Lepidus the centurion; a Roman of to-day

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. I EXHUME MYSELF I

II. THE SLEEPER AWAKENED 15

Chapter I

T HERE could be no doubt about it : I, Louis Allanby, Squire and J.P., young, healthy, in full possession of all those faculties with which it had pleased Providence to bless me at my birth, and in the enjoyment of a rent roll exceeding even in these hard times three thousand per annum, was unequivocally bored !

I was bored to death of sleek sufficiency that afternoon on which this narrative begins. I was sick of the good fellowship of those laughing men and women who drank my wine, and rode my horses back yonder at the Manor House; there was no pride in my wide acres, no pleasure in the stream that ran speckled with summer sunshine through the park ; my rods were idle, I hated my guns — if I had only been a little more vicious there might have been fun in life for me, and if I had been virtuous i there might have been contentment. But I was a blank, a cipher, a healthy living nonentity, and in gloomy knowledge of the fact I had strolled out into the pine woods to sulk over my good fortune that pleasant summer afternoon.

Had I been a fool, life might have been pleasanter, for an empty head and heart are easily filled, but I was not absolutely that. At school “ young Allanby ” was branded as the cleverest — and laziest — fellow in his class. At college he broke the hearts of two well-meaning tutors, and then astounded friends and enemies alike by plunging red-hot one day from a rat hunt into the sacred quiet of the examination hall and emerging with a creditable degree!

And thus it had been with me always; wasting my opportunities so assiduously, that my well wishers could but thank Providence my stomach would never have to rely on my head for sustenance ; and even my dear widowed mother sighed as she put away in lavender all the womanly ambitions she had had for me, and tried to console herself with the vague reflection that if I failed in everything else, at least I might make a creditable country bumpkin.

Amongst my studies at college, classics had always interested me. In my dullest moments the rhetoric of those fine old Romans who wrote for a young world with the ardour of youth rarely failed somehow to stir a current in my stagnant blood, and thus it was that on the afternoon in question, being especially dull, I had wandered through the dusty library at the Manor, and brought out the topmost volume of a pile someone had thrown out from the shelves in a hasty quest. It was not much of a book to look at, but as it was quite certain to bore me as efficiently as any other of its fellow thousands, I strolled away with it; down over the tennis-courts, where the peach-cheeked girls were playing tennis; down where, at the garden bottom, the stream widened out into a lake, dotted with water-lilies and shadowed by fringing trees, and thence sauntering along its rim, through meadow-sweet and yellow water flags, till the reedy mere narrowed again, and crossing the neck by a rustic bridge, I turned up into the firs on the hillside.

Here was comparative peace. The ridiculous laughter of those strawberry-sucking jades was lost in the distance ; the glitter of the pool came up only here and there in gold spangles into this welcome gloom, the brown pine needles were soft under foot, the sigh of the wind in the resinous boughs overhead sounded to me like the monotonous pulse of my life, and with a growl of discontent at all things and all men, I pulled that book from my pocket and dipped into its crabbed pages.

Bah! it was the stupidest stuff in a hundred stupid books I had sampled that week. The classic fool, where I opened on him, was declaring life to be splendid and extensive, passing on and on while each continuous soul, broadening and brightening some distant goal, wore out as it went through the ages many bodies — the giddiest rubbish that was ever handed down by time to prove that some day, as the circles of existence were completed, those who lived when that classic dreamer penned his nonsense in ancient Rome would be ripe again — would be due each ancient spirit to inhabit once more a human form and tread this earth anew — what nonsense ! I did not even try to understand the writer closely, I dimly gathered what he meant by a glance at his first half-dozen headings, then, for comment, shut his ancient leather covers with a snap, and flung him into a bush for stoats and weasels to study at their leisure.

And yet there was a certain dreamy pleasantness in the idea. One must believe something, I idly speculated as I leant against a rock and stared at the freckled sunshine through the leaves — and why not this ? Such a scheme would give a man a chance to amend his misdeeds in new lives, pay his debts and collect his rents, moral and spiritual. Even if that mildewed old heathen in the gorse bush at my feet had not lighted on the absolute truth, yet he might have been on the trail of it. Even I myself had often thought I felt at times something of that which I had never experienced in fact, and had knowledge somewhere in my remotest nature of things of which I had not had experience; why should not all this be the dim evidence of some such scheme as that ancient writer had concocted ?

I brooded over it for an hour or so, not in truth making much of the fancy, and then sauntered on again, hands in pockets, whistling to my idleness, until, half way round the steep forest knoll overlooking the valley, and deep in shadowy pine and juniper, a sprightly little squirrel caught my eye, and then another. They were love making, poor beasts, and I smiled to see their ardour. The little lady in russet was dodging round and round a tree stem, now head up, now tail, and the gentleman after her, his bead eyes glittering with excitement. Round and round, to and fro, in splendid merriment and fun, up and down, round and round the branches, till at last the breathless pursued was fairly “ cornered ” — driven in a careless moment to the end of a broken limb, and retreat cut off behind ! Surely he had her now. I heard him squeak with exultation, and a ripple of joy seemed to run up his bushy tail, but in a twinkling the lady had thrown herself off into the air, had lit safely on the moss twenty feet below, had rushed to a fallen pine tree, and spinning round and round its prostrate stem half-a-dozen times in sheer exuberance of fun and spirit, went off into the distant undergrowth with a long start, and her wooer hot in pursuit again.

But for those little beasts, this book might never have been written. I walked over to the broken pine, a fine stem fallen only a night or two before, and you know how such a one lies? The green head, crushed by its descent, rested, a confused mass, in the shadow of the nearest trees ; the red bole, straight as an arrow, gleamed in the slanting sunshine coming through the gap above left by its fall, and beyond, the great shield of root-tangled turf and gravel stood upright over the broad scar of earth it had left exposed. Going round behind that ragged buttress I kicked the loose new rubble idly with my foot, and as I did so, noticed a squared corner of stone amongst the rest. The angles were clear and sharp, and my first idea was to stoop and pick it up, but it would not come. I cleared a little more sand and rubbish away with a boot tip, thinking nothing of the find as yet, and then saw it was not a broken brick or such like lying before me, but the corner of an earth-fast flag stone.

This began to be interesting, and I stood still a minute or two, half amused and half surprised. There certainly had been an ancient settlement hereabouts, I told myself, though never as far as we knew upon this hill, and in the Manor hall were two glass cases of red Roman pottery dug up from a field half-a-mile down the stream. But this hill had always been unexplored and silent — sacred to shadows and sleep; how could this well-trimmed flagstone, newly laid bare, have come here, and were there more like it ? I set to work diligently, with a flat bit of stone for spade, and, as the rubble was all loose, and the slab lay flat and shallow, soon defined its shape, and, what was more, to my increasing wonder discovered a bronze ring at the further edge, green with age, but sound and perfect still. It was like the cover of a well, and when I had given my find a final brush down with a wisp of bracken leaves, I stood perspiring and staring at it with silent interest — yes, the first genuine interest that had stirred my stagnant pulses for many weeks.

Then it goes without saying, I wanted to see what was below ; but though, taking off my coat, I tugged at that bronze ring until my muscles ached, it would not move. So strategy had to come to the aid of main strength, and fetching a stout fir branch from the neighbouring heap, one end was pushed in under the flag-stone, and leaning all my weight upon the lever, after a breathless moment or two, with a strange thrill of delight and fascination, I saw the soil gape, a black crack start and fly round the dusty square of the block, and directly afterwards the loosened stone rose on its rear as I worked at it — up until it was perpendicular, and then a final push sent it floundering over on its bronze-ringed back in a cloud of dust, and left me master of whatever lay hidden down underneath.

A square, deep hole, black as midnight, lay before me, whence rose the quaintest, the most antique of smells, as I stood gaping over it. I have often thought there is more in the philosophy of scents than we yet recognise — that maybe the way to our souls through our derided noses is as short as any other — but, anyhow, that quaint aroma coming up from the black void fascinated me. It was not wicked, nor unpleasant, yet somehow that impalpable taint, that breath of long silence and suspension sent my blood to my head, and the courage out of my knees for a moment, as though a voice had spoken, or I had seen some sight of terror down in that black patch before me. Fortunately no one witnessed my momentary weakness; 'the repose of the afternoon woods was all around, the curtain of the shadows hid that little arena from all outsiders, and the now drooping sun began to pour his rays right across the mouth of the hollow.

I looked again, and by the yellow gleam saw the hole was not so deep as had seemed at first — it was scarcely deeper than my own six feet of height, with a broad step at the bottom, and a show of sandy floor beyond — why, if that was all, there was nothing so dreadful about the matter ; and the smell, too, had all but passed away. Probing the bottom with my fir pole, and finding it as it looked, firm and substantial, I hesitated a minute, then boldly dropped through the opening on to the smooth floor below.

Black darkness again for a minute or two to my unaccustomed eyes, with an awe-inspiring silence! Then, as I came to see better, slowly four narrow walls built themselves up out of the shadows, walls of rough strange masonry with courses of red tiles showing dimly round them, plain, unsmoothed, rising from a clean-swept sandy base, and across that floor, right in the mid of the little underground chamber, there rose to my strengthening vision from the gloom an oblong block of masonry, island-like in the shadows, and my heart beat a trifle faster again as I noticed there was something grey, indefinite and mysterious stretched out upon it ! I stood for a moment flat against the entrance wall, a white butterfly hovering, I remember, daintily in the golden gleam just overhead, then slowly and stealthily sidled into the chamber with a tumultuous rush of feelings in my heart out of all proportion to the necessities of the case.

By the great Jove, there was something on that central bier, something human and long, its shape only dimly shown by sad sage-coloured wrappings that seemed to be falling to pieces, so old they were, even as I looked. It was a man for certain, perfect in outline, now that I could see his geography, and stepping over to the pile, I picked up a corner of the dusty cloth covering his face, and drew it gently off. It was not, as might have been expected, only the bare framework of extinct humanity lying there so still beneath it, but the head and shoulders of a being marvellously preserved, singularly and extraordinarily life-like. I gazed with amazement at the dim outline of those features for a space, then, urged I know not by what, pulled down the dusty rags again wherewith he was covered, inch by inch, until he was unshrouded to his knees — a well-built supple fellow in ancient clothes, about my height and make — it was marvellous to see him lie there so still ii and perfect, and I eyed him over while a cool, resinous, refreshing breath from the pine trees outside came down into our den, and a square patch of sunlight crept up the bier lying in a pool of brightness upon his feet — I looked him up and down, and the third time could almost have sworn that one of his skyward pointing toes twitched under its dusty coverings. An absurd idea! It was, of course, but the wavering reflection of a pine branch against the blue sky, or a freak of my excited fancy, and to give my nerves time to cool, I fell to exploring the crypt as well as might be in the uncertain light.

The place was absolutely bare and void of interest, except on the wall farthest from the entrance. There, directly in a line with the recumbent figure's head was a tablet, and on it, to my delight, an inscription. Most lovingly those faded letters were dusted with a handkerchief, and fingered over until they came out with something of their pristine freshness.

“ Marcus Lepidus, the Centurion," I translated to myself, “ is Asleep; Tread Lightly!"

Asleep ! I should think so, but how long had he slept? There was no date, not the slightest other sign or clue. Still it was something to know yonder old fellow was a Roman, and this a Roman-British tomb into which I had blundered so strangely.

What a good paper it would make for an antiquarian journal, and how those beflannelled tennis players would stare when the story was told to them at dinner-time!

I went over to my friend Lepidus again and gazed at him with folded arms and silent awe. It is not every day you come on such a page as this from the book of the Old World, and my classic reading was still fresh upon me. What a strange unkempt England it must have been to which this oliveskinned exile came ! Was it the galleys that brought him? — ‘two weeks of sour black bread and water as the peaked prow of the trireme plunged slowly through the black waters of Armorica. Or was it overland, over the green flats beyond Albi, round under the knees of the Southern sloping Alps, and so to Gaul and the British seas ? There were no refreshment rooms at Anderida when this traveller landed you may take it for certain, and walled Camulodunum fringed with marshes, Deva on the Northern estuary, Eboracum itself, and all those other citykeeps where the Roman eagle lorded it over interminable barbarian wastes — oh, for an hour’s remembrance of the things those tight-shut eyes had seen ! Poor Lepidus — I laid my hand across his face sympathetically, then snatched it away again, for I could have sworn the lid my finger touched had winked.

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It was too foolish, he was dead — dead for certain ; and yet as I bent over him a vague unreasonable dread rose within me. I stared and frowned at that dim, handsome, dusty face, then calling my pride to aid — and, thank God, that at least has never yet failed me — put a hand again lightly upon his chest. Poor heart, it was still enough, not a flutter now to tell how it must have pulsed and jumped once on a time. Think how it ran riot in its first battle, think how it jumped when the peach-cheeked Amymone, the proud, the unbending, on her way to the baths one day slipped a flower and her own warm fingers for a second into the Centurion’s hand! It was still enough now, still as still could be, ah !

Was I mad? was the warm, stagnant air of the place turning my brain? Wondering and smiling to myself like that, I had kept a hand upon the Roman bosom where it was impossible, incredible that a spark of life could be after all this lapse of time, and yet either all my faculties were false or something did move within there. Down in that hollow chest where the soldier’s heart had once been, under the very palm of my hand, as I speculated on his remote emotions there came a thrill, a swift rapid pulse for a moment, then a pause; and then clear, unmistakable, below my fingers a throb or two !

It would have turned anyone’s head. It turned mine. Away to the wall I sprang, then sidled to the shaft, copper coloured now with the last rays of the setting sun : put my toe into a crevice, and vaulted fairly out again into the fresh clean air as though invisible springs had sent me aloft. The big flagstone I had coolness enough to replace — it did not fit so well this time; 'there was an air space all the way round — and then set off, dusty, bewildered, and — must I say it? — fairly frightened out of my philosophy, down the hill, across the meadows, and so home just as the dressing bell was ringing for dinner, and the odour of the soup was steaming hallwards from the kitchens.

Chapter II

T HE evening meal was interminably long that night. I was barely civil to our guests, who set my strung nerves jarring with their chatter, their interminable small talk, their village gossip, their recounting of scores at tennis — how could I take them into my confidence, or tell them the wonderful story that was seething in my mind? My dear good mother saw my absent-mindedness and pallor, and as I never have grown or shall grow out of boyhood to her, she came into my room in her dressing-gown after I was in bed, and administered two pills to me — bless her kindly heart! — two of those pungent family pills whereof she alone knows the prescription, though I and her friends understand the efficacy. It was not medicine I wanted, but sympathy. I sat up with my chin between my knees, wondering, while she gently lectured me on the laws of digestion and sociability, whether I could trust her with my secret. But though all the sympathy was there, how could I expect that dear prosaic lady to rise to a tale of wild imagination, a narrative which I, in the full fever of it, could scarcely believe ? No, I kept my lips shut, and meekly promising to be more careful of my ‘diet, and not to smoke quite so much in future, took my pills in silence, and let her turn out the lights without an idea she had not solved my malady.

For an hour I tossed to and fro, while every shadow in the room shaped itself into the likeness of a gaunt, dusty Roman face, and when I eventually dropped off to sleep it was with the firm determination of having that vault hermetically sealed up on the morrow, and the biggest sapling fir on the estate planted on top of it.

And when I woke up the next morning, I found myself equally resolved that when breakfast was over I would go and see that wonderful thing again. Yesterday I was out of sorts. The dear mother was right, I had been bilious and silly ; my own irregular pulses had filled me with ridiculous imaginings, but now, what with the broad seven o'clock sunshine streaming into my room, and those blessed pills — either it was they or the confidence of another day which made me feel physically limp but morally courageous — clearing mind and body simultaneously — yes, I would certainly go and see the Centurion again — smoke a cigar over that poor brown

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husk of withered humanity, and once for all put the silly fancies of yesterday to flight.

So, the morning meal over, I slipped away with one of those excuses only too familiar of late, and making sure no one saw me, went off boldly to the fir-covered knoll. The nearer it came, however, the slower I went, till by the time the fir-trees were waving like black flags, and the steep needle-strewn path twisted up into the shadows just ahead, I was going very slowly indeed. What would there be in the crypt now ? All yesterday’s awe came back to me, and I was by no means so sure as I had been before breakfast that the throbbings of that long dead heart were all fancy. I could feel them again. What if this was the verge of a story-book romance, and those throbs had indeed been a faint flicker of real life miraculously preserved? Suppose it had increased, suppose the soldier had returned to existence, and, pushing back the slab that alone held him down, was stalking about the gloomy knoll in his rags? But this was sheer folly and cowardice. I straightened myself up and boldly marched into the clearing where the prone pine tree lay. All was still, nothing had altered, the silver dew was thick upon the ground — not a footstep had brushed it, while on a branch beyond, a blue wood-pigeon was pruning her wing feathers in the morning sunshine.

Whereat, plucking up heart of grace, I went over to the slab, and getting my fingers into the crack, pulled it up. All was well so far, a little rattle of gravel falling down the shaft perhaps, but not another sound.

Peeping and peering, I got down into the abyss, and at a glance satisfied myself the Centurion lay as he did before. This was just what a sane man would have expected, and it proved that yesterday I was a fool. A little angry with myself, I went over to the Roman, and stood by him, while my eyes got accustomed to the light. Yes, he was just as ever, a trifle rounder in outline I might have said had that not been impossible, a little fuller in chest and waist under the dingy rags somehow, but the same — just as he had been yesterday; and greatly relieved, I pulled down the coverlet from his face, then started back with a thrill of amazement.

The same, did I say? Why, he was as different as could bey The face was the same as before, and yet utterly, unmistakably different. Yesterday it had been dry and void, no more life in it than in a dead leaf. It had been perfect and uninjured in every respect, but a mere mask, a shred without a trace of the roundness of life in it. And now — I cannot express the extraordinary change that had taken place. It was still as silent, as grey as ever under its piled-up

*9 dust, but it was the face of a sleeper, of one immersed in profound and easy slumber, rather than the features of a mummy ! There could be no mistake about it! I rubbed my eyes and stared, and rubbed and stared again. There was no illusion, and a grim, desperate resolve to see this mystery out took possession of me. I shut my mouth resolutely, and peeled the stranger of his coverlet. It came off in cobwebbed tatters that fell in shreds from my fingers as I held them up, and underneath it there he lay at last, in his ragged Roman finery, plump, yes, certainly plumper than he had been, full, perfect, well proportioned, dirty with the harmless dirt of ages, but above all and everything, a sleeper, and not that other thing I had thought him.

Then a sort of frenzy seized me. I do not quite know for certain how it was, or what I did the next few minutes, but I know I vowed, there in that dismal place, that Lepidus should live again though I gave him half my life, and rushing to him, forgetting everything, all the strangeness of it, I chafed his hands, rubbed his olive knees, and at last, throwing myself upon him, chest to chest, did as they do who rouse drowning men, working his arms and breathing into his nostrils with all the strength and tenderness in me. At last, exhausted and panting, streaked and smudged with the Roman’s dust, I stepped back a space and looked intently. I had triumphed! With a gentle, regular movement his broad chest was rising and falling — you could measure its heave by the mortared cracks between the opposite stones, and there was the slightest twitching in one further toe — I shouted with unreasonable joy and rushing at him, whipped out my handkerchief (it was the Rector's black-eyed daughter Kate who had worked those initials fnto the corner, and Heaven only knows what soft and foolish hopes besides) and down upon my knees I went, taking the curly Roman head upon my left arm, while with my right hand wiping the dust from his cheeks as tenderly as a mother smooths out the fright from the face of her little one. “ Lepidus,” I whispered in his ear, “ wake ; I will have you wake ; by all the gods living and dead, by all you hope or fear, wake ! ’Tis I, Lepidus, — I say it, and you shall wake ! ” and I shook him till the dust rose in a grey cloud from end to end of that marvellous being.

As that fine impalpable powder, pungent and aggressive, entered the Roman nostrils, an extraordinary thing happened : I tell it nor more briefly than it came about. The whole geography of the recumbent face was contorted in an instant. An earthquake spasm shook cheek and chin, the dust of centuries fissured and cracked from side to side, the broad soldier forehead puckered itself into a portentous frown, the offended eagle-nose twitched and twitched again, and then with a mighty explosion that echoed round the crypt, the Roman gave a sneeze that sent me with an uncontrollable cry staggering back against the furthest wall.

Only cowards declare they are never frightened. Brave men often are — I am! At that particular moment, when the dusty grey figure on the block in the mid of that dim chamber showed such gross, such startling evidence of healthy life, I was as near to being scared out of my wits as I ever was. If there had been room for an ignominious flight, that course would certainly have commended itself to me. But the thing was between me and the narrow exit, and now as the sunshine gleamed down again between the curdling grey dust streaming upwards in long tongues through the orifice, I saw, with a thrill of wonder, Lepidus was moving; he was up, sitting there on the end of his own monument in a pool of light, kicking his heels against his own monumental slab. As for me, I spread my hands flat out upon the wall on either side and with staring eyes, invited the irresponsive stone and mortar to absorb me.

Presently our eyes met, as the strange being began to stare about him, and I felt that anything was possible in that moment of exquisite expectation. But, as so often happens at a supreme crisis, the occasion was not equal to its opportunities. Our eyes met across the intervening sand, we stared at each other grimly for a minute, and then in a husky and somewhat angry voice the wonder asked, “ What on earth are you shouting at? ”

I hung my head, until again the sleeper asked in a voice imperious in spite of its dustiness, “ I say, what were you shouting for? Can’t a gentleman lie down for an hour without being disturbed like this ? ” and I was constrained to reply that he had frightened me by sneezing.