The Roman Traitor Volume I Part 13

Arvina, trembling with the deep consciousness of hospitality betrayed, and feeling the first stings of remorse already, stood thunderstricken, and unable to articulate.

"Speak!" thundered Catiline; "speak! art thou not mine-mine soul and body-sworn to be mine forever?"

Alas! the fatal oath, sworn in the heat of pa.s.sion, flashed on his soul, and he answered humbly, and in a faint low voice, how different from his wonted tones of high and manly confidence-

"I am sworn, Catiline!"

"See then that thou be not forsworn. Little thou dream'st yet, unto what thou art sworn, or unto whom; but know this, that h.e.l.l itself, with all its furies, would fall short of the tortures that await the traitor!"

"I am, at least, no traitor!"

"No! traitor! Ha!" cried Catiline, "is it an honest deed to creep into the bosom of a daughter of the house which entertained thee as a friend!-No!

Traitor-ha! ha! ha! thou shalt ere long learn better-ha! ha! ha!"

And he laughed with the fearful sneering mirth, which was never excited in his breast, but by things perilous and terrible and hateful. In a moment, however, he repressed his merriment, and added-

"Give me that poniard thou didst wear this morning. It is mine."

"Thine!" cried the unhappy youth, starting back, as if he had received a blow; "thine, Catiline!"

"Aye!" he replied, in a hoa.r.s.e voice, looking into the very eyes of Paul.

"I am the slayer of the slave, and regret only that I slew him without torture. Know you whose slave he was, by any chance?"

"He was the Consul's slave," answered Arvina, almost mechanically-for he was utterly bewildered by all that had pa.s.sed-"Medon, my freedman Thrasea's cousin."

"The Consul's, ha!-which Consul's? speak! fool! speak, ere I tear it from your throat; Cicero's, ha?"

"Cicero's, Catiline!"

"Here is a coil; and knows he of this matter? I mean Cicero."

"He knows it."

"That is to say, you told him. Aye! this morning, after I spoke with you.

I comprehend; and you shewed him the poniard. So! so! so! Well, give it to me; I will tell you what to do, hereafter."

"I have it not with me, Sergius," he replied, thoroughly daunted and dismayed.

"See that you meet me then, bringing it with you, at Egeria's cave, as fools call it, in the valley of Muses, at the fourth hour of night to-morrow. In the meantime, beware that you tell no man aught of this, nor that the instrument was bought of Volero. Ha! dost thou hear me?"

"I hear, Catiline."

"And wilt obey?"

"And will obey."

"So shall it go well with thee, and we shall be fast friends forever. Good repose to thee, good my Paullus."

"And Lucia?" he replied, but in a voice of inquiry; for all that he had heard of the tremendous pa.s.sions and vindictive fury of the conspirator, flashed on his mind, and he fancied that he knew not what of vengeance would fall on the head of the soft beauty.

"Hath played her part rarely!" answered the monster, as he dismissed him from the door, which he opened with his own hand. "Be true, and you shall see her when you will; betray us, and both you and she shall live in agonies, that shall make you call upon death fifty times, ere he relieve you."

And with a menacing gesture, he closed and barred the door behind him.

"Played her part rarely!" The words sank down into his soul with a chilling weight, that seemed to crush every energy and hope. Played her part! Then he was a dupe-the very dupe of the fiend's arch mock, to lip a wanton, and believe her chaste-the dupe of a designing harlot; the sworn tool and slave of a murderer-a monster, who had literally sold his own child's honor. For all the world well knew, that, although Lucia pa.s.sed for his adopted daughter only, she was his natural offspring by Aurelia Orestilla, before their impious marriage.

Well might he gnash his teeth, and beat his breast, and tear his dark hair by handfulls from his head; well might he groan and curse.

But oh! the inconsistency of man! While he gave vent to all the anguish of his rage in curses against her, the soft partner of his guilt, and at the same time, its avenger; against the murderer and the traitor, now his tyrant; he utterly forgot that his own dereliction, from the paths of rect.i.tude and honor, had led him into the dark toils, in which he now seemed involved beyond any hope of extrication.

He forgot, that to satisfy an insane and unjustifiable love of adventure, and a false curiosity, he had a.s.sociated himself with a man whom he believed, if he did not actually know, to be infamous and capable of any crime.

He forgot, that, admitted into that man's house in friendship, he had attempted to undermine his daughter's honor; and had felt no remorse, till he learned that his success was owing to connivance-that his own treason had been met and repaid by deeper treason.

He forgot, that for a wanton's love, he had betrayed the brightest, and the purest being that drew the breath of life, from the far Alps, to the blue waters of the far Tarentum-that he had broken his soul's plighted faith-that he was himself, first, a liar, perjurer, and villain.

Alas! it is the inevitable consequence, the first fruit, as it were, of crime, that guilt is still prolific; that the commission of the first ill deed, leads almost surely to the commission of a second, of a third, until the soul is filed and the heart utterly corrupted, and the wretch given wholly up to the dominion of foul sin, and plunged into thorough degradation.

Arvina had thought lightly, if at all, of his first luxurious sin, but now to the depth of his secret soul, he felt that he was emmeshed and entangled in the deepest villainy.

All that he ever had yet heard hinted darkly or surmised of Catiline's gigantic schemes of wickedness, rushed on him, all at once! He doubted nothing any longer; it was clear to him as noonday; distinct and definite as if it had been told to him in so many words; the treason to the state concealed by individual murder; and he, a sworn accomplice-nay, a sworn slave to this murderer and traitor!

Nor was this all; his peril was no less than his guilt; equal on either side-sure ruin if he should be true to his country, and scarce less sure, if he should join its parricides. For, though he had not dared say so much to Catiline, he had already sent the poniard to the house of Cicero, and a brief letter indicating all that he had learned from Volero. This he had done in the interval between the Campus and his unlucky visit to the house of Catiline, whom he then little deemed to be the man of whom he was in quest.

Doubtless, ere this time, the cutler had been summoned to the consul's presence, and the chief magistrate of the Republic had learned that the murderer of his slave was the very person, whom he had bound himself by oaths, so strong that he shuddered at the very thought of them, to support and defend to the utmost.

What was he then to do? how to proceed, since to recede appeared impossible?

How was he to account to the conspirator for his inability to produce the poniard at their appointed meeting? how should he escape the pursuit of his determined vengeance, if he should shun the meeting?

And then, Lucia! The recollection, guilty and degraded as he knew her to be, of her soft blandishments, of her rare beauty, of her wild and inexplicable manner, adding new charms to that forbidden bliss, yet thrilled in every sense. And must he give her up? No! madness was in the very thought! so strangely had she spread her fascinations round him. And yet did he love her? no! perish the thought! Love is a high, a holy, a pure feeling-the purest our poor fallen nature is capable of experiencing; no! this fierce, desperate, guilty pa.s.sion was no more like true love, than the whirlwind that upheaves the tortured billows, and hurls the fated vessel on the treacherous quicksands, is like to the beneficent and gentle breeze that speeds it to the haven of its hopes, in peace and honor.

After a little while consumed in anxious and uneasy thoughts, he determined-as cowards of the mind determine ever-to temporise, to await events, to depend upon the tide of circ.u.mstance. He would, he thought, keep the appointment with his master-for such he felt that Catiline now was indeed-however he might strive to conceal the fact; endeavor to learn what were his real objects; and then determine what should be his own course of action. Doubtful, and weak of principle, and most infirm of purpose, he shrunk alike from breaking the oath he had been entrapped into taking, and from committing any crime against his country.

His country!-To the Roman, patriotism stood for religion!-Pride, habit, education, honor, interest, all were combined in that word, country; and could he be untrue to Rome? His better spirit cried out, no! from every nerve and artery of his body. And then his evil genius whispered Lucia, and he wavered.

Meantime, had no thought crossed him of his own pure and n.o.ble Julia, deserted thus and overlooked for a mere wanton? Many times! many times, that day, had his mind reverted to her. When first he went to Cataline's house, he went with the resolution of leaving it at an early hour, so soon as the feast should be over, and seeking her, while there should yet be time to ramble among the flower-beds on the hill of gardens, or perchance, to drive out in his chariot, which he had ordered to be held in readiness, toward the falls of the Anio, or on the proud Emilian way.

Afterward, in the whirl of his mad intoxication for the fascinating Lucia, all memory of his true love was lost, as the chaste moon-light may be dimmed and drowned for a while by the red glare of the torches, brandished in some licentious orgy. Nor did he think of her again, till he found himself saddened, and self-disgusted, plunged into peril-perhaps into ruin, by his own guilty conduct; and then, when he did think, it was with remorse, and self-reproach, and consciousness of disloyalty, so bitterly and keenly painful-yet unaccompanied by that repentance, which steadily envisages past wrong, and determines to amend in future-that he shook off the recollection, whenever it returned, with wilful stubbornness; and resolved on forgetting, for the present, the being whom a few short hours before, he would have deemed it impossible that he should ever think of but with joy and rapturous antic.i.p.ation.

Occupied in these fast succeeding moods and fancies, Paullus had made his way homeward from the house of Catiline, so far as to the Cerolian place, at the junction of the Sacred Way and the Carinae. He paused here a moment; and grasping his fevered brow with his hand, recalled to mind the strange occurrences, most unexpected and unfortunate, which had befallen him, since he stood there that morning; each singly trivial; each, unconnected as it seemed with the rest, and of little moment; yet all, when united, forming a chain of circ.u.mstances by which he was now fettered hand and foot-his casual interview with Catiline on the hill; his subsequent encounter of Victor and Aristius Fuscus; the recognition of his dagger by the stout cutler Volero; the death of Varus in the hippodrome; his own victorious exercises on the plain; the invitation to the feast; the sumptuous banquet; and last, alas! and most fatal, the too voluptuous and seductive Lucia.

Just at this moment, the doors of Cicero's stately mansion were thrown open, and a long train came sweeping out in dark garments, with blazing torches, and music doleful and piercing. And women chanting the shrill funereal strain. And then, upon a bier covered with black, the rude wooden coffin, peculiar to the slave, of the murdered Medon! Behind him followed the whole household of the Consul; and last, to the extreme astonishment of Paullus, preceded by his lictors, and leaning on the arm of his most faithful freedman, came Cicero himself, doing unusual honor, for some cause known to himself alone, to the manes of his slaughtered servant.

As they pa.s.sed on toward the Capuan gate of the city, the Consul's eyes fell directly on the form of Arvina, where he stood revealed in the full glare of the torch-light; and as he recognised him, he made a sign that he should join him, which, under those peculiar circ.u.mstances, he felt that he could not refuse to do.

Sadly and silently they swept through the splendid streets, and under the arched gate, and filed along the celebrated Appian way, pa.s.sing the tomb of the proud Scipios on the left hand, with its superb sarcophagi-for that great house had never, from time immemorial, been wont to burn their dead-and on the right, a little farther on, the n.o.ble temple and the sacred slope of Mars, and the old statue of the G.o.d which had once sweated blood, prescient of Thrasymene. On they went, frightening the echoes of the quiet night with their wild lamentations and the clapping of their hands, sending the glare of their funereal torches far and wide through the cultured fields and sacred groves and rich gardens, until they reached at length the pile, hard by the columbarium, or slave-burying-place of Cicero's household.

Then, the rites performed duly, the dust thrice sprinkled on the body, and the farewell p.r.o.nounced, the corpse was laid upon the pile, and the tall spire of blood-red flame went up, wavering and streaming through the night, rich with perfumes, and gums, and precious ointment, so n.o.ble was the liberality of the good Consul, even in the interment of his more faithful slaves.