CHAPTER VI
A MEETING OF GHOSTS
A voice whose prompting he could not resist, impelled Tristan, afterhis parting from the Monk of Cluny, to follow the Grand Chamberlain,who had taken the direction of the Pincian Hill. His retreating formbecame more phantom-like in the misty moonlight, as viewed from theramparts of the Emperor's Tomb. Nevertheless, mindful of the partingwords of the monk, and filled with dire misgivings, Tristan set outat once. True to his determination, he procured a small lantern and apiece of coarse thick cloth, which he concealed under his cloak, then,by a solitary pathway, he followed the direction he had seen Basiltake. The Bridge of San Angelo was deserted and not a human being wasabroad.
After a time he arrived at a small copse, where Basil's form haddisappeared from sight. Clearing away the underbrush, Tristan came towhat seemed a fissure in a wall, which cast a tremendous shadow overthe surrounding trees and bushes. Creeping in as far as he dared, hepaused, then, with mingled emotions of expectancy and apprehensionwhich affected him so powerfully that for a moment he was hardly masterof his actions, he slowly and carefully uncovered his lantern, strucktwo flints and lighted the wick.
His first glance was intuitively directed to the cavity that openedbeneath him.
Of Basil he saw no trace, notwithstanding he had seen him enterthe cavity at the point where he himself had entered. Ere longhowever, he heard a thin, long-drawn sound, now louder, now softer;now approaching, now receding, now verging toward shrillness, nowreturning to a faint, gentle swell. This strange, unearthly music wasinterrupted by a succession of long, deep rolling sounds, which rosegrandly about the fissures above, like prisoned thunderbolts strivingto escape. Roused by the mystery of the place and the uncertainty ofhis own purpose, Tristan was, for a moment, roused to a pitch of suchexcitement that almost threatened to unsteady his reason. Conscious ofthe danger attending his venture, and the fearful legends of invisiblebeings and worlds, he was constrained to believe that demons werehovering around him in viewless assemblies, calling to him in unearthlyvoices, in an unknown tongue, to proceed upon his enterprise and takethe consequences of his daring.
Thus he remained for a time, fearful of advancing or retracing hissteps, looking fixedly into the trackless gloom and listening to thestrange sounds which, alternately rising and falling, still floatedaround him. The fitful light of his lantern suddenly fell upon ashape that seemed to creep through one of the stone galleries. In theunsteady gleam it appeared from the distance like a gnome wanderingthrough the bowels of the earth, or a forsaken spirit from purgatory.
Had it been but a trick of his imagination, or had his mortal eyesseen a denizen of the beyond? At last he aroused himself, trimmed withcareful hand his guiding wick and set forth to penetrate the great rift.
He moved on in an oblique direction for several feet, now creepingover the tops of the foundation arches, now skirting the extremitiesof the protrusions in the ruined brickwork, now descending into dark,slimy, rubbish-choked chasms, until the rift suddenly diminished in alldirections.
For a moment Tristan paused and considered. He was almost tempted toretrace his steps, abandoning the purpose upon which he had come.Before him stretched interminable gloom, brooding, he knew not overwhat caverns and caves, inhabited by denizens of night.
He moved onward, with less caution than he had formerly employed,when suddenly and without warning a considerable portion of brickworkfell with lightning suddenness from above. It missed him, else heshould never had known what happened. But some stray bricks hurled himprostrate on the foundation arch, dislocating his right shoulder, andshattering his lantern into atoms. A groan of anguish rose to his lips.He was left in impenetrable darkness.
For a short time Tristan lay as one stunned in his dark solitude.Then, trying to raise himself, he began to experience in all theirseverity the fierce spasms, the dull gnawings that were the miserableconsequences of the injury he had sustained. His arm lay numbed by hisside, and for the space of some moments he had neither the strength northe will to even move the sound limbs of his body.
But gradually the anguish of his body awakened a wilder and strangedistemper in his mind, and then the two agonies, physical and mental,rioted over him in fierce rivalry, divesting him of all thoughts, savesuch as were aroused by their own agency. At length, however, the pangsseemed to grow less frequent. He hardly knew now from what part of hisbody they proceeded. Insensibly his faculties of thinking and feelinggrew blank; he remained for a time in a mysterious, unrefreshing reposeof body and mind, and at last his disordered senses, left unguided andunrestrained, became the victims of a sudden and terrible illusion.
The black darkness about him appeared, after an interval, to be dawninginto a dull, misty light, like the reflection on clouds which threatena thunderstorm at the close of day. Soon this atmosphere seemed to becrossed and streaked with a fantastic trellis work of white, seethingvapor. Then the mass of brickwork which had fallen in, grew visible,enlarged to an enormous bulk and endowed with the power of locomotion,by which it mysteriously swelled and shrank, raised and depresseditself, without quitting for a moment its position near him. And then,from its dark and toiling surface, there rose a long array of duskyshapes, which twined themselves about the misty trellis work above andtook the palpable forms of human countenances.
There were infantile faces wreathed with grave worms that hung roundthem like locks of slimy hair; aged faces dabbled with gore and slashedwith wounds; youthful faces, seamed with livid channels along whichran unceasing tears; lovely faces distorted into the fixed coma ofdespairing gloom. Not one of these countenances exactly resembled theother. Each was stigmatized by a revolting character of its own. Yet,however deformed their other features, the eyes of all were preservedunimpaired. Speechless and bodiless they floated in unceasing myriadsup to the fantastic trellis work, which seemed to swell its wildproportions to receive them. There they clustered in their goblinamphitheatre, and fixedly and silently they glared down, withoutexception, on the intruder's face.
Meanwhile the walls at the side began to gleam out with a light oftheir own, making jaded boundaries to the midway scenes of phantomfaces. Then the rifts in their surface widened, and disgorgedmisshapen figures of priests and idols of the olden time, which cameforth in every hideous deformity of aspect, mocking at the faces ofthe trellis work, while behind and over the whole soared shapes ofgigantic darkness. From this ghastly assemblage there came not theslightest sound. The stillness of a dead and ruined world was abouthim, possessed of appalling mysteries, veiled in quivering vapors andglooming shadows.
Days, years, centuries seemed to pass, as Tristan lay gazing up in atrance of horror into this realm of peopled and ghostly darkness.
At last he staggered to his feet. He must find an egress or go mad.Slowly raising himself upon his uninjured arm, he looked vainly aboutfor the faintest glimmer of light. Not a single object was discernibleabout him. Darkness hemmed him in, in rayless and triumphant obscurity.
The first agony of the pain having resolved itself into a dullchangeless sensation, the vision that had possessed his senses was now,in a vast and shadowy form, present only to his memory, filling thedarkness with fearful recollections and urging him on, in a restless,headlong yearning, to effect his escape from this lonely and unhallowedsepulchre.
"I must pass into light. I must breathe the air of the sky, or I shallperish in this vault," he muttered in a hoarse voice, which the fitfulechoes mocked by throwing his words as it were, to each other, even tothe faintest whisper of its last recipient.
Gradually and painfully he commenced his meditated retreat.
Tristan's brain still whirled with the emotion that had so entirelyoverwhelmed his mind, as, staggering through the interminable gloom, heset forth on his toilsome, perilous journey.
Suddenly however he paused, bewildered, in the darkness. He had nodoubt mistaken the direction, and a gleam of light, streaming throughthe fissure of the rock, informed him that there were others in thisabo
de of darkness, beside himself.
Had he come upon the object of his quest?
For a moment Tristan's heart stood still, then, with all the cautionwhich the darkness, the danger of secret pitfalls and the risk ofdiscovery suggested, he crept toward the crevice until the glowgradually increased. From the bowels of the earth, as it were, voiceswere now audible; they seemed to issue from the depths of a caverndirectly below where Tristan stood. Groping his way carefully alongthe wall of rock, he at last reached the spot whence the light issuedand presently started at finding himself before an aperture just wideenough to admit the body of a single man. A sort of perpendicularladder was formed in the wall of narrow juttings of stone, and belowthese was the rock chamber from which the voices proceeded.
It was some time ere the confusion of his ideas and the darknessallowed Tristan to form any notion of the character of the locality,when it suddenly dawned upon him that he had strayed into a placeregarding which he had heard and wondered much: the Catacombs of St.Calixtus.
This revelation was by no means reassuring, although the presence ofothers held out hope that he would discover an exit from this shadowylabyrinth.
For a moment Tristan remained as one transfixed, as he gazed from hislofty pinnacle into the shadowy vault below.
He saw a stone table, lighted with a single taper, in the centre ofwhich lay an unsheathed dagger, and an object the exact character ofwhich he could not determine in the half gloom, also a brazen bowl.About a dozen men in cloaks with black vizors stood around, and one,taller than the rest, the gleam of whose eyes shone through the slitsof his mask, appeared to be concluding an address to his companions.
The words were indistinguishable to Tristan but, when the speaker hadconcluded, a dark murmur arose which subsided anon. Then those presentcrowded around the stone table. The taper was momentarily obscured bythe intervening throng, and Tristan could not see the ceremony, thoughhe could hear the muttered formula of an oath they seemed to be taking.What he did see caused the chill of death to run through his veins.
The group again receding, the man bared his left arm, raised the daggeron high and let it descend. Tristan saw the blood weltering slowlyfrom the self-inflicted wound, trickling drop by drop into the brazenbowl, which another muffled figure was holding. Then each one presentrepeated the ceremony, he who was presenting the bowl being the last tomingle his blood with that of the rest.
Then another stepped forth and, raising the bloody knife on high,stabbed the object that lay upon the table. Some mysterious signspassed between them, meaningless words that struck Tristan's ear withthe vague memory of a dimly remembered dream. Then he who seemed tobe the speaker raised the object on high and, walking to a niche,concealed in the shadows, placed it in, what seemed to Tristan, afissure in the rock.
Like ghosts returning to the bowels of the earth, they glided away,silently, soundlessly, and soon the silence of death hovered once againin the rock caverns of the Catacombs of St. Calixtus.
In breathless suspense, utterly oblivious of the injury he hadsustained, Tristan gazed into the deserted rock chamber where the dimlight of the taper still flickered in a faint breath of air wafted fromwithout.
Hardly did the hearts of the Magi when the vision of the Star in theEast first dawned upon their eyes experience a transport more vividthan that which animated Tristan when he found his terrible stressrelieved.
But almost immediately a reaction set in and a dire misgivingextinguished the quick ray of hope that had lighted his heart, luringhim on to escape from these caverns of Death.
By a strange mischance they had neglected to extinguish the taper.They might return at any moment and, his presence discovered, the doomin store for the intruder on their secret rites was not a matter ofsurmise. Composing himself to patience, Tristan waited, glaring as acaged tiger at the gates whose opening or closing might spell freedomor doom. At last, after a considerable lapse of time, moments thatseemed eternity, he resolved to hazard the descent.
Slowly and painfully moving, with the pace and perseverance of aturtle, he writhed downward upon his unguided course until he reachedthe bottom of the cavern. Breathless with exhaustion after hisbreakneck descent, he waited in the shadow of a projecting rock. Whenthe deep sepulchral silence remained undisturbed, he advanced towardthe fissure in the rock where one of the muffled company had placed themysterious object.
Tristan's quest was not at once rewarded. The shelving in the rockcavern, being irregular and almost indistinguishable, offered no clueto the mystery. A great fear was upon him, but he was determined, todiscover the meaning of it all.
Suddenly he paused. A small cabinet of sandal wood, concealed behindthe jutting stone, had caught his eye. It was painted to resemble therock and the untrained eye would not linger upon it. A small keyholewas revealed, but the key had been taken away.
Tristan stood irresolute, with straining eyes and listening ear. Nota sound was audible. Even the piping of the night wind in the rockfissures seemed to have died to silence. With quick resolution heinserted one of the sharp-edged flints and gave a wrench.
When the top receded he could not repress an outcry. A chill coursedcoldly through his veins. His breath came and went in sobs, as from onehalf drowned.
He only glanced at what was before him for the fraction of a second.But he knew what had made the very soul within him shudder and hisbones grind, as if in mortal agony.
It was as though Hell itself had opened the gates. He staggered back ina paroxysm of horror.--
With a grim, set face Tristan closed the top of the cabinet andreplaced it on the rocky ledge. Thus he stood, his face buried in hishands. Could the All-seeing God permit such an outrage and let theperpetrators live?
But there was no time for reflection. At any moment one of the muffledphantoms might return, and indeed he thought he heard steps approachingthrough one of the rock galleries. He crouched in breathless, agonizedsuspense, for it did not suffer him longer in these caverns of crimeand death.
He dimly remembered the direction in which the nocturnal company haddeparted and, after some research, he discovered a narrow corridorthat seemed to slope upward through the gloom. His lantern having beenbroken to atoms, the taper held out little promise of life beyond abrief space of time during which he must find the entrance of thecavern, if he did not wish to meet a fate even worse than death in theevent of discovery.
Grimly resolved Tristan raised the flickering taper and entered thegallery on his left. The Stygian gloom almost extinguished the feeblelight, though he noted every object he passed, every turn in thetortuous ascent.
After some time which seemed eternity he at last perceived a dim glowat the extremity of the gallery, and soon found himself before theouter cavity of the stone wall, in a region of the city that seemedmiles removed from the place where he had entered.
It was near daybreak. The moon shone faintly in the grey heavens and avaporous mist was sinking from shapeless clouds that hovered over thecourse of the Tiber.
Tristan looked about his solitary lurking place, but beheld no humanbeing in its lonely recesses. Then his eyes fixed themselves with ashudder upon the glooming vault from which he had made his escape.
He was on the track of a terrible mystery, a mystery which shunned thelight of day and of heaven. He must fathom it, whatever the risk. Astrange new energy possessed him. His life at last seemed to have apurpose. He was no longer a rolling stone. There was work ahead. Hisfuture course stood out clearly defined, as Tristan turned his backupon the Catacombs of St. Calixtus and took the direction of theAventine. To Odo, the Monk of Cluny, he must confide the terriblediscovery he had made in the mephitic caverns of the Catacombs. To himhe must turn for counsel, of which he stood sorely in need. And in someway which he could not account for to himself, Tristan felt as if thefate of Hellayne was bound up in these dreadful mysteries. At firstthe thought seemed absurd, but somehow it gained upon him and began toadd new weight to his burden. Could he but see her! Could he but have
speech with her. A great dread seized him at the thought of what mightbe her fate at the present hour. What would she think of him who seemedto have abandoned her in the hour of dire distress, when she needed himabove all men on earth?
Did her intuition, did her heart inform her that he had roamed the cityfor days in the hope of finding her? Had her heart informed her that,like a spirit judged and condemned, he found neither rest nor peacein his vain endeavors to discover her abode? Was she sinking underher loneliness, perishing from uncertainty of her fate, doubts of hisallegiance? To what perils and miseries had he exposed her, and to whatend? He groaned in despair, as his mind reverted from the dark presentto the happy past. A past, forever gone!--
A faint streak of light crept across the East, permeating the grey dawnwith roseate hues as Tristan re-entered the Emperor's Tomb to partakeof an hour or two of much needed rest, ere the business of the new-bornday claimed him its own.
Under the Witches' Moon: A Romantic Tale of Mediaeval Rome Page 30