One day I was sitting, in gloomy abstraction, in the sunny garden, when, looking up suddenly, a little maid stood by, demurely, and somewhat compassionately, regarding me. Grateful then for any sort of sympathy, I led her to talk, and presently found, as we thawed into good-fellowship, drawn together by some mutual attraction, that she was of British birth, and more—from my old village! This was bond enough in my then state; but think how moved and pleased I was when the comely little damsel laughingly said, “Oh, yes! it is only you Roman lords who come and go more often than these flowers. We British seldom move; I and my people have lived yonder on the coast for ages!” So I let my lonely fancy fill in the blanks, and took the little maid for a kinswoman, and was right glad to know some one in the void world into which four hundred years’ sleep had plunged me.
Strange, too, as you will take it, Numidea, who, now and then, to my mind, was so like the ancestress she knew naught of: Numidea, the slave-girl who had stood before me by predestined chance in that hour of sorrow—it was she who directed my destiny and saved and ruined me in this chapter, just as her mother had done distant lifetimes before!
Between this fair little friend and my inexhaustible wallet I dried up my grief and turned idle and reckless in that fascinating town of extravagance and debauchery. It was not a time to boast much of. The degenerate Romans had lost all their valor and most of their skill in the arts of government. All their hardihood and strength had sunk under the evil example of the debased capital by the Tiber; and, though some few unpopular ones among them railed against the effeminate luxury of the times, few heeded, and none were warned. It shamed me to find that all these latter-day Romans thought of was silks and linens, front seats at the theater, pageantry and spectacles, trinkets and scents. It roused my disdain to see the senators go by with gilded trains of servitors and the young Centurions swagger down the streets in their mock armor—their toy, peace-time swords hanging in golden chains from their tender sides, and the wind warning one of their perfumed presence even before they came in sight. Such were not the men to win an empire, I thought, or to hold it!
As for the native British, a modicum of them had dropped the sagum for the toga, and had put on with it all its vices, but few of its virtues. Such a witless, vain, incapable medley of arrogant fools never before was seen. To their countrymen they represented themselves as possessed of all the keys of statecraft and government, stirring them up as far as they durst to discontent and rebellion, while to their masters they stood acknowledged sycophants and apes of all the meannesses of a degenerate time. All this was the more the pity, for magnificent and wide were the evidences of what Rome had done for Britain during the long years she had held it. When I slept, it was a chaotic wild, peopled by brave but scattered tribes; when I awoke, it was a fair, united realm—a beautiful territory of fertility, rich in corn and apple-yards, arteried by smooth, white-paved roads, and ruled by half a dozen wonderful capitals, with countless lesser cities, camps, and villas, wherein modern luxury, like a rampant, beautiful-flowered parasite, had overgrown, and choked and killed the sturdy stuff on which it grew.
Well, it is not my province to tell you of these things. The gilded fops who thronged the city ways, I soon found, were good enough for drinking bouts and revelry, and, by all Olympus! my sleep had made me thirsty, and my sorrow full of a moroseness which had to be constantly battened down under the hatches of an artificial pleasure. All the old, cautious, frugal, merchant spirit had gone, and the Roman Phra, in his gold and turquoise cincture, his belt full of his outlandish, never-failing coins, was soon the talk of the town, the life and soul of every reckless bout or folly, the terror of all lictors and honest, benighted citizens.
And, like many another good young man of like inclinations, his exit was as sudden as his entry! Well I remember that day, when my ivory tablets were crowded with suggestions for new idleness and vanities, and bore a dozen or two of merry engagements to plays and processions and carnivals, and all my new-found world looked like a summer sea of pleasure. Under these circumstances, I went to my hoard one evening, as I had done very often of late, and was somewhat chagrined to discover only five pieces of money left. However, they were big plump ones, larger than any I had used before, and, as all those had been good gold, these still might mean a long spell of frolic for me—when they were nearly spent it would be time to turn serious.
I at once sat down to rub the general green tint of age from one, noticing it was more verdant than any of its comrades had been, and rubbed with increasing consternation and alarm, moment after moment, until I had reduced it at last to an ancient British copper token, a base, abominable thing, not good enough to pitch to a starving beggar!
Another and another was snatched up and chafed, and, as I toiled on by my little flickering earthen lamp in my bachelor cell, every one of those traitor coins in an hour had shed its coating of time and turned out, under my disgusted fingers, common plebeian metal. There they lay before me at length, a contemptible five pence, wherewith to carry on a week’s carousing. Five pence! Why, it was not enough to toss to a noisy beggar outside the circus—hardly enough for a drink of detestable British wine, let alone a draught of the good Italian vintages that I had lately come to look upon as my prerogative! Horrible! and as I gazed at them stolidly, that melancholy evening, the airy castle of my pleasure crumbled from base to battlement.
As the result of long cogitation—knowing the measure of my friends too well to think of borrowing of them—I finally decided to make a retreat, and leave my acquaintance my still unblemished reputation in pawn for the various little items owing by me. Taking a look round, to assure myself every one in the house was asleep, I argued that to-night, though a pauper, I was still of good account, whereas with daylight I should be a discredited beggar; so that it was, in fact, a meritorious action to leave my host an old pair of sandals in lieu of a month’s expenses, and drop through the little window into the garden, on the way to the open world once more. Necessity is ever a sophist.
It is needless to say the gray dawn was not particularly cheerful as I sprang into the city fosse and struck out for the woods beyond. The fortune which makes a man one day a gentleman of means and the next a mendicant is more pleasant to hear of when it has befallen one’s friends than to feel at first hand. It was only the fear of the detestable city jail, and the abominable provender there, added to the ridicule of my friends, perhaps, that sent me, scripless, thus afield. Gray as the prospect ahead might be, behind it was black: so I plodded on, with my spear for a staff and Melancholy for a companion.
The leafy shades reached in an hour or so invited rest, and in their seclusion an idle spell was spent watching, through the green frame of branches, the fair, careless city below wake to new luxurious life; watching the blue smoke rise from the temple courtyards, and the pigeons circling up into the sky, and the glitter of the sun on the legionaries’ arms as they wheeled and formed and re-formed in the open ground beyond the Prefect’s house. Oh, yes! I knew it all! And how pleasantly the water spluttered in the marble baths after those dusty exercises; and how heavy the lightest armor was after such nights as I and those jolly ones down there were accustomed to spend! As I, breakfastless, leaned upon the top of my staff, I recalled the good red wine from my host’s coolest cellars, and the hot bread from slaves’ ovens in the street, and how pleasant it was to lie in silk and sandals, and drink and laugh in the shade, and stare after the comely British maids, and lay out in those idle sunny hours the fabrics of fun and mirth.
On again, and by midday a valley opened before me, and at the head, a mile or so from the river, was a very stately white villa. Thither, out of curiosity, my steps were turned, and I descended upon that lordly abode by coppices, ferny brakes, and pastures, until one brambly field alone separated us. An ordinary being, whom the Fates had not set themselves to bandy forever in their immortal hands, would have gone round this enclosure, and so taken the uneventful pathway, but not so I; I must needs cross the brambles, and thus bring down fresh ventures on my head. In the midst of the enclosure was an oak, and under the oak five or six white cows, with a massive bull of the fierce old British breed. This animal resented my trespass, and, shaking his head angrily as I advanced, he came after me at a trot when half way across. Now, a good soldier knows when to run, no less than when to stand, and so my best foot was put forth in the direction of the house, and I presently slipped through a hole in the fence directly into the trim gay garden of the villa itself.
So hasty was my entry that I nearly ran into a stately procession approaching down one of the well-kept terraces intersecting the grounds: a seneschal and a butler, a gorgeously arrayed mercenary or two, men and damsels in waiting, all this lordly array attending a litter borne by two negro slaves, whereon, with a languidness like that of convalescence, belied, however, by the bloom of excellent health and the tokens of robust grace in the every limb, reclined a handsome Roman lady. There was hardly time to take all this in at a glance, when the gorgeous attendants set up a shout of consternation and alarm, and, glancing over my shoulder to see the cause, there was that resentful bull bursting the hedge, a scanty twenty paces away, with vindictive purpose in his widespread nostrils and angry eyes.
Down went the seneschal’s staff of office, down went the base mercenaries’ gilded shields; the butler threw the dish of grapes he was carrying for his lady’s refreshment into the bushes; the waiting-maids dropped their fans, and, shrieking, joined the general rout. Worse than all, those base villains, the littermen, slipped their leather straps, and in the general panic dropped the litter, and left to her fate that mistress who, with her sandaled feet wrapped in silks and spangled linens, struggled in vain to rise. There was no time for fear. I turned, and as the bull came down upon us two in a snorting avalanche of white hide and sinew, I gave him the spear, driving it home with all my strength just in front of the ample shoulder, as he lowered his head. The strong seven-foot haft of ash, as thick as a man’s wrist, bent between us like a green hazel wand, and then burst into splinters right up to my grasp. The next moment I was hurled backward, crashing into the flowers and trim parterres as though it were by the fist of Jove himself I had been struck. Hardly touching the ground, I was up again, my short sword drawn, and ready as ever—though the gay world swam before me—to kill or to be killed.
I gave him the spear as he lowered his head
It was not necessary. There had been few truer or more forceful spears than mine in the old times; and there lay the great white monster on his side in a crimson pool of blood, essaying in vain to lift his head, and dying in mighty tremors all among the pretty things the servants had thrown down. The gush of red blood from his chest was wetting even the silken fringes of the comely dame’s skirts and wrappings, while she, now at last on her feet, frowned down on him, with angry triumph rather than fear in her countenance.
Though there was hardly a change of color on her face or a tremor in the voice with which she thanked me, yet I somehow felt her ladyship was in a fine passion behind that disdainful mask. But whether it were so or not, she was civil enough to me, personally evincing a condescending interest in a trifling wound that was staining my bare right arm with crimson, and sending her “good youth” away in a minute or two to the house to get it bound. As I turned to go, the stately lady gathered up tunic folds and skirt in her white fist and moved down upon the group of trembling servants, who were gathering their wits together slowly under the nervous encouragement of the seneschal. What she said to them I know not, but if ever the countenances of men truly reflected their sensations, her brief whispers must have been exceedingly unpleasant to listen to.
The damsel who bound the scratch upon my shoulder told me something of this beautiful and wealthy dame. But, in truth, when she called her Lady Electra, I needed to hear little more. It was a name that had circulated freely in the city yonder, and especially when wine was sparkling best and tongues at lightest! I knew, without asking, the lady was niece to an emperor, and was reputed as haughty and cruel as though she had been one of the worst herself; I knew her lawful spouse was away, like most Romans, from his duty just then, and she stood in his place to tyrannize over the British peasants and sweep the taxes into his insatiate coffers. I knew, too, why Rome was forbidden for a time to the vivacious lady, as well as some stories, best untold, of how she enlivened the tedium of her exile in these “savage” places.
In fact, I knew I had fallen into the gilded hold of a magnificent outlaw, one of the worst productions of a debased and sinking State, and, being wayward by predestination, I determined to play with the she-wolf in her own den.
No fancy of mine is so rash but that Fate will countersign it. When Electra sent for me presently in the great hall, where the fountains played into basins of rosy marble, it was to inform me that the destruction of the bull, and my bearing thereat, had caught her fancy, and I was to “consider myself for the present in her private service, and attached to the body-guard.” This decision was announced with an easy imperialness which seemed to ignore all suggestion of opposition—a suavity such as Juno might use in directing the most timorous of servitors—so, as my wishes ran in unison, I bowed my thanks, and kissed the fringe of my ladyship’s cloak, and thought, as she lay there before me on her silken couch in the tessellated hall of her stately home, that I had never before seen so beautiful or dangerous-looking a creature.
Nor had I long to wait for a sight of the Vice-Prefect’s talons. While she asked me of my history, the which I made up as I told it (and, having once balked the truth, never afterward told her the real facts), a messenger came, and, standing at a respectful distance, saluted his mistress.
“Ah!” she said, with a pretty look of interest in her face, and rising on her elbow, “are they dead?”
“One is, madam,” the man responded: “one of your bearers fled, but the other we secured. We took him into the field and tied him, as your ladyship directed, to the horns of the strongest white cow. She dragged him here and there, and gored him for full ten minutes before he died—and now all that remains of him,” with a wave of the hand toward the vestibule, “most respectfully awaits your ladyship’s inspection in the porch!” And the messenger bowed low.
“It is well. Fling the dog into a ditch! And, my friend, let my brave henchmen know if they do not lay hands on the other villain before sunset to-morrow, I shall come to them for a substitute.”
The successful termination of this episode seemed to relieve my new mistress.
“Ah! my excellent soldier,” she said, with a pretty sigh, “you cannot conceive what a vexation my servants are to me, or how rebellious and unruly! Would there were but a man here, such as yourself, for instance, to protect and soften a lonely matron’s exile.”
This was very flattering to my vanity, more especially as it was accompanied by a gracious look, with more of condescension in it than I fancied usually fell to the lot of those who met her handsome eyes. In such circumstances, under a lordly roof, and careless again of to-morrow, a new spell of experience was commenced in the Roman villa, and I learned much of the ways of corrupt Roman government and a luxurious society there which might amuse you were it not all too long to set down. For a time, when her ladyship gave, as was her frequent pleasure, gorgeous dinners, and all the statesmen and soldiers of the neighboring towns came in to sup with her, I pleaded one thing and another in excuse for absence from the places where I must have met many too well known before. But Electra, as the time went on, was proud of her handsome, stalwart Centurion, and advanced me quicker than my modest ambition could demand, clothed me in the gorgeous livery of her household troops, raised me to the chief command, and finally, one evening, sat me at her side on her own silken couch, before all the lords and senators, and, deriding their surprise and covert sarcasm, proclaimed me first favorite there with royal effrontery.
Did I but say Electra was proud of her new find? Much better had it been simply so; but she was not accustomed to moderation in any matters, and perhaps my cold indifference to her overwhelming attractions, when all else fawned for an indulgent look, excited her fiery thirst of dominion. Be this as it may, no very long time after my arrival it was palpable her manner was changing; and as the days went by, and she would have me sit on the tiger-skin at her knee, a second Antony to this British Cleopatra, telling wonderful tales of war and woodcraft, I presently found the unmistakable light of awakening love shining through her ladyship’s half-shut lids. Many and many a time, before and since, has that beacon been lit for me in eyes of every complexion—it makes me sad to think how well I know that gentle gleam—but never in all my life did I experience anything like the concentrated fire that burned silently but more strongly, day by day, in those black Roman eyes.
I would not be warned. More; I took a lawless delight in covertly piling on material and leading that reckless dame, who had used and spurned a score of gallant soldiers or great senators, according to her idle fancy, to pour out her over-ample affection on me, the penniless adventurer. And, like one who fans a spark among combustible material, the blaze that resulted was near my undoing.
The more dense I was to her increasing love, the more she suffered. Truly, it was pitiful to see her, who was so little accustomed to know any other will, thwarted by so fine an agency—to see her imperialness strain and fret at the silken meshes of love, and fume to have me know and answer to her meaning, yet fear to tell it, and at times be timorous to speak, and at others start up, palely wrathful, that she could not order in this case as elsewhere. Indeed, my lady was in a bad way, and now she would be fierce and sullen, and anon gracious and melancholy. In the latter mood she said one day, as I sat by her bisellium:
“I am ill and pale, my Centurion. I wonder you have not noticed it.”
“Perhaps, madam,” I said, with the distant respect that galled her so, “perhaps your ladyship’s supper last night was over-large and late—and those lampreys, I warned you against them that third time.”
“Gross! Material!” exclaimed Electra, frowning blackly. “Guess again—a finer malady—a subtler pain.”
“Then, maybe the valley air affects my lady’s liver, or rheumatism, perhaps, exacts a penalty for some twilight rambles.”
Such banter as this, and more, was all the harder to bear since she could not revenge it. I was sorry for the tyrantess, for she was wonderfully attractive thus pensivewise, and wofully in earnest as she turned away to the painted walls and sighed to herself.
“Fie! to be thus withstood by a fameless mercenary. Why thus must I, unaccustomed, sue this one—the least worthy of them all—and lavish on his dull plebeian ears the sighs that many another would give a province or two to hear?—I, who have slighted the homage of silk and scarlet, and Imperial purple, even! Lucullus was not half so dull—or Palladius, or Decius; and that last of many others, my witty Publius Torquatus, would have diagnosed my disease and prescribed for it all in one whisper.”
Poor lady! It was not within me—though she did not know it—to hold out for long against the sunshine and storm of her impetuous nature. Neither her abominable cruelties nor her reckless rapacity could suffice to dim her attractions—many a time since, when that comely personage has been as clearly wiped from the page of life, as utterly obliterated from the earth as the very mound of her final resting-place, have I regretted that she was not born to better days, and then, perchance, her fine material might have been run into a nobler mold.
She was jealous, too; and it came about in this way. Very soon after I had taken service with her, whom should I espy, one morning, feeding the golden pheasants outside the veranda, but my little friend, Numidea. Often I had thought of that maid, and determined to discover that “big house” where she had told me she was bondwoman, and the “great lady” who sent her tripping long journeys into the town for the powders and silk stuffs none could better choose. And now here she was on my path again, a roofmate by strange chance, with her graceful, tender figure, and her dainty ways, and that chronic friendly smile upon her mouth that brought such strange fancies to my mind every time I looked upon it. Of course, I befriended the maid as though she were my own little one, not so many times removed, and equally, of course, Lady Electra noticed and misread our friendship. Poor Numidea! She had a hard life before I came, and a harder, perhaps, afterward. You compassionate moderns will wonder when I tell you that Numidea has shown me her white silk shoulders laced with the red scars of old floggings laid on by Electra herself, and the blood-spotted dimples here and there, where that imperious dame had thrust, for some trivial offense, a golden bodkin from her hair deep into that innocent flesh. No one knew better than my noble mistress how to give acute torture to a slave without depreciating the market price of her property.
But when I became of more weight—when, in brief, my comely tigress was too fast bound to be dangerous—I spoke up, and Electra grew to be jealous and to hate the small Christian slave-girl with all the unruly strength that marked her other passions.
Thus, one day having discovered Numidea weeping over a new-made wound, I sought out the offender, and as she sauntered up and down her tessellated pavements I shook my fist at her Queenship, and said:
“By the bright flame of Vesta, Lady Electra, and by every deity, old or new, in the endless capacity of the skies, if you get out your abominable flail for that girl again, or draw but once upon her one of your accursed bodkins, I will—marry her among the smoking ruins of this white sty of yours!”
When I spoke to her thus under the lash of my anger, she would uprise to the topmost reach of her height, and thence, frowning down upon me, her shapely head tossed back, and her draperies falling from her crossed arms and ample shoulders to the marble floor, she would regard me with an imperious start that might have withered an ordinary mortal. So beautiful and statuesque was her ladyship on these occasions, towering there in her own white hall like an image of an offended Juno in the first flush of her queenly wrath, that even I would involuntarily step back a pace. But I did not cower or drop my eyes, and when we had glowered at each other so for a minute or two the royal instinct within her was no match for traitor Love. Slowly then the woman would come welling into her proud face, and the glow of anger gave way upon her cheeks; her arms dropped by her sides; she shrank to mortal proportions, and lastly sank on the ebony and ivory couch in a wild gust of weeping, wofully asking to know, as I turned upon my heels, why the slave’s trivial scars were more to me than the mistress’s tears.
My Vice-Prefect was avaricious, too. There was stored in the spacious hollows below her villa I know not how much bronze and gold squeezed from those reluctant British hinds whose old-world huts clustered together in the oak clumps dotting the fertile vales as far as the eye could see from our roof-ledges on every hand. Had all the offices of the Imperial Government been kept as she kept her duties of tax collecting, the great empire would have been further by many a long year from its ruin. And the closer Electra made her accounts, the more deadly became her exactions, the more angry and rebellious grew the natives around us.
Already they had heard whispers of how hard barbarians were pressing upon Rome, day by day they saw Britain depleted of the stalwart legionaries who had occupied the land four hundred years, and as phalanx after phalanx went south through Gaul to protect the mother city on the Tiber, their demagogues secretly stirred the people up to ambition and discontent.
Nor can it be denied the villains had something to grumble for. Society was dissolute and debased, while the country was full of those who made the good Roman name a byword. The British peasant had to toil and sweat that a hundred tyrants, the rank production of social decay, might squander and parade in the luxury and finery his labor purchased. Added to this, the pressing needs of the Emperor himself demanded the services of those who had taken upon themselves for centuries the protection of the country. As they retired, Northern rovers, at first fitfully, but afterward with increasing rigor, came down upon the unguarded coasts, and sailing up the estuaries, harried the rich English vales on either side, and rioted amid the accumulated splendor and plenty of the luckless land to their heart’s content.
Saddled thus with the weight of luxurious conquerors who had lost nearly every art but that of extortion, miserable at home, and devastated from abroad, who can wonder that the British longed to throw off the Roman yoke and breathe the fresher air of a wholesome life again? And as the shadow of the Imperial wings was withdrawn from them their hopes ripened; they thought they were strong and ruleworthy. Fatal mistake! I saw it bud, and I saw it bitterly fruitful!
If you turn back the pages of history you will find these hinds did indeed make a stand for a moment, and when Honorius had withdrawn his last legionaries, and given the islanders their liberty, for a few brief years there was a shepherd government here—the British ruled again in Britain. Then came the next strong tide of Northern invasion, and another conquest.
I well remember how, in the throes of the first great change that heralded a new era in Britain, the herdsmen and serfs were crushed between waning Roman terrors, such as Electra wielded, and the growing horrors of the Northmen.
Of these latter I saw something. On one occasion when the storm was brewing, I was away down in the coast provinces hunting wolves, and thus by chance fell in with a “sea king’s” foray and a British reprisal. On that occasion the spoilers were spoiled, and we taught the Northern ravishers a lesson which, had they been more united so that such a blow might have been better felt by the whole, would have damped their ardor for a long time. As it was, to rout and destroy their scattered parties was but like mopping up the advancing tide of those salt waves that brought them on us.
Those down there by the Kentish shore had been unmolested for some years; they had lived at their leisure, had got their harvests in, had rebuilt their villages out in the open, and set up forges, and hammered spearheads and bosses, rings for the women, of silver and brass, and chains and furniture for their horses, of gold; shearing their flocks, and living as though such things as Norsemen were not—when one day the infliction came upon them again.
It was a gusty morning in early summer—I remember it well—and most of the men were from the villages, hunting, when away toward the coast went up to the brightening sky a thin curl of smoke, followed by another and another. The sight was understood only too well. Line after line crept up in the silence of the morning over the green tree tops and against the gray of the sea, while groups of black figures (flying villagers we knew them to be) went now and then over the sky-line of the wolds into the security of the valleys to right and left. As the wail went up from the huts where I rested, a mounted chief, his toes in the iron rings of his stirrups, and his wolf skins flying from his bare shoulders, came pounding through the woods with the bad news the raiders were close behind.
Rapid packing was a great feminine accomplishment in those days, and, while the women swept their children and more portable valuables into their clothes and disappeared into the forest, we sent the quickest-footed youths that were with us to call back the hunters, and made our first stand there round the huts and mounds of the old village of Caen Edron.
And we kept its thatch and chattels inviolate, for, by this time, the countryside was all in arms, and, as the sea was far behind them, the despoilers but showed themselves on the fringe of the open, exchanged a javelin or two, and turned.
Hot on their track that morning of vengeance we went after them; over the scrubby open ground and down through the tangles of oak and hazel. We pressed them back past the charred and smoking remnants of the villages they had burned, back by the streams that still ran streaky in quiet places with blood, back down the red path of ruin and savagery they had trodden, back by the cruel finger-posts of dead women, back by the halting places of the ravishers—ever drawing new recruits and courage, till we outnumbered them by six to one—and thus we trampled that day on the heels of those laden pirates from the valley-head down to the shore.
It was a time of vengeance, and our women and children crowded, singing and screaming, after us, to kill and torture the wounded. Every now and then those surly spoilers turned, and we fled before them as the dogs fly from a big boar who goes to bay; but each time we came on again, and their standing places by the coverts and under the lichened rocks were littered with dead, and all bestrewn amid the ferns in the pink morning light was the glittering spoil they disgorged. Truly that was an hour of victory, and the Britons were drunk with success. They followed like starving wolves after a herd of deer, leaping from rock to rock, crowding every point of vantage, and running and yelling through the underwood until surely the Northmen must have thought the place in possession of a legion of devils.
But all this noise was as nothing to the frightful yell of savage joy which went up from us when we saw the raiders draw together on the shingle ridge of the beach, and knew instinctively by their pale, tideward faces and hesitation, that they were trapped—the sea was out, and their ships were high and dry!
Somehow, I scarcely know how it was, when those men turned grimly and prepared to make their last stand under their ships, a strange silence fell upon both bands, and for a minute or two the long, wild rank of our warriors halted at the bottom of the slope, every man silent and dumb by a strange accord, while opposite, against the sky-line, were the mighty Norsemen, clustered together, and looking down with fierce, sullen brows, equally silent and expectant, while the sun glinted on their rustling arms and tall, peaked casques.
We stood thus a minute or two, and I heard the thumpings of my own heart, like an echo of the low wash of the far-away sea—a plover piping overhead, and a raven croaking on the distant hills, but not another sound until—suddenly some British women who had come red-handed to a mound behind broke out into a wild war song. Then the spell was loosed, and we were again at them, sweeping the sea kings from the ridge into the tangle of long grass and sand and stunted bushes that led to the shore, and there, separated, but dying stubbornly, powerless against our numbers, we pulled them down, and killed them one by one, lopping their armor from them and stripping their cloths, till the pleasant lichened valleys of the seashore wood and the green footways of the moss were stamped full of crimson puddles and littered with the naked bodies of those tawny giants.
The last man to fall was a chief. Twice I had seen him hard pressed, and had lifted my javelin to slay him, but a touch of silly compunction had each time held my hand, and now he stood with his back to his ship, like some fierce, beautiful thing of the sea. His plated brass and steel cuirass was hacked and dented, his white linen hung in shreds about him; his arms were bare, and blood ran down them, while his long fair hair lifted to the salt wind that was coming in freshly with the tide, and the sun shone on his cold blue eyes, and his polished harness, and his tall and comely proportions, standing out there against the dark side of his high-sterned vessel.
But what cared the Britons for flaxen locks or the goodliness of a young Thor? He had in his hands a broken spear, his own sword being snapped in two; and with this weapon he lay about fiercely every now and then as the men edged in upon him. Luckless Viking! there is no retreat or rescue! He was bleeding heavily, and, even as I watched, his chin sank upon his chest. At once the Britons ran in upon him, but the life flared up again, and the gallant robber crushed in a pair of heads with his stave and sent the others flying back, still glaring upon the wide circle of his enemies with death and defiance struggling for mastery in his eyes in a way wonderful to behold. Again and again the yellow head of the young Thor nodded and sank, and again and again he started up and scowled upon them, as each savage cry of joy, to see him thus bleeding to death, fell upon his ears. Presently he wavered for a moment and leaned his shoulder against the black side of his ship, and his lids dropped wearily; at once the Britons rushed, and, when I turned my face there again, they were hacking and stripping the armor from a mutilated but still quivering corpse!
A few such episodes as this repulse of the Northmen, magnified and circulated with all the lying exaggeration that a coward race ever wraps about his feats of arms, made the Britons bold, and their boldness brings me to the end of my chapter.
Many a pleasant week and month did I live and enjoy all the best things life has to give: the master of my Roman mistress; the foremost spearman where the boar went to bay among the rocks on the hillside; the jolliest fellow that was ever invited to a lordly banquet; the penniless adventurer whose fortune every one envied—and then fate put me by again, and wiped my tablets clean for another frolic epoch.
It came about this way. The British grew more and more unruly as time went on, and legion after legion left us. At length, when the last of the Romans were down to the coast, about to embark, Electra made up her mind to go, too—and with all her hoards. But in this latter particular the new authorities in the neighboring town could not concur, and they sent two brand-new civilian senators to expostulate and detain her, the last representative of the old rule. Electra had those gentlemen stripped in the vestibule, and flogged within an ace of their lives, and then sent them home, bound, in a mean country cart.
All that afternoon we were busy sewing up the gold and bronze in bags, and by dusk a long train of mules set out for the coast, in charge of a score of our mercenaries, who, having served a long apprenticeship to cruelty and extortion, had more to fear from the natives than even we. Nor was it too soon. As the last of the convoy went into the evening darkness, Electra and I ascended the flat, wide roof of her home, and there we saw, westward, under the stormy red of the setting sun, the flashing of arms and the dust-wreaths against the glow which hung above the bands of people moving out and bearing down on us in a mood one well could guess.
Her ladyship, having safely packed, was disdainful and angry. Her fine lips curled as she watched the gray column of citizens swarming out to the assault; but when her gaze wandered over the fair valleys she had ruled and bled so long, she was, perhaps, a little regretful and softened.
“My good and stalwart Captain,” she said, coming near to me, “yonder sun, I fear, will never rise again on a Roman Briton! We must obey the Fates. You know what I would do, had I the power, to yonder scum; but, since we must desert this house to them (as I see too clearly we must), how can we best ensure the safety of the treasure?”
We arranged there and then, with small time for parley, that I should stay with a handful of her mercenaries and make a stand about the villa, while she, with the last of her servants, should go on and hurry up by every means in her power the slow caravan of her wealth. In truth, my mistress was as brave as she was overbearing, and but for those endless shining bags of gold, I do believe she would have stayed and fought the place with me.
As it was, she reluctantly consented to the plan, and bid me adieu (which I returned but coldly), and came back again for another kiss, and said another good-by, and hung about me, and enjoined caution, and held my hands, and looked first into my eyes and then back into the darkness where the laden mules were, as much in love as a rustic maid, as anxious as a usurer, and torn and distracted between these contending feelings.
At last she and all the women were gone, whereon with a lighter mind we set ourselves down to cover their retreat. Here must it be confessed that for myself I was ill at ease; treachery lurked within me. I had grown somewhat weary of her ladyship, nor had longer a special wish to be dragged in her golden chains, the restless spirit chance had bred within moved, and I had determined to see my enamored Vice-Prefect safe to her ships, and then—if I could—if I dared—break with her! I well knew the wild tornado of indignation and love this would call up, and hence had not confessed my intentions earlier, but had been cold and distant. The dame, you will see presently, had been sharper in guessing than I supposed.
We made such preparation as we could, with the small time at our disposal, barricading the white façade of the villa and closing all approaches. Then we pulled the winter stacks to pieces in the yard, making two great mounds of fagots in front of the porch, pouring oil upon each, and stationing a man to fire them, by way of torches, at a given signal. My hope was that, as the wide Roman way ran just below the villa, the avengers of the Ambassadors would not think of passing on until they had demolished the house and us.
Of the loyalty of the few men with me I had little fear. They were brave and stubborn, all their pay was on Electra’s mules, and the British hated them without compunction. There were in our little company that black evening, seven wild Welshmen, under a shaggy-haired, blue-eyed princeling: Gwallon of the Bow, he called himself—fifteen swarthy Iberians, all teeth and scimitar—a handful of Belgic mercenaries, with great double-headed axes—but never a Roman among them all in this last stand of Roman power in Britain!
Was I a Roman, I wondered, as I stood on the terrace, waiting the onset of the liberated slaves? What was I? Who was I? How came it that he who was first in repelling the stalwart Roman adventurers of endless years before was the last to lift a sword in their defense? And, more personally, was this night to be, as it greatly seemed, the last of all my wild adventures; or had fate infinite others in store for her bantling?
You will guess how I wondered and speculated as my golden Roman armor clanked to my gloomy stride in Electra’s empty corridors, and the wet, fleecy clouds drifted fitfully across the face of a broad, full moon, and a thousand things of love or sorrow crowded on my busy mind.
We had not long to wait, however. In an hour the mob came scuffling round the bend, shouting disorderly, with innumerable torches borne aloft, and they set up a yell when they caught sight of our shining white walls silently agleam in the moonlight.
There could be no parley with such a leaderless rush, and we attempted none. Without a thought of discipline they stormed the pastures and swarmed into the garden, a motley, angry crowd, armed with scythes and hooks and axes, and apparently all the town pressing on behind.
Well, we fired our fagots, and they gleamed up fiercely to welcome the scullion levies to their doom. Never did you see such a ruddy, wild scene—such a motley parody of noble war! The bright flames leaped into the tranquil sky in volcanoes of spark and hissing tongues, the British rushed at us between the fires like imps of darkness, and we met them face to face and slew them like the dogs they were. In a few minutes we were hemmed in the veranda, under whose columns we had some shelter, and then my brave Welshmen showed me how they could pull their long bows, which indeed they did in right good earnest, until all the trim terraces were littered with writhing, howling foemen.
But again they drove us back, this time into the house, and there we soon had a better light to fight by, for the sparks had caught the roof, and soon everything far and near was ablaze. Every man with me that night fought like a patrician, and Electra’s walls, with their endless painted garlands of oak and myrtle, their cooing doves and tender Cupids, were horribly besmeared and smudged; and her marble pillars were chipped by flying javelins and gashed by random axe-strokes.
Ten times we hurled ourselves upon the invaders and drove them staggering backward over the slippery pavements into the passages—sixteen men had fallen to my own arm alone, and we crammed their bodies into the doorways for barricade. But it would not do. The sheer weight of those without made the men within brave against their will. Nothing availed the stinging shafts of my Welshmen, the Iberian scimitars played hopelessly (like summer lightning in the glare) upon a solid wall of humanity, and the German axes could make no pathway through that impenetrable civilian tangle.
Overhead and among us the smoke curled and eddied, and the flames behind it made it like a hot noonday in our fighting-place. And in the wreaths of that pungent vapor, circling thick and yellow in the great open-roofed hall of the noble Roman villa, her ladyship’s statues of faun and satyr still fluted and grinned imbecilely as though they liked the turmoil. Niobe wept for new griefs as the marble little ones at her feet were calcined before her eyes, and the Gorgon head wore a hundred frightful snakes of flame; the pale, proud Pallas Athene of the Greeks looked disdainfully on the dying barbarians at her feet, and Pan, himself in bronze, leered on us through the reek until his lower limbs grew white hot—and gave way, and down he came—whereon a mighty Briton heaved him up by his head, and with this hissing, glowing flail carried destruction and confusion among us.
It was so hot in that flaming marble battle-place that foreigner and Briton broke off fighting now and then to kneel together for a moment at the red fountain basins where the jets still played (for the fugitives had forgotten to turn them off), and quenched their thirst in hurried gasps, ere flying again at each other’s throats, and so wild the confusion and uproar, and so dense the smoke and flame, so red and slippery were the pavements, and so thick the dead and dying, that hardly one could tell which were friends and which foes.
For an hour we kept them at bay, and then, when my arms ached with killing, all of a sudden the face of a man unknown to me, whom I never had seen before, shone in the gleam at my shoulder.
“Phra the Phœnician,” he said, calling me by an appellation no living man then knew, “I am bidden to get you hence. Come to the inner doorway—quick!”
I hardly knew what he meant, but there was that about him which I could not but obey, so I turned and followed his retreating figure.
I ran with him across the courtyard, under the white marble pillars all aglow, through the silent banquet-hall that had echoed so often to the haughty laughter of my mistress, and then when we reached the cool, damp outer air—like a wreath of mist in November, like an eddy among the dead leaves—my guide vanished and left me!
Angry and surprised, but with no time for wonder, I turned back.
Even as I did so there was a mighty crack, a groaning of a thousand timbers, and there before my very face, with a resounding roar, Electra’s lordly mansion, and all the wings, and buttresses, and basements, the rooms, and colonnades, and corridors of that splendid home of luxury and power, lurched forward, and heaved, and collapsed in one mighty red ruin that tinctured the sky from east to west, and buried alike in one vast, glowing hecatomb besiegers and besieged!
It had fallen, the last stronghold of Roman authority, and there was nothing more to defend! I turned, and took me to the quiet forest pathways, every nook and bend of which I knew. As I ran, the sweet, moist air of the evening was like an elixir to my heated frame; now into the black shadows I plunged, and anon brushing the silver moonlight dew from bramble and bracken, while a thousand fancies of our stubborn fight danced around me.
In a little time the road went down to a river that sparkled in flood under the moonbeams. Here the laden mules had crossed into comparative safety, and now I had to follow them with a single guide-rope to feel my way alone across the dangerous ford. I struggled through the swollen stream safely, though it rose high above my waist, and then who should loom out of the dark on the far side but Electra, standing alone and expectant at the brink.
Faithful, stately matron! She was so glad to see me again I was really sorry I did not love her more. I told her something of the fight, and she a little of the retreat. Some time before the long train of mules and slaves had gone on up the steep slowing bank, and into the coppice beyond, and now I and the Roman dame lingered a minute or so by the brink of the turgid stream to see the last flickers of her burning home. We were on the point of turning; indeed, Lady Electra seemed anxious to be gone, when, stepping out of the dark pathway into a patch of moonlight on the farther shore, a little silver casket in her duteous hands, and those dainty skirts in which she took so much pride muddy and soiled, appeared the poor little slave Numidea.
She tripped fearfully forth from the shadows and down to the brink, where the water was swirling against the stones in an ivory and silver inlay; and when she saw (not perceiving us in the shadow) that all the people had gone on and she was deserted to the tender mercies of the foemen behind, she dropped her burden, and threw up her white, clasped hands in the moonlight, and wailed upon us in a way that made my steel cuirass too small for my swelling heart.
Surely such a pitiful sight ought to have moved any one, yet Electra only cursed those nimble feet under her breath, and from this, though I may do her heavy injustice, I have since feared she had planned the desertion and sent the maid back to be killed or taken on some false errand which for her jealous purpose was too quickly executed.
That noble Roman lady pulled me by the hand, and would have had me leave the girl to her fate, scolding and entreating; and when I angrily shook myself free, turning her wild, untutored passions into the channels of love, told me she had guessed my project of leaving her “for Numidea,” and clung to me, and endeared me, and promised me “the tallest porch on Palatina” (as I threw off my buckler and broadsword to be lighter in the stream) and “the whitest arms for welcome there that ever a Roman matron spread” (as I pitched my gilded helmet into the bushes and strode down to the torrent), if I would but turn my back once for all upon my little kinswoman.
Three times the white arms of that magnificent wanton closed round me, and three times I wrenched them apart and hurled her back, three times she came anew to the struggle, squandering her wild, queenly love upon me, while, under the white light overhead, the tears shone in her wonderful upturned eyes like very diamonds; three times she invoked every deity in the hierarchy of the southern skies to witness her perjured love, and cursed, for my sake, all those absent youths who had fallen before her. Three times she knelt there on the black and white turf, and wrung her fair hands and shook out her long, thick hair, and came imploring and begging down to the very lapping of the water. And there I stood—for I too was a Southern, and could be hot and fierce—and spoke such words as she had never heard before—abused and scoffed and derided her: laughed at her sorrow and mocked her grief, and then turned and plunged into the torrent.
The ford was not long: in a minute or two I struggled out on the farther shore, and Numidea, with a cry of pleasure and trustfulness, came to my dripping arms.
The British, hot on the track, were shouting to one another in the dark pursuit, so the little maid was picked up securely, and, with her in my left arm upon my hip, her warm wrists about my neck, and my other hand on the guide-rope, we went back into the stream again. By the sacred fane of Vesta, it ran stronger than a mill sluice, and tugged and worried at my limbs like the fingers of a fury! I felt the pebbly gravel sifting and rolling beneath my feet, and the strong lift of the water, as it swirled, flying by in the moonlight, hissing and bubbling at my heaving chest in a way that frightened me—even me. At last, with every muscle on fire with the strain and turmoil, and my head giddy with the dancing torrent all about it, I saw the farther bank loom over us once more, and, heaving a heavy sigh of fatigue, collected myself for one more crowning effort.
But I had forgotten that royal harpy, my mistress; and, even as I gathered my last strength in the swirl of the black water below, she sprang to the verge of the bank overhead, vengeance and hatred flashing in the eyes that I had left full of gentleness and tears, and gleaming there in her wrath, her white robes shining in the moonlight against the ebony setting of the night, and glowered down upon us.
“Down with the maid!” she screamed, with all the tyrant in her voice. “Down with her, Centurion, or you die together!”
“Never! never!” I shouted, for my blood was boiling fiercely, and I could have laughed at a hundred such as she. But while I shouted my heart sank, for Electra was terrible to behold—an incarnation of beautiful cruelty, hot, reckless hatred ruling the features that had never turned upon me before but in sweetness and love. For one minute the passion gathered head, and then, while I stood in the current with dread of the coming deed, she snatched my own naked sword from the ground. “Die, then!” she yelled; “and may a thousand curses weigh down your souls!” As she said it the blade whirled into the moonlight, descending on the guide-rope just where it ran taut and hard over the posts, severing it clean to the last strands with one blow of those effective white arms, and the next minute the hempen cord was torn out of my grasp, and over and over in a drowning, bewildered cascade of foam we were swept away down the stream.
“Die, then!” she yelled; “and may a thousand curses weigh down your souls!”
It was the wildest swim that ever a mortal took. So fiercely did we spin and fly that heaven and earth seemed mixed together, and the white clouds overhead were not whiter than the sheets of foam that ran down seaward with us. I am a good swimmer, but who could make the bank in such a caldron of angry waters? and now Numidea was on top, and now I. It went to my heart to hear the poor little Christian gasp out on “Good St. Christopher!” and to feel the flutter of her breast against my leather jerkin, and then presently I did not feel it at all. Many an island of wreckage passed us, but none that I could lay hold on, until presently a mighty log came foaming down upon us, laboring through that torrent surf like a full-sailed ship. As it passed I threw an arm over a strong root, and thus, for an hour, behind that black midnight javelin we flew downward, I knew not whither. Then it presently left the strong stream, and towing me toward a soft alluvial beach, just as dawn was breaking in the east, deposited me there, and slowly disappeared again into the void.
This is all I know of Roman Britain; this is the end of the chapter.
As I reeled ashore with my burden some friendly fisherfolk came forward to help, but I saw them not. Numidea was dead! my poor little slave-girl—the one speck of virtue in that tyrant world—and I bent over her, and shut her kindly eyes, and spread on the sand her long wet braids, and smoothed the modest white gown she was so careful of, with a heart that was heavier than it ever felt yet in storm or battle!
Then all my grief and exertions came upon me in a flood, and the last thing I remember was stooping down in the morning starlight to kiss the fair little maid upon that pallid face that looked so wan and strange amid the wild-spread tangles of her twisted hair.