed. But no consideration of past or present could restrain his hand from gently soothing her silken hair.

"Oh, why did you leave me?" she cried. "Why could we not have loved without all this? Surely two souls can love—if love they must—without doing wrong to any one."

His arms stole about her.

"Speak to me! Speak to me!" she whispered with upturned face.

"Had I known that this would happen, I should have known that I did foolishly," he replied. "You should have known, dearest. You thought to kill our love by cutting it to earth. You have but made its roots grow deeper down into the present and the future!"

She nodded dreamily.

"Perchance you speak truth!" she said. "You see me here by your side, having crossed leagues and leagues to seek your soul, my home—my only home forever. And as surely as the bee goes back to its one hallowed oak have I refound you. And as surely as the ocean knows that every breath of vapor lifted from its face shall some day come back to its breast, so surely did you know that your love must return to you."

"Unless," he said, "it sinks into the unseen springs that are so deep that they are lost from sight forever."

"Lost—nothing is lost. The deepest water shall break out some day and reach the lake—the river. Then, why not now? I am one who cannot wait for eternity."

"And yet, eternity I fear, is waiting for us!"

There was a deep silence, lasting apace.

"Ah, I know," she said at last. "I know I ought to think as you do. I should be conscience stricken now, as I was then. I should be glad that you left me. But I am not—I am not. I am here, dearest, to ask you if you love me still?"—

"Love you?" he replied in a transport, holding her close, while he covered her eyes and her upturned face with kisses. "I love you as never woman was loved—as the night loves the dew in the cups of the upturned flowers—as the nightingale loves the dream that weaves its phantom webs about her bowers. I love you above everything in heaven or on earth. You knew the answer, dearest. Why did you ask?"

"I see it in your eyes. You love me still," she crooned, her beautiful white arms about his neck, "notwithstanding—"

He started. And yet, after the scene she had witnessed on that night, her doubts were but too well-founded. Yet she had not queried before.

"Strange fortunes crossed my path since I came here," he said. "Ambition lured—I followed, as one who lost his way. Would you have had me do otherwise?"

In his eyes she read the truth. Yet the shadow of that other woman had come between them as a phantom.

"Oh, no,—although I never thought that you were made for statecraft."

"I am in the service of the Senator. And the Senator of Rome is her foe."

"And you?"

"I am his servant."

She laughed nervously.

"I never thought you would come to this, my love."

"Nor ever should I have thought so. But fate is strange. The Holy Father is imprisoned in the Lateran. To him I wended my way. But the only service I did him was to prevent his escape—unwittingly. I visited the sanctuaries. But though prayers hovered on my lips, repentance was not in my heart. And then it came to pass. And I feel like one borne in a bark that has neither sail nor rudder. And if, instead of being far-floated to these Roman shores, I am headed for a port where all is security and peace, can I prevent it? I am borne on! I close my eyes and try to think that Fate has intended it for my good."

"For your good!" she said bitterly.

"For yours no less, perchance."

"How so, dearest? What good can come to me from your soul's security? To me, who believe our love is rightful?"

"And yet you sent me from you—into darkness—loneliness—despair?"

She stroked his hair.

"It was fear as well as conscience that prompted. You once said that all things are right, that may not be escaped. You said, that if God was at the back of all things, all things were pure—"

"I know I said it! But, what I meant, I know not now. I saw things strangely then."

"There were days when I, too, lost my vision," she said softly, "when I said to myself: there is truth and truth—the higher and the lower. It was the higher, if you like to call it so, Tristan, that prompted the deed. Since then I have come down to earth, and the lower truth, more fit for beings of clay, proclaims my presence here—"

"What will you do?" he queried anxiously.

"I know not—I know not! I came here to be with you—without ever a thought of meeting him again whom I have wronged—if wronged indeed I have. He has vowed to kill you! Oh, to what a pass have I brought you—my love—my love! Let us fly from Rome! Let us leave this city. He will never know. And as for me—he but loves me because I am fair to look upon, and lovable in the eyes of another. What I have suffered in the silence, in the darkness, you will never know. You shall take me with you—anywhere will I go—so we shake the dust of this city from our feet."

She leapt at him again and flung her arms about his neck, her face upturned. He had neither will nor power to release himself. He scarcely had the strength to speak the words which he knew would stab her to the heart.

Even ere he spoke she fell away from him as if she had read his mind.

"So you persuaded him of your repentance," she cried. "You are friends over the body of your murdered love! And I—who gave all—am left alone,—the foe of either. It was nobly done."

He stared at her as if he thought she had gone mad.

"Listen, Hellayne," he urged, taking her hands in his, in the endeavor to soothe her. "What spirit of evil has whispered this madness into your ears? Even just now you said, he has sworn to kill me. How could there be reconciliation between Roger de Laval and myself—who love his wife?"

"Then what is it?" she queried, her eyes upon his lips as if she were waiting sentence to be pronounced upon her.

"I am the Senator's man!"

The words fell upon her ears like the knell of doom.

"He will release you! I will go to him—if your pride is greater, than your love."

She was all woman now, deaf to reason and entreaty, thinking of nothing but her great love of him.

He drew her down beside him on the marble seat.

"Listen, Hellayne! You do not understand—you wrong me cruelly. Naught is there in this world that I would not do to make you happy—you, whose love and happiness are my one concern while life endures. But this thing may not be. The Senator of Rome is away on a pilgrimage. He has chosen me to watch over this city till his return. Danger lurks about me in every guise. Its nature I know not. But I do know that there is some dark power at work plotting evil. There is one I do not trust—the Lord Basil."

Hellayne gave a start.

"The bosom friend, so it would seem, of the Count Laval."

The color had left Tristan's face.

"You have met?"

"He appears to have taken a great liking to my lord. Almost daily does he call, and they seem to have some secret matter between them."

Tristan gripped Hellayne's hand so fiercely that she hardly suppressed an outcry.

"Have you surprised any utterance?"

"Only a name. They thought I was out of earshot."

"What name?"

"Theodora!"

She watched him narrowly as she spoke the word.

He gave a start.

"Theodora," Hellayne repeated slowly. "She who saved your life when my poor efforts failed."

There was a tinge of bitterness in her tone which did not escape Tristan's ear. Ere he could make reply, she followed it up with the question:

"What is there between you and her?"

"For aught I know it is some strange whim of the woman, call it infatuation if you will," he replied, "which, though I have repelled her, still maintains. It was at her feast I first met the Lord Roger face to face."

"How came you there?" she questioned with pained voice.

Tristan recounted the circumstances, concealing nothing from the time of his arrival in Rome to the present hour. Hellayne listened wearily, but the account he gave seemed rather to irritate than to reconcile her to him, who thus laid bare his heart before her.

"And so soon was I forgot?" she crooned.

"Never for a moment were you forgot, my Hellayne," he replied with all the fervor of persuasion at his command. "At all times have I loved you, at all times was your image enshrined in my heart. Theodora is all-powerful in Rome, as was Marozia before her. The magistrates, the officers of the Senator's court, are her creatures,—Basil no less than the rest. Would that the Lord Alberic returned, for the burden he has placed upon my shoulders is exceeding heavy. But you, my Hellayne, what will you do? I cannot bear the thought of knowing you with him who has wrecked your life, your happiness."

In Hellayne's blue eyes there was a great pain.

"Why mind such trifles since you but think of yourself?"

"You do not understand!" he protested. "Can I with honor abandon the trust which the Senator has imposed? What if the dreadful thing should happen? What if sudden sedition should sweep his power into the night of oblivion? Could I stand face to face with him, should he ask: 'How have you kept your trust?'"

Steps were approaching on the greensward.

Hellayne turned pale and Tristan's arm closed about her, determined to defend her to the death against whosoever should dare intrude.

Then it was as if some impalpable barrier had arisen between the man and the woman. It seemed the last hard malice of Fate to have brought them so near to what was not to be.

Hardly had Tristan drawn her throbbing bosom to his embrace when a dark shadow fell athwart their path and, looking up, he became aware of a forbidding form that stood hard by, wrapped in a black mantle that reached to his heels. From under a hood which was drawn over his face two beady eyes gleamed with smouldering fire, while the hooked nose gave the face the semblance of a bird of prey, which illusion the cruel mouth did little to dispel.

Hellayne, too, had seen this phantom of ill omen and was about to release herself from Tristan's arms, her face white as her robe, when the speech of the intruder arrested her movement.

"A message from the Lady Theodora."

A hot flush passed over Tristan's face, giving way to a deadly pallor as, hesitating to take the proffered tablet, he replied with ill-concealed vexation:

"Whom does the Lady Theodora honor by sending so ill-favored a messenger?"

The cowled figure fixed his piercing eyes first upon Tristan then upon Hellayne.

"The Lord Tristan will do well to pay heed to the summons, if he values that which lies nearest his heart."

But ere he, for whom the message was intended, could take it, Hellayne had snatched it from the messenger, had broken the seal and devoured its contents by the light of the moon which made the night as bright as day.

Then, with a shrill laugh, she cast it at Tristan's feet and, ere the latter could recover himself, both the woman and the messenger had gone and he stood alone in the bosquet of roses, vainly calling the name of her who had left him without a word to his misery and despair.

---

[CHAPTER VIII]
AN ITALIAN NIGHT

The palace of Theodora on Mount Aventine was aglow with life and movement for the festivities of the evening. The lights of countless cressets were reflected from the marble floor of the great reception hall and shone on the rich panelling, and the many-hued tapestries which decked the walls.

In the shadow of the little marble kiosk which rose, a relic of a happier age, among oleander and myrtles, shadowed by tall cypresses, silent guardians of the past, Theodora and Basil faced each other. The white, livid face of the man gave testimony to the passions that consumed him, as his burning gaze swept the woman before him.

"I have spoken, my Lord Basil! Should some unforeseen mischance befall him I have summoned hither, look to it that I require not his blood at your hands."

Theodora's tone silenced all further questioning. After a pause she continued: "And if you desire farther proof that this man shall not stand against my enchantments, pass into yonder kiosk and through its carven windows shall you be able to witness all that passes between us."

She ceased with quivering lips, the while Basil regarded her from under half-shut lids, filled with sudden brooding, and for a space there was silence. At last he said in a low, unsteady voice:

"So I did not err when my hatred rose against this puppet of the Senator's, who came to Rome to do penance for a kiss. You love him, your foe, while I, your utter slave, must stand by and, with aching heart, see your mad desire bring all our schemes to naught."

His hand closed on his dagger hilt, but Theodora's eyes flashed like bared swords as with set face she said:

"Fool!—to see but that which lies in your path, not the intricate nets which are spread in the darkness. I mean to make this man my very own! His fevered lips shall close on mine, and in my embrace he shall climb to the heaven of the Gods. He shall be mine! He shall do my bidding utterly. He shall open for me the gates of the Emperor's Tomb. He shall stand beside me when I am proclaimed mistress of Rome! For my love he shall defy the world that is—and the world that is not."

"And what of the woman he loves?" Basil snarled venomously, and the pallor of Theodora's face informed him that the arrow he had sped had hit the mark.

She held out her wonderful statuesque arms, then, raising herself to her full height, she said:

"Is the pale woman from his native land a match for me? What rare sport it shall be to make of this Hellayne a mock, and of her name a memory, and put Theodora's in its high place. Do you doubt my power to do as I say?"

"Verily I do believe that you love this pilgrim," Basil said sullenly. "And while I am preparing the quake that shall tumble Alberic's dominion into dust and oblivion, you are making him the happiest of mortals. And deem you I will stand by and see yon dotard reap the fruits of my endeavors and revel where I, your slave, am starving for a look?"

"Well have you chosen the word, my lord—my slave! For then were Theodora indeed the puppet of a lust-bitten subject did she heed his mad ravings and his idle plaints. Know, my lord, that my love is his to whom I choose to give it, his who gives to me that in return which I desire. And though I have drunk deep of the goblet of passion, never has my heart beat one jot the faster, nor has the fire in my soul been kindled until I met him whom this night I have summoned."

"And deem you, fairest Theodora, that the sainted pilgrim will come?" Basil interposed with an evil leer.

An inscrutable smile curved Theodora's crimson lips.

"Let that be my affair, my lord, but—that everything may be clear between us—know this: when I summoned him, after he had spurned me on the night when I intended to make him the happiest of men, it was to torture him, to make a mock of him, to arouse his passions till they overmastered all else, till in very truth he forgot his God, his honor, and the woman for whose kisses he does such noble penance—but now—"

"But now?" came the echo from Basil's lips.

"Who says I shall not?" Theodora replied with her inscrutable smile. "Who shall gainsay me? You—my lord?"

There was a strange light in Basil's eyes, kindled by her mockery.

"And when he kneels at your feet, drunk with passion—laying bare his soul in his mad infatuation—who shall prevent this dagger from drinking his heart's blood, even as he peers into the portals of bliss?"

Theodora's eyes flashed lightnings.

"I shall kill you with my own hands, if you but dare but touch one hair of his head," she said with a calm that was more terrible than any outburst of rage would have been. "He is mine, to do with as I choose, and look well to it, my lord, that your shadow darken not the path between us.—Else I shall demand of you such a reckoning as none who may hear of it in after days shall dare thwart Theodora—either in love or in hate."

Basil's writhing form swayed to and fro; passion-tossed he tried in vain to speak when she raised her hand.

With a gesture of baffled wrath and rage Basil bowed low. A sudden light leaped into his eyes as he raised her hand to his lips. Then he retreated into the shadow of the kiosk.

A moment later Tristan came within view, walking as one in a trance. Mechanically he passed towards the banquet hall. Then he paused, seeming to wait for some signal from within.

A hand stole into his and drew him resistlessly into the shadows.

"Why do you linger here? Behold where the moonlight calls."

"Where is your mistress?" Tristan turned to the Circassian.

A strange smile played on Persephoné's lips.

"She awaits you in yonder kiosk," she replied, edging close to him. "Take care you do not thwart her though—for to-day she strikes to kill."

"It is well," Tristan replied. "It must come, and will be no more torture now than any other time."

Persephoné gave a strange smile, then she led him through a cypress avenue, at the remote end of which the marble kiosk gleamed white in the moonlight.

Pointing to it with white outstretched arm she gave him a mock bow and returned to the palace.

His lips grimly set, Tristan, insensible to the beauty of the summer night, strode down the flower-bordered path. Woven sheets of silvery moonlight, insubstantial and unreal, lay upon the greensward. The sounds of distant lutes and harps sank down through the hot air. The sky was radiant with the magic lustre of a great white moon, suspended like an alabaster lamp in the deep azure overhead. Her rays invaded the sombre bosquets, lighted the trellised rose-walks and cast into bold relief against the deep shadows of palm and ilex many feathery fountain sprays, crowning flower-filled basins of alabaster with whispering coolness.

The path was strewn with powdered sea shells and bordered on either side with rare plants, filling the air with exquisite perfume. Between thickets of yellow tufted mimosa and leafy bowers of acacia shimmered the crystal surface of the marble cinctured lake, tinted with pale gold and shrouded by pearl-hued vapors.—Pink and white myrtles, golden-hued jonquils, rainbow tinted chrysanthema, purple rhododendrons, iris, lilac and magnolia mingled their odors in an almost disconcerting orgy, and rare orchids raised their glowing petals with tropical gorgeousness from vases of verdigris bronze in the moonlight.

At the entrance of the marble kiosk, there stood the immobile form of a woman, half hidden behind a cluster of blooming orchids.

The silver light of the moon fell upon the pale features of Theodora. Her gaze was fixed upon the dark avenue of cypress trees, through which Tristan was swiftly approaching.

She stood there waiting for him, clad in misty white, like the moonbeams, yet the byssus of her garb was no whiter than was the throat that rose from the faultless trunk of her body, no whiter than her wonderful hands and arms.

Tristan's lips tightened. He had come to claim the scarf and dagger. To-night should end it all. There was no place in his life for this woman whose beauty would be the undoing of him who gave himself up to its fatal spell.

As he stood before her, a gleam of moonlight on his broad shoulders, Theodora felt the blood recede to her heart, the while she gazed on his set, yet watchful face. His silence seemed to numb her faculties and her voice sounded strange as, extending her hand, she said:

"Welcome, my Lord Tristan."

He bowed low, barely touching the soft white fingers.

"The Lady Theodora has been pleased to summon me and I have obeyed. I am here to claim the dagger which was taken from me and the scarf of blue samite."

Theodora glanced at him for a moment, the blood drumming in her ears and driving a coherent answer from her mind, while Tristan met her gaze without flinching, with the memory of Hellayne in his heart.

"Presently will I reveal this matter to you, my Lord Tristan," she said at last. "Meanwhile sit you here beside me—for the night is hot, and I have waited long for your coming."

For a moment Tristan hesitated, then he took his seat beside her on the marble bench, his brain afire, as he mused on all the treachery her soft bosom held.

"You look strangely at me, Tristan," she said in a low tone, dropping all formality, "almost as if it gave you pain to sit beside me. Yet I cannot think that a man like you has never rested beside a beautiful woman in an hour of solitude and passion."

A laugh, soft as the music of the Castalian fountain, fell on Tristan's ear, but as he sat without answer, she continued, her face very close to his:

"Strange, indeed, my words may sound in your ears, Tristan—and yet—can it be that you are blind as well as deaf to the call of the Goddess of Love, who rules us all?"

She paused, her lips ajar, her eyes alight with a strange fire, such as he had seen therein on the night in the sunken gardens, beyond the glimmering lake.

"And what have I to give to you, Lady Theodora," he said at length. "What can you expect from me, the giving of which would not turn my honor to disgrace and my strength to water?"

At his words she rose up and, towering her glorious womanhood above him, glided behind the marble bench and, leaning hot hands upon his shoulders, bent low her head, till strands of perfumed hair rested on his tense features.

"Do you love power, Tristan?" she said with low, yet vibrant voice. "I tell you that, if you give yourself to me, there are no heights to which the lover of Theodora may not climb. The way lies open from camp to palace, from sword to sceptre, and, though the aim be high, at least it is worth the risk. Steep is the path, but, though attainment seems impossible, I tell you it is the wings of love that shall raise you and bid you soar to flights of glory and rapture. I offer you a kingdom, if you will but lay your sword at my feet and yet more besides, for, Tristan, I offer you myself."

The perfumed head bent lower and the scented cloud fell more thickly upon him as he sat there, dazed and enchanted out of all powers of resistance by the misty sapphire eyes that gleamed amid it, and seemed to drag his soul from out of him. Now his head was pillowed on her soft bosom and her white arms were about him, while lingering kisses burnt on his unresponsive lips, when suddenly she faced round with a cry, for there, directly before them in the clearing, stood a woman, whose gleaming white robe, untouched by any color, save that of the violet band that bound it round her shoulders, seemed one with the sun-kissed hair, tied into a simple knot.

Hellayne stood there as if deprived of motion, her blue eyes wide with horror and pain, her curved lips parted, as if to speak, though no sound came from them, until Tristan turned and, as their glances met, he gave a strangled groan and buried his face in his hands.

Theodora stood immobile, with blazing eyes and terrible face, then she clapped her hands twice and at the sound two eunuchs appeared and stood motionless awaiting their mistress' behest. For apace there was silence, while Theodora glanced from the one to the other, quivering from head to foot with the violence of the passion that possessed her, casting anon a glance at Tristan who stood silent, with bowed head.

At length she glided up to him and, as she laid her two white hands on his broad shoulders, Tristan shuddered and felt a longing to make an end of all her evil beauty and devilish cunning. Then, deliberately, she took the scarf of blue samite, which lay beside her and put her foot upon it.

"This is very precious to you, Tristan, is it not?" she said in her sweet voice, while her witching eyes sank into his. "I was about to tell you how you might serve me, and deserve all the happiness that is in store for you when I was interrupted by the appearance of this woman. Can you tell me, who she is, and why she is regarding you so strangely?"

As she spoke she turned slowly towards Hellayne whose face was pale as death.

A spasm of rage shook Tristan, at the sight of the woman who regarded him out of wide, pitiful eyes, but even as he longed to pierce the heart of her who was striving to wreck all he held dear, Odo of Cluny's warning seemed to clear his brain of the rage and hate that was clouding it, and in that instant he knew, if he played his part, he held in his hand the last throw in the dread game, of which Rome was the pawn.

"In all things will I do your bidding, Lady Theodora,—for who can withstand your beauty and your enchantment?" said a voice that seemed not part of himself.

Theodora turned to Hellayne.

"You have heard the words the Lord Tristan has spoken," she said in veiled tone of mockery. "Tell me now, did you not know that I was engaged upon matters of state when you intruded yourself into our presence?"

For a moment the blue eyes of Hellayne flashed swords with the dark orbs of Theodora. There was a silence and the two women read each other's inmost thoughts, Hellayne meeting Theodora's contemptuous scorn with the keen look of one who has seen her peril and has nerved herself to meet it.

To Tristan she did not even vouchsafe a glance.

"I followed one, perjured and forsworn," she said in tones that cut Tristan's very soul, while a look of immeasurable contempt flashed from her blue eyes. "You are welcome to him, Lady Theodora. I do not even envy you his memory."

Ere Theodora could reply, Hellayne, with a choking sob, turned and fled down the moonlit path like some hunted thing, and ere either realized what had happened she had vanished in the night.

Tristan, dreading the worst, his soul bruised in its innermost depths, cursing himself for having permitted any consideration except Hellayne's life to interfere with his preconceived plans, started to follow, when Theodora, guessing his purpose, suddenly barred his way.

Ere he could prevent, she had thrown her arms about him and her face upturned to his stormy brow she whispered deliriously, utterly oblivious of two eyes that burnt from their sockets like live coals:

"I love you! I love you!" and her whole being seemed ablaze with the fire of an all-devouring passion. "Tristan, I love you with a love so idolatrous, that I could slay you with these hands rather than be spurned, be denied by you. Love me Tristan—love me! And I shall give 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 his side no task would have seemed too great of accomplishment. And whatever the fruits of her plotting he was to have shared them. How she hated him; and how she hated that woman who had come between them. As for him whose stammering words of love tumbled from his drunken lips, Theodora could have driven her poniard through his heart without wincing in the act.

"If you love me then, as you say," she whispered at last, "revenge me on him who has put this slight upon me!"

A baleful light shone in Basil's eyes.

"He dies this very night."

She raised her hands with a shudder.

"No—no! Not a quick death! He would die as another changes his garment—with a smile.—No! Not a quick death! Let him live, but wish he were dead a thousand times. Strike him through his honor. Strike him through the woman he loves."

For a pace Basil was silent. Could Theodora have read his thoughts at this moment the weapon would not have dropped from her nerveless grasp.

"Ah!" he said, and a film seemed to pass over his eyes in the utterance. "There is nothing that shall be left undone—through his honor—through the woman he loves."

She utterly abandoned herself to him now, suffering his endearments and kisses like a thing of stone and thereby rousing his passions to their highest pitch. She could have strangled him like a poisonous reptile that defiled her body, but, after having suffered his embrace for a time, she suddenly shook herself free of him.

"My lord—what of our plans? How much longer must I wait ere the clarions announce to Rome that the Emperor's Tomb harbors a new mistress? What of Alberic? What of Hassan Abdullah, the Saracen?"

Basil was regarding her with a mixture of savage passion, doubt, incredulity and something like fear.

"The death-hounds are on Alberic's scent," he said at last, with an effort to steady his voice, and hold in leash his feelings, which threatened to master him, as his eyes devoured the woman's beauty.—"Hassan Abdullah is even now in Rome."

"Can we rely upon him and his Saracens when the hour tolls that shall see Theodora mistress of Rome?"

"Weighing a sack of gold against the infidel's treachery, it is safe to predict that the scales will tip in favor of the bribe—so it be large enough."

"Be lavish with him, and if his heart be set on other matters—"

She paused, regarding the man with an inscrutable look. Shrewd as he was, he caught not its meaning.

"Why not entrust to his care the Lady Hellayne?"

The devilish suggestion seemed to find not as enthusiastic a reception as she had anticipated.

"After having seen the Lady Theodora," Basil said, his eyes avoiding those of the woman, "I fear the Lady Hellayne will appear poor in Hassan Abdullah's eyes."

Theodora had grown pensive.

"I do not think so. To me she seemed like a snow-capped volcano. All ice without, all fire within. Perchance I should bow to your better judgment, my lord, and perchance to Hassan Abdullah's, whose good taste in preferring the Lady Theodora cannot be gainsaid. But, our guests are becoming impatient. Take me to the palace."

Basil barred the woman's way.

"And when you have reached the summit of your desire, will you remember certain nuptials consummated in a certain chamber in the Emperor's Tomb, between two placed as we are and mated as we?"

Theodora's lips curved in one of those rare smiles which brought him to whom she gave it to her feet, her abject slave.

"I shall remember, my lord," she said, and, linking her arm in his, they strode towards the palace.

---

[CHAPTER X]
DEVIL WORSHIP

The dawn of the following day brought in its wake consternation and terror. From the churches of the two Egyptian Martyrs, Sts. Cosmas and Damian, the Holy Host had been taken during the preceding night. Frightened beyond measure, the ministering priests had suffered the terrible secret to leak out, and this circumstance, coupled with the unexplained absence of the Senator, the tardiness of the Prefect to start his investigations, and the captivity of the Pontiff, threw the Romans into a panic. It was impossible to guard every church in Rome against a similar outrage, as the guards of the Senator were inadequate in number, and, consisting chiefly of foreign elements, could not be relied upon.

The early hours of the morning found Tristan in the hermitage of Odo of Cluny. To him he confided the incidents of the night and his adventure in the Catacombs. To him he also imparted the terrible discovery he had made.

Odo of Cluny listened in silence, his face betraying no sign of the emotion he felt. When Tristan had concluded his account he regarded him long and earnestly.

"I, too, have long known that all is not well, that there is something brewing in this witches' cauldron which may not stand the light of day.—"

"But what is it?" cried Tristan. "Tell me, Father, for a great fear as of some horrible danger is upon me; a fear I cannot define and which yet will not leave me."

Odo's face was calm and grave. The Benedictine monk had been listening intently, but with a detached interest, as to some tale which, even if it concerned himself, could not in the least disturb his equanimity. With his supernormal quickness of perception he knew at once the powers with which he had to cope. Tristan had told him of the devilish face in the panel during the night of his first watch at the Lateran.

"The powers of Evil at work are so great that only a miracle from heaven can save us," he said at last. "Listen well, and lose not a word of what I am about to say. Have you ever heard of one Mani, who lived in Babylonia some seven hundred years ago and founded a religion in which he professed to blend the teachings of Christ with the cult of the old Persian Magi?"

A negative gesture came in response. Tristan's face was tense with anxiety. Odo continued:

"According to his teachings there exist two kingdoms: the kingdom of Light and the kingdom of Darkness. Light represents the beneficent primal spirit: God. Darkness is likewise a spiritual kingdom: Satan and his demons were born from the kingdom of Darkness. These two kingdoms have stood opposed to each other from all eternity—touching each other's boundaries, yet remaining unmingled. At last Satan began to rage and made an incursion into the kingdom of Light. Now, the God of Light begat the primal man and sent him, equipped with the five pure elements, to fight against Satan. But the latter proved himself the stronger, and the primal man was, for the time, vanquished. In time the cult of the Manichæans spread. The seat of the Manichæan pope was for centuries at Samarkand. From there, defying persecutions, the sect spread, and obtained a foothold in northern Africa at the time of St. Augustine. Thence it slowly invaded Italy."

Tristan listened with deep attention.

"The original creed had meanwhile been split up into numerous sects," Odo of Cluny continued. "The followers of Mani believed there were two Gods,—the one of Light, the other of Darkness, both equally powerful in their separate kingdoms. But lately one by the name of Bogumil proclaims that God never created the world, that Christ had not an actual body, that he neither could have been born, nor that he died, that our bodies are evil, a foul excrescence, as it were, of the evil principle. Maintaining that God had two sons—Satan the older and Christ the younger—they refuse homage to the latter, Regent of the Celestial World, and worship Lucifer. And they hold meetings and perform diabolical ceremonies, in which they make wafers of ashes and drink the blood of a goat, which their devil-priests administer to them in communion."

Odo of Cluny paused and took a long breath, fixing Tristan with his dark eyes. And when Tristan, stark with horror, dared not trust himself to speak, Odo concluded:

"This is the peril that confronts us! And Holy Church is without a head, and the cardinals cannot cope with the terrible scourge. It is this you saw, my son, and, had your presence been discovered, you would never again have greeted the light of day."

At last Tristan found his tongue.

"God forbid that there should be such a thing, that men should worship the Fiend."

"Nevertheless they do," Odo replied, "and other things too awful for mortal mind to credit."

The perspiration came out on Tristan's brow. Although he was prepared for matters of infinite moment and knew that this interview might well be one of the decisive moments of his life, he yet possessed the detached attitude of mind which was curious of strange learning and information, even in a crisis.

"And you have known this, Father?" he said at last, "and you have done nothing to check the evil?"

"We are living in evil times, my son," Odo replied. "I have long known of the existence of this black heresy, which has slowly spread its baleful cult, until it has reached our very shores. But that they would dare to establish themselves in the city of the Apostle, this I was not prepared to accept, until the terrible crime at the Lateran removed the last doubt. And now I know that the foul thing has obtained a footing here, and more than that, I know that some high in power are affiliated with this society of Satan, that would establish the reign of Lucifer among the Seven Hills. Did you not tell me, my son, of one, terrible of aspect, who peered through the panel in the Capella Palatina on the night of that first and most horrible outrage?"

"One who looked as the Fiend might look, did he assume human guise," Tristan confirmed with a nod.

"The high priest of Satan," Odo returned, "a familiar of black magic—the most terrible of all heinous crimes against Holy Church. A wave of crime is rolling its crimson tide over the Eternal City such as the annals of the Church have never recorded. It started in the reign of Marozia, and Theodora is leagued with the fiend, as was her sister before her."

Odo paused for a moment, breathing deep, while Tristan listened spellbound.

"Have you ever pondered," he continued with slow emphasis, "why the Lord Alberic entrusted to you, a stranger, so important a post as the command of the Emperor's Tomb? That there may be one he does not trust and who that one may be?"

Tristan gave a start.

"There is one I do not trust—one who seems to wrap himself in a poison mist of evil—the Lord Basil."

"Be wary and circumspect. Has he of late come to the Tomb?"

"Three days ago—in company with a stranger from the North—one I may not meet and again look upon heaven."

"The woman's husband?" Odo queried with a penetrating glance.

Tristan colored.

"How these two met I cannot fathom."

"Remember one thing, my son, their alliance portends evil to some one. What did they in the crypts?"

"The Lord Basil seems to have taken a fancy to exploring the cells," Tristan replied. "Those who have followed him report that he holds strange converse with the ghost of some mad monk whom he starved into eternity."

"And this converse—what is its subject?" Odo queried with awakening interest.

"A prophecy and a woman," Tristan replied. "Though those who heard them were so terror stricken at their infectious madness that they fled—not daring to tarry longer lest they would find themselves in the clutches of the fiend."

"A prophecy and a woman," Odo repeated pensively. "The Lord Alberic has confided much in me—his fears—his doubts! For even he knows not, how his mother came to her untimely end."

"The Lady Marozia?"

"The tale is known to you?"

"Rumors—flimsy—intangible—"

"One night she was mysteriously strangled. The Lord Alberic was almost beside himself. But the mystery remained unsolved."

After a pause Odo continued:

"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 clay lay encased above him. In turn he reviewed each scene of his life where it had touched upon her own. He evoked every word she had spoken to him since they had again met on that memorable night.

Thus he sat, clenching his hands and torturing his dull inert brain while the night wore slowly on. Later a still more frenzied mood obsessed him, a burning desire to look once more upon the sweet face he had loved so well. What was there to prevent him? Who was there to gainsay him?

He arose and uttered aloud the challenge in his madness. His voice echoed mournfully along the aisles and the sound of the echoes chilled him, though his purpose gathered strength.

Tristan advanced, and, after a moment's pause, with the silver embroidered hem of the pall in his hands, suddenly swept off that mantle of black cloth, setting up such a gust of wind as all but quenched the tapers. He caught up the bench upon which he had been sitting and, dragging it forward, mounted it and stood, his chest on a level with the coffin lid. His trembling hands fumbled along its surface. He found it unfastened. Without thought or care how he went about the thing, he raised it and let it crash to the ground. It fell on the stone flags with a noise like thunder, booming and reverberating through the gloomy vaults.

A form all in purest white lay there beneath his gaze, the face covered by a white veil. With deepest reverence, and a prayer to her departed soul to forgive the desecration of his loving hands, he tremblingly drew the veil aside.

How beautiful she was in the calm peace of death! She lay there like one gently sleeping, the faintest smile upon her lips, and, as he gazed, it was hard to believe that she was truly dead. Her lips had lost nothing of their natural color. They were as red as he had ever seen them in life.

How could this be?

The lips of the dead are wont to assume a livid hue.

Tristan stared for a moment, his awe and grief almost effaced by the intensity of his wonder. This face, so ivory pale, wore not the ashen aspect of one that would never wake again. There was a warmth about that pallor. And then he bit his nether lip until it bled, and it seemed a miracle that he did not scream, seeing how overwrought were his senses.

For it had seemed to him that the draperies on her bosom had slightly moved, in a gentle, almost imperceptible heave, as if she breathed. He looked—and there it came again!

God! What madness had seized upon him, that his eyes should so deceive him! It was the draught that stirred the air about the church, and blew great shrouds of wax down the taper's yellow sides. He manned himself to a more sober mood and looked again.

And now his doubts were all dispelled. He knew that he had mastered any errant fancy, and that his eyes were grown wise and discriminating, and he knew, too, that she lived! Her bosom slowly rose and fell; the color of her lips, the hue of her cheek, confirmed the assurance that she breathed!

He paused a second to ponder. That morning her appearance had been such that the mediciner had been deceived by it and had pronounced her dead. Yet now there were signs of life! What could it portend, but that the effects of a poison were passing off and that she was recovering?

In the first wild excess of joy, that sent the blood tingling and beating through his brain, his first impulse was to run for help. Then Tristan bethought himself of the closed doors and he realized that, no matter how loudly he shouted, no one would hear him. He must succour her himself as best he could, and meanwhile she must be protected from the chill night air of the church, cold as the air of a tomb. He had his cloak, a heavy serviceable garment, and, if more were needed, there was the pall which he had removed, and which lay in a heap about the legs of the bench.

Leaning forward Tristan slowly passed his hand under her head and gently raised it. Then, slipping it downward, he thrust his arm after it, until he had her round the waist in a firm grip. Thus he raised her from the coffin, and the warmth of her body on his arms, the ready bending of her limbs, were so many added proofs that she lived.

Gently and reverently Tristan raised the supple form in his arms, an intoxication of almost divine joy pervading him as the prayers fell faster from his lips than they had ever since he had recited them on his mother's knee. He laid her on the bench, while he divested himself of the cloak.

Suddenly he paused and stood listening with bated breath.

Steps were approaching from without.

Tristan's first impulse was to rush towards the door, shouting his tidings and imploring assistance. Then, a sudden, almost instinctive dread caught and chilled him. Who was it that came at such an hour? What would any one seek in the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin at dead of night? Was the church indeed their goal, or were they but chance passers-by?

That last question remained not long unanswered. The steps came nearer. They paused before the door. Something heavy was hurled against it. Then some one spoke.

"It is locked, Tebaldo! Get out your tools and force it!"

Tristan's wits were working at fever pace. It may have been that he was swift of thought beyond any ordinary man, or it may have been a flash of inspiration, or a conclusion to which he leapt by instinct. But in that moment the whole problematical plot was revealed to him. Poisoned forsooth she had been, but by a drug that but produced for a time the outward appearance of death, so truly simulated as even to deceive the most learned of doctors. Tristan had heard of such poisons, and here, in very truth, was one of them at work. Some one, no doubt, intended secretly to bear her off. And to-morrow, when men found a broken church door and a violated bier, they would set the sacrilege down to some wizard who had need of the body for his dark practices.

Tristan cursed himself in that dark hour. Had he but peered earlier into her coffin while yet there might have been time to save her. And now? The sweat stood out in beads upon his brow. At that door there were, to judge by the sound of their footsteps and voices, some five or six men. For a weapon he had only his dagger. What could he do to defend her? Basil's plans would suffer no defeat through his discovery when to-morrow the sacrilege was revealed. His own body, lying cold and stark beside the desolated bier, would be but an incident in the work of profanation they would find; an item that in no wise could modify the conclusion at which they would naturally arrive.

---

[CHAPTER XII]
THE DEATH WATCH

A strange and mysterious thing is the working of terror on the human mind. Some it renders incapable of thought or action, paralyzing their limbs and stagnating the blood in their veins; such creatures die in anticipating death. Others, under the stress of that grim emotion have their wits preternaturally sharpened. The instinct of self-preservation assumes command and urges them to swift and feverish action.

After a moment of terrible suspense Tristan's hands fell limply beside him. At the next he was himself again. His cheeks were livid, his lips bloodless. But his hands were steady and his wits under control.

Concealment—concealment for Hellayne and himself—was the thing that now imported, and no sooner was the thought conceived than the means were devised. Slender means they were, yet since they were the best the place afforded, he must trust to them without demurring, and pray to God that the intruders might lack the wit to search. And with that fresh hope it came to him that he must find a way as to make them believe that to search would be a waste of effort.

The odds against him lay in the little time at his disposal. Yet a little time there was. The door was stout, and those outside might not resort to violent means to break it open lest the noise arouse the street.

With what tools the sbirri were at work he could not guess, but surely they must be such as to leave him but a few moments. Already they had begun. He could distinguish a crunching sound as of steel biting into wood.

Swiftly and silently Tristan set to work. Like a ghost he glided round the coffin's side, where the lid was lying. He raised it and, after he had deposited Hellayne on the ground, mounted the bench and replaced it. Next he gathered up the cumbrous pall and, mounting the bench once more, spread it over the coffin. This way and that he pulled it, until it appeared undisturbed as when he had entered.

What time he toiled, the half of his mind intent upon his task, the other half was as intent upon the progress of the workers at the door.

At last it was done. Tristan replaced the bench at the foot of the catafalque and, gathering up the woman in his arms, as though her weight had been that of a feather, he bore her swiftly out of the radius of the four tapers into the black, impenetrable gloom beyond. On he sped towards the high altar, flying now as men fly in evil dreams, with the sensation of an enemy upon them, and their progress a mere stand still.

Thus he gained the chancel, stumbling against the railing as he passed, and pausing for an instant, wondering whether those outside had heard. But the grinding sound continued and he breathed more freely. He mounted the altar stairs, the distant light behind him feebly guiding him on, then he ran round to the right and heaved a great sigh of relief upon finding his hopes realized. The altar stood a pace or so from the wall, and behind it there was just such a concealment as he had hoped to find.

Tristan paused at the mouth of that black well, and even as he paused something that gave out a metallic sound, dropped at the far end of the church. Intuition informed him that it was the lock which the miscreants had cut from the door. He waited no longer, but like a deer scudding to cover, plunged into the dark abyss.

Hellayne, wrapped in his cloak, as she was, he placed on the ground, then crept forward on hands and knees and thrust out his head, trusting to the darkness to conceal him.

He waited thus for a time, his heart beating almost audibly in the intermittent silence, his head and face on fire with the fever of sudden reaction.

From his point of vantage it was impossible for Tristan to see the door that was hidden in the black gloom. Away in the centre of the church, an island of light in that vast well of blackness, stood the catafalque with its four waxen tapers. Something creaked, and almost immediately he saw the flames of those tapers bend toward him, beaten over by the gust that smote them from the door. Thus he surmised that Tebaldo and his men had entered. Their soft foot-fall, for they were treading lightly now, succeeded, and at last they took shape, shadowy at first, then clearly defined, as they emerged within the circle of the light.

For a moment they stood in half whispered conversation, their voices a mere boom of sound in which no words were to be distinguished. Then Tristan saw Tebaldo step forward, and by his side another he knew by his great height—Gamba, the deposed captain. Tebaldo dragged away, even as Tristan had done, the pall that hid the coffin. Next he seized the bench and gave a brisk order to his men.

"Spread a cloth!"

In obedience to his command, the four who were with him spread a cloak among them, each holding one of its corners. Apparently they intended to carry away the dead body in this manner.

The sbirro now mounted the bench and started to remove the coffin lid, when a blasphemous cry of rage broke from his lips that defied utterly the sanctity of the place.

"By the body of Christ! The coffin is empty!"—

It was the roar of an enraged beast and was succeeded by a heavy crash, as he let fall the coffin lid. A second later a second crash waked the midnight echoes of that silent place.

In a burst of maniacal fury he had hurled the coffin from its trestles.

Then he leaped down from the bench and flung all caution to the winds in the rage that possessed him.

"It is a trick of the devil," he shouted. "They have laid a trap for us, and you have never even informed yourselves."

There was foam about the corners of his mouth, the veins had swollen on his forehead, and from the mad bulging of his eyes spoke fury and abject terror. Bully as Tebaldo was, he could, on occasion, become a coward.

"Away!" he shouted to his men. "Look to your weapons! Away!"

Gamba muttered something under his breath, words the listener's ear could not catch. If it were a suggestion that the church should be searched, ere they abandoned it! But Tebaldo's answer speedily relieved his fears.

"I'll take no chances," he barked. "Let us go separately. Myself first and do you follow and get clear of this quarter as best you may."

Scarcely had the echoes of his footsteps died away, ere the others followed in a rush, fearful of being caught in some trap that was here laid for them, and restrained from flying on the instant but by their still greater fear of their master.

Thanking Heaven for this miraculous deliverance, and for his own foresight in so arranging matters as to utterly mislead the ravishers, Tristan now devoted his whole attention to Hellayne. Her breathing had become deeper and more regular, so that in all respects she resembled one sunk into healthful slumber. He hoped she would waken before the elapse of many moments, for to try to bear her away in his arms would have been sheer madness. And now it occurred to him that he should have restoratives ready for the time of her regaining consciousness. Inspiration suggested to him the wine that should be stored in the sacristy for altar purposes. It was unconsecrated, and there could be no sacrilege in using it.

He crept round to the front of the altar. At the angle a candle branch protruded at the height of his head. It held some three or four tapers and was so placed as to enable the priest to read his missal at early Mass on dark winter mornings. Tristan plucked one of the candles from its socket and, hastening down the church, lighted it from one of the burning tapers of the bier. Screening it with his hand he retraced his steps and regained the chancel. Then, turning to the left, he made for a door which gave access to the sacristy. It yielded and he passed down a short, stone flagged passage and entered a spacious chamber beyond.

An oak settle was placed against one wall, and above it hung an enormous, rudely carved crucifix. On a bench in a corner stood a basin and ewer of metal, while a few vestments, suspended beside these, completed the appointments of the austere and white-washed chamber. Placing his candle on a cupboard, he opened one of the drawers. It was full of garments of different kinds, among which he noticed several monks' habits. Tristan rummaged to the bottom, only to find therein some odd pairs of sandals.

Disappointed, Tristan closed the drawer and tried another, with no better fortune. Here were undervests of fine linen, newly washed and fragrant with rosemary. He abandoned the chest and gave his attention to the cupboard. It was locked, but the key was there. Tristan's candle reflected a blaze of gold and silver vessels, consecrated chalices, and several richly carved ciboria of solid gold, set with precious stones. But in a corner he discovered a dark brown, gourd-shaped object. It was a skin of wine and, with a half-suppressed cry of joy, he seized upon it.

At that moment a piercing scream rang through the stillness of the church and startled him so that for some moments he stood frozen with terror, a hundred wild conjectures leaping into his brain.

Had the ruffians remained hidden in the church? Had they returned? Did the screams imply that Hellayne had been awakened by their hands?

A second time it came, and now it seemed to break the hideous spell that its first utterance had cast over him. Dropping the leathern bottle he sped back, down the stone passage to the door that abutted on the church.

There, by the high altar, Tristan saw a form that seemed at first but a phantom, in which he presently recognized Hellayne, the dim rays of the distant tapers searching out the white robe with which her limbs were draped. She was alone, and he knew at once that it was but the natural fear consequent upon awakening in such a place, that had evoked the cry he had heard.

"Hellayne!" he called, advancing swiftly to reassure her. "Hellayne!"

There was a gasp, a moment's silence.

"Tristan?" she cried questioningly. "What has happened? Why am I here?"

He was beside her now and found her trembling like an aspen.

"Something horrible has happened, my Hellayne," he replied. "But it is over now, and the evil is averted."

"What is it?" she insisted, pale as death. "Why am I here?"

"You shall learn presently."

He stooped, to gather up the cloak, which had slipped from her shoulders.

"Do you wrap this about you," he urged, assisting her with his own hands. "Are you faint, Hellayne?"

"I scarce know," she answered, in a frightened voice. "There is a black horror upon me. Tell me," she implored again, "Why am I here? What does it all mean?"

He drew her away now, promising to tell her everything once she were out of these forbidding surroundings. He assisted her to the sacristy and, seating her upon a settle, produced the wine skin. At first she babbled like a child, of not being thirsty, but he insisted.

"It is not a matter of quenching your thirst, dearest Hellayne. The wine will warm and revive you! Come, dearest—drink!"

She obeyed him now, and having got the first gulp down her throat, she took a long draught, which soon produced a healthier color, driving the ashen pallor from her cheeks.

"I am cold, Tristan," she shuddered.

He turned to the drawer in which he had espied the monks' habits and pulling one out, held it for her to put on. She sat there now in that garment of coarse black cloth, the cowl flung back upon her shoulder, the fairest postulant that ever entered upon a novitiate.

"You are good to me, Tristan," she murmured plaintively, "and I have used you very ill! You do not love that other woman?" She paused, passing her hand across her brow.

"Only you, dearest—only you!"

"What is the hour?" she turned to him suddenly.

It was a matter he left unheeded. He bade her brace herself, and take courage to listen to what he was about to tell. He assured her that the horror of it all was passed and that she had naught to fear.

"But—how came I here?" she cried. "I must have lain in a swoon, for I remember nothing."

And then her quick mind, leaping to a reasonable conclusion, and assisted perhaps by the memory of the shattered catafalque which she had seen, her eyes dilating with a curious affright as they were turned upon his own, she asked of a sudden:

"Did you believe that I was dead?"

"Yes," he replied with an unnatural calm in his voice. "Every one believed you were dead, Hellayne."

And with this he told her the entire story of what had befallen, saving only his own part therein, nor did he try to explain his own opportune presence in the church. When he spoke of the coming of Tebaldo and his men she shuddered and closed her eyes. Only after he had concluded his tale did she turn them full upon him. Their brightness seemed to increase, and now he saw that she was weeping.

"And you were there to save me, Tristan?" she murmured brokenly. "Oh, Tristan, it seems that you are ever at hand when I have need of you! You are, indeed, my one true friend—the one true friend that never fails me!"

"Are you feeling stronger, Hellayne?" he asked abruptly.

"Yes—I am stronger!"

She rose as if to test her strength.

"Indeed little ails me save the horror of this thing. The thought of it seems to turn me sick and dizzy."

"Sit then and rest!" he enjoined. "Presently, when you feel equal to it, we shall start out!"

"Whither shall we go?" she asked.

"Why—to the abode of your liege lord."

"Why—yes—" she answered at length, as though it had been the last suggestion she had expected. "And when he returns," she added, after a pause, "he will owe you no small thanks for your solicitude on my behalf."

There was a pause. A hundred thoughts thronged Tristan's mind.

Presently she spoke again.

"Tristan," she inquired very gently, "what was it that brought you to the church?"

"I came with the others, Hellayne," he replied, and, fearing such questions as might follow—questions he had been dreading ever since he brought her to the sacristy, he said:

"If you are recovered, we had better set out."

"I am not yet sufficiently recovered," she replied. "And, before we go, there are a few points in this strange adventure that I would have you make clear to me! Meanwhile we are very well here! If the good fathers do come upon us, what shall it signify?"—

Tristan groaned inwardly and grew more afraid than when Basil's men had broken into the church an hour ago.

"What detained you after all had gone?"

"I remained to pray," he answered, with a sense of irritation at her persistence. "What else was there to do in a church?"

"To pray for me?"

"Assuredly."

"Dear, faithful heart," she murmured. "And I have used you so cruelly. But you merited my cruelty—Tristan! Say that you did, else must I perish of remorse."

"Perchance I deserved it," he replied. "But perchance not so much as you bestowed, had you understood my motives," he said unguardedly.

"If I had understood your motives?" she mused. "Ay—there is much I do not understand! Even in this night's business there are not wanting things that remain mysterious, despite the elucidations you have supplied. Tell me, Tristan—what was it that caused you to believe, that I still lived?"

"I did not believe it," he blundered like a fool, never seeing whither her question led.

"You did not?" she cried, with deep surprise, and now, when it was too late, he understood. "What was it then that induced you, to lift the coffin lid?"—

"You ask me more than I can tell you," he answered almost roughly, for fear lest the monks would come at any moment.

She looked at him with eyes that were singularly luminous.

"But I must know," she insisted. "Have I not the right? Tell me now! Was it that you wished to see my face once more before they gave me over to the grave?"

"Perchance it was, Hellayne," he answered. Then he suggested their going, but she never heeded his anxiety.

"Do you love me then so much, dearest Tristan?"

He swung round to her now, and he knew that his face was white, whiter than the woman's had been when he had seen her in the coffin. His eyes seemed to burn in their sockets. A madness seized upon him and completely mastered him. He had undergone so much that day of grief, and that night the victim of a hundred emotions, that he no longer controlled himself. As it was, her words robbed him of the last lingering restraint.

"Love you?" he replied, in a voice that was unlike his own. "You are dearer to me than all I have, all I am, all I ever hope to be! You are the guardian angel of my existence, the saint to whom I have turned mornings and evenings in my prayers! I love you more than life!"

He paused, staggered by his own climax. The thought of what he had said and what the consequences must be, rushed suddenly upon him. He shivered as a man may shiver in waking from a trance. He dropped upon his knees before her.

"Forgive," he entreated. "Forgive—and forget!"

"Neither forgive nor forget will I," came her voice, charged with an ineffable sweetness, such as he had never before heard from her lips, and her hands lay softly on his bowed head as if she would bless and soothe him. "I am conscious of no offence that craves forgiveness, and what you have said to me I would not forget if I could. Whence springs this fear of yours, dear Tristan? Has not he to whom I once bound myself in a thoughtless moment, he who never understood, or cared to understand my nature, he whose cruelty and neglect have made me what I am to-day, lost every right, human or divine? Am I more than a woman and are you less than a man that you should tremble for the confession which, in a wild moment, I have dragged from you? For that wild moment I shall be thankful to my life's end, for your words have been the sweetest that my poor ears have ever listened to. I count you the truest friend and the noblest lover the world has ever known. Need it surprise you then, that I love you, and that mine would be a happy life if I might spend it in growing worthy of this noble love of yours?"

There was a choking sensation in his throat and tears in his eyes. Transport the blackest soul from among the damned in Hell, wash it white of its sins and seat it upon one of the glorious thrones of Heaven,—such were the emotions that surged through his soul. At last he found his tongue.

"Dearest," he said, "bethink yourself of what you say! You are still his wife—and the Church grants no severance of the bonds that have united two for better or worse."

"Then shall we see the Holy Father. He is just and he will be merciful. Will you take me, Tristan, no matter to what odd shifts a cruel Fortune may drive us? Will you take me?"

She held his face between her palms and forced his eyes to meet her eyes.

"Will you take me, Tristan?" she said again.

"Hellayne—"

It was all he could say.

Then a great sadness overwhelmed him, a tide that swept the frail bark of happiness high and dry upon the shores of black despair.

"To-morrow, Hellayne, you will be what you were yesterday."

"I have thought of that," she said, a slight flutter in her tone. "But—Hellayne is dead.—We must so dispose that they will let her rest in peace."—

---

[CHAPTER XIII]
THE CONVENT IN TRASTEVERE

He stared at her speechless, so taken was he with the immensity of the thing she had suggested. Fear, wonder, joy seemed to contend for the mastery.

"Why do you look at me so, Tristan?" she said at last. "What is it that daunts you?"

"But how is this thing possible?" he stammered, still in a state of bewilderment.

"What difficulty does it present?" she returned. "The Lord Basil himself has rendered very possible what I suggest. We may look on him to-morrow as our best friend—"

"But Tebaldo knows," he interposed.

"True! Deem you, he will dare to tell the world what he knows? He might be asked to tell how he came by his knowledge. And that might prove a difficult question to answer. Tell me, Tristan," she continued, "if he had succeeded in carrying me away, what deem you would have been said to-morrow in Rome when the coffin was found empty?"—

"They would naturally assume that your body had been stolen by some wizard or some daring doctor of anatomy."

"Ah! And if we were quietly to quit the church and be clear of Rome before morning—would not the same be said?"

He pondered a while, staggered by the immensity of the risk, when suddenly a memory flashed through his mind that left his limbs numb as if they had been paralyzed by a thunderbolt.

It was the night on which the terrible crime at the Lateran was to be committed. Even now it could not be far from the midnight hour. Did he dare, even for the consideration of the greatest happiness which the world and life had to give, to forego his duty towards the Church and the Senator of Rome?

Hellayne noted his hesitancy.

"Why do you waste precious moments, Tristan?" she queried. "Is it that you do not love me enough?"

A negative gesture came in response, and his eyes told her more than words could have expressed.

At last he spoke.

"If I hesitate," he said, trying to avoid the real issue, instead of stating it without circumlocution, "it is because I would not have you do now of what, hereafter, you might repent. I would not have you be misled by the impulse of a moment into an act whose consequences must endure while life endures."

"Is that the reasoning of love?" she said very quietly. "Is this cold argument, this weighing of issues consistent with the hot passion you professed so lately?"

"It is," he replied. "It is because I love you more than I love myself, that I would have you ponder, ere you adventure your life upon a broken raft such as mine. You are still the wife of another."

"No!" she replied, her eyes preternaturally brilliant in the intensity of her emotion. "Hellayne, the wife of Roger de Laval, is dead—as dead to him, as if she in reality were bedded in the coffin. Where is he? Where is the man who should have been where you are, Tristan? I venture to say his grief did not overburden him. He will find ready consolation in the arms of another for the wife who was to him but the plaything of his idle hours. He never loved me! He even threatened to shut me up within convent walls for the rest of my days if I did not return with him—his mistress,—his wife but in a name, a thing to submit to his loathsome kisses and caresses, while her soul is another's. He himself and death, which perchance he himself decreed, have severed bonds no persuasion would have tempted me to break. Tristan, I am yours—take me."

She held out her beautiful arms.

He was in mortal torment.

"Nevertheless, Hellayne, to-night of all nights it may not be—" he stammered. "Listen, dearest—"

"Enough!" she silenced him, as she rose. She swept towards him and, before he knew it, her hands were on his shoulders, her face upturned, her blue eyes holding his own, depriving him of will and resistance.

"Tristan," she said, and there was an intensity almost fierce in her tones, "moments are fleeting, and you stand there reasoning with me and bidding me weigh what already is weighed for all time. Will you wait until escape is rendered impossible, until we are discovered, before you will decide to save me and to grasp with both hands the happiness that is yours; this happiness that is not twice offered in a lifetime?"

She was so close to him that he could almost feel the beating of her heart. He was now as wax in her hands. Forgotten were all considerations of rank and station. They were just man and woman whose fates were linked together irrevocably. Under the sway of an impulse he could not resist, he kissed her upturned face, her lips, her eyes. Then he broke from her clasp and, bracing himself for the task to which they stood committed by that act, he said, the words tumbling from his lips:

"Hellayne, we know not who is abroad to-night. We know not what dangers are lurking in the shadows. Tebaldo and his men may even now be scouring the streets of Rome for a fugitive, and once in their power all the saints could not save us from our doom. I know not the object of this plot of which you were the victim, and even the Lord Roger may be but the dupe of another. I will take you to the convent of the Blessed Sisters of Santa Maria in Trastevere, that you may dwell there in safety until I have ascertained that all danger is past. You shall enter as my sister, trying to escape the attention of an unwelcome suitor. But the thing that chiefly exercises my mind now is how to make our escape unobserved."

Hellayne nodded dreamily.

"I have thought of it already."

"You have thought of it?" he replied. "And of what have you thought?"

For answer she stepped back a pace and drew the cowl of the monk's habit over her head until her features were lost in the shadows. Her meaning was clear to him at once. With a cry of relief he turned to the drawer whence he had taken the habit in which she was arrayed and, selecting another, he hastily donned it above the garments he wore.

No sooner was it done than he caught her by the arm.

There was no time to be lost. Moments were flying.

If he should be too late at the Lateran!

"Come!" he said in an urgent voice.

At the first step she stumbled. The habit was so long that it cumbered her feet. But that was a difficulty soon overcome. Without regarding the omen, he cut with his dagger a piece from the skirt, enough to leave her freedom of movement and, this accomplished, they set out.

They crossed the church swiftly and silently, then entered the porch, where he left her in order to peer out upon the street. All was quiet. Rome was wrapt in sleep. From the moon he gleaned it wanted less than an hour to midnight.

Drawing their cowls about their faces, they abandoned the main streets, Tristan conducting his charge through narrow alleys, deserted of the living. These lanes were dark and steep, the moonlight being unable to penetrate the chasms formed between the tall, ill-favored houses. They stumbled frequently, and in some places he carried her almost bodily, to avoid the filth of the quarter they were traversing.

The night was solemn and beautiful. Myriads of stars paved the deep vault of heaven. The moon, now in her zenith, hung like a silver lamp in the midst of them; a stream of quivering, rosy light, issuing from the north, traversed the sky like the tail of some stupendous comet, sending forth, ever and anon, corruscations like flaming meteors.

At last they reached the Transtiberine region and the convent of Santa Maria in Trastevere hove into sight. The range of habitations around were in a ruinous state and the whole aspect of the region was so dismal as to encourage but few ramblers to venture there after nightfall.

Passing through the ill-famed quarter of the Sclavonians, where, in after time, one of the blackest crimes in history was committed, Tristan and Hellayne at last arrived before the gates of the convent. They had spoken but little, dreading even the faintest echo of their footsteps might bring a pursuer on their track. Their summons for admission was, after a considerable wait, answered by the porter of the gate, who, upon seeing two monks, relinquished his station by the wicket and descended to inquire into their behest.

Hellayne shrank up to Tristan, as the latter stated their purpose and the old monk, unable to understand the jargon of his belated caller, withdrew, mumbling some equally unintelligible reply.

Hellayne's eyes were those of a frightened deer.

"What will he do, Tristan?" she whispered, "Oh, Tristan, do not leave me! I feel I shall never see you again, Tristan—my love—take me away—I am afraid—"

He held her close to him.

"There is nothing to fear, my Hellayne! To-morrow night I shall return and place you safely where we may see each other till I have absolved my duties to the Senator. Do not fear, sweetheart! Of all the abodes in Rome the sanctity of the convent is inviolate! But I hear steps approaching—some one is coming. Courage, dearest—remember how much is at stake!"

Another moment and they stood before the Abbess of Santa Maria in Trastevere.

Summoning all his presence of mind, Tristan told his tale and made his request. Danger lurking in the infatuation of a Roman noble was threatening his sister. She had fled from his innuendos and begged the convent's asylum for a brief space of time, when he, Tristan, would claim her. He explained Hellayne's attire, and the Abbess, raising the woman's head, looked long and earnestly into her face.

What she saw seemed to confirm of the truth of Tristan's speech, and she agreed readily to his request. Tristan kissed Hellayne on the brow, then, after a brief and affectionate farewell and the assurance that he would return on the following day, he left her in charge of the Blessed Sisters. With a sob she followed the Abbess and the gates shut behind them.

For a moment Tristan felt as if all the world about him was sinking into a dark bottomless pit.

Then, suppressing an outcry of anguish, his winged feet bore him across Rome towards the Basilica of St. John in Lateran.

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[CHAPTER XIV]
THE PHANTOM OF THE LATERAN

It still lacked a few minutes of midnight when Tristan arrived at the Lateran. The guard had been set in all the chapels, as on the night when he had kept the watch before.

Without confiding his purpose to any one, he traversed the silent corridors until he came to the chapel where he was to watch all night.

The men-at-arms were posted outside the door. A lamp was burning in the corridor, and strict orders had been given that no person whatsoever was to pass into the chapel.

After assuring himself that all was secure, Tristan seated himself in a chair which stood in the centre of the chapel.

The place was dim and ghostly. A red lamp burnt before the Blessed Sacrament, and from the roof of the chapel hung another lamp of bronze. The light was turned low, but it threw a slight radiance upon portions of the mosaic of the floor.

Tristan unbuckled his sword and placed it ready to hand. The whole of the Basilica was hushed in sleep. There was a heaviness and oppression in the air, and no sound broke the stillness in the courts of the palace.

Memory flared up and down like the light of a lamp, as Tristan pondered over the changes and vicissitudes of his life, with all its miseries and heart-aches, as he thought of the future and of Hellayne. Danger encompassed them on every side. But there had been even greater terrors when he had plucked her from the very grip of Death, from the midst of her foes.

And then he began to pray, pray for Hellayne's happiness and safety, and his whispering voice sounded as if a dry leaf was being blown over the marble floor, and when it ceased the silence fell over him like a cloak, enveloping him in its heavy, stifling folds.

He had been on guard in the Lateran before, but the silence had never seemed so deep as it was now. His mind, heated and filled with the events of the past days, would not be tranquil. And yet there was a deadly fascination in this profound silence, in which it seemed his own mind and the riot of his thoughts were living and awake.

What, if even now some lurking danger were approaching through the thousand corridors and anterooms of the palace! For on this night the enemies of Christ were abroad, silently unfurling the sable banners of Hell.

The thought was almost unbearable. It was not fear which Tristan felt, rather a restlessness he was unable to control. Although the night was no hotter than usual, perspiration began to break out upon his face, and he felt athirst. The fumes of incense that permeated the chapel, increased his drowsiness.

With something of an effort Tristan strode to the door and opened it. In the corridor two men-at-arms were on guard, one standing against the wall, the other walking slowly to and fro. The men reported that all was well, and that no one had passed that way. Tristan closed the door and returned inside. He walked up the chapel's length and then, his drawn sword beside him on the marble, knelt in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament which he had come to guard.

There, for a little, his confused and restless mind found peace.

But not for long.

A drowsiness more heavy and insistent than any he had ever known began to assail him. It billowed into his brain, wave after wave. It assailed him with an irresistible, physical assault. He fought against it despairingly and hopelessly, knowing that he would be vanquished. Once, twice, sword in hand, as though the long blade could help him in the fight, he staggered up and down the chapel. Then, with a smothered groan, he sank into the chair, the sword slipping from his grasp. He felt as if deep waters were closing over him. There was a sound like dim and distant drums in his ears, a sensation of sinking, lower, ever lower,—then utter oblivion.

And now silence reigned, silence more intense than his mind had ever known.

The red lamp burned before the Host. The lamp in the centre of the chapel threw a dim radiance upon the bowed form of Tristan, whose sword crossed the mosaics of the floor.

Silence there was in the whole circuit of the Lateran.

Even the Blessed Father, prisoner in his own chamber, was asleep. The domestic prelates, the whole vast ecclesiastical court were wrapt in deep repose.

In the chapel of St. Luke the silence was broken by the deep breathing of Tristan. It was not the breathing of a man in healthy sleep. It was a long-drawn catching at the breath, then once more a difficult inhalation. The men-at-arms outside in the corridor heard nothing of it. The sound was confined to the interior alone.

The ceiling of the chapel was painted, and the various panels were divided by gilded oak beadings.

Almost in the centre, directly above where Tristan reposed in leaden slumber, was a panel some two feet square, which represented in faint and faded colors the martyrdom of St. Sebastian.

Suddenly, without a sound, the panel parted.

If the sleeper had been awake he would have seen almost at his feet a swaying ladder of silk rope, which for a moment or two hissed back and forth over the tesselated floor.

Now the dark square in the painted ceiling became faintly illumined. In its dim oblong a formless shape centred itself. The faint hiss from the end of the silken rope ladder recommenced and down the ladder from the roof of the chapel descended a formless spectre, with incredible swiftness, with incredible silence.

The spider had dropped from the centre of its web. It had chosen the time well. It was upon its business.

The trembling of the rope ladder ceased. Without a sound the black figure emerged into the pale light thrown by the central lamp. The figure was horrible. It was robed in deepest black, and as it made a quick bird-like movement of the head, the face, plucked as from some deadly nightmare, was so awful that it seemed well that Tristan was unconscious.

The High Priest of Satan stood in the chapel of the Lateran. His quick, dexterous fingers ran over Tristan's sleeping form. Then he nodded approvingly.

There was a soft pattering of steps and now the black form passed out of the circle of light and emerged into the red light of the lamp, which burned before the altar.

Above, upon the embroidered frontal, were the curtains of white silk edged with gold—the gates of the tabernacle.

A long, lean arm, hardly more than a bone, drew apart the curtains. Mingling with the heavy breathing of the sleeping man there was a sharp sound, most startling in the intense silence.

It was a bestial snarl of satisfaction. It was followed by abominable chirpings of triumph, cold, inhuman, but real.

Tristan slept on. The men-at-arms kept their faithful watch. In the whole of the Lateran Palace no one knew that the High Priest of Satan was prowling through the precincts and had seized upon his awful prey.

He thrust the Holy Host into a silver box, and placed it next to his bosom. Then he drew a wafer of the exact size and shape of the stolen Host from the pocket of his robe. Gliding over to Tristan he thrust this unconsecrated wafer into his doublet.

Then the black bat-like thing mounted to the ceiling. The lemon-colored light reappeared for a moment. In its glare the dark phantom looked terrific, like a fiend from Hell. The rope ladder moved silently upwards, and the painted panel with the arrow-pierced Sebastian dropped soundlessly into its place.

The red lamp burnt in front of the tabernacle. But the chapel was empty now.

At dawn the unexpected happened.

The guards, expecting to be relieved, found themselves face to face with a special commission, come to visit the Lateran. It consisted of the Cardinal-Archbishop of Ravenna, the Cardinal of Orvieto, the Prefect of the Camera and Basil the Grand Chamberlain.

After having made the rounds they at last arrived before the chapel of St. Luke. They found the two men-at-arms stationed at the door, alert at their post. The men were exhausted; their faces appeared grey and drawn in the morning light, but they reported that no one had passed into the chapel, nor had they seen anything of Tristan since midnight, when he had questioned them.

The doors of the chapel were locked. Tristan held the keys. Repeated knocks elicited no response.

The Archbishop of Ravenna looked anxiously at the Prefect of the Camera.

"I do not like this, Messer Salviati," he said in a low voice. "I fear there is something wrong here."

"Beat upon the door more loudly," the Prefect turned to one of the halberdiers, and the man struck the solid oak with the staff of his axe, till the whole corridor, filled with the ghostly advance light of dawn, rang and echoed with the noise.

The Prefect of the Camera turned to the Archbishop.

"It would seem the Capitano has fallen asleep. That is not a thing he ought to have done—but as the chapel seems inviolate we need hardly remain longer."

And he looked inquiringly at the Grand Chamberlain.

The latter shook his head dubiously.

"I fear the Capitano can hardly be asleep, since we have called him so loudly," he said, looking from the one to the other. "I would suggest that the door of the chapel be forced."

They were some time about it. The door was of massive oak, the lock well made and true. A man-at-arms had been despatched to another part of the Lateran to bring a locksmith who, for nearly half an hour, toiled at his task.

It was accomplished at last and the four entered the chapel.

It stretched before them, long, narrow, almost fantastic in the grey light of morning.

The painted ceiling above held no color now. The mosaics of the floor were dead and lifeless. In the centre of the chapel, with face unnaturally pale, sat Tristan, huddled up in the velvet chair. By his side lay his naked sword.

The lamp which was suspended from the centre of the ceiling had almost expired.

In front of the altar the wick, floating on the oil, in its bowl of red glass, gave almost the only note of color against the grey.

As they entered the chapel, the four genuflected to the altar. And while the Prefect and Basil went over to where Tristan was sleeping in his chair, and stood about with alarmed eyes, the Cardinal of Orvieto and the Archbishop of Ravenna approached the tabernacle with the proper reverences, parted the curtains and staggered back, indescribable horror in their faces.

The Holy Host had disappeared.

The priests stared at each other in terror. What did it mean? Again the Body of Our Lord had been taken from His resting-place. The captain of the guard was asleep in his chair. Verily the demons were at work once more and Hell was loosed again.

The Archbishop of Ravenna began to weep. He covered his face with his hands. As he knelt upon the altar steps, great tears trickled through his trembling fingers, while he sent up prayers to the Almighty that this sacrilege might be discovered and its perpetrators brought to justice. On either side of him knelt the priests who had come into the chapel after them. Their hearts were filled with fear and sorrow.

The Cardinal of Ravenna rose at last.

His old, lean face shone with holy anger and sorrow.

"An expiatory service will be held in this chapel before noon," he addressed those present. "I shall myself say Mass here. Meanwhile the whole of the palace must be aroused. Somewhere the emissaries of Satan have in their possession the Blessed Sacrament. See that the secret Judas does not escape us!"

Almost upon his words there came a loud wail of anguish from the centre of the chapel where Tristan was still huddled in his chair.

Basil had opened the doublet at his neck, as if to give him air, and the Prefect of the Camera, who was standing by, clapped his hands to his temples, and groaned like a soul in torment.

The two ecclesiastics hurried down from the altar steps.

Upon the lining of Tristan's doublet there lay the large round wafer, which every one present believed to be the consecrated Host.

The Cardinal-Archbishop reverently took the wafer from Tristan and held it up in two hands.

The men-at-arms sank to their knees with a rattle and ring of accoutrement.

Every one knelt.

Then in improvised procession, His Eminence restored the wafer to the tabernacle.

Tristan was dragged out of the chapel.

In the corridor horror-stricken men-at-arms buffeted him into some sort of consciousness. His bewildered ears caught the words: "To San Angelo," as he staggered between the men-at-arms as one in the thrall of an evil dream, leaving behind him a nameless fear and horror among the monks, priests and attendants at the Lateran.

END OF BOOK THE THIRD

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