CHAPTER VII

THE QUEST

As the world grew gray with waking light, Francesco came from the

woods and heard the noise of the sea in the hush that breathed in the

dawn. The storm had passed over the sea and a vast calm hung upon the

lips of the day. In the east a green streak shone above the hills. The

sky was still aglitter with sparse stars. An immensity of gloom

brooded over the sea.

Gaunt, wounded, triumphant, Francesco rode up beneath the banners of

the dawn, eager yet fearful, inspired and strong of purpose. Wood and

hill slept in a haze of mist. The birds were only beginning in the

thickets, like the souls of children yet unborn, calling to eternity.

Beyond in the cliffs, San Nicandro, wrapped round with night, stood

silent and sombre athwart the west.

Francesco climbed from the valley as the day came with splendor, a

glow of molten gold streaming from the east. Wood and hillside

glimmered in a smoking mist, dew-bespangled, wonderful. As the sun

rose, the sea stretched sudden into the arch of the west, a great

expanse 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 that

morning the ransomer, the champion, defeated in life and hope and

happiness, yet with head erect, as if defying Fate. His manhood smote

him 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 eyes

were afire.

As he walked his horse with a hollow thunder of hoof over the narrow

bridge, he took his horn and blew a blast thereon. There was a sense

of desolation, a lifelessness about the place that smote his senses

with a strange fear. The walls stared void against the sky. There was

no stir, no sound within, no watchful faces at portal or wicket. Only

the gulls circled from the cliffs and the sea made its moan along the

strand.

Francesco sat in the saddle and looked from wall to belfry, from tower

to gate. There was something tragic about the place, the silence of a

sacked town, the ghostliness of a ship sailing the seas with a dead

crew upon her decks. Francesco's glance rested on the open postern, an

empty gash in the great gate. His face darkened and his eyes lost

their sanguine glow. There was something betwixt death and worse than

death in all this calm.

He dismounted and left his steed on the bridge. The postern beckoned

to him. He went in like a man nerved for peril, with sword drawn and

shield 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 thrust

it full open with the point of his sword and looked in. A gray light

filtered through the narrow windows. The nuns lay huddled on benches

and on the floor. Some lay fallen across the settles, others sat with

their heads fallen forward upon the table; a few had crawled towards

the door and had died in the attempt to escape. The shadow of death

was over the whole.

Francesco's face was as gray as the faces of the dead. There was

something here, a horror, a mystery, that hurled back the warm courage

of the heart.

With frantic despair he rushed from one body to the other, turning the

dead faces to the light, fearing every one must be that of his own

Ilaria. But Ilaria was not among them; the mystery grew deeper, grew

more unfathomable. For a moment, Francesco stood among the dead nuns

as if every nerve in his body had been suddenly paralyzed, when his

eyes fell upon a crystal chalice, half overturned on the floor. It

contained the remnants of a clear fluid. He picked it up and held it

to his nostrils. It fell from his nerveless fingers upon the stone and

broke into a thousand fragments, a thin stream creeping over the

granite towards the fallen dead. It was a preparation of hemlock and

bitter almonds. He stared aghast, afraid to move, afraid to call. The

nuns had poisoned themselves.

Like a madman he rushed out into the adjoining corridor, hither and

thither, in the frantic endeavor to find a trace of Ilaria. Yet not a

trace of her did he find. But what he did discover solved the mystery

of the grewsome feast of death which he had just witnessed. In a

corner where he had dropped it, there lay a silken banderol belonging

to a man-at-arms of Anjou's Provencals. They had been here, and the

nuns, to escape the violation of their bodies, had died, thus cheating

the fiends out of the gratification of their lusts.

The terrible discovery unnerved Francesco so completely that for a

time he stood as if turned to stone, looking about him like a

traveller who has stumbled blindly into a charnel house. Urged by

manifold forebodings, he then rushed from room to room, from cell to

cell. The same silence met him everywhere. Of Ilaria he found not a

trace. Had the fiends of Anjou carried her away, or had she, in

endeavoring to escape, found her death outside of the walls of San

Nicandro?

He dared not think out the thought.

The shadows of the place, the staring faces, the stiff hands clawing

at things inanimate, were like the phantasms of the night. Francesco

took the sea-air into his nostrils and looked up into the blue

radiance of the sky. All about him the garden glistened in the dawn;

the cypresses shimmered with dew. The late roses made very death more

apparent to his soul.

As he stood in deep thought, half dreading what he but half knew, a

voice called to him, breaking suddenly the ponderous silence of the

place. Guided by its sound, Francesco unlatched the door and found

himself 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 as

to an eternal void.

The duke's eyes seemed to look leagues away over moor and valley and

hill, where the blackened ruins of Astura rose beneath a dun smoke

against the calm of the morning sky.

A strange tenderness played upon his lips, as if with the extinction

of 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 and

die,--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 of

the sun, natural as sleep. Not for myself do I fear it alone,--but I

should not like to think that I should never see her again."

The duke's eyes had caught life on the distant hillside, life surging

from the valleys, life and the glory of it. Harness, helm and shield

shone in the sun. Gold, azure, silver, scarlet were creeping from the

bronzed green of the wilds. Silent and solemn the host rolled slowly

into the full splendor of the day.

The duke's face had kindled.

"Grapple the days to come!" he said. "Let Scripture and ethics rot! My

men are at your command! Let them ride by stream and forest, moor and

mere! 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 will

find her whom your heart seeks. Like a golden dawn shall she rise out

of the past. Blow your horn! Let us not tarry!"