Chapter IV The Angel of the Agony
he morning of the following day broke hazy and threatening. But as the hours wore on, the sky, which had been overcast, brightened slowly and in that instant’s change the earth became covered with a radiance of sunshine and the heavens seemed filled with ineffable peace.
It was late in the day, when Otto woke from his lethargy. Hour after hour he had raved without recovering consciousness. His breathing grew weaker. He was thought to be in his last agony. Little by little the vigour of his youth had reasserted itself, little by little he had opened his eyes. His sight had become dimmed from the effects of the poison, and his reason seemed to sway and to totter; the fevered flow of blood, the wild beating of his temples, caused everything around him to scintillate in a crimson haze and flit before his vision with fitful dazzling gleams. But his eyes seemed fixed steadily in a remote recess of the room.
Those surrounding his couch had believed him nearing dissolution, and when he opened his eyes, Otto looked upon the faces of those who had guided his steps ever since he set his foot upon Italian soil, Eckhardt, Count Tammus, and Sylvester, the silver-haired pontiff who had come from Rome. Their faces told him the worst. He attempted to raise himself in his cushions, but his strength failed him, and he fell heavily back. Anew his ideas became confused and his gaze resumed its former fixedness.
His lips moved and Eckhardt, who bent over him, to listen, turned white with rage.
“Again her accursed name,” he growled, turning to the monk by his side.
“Stephania—where is Stephania?” moaned the dying youth.
A voice almost a shriek rent the silence.
“I am here,—Otto,—I am here!”
A shadow passed before the eyes of the amazed visitors in the sick-chamber, a shadow which seemed to come out of the wall itself, and the wife of the Senator of Rome staggered towards Otto’s couch, who made a feeble effort to stretch out his hands toward her. He could not raise them. They were like lead. She rushed to his side, ere Eckhardt could prevent, and with a sob fell down before the couch and grasped them tightly in her own.
The petrified amazement, which had pictured itself in the features of those assembled, at the unexpected apparition, gave vent to a flurry of whispers and conjectures during which Eckhardt, with face drawn and white and haggard, had rushed through the outer chamber to the door.
“Guards!” he thundered, “Guards!”
Two spearmen appeared in the doorway.
“Seize this woman and throw her over the ramparts!” the Margrave said with a voice whose calm formed a fearful contrast to the blazing fury in his eyes.
The men-at-arms approached with hesitation, but Sylvester barred their progress with uplifted arm.
“Vengeance is the Lord’s!” he turned to Eckhardt, whose eyes, aflame with wrath, seemed the only living thing in his stony face.
A terrible laugh broke from the Margrave’s lips.
“His mad pleadings saved her once! Now, all the angels in heaven and demons in hell combined shall not save her from her doom!” he replied to the Pontiff. “Seize her, my men! She has killed your king! Over the ramparts with her!”
They dared deny obedience no longer. Approaching the couch they laid hands on the kneeling woman. But the sight of violence for a moment so incensed the prostrate form in the cushions, that he started up, as he had done in the vigour of his health.
With eyes glowing with fever and wrath, Otto leaped from the bed, planting himself before the prostrate form of the woman.
“Back!” he cried. “The first who lays hand on her dies by my hand, a traitor! Down on your knees before the Empress of the Romans!”
Terror and amazement accomplished Stephanie’s salvation.
Even Eckhardt was stunned. He knelt with the rest with averted face.
“Leave the room!” Otto turned to the men-at-arms, and with heads bowed down they strode from the sick chamber and resumed their watch outside. What did it all mean? The presence of the Senator’s wife at their sovereign’s bedside, Eckhardt’s contradictory demeanour, Otto’s strange words; mystified they shook their heads, glad the terrible task had been spared them.
Otto’s exertion was followed by a complete collapse, and he fell back in a swoon. After a time he seemed to rally. Without assistance he sat up straight and rigid, and turned towards the woman, whose wan face and sunken eyes made her fatal beauty all the more terrible.
“Tell me—shall I live till night?” he whispered.
And as she hid her face from him with a sob, he continued:
“Do not deceive me! I am not afraid!”
His voice broke. Every one in the room knelt down weeping. Sylvester tried to answer, but in vain. Hiding his face in his hands, the pontiff sobbed aloud.
“Softly—softly—” Otto whispered to Stephania, then turning towards the sky he whispered:
“How beautiful!”
The morning clouds were growing rosy; the twilight had become warm and mellow. The first beam of the sun appeared over the rim of the horizon. The dying youth held his face with closed eyes towards the light. A faint shiver ran through his body and with a last effort he stretched out his arms, as if he would have rushed to meet the rising orb.
Suddenly he was seized by a convulsion; the veins swelled on neck and temples.
“Water—water!” he gasped choking.
Stephania knew the symptoms. Pale as death she staggered to her feet, filled a cup with clear spring water and held it to his lips.
Otto, grasping her hand with the cup, drank thirstily from the ice-cold draught.
Then his head fell back. A last murmur came from his half-open lips:
“Stephania,—Stephania—”
Then his life went out. With a moan of heart-rending anguish she closed his eyes. The face of the youth, kissed by the early rays of the December sun, took on a look as of one sleeping. His soul, freed from earthly love, had entered on its eternal repose.
Johannes Crescentius was avenged.
Eckhardt had watched the last moments of his king. In the awful presence of Death, he had restrained a new outburst of passion against the woman, who had so utterly made that dead youth her own. But he had sworn a terrible oath to himself, that she should pay the penalty, if that life went out,—it would be cancelling the last debt he owed on the accursed Roman soil.
And no sooner had the light faded from Otto’s eyes, no sooner had they been closed under the soft touch of Stephania’s hand, than Eckhardt rushed anew to the door and the terrible voice of the Margrave thundered through the stillness of the death-chamber:
“Guards! Throw this woman over the ramparts! She has killed your King!”
Again the guards rushed into the chamber. The terrible denunciation had stirred their zeal. Stephania, kneeling by Otto’s couch, never stirred, but as the men-at-arms, over-awed by the spectacle that met their gaze, paused for a moment, the sound of falling crystal, breaking on the floor, startled the silver-haired pontiff.
He had seen enough.
Stepping between Stephania and her would-be slayers he waved them back.
Then he picked up a fragment of the empty flask.
“This phial,” he spoke to Eckhardt, “is of the same shape and size as one discovered in a witch’s grave, when they were digging the foundations for the monastery of St. Jerome!”
And he strode towards the woman and laid his hands on her head.
“She will soon answer before a higher tribunal,” said the monk of Aurillac.
“Father,” she whispered, holding the hands of the corpse in her own, while her head rested on her arms,—“I cannot see,—stoop down,—and let me whisper—”
“I am here, daughter, close—quite close to you.”
He inclined his ear to her mouth and listened. But though her lips moved, no words would come.
After a moment or two of intense stillness, she whispered, raising her head.
“It is bright again! They are calling me! We will go together to that far, distant land of peace. I am with you, Otto—hold me up, I cannot breathe—”
Gently Sylvester lifted her head.
“Otto,—my own love—forgive—” she gasped. A convulsive shudder passed through her body and she fell lifeless over the dead body of her victim.
Stephania’s proud spirit had flown.
Sylvester muttered the prayer for the departed, and staggered to his feet.
Eckhardt pointed to her lifeless clay. In his livid face burnt relentless, unforgiving wrath.
“Throw that woman over the ramparts!” he turned to his men. “She shall not have Christian burial!”
Anew Sylvester intervened.
“Back!” he commanded the guards. “Judge not,—that ye may not be judged. What has passed between those two—lies beyond the pale of human ken. He alone, who has called, has the right to judge them! She died absolved.—May God have mercy on her soul!”
As weeping those present turned to leave the death-chamber, Eckhardt bent over the still, dead face of Otto.
“I will hold the death-watch,” he turned to Sylvester. “Have the bier prepared! To-morrow at dawn we start. We return to our Saxon-land,—we go back across the Alps. In the crypts of Aix-la-Chapelle the grandson of the great Otto shall rest; he shall sleep by the side of the great emperor, whom he visited ere he came hither; Charlemagne’s phantom has claimed him at last. Rome shall not have a lock of his hair!”
“As you say—so shall it be!” replied Sylvester, his gaze turning from Otto to the lifeless clay of Stephania.
Softly he raised her dead body and laid it side by side with that of Theophano’s son, joining their hands.
“Though they shall sleep apart in distant lands, their souls are one in the great beyond, that holds no mysteries for the departed.”
From the chapel of the cloister at the foot of the hill, stealing through the solemn stillness of the December morning, came the chant of the monks:
“Quando corpus morietur,
Fac ut animae donetur
Paradisi gloria.”