The Hill of Venus Read online

  CHAPTER VII

  ROME!

  The chimes of the Angelus were borne to him on the soft breeze ofevening, when, on the third day of his journey, Francesco caught sightof the walls and towers of Rome. As he drew rein on the crest of a lowhill, the desolate brown wastes of the Campagna stretched before him,mile upon mile to northward, towards the impenetrable forests ofViterbo.

  Before him rose the huge half-ruined wall of Aurelian, battered byGoth and Saracen and imperial Greek; before him towered thefortress-tomb of the former master of the world, vast and impregnable.Here and there above the broken crenelations of the city's battlementsrose dark and massive towers, square and round, marking the fortifiedmansions of the Roman nobles.

  In the evening light the towers seemed encircled as by a halo. Themachicolated heights, the encircling ramparts, the stern tomb of theEmperor Hadrian rose proudly impregnable into the golden air ofevening, a massive witness to the power of a Church, literallymilitant here below. Under the broad Aelian bridge, built centuriesago, rolled the turbid waves of the Tiber, and upon the bridge itselfa stream of humanity, hardly less intermittent, was moving. Francesco,having buried his sword and shield under a grass-grown ruin beyondthe city walls, rode dazed and wondering into the sun-kissed splendorsof pontifical Rome.

  Gradually the sun sank, the valley of the Tiber filled with goldenlights, moving along little by little, travelling slowly up theemerald hillocks, covering the bluish mountains of Alba with a goldenflush, crowning the thousand churches and palaces with a rosy sheen,then dying away into the pale, amber horizon, rosy where it touchedthe distant hills, bluish where it merged imperceptibly with the uppersky. Bluer and bluer became the hills, deeper and deeper that firstfaint amber. The valleys were filled with gray-blue mist, againstwhich the Seven Hills stood out dark, cold and massive.

  There was a sudden stillness, as when the last chords of a greatsymphony have died away. The yellow waters of the Tiber eddied sullenand mournful round the ship-shaped island, along by Vesta's temple,beneath the cypressed Aventine.

  After having secured temporary lodging at a tavern bearing the sign ofthe Mermaid, over against the tower of Nona, near the bridge of SanAngelo, Francesco wandered out into the streets of Rome.

  The inn was old, as the times of Charlemagne, and was a favoritestopping-place for travellers coming from the north. The quarter wasat that time in the hands of the powerful house of the Pierleoni,whose first Pope, Anacletus, had been dead a little over a century,and who, though they lorded the castle and many towers and fortressesin Rome, had not succeeded in imposing their anti-pope upon the Romanpeople against the will of Bernard of Clairvaux.

  Francesco wandered through the crooked, unpaved streets, in and out ofgloomy courts, over desolate wastes and open places. There was acrisis at hand in the strife of the factions. Every one went armed,and those who knelt to hear mass in a church, knelt with their backsto the wall.

  At his inn, too, he had noted every one lived in a state of armeddefence, against every one, including the host and other guests. Andreasons were not lacking therefor, for Rome was in the throes ofpolitical convulsions and its walls resounded the battle-cry of Guelphand Ghibelline.

  Howling and singing, a mob filled the streets southward to theCapitol, or even to the distant Lateran, where Marcus Aurelius on hisbronze horse watched the ages go by. Across the ancient Aelian bridgeFrancesco stalked, under the haunted battlements of Castel San Angelo,where the ghost of Theodora was said to walk on autumn nights, whenthe south wind blew, and through the long wreck of the fair porticothat had once extended from the bridge to the Basilica, till he sawglistening in the distance the broad flight of steps leading to thewalled garden court of St. Peter's.

  Here he rested among the cypresses, wondering at the vast bronzepine-cone and the great brass peacocks, which Symmachus had broughtthither from the ruins of Agrippa's baths, in which the family of theCrescentii had fortified themselves during more than a hundred years.

  For a long time Francesco sat there in mournful silence, drinking inthe sun-steeped air of evening, and the scent of the flowers that grewhere with the profusion of spring-time.

  An indescribable sense of desolation came over him, as he thought ofhis happy childhood with its joys and griefs, as he thought of thespring-time of life, the days of Avellino, and of Ilaria. He sat herean outcast, an exile, one who had no further claim on the joys of theliving, guiltless himself, the victim of another's sin. The soul ofRome, the Rome of Innocent and Clement, had taken hold of his soul,and, for a time, he dreamed himself away from the bleak present andthe bleaker future. The past, with his father's sins, his own sorrows,the friendship of the Viceroy, the love of Ilaria, were now allinfinitely far removed and dim. The future, whose magic mirror hadonce dazzled his senses, had faded like a departing vision into theblue Roman sky. Only the present remained, only the hour was his, thedreamy half-narcotic present with its mazy charms which enmeshed him,far from the reality, the Rome as it existed, where the Church was theWorld, and Rome herself meant some seven or eight thousand ruffians,eager always for a change, because it seemed that no change could befor the worse.

  In the ancient Basilica of St. Peter's at least there was peace. Thewhite-haired priests solemnly officiated day by day, morning and noon,and at Vespers more than a hundred voices sang the Vesper psalms inthe Gregorian chant. Slim youths in violet and white swung silvercensers before the high altar, and the incense floated in spiralclouds upon the sunbeams that fell slanting upon the antique floor.

  Here, at least, as in many a cloister of the world, the Church wasstill herself, as she was and is and always will be; words were spokenand solemn prayers intoned that had been familiar to the lips of theapostles.

  But they brought no consolation to Francesco's heart; his soul was notrelieved by the solemn ceremony. With the rest of the worshippers heknelt unconsciously in the old cathedral; with the rest of theworshippers he chanted the responses and breathed anew theincense-laden air, which was to encompass him to his life's end.

  Refreshed neither in body nor soul, he returned to the inn late atnight. But he could not sleep. Opening wide the wooden shutters of hiswindow, he looked out upon the Mausoleum of the Flavian Emperor, atthe tide of the Tiber, which gleamed and eddied in the moonlight.

  Life rose before him in a mystery, a mystery for him to solve bydeeds. For a moment he felt that he must rise above his fate, that hewas not idly to dream away his years, and the long dormant instinct ofhis race bade him defy the yoke which was about to be imposed uponhim, not to evade it. Then his heart beat faster; his blood surged tohis throat, and his hands hardened one upon the other as he leanedover the stone sill, and drew the night air sharply between his closedteeth.

  And as a gentle breeze stirred the branches of the willows by theriver brink, in it seemed to float a host of spirit armies, ghostlyknights and fairy-maidens and the forecast shadows of things to come.Once before during the evening had this sensation gripped his soul, aswith a solitary monk whom he chanced to meet, he had traversed thedesolate regions of the Aventine in the sun's afterglow. And then, asnow, there had come the rude awakening.

  But from the monk he had learned that the Pontiff had fled from Romebefore the approaching hosts of Conradino, and had betaken himself toViterbo, while his champion, Charles of Anjou, had marched tosouthward, leaving the city to the Ghibellines and the imperial partyof the Colonna.

  End of Book the Second.

  Book the Third

  THE BONDAGE