But Licinius had an ordeal to go through on the following day, which was especially painful to the kind heart of the Roman general. When the terms of the combat were explained to the person chiefly interested, that young warrior eagerly accepted the challenge as affording an opportunity for indulgence in those feats of arms which early education had rendered so pleasing to his martial disposition. He could vanquish two such men as the tribune, he thought, at any exercise and with any weapons; but his face sank when he learned the penalty of failure, and a shudder passed through his whole frame at the bare possibility of becoming a slave to anyone but his present master. It nerved him, however, all the more in his resolution to conquer; and when Licinius, reproaching himself bitterly the while, promised him his liberty in the event of victory, Esca’s heart beat fast with joy and hope and exultation once more.
A thousand vague possibilities danced through his brain; a thousand wild and visionary schemes, of which Mariamne formed the centre figure. Life that had seemed so dull but one short week ago, now shone again in the rosy light with which youth—and youth alone—can tinge the long perspective of the future. Alas for Licinius! he marked the glowing cheek and the kindling eye with a sensation of despondency weighing at his heart. Nevertheless the lot was cast, the offer was accepted. It was too late for looking back. Nothing remained but to strain every nerve to win.
In all bodily contests, in all mental labours, in everything which human nature attempts, systematic and continuous training is the essential element of success. The palm, as Horace says, can only flourish where the dust is plentiful; and he who would attain a triumph either as an athlete or a scholar, must cultivate his natural abilities with the utmost attention, and the most rigid self-denial, ere he enters for the prize. It is curious, too, how the mind, like the body, [pg 118]acquires vigour and elasticity by graduated exertion. The task that was an impossibility yesterday, is but a penance to-day, and will become a pleasure to-morrow. Let us follow Esca into the training-school, where his muscles are to be toughened, and his skill perfected for the deadly exercises of the arena.
It is a large square building, something like a modern riding-house, lighted and ventilated at the top, and is laid down three inches deep in sand, an arrangement which increases, indeed, the labour of all pedestrian exertion, but renders a fall comparatively harmless, and accustoms the pupil, moreover, to the yielding surface on which hereafter he will have to struggle for his life. Quoits, dumb-bells, ponderous weights, and massive clubs are scattered in the corners, or propped against the walls of the edifice, and a horizontal leaping-bar, placed at the height of a man’s breast, denotes that activity is not neglected in the acquisition of strength. Beside these insignia of peaceful gymnastics, the cestus hangs conspicuous, and racks are placed at intervals supporting the deadly weapons and defensive armour with which the gladiator plies his formidable trade. There are also pointless spears, and blunted swords for practice, and a wooden figure, hacked and hewed out of all similitude to an enemy, on which the cuts and thrusts most in request have been dealt over and over again with increasing skill and severity.
At one end of the building paces the master to and fro; now glancing with wary eye at the movements of his pupils; now pausing to adjust some implement of instruction; now encouraging or chiding with a gesture; and anon catching up, as though in sheer absence of mind, one of the idle weapons, and whirling it round his head with a flourish that displays all the power and skill of the practised professional. Hippias, the retired gladiator, is a man of middle age, and of somewhat lofty stature, rendered more commanding by its lengthy proportions, and the peculiar setting on of the head. Constant exercise, pushed, indeed, to the verge of toil, and continued for many years, has toughened each shapely limb into the hardness and consistency of wire, and has rendered his large frame lean and sinewy, like a greyhound’s. All his gestures have the graceful pliant ease which results from muscular strength, and his very walk—light, smooth, and noiseless—is like that of a panther traversing the floor of its cage. His swarthy complexion has been deeply tanned by exposure to heat and toil, but the blood courses healthfully [pg 119]beneath, and imparts a warm mellow tint to the skin. The fleshless face, in spite of a worn eager look, and a dash of grey in the hair and beard, is not without a wild defiant beauty of its own; and though its expression is somewhat dissolute and reckless, there is a bold keen flash in the eye, and the man is obviously enterprising, courageous, and steel to the backbone.
The Roman ladies, with that depravity of taste which marks a general deterioration of manners and morality, delighted at this period to choose their favourites from the ranks of the amphitheatre. There was a rage for warlike exercises, Amazonian dresses, imitations of the deadly sports, played out with considerable skill and ferocity, nay, for the very persons of the gladiators themselves. It was no wonder then, that the handsome fencing-master, with his reputation for strength and courage, should have been a marked man with the proud capricious matrons of the Imperial City. The favour of each, too, was doubtless his best recommendation to the good graces of the rest; and Hippias might have sunned himself in the smiles of the noblest ladies in Rome.
He made but little account, however, of his good fortune. The peaches fallen on the ground are doubtless the ripest, yet they never seem so tempting as those which sun themselves against the wall, a hand’s-breadth above our reach. Nor can a man pay implicit obedience to more than one dominion (at a time); and unless the yoke be very heavy, it is scarce worth while to carry it at all. Hippias was neither dazzled nor flattered by the bright eyes that looked so kindly into his war-worn face. He loved a flask of wine nearly as well as a woman’s beauty—two feet of pliant steel and a leathern buckler far better than either; nevertheless, amongst all the dainty dames of his acquaintance, he was least disposed to undervalue Valeria’s notice, the more so, that she rarely condescended to bestow it on him; and he took more pains with her fencing lessons, than those of any other female pupil, and stayed longer in her house than in that of any lady in Rome. He approved of her strength, her resolution, her quickness, above all her cold manner and her pride, besides admiring her personal charms exceedingly, in his own practical way. There is a gleam of interest, almost of tenderness in his eyes, as he pauses every now and then in his walk, and reads a line or two from a scroll he carries in his hand, which Myrrhina brought him not an hour ago.
The scroll is from Valeria. She has heard of Esca’s peril[pg 120]—nay, she has herself brought it on his head; and who knows the price it cost her haughty wilful heart? Yet in all her bitter anger, vexation, shame, she cannot bear to think of the noble Briton down on the sand, writhing and helpless at the mercy of his enemy. It is the weapon now she hates, and not the victim. It would give her intense pleasure, she feels, to see Placidus humbled, defeated, slain. Such is the sense of justice in a woman’s breast; such are the advantages gained by submission at any sacrifice to do her bidding. We need not pity the tribune, however, in his dealings with either sex; he is well able to take care of himself.
Valeria accordingly sat her down and wrote a few friendly lines to the fencing-master, who had always stood high in her favour, and whose frank bold nature she felt she could trust. Womanlike, she thought it necessary to fabricate an excuse for her interest in the Briton, by affirming that she had staked heavily on his success in the coming contest. She adjured Hippias to spare no pains in counsel or instruction, and bade him come to see her without delay, and report the progress of his pupil. He raised his eyes from the scroll, and watched the said pupil holding his own gallantly at sword and buckler with Lutorius.
“One, two—Disengage the blade! A feint at the head, a cut at the legs, and come in over the shield with a lunge! Good! but scarce quick enough. Try that again—the elbow turned outwards, the wrist a little higher. So—once more. Now, look at me. Thus.”
The combatants paused for breath, Hippias seized a wooden foil, and, beckoning to Hirpinus, engaged him in the required position, for Esca’s especial benefit. Trained and wary, the old gladiator knew every feint and parry in the game. Yet had those blades been steel, Hirpinus would have been gasping his life out, at the master’s feet, ere the close of their second encounter. Hippias never shifted his ground, never seemed to exert himself much, yet the quickest eye in Rome was puzzled to follow the movements of his point, the readiest hand to intercept it where it fell. Again he pitted Esca and Lutorius in the mimic strife, and stood with well-pleased countenance to watch the result. The Briton had, indeed, lost no time in beginning a course of instruction which he hoped was to ensure him victory and its reward—his much desired freedom. That morning Hirpinus had brought him to the school; and the veteran gladiator watched, with an interest that was almost touching, the preparations which were to fit his young friend for a career that at best must end [pg 121]ere long in a violent death. Hippias was delighted with the stature and strength of his new pupil. He had matched him at once with Lutorius, a wiry Gaul, who was supposed to be the most scientific swordsman of “the Family,” and smiled to observe how completely, with an occasional hint from himself, the Briton was a match for his antagonist, who had expected an easy victory, and was even more disgusted than surprised. As the encounter was prolonged, and the combatants, warming to their work, advanced, retreated, struck, lunged and parried; now traversing warily at full distance—now dashing boldly in to close, the other gladiators gathered round, excited to unusual interest by the excellence of the play, and the dexterity of the barbarian.
“He is the best we’ve seen here for a lustre at least,” exclaimed Rufus, a gigantic champion from Northern Italy, proud of his stature, proud of his swordsmanship, but above all, proud that he was a Roman citizen, though a gladiator; “those thrusts come home like lightning, and when he misses his parry, see, he jumps away like a wild-cat. Faith, Manlius, if they match him against thee at the games, thou wilt have a handful. I would stake my rights as a Roman citizen on him, toga and all, barbarian though he be. What, man! he would have thee down and disarmed in a couple of passes!”
Manlius seemed to think so too, though he was loth to confess it. He turned the subject by vowing that Lutorius must be masking his play, and not fighting his best, or he never could be thus worsted by a novice.
“Masking his play!” exclaimed Hirpinus indignantly, “let him unmask, then, as soon as he will! I tell thee this lad of mine hath not his match in the empire. I shall see him champion of the amphitheatre, and first swordsman in Rome, ere they give me the wooden foil with the silver guard,9 and lay old Hirpinus on the shelf. I shall be satisfied to retire then, for I shall leave some good manhood to take my place.”
“Well crowed!” replied Manlius, not quite pleased at the value placed on his own prowess in comparison. “To hear thee, a man would say there never was but one gladiator in Rome, and that this young mastiff must pull us all down by the throat, because he fences like thyself, wild and wide, and by main strength.”
“It is no swordsmanship to run in like a bull and take [pg 122]more than you give,” observed Euchenor, listening with his arms folded, and an expression of supreme contempt on his handsome features.
“Nevertheless his blows fall thick and fast, like a hailstorm, and Lutorius shifts his ground every time the young one makes the attack,” argued honest Rufus, who had not a grain of either fear or jealousy in his disposition; and who considered his profession as a mere trade by which he could obtain a livelihood for wife and children in the meantime, and a remote chance of independence with a vineyard of his own beyond the Apennines, should he escape a violent death in the amphitheatre at last.
“He thrusts too often overhand,” observed Manlius, “and his guard is always open for the wrist.”
“He is a strong fencer, but he has no style,” added Euchenor; and the boxer looked around him with the air of a man who closes a controversy by an unanswerable argument.
Hirpinus was boiling over with indignation; but his eloquence was by no means in proportion to his corporeal gifts, and he could not readily find words to express his dissent and his disdain. Banter, too, and a coarse, good-humoured sort of wrangling, was the usual form by which difference of opinion found expression in the training-school. Quarrelling, amongst men whose very trade it was to fight to the death, seemed simply absurd; and to come to blows except in public and for money, a mere childish waste of time. Indeed, with all their contempt for death, and their extraordinary courage when pitted against each other to amuse the populace, these gladiators, perhaps from the very nature of their profession, seem to have been unsuited for any sustained efforts of energy and endurance. When banded together under the eagles, they were often so undisciplined in camp, as by no means to be relied on before an enemy. Perhaps there was something of bravado in the flourish with which they entered the circus, and hailed Cæsar with their greetings from those about to die!10 Moreover, they had to fight in a corner, and with the impossibility of escape. Courage is of many different kinds. Men are brave from various motives—from ambition, from emulation, from the habit of confronting danger; some from a naturally chivalrous disposition, backed by strong physical nerves. The last alone are to be trusted in an emergency; and a really courageous man faces an unexpected and unaccustomed peril, if not with [pg 123]confidence, at least with an unflinching determination to do his best.
Hirpinus turned upon Euchenor, for whom he had no great liking at any time.
“You talk of your science,” said he, “and your Greek skill, against which even our Roman thews and sinews are of no avail. Dare you stand up to this barbarian with the cestus on? Only to exchange half a dozen friendly buffets, you know, in sheer sport.”
But Euchenor excused himself with great disdain. Like many another successful professor, he owed no inconsiderable share of his fame to his own assumption of superiority, and the judgment with which, when practicable, he matched himself against inferior performers. Champions who exist on their reputation, such as it is, are not to peril it lightly against the first tyro that comes, who has everything to gain and nothing to lose by an encounter with the celebrity; whereas the celebrity derives no additional laurels from a triumph, and a defeat tends to take the very bread out of his mouth. Euchenor said as much; but Hirpinus was not satisfied, till the subtle Greek, who had learned the terms of the match in which Esca was engaged, observed carelessly, that all the time the Briton had to spare should be devoted to practice in the part he was about to play before the Emperor. The suggestion took effect upon Hirpinus at once. He sprang across the school to where the master had resumed his walk. The old gladiator positively turned pale while he entreated Hippias to instruct his pupil in all the scientific devices by which those deadly meshes could be foiled.
“Nothing but art can save him,” said he, in imploring accents, which seemed almost ludicrous from one of his Herculean exterior. “Courage and strength, ay, and the activity of a wild-cat, are all paralysed when that accursed twine is round your limbs. I know it! I have felt it! I was down under the net myself once. If a man is to die, he should die like a man, not like a thrush caught in a springe. He must learn, Hippias, he must practise day by day, and hour by hour; he must study every movement of the caster. Pit him against Manlius, he is the best netsman in the Family. If he learns to foil him, he will take the conceit out of Placidus readily enough. I tell you I shall not be easy till I see him with his foot on the gay tribune’s breast!”
“Patience, man,” replied Hippias, “thou fearest but one thing in the world, and that is a fathom of twine. Thinkest thou all others are scared at the same bugbear? Mind thine [pg 124]own training,—thou art yet too lusty by half to go into the circus,—and leave this young barbarian to me.”
The master kept up his influence amongst these lawless pupils, partly by a reserved demeanour and a silent tongue, partly by never suffering his authority to be disputed for a moment. To have said as much as he now did was tantamount to a confession of interest in the Briton’s success; and Hirpinus resumed his own labours with a lightened heart, whilst Esca, in all the delightful flush of youth and health, and muscular strength developing itself by scientific practice, plied his antagonist with redoubled vigour, and enjoyed his pastime to the utmost.
It was like taking an old friend by the hand to grasp a sword once more.
For three whole days Mariamne had not set eyes on the Briton, so she felt listless and dispirited. Not that she acknowledged, even to herself, the necessity of Esca’s presence, nor that she was indeed aware how much it had influenced her thoughts and actions ever since she had known him—a period that seemed now of indefinite length. She found herself perpetually recalling the origin and growth of their acquaintance; she dwelt with a strange pleasure on the gross insult offered her by Spado, which scarce seemed an agreeable subject of contemplation; nor, be sure, did she forget its prompt and satisfactory redress. She remembered every step of her subsequent walk home, and every syllable of their conversation in that hasty and agitated progress; nay, every look and gesture of her companion’s and of her own. It pleased her to think of the favourable impression made on her father and his brother by their guest; and the earthen pitcher, from which she gave the latter to drink, assumed a new and unaccountable value in her eyes. Also she strolled to Tiber-side, whenever she had a spare half-hour, and sat her down under the shadow of a broken column, with a strange persistency, and a vague expectation of something, she knew not what. For the first day this dreamy imaginative existence was delightful. Then came a feeling of want; a consciousness that there was a void, which it would be a great happiness to fill. Soon this grew to a thirst—a craving for a repetition of those hours which had glided by so sweetly and so fast. At rare intervals arose the startling thought, “suppose she should never see him again,” and her heart stopped beating, and her cheek paled with the bare possibility; [pg 126]yet was there something not wholly painful in a consciousness of the sorrow such a privation would create.
Though young, Mariamne was no foolish and inexperienced girl. Her life had been calculated to elicit and bring to perfection some of woman’s loftiest qualities. She had early learned the nobility of self-sacrifice, the necessity of self-reliance and self-denial. Like the generality of her nation she possessed considerable pride of race; suppressed, indeed, and kept down by the exigencies in which the Jews had so often found themselves, but none the weaker nor the less cherished on that account. Notwithstanding his many chastisements and reverses,—from his pilgrimage through the wilderness to his different captivities by the great Oriental powers, and final subjection under Rome,—the Jew never forgot that he sprang from a stem more especially planted by the hand of the Almighty; that he could trace his lineage back, unbroken and unstained, to those who held converse with Moses under the shadow of Mount Sinai; nay, to the Patriarch himself, who held his authority direct from Heaven, and who was thought worthy to entertain angels at his tent door on the plains of Mamre. Such a conviction imparted a secret pride to every one of his descendants. Man, woman, and child, were persuaded that to them belonged of right the dominion of the earth.
It may be supposed that one of Eleazar’s disposition was not likely to bring up his family in any humble notions of their privileges and their importance. Mariamne had been early taught to consider her nationality as the first and dearest of her advantages; and, womanlike, she clung to it all the closer that her people had been forced to submit to the Roman yoke. Habits of patience, of reflection and endurance, had been engendered by the everyday life of the Jewish maiden, witnessing her father’s continued impatience of the existing state of things, and his energetic, though secret, efforts to change the destinies of his countrymen; whilst all that such an education might have created of hard, cunning, and unfeminine in his daughter’s mind, the society and counsels of Calchas were eminently qualified to counteract. Losing no opportunity of sowing the good seed; of teaching, both by precept and example, the lessons he had learned from those who had them direct from the Fountain-head; it was impossible to remain long uninfluenced by the constant kindliness and gentle bearing of one who understood Christianity to signify, not only faith, and purity, and devotion even to the death, but also that peace and goodwill [pg 127]amongst men, which its first teachers inculcated as its fundamental principle and essential element. Calchas, indeed, lacked not the fiery energy and the tameless instincts of his race. His nature, perhaps, was originally fierce and warlike as his brother’s, but it had been subdued, softened, exalted by his religion; and, while his heart was pitiful and kindly, nothing remained of the warrior but his loyalty, his courage, and his zeal.
Cherishing a true attachment for that brother, it was doubtless a cause of daily sorrow to observe how totally Eleazar’s principles and conduct were opposed to the meek and holy precepts of the new faith. It seemed to human reasoning impossible to convert the Jew from his grand and simple creed, to modify or to explain it, to add to it, or to take away from it, in the slightest degree to alter his belief in that direct thearchy, to which he was bound by the ties of gratitude, of tradition, of national isolation and characteristic pride of race. A religion which accepts the first great principles of truth, the omnipotence and eternity of the Deity, the immortality of souls, and the rewards and punishments of a life to come, stands already upon a solid basis from which it has little inclination to be removed; and in all ages, the Jew, as in a somewhat less degree the Mahometan, has been most unwilling to add to his own stern tenets the mild and loving doctrines of our revealed religion. Eleazar’s was a character to which the outward and tangible ceremonials of his worship were essentially acceptable. To him the law, in its severest and most literal sense, was the only true guide for political measures as for private conduct; and where its burdens were multiplied or its severities enhanced by tradition, he upheld the latter gladly and inflexibly. To offer the sacrifices ordained by Divine command; to exact and rigidly fulfil the minutest points of observance which the priests enjoined; to keep the Sabbath inviolate by word and deed; also, when opportunity offered, to smite the heathen hip-and-thigh with the edge of the sword; these were the points of faith and practice on which Eleazar took his stand, and from which no consideration of affection, no temptation of ambition, no exigency of the times, would have induced him to waver one hair’s-breadth. The fiercest soldier, the wildest barbarian, the most frivolous and dissolute patrician of the Imperial Court, would have been a more promising convert than such a man as this. Yet did not Calchas despair: well he knew that there is a season of seed-time and a season of harvest, that the soil once choked with weeds, or sown [pg 128]with tares, may thereafter produce a good crop; that waters have been known to flow freely from the bare rock, and that nothing is impossible under heaven. So he loved his brother and prayed for him, and took that brother’s daughter to his heart as though she had been his own child.
It must have required no small patience, no small amount of self-control and humility, to engraft in Mariamne the good fruit, which her father held in such hatred and disdain. These, too, were difficulties with which the early Christians had to contend, and of which we now make small account. We read of their privations, their persecutions, their imprisonments, and their martyrdoms, with a thrill of mingled horror and indignation—we pity and admire, we even glorify them as the heroic leaders of that forlorn hope which was destined to head the armies of the only true conqueror, but we never consider the daily and harassing warfare in which they must have been engaged, the domestic dissensions, the insults of equals, the alienation of friends; above all, the cold looks and estranged affections of those whom they loved best on earth; whom they must give up here, and whom, with the new light that had broken in on them, they could scarce hope to see hereafter. So-called heroic deeds are not always deserving of that superiority which they claim over mortal weakness, when emblazoned on the glowing page of history. Many a man is capable, so to speak, of winding himself up for one great effort, even though it be to perish on the scaffold or the breach; but day after day, and year after year, to wage unceasing war against our nearest and dearest, our own comforts, our own prosperity, nay, our own weaknesses and inclinations, requires the aid of a sustaining power that is neither without nor within, nor anywhere below on earth, but must reach the suppliant directly and continuously from above.
Nevertheless the example of a true Christian, in the real acceptation of the word, is never without its effect on those who live under its constant influence. Even Eleazar loved and respected his brother more than anything on earth, save his ambition and his creed; while Mariamne, whose trusting and gentle disposition rendered her a willing recipient of those truths which Calchas lost no opportunity of imparting, gradually, and almost insensibly, imbibed the opinions and the belief of one whose everyday practice was so pure, so elevated, and so kindly; to whom, moreover, she was accustomed to look as her counsellor in difficulty, and her refuge in distress.
[pg 129]It was Calchas, then, whose studies she interrupted as he sat with the scroll before him, that was seldom out of his hand, perusing those Syriac characters again and again, as a mariner consults his chart, never weary of storing information for his future course, and verifying the progress he has already made. It was to Calchas she had determined to apply for comfort because Esca came not, and for assistance to see him again—not that she admitted, even to herself, that this was her intention or her wish. Nevertheless, she hovered about the old man’s seat, more caressingly than usual, and finding his attention still riveted on his employment, she laid one hand lightly on his shoulder, and with the other parted the thin grey hair that strayed across his forehead. He looked up with a pleasant smile.
“What is it, little one?” said he, with the endearing diminutive he had used in addressing her from her childhood. “You seem unusually busy with your household affairs to-day. Is this room to be decorated for a guest? My brother makes no acquaintances here in Rome; and we have given no stranger so much as a mouthful of food since we arrived, save that goodly barbarian you brought home with you the other evening. Is he coming again to-night?”
A bright blush swept over her face, yet when it faded, Calchas could not but remark that she was paler than her wont; and her manner, usually so gentle and composed, was now restless, anxious, and ill at ease.
“Nay,” she replied, “what should I know of the barbarian’s movements? It was but a chance meeting that led him to our quiet dwelling in the first instance; and save by the merest accident we are never likely to see him more.”
She turned away while she spoke, trying to steady her voice and give it a tone of cold indifference, but failing utterly in the attempt.
“There is no such power as chance,” said Calchas, looking her keenly in the face.
“I know it,” replied Mariamne, smiling sadly; “and I know, too, that whatever befalls us is for the best. Yet some things are hard to bear, nevertheless. Not that I have aught to complain of,” she added, shrinking instinctively from the very topic she wanted to bring on, “save my constant anxiety for my father in these tumultuous times.”
“He is in God’s hand,” said Calchas, “who will bring him safe through all his perils, though they seem now to environ him as the breakers boil round a stranded galley, when the wild Adriatic is leaping and dashing for its prey. Take [pg 130]comfort, little one; I cannot bear to see your step so listless and your cheek so pale.”
“How can they be otherwise?” returned the girl, not very candidly. “It is a weary lot to be a soldier’s daughter. I could even find it in my heart to wish we had never left Judæa; never come to Rome.”
He tried his best to soothe and comfort her—his best such as it was, for the good old man knew but little of a woman’s heart—its wild hopes, its indefinite aims, its wayward feelings, and its inexplicable tendency to self-torture. He thought in his simplicity the real grievance was that which she avowed, and he strove to remove it in his own kind hopeful way.
“My child,” said he, “the evils that are raging in Italy, the horrors that we hear of every day, cannot but make Eleazar’s position more important and less hazardous, as they increase the difficulties of the imperial councils. It is, indeed, no child’s play to bridle such a nation as ours with one hand, and to grasp at the imperial diadem with the other. It takes a bold heart to draw the sword against Judah, and a long arm to buffet Cæsar across the seas. Vespasian will have little leisure to persecute our race; and the Emperor, sore beset as he is, will surely lend a favourable ear to my brother’s proposals for peace. Even now the legions are declaring, far and wide, against Vitellius; and civil war, the most dreadful of all scourges, is desolating the provinces and entering Italy herself. It was but yesterday that news reached Rome of the revolt of the whole fleet at Ravenna—and ere this Cremona has perhaps fallen into the power of Antonius, that soldier-orator, with the iron arm and the silver tongue. Well we know, for we have been told by One whose words shall never be forgotten, that a house divided against itself cannot stand; and is this a time, think you, my child, for the worn-out sensualist who wears the purple here, to make conditions with such a man as your father? It is all in God’s hand, as I never cease to insist; yet I cannot but feel that a better day must at last be dawning upon Judæa, that her enemies will be confounded, her armies victorious, and her chiefs—but what have we to do with the sword?” he broke off abruptly, while his kindling eye and animated gestures bore witness to the ardent spirit that would flash out here and there even now. “Our weapon is the Cross, our warfare is not of this world, our triumph is in our humility, and when most we are brought low, then are we most exalted. Oh, that the time were come, as come it surely will, when Cæsar [pg 131]shall be content to take only that which is Cæsar’s, and men shall be gathered under one banner, and in one brotherhood, from all corners of the world!”
It was no exaggerated account Calchas thus gave of the dilemma in which the empire was placed at this juncture. Vespasian, with great political talents, with coolness, patience, and audacity, was playing a game against which the besotted brains of Vitellius were powerless to compete. The former, adored by the army, who saw in him a successful general, an intrepid soldier, and a man of simple virtuous habits, contrasting nobly with the luxurious gluttony and sensuality of his rival, lost none of his influence by the moderation he displayed, and the modesty, real or affected, with which he declined the purple. Not afraid to wait till advantage ripened into opportunity, he could seize it when the time came with a bold and tenacious grasp, could turn it deftly to his own profit and guide those circumstances of which he seemed to be the mere puppet, with a master-hand. Though at a distance from the scene of warfare, and to all appearance little more than an unwilling observer of the disturbances carried on in his name, he directed as it were from behind a curtain the operations of his generals, and pulled the strings that set in motion his numerous partisans with a clear head, a delicate touch, and that tenacity of purpose which is the essential element of success. Vitellius, on the other hand, whose natural abilities had been weakened, nay destroyed, by an unceasing course of sensual gratification, wavered in council and hesitated in action; now determined to abdicate the diadem and retire into obscurity; anon persuaded to fight for dominion to the death; and ever paralysing the energies of his warmest partisans by the distrust he entertained for honest advisers, and the reliance he placed on the counsels of those traitors who surrounded him.
The empire was, perhaps, at this period in a more disheartening position than even under the ferocious sway of Nero. Monster as the latter was, he at least held the reins with a firm hand; and tyranny, however oppressive, is doubtless one degree better than anarchy and confusion. Now, the mighty fabric, of which Romulus laid the first stone and Augustus completed the pinnacle—the work of seven centuries, to which every generation had added its labours and its enterprise, till it embraced the confines of the known world—was beginning perceptibly to sink and crumble from its own enormous size and weight. The legions (and it must never be forgotten that the dominion of Rome was essentially [pg 132]that of the sword) were now recruited from natives of her distant colonies. The Syrian and the Ethiop guarded the eagles as well as the tall turbulent sons of Germany, and the ever-changing, ever-faithless Gaul. Armies thus gathered under one standard from such various climates could have but little in common save a certain professional ferocity, and an ardent liking for plunder, no less than pay. Mercenaries have in all ages been easily bought by the one and seduced by the other. Each legion gradually came to consider itself a separate and independent power, to be sold to the highest bidder. Perhaps the fairest vision of all was a march upon Rome, and a ten hours’ sack of the city they were sworn to defend. A great and good man, backed by the glory of name, race, and illustrious actions, could alone have ruled such discordant elements, and united these conflicting interests for the common good; but fate ordained that the weak, worn-out, besotted Vitellius should be seated on the throne of the Cæsars, and that the cool, unflinching, and far-seeing Vespasian should be watching with sleepless eye and ready hand to snatch the diadem from his bewildered predecessor, and place it firmly on his own head.
While the destinies of the world were thus trembling in the balance, while her own nation was fighting for its very existence, and the storm gathering all around, obviously to burst in its greatest fury on the Imperial City, the care that weighed heaviest at Mariamne’s heart was that she had that day noticed a barbarian slave walk into the training-school of a Roman gladiator.
“Is it true, then,” asked the girl, “that civil war is indeed raging here, as we have seen it at home? That we shall have an enemy ere long at the very gates of the city?”
“Too true, my child,” replied Calchas; “and the Roman people seem, as usual, to make light of the emergency, to eat, drink, buy, sell, and feast their eyes on bloodshed in the circus, as though their idolatrous temple, where Janus overlooks the usurers and money-changers of the city, were shut up once for all, never to be opened again.”
She turned pale and shuddered at the mention of the circus.
“Are they making no preparations?” she asked timidly. “Did I not hear my father say they were collecting the gladiators, and—and—some of the nobles had enrolled their German and British slaves, and were arming them against an attack?”
“It may be so,” answered Calchas; “but a slave can [pg 133]scarcely be expected to fight very stoutly for a cause which only serves to rivet his chains. As for the gladiators, those tigers in human form, it were surely better for them to perish in open warfare, than to tear one another to pieces in the arena, like the very beasts against which I have seen them pitted. Yet these, too, have souls to be saved.”
“Surely have they,” exclaimed Mariamne, with kindling eyes, “and none to help them; none to show them so much as a glimpse of the true light. These men go out to die as the citizen goes to his business or his bath; and who is answerable to man for their blood? who is answerable to God for their souls?”
His eye brightened while she spoke, and he raised his head like a soldier who hears the trumpet summoning him to the front.
“If I have a well in my court,” said he, “and a man fall down and die of thirst at my gate, who is answerable? Surely I am guilty of my brother’s blood, that I never so much as reached him the pitcher to drink. Shall these men go down daily to death, and shall I not stretch out a finger lest they perish everlastingly? Mariamne, it seems there is a task set to my hand, and I must accomplish it.”
She was far from wishing to hinder him. Actuated as human nature too often is by mixed motives, she could yet respond, in her womanly generosity of heart, to that noble self-sacrifice which was so distinguishing a characteristic of the new religion; and could appreciate the devotion of Calchas, while she hoped through his intervention to obtain some alleviation of her anxiety on Esca’s behalf. She had caught a glimpse of the slave’s figure that very day as it entered the portals of the training-school; and this rapid glance had not served to quiet her misgivings on his account.
If Calchas should now think it right to interest himself about a class of men the most reckless and desperate of the whole Roman population, it was probable that he would at the same time learn something of Esca’s movements; perhaps be able to dissuade him from joining the fierce band in which she now feared he was about to be enrolled. “It may be that he has some wild hope of thus obtaining his liberty,” thought the girl; and her heart throbbed while she reflected that it was for her sake liberty had now become so dear to the barbarian. “It may be that he has extorted some vague promise from his lord, and, in his pride of strength and courage, he never dreams of danger or defeat; but oh! if he [pg 134]should come to harm for my sake, what will become of me? I would rather die a thousand times than that his white skin should be disfigured with a scratch!”
“They are practising for their deadly pastime in the next street,” said she; “I can hear the blows as I go down to draw water. Blows dealt, as it were, in sport; what must they be in earnest?”
“There is no time to be lost,” said Calchas. “The games of Ceres are to be soon celebrated, and the Roman crowd will think it but a poor show if some hundreds of gladiators are not slaughtered at the least. Child, I will visit these men to-morrow; they will revile me, but after a time they will listen. If I can even gain over one, be he the lowest and most degraded of the band, it will be a triumph greater than a thousand victories; a gain infinitely more precious than all the treasures of Rome.”
“To-morrow may be too late,” she returned, moving across the room at the same time so as to hide her face. “The school is full to-day. I—I think I saw that barbarian who was here lately go into it an hour or two ago.”
“The Briton!” exclaimed Calchas, starting from his seat. “Why did you not tell me so before? Quick, girl, fetch me my gown and sandals. I will go there without delay.”
She helped him, nothing loth. In a few minutes Calchas was ready to go forth, and as she watched him from the door, and saw him turn the corner of the street, Mariamne clasped her hands and muttered a thanksgiving for the success of her well-meant artifice; while the old man strode boldly to his destination, confident in the integrity of his purpose, and rejoicing in the breastplate of proof which covers a good heart bound on a pious mission. “It is no business of mine,” was a maxim unknown to the early Christian. Fresh in his memory was the parable of the Good Samaritan; and it never occurred to him that, like the Pharisee, he might pass by on the other side. The world is some centuries older, yet is that tale of the friendless wounded wayfarer less suggestive now than it was then?