No sooner had the Senator of Rome departed, than the conjurer's familiar tore the trappings from his person and stood revealed to his companion as Benilo, the Chamberlain.
"Dog! Liar! Impostor," he hissed into Dom Sabbat's face, while kicking and buffeting him. "Marozia has been dead some fifty years. How dare you perpetrate this monstrous fraud? Was it this I bade you tell the Senator of Rome?"
Dom Sabbat cringed before the blows and the flaming madness in the Chamberlain's eyes. Folding his arms over his chest and bending low he replied with feigned contrition:
"It was not for me to compel the spirit's answer! And as for the corpse, 'twas Marozia's. Thus read you the devil's favour. Until blessed by the holy rite, the body cannot return to its native dust."
"Then it was Marozia's spirit we beheld?" Benilo queried with a shudder, as they left the churchyard.
"Marozia's spirit," replied Dom Sabbat. "Yet who would raise a fabric on the memory of a lie?"
CHAPTER XII
THE HERMITAGE OF NILUS
tephania's sleep had been broken and restless. She tossed and turned in her pillows and pushed back the hair from her fevered cheeks and throbbing temples in vain. It was weary work, to lie gazing with eyes wide open at the flickering shadows cast by the night-lamp on the opposite wall. It was still less productive of sleep to shut them tight and to abandon herself to the visions thus evoked, which stood out in life-like colours and refused to be dispelled.