What the seventh Cardinal would have solicited is not known, for he had hardly opened his mouth when the twelfth hour expired, and Lucifer, regaining his vigour with his shape, sent the Prince of the Church spinning to the other end of the room, and split the marble table with a single stroke of his tail. The six crouched and huddling Cardinals cowered revealed to one another, and at the same time enjoyed the spectacle of his Holiness darting through the stone ceiling, which yielded like a film to his passage, and closed up afterwards as if nothing had happened. After the first shock of dismay they unanimously rushed to the door, but found it bolted on the outside. There was no other exit, and no means of giving an alarm. In this emergency the demeanour of the Italian Cardinals set a bright example to their ultramontane colleagues. “Bisogna pazienzia,” they said, as they shrugged their shoulders. Nothing could exceed the mutual politeness of Cardinals Anno and Benno, unless that of the two who had sought to poison each other. The Frenchman was held to have gravely derogated from good manners by alluding to this circumstance, which had reached his ears while he was under the table: and the Englishman swore so outrageously at the plight in which he found himself that the Italians then and there silently registered a vow that none of his nation should ever be Pope, a maxim which, with one exception, has been observed to this day.
Lucifer, meanwhile, had repaired to Silvester, whom he found arrayed in all the insignia of his dignity; of which, as he remarked, he thought his visitor had probably had enough.
“I should think so indeed,” replied Lucifer. “But at the same time I feel myself fully repaid for all I have undergone by the assurance of the loyalty of my friends and admirers, and the conviction that it is needless for me to devote any considerable amount of personal attention to ecclesiastical affairs. I now claim the promised boon, which it will be in no way inconsistent with thy functions to grant, seeing that it is a work of mercy. I demand that the Cardinals be released, and that their conspiracy against thee, by which I alone suffered, be buried in oblivion.”
“I hoped you would carry them all off,” said Gerbert, with an expression of disappointment.
“Thank you,” said the Devil. “It is more to my interest to leave them where they are.”
So the dungeon-door was unbolted, and the Cardinals came forth, sheepish and crestfallen. If, after all, they did less mischief than Lucifer had expected from them, the cause was their entire bewilderment by what had passed, and their utter inability to penetrate the policy of Gerbert, who henceforth devoted himself even with ostentation to good works. They could never quite satisfy themselves whether they were speaking to the Pope or to the Devil, and when under the latter impression habitually emitted propositions which Gerbert justly stigmatised as rash, temerarious, and scandalous. They plagued him with allusions to certain matters mentioned in their interviews with Lucifer, with which they naturally but erroneously supposed him to be conversant, and worried him by continual nods and titterings as they glanced at his nether extremities. To abolish this nuisance, and at the same time silence sundry unpleasant rumours which had somehow got abroad, Gerbert devised the ceremony of kissing the Pope’s feet, which, in a grievously mutilated form, endures to this day. The stupefaction of the Cardinals on discovering that the Holy Father had lost his hoof surpasses all description, and they went to their graves without having obtained the least insight into the mystery.
THE CUPBEARER
The minister Photinius had fallen, to the joy of Constantinople. He had taken sanctuary in the immense monastery adjoining the Golden Gate in the twelfth region of the city, founded for a thousand monks by the patrician Studius, in the year 463. There he occupied himself with the concoction of poisons, the resource of fallen statesmen. When a defeated minister of our own day is indisposed to accept his discomfiture, he applies himself to poison the public mind, inciting the lower orders against the higher, and blowing up every smouldering ember of sedition he can discover, trusting that the conflagration thus kindled, though it consume the edifice of the State, will not fail to roast his own egg. Photinius’s conceptions of mischief were less refined; he perfected his toxicological knowledge in the medical laboratory of the monastery, and sought eagerly for an opportunity of employing it; whether in an experiment upon the Emperor, or on his own successor, or on some other personage, circumstances must determine.
The sanctity of Studius’s convent, and the strength of its monastic garrison, rendered it a safe refuge for disgraced courtiers, and in this thirtieth year of the Emperor Basil the Second (reckoning from his nominal accession) it harboured a legion of ex-prime ministers, patriarchs, archbishops, chief secretaries, hypati, anthypati, silentiarii, protospatharii, and even spatharo-candidati. And this small army was nothing to the host that, maimed or blinded or tonsured or all three, dragged out their lives in monasteries or in dungeons or on rocky islets; and these again were few in comparison with the spirits of the traitors or the betrayed who wailed nightly amid the planes and cypresses of the Aretae, or stalked through the palatial apartments of verdantique and porphyry. But of those comparatively at liberty, but whose liberty was circumscribed by the hallowed precincts of Studius, every soul was plotting. And never, perhaps, in the corrupt Byzantine Court, where true friendship had been unknown since Theodora quarrelled with Antonia, had so near an approach to it existed as in this asylum of villains. A sort of freemasonry came to prevail in the sanctuary: every one longed to know how his neighbour’s plot throve, and grudged not to buy the knowledge by disclosing a little corner of his own. Thus rendered communicative, their colloquies would travel back into the past, and as the veterans of intrigue fought their battles over again, the most experienced would learn things that made them open their eyes with amazement. “Ah!” they would hear, “that is just where you were mistaken. You had bought Eromenus, but so had I, and old Nicephorus had outbid us both.” “You deemed the dancer Anthusa a sure card, and knew not of her secret infirmity, of which I had been apprised by her waiting woman.” “Did you really know nothing of that sliding panel? And were you ignorant that whatever one says in the blue chamber is heard in the green?” “Yes, I thought so too, and I spent a mint of money before finding out that the dog whose slaver that brazen impostor Panurgiades pretended to sell me was no more mad than he was.” After such rehearsals of future dialogues by the banks of Styx, the fallen statesmen were observed to appear exceedingly dejected, but the stimulus had become necessary to their existence. None gossiped so freely or disclosed so much as Photinius and his predecessor Eustathius, whom he had himself displaced—probably because Eustathius, believing in nothing in heaven or earth but gold, and labouring under an absolute privation of that metal, was regarded even by himself as an extinct volcano.
“Well,” observed he one day, when discoursing with Photinius is an unusually confidential mood, “I am free to say that for my own part I don’t think over much of poison. It has its advantages, to be sure, but to my mind the disadvantages are even more conspicuous.”