A groan broke from the Margrave's lips.
"To-night!"
Then he beckoned his visitor to a seat.
"I have come to fulfil my promise," spoke Hezilo.
"Tell me all!"
Hezilo nodded; yet he seemed at a loss how to commence. After a pause he began his tale in a voice strangely void of inflection, like that of an automaton gifted with speech.
Dwelling briefly on the events of his own life from the time of his arrival in Rome with the motherless girl Angiola, on her chance meeting with Benilo and the latter's pretence of interest in his child, Hezilo touched upon the Chamberlain's clandestine visits at the convent, where he had placed her, upon the girl's strange fascination for the courtier, the latter's promises and advances, culminating in Angiola's abduction. After having betrayed his credulous victim, the Chamberlain had revealed himself the fiend he was by causing her to be concealed in an old ruin, and, to secure immunity for himself, he had her deprived of the sight of her eyes. In a voice resonant with the echoes of despair, Hezilo described the long and fruitless hunt for his lost child, of whose whereabouts the disconsolate nuns at the convent disclaimed all knowledge, till chance had guided him to the place of Angiola's concealment, in the person of an old crone, whom he had surprised among the ruins of the ill-famed temple of Isis, whither she carried food to the blind girl at certain hours of the day. At the point of his dagger he had forced a confession and by a sufficiently large bribe purchased her silence regarding his discovery. The rest was known to Eckhardt, who had witnessed Angiola's rescue from her dismal prison, as he had been present in her dying hour.
There was a long silence between them. Then Hezilo continued his account. Step for step he had fastened himself to the heels of the betrayer of his child, whose name the crone had revealed to him. Again and again he might have destroyed the libertine, had he not reserved him for a more summary and terrible execution. He had discovered Benilo's illicit amour with one Theodora, a woman of great beauty but of mysterious origin, who had established her wanton court at Rome. As a wandering minstrel Hezilo had found there a ready welcome, and had in time gained her confidence and ear.
Eckhardt's senses began to reel as he listened to the revelations now poured into his ears. Much, which the confession of the dying wretch in the rock-caves under the Gemonian stairs had left obscure, was now illumined, as a dark landscape by lightnings from a distant cloud-bank. Ginevra's smouldering discontent with Eckhardt's seeming lack of ambition, her inordinate desire for power,—the Chamberlain's covert advances and veiled promises, aided by his chance discovery of her descent from Marozia; their conspiracy, culminating in the woman's simulated illness and death; the substitution of a strange body in the coffin, which had been sealed under pretence of premature decay,—Ginevra's flight to a convent, where she remained concealed till after Eckhardt's departure from Rome:—from stage to stage Hezilo proceeded in his strange unimpassioned tale, a tale which caused his listener's brain to spin and his senses to reel.
The monk conducting the last rites, having chanced upon the fraud, had been promised nothing less than the Triple Tiara of St. Peter as reward for his silence and complicity, as soon as Ginevra should have come into her own. Continuing, Hezilo touched upon Ginevra's reappearance in Rome under the name of Theodora; on the Chamberlain's betrayal of the woman. He dwelt on the events leading up to the wager and the forfeit, the woman's share in luring Eckhardt from the Basilica, and Benilo's attempt to poison him at the fateful meeting in the Grotto. He concluded by pointing out the Chamberlain's utter desperation and the woman's mortal fear,—and Eckhardt listened as one dazed.