Nathan Gallizier - The Sorceress of Rome

"I have little time to spare," he said, scarcely noticing the alchemist's obeisance, "and less inclination to enter into particulars. Give me what I want and let me be gone out of this atmosphere, which is enough to stifle the lungs of an honest man."

"Hi, hi, my illustrious friend," fawned the other with evident enjoyment of his patron's impatience. "Was the horoscope not right to a minute? Did not the charm work its unpronounced intent?"

"'Tis well you remind me! It required six stabs to finish your bungling work! See to it, that you do not again deceive me!"

"You say six stabs?" replied Dom Sabbat, looking up from the task he was engaged in, of mixing some substances in a mortar. "Yet Mars was in the Cancer and the fourth house of the Sun. But perhaps the gentleman had eaten river-snails with nutmeg or taken a bath in snake skins and stags-antlers?"

"To the devil with your river-snails!" exploded Benilo. "The love-philtre and quickly, – else I will have you smoked out of your devil's lair ere the moon be two hours older!"

The alchemist shook his head, as if pained by his patron's ill temper. Yet he could not abstain from tantalizing him by assuming a misapprehension of his meaning.

"The hour," he mumbled slowly, and with studied hesitation, "is not propitious. Evil planets are in the ascendant and the influence of your good genius is counteracted by antagonistic spells."

"Fool!" growled Benilo, at the same time raising his foot as if to spurn the impostor like a dog. "You keep but one sort of wares such as I require, – let me have the strongest."

Neither the gesture nor the insult were lost on Dom Sabbat, yet he preserved a calm and imperturbable demeanour, while, as if soliloquizing, he continued his irritating inquiries.

"A love-philtre? They are priceless indeed; – even a nun, – three drops of that clear tasteless fluid, – and she were yours."

Again Benilo's lips straightened in a hard, drawn line. Stooping over the alchemist, he whispered two words into his ear, which caused Dom Sabbat to glance up with such an expression of horror that Benilo involuntarily burst into a loud laugh, which sent the other spinning to his task.

Ransacking some remote corner in his devil's kitchen he at last produced a tiny phial, which he wrapped in a thin scroll. This he placed with trembling hands into those eagerly stretched out to grasp it and received therefor a hand full of gold coin, the weight of which seemed to indicate that secrecy was to constitute no small portion of the bargain.

After having conducted his visitor to the entrance, where he took leave of him with many bends of the head and manifold protestations of devotion, Dom Sabbat locked his abode and Benilo hastened towards the city.

As he mentally surveyed the events of the evening even to their remotest consequences, he seemed to have neglected no precaution, nor omitted anything which might eventually prevent him from triumphing over his opponents. But even while reviewing with a degree of satisfaction the business of the night, terrible misgivings, like dream shadows, drooped over his mind. After all it was a foolhardy challenge he had thrown to fate. Maddened by the taunts of a woman, he had arrayed forces against himself which he must annihilate, else they would tear him to pieces. The time for temporizing had passed. He stood on the crater of a volcano, and his ears, trained to the sounds of danger, could hear the fateful rumbling in the depths below.

In that fateful hour there ripened in the brain of Benilo the Chamberlain a thought, destined in its final consequences to subvert a dynasty. After all there was no security for him in Rome, while the Germans held sway in the Patrimony of St. Peter. But – indolent and voluptuous as he was – caring for nothing save the enjoyment of the moment, how was he to wield the thunderbolt for their destruction, how was he to accomplish that, in which Crescentius had failed, backed by forces equal to those of the foreigners and entrenched in his impregnable stronghold?

As Benilo weighed the past against the future, the scales of his crimes sank so deeply to earth that, had Mercy thrown her weight in the balance it would not have changed the ultimate decree of Retribution. Only the utter annihilation of the foreign invaders could save him. Eckhardt's life might be at the mercy of John of the Catacombs. The poison phial might accomplish what the bravo's dagger failed to do, – but one thing stood out clearly and boldly in his mind; the German leader must not live! Theodora dared not win the wager, – but even therein lay the greater peril. The moment she scented an obstacle in her path, she would move all the powers of darkness to remove it and it required little perspicuity to point out the source, whence it proceeded.

At the thought of the humiliation he had received at her hands, Benilo gnashed his teeth in impotent rage. His pride, his vanity, his self-love, had been cruelly stabbed. He might retaliate by rousing her fear. But if she had passed beyond the point of caring?

As, wrapt in dark ruminations, Benilo followed the lonely path, which carried him toward the city, there came to him a thought, swift and sudden, which roused the evil nature within him to its highest tension.

Could his own revenge be more complete than by using his enemies, one for the destruction of the other? And as for the means, – Theodora herself would furnish them. Meanwhile – how would Johannes Crescentius bear the propinquity of his hereditary foe, the emperor? Might not the Senator be goaded towards the fateful brink of rebellion? Then, – Romans and Germans once more engaged in a death grapple, – his own time would come, must come, the time of victory and ultimate triumph.

Two days had elapsed since Eckhardt's arrival in Rome. At the close of each day, he had met Benilo on the Palatine, each time renewing the topic of their former discourse. Benilo had listened attentively and, with all the eloquence at his command, had tried to dissuade the commander from taking a step so fateful in its remotest consequences. On the evening of the third day the Chamberlain had displayed a strange disquietude and replied to Eckhardt's questions with a wandering mind. Then without disclosing the nature of the business which he professed to have on hand, they parted earlier than had been their wont.

The shades of evening began to droop with phantom swiftness. Over the city brooded the great peace of an autumnal twilight. The last rays of the sun streaming from between a heavy cloud-bank, lay across the landscape in broad zones of brilliancy. In the pale green sky, one by one, the evening stars began to appear, but through the distant cloud-bank quivered summer lightning like the waving of fiery whips.

Feeling that sleep would not come to him in his present wrought up state of mind, Eckhardt resolved to revisit the spot which held the dearest he had possessed on earth. Perhaps, that prayer at the grave of Ginevra would bring peace to his soul and rest to his wearied heart. His feet bore him onward unawares through winding lanes and deserted streets until he reached the gate of San Sebastiano. There, he left the road for a turfy hollow, where groups of black cypress trees stretched out their branches like spectral arms, uplifted to warn back intruders. He stood before the churchyard of San Pancrazio.

Pausing for a moment irresolutely before its gloomy portals Eckhardt seemed to waver before entering the burial ground. Hushing his footsteps, as from a sense of awe, he then followed the well-known path. The black foliage drooped heavily over him; it seemed to draw him in and close him out of sight, and although there was scarcely any breeze, the dying leaves above rustled mysteriously, like voices whispering some awful secret, known to them alone. A strange mystery seemed to pervade the silence of their sylvan shadows, a mystery, dread, unfathomable, and guessed by none. With a dreary sense of oppression, yet drawn onward by some mysterious force, Eckhardt followed the path, which here and there was over-grown with grass and weeds. Uneasily he lifted the overhanging branches and peered between the dense and luminous foliage. Up and down he wistfully gazed, now towards the winding path, lined by old gravestones, leading to the cloister; now into the shadowy depths of the shrubbery. At times he paused to listen. Never surely was there such a silence anywhere as here. The murmur of the distant stream was lost. The leaves seemed to nod drowsily, as out of the depths of a dream and the impressive stillness of the place seemed a silent protest against the solitary intruder, a protest from the dead, whose slumber the muffled echo of his footsteps disturbed.