Many were the details of that strange blue record I have not mentioned; many are the strokes and flourishes that still expand and contract to the pulsations of my mighty life—undeciphered, unintelligible. But I have said enough to show you how ingenious it was—how sufficient in its variety, how disappointing in its pointless end. For, indeed, it stopped suddenly at the twentieth season, and the cause thereof I could guess only too well!
There, in that Roman hotel, I stayed, reflecting. It was in this rest-house, from the idle gossip of the loungers and chatter of Roman politicians, that I came to comprehend the extent of my sleep in the cave, and as the truth dawned upon me, with a consciousness of the infinite vacuity of my world, I went into the garden, and there was no light in the sunshine, and no color in the flowers, and no music in the fountain, and I threw my toga over my head and grieved for my loneliness, with the hum of the crowd outside in my ears, and mourned my fair Princess and all the ancient times so young in memory, yet so old in fact.
Many days I sorrowed purposeless, and then my grief was purged by the good medicine of hardship and more adventure.
CHAPTER IV
One day I was sitting, in gloomy abstraction, in the sunny garden, when, looking up suddenly, a little maid stood by, demurely, and somewhat compassionately, regarding me. Grateful then for any sort of sympathy, I led her to talk, and presently found, as we thawed into good-fellowship, drawn together by some mutual attraction, that she was of British birth, and more—from my old village! This was bond enough in my then state; but think how moved and pleased I was when the comely little damsel laughingly said, “Oh, yes! it is only you Roman lords who come and go more often than these flowers. We British seldom move; I and my people have lived yonder on the coast for ages!” So I let my lonely fancy fill in the blanks, and took the little maid for a kinswoman, and was right glad to know some one in the void world into which four hundred years’ sleep had plunged me.
Strange, too, as you will take it, Numidea, who, now and then, to my mind, was so like the ancestress she knew naught of: Numidea, the slave-girl who had stood before me by predestined chance in that hour of sorrow—it was she who directed my destiny and saved and ruined me in this chapter, just as her mother had done distant lifetimes before!
Between this fair little friend and my inexhaustible wallet I dried up my grief and turned idle and reckless in that fascinating town of extravagance and debauchery. It was not a time to boast much of. The degenerate Romans had lost all their valor and most of their skill in the arts of government. All their hardihood and strength had sunk under the evil example of the debased capital by the Tiber; and, though some few unpopular ones among them railed against the effeminate luxury of the times, few heeded, and none were warned. It shamed me to find that all these latter-day Romans thought of was silks and linens, front seats at the theater, pageantry and spectacles, trinkets and scents. It roused my disdain to see the senators go by with gilded trains of servitors and the young Centurions swagger down the streets in their mock armor—their toy, peace-time swords hanging in golden chains from their tender sides, and the wind warning one of their perfumed presence even before they came in sight. Such were not the men to win an empire, I thought, or to hold it!
As for the native British, a modicum of them had dropped the sagum for the toga, and had put on with it all its vices, but few of its virtues. Such a witless, vain, incapable medley of arrogant fools never before was seen. To their countrymen they represented themselves as possessed of all the keys of statecraft and government, stirring them up as far as they durst to discontent and rebellion, while to their masters they stood acknowledged sycophants and apes of all the meannesses of a degenerate time. All this was the more the pity, for magnificent and wide were the evidences of what Rome had done for Britain during the long years she had held it. When I slept, it was a chaotic wild, peopled by brave but scattered tribes; when I awoke, it was a fair, united realm—a beautiful territory of fertility, rich in corn and apple-yards, arteried by smooth, white-paved roads, and ruled by half a dozen wonderful capitals, with countless lesser cities, camps, and villas, wherein modern luxury, like a rampant, beautiful-flowered parasite, had overgrown, and choked and killed the sturdy stuff on which it grew.
Well, it is not my province to tell you of these things. The gilded fops who thronged the city ways, I soon found, were good enough for drinking bouts and revelry, and, by all Olympus! my sleep had made me thirsty, and my sorrow full of a moroseness which had to be constantly battened down under the hatches of an artificial pleasure. All the old, cautious, frugal, merchant spirit had gone, and the Roman Phra, in his gold and turquoise cincture, his belt full of his outlandish, never-failing coins, was soon the talk of the town, the life and soul of every reckless bout or folly, the terror of all lictors and honest, benighted citizens.
And, like many another good young man of like inclinations, his exit was as sudden as his entry! Well I remember that day, when my ivory tablets were crowded with suggestions for new idleness and vanities, and bore a dozen or two of merry engagements to plays and processions and carnivals, and all my new-found world looked like a summer sea of pleasure. Under these circumstances, I went to my hoard one evening, as I had done very often of late, and was somewhat chagrined to discover only five pieces of money left. However, they were big plump ones, larger than any I had used before, and, as all those had been good gold, these still might mean a long spell of frolic for me—when they were nearly spent it would be time to turn serious.