Rome For Sale, page 36
5
Lentulus found himself surrendering more and more to dreams. He would become King of Rome after Catalina was removed. The lucky antagonism of Cethegus would see to that removal, and Cethegus would be no rival for supreme power; he was the perfect colleague, aiming only at the satisfaction of certain wants and at slaking his emotions. Lentulus let his mind range over the Empire; he spent his time dividing the provinces, making and unmaking kings. Sometimes he awoke with a start from these fancies, and laughed at himself. Then he relapsed again. The impeachment of Lucius Murena brought to his mind the fact that Further Gaul was held by Gaius Murena, who would undoubtedly stand for the Senate; and Lentulus, feeling himself already the organiser and minister of far-flung schemes of combination and balance of forces, wondered how he could counterblast the conservatives in the Province. He recalled that among the men attached in varying degrees to his person there was one Publius Umbrenus, a merchant, who had traded in Gaul, and that some ambassadors from the tribe of the Allobroges were at present in Rome petitioning the Senate. What a fine coup, what an excellent revelation of his masterly sense of government, if he could arrange for the Allobroges to attack Gaius Murena simultaneously with the attack on Rome by Catalina. The Allobroges were a warlike people, and the ambassadors, despite their gifts, were receiving scant attention from the Senate. The chance was too good to be missed.
On instructions from Lentulus, Umbrenus accosted the deputies in the Forum, recalled himself to their acquaintance, and chatted about his memories of Gaul. Sympathetically he inquired about the province, commiserated with the deputies on the state of affairs in their district, and hinted that he knew where alone measures of relief could be gained.
As the deputies pressed him for his help, he took them to Sempronia’s house nearby and sent for Gabinius, the most capable of the financial experts in the conspiracy. Gabinius talked the matter over with the deputies, explained the aims of the conspiracy, and showed them how they could share in the economic benefits. To impress the men, Gabinius and Umbrenus boasted that practically every public man in Rome was behind the conspiracy. Strongly affected, the deputies left to consider the matter.
6
It was clear that someone had betrayed the meeting at Læca’s, so that now much greater care was taken. Only the heads of the conspiracy met for discussion, and Curius once more had nothing but meagre scraps of surmise for Fulvia. She began to lose something of her fear of him, and became neglectful again.
“How can you bear to be so unkind?” he complained. “Haven’t I spoiled my whole life for you, and smirched my honour? I would have killed anyone who’d even hinted a year ago that I’d have done the things I’ve done.”
“Then it’s time you killed yourself for having done them,” she remarked coldly.
“But wouldn’t you care? Surely a little?” he pleaded. “I did it all for you.”
“You didn’t. You did it for money.”
“Don’t you dare say that.” He grasped her in his arms and put his hand about her throat. “I can’t stand it. Take the words back.”
“I won’t.”
He pushed her down and tightened his grip, sobbing and complaining. “All for you. Tell me the truth. All for you.”
“Yes, yes,” she said hoarsely, tearing at his hands and feeling that her last hour was come. “It was for me.”
At once he relaxed and fell weeping in her lap. “I loathe money. It means nothing to me. How could you say that I betrayed my best friend for money. And it wasn’t me anyway. It was Cæsar.” He longed to win a fortune so that he could come and throw it contemptuously at Fulvia, ram the coins down her throat, pour them molten into the maw of her lying lust.
Fulvia slowly recovered herself and grew interested in what he had said. “What’s that about Cæsar?”
“Catalina told me Cæsar was in it but wriggled out.”
Fulvia considered. That was at least something to retail to her employers; she had had so little of late.
7
The closed door of Orestilla’s house was driving Cethegus insane with rage. He passed it by designedly, looking forward to the day when he would come with men armed with axes. Then she would not have time to think of plans to fool him, to lead him on and then turn him down. She was the vilest woman in Rome and he desired her. In desperation he succumbed to Chelidon’s importunate requests and met her again at the assignation-rooms.
“You’re more handsome than ever,” she said. “You look like a one-eyed wolf. Kiss me.”
His only consolation was to go home and beat Precia. How dare his mistress look so old. Her eyes were deep-sunken patches of raw skin. Though she was thin, her skin was loose. He drank deeply, and beat her.
Then he dominated all the meetings of the conspirators, demanding action. He had lost all sense of caution. When Lentulus first mentioned the Allobroges, his impulse had been to oppose any meddling with the foreign ambassadors; he saw the risk; but the wish to placate Lentulus and leave undisturbed his sense of great diplomacies, mixed with his own growing recklessness, stopped his tongue. Something, anything, must be done. It was imbecile to wait while the government completed preparations; there was no need to pause for Catalina. Call on the mob; they would do all the necessary work.
Lentulus was not displeased by this urgency, but he was unable to rouse himself from the lethargy of dreams. He wanted Cethegus to force the situation, as he wanted him to get rid of Catalina later on. The two men now had no pretences.
“Why do you hate Catalina?” asked Lentulus, when they were alone.
“That’s my concern. I’ll settle with him so that everyone will think he was killed in storming the city. That’s the best plan. He’ll leave a memory for the people to worship, and we’ll be able to use him better dead than we could alive.”
“Tell me what you want for your part in all this?”
“The second rank to you, and one other thing. I’ll tell you what it is when the time comes. But it’s nothing you’ll want.”
8
Orestilla scarcely knew her daughter when she saw her. Two years had made such a difference. The child, now eight years old, had shot up; instead of being rather dumpy, she was thin and lengthy. Frightened of her mother, she needed to be coaxed before she would even eat a mouthful, and she disliked her baby half-sister passionately. On the second day she sidled up to her mother and asked, “Where is he?”
Orestilla could not think for a moment who was meant, then she said, “Far away.”
“Is he ever coming back?”
“I don’t know. Of course he is. I suppose.”
The child buried her face in her mother’s lap until Orestilla raised it for fear that she was smothered. The child’s face was flushed and her eyes filmed. Orestilla shook her. “Wake up, you silly little thing.”
The child stole away and sat in a corner watching the cradle where her half-sister lay.
Next day Orestilla found the baby turned round with a swaddling-cloth wound round her face and a cushion placed over her head, stifled. Her heart bounded with a moment of abject misery and terror; she wailed, seized the dead child and hugged it in her arms, wailing wildly. The nurse rushed in and wailed in concert; she had done nothing; no one had passed through the door but the baby’s sister. These words struck Orestilla with a far greater pain than the discovery itself, but they quieted her. She handed the dead baby to the nurse and went in search of the elder child. She found her playing with some shells in the small courtyard.
Orestilla picked her up and held her face between two hands. “Why did you do it? Why?” She could scarcely whisper.
The child looked at her with innocent wide-open eyes. “What, mother?”
“How could you harm a little helpless baby?”
“I haven’t done anything, mother.”
Orestilla began to cry softly, and the child cried in sympathy, repeating, “But I haven’t done anything, mother, truly I haven’t.”
Orestilla felt guilty as she clasped the child to her breast, as if by the embrace she was condoning the death, provoking it. Had not her failure to give enough love to this child been the real provocation? She was the guilty one, not the poor child. She felt painfully, overwhelmingly drawn to her firstborn. More than ever something within her cried in blind persistence of pain and desire: Catalina will never return. And yet her love of Catalina was consumingly the reality of her life. She knew that if he returned she would send the child back to the country, forgetting about her after the first week of remorse. But as she held the child, there was an aching sweetness in the embrace which obliterated all else.
9
Innocence wears a bold face. If people show that they suspect you most unreasonably, the best way to show them their wrongness is to act twice as carelessly. That was how Mucia argued. It was quite ridiculous for such a scandal to have grown up over a Greek equerry, however handsome and although he did have hyacinthine hair and rode like a centaur. The best way to silence gossip was to show that she cared nothing for the equerry, and how could that be done better than by having twenty young men crowding about her? But the unpersuaded eye of her silent brother Metellus Nepos worried her, and, realising that he was working with Cæsar, she made great efforts to gain Cæsar’s help. He found it difficult to refuse to call on her when requested. She was the wife of Pompeius, and the last thing he wished was to quarrel with her or to come between her and Pompeius. But he had no choice. She made it clear that unless he gave her his support she would seek to embroil him with her husband.
“Of course you have my support,” said Cæsar, “in every way.”
She came close. “I’m so glad you love me, I was afraid you didn’t.”
He felt that the only way of escaping from the worst consequences of the liaison was a temporary submission. There could surely be no doubt that she would be divorced, and that meant Pompeius looking for another wife. Cæsar wondered if he could bring Pompeius to marry Iulia, and then drove out the thought. Iulia was young enough to be the man’s daughter; everything was as yet shadowy; but with masterful tact everything was possible. For the moment the main thing was to dispose of Mucia. Mucia for her part was determined to make the most of his partisanship, sending for him at the most inconvenient hours. She salved her conscience with one unfailing remark:
“There’s nothing I hate more in this world than infidelity. But fate’s different. Mortals can’t fight against fate. They simply can’t. I knew it was fate the moment that you told me you loved me.”
He did his best to remove her interest and confuse the vestiges of his own guilt by sending her on various pretexts some of the youths who worked for him, but she was not to be distracted. One day he sent Labienus, and, unknown to him, Labienus was successful on that one occasion; but immediately afterwards Mucia took a strong dislike to him and would not admit him to the house again. Labienus jested with Cæsar about it, but was deeply hurt and never confessed to the one successful afternoon, which had lifted him to a pinnacle of ambitious ecstasy. He was a snob; and the hope of being the known lover of the wife of Pompeius had meant far more to him than Cæsar guessed. But now he was left suspicious; he could not lose the feeling that Cæsar had planned the whole episode with Mucia to make a fool of him. Instead of being able to meet with sly grandiloquence the hints of his friends that he was Mucia’s lover, he found himself stiffening with outrage at the mention of her name, and that one successful afternoon became a horror-spot in his mind.
10
The Allobroges were powerfully swayed by the arguments of Gabinius and Umbrenus, but they had natural suspicions and fears as to involving themselves in a conspiracy in a foreign state where they had no means of properly evaluating the forces at work. They asked for another meeting at Sempronia’s house and decided that what they heard this time would make up their minds for them. Sempronia received them in her best matronly manner, and they presented her with some enamels from Bibracte.
“Where do they come from?” she asked, interested. “Sidon or Alexandria?”
“From our native land,” said Acco, one of the deputies, in his precise guttural Latin.
Sempronia considered the finish and grace of the designs. Before a nation could produce one such article it must have won its form of civilisation. “How small-minded we are,” she said. “Please excuse my lack of intelligence. Perhaps someday I will visit Bibracte.” Young men were striding along the streets of Bibracte, fair-haired and blue-eyed and dressed in woollen breeches bound about the legs. She felt dissatisfied with the enclosed revolving intrigues of Rome. There was a world outside, developing, stirring, emerging out of savagery, travailing into individuality. She would travel, not blinded by the lust for profit like the other Romans, who at the very best did no more than visit the spots famous in literature so as to be able to speak of having seen them. She would travel to observe, to feel and enjoy the difference of cultures, to learn the subtly diverging identities of Latin and Gallic and Lusitanian and Damascene.
Umbrenus and Gabinius arrived, full of plausible arguments and statistics. The Allobroges listened attentively. The Romans were very clever, but quite unaware of the plots that were going on among the Helvetian and Æduan tribes; they were so full of their own politics that they never imagined the Gallic tribes also had their parties. If the nationalist movement got the upper-hand among the Helvetii and then burst out in the Ædui, these Romans might yet regret the day of their absorbed arrogance. But of course the Gallic reactionaries might win and complete alliances with Rome and in any event something must be done about these debts with which the cursed Roman business-men were strangulating the states. The emotions of the deputies were nationalistic, but this they could not confess at Rome.
Craftily then the Gauls listened, and the Romans with much condescension explained the policy of the conspirators. Sempronia alone watched the deputies with penetration; she saw something of the stir of thought beneath their respectful countenances. The men whose people made enamels of such beauty could not be treated like children.
Cethegus arrived in a sweat of fury. He had promised to meet Chelidon this afternoon, and was afraid of what would happen when he did not meet her. But he was determined not to succumb to her again. Already she would have been two hours waiting. Vehemently he poured out to the Gauls the story of the preparations for the outbreak. The Gauls listened even more intently; this was something more real; the fury caught their interest more sharply than the economic arguments. Here was force. They began to incline strongly to the belief that the conspiracy represented a vital impulse, with which it would be advisable to come to terms.
11
Chelidon had not been waiting two hours. She had waited one and a half, had then smashed a chair against the couch, run downstairs, and told her chairmen to carry her to the house of Cethegus. The porter told her that Cethegus was out, but this time she refused to yield. The porter, obeying orders, called for aid. Chelidon struggled and screamed in the grasp of six strong-armed slaves, thoroughly enjoying her predicament. Precia heard the noise and hurried out. She bade the servants stand aside. “Where’s my lover?” asked Chelidon, resolved to wreck everybody and everything, including herself.
Precia looked round at each of the slaves in turn, and then said to Chelidon, “Come inside.” When they were alone, she went on, “You referred to Cethegus, I take it.” Chelidon nodded. “He’s at Sempronia’s on some matter of business.”
“Then that’s where I’m going,” said Chelidon. It was Precia’s turn to nod. The two women walked out of the house, looking like friends starting on some shopping expedition.
They entered Sempronia’s house arm in arm. Precia had taken Chelidon’s arm, and Chelidon did not repel the gesture. Cethegus, with his arm lifted in mid-declamation, saw the pair and blenched. It was his nightmare come true at last. He shook himself and paused irresolutely. The deputies stared at him and then at the newcomers. Chelidon threw off Precia’s arm, advanced towards Cethegus, and smacked him in the face. “How dare you treat poor Precia so badly, and why didn’t you turn up to make love to me this afternoon?”
Sempronia, despite her love of scenes, felt that she must carry out her duty as conspirator. She took hold of Chelidon and drew her, foully swearing, from the room. Precia followed after a long humiliating look at Cethegus.
Cethegus sought to find the train of his thoughts. “So you see,” he concluded lamely, “it’d be definitely to your advantage.” His brain would not function, and he motioned to Gabinius to take up the argument. The deputies exchanged sidelong hardly-perceptible glances; there was no safety in a conspiracy where women were such insubordinate partners; these Romans were in their second-childhood. Sempronia had impressed the Gauls, but these other two women, particularly the blaspheming Chelidon, had struck them with horror. They listened politely to all that Gabinius and Umbrenus had to say, then went.
“This brave Cethegus cannot lift his eyes before a noisy woman,” said Acco. “I take it that we visit our patron Sanga after all.”
12
Cethegus dawdled, talking aimlessly to the two men, dreading the exposures of himself that must be going on in the next room. His suspicions were correct. Chelidon was narrating with tireless exaggeration the full story of their relations. Precia said nothing except, “Certainly he has been very miserable of late.” Sempronia was not deceived by her quietness; she knew that she was writhing with anger. But Precia was determined to placate Chelidon; she took her in her arms and kissed her. “Don’t upset yourself.” Sempronia called for wine.
“He can’t get away with it,” Chelidon repeated to Precia. “I should never have given him away to you if he’d met me regularly.”
