"Why all this profusion?" I queried. "You have enough here for a party of ten."
"I always have a variety like this," she explained. "I generally have very little appet.i.te on a journey so I tell Lydia to put in all the things she can get which she knows I like. Then something is likely to tempt me."
We feasted by moonlight, while I told my story from the moment when I had received her warning letter.
"I knew that you mounted the horse in front of Plosurnia"s Tavern," she said, "but I have never heard of you after that. Tanno and I did all we could to find out what had become of you; all we could without risking the secret service getting an inkling that we had a hope that you were not dead.
"In fact it was not only advertised from the Palace in due course, but circ.u.mstantially reported to us privately, that the secret service had learned that you had arranged for a fishing-vessel to take you to sea from Sipontum. They had then set three detachments of Praetorians to intercept you, one on each road, with watchers to warn them if you were recognized.
You were seen or betrayed somewhere between Hadria and Auximum, one account said at Ortona, and the Praetorians killed you.
"Tanno said that the secret service always gave out such an account if they failed to locate and capture any man they should have arrested. But the confirmation of the story by three different private agencies plainly destroyed his hopes that you might still be alive. I tried to keep on hoping, but, after a whole year, I stopped lying awake and sobbing in the dark; while I felt more grief for you than I ever felt for Satronius Patavinus and more truly widowed than when he died, I ceased to grieve and regained my interest in gaieties and suitors. Don"t you think that was natural?"
"Very natural," I admitted and went on with my story.
The moon rose higher and its rays no longer struck on our faces, but, striking through the open panel, diffused from what part of the cushion or sides of the coach they fell on directly, lit up the whole interior with a pearly glimmer. By this subdued light Vedia looked bewitchingly charming and coquettish, all the more because of the contrast between her elaborate coiffure and the simple costume her maid had worn.
I ate liberally and with relish and she appeared to enjoy her food as I did.
"You don"t seem a bit worried," I remarked, "over the loss of your jewels."
"Loss!" she exclaimed. "I haven"t lost them, they are all in the secret compartment under us inside the coach body, just where Lydia put them before we left Rome. The bandits had barely begun to ransack the coach when we heard the yells of the constabulary and then the hoof-beats of their horses. They and their horses made so much noise that the brigands thought they had to do with a hundred or more and fled, dragging off Bambilio and Lydia and leaving me and the hampers, even the wine-skins.
They never were near laying hands on those jewels. They had Bambilio"s coin-chests, to be sure; but not my jewelry nor so much as a nugget of the bullion they had expected. They were preparing to torture the procurator to make him reveal the hiding place of his bullion, when the yelling and galloping hors.e.m.e.n scared them away."
I congratulated her and we ate with even more relish. Both of us, however, were sparing of the wine, though I gloated at the savor of the first really good wine I had tasted for more than two years.
And garum sauce! I had not realized how I had craved such luxuries as garum.
I told my story to an accompaniment of Vedia"s exclamations. She was amazed at all of it; at our crawl through the drain, at the loyalty of old Chryseros, at my involvement with Maternus, at my encounter with Pescennius Niger, at my involvement with the mutineers; but most of all, at my having been present in the great circus, an eyewitness of the most spectacular day of racing Commodus ever exhibited under his transparent pseudonym of Palus and his last day of public jockeying; and, equally, at Agathemer"s device by which we survived the ma.s.sacre.
We had finished our leisurely meal and I had finished my story, neither our appet.i.tes nor the flow of my narrative marred by the distant squalls of leopards and roars of lions, nor by the uncanny sounds made by the hyenas, when, all of a sudden, a lion uttered a powerful and prolonged roar within a dozen yards of us. Vedia shrieked and clung to me, clutching me so I had to remonstrate with her in order to be able to slide shut and fasten the open front panel. I had barely fastened it when another roar as loud, sudden, and long answered the first from the other side of us, somewhere in the swamp tract. This time Vedia did not shriek, she only clung closer to me. I held her as close as she held me and, so clinging to each other, in the pale glimmer of the moonlight striking on the sh.e.l.l panes in the panels, we listened to repet.i.tions of the roars, each time nearer, till the two beasts were roaring at each other not much more than its length from the carriage, apparently facing each other across the dead pole-horses. I expected a fight, but they ceased roaring, and, by the sounds they made, fell to gorging themselves on horse-meat.
When we had become used to their proximity, since, after a lapse of time which seemed like half an hour or more, they kept on crunching and rending without any roarings and without coming nearer the carriage, Vedia, her arms still about me, told me the story of her doings since my downfall.
Most of it was taken up with social gaieties and with rejections of tolerated suitors.
Then she, shyly, told me of her liking for Orensius Pacullus, of Aquileia, and her promise to marry him. She explained at length why she had been called imperatively to Aquileia, why he felt bound to remain there and how it was that she had agreed to travel to Aquileia to be married there, instead of his returning to Rome, which would have been the most conventional arrangement.
While she was telling me this we heard not only the noise of the feeding of the two lions which were eating the dead horses, but heard also a third animal as noisily tearing at one of the dead mules behind the coach.
"I cannot believe," she said, "that I ever consented to marry anybody else, even when I was certain you were dead. But you know, Caius, it is natural to be married; and to live alone, as maid or widow, is not only lonesome and unnatural, but unfashionable and absurd.
"But, now that I know you are alive, I shall not care who thinks me ridiculous or who calls me silly; I shall feel lonely, but lonely merely because I cannot live with you. I shall jilt poor dear Pacullus, who is as good a man and as good a fellow as ever lived, and I shall stick to my widowhood until I die or Commodus joins the company of the G.o.ds and we can arrange for your full rehabilitation and the restoration of your estates and rank."
Just as she said this we distinctly heard clawing and snuffing against the panels behind our heads, opposite where the lions were feasting. Vedia did not shriek, she was too scared to make any sound: she merely clutched me closer.
Both lions roared in front of the coach; a tiger"s rasping yarr answered from behind it and almost instantly there were noises alongside the coach indicating that a lion and tiger were at grips; growls, snarls, more growls and more snarls, each choked off in the middle as it were, half swallowed and left unfinished. For some reason the noise of the fight immediately started a chorus of hyenas, emitting their strange cries, much like human laughter, but the laughter of maniacs. Our situation and environment was to the last degree uncanny.
The fight lasted no long time. We could not conjecture which combatant was victorious, but they dashed off, one pursuing the other. The remaining lion roared twice; long, choking, snarling torrents of thunderous noise; then it also went away. Except for distant snarls, squalls and roars, we were in a silent moonlit world, almost peaceful. I ventured to unfasten the other front panel and slide it a little way open. The rays of the high moon, poured in on our feet, we looked out on a magical prospect.
Vedia put a relishing warm arm round my neck.
"Call me Caia again," she whispered. "Where you are Caius I am Caia!"
[Footnote: From the Roman marriage-ritual.] The implication thrilled me.
It was as if we were married, had been man and wife for long past.
It may have been midnight, was near midnight when she said:
"I don"t want to go to sleep at all. We can do without one night"s sleep.
We can sleep tomorrow night, when we are not together. Let"s try to keep awake every minute till daylight."
In fact it was not easy to sleep, for a pack of hyenas, apparently as friendly with each other as if they had hunted together since they were weaned, came and picked the bones of the horses and mules, even ate the bones, which cracked loudly between their powerful jaws. The noise of their gluttony would have kept awake a pair sleepier than we.
But, when the moon was almost half way down the sky, when the roars and squalls and snarls of lions and leopards and tigers and the horrid laughter of hyenas had ceased to sound, when the night silence was so complete that we could hear the c.o.c.ks crowing near distant farmsteads and the faint breezes rustling in the willows, we did sleep, she first, her arms round me and her head on my shoulder.
When we woke, with the slanted moon rays on the back corner of the coach behind me, she cuddled to me luxuriously, patted me and presently whispered, in a bantering, roguish tone which I detected even in her softest whisper:
"You remember that old sweetheart of yours?"
"I don"t remember any sweetheart except you," I retorted. "I never had any sweetheart except you."
"I mean," she said, "that minx who made eyes at you and all your country neighbors and certainly tried to marry you and most of your Sabine friends."
"You mean Marcia?" said I.
"Ah," she said, playfully and teasingly, "I thought you would remember her name. If you remember her name you must remember her."
"Of course I remember Marcia," I said. "How could I forget her after the way she led my uncle by the nose, had half the countryside mad for her, set us all by the ears, rebuffed Ducconius Furfur, and married Marcus Martius?
"If I had never known her before I"d be bound to recall the creature who embroiled me with you. My! You were in a wax!"
"I certainly was," she whispered, "and I thought I had reason to be indignant. But now I believe your version of her relations with you and feel no qualms at recollecting the slanders I then credited. But, the point is, you remember her."
"My dear," I said, "if I had never set eyes on Marcia except when I encountered her in the Baths of t.i.tus the day you rescued me from drowning when I fainted in the swimming pool, I"d remember her for life. She is too beautiful to forget."
"Am I so hideous?" she demanded.
"You are the loveliest woman alive," I vowed. "But Marcia is amazingly spectacular and the pictures she makes impress themselves on one"s memory and eyesight. I could never forget her in that brilliant tableau on the camp-platform facing the mutineers, even if I had never seen her before."
"I was coming to that," Vedia said. "Marcia, who was a foundling and a slave as the adopted child of a slave, has risen so high that she is truly Empress in all but the official t.i.tle. She has all the honors Faustina or Crispina ever had, except that she keeps out of those religious rites, partic.i.p.ation in which is confined to women married with the full old-time ceremonies and observances."
I then told her what Agathemer and I had heard about Marcia while domiciled with Colgius, and of the absence from all talk about her of any mention of or allusion to Marcus Martius; I asked if she knew what had become of him or, indeed, anything about him.
"Oh, yes," she said, "all Roman society knew the main facts and dear old Tanno supplied me with many of the intimate details. Commodus made a point of having Martius specially presented to him because he had heard that he had been, with you and Tanno, one of the foremost fighters in your affrays in Vediamnum and near Villa Satronia. At his private audience he congratulated and bepraised Martius and acclaimed his prowess. Martius, who seems to have been a very fine fellow, disclaimed any pretensions to such laudations and modestly stated that he had, at the beginning of each fight, been far in the rear in your travelling-coach, with Marcia; that she had clung to him and so delayed his getting out; that each time he had gotten out and picked up the staff of a disabled combatant, but that, in each combat, he had arrived barely in time to land a few blows on some of the routed enemy; that in neither affray had he done any real fighting or been in any danger or performed any exploits.
"Commodus, in his blunt way, had asked whether he was good for anything, anyhow. Martius had replied that he was considered more than a mediocre horse-master.
"Commodus had then invited him to demonstrate his prowess in the Stadium of the Palace. There Martius had shown such skill, courage, agility, judgment, grace and ease that Commodus was delighted. He had Martius ride a number of wild, fierce and unmanageable horses and was more and more charmed with him.
"Next day he had another batch of intractable mounts for him. As Martius was manoeuvring one which he had almost subdued Commodus stepped too near the plunging brute and, in saving the Emperor from being run down and trampled, Martius was somehow thrown and his neck broken.