"A stranger," came the sepulchral reply. "He bade me give you this!"
Basil took the scroll which his famulus handed to him and cut the cord.
A fiendish smile passed over his face and lighted up the dark, sinister eyes. But quickly as the mood had come it left. It fell from him as a dropped cloak.
He stood upright, supporting himself on the onyx table, while Horus, who only understood in a dull dim way his master's moods, assisting him in all his villainies, but confessing his own share to a household priest, stood impassively by.
"Give me some wine!" Basil turned to the sinister Major Domo, and the latter disappeared and returned with a jug of Malvasian.
The Grand Chamberlain grasped the jug which Horus had brought him and held it with shaking fingers to his mouth. When he had drank deep he dismissed his famulus, struck a flint and burnt the scroll to pallid ashes. Then he staggered out into the hall of colored marbles and through it to the garden doors.
The bronze gates trembled as they swung back upon their hinges, and as the full noon of the quiet garden burst upon Basil's eyes he fancied he saw the fold of a dark robe disappear among the cypresses.
And now the hot air of high noon wrapped him round with its warm southern life, flowing over the lithe body within the silken doublet, drawing away the inward darkness and the vaulting flames within his soul and reminding his sensuous nature that the future held gigantic promise of love and power.
The great tenor and alto bells of St. John in Lateran were beating the echoes to silver far away. The roofs and palaces, domes and towers of Rome, were bathed in sunlight as he advanced to the embrasure in the wall and once more surveyed the city.
The heat shimmered down and, through the quivering sunlit air, the colors of the buildings shone like pebbles at the bottom of a pool and the white ruins glowed like a mirage of the desert.