The Last Days of Pompeii

by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

  ‘Well,’ said Sallust, ‘thou wilt be worthy of thy Eastern name and fame if thou canst learn aught from him; but thou mayst try. Poor Glaucus!—and he had such an excellent appetite! He eats nothing now!’

  The benevolent epicure was moved sensibly at this thought. He sighed, and ordered his slaves to refill his cup.

  ‘Night wanes,’ said the Egyptian; ‘suffer me to see thy ward now.’

  Sallust nodded assent, and led the way to a small chamber, guarded without by two dozing slaves. The door opened; at the request of Arbaces, Sallust withdrew—the Egyptian was alone with Glaucus.

  One of those tall and graceful candelabra common to that day, supporting a single lamp, burned beside the narrow bed. Its rays fell palely over the face of the Athenian, and Arbaces was moved to see how sensibly that countenance had changed. The rich color was gone, the cheek was sunk, the lips were convulsed and pallid; fierce had been the struggle between reason and madness, life and death. The youth, the strength of Glaucus had conquered; but the freshness of blood and soul—the life of life—its glory and its zest, were gone for ever.

  The Egyptian seated himself quietly beside the bed; Glaucus still lay mute and unconscious of his presence. At length, after a considerable pause, Arbaces thus spoke:

  ‘Glaucus, we have been enemies. I come to thee alone and in the dead of night—thy friend, perhaps thy saviour.’

  As the steed starts from the path of the tiger, Glaucus sprang up breathless—alarmed, panting at the abrupt voice, the sudden apparition of his foe. Their eyes met, and neither, for some moments, had power to withdraw his gaze. The flush went and came over the face of the Athenian, and the bronzed cheek of the Egyptian grew a shade more pale. At length, with an inward groan, Glaucus turned away, drew his hand across his brow, sunk back, and muttered:

  ‘Am I still dreaming?’

  ‘No, Glaucus thou art awake. By this right hand and my father’s head, thou seest one who may save thy life. Hark! I know what thou hast done, but I know also its excuse, of which thou thyself art ignorant. Thou hast committed murder, it is true—a sacrilegious murder—frown not—start not—these eyes saw it. But I can save thee—I can prove how thou wert bereaved of sense, and made not a free-thinking and free-acting man. But in order to save thee, thou must confess thy crime. Sign but this paper, acknowledging thy hand in the death of Apaecides, and thou shalt avoid the fatal urn.’

  ‘What words are these?—Murder and Apaecides!—Did I not see him stretched on the ground bleeding and a corpse? and wouldst thou persuade me that I did the deed? Man, thou liest! Away!’

  ‘Be not rash—Glaucus, be not hasty; the deed is proved. Come, come, thou mayst well be excused for not recalling the act of thy delirium, and which thy sober senses would have shunned even to contemplate. But let me try to refresh thy exhausted and weary memory. Thou knowest thou wert walking with the priest, disputing about his sister; thou knowest he was intolerant, and half a Nazarene, and he sought to convert thee, and ye had hot words; and he calumniated thy mode of life, and swore he would not marry Ione to thee—and then, in thy wrath and thy frenzy, thou didst strike the sudden blow. Come, come; you can recollect this!—read this papyrus, it runs to that effect—sign it, and thou art saved.’

  ‘Barbarian, give me the written lie, that I may tear it! I the murderer of Ione’s brother: I confess to have injured one hair of the head of him she loved! Let me rather perish a thousand times!’

  ‘Beware!’ said Arbaces, in a low and hissing tone; ‘there is but one choice—thy confession and thy signature, or the amphitheatre and the lion’s maw!’

  As the Egyptian fixed his eyes upon the sufferer, he hailed with joy the signs of evident emotion that seized the latter at these words. A slight shudder passed over the Athenian’s frame—his lip fell—an expression of sudden fear and wonder betrayed itself in his brow and eye.

  ‘Great gods!’ he said, in a low voice, ‘what reverse is this? It seems but a little day since life laughed out from amidst roses—Ione mine—youth, health, love, lavishing on me their treasures; and now—pain, madness, shame, death! And for what? What have I done? Oh, I am mad still?’

  ‘Sign, and be saved!’ said the soft, sweet voice of the Egyptian.

  ‘Tempter, never!’ cried Glaucus, in the reaction of rage. ‘Thou knowest me not: thou knowest not the haughty soul of an Athenian! The sudden face of death might appal me for a moment, but the fear is over. Dishonour appals for ever! Who will debase his name to save his life? who exchange clear thoughts for sullen days? who will belie himself to shame, and stand blackened in the eyes of love? If to earn a few years of polluted life there be so base a coward, dream not, dull barbarian of Egypt! to find him in one who has trod the same sod as Harmodius, and breathed the same air as Socrates. Go! leave me to live without self-reproach—or to perish without fear!’

  ‘Bethink thee well! the lion’s fangs: the hoots of the brutal mob: the vulgar gaze on thy dying agony and mutilated limbs: thy name degraded; thy corpse unburied; the shame thou wouldst avoid clinging to thee for aye and ever!’

  ‘Thou ravest; thou art the madman! shame is not in the loss of other men’s esteem—it is in the loss of our own. Wilt thou go?—my eyes loathe the sight of thee! hating ever, I despise thee now!’

  ‘I go,’ said Arbaces, stung and exasperated, but not without some pitying admiration of his victim, ‘I go; we meet twice again—once at the Trial, once at the Death! Farewell!’

  The Egyptian rose slowly, gathered his robes about him, and left the chamber. He sought Sallust for a moment, whose eyes began to reel with the vigils of the cup: ‘He is still unconscious, or still obstinate; there is no hope for him.’

  ‘Say not so,’ replied Sallust, who felt but little resentment against the Athenian’s accuser, for he possessed no great austerity of virtue, and was rather moved by his friend’s reverses than persuaded of his innocence—’say not so, my Egyptian! so good a drinker shall be saved if possible. Bacchus against Isis!’

  ‘We shall see,’ said the Egyptian.

  Suddenly the bolts were again withdrawn—the door unclosed; Arbaces was in the open street; and poor Nydia once more started from her long watch.

  ‘Wilt thou save him?’ she cried, clasping her hands.

  ‘Child, follow me home; I would speak to thee—it is for his sake I ask it.’

  ‘And thou wilt save him?’

  No answer came forth to the thirsting ear of the blind girl: Arbaces had already proceeded far up the street; she hesitated a moment, and then followed his steps in silence.

  ‘I must secure this girl,’ said he, musingly, ‘lest she give evidence of the philtre; as to the vain Julia, she will not betray herself.’

  Chapter VIII

  * * *

  A Classic Funeral.

  WHILE Arbaces had been thus employed, Sorrow and Death were in the house of Ione. It was the night preceding the morn in which the solemn funeral rites were to be decreed to the remains of the murdered Apaecides. The corpse had been removed from the temple of Isis to the house of the nearest surviving relative, and Ione had heard, in the same breath, the death of her brother and the accusation against her betrothed. That first violent anguish which blunts the sense to all but itself, and the forbearing silence of her slaves, had prevented her learning minutely the circumstances attendant on the fate of her lover. His illness, his frenzy, and his approaching trial, were unknown to her. She learned only the accusation against him, and at once indignantly rejected it; nay, on hearing that Arbaces was the accuser, she required no more to induce her firmly and solemnly to believe that the Egyptian himself was the criminal. But the vast and absorbing importance attached by the ancients to the performance of every ceremonial connected with the death of a relation, had, as yet, confined her woe and her convictions to the chamber of the deceased. Alas! it was not for her to perform that tender and touching office, which obliged the nearest relative to endeavor to catch the last breath—the parting soul—of the beloved
one: but it was hers to close the straining eyes, the distorted lips: to watch by the consecrated clay, as, fresh bathed and anointed, it lay in festive robes upon the ivory bed; to strew the couch with leaves and flowers, and to renew the solemn cypress-branch at the threshold of the door. And in these sad offices, in lamentation and in prayer, Ione forgot herself. It was among the loveliest customs of the ancients to bury the young at the morning twilight; for, as they strove to give the softest interpretation to death, so they poetically imagined that Aurora, who loved the young, had stolen them to her embrace; and though in the instance of the murdered priest this fable could not appropriately cheat the fancy, the general custom was still preserved.

  The stars were fading one by one from the grey heavens, and night slowly receding before the approach of morn, when a dark group stood motionless before Ione’s door. High and slender torches, made paler by the unmellowed dawn, cast their light over various countenances, hushed for the moment in one solemn and intent expression. And now there arose a slow and dismal music, which accorded sadly with the rite, and floated far along the desolate and breathless streets; while a chorus of female voices (the Praeficae so often cited by the Roman poets), accompanying the Tibicen and the Mysian flute, woke the following strain:

  THE FUNERAL DIRGE

  O’er the sad threshold, where the cypress bough

  Supplants the rose that should adorn thy home,

  On the last pilgrimage on earth that now

  Awaits thee, wanderer to Cocytus, come!

  Darkly we woo, and weeping we invite—

  Death is thy host—his banquet asks thy soul,

  Thy garlands hang within the House of Night,

  And the black stream alone shall fill thy bowl.

  No more for thee the laughter and the song,

  The jocund night—the glory of the day!

  The Argive daughters’ at their labours long;

  The hell-bird swooping on its Titan prey—

  The false AEolides upheaving slow,

  O’er the eternal hill, the eternal stone;

  The crowned Lydian, in his parching woe,

  And green Callirrhoe’s monster-headed son

  These shalt thou see, dim shadowed through the dark,

  Which makes the sky of Pluto’s dreary shore;

  Lo! where thou stand’st, pale-gazing on the bark

  That waits our rite to bear thee trembling o’er!

  Come, then! no more delay!—the phantom pines

  Amidst the Unburied for its latest home;

  O’er the grey sky the torch impatient shines—

  Come, mourner, forth!—the lost one bids thee come.

  As the hymn died away, the group parted in twain; and placed upon a couch, spread with a purple pall, the corpse of Apaecides was carried forth, with the feet foremost. The designator, or marshal of the sombre ceremonial, accompanied by his torch-bearers, clad in black, gave the signal, and the procession moved dreadly on.

  First went the musicians, playing a slow march—the solemnity of the lower instruments broken by many a louder and wilder burst of the funeral trumpet: next followed the hired mourners, chanting their dirges to the dead; and the female voices were mingled with those of boys, whose tender years made still more striking the contrast of life and death—the fresh leaf and the withered one. But the players, the buffoons, the archimimus (whose duty it was to personate the dead)—these, the customary attendants at ordinary funerals, were banished from a funeral attended with so many terrible associations.

  The priests of Isis came next in their snowy garments, barefooted, and supporting sheaves of corn; while before the corpse were carried the images of the deceased and his many Athenian forefathers. And behind the bier followed, amidst her women, the sole surviving relative of the dead—her head bare, her locks disheveled, her face paler than marble, but composed and still, save ever and anon, as some tender thought—awakened by the music, flashed upon the dark lethargy of woe, she covered that countenance with her hands, and sobbed unseen; for hers were not the noisy sorrow, the shrill lament, the ungoverned gesture, which characterized those who honored less faithfully. In that age, as in all, the channel of deep grief flowed hushed and still.

  And so the procession swept on, till it had traversed the streets, passed the city gate, and gained the Place of Tombs without the wall, which the traveler yet beholds.

  Raised in the form of an altar—of unpolished pine, amidst whose interstices were placed preparations of combustible matter—stood the funeral pyre; and around it drooped the dark and gloomy cypresses so consecrated by song to the tomb.

  As soon as the bier was placed upon the pile, the attendants parting on either side, Ione passed up to the couch, and stood before the unconscious clay for some moments motionless and silent. The features of the dead had been composed from the first agonized expression of violent death. Hushed for ever the terror and the doubt, the contest of passion, the awe of religion, the struggle of the past and present, the hope and the horror of the future!—of all that racked and desolated the breast of that young aspirant to the Holy of Life, what trace was visible in the awful serenity of that impenetrable brow and unbreathing lip? The sister gazed, and not a sound was heard amidst the crowd; there was something terrible, yet softening, also, in the silence; and when it broke, it broke sudden and abrupt—it broke, with a loud and passionate cry—the vent of long-smothered despair.

  ‘My brother! my brother!’ cried the poor orphan, falling upon the couch; ‘thou whom the worm on thy path feared not—what enemy couldst thou provoke? Oh, is it in truth come to this? Awake! awake! We grew together! Are we thus torn asunder? Thou art not dead—thou sleepest. Awake! awake!’

  The sound of her piercing voice aroused the sympathy of the mourners, and they broke into loud and rude lament. This startled, this recalled Ione; she looked up hastily and confusedly, as if for the first time sensible of the presence of those around.

  ‘Ah!’ she murmured with a shiver, ‘we are not then alone!’ With that, after a brief pause, she rose; and her pale and beautiful countenance was again composed and rigid. With fond and trembling hands, she unclosed the lids of the deceased; but when the dull glazed eye, no longer beaming with love and life, met hers, she shrieked aloud, as if she had seen a spectre. Once more recovering herself she kissed again and again the lids, the lips, the brow; and with mechanic and unconscious hand, received from the high priest of her brother’s temple the funeral torch.

  The sudden burst of music, the sudden song of the mourners announced the birth of the sanctifying flame.

  HYMN TO THE WIND

  I

  On thy couch of cloud reclined,

  Wake, O soft and sacred Wind!

  Soft and sacred will we name thee,

  Whosoe’er the sire that claim thee—

  Whether old Auster’s dusky child,

  Or the loud son of Eurus wild;

  Or his who o’er the darkling deeps,

  From the bleak North, in tempest sweeps;

  Still shalt thou seem as dear to us

  As flowery-crowned Zephyrus,

  When, through twilight’s starry dew,

  Trembling, he hastes his nymph to woo.

  II

  Lo! our silver censers swinging,

  Perfumes o’er thy path are flinging—

  Ne’er o’er Tempe’s breathless valleys,

  Ne’er o’er Cypria’s cedarn alleys,

  Or the Rose-isle’s moonlit sea,

  Floated sweets more worthy thee.

  Lo! around our vases sending

  Myrrh and nard with cassia blending:

  Paving air with odorous meet,

  For thy silver-sandall’d feet!

  III

  August and everlasting air!

  The source of all that breathe and be,

  From the mute clay before thee bear

  The seeds it took from thee!

  Aspire, bright Flame! aspire!

  Wild wind!�
�awake, awake!

  Thine own, O solemn Fire!

  O Air, thine own retake!

  IV

  It comes! it comes! Lo! it sweeps,

  The Wind we invoke the while!

  And crackles, and darts, and leaps

  The light on the holy pile!

  It rises! its wings interweave

  With the flames—how they howl and heave!

  Toss’d, whirl’d to and fro,

  How the flame-serpents glow!

  Rushing higher and higher,

  On—on, fearful Fire!

  Thy giant limbs twined

  With the arms of the Wind!

  Lo! the elements meet on the throne

  Of death—to reclaim their own!

  V

  Swing, swing the censer round—

  Tune the strings to a softer sound!