CHAPTER VII THE FACE IN THE PANEL

On the following day Tristan entered upon his duties as captain of the Senator's guard.

The first person upon whom he chanced on his rounds at the Lateran was the Grand Chamberlain, who inquired affably how his penitences were progressing and expressed the hope that he had received final absolution, and that his sins would not weigh too heavily upon his soul. Basil commended him for his zeal in the cause of the Senator, hinting incidentally that his duties between the Lateran and Castel San Angelo need not deprive him of the society of the fair Roman ladies, who would welcome the stranger from Provence and would doubtlessly enmesh his heart, if it were not well guarded. He then proceeded to caution Tristan with respect to his exalted prisoner. Numerous attempts at abduction had been made from time to time, Tristan having, by his prowess and daring, prevented the last, emanating doubtlessly from the Pontiff's nearest kith and kin. The men under him could be fully relied upon. Nevertheless, it behooved him to be circumspect.

After a time Basil departed, and Tristan went about his business, inspecting the guard and familiarizing himself with the place where he was to keep his first watch.

The level beams of the evening sun filled the Basilica of St. John in Laterano. There were pearl lights and lights of sapphire; falling radiances of emerald and blood-red; vague translucent greens, that seemed to tremble under spiral clouds of incense.

Now the sun was sinking behind Mount Janiculum. The clouds at the zenith of the heavens were rose-hued, but it was growing dark in the valleys, and the great church began to take on sombre hues. It seemed to frown upon him, to warn him not to enter, an impression he was long afterwards to remember, as he strode through the high-vaulted corridors.

He hesitated, till the sound of a distant chant reached his ear. With a sort of fascination he could not account for, he watched the advance of the slowly gathering gloom, as an increasing greyness stole into the chapels.

Evening was about to take the veil of night.

The light left the stained-glass windows and the church grew darker and darker. The altar steps lay now in purple shadows that were growing deeper and denser each moment.

Shadowy forms seemed to be moving about in the sanctuaries. Soon a monk entered with a taper, lighting the lights before some remote shrines. Tristan could not distinguish his features, for the light was very dim. Yet it enabled him to see that there were a few belated worshippers in the church.

After a time the great nave was deserted. As the lone monk passed quickly through a sphere of thin light, Tristan gave a start. It seemed a ghost in a cassock that had vanished in the sacristy. He told himself that the impression was absurd, but he could not throw it off. He had caught a momentary glimpse of a face that had no human likeness, and the way in which the cassock had flapped about the limbs of the fleeting form seemed to suggest that it clothed a frame that had lost its flesh.

Superstitious fear began to creep over him. He felt that he must seek the open, escape the haunting incense-saturated pall, these dim sepulchral chapels. Such light as there was, save what emanated from the candles on the altar, came from a stone lamp which cast its glimmer on the vanishing form.

In every corner of the vast nave now lay fast gathering darkness. The figures of the saints seemed vague and formless. The altar loomed dim in the shadows.

All these things Tristan noted.

The whole interior of the church was now steeped in the dense pall of night, illumined only by the faint radiance of the lamp upon the altar, which seemed rather to intensify than to lift the gloom.

A faint footfall was audible behind the carven screen, near the entrance to the chapels. A figure, almost lost in the gloom, glided into the nave, and shadows were falling about him like thin veils.

It was an unusual hour for monks to be abroad. None the less, he seemed sure of himself, for he proceeded without hesitation to the altar, shrouded as it was in utter darkness, but for the light of one faint taper, which gleamed afar, like a star in the nocturnal heavens, driving the gloom a few paces from the carven stone. There the shrouded form seemed to melt into the very pall of night that weighed heavily upon the time-stained walls of the Mother Church of Rome.

At first Tristan thought it was some belated penitent seeking forgiveness for his sins, but when the dark-robed form did not return he strode towards the altar to see if he might perchance be of assistance to him.

When Tristan reached the altar steps he could discover no trace of a human being, though he searched every nook and corner and peered into every chapel, examined every shrine.

Seized with a strange restiveness he began to pace up and down before the altar steps. He was far from feeling at ease. He remembered the warning of the Grand Chamberlain. He remembered the strange tales he had heard whispered of the Pontiff's prison house.

Tristan suddenly paused.

He thought he heard sibilant whispers and the low murmur of voices from behind the screen at the eastern transept of the Capella, and at once he began assembling the things in his mind which might beset him in the hour of darkness.

The Chapel of the Most Holy Saviour of the Holy Stairs, the Scala Santa of the present day, adjoins the Lateran Church. At the period of which we write it was still the private chapel of the popes in the Patriarchium, and was called the Sancta Sanctorum on account of the great number of precious relics it enshrines.

To this chapel Tristan directed his steps, oppressed by some mysterious sense of evil. By a judicious disposition of the men under his command he had, after a careful survey of the premises, placed them in such a manner that it would be impossible for any one to gain access to the stairs leading to the Pontiff's chamber.

Had it been a hallucination of his senses conjured up by his sudden fear?

Not a sound broke the stillness. Only the echoes of his own footsteps reverberated uncannily from the worn mosaics of the floor. In the dim distance of the corridors he saw a shadow moving to and fro. It was the guard before the entrance to a side-chapel of the Basilica.

What caused Tristan to pause in the night gloom of the corridor leading to the Pontifical Chapel he did not know. He seemed as under a strange spell. At a distance from him of some five feet, in the decorated wall, there was a dark panel some two feet in height and of corresponding breadth, looking obliquely towards the Pontifical Chapel. The panel contained a small round opening, a spy-hole which communicated with a secret chamber in the thickness of the wall.

A slight rustling noise came from behind the masonry. Tristan heard it quite distinctly. It suggested the passing of naked feet over marble.

Suddenly, noiselessly the panel parted.

A sudden gleam of white, blinding light shot into the chapel like a spear of silver.

Tristan paused with a start, looking swiftly and inquiringly at the black slit in the wall and as he did so the spear of light shifted a little in its passing.

A face, white with the pallor of death, ghastly and hideous as a corpse that has retained upon its set features the agony of dying, peered out from blackness into blackness.

A tremor shook Tristan's frame from head to toe. He could not have cried out, had he wished to. He felt as one grazed by a lightning bolt. Then, in a flash that made his heart and soul shudder within him, he knew.

He had seen looking at him a face—the clean shaven face of a man. But it was not human. It bore the terrible stigmata of the unquenchable fire; an abominable vision of the lust that cannot be satiated, the utter, unconquerable, fiendish malevolence of Hell. A harsh, raven-like croak broke the stillness, and at the sound of that cry the terrible face vanished with the swiftness of a trick. Instead, a long arm, clothed in a black sleeve, stole through the opening. A flash, keen as that of the lightning, cut the air and a dagger struck the mosaic floor at Tristan's feet with such force that its point snapped after shattering the stone, drawing fire from the impact.

Bounding back, Tristan uttered a shrill cry of terror, but when he looked in the direction of the panel only dim dun dusk met his eyes.

Rushing frantically from the corridor he now called with all his might. His outcries brought the guards to the scene. Briefly, incoherently, almost mad with terror, he told his tale. They listened with an air of amazement in which surprise held no small share. Then they accompanied him back to the chapel.

Arriving near the spot he was about to point to the dagger, to corroborate his wild tale. But the dagger had disappeared. Only the shattered marble of the floor lent testimony and credence to his words.

On the following morning an outcry of horror arose from all quarters of Rome.

On the night which preceded it, the Holy Host had been taken from the Pontifical Chapel in the Lateran.