“Nay, let us go together, lad, for I am anxious to take a glance round the camp, and we can talk to him as we go.”
So together they went, and joined Mago.
CHAPTER X.
FRIENDS MUST PART.
It was upon a beautiful summer’s morning that Mago embarked for Carthage. The country all around the Carthaginian camp was, after a shower on the previous night, looking its very best. The green leaves of the vines, all bedewed with the raindrops, glistening in their little hollows, dispensed a sweet odour in the clear, refreshing air. The verdant cornfields, waving before the gentle sea-breeze, softly rustled with a soothing sound, displaying, as they moved, the large red poppies previously hidden beneath their bending stems. In the dim distance, the peaks of the Apennines stood up purple and sharp to the azure sky, while here and there a fleecy white cloud softly rested upon some mountain crest, nestling around the hill-top, and embracing it lovingly, as a pure maiden softly enfolding her lover in the embrace of her snowy arms. Upon the groves of chestnut trees the morning sun, striking upon one side and lighting them up vividly, made all the more remarkable the contrast with the gloomy shades which hovered in long, dark streaks along the branches where the sunbeams had not yet fallen. Here and there from a belt of sweet-scented pine trees could be heard the soft, trilling notes of Philomel, the sad-voiced nightingale; while closer at hand, flowing past the fallen tree trunk, upon which two warriors were seated, there rippled merrily by a little streamlet, sparkling like silver in the morning rays.
At some distance in the foreground, as if to show that all in this world is not peace, there stood line upon line of snow-white tents, denoting the presence of an enormous camp, while behind the camp the blue and scarcely ruffled waters of the Adriatic faded away in the far distance into the blue of the sky, with which it seemed to merge its waters. It was a morning made for love, for all that should be sweet and delightful, a morning fit for heaven itself. But it was a morn that was witness of a great sorrow—the parting of two lifelong friends—who felt, they knew not why, that they were communing with each other for the last time on earth.
Mago and Maharbal, each, although quite young, the hero of a hundred bloody fights, sat upon the fallen tree, hand clasped in hand as though they were but two young children. For long they sat in silence, drinking in all the beauties of nature around, yet their hearts too full to speak. So great was the sorrow they felt, that a kind of awkwardness had fallen upon them both. They did not know what to say to each other now that the time had come for parting. These two, who, with bared sword and gleaming eye, so often had charged together side by side into the very jaws of death, to issue on the other side of some hostile squadron, with the warm blood dripping from their deadly blades, were now speechless. At length Mago spoke, while gripping his friend’s hand closer.
“I shall never forget it, Maharbal. I shall remember it all my life.”
“What?” said Maharbal, suddenly starting from his reverie, “remember what, Mago?”
“How thou didst save me from that most blood-thirsty Gaul, at whose mercy I was in that awful night of our second engagement on the Alps. I can see thee now, in my mind’s eye, casting him and his horse together over the precipice. By Moloch! but thou didst display a terrible strength with this right hand of thine, snapping his hand at the wrist like a carrot even as he was striking at me.”
“Tush, man! hold thy peace. I did not do one half for thee what thou thyself didst for me before Saguntum—ay, and once again at the Trebia, when three Romans had, owing to the slippery ground, unhorsed me, and would have slain me but for thy killing two of them and putting the third to flight. But him, thou wilt doubtless remember, I pursued and slew myself. He was a terrible black-looking scoundrel, but a very coward at heart, or he would not have fled when thou wast but one to three, standing over my prostrate body. I killed him easily.”