Volume Ii Part 4 (1/2)

Things, bad begun, make strong themselves by ill.

MACBETH.

Sixteen days had elapsed, since the conspirators were again frustrated at the Consular Comitia.

Yet not for that had the arch-traitor withdrawn his foot one hair's breadth from his purpose, or paused one moment in his career of crime and ruin.

There is, beyond doubt, a necessity-not as the ancients deemed, supernatural, and the work of fate, but a natural moral necessity-arising from the very quality of crime itself, which spurs the criminal on to new guilt, fresh atrocity.

In the dark path of wickedness there is no halting place; the wretched climber must turn his face for ever upward, for ever onward; if he look backward his fall is inevitable, his doom fixed.

So was it proved with Catiline. To gain impunity for his first deed of cruelty and blood, another and another were forced on him, until at last, hara.s.sed and maddened by the consciousness of untold guilt, his frantic spirit could find no respite, save in the fierce intoxication of excitement, the strange delight of new atrocity.

Add to this, that, knowing himself antic.i.p.ated and discovered, he knew also that if spared for a time by his opponent, it was no lack of will, but lack of opportunity alone to crush him, that held the hands of Cicero inactive.

Thus, although for a time the energies of his weaker comrades sank paralysed by the frustration of their schemes, and by the certainty that they were noted and observed even in their most secret hours, his stronger and more vehement spirit found only in the greater danger the greater stimulus to action.

Sixteen days had elapsed, and gradually, as the conspirators found that no steps were taken by the government for their apprehension or punishment, they too waxed bolder, and began to fancy, in their insolent presumption, that the republic was too weak or too timid to enforce its own laws upon undoubted traitors.

All the causes, moreover, which had urged them at first to councils so desperate, existed undiminished, nay, exaggerated by delay.

Their debts, their inability to raise those funds which their boundless profusion rendered necessary, still maddened them; and to these the consciousness of detected guilt, and that ”necessity which,” in the words of their chief, ”makes even the timid brave,” were superadded.

The people and the Senate, who had all, for a time, been vehemently agitated by a thousand various emotions of anger, fear, anxiety, revenge, forgetting, as all popular bodies are wont to do, the past danger in the present security, were beginning to doubt whether they had not been alarmed at a shadow; and were half inclined to question the existence of any conspiracy, save in the fears of their Consul.

It was well for Rome at that hour, that there was still in the commonwealth, a counterpoise to the Democratic Spirit; which, vehement and energetical beyond all others in sudden and great emergencies, is ever restless and impatient of protracted watchfulness and preparation, and lacks that persistency and resolute endurance which seems peculiar to aristocratic const.i.tutions.

And now especially were demonstrated these opposite characteristics; for while the lower orders, and the popular portion of the Senate, who had been in the first instance most strenuous in their alarm, and most urgent for strong measures, were now hesitating, doubting, and almost compa.s.sionating the culprits, who had fallen under such a load of obloquy, the firmer and more moderate minds, were guarding the safety of the commonwealth in secret, and watching, through their unknown emissaries, every movement of the traitors.

It was about twelve o'clock at night, on the eighth day before the Ides, corresponding to our seventh of November, when the Consul was seated alone in the small but sumptuous library, which has been described above, meditating with an anxious and care-worn expression, over some papers which lay before him on the table.

No sound had been heard in the house for several hours; all its inhabitants except the Consul only, with the slave who had charge of the outer door, and one faithful freedman, having long since retired to rest.

But from without, the wailing of the stormy night-wind rose and fell in melancholy alternations of wild sobbing sound, and breathless silence; and the pattering of heavy rain was distinctly audible on the flat roofs, and in the flooded tank, or _impluvium_, which occupied the centre of the hall.

It was in one of the lulls of the autumnal storm, that a heavy knock was heard on the pannel of the exterior door, reverberating in long echoes, through the silent vestibule, and the vast colonnades of the Atrium and peristyle.

At that dead hour of night, such a summons would have seemed strange in any season: it was now almost alarming.

Nor, though he was endowed pre-eminently with that moral strength of mind which is the highest quality of courage, and was by no means deficient in mere physical bravery, did Cicero raise his head from the perusal of his papers, and listen to that unwonted sound, without some symptoms of anxiety and perturbation.

So thoroughly acquainted as he was, with the desperate wickedness, the infernal energy, and absolute fearlessness of Catiline, it could not but occur to him instantly, when he heard that unusual summons, at a time when all the innocent world was buried in calm sleep, how easy and obvious a mode of liberation from all danger and restraint, his murder would afford to men so daring and unscrupulous, as those against whom he was playing, for no less a stake than life or death.

There was, he well knew, but a single slave, and he old and unarmed, in the vestibule, nor was the aged and effeminate Greek freedman, one on whom reliance could be placed in a deadly struggle.

All these things flashed suddenly upon the mind of Cicero, as the heavy knocking fell upon his ear, followed by a murmur of many voices, and the tread of many feet without.

He arose quietly from the bronze arm-chair, on which he had been sitting, walked across the room, to a recess beside the book-shelves, and reached down from a hook, on which it hung, among a collection of armor and weapons, a stout, straight, Roman broad-sword, with a highly adorned hilt and scabbard.

Scarcely, however, had he taken the weapon in his hand, before the door was thrown open, and his freedman ushered in three men, attired in the full costume of Roman Senators.