The Last Days of Pompeii

E >> Edward George Bulwer Lytton >> The Last Days of Pompeii


'Stretch out your arm, my Lydon,' said Lepidus, with the air of a
connoisseur.

The gladiator, with a significant glance at his companions, extended an
arm which, if not so huge in its girth as those of his comrades, was so
firm in its muscles, so beautifully symmetrical in its proportions, that
the three visitors uttered simultaneously an admiring exclamation.

'Well, man, what is your weapon?' said Clodius, tablet in hand.

'We are to fight first with the cestus; afterwards, if both survive,
with swords,' returned Tetraides, sharply, and with an envious scowl.

'With the cestus!' cried Glaucus; 'there you are wrong, Lydon; the
cestus is the Greek fashion: I know it well. You should have encouraged
flesh for that contest: you are far too thin for it--avoid the cestus.'

'I cannot,' said Lydon.

'And why?'

'I have said--because he has challenged me.'

'But he will not hold you to the precise weapon.'

'My honour holds me!' returned Lydon, proudly.

'I bet on Tetraides, two to one, at the cestus,' said Clodius; shall it
be, Lepidus?--even betting, with swords.'

'If you give me three to one, I will not take the odds, said Lepidus:
'Lydon will never come to the swords. You are mighty courteous.'

'What say you, Glaucus?' said Clodius.

'I will take the odds three to one.'

'Ten sestertia to thirty.'

'Yes.'

Clodius wrote the bet in his book.

'Pardon me, noble sponsor mine,' said Lydon, in a low voice to Glaucus:
'but how much think you the victor will gain?'

'How much? why, perhaps seven sestertia.'

'You are sure it will be as much?'

'At least. But out on you!--a Greek would have thought of the honour,
and not the money. O Italians! everywhere ye are Italians!'

A blush mantled over the bronzed cheek of the gladiator.

'Do not wrong me, noble Glaucus; I think of both, but I should never
have been a gladiator but for the money.'

'Base! mayest thou fall! A miser never was a hero.'

'I am not a miser,' said Lydon, haughtily, and he withdrew to the other
end of the room.

'But I don't see Burbo; where is Burbo? I must talk with Burbo,' cried
Clodius.

'He is within,' said Niger, pointing to the door at the extremity of the
room.

'And Stratonice, the brave old lass, where is she?' quoth Lepidus.

'Why, she was here just before you entered; but she heard something that
displeased her yonder, and vanished. Pollux! old Burbo had perhaps
caught hold of some girl in the back room. I heard a female's voice
crying out; the old dame is as jealous as Juno.'

'Ho! excellent!' cried Lepidus, laughing. 'Come, Clodius, let us go
shares with Jupiter; perhaps he has caught a Leda.'

At this moment a loud cry of pain and terror startled the group.

'Oh, spare me! spare me! I am but a child, I am blind--is not that
punishment enough?'

'O Pallas! I know that voice, it is my poor flower-girl!' exclaimed
Glaucus, and he darted at once into the quarter whence the cry rose.

He burst the door; he beheld Nydia writhing in the grasp of the
infuriate hag; the cord, already dabbled with blood, was raised in the
air--it was suddenly arrested.

'Fury!' said Glaucus, and with his left hand he caught Nydia from her
grasp; 'how dare you use thus a girl--one of your own sex, a child! My
Nydia, my poor infant!'

'Oh? is that you--is that Glaucus?' exclaimed the flower-girl, in a tone
almost of transport; the tears stood arrested on her cheek; she smiled,
she clung to his breast, she kissed his robe as she clung.

'And how dare you, pert stranger! interfere between a free woman and her
slave. By the gods! despite your fine tunic and your filthy perfumes, I
doubt whether you are even a Roman citizen, my mannikin.'

'Fair words, mistress--fair words!' said Clodius, now entering with
Lepidus. 'This is my friend and sworn brother; he must be put under
shelter of your tongue, sweet one; it rains stones!'

'Give me my slave!' shrieked the virago, placing her mighty grasp on the
breast of the Greek.

'Not if all your sister Furies could help you,' answered Glaucus. 'Fear
not, sweet Nydia; an Athenian never forsook distress!'

'Holla!' said Burbo, rising reluctantly, 'What turmoil is all this about
a slave? Let go the young gentleman, wife--let him go: for his sake the
pert thing shall be spared this once.' So saying, he drew, or rather
dragged off, his ferocious help-mate.

'Methought when we entered,' said Clodius, 'there was another man
present?'

'He is gone.'

For the priest of Isis had indeed thought it high time to vanish.

'Oh, a friend of mine! a brother cupman, a quiet dog, who does not love
these snarlings,' said Burbo, carelessly. 'But go, child, you will tear
the gentleman's tunic if you cling to him so tight; go, you are
pardoned.'

'Oh, do not--do not forsake me!' cried Nydia, clinging yet closer to the
Athenian.

Moved by her forlorn situation, her appeal to him, her own innumerable
and touching graces, the Greek seated himself on one of the rude chairs.
He held her on his knees--he wiped the blood from her shoulders with his
long hair--he kissed the tears from her cheeks--he whispered to her a
thousand of those soothing words with which we calm the grief of a
child--and so beautiful did he seem in his gentle and consoling task,
that even the fierce heart of Stratonice was touched. His presence
seemed to shed light over that base and obscene haunt--young, beautiful,
glorious, he was the emblem of all that earth made most happy,
comforting one that earth had abandoned!

'Well, who could have thought our blind Nydia had been so honored!' said
the virago, wiping her heated brow.

Glaucus looked up at Burbo.

'My good man,' said he, 'this is your slave; she sings well, she is
accustomed to the care of flowers--I wish to make a present of such a
slave to a lady. Will you sell her to me?' As he spoke he felt the
whole frame of the poor girl tremble with delight; she started up, she
put her disheveled hair from her eyes, she looked around, as if, alas,
she had the power to see!

'Sell our Nydia! no, indeed,' said Stratonice, gruffly.

Nydia sank back with a long sigh, and again clasped the robe of her
protector.

'Nonsense!' said Clodius, imperiously: 'you must oblige me. What, man!
what, old dame! offend me, and your trade is ruined. Is not Burbo my
kinsman Pansa's client? Am I not the oracle of the amphitheatre and its
heroes? If I say the word, break up your wine-jars--you sell no more.
Glaucus, the slave is yours.'

Burbo scratched his huge head, in evident embarrassment.

'The girl is worth her weight in gold to me.'

'Name your price, I am rich,' said Glaucus.

The ancient Italians were like the modern, there was nothing they would
not sell, much less a poor blind girl.

'I paid six sestertia for her, she is worth twelve now,' muttered
Stratonice.

'You shall have twenty; come to the magistrates at once, and then to my
house for your money.'

'I would not have sold the dear girl for a hundred but to oblige noble
Clodius,' said Burbo, whiningly. 'And you will speak to Pansa about the
place of designator at the amphitheatre, noble Clodius? it would just
suit me.'

'Thou shalt have it,' said Clodius; adding in a whisper to Burbo, 'Yon
Greek can make your fortune; money runs through him like a sieve: mark
to-day with white chalk, my Priam.'

'An dabis?' said Glaucus, in the formal question of sale and barter.

'Dabitur,' answered Burbo.

'Then, then, I am to go with you--with you? O happiness!' murmured
Nydia.

'Pretty one, yes; and thy hardest task henceforth shall be to sing thy
Grecian hymns to the loveliest lady in Pompeii.'

The girl sprang from his clasp; a change came over her whole face,
bright the instant before; she sighed heavily, and then once more taking
his hand, she said:

'I thought I was to go to your house?'

'And so thou shalt for the present; come, we lose time.'



Chapter IV

THE RIVAL OF GLAUCUS PRESSES ONWARD IN THE RACE.

IONE was one of those brilliant characters which, but once or twice,
flash across our career. She united in the highest perfection the
rarest of earthly gifts--Genius and Beauty. No one ever possessed
superior intellectual qualities without knowing them--the alliteration
of modesty and merit is pretty enough, but where merit is great, the
veil of that modesty you admire never disguises its extent from its
possessor. It is the proud consciousness of certain qualities that it
cannot reveal to the everyday world, that gives to genius that shy, and
reserved, and troubled air, which puzzles and flatters you when you
encounter it.

Ione, then, knew her genius; but, with that charming versatility that
belongs of right to women, she had the faculty so few of a kindred
genius in the less malleable sex can claim--the faculty to bend and
model her graceful intellect to all whom it encountered. The sparkling
fountain threw its waters alike upon the strand, the cavern, and the
flowers; it refreshed, it smiled, it dazzled everywhere. That pride,
which is the necessary result of superiority, she wore easily--in her
breast it concentred itself in independence. She pursued thus her own
bright and solitary path. She asked no aged matron to direct and guide
her--she walked alone by the torch of her own unflickering purity. She
obeyed no tyrannical and absolute custom. She moulded custom to her own
will, but this so delicately and with so feminine a grace, so perfect an
exemption from error, that you could not say she outraged custom but
commanded it. The wealth of her graces was inexhaustible--she
beautified the commonest action; a word, a look from her, seemed magic.
Love her, and you entered into a new world, you passed from this trite
and commonplace earth. You were in a land in which your eyes saw
everything through an enchanted medium. In her presence you felt as if
listening to exquisite music; you were steeped in that sentiment which
has so little of earth in it, and which music so well inspires--that
intoxication which refines and exalts, which seizes, it is true, the
senses, but gives them the character of the soul.

She was peculiarly formed, then, to command and fascinate the less
ordinary and the bolder natures of men; to love her was to unite two
passions, that of love and of ambition--you aspired when you adored her.
It was no wonder that she had completely chained and subdued the
mysterious but burning soul of the Egyptian, a man in whom dwelt the
fiercest passions. Her beauty and her soul alike enthralled him.

Set apart himself from the common world, he loved that daringness of
character which also made itself, among common things, aloof and alone.
He did not, or he would not see, that that very isolation put her yet
more from him than from the vulgar. Far as the poles--far as the night
from day, his solitude was divided from hers. He was solitary from his
dark and solemn vices--she from her beautiful fancies and her purity of
virtue.

If it was not strange that Ione thus enthralled the Egyptian, far less
strange was it that she had captured, as suddenly as irrevocably, the
bright and sunny heart of the Athenian. The gladness of a temperament
which seemed woven from the beams of light had led Glaucus into
pleasure. He obeyed no more vicious dictates when he wandered into the
dissipations of his time, than the exhilarating voices of youth and
health. He threw the brightness of his nature over every abyss and
cavern through which he strayed. His imagination dazzled him, but his
heart never was corrupted. Of far more penetration than his companions
deemed, he saw that they sought to prey upon his riches and his youth:
but he despised wealth save as the means of enjoyment, and youth was the
great sympathy that united him to them. He felt, it is true, the
impulse of nobler thoughts and higher aims than in pleasure could be
indulged: but the world was one vast prison, to which the Sovereign of
Rome was the Imperial gaoler; and the very virtues, which in the free
days of Athens would have made him ambitious, in the slavery of earth
made him inactive and supine. For in that unnatural and bloated
civilization, all that was noble in emulation was forbidden. Ambition in
the regions of a despotic and luxurious court was but the contest of
flattery and craft. Avarice had become the sole ambition--men desired
praetorships and provinces only as the license to pillage, and
government was but the excuse of rapine. It is in small states that
glory is most active and pure--the more confined the limits of the
circle, the more ardent the patriotism. In small states, opinion is
concentrated and strong--every eye reads your actions--your public
motives are blended with your private ties--every spot in your narrow
sphere is crowded with forms familiar since your childhood--the applause
of your citizens is like the caresses of your friends. But in large
states, the city is but the court: the provinces--unknown to you,
unfamiliar in customs, perhaps in language--have no claim on your
patriotism, the ancestry of their inhabitants is not yours. In the
court you desire favor instead of glory; at a distance from the court,
public opinion has vanished from you, and self-interest has no
counterpoise.

Italy, Italy, while I write, your skies are over me--your seas flow
beneath my feet, listen not to the blind policy which would unite all
your crested cities, mourning for their republics, into one empire;
false, pernicious delusion! your only hope of regeneration is in
division. Florence, Milan, Venice, Genoa, may be free once more, if
each is free. But dream not of freedom for the whole while you enslave
the parts; the heart must be the centre of the system, the blood must
circulate freely everywhere; and in vast communities you behold but a
bloated and feeble giant, whose brain is imbecile, whose limbs are dead,
and who pays in disease and weakness the penalty of transcending the
natural proportions of health and vigour.

Thus thrown back upon themselves, the more ardent qualities of Glaucus
found no vent, save in that overflowing imagination which gave grace to
pleasure, and poetry to thought. Ease was less despicable than
contention with parasites and slaves, and luxury could yet be refined
though ambition could not be ennobled. But all that was best and
brightest in his soul woke at once when he knew Ione. Here was an
empire, worthy of demigods to attain; here was a glory, which the
reeking smoke of a foul society could not soil or dim. Love, in every
time, in every state, can thus find space for its golden altars. And
tell me if there ever, even in the ages most favorable to glory, could
be a triumph more exalted and elating than the conquest of one noble
heart?

And whether it was that this sentiment inspired him, his ideas glowed
more brightly, his soul seemed more awake and more visible, in Ione's
presence. If natural to love her, it was natural that she should return
the passion. Young, brilliant, eloquent, enamoured, and Athenian, he was
to her as the incarnation of the poetry of her father's land. They were
not like creatures of a world in which strife and sorrow are the
elements; they were like things to be seen only in the holiday of
nature, so glorious and so fresh were their youth, their beauty, and
their love. They seemed out of place in the harsh and every-day earth;
they belonged of right to the Saturnian age, and the dreams of demigod
and nymph. It was as if the poetry of life gathered and fed itself in
them, and in their hearts were concentrated the last rays of the sun of
Delos and of Greece.

But if Ione was independent in her choice of life, so was her modest
pride proportionably vigilant and easily alarmed. The falsehood of the
Egyptian was invented by a deep knowledge of her nature. The story of
coarseness, of indelicacy, in Glaucus, stung her to the quick. She felt
it a reproach upon her character and her career, a punishment above all
to her love; she felt, for the first time, how suddenly she had yielded
to that love; she blushed with shame at a weakness, the extent of which
she was startled to perceive: she imagined it was that weakness which
had incurred the contempt of Glaucus; she endured the bitterest curse of
noble natures--humiliation! Yet her love, perhaps, was no less alarmed
than her pride. If one moment she murmured reproaches upon Glaucus--if
one moment she renounced, she almost hated him--at the next she burst
into passionate tears, her heart yielded to its softness, and she said
in the bitterness of anguish, 'He despises me--he does not love me.'

From the hour the Egyptian had left her she had retired to her most
secluded chamber, she had shut out her handmaids, she had denied herself
to the crowds that besieged her door. Glaucus was excluded with the
rest; he wondered, but he guessed not why! He never attributed to his
Ione--his queen--his goddess--that woman--like caprice of which the
love-poets of Italy so unceasingly complain. He imagined her, in the
majesty of her candour, above all the arts that torture. He was
troubled, but his hopes were not dimmed, for he knew already that he
loved and was beloved; what more could he desire as an amulet against
fear?

At deepest night, then, when the streets were hushed, and the high moon
only beheld his devotions, he stole to that temple of his heart--her
home; and wooed her after the beautiful fashion of his country. He
covered her threshold with the richest garlands, in which every flower
was a volume of sweet passion; and he charmed the long summer night with
the sound of the Lydian lute: and verses, which the inspiration of the
moment sufficed to weave.

But the window above opened not; no smile made yet more holy the shining
air of night. All was still and dark. He knew not if his verse was
welcome and his suit was heard.

Yet Ione slept not, nor disdained to hear. Those soft strains ascended
to her chamber; they soothed, they subdued her. While she listened, she
believed nothing against her lover; but when they were stilled at last,
and his step departed, the spell ceased; and, in the bitterness of her
soul, she almost conceived in that delicate flattery a new affront.

I said she was denied to all; but there was one exception, there was one
person who would not be denied, assuming over her actions and her house
something like the authority of a parent; Arbaces, for himself, claimed
an exemption from all the ceremonies observed by others. He entered the
threshold with the license of one who feels that he is privileged and at
home. He made his way to her solitude and with that sort of quiet and
unapologetic air which seemed to consider the right as a thing of
course. With all the independence of Ione's character, his heart had
enabled him to obtain a secret and powerful control over her mind. She
could not shake it off; sometimes she desired to do so; but she never
actively struggled against it. She was fascinated by his serpent eye.
He arrested, he commanded her, by the magic of a mind long accustomed to
awe and to subdue. Utterly unaware of his real character or his hidden
love, she felt for him the reverence which genius feels for wisdom, and
virtue for sanctity. She regarded him as one of those mighty sages of
old, who attained to the mysteries of knowledge by an exemption from the
passions of their kind. She scarcely considered him as a being, like
herself, of the earth, but as an oracle at once dark and sacred. She
did not love him, but she feared. His presence was unwelcome to her; it
dimmed her spirit even in its brightest mood; he seemed, with his
chilling and lofty aspect, like some eminence which casts a shadow over
the sun. But she never thought of forbidding his visits. She was
passive under the influence which created in her breast, not the
repugnance, but something of the stillness of terror.

Arbaces himself now resolved to exert all his arts to possess himself of
that treasure he so burningly coveted. He was cheered and elated by his
conquests over her brother. From the hour in which Apaecides fell
beneath the voluptuous sorcery of that fete which we have described, he
felt his empire over the young priest triumphant and insured. He knew
that there is no victim so thoroughly subdued as a young and fervent man
for the first time delivered to the thraldom of the senses.

When Apaecides recovered, with the morning light, from the profound
sleep which succeeded to the delirium of wonder and of pleasure, he was,
it is true, ashamed--terrified--appalled. His vows of austerity and
celibacy echoed in his ear; his thirst after holiness--had it been
quenched at so unhallowed a stream? But Arbaces knew well the means by
which to confirm his conquest. From the arts of pleasure he led the
young priest at once to those of his mysterious wisdom. He bared to his
amazed eyes the initiatory secrets of the sombre philosophy of the
Nile--those secrets plucked from the stars, and the wild chemistry,
which, in those days, when Reason herself was but the creature of
Imagination, might well pass for the lore of a diviner magic. He seemed
to the young eyes of the priest as a being above mortality, and endowed
with supernatural gifts. That yearning and intense desire for the
knowledge which is not of earth--which had burned from his boyhood in
the heart of the priest--was dazzled, until it confused and mastered his
clearer sense. He gave himself to the art which thus addressed at once
the two strongest of human passions, that of pleasure and that of
knowledge. He was loth to believe that one so wise could err, that one
so lofty could stoop to deceive. Entangled in the dark web of
metaphysical moralities, he caught at the excuse by which the Egyptian
converted vice into a virtue. His pride was insensibly flattered that
Arbaces had deigned to rank him with himself, to set him apart from the
laws which bound the vulgar, to make him an august participator, both in
the mystic studies and the magic fascinations of the Egyptian's
solitude. The pure and stern lessons of that creed to which Olinthus
had sought to make him convert, were swept away from his memory by the
deluge of new passions. And the Egyptian, who was versed in the articles
of that true faith, and who soon learned from his pupil the effect which
had been produced upon him by its believers, sought, not unskilfully, to
undo that effect, by a tone of reasoning, half-sarcastic and
half-earnest.

'This faith,' said he, 'is but a borrowed plagiarism from one of the
many allegories invented by our priests of old. Observe,' he added,
pointing to a hieroglyphical scroll--'observe in these ancient figures
the origin of the Christian's Trinity. Here are also three gods--the
Deity, the Spirit, and the Son. Observe, that the epithet of the Son is
"Saviour"--observe, that the sign by which his human qualities are
denoted is the cross.' Note here, too, the mystic history of Osiris, how
he put on death; how he lay in the grave; and how, thus fulfilling a
solemn atonement, he rose again from the dead! In these stories we but
design to paint an allegory from the operations of nature and the
evolutions of the eternal heavens. But the allegory unknown, the types
themselves have furnished to credulous nations the materials of many
creeds. They have travelled to the vast plains of India; they have
mixed themselves up in the visionary speculations of the Greek; becoming
more and more gross and embodied, as they emerge farther from the
shadows of their antique origin, they have assumed a human and palpable
form in this novel faith; and the believers of Galilee are but the
unconscious repeaters of one of the superstitions of the Nile!'

This was the last argument which completely subdued the priest. It was
necessary to him, as to all, to believe in something; and undivided and,
at last, unreluctant, he surrendered himself to that belief which
Arbaces inculcated, and which all that was human in passion--all that
was flattering in vanity--all that was alluring in pleasure, served to
invite to, and contributed to confirm.

This conquest, thus easily made, the Egyptian could now give himself
wholly up to the pursuit of a far dearer and mightier object; and he
hailed, in his success with the brother, an omen of his triumph over the
sister.

He had seen Ione on the day following the revel we have witnessed; and
which was also the day after he had poisoned her mind against his rival.
The next day, and the next, he saw her also: and each time he laid
himself out with consummate art, partly to confirm her impression
against Glaucus, and principally to prepare her for the impressions he
desired her to receive. The proud Ione took care to conceal the anguish
she endured; and the pride of woman has an hypocrisy which can deceive
the most penetrating, and shame the most astute. But Arbaces was no
less cautious not to recur to a subject which he felt it was most
politic to treat as of the lightest importance. He knew that by dwelling
much upon the fault of a rival, you only give him dignity in the eyes of
your mistress: the wisest plan is, neither loudly to hate, nor bitterly
to contemn; the wisest plan is to lower him by an indifference of tone,
as if you could not dream that he could be loved. Your safety is in
concealing the wound to your own pride, and imperceptibly alarming that
of the umpire, whose voice is fate! Such, in all times, will be the
policy of one who knows the science of the sex--it was now the
Egyptian's.