A Friend of Caesar Part 54

But Agias reasoned otherwise. If Pothinus and Achillas had really consented to receive the Magnus, flight was indeed necessary. Agias, however, had grounds, he thought, for hesitancy. He knew that Achillas, the head of the army, bitterly opposed the idea of letting Pompeius land; he knew, what was almost as much to the point, that Pratinas did not care to renew certain acquaintanceships contracted at Rome. Therefore the young h.e.l.lene calmed Cornelia's fears, and waited as best he might.

The council had convened early in the day; the herald went through the squares of Pelusium announcing that Ptolemaeus, "Son of Ra," would receive as his guest the Roman suppliant. The sh.o.r.e fronting the anchorage was covered with the files of the royal army in full array.

Several Egyptian men-of-war had been drawn down into the water and their crews were hastening on board. Out in the haven rode the little fleet of the Pompeians. Agias had heard the proclamation, and hurried down to the mole to bear the earliest definite information to his mistress. Presently, out of the throng of officers and court magnates on the quay, stepped Achillas in a splendid panoply of gilded armour, with a purple chiton flowing down from beneath. Beside him, with the firm swinging step of the Roman legionary, strode two other officers in magnificent armour, whom Agias at once recognized as Lucius Septimius, a Roman tribune now in Egyptian service, and a certain Salvius, who had once been a centurion of the Republic. The three advanced on to the quay and stood for a moment at a loss. Agias, who was quite near, could hear their conversation.

"The yacht is not ready for us."

"We cannot delay a moment."

There was a large open boat moored to the quay, a fisher man's craft.

In a moment a few subalterns had taken possession of it and there was a call for rowers. Agias, who, like all his race, never declined a chance "to see or hear some new thing," took his seat on one of the benches, and soon the craft shot away from the mole with the three officers in its stern.

It was a short pull to the Pompeian ships; Agias, as he glanced over his shoulder thought he could see a motion on board the vessels as if to sheer away from the boat; but in a moment the little craft was alongside, under the lee of the flagship.

"Where is Pompeius Magnus?" cried Achillas, rising from his seat; "we are sent to carry him to the king."

A martial, commanding figure was seen peering over the side,--a figure that every inhabitant of Rome knew right well.

"I am he; but why do you come thus meanly with only a fisher's boat?

Is this honourable, is this worthy of a great king's guest?"

"a.s.suredly, kyrios," began Achillas, "we are forced to come in this small craft, because the water is too shallow for larger ships to approach the sh.o.r.e."

Agias knew that this was a lie; he was very certain that he was about to be witness to a deed of the darkest treachery. A vague feeling of shrinking and horror froze his limbs, and made his tongue swell in his mouth. Yet he was perfectly powerless to warn; a sign or a word would have meant his instant death.

"_Salve_, Imperator!" shouted Septimius in Latin, rising in turn.

"Don't you remember the campaign I had with you against the pirates?"

The fugitive general's care-worn face lighted up at the recognition of an old officer.

"_Eu!_" he answered, "I shall not want for good friends, I see! How glad I shall be to grasp your hands! But is not this a very small boat? I see men going on board the galleys by the sh.o.r.e."

"You shall be satisfied in a moment, kyrios," repeated Achillas, with suave a.s.surance, "that the quicksands by the mole are very dangerous to large vessels. Will you do us the honour to come aboard?"

Agias felt as though he must howl, scream, spring into the sea--do anything to break the horrible suspense that oppressed him.

A woman was taking leave of Pompeius on the deck, a tall, stately, patrician lady, with a sweet, trouble-worn face; Agias knew that she was Cornelia Scipionis. She was adjuring her husband not to go ash.o.r.e, and he was replying that it was impossible to refuse; that if the Egyptians meant evil, they could easily master all the fugitives with their armament. Several of the Magnus's servants came down into the boat--couple of trusted centurions, a valued freedman called Philip, a slave named Scythes. Finally Pompeius tore himself from his wife's arms.

"Do not grieve, all will be well!" were his words, while the boat's crew put out their hands to receive him; and he added, "We must make the best choice of evils. I am no longer my own master. Remember Sophocles's iambics,

"He that once enters at a tyrant's door Becomes a slave, though he were free before.'"

The general seated himself on the stern seat between the Egyptian officers. Agias bent to his oar in sheer relief at finding some way in which to vent his feelings; and tugged at the heavy paddle until its tough blade bent almost to cracking. The silence on the part of the officers was ominous. Not a word, not a hint of recognition, came from Achillas or his Italian a.s.sociates, from the instant that Pompeius set foot in the boat. The stillness became awkward. The Magnus, flushed and embarra.s.sed, turned to Septimius. "I was not mistaken in understanding that you were my fellow-soldier in years past?" His answer was a surly nod. Pompeius, however, reined his rising feelings, and took up and began to re-read some tablets on which he had written an address in Greek, to be delivered before the king. Agias rowed on with the energy of helpless desperation. They were very close to the quay. A company of the royal body-guard in gala armour stood as if awaiting the distinguished visitor. For a moment the young h.e.l.lene believed that Achillas was sincere in his errand.

The boat drew up to the landing; one or two of the rowers sprang to the dock and made her fast. Agias was unshipping his oar. His thought was that he must now contrive the escape of Cornelia. Pompeius half rose from his seat; the boat was pitching in the choppy harbour swell; the general steadied himself by grasping the hands of Philip the freedman. Suddenly, like the swoop of a hawk on its prey, Agias saw the right hand of Septimius tear his short sword from its sheath. A scream broke from the h.e.l.lene's lips; before the Magnus could turn his head, the blow was struck. Pompeius received the blade full in the back, and staggered, while Salvius and Achillas likewise drew and thrust at him. Agias gazed on, paralyzed with horror. The general seized his red paludamentum, threw it over his face, groaned once, and fell. Even as he did so Septimius struck him across the neck, decapitating the corpse. The brutal boatmen tore the blood-soaked clothes off of the body, and flung it overboard, to drift ash.o.r.e with the current. And so it ended with Pompeius Magnus, Imperator, the Fortunate, the favourite general of Sulla, the chieftain of "G.o.dlike and incredible virtue," the conquerer of the kingdoms of the East, thrice consul, thrice triumphator, joint ruler with Caesar of the civilized world!

Agias hastened back to Cornelia to tell her that the danger was past, that there was no need of a flight to Cleopatra; but he was sick at heart when he thought of the treachery in which he had shared, albeit so unwillingly.

Chapter XXIII

Bitterness and Joy

I

Cornelia knew not whether to be merry or to weep when the report of the fate of Pompeius reached her. That she would be delivered up to her uncle was no longer to be dreaded; but into the hands of what manner of men had she herself fallen? Her own life and that of Fabia, she realized, would be snuffed out in a twinkling, by Pothinus and his confederates, the instant they saw in such a deed the least advantage.

The splendid life of the court at the garrison city went on; there was an unending round of fetes, contests in the gymnasium and stadium; chariot races; contests of poets and actors for prizes in dramatic art. To the outward eye nothing could be more decorous and magnificent than the pleasures of the Egyptian king. And so some days pa.s.sed while Cornelia crushed her fears, and waited for the news that she was sure would come--that Caesar was pressing on the tracks of his rival.

Late one afternoon, as the king and his suite were just returned from a visit by boat up the river to inspect a temple under restoration at Sethroe, Agias sought the private apartment of his patroness. His face was extremely grave, and Cornelia at once realized that he brought serious news.

"Domina," he said, speaking in Latin to evade the curiosity of the maids present, "when you are at leisure, I have a curious story to tell you."

Cornelia presently found pretexts to get rid of all her women. Agias reconnoitred, made certain that there was no eavesdropper, and began afresh.

"What I have to say is so different from that which we feared a few days since, that I scarce know how you will receive it. I have just learned that your uncle Lucius Lentulus and Lucius Ahen.o.barbus made a landing on the coast the day after Pompeius was murdered; they have been quietly arrested and the matter hushed up. I believe that Pothinus intends to execute them without your knowledge. Only by a friendship with some of the officers of the guard did I get at this."

Cornelia's lips twitched; her hands pressed on her cheeks till the pale skin flushed red. In her heart a hundred conflicting emotions held sway. She said nothing for a long time, and then it was only to ask where the prisoners were confined.

"They are in the dungeon of the fortress," said Agias. "That is all that I can discover."

"I must see them at once," declared the lady.

"I do not know how Pothinus will take this," replied the young freedman; "the discovery of his secret will be rightly attributed to me, and your ladyship would not care to imperil my life unless something very great is to be gained thereby."

"I shall miss you very much," said Cornelia, soberly. "But though Lucius Lentulus has done me grievous ill, he is my uncle. You must leave Pelusium this very night, and keep out of danger until Pothinus's vexation can abate. In the morning I shall demand to see the prisoners and to learn the eunuch's intentions touching them."

Agias accordingly fared away, much to Cornelia's regret; but not quite so much to his own, because his enforced journeying would take him to the Nile villa, where was the pretty Artemisia. Early on the following day Cornelia boldly went to Pothinus, and, without any explanations, demanded to see her uncle. The regent, who had tried to keep the matter profoundly secret, first was irate, then equivocated, and tried to deny that he had any Roman prisoners; then, driven to bay by Cornelia's persistency and quiet inflexibility before his denials and protests, gave her permission to be taken to the prison and see the captives.

To pa.s.s from the palace of Pelusium to the fortress-prison was to pa.s.s, by a few steps, from the Oriental life, in all its sensuous splendour, to Orientalism in its most degraded savagery. The prison was a half-underground kennel of stone and brick, on which the parching sun beat pitilessly, and made the galleries and cells like so many furnaces in heat. The fetid odour of human beings confined in the most limited s.p.a.ce in which life can be maintained; the rattle of fetters; the grating of ponderous doors on slow-turning pivots; the coa.r.s.e oaths and brutish aspect of both jailers and prisoners; the indescribable squalor, filth, misery,--these may not be enlarged upon.

The attendants led Cornelia to the cell, hardly better than the rest, wherein Lentulus and Ahen.o.barbus were confined.

But another had been before Cornelia to visit the unfortunates. As the lady drew toward the open door she saw the graceful, easy form of Pratinas on the threshold, one hand carelessly thrust in the folds of his himation, the other gesturing animatedly, while he leaned against the stone casing.

Lucius Lentulus, his purple-lined tunic dirty and torn, his hair disordered, his face knitted into a bitter frown, crouched on a stool in the little low-ceiled room, confronting the h.e.l.lene. Cowering on a ma.s.s of filthy straw, his head bowed, his body quaking in a paroxysm of fear, was another whose name Cornelia knew full well.

Pratinas was evidently just concluding a series of remarks.

"And so, my friends, amici, as we say at Rome," he was jauntily vapouring, "I regret indeed that the atomic theory,--which my good Ahen.o.barbus, I am sure, holds in common with myself,--can leave us no hope of meeting in a future world, where I can expect to win any more of his good sesterces with loaded dice. But let him console himself!

He will shortly cease from any pangs of consciousness that our good friend Quintus Drusus will, in all probability, enjoy the fortune that he has inherited from his father, and marry the lady for whose hand the very n.o.ble Ahen.o.barbus for some time disputed. Therefore let me wish you both a safe voyage to the kingdom of Hades; and if you need money for the ferryman, accept now, as always, the use of my poor credit."

"May all the infernal G.o.ds requite you!" broke forth Lentulus, half rising, and uplifting his fettered hands to call down a solemn curse.

"It has been often observed by philosophers," said Pratinas, with a smile, "that even among the most sceptical, in times of great extremity, there exists a certain belief in the existence of G.o.ds.

Your excellency sees how the observation is confirmed."

"The G.o.ds blast you!" howled Lentulus, in impotent fury. Before further words could pa.s.s, Cornelia put Pratinas aside, and entered the cell.