A second crash, that seemed to rend the very heavens, caused Eckhardt at last to wake from his apathy of despair. A terrible spectacle met his eyes. The east wall of the tower, in which Ginevra had sought refuge and found death, had fallen out; the victorious fire roared loudly round its summit, enveloping the whole structure in clouds of smoke and jets of flame; whose lurid lights crimsoned the murky air like a wide Aurora Borealis. But on the platform of the tower there stood a solitary human being, cut off from retreat, enveloped by the roaring element, by a sea of flame!
With a groan of anguish, Eckhardt fixed his straining eyes on the dark form of Hezilo the harper, whom no human intervention could save from his terrible doom. Whether his eagerness, to avenge his dead child or her betrayer, had carried him too far, whether in his fruitless search for the Chamberlain he had grown oblivious of the perils besetting his path, whether too late he had thought of retreat,—clearly defined against the lurid, flame-swept horizon his tall dark form stood out on the crest of the tower;—another moment of breathless horrid suspense and the tower collapsed with a deafening crash, carrying its lonely occupant to his perhaps self-elected doom.
All that night Eckhardt knelt by the dead body of his wife. When the bleak, gray dawn of the rising day broke over the crest of the Sabine hills he rose, and went away. Soon after a company of monks appeared and carried Theodora's remains to the mortuary chapel of San Pancrazio, where they were to be laid to their last and eternal rest.
CHAPTER XVIII
VALE ROMA
t was the eve of All Souls Day in the year nine hundred ninety nine,—the day so fitly recalling the fleeting glories of summer, of youth, of life, a day of memories and tributes offered up to the departed.
Afar to westward the sun, red as a buckler fallen from Vulcan, still cast his burning reflections. On the horizon with changing sunset tints glowed the departing orb, brightening the crimson and russet foliage on terrace and garden walls. At last the burning disk disappeared amid a mass of opalescent clouds, which had risen in the west; the fading sunset hues swooned to the gray of twilight and the breath of scanty flowers, the odour of dead leaves touched the air with perfume faint as the remembered pathos of autumn. No breeze stirred the dead leaves still clinging to their branches, no sound broke the silence, save from a cloister the hum of many droning voices. Now and then the air was touched with the fragrance of hayfields, reclaimed here and there upon the Campagna, and mists were slowly descending upon the snow-capped peak of Soracté. In the dim purple haze of the distance the circle of walls, a last vestige of the defence of the ancient world, stood a sun-browned line of watch-towers against the horizon. From their crenelated ramparts at long distances, a sentinel looked wearily upon the undulating stretch of vacant, fading green.
In the portico of the imperial palace on the Aventine sat Eckhardt, staring straight before him. Since the terrible night, which had culminated in the crisis of his life, the then mature man seemed to have aged decades. The lines in his face had grown deeper, the furrows on his brow lowered over the painfully contracted eyebrows. No one had ventured to speak to him, no one to break in upon his solitude. The world around him seemed to have vanished. He heard nothing, he saw nothing. His heart within him seemed to be a thing dead to all the world,—to have died with Ginevra. Only now and then he gazed with longing, wistful glances towards the far-off northern horizon, where the Alps raised their glittering crests,—a boundary line, not to be transgressed with impunity. Would he ever again see the green, waving forests of his Saxon-land, would his foot ever again tread the mysterious dusk of the glades over which pines and oaks wove their waving shadows, those glades once sacred to Odhin and the Gods of the Northland? Those glades undefiled by the poison-stench of Rome? How he longed for that purer sphere, where he might forget—forget? Can we forget the fleeting ray of sunlight, that has brightened our existence, and departing has left sorrow and anguish and gloom?
Eckhardt's heart was heavy to breaking.