Part 45 (1/2)

”_Phui!_ What use have I of money? To paraphrase aeschylus: 'For more of money than I would is mine.' I can't eat it, or beat swords out of gold, or repair my s.h.i.+ps therewith.”

”Then why ama.s.s it at all?”

”Why drink when you know it is better to keep sober? I can no more stop plundering than a toper leave a wine-jar. Besides, perhaps some day I may see a road to amnesty open,--and, then, what will not money do for a man or woman?”

”Quintus Drusus, my patron, the Lady Cornelia, and the Lady Fabia all are rich. But I would not take up their sorrows for all their wealth.”

”True,” and Demetrius stared down into the inky water. ”It will not give back those who are gone forever. Achilles could ask Hephaestus for his armour, but he could not put breath into the body of Patroclus.

_Plutus_ and _Cratus_[162] are, after all, but weaklings. _A!_ This is an unequal world!”

[162] Riches and strength.

When Agias fell asleep that night, or rather that morning, on a hard seaman's pallet, two names were stirring in his heart, names inextricably connected: Cornelia, whom he had promised Quintus Drusus to save from Ahen.o.barbus's clutches, and Artemisia. In the morning the yacht, having run her sixteen miles to Ostia, stood out to sea, naught hindering.

It was two months later when Quintus Drusus reentered Rome, no more a fugitive, but a trusted staff officer of the lawfully appointed dictator Julius Caesar. He had taken part in a desperate struggle around Corfinium, where his general had cut off and captured the army with which Domitius had aimed to check his advance. Drusus had been severely wounded, and had not recovered in time to partic.i.p.ate in the futile siege of Brundusium, when Caesar vainly strove to prevent Pompeius's flight across the sea to Greece. Soon as he was convalescent, the young officer had hurried away to Rome; and there he was met by a story concerning his aunt, whereof no rational explanation seemed possible. And when, upon this mystery, was added a tale he received from Baiae, he marvelled, yet dreaded, the more.

Chapter XIX

The Hospitality of Demetrius

I

While grave senators were contending, tribunes haranguing, imperators girding on the sword, legions marching, cohorts clas.h.i.+ng,--while all this history was being made in the outside world, Cornelia, very desolate, very lonely, was enduring her imprisonment at Baiae.

If she had had manacles on her wrists and fetters on her feet, she would not have been the more a prisoner. Lentulus Crus had determined, with the same grim tenacity of purpose which led him to plunge a world into war, that his niece should comply with his will and marry Lucius Ahen.o.barbus. He sent down to Baiae, Phaon,--the evil-eyed freedman of Ahen.o.barbus,--and gave to that worthy full power to do anything he wished to break the will of his prospective patroness. Ca.s.sandra had been taken away from Cornelia--she could not learn so much as whether the woman had been scourged to death for arranging the interview with Drusus, or no. Two ill-favoured slatternly Gallic maids, the scourings of the Puteoli slave-market, had been forced upon Cornelia as her attendants--creatures who stood in abject fear of the whip of Phaon, and who obeyed his mandates to the letter. Cornelia was never out of sight of some person whom she knew was devoted to Lentulus, or rather to Phaon and his patron. She received no letters save those from her mother, uncle, or Ahen.o.barbus; she saw no visitors; she was not allowed to go outside of the walls of the villa, nor indeed upon any of its terraces where she would be exposed to sight from without, whether by land or sea. At every step, at every motion, she was confronted with the barriers built around her, and by the consciousness that, so long as she persisted in her present att.i.tude, her durance was likely to continue unrelaxed.

Cornelia was thirsty for the news from the world without. Her keepers were dumb to the most harmless inquiry. Her mother wrote more of the latest fas.h.i.+ons than of the progress of events in the Senate and in the field; besides, Claudia--as Cornelia knew very well--never took her political notions from any one except her brother-in-law, and Cornelia noted her mother's rambling observations accordingly.

Lentulus studiously refrained from adverting to politics in letters to his niece. Ahen.o.barbus wrote of wars and rumours of wars, but in a tone of such partisan venom and overreaching sarcasm touching all things Caesarian, that Cornelia did not need her prejudices to tell her that Lucius was simply abusing her credulity.

Then at last all the letters stopped. Phaon had no explanation to give. He would not suffer his evil, smiling lips to tell the story of the flight of the oligarchs from Rome, and confess that Lentulus and Claudia were no farther off than Capua. The consul had ordered that his niece should not know of their proximity and its cause,--lest she pluck up hope, and all his coercion be wasted. So there was silence, and that was all. Even her mother did not write to her. Cornelia grew very, very lonely and desolate--more than words may tell. She had one consolation--Drusus was not dead, or she would have been informed of it! Proof that her lover was dead would have been a most delightful weapon in Lentulus's hands, too delightful to fail to use instantly.

And so Cornelia hoped on.

She tried again to build a world of fantasy, of unreal delight, around her; to close her eyes, and wander abroad with her imagination. She roamed in reverie over land and sea, from Atlantis to Serica; and dwelt in the dull country of the Hyperboreans and saw the gold-sanded plains of the Ethiops. She took her Homer and fared with Odysseus into Polyphemus's cave, and out to the land of Circe; and heard the Sirens sing, and abode on Calypso's fairy isle; and saw the maiden Nausicaa and her maids at the ball-play on the marge of the stream. But it was sorry work; for ever and again the dream-woven mist would break, and the present--stern, unchanging, joyless--she would see, and that only.

Cornelia was thrown more and more back on her books. In fact, had she been deprived of that diversion, she must have succ.u.mbed in sheer wretchedness; but Phaon, for all his crafty guile, did not realize that a roll of aeschylus did almost as much to undo his jailer's work as a traitor among his underlings.

The library was a capacious, well-lighted room, prettily frescoed, and provided with comfortably upholstered couches. In the niches were a few choice busts: a Sophocles, a Xenophon, an Ennius, and one or two others. Around the room in wooden presses were the rolled volumes on Egyptian papyrus, each labelled with author and t.i.tle in bright red marked on the tablet attached to the cylinder of the roll. Here were the poets and historians of h.e.l.las; the works of Plato, Aristotle, Callimachus, Apollonius Rhodius and the later Greek philosophers.

Here, too, were books which the Greek-hating young lady loved best of all--the rough metres of Livius Andronicus and Cnaeus Naevius, whose uncouth lines of the old Saturnian verse breathed of the hale, hearty, uncultured, uncorrupted life of the period of the First Punic War.

Beside them were the other great Latinists: Ennius, Plautus, Terence, and furthermore, Pacuvius and Cato Major, Lucilius, the memoirs of Sulla, the orations of Antonius ”the orator” and Gracchus, and the histories of Claudius Quadrigarius and Valerius Antias.

The library became virtually Cornelia's prison. She read tragedy, comedy, history, philosophy,--anything to drive from her breast her arch enemy, thought. But if, for example, she turned to Apollonius Rhodius and read--

”Amidst them all, the son of aeson chief Shone forth divinely in his comeliness, And graces of his form. On him the maid Looked still askance, and gazed him o'er;”[163]

[163] Elton, translator.

straightway she herself became Medea, Jason took on the form of Drusus, and she would read no more; ”while,” as the next line of the learned poet had it, ”grief consumed her heart.”