Part 14 (2/2)

Herennia was already dressed for the party. Her brown hair had been piled up in an enormous ma.s.s on her head, eked out by false tresses and puffings, and the whole plentifully powdered with gold dust. She wore a prodigious number of gaudily set rings; her neck and ears and girdle were ablaze with gold and jewels. So far from aiming, as do modern ladies, to reduce the waist to the slenderest possible proportions, Herennia, who was actually quite thin, had carefully padded out her form to proper dimensions, and showed this fact by her constrained motions. She was rouged and painted, and around her floated an incense of a thousand and one rare perfumes. Her amethystine tunic and palla were of pure silk--then literally worth its weight in gold--and embroidered with an elaborate pattern in which pearls and other gems played a conspicuous part. For all this display of extravagance, Herennia was of only very mediocre beauty; and it was on this account that she was always glad to make uncomfortable flings at her ”dear friend” Cornelia, whenever possible.

Herennia seated herself on a divan, and proceeded to plunge into all the flying gossip of the day. Incidentally she managed to hint that Servius Maccus, her devoted admirer, had told her that the night before Lucius Ahen.o.barbus and some of his friends had attacked and insulted a lady on her way back from a late dinner.[87]

[87] A common diversion for ”young men of spirit.”

”The outrageous scapegrace!” cried Cornelia, while her maids hurried along a toilet which, if not as elaborate as Herennia's, took some little time. ”I imagined he might do such things! I always detested him!”

”Then you are not so very fond of Lucius Ahen.o.barbus,” said Herennia, raising her carefully painted eyebrows, as if in astonishment. ”I am really a little surprised.”

”Surprised?” reechoed Cornelia. ”What have I done or said that makes Lucius Ahen.o.barbus anything more than a very distant, a _very_ distant acquaintance?”

”My dear girl,” exclaimed Herennia, throwing up her hands, ”either you are the best actress, or the most innocent little wight, in Rome!

Don't you know all that they say about you?”

”Who--say--what--about--me?” stammered Cornelia, rising in her chair so suddenly, as to disarrange all the work Ca.s.sandra had been doing on her hair.

”Why, everybody,” said Herennia, smiling with an exasperating deliberation. ”And then it has all come out in the daily gazette.”[88]

[88] _Acta Diurna_, prepared officially.

”Where is it? Read! Let me see,” pleaded Cornelia, agitated and trembling.

”Why, how troubled you are,” giggled Herennia. ”Yes, I have my freedman copy down the whole bulletin every day, as soon as it is posted by the censor's officers; now let me see,” and she produced from under her robe a number of wooden, wax-covered tablets, strung together: ”the last praetor's edict; the will of old Publius Blaesus;”

and she ran over the headings with maddening slowness: ”the speech in the Senate of Curio--what an impudent rascal; the money paid yesterday into the treasury,--how dull to copy all that down!--the meteor which fell over in Tibur, and was such a prodigy; oh, yes, here it is at last; you may as well hear what all Rome knows now, it's at the end, among the private affairs. 'Lucius Ahen.o.barbus, son of Lucius Domitius, the Consular, and Cornelia, daughter of the late tribune, Caius Lentulus, are in love. They will be married soon.'”

These two brief sentences, which the mechanical difficulties under which journalistic enterprise laboured at that day made it impossible to expand into a modern ”article,” were quite sufficient to tell a whole story to Rome. Cornelia realized instantly that she had been made the victim of some vile trick, which she doubted not her would-be lover and her uncle had executed in collusion. She took the tablets from Herennia's hand, without a word, read the falsehoods once, twice, thrice. The meaning of the day attached to the terms used intimated the existence of a low intrigue, quite as much as any honourable ”engagement.” If Cornelia did not soon become the lawful wife of Lucius Ahen.o.barbus, the world would feel justified in piling scandal upon her name. The blow was numbing in its brutality. Instead of crying and execrating the liars, as Herennia fully expected her to do, Cornelia merely handed back the tablets, and said with cold dignity, ”I think some very unfortunate mistake has been made. Lucius Ahen.o.barbus is no friend of mine. Will you be so kind as to leave me with my maids?”

Herennia was overborne by the calm, commanding att.i.tude of the rival she had meant to annoy. When Cornelia became not the radiant _debutante_, but the haughty patrician lady, there was that about her which made her wish a mandate. Herennia, in some confusion, withdrew.

When she was gone, Cornelia ordered her maids out of the room, stripped off the golden tiara they had been plaiting into her hair, tore away the rings, bracelets, necklaces, and flung herself upon the pillows of the divan, quivering with sobs. She did not know of a single friend who could help her. All the knowledge that she had imbibed taught her that there was no G.o.d either to hear prayer, or succour the wronged. Her name would become a laughing-stock and a hissing, to be put on a par with Clodia's or that of any other frivolous woman, unless she not merely gave up the man she loved, but also threw herself into the arms of the man she utterly hated. The craving for any respite was intense. She was young; but for the moment, at least, life had lost every glamour. If death was an endless sleep, why not welcome it as a blessed release? The idea of suicide had a grasp on the ancient world which it is hard at first to estimate. A healthy reaction might have stirred Cornelia out of her despair, but at that instant the impulse needed to make her commit an irrevocable deed must have been very slight. But while she lay on the pillows, wretched and heart-sick, the voice of Agias was heard without, bidding the maids admit him to their mistress.

”Stay outside. I can't see you now,” moaned poor Cornelia, feeling that for once the sight of the good-humoured, vivacious slave-boy would be maddening. But Agias thrust back the curtains and boldly entered. What he said will be told in its due time and place; but the moment he had gone Cornelia was calling in Ca.s.sandra, and ordering the maids to dress her with all possible speed for the dinner-party.

”I must be all smiles, all enchantments,” she was saying to herself.

”I must dissemble. I must win confidences. I must do everything, and anything. I have no right to indulge in grief any longer. Quintus's dear life is at stake!”

II

Lentulus did not go to the banquet of Favonius, to see the unwonted graciousness with which his niece received the advances of Lucius Ahen.o.barbus, Neither was Favonius himself present at his own entertainment. They, and several others of the high magnates of their party, had been called away by an urgent summons, and spent the evening in secluded conference with no less a personage than Pompeius, or as he dearly loved to be called, ”the Magnus,” in his splendid palace outside the walls on the Campus Martius. And here the conqueror of Mithridates--a stout, soldierly man of six-and-fifty, whose best quality was a certain sense of financial honesty, and whose worst an extreme susceptibility to the grossest adulation--told them that he had received letters from Labienus, Caesar's most trusted lieutenant in Gaul, declaring that the proconsul's troops would never fight for him, that Caesar would never be able to stir hand or foot against the decrees of the Senate, and that he, Labienus, would desert him at the first opportunity.

Cheerful news this to the n.o.ble lords, who had for years scented in Caesar's existence and prosperity destruction to their own oligarchic rule of almost the known world. But when Cato, the most violent anti-Caesarian of them all, a sharp, wiry man with angular features, and keen black eyes, demanded:--

”And now, Magnus, you will not hesitate to annihilate the enemies of the Republic?” a look of pained indecision flitted across Pompeius's face.

”_Perpol_, gentlemen,” he exclaimed, ”I would that I were well out of this. Sometimes I think that you are leading me into breaking with Caesar for some ends of your own. He was my friend before you had a word of praise for me. He loved Julia; so did I.” And the Magnus paused a moment, overcome by the thought of his dead wife. ”Perhaps the Republic demands his sacrifice, perhaps--” and he cast a glance half of menace upon Lentulus Crus and Cato, ”you are the guilty, not he. But I am in grievous doubt.”

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