The Count of the Saxon Shore; or The Villa in Vectis.<br />A Tale of the Departure of the Romans fro, Church and Putnam [summer beach reads TXT] 📗
- Author: Church and Putnam
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“Carry him to my own cabin,” he said.
The old man raised his hand in a gesture that seemed to refuse the service which half a dozen stout sailors were at once ready to render him. “Nay,” said he, “it is idle; this arrow has sped me. But let me die here, where I can see the waves and the sky. I have known them, man and boy, threescore years—aye, and more, for my father would take me on his ship when I was a tiny chap of three feet high. Nay, no cabin for me; ’tis almost as bad as dying in one’s bed.”
His voice grew feeble. The Count stopped, and [pg 30]asked whether there was anything that he could do for him.
“Nay,” said the old man, “nothing; I have neither chick nor child. ’Tis all as well as I could have wished. But mark, my lord, I was right about sailing in October. Any one that knows the sea would be sure that trouble must come of it.”
The next moment he was past speaking or hearing.
It was his privilege, we must remember, to have the last word.
The Panther meanwhile had been brought to the wind. Her consorts, too, had come up, and a search was made for any survivors of the encounter that might be still afloat. Some had been killed outright by the concussion; others had been so hurt that they could make no effort to save themselves. They would not, however, have made it if they could. Those that had escaped uninjured evidently preferred drowning to a Roman prison. With grim resolution they straightened their arms to their sides and went down. Only two survivors were picked up. These, evidently twins from their close resemblance to each other, were found clinging to a fragment of timber. One had been grievously hurt, the other had not suffered any injury.
The wounded man, who had received an almost fatal blow upon the head, had lost the power to move, and was holding on to life more than half un[pg 31]consciously; and his brother, moved by that passionate love so often found between twins, had sacrificed himself—that is, the honour which he counted dearer than life—to save him. Had he had only himself to think of, he would have been the first to go down a free man to the bottom of the sea; but his brother was almost helpless, and he could not leave him.
When it was evident that all further search would be useless, the squadron set their sails for Lemanis, which, thanks to a further change in the wind to the northward, they were able to reach before midnight.
THE VILLA IN THE ISLAND.
Count Ælius was a man of the best Roman type, a man of “primitive virtue,” as the classical writers would have put it, though this virtue had been softened, refined, and purified by civilizing and instructing influences, of which the old Roman heroes—the Fabiuses, the Catos, the Scipios—had known nothing. In the antiquity of his lineage there was scarcely a man in the Empire who could pretend to compare with him. For the most part, the old houses from which had come the Consuls and Dictators of the Republic had died out. The old nobility had gone, and the new nobility had followed it. The great name of Fabius, saved by an accident from extinction, when its three hundred gallant sons, each of them “fit to command an army,” perished in one day by the craft of the Etruscan foe, had passed away. There was no living representative of the conqueror of Carthage, or of the conqueror [pg 33]of Corinth. Even the parvenus of the Empire had in their turn disappeared. The generals and senators, both of the old Rome and of the new,12 bore names which would have sounded strange and barbarous to Cicero or even to Tacitus. An Ælius then, one who claimed to trace his descent to a time even earlier than the legendary age, to a race which was domiciled in Italy long before even Æneas had brought thither the gods of Troy, was an almost singular phenomenon
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