Part 20

"My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour."

The reverential words chafed his disordered temper. He wove their fine gold into the dark web of his tempestuous passions. "Why do these monks plague me with their croakings?" he cried. "I need no help from Heaven to strengthen me against this buffet."

Renewed rage at his denial set him devising new pangs for her who had denied him, heedless of the chanting from the church; but soon again he found himself listening, as if against his will, to the sonorous words.

"Fecit potentiam in brachio suo: dispersit superbos mente cordis sui."

"What are the fools crooning?" cried the exasperated King. "He hath showed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts."

The words, as he rendered them, rang in his ears like a warning. He hardened his heart, but he listened still, for the next sentence seemed to lapse with deeper solemnity through the golden air.

"Deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles."

Robert echoed the words in a scream of insane fury.

"He hath put down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree."

In the quiet of the evening his voice sounded strange to him, horridly shouting; he shook his clinched fists at the church as he raved.

"These fools shall bray no more folly. Who shall uplift or cast down here save I? Is there any other God save I in Sicily?"

To him, in his heat, it seemed as if the church, through the voices of her ministrants, was seeking to come between him and his purpose, to save Perpetua from his hate. Though the voices had ceased, the august menace echoed in his brain, and he raved again.

"Shall I, who am the glory of the world, the very flower of knighthood, believe that any power beyond those skies can cast me from my seat or save this woman from my will?"

Even as he spoke the golden sunlight withered around him; the blackness of darkness seemed to muffle all the earth; only a pale light like the light of earliest dawn illuminated the gray walls of the church and gleamed with strange effulgence upon the armored image of the archangel. The King, rigid with terror, beheld the image of the archangel move slowly into life. It lifted the drawn sword on which its hands had rested and pointed the weapon at the crouching King. Slowly the radiant figure seemed to leave its niche; stately it descended the rough-hewn steps. Then it paused. The church now was swallowed up in the enveloping darkness. Only the figure of the archangel was visible in that agony of blackness, bright as burnished silver, bright as moonlight. Its right arm extended its sword towards the crouching King, and the blade glowed like a blade of white fire. Like a flash of lightning it seemed to leap to Robert's breast and sear his heart; he would have screamed with the pain, but his voice seemed dead within him, and all around him thunder rolled, horrible as the noise of a dispersing world.

The awful tumult was followed by a yet more awful silence. Robert, unable to move, unable to speak, feeling as if he were the last living thing on an obliterated earth, unable to do aught save stare in terror at that shining, celestial shape, now saw the beautiful lips part, now heard a voice address him; and the sound of that voice was clear like light, and loud as all the winds of all the world--a terrible, beautiful voice, the trumpet of doom.

"Robert of Sicily!"

The great voice called him by his name, and the King in his abasement thrust out his hands appealingly.

"Heaven has been patient with your pride. But now the cup of your offence is overfull, your silver has become dross, and Heaven is weary of you. You shall be as an oak whose leaf fadeth and as a garden that hath no water. I will set you up as a gazing-stock, and it shall come to pass that all they that look upon you shall loathe you. Base of soul, be base of body. God will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible."

As the great words died into silence, Robert's body was wrung with pangs. His spirit seemed to struggle in its earthly house, his flesh to divide and dissolve in anguish. Horrid tremors tore him; rigor of cold clawed at his heart, yet fever seemed to flush every channel of his body; his senses reeled as if to dissolution. Again the lightning flamed from the sword of the archangel; again the sullen thunder rumbled through the vaulted darkness. Robert staggered to his feet with an inarticulate cry as the archangel vanished from his view. All was unutterable night, and then in a moment the veil of darkness dissipated; again the mountain summit was flooded with golden air; again the kindly sunlight reigned over earth and sea; again the birds called joyously through the trees, and belated bees forsook the flowers; again Robert, dizzy and dismayed, sat on the fallen column and stared at the gray church.

But not Robert the King, the young, the comely, the radiantly clad. His fair features had withered to the foul features of the fool Diogenes; his body had warped to the crooks and hunches of the fool's body; his raiment had faded from its regal pomp to the stained livery of the mountebank. But it was with no knowledge of his metamorphosis that the changed man stared at the church and shuddered in the warm air.

"What a horrible dream!" he muttered to himself, drawing his hand across his damp forehead. "I must have dozed in the warm air; yet I did not think I slept. The storm seemed so real, and the spirit with the flaming sword--"

At the thought of the spirit he scrambled to his feet and limped across the grass to the church. The bronze image of the archangel stood in its niche, its hands resting as of yore on the hilt of the great sword. Robert peered at it with eyes still dazzled, and he babbled to himself weakly.

"That image seemed to quicken, but now it is no more than motionless bronze. I slept; I dreamed, and the lying vision has shaken me. I am wet with sweat and my knees tremble. I will go into the chapel and pray."

He moved a little farther to ascend the steps, conscious of an unfamiliar heaviness, unconscious of transformation. But as he made to set his foot upon the lowest of the steps leading to the church, its doors were thrown wide open, and to Robert's astonishment the congregation began to issue forth, headed by the archbishop of Syracuse, and ranged themselves in a double rank on the semicircle of the steps as if forming a lane for one who was yet to come.

For a moment, in his rage, speech seemed denied to Robert as he glared at the many-colored crowd before him--the fair ladies of honor, butterfly bright; the slim, Italianate youths, fantastically foppish; the smooth, eager priesthood; the soldiers weary of ceremonial but indifferent to fatigue; the sturdy bulk, blue eyes, and yellow hair of the Northern Guards. They paid no heed to Robert, standing there below them; their glances were all for the open portal of the church and its depths beyond of cool twilight.

Rage overcame amazement and gave Robert back his speech.

"How is this, my lord archbishop?" he cried out in a great voice--"I bade you wait within the church till I came."

The archbishop, hearing this sudden appeal to him, turned for a moment his wrinkled, astute face in the direction of the speaker, and, following his example for the moment, all the others turned their indifferent eyes upon Robert. Some of the pretty she-things whispered and tittered. The archbishop spoke in a voice of gentle petulance.