Cleopatra and the Decurion
On the headland of Lochias, where it pushed towards the overlapping promontory of Pharos, stood the palace and gardens of the Ptolemies. The great lighthouse on the opposite shore glowed across the strait, and in the deep waters between were planted a number of islets, like gigantic stepping-stones, their intervals closed with booms and chains. These, and the arms of land, enlocked the harbour of Alexandria, all round whose mighty circumference the city flamed like a belt of fire, impassable, magnificent. It was thirty years before the birth of Christ, and the battle of Actium had been fought and, for all that it meant to Egypt and the world, lost. Cleopatra was doomed, and Magdalen, perhaps, conceived.
Mark Antony, desperate, though infatuated still, had come out of his retirement on Pharos, whither he had retreated to brood over his leman’s treachery. The two were reconciled in a way, and sought perpetually to drown in revelry the horror of an impending judgment. The beautiful queen, last expression of a monstrous demonism, its heir and epitome, had no instinct at the last but to gore the world that crushed her—to glut herself with blood and suffering. In these final days her inhumanity surpassed itself. And crowned Antony, glooming in his purple and diamonds, watched and was silent.
One night they sat at supper in the Palace, a fierce nucleus, where enthroned, to all the blazing splendour of the hall. It was so alight with torches that the marble columns on which those hung aloft looked, in their deep reflections in the pavement, as if they were rooted in hell fire. Not a sleek Nubian crossing the floor with a golden dish in his hands but had his “fellow in the cellarage” keeping step with him, like a devil reversed and busy in that under inferno. There were far faint cries in the air—of a doomed city, of some nearer anguish—punctuating the throb and swoon of harps. The swaying of peacock fans in soft undulating arms stirred the floating incense, lest the rank breath of torture should enter and overpower it. There was not a man or woman there whose heart, for all the sensuous glamour, was void of fear—unless it were, perhaps, the Decurion Dentatus. He was young, cold, beautiful as Antinous—a Græco-Roman of the heroic type—and he loved his master Antony.
A Hebe, sweet in years and looks, filled the wine cups of the King and Queen. Antony, lifting his, hesitated on the draught. His eyes, already inflamed, sought his partner’s, half covertly, half challengingly. Cleopatra laughed, and putting her glass to her full lips, drank. She followed a formula in doing so, conceding it agreeably to the very madness of his passion. He was haunted, since his defeat, with the thought that she would poison him to save herself. And yet he loved her. It was not the first or the last time in the history of worship that the supreme egotism had evoked the supreme adoration.
Presently, amidst some amorous fondlings, the Queen took the lily chaplet from her hair and shredded a petal or two from it into her lord’s wine.
“Do you the same by mine, my soul,” she whispered, “and let us drink the very perfume of each other’s wit.”
His eyes burning, he lifted the wreath from his brow and obeyed, dropping a flower into her cup. As he raised his own to drink, she stopped him, coaxed the vessel from his hand, and calling the little Hebe to her, bade her take it.
“Thou art fair,” she said. “My lord pledges thee. Drink to his passing fancy.”
Like one of those woodland growths which, being torn, flush a faint, slow sapphire through all their tender flesh, the child’s face, as she stood, seemed to sicken to the hue of death. She shuddered; her limbs began to fail her.
“Drink!” said Cleopatra, rising in her place with a smile. “Drink, child—for thine own sake.”
Better swift death than nameless torture. The poor slave drained the cup, and, casting it, with a scream, from her, dropped upon the pavement, a glittering, voluble shadow, writhing to its own reflection.
Antony had risen, the company with him—speechless all, breathing out the long minutes of the tragedy. It amounted to no more than this, that the child had been so young and lovely—and that now she was spoiled.
At the end, the Queen, scornful, magnificent, turned her burning eyes on her lover’s face. There was a look in its ruined strength which made her pause a moment.
“Read there, sweet lord,” she said, “the groundlessness, the unworthiness of thy suspicions. Were my love false, what precautions of thine could avail against my wit and will to end thee?”
He turned, still without a word, and, the light glinting a moment on his grizzling hair and fuddled, frowning eyes, passed from the banquet.
Then, coming down into the hall, Cleopatra, with a wave of her hand, dismissed the company, the slaves, the musicians—all without exception, save the Decurion Dentatus, whom she called to her.
Under the blazing lights the two stood together, and the body of the dead girl lay at their feet. The Queen pointed to it. Her arm and hand were of faultless beauty. She was thirty-eight, but with all the bloom and fullness of just-ripened womanhood. Years had not set one streak of alloy in the treasure of her golden hair, or clouded the azure of her eyes, or done more than perfect in her the natural weapons of the sorceress. She might have been the Decurion’s sister, so like he was to her in grace and Grecian fairness.
She fixed him with her eyes.
“I marked thee, Decurion,” she said—“and not for the first time. Thy looks defied me, thine eyes condemned. What—did you dare! And thy lip curled when Antony yielded me the cup. Answer why, so thou wouldst not——”
He stayed her fearlessly:
“Because I love him.”
“What, then?” she said, wondering.
“Could he not see, as we all saw,” he answered, “that thou hadst poisoned it? For his wit’s sake I would have had him comprehend; for his nobility’s sake I would have had him refuse thee the cup; for his soul’s sake I would have had him drink from it himself, and die, and be free.”
“Free? From what?”
“From his thrall.”
“What callest thou that?”
“The Curse of Antony.”
“Meaning Cleopatra?”
“Meaning thee, O Queen!”
She laughed. She did not strike his mouth, as was her first mad impulse.
“Darest thou?” she breathed again; then stared into his eyes in pure amazement. Was he not the first man who had ever spoken to her thus?
“Well, thou lovest him,” she said presently, with a deep sigh—“and I, too, in my poor way. It shall be a contest of loves between us.”
She gazed a moment unmoved on the little distorted body at her feet, glanced mockingly at the Decurion, and, turning, left him lost in wonderment.
He never saw her again until near the end. She was occupied in the meanwhile in building herself an unsurpassable mausoleum, and in testing on the bodies of slaves the effects of various poisons. Foreseeing the worst, and prepared for it, she would yet woo Death like a voluptuary, and borrow rapture of his embrace. Yet so far the test had failed her; and not from any inhumanity; for indeed she would have kissed in ecstasy that slave who suffered nothing in obliging her. But one and all they would persist most perversely in dying in extreme agony.
And then one day she sent for the Decurion Dentatus, who, in the thick of the general treachery, was among the few noble who stood by their leader. It was when Octavius was at Pelusium, and the fate of Alexandria appeared sealed.
The soldier was brought in to the Queen where she lay in a private chamber of her Palace. Two faithful women attended upon their mistress; an enamelled casket lying on a table near by was half buried under scented blossoms. Cleopatra fanned herself languidly; a luminous green scarab burned on her forehead between the wings of golden hair; the gauzy film which enwrapped her deepened to a tender flush over hips and bosom. Yet in her eyes some shadow of a mortal fear belied the sensuous abandonment of her attitude.
“The contest of our loves, Decurion,” she said. “Art thou prepared to wage it?”
He looked at her steadfastly, and answered, “Yes, Queen.”
“To free thy master,” she said, “from this curse? Wilt thou teach me how to die?”
“Aye, gladly,” he said.
She pointed to the casket. “It lies therein—the means. Open and handle it. It is said its sting benumbs—puts Death asleep. So thou diest sweetly, I am thy slave and grave-fellow.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, he strode to the casket, and unfastened and raised the lid. Within, upon a mat of green leaves, lay coiled a thick emblazoned worm, all bronzed and gold—a poisonous horned viper. He grasped and held it aloft; received the stabbing tooth, once, twice, in his arm; flung the reptile back into its box and closed the lid.
After long waiting, he was down upon his knees, pallid but triumphant.
“Sufferest thou?” she demanded.
“But too much bliss,” he answered faintly. “I swoon from it.”
He crawled towards her, but sank on the way and died, forcing a smile to his agonised lips.
Then, when it was over, she rose in great emotion, and looked down upon the body.
“I have conquered all others,” she said. “Thou conquerest me. Greater than mine is thy love.” She turned to her trembling women. “Keep the worm safe.” And then she kneeled and, bending, kissed the dead man’s lips. “Take me for thy slave, Dentatus,” she whispered, “in the shadows to come. Not Antony, not another, but thou alone.”