The Lion's Brood.

by Duffield Osborne.

PART I.

THE LION'S BROOD.

INTRODUCTION.

Centuries come and go; but the plot of the drama is unchanged, and the same characters play the same parts. Only the actors cast for them are new.

It is much worn,--this denarius,--and the lines are softened and blurred,--as of right they should be, when you think that more than two thousand years have pa.s.sed since it felt the die. It is lying before me now on my table, and my eyes rest dreamily on its helmeted head of Pallas Nicephora. There, behind her, is the mint-mark and that word of ancient power and glory, "Roma." Below are letters so worn and indistinct that I must bend close to read them: "--M. SERGI," and then others that I cannot trace.

Perhaps I have dozed a bit, for I must have turned the coin, unthinking, and now I see the reverse: a horseman, in full panoply, galloping, with naked sword brandished in his left hand, from which depends a severed head tight-clutched by long, flowing hair.

The clouds hang low over the city, as I peer from my tower window,--driving, ever driving, from the east, and changing, ever changing, their fantastic shapes. Now they are the waving hands and gowns of a closely packed mult.i.tude surging with human pa.s.sions; now they are the headlong rout of a flying army upon which press hordes of riders, dark, fierce, and barbarous--horses with tumultuous manes, and hands with brandished darts. Surely it is a sleepy, workless day! It will be vain to drive my pen across the pages.

I do not see the cloud forms now--not with my eyes, for they have closed themselves perforce; but my brain is awake, and I know that the eyes of Pallas Nicephora see them, and grow brighter as if gazing on well-remembered scenes.

Why not? How many thousand clinkings of coin against coin in purse and pouch, how many hundred impacts of hands that long since are dust, have served to dim your once clear relief!

Surely, Pallas, you have looked upon all this and much more. Shall I see aught with your eyes, lady of my Sergian denarius? Shall I see, if, with you before me, I look fixedly at the legions of clouds that cross my window an hour--two--three--even until the night closes in?

Grant but a grain of this, O G.o.ddess, and lo! I vow to thee a troop of pipe-players upon the Ides of June.

I.

NEWS.

"A troop of pipe-players to Minerva on the Ides of June, if we win!"

"And my household to Mars, if we have lost!"

The speakers were hurrying along the street that leads down from the Palatine Hill toward the Forum, and both were young. Their high shoes fastened with quadruple thongs and adorned with small silver crescents proclaimed their patrician rank.

"Why do you vow as if the G.o.ds had already pa.s.sed judgment, Lucius?"

"Because, my Caius, I am very sure that a battle has been fought. What else do these rumours mean that are flying through the city? rumours that none can trace to a source. It is only a few minutes, since my freedman, Atius, told me how the slaves report that our neighbour Marcus Sabrius rode in last night through the Ratumenian Gate; and when I sent to his house to inquire, the doorkeeper feigned ignorance. That is only one of a hundred tales. Note the crowd thickening around us as we approach the Forum, and how all are pressing in the same direction.

Study their faces, and doubt what I say if you can."

"But is it victory or defeat?"

"Answer me your own question, Caius. Is 'victory' or 'defeat' the word that men do not dare to utter?"

The face of Caius became grave. Then suddenly he burst out with:--

"You are right. I see it all now, even as you speak; and what hope had we from the first? Who was the demagogue Flaminius that he should command our army, going forth without the auspices--a consul that was no consul at all in the sight of the G.o.ds! Then, too, there were the warnings that poured in from all the country: the ships in the sky, the crow alighting on the couch in the Temple of Juno, the stones rained in Picinum--"

"Foolish stories, my Caius; the dreams of ignorant rustics," replied Lucius, smiling faintly. "Besides, you remember they were all expiated--"

"And who knows that they were expiated truly!" croaked an old woman from a booth by the road. "Who does not know that, as Varro says, your patrician magistrates would rather lose a battle than that a plebeian consul should triumph! Varbo, the butcher, dreamed last night that his son's blood was drenching his bed, and when he awoke, it was water from the roof; and Arates, the Greek soothsayer, says that Varbo's son has been slain in the water, and his blood--"

But the young patricians, who had halted a moment at the interruption, now hurried on with an expression of contempt on their faces.

"That is what Flaminius stands for," resumed Lucius after a moment of silence. "How can we look for success when such men are raised to the command, merely because they _are_ such men; and when a Fabius and a Claudius are set aside because their fathers' fathers led the armies of the Republic to victory in the days when this rabble were the slaves they should still be."

The friends had turned into the Sacred Way. A moment later they arrived at the Forum lined with its rows of booths nestled away beneath ma.s.sive porticoes of peperino, and with its columned temples standing like divine sentinels about or sweeping away up the rugged slope of the Capitoline to where the great fane of Jupiter Capitolinus shed its protecting glory over the destinies of Rome.

Below, the broad expanse of Forum and Comitia was thronged with a surging crowd--patricians and plebeians,--elbowing and pushing one another in mad efforts to get closer to the Rostra and to a small group of magistrates, who, with grave faces, were cl.u.s.tered at the foot of its steps. These latter spoke to each other in whispers, but such a babel of sounds swelled up around them that they might safely have screamed without fear of being overheard.

The booths were emptied of their cooks and butchers and silversmiths.

Waving arms and the flutter of robes emphasized the discussions going on on every side. Here a rumour-monger was telling his tale to a gaping cl.u.s.ter of pallid faces; there a plebeian pot-house orator was arraigning the upper cla.s.ses to a circle of lowering brows and clenched fists, while the sneering face of some pa.s.sing patrician told of a disdain beyond words, as he gathered his toga closer to avoid the contamination of the rabble.

One sentiment, however, seemed to prevail over all, and, beside it, curiosity, party rancour, wrath, and contempt were as nothing. It was anxiety sharpened even into dread that brooded everywhere and controlled all other pa.s.sions, while itself threatening at every moment to sweep away the barriers and to loose the warm southern blood of the citizens into a seething flood of furious riot or headlong panic.

The two young men had descended into this maelstrom of popular excitement, and were making such headway as they could toward the central point of interest. Now and again they pa.s.sed friends who either looked straight into their faces, without a sign of recognition, or else burst out into floods of information,--prayers for news or vouchsafings of it,--news, good or bad, true or false. Perhaps three-fourths of the distance had been covered at the expense of torn togas and bruised sides, when a sudden commotion in front showed that something was happening. The next moment the hard, stern face of Marcus Pomponius Matho, the praetor peregrinus, rose above the crowd, and then the broad purple band upon his toga, as he mounted the steps of the Rostra.

It seemed hours--almost days--that he stood there, grave and silent, looking down into the sea of upturned faces, while the roar of the mult.i.tude died away into a gentle murmur, and then into a silence so oppressive that each man seemed to be holding his breath. Once the magistrate's lips moved, but no words came from them, and strange noises, as of the clenching of teeth and sharp, quick breathing, rose all about. Then a voice came from his mouth, the very calmness of which seemed terrible:--

"Quirites, we have been beaten in a great battle. Our army is destroyed, and Caius Flaminius, the consul, is killed."

For a moment there was stillness deeper almost than before, as if the leadlike words were sinking slowly but steadily along pa.s.sage and nerve down to the central seats of consciousness; then burst forth a sound as of a single groan--the groan of Jupiter himself in mortal anguish; and then the noise of women weeping, the shrieking treble of age, and the rumbling murmur of curses and execrations,--against senate and n.o.bles, against the rabble and their dead leader, but, above all, against Carthage and her terrible captain.

"Who are these men that slay consuls and destroy armies?" piped the shrill voice of an aged cripple who had struggled up from where he sat upon the steps of Castor, and was shaking the stump of a wrist toward the north.

"Are they not the men who surrendered Sicily that we might let them escape from us at Eryx? Did they not give up their ships, and pay us tribute, and scurry out of Sardinia that Rome might spare them? I--I who am talking to you have seen their armies: naked barbarians from the deserts, naked barbarians from the woods--not one well-armed man in five--a rabble with a score of languages, to whom no general can talk.

_They_ to destroy the army of Rome--in her own land!--what crime have we committed that the G.o.ds should deal with us thus?"

"But the great beasts that tear up the ranks?" put in a young butcher, one of the circle that had been drawn together about the veteran.

"How did his elephants save Pyrrhus--and then we saw them for the first time?" retorted the cripple.

"You forget, that was before Rome had become the prey of demagogues; before she had Flaminii for consuls."

All turned toward the new speaker--the young patrician whom his companion had called Lucius. He was a man perhaps twenty-five years of age, of middle height, sparely built but as if of tempered steel, with strong, commanding features and dark hawklike eyes that were now glittering with pa.s.sion. It was not a handsome face except so far as strength and pride make masculine beauty, but it was the face of one whom a man might trust and a woman love.

The butcher was on the point of returning an angry retort, half to hide his awe of the other's rank, when a friend caught him by the arm.

"Do you not see it is Lucius Sergius Fidenas?" he whispered.

The result of the warning was still doubtful, when a sudden commotion in the crowd about them drew the attention of all to a short, thick-set man of middle age, in the light panoply of a mounted legionary. Cries went up from all about:--

"It is Marcus Decius." "He is from the army." "Tell us! what news?"