CHAPTER VI THE LURE OF THE ABYSS

The sun had sunk to rest in fleecy clouds of crimson and gold.

The clear and brilliant moonlight of Italy enveloped hill and dale, bathing in its effulgence the groves, palaces and ruins of the Eternal City. The huge pile of the Colosseum was bathed in its rosy glow, raising itself in serene majesty towards the beaming night sky.

A few hours later a great change had come over the heavens. The wind had sprung up and had driven the little downy clouds of sunset into a great, black mass, which it again tore into flying tatters that it swept before it. The moon rose and raced through the dun and silver. Below it, in the vast spaces of the deserted amphitheatre, from whose vomitories pale ghosts seemed to flit, the big boulders and rain-left pools looked dim and misty. Night had cast her leper's cloak on nature and the moon seemed the leprous face.

Deepest silence reigned, broken only by the occasional hoot of an owl, or the swishing of a bat that whirled its crazy flight in and out the labyrinthine corridors.

By the largest of these boulders stood the dark cloaked form of a man. As the moon-thrown shadows of the clouds swept over him and the rude rock by which he stood looking up at the sky, his black mantle flapped in the wind and clung to his limbs, making him look even taller than he was.

At the feet of Basil cowered the huge Molossian hound. As the wind grew stronger and the clouds above assumed more fantastic shapes, it raised its head and gave voice to a low whine. On the distant hillocks a myriad dusky flames seemed to writhe and hiss and dart through tinted moon-gleams.

Three times he whistled—and in the misty, moonlit expanse countless forms, as weird as himself, seemed to rise and form a great circle about him.

Were they the creatures of his brain which had at last given way in the excitement of the hour? Were they phantoms of mist and moon, wreathing round him from the desolate marshes? Or were they real beings of flesh and blood, congregations of crime and despair, mad with the misery of a starving century, the horrors of serfdom and oppression that had united in the great reel of a Witches' Sabbat?

Round him they circled, at first slowly,—like the curls of a marsh, then faster and ever faster, till his eyes could scarcely follow them as they rotated about him in their horrible dance of madness and sin.

Black clouds raced over the moon. The reddish gleam of a forked tongue of fire illumined the dark heavens, and thunder went pealing down the hills. Suddenly out of the underbrush arose a black form, about the height and breadth of a man, but without the distinct outlines of one. Basil's face grew white as death, and his gaze became fixed as he clutched at the rock for support. But the next moment he seemed to gain his reassurance from the knowledge that he had seen this phantom before. The dog lay at his feet and continued its low tremulous whine.

"You have kept the tryst," gibbered the bent form as it slowly approached, supporting itself upon a crooked staff of singular height.

"Else were I not the man to compel fate to do my bidding," responded the Grand Chamberlain. "Fear can have no part in the compact which binds us. I have live things under my feet that clog my steps and grow more stubborn day by day."—

"Deem you, you can keep your footing in the black lobbies of hell?" gibbered the cowled form. "For you will need all your courage, if you would reach the goal!"

Basil, for a moment, faced his shadowy interlocutor in silence. There was a darker light in his eyes when he spoke.

"Give me but that which my soul desires and I shall run the gauntlet unflinchingly. I shall brace my courage to the dread experiment."

A fierce gust of wind shook the cypresses and holm oaks into shuddering anxiety.

"You are about to embark upon an enterprise more perilous than any man now living has ever ventured upon," spoke the cowled form. "Your soul will travel through the channels, through which the red and fiery tide rolls up when the volcano wakes. Each time it wakes the lava washes over the lost souls, which, chained to rings in the black rock, glow like living coals, but leaves them whole, to undergo their fate anew. Do you persist?"

"Give me what I desire—"

"Ay—so say they all—but to grovel in the dust before the Unknown Presence which they have defied."

"Who are you to taunt me with a fear my soul knows not?" Basil turned to the black-robed form, stretching out his hand as if to touch his mantle.

A magnetic current passed through his limbs that caused him to drop his arm with a cry of pain.

Forked lightnings leaped from one cloud-bank to another.

Distant thunder growled and died among the hills.

"I have seen the fall of Nineveh and Babylon. I was present at the destruction of the Holy City by the legions of Titus, I witnessed the burning of Rome by Nero and the fall of the temple of Serapis. I stood upon Mount Calvary under the shadow of the world's greatest tragedy."

The voice of the speaker died to silence.

Basil's hand went to his head, as if he wished to assure himself whether he was awake or in the throes of some mad dream.

It is a narrow boundary line, that divides the two great realms of sanity and madness. And the limits are as restless as those of two countries divided from each other by a network of shifting rivers. What belonged to the one overnight may belong to the other to-morrow.

An overmastering dread had seized upon Basil at the speech of the uncanny apparition. Was not he, too, pushing his excursions now into the one realm, now into the other? And who would know in which of the two to seek for him?

"Have you indeed wandered upon earth ever since those days?" he stammered, once more slave to his superstition.

The apparition nodded.

"I have drunk deep from the black wells of despair. I have raised the shadowy altars of him who was cast out of the heavens, higher and higher, till they almost touch the throne of the Father."

"Your master then is Lucifer—"

"Cannot the Fiend as well as God live incarnate in human clay? Is not the earth the meeting ground of Heaven and Hell? Why should not Basil, the Grand Chamberlain, be Hell's incarnation?"—

"What then must I do to deserve the crimson aureole?"

"Espouse the cause of him who rules the shadows. He will give to you what your soul desires. One of the shadowy congregation that rules the world through fear, make quick wings for Time, that crawls through eternity like a monstrous snake, while with starved desire your eyes glare at the fleeting things of life—dominion, power and love, that you may snatch from fate! Only by becoming one of us can your soul slake its thirst. Speak—for my time is brief—"

When Basil turned towards the bent form of the speaker his gaze fell upon a gleaming knife which Bessarion had produced from under the loose folds of his gown.

For a moment the two stood face to face. Neither spoke, each seemingly intent upon fathoming the thoughts of the other. The wind hissed and screamed through the corridors of the Colosseum.

It was Basil who broke the silence.

"What is it, you want?"

"Bare your left arm!"

There was a natural hollow in the rock, that the weather had scooped out in the stone altar.

Basil obeyed.

The gibbering voice rose again above the silence.

"Hold it over the basin!"

The lightnings twisted and streamed like silvery adders through the dark vaults of the heavens, and terrific peals of thunder shook the shuddering world in its foundations.

The bent form raised the knife.

Three drops of blood dripped, one by one, into the hollow of the stone.

Bessarion chanted some words in an unintelligible jargon as, with a claw-like hand, he bound up the wound in Basil's arm.

"At midnight—in the Catacombs of St. Calixtus—you will stand face to face with the Presence," the apparition spoke once more.

The next moment, after a fantastic salutation, he had vanished, as if the earth had swallowed him, behind a projecting rock.

Basil remained for a time in deep rumination. The Molossian hound rose up from the ground as soon as the adept of the black arts had disappeared, and, sitting on its haunches, gazed inquisitively into its master's face.

Suddenly it uttered a growl.

At the next moment the misshapen form of an African Moor crouched at the feet of the Grand Chamberlain. Noiselessly and swiftly as a panther he had sped through the waste spaces of the amphitheatre, and even Basil could not overcome a feeling of revulsion as he gazed into the hairy, bestial features of Daoud, whom he employed when secrecy and despatch were essential to the success of a venture.

Red inflamed eyelids gleamed from a face whose cadaverous tints seemed enhanced by wiry black hair that hung in disordered strands from under a broad Spanish hat. Daoud was undersized in stature, but possessed prodigious strength, and the size of his hands argued little in favor of him who had incurred the disfavor of his master or his own.

This monster in human guise Basil had acquired from a certain nobleman in the suite of the Byzantine ambassador extraordinary to the Holy See.

Basil looked up at the moon which just then emerged from the shadow of a cloud. Then he gave a nod of satisfaction.

"Your promptness argues well for your success," he turned to his runner who was cowering at his feet, the ashen face with the blinking and inflamed eyes raised to his master. "Know you the road to southward, my good Daoud?"

The Moor gave a nod and Basil proceeded.

"You must depart this very night. Take the road that leads by Benevento to the Shrines of the Archangel. You will overtake the Senator and deliver into his hands this token. You will return forthwith and bring to me—his answer. Do I make myself quite clear to your understanding, my good Daoud?"

The Moor fell prostrate and touched Basil's buskin with his forehead.

"Up!" the latter spurned the kneeling brute. "To-morrow night must find you in the Witches' City."

With these words he placed into the Moor's hand a small article, carefully tied and sealed.

The twain exchanged a mute glance of mutual understanding, then Daoud gave a bound, darted forward and shot away like an arrow from the bow. Almost instantly he was out of sight.

The hound bounded after him but, obedient to his master's call, instantly returned to the latter's feet.

For some time Basil remained near the rock where the weird ceremony had taken place.

"The Rubicon is passed," he muttered. "The stars—or the abyss."

Then, slowly quitting the stupendous ruins of the Amphitheatre, he took the direction of the Catacombs of St. Calixtus.