The Hill of Venus 20Book the Third · The Red Tower
18
Literature · Historical Fiction
The Hill of Venus 20
Book the Third · The Red Tower
GallizierEnglish
With the first pulse of dawn in the East, Francesco was up and astir with the zest of the hour. The woods were full of golden vapor, of dew and the chanting of birds. A stream sang under the boughs, purling and foaming over a broad ledge of stone into a misty pool. A blue sky glimmered above the glistening tree-tops; the dwindling wood-ways quivered with the multitudinous madrigals of the dawn.
A strange calm encompassed him, as he rode down the castle hill into a wood of ilex where the dawn freshness still lingered. The rebellious temper of his mood sank like a sea beneath the benediction of a god. His was not a soul that bartered through carven screens for penitence and peace. His face caught a radiance from the vaultings of the trees.
Around him ran wooded hills, streams and pastures, dusted thick with flowers. The odors of dawn burdened the breeze. In the distance the purple heights of Viterbo faded into the azure of the sky.
Southward he rode, towards Circe's land. The far heights bristled with woodlands, shimmering with magic mystery under the rising sun. The forest spires were smitten with a glamor of gold. Precipice and wooded heights were solitary as the sea itself.
Francesco had left Viterbo exalted, liberated, glad. The prospect of high endeavor had lifted him out of his melancholy. His mind, overawed by the spirit, was for the time set free from that intellectual restlessness and moral incertitude, which against his will had grown up in him in the atmosphere wherein he moved.
He was the messenger of the Church, bound for the Neapolitan court on a mission aiming to restore the Southern Italian cities to the control of him who was the Vicar of Christ on earth. For a moment even the paradox did not distress him. Enough that he was under marching orders, that the walls of Monte Cassino lay far behind him. Surely the time was coming when loyalty to Church and country would be as one! If he might only meet some great outward test, he mused, some great trial, in which, to his own mind, as to the world, his convictions might shine forth!
All he saw and heard confirmed the dark insinuations of the Duca di Spoleto; yet the fact of decision had soothed his bewilderment, and there was hope of action ahead. Meantime he allowed himself to react passively on the impressions of the way. He was entertained with making acquaintances all along the route. Nothing in his graceful aspect betrayed the religious, and people, not suspecting his errand talked to him with the frankness to which excited times give birth. On all lips there was the same tale; the cause of the League of Italian cities against the Pope was filling young and old with chivalric passion. From the lower undulations of Tuscany, through the valleys of the Apennines, in the levels of Emilia, everywhere waved the Florentine banner, blood red, with its flashing motto: "Libertas." It fanned the fire of a patriotism which he was compelled to recognize as pure, of that proud spirit of independence and hatred of oppression which has created the free cities of Italy. Not for the last time united protest against foreign tyranny was stilling petty strife and evoking the national consciousness, which even Dante was vainly to long for. And Francesco's spirit was swift to respond to the call. How otherwise? Was he not young? Was he not, too, a man, to whom country and race were dear?
But as he continued upon his way, as with his steady advance the forests gradually thinned and he began the descent into the plains of the Campagna, the image of Ilaria was constantly before him. Where was she? What was she doing? The thought brought with it a troubled bewilderment. Possessed like himself of a love of beauty, like himself consumed by a restlessness tremulous for something not quite clearly understood, this fine and beautiful creature would be ill at ease in the rough life of the feudal castle. That in the one case the restlessness might be reaching upwards, in the other, downwards. Francesco was too loyal to surmise. What good days they had known, he and she! Together they had watched the play of light on the mountain slopes, or over the great faint-gleaming lands within the soft curve of whose farthest blue they could divine the sea; together the two dark heads had bent over some vellum roll of Lariella's favorite poet.
And again she stood before him; the perfectly arched eyebrows, the wide forehead, the sweet curves that had dimpled in girlish days beneath a shadowy crown, greeted him from a dusky frame. With the increased perfection of her person went, he soon perceived, a trained and practised instinct for all the graces of life. As she had appeared to him in Rome, she had been more charming than ever before.
Too charming, alas! to remain unapproached by desire,--and too reckless, perchance, to resist!
With a jerk he reined in his steed.
Of a sudden, the fears that had been squirming below consciousness heaved up their heads and Francesco heard himself cry aloud:
"God! If one's lady of the stars should prove a wanton!"--
The uttered words struck cold upon his ear. He had stopped abruptly, throwing his open palm against the rough bark of a tree. The hurt mixed with the sound of his own voice.
Dismounting, he permitted the disturbed animal to graze in an adjacent meadow-land; then, invaded by the terror of the fact, he flung himself face downward, pressing his cheek into the wet grass, recalling every too significant word and look of the Proserpina of yore, thrilled in his senses by her last glance at him and troubled by a passion he despised. Slowly to the first pain, with which the image of his dream-lady faded, there succeeded another. The friend of his youth, the one woman he loved,--what was befalling her? Was she happy? Had the memory of the past faded from her mind? This pain was sharper than the other, though Francesco knew it not. It healed the pang of fleshly desire.
He called to his steed, mounted, and rode on with a new gravity. According to his curious wont in concrete experience, his relations with Ilaria became the index to wider questionings.
The old spell had been renewed, with a difference, and Francesco found himself trembling on the verge of a genuine passion. Through the mystic reverence which he sought to cultivate towards his lady flashed the allurement of the senses, and an occasional pang of reproach for his own cowardly surrender. He reproached himself bitterly for it, as he rode down the long hill that stretched in uneven rise and fall from Tivoli to Bracciano. Not that it troubled him, to find in his own love an earthly taint; many he knew who had struggled, had conquered, not without salt-tears. But to distrust the brightness of his lady's image; this surely in the annals of high love was a crime unparalleled. He tried to cast the evil thought aside, to exalt at once his love and his ideal. Breathing the morning air, the thing seemed possible. The situation helped; delicate enough to tickle his sense of honor, dramatic enough to absorb fancy.
The Ilaria of the ilex-wood grew dim as a fading fresco to Francesco's memory. He saw in her stead the little maid of the old castle of Avellino, whose waywardness, whose bright and ready gaiety had seemed to his more despondent temperament a gift of enchanting sweetness. Thinking of these things, dubious traits vanished from her image; she shone before his eyes, the piteous lady of his desire, and the devotion for which he longed rose ardent within him. It brought a fulness to the throat, to the eyes a smart which he coaxed into a tear. Then he rode on in a happier mood. The dark trees, which crowned the hill, were giving way as he descended to a wood of fresher green.
It was now verging towards evening. Francesco had reached the top of a lower ridge, from which the towers of Camaldoli, seen through a gap in the trees, rose shadowy against the fading blue of the horizon. The path, hardly more than a foottrail, had been lonely. Now a priest came ambling up on mule-back, feasting his eyes on the pleasant woodland. At the sight of Francesco he dropped them on his breviary, and passed on without word or sign.
For a moment the action struck him as a smart.
The sight of the Office-book had opened the door of another chamber in the house of Mind, that mysterious dwelling which always numbers rooms which the owner has never entered, and others, closed in long disuse.
At that moment the faint spark of devotion passed into a large indifference. In his early youth Francesco had been in the habit--how acquired he could not have told--of repeating, whenever possible, the canonical hours. He had long abandoned the custom, as far as intention went; yet in some forgotten chapel of the mind, deserted of the conscious powers, the holy rites go on forever, biding the time of their recall. He was as one in the grip of a bitter wrong; for through the jostling images which filled his mind, the Office continued to ring in persistent undertones.
The light between the great tree trunks grew from splendor to splendor; flashing its level glories through the forest, transfiguring the wood into flame. The sun had reached the rim of the horizon. Some far memory of brilliance was stirring and seeking. A pageant, withal, but not that triumph of earthly love, so fair in the false twilight of a night in the past, so wizened gray and lustful red in the light of recollection. The beams of the sinking sun were seven candle-sticks of gold. What noble elders follow, crowned with fleurs-de-lis? What mystic chariot was this, within which rides a woman olive-garlanded, robed in hues of living fire and of the fresh spring grass? Memory found what it sought: but he who thus looked back into the past was unaware that neither Lethe nor Eunoe might be his, who had not yet climbed the Purgatorial Mound.
The sun was sinking in the west when Francesco came to a ridge in the woodland, which sloped southward from the high rocks. The path seemed to lead into the heart of a wilderness. Pine woods bordered it and dead bracken and whortleberry spread away under the stiff shadows of the silent trees. A thousand spires began to blacken against the sunset, and Francesco was aware that he was carrying a savage hunger. He had hoped for a manor-house or inn, or some woodman's lodge, but the brambles that had rooted their long feelers across the path made it appear that the track had not been used for years. So rough and tangled did it become that Francesco turned in among the trees, where the dense summer foliage of the beeches had kept the ground clear of brush and bramble.
The prospect of a supperless night under the trees, even though he had never been clogged with heavy feeding at the monastery, made Francesco's thoughts hark back to the inn he had left at Viterbo, and he regretted not having supplied himself with a stock of provisions ere he departed. Suddenly a distant sound made him pause and listen. The sound had a human note, and seemed nearer to him than he had at first imagined. He urged his steed on through the on-coming dusk. It was not long before the trees thinned before him and streams of golden light, slanting into an open space, gave the clearing the appearance of a forest-chapel at sunset.
From the open ground ahead came the incessant babbling of a thin and querulous voice, that faltered between the prattling of a child and the chatter of a mad soul, talking to the empty air. Sometimes there was a croon in the voice, sometimes a touch of decrepit anger.
A long, green bank, brushed by the boughs of the beech-trees, hid from Francesco the open ground that lay ahead of him. But, though it hid what he desired to see, the bank gave him the chance of approaching unobserved. Dismounting, he went up it on hands and knees, and insinuated a cautious head between the turf and the branches of the beeches.
On the other side of the bank lay a stretch of undulating grass, that rose into mounds and ridges, and dipped into shallow dykes, the mounds and ridges catching the fading sunlight, the hollows lying filled with the shadows. The trunks of the forest-trees shut in this open space on every side as with a palisade. On a mound in the centre stood crags of ruined masonry smothered in ivy, a broken squint in the wall looking like a rent in a cloud, through which the sunlight slanted.
A little old woman, with hair as white as snow, and strange black eyes in a strange and wrinkled face, knelt there, polishing something smooth and round that she held in her lap. The strange sight caused Francesco to peer all the more intently, and he drew back with a quick gasp, when in the suddenly revealed white dome of the head, the shadowy eye-sockets, the glistening teeth in the bare jaws, he recognized the thing for what it was,--the head of a skeleton.
As he sat there, considering the strange picture, Francesco for a time became oblivious of the cravings of his stomach. It was plain that the woman was mad, for as she polished the skull, she chattered incessantly. He asked himself, what was behind this madness. Death had been here at some time, perhaps with violence, wiping out life and reason, leaving white hair and tragic madness in its wake. The furrows deepened above Francesco's eyes. He sat there in the deepening dusk calling up visions of ruffianism and wrong; the vision of this poor soul's madness made him forget the dangers of the woods by night. Picking his way cautiously among the trees, he came within about five paces of her, before she lifted her head and saw him. Then he crossed himself and gave her a "Pax Dei."--
The little old woman stared at him and said nothing, her lower lip drooping, her inert hands resting on the top of the skull.
Her eyes puzzled Francesco, they were so black and bright, like the eyes of a bird. There was a startled wonder in them, as though she had never seen such a creature before. Then she suddenly wrapped the head in a bright-colored scarf which lay by her side, arose, and started through the thicket, putting her arms around the thing as a mother would hold a child.
The sun was now below the hills and the woods were turning black. Francesco felt a vague shudder go through him as, following the woman, he arrived at the fragments of a ruin, that was smothered up in ivy. An arched doorway with broken pillars led into a vault in which there stood an open coffin. He saw her approach the receptacle for the dead, place the skull in the coffin and close the lid. Then she crooned softly to herself and hobbled away into the dusk.
The thought that there must be a hut close by, struck Francesco with the pang of the returning consciousness of hunger, when suddenly he saw a light gleaming through the night as from a blood-red star. Straining his eyes, he peered through the dusk in the direction whence the light shone.
Under the shadow of a wooded spur that ran down into the valley Francesco saw a tower rising from an island in the centre of one of the great pools, of which the region abounded.
The walls of the tower shone crimson in the light of the rising moon, glowing above the black water as though it had been built of iron at red heat. Thousands of willows and aspens grew about the mere, and in the shallows were sedges and sword-leaved flags.
Remounting his steed, Francesco resolved to ask for food and a night's lodging, rather than to traverse the forests at night. He was spent, and so was his steed, and the region was infested by all manner of outlaws, who made the roads insecure. As he approached the mere, a large boat put out from a water-gate and crawled with long oars, like a beetle on the surface of the water. It disappeared in the night, and Francesco decided to hail it upon its return, in the meanwhile watching the red tower overhanging the pool. The reflection of the walls in the rippling waters was a broken redness wrinkling into black.
Francesco's wait was destined to be brief. The barge soon returned, and hailing the astonished oarsmen, he requested to be rowed across the mere. They seemed to hold silent council, then, seeing it was but one man, they grumblingly ran out planks for Francesco's horse, and he rode into the barge, remaining in the saddle and caressing his steed's black ears.
At the water-gate a lean man in a black tunic stood waiting. He gave the newcomer the blind stare of two watery eyes and, upon learning his request, disappeared inside of the tower. After a wait of brief duration he returned, and, beckoning to Francesco to enter the dark gateway, called to some attendant, who took charge of his horse and then led the guest to a dimly lighted chamber, in which he discovered the forms of a woman and a man. As Francesco appeared on the threshold, the man precipitately arose and, whispering a few words in the woman's ear, retreated by an opposite door. Francesco was so absorbed in the scrutiny of his surroundings, that he paid little heed to the action of the one of the occupants. The castellan ushered him into the chamber, closing the door behind him, and Francesco, making the best of a strange situation, approached the woman, who, reclining upon a dais, was regarding him intently, and preferred his request for a night's hospitality.
"Our guest-table waits for strangers," she replied with a smile, bidding Francesco to take the seat vacated by the former occupant, then regarding him with unconcealed interest.
For a moment Francesco was mute; the suddenness of the transition deprived him of speech. Perhaps it was also her complete fearlessness of manner, bare of every trace of aloofness, which had a somewhat disconcerting effect upon one who had not known woman's society in a long space of time, which caused the consciously awkward silence, as now and then their eyes met.
Her face had a singular charm. The lips were thin, tinged slightly with scorn, yet tender when she smiled. The eyes were large, of greenish hue, and strange lights seemed to flash from their depths. There was a rich, round beauty upon the face; the rose tints of the skin warm, and sensuous as the bloom upon fruit. She was very slender where the girdle ran, but big of bosom and long of limb.
Unconsciously, as he joined her at the board and partook of food and drink, she drew from him his tale. Her swift comprehension was as a magic mirror, wherein all creatures showed their thoughts. Not being burdened with the reflective sense, he flung his words in the welkin's face, with the candour of one who had no shame or fear.
Between the woman's talking and his hunger, Francesco found little time for reflection. He did not see a dim figure with a white face pass out behind the hangings, turning half furtively to look at the two at the high table, before it disappeared. There were no lights in the hall, save a torch on a bracket by the screens. Francesco saw the smoke wavering up into the gloom of the roof, and the way it vanished into nothingness made him think of the updrift of souls into the night.
He was silent a while, thinking of the little old woman and the skull she cherished. The woman beside him felt his silence like the sudden closing of a door.
"You are thinking of some one?" she asked. "Or is it that you are tired?"
Francesco held his head high, as one looking into the distance. There seemed no reason why he should conceal the goal of his journey.
He stared at the flaring torchlight as he talked, but had he looked into the woman's eyes, he might have seen a sudden shiver of light leap up into them. She became watchful, studying Francesco as he talked, yet keeping a white calm.
"You journey to Naples," she said at last with a strange smile while she caught his wrist, her tense arm quivering, her eyes looking into his. "Do you not fear the contagion of that Court of Love?"
Her face seemed suddenly to blaze with intense passion, her eyes taking a reddish lustre and shining like points of fire.
"Hot blood and a cold ending," he said, looking past her, and she took her hand from his wrist and sat silent and stiff, her eyes fixed upon his face. Then she clapped her hands. An attendant conducted Francesco to a chamber which had been prepared for him, but as he passed out of her presence, he still felt the burning touch of her fingers and the strange look of her eyes.--
Sleep would not come readily to Francesco that night, as he lay on the couch prepared for him high up in the Red Tower. A full moon had risen and his wakeful mood shared the wonder and the mystery of the night. A dog bayed in the courtyard; the sound had but the effect of intensifying the stillness. The mere lay like a pavement of black marble, with no wavelets lapping against the base of the tower.
Francesco had lived through many strange moments, since he left Viterbo, and chance had thrown him with a singular suddenness into the life that he sought. Vividly in the midst of his wakefulness he saw the proud beauty of Ilaria as contrasted with the fierce pallor in the face of the lady of the castle, whose name he knew not. It seemed to Francesco that these two confronted one another with a mysterious hatred. And he was conscious of desires that had been awakened within him, the heat of the blood, the simmering of the brain. The woman was beautiful, lithe and limp as a snake and he felt, that once she had set her mind on gratifying a desire, resistance would be utterly in vain.
It was towards midnight when Francesco fell asleep, and his sleep had lasted for about an hour when he started awake in bed with a loud cry and a flinging out of the hands. He sat up with a shiver of fear, awakened from a dream in which torrents of black water had poured down to smother him. A wind had suddenly arisen far off in the valley. Francesco heard it sweeping out of the night, whistling through the aspens and the willows until it struck the tower and moaned about it, like a desperate and dying thing clinging to something that it loved. A cloud passed across the face of the moon. In the court below the watch-dogs set up a fierce howling.
Francesco crossed himself, feeling the presence of evil in the moaning of the wind. The night had sprung from moonbeams and slumber into a tumult of unrest. He heard the water splashing against the base of the tower.
The moon came out again and Francesco rose from the bed and went to the window. The mere was scarred with lines of foam and the aspen boughs glittered and clashed in the moonlight. Francesco, greatly astonished, saw the barge was crossing the water with long, sinuous strokes of the oar. In the barge there stood a figure on horseback, motionless and black as jet, save for a sparkle of moonlight about its head. On the far bank among the aspen trees, a company of horsemen waited, spears erect, helmets glimmering, the wind tossing the dark manes of their steeds.
The nose of the barge turned to the bank, and almost instantly the wind ceased, and a great calm fell. The night grew quiet. The watch-dogs turned into their kennels. The plash of the water against the tower grew less and less.
Francesco saw the black horseman ride up the bank and join those who waited. There was not a sound save the muffled beat of horses' hoofs, as they turned and rode away among the trunks of the aspen trees. The barge had thrust out again and was recrossing the mere, with wrinkles of silver running from its snout. Francesco watched it with a strange misgiving. Who was the man who had disappeared the instant he had entered the presence of the woman? Why were armed men coming and going at this hour of the night? Why should the wind rise so suddenly and die down again when the barge touched the further bank? Reality and dream mingled strangely in the deep of the night, and these happenings made him question his own eyes and ears.
Again he betook himself to his rest, but it was some time ere sleep would come to his eyes. And then it seemed not sleep, but rather a deep trance, that seemed to hold him enthralled, seemed to benumb his limbs and deprive him of all energy, as if some opiate had been mingled with his draught.
He was suddenly conscious of an arch in the heavy stone, parting. In the opening there stood a woman, tall, lithe, slender. Instinctively he knew it was the lady of the tower. She held a lamp behind the folds of her skirt, and after she had entered his chamber the aperture closed noiselessly behind her.
Francesco stared at her wide-eyed, afraid to speak, afraid to move. Was it indeed the woman at whose side he had partaken of drink and food,--or was it some restless phantom haunting the abode of former days? He saw the strange glitter of her eyes in the midst of the darkness, for the moon was again hidden behind a cloud; he heard the sudden shrill clanging of a bell from some distant cloister or convent.
"You are awake!" she said in a whisper.
And suddenly the intimate dimness of the room was surcharged with faint perfumes, as the woman slowly walked towards him, looking at him steadily with deep, long breath.
He leaped up, sitting on the edge of the couch. Her fine finger tips rested on his shoulders, preventing him from rising. He saw the whiteness of her arms, bare to the shoulders; his eyes rested on the soft curves of the lithe body, under the clinging, transparent texture of a gown vying in whiteness with her skin. He looked up and trembled.
"What did you see, my friend?" she queried, bending over him.
"The wind waked me at midnight," he replied evasively.
The pressure of her fingers increased.
"What did you see?"
He noted the strange glitter in her eyes. The strange perfume which clung to her, crept to his brain.
"I saw armed men waiting among the aspens; a man on a horse ferrying across in the barge."--
His straightforwardness sent a momentary shadow across her face and for a moment she shut her lips tightly. But a strange light played in her eyes, as she said:
"Friends come and go in the night. There may be pain in their passing to and fro. The man you saw was my brother!"
She spoke with a level and unhesitating voice, yet in her eyes there gleamed a vague smouldering of unrest.
"I do not even know your name," he said, longing to clasp those firm white hands which were so close to his eyes.
"What is a name?" she shrugged, then, with a laugh, she added: "Has the night taken away your courage?"
Their eyes met.
"What is there to be afraid of?" he queried tremulously.
Again her eyes thrilled him.
"I have tricked you!"
He started to rise, grasping the white soft hands in his own and relinquishing them the next moment, as if he had touched fire. She held him easily with a glance of her strange eyes.
"What do you want of me?" he stammered. "Why are you here?"
"Come,--let me show you!" she said, taking him by the hand and leading him towards the window which looked out upon the mere.
He followed her resistlessly.
In a flash he felt her arms about him, drawing him close to her. She threw words in his face, with a fierce, intimate whispering.
Francesco recoiled, as if he had been bitten by a snake. But the magic was too strong for his starved senses; ever and ever she caught him towards her, kissing him with moist, hungry lips, while her eyes scintillated in strange lights that made him dizzy, and her arms were coiled about him with a strength he had not guessed.
With a choking outcry he succeeded at last in releasing himself, and turning to the door, tore at it, and found it fastened on the other side.
He stood there, facing her, white with fear, anger, passion. He knew if she willed to make him her own, he was lost, and she came slowly towards him, with the soundless tread of a tigress who has cornered her prey.
She was regarding him with a strange amused smile, then she held out her white arms.
"Are these charms so poor, that they must go begging?" she said with a return of the sardonic glitter in her eyes.
"In the name of mercy--go!" he stammered with blind pleading eyes.
"The halo cannot fail you," she replied with a laugh, as her glance swept him from head to foot. "Fool--fool!" She placed her hands tightly about his throat, looking into his eyes.
"Should you learn at the court of Naples to value the earthly joys more than the heavenly,--return,--and be forgiven!"--She kissed him and sent him reeling against the wall.
For a moment he stood paralyzed, facing her in the darkness, while her laughter, high and shrill, resounded in his ears. He rushed at her, tried to detain her, as she reached the arch. But as the panel parted, a figure suddenly came between him and the woman. The moon had emerged from the cloud, behind which it had been hidden. Francesco recoiled and staggered back into his chamber, as if he had been dealt a sudden blow. For, swift as the shadow had come between them, ere the panel closed behind the woman--he had recognized Raniero Frangipani.
