I
The boy's mother let the book fall, and, walking restlessly to the
doorway, flung aside the curtains that separated the library from
the larger and open hall. The December afternoon was sharp and cold,
and she had courted an hour's forgetfulness within a secluded room,
bidding her maid bring a brazier and draw the curtains close, and
deliberately selecting from her son's books a volume of Lucretius.
But her oblivion had been penetrated by an unexpected line, shot like
a poisoned arrow from the sober text:--
Breast of his mother should pierce with a wound sempiternal,
unhealing.
That was her own breast, she said to herself, and there was no hope
of escape from the fever of its wound. A curious physical fear took
possession of her, parching her throat and robbing her of breath.
It was a recoil from the conviction that she must continue to suffer
because her son, so young even for his twenty-three years, had openly
flouted her for one of the harpies of the city and delivered over
his manhood to the gossip-mongers of Rome.
Seeking now the sting of the winter air which she had been avoiding,
she pushed the heavy draperies aside and hurried into the atrium.
Through an opening in the roof a breath from December blew
refreshingly, seeming almost to ruffle the hair of the little marble
Pan who played his pipes by the rim of the basin sunk in the centre
of the hall to catch the rain-water from above. She had taken pains
years ago to bring the quaint, goat-footed figure to Rome from Assisi,
because the laughing face, set there within a bright-coloured garden,
had seemed to her a happy omen on the day when she came as a bride
to her husband's house, and in the sullen hours of her later sorrow
had comforted her more than the words of her friends.
As she saw it now, exiled and restrained within a city house, a new
longing came upon her for her Umbrian home. Even the imperious winds
which sometimes in the winter swept up the wide valley, and leaped
over the walls of Assisi and shrieked in the streets, were better
than the Roman Aquilo which during these last days had been biting
into the very corners of the house. And how often, under the winter
sun, the northern valley used to lie quiet and serene, its brown
vineyards and expectant olive orchards held close within the shelter
of the blue hills which stretched protectingly below the
snow-covered peaks of the Apennines. How charming, too, the spring
used to be, when the vineyards grew green, and the slow, white oxen
brought the produce of the plain up the steep slopes to the town.
She wondered now why, in leaving Assisi when Propertius was a child,
she had not foreseen her own regretful loneliness. Her reason for
leaving had been the necessity of educating her son, but the choice
had been made easy by the bitterness in her own life. Her husband
had died when the child was eight years old, and a year later her
brother, who had bulwarked her against despair, had been killed in
the terrible siege of Perugia.
Her own family and her husband's had never been friendly to Caesar's
successor. Her husband's large estates had been confiscated when
Octavius came back from Philippi, and her brother had eagerly joined
Antony's brother in seizing the old Etruscan stronghold across the
valley from Assisi and holding it against the national troops. The
fierce assaults, the prolonged and cruel famine, the final
destruction of a prosperous city by a fire which alone saved it from
the looting of Octavius's soldiers, made a profound impression upon
all Umbria. Her own home seemed to be physically darkened by evil
memories. Her mind strayed morbidly in the shadows, forever
picturing her brother's last hours in some fresh guise of horror.
She recovered her self-control only through the shock of discovering
that her trouble was eating into her boy's life also.
He was a sensitive, shrinking child, easily irritated, and given to
brooding. One night she awoke from a fitful sleep to find him
shivering by her bed, his little pale face and terrified eyes defined
by the moonlight that streamed in from the opposite window. "It is
my uncle," he whispered; "he came into my room all red with blood;
he wants a grave; he is tired of wandering over the hills." As she
caught the child in her arms her mind found a new mooring in the
determination to seek freedom for him and for herself from the
memories of Assisi, where night brought restless spectres and day
revealed the blackened walls and ruins of Perugia.
That was fourteen years ago, but to-day she knew that in Rome she
herself had never wholly been at home. Her income had sufficed for
a very modest establishment in the desirable Esquiline quarter; and
her good, if provincial, ancestry had placed her in an agreeable
circle of friends. She and her son had no entree among the greater
Roman nobles, but they had a claim on the acquaintance of several
families connected with the government and through them she had all
the introductions she needed. There was, however, much about city
life which offended her tastes. Its restlessness annoyed her, its
indifference chilled her. Architecture and sculpture failed to make
up to her for the presence of mountain and valley. Ornate temples,
crowded with fashionable votaries, more often estranged than
comforted her. Agrippa's new Pantheon was now the talk of the day,
but to her the building seemed cold and formal. And two years ago,
when all Rome flocked to the dedication of the new temple of Apollo
on the Palatine, her own excitement had given way to tender memories
of the dedication of Minerva's temple in her old home. Inside the
spacious Roman portico, with its columns of African marble and its
wonderful images of beasts and mortals and gods, and in front of the
gleaming temple, with its doors of carven ivory and the sun's chariot
poised above its gable peak, she had been conscious chiefly of a
longing to see once more the homely market-place of Assisi, to climb
the high steps to the exquisite temple-porch which faced southward
toward the sunbathed valley, and then to seek the cool dimness within,
where the Guardian of Woman's Work stood ready to hear her prayers.
To-day as she walked feverishly up and down, fretted by the walls
of her Roman house, her homesickness grew into a violent desire for
the old life. Perugia was rebuilt, and rehabilitated, in spite of
the conquering name of Augustus superimposed upon its most ancient
Etruscan portal. Assisi was plying a busy and happy life on the
opposite hillside. The intervening valley, once cowering under the
flail of war, was given over now to plenty and to peace. Its beauty,
as she had seen it last, recurred to her vividly. She had left home
in the early morning. The sky still held the flush of dawn, and the
white mists were just rising from the valley and floating away over
the tops of the awakening hills. She had held her child close to her
side as the carriage passed out under the gate of the town and began
the descent into the plain, and the buoyant freshness of the morning
had entered into her heart and given her hope for the boy's future.
He was to grow strong and wise, his childish impetuosity was to be
disciplined, he was to study and become a lawyer and serve his country
as his ancestors had before him. His father's broken youth was to
continue in him, and her life was to fructify in his and in his
children's, when the time came.
The mother bowed her head upon her clenched hands. How empty, empty
her hopes had been! Even his boyhood had disappointed her, in spite
of his cleverness at his books. The irritability of his childhood
had become moroseness, and he had alienated more often than he had
attached his friends. A certain passionate sincerity, however, had
never been lacking in his worst moods; and toward her he had been
a loyal, if often heedless, son. In this loyalty, as the years passed,
she had come to place her last hope that he would be deaf to the siren
calls of the great city. Outdoor sports and wholesome friendships
he had rejected, even while his solitary nature and high-strung
temperament made some defense against temptation imperative.
When he was eighteen he refused to go into law, and declared for a
literary life. She had tried hard to conceal her disappointment and
timid chagrin. She realised that the literary circle in Rome was
quite different from any she knew. It was no more aristocratic than
her own, and yet she felt intuitively that its standards were even
more fastidious and its judgments more scornful. If Propertius were
to grow rich and powerful, as the great Cicero had, and win the
friendship of the old senatorial families, she could more easily
adjust herself to formal intercourse with them than to meeting on
equal terms such men as Tibullus and Ponticus and Bassus, and perhaps
even Horace and Virgil. But later her sensitive fear that she could
not help her son in his new career had been swallowed up in the anguish
of learning that he had entirely surrendered himself to a woman of
the town. This woman, she had been told, was much older than
Propertius, beautiful and accomplished, and the lure of many rich
and distinguished lovers. Why should she seek out a slight, pale boy
who had little to give her except a heart too honest for her to
understand?
When the knowledge first came to her, she had begged for her son's
confidence, until, in one of his morose moods, he had flung away from
her, leaving her to the weary alternations of hope and fear. Two weeks
ago, however, all uncertainty had ended. The sword had fallen.
Propertius had published a series of poems boasting of his love,
scorning all the ideals of courage and manhood in which she had tried
to nurture him, exhibiting to Rome in unashamed nakedness the
spectacle of his defeated youth. Since the day when her slave had
brought home the volume from the book-store and she had read it at
night in the privacy of her bedroom, she had found no words in which
to speak to him about his poetry. Any hope that she had ever had of
again appealing to him died before his cruel lines:--
Never be dearer to me even love of a mother beloved,
Never an interest in life dear, if of thee I'm bereft.
Thou and thou only to me art my home, to me, Cynthia, only
Father and mother art thou--thou all my moments of joy.
He had, indeed, been affectionate toward her once more, and had made
a point of telling her things that he thought would please her. He
had even, some days before, seemed boyishly eager for her sympathetic
pleasure in an invitation to dine with Maecenas.
"I am made, mother," he said, "if he takes me up."
"_Made!_" she repeated now to herself. Made into what?
A friend had told her that the Forum was ringing with the fame of
this new writer, and that from the Palatine to the Subura his poetry
was taking like wildfire. She was dumb before such strange comfort.
What was this "fame" to which men were willing to sacrifice their
citizenship? Nothing in Rome had so shocked her as the laxity of
family life, the reluctance of young men to marry, the frequency of
divorce. She had felt her first sympathy with Augustus when he had
endeavoured to force through a law compelling honourable marriage.
Now, all that was best in her, all her loyalty to the traditions of
her family, rose in revolt against a popular favour which applauded
the rhymes of a ruined boy and admired the shameless revelations of
debauchery.
These plain words, spoken to herself, acted upon her mind like a tonic.
In facing the facts at their worst, she gained courage to believe
that there must still be something she could do, if she could only
grow calmer and think more clearly. She stopped her restless walking,
and, taking a chair, forced herself to lean back and rest. The
afternoon was growing dark, and a servant was beginning to light the
lamps. In the glow of the little yellow flames Pan seemed to be piping
a jocund melody.
The frenzy of despair left her, and she began to remember her son's
youth and the charming, boyish things about him. Perhaps among his
new friends some would love him and help him where she and his earlier
friends had failed. There was Virgil, for example. He was older, but
Propertius's enthusiasm for him seemed unbounded. He had pored over
the _Georgics_ when they came out, and only the other day he had told
her that the poet was at work on an epic that would be greater than
the _Iliad_. The boy's likes and dislikes were always violent, and
he had said once, in his absurd way, that he would rather eat crumbs
from Virgil's table than loaves from Horace's.
She knew that Virgil believed in noble things, and she had heard that
he was kind and full of sympathy. As the son of a peasant he did not
seem too imposing to her. He had been pointed out to her one day in
the street, and the memory of his shy bearing and of the embarrassed
flush on his face as he saw himself the object of interest, now gave
her courage to think of appealing to him.
Her loosened thoughts hurried on more ambitiously still. Of
Maecenas's recent kindness Propertius was inordinately proud. Would
it not be possible to reach the great man through Tullus, her son's
faithful friend, whose government position gave him a claim upon the
prime minister's attention? Surely, if the older man realised how
fast the boy was throwing his life away he would put out a restraining
hand. She had always understood that he set great store by Roman
morals. Rising from her chair with fresh energy, she bade a servant
bring her writing materials to the library. The swift Roman night
had fallen, and the house looked dull and dim except within the short
radius of each lamp. But to her it seemed lit by a new and saving
hope.