The Roman Traitor Volume Ii Part 36

Nor was he very long in doubt on this head; for while he was yet gazing, there was a bustle clearly perceptible about the praetorium, lights were seen flitting to and fro, voices were heard calling and answering to one another, and then the din of hammers and sounds of busy preparation.

This might have lasted perchance half an hour, to the great amazement of the traitor, who could not conceive the meaning of that nocturnal hubbub, when the clang of harness succeeded by the heavy regular tramp of men marching followed the turmoil, and, with many torches borne before them, the spears and eagle of a cohort were seen coming rapidly toward the Praetorian Gate.

"By Hecate!" cried Catiline-"what may this mean, I wonder. They are too few for an a.s.sault, nay! even for a false alarm. They have halted at the gate! By the G.o.ds! they are filing out! they march hitherward! and lo!

Manlius is aware of them. I will risk something to tarry here and watch them."

As he spoke, the cohort marched forward, straight on the hillock where he stood; and so far was it from seeking to conceal its whereabout, that its trumpets were blown frequently and loudly, as if to attract observation.

Meantime the camp of Catiline was on the alert also, the ramparts were lined with torches, by the red glare of which the legionaries might be seen mustering in dense array with s.h.i.+elds in serried order, and spear heads twinkling in the torch-light.

As the cohorts approached the hill, Catiline fell back toward his own camp a little, and soon found shelter in a small thicket of holleys and wild myrtle which would effectually conceal him from the enemy, while he could observe their every motion from its safe covert.

On the hillock, the cohort halted-one manipule stood to its arms in front, while the rest formed a hollow square, all facing outward around its summit. The torches were lowered, so that with all his endeavors, Catiline could by no means discover what was in process within that guarded s.p.a.ce.

Again the din of hammers rose on his ear, mixed now with groans and agonizing supplications, which waxed at length into a fearful howl, the utterance of one, past doubt, in more than mortal agony.

A strange and terrible suspicion broke upon Catiline, and the sweat started in beadlike drops from his sallow brow. It was not long ere that suspicion became certainty.

The clang of the hammers ceased; the wild howls sank into a continuous weak pitiful wailing. The creak of pullies and cordage, the shouts of men plying levers, and hauling ropes, succeeded, and slowly sullenly uprose, hardly seen in the black night air, a huge black cross. It reached its elevation, and was made fast in almost less time than it has taken to relate it, and instantly a pile of f.a.ggots which had been raised a short distance in front if it, and steeped in oil or some other unctuous matter, was set on fire.

A tall wavering snowwhite glare shot upward, and revealed, writhing in agony, and wailing wofully, the naked form of Chaerea, bleeding at every pore from the effects of the merciless Roman scourging, nailed on the fatal cross.

So near was the little thicket in which Catiline lay, that he could mark every sinew of that gory frame working in agony, could read every twitch of those convulsed features.

Again the Roman trumpets were blown shrill and piercing, and a centurion stepping forward a little way in front of the advanced manipule, shouted at the pitch of his voice,

"THUS PERISH ALL THE MESSENGERS OF PARRICIDES AND TRAITORS!"

Excited, almost beyond his powers of endurance, by what he beheld and heard, the fierce traitor writhed in his hiding place, not sixty paces distant from the speaker, and gnashed his teeth in impotent malignity. His fingers griped the tough shaft of his ma.s.sive pilum, as if they would have left their prints in the close-grained ash.

While that ferocious spirit was yet strong within him, the wretched freedman, half frenzied doubtless by his tortures, lifted his voice in a wild cry on his master-

"Catiline! Catiline!" he shrieked so thrillingly that every man in both camps heard every syllable distinct and clear. "Chaerea calls on Catiline.

Help! save! Avenge! Catiline! Catiline!"

A loud hoa.r.s.e laugh burst from the Roman legionaries, and the centurion shouted in derision.

But at that instant the desperate spectator of that horrid scene sprang to his feet reckless, and shouting, as he leaped into the circle of bright radiance,

"Catiline hears Chaerea, and delivers,"-hurled his ma.s.sive javelin with deadly aim at his tortured servant.

It was the first blow Catiline ever dealt in mercy, and mercifully did it perform its errand.

The broad head was buried in the naked breast of the victim, and with one sob, one shudder, the spirit was released from the tortured clay.

Had a thunderbolt fallen among the cohort, the men could not have been more stunned-more astounded. Before they had sufficiently recovered from their shock to cast a missile at him, much less to start forth in pursuit, he was half way toward his own camp in safety; and ere long a prolonged burst, again and again reiterated, of joyous acclamations, told to the consular camp that the traitors knew and appreciated the strange and dauntless daring of their almost ubiquitous leader.

An hour afterward that leader was alone, in his tent, stretched on his couch, sleeping. But oh! that sleep-not gentle slumber, not nature's soft nurse-but nature's horrible convulsion! The eyes wide open, glaring, dilated in their sockets as of a strangled man-the brow beaded with black sweat drops-the teeth grinded together-the white lips muttering words too horrible to be recorded-the talon-like fingers clutching at vacancy.

It was too horrible to last. With a wild cry, "Lucia! Ha! Lucia! Fury!

Avenger! Fiend!" he started to his feet, and glared around him with a bewildered eye, as if expecting to behold some ghastly supernatural visitant.

At length, he said, with a shudder-which he could not repress, "It was a dream! A dream-but ye G.o.ds! what a dream! I will sleep no more-'till to-morrow. To-morrow," he repeated in a doubtful and enquiring tone, "to-morrow. If I should fall to-morrow, and such dreams come in that sleep which hath no waking, those dreams should be reality-that reality should be-h.e.l.l! I know not-I begin to doubt some things, which of yore I held certain! What if there should be G.o.ds! avenging, everlasting torturers! If there should be a h.e.l.l! Ha! ha!" he laughed wildly and almost frantically.

"Ha! ha! what matters it? Methinks this is a h.e.l.l already!" and with the words he struck his hand heavily on his broad breast, and relapsed into gloomy and sullen meditation.

That night he slept no more, but strode backward and forward hour after hour, gnawing his nether lip till the blood streamed from the wounds inflicted by his unconscious teeth.

What awful and mysterious retribution might await him in the land of spirits, it is not for mortals to premise; but in this at least did he speak truth that night-conscience and crime may kindle in the human heart a h.e.l.l, which nothing can extinguish, so long as the soul live identical self-knowing, self-tormenting.

CHAPTER XX.

THE FIELD OF PISTORIA.

Make all our trumpets speak; give them all breath, Those clamorous harbingers of blood and death.

MACBETH.

The first faint streaks of day were scarcely visible in the east, when Catiline, glad to escape the horrors which he had endured through the dark solitude of the night watches, issued from his tent, armed at all points, and every inch a captain.

All irresolution, all doubt, all nervousness had pa.s.sed away. Energy and the strong excitement of the moment had overpowered conscience; and looking on his high, haughty port, his cold hard eye, his resolute impa.s.sive face, one would have said that man, at least, never trembled at realities, far less at shadows.

But who shall say in truth, which are the shadows of this world, which the realities? Many a one, it may be, will find to his sorrow, when the great day shall come, that the hard, selfish, narrow fact, the reality after which his whole life was a chase, a struggle, is but the shadow of a shade; the unsubstantial good, the scholar's or the poet's dream, which he scorned as an empty nothing, is an immortal truth, an everlasting and immutable reality.

Catiline shook at shadows, whom not the 'substance of ten thousand soldiers armed in proof,' could move, unless it were to emulation and defiance.

Which were in truth more real, more substantial causes of dismay, those shadows which appalled him, or those realities which he despised.

Ere that sun set, upon whose rising he gazed with an eye so calm and steadfast, that question, to him at least, was solved for ever-to us it is, perhaps, still a question.

But, at that moment, he thought nothing of the past, nothing of the future. The present claimed his whole undivided mind, and to the present he surrendered it, abstracted from all speculations, clear and unclouded, and pervading as an eagle's vision.

All his arrangements for the day had been made on the previous night so perfectly, that the troops were already filing out from the Praetorian gate in orderly array, and taking their ground on the little plain at the mouth of the gorge, in the order of battle which had been determined by the chiefs beforehand.

The s.p.a.ce which he had selected whereon to receive the attack of Antonius'

army, was indeed admirably chosen. It front it was so narrow, that eight cohorts, drawn up in a line ten deep, according to the Roman usage, filled it completely; behind these, the twelve remaining cohorts, which completed the force of his two legions, were arrayed in reserve in denser and more solid order, the interval between the mountains on the left, and the craggy hill on the right, which protected his flanks, being much narrower as it ascended toward the gorge in which the rebel camp was pitched.

In front of the army, there was a small plain, perfectly level, lying in an amphitheatre, as it were, of rocks and mountains, with neither thicket, brake, nor hillock to mar its smooth expanse or hinder the shock of armies, and extending perhaps half a mile toward the consular army. Below this, the ground fell off in a long abrupt and rugged declivity, somewhat exceeding a second half mile in length, with many thickets and clumps of trees on its slope, and the hillock at its foot, whereon still frowned Chaerea's cross with the gory and hideous carcase, already blackened by the frosty night wind, hanging from its rough timbers, an awful omen to that army of desperate traitors.

Beyond that hillock, the ground swelled again into a lofty ridge, facing the mouth of the gorge in which Catiline had arrayed his army, with all advantages of position, sun and wind in his favor.

The sun rose splendid and unclouded, and as his long rays streamed through the hollows in the mountain top, nothing can be conceived more wildly romantic than the mountain scene, more gorgeous and exciting than the living picture, which they illuminated.

The h.o.a.ry pinnacles of the huge mountains with their crowns of thunder-splintered rocks, the eyries of innumerable birds of prey, gleaming all golden in the splendors of the dawn-their long abrupt declivities, broken with crags, feathered with gray and leafless forests, and dotted here and there with ma.s.ses of rich evergreens, all bathed in soft and misty light-and at the base of them the mouth of the deep gorge, a gulf of ma.s.sive purple shadow, through which could be descried indistinctly the lines of the deserted palisades and ramparts, whence had marched out that ma.s.s of living valor, which now was arrayed in splendid order, just where the broad rays, sweeping down the hills, dwelt in their morning glory.