The Lion's Brood Part 8

Sergius sprang aside, as the beast dashed by; but Decius, roused once more to the possibility of independent thought and action, stepped toward it and, as it pa.s.sed, plunged his sword between its heaving ribs.

"What now, my master?" he said, flushing with shame at his fears of the last hour--perhaps the bravest hour of his life. "Does the lying Carthaginian seek to terrify Quintus Fabius, the dictator, as he terrified Marcus Decius, the decurion?"

"Yes, truly," replied Sergius, gloomily; "and he will succeed even better. No general, and, least of all, ours, would lead out his army in the night against such a spectacle. Come, it is necessary that we should reach the camp," and, turning once again, they fell to running in a more southern direction, where a dim glow in the sky seemed to tell of the watchfires of an army.

At first no sound broke the stillness of the night, save the laboured breathing of the weary runners and the strokes of their leathern cothurni upon the hard ground; but soon other noises came to mingle with these and, at last, to drown them: the lowing of thousands of cattle, now scattered far and wide over the plain and hillsides, and then the distant clash of arms and the cries of combatants.

Day began to dawn, just as the fugitives came in sight of the Roman camp with the army drawn up behind its ramparts, waiting for they knew not what. Here and there upon the heights they could see small bodies of legionaries who defended themselves against light troops of the enemy, until overwhelmed by the Spanish infantry that scaled the hills and cut them to pieces; while to every prayer that the dictator should march out to their support, he returned one grim answer.

"They deserted their posts in the pa.s.ses. Rome needs not such soldiers."

So, company by company, the guards of the defiles, terrified or lured away to the ridges by the ruse of the cattle and the blazing f.a.gots, fell ingloriously before their comrades' eyes, as being men not worth the effort to succour. The rear-guard of the invaders had already made its way through the pa.s.s, while the Carthaginian van was well on into the valley of the Volturnus. Now, too, the African light troops disappeared, and, at last, the white tunics of the Spaniards, gay with their purple borders, glittered for a moment on the hilltops, and then, their work of death completed, sank away behind the ridges to fall back and join their comrades in a march of new destruction through a new country.

VIII.

DISGRACE.

While these things were happening, for the most part in the sight of all, Sergius had been able to gain a moment's speech with the dictator.

Forcing his way through the crowd of tribunes and officers who thronged the praetorium, he had found Fabius seated before his tent, and had told his story in the fewest words possible.

Naked but for his torn tunic and his cothurni, covered from head to foot with blood and mire, his left arm hanging useless, and his face like the face of a dead man, neither his miserable plight nor his story brought softness to the stern lips and brow of the general.

"You have come to tell me this?" he said, when the other had finished speaking. "Do I not know it _now_?" and he pointed to the heights.

Then he turned away and spoke with some one at his side, while Sergius stood, with downcast eyes, swaying and scarcely able to keep his feet.

Among those around him his fate seemed hardly a matter of conjecture, but a thrill went through the company when Minucius, who had been vainly urging the dictator to support the guards of the pa.s.ses, now turned away in disgust, and, noting the disgraced officer, as if for the first time, cried out in a loud voice:--

"What, my friend! have not the lictors attended to you, yet, for venturing to play the man?"

Sergius felt the added danger to which the master-of-the-horse had exposed him by using his insubordination to point such a moral to his commander; but the face of the dictator gave no sign that he had even heard the taunting challenge. Calmly he gave his orders for cautious scouting, for breaking camp, and for the army to resume its patient march of observation, along the flank of the retiring foe. Then, when one after another had retired to fulfil his commands, he turned again to the waiting tribune.

"I have been considering your fault," he said slowly, "and I had marked you out as a much needed victim for the rods and axe. Go to my master-of-the-horse and thank him for your life. His taunt was doubtless meant to destroy you, in order that he might play the demagogue over your fate. I accept it as a challenge to my self-control. It is more necessary that I should show myself wise and forbearing than that one fool should perish for his folly. Go back to Rome, and tell them that I have many soldiers who can fight, and that I want only those who can obey."

Utterly exhausted, Sergius struggled vainly to withstand this last, crushing blow. His composure was unequal to the task, and, sinking upon his knees, as the dictator turned toward the tent, he could only stretch out one hand and murmur:--

"The axe, my master; I pray you, the axe."

Fabius paused a moment and eyed him grimly. Then his rugged, weary face softened slightly.

"I trusted you," he said. "Could you not trust me for a little while?

But go to Rome, as I bade you--only there shall others go with you, and you shall bear for your message, instead of that one, this: that there is no room for wounded men in my camp."

"But I shall be well in two days--in one--I am well now if you say it."

Fabius shook his head slowly.

"Aesculapius has not been unhonoured by me," he said, "and he has told me that you will be but a burden for many days. For this reason go to Rome, and for two others that you shall not tell of: one, for punishment because you could not obey, and one, because the time will come soon when Rome shall need even the men who can only fight."

Sergius saw the hopelessness of struggling against his softened fate, bitter though it was. Open disgrace, indeed, had been turned aside; but, on the other hand, he was doomed to inaction during times when all Rome longed only to strike, and he could not but feel that he had fallen far in the estimation of his general.

IX.

HOME.

The Appian Way was still safe, even from the chance of Numidian foray, and it was along its lava-paved level that the long convoy of sick and wounded writhed slowly northward that afternoon.

Half reclining in the rude chariot, each jolt of which brought agony to his injured shoulder, Sergius watched, with far deeper pain than that of body, the last troop of allied horse winding up the pa.s.s toward Allifae: the rear-guard of Rome's line of march. Then he fell to brooding upon his fate, while the night followed the day and the day the night, and still the dreary, groaning caravan dragged on, resting only during the heated hours.

On, over the Liris at Minturnae, upward, over the mountains behind Tarracina and descending again into the Pontine plain; through the shady groves of Arician ilex that crown the Alban Hills, down to Bovillae, and then away across the Campagna to Rome--a marvel of deep cuttings through the hills,--a marvel of giant superstructures over valleys,--the Appian, the Queen of Ways.

There were long, green ridges now, swelling from the plain and breaking away into little rocky cliffs tufted with wild fig trees: sluggish streams wound down from the east where, far away, loomed the snow-tipped summits of Apennine, while toward the west the sky reflected a brighter light from the sea that glittered beneath it.

At last the eyes of the vanguard of weary wayfarers could descry, through the morning mists, the crowned cl.u.s.ter of hills that was to be a crown to all the world. Nearer they came and yet nearer, through the vineyards and cornfields of the Campagna--the southern Campagna teeming with its herds of mouse-coloured cattle, whose great, stupid eyes were only less stupidly beautiful than those of the rustics that watched over their grazings.

And now wounds and sickness were, for the moment, forgotten, as man pointed out to man this and that landmark of home: temples on this hill and on that; Diana on the Aventine, the hill of the people; Jupiter Stator on the Palatine; the grim ma.s.s of the citadel above the rock of Tarpeia; the great quadriga that surmounted the greatest fane of all--the house of Capitoline Jove. To the right of these were the cl.u.s.tered oaks of the Caelian Mount, while, farthest away, but highest of all, the white banner fluttering from the heights of Janiculum told them that the city was still safe, still una.s.sailed. They were pa.s.sing where the road was bordered by its houses of the dead; tombs of the great families, above which the funereal cypresses bent their heads and shed peace and shade alike over the dead and the living. The hum of the city came to their ears, and, as the convoy drew nearer to the Capenian Gate, the throng, pouring out to meet them, grew thicker and more dense, blocking the way until the cavalry of the escort cleared it with their spear-b.u.t.ts. Then the press divided, running along on both sides of the carriages, in two fast-filling streams whose murmurs swelled into a very torrent's roar of questions and prayers for news of the general and the army.

"Was Hannibal beaten? Had he been slain, or was he waiting in chains to grace the Fabian triumph? Was it true that he measured twice the height of common men, and that a single eye blazed cyclops-like in the middle of his forehead? How many elephants would be seen in the triumph?"

Such and a hundred queries, equally wild, a.s.sailed the escort and the occupants of the wagons; for this was the rabble: poor citizens, freedmen, slaves, for whom no story of Hannibal and Carthage was too improbable. Nevertheless Sergius imagined he could discern a spirit of irony underlying much that he heard.

When they had reached the low eminence that, crowned by the Temple of Mars, faced the city gate, he bade the attendants help him descend from the army carriage, that he might wait the coming of his slaves with a litter. A messenger was soon found, and hurried off, charged with necessary directions.

The crowd had rolled on through the gate, together with the convoy, and the sick man was left alone save for the attendants of the temple in whose care he had placed himself. Day by day, as he had jolted along his journey, he had felt the fever coming on--fever born of his injury and the terrible strain to which he had been subjected: now it was only necessary to reach his home and rest. Last of his race but for two older sisters who had married several years since, the s.p.a.cious mansion of the family of Fidenas was his alone, with its slaves and its ancestral masks and its cool courts and its outlook over the seething Forum up to the opposite heights of the Capitol. There he would find care and comfort for the body if not for the soul.

And now the patter of running feet sounded from the pavement below.

They were come, at last, with the litter, and Sergius, entering it, was borne swiftly through the gate, on, between the tall houses that backed up against the hills, turning soon to the left into the New Way; on, past the altar of Hercules in the cattle market, past the Temple of Vesta, along the Comitia, and into the Sacred Way by the front of the Curia. Thence they swung westward to the Roman Gate, the gate in the ancient Wall of the City of Romulus that fenced the Palatine alone,--a stately entrance, now, to the residence portion of the city most favoured by the great families. Near by stood the house that marked the ending of the journey, bustling with its slaves and bright with a hundred lamps; while the physician, an old freedman of the tribune's father, stood upon the threshold to greet and care for his late master's son.

Gravely shaking his head at the discouraging aspect of the invalid and muttering to himself in Greek, for he was born in Rhodes, he led the way back to the great hall between the peristyle and the garden.

"Here, master," he said, "I have caused your couch to be laid, at the moment I learned of your arrival and condition. You observe, the air and light will be better than in your apartment, and the s.p.a.ce better calculated for those whose duty it shall be to minister to you, until the divine Aesculapius and Apollo's self unite to grant success to my efforts."

"It is well, Agathocles," said Sergius, wearily, "and I thank you."

His voice seemed to die away with the last words, and a sort of stupor fell over him. Agathocles watched him closely, as he lay upon the couch, noted the heavy breathing, and drew his brows together with a deep frown. Behind him a group of the household slaves whispered together and cast frightened glances, now at their master, now at the disciple of the healing art; for Sergius had been brought up among them, and the terms of their service were neither heavy nor harsh.

Then the surgeon set to work examining the shoulder, nodding his head to observe that the bone had been replaced in its socket, but waxing troubled again over the inflammation and swelling that told the story of torn tendons and blood-vessels too long neglected, and of the hardships of the journey. Slaves were sent scurrying, in this direction and that, to compound lotions and spread poultices, while Agathocles himself proceeded to the ostentatious mixing of some cooling draught calculated to ward off, if possible, the fever that was already claiming its sway.

X.

CONVALESCENCE.