Faustula n. A. D. 340

Front matter

By

JOHN AYSCOUGH i '

AUTHOR OF “MAROTZ,” MEZZOGIORNO,” HURDCOTT,” ETC.

Chapter I

The October sun was within half an hour of its setting when Faustulus came out of the Decian Baths, on the Aventine, and began his leisurely saunter homewards.

He walked for two reasons — not that he was a man to bore himself with reasons for doing things: he was careful never even to bore other people. First and chiefly he had a horror of becoming fat; his father, he remembered, grew stout, almost suddenly, when not much older than he was now ; and the elder Faustulus had till then been remarkable for a figure that was particularly slim, graceful and aristocratic: when he ran to flesh all his distinction of appearance had been lost.

Even now the younger Faustulus was not, he confessed unwillingly, really slim, though he was sure few of his contemporaries were more distinguished-looking : and he saw no use at all in being aristocratic unless one looked it. It was all very well to claim descent from the shepherd who foster-fathered Romulus: and his sister Sabina thought almost more of it than of the wealth her husband had left her; but Faustulus himself did not care much for pedigrees; what he liked was the subtle aroma high birth hangs about its owner when people are forced to remember and acknowledge its presence. “If one looks like a plebeian one might as well be one,” he thought. Besides Faustulus hated the idea of becoming fat because he shrank with disgust from the idea of becoming middle-aged. To be middle-aged was worse than being plebeian, because it was more personal, and because, alas, it was inevitable. One naturally struggles harder against the inevitable than against what one can actually avoid by struggling.

“A stupid man who lets himself get stout is middle-aged at five-and-thirty,” Faustulus said to himself : he had stood still for a few moments on the steps of the baths, and was absentmindedly glancing across towards the Christian church of St. Prisca. “But if one’s figure at five-and-thirty is practically what it was at

five-and-twenty ” He did not complete

the argument. One only finishes up arguments with dull persons, and Faustulus was perfectly aware that he was not dull.

It was rather his custom of late to allude to himself, in these intimate conversations, as being thirty-five : ten or eleven months ago he had ignored the circumstance ; but, as he would be thirty-six in a week or so, he did it pretty often now — while he could.

His other reason for walking was that he was a gossip, and one can pick up unconsidered trifles of news on foot which would escape one otherwise. And Faustulus liked looking about him : he had a whimsical, observing eye which provided him with more things to talk about than anybody else’s report could do. The streets never became stale to him, but always off ered something new to catch his indolently alert attention.

And Faustulus was perfectly good-natured, as so many people are who never put themselves out for anybody, and he knew that on his way home he should hear something, or see something, that it would amuse poor Accia to be told about. He had the knack of making a funny little story out of the merest nothing.

“Poor Accia,” he thought, coming down the steps, “what a nuisance it must be to have babies. I remember, when I was growing up, and my f ather used to prose so much about the duty, in those of high birth, of doing something in the world (especially in these beastly times of new ideas) that I wished I had been a girl instead of Sabina — who would have made an excellent soldier — girls have so little trouble. Then I recollected the baby-business, and was less disposed to quarrel with those officious old maids the Fates. And Accia hates the whole thing as much as I should. She likes going about and doing everything: and one’s place gets filled if one drops out of it even for two or three months; especially at Accia’s age. One’s age is what people say it is, and one can only make them think it always the same by always doing the same things. ... I thought Accia seemed out of sorts when I left her: that was why I hurried off — it would not have done to let her see I noticed it ; low-spirits assert themselves the more they are officially recognized. I knew I should hear something to amuse her. The report of the victory of Constans and Constantine’s death will take her out of herself — she loves to hear about Emperors: what a pity, for her sake, there’s no Court here now.”

All the same Faustulus did not hurry home to tell her. There were things to see on the way. It was the 19th of October and he met groups of soldiers, and civilians too, making their way to the now rather shabby laurel-grove where the Arimlustrium was still kept up by the people. It was all very well for the Emperors to be Christian and to frown at pagan festivals, but Rome was not Christian yet, and people will dance whatever religion the Court may prefer. So there were plenty of idle folk ready to find their way to the burial-place of King Tatius and celebrate him by martial dances. Faustulus half thought he would go himself, but changed his mind and walked leisurely on. He noted the house where Livius Andronicus, the playwriter, had lived a hundred and thirty years or so before, and idly wondered whether another house was really that in which Ovid’s friend, the poet Gallus, had lived.

he quoted.

A mere cottage, in a scrap of vineyard, was, he knew, said to be that in which the other poet Ennius had turned his lay with none to listen but his single slave.

At the top of the hill where the Clivus Publicius began he paused a moment to admire the view of Hadrian’s mausoleum in the yellow distance, and to picture to himself Caius Gracchus and Marcus Flaccus hurrying up, with Death in close pursuit, to sanctuary in the Temple of Diana close by.

Then he sauntered easily down the sloping road, not hurrying, for he never hurried.

His own house was close under the Palatine, and near the Temple of Romulus, into which he saw a girl, whose figure seemed familiar (but he did not notice particularly, and her back was to him), hastening with a child pressed to her bosom. No doubt the baby was sick, and the mother was taking it to touch the bronze she-wolf, and get it cured.

He smiled indulgently, for after all the wolf would do the child as much good as the doctor, probably, and cost less. He often smiled, too, to think how devoutly his sister Sabina believed that their house stood on what had been the herding-ground, perhaps the very fold, of Faustulus the shepherd. Personally he was sure the site had been given by Nero to a Faustulus whose tastes had been about as pastoral as those of the Emperor, an ancestor who had been fortunate in attracting the Imperial favour only a few months before Nero’s death, so that he had contrived to keep both it and his house.

Faustulus entered unobserved ; there were no slaves about the door, and he was quite indiff erent to their absence: he was not a man who cared for the fuss of respect, and liked well enough to slip in and out without parade. Sometimes he would do so deliberately — to go about the town alone, when his household, perhaps, supposed him to be at home, gave a sort of fillip to his wanderings, lent a mild sense of incognito to his unattended state that made every such small stroll a kind of adventure in miniature.

“You always see so much,” Accia would remark admiringly — if she happened to be in a good humour.

“Because I do not always trail about with a lot of slaves and toadies to tell everyone who’s coming,” he would reply, quite pleased with her compliment and with himself.

Of course such solitary rambles were not always particularly dignified: nor did he trouble Accia to hear of all he saw, or of all the queer nooks and corners of the city into which they led him.

He passed through the porthyra , with a cella on each side, one for the chained porter and the other for the chained dog: the chains were there still ( as one may see in London now outside great houses the extinguishers for the linkboys’ torches) but Faustulus did not keep a street-door dog, and that cella was empty ; and the porter opposite was held by no harder chain than that of sleep.

The sun was set now, but there was a rosy glow that filled the atrium with a pretty flush that Faustulus paused a moment to enjoy. He had a great deal of appreciation and was determined never to lose the pleasures it brought him. Not to lose a pleasure was his philosophy of life.

“And so many pleasures cost nothing,” he told himself, “neither money, nor health, nor trouble. Lots of mine are common property, and yet I have them to myself.”

The water fell into the tank in the middle of the atrium with a soft, purring trickle, for the fountain was not large nor high, and it played, as it were, lazily, not with a loud, booming spurt.

The little statues of the gods, set up on low pillars, were old but only of tolerable artistic merit, and insignificant in size. Of course Faustulus had not set them there: they were probably about as old as the house which Nero’s favourite had built in the year after the great fire.

Faustulus regarded them with careless criticism untempered by devotion.

“They are much too small!” he thought: “they look, in this pink light, like dolls. Images of gods at all events should be of heroic size. There’s nothing impressive in a manikin Jupiter. One small image of a god, in some inner private room, may be tolerable. But a dozen of them, each no bigger than a monkey, in an atrium of this size — I should like to bundle them all away, but Sabina would think it impiety and the busy-bodies would say I was turning Christian. One large good copy of the Wolf (with our foster-uncles) would be tolerable, and I know where there is one, in a builder’s yard of the Suburra. Well, Flavia; no one to play with?”

A little girl, perhaps five years old, was peeping at him round one of the pillars, with a shy finger thrust into her mouth, and the other plump wee hand slowly moving up and down the base of the column. She was enough like himself to show that she was his daughter, though she was dark, like Accia, while Faustulus was of f air complexion with dark grey eyes and bronze-brown hair.

“Ah, Flavia ! Y ou won’t be pet rabbit much longer,” he observed with a monitory shake of the head. “Your mother only cares for the last. Why can’t you go on being the last? After so well-considered a pause why should your mother begin again?”

Flavia continued to smooth the pillar, and to stare : but aff ected no interest in the conversation.

‘Where’s Tatius?”

The small child drew out the finger from her mouth and pointed towards an inner room.

The sunset-glow had faded now, and the hasty twilight was already filling with dark shadow the spaces between the pillars, behind which were the various rooms of the great house. There was a sort of wintriness in the chill grey that fell so swiftly.

“I wish they would light the lamps,” thought Faustulus: he disliked sombre half-lights and loved warmth and brightness.

Out of the shadow a lady came, rather hurriedly, and said at once :

“Faustulus, where have you been?”

She was tall like her brother, but a year or so older, and in her case there was no threat of fatness: if she grew old she would become lean and bony. Her dress was somewhat old-fashioned and made her appear older than she was, while Faustulus affected the extreme of youthful fashion.

“Where have you been?” she asked. “We have been sending everywhere for you.”

“Not quite everywhere. Had you sent to the Decian Baths you would have found me.” “We sent to the Baths of Diocletian ”

“I was there yesterday — What is the matter? Poor Accia? Is Flavia’s new rival come — or on the point of arrival — Yes? I hope Accia is not very uncomfortable: not suffering much? Not frightened, surely ?”

There was too little light for the expression of Sabina’s face to be seen, but he felt that her manner was grave — as it mostly was.

As she began to speak she made a slight movement to take Flavia’s hand in hers, but the child drew back and slipped away. She did not care for her father’s sister. He teased her, but she liked him, for he was a man: Sabina was only a woman, and quite old as Flavia considered.

“Accia is not frightened now,” Sabina said with a grave pity in her voice. “She was. The child was born two or three hours ago.” “Ah! A new Tatius or a new Flavia?” “Faustulus, don’t. Can you not see I have been trying to prepare you for bad news? Accia’s fears are over: if we could have found you, you might have bade her farewell. But she did not know you were not there.”

Faustulus knew very well that he was glad they had not found him, since poor Accia would not even have known he was at her side. He shrank from all painful emotion, from which his soft sensuous temperament was by no means immune: he shrank from the emotion of the present moment which was quite bad enough. He carefully abstained even from telling himself, in so many words, that Accia was dead: his real desire was to go out again and have numbers of living people around him. He was grateful to the slaves who came with lighted lamps and hung them up between the pillars: Sabina, he suspected with irritation, would have forbidden the house to be lighted up, in sign of mourning — as if the fact of mourning was not enough without dismal gratuitous signs of it. But his sister was only a guest and f ar too well-bred to assume there any functions of authority. She would not even suggest that he should go and see his dead wife : she left it to himself, and was angered rather than surprised to see that he turned away and went to his own luxurious room.

Chapter II

Sabina was almost out of date ; a woman who should have lived in the austere days of the Republic, with feelings and prejudices quite out of touch with these times of the Late Empire. She was intensely pagan, out of conservatism, and disliked Christians stoutly, and disliked them more since the change in their position brought about by Constantine’s conversion. The late Emperor’s change to Christianity and endeavours to suppress the worship of the gods made her cling to them more rigidly.

Her idea of life, and especially of the life of nobles, was adherence to fixed, plain rules of duty and public service: pleasure and dissipation she despised, amusement she suspected.

She had a sisterly, habitual affection for her brother, but it was deep rather than warm, and largely sustained by the fact that he was the head of their ancient family. Personal fondness for him she found different: of almost every characteristic he possessed, and he had a good many, she disapproved silently.

“Sabina does not like me” he assured Accia,

who was jealous of everybody who liked her husband. 4 4 She only cares for her father’s son, Faustulus.”

“But that is you,” Accia pointed out.

“Oh, no! The Faustulus she feels it her duty to have a regard for is merely the head of the Faustuli, the descendant and representative of that tedious shepherd. Tm not tedious, am I, Accia?”

“No, but she is — I don’t want to be a Roman Matron and look like a statue.”

“You don’t a bit. You don’t walk this way.”

And Accia laughed herself back into goodhumour to see him imitate his sister’s majestic gait. “As if she had no feet, only a pedestal,” she declared, clapping her plump hands.

Sabina knew well enough that her sister-inlaw did not like her, and it troubled her very little: she could dispense as easily with the affection of a perverse kitten. But it had seemed hard to her that the frightened girl (for at thirty Accia really was a girl still, and need not have been at such pains to set up for one) should have only had the sister-in-law she shrank from at her side, as she lay confronted with the chill approach of death, instead of the cheerful, easy, careless, selfish husband whom she really liked in her fashion.

Accia had indulged in quite a number of flirtations which Faustulus knew all about and did not grudge her in the least, entirely refusing to wonder whether they were serious or no. Sabina had heard about them too, up in her castle among the hills by Olibanum, and their notoriety had angered her deeply. Nevertheless she knew, as well as Faustulus himself, that if the vain, silly, pleasure-loving, sensuous wife had anything like sincere affection for anyone it was for her idle, selfish, self-indulgent, utterly conscienceless husband.

Had Faustulus beaten her, quite soundly, and kissed away her noisy tears afterwards, Accia would have liked him, perhaps, all the better: and Sabina, for her part, would have thought the beatings thoroughly wholesome, whether Accia liked him better or not : but such archaic discipline was far too old-fashioned for Faustulus: besides he hated tears and scenes and reconciliations, and had no grudge against faulty conduct which did not interfere with his own. Accia had annoyed him more by dying than by any previous indiscretion ; and her life had never been discreet. For their station they were not at all rich, and she had been incurably extravagant — the table in his room was littered now with outrageous bills of hers : but there were plenty of his own, and it was rather the people whose creditors they both were whom he regarded as the common enemy: not that he had any very deep enmity to them either: when you have no present intention of paying your bills your grudge against your creditors need not be rancorous.

Faustulus was more sorry for Accia’s death for her sake than for his own: naturally, she had wished to live, and, as she had enjoyed her vacuous, shallow life, it seemed hard she should be deprived of it.

Poor Accia! where was she now? In the Elysian Fields? He half smiled as the trite smug phrase rose to his lips. He did not believe in the Elysian Fields at all. He did not believe in anything, neither in the gods, nor in men, nor in himself. He was no worse than half the gods, and most of the men he knew were about as good as himself : that he was bad he did not feel; it is good men, remembering their faults, who feel themselves bad.

“The Elysian Fields! Fancy Accia in the Elysian Fields ! How it would bore her! Of course she is really nowhere. . . But that, too, seemed bleak and dismal, till he remembered that it merely meant that she was precisely where she had been about thirty years ago. At all events she was no longer in pain — and Accia never could have borne pain for long: or even uncomfortable, as she had loudly complained of being for some weeks.

That he could himself do very well without her was so obvious that he did not state the fact even in his inmost mind — it was not his way to make obvious statements. For years it had been his daily task to keep her in good humour — that he should have taken the trouble was a proof of his being at any rate goodhumoured himself : what had helped him was the sense it gave him of his own tact and skill. To know that you are doing a rather difficult thing constantly and almost easily is a tribute to your powers. Faustulus was an artist with the knowledge of his own achievement : he did not want people to wonder at his patience with a tiresome wife; he merely prevented her as often as possible from being tiresome. Still it had been an effort, and he was too indolent not to feel some relief in the knowledge that no further effort would be called for. He had never in the least disliked Accia : instead of yielding to irritations at her many foibles he had chosen to find in them material for amusement — always conscious of the accomplishment it implied in himself. The fretfulness of a selfish and perverse child entertains some parents, and he had made a child of her, not at all against her will.

That he would miss her much he did not now pretend for a moment : his regret, such as it was, for her death was purely good-natured — on her own account; he had never grudged her her pleasures and would have liked her to go on living since that was her principal pleasure. She had been irritably jealous, though quite careless as to affording him grounds for jealousy; jealous even of her own children when he seemed more amused by them than by her. People called her good-natured, because she was a plump, easy-seeming creature, given to much noisy, rather causeless laughter. Faustulus knew she was not even good-tempered; and she was really stupid though able to make sharp, clumsy gibes at her friends, which she always did with a squealing laugh that made people think her merely kittenish and funny. She was greedy, liking nothing so much as good food. Her plumpness was not due entirely to her easy disposition : if she supped on the sly, with a wealthy or extravagant admirer, it was the supper she went for much more than for the society of her host.

Faustulus ate rather sparingly, though he would eat of the most delicate fare, and had an idea that women should not be seen eating at all; there should be little retired rooms for their repasts into which it would be an indelicacy for a man to enter. Accia, in spite of her rank, had many ways of a peasant, and would even eat audibly, and smack her lips a little when a dainty dish gave satisfaction, hut her husband would not remember that now; poor girl, her faults were all at an end; he had never borne heavily on them, why*should he recall them now?

And he was too courteous even to let himself remember that, practically, her death might prove a way out of difficulties which he had never chosen to weigh or face. They were in debt, and had been living at double the rate their income could cover ; as Accia had been responsible for at least the larger half of this expenditure, but he would not think of that.

He supped, lightly and briefly, alone, there in his own room. He would not go to the triclinium where he would have to sit with Sabina and it would be hard to ignore the solemn event of the day. When he had finished, there came a light knock at the door, and he supposed it was the slaves coming to take away the dishes. He remembered how that door used to be a grievance with Accia, who said he ought to have only a curtain; there was a curtain as well, but it hung inside, for he had been quite aware that his wife could listen at doors.

As no one entered he paused a moment before giving any signal for the person, whoever it was that knocked, to enter; it might be his sister and he wondered idly if the curtain prevented the light from showing under the door. Then the knock was repeated, a very humble, gentle knock, and he rose and went to the door. There was moonlight in the atrium now, and the fountain was silent. “Sabina,” he thought with his whimsical smile, “has had it stopped.”

By his door stood a slave, a mere girl, with a child pressed to her breast.

“Clodia!” he said, almost in a whisper, and drew back into his room.

“Do not be angry,” she said in a low voice of sad humility. For months she had not been there or put herself in his way.

“What is it?” he asked, closing the door noiselessly.

“The child,” she whispered, without raising her eyes from his feet. Less than a year ago he had thought those large, deep eyes beautiful. He had quite forgotten them. But, scamp as he was, his nature was not brutal, nor cruel. Because he was simply indifferent to the girl he did not treat her harshly, or order her away with rough authority.

“The child,” she murmured, pressing her baby closer to her.

He barely glanced at it. He was thinking for the moment of the child that had cost Accia her trivial life. He almost smiled again as he remembered that he did not even know yet whether it were boy or girl. That the slave should be thinking of her own baby, to-night, when all the house must be occupied with the fateful arrival of the other, did not even occur to him; for, though he laughed at pedigrees, he was aristocratic to his backbone, what there was of it.

“It is dead,” Clodia said simply, and pressed her baby closer.

For an instant he still thought she was speaking of Accia’s child; and, with easy good-nature, he wished that it might have died instead of, and not as well as, the mother.

“Dead too;” he exclaimed.

“Yes, too,” said Clodia, as one who might have said, “Death at all events is for slave and lord alike.”

Something in her voice and gesture did make him look more closely at her baby at last; the tiny hands were not pink, but bluish, and they did not close about the mother’s fingers.

Had Clodia expected him to care? God knows. She felt that he did not. Had he ever cared for anything? She was ashamed of caring for him still, but she did.

“The child,” she said simply, “is free.”

“I went,” she continued hurriedly, “to the Temple. I laid the child, between the two others, under the wolf. But he was not cured.”

She lifted her eyes at last, and said eagerly, in a strange, plain voice without a tear in it: “May I nurse the other one?”

“You would like to?” he asked, wondering to himself at the oddness of a sex that on the whole he disliked.

“It is yours, too, the other one,” she thought, but did not say so ; she was much prouder than the master who owned her, and ashamed of letting him see how she loved him. She only nodded.

“Very well,” he answered easily. It seemed wonderfully convenient. He was really pleased to think she might find some distraction from her merely personal disappointment in so practical a way.

“She wants me already,” the girl said quietly, turning to the door, still pressing to her breast the baby that wanted it no longer.

“So it’s another girl,” he said to himself, carelessly, closing the door, and glad that the interview was over.

“One baby or another it’s all the same to a woman,” he told himself, smiling at the queerness of things.

Then he sat down and took up a book, unrolling it daintily, for he was fond of books and always treated them respectfully. He remembered how Accia detested them and never let him read in her presence without interruption.

“It is a sign of an empty mind,” she would say, sententiously, “when people cannot sit still without a book in their hands. If one has ideas of one’s own one does not require other people’s at second hand. Poetry too! That’s the dullest sort of book. No one writes poetry who has anything to say he could not say in prose. Poets are people who don’t know what they have to write about ; so they put it in verse hoping it may turn out something.”

Chapter III

Faustulus had borne no selfish grudge against Accia for dying except for the abominable necessity it would lay upon him of presiding at her funeral. The funeral ceremonies were now all over, and her ashes had been duly deposited in their urn, in one of the niches of the family columbarium on the Appian Way. Her name was soon forgotten almost as completely as if she had never borne it. There was not much to remember about her: her beauty had never been more than prettiness, and it had barely lasted her time : she had never cared much for anyone, or done anything for anybody; and unwavering selfishness may secure a good deal of attention during life, but does not, in private persons, secure immortality afterwards.

“So you are going home,” Faustulus remarked with polite regret to his sister. He always was polite, not only to strangers, but even to his own family. But there was more politeness than regret in his voice.