The Hill of Venus

by Nathan Gallizier

  CHAPTER VII

  THE QUEST

  As the world grew gray with waking light, Francesco came from thewoods and heard the noise of the sea in the hush that breathed in thedawn. The storm had passed over the sea and a vast calm hung upon thelips of the day. In the east a green streak shone above the hills. Thesky was still aglitter with sparse stars. An immensity of gloombrooded over the sea.

  Gaunt, wounded, triumphant, Francesco rode up beneath the banners ofthe dawn, eager yet fearful, inspired and strong of purpose. Wood andhill slept in a haze of mist. The birds were only beginning in thethickets, like the souls of children yet unborn, calling to eternity.Beyond in the cliffs, San Nicandro, wrapped round with night, stoodsilent and sombre athwart the west.

  Francesco climbed from the valley as the day came with splendor, aglow of molten gold streaming from the east. Wood and hillsideglimmered in a smoking mist, dew-bespangled, wonderful. As the sunrose, the sea stretched sudden into the arch of the west, a greatexpanse of liquid gold. A mysterious lustre hovered over the cliffs,waves of light bent like saffron mist upon San Nicandro.

  The dawn-light found an echo in Francesco's face. He came thatmorning the ransomer, the champion, defeated in life and hope andhappiness, yet with head erect, as if defying Fate. His manhood smotehim like the deep-throated cry of a great bell, majestic and solemn.The towers on the cliff were haloed with magic hues. Life, glory, joy,lay locked in the gray stone walls. His heart sang in him; his eyeswere afire.

  As he walked his horse with a hollow thunder of hoof over the narrowbridge, he took his horn and blew a blast thereon. There was a senseof desolation, a lifelessness about the place that smote his senseswith a strange fear. The walls stared void against the sky. There wasno stir, no sound within, no watchful faces at portal or wicket. Onlythe gulls circled from the cliffs and the sea made its moan along thestrand.

  Francesco sat in the saddle and looked from wall to belfry, from towerto gate. There was something tragic about the place, the silence of asacked town, the ghostliness of a ship sailing the seas with a deadcrew upon her decks. Francesco's glance rested on the open postern, anempty gash in the great gate. His face darkened and his eyes losttheir sanguine glow. There was something betwixt death and worse thandeath in all this calm.

  He dismounted and left his steed on the bridge. The postern beckonedto him. He went in like a man nerved for peril, with sword drawn andshield in readiness. Again he blew his horn. No living being answered,no voice broke the silence.

  The refectory was open, the door standing half ajar. Francesco thrustit full open with the point of his sword and looked in. A gray lightfiltered through the narrow windows. The nuns lay huddled on benchesand on the floor. Some lay fallen across the settles, others sat withtheir heads fallen forward upon the table; a few had crawled towardsthe door and had died in the attempt to escape. The shadow of deathwas over the whole.

  Francesco's face was as gray as the faces of the dead. There wassomething here, a horror, a mystery, that hurled back the warm courageof the heart.

  With frantic despair he rushed from one body to the other, turning thedead faces to the light, fearing every one must be that of his ownIlaria. But Ilaria was not among them; the mystery grew deeper, grewmore unfathomable. For a moment, Francesco stood among the dead nunsas if every nerve in his body had been suddenly paralyzed, when hiseyes fell upon a crystal chalice, half overturned on the floor. Itcontained the remnants of a clear fluid. He picked it up and held itto his nostrils. It fell from his nerveless fingers upon the stone andbroke into a thousand fragments, a thin stream creeping over thegranite towards the fallen dead. It was a preparation of hemlock andbitter almonds. He stared aghast, afraid to move, afraid to call. Thenuns had poisoned themselves.

  Like a madman he rushed out into the adjoining corridor, hither andthither, in the frantic endeavor to find a trace of Ilaria. Yet not atrace of her did he find. But what he did discover solved the mysteryof the grewsome feast of death which he had just witnessed. In acorner where he had dropped it, there lay a silken banderol belongingto a man-at-arms of Anjou's Provencals. They had been here, and thenuns, to escape the violation of their bodies, had died, thus cheatingthe fiends out of the gratification of their lusts.

  The terrible discovery unnerved Francesco so completely that for atime he stood as if turned to stone, looking about him like atraveller who has stumbled blindly into a charnel house. Urged bymanifold forebodings, he then rushed from room to room, from cell tocell. The same silence met him everywhere. Of Ilaria he found not atrace. Had the fiends of Anjou carried her away, or had she, inendeavoring to escape, found her death outside of the walls of SanNicandro?

  He dared not think out the thought.

  The shadows of the place, the staring faces, the stiff hands clawingat things inanimate, were like the phantasms of the night. Francescotook the sea-air into his nostrils and looked up into the blueradiance of the sky. All about him the garden glistened in the dawn;the cypresses shimmered with dew. The late roses made very death moreapparent to his soul.

  As he stood in deep thought, half dreading what he but half knew, avoice called to him, breaking suddenly the ponderous silence of theplace. Guided by its sound, Francesco unlatched the door and foundhimself face to face with the Duke of Spoleto.

  For a moment they faced each other in silence.

  Then he gave a great cry.

  "Ever, ever night!" he said, stretching out his hands despairingly asto an eternal void.

  The duke's eyes seemed to look leagues away over moor and valley andhill, where the blackened ruins of Astura rose beneath a dun smokeagainst the calm of the morning sky.

  A strange tenderness played upon his lips, as if with the extinctionof the Frangipani brood peace had entered his soul.

  "A man is a mystery to himself," he said.

  "But to God?"

  "I know no God, save the God, my own soul! Let me live anddie,--nothing more! Why curse one's life with a 'to be?'"

  Francesco sighed heavily.

  "It is a kind of Fate to me!" he said, "inevitable as the setting ofthe sun, natural as sleep. Not for myself do I fear it alone,--but Ishould not like to think that I should never see her again."

  The duke's eyes had caught life on the distant hillside, life surgingfrom the valleys, life and the glory of it. Harness, helm and shieldshone in the sun. Gold, azure, silver, scarlet were creeping from thebronzed green of the wilds. Silent and solemn the host rolled slowlyinto the full splendor of the day.

  The duke's face had kindled.

  "Grapple the days to come!" he said. "Let Scripture and ethics rot! Mymen are at your command! Let them ride by stream and forest, moor andmere! Let them ride in quest of your lost one, ride like the wind!"

  Francesco looked at the duke through a mist of tears.

  "You know?" he faltered.

  "For this I came!" replied the duke, extending his hand. "You willfind her whom your heart seeks. Like a golden dawn shall she rise outof the past. Blow your horn! Let us not tarry!"