He stretched out his arms toward her, but she gambolled before him, as a butterfly, flitting from flower to flower.
"Night of Love—night of madness," she whispered. "To-night, if you but will it, the secret is yours!"
Her voice thrilled him through and through. The perfume of the Poppy-flower sank benumbing into his heart. It was her voice,—it was her form,—was it but a mocking phantom,—what was it? Again she approached him.
"Lift the veil!" she spoke in a voice of command.
With trembling hand he started to obey, when the leaves of the nearest myrtle-bush began to rustle.
Eckhardt heard nothing, saw nothing.
As Benilo stepped into the moonlight, the apparition vanished like a dream phantom, but from the distance her laugh was heard, strange in some way, and ominous.
Eckhardt rushed after the fading vision like a madman.
Would it mock him for ever, wherever he was, wherever he went?
How long he had followed it, in headlong, breathless pursuit, as on that fateful eve, when it had lured him from the altars of Christ, he knew not. When he at last desisted from the mad and fruitless chase, he found himself at the base of the Capitoline Hill. Here were scattered the ruins of the old Mamertine prisons, once a series of cells rising in stages against the rock to a considerable height. Here were the baths of Mamertius, where Jugurtha, the Numidian, was starved. There Simon Bar Gioras, the Jew, was strangled, he, who to the last maintained the struggle against the victorious son of Vespasian. In the cell to the right Appius Claudius, the Triumvir, was said to have committed suicide. Another cell reëchoed from the clangour of the chains of Simon Petrus. It was not a region where men tarried long, and few relished the fare of the low taverns, which were strung along the gray wall of Servius Tullius. For weird and dismal wails were at times to be heard in clear moonlight nights, and the region of the Capitoline Hill, cut by the old Gemonian stairs, was in ill repute, as in the days of Republican Rome.