Thus did Maharbal obtain his heart’s desire, and thus did Elissa once again do her duty to her father and her country. And having now married Maharbal, she strove to make him happy.
When once more upon his native soil, Hannibal was not the man to let the grass grow under his feet. He was not long in organising an army from one source and another, and soon he had collected a large force of infantry and a considerable number of elephants; he only wanted cavalry to make up an army which, in Italy, would have been irresistible.
CHAPTER VI.
A MOMENTOUS MEETING.
Although Maharbal’s union with Elissa was kept absolutely secret, yet, since he lived in the same building as that which his Chief had selected as his head-quarters, it was easy for him to be with her at all times. Moreover, since he was Hannibal’s right-hand man, there were none who dared to criticise the terms of intimacy upon which he might be with Hannibal’s daughter. In years gone by, she had been looked upon as being virtually his wife, and it had been well known in those days that it was only the dislike on the part of Hannibal to his officers being married just before going on a campaign that had prevented the union being then acknowledged. Now there were none of the superior officers still alive who had left Spain with Hannibal at the beginning of the Italian war, and, of all others present, none dared to cast an aspersion upon the daughter of their great Chief and greatest and most daring General, especially as her unusual intimacy with Maharbal apparently met with the Chief’s own approval.
Thus it came to pass that during the few months passed at Adrumentum, Elissa, while still passing as an unmarried woman, was constantly in her husband’s society, and that gradually his single-mindedness, his frank boyishness of character, which years of campaigning and bloodshed had been unable to spoil, won somewhat upon her once more. It was by degrees certainly, but they won upon her all the same.
Maharbal was ever so diffident, so conscious of his own shortcomings, so ready to make excuses for everything in Elissa’s own past life, that it would have been wonderful indeed, if, after having once become his actual wife, she had not considerably melted towards him.
He, poor fellow, recognised the barrier at first, and with reason put it down to his own fault in that he had not come back to her when Hannibal had given him, upon two occasions, the opportunity of doing so. He was now inclined to blame himself for his behaviour upon those occasions, and treated his wife, in consequence, with an amount of delicacy and respect which could scarcely have been expected in a man whose whole life had been passed in scenes of carnage and slaughter.
But although a soldier, and even at times a cruel soldier, his own life had ever been absolutely pure. As Scipio had been in the Roman army, so had Maharbal been in the Carthaginian army. In an era when rapine was law, when lust in its most brutal forms was not merely tolerated but approved, each had selected for himself a higher standard than that of the age. The unfortunate thing was that they had both placed their whole affections upon the same woman, that that woman had loved each in turn, and that, strive how she might, she had been unable to fulfil her duty, or what she considered her whole duty to either of them. For what she gave to one she took from the other.
Poor Elissa! It were useless to say that she ought only to have loved one of them. Now, living with Maharbal, and being a woman of great acumen, she soon recognised his greatness, and her mistake in having condemned him too readily. For it became patent to her that it was no idea of his own self-aggrandisement, his own military glory, that had kept him from her side, but solely love and devotion to her own father. With an open simple nature like his, there was no concealment possible from such a clever woman as herself. Therefore, she very soon learned the secret of the terrible act of self-renunciation which the young warrior must have put upon himself at the time that he allowed her uncle Mago to return to Iberia and New Carthage in his place, when he might have come back himself to find a loving bride. As all this dawned upon her, Elissa respected Maharbal more and more. She even loved him in a way, yet it was never in the old way of early girlhood. For all that, from sheer gratitude, she tried to persuade herself, and easily succeeded in persuading him, that the old passion had come back again with all its old intensity. Thus was she more nearly happy than she had been for years past, while she made Maharbal supremely so.
While Hannibal was collecting troops at his head-quarters at Adrumentum, he had not forgotten his idea of recruiting as many Numidian cavalry as possible. For this purpose he sent Maharbal with a large escort, to visit various Numidian chieftains, and upon this expedition, although having for appearance sake a separate guard and a separate camp, Elissa accompanied him.