“I hear of a new sense of brotherhood spreading from man to man,” Sempronius continued. “Of a passionate longing for a real life after death. Not the vague life of the ghost flitting round the tomb on the Appian Way like some poor bat. But a life lovely amongst the stars, earned, perhaps, by a succession of lives on earth. All the deep thinkers are moving to that belief.”
“All the drunken ones, too,” Attilius added with a smile, as he recalled Daemonides.
Sempronius Proculeius laughed. A man of this world, he had strayed into speculations more serious than he cared for. He was glad to shake them off with a jest.
“I wonder what you’ll be in your next life, Attilius.” He looked at the map upon the table. “A spy,I expect.”
“That’s better than being twopence the big bunch,” Attilius answered dryly.
“What shall I be?”
“I know, but respect forbids me to say,” said Attilius.
“Speak freely. You dare not? Is that all you know of Ulysses?” cried the Procurator. “What shall I be?”
“A Centurion,” said Attilius.
The Procurator had an answer after his own heart. A trifle of wit and no great subtlety. He rose to his feet.
“You shall join your Legion at Londinium. I have sent word to York that they shall have a care of your luggage. You have served me well, Attilius. May the Gods prosper you!” He stopped, on the point of turning away. “By the way, you march from Londinium by your new road and embark at Regnum” — and the next moment he regretted that he had not let Attilius go without that knowledge. He would thus have parted from a young friend who smiled, and not from one who left an uncomfortable impression that all was not well with him. For Attilius was once more troubled. He stood with his eyes opening wider and wider, as though he saw some warning sign and yet was not sure whether it was a warning or a beacon.
“So we march by the new road,” he said very slowly. Then he drew himself erect and saluted and went away.
Sempronius Proculeius hated mysteries and especially mysteries which induced melancholy. Something had happened to Attilius Scaurus and on that new road from London to the Chichester which was to be. It had been long a-building. Woodland men standing upon some high knoll in the forest of Anderida had seen it far away above the treetops, descending from a shoulder of Leith Hill, white and straight and irresistible, like a slow-moving avalanche. Then it had disappeared for months upon months. Only the white avalanche track remained as a warning. Then suddenly it reappeared at the top of Boro’ Hill and, once more white and straight and irresistible, clove down to where the Arun and the Rother join. Somewhere near to that junction Attilius must have joined the roadmakers. Not before, for he had been two years upon the Wall, and Scapula had been clamouring for further help long before Sempronius had let the younger Tribune go. Somewhere in the Weald or on the Down between Boro’ Hill and the sea and during the fourth year of Attilius’ exile some momentous circumstance had happened. “I know what it is,” said the Governor to himself. “Something has happened. Something always happens and it’s always the same thing, whether you call it Lydia or Chloe or Diana.”
But that something had struck Attilius hard — so hard that, four years afterwards, the mere statement that he must now travel that road again was enough to strike the smile from his lips and shroud him in perplexity and loneliness.
Loneliness. Sempronius Proculeius caught at the word after which his thoughts had been groping. He watched Attilius cross the court towards the outer door, a boy still in face and figure and his lighter hours. Yet as the Procurator watched him go he had, even as old Aemilius once had, a glimpse of another being, somehow fated, somehow rather desolate, with an aura of loneliness shutting him apart.
Attilius went to his quarters and sat down to balance his account with himself. Something indeed had happened whilst he was at the making of the Stane Street. Calpurnius Scapula was away on Bignor Hill, establishing the alignment down to Chichester. He himself was on the weald behind superintending the smooth spread of the layer of concrete over the courses of rubble to support the final pavement of flat stone. It was ten o’clock in the morning. A small, dark, baldish man with a peaked beard came riding out of the forest from the east. He had a train of serfs at his mule’s heels and he wore the two tunics, the mantle and the strapped buskins of the Roman gentleman upon his travels.
“Greeting, dear Officer,” he said, slipping off his mule. “Greeting and welcome.”
He introduced himself as Prasutacus, the overlord of those parts. “But what should I be, Officer dear, but for the gracious protection of the Emperor and his Viceroy? Of less account than an undertaker, a dweller in a hovel with a life as short as a wolf’s.”
“There were landlords in Britain before the Romans came,” Attilius said coldly. He was not attracted by this little great man with his train of serfs and his obsequious humilities. Prasutacus, however, now spoke more to the point.
“My poor house is yours, of course. Meanwhile, that you may know that I speak in earnest—” He waved his hand to two of his attendants and they laid at Attilius’ feet a fat sucking pig, five chickens, and a big flagon of red wine. Attilius melted a little. After all, a sucking pig was a sucking pig, and such treasures were not offered every day to a roadmaker in a forest. He thanked Prasutacus gravely and was thereupon invited to sup with him that night at his house.
“I will send servants to guide you,” he said. Attilius shook his head.
“I thank you, but we work early and late upon the road.”
“I have a bath,” said Prasutacus.
“Oh!”
That certainly gave a different colour to the invitation. Attilius was not, however, inclined to ride out after a long day’s work to take supper with a man he disliked, unless he was very sure that it was worth while.
What kind of a bath? he asked.
“The best,” Prasutacus answered. “I use it myself, dear Officer. A fine hypocaust, a hot room and a cooling room and a cold plunge to finish.”
“Then I’ll come,” said Attilius carelessly. “At the eleventh hour. I shall not be free till then.”
The words were ungracious, the manner of speaking them insolent. Attilius was aware of it himself, but there had sprung into his memory a disparaging sentence or two uttered by Sempronius Proculeius about Britons who were more Roman than any Roman ever was. He made a small attempt, however, to mitigate his abruptness. For, after bidding a soldier to take up his gifts and carry them to his camp, he said to Prasutacus: “You will forgive me now if I go on with the work of the Emperor and the Viceroy, who are so near to both our hearts.”
But, even so, some faint note of derision turned his excuse into another taunt. Suddenly a mask dropped and that little, dark, obsequious man gave him one look which made his blood turn cold; and accompanied it with a slow mirthless smile which had the malignancy of a demon. Attilius was frightened by it. Nothing had frightened him so much, not even the coming of the December night when he had for the first time to lead a scouting party into the heather beyond the Wall. He stood, holding himself so that he should not shiver and hoping that no sign of his fear was legible in his eyes. But the next moment the look and the smile had gone, and a Briton more Roman than the Romans was bidding him Godspeed.
Attilius was forced now by his own pride to keep his promise.
“I’d give a year’s pay to dine on that sucking pig and go to bed in my own tent,” he reflected. But he mounted his horse at five o’clock in the afternoon and rode by glade and avenue to a vast clearing marked out for pasturage and plough. In the front of it, facing the high Down, a great house with glazed windows looked out upon a garden aflame with roses. Box hedges and trees tortured into the shapes of bears and serpents enclosed it, and on a lawn peacocks screamed and simpered and scuttered. It was all as Roman as could be.
Prasutacus’ steward threw open the door, a red giant of a man with a beard draping his chest and hair that stood straight up on h
is head; and just behind his shoulder stood Prasutacus. That was unfortunate. For Attilius was in his worst possible mood. He could not forgive Prasutacus for frightening him. His good manners were in tatters. In the porch stood the sculptured figure of a boarhound, very well done with the skill of the native craftsman when he had an animal to reproduce. But this boarhound wore a collar and was ridiculously chained to a staple in the wall, as though he guarded the house.
“Welcome,” said the steward, and Attilius turned to the stone dog and growled “Wuff! Wuff!” at it. He was not polite. Nor did he mend, even after the most satisfying and luxurious bath he had taken since he left Rome. For the first thing that he saw when, scraped and oiled and scented, he was conducted into the big dining room, was that Prasutacus awaited him in a tunic with the broad purple stripe of senatorial rank.
“Hail, Prasutacus!” he cried. “By Hercules, you lift us all out of the mud. Up till today the Senators weren’t worth the parings of a sewer-man’s fingernails. But since you deign to wear their badge they’ll begin to get about again. I shall write to my family. They will be pleased.”
Attilius was definitely aggressive. He wished to see that fire of hatred burn once more in the face of his host and to challenge him to an account. But his host that night was the perfect host. He begged pardon if, in his ignorance, he had shown a lack of taste. He led his guest to the couch of honour by a table of citrus wood and ivory and filled him a cup of red wine.
“Samian ware. Imported!” said Prasutacus, calling his attention to the cup.
“Not a patch on your own Castor ware,” Attilius grumbled. “You had a real art there and you let a good thing die that you might flatter me with a bad one. Where are the hares with their eyes starting out of their heads and the dogs chasing round the tankard after them?”
And as he turned the cup round he stopped in the middle of a sentence. For over the head of Prasutacus, framed in a doorway, with a cloud of dark, lustrous hair making whiter still the whiteness of her broad forehead, stood the marvellous girl. Her beauty took him by the heart. The lovely oval of her face, the red mouth made for laughter and love, the big eyes dark as pools and shining like the stars — he saw them not as separate splendours but as the mark and vesture of one being different from any other that lived. Attilius rose from his couch, and over the head of Prasutacus their eyes met, in his great wonder, in hers an odd solemnity as though some tremendous event had changed the world.
“What troubles you, my Attilius?” said the host, and he turned his head. “It is my daughter, Sergia,” he explained with a little surprise that his daughter should be found remarkable when he himself was present.
“Your daughter?” Attilius repeated, and his eyes turned to his host. There must, after all, be something very remarkable in the father of such a daughter.
“You come to make the wine sweet for us, Sergia,” he said, and he lingered on the name as though he could not let it go. The girl shook her head, and her lips parted in a smile. Did he imagine it or was it true that her low and pleasant voice had the music of all the harps?
“No. I come to see that my father’s guest is fitly served.”
She advanced into the room. She wore a blue gown and white shoes sewn with pearls. She was slender and long of limb and moved without haste. And all these details Attilius was hard put to it to keep out of his speech. But he set to work. After all, he had been for two years at the Wall. He was making a road. If he could not talk for a little while like a sensible, full-grown man, by Hercules, who could? He remembered afterwards, and indeed was given occasion to remember, that he talked at inordinate length about roads and their construction and how thronged they were and how they civilized the nations and how they all met at the Golden Post in Rome’s Forum. The theme was the easiest of all for Attilius. He could rattle along whilst his thoughts were full of a blue gown and a cloudy coronal of hair. For old Daemonides by mere chance had fired a hidden train of poetry in the young exile which had never since been extinguished. Even at the end of all roads in the north the flame had burned, and Attilius had played with it as a child with a toy; so that the echo of a bugle blowing the Last Post on a high tower of the Wall upon a winter’s night sounded a response, delicate and faint, from a sentry of some far southern fortress lost among the deserts.
“Heu!” cried Prasutacus, lifting his hands in admiration. “What we poor barbarians owe to you!”
“When you see the first blades of grass allowed to shoot up between the crevices of the pavements, then you may say the dried figs of Caria are all eaten. Rome was,” replied Attilius.
It is to be remembered that he was at this date only twenty- two years old and a little bombast is the salt of youth. But at this moment, the meal being nearly at an end, Sergia had a chair placed for herself at the head of the couch on which he reclined, and he lapsed into diffidence and silence. The complete incompetence of words to express meanings weighed upon him like a calamity; except, of course, when she spoke, and then every syllable was a ruby, even if it were only to lament the lateness of the fruit trees that season.
One moment of that first meeting, however, stood out forever in his memories. He had bidden goodbye to his host. He had strapped on his boots in the outer court and was adjusting his cloak about his shoulders, when he heard a light step behind him. He looked up. The square pillars of the court, like those in the dining room, were faced with polished phegnite in the Roman fashion, so that one looking at them saw what was behind him reflected as in a faulty mirror. Attilius saw Sergia. He turned and took her hands. He wanted to thank her for existing.
“But words! What are they?” he whispered.
Sergia smiled, her eyes sending and receiving the messages which are the prerogatives of hearts, and answered: “They are just your lantern on a night of moonlight.”
She nodded towards the open door. Outside were his horse and the guide carrying the lighted lantern; and lawn and garden were lit with such a silver radiance of moonlight that they seemed hung in some magical ether between earth and sky. For a few moments they stood side by side, looking out through the door and silent. Then he had mounted his horse and ridden slowly away. Sergia watched him go. Even after he had crossed the open ground she could see the lantern twinkling amongst the trees. She had a thought that the flame of that candle was her soul. A movement behind her made her turn, and she saw that her father was watching her from the depths of the court as closely as she watched Attilius. A breath of wind stirred in the garden, gentle as a sigh. Bran, the great steward, slammed to the heavy door and bolted it.
Thus it began, and for a little while, thus it continued. The road crept nearer to the Down, Prasutacus’ hospitality did not flag, Attilius required no guide to lead him through the forest.
Then one night a whisper was answered by a whisper. The road had begun to climb the Down. At the edge of the trees Attilius sent forward to the camp his orderly with his horse. Wrapped in a dark cloak, he waited whilst the lights died out in the house and, after a while, suddenly Sergia was in his arms. She was eighteen, he twenty-two. He had found a small hollow on the side of the hill and there, with boughs and fragrant bushes, had built a little summer house; and there the dawn almost caught them unawares.
IX. THE SANCTUARY
How soon a smile of God can change the world!
How we are made for happiness! How work
Grows play, adversity a winning fight!
— Robert Browning
class=“first”The Eighth Legion and the Sixth marched southwards over London Bridge, each with its auxiliaries, its ten squadrons of cavalry, its train of catapults heavy and light; twenty-four thousand men in all. Britain was at peace. The Northwest Frontier was the only danger spot. One Legion would serve in place of two, and the Thirteenth was even now marching up from Richboro’ and Lymne to take their place. Through Merton they tramped, and the Dorking Gap, singing as they went, with their camp equipment rattling on their backs. For two days their helmets flas
hed on the shoulder of Leith Hill. Through Five Oaks they strode to Anderida. The thunder of their march reverberated along the glades, and the dust of the broad pavement swirled above the treetops like the spray of the Victoria Falls over the forests of Rhodesia. The woodland people, the deer, and the wolves fled into the depths of the thickets, scared into a transient fellowship; and in white villas and tiny townships the men of peace looked at one another and whispered: “The Romans are leaving us to our fate.” Rumours of disaster on the Danube, in Scythia, in Africa, multiplied. The Eighth and the Sixth legions left dismay behind the rumble of their machines; and here and there some wild hopes of rapine and disorder; and here and there, too, dreams of great power.
The Eighth marched first. It swung down the long hill to Regnum at the end of the fifth day and camped about the estuaries of the harbour. The first half of the Sixth, with the Eagles and the Double Cohort, bivouacked on the top of Bignor Hill; the rear half with the artillery halted at the permanent mansion of Hardham. This was on the long day of June when the sun crossed the Line.
Attilius was with his Cohort on Bignor Hill. The camp was marked out, the trenches were dug, the tents aligned, and the men fed by eight o’clock. Then he was free. He hung his bow upon his shoulder and strapped his quiver about his waist, as though he were hunting game for the pot. He set his face to the Weald and descended the road until he reached the second elbow about two thirds of the way down. At the angle he left the road and clambered along the rough hillside, clinging to the slope by the edges of his boots. After he had covered half a mile he pushed some bushes aside and stood in a tiny amphitheatre of grass with a sheer wall of white chalk cropping out on the further side of it. Below him was the great house with its wings and its garden and its long roofed corridor facing the sun. He stood there spellbound by such an inrush of golden memories that the last four years were swept away. Here Sergia had kept tryst with him for the first time yesterday — no, a week ago. Even a week could hardly encompass all his recollections though he crammed each hour with them.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 618