As the world grew gray with waking light, Francesco came from the woods and heard the noise of the sea in the hush that breathed in the dawn. The storm had passed over the sea and a vast calm hung upon the lips of the day. In the east a green streak shone above the hills. The sky was still aglitter with sparse stars. An immensity of gloom brooded over the sea.
Gaunt, wounded, triumphant, Francesco rode up beneath the banners of the dawn, eager yet fearful, inspired and strong of purpose. Wood and hill slept in a haze of mist. The birds were only beginning in the thickets, like the souls of children yet unborn, calling to eternity. Beyond in the cliffs, San Nicandro, wrapped round with night, stood silent and sombre athwart the west.
Francesco climbed from the valley as the day came with splendor, a glow of molten gold streaming from the east. Wood and hillside glimmered in a smoking mist, dew-bespangled, wonderful. As the sun rose, the sea stretched sudden into the arch of the west, a great expanse of liquid gold. A mysterious lustre hovered over the cliffs, waves of light bent like saffron mist upon San Nicandro.
The dawn-light found an echo in Francesco's face. He came that morning the ransomer, the champion, defeated in life and hope and happiness, yet with head erect, as if defying Fate. His manhood smote him like the deep-throated cry of a great bell, majestic and solemn. The towers on the cliff were haloed with magic hues. Life, glory, joy, lay locked in the gray stone walls. His heart sang in him; his eyes were afire.
As he walked his horse with a hollow thunder of hoof over the narrow bridge, he took his horn and blew a blast thereon. There was a sense of desolation, a lifelessness about the place that smote his senses with a strange fear. The walls stared void against the sky. There was no stir, no sound within, no watchful faces at portal or wicket. Only the gulls circled from the cliffs and the sea made its moan along the strand.
Francesco sat in the saddle and looked from wall to belfry, from tower to gate. There was something tragic about the place, the silence of a sacked town, the ghostliness of a ship sailing the seas with a dead crew upon her decks. Francesco's glance rested on the open postern, an empty gash in the great gate. His face darkened and his eyes lost their sanguine glow. There was something betwixt death and worse than death in all this calm.
He dismounted and left his steed on the bridge. The postern beckoned to him. He went in like a man nerved for peril, with sword drawn and shield in readiness. Again he blew his horn. No living being answered, no voice broke the silence.
The refectory was open, the door standing half ajar. Francesco thrust it full open with the point of his sword and looked in. A gray light filtered through the narrow windows. The nuns lay huddled on benches and on the floor. Some lay fallen across the settles, others sat with their heads fallen forward upon the table; a few had crawled towards the door and had died in the attempt to escape. The shadow of death was over the whole.
Francesco's face was as gray as the faces of the dead. There was something here, a horror, a mystery, that hurled back the warm courage of the heart.
With frantic despair he rushed from one body to the other, turning the dead faces to the light, fearing every one must be that of his own Ilaria. But Ilaria was not among them; the mystery grew deeper, grew more unfathomable. For a moment, Francesco stood among the dead nuns as if every nerve in his body had been suddenly paralyzed, when his eyes fell upon a crystal chalice, half overturned on the floor. It contained the remnants of a clear fluid. He picked it up and held it to his nostrils. It fell from his nerveless fingers upon the stone and broke into a thousand fragments, a thin stream creeping over the granite towards the fallen dead. It was a preparation of hemlock and bitter almonds. He stared aghast, afraid to move, afraid to call. The nuns had poisoned themselves.
Like a madman he rushed out into the adjoining corridor, hither and thither, in the frantic endeavor to find a trace of Ilaria. Yet not a trace of her did he find. But what he did discover solved the mystery of the grewsome feast of death which he had just witnessed. In a corner where he had dropped it, there lay a silken banderol belonging to a man-at-arms of Anjou's Provencals. They had been here, and the nuns, to escape the violation of their bodies, had died, thus cheating the fiends out of the gratification of their lusts.
The terrible discovery unnerved Francesco so completely that for a time he stood as if turned to stone, looking about him like a traveller who has stumbled blindly into a charnel house. Urged by manifold forebodings, he then rushed from room to room, from cell to cell. The same silence met him everywhere. Of Ilaria he found not a trace. Had the fiends of Anjou carried her away, or had she, in endeavoring to escape, found her death outside of the walls of San Nicandro?
He dared not think out the thought.
The shadows of the place, the staring faces, the stiff hands clawing at things inanimate, were like the phantasms of the night. Francesco took the sea-air into his nostrils and looked up into the blue radiance of the sky. All about him the garden glistened in the dawn; the cypresses shimmered with dew. The late roses made very death more apparent to his soul.
As he stood in deep thought, half dreading what he but half knew, a voice called to him, breaking suddenly the ponderous silence of the place. Guided by its sound, Francesco unlatched the door and found himself face to face with the Duke of Spoleto.
For a moment they faced each other in silence.
Then he gave a great cry.
"Ever, ever night!" he said, stretching out his hands despairingly as to an eternal void.
The duke's eyes seemed to look leagues away over moor and valley and hill, where the blackened ruins of Astura rose beneath a dun smoke against the calm of the morning sky.
A strange tenderness played upon his lips, as if with the extinction of the Frangipani brood peace had entered his soul.
"A man is a mystery to himself," he said.
"But to God?"
"I know no God, save the God, my own soul! Let me live and die,--nothing more! Why curse one's life with a 'to be?'"
Francesco sighed heavily.
"It is a kind of Fate to me!" he said, "inevitable as the setting of the sun, natural as sleep. Not for myself do I fear it alone,--but I should not like to think that I should never see her again."
The duke's eyes had caught life on the distant hillside, life surging from the valleys, life and the glory of it. Harness, helm and shield shone in the sun. Gold, azure, silver, scarlet were creeping from the bronzed green of the wilds. Silent and solemn the host rolled slowly into the full splendor of the day.
The duke's face had kindled.
"Grapple the days to come!" he said. "Let Scripture and ethics rot! My men are at your command! Let them ride by stream and forest, moor and mere! Let them ride in quest of your lost one, ride like the wind!"
Francesco looked at the duke through a mist of tears.
"You know?" he faltered.
"For this I came!" replied the duke, extending his hand. "You will find her whom your heart seeks. Like a golden dawn shall she rise out of the past. Blow your horn! Let us not tarry!"
