Chapter IX The Snare of the Fowler
hile these events transpired in Rome, a feverish activity prevailed in Castel San Angelo. In day time the huge mausoleum presented the same sullen and forbidding aspect as ever but without revealing a trace of the preparations, which were being pushed to a close within. Under cover of night the breaches had been repaired; huge balistae and catapults had been placed in position on the ramparts, and the fortress had been rendered almost impregnable to assault, as in the time of Vitiges, the Goth.
Events were swiftly approaching the fatal crisis. While Otto languished in the toils of Stephania, whose society became more and more indispensable to him, while with pernicious flattery Benilo closed the ear of the king to the cries of his German subjects and estranged him more and more from his leaders, his country, and his hosts, while Eckhardt vainly strove to arouse Otto to the perils lurking in his utter abandonment to Roman councillors and Roman polity, the Senator of Rome had introduced into Hadrian’s tomb a sufficiently strong body of men, not only to withstand a siege, but to vanquish any force, however superior to his own, to frustrate any assault, however ably directed. While the German contingents remained on Roman soil he dared not engage his enemy in a last death-grapple for the supremacy over the Seven Hills, which Otto’s war-worn veterans from the banks of the Elbe and Vistula had twice wrested from him. The final draw in the great game was at hand. On this day the envoys of the Electors would arrive in Rome to demand Otto’s immediate return to his German crown-lands, whose eastern borders were sorely menaced by the ever recurring inroads of Poles and Magyars. In the event of Otto’s refusing compliance with the Electoral mandate, Count Ludeger of the Palatinate was to relieve Eckhardt of his command and to lead the German contingents back across the Alps.
But it was no part of the Senator’s policy to permit Otto to return. For while there remained breath in the youth, Rome remained the Fata Morgana of his dreams, and Crescentius remained the vassal of Theophano’s son. He could never hope to come into his own as long as the life of that boy-king overshadowed his own. Therefore every pressure must be brought to bear upon the headstrong youth, to defy the Electoral mandate, to rebuff, to offend the Electoral envoys. Then, the great German host recalled, Eckhardt relieved of his command, Otto isolated In a hostile camp, Stephania should cry the watchword for his doom. The inconsiderable guard remaining would be easily vanquished and the son of Theophano, utterly abandoned and deserted, should fall an easy prey to the Senator’s schemes, a welcome hostage in the dungeons of Castel San Angelo, for him to deal with according to the dictates of the hour. The task to urge Otto to this fatal step had been assigned to Benilo, but Crescentius was prepared for all emergencies arising from any unforeseen turn of affairs. He had gone too far to recede. If now he quailed before the impending issue, the mighty avalanche he had started would hurl him to swift and certain doom.
Since that fateful hour, when in a moment of unaccountable weakness Crescentius had listened to Benilo’s serpent-wisdom, and had arrayed his own wife against the German King, the Senator of Rome had seen but little of Stephania. The preparations for the impending revolt of the Romans, in whose fickle minds his emissaries found a fertile soil for the seed of treason and discontent, engaged him night and day. He seemed present at once on the ramparts, in the galleries and in the vaults of his formidable keep. But when chance for a fleeting moment brought the Senator face to face with his consort, the meaning-fraught smile on the lips of Stephania seemed to assure him that everything was going well. Otto was lost to the world. Heaven and earth seemed alike blotted out for him in her presence. Together they continued to stroll among the ruins, while Stephania poured strange tales into the youth’s ear, tales which crept to his brain, like the songs of the Sirens that lure the mariner among the crimson flowers of their abode. And Eckhardt despised the Romans too heartily to fear them, and even therein he revealed the heel of Achilles.
If the present day was gained, the Senator’s diplomacy would carry victory from the field, and Benilo had well plied his subtle arts. Yet Crescentius was resolved to attend in person the audience of the envoys. He would with his own ears hear the King’s reply to the Electors. If Benilo had played him false? He hardly knew why a lingering suspicion of the Chamberlain crept into his mind at all. But he shook himself free of the thought, which had for a moment clouded the future with its sombre shadow.
As the Senator of Rome hurriedly traversed the galleries of the vast mausoleum, he suddenly found himself face to face with Stephania.
Her face was pale and her eyes revealed traces of tears.
At the first words she uttered, Crescentius paused, surprise and gladness in his eyes.
“We are well met, my lord,” she said, after a brief greeting, an unwonted tremor vibrating in her tones. “I have sought you in vain all the morning. Release me from the task you have imposed upon me! I cannot go on! I am not further equal to it. It is a game unworthy of you or me!”
The surprise at her words for a moment choked the Senator’s utterance and almost struck him dumb.
“Imposed upon?” he replied. “I thought you had accepted the mission freely. Is the boy rebellious?”
“On the contrary! Were he so, perhaps I should not now prefer this request. He is but too pliant.”
“He has made your task an easy one,” Crescentius nodded meaningly.
“He has laid his whole soul bare to me; not a thought therein, ever so remote, which I have not sounded. I can not stand before him. My brow is crimsoned with the flush of shame. He gave me truth for a lie,—friendship for deceit. He deserves a better fate than the Senator of Rome has decreed for him.”
Crescentius breathed hard.
“The weakness does you honour,” he replied after a pause. “Perchance I should have spared you the task. I placed him in your hands, because I dared trust no one else. And now it is too late—too late!”
“It is not too late,” replied Stephania.
Crescentius pointed silently to the ramparts, where a score of men were placing a huge catapult in position.
“It is not too late!” she repeated, her cheeks alternately flushing and paling. “To-day, my lord informed me, the King stands at the Rubicon. To-day he must choose, If it is to be Rome, if Aix-la-Chapelle. If he elects to return to the gray gloom of his northern skies, to the sombre twilight of his northern forests, let him go, my lord,—let him go! Much misery will be thereby averted,—much heart-rending despair!”
Crescentius had listened in silence to Stephania’s pleading. There was a brief pause, during which only his heavy breathing was heard.
“His choice is made,” he replied at last in a firm tone.
“I do not understand you, my lord!”
The Senator regarded his wife with singularly fixed intentness.
“The toils of the Siren Rome are too firm to be snapped asunder like a spider’s web.”
She covered her face with her hands. Her breath came and went with quick, convulsive gasps.
“It is shameful—shameful—” she sobbed. “Had I never lent myself to the unworthy task! How could you conceive it, my lord, how could you? But it was not your counsel! May his right hand wither, who whispered the thought into your ear!”
Crescentius winced. He felt ill at ease.
“Is it so hard to play the confessor to yonder wingless cherub?” he said with a forced smile.
Stephania straightened herself to her full height.
“When I undertook the shameless task, I believed the son of Theophano a tyrant, an oppressor, his hands stained with the best of Roman blood! Such your lying Roman chroniclers had painted him. I gloried in the thought, to humble a barbarian, whose vain-glorious, boastful insolence meditated new outrages upon us Romans. Yet his is a purer, a loftier spirit, than is to be found in all this Rome of yours! Were it not nobler to acknowledge him your liege, than to destroy him by woman’s wiles and smiles?”
“I cannot answer you on these points,” Crescentius spoke after a pause, during which the olive tints of his countenance had faded to ashen hues. “I regard those dreams, whose mock-halo has blinded you, in a different light. It is the wise man who rules the state,—it is the dreamer who dashes it to atoms. We have gone too far! I could not release you,—even if I would!”
Stephania breathed hard. Her hands were tightly clasped.
“It can bring glory to neither you, nor Rome,” she said in a pleading voice. “Let him depart in peace, my lord, and I will thank you to my dying hour!”
“How know you he wishes to depart?”
“How know you he wishes to remain?”
“His destiny is Rome. Here he will live—and here he will die!” the Senator spoke with slow emphasis. “But we have not yet agreed upon the signal,” he continued with cold and merciless voice. “After the departure of the envoys you will lead the King into his favourite haunts, the labyrinth of the Minotaurus, to the little temple of Neptune. There I will in person await him. When you see the gleam of spearpoints in the thickets, you will wave your kerchief with the cry: ‘For Rome and Crescentius.’ No harm shall befall the youth,—unless he resist. He shall have honourable conduct to the guest chamber, prepared for him,—below.”
And Crescentius pointed downward with the thumb of his right hand.
Stephania’s bosom rose and fell in quick respiration.
“I am not accustomed to prefer a request and be denied,” she said proudly, her face the pallor of death. “Is this your last word, my lord?”
Crescentius met her gaze unflinchingly.
“It is my last,” he replied. “Yet one choice remains with you: You may betray the King,—or the Senator of Rome!”
He turned to go, but something whispered to him to stay. At that moment he despised himself for having imposed upon his wife a task, against which Stephania’s loftier nature had rebelled and he inwardly cursed the hour which had ripened the seed and him, who had sown it. Gazing after Stephania’s retreating form, all the love he bore her surged up into his heart as he cried her name.
Arrested by his voice, Stephania turned and paused for a moment swift as thought, but in that moment she seemed to read the very depths of his soul and the utter futility of further entreaty. Without a word she ascended the spiral stairway leading to the upper galleries and re-entered her own apartments, while with long and wistful gaze Crescentius followed the vanishing form of his wife.
And it seemed as if the Senator’s prophecy was to be fulfilled. At the reading of the Electoral manifesto, Otto had been seized with an uncontrollable fit of rage. He had torn the document to shreds and cast its fragments at the feet of the Bavarian duke, who acted as spokesman for his colleagues, the dukes of Thuringia, Saxony and Westphalia. Neither the arguments of the Electoral envoys, nor the violent denunciations of Eckhardt, who aired his hatred of Rome in language never before heard in the presence of a sovereign, could stand before Benilo’s eloquent pleading. On his knees the Chamberlain implored the King not to abandon Rome and his beloved Romans. Vainly the German dukes pointed to the dangers besetting the realm, vainly to the inadequate defences of the Eastern March. With a majesty far above his years, Otto declared his supreme will to make Rome the capital of the earth, and to restore the pristine majesty of the Holy Roman Empire. Rome was his destiny. Here he would live, and here he would die. Rome was pacified. He required no longer the presence of the army. Let Bavaria and Saxony defend their own boundaries as best they might; let the Count Palatine lead his veteran hosts across the Alps. He would remain. This his reply to the Electors.
On the eve of that eventful day the German dukes departed, while the Count Palatine proceeded to Tivoli, to prepare the great armament for their winter march across the Alps. It had come to pass as Crescentius had predicted. The die was cast. Rome, the Siren, had conquered.
In the night following these events, Rome in her various quarters presented a strange aspect of secret activity.
In the fortresses of the Cavalli and Caetani lights flitted to and fro through the gratings in the main court. Benilo, the Chamberlain, might be seen stealing from the postern gate. Towards the ruins of the Coliseum men whose dress bespoke them of the lowest rank, were seen creeping from lanes and alleys. From these ruins at a later hour, glided again the form of the Grand Chamberlain. Later yet,—when a gray light is breaking in the east, the gates of Rome, by St. John Lateran, are open. Benilo is conversing with the Roman guard. The mountains are dim with a mournful and chilling haze when Benilo enters the palace on the Aventine.