Stephania gazed at him with wide astonished eyes.
"Ah! It is this then," she said with a sigh of relief. "A moment's thought must show you what passions are here at work. You must rise above such fears. As for us,—no one can judge between us, but ourselves. Shake off these dread fancies! There lies but one goal before us. You pointed the way to it once. Surely you would not hold me back from it now?"
Gently she drew him down by her side. Through the crevices in the roof glimmered the evening star.
She saw the conflict, which raged within him, the instinct to break away from her, who could never more be his own. She saw the fear which bound him to her,—she saw the great love he bore her, and she knew that he was hers soul and body, her instrument, her toy,—her lover if she so willed.
He spoke to her of his childhood in the bleak northern forests; of the black pines of Thuringia, of the snow-drifts, which froze his heart; of the sad sea horizons brooding infinitely away; of the gloomy abbey of Merséburg, in the Saxon-land, where the great Emperor Otto, his grandsire, was sleeping towards the day of resurrection, where under the abbot's guidance he had first been initiated into the magic of a sunnier clime. He spoke to her of his Greek mother, the Empress Theophano, whose great beauty was only rivalled by her own, and of that eventful night, when he descended into the crypts of Aix-la-Chapelle and opened the tomb of Charlemagne, then dead almost two hundred years. He told her how he had fought against this mad, unreasoning love, which had at first sight of her crept into his heart, urging naught in palliation of his offence, but like a flagellant laying bare his tortured flesh to a self-inflicted scourge. He begged her to decide for him, to guide him, lonely antagonist of destiny—dared he ask for more? She was the wife of the Senator of Rome.
As he ceased speaking, Otto covered his face with his hands, but Stephania drew them down and held them firmly in her own. Truly, if it was victory to accomplish the end, by drawing out a loving, confiding heart, the victory was with the vanquished. And with the memory of the compact she had sealed a wondrous pity flashed through the woman's soul, a mighty longing, to lift the son of the Greek Princess up into joyous peace! No thought of evil marred her pure desire,—alas! She knew not at that moment, that even in that pity lay his direst snare, and hers.
The decisive moment was at hand. In the thickets before the temple her eye discerned the gleam of spear-points. For a moment a violent tremor passed through her body. She had hardly strength sufficient to maintain her presence of mind, and her face was pale as that of a corpse.
Would she, a second Delilah, deliver Otto to her countrymen—the Romans?
It was some time ere she felt sufficiently composed to speak. Her throat was dry and she seemed to choke.
Otto remarked her discomfiture, far from guessing its cause.