THE PASSAGE

FRANCESCO rode out into the scented night and the round yellow moon rode with him. Strange things were happening beneath that moon; in the crucible of destiny a new life was forming, new feelings arising on the ashes of the old. And Francesco's heart was slowly undergoing a change 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 broad ribbon which lost itself among hills and in the shadows of trees. In his ears was the thunder of his horse's feet, pounding insistent clamor into the quiet of the night. He would have desired wings for his steed; the wind of the speed of his going swept cool against his face. The night was gray around him, a velvet moon-steeped darkness, odorous with the fragrance of breaking earth. Far away the deep-throated bay of a dog rose and died across the world. A bell note, thinned by distance to a faint dream sound, stole over silent hill and dale; peace seemed to wrap the world round as in a cloister garden. With every mile that now carried him farther away from his Eden, from his garden of dreams, from his lost youth, new scenes unrolled themselves before him. Off in the wide Apulian plains lights twinkled here and yonder, wakeful eyes of watchfulness among the hills. He passed pale glimmering bogs, where lonely herons brooded, and wide barren heaths, over which the road led straight as an arrow's flight.

As the miles reeled away under him, his restlessness began to increase with the sweep of his horse's stride. Vague forms seemed to slip by him in the shadows; in every bush beside the road he saw white faces lurking. Strange, half-formed impressions of the new life he was about to enter upon, haunted him; strange forms in monkish garbs seemed to pass 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 but the excrescences of his fevered brain. For always, when he had endeavored to rouse himself and look about him sanely, the road stretched 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 was yet too young to realize the healing power of time, how it bears forgetfulness on its kindly wings, how its shadow becomes finally a shield, by which the keen daggers of remembrance are blunted and turned aside. He did not know that the human soul can suffer only so far, that greater miseries efface the memory of the lesser. The irony of his parting from Ilaria, to him forever lost, her cruel words, had stabbed his soul to the quick, and to himself he appeared to have entered into a dismal, dreary land, a boundless valley of shadows.

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

Then the mist in his eyes cleared suddenly, and he saw the figure below the face, wreathed in a floating web of moonlight, through which white limbs gleamed, while the dusky hair streamed behind it as a cloud. Again, as he looked, the form was flying from him upon a great white 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 its hand it bore a wan pale flame which was his soul. And, with the fleeting vision, there came to him the realization that he had forever lost that for which all men strive, which all men hold most dear: life and love; and all his being leaped to the fierce desire to break the oath that bound him to that other sphere,—the Church. But fast as his good steed went, with ears laid back and neck outstretched and body flattened to the desperate headlong stride, that great white horse went faster, bearing ever just beyond his reach the slender form veiled in misty moonbeams, the face with the laughing eyes and the marble-cold disdain.

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

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

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

End of Book the First.

Book the Second

THE PILGRIMAGE