Domitia. Baring-Gould Sabine

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СКАЧАТЬ he had returned to Antioch, to the society of his wife and little daughter.

      The former, a dashing, vain and ambitious woman, had made a salon there which was frequented by the best society of the province. Corbulo, a quiet, thoughtful and modest man, shrunk from the stir and emptiness of such life, and had found rest and enjoyment in the company of his daughter.

      Lamia had served as his secretary and aide-de-camp. He was a youth of much promise, and of singular integrity of mind and purity of morals in a society that was self-seeking, voluptuous, and corrupt.

      He belonged to the Ælian gens or clan, but he had been adopted by a Lamia, a member of a family in the same clan, that claimed descent from Lamius, a son of Poseidon, or Neptune, by one of those fictions so dear to the Roman noble houses, and which caused the fabrication of mythical origins, just as the ambition of certain honorable families in England led to the falsification of the Roll of Battle Abbey.

      Pliny tells a horrible story of the first Lamia of importance, known to authentic history. He had been an adherent of Cæsar and a friend of Cicero. He was supposed to be dead in the year in which he had been elected prætor, and was placed on the funeral pyre, when consciousness returned, but too late for him to be saved. The flames rose and enveloped him, and he died shrieking and struggling to escape from the bandages that bound him to the bier on which he lay.

      Lucius Lamia had been kindly treated by Corbulo, and the young man’s heart had gone out to the venerated general, to whom he looked up as a model of all the old Roman virtues, as well as a man of commanding military genius. The simplicity of the old soldier’s manner and the freshness of his mind had acted as a healthful and bracing breeze upon the youth’s moral character.

      And now he took the young girl by the hand, and walked with her up and down the pleached avenues for some moments without speaking.

      His breast heaved. His head swam. His hand that held hers worked convulsively.

      All at once Domitia stood still.

      She had looked up wondering at his manner, into his eyes, and had seen that they were full.

      “What ails you, Lucius?”

      “Come, sit by me on the margin of the basin,” said he. “By the Gods! I conjure thee to summon all thy fortitude. I have news to communicate, and they of the saddest – ”

      “What! are we not to return to Rome? O Lamia, I was a child when I left it, but I love our house at Gabii, and the lake there, and the garden.”

      “It is worse than that, Domitia.” He seated himself on the margin of a basin, and nervously, not knowing what he did, drew his finger in the water, describing letters, and chasing the darting fish.

      “Domitia, you belong to an ancient race. You are a Roman, and have the blood of the Gods in your veins. So nerve thy heroic soul to hear the worst.”

      And still he thrust after the frightened fish with his finger, and she looked down, and saw them dart like shadows in the pool, and her own frightened thoughts darted as nimbly and as blindly about in her head.

      “Why, how now, Lamia? Thou art descended by adoption from the Earth-shakes, and tremblest as a girl! See – a tear fell into the basin. Oh, Lucius! My very kid rears in surprise.”

      “Do not mock. Prepare for the worst. Think what would be the sorest ill that could befall thee.”

      Domitia withdrew her eyes from the fish and the water surface rippled by his finger, and looked now with real terror in his face.

      “My father?”

      Then Lamia raised his dripping finger and pointed to the house.

      She looked, and saw that the gardener had torn down boughs of cypress, and therewith was decorating the doorway.

      At the same moment rose a long-drawn, desolate wail, rising, falling, ebbing, flowing – a sea of sound infinitely sad, heart-thrilling, blood-congealing.

      For one awful moment, one of those moments that seems an eternity, Domitia remained motionless.

      She could hear articulate words, voices now.

      “Come back! O Cnæus! Come, thou mighty warrior! Come, thou pillar of thy race! Come back, thou shadow! Return, O fleeted soul! See, see! thy tabernacle is still warm. Return, O soul! return!”

      She knew it – the conclamatio; that cry uttered about the dead in the hopes of bringing back the spirit that has fled.

      Then, before Lamia could stop her, Domitia started from the margin of the pool, startling the fish again and sending them flying as rays from where she had been seated, and ran to the house.

      The gardener, with the timidity of a slave, did not venture to forbid passage.

      A soldier who was withdrawing extended his arm to bar the doorway. Quick as thought she dived below this barrier, and next moment with a cry that cut through the wail of the mourners, she cast herself on the body of her father, that lay extended on the mosaic floor, with a blood-stained sword at his side, and a dark rill running from his breast over the enamelled pavement.

      Next moment Lamia entered.

      Around the hall were mourners, slaves of the house, as also some of those of Longa Duilia, raising their arms and lowering them, uttering their cries of lamentation and invocations to the departed soul, some rending their garments, others making believe to tear their hair and scratch their faces.

      In the midst lay the dead general, and his child clung to him, kissed him, chafed his hands, endeavored to stanch his wound, and addressed him with endearments.

      But all was in vain. The spirit was beyond recall, and were it to return would again be expelled. Corbulo was dead.

      The poor child clasped him, convulsed with tears; her copious chestnut hair had become unbound, and was strewed about her, and even dipped in her father’s blood. She was as though frantic with despair; her gestures, her cry very different from the formal expressions and utterances of the servile mourners.

      But Lamia at length touched her, and said —

      “Come away, Domitia. You cannot prevent Fate.”

      Suddenly she reared herself on her knees, and put back the burnished rain of hair that shrouded her face, and said in harsh tones: —

      “Who slew him?”

      “He fell on his own sword.”

      “Why! He was happy?”

      Before an answer was given, she reeled and fell unconscious across her father’s body.

      Then Lamia stooped, gathered her up tenderly, pitifully, in his arms, and bore her forth into the garden to the fountain, where he could bathe her face, and where the cool air might revive her.

      Why was Corbulo dead? and why had he died by his own hand?

      The Emperor Nero was, as Duilia had told her husband, at this very time in Greece, and further, hard by at Corinth, where he was engaged in superintending the cutting of a canal, that was to remove the difficulty of a passage from the Saronic to the Corinthian Gulf.

      Nero had come to Greece attended by his Augustal band of five thousand youths with flowing СКАЧАТЬ