Chapter XIII

What Befell at Baiae

I

Cornelia was at Baiae, the famous watering-place, upon the classic Neapolitan bay,—­which was the Brighton or Newport of the Roman.  Here was the haunt of the sybarites, whose gay barks skimmed the shallow waters of the Lucrine lake; and not far off slumbered in its volcanic hollow that other lake, Avernus, renowned in legend and poetry, through whose caverns, fable had it, lay the entrance to the world of the dead.  The whole country about was one city of stately villas, of cool groves, of bright gardens; a huge pleasure world, where freedom too often became license; where the dregs of the nectar cup too often meant physical ruin and moral death.

Cornelia had lost all desire to die now.  She no longer thought of suicide.  Lentulus’s freedmen held her in close surveillance, but she was very happy.  Drusus lived, was safe, would do great things, would win a name and a fame in the world of politics and arms.  For herself she had but one ambition—­to hear men say, “This woman is the wife of the great Quintus Drusus.”  That would have been Elysium indeed.  Cornelia, in fact, was building around her a world of sweet fantasy, that grew so real, so tangible, that the stern realities of life, realities that had hitherto worn out her very soul, became less galling.  The reaction following the collapse of the plot against Drusus had thrown her into an unnatural cheerfulness.  For the time the one thought when she arose in the morning, the one thought when she fell asleep at night, was, “One day,” or “One night more is gone, of the time that severs me from Quintus.”  It was a strained, an unhealthy cheerfulness; but while it lasted it made all the world fair for Cornelia.  Indeed, she had no right—­from one way of thinking—­not to enjoy herself, unless it be that she had no congenial companions.  The villa of the Lentuli was one of the newest and finest at Baiae.  It rested on a sort of breakwater built out into the sea, so that the waves actually beat against the embankment at the foot of Cornelia’s chamber.  The building rose in several stories, each smaller than the one below it, an ornamental cupola highest of all.  On the successive terraces were formally plotted, but luxuriant, gardens.  Cornelia, from her room in the second story, could command a broad vista of the bay.  Puteoli was only two miles distant.  Vesuvius was ten times as far; but the eye swept clear down the verdant coast toward Surrentum to the southward.  At her feet was the sea,—­the Italian, Neapolitan sea,—­dancing, sparkling, dimpling from the first flush of morning to the last glint of the fading western clouds at eve.  The azure above glowed with living brightness, and by night the stars and planets burned and twinkled down from a crystalline void, through which the unfettered soul might soar and soar, swimming onward through the sweet darkness of the infinite.