How different, save in its disquietude, was the noble nature at the same moment seeking repose and finding none, within half a bow-shot of the garret in which these two knaves were plotting. Despite his blameless life, despite his distinguished career, Caius L. Licinius sat and brooded, lonely and sorrowful, in his stately home. In that noble palace, long ranges of galleries and chambers were filled with objects of art and taste, beautiful, and costly, and refined. If a yard of the wall had looked bare, it would have been adorned forthwith by some trophy of barbaric arms taken in warfare. If a corner had seemed empty, it would have been at once filled with an exquisite group of marble, wrought into still life by some Greek artist’s chisel. Not a recess in that pile of building, but spoke of comfort, complete in every respect, and the only empty chamber in the whole was its owner’s heart. Nay, more than empty, for it was haunted by the ghost of a beloved memory, and the happiness that was never to come again.
Cold and dreary is the air of that mysterious tenement where we buried our treasures long ago. Cold and dreary, like the atmosphere of the tomb, but a perfume hangs about it still, because love, being divine, is therefore eternal; and though the turf be laid damp and heavy over the beloved head, our tears fall like the blessed rain from heaven, and water the very barrenness of the grave, till at length, through weary patience and humble resignation, the flowers of hope begin to spring, and faith tells us they shall bloom hereafter, in another and a better world.
Licinius was very lonely, and at a time of life when, perhaps, loneliness is most oppressive to the mind. Youth has so much to anticipate, is so full of hope, is so sanguine, so daring, that its own dreams are sufficient for its sustenance; but in middle age, men have already found out that the mirage is but sand and sunshine after all; they look forward, indeed, still, yet only from habit, and because the excitement that was once such intoxicating rapture, is now but a necessary stimulant. If they have no ties of family, no affections to take them out of themselves, they become pompous triflers, or despondent recluses, according as their temperaments lead them to inordinate self-importance or excessive humility. [pg 206]Not so when the quiver is full, and the hearth is merry with the patter of little feet, and the ring of childish laughter. There is a charm to dispel all the evil, and call up all the good, even of the worst man’s nature, in the soft white brow, pure from the stamp of sin and care, in the bold bright eyes that look up so trustingly to his own. There is a sense of protection and responsibility, that few natures are so depraved as to repudiate, in the household relationship which acknowledges and obeys the father as its head; and there is no man so callous or so reckless, but he would wish to appear nobler and better than he is in the eyes of his child. Licinius had none of these incentives to virtue; but the lofty nature and the loving heart that could worship a memory, and feel that it was a reality still, had kept him pure from vice. He had never of late attached himself much to anything, till Esca became an inmate of his household; but since he had been in habits of daily intercourse with the Briton, a feeling of content and well-being, he would have found it difficult to analyse, had gradually crept over him. Perhaps he would have remained unconscious of his slave’s influence, had it not been for the blank occasioned by his departure. He missed him sadly now, and wondered why, at every moment of the day, he found himself thinking of the pleasant familiar face and frank cordial smile.
So much alone, he had acquired grave habits of reflection, even of that self-examination which is so beneficial an exercise when impartially performed, but which men so rarely practise without a self-deception that obviates all its good effects. This evening he was in a more thoughtful mood than common; this evening, more than ever, it seemed to him that his was an aimless, fruitless life; that he had let the material pleasures of existence slip through his fingers, and taken nothing in exchange. Of what availed his toils, his enterprise, his love of country, his self-denial, his endurance of hardship and privation? What was he the better now, that he had marched, and watched, and bled, and preserved whole colonies for the empire; and sat glorious, crowned with laurels in the triumphal car? He looked round on his stately walls, and the trophies that adorned them, thinking the while that even such a home as this might be purchased too dear at the expense of a lifetime. Gold and marble, corridors and columns, ivory couches and Tyrian carpets, were these equivalents for youth’s toil and manhood’s care, and at last a desolate old age? What was this ambition that led men so irresistibly up the steepest paths, by the brink of such fatal precipices? [pg 207]Had he ever experienced its temptations? He scarcely knew; he could not realise them now. Had Guenebra lived, indeed, and had she been his own, he might have prized honour and renown, and a name that was on all men’s lips, for her dear sake. To see the kind eyes brighten; to call up a smile into the beloved face, that would surely have been reward enough, and that would never be. Then he fell to thinking of the bright days when they were all in all to each other, when the very sky seemed fairer, while he watched for her white dress under the oak-tree. Was he not perfectly happy then? Would he not at least have been perfectly happy could he have called her, as he hoped to do, his own? Honesty answered, No. At the very best there was a vague longing, a something wanting, a sense of insufficiency, of insecurity, and even discontent. If it was so then, how had it been since? Passing over the sharp sudden stroke, so numbing his senses at the time that a long interval had to elapse ere he awoke to its full agony—passing over the subsequent days of yearning, and nights of vain regret, the desolation that laid waste a heart which would bear fruit no more, he reviewed the long years in which he had striven to make duty and the love of country fill the void, and was forced to confess that here, too, all was barren. There was a something ever wanting, even to complete the dull torpor of that resignation which philosophy inculcated, and common sense enjoined. What was it? Licinius could not answer his own question, though he felt that it must have some solution, at which man’s destiny intended him to arrive.
All the Roman knew, all he could realise, was that the spring was gone long ago, with her buds of promise, and her laughing morning skies; that the glory of summer had passed away, with its lustrous beauty and its burnished plains, and its deep dark foliage quivering in the heat; that the blast of autumn had strewn the cold earth now with faded flowers and withered leaves, and all the wreck of all the hopes that blossomed so tenderly, and bloomed so bright and fair. The heaven was cold and grey, and between him and heaven the bare branches waved and nodded, mocking, pointing with spectral fingers to the dull cheerless sky. Could he but have believed, could he but have vaguely imaged to himself that there would come another spring; that belief, that vague imagining, had been to Licinius the one inestimable treasure for which he would have bartered all else in the world.
In vain he sought, and looked about him for something [pg 208]on which to lean; for something out of, and superior to himself, inspiring him with that sense of being protected, for which humanity feels so keen, yet so indefinite, a desire. What is the bravest and wisest of mankind, but a child in the dark, groping for the parental hand that shall guide its uncertain steps? Where was he to find the ideal that he could honestly worship, on the superiority of which he could heartily depend? The mythology of Rome, degraded as it had become, was not yet stripped of all the graceful attributes it owed to its Hellenic origin. That which was Greek, might indeed be evil, yet it could scarce fail to be fair; but what rational man could ground his faith on the theocracy of Olympus, or contemplate with any feeling save disgust that material Pantheism, in which the lowest even of human vices was exalted into a divinity? As well become a worshipper of Isis at once, and prostitute, to the utter degradation of the body, all the noblest and fairest imagery of the mind. No, the deities that Homer sang were fit subjects for the march of those Greek hexameters, sonorous and majestic as the roll of the Ægean sea; fit types of sensuous perfection, to be wrought by the Greek chisel, from out the veined blocks of smooth, white Parian stone; but for man, intellectual man, to bow down before the crafty Hermes, or the thick-witted god of forges, or the ambrosial front of father Jove himself, the least ideal of all, was a simple absurdity, that could scarce impose upon a woman or a child.
Licinius had served in the East, and he bethought him now of a nation against whom he had stood in arms, brave fierce soldiers, men instinct with public virtue and patriotism; whose rites, different from those of all other races, were observed with scrupulous fidelity and self-denial. This people, he had heard, worshipped a God of whom there was no material type, whose being was omnipresent and spiritual, on whom they implicitly depended when all else failed, and trusting in whom they never feared to die. But they admitted none to partake with them in their advantages, and their faith seemed to inculcate hatred of the stranger no less than dissensions and strife amongst themselves.
“Is there nothing, alas! but duty, stern cold duty, to fill this void?” thought Licinius. “Be it so, then; my sword shall be once more at the service of my country, and I will die in my harness like a Roman and a soldier at the last!”