A Captive of the Roman Eagles Part 13

"But he took his prisoner to Ausonius?"

"Yes. Yet he did not lift her on Ausonius's white horse, as the latter seemed to ask, but swung the struggling girl upon another--a black one--perhaps, yes, probably his own."

The Duke remained silent and thoughtful. At last he said: "The Adeling is not to reach the Roman camp until twilight is closing in tomorrow.

Before he rides forth he will receive some directions from me. Tell him so. And"--here he lowered his voice to a whisper, much to the surprise of the slave, since there was no one in the tent--"if a faithful and cunning man should venture to introduce himself or some one else in disguise into the hostile camp and tell me what he saw there,--for I fear they will not give Adalo much chance to look about him,--and this man should be a slave, I would buy his freedom."

"Great Father!" exclaimed the Sarmatian, throwing himself prostrate before the Duke and trying to kiss his feet.

The old man angrily thrust him back with the handle of his spear: "Are you a dog, that you want to lick my feet?"

"Zercho is a Jazyge," said the bondman, rising and rubbing his bruised shins. "Thus my people honor one who is worthy of honor."

"But we sons of the Ases do not bend the knee even to the mighty King of Asgard when we call upon him and desire to honor him. Now go.

Perhaps it will be well that Adalo should not know what is to happen."

"He must not hear of it until after it has succeeded, for he would not let the others whom I must have go with me."

"I do not wish to know in advance how the work is to be done. Say outside that no one is to enter till I strike the shield."

The slave had scarcely gone when the Duke drew back the linen curtain whose folds fell to the ground behind him, shutting off the rear of the tent, used as a sleeping-room.

A man with long gray hair, scarcely younger than Hariowald, came forward glancing cautiously around him.

"We are alone, Ebarvin. Repeat your King's words exactly again. For consider, you must repeat them to his face, on oath, before the a.s.sembly of the people, if he deny them."

"He will not deny them," said the graybeard sorrowfully. "He is too proud to submit to you, but he is also too proud to lie."

"It is a pity," replied the Duke, curtly. "He was a fearless man."

"You speak as if he were numbered with the dead!" cried the other, shuddering.

"I do not see how he can survive. Or, do you believe he will change his choice?"

Ebarvin silently shook his head.

"How long have you borne his shield?"

"Ever since he _had_ a shield. I carried his father's, too," sighed the man.

"I know it, Ebarvin. And," he asked craftily, as if in reproach, while his gray eye blazed with a searching light, "and yet you betrayed him?"

The man gripped his short sword angrily.

"Betray? I accuse him openly, after I have often warned him loyally, after threatening that I would tell you all. He laughed at it; he would not believe me."

"And why do you do it? You have loved him."

"Why? And you ask that--you, who taught it to me, to us all? True, it was not you alone--first necessity! Why? Because only this league of the Alemanni can save us from ruin, from the shame of bondage. Why? Oh, Duke, the oaths with which you bound us years ago, before the ash of Odin, are terrible. Ebarvin will not forswear himself; I will not, a perjured man, drift through endless nights down the horrible river of Hel among corpses, serpents, and swords. And I have learned through a long life that we must stand together, or the Romans will destroy us province by province. Oh, I would slay my own son if, disobedient to the Duke and the Council of the people, he tried to burst our league asunder."

Up sprang the old chieftain; his eye flashed with delight. Raising the spear aloft with his left hand, he struck the right one on the clansman's shoulder: "I thank you for those words, Ebarvin! And I thank thee, thou Mighty One in the clouds! If such a spirit lives in the Alemanni, the league will never be sundered."

CHAPTER XXII.

It was really as Zercho the bondman had believed: Bissula had become the captive, not of Ausonius, but another; and his captive she remained. To the extreme surprise, nay, barely repressed indignation of the Prefect of Gaul, the younger man had a.s.serted his claim according to the rights of war. Ausonius had no claims whatever to the prisoner; that was clear. His nephew undoubtedly might have raised them, and at first he did make the attempt. But he grew strangely silent when the Tribune--scarcely in absolute harmony with the truth--said in his uncle's presence: "The girl had escaped again. I was the first to catch her finally. Shall I call her, that she may tell you the whole story herself?"

Hercula.n.u.s, with a venomous glance, left the tent.

But Ausonius did not understand the imperious rudeness of the brave soldier who was usually so devoted to him. When the Tribune curtly appealed to the right of war, Ausonius, deeply offended, pondered over all the reasons which, as he thought, must induce his friend not to yield his legal right in this instance to him. The poet, seeking motives for the act, of course first grasped the nearest: all the men in the camp gazed at the peculiar beauty of the child with unconcealed admiration. It was no wonder then that the Illyrian, in the full vigor of manhood, should also be seized with ardent love for the beautiful creature who had fallen into his hands and, without really having any evil design, wanted to keep her in his power until either from affection or obedience the captive should yield to her master.

But this anxiety, which at first had weighed heavily upon him, was soon relieved. With the keen distrust of jealousy, he watched his rival sharply at every meeting; but even suspicion could discover nothing that would have warranted this conjecture. Quiet, unmoved, and steadfast as ever was the Tribune's bearing in her presence, which he neither shunned nor sought, but treated with indifference. He looked into the wonderful eyes no more frequently than occasion required, and his glance was calm, his voice did not tremble. So Ausonius regarded his friend's act as a soldier's strange whim, and did not doubt that he would soon give it up. But this proved an error.

On returning to the camp Ausonius entreated his friend, without renouncing his right of possession, to place the young girl in the tent next to the Prefect's, now occupied by slaves and freedwomen, whom he would remove. But Saturninus insisted that Bissula should be lodged among the wives of the freedmen and female slaves who occupied some tents a long distance from the Prefect's. The young girl herself paid little heed to the discussion between the two Romans, whose meaning she scarcely understood.

Released by the Tribune from the fear of death, and soothed by the presence of her honored friend, her young cheerful heart soon accommodated itself to the new condition of affairs,--not through recklessness, but through childish ignorance of the perils which possibly threatened her. Her grandmother was not discovered; her faithful servant had not been captured; she herself was certainly secure in the presence and under the eyes of her friend, the most aristocratic man in the Roman camp. He would not let a hair of her head be harmed, she knew.

True, the thought weighed heavily upon her heart as soon as she was captured that she herself was solely to blame for her misfortune. If she had obeyed the well-meant counsel--she was on the verge of tears; experience had taught the value of the advice--she would now have been safe and sheltered with her grandmother, though also with Adalo. And owing him a debt of grat.i.tude! She crushed the tears on her long lashes. No, she would not admit that he was right. Now she owed the haughty Adeling nothing: that was certainly an advantage. "And"--she shook her waving locks back defiantly--"they won't eat me here! Only don't be afraid, Bissula," she said to herself; "and don't submit to anything!"

She had trembled only a moment after her escape from Hercula.n.u.s, when her powerful deliverer measured her whole dainty figure with a look under which she lowered her eyes in confusion. But when she again raised those innocent child-eyes, the expression had vanished. And it never returned.

Her master allowed her to spend the whole day with her "Father Ausonius": only when it grew dark he appeared, with inexorable firmness, to take her away; and he went with her himself to the tent a.s.signed to her, before which he stationed one of his Illyrian countrymen as a sentinel all night.

Bissula never saw her friend's nephew, whom she feared, alone. She confidently expected the restoration of her liberty when the camp should be broken up and the Romans should withdraw from the country.

There would be no fighting, Ausonius repeatedly told her. So the light-hearted girl regarded her captivity, which had lost all its terrors, as an adventure that afforded her an opportunity for the conversations with her friend which she had missed so long.

Many of her young playmates had lived as hostages and probably as captives in Roman camps and in the fortresses on the southern sh.o.r.e, and been restored to liberty uninjured when truce or peace was declared. That she could be detained or carried away against her will she did not fear: the most powerful man in the camp was her protector.

Yet this peril constantly threatened her more and more closely.

Ausonius kept a sort of diary, in which before going to sleep he recorded events, impressions, sketches of poems, and short bits of verse--a custom whose regular observance he scarcely omitted even in camp. A touch of pedantry was one of his characteristics. Yet the diary was not a monologue, rather a sort of dialogue; for he addressed it in the form of a letter to his oldest and most intimate friend, Arius Paulus of Bigerri, rhetorician, but also an old soldier. Every three months he collected what he had written and forwarded it to him to receive his criticisms and answers on the margin of the ma.n.u.script when returned.

So, during these days of involuntary leisure he wrote.

CHAPTER XXIII.

V. BEFORE THE KALENDS OF SEPTEMBER.

Ausonius sends greetings to his Paulus.

I wrote to you yesterday about the charming Barbarian child. Child? She is one no longer. The delicate, yet lovely outlines of her form have developed into exquisite roundness. And Barbarian? If she ever was one she has ceased to be so, since Ausonius taught her the pomp of the Latin language. How shall I describe her to you without drawing, no, painting her? For it is precisely the charm of her coloring that is so peerless. If only I had brought with me Paralos, my Ionian slave, who painted the nymphs so exquisitely--you know--in my little dining hall yonder, in the villa in the Province Noverus! And the expression--the vivacity--in those ever varying features, now full of mischievous wrath, now mirth, now jest, and anon of a sorrowful yearning which to me is full of mystery.

And the dainty figure! Recently her leather sandals stuck fast in the mire outside the camp ditch. How white and charming were the little feet! How can they even support the figure, lightly as it floats along?

The muse which so long has shunned me has again returned in the form of this Suabian girl: a fairer metamorphosis than ever Ovid dreamed.

Verses well up in my mind ceaselessly. Just listen!

"Nature had dowered Bissula with charms which the greatest of artists Vainly to picture would strive. Doubtless to full many another Justice he might do by use of the pigments of red and of white lead: Coloring like hers, alas! will forever escape him, unless he should paint Her face with a lily's l.u.s.tre, on which the breath of a rose hath rested."