Nicanor - Teller of Tales Part 10

"You love me," she repeated, not questioningly, but as one making statement of a fact. "Ay, I understand that. Why should I not?" Her voice grew tenderly solemn. "'Where thou art, Caius, there am I, Caia; and thy people shall be my people' ... _that_ is when one loves."

Nicanor cut her short with an exclamation.

"Ay, that is when happy other men and women love!" he said bitterly.

"But not for such as thou and I. For us, beloved, it means that where thou art, there I may not be; that all men, all circ.u.mstance, would strive to part us, since the world will have it that high blood may not mate with lowly."

"But why?" she asked. Her voice was wondering. "If two people love, is not that enough?"

"'If two people love,'" Nicanor repeated. He drew her back into his arms and turned her face upward to the stars and to his eyes. "Beloved, I have said I love thee with a love that must last through life and death and all that lies beyond. So, since I am what I must be, I have placed my life within thy hands for good or ill. Thou sayest 'If two people love.' Dost thou then love me?"

She raised her head and looked full at him.

"Ay, surely I love thee," she answered. "Thou hast told me tales so strange and wonderful that none were ever like them in the world before.

And thou hast been kind to me, nor ever scolded, nor called me fool, as does my lord father when I have displeased him. Does not one always love those who are kind to one? It is the least that one can do, I think. And yet ... I do not know. What is this love thou hast?"

"The most terrible thing in the world, and the sweetest," Nicanor answered, his eyes on hers. "It is a chain that binds life to life, and the links of the chain are drops of heart's blood. It is pain from which one would not seek relief. Men have called it a flower, beloved, but it is no flower, for flowers wither in a little s.p.a.ce, and die, and love hath eternal life. Ay, for it is eternal; and death, to it, is but a moment in the dark."

Varia caught her breath with a smothered sob.

"Ah, but I do love thee when thou talkest so!" she whispered. "Often I cannot understand thy words, but I can feel them, here,--" she clasped her hands above her heart,--"and sometimes they make me glad, and sometimes sorry, and sometimes they frighten me, and I do not at all know why. But always I long to hear more. They make me to want things I have not got, to know things I do not know, for I am very foolish. Oh, thou wizard of the silver tongue!" She raised both hands to his temples, and he could feel that her fingers shook. "Play not with me for the sake of thy sport, I pray thee! Ay, I am very foolish,--I know it,--for I may not understand how such things be; but thy speech leads me as a nurse leads her child by the hand, and I am afraid, because I cannot understand whither thou wouldst have me go."

"Play with thee! Beloved, it is no play to me," Nicanor answered. "I'd give thee all my life and soul, as I've given thee my heart, could I but keep from thee a moment's fear or sorrow." He bent his head and kissed her snowy eyelids. "Whatever G.o.d or G.o.ds there be that men may pray to, may they have thee, lady mine, in their holy keeping. Whoever they may be, I give thanks that this night they guarded thee--or was it the veil of thine own white innocence around thee?--for this night hath a beast been held at bay."

He let her go, and stood watching hungrily as she slipped away from him across the gra.s.s. Over the surrounding walls of the villa a faint gray mist came stealing. The song of the insects had died, and the world hung silent, awaiting the mystery of the day. The trees and bushes of the garden ma.s.sed themselves into denser shadow against the tinge of ghostly light. From somewhere, far away, a c.o.c.k crew, and another answered.

Nicanor listened until the faint click of a closing window reached him.

Suddenly he buried his face in his hands and stood an instant motionless, a dark and sombre figure in the gray loneliness of dawn.

Before the light had gathered strength for him to be more than a moving blot among the shadows, he pulled himself together with a quick shake of his shoulders, and vanished amid the tangle of vines and shrubbery that hid the little garden door.

p.a.w.nS AND PLAYERS

BOOK III

Book III

p.a.w.nS AND PLAYERS

I

The lord Eudemius, covered with tawny leopard skins, lay stretched on a couch of carven ebony in the library of the villa, of which the windows overlooked the great central courtyard. He was a tall man, spare, with black, sombre eyes, a high nose, and a wiry black beard, close clipped.

His hands, long and white and nervous, held a scroll which he kept slowly unwinding and letting roll together again. His face was remarkable for nothing save its complete impa.s.sivity; devoid of all expression, it was merely a mask behind which the man kept locked his real self and thoughts. A dish of fruit stood on a stand at his elbow.

With him in the room sat Livinius, the father of Marius, making notes with a stylus on a tablet of ivory coated with wax. The face of Livinius was grave, yet eager. He began to speak presently, as though continuing a conversation which had gone before.

"Rome has often needed gold, and has wrung it from the people mercilessly; but I tell you, Eudemius, that her need was never greater than in this hour. Ay, and not gold alone she must have, but brains to plan for her, hands to work for her, blood to be spilled for her. You, yourself, friend, have been soldier, senator, statesman. You know, as I know, and as every Roman in his soul must know, that the core of the trouble lies in the fact that she hath gathered in more than her two hands could hold. I would not see her other than she is,--mistress of the world; but I would first see her in a position to maintain that t.i.tle in the face of all challenge. And she is not in such position.

Outwardly, she hath all show of might, of force invincible and impregnable. But behind this, what is there? The weakness of dissension, where there should be solidarity; division of interests, where nothing can save but union; rottenness, where there should be wholesomeness and vigor. This is not treason I speak, but truth. We have served her in field and forum, you and I; we have offered our blood on her altars; we shall both carry the marks of her service until we die. And she hath paid us well. Now I am worn out, useless, and cast aside; she has taken all she would from me, even my son. But you, old friend, have still what she needs to offer. She needs gold; but more than that, she needs one, powerful as you are powerful, to come forward and point to more timid ones the way. When she enters her own once more, she will repay your loan with interest, for that hath ever been Rome's way. I tell you, Rome in these days is like a sinking s.h.i.+p, from which the rats scurry in swarms, to stand aside and wait to see if there be prospect of a safe return. Here, overseas, you get but an echo of the truth. Every day the call goes out for more troops, and more."

Eudemius nodded thoughtfully.

"So the Third Legion is to be recalled from Gaul to Rome. It is what may be expected, but I had not thought so soon. Their plans have been kept well secret. aetius will soon not have men enough for himself, not to speak of sending over men to our a.s.sistance. I suppose your son goes with them? It must be all of ten years since I saw him last."

"He hath changed," the father answered quietly. "Yes, he goes, and I go with him. Come thou with us, friend! What has Rome done to thee that thou shouldst not answer to her need? Now, if ever, is the time when her sons must rally to her, for with all her faults--and she hath many--she is still the mother of them all. I know well that it was within her walls that thy trouble fell upon thee; but was she to blame for that?"

Eudemius's dark face never changed from its graven inscrutability, but his thin hands clutched the scroll tighter and let it fall. Livinius eyed him tenderly.

"Is not the old wound healing, even yet?" he asked with great gentleness. For a moment silence fell. Then Eudemius, stooping from the couch to pick up the fallen roll, said in his hard and even voice, as though he discussed matters of small moment and everyday concern:

"Healing? Nay, how should it heal when each day fresh salt is rubbed into it? Take a look at it now, if you will, for hereafter we'll let it bide and rankle as it must. Tell me; have not your eyes seen changes, mental as well as physical, concerning which your lips have not questioned?"

"Changes? in you?" said Livinius, dropping into the other's more distant tone. "Ay, that is true, and my heart aches to see them. That is another reason why I urge your return to Rome. New scenes, new faces--your life is broken, yet a broken pitcher may be mended."

"True," Eudemius admitted evenly. "But who expects it to hold water again? Is it not rather placed upon the shelf and forgotten--if, indeed, it be not flung upon the rubbish-heap?"

"But think of this--" Livinius persisted. Eudemius broke in.

"Ay, I have thought of this and that, and this is all it comes to!" he said harshly. "That when I am gone, my name, blazoned in the annals of Rome before great Caesar was, must dwindle out to nothing with a weak girl. It came to me great, unstained, heavy with memories of soldiers, heroes, statesmen, who had borne it worthily and left it clean for their sons and their sons' sons. I made it the name of wealth as well as of greatness; I thought to hand it down to my sons and my sons' sons, as the fires of Vesta are handed down from one generation to the next. A son I prayed for--what any sodden carter is judged worthy to beget; a male child to uprear in the traditions of his house, to add, an he might, his share to the glory of it. A son to serve Rome as his fathers served. And what was born to me? A puling fool, not worthy even to breed her kind into the world. Were she blessed with wit, she might mate with one worthy of her blood and keep her name thus from complete extinction.

As it is--what man would have her to bear him mindless brats? Who would become sire to a race of idiots?"

Livinius scratched the wax of his tablet absently, and rubbed his finger over the mark.

"I have wondered often why you never married again," he remarked, tentatively. "It is fifteen years since Constantia's death; surely in that time you might have found a woman to become the mother of your sons."

"True, I might," Eudemius admitted, coolly. "But those fifteen years ago, through mine own folly and hatred of life after that double blow of her death and knowledge of the girl's condition,--for it was a blow, Livinius, since I was not then the wooden image of to-day,--there fell on me the judgment of the G.o.ds for such rebellion as mine." He turned his sombre eyes full on Livinius. "Would you believe, to see me as I sit here, that mine is a body racked by the tortures of the d.a.m.ned, drained of the very sap of life by disease that eats into every nerve and leaves it raw and quivering, yet that only numbs when its fury is spent, and will not kill? That time after time, when its throes are on me, I have turned craven and begged Claudius for a potion to end it all?" He laughed shortly, with no sound of merriment. "I marry again--a rotten hulk fit only for carrion!"

Livinius listened, shocked.

"Oh, my dear!" he exclaimed in honest sympathy, "is it indeed thus with thee? And I had thought of thee entering the harbor of thy rest, wealthy, honored, reconciled, perhaps, to what the G.o.ds in their wisdom had ordained for thee, to end thy days in quiet and content. For fifteen years, thou sayest. Man, how hast thou lived to tell it?"

Eudemius smiled, a smile which began at his lips and ended there, leaving his bitter eyes unlightened.

"Ay, fifteen years--and yet not so bad as that!" he said shortly. "Or it would have been well over with me by now. But I have known from the first what lay ahead. I won it from Claudius,--poor fool, how he trembled to tell me!--knew that each attack must be more severe than the one before; that each day the disease would stride forward a slow inch, no more, and no human skill might advance it or hold it back." His harsh voice sank a note lower. "At such times, when that grip closes upon me, I know not what I do. Rather, I know, yet am powerless to act otherwise.

I tell thee, Livinius, I have had slaves flogged, ay, tortured, before my eyes, to see if by chance I might find suffering greater than mine own. And if they died, I have had tortured those who let them die, for it is not death I want, but what I have found to be worse than death.

Judge then if I were not better out of the world! Yet the only way of release open to me I will not take, since I have not yet lost courage enough to brand myself a coward. I have told Claudius, on pain of death for disobedience, that no matter how I cry to him for peace, he shall pay no heed. Strange, is it not, that in this house the only happy thing is the cause of all the sorrow that hath entered it? And yet--perhaps it is not so strange. She is but the cause; on others fall the effects, ...

and in their wisdom the G.o.ds have ordered that only effects shall count in their scheme of things."

He put a hand over Livinius's hand, held it a moment, and let it go. For the first time he fell into the intimacy of the other's speech.

"Thank thee, old friend, for thy sympathy. It is not often that the gall of my bitterness overflows, for I have learned the wisdom of the Stoic at first hand. But I can claim scant sympathy here,--and would not if I could,--where men call me the Torturer behind my back and cringe like curs before my face. I am hard and cruel and calloused to the bone; yet were I not thus, in the name of the high G.o.ds, what should I be? A thing lower than man, who can be lower than the beasts; from which G.o.ds and men--ay, and beasts themselves--would turn in loathing. Thou art my childhood's friend; thy sympathy hath been sweet to me, and I've bared my heart to thee. I have said: 'The world runs thus and so with me; were it in my power, I'd have it otherhow. As it is, no good will come of its discussion, so let there be an end to it, now and for all time.'"

A quick step sounded on the marble floor; the curtains at the entrance parted, and Marius came in. He went clad in spotless white, which oddly accentuated his bulk and made his swarthiness darker by contrast. He stopped short at sight of the two apparently in earnest conversation.