He crossed to the chalk wall and, at the edge of it, lifted a piece of turf which overhung and protected the chalk below. There were half-obliterated marks which brought a smile to his face. He drew his short sword from its scabbard and cut a new one deep and with infinite care that it might be worthy of so rare a moment. He carved a heart and transfixed it with half an arrow, leaving room beside it for another heart and the rest of the arrow-shaft. Under his heart he cut his initials deep, A. S., and stood back, proud as a boy, to admire his handiwork. Sergia would know that the Sixth Legion was on the hill. It would remain in its camp tomorrow, whilst the Eighth embarked. She would look here for a sign — if she remembered. Yes, if she remembered. His heart failed him as he thought: “She may not. Why should she? Now, if I were Calpurnius Scapula, then indeed—” and at that moment a shrub stirred behind him, though there was no wind.
He was very quick, with Scapula’s own silence. A Scythian bowman of his Legion had taught him on many a hunting expedition on the moors. His sword was on the turf, held there by the sole of his boot, his bow was strung and the notch of the arrow on the string before he turned. When he turned, not even a frond was quivering on the top of any bush. But he himself stood without a movement, too. He could outlast a deer at its own game of patience. Bronze could not have been more still. And in the end he won. Twenty yards below him a clump of hazel shook for a second. Then ten yards below that the yellow flowers on a twig of gorse danced. Attilius’ bow was raised, the plume of his arrow touched his ear. But he never loosed it.
“The Brotherhood of Man,” he said to himself, as he lowered his bow, making a jest and an excuse of that new spirit which, according to Sempronius, now breathed in Rome. But the Brotherhood of Man had nothing to do with his forbearance. This spot was sanctuary. Blood must not stain it. He had almost felt a small hand close over his, forbidding him. Let the spy go! Indeed, the spy went. For swiftly, openly, in a straight line down the hillside, bushes rippled and tossed as though a draught of wind blew down a corridor.
Attilius sprang onto a hillock. He watched the open ground at the foot of the hill, but no one fled across it.
A deer or a man?
If a man, then a spy. If a spy, then one who knew enough of this green shrine to guess that here he would come the moment he was free. His face darkened — for that threatened Sergia — and lightened again. For he had a plan. Four years ago, yes, the arrow should have flown and struck and closed a mouth. Now there was no need. Attilius had his plan.
“Anyway, the pot goes empty,” he said with a laugh. He unstrung his bow and slid back the arrow in his quiver. But he did not go. The dusk dropped its veils and darkness came. The thickets woke to life and the throb of nightingales. Behind him the moon rose from the Channel.
“This time tomorrow!” he said. He walked up the hill to the camp. Across the water the great shoulder of the Island of Vectis clove the night.
X. THE TRYST
Alas,
We loved, sir — used to meet,
How sad and bad and mad it was,
But then, how it was sweet!
— Robert Browning
If yesterday was the longest of the year this next one was the longest since the world began. Never did hours so limp. There was the morning drill — an eternity! The exercises of the afternoon, tedium made torture. Betweenwhiles Attilius, stretched upon his face in the sunlight, kicked his toes into the turf and watched the black galleys laden with the Eighth Legion crawl round Selsey Bill like so many sea centipedes and make for the open water beyond the bluff of Vectis. He reached the green sanctuary on the hillside before the night fell. It was empty. He knew that it would be empty — he was so many hours before his time. Yet he was chilled. He hurried across to the chalk slab and his disappointment vanished. A second heart had been carved in the chalk side by side with his. There was an initial, too, within the heart. S.
Attilius danced a step or two on the turf. But seventh heavens have hells to match, and the journey between them is swifter than light. Attilius dropped like lead. He saw that his arrow was not prolonged to pierce her heart as well as his. What did that mean? Was it just her own natural reserve and dignity counselling her?— “Four years have passed. How do you know that the flame still burns in him? How do you know that he is not reviving the old symbol which once meant so much, in order that he may the more prettily bid you farewell?”
Yes, so she might have argued. A delicate reticence was in her blood. On the other hand she might be saying: “My heart is free. No arrow transfixes it. It’s healed. Look for yourself, poor blockhead,” and suddenly panic seized upon him. There was her initial, plain as could be, cut within the heart. S. There it was! What words could say more clearly: “My heart’s my own, not yours. Off with you, little Tribune!”
Lovers, alas! must look for twisted meanings. And clutch the torture close to them when they think they have discovered them. That Sergia’s duties had left her little time that day, or that her eyes were so dimmed when she read this message; or that her hands so trembled that she could trust neither eyes nor hands; or that her blood throbbed so furiously in her veins that she could not take thought of how to answer him, so long as he was answered — not one of these possibilities occurred to Attilius. If they had, he would have dismissed them. No, tragedy stalked at his heels. All was over.
Then he stooped. All certainly was over. Sergia sent him to the rightabout. But what was this word, rudely, swiftly cut in the chalk beneath the hearts? He spelled it out and stood up erect.
“Puniamini” he had read. “For shame!”
His thought went back to a sprig of gorse dancing in a windless air, to a swift ripple running along the tops of the bushes down the hillside. The spy had scrawled that rebuke. Attilius’ despair changed to anger. Who dared to rebuke a Tribune of the Double Cohort here in Britain, Rome’s conquest, Rome’s debtor?
“I ought to have let that arrow fly,” he said, chiding himself. “If all men are my brothers I could easily have done without one of them.”
He turned about, half hoping that a bush would shake. But he forgot his anger. For the dusk was gathering, and in the windows of that Roman house lording it in Anderida the lights began to glow. Overhead in those other windows from which, if these new philosophers were right, immortal souls leaned out, other lamps were lit. In a while the moon rose behind the hill and drowned them, blanching the deep azure of the sky. Long afterwards the house darkened.
“A few minutes,” he said, and suddenly his vigil was ended. Between those two shrubs she had always come. Between those two shrubs she came now. She halted when she saw him, the moonlight shining darkly on his armour. She herself was in the shadow, and the same pretty dignity which had checked her hand when she wrote her answer in the chalk held her there. Four years had passed. Was this the lover of those days? Or had the four years withered his passion with their dust?
Yet in the end it was she who spoke first.
“Attilius,” she said; and though she breathed his name never so gently, the sound of her voice seemed to him to fill the world with music. Her face, her slim, tall figure, the grace of her bearing, these he had been able to see again, even when he was alone. The soft touch of her hair — that he had been able to feel. But her voice with its full and liquid notes he had never been able to hear. No effort of memory had availed to restore it. So that hearing it flow, it moved him till the tears were in his eyes.
“You have a way of saying Attilius — oh, I shall hear it when I die!” he began, with a little, unsteady laugh, and his voice broke and Sergia was in his arms, her heart beating as though it would break through bone and blood to mate with his.
Attilius put his hand beneath her chin to lift up her face.
“No,” she whispered.
“Let me see you, dearest.”
“No!” And she clung the closer, feeling his shoulders to assure herself that it was he and not some malignant spirit which had assumed his shape to make a fool of
her.
“In a moment,” she said, and she laughed happily. But the laugh ended in a low cry of distress. “Four years, my darling. I wouldn’t have believed that four years could hurt one so.”
To comfort her he said foolishly: “Nonsense, Sergia! We were here together yesterday, you and I,” and whilst speaking he heard the folly of his words.
Some knowledge of her, after all, he had lost and now recaptured. The pretences, the empty, pretty phrases which only avoid and cannot heal, had never any solace for Sergia. She was direct and simple.
“We were not,” she answered. She threw back her head now, and her eyes searched his face. “Yes, four endless years, Attilius.”
She unlatched the chin strap of his helmet and tumbled the fine, plume-crested thing onto the ground with disrespect. The panoply of Rome meant nothing to her, but this Roman meant the world. She turned his face to the moonlight and shook her head and smiled.
“Four years, Attilius! They are written here.” She raised her hand and with a finger traced the line between his nostril and the corner of his mouth. “And here’s a tiny wrinkle I don’t know, at the edge of the eye. Oh! And this furrow here. You have grieved for me, my dear, as I for you.” She smoothed her hand down his cheek and patted it and clung to him again.
“If you had not sent for me tonight!” Sergia whispered, her voice muffled in the embrace. But even so a note of panic could be heard.
“Child!” replied Attilius, in the mood of Man the Paternal. He saw no reason to admit that he had been hopping from one foot to another all that day in terror lest she should take no notice of his summons.
“But you did,” she continued. “It was kind.” She drew away a little and took him by the arm, opening and shutting her hand upon it as though she were still not quite sure that he was really at her side. “To know that you had not forgotten will make it easier.”
“What easier?” asked Attilius.
“Everything. All the years that will be. I am only twenty-two. I have a long way to go alone.”
She led him a little up the side of the hollow. There was a mound of turf there on which she took her seat. She could command her face, perhaps, even her voice, but her knees, no.
“Why alone, Sergia?”
“You go with your Legion tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
There was no hesitation in his answer. Sempronius Proculeius had not used the big stick, but he had no less effectually nursed his Remittance Man into the iron discipline of the army. Attilius would return with his Legion along that endless road through Gaul.
“I want you to carry away with you a good thought of me,” she went on, keeping her eyes averted from his face so that her voice might be steadier. “I want you to remember me as one to whom you brought for a little while an undreamt-of happiness.”
Attilius was standing over her, a smile upon his lips and a great tenderness in his face.
“I am not going to remember you at all, Sergia.”
Since her eyes were not upon him, it was only the words she heard. Their very hardness deafened her to the tone which uttered them. A low cry broke from her: “Oh!”
Attilius dropped down by her side.
“I am going to live with you, love you, quarrel with you, grow old with you, in my big house on the Quirinal.”
Sergia turned to him, her face uplifted.
“If it could be!” she cried, with such longing in her cry as melted his heart.
“It will be,” said Attilius.
She adored the stubbornness in his voice, but facts were facts and dreams were dreams, and wise young people with many long, unhappy years in front of them must keep them apart.
“Child!” she in her turn said, and held his face for a moment side by side against hers. “These are our last hours together.”
“No,” he exclaimed violently.
“But you go tomorrow.”
“I shall return.”
“The Romans are leaving Britain.”
And Attilius really laughed. He threw back his head and laughed joyously. So this was what was troubling her. Because two Legions were relieved, Britain with its wealth of wool and wheat and lead was being jettisoned!
“A fable!” he cried. “Who believes it?”
“Everyone.” She added after a pause, and in a lower key, “My father.”
“He?” Attilius was astounded.
“But I gave him a sure sign by which he might know when Rome was breaking. When the grass grows up between the slabs of our pavements and breaks our roads, then Rome’s breaking, too. But not till then, Sergia. He has forgotten it.”
“He does not want to believe it,” said Sergia.
Attilius was not at the moment concerned with Sergia’s father. Sergia’s father could wait on the very outskirts of his thoughts. Sergia could not.
“But you, dearest! You believe it?” He took her hands. “I go to Rome now. Yes. I must go with my Legion. I must get free of my Legion. Then I shall come back — for you.”
Sergia looked at him, her lips parted, her eyes hiding her thoughts. She believed him. It was impossible that on so great a matter he should play with her — he who had never played with her. But she had to get used to a dream transfigured and made true. She was a little scared by it.
“We shall be together — always!” she whispered. “Oh!” — and she clasped him to her breast.
“I shall go straight to your father and claim you,” Attilius continued, and again he laughed. “My wife! Before all the world, my wife!” He looked at her a little wistfully. “We’ll have to pretend at times that we must be secret and our meetings stolen.”
Suddenly Sergia drew back.
“It will be no pretence,” she said, and despair seized upon her again.
“Why? I don’t understand.”
“Dearest! You never guessed? I thought…you ceased to come to our house…if you were asked you refused…I thought you guessed.”
Attilius put his arm about her, drew her close and whispered in her ear.
“When did I cease? After we first met here. I never guessed? What was there to guess?”
“My father hates you,” and that too was whispered.
“Oh, not because you are you. How could he?” and a smile of pride in her lover made her face for a second joyous. “But because you are a Roman. He hates all Romans. He is jealous of Rome. He hates Rome.”
The revelation took Attilius by surprise. Yet perhaps he might have suspected. That suavity in so important a personage might well conceal an overpowering jealousy. There had never been any genuine friendliness in Prasutacus. Fair words and flatteries and an obsequious ear for any folly a young Tribune might utter — these were always ready. But Attilius had never liked him, never trusted him. At one time he had whipped himself into some semblance of a belief that he had been prejudiced unjustly by the saying of his Legate. Britons more Roman than Rome were to be kept at arm’s length. Now he understood that an instinct had warned him wisely.
“I understand that now,” he agreed. “None the less, my sweetheart, I hold you till death.”
The tightening of her arms about his neck was answer enough. But she added: “Death would come before he gave me to you. Listen, Attilius. I could follow you. I’d beg my way to Rome, with you at the journey’s end. I am young and strong—”
“Madness, dearest—” he began and stopped, listening. He held up a hand in warning. For behind him and just above him the bushes rattled on the hillside. Attilius rose and turned. But quick as he was he was not quick enough. As his hand flew to his sword hilt a very giant of a man sprang. He sprang from the heart of the scrub above their heads and came hurtling down. He dropped with the force of a great boulder upon the Tribune’s shoulders and, as he dropped, he struck. He struck at Attilius’ head with a great knobbed stick and both men crashed to the ground. At the noise of their fall Sergia screamed. In an instant one man was upon his feet, the man who had jumped.
“Silence!�
� he cried.
Sergia stared at him.
“Bran!”
It was her father’s steward who threatened her.
“You have killed him!”
In spite of his bulk she swept him aside and, dropping upon her knees, gently raised her lover’s head and pillowed it upon her arm. Attilius was breathing, but his eyes were closed. The blood streamed down the side of his face.
Sergia had her wits about her now. She had to think and to think fast, for his sake and for hers. If she could reach the camp on the hill. A cry? What heed would a sentry up there pay to a woman’s cry on the hillside below? His business was to guard his camp. She must reach him, speak to him. Her father? She gave not a thought to him.
Someone was speaking. Bran — but not to her. She looked up. There were other men, serfs of Prasutacus. The moonlit hollow seemed alive with them. Two men carrying a hurdle came forward, and Bran lifted her roughly from the ground. Sergia hardly felt his hand, and she uttered no cry. Indeed, Bran was helping her. She reeled back, towards the tangle of bush and shrub which enclosed this violated sanctuary. If she could reach the edge of it unnoticed. She saw Bran stoop over Attilius and fling him over on his face. He was still unconscious, for his armour only rattled once. She drew back another step. Bran held out a hand, and one of the serfs handed to him a leather thong, and he bound Attilius’ hands behind his back, with so much force that she felt the bones of her lover’s arms must crack. But that, too, she endured without a moan. Only she stepped back again. She was on the rim of the open ground now.
“Now,” said Bran.
Two men stooped, lifted Attilius, and tumbled him onto the hurdle. They were going to take him down into the house. Once they reached it, it would be no more a house but Attilius’ tomb. She must wake the camp. One more step whilst they raised the hurdle. With hardly a whisper of the boughs she was gone. Gathering her black cloak about her, she bent and ran. The side of the hill was steep. She could hardly keep her feet. She stumbled and regained her balance and ran on. She heard a shout raised behind her.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 619