sed
through a secret door in a corner of his chamber, followed by the Cardinal
bearing another lamp and a naked sword, and preceded by the dog and the two
cats, all ardent and undaunted as champions bound to the Holy Land for the
recovery of the Holy Sepulchre.

II

The wizard had kept his word. Not a rat was seen or heard upon the
pilgrimage, which was exceedingly toilsome to the aged Pope, from the
number of passages to be threaded and doors to be unlocked. At length the
companions stood before the portal of the Appartamento Borgia.

"Your Holiness must enter alone," Cardinal Barbadico admonished, with
manifest reluctance.

"Await my return," enjoined the Pontiff, in a tone of more confidence than
he could actually feel, as, after much grinding and grating, the massive
door swung heavily back, and he passed on into the dim, unexplored space
beyond. The outer air, streaming in as though eager to indemnify itself for
years of exile, smote and swayed the flame of the Pope's lamp, whose feeble
ray flitted from floor to ceiling as the decrepit man, weary with the way
he had traversed and the load he was bearing, tottered and stumbled
painfully along, ever and anon arrested by a closed door, which he unlocked
with prodigious difficulty. The cats cowered close to the Cardinal; the dog
at first accompanied the Pope, but whined so grievously, as though he
beheld a spirit, that Alexander bade him back.

Supreme is the spell of the _genius loci_. The chambers traversed by the
Pope were in fact adorned with fair examples of the painter's art, mostly
scriptural in subject, but some inspired with the devout Pantheism in which
all creeds are reconciled. All were alike invisible to the Pontiff, who,
with the dim flicker of his lamp, could no more discern Judaea wed with
Egypt on the frescoed ceiling than, with the human limitation of his
faculties, he could foresee that the ill-reputed rooms would one day
harbour a portion of the Vatican Library, so greatly enriched by himself.
Nothing but sinister memories and vague alarms presented themselves to his
imagination. The atmosphere, heavy and brooding from the long exclusion of
the outer air, seemed to weigh upon him with the density of matter, and to
afford the stuff out of which phantasmal bodies perpetually took shape and,
as he half persuaded himself, substance. Creeping and tottering between
bowl and cord, shielding himself with lamp and crucifix from Michelotto's
spec