The Sorceress of Rome. Gallizier Nathan

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СКАЧАТЬ broken and destroyed, Theodora's anger seemed for a moment to subside, like a trampled spark, before a great pity that rose in her heart. In an instant the whole company rushed upon her with excited gestures and before the Babel of jabbering tongues, each striving to tell his or her story in a voice above the rest, the Fury returned.

      Theodora stamped her foot and commanded silence. At the sight of the woman, Benilo's arms had fallen powerlessly by his side and Roffredo, taking advantage of an unwatched moment, had pushed the Chamberlain off and staggered to his feet.

      "Whose deed is this?" Theodora demanded, holding aloft the covering of the couch.

      "It was my accursed luck! The decanter was intended for this lying cur, whose black heart I will wrench out of his body!"

      And Benilo pointed to the shrinking form of Roffredo.

      "What had he done?"

      "He had insulted you!"

      "That proves his courage!" she replied with a withering glance of contempt.

      Then she beckoned to the attendants.

      "Have the girl removed and summon the Greek – though I fear it is too late."

      There was a ring of regret in her tones. It vanished as quickly as it had come.

      The body of Nelida, the dancing girl, was carried away and the guests resumed their seats. Roxané had reluctantly abandoned her usurped place of honour. A quick flash, a silent challenge passed between the two women, as Theodora took her accustomed seat.

      "A glass of wine!" she commanded imperiously, and Roffredo, reassured, rushed to the nearest attendant, took a goblet from the salver and presented it to the Queen of the Groves.

      "Ah! Thanks, Roffredo! So it was you who insulted me in my absence?" she said with an undertone of irony in her voice, which had the rich sound of a deep-toned bell.

      "I said you would embrace the devil, did he but appear in presentable countenance!" Roffredo replied contritely, but with a vicious side glance at Benilo.

      An ominous smile curved Theodora's crimson lips.

      "The risk would be slight, since I have kept company with each of you," she replied. "And our virtuous Benilo took up the gauntlet?"

      Her low voice was soft and purring, yet laden with the poison sting of irony, as through half-closed lids she glanced towards the Chamberlain, who sat apart in moody silence like a spectre at the feast.

      Benilo scented danger in her tone and answered cautiously:

      "Only a coward will hear the woman he loves reviled with impunity."

      Theodora bowed with mock courtesy.

      "If you wish to honour me with this confession, I care as little for the one as the other. From your temper I judge some innocent dove had escaped your vulture's talons."

      Benilo met the challenge in her smouldering look and answered with assumed indifference:

      "Your spies have misinformed you! But I am in no mood to constitute the target of your jests!"

      "There is but one will which rules these halls," Theodora flashed out. "If obedience to its mandates is distasteful to you, the gates are open – spread your pinions and fly away!"

      She flung back her head and their eyes met.

      Benilo turned away, uttering a terrible curse between his clenched teeth.

      There was a deep hush in the hall, as if the spirit of the dead girl was haunting the guests. The harps played a plaintive melody, which might indeed have stolen from some hearth of ashes, when stirred by the breath of its smouldering spark, like phantom-memories from another world, that seemed to call to Theodora's inner consciousness, each note a foot-step, leading her away beyond the glint and glitter of the world that surrounded her, to a garden of purity and peace in the dim, long-forgotten past. Theodora sat in a reverie, her strange eyes fixed on nothingness, her red lips parted, disclosing two rows of teeth, small, even, pearly, while her full, white bosom rose and fell with quickened respiration.

      "The Queen of the Groves is in a pensive mood to-night," sneered the Lord of Bracciano, who had been engaged in mentally weighing her charms against those of Roxané.

      Theodora sighed.

      "I may well be pensive, for I have seen to-day, what I had despaired of ever again beholding in Rome – can you guess what it is?"

      Shouts of laughter broke, a jarring discord, harshly upon her speech.

      "We are perishing with curiosity," shouted, as with one voice, the debauched nobles and their feminine companions.

      "In the name of pity, save our lives!" begged a girl nearest to Theodora's seat.

      "Can you guess?" the Queen of the Groves repeated simply, as she gazed round the assembly.

      All sorts of strange answers were hurled at the throne of the Queen of the Groves. She heeded them not. Perhaps she did not even hear them.

      At last she raised her head.

      Without commenting on the guesses of her guests, she said:

      "I have seen in Rome to-day – a man!"

      Benilo squirmed. The rest of the guests laughed harshly and Bembo, the Poet asked with a vapid grin:

      "And is the sight so wondrous that the Queen of Love sits dreaming among her admirers like a Sphinx in the African desert?"

      "Had he horns?" shouted the Lord of Bracciano.

      "Or a cloven hoof?" cried Oliverotto.

      "What was he like?" sneered a third.

      Theodora turned upon her questioners, a dash of scorn in her barbed reply.

      "I speak of a man, not reptiles like you – you all!"

      "Mercy, oh queen, mercy!" begged the apoplectic poet, amid the noisy clamour of his jeering companions. But heedless of their jabbering tongues Theodora continued earnestly:

      "Not such men as the barons of Rome are pleased to call themselves, cowardly, vicious, – beasts, who believe not in God nor the devil, and whose aim in life is but to clothe their filthy carcass in gaudy apparel and appease the cravings of their lust and their greed! I speak of a man, something the meaning of which is as dark to you as the riddle of the Sphinx."

      The company gazed at each other in mute bewilderment.

      Theodora was indeed in a most singular mood.

      "Are we not at the Court of Theodora?" shouted the Lord of Bracciano, who was experiencing some inconvenience in the feat of embracing with his short arms the two women between whom he was seated. "Or has some sudden magic transported us to the hermitage of the mad monk, who predicts the End of Time?"

      "Nay," Benilo spoke up for the first time since Theodora's rebuke had silenced him, "perhaps our beautiful Queen of Love has in store for her guests just such a riddle as the one the Sphinx proposed to the son of Iokasté – with but a slight variation."

      The illiterate high-born rabble of Rome did not catch the drift СКАЧАТЬ