Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  “I am very tired,” he spoke aloud those last words of so many people, and he dropped his head upon his arm.

  The next morning the fog had cleared away, and boatmen early upon the beach of the cove saw a small cutter drift with the tide, and a faint wind of dawn within the ring of cliffs. Coming up into the wind and falling off it crossed the great well of sea and grounded gently on the pebbles, as though it carried a sacred burden. It carried an old dead man whose hand was still clasped about the tiller.

  * * * * *

  A few days later, Sir William Hawker presented himself at the office of “Lightfoot’s,” in Southampton, and handed to Mona a letter.

  “It has been in my safe these last two years,” he said, and Mona broke the seal and read. It was very short and with the tears in her eyes, Mona passed it to Lois.

  Hawker will bring you this himself, it ran. I have made a provision for you both in my will, and with all my heart I beg you to accept it. Lois is young. She has her life ahead of her. For her sake then! Did I recite to you, Mona, in the West Bay these words?

  “Hereafter, in a better world than this,

  I shall desire more love and knowledge of you.”

  Mark.

  THE END

  The Three Gentlemen (1932)

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE. ATTILIUS SCAURUS

  I. THE DANDY

  II. TRIAL BY FAMILY

  III. THE LAST NIGHT IN ROME

  IV. ATTILIUS AND THE CYNIC

  V. AT YORK

  VI. LUNCHEON ON THE NORTHWEST FRONTIER

  VII. THE HARD CHOICE

  VIII. SERGIA

  IX. THE SANCTUARY

  X. THE TRYST

  XI. THE PLEDGE

  PART TWO. ANTHONY SCARR

  XII. ON DENNIS HEAD

  XIII. THE CABIN OF THE “PELICAN”

  XIV. THE MAN OF SECRETS

  XV. ROMAN ROADS

  XVI. THE REHEARSAL

  XVII. THE LONG LAD

  XVIII. IN THE CLOSEWALKS

  XIX. BY BOGNOR HILL

  XX. THE DANCING LESSON

  XXI. WALSINGHAM WINS

  XXII. AT THE BEACON

  XXIII. NEWS FROM SPAIN

  XXIV. NEWS FROM TOBERMORY

  PART THREE. ADRIAN SHARD

  XXV. MIDNIGHT

  XXVI. THE INDIGO ROOM

  XXVII. “I DESIRE ANTIQUITIES”

  XXVIII. SONIA CHALLICE

  XXIX. THE PRIVATE SECRETARY

  XXX. IN DANGER

  XXXI. THE CIPHER

  XXXII. AT RANELAGH

  XXXIII. SOMETHING NEW TO THE PILGRIM

  The first edition

  PART ONE. ATTILIUS SCAURUS

  I. THE DANDY

  NOW I DO not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

  — Chuang Tzu

  There was not a throb in the big toe that morning and the skin had lost its glaze. Aemilius Scaurus ate his breakfast of bread and olives and dried grapes in comfort for the first time for a week. Then he leaned luxuriously back upon his pillows and picked up his copy of the Daily Journal. A bright youth lounging through the bookshops of the Argiletum had said of Aemilius Scaurus as he was carried past in his litter: “You mustn’t call him an Old Roman. He is Old Rome.” And certainly the aged senator was in the truest tradition of his race when he unwound his scroll until he reached the column of gossip. What was happening on the Danube was no doubt very menacing and important but Medius Fidius! it was always happening, whilst the spicy bit of scandal which kept all the Wits in the Forum busy yesterday would be as dead as a doornail this time tomorrow.

  There was the usual attack on the Stage, of course. Since Paris broke into society and got himself killed for his pains, there weren’t any actors and still fewer plays. Nothing but dancing and musical comedies. Aemilius had read it a hundred times before and pushed out his heavy lower lip and skipped the paragraph. There would certainly be some new escapade by Lydia Prisca, though to be sure she was getting long in the tooth nowadays and might be expected to quiet down. An old man with plaguey attack of gout missed all the salt of life.

  He read about Lydia Prisca. She had divorced her new boy and taken up with a buck Negro from the Sahara. Lydia’s sense of smell had always been deficient, Mr Gossip wrote, and Aemilius chuckled. But his eyes lit upon another name; and he stared; and he blazed; and the next minute his bellowings rent the house. His secretary ran. His librarian ran. Ran, too, his house steward, an Alexandrian who wrote a better hand than any of them, and within an hour a little flight of letter-carriers burst from the great house and scattered over the Quirinal. A salad of scandal salted with wit, peppered with malice and with just a hint of indecency, the rub of an onion, as it were, round the inside of the bowl, was palatable enough with one’s breakfast, but by the ghost of Numa Pompilius, the old families ought to be left out of it. The scribbler should be whipped round the town and all the harder because, by Jupiter, he spoke the truth!

  The old man got out of bed and dressed himself with the help of his personal servant. He gave orders to his butler to set out chairs and couches in the room of the Archives.

  “I want the whole family here,” he cried. “If those slaves of mine miss one of them out I’ll have the skin off their backs.”

  Fortunately for them their work was easy. Since the Caesars had annexed the Palatine, the great families had clustered close together on the slopes of the Quirinal. It was just as well to have the Forum between you and the Emperor. Consequently before Aemilius’ water-clock marked the hour of noon, the Scaurus family was ranging itself round the walls of the room of the Archives. All, indeed, except the young Attilius who was the cause of all this bother.

  Attilius had not dared to disobey his uncle’s summons. The old man was the head of the family. Attilius was present, looking his careful best; and his best was the envy of the bright young sparks and the standard by which the girls found them wanting. The major-domo had actually announced him. His foot was on the threshold of the crowded room when old Aemilius let loose a roar.

  “Let Attilius stay outside till he’s wanted. That pretty boy has plucked an owl this morning, I can tell you. He’d better keep quiet, too, or I’ll turn my toga upside down and sentence him offhand.”

  Attilius drew discreetly back. The door was slammed. The pretty boy was left in the garden court to watch the fountain playing and to get what comfort he could out of its sparkle in the sunlight and its pleasant patter in the marble basin. It was not very great — that comfort. Aesthetic pleasures, for once in a way, had little consolation for Attilius Scaurus. He had never seen his uncle in so truculent a mood. He was a detestable person even on his red-letter days. On the others, and this was one of the worst of the others, he was the most noisome old cobra that ever spat poison.

  “I don’t care,” Attilius assured himself. He arranged himself in an interesting pose on a marble bench between the porphyry pillars of the colonnade, the spirited young soul as against the unintelligent parents. A theme for a rhapsody, for a parable. But would he have the chance, now, either to compose or deliver it? From time to time a gusty word spoken by the one abominated voice boomed through the closed doors, and Attilius was conscious of unaccustomed vacancies in the pit of his stomach.

  “I don’t care,” he repeated valiantly.

  He was just seventeen years old and, to be frank, a trifle too modish in his dress, even for an exquisite of Hadrian’s day. He wore a gold net over his hair to keep it orderly, a silken tunic in defiance of the sumptuary laws, a cloak dyed delicately the colour of hyacinth, and the white gaiters and red shoes of the dandy. But at this moment all his gaiety was in his dress. The sadness of life was not, after all, a pretence of the poets, but very real.

  “I remember,” he suddenly cried. He had found the explanation. “Of course! Of course! I met an Ethiopian yesterday in the Sacred Way. I had come out of a shop. I had bought a flask of the new amber s
cent for little Camilla. And there was the Ethiopian, black as a thousand years of sun could make him. I took no notice. What a fool I was! I might have known that a catastrophe must follow.”

  What a subject for a melting piece of rhetoric. Why, only this morning, for the first time this year, he had put on his summer rings. There was a real point of pathos to be made out of that. He saw himself in the temple behind the Forum making it — and suddenly a name rang out from the closed room.

  “Clodius Laeta!”

  Attilius was not in the temple behind the Forum, drawing tears by the artifice of his emotions. Attilius was shivering in the garden court of the family mansion on the Quirinal Hill, shivering in the buoyant sunlight of April and not altogether on his own account.

  “Clodius Laeta!”

  Would the old man never stop? Clodius Laeta was Attilius’ bosom friend. Together they had feasted and hunted, raced and wooed. They had harangued each other in the mock murder trials. They had beaten up the town at night. Between them they had led young Rome, though there had always been a little of the disciple in Attilius and a great deal of the captain in Clodius. Clodius! The impossible, passionate, dazzling Clodius Laeta! For the rest of his few days he was sunk in darkness and infamy and horror. To this his captaincy had come. The dried figs of Caria were all eaten.

  II. TRIAL BY FAMILY

  Are we all met?

  Pat, Pat.

  — A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  Behind the closed doors Aemilius was bawling like a weaver, his broad, bald head wet with his violence.

  “Have you all read Mr Gossip this morning?” He brandished his roll of papyrus in the air. “There’s a witty dog for you! Rome’s twins. Old style, Romulus and Remus, Architects and Builders. New style, Scaurus and Laeta, Sappers and Housebreakers. Their names together! Partners! What an infamy!”

  “Oh, come, come, Aemilius,” a mild man protested, who obviously had not read Mr Gossip that morning. “You were a fine young cockerel, too, in your day. Have a heart!”

  Aemilius swung round and stared at the mild man. He was so dumbfounded that he could only indicate by a gesture the enormity of the interruption.

  “It’s Probus,” he gasped at length. “Probus Honorius Scaurus, my nephew’s true and faithful guardian.”

  Probus was an easy-going, negligible man. He certainly had a mouth and a nose, a pair of eyes and a few long wisps of sandy hair. It was accepted that he had these features, for it would have been noticeable if he had not. But his face was less a face than a convention of which the absence would have struck the beholder as odd. A chain — no, he could not claim to possess one. Probus Honorius can hardly be described, for he could never be remembered. At the moment he smiled vaguely at Aemilius. He had heard these tirades before.

  “You’ve not read the news this morning,” cried Aemilius.

  “I have not,” Probus returned pleasantly. “You shall tell me it.”

  The old man told him some of it.

  “Clodius Laeta had hardly hung up his gold amulet before he had squandered one fortune. He has got through two more, since. And he’s not a day over nineteen. That’s quite in order nowadays, to be sure. Just the right friend for Attilius. But—” His voice rose again in passion and the veins swelled in his face. He thrust the news roll under Probus’ nose. “Read for yourself, Probus.”

  Probus read, and he lifted up his face and lowered it again and his fingers played foolishly with the scroll.

  “But it mayn’t be true,” he stammered. “These fellows—”

  “It is true,” said Aemilius. “I verified it.”

  One or two of the company cried “Alas! Alas!” and Probus Honorius read again and this time aloud.

  “Romulus Laeta’s out in the rain, now. Soused in debt, he’s been all this week on his knees to the moneylenders. On Wednesday his latest flame, Chloe, the girl from Thrace, slammed her door in his face. Yesterday he sold himself to Sylvanus for his gladiatorial school. Last night he left for the barracks at Capua.”

  Probus Honorius let the news sheet slip from his fingers to the floor. Clodius Laeta a gladiator!

  “Incredible,” he murmured.

  “You’d think so!” the implacable old man returned. “By Jupiter, there was a Laeta fought at Carthage! Now there’s another sold to a trainer. To be fatted up for a feast! The whip and the stocks if he doesn’t do his exercises properly, and a prison for his home.”

  Aemilius laughed savagely and choked, and a brother of his, a melancholy, long-nosed man, took up the tale.

  “It’s all true. I was in the Forum before I came here. Everybody’s thrilled by the news — pleasantly thrilled. But what do you expect? Rome’s growing downwards like a cow’s tail and has been this last hundred years.”

  Aemilius stood over the unhappy guardian of Attilius and rubbed the news in.

  “Clodius Laeta’ll draw a full house to the Flavian Amphitheatre, won’t he, when they’ve fed him and whipped him and taught him his job at Capua? Rome’s darling skipping round the arena with the man with the net at his heels! Perhaps the mark of a branding iron on his dainty white skin, because he didn’t learn his lessons nimbly enough. Oh, he’ll draw a bigger audience than the God Nero — once. Yes, just once,” — and Aemilius nodded his head grimly as his eyes swept the room. “For every greasy, sweating rogue in Rome will be there to turn his thumb down at the end of it.” Suddenly the old man exploded. “And the court, too! Don’t forget that,” and he jerked his thumb towards the Palatine. “Yes, the Emperor and his Court, too.”

  At once a startled outcry broke from even the less timorous of the family. This was the golden age for informers. Hardly a household but harboured one who was quick to steal, muffled, to the palace after dark with some impeachment of a rich man’s loyalty. Father betrayed son, son father, half in terror, half through greed. No wonder all the hands went up in the room of the Archives, and such a tumult of denials rang out that the young exquisite outside on the bench by the fountain shook like a leaf.

  “They are hotting it up for me,” he reflected miserably. “A fine price I shall have to pay for Clodius Laeta’s friendship. Old Probus alone I could have dealt with.”

  Not a doubt of it. He would have fetched a few of his engaging cajoleries from the armoury of his youth — and he had an arsenal full of them — and all would have been well. But Aemilius was altogether another proposition.

  “Aemilius, the old horse thief, can make a salad of anyone. When he gets busy the pavement smokes. This means six months for me in the old house in the Apennines. Just at this time, too, when Rome’s Heaven.” And he looked disconsolately at his summer rings and kicked his smart red shoes about and groaned. “Six months in the Apennines. Oh, Robigus and Pales!”

  But even in that hour of depression Attilius was an optimist. At that moment, indeed, not one of the family was bothering his head about the miserable boy at all. They were all at pains to publish their loyalty.

  “I can’t listen to such slanders, Aemilius,” said one, angrily.

  “Our sweet Emperor to be so maligned!” cried another, with a breaking voice.

  “Never was there a ruler who loved his subjects better,” piously exclaimed a third.

  But the old man’s voice beat them all down and thundered over their heads like surf upon a beach.

  “The Court too” — he repeated it. “And you all know it, bleat as much as you like. Emperors are Emperors and the best of them feels a trifle more solid in his seat when some great family is rolled in the dust. All the thumbs’ll turn down in the Imperial Box. Make no mistake! Clodius’ll leave the arena — a carcass dragged out on the hook. I’m telling you,” he roared, as the protests began to swell again, and suddenly he was silent, a very old man and rather piteous.

  “Clodius!” He dwelt on the name gently, caressingly. “Why, he used to run in and out of this house when he was a boy at school, as if it were his own. Such a lad! So winning, you couldn’t but love him. Now —
the hook!”

  And his face was suddenly stamped with horror, and those in the room dreamed that they could see in his set and staring eyes the dreadful picture which the Colosseum must so soon present. He turned to Probus Honorius.

  “You didn’t finish your paragraph, my cousin,” he said, with a most intimidating quietude. “Let us hear it, I pray you. After Romulus Laeta what follows?”

  Reluctantly Probus Honorius fumbled for the fallen news sheet on the ground. He picked it up and found the paragraph and seemed to lose it again.

  “We are waiting, Probus Honorius,” said Aemilius softly. “We may learn something of how you have discharged your trust.”

  Probus Honorius wriggled unhappily. He very much wished that he had stayed at home or — still better — that Aemilius’ big toe was the size of a turnip, a hot roast turnip with a pulse beating away in the middle of it, so that he could think of nothing else but the pain he was in. However, it was no use to wish for such blessings. Aemilius’ gout had gone and with it his manners, too. Probus Honorius read: