But his affright was groundless.  The Inquisitors had already taken cognisance of Abano’s scrolls, and found that, touching these at least, he had spoken sooth.  Besides kings, princes, ministers, magistrates, and other secular persons who had owed their success in life to dealings with the devil under his mediation, the infernal bondsmen included so many pillars of the Church and champions of the Faith; prelates plenty, abbots in abundance, cardinals not a few, a (some whispered the) Pope; above all, so many of the Inquisitors themselves, that further inquiry could evidently nowise conduce to edification.  The surgeon, therefore, infused an opiate into the veins of the unconscious youth, and he came to himself upon a galley speeding him to the holy war in Cyprus, where he fell fighting the Turk.

ALEXANDER THE RATCATCHER

“Alexander Octavus mures, qui Urbem supra modum vexabant, anathemate perculit."[—­Palatius.  Fasti Cardinalium, tom. v.p. 46.]

I

“Rome and her rats are at the point of battle!”

This metaphor of Menenius Agrippa’s became, history records, matter of fact in 1689, when rats pervaded the Eternal City from garret to cellar, and Pope Alexander the Eighth seriously apprehended the fate of Bishop Hatto.  The situation worried him sorely; he had but lately attained the tiara at an advanced age—­the twenty-fourth hour, as he himself remarked in extenuation of his haste to enrich his nephews.  The time vouchsafed for worthier deeds was brief, and he dreaded descending to posterity as the Rat Pope.  Witty and genial, his sense of humour teased him with a full perception of the absurdity of his position.  Peter and Pasquin concurred in forbidding him to desert his post; and he derived but small comfort from the ingenuity of his flatterers, who compared him to St. Paul contending with beasts at Ephesus.

It wanted three half-hours to midnight, as Alexander sat amid traps and ratsbane in his chamber in the Vatican, under the protection of two enormous cats and a British terrier.  A silver bell stood ready to his hand, should the aid of the attendant chamberlains be requisite.  The walls had been divested of their tapestries, and the floor gleamed with pounded glass.  A tome of legendary lore lay open at the history of the Piper of Hamelin.  All was silence, save for the sniffing and scratching of the dog and a sound of subterranean scraping and gnawing.

“Why tarries Cardinal Barbadico thus?” the Pope at last asked himself aloud.  The inquiry was answered by a wild burst of squeaking and clattering and scurrying to and fro, as who should say, “We’ve eaten him!  We’ve eaten him!”

But this exultation was at least premature, for just as the terrified Pope clutched his bell, the door opened to the narrowest extent compatible with the admission of an ecclesiastical personage of dignified presence, and Cardinal Barbadico hastily squeezed himself through.