A Friend of Cæsar: A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C., - [famous ebook reader .txt] 📗

their bankers' in a very short time, or enduring an indefinite captivity. After more or less of surly threats and resistance on the part of the men, and screaming on the part of the women, the prisoners one and all capitulated, and put their names to the papyri they were commanded to sign; and away went a boat dancing over the waves to Puteoli to cash the money orders, after which the captives would be set ashore at Baiæ.

Last of the wretches brought before Demetrius came Phaon. The freedman had been roughly handled; across his brow a great welt had risen where a pirate had struck him with a rope's end. His arms were pinioned behind his back. He was perfectly pale, and his eyes wandered from one person to another as if vainly seeking some intercessor.

"Euge! Kyrios[170]" cried the pirate chief, "you indeed seem to enjoy our hospitality but ill."

Phaon fell on his knees.

"I am a poor man," he began to whimper. "I have no means of paying a ransom. My patron is not here to protect or rescue me. I have nothing to plunder. Mu! mu! set me free, most noble pirate! Oh! most excellent prince, what have I done, that you should bear a grudge against me?"

"Get up, fellow," snapped Demetrius; "I'm not one of those crocodile-headed Egyptian gods that they grovel before in the Nile country. My cousin Agias here says he knows you. Now answer—are you a Greek?"

"I am an Athenian born."

"Don't you think I can smell your Doric accent by that broad alpha? You are a Sicilian, I'll be bound!"

Phaon made a motion of sorrowful assent.

"Phui!" continued Demetrius, "tell me, Agias, is this the creature that tried to murder Quintus Drusus?"

Agias nodded.

"A fit minister for such a man as I imagine the son of Lucius Domitius to be. Eurybiades, take off that fellow's bands; he is not worth one stroke of the sword."

"The captain will not spare the knave!" remonstrated the sanguinary lieutenant.

"What I have said, I have said," retorted the other; then, when Phaon's arms hung free, "See, on the strength of our fellowship in our both being Greeks, I have set you at large!"

Phaon again sank to his knees to proffer thanks.

"Hold!" cried Demetrius, with a menacing gesture. "Don't waste your gratitude. Greek you pretend to be, more the shame! Such as you it is that have brought Hellas under the heel of the oppressor; such as you have made the word of a Hellene almost valueless in the Roman courts, so that juries have to be warned to consider us all liars; such as you have dragged down into the pit many an honest man; ay, myself too!"

Phaon left off his thanks and began again to supplicate.

"Stop whining, hound!" roared Demetrius; "haven't I said you are free? Free, but on one condition!"

"Anything, anything, my lord," professed the freedman, "money, service—"

"On this condition," and a broad, wicked smile over-spread the face of the pirate, "that you quit this ship instantly!"

"Gladly, gladly, merciful sir!" commenced Phaon again; "where is the boat?"

"Wretch!" shouted the other, "what did I say about a boat? Depart—depart into the sea! Swim ashore, if the load on your legs be not too heavy. Seize him and see that he sinks,"—this last to Eurybiades and the seamen.

Phaon's terror choked his utterance; he turned livid with mortal fright. He pleaded for life; life on the terms most degrading, most painful, most joyless—life, life and that only. He cried out to Cornelia to save him, he confessed his villanies, and vowed repentance a score of times all in one breath. But Cornelia lived in an age when the wisest and best—whatever the philosophers might theorize—thought it no shame to reward evil for evil, not less than good for good. When Demetrius asked her, "Shall I spare this man, lady?" she replied: "As he has made my life bitter for many days, why should I spare him a brief moment's pain? Death ends all woe!"

There was a dull splash over the side, a circle spreading out in the water, wider and wider, until it could be seen no more among the waves.

"There were heavy stones to his feet, Captain," reported Eurybiades, "and the cords will hold."

"It is well," answered Demetrius, very grave....

Later in the day the boat returned from Puteoli, and with it sundry small round-bellied bags, which the pirate prince duly stowed away in his strong chest. The ransomed captives were put on board a small unarmed yacht that had come out to receive them. Demetrius himself handed the ladies over the side, and salaamed to them as the craft shot off from the flagship. Then the pirates again weighed anchor, the great purple[171] square sail of each of the ships was cast to the piping breeze, the triple tiers of silver-plated oars[171] began to rise and fall in unison to the soft notes of the piper. The land grew fainter and more faint, and the three ships sprang away, speeding over the broad breast of the sea.

That night Cornelia and Fabia held each other in their arms for a long time. They were leaving Rome, leaving Italy, their closest friend at hand was only the quondam slave-boy Agias, yet Cornelia, at least, was happy—almost as happy as the girl Artemisia; and when she lay down to sleep, it was to enjoy the first sound slumber, unhaunted by dread of trouble, for nigh unto half a year.

CHAPTER XX CLEOPATRA I

A "clear singing zephyr" out of the west sped the ships on their way. Down they fared along the coast, past the isle of Capreæ, then, leaving the Campanian main behind, cut the blue billows of the Tyrrhenian Sea; all that day and night, and more sail and oar swept them on. They flew past the beaches of Magna Græcia, then, betwixt Scylla and Charybdis, and Sicilia and its smoke-beclouded cone of Ætna faded out of view, and the long, dark swells of the Ionian Sea caught them. No feeble merchantman, hugging coasts and headlands, was Demetrius. He pushed his three barques boldly forward toward the watery sky-line; the rising and setting sun by day and the slowly circling stars by night were all-sufficient pilots; and so the ships flew onward, and, late though the season was, no tempest racked them, no swollen billow tossed them.

Cornelia sat for hours on the poop, beneath a crimson awning, watching the foam scudding out from under the swift-moving keel, and feeling the soft, balmy Notos, the kind wind of the south, now and then puff against her face, when the west wind veered away, and so brought up a whiff of the spices and tropic bloom of the great southern continent, over the parching deserts and the treacherous quicksands of the Syrtes and the broad "unharvested sea."

Cornelia had seen the cone of Ætna sinking away in the west, and then she looked westward no more. For eastward and ever eastward fared the ships, and on beyond them on pinions of mind flew Cornelia. To Africa, to the Orient! And she dreamed of the half-fabulous kingdoms of Assyria and Babylonia; of the splendours of Memphis and Nineveh and Susa and Ecbatana; of Eastern kings and Eastern gold, and Eastern pomp and circumstance of war; of Ninus, and Cyrus the Great, and Alexander; of Cheops and Sesostris and Amasis; of the hanging gardens; of the treasures of Sardanapalus; of the labyrinth of Lake Moeris; of a thousand and one things rare and wonderful. Half was she persuaded that in the East the heart might not ache nor the soul grow cold with pain. And all life was fair to Cornelia. She was sure of meeting Drusus soon or late now, if so be the gods—she could not help using the expression despite her atheism—spared him in war. She could wait; she could be very patient. She was still very young. And when she counted her remaining years to threescore, they seemed an eternity. The pall which had rested on her life since her uncle and her lover parted after their stormy interview was lifted; she could smile, could laugh, could breathe in the fresh air, and cry, "How good it all is!"

Demetrius held his men under control with an iron hand. If ever the pirate ship was filled with sights and sounds unseemly for a lady's eyes and ears, there were none of them now. Cornelia was a princess, abjectly waited on by her subjects. Demetrius's attention outran all her least desires. He wearied her with presents of jewellery and costly dresses, though, as he quietly remarked to Agias, the gifts meant no more of sacrifice to him than an obol to a rich spendthrift. He filled her ears with music all day long; he entertained her with inimitable narrations of his own adventurous voyages and battles. And only dimly could Cornelia realize that the gems she wore in her hair, her silken dress, nay, almost everything she touched, had come from earlier owners with scant process of law.

Demetrius was no common rover. He had been a young man of rare culture before misfortune struck him. He knew his Homer and his Plato as well as how to swing a sword. "Yet," as he remarked with half jest, half sigh, "all his philosophy did not make him one whit more an honest man."

And in his crew of Greeks, Orientals, and Spaniards were many more whom calamity, not innate wickedness, so Cornelia discovered, had driven to a life of violence and rapine.

Demetrius, too, gave no little heed to Artemisia. That pretty creature had been basking in the sunshine of Agias's presence ever since coming on shipboard. It was tacitly understood that Cornelia would care for the welfare and education of Pratinas's runaway, until she reached a maturity at which Agias could assert his claims. The young Hellene himself had been not a little anxious lest his cousin cast obstacles in the way of an alliance with a masterless slavegirl; for of late Demetrius had been boasting to his kinsman that their family, before business misfortunes, had been wealthy and honourable among the merchant princes of Alexandria. But the worthy pirate had not an objection to make; on the contrary, he would sit for hours staring at Artemisia, and when Agias demanded if he was about to turn rival, shook his head and replied, rather brusquely:—

"I was only thinking that Daphne might be about her age, and look perhaps like her."

"Then you do not think your little daughter is dead?" asked Agias, sympathetic, yet personally relieved.

"I know nothing, nothing," replied his cousin, a look of ineffable pain passing over his fine features; "she was a mere infant when I was arrested. When I broke loose, I had to flee for my life. When I could set searchers after her, she had vanished. Poor motherless thing; I imagine she is the slave of some gay lady at Antioch or Ephesus or Rome now."

"And you do not know who stole her?" asked Agias.

"Don't tear open old wounds," was the retort. "I know nothing. I think—but it matters little what I think. There was that sly-eyed, smooth-tongued Greek, like that Phaon who met his deserts, who was no stranger to Domitius's blackmailings. I feel that he did it. Never mind his name. If ever I get the snake into my power—" and Demetrius's fingers tightened around the thick, hard cable he was clutching, and crushed the solid hemp into soft, loose strands; then he broke out again, "Never mention this another time, Agias, or I shall go mad, and plunge down, down into the waves, to go to sleep and forget it all!"

Agias was faithful to the injunction; but he observed that Demetrius showed Artemisia the same attention as Cornelia, albeit mingled with a little gracious and unoffending familiarity.

II

After a voyage in which one pleasant day succeeded another, Cornelia awoke one morning to hear the creak of blocks and tackle as the sailors were lowering sail. The full banks of oars were plashing in the waves, and on deck many feet were rushing to and fro, while officers shouted their orders. Coming out of her cabin, the young lady saw that the end of her seafaring was close at hand. Even to one fresh from the azure atmosphere of the Campanian Bay, the sky was marvellously clear. The water was of a soft green tint, that shaded off here and there into dark cerulean. The wind was blowing in cool puffs out of the north. A long, slow swell made the stately triremes rock gracefully. Before them, in clear view, rose the tall tower of the Pharos,—the lighthouse of Alexandria,—and beyond it, on the low-lying mainland, rose in splendid relief against the cloudless sky the glittering piles and fanes of the city of the Ptolemies. It was a magnificent picture,—a "picture" because the colours everywhere were as bright as though laid on freshly by a painter's brush. The stonework of the buildings, painted to gaudy hues, brought out all the details of column, cornice, and pediment. Here Demetrius pointed out the Royal Palace, here the Theatre; here, farther