The Hill of Venus

  CHAPTER VII

  THE PASSAGE

  Francesco rode out into the scented night and the round yellow moonrode with him. Strange things were happening beneath that moon; in thecrucible of destiny a new life was forming, new feelings arising onthe ashes of the old. And Francesco's heart was slowly undergoing achange as he rode through the night into a season of darkness,inevitable, irrevertible.

  Ahead of him the great road stretched white in the moonlight, a broadribbon which lost itself among hills and in the shadows of trees. Inhis ears was the thunder of his horse's feet, pounding insistentclamor into the quiet of the night. He would have desired wings forhis steed; the wind of the speed of his going swept cool against hisface. The night was gray around him, a velvet moon-steeped darkness,odorous with the fragrance of breaking earth. Far away thedeep-throated bay of a dog rose and died across the world. A bellnote, thinned by distance to a faint dream sound, stole over silenthill and dale; peace seemed to wrap the world round as in a cloistergarden. With every mile that now carried him farther away from hisEden, from his garden of dreams, from his lost youth, new scenesunrolled themselves before him. Off in the wide Apulian plains lightstwinkled here and yonder, wakeful eyes of watchfulness among thehills. He passed pale glimmering bogs, where lonely herons brooded,and wide barren heaths, over which the road led straight as an arrow'sflight.

  As the miles reeled away under him, his restlessness began to increasewith the sweep of his horse's stride. Vague forms seemed to slip byhim in the shadows; in every bush beside the road he saw white faceslurking. Strange, half-formed impressions of the new life he was aboutto enter upon, haunted him; strange forms in monkish garbs seemed topass him in the gloom of the night and vanish silently as ghosts.Later he could not tell if he had seen them, or if they had been butthe excrescences of his fevered brain. For always, when he hadendeavored to rouse himself and look about him sanely, the roadstretched before him white and desolate.

  The weight of the hours past, yet more the presage of those to come,had crushed Francesco's spirit with merciless relentlessness. He wasyet too young to realize the healing power of time, how it bearsforgetfulness on its kindly wings, how its shadow becomes finally ashield, by which the keen daggers of remembrance are blunted andturned aside. He did not know that the human soul can suffer only sofar, that greater miseries efface the memory of the lesser. The ironyof his parting from Ilaria, to him forever lost, her cruel words, hadstabbed his soul to the quick, and to himself he appeared to haveentered into a dismal, dreary land, a boundless valley of shadows.

  As he rode on, at a wild and reckless pace, the only human being onthat wide expanse, all sense of pain and misery left the son ofGregorio Villani for the time, even all consciousness of the regionwhich he traversed. He could not stop; it seemed an iron weight wouldcrush him to earth, while, at the same time, a force against which hecould not struggle drove him on. His brain seemed to be on fire; ballsof flame danced before his eyes; while he looked upon them, theyturned to faces grinning from out a blood-red mist. The faces drewcloser and melted into one, Ilaria's face, as he had seen it last,white in its marble-cold disdain, with scarlet lips and flamingpoppies in her dark scented hair.

  Then the mist in his eyes cleared suddenly, and he saw the figurebelow the face, wreathed in a floating web of moonlight, through whichwhite limbs gleamed, while the dusky hair streamed behind it as acloud. Again, as he looked, the form was flying from him upon a greatwhite horse. And as it flew, it looked back at him with laughing,witch-like eyes, Ilaria's eyes, as he was wont to see them, and in itshand it bore a wan pale flame which was his soul. And, with thefleeting vision, there came to him the realization that he had foreverlost that for which all men strive, which all men hold most dear: lifeand love; and all his being leaped to the fierce desire to break theoath that bound him to that other sphere,--the Church. But fast as hisgood steed went, with ears laid back and neck outstretched and bodyflattened to the desperate headlong stride, that great white horsewent faster, bearing ever just beyond his reach the slender formveiled in misty moonbeams, the face with the laughing eyes and themarble-cold disdain.

  He laughed aloud in answer, caught up in the whirlwind of his furiousspeed; heaven and earth held nothing for him but the frenzy of desire.Fire of life, the life he had cast from him, coursed through hisveins; the chase was life itself, exultant, all-conquering, sublime.He had no eyes for the road ahead. Ahead was the darkness of the greatforests. A stride, and he was within their shadows. The moon wasblotted out by the blackness of the trees; and with it had faded thevision, gone like a wreath of smoke, or a dream that is lost indarkness. Francesco reeled in his saddle; his steed thundered on, thereins loose upon its neck, through the damp silence of the wood, wherenight hung heavy, thence out into the open, where again the roadgleamed white and desolate beneath the moon.

  And at last the moon was gone and the light went out of the world, andhe knew himself for a soul cast into outer darkness. His mind wasblank. He knew not whether he lived or died, nor did he care. He livedin a nebulous void of gray unconsciousness, horribly empty of allthought and all sensation.

  And thus he rode onward on the road to his destiny.

  End of Book the First.

  Book the Second

  THE PILGRIMAGE