“It is a disappointment,” said Pudens. “I had counted upon Corbulo. But what do you suggest?”
“That is exactly what I have been thinking of. It would be a risk to go westward again; though once in Spain or Germany you might be safe. No; I should advise you to stay here, or hereabouts. I have an idea,” he resumed, after a few minutes’ silence. [302] “You must tell me what you think about it. Briefly, it is this; enlist under another name in the local force which our King here keeps up. It is a somewhat audacious plan, but none the worse for that. You can wear the beard which you have grown during your three months’ illness. It is not uncommon in the force. That will be something of a disguise.”
The suggestion was carried out, and with success. No one thought of looking for a conspirator in hiding among the troops of King Antiochus, and so no one found him. The events of the years that followed may be told in a few words. Two years after his enlistment Pudens heard of the fate of Corbulo, a fate which singularly justified his friend’s conception of his character. Not long after he had the relief of hearing that Nero was dead. In the year of civil strife that followed this event, the year which saw three Emperors fall in rapid succession, he was, happily for himself, better employed than in supporting one pretender or another. Vespasian, appointed to command the legions of Syria in the year of Corbulo’s death, had a keen eye for a good soldier; he saw the capacity of Pudens, and offered him a place on his personal staff, during the earlier operations of the Jewish war. Vespasian, going to Rome in the autumn of 69 to take possession of the Imperial throne, handed over his aide-de-camp to Titus. A brilliant period of service followed. The most famous siege in history, the siege of Jerusalem, was going on, and Pudens had a share in all its perils and glories.
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MEETING AGAIN
[303] JERUSALEM fell on September 2nd. About six weeks after, Pudens was once more in Rome, the bearer of a despatch from Titus to his father, the Emperor, announcing his success, and giving the details of the final assault and of the events which followed it.
He had reached Rome late at night, too late to present himself at the palace. He snatched a few hours of sleep at an inn which was conveniently near, and proceeded to discharge his duty at the earliest possible hour next morning. The day had scarcely dawned, but the Emperor’s ante-chamber was already open, and already contained two or three occupants. Vespasian was a very early riser, and Pudens, who announced himself to the usher in waiting as the bearer of despatches from the army of the East, was not kept waiting more than two or three minutes. Admitted to the Imperial presence, he met with a very warm greeting from his old chief; the despatches were read, and the information they contained had, of course, to be supplemented by a number of details which Pudens was able to supply. The interview [304] was naturally protracted to a very great length, and when Pudens was at last dismissed, not without a hearty assurance of future favour from the Emperor, he found the ante-chamber crowded with applicants who had been vainly waiting for an audience. Their hopes were summarily dashed, at least for the day, by an announcement from the usher that the Emperor was too much occupied by a sudden pressure of business to see any other visitor that morning.
A groan of disappointment went up from the little crowd.
“You have done us all an ill turn, sir,” said a young man with a remarkably clever face and brilliant eyes, shabbily dressed, but evidently a gentleman. “But doubtless your business with the Emperor was much more important than all of ours put together. You are a soldier, I see, and if I guess rightly, from the East. Is your news a secret, may I ask?”
“Not at all,” answered Pudens. “All Rome may, and probably will, know it in the course of a few hours. Briefly, Jerusalem is taken.”
“Ah!” said the other, “there have been rumours of the kind about for the last two or three days. And so it has actually happened. No wonder that the Emperor could think of nothing else.”
“I hope, sir,” said our hero, “that the business which I unwittingly interrupted or postponed was not very pressing?”
His new acquaintance, whom I may introduce to [305] my readers by his full name of M. Valerius Martialis, smiled. “Certainly not, it was a trifle. I have a little poem in my pocket, which I should be glad if you would do me the favour of hearing at your leisure, and I wanted to get an order for some more of the same kind from the Emperor. To tell you the truth, he does not care much for poets and their verses, and his ideas of remuneration are of the most moderate kind. A very frugal person, sir, is C?sar. Perhaps it is as well, for another Nero would certainly have made the Empire hopelessly bankrupt; but still there’s a limit, and when it comes to paying ten sesterces a line for really tolerable verses,�if I may say so much of my own work,�one may say that the virtue is a little in excess.”
“I hope,” remarked Pudens, “that private patrons are more liberal, and that there are those who buy.”
“As for private patrons,” returned the poet, “there are good and bad, and as I said of my own epigrams, a few good and more bad. As for the public that buy, very little of their money comes to us. The publishers send us in large bills, and what with copying, price of parchment, ink, vermilion, pumice-stone, polishing, and I know not what else, there is very little left. And then, if a book does sell, there are rascals who copy it, and give us nothing at all. But I am running on, and tiring you with things that don’t interest you. Will you dine with me to-day? [306] Mind, there will be simple poet’s fare�a few oysters, a roast kid, and a jar of Alban wine. If you want flowers or perfume or Falernian, you must even bring them yourself.”
Pudens, who had very few friends in Rome, gladly accepted.
“Remember, then,” said the poet, “at the eleventh hour. (Footnote: About five o’clock. This would be late. Fashionable people dined early.) I have some work to do, and I cannot afford to be fashionable and early.”
“You must see the great beauty about whom all the golden youth of Rome is raving,” said Martial, in the course of their after-dinner talk. “That is to say, if you can contrive it, for it is no easy matter to catch a glimpse of her. She is never at the theatre or the Circus. Her mother�mother by adoption, you will understand�is a very strange person, follows some curious superstition, I am told, the chief part of which, it seems, is to take all the pleasure out of life. But the girl is a great beauty, not in our Roman style at all, but dazzlingly fair, a British princess they say she is, whatever that may mean.”
Pudens, of course, recognized Claudia in this description. He did not care to betray his acquaintance with her, nor indeed to encourage his host in talking about her. Martial’s way of speaking about women, was, to be candid, not very edifying, and [307] though he had nothing but good to say about this northern beauty, Pudens did not care to hear her name upon his lips.
The years which the young soldier had spent between his departure from the capital and his return to it had been a time in which he had learnt and thought much. In particular, the knowledge of Christianity which he had begun to acquire under the instruction of Linus had been greatly deepened and broadened. The new faith had been commended to him by the purity, the courage, the self-devotion of its professors. He now began to realize what a power it already was, to what vast proportions it was likely to grow. In the East, while he was living in Antioch, and afterwards, while he was in camp before the walls of Jerusalem, he had many opportunities of hearing the marvellous history of its origin and its growth. Scarcely a single generation had passed since it had been founded by an obscure Galilean peasant, and already there was not a city or town, scarcely a village, in which it did not possess a company, often a very numerous company, of devoted followers. The young man had never heard or read of anything like it. That, he felt, could be no mere superstition, which, without any attraction of pomp or power, offering to its followers nothing but a life of self-denial, made burdensome by the hatred and contempt of society, had yet found disciples wherever it had come. Here was something which, before [308] long, would match, and more than match, the world-wide influence of the great Roman Empire itself. The impression thus made had been deepened by his intercourse with men, of whom he met not a few both at Antioch and in Jud?a, who had had personal knowledge both of the Founder and of his first followers. The story which they had to tell of wonders which they had witnessed, and of which, in some cases, they had been themselves the subjects, interested him profoundly. He was even more touched by the picture they drew of a sanctity, a purity, a burning zeal for the good of mankind, which was more marvellous than the healing of the sick, the restoring of sight to the blind, even the bringing back of the dead to life.