Chapter X The Temple of Neptune
haken to the inmost depths of his soul by a storm of forebodings, hope, fear and passion, Otto had shaken himself free from the throng of flattering friends and courtiers and had sought the solitude of his own chamber. He had dismissed the envoys of the Electors with the unalterable reply that he would not return to his gloomy Saxon-land. Let the Saxon dukes defend the borders of the realm, let them keep Poles and Slavs in check. His own destiny was Rome. Here he would live, and here he would die. Deeply offended, the German envoys had departed. The consequences might be far-reaching indeed. Tearing off his accoutrements and all insignia of office and rank, Otto flung himself on his couch in solitary seclusion. All had been against him,—save Benilo. Benilo alone understood him. Benilo alone encouraged the young king to follow out his destiny. Benilo alone had pointed out that the earth might be governed from the ancient seat of empire without detriment to any of the nations of the Holy Roman Empire. Benilo alone had demonstrated the necessity of Otto’s presence in his chosen capital, whose heterogeneous elements would obey no lesser authority.
Weary and torn by conflicting emotions he at last sank down before the image of Mary and prayed to the Mother of God to guide his steps in the dark wilderness in which he found himself entangled. Thus transported out of himself far beyond the vociferous pageant of that exhausting day, Otto gave himself with all the mystical fervour of his Hellenic nature to visions of the future.
Thus the evening approached. Long before the hour appointed he slowly bent his steps towards the little temple of Neptune, crowning the olive-clad summits of Mount Aventine and overlooking the vale of Egeria and the meandering course of the Tiber. The clouds above, beautiful with changing sunset tints, mottled the broken surface of the river with hues of bronze and purple between the leaves of the creeping water-plants, which clogged the movement of the stream. On the river-bank the rushes were starred with iris and ranunculus.
The sun was declining in the horizon. A solemn stillness, like the presage of some divine event, held the pulses of the universe. A soft rose crept into the shimmer of the water, cresting the summits of far off Soracté. The transient, many-tinted glories of the autumn sunset were reflected in opalescent lights on the waves of the Tiber, and swept the landscape in one dazzling glow of gold and amber, strangely blending with the gold and russet of the autumn foliage. The floating smell of flowers invisible hovered on the air; a mystic yearning seemed to pervade all nature in that chill, melancholy odour, that puts men in mind of death. The soft masses of leaves decayed caused a brushing sound under the feet of the lonely rambler.
Round him in the silent woods burnt the magnificent obsequies of departing summer.
Fire-flies moved through the embalmed air, like the torches of unseen angels. The late roses exhaled their mystic odour, and silently like dead butterflies, here and there a wan leaf dropped from the branches.
At every step the wood became more lonely. It was as untroubled by any sound as an abandoned cemetery. Birds there were few, the shade of the laurel-grove being too dense and no song of theirs was heard. A grasshopper began his shrill cry, but quickly ceased, as if startled by its own voice. Insects alone were humming faintly in a last slender ray of sunlight, but ventured not to quit its beam for the neighbouring gloom. Sometimes Otto trended his path along wider alleys bordered by titanic walls of weird cypress, casting dark shade as a moonless night. Here and there subterranean waters made the moss spongy. Streams ran everywhere, chill as melted snow, but silently, with no tinkling ripples, as if muted by the melancholy of the enchanted wood. Moss stifled the sound of the falling drops and they sank away like the tears of an unspoken love.
For a moment; Otto lingered among a tangle of elder-bushes. The oblique sun rays filtering through the dense laurel became almost lunar, as if seen through the smoke of a funeral torch.
Along the edge of the road goats were contentedly browsing and a rugged sun-burnt little lad with large black eyes was driving a flock of geese. Storm clouds lined with gold were rising in the North over the unseen Alps, and high up in the clear sky there burned a single star.
Deep in thought, Otto passed the walls of the cloisters of St. Cosmas.
Onward he walked as in the memory of a dream.
Through the purple silence came faintly the chant of the monks:
“Fac me plagis vulnerari
Pac me cruce inebriari
Ob amorem Filii.”
At last the Ionic marble columns, softly steeped in the warmth of departing day, came into sight. Silence and coolness encompassed him. The setting sun still cast his glimmer on the capitals of the columns whose fine, illumined scroll work, contrasted with the penumbral shadows of the interior, seemed soft and bright as tresses of gold.
A hand softly touched Otto’s shoulder. A voice whispered:
“If you would know all—come! Come and I will tell you the secret which never yet I have uttered to mortal man.”
In the departing light, veiled by the thick cypresses and pale as the moon-beams, just as in the Egerian wilderness in the whiteness of summer-lightnings, she put her face close to his, her face white as marble, with its scarlet lips, its witch-like eyes.
On they walked in silence, hand in hand.
On they walked along the verge of a precipice, where none have walked before, resisting the vertigo and the fatal attraction of the abyss. If they should prove unequal to the strain,—overstep the magic circle?
Stephania was pale and trembled. She smiled,—but the smile troubled him, he scarce knew why. He tried to think it was the melancholy, caused by the wild and stormy look of the sunset and the loud cawing of the hereditary rooks, which seemed to croak an everlasting farewell to life and hope in the oaks of the convent.
Must he repulse the love that surged up to him in resistless waves?
Must he renounce the near for the far-away, the ideal, whose embodiment she was, for the commonplace?
Slowly the sun sank to rest in a sea of crimson and gold, a fiery funeral of foliage and flowers.
A clock boomed from a neighbouring tower. The heavy measured clang vibrated long through the stillness, quivering In the air, like a warning knell of fate.
Softly she drew him into the dusk of the pagan temple, drew him down beside her on one of the scattered fragments of antiquity, a dog-eared God of black Syenite from Egypt, which had shared the fate of its Latin equals.
But he could not sit beside—her.
Abruptly he rose; standing before her, the passion of the long fight surged up in him. Stephania sat motionless, and for a time neither spoke.
At last Otto broke the silence. His voice was strained as if he were suffering some great pain.
“I have come!” he said. “I have cut every bridge between present and past! I am here.—Have you thought of my appeal?”
“Oh, why do you torture me?” she replied half sobbing, “I venture to ask for a delay, and you arraign me as though I stood at the bar of judgment.”
“It is our day of judgment,” he replied. “It is the day when life confronts us with our own deeds,—when we must answer for them, when we must justify them. For if we are but triflers, we cannot stand in the face either of heaven or of hell!”
He bent down and took her hands in his.
“Stephania,” he said, “I too have doubted, I too have wavered:—give me but one word of assurance,—my love for you is a wound which no eternity can cure.”
She broke from him, to hide her weeping.
“Have you thought of the forfeit?” she faltered after a time.
“I would not forego the doom!—You alone are my light in this dark country of the world. Do not stifle the voice in your heart with reasons—”
“Reasons! Reasons!” she interrupted. “What does the heart know of reasons! Mine has long forgotten their pleadings—else, were I here?”
Something in her voice and gesture was like a lightning flash over a dark landscape. In an instant he saw the pit at his feet.
“What then,” he faltered, “is this to lead to?”
“Some one has been with you,” she said quickly. “These words were not yours.”
He rallied with a fault smile.
“A pretext for not heeding them.”
“Eckhardt has been with you! He has maligned me to you!”
“He has warned me against you!”
She turned very pale.
“And you heeded?”
“I am here, Stephania!”
The subtle perfume clinging to her gown mounted to his brain, choking back reason and resistance.
“Yet again I ask you, what is this to lead to? I am afraid of the future as a child of the dark!”
She held his hands tightly clasped.
“Oh!” she sobbed, “why will you torture me? I have borne much for our love’s sake—but to answer you now is to relive it and I lack the strength.”
He held her hands fast, his eyes in hers.
“No, Stephania,” he said, “your strength never failed you when there was call on it, and our whole past calls on it now! Eckhardt tells me that the Romans hate me,—that they resent the love I bear them—oh, if it were true!”
Stephania gazed at him with wide astonished eyes.
“Ah! It is this then,” she said with a sigh of relief. “A moment’s thought must show you what passions are here at work. You must rise above such fears. As for us,—no one can judge between us, but ourselves. Shake off these dread fancies! There lies but one goal before us. You pointed the way to it once. Surely you would not hold me back from it now?”
Gently she drew him down by her side. Through the crevices in the roof glimmered the evening star.
She saw the conflict, which raged within him, the instinct to break away from her, who could never more be his own. She saw the fear which bound him to her,—she saw the great love he bore her, and she knew that he was hers soul and body, her instrument, her toy,—her lover if she so willed.
He spoke to her of his childhood in the bleak northern forests; of the black pines of Thuringia, of the snow-drifts, which froze his heart; of the sad sea horizons brooding infinitely away; of the gloomy abbey of Merséburg, in the Saxon-land, where the great Emperor Otto, his grandsire, was sleeping towards the day of resurrection, where under the abbot’s guidance he had first been initiated into the magic of a sunnier clime. He spoke to her of his Greek mother, the Empress Theophano, whose great beauty was only rivalled by her own, and of that eventful night, when he descended into the crypts of Aix-la-Chapelle and opened the tomb of Charlemagne, then dead almost two hundred years. He told her how he had fought against this mad, unreasoning love, which had at first sight of her crept into his heart, urging naught in palliation of his offence, but like a flagellant laying bare his tortured flesh to a self-inflicted scourge. He begged her to decide for him, to guide him, lonely antagonist of destiny—dared he ask for more? She was the wife of the Senator of Rome.
As he ceased speaking, Otto covered his face with his hands, but Stephania drew them down and held them firmly in her own. Truly, if it was victory to accomplish the end, by drawing out a loving, confiding heart, the victory was with the vanquished. And with the memory of the compact she had sealed a wondrous pity flashed through the woman’s soul, a mighty longing, to lift the son of the Greek Princess up into joyous peace! No thought of evil marred her pure desire,—alas! She knew not at that moment, that even in that pity lay his direst snare, and hers.
The decisive moment was at hand. In the thickets before the temple her eye discerned the gleam of spear-points. For a moment a violent tremor passed through her body. She had hardly strength sufficient to maintain her presence of mind, and her face was pale as that of a corpse.
Would she, a second Delilah, deliver Otto to her countrymen—the Romans?
It was some time ere she felt sufficiently composed to speak. Her throat was dry and she seemed to choke.
Otto remarked her discomfiture, far from guessing its cause.
“I will fetch you some water,” he said, starting up to leave the temple.
Quick as lightning she had arisen, holding him back.
“It is nothing,” she whispered nervously. “Do not leave me!”
And he obeyed.
Stephania closed her eyes as if to exclude the sight of the spear-points.
“Otto,” she said softly, after a pause, for the first time calling him by his name, “I fear there is one great lesson you have never learned.”
“And what is this lesson?”
“That, what you are doing for the Romans might also be done for you! Is there no heart to share your sorrow, to help you bear the pain of disappointment, which must come to you sooner or later? You told me, you had never loved before we met—”
He nodded assent.
“Never—Never!”
“Ah! Then you do not know. You seek for light, where the sun can never shine! Striving for the highest ideals of mankind we can rise from the black depths of doubt but by one ladder,—that of a woman’s love!”
Again the dreadful doubt assailed him.
“If you mean—that,—oh, do not speak of it, Stephania! The wound is already past healing.”
She bent towards him and rested her head upon his shoulders.
“And yet I must,—here—and to you.”
“No—no—no!” he muttered helplessly and turned away. The words of Eckhardt rushed and roared through his memory: “Once you are hers,—no human power can save you from the abyss.”
But Eckhardt hated the Romans as one hates a scorpion, a basilisk.
Stephania relinquished not her victim. He must be hers, body and soul, ere she shrieked the fatal word.—The warm blood hurtling through her veins quenched the last pitying spark.
“Ah!” she said with a sigh. “You have never known the tenderness of a woman’s smile,—the touch of a woman’s hand,—her soft caress,—the sound of her voice,—that haunts you everywhere,—waking,—in your dreams—”
“Stephania!” he gasped, and rose as if to flee from her, but she held him back.
“You have never known the ear that listens for your footsteps,—the lips that meet your own in a long, passionate kiss,—the kiss that thrills—and burns—and maddens—”
“Stephania—in mercy—cease!”
Again he attempted to rise, again she drew him down.
“You are not like other men—Otto! Will you always live so lonely,—so companionless,—with no one to love you with that lasting love, for which your whole soul cries out?”
Shivering he raised his arms as if to shut the sight of her from his dazzled gaze. Again, though fainter, Eckhardt’s terrible warning knocked at the gates of his memory. But her purring voice with its low melodious roll, wooed his listening heart till the doors of reason tottered on their hinges. And the end—what would be the end?
“Tell me no more,” he gasped, “tell me no more! I cannot listen! I dare not listen! You will destroy me! You will destroy us both!”
Her lips parted in a smile,—that fateful smile, which caused his soul to quake. Her fine nostrils quivered, as she bent towards him.
“You cannot?” she said. “You dare not? Will you pass the cup untasted, the cup that brims with the crimson joy of love? Is there none in all the world to take you by the hand,—to lead you home?”
With a cry half inarticulate he sprang toward her,—his fierce words tumbling from delirious lips:
“Yes,—there is one,—there is one,—one who could lift me up till my soul should sing in heavenly bliss,—one who could bring to me forgetfulness and peace,—one who could change my state of exalted loneliness to a delirium of ecstasy,—one who could lead me, wherever she would—could I but lay my head on her breast,—touch her lips,—call her mine—”
Stephania stretched out her white, bare arms that made him dizzy. He stood before her quivering with hands pressed tightly against his throbbing temples. One moment only.—Half risen from her seat, her eye on the gleaming spear-points in the thicket, she seemed to crouch towards him like some beautiful animal, then a half choked out cry broke from his lips, as their eyes looked hungrily into each others, and they were clasped in a tight embrace. Stephania’s arms encircled Otto’s neck and she pressed her lips on his in a long, fervid kiss, which thrilled the youth to the marrow of his bone.
At that moment a curtain of matted vines, which divided the vestibule of the little temple from its inner chambers was half pushed aside by a massive arm, wrapped with scales of linked mail. Standing behind them, Crescentius witnessed the embrace and withdrew without a word.
Was Stephania not overacting her part?
He waited for the signal.
No signal came.
Then a terrible revelation burst upon the Senator’s mind.
Johannes Crescentius had lost the love of his wife.
After a time the spear-points disappeared.
The Senator of Rome saw his own danger and the forces arrayed against him. He was no longer dealing with statecraft. The weapon had been turned. With a smothered outcry of anguish he slowly retraced his steps.
Neither had seen the silent witness of their embrace.
Silence had ensued in the temple.
Each could feel the tremor in the soul of the other.
After a time Otto stumbled blindly into the open. Stephania remained alone in rigid silence.
In frozen horror she stared into the dusk.
“The game is finished,—I have won,—oh, God forgive me—God forgive me!” she moaned. “Otto... Otto... Otto...”
“If you would know all,—come at midnight to the churchyard near Ponte Sisto,” whispered a voice close by his side, as Crescentius staggered towards the Aelian bridge.
He felt a hand upon his shoulder, turned, and saw, like some ill-omened ghost in the wintry twilight, a lean pale face staring into his own.
In the darkness, under the dense shadows of the cypress-trees he could not distinguish the features of his companion, who wore the habit of a monk.
But when Crescentius turned to reply, he was alone.
“Christ too prayed a human prayer for a miracle: Father, let this cup pass from me!” he muttered, continuing upon his way.
With eyes on the ground he strode along the narrow walk, skirting the Tiber, in whose turbid waves no stars were reflected. And scarce consciously he repeated to himself:
“As like as a man and his own phantom,—his own phantom.”
He passed the bridge and entered the mausoleum of the Flavian emperor. Rapidly he ascended to his own chamber.
The candle was burning low.
Up and down he paced in the endeavour to order his thoughts. But no order would come into the chaotic confusion of his mind.
What was the dominion of Rome to him now?
What the dominion of the Universe?
What devil in human shape had counselled the act in the seeds of which slumbered his own destruction?
The flame of the dying candle flickered and grew dim.
Had Stephania returned?
He heard no steps, no sound in her chamber.
At the memory of what he had seen, a groan broke from his lips.
How he hated that boy, who after wresting from him the dominion of the city, had stolen from him the love of his wife!
Stolen? Had it not been thrust upon him? What mortal could have resisted the temptation? He would die—thus it was written in the stars;—but Stephania would weep for him—
On tip-toe the Senator stole to the chamber of his wife. The door stood ajar. The chamber was empty.
The candle flared up for the last time, lighting up the gloom. Then it sank down and went out.
Crescentius was alone in the darkness.