Allinson, Anne C. E. . Roads from Rome
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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


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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


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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


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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


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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,


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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

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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


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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


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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


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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

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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.



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   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


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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


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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.