Within a few minutes after Hermas had flung himself out of window into
the roadway, Phoebicius walked into his sleeping-room. Sirona had had
time to throw herself on to her couch; she was terribly frightened, and
had turned her face to the wall. Did he actually know that some one
had been with her? And who could have betrayed her, and have called him
home? Or could he have come home by accident sooner than usual?
It was dark in the room, and he could not see her face, and yet she kept
her eyes shut as if asleep, for every fraction of a minute in which she
could still escape seeing him in his fury seemed a reprieve; and yet her
heart beat so violently that it seemed to her that he must hear it, when
he approached the bed with a soft step that was peculiar to him.
She heard him walk up and down, and at last go into the kitchen that
adjoined the sleeping-room. In a few moments she perceived through her
half-closed eyes, that he, had brought in a light; he had lighted a lamp
at the hearth, and now searched both the rooms.
As yet he had not spoken to her, nor opened his lips to utter a word.
Now he was in the sitting-room, and now--involuntarily she drew herself
into a heap, and pulled the coverlet over her head--now he laughed
aloud, so loud and scornfully, that she felt her hands and feet turn
cold, and a rushing crimson mist floated before her eyes. Then the light
came back into the bed-room, and came nearer and nearer. She felt her
head pushed by his hard hand, and with a feeble scream she flung off the
coverlet and sat up.
Still he did not speak a word, but what she saw was quite enough to
smother the last spark of her courage and hope, for her husband’s eyes
showed only the whites, his sallow features were ashy-pale, and on his
brow the branded mark of Mithras stood out more clearly than ever. In
his right hand he held the lamp, in his left Hermas’ sheepskin.
As his haggard eye met hers he held the anchorite’s matted garment so
close to her face, that it touched her. Then he threw it violently on
the floor, and asked in a low, husky voice, “What is that?”
She was silent. He went up to the little table near her bed; on it stood
her night-draught in a pretty colored glass, that Polykarp had brought
her from Alexandria as a token, and with the back of his hand he swept
it from the table, so that it fell on the dais, and flew with a crash
into a thousand fragments. She screamed, the greyhound sprang up and
barked at the Gaul. He seized the little beast’s collar, and flung it
so violently across the room, that it uttered a pitiful cry of pain. The
dog had belonged to Sirona since she was quite a girl, it had come
with her to Rome, and from thence to the oasis; it clung to her with
affection, and she to it, for Iambe liked no one to caress and stroke
her so much as her mistress. She was so much alone, and the greyhound
was always with her, and not only entertained her by such tricks as any
other dog might have learned, but was to her a beloved, dumb, but by no
means deaf, companion from her early home, who would prick its ears when
she spoke the name of her dear little sisters in distant Arelas, from
whom she had not heard for years; or it would look sadly in her face,
and kiss her white hands, when longing forced tears into her eyes.
In her solitary, idle, childless existence Iambe was much, very much,
to her, and now as she saw her faithful companion and friend creep
ill-treated and whining up to her bed--as the supple animal tried
in vain to spring up and take refuge in her lap, and held out to his
mistress his trembling, perhaps broken, little paw, fear vanished from
the miserable young woman’s heart--she sprang from her couch, took the
little dog in her arms, and exclaimed with a glance, which flashed with
anything rather than fear or repentance: “You do not touch the poor
little beast again, if you take my advice.”
“I will drown it to-morrow morning,” replied Phoebicius with perfect
indifference, but with an evil smile on his flaccid lips. “So many
two-legged lovers make themselves free to my house, that I do not see
why I should share your affections with a quadruped into the bargain.
How came this sheepskin here?” Sirona vouchsafed no answer to this
last question, but she exclaimed in great excitement, “By God--by your
God--by the mighty Rock, and by all the gods! if you do the little beast
a harm, it will be the last day I stop in your house.”
“Hear her!” said the centurion, “and where do you propose to travel to?
The desert is wide and there is room and to spare to starve in it, and
for your bones to bleach there. How grieved your lovers would be--for
their sakes I will take care before drowning the dog to lock in its
mistress.”
“Only try to touch me,” screamed Sirona beside herself, and springing
to the window. “If you lay a finger on me, I will call for help, and
Dorothea and her husband will protect me against you.”
“Hardly,” answered Phoebicius drily. “It would suit you no doubt to find
yourself under the same roof as that great boy who brings you colored
glass, and throws roses into your window, and perhaps has strewed the
road with them by which he found his way to you to-day. But there are
nevertheless laws which protect the Roman citizen from criminals and
impudent seducers. You were always a great deal too much in the house
over there, and you have exchanged your games with the little screaming
beggars for one with the grownup child, the rose-thrower-the fop, who,
for your sake, and not to be recognized, covers up his purple coat with
a sheepskin! Do you think, you can teach me anything about lovesick
night-wanderers and women?
“I see through it all! Not one step do you set henceforth across Petrus’
threshold. There is the open window--scream--scream as loud as you will,
and let all the people know of your disgrace. I have the greatest mind
to carry this sheepskin to the judge, the first thing in the morning.
I shall go now, and set the room behind the kitchen in order for you;
there is no window there through which men in sheepskin can get in to
my house. You shall live there till you are tamed, and kiss my feet, and
confess what has been going on here to-night. I shall learn nothing from
the senator’s slaves, that I very well know; for you have turned all
their heads too--they grin with delight when they see you. All friends
are made welcome by you, even when they wear nothing but sheepskin. But
they may do what they please--I have the right keeper for you in my
own hand. I am going at once--you may scream if you like, but I should
myself prefer that you should keep quiet. As to the dog, we have not yet
heard the last of the matter; for the present I will keep him here. If
you are quiet and come to your senses, he may live for aught I care;
but if you are refractory, a rope and a stone can soon be found, and the
stream runs close below. You know I never jest--least of all just now.”
Sirona’s whole frame was in the most violent agitation. Her breath came
quickly, her limbs trembled, but she could not find words to answer him.
Phoebicius saw what was passing in her mind, and he went on, “You may
snort proudly now; but an hour will come when you will crawl up to me
like your lame dog, and pray for mercy. I have another idea--you will
want a couch in the dark room, and it must be soft, or I shall be
blamed; I will spread out the sheepskin for you. You see I know how to
value your adorer’s offerings.”
The Gaul laughed loud, seized the hermit’s garment, and went with
the lamp into the dark room behind the kitchen, in which vessels and
utensils of various sorts were kept. These he set on one side to turn
it into a sleeping-room for his wife, of whose guilt he was fully
convinced.
Who the man was for whose sake she had dishonored him, he knew not, for
Miriam had said nothing more than, “Go home, your wife is laughing with
her lover.”
While her husband was still threatening and storming, Sirona had said to
herself, that she would rather die than live any longer with this man.
That she herself was not free from fault never occurred to her mind. He
who is punished more severely than he deserves, easily overlooks his own
fault in his feeling of the judge’s injustice.
Phoebicius was right; neither Petrus nor Dorothea had it in their power
to protect her against him, a Roman citizen. If she could not contrive
to help her self she was a prisoner, and without air, light, and freedom
she could not live. During his last speech her resolution had been
quickly matured, and hardly had he turned his back and crossed the
threshold, than she hurried up to her bed, wrapped the trembling
greyhound in the coverlet, took it in her arms like a child, and ran
into the sitting-room with her light burden; the shutters were still
open of the window through which Hermas had fled into the open. With the
help of a stool she took the same way, let herself slip down from the
sill into the street, and hastened on without aim or goal--inspired only
by the wish to escape durance in the dark room, and to burst every bond
that tied her to her hated mate--up the church-hill and along the road
which lead over the mountain to the sea.
Phoebicius gave her a long start, for after having arranged her prison
he remained some time in the little room behind the kitchen, not in
order to give her time, collect his thoughts or to reflect on his future
action, but simply because he felt utterly exhausted.
The centurion was nearly sixty years of age, and his frame, originally a
powerful one, was now broken by every sort of dissipation, and could no
longer resist the effects of the strain and excitement of this night.
The lean, wiry, and very active man did not usually fall into these
fits of total enervation excepting in the daytime, for after sundown
a wonderful change would come over the gray-headed veteran, who
nevertheless still displayed much youthful energy in the exercise of his
official duties. At night his drooping eyelids, that almost veiled his
eyes, opened more wildly, his flaccid hanging under-lip closed firmly,
his long neck and narrow elongated head were held erect, and when, at a
later hour, he went out to drinking-bouts or to the service in honor
of Mithras, he might often still be taken for a fine, indomitable young
man.
But when he was drunk he was no longer gay, but wild, braggart, and
noisy. It frequently happened that before he left the carouse, while he
was still in the midst of his boon-companions, the syncope would come
upon him which had so often alarmed Sirona, and from which he could
never feel perfectly safe even when he was on duty at the head of his
soldiers.
The vehement big man in such moments offered a terrible image of
helpless impotence; the paleness of death would overspread his features,
his back was as if it were broken, and he lost his control over every
limb. His eyes only continued to move, and now and then a shudder shook
his frame. His people said that when he was in this condition, the
centurion’s ghastly demon had entered into him, and he himself believed
in this evil spirit, and dreaded it; nay, he had attempted to be
released through heathen spells, and even through Christian exorcisms.
Now he sat in the dark room on the sheepfell, which in scorn of his wife
he had spread on a hard wooden bench. His hands and feet turned cold,
his eyes glowed, and the power to move even a finger had wholly deserted
him; only his lips twitched, and his inward eye, looking back on the
past with preternaturally sharpened vision, saw, far away and beyond,
the last frightful hour.
“If,” thought he, “after my mad run down to the oasis, which few younger
men could have vied with, I had given the reins to my fury instead of
restraining it, the demon would not have mastered me so easily. How that
devil Miriam’s eyes flashed as she told me that a man was betraying me.
She certainly must have seen the wearer of the sheepskin, but I lost
sight of her before I reached the oasis; I fancy she turned and went up
the mountain. What indeed might not Sirona have done to her? That woman
snares all hearts with her eyes as a bird-catcher snares birds with his
flute. How the fine gentlemen ran after her in Rome! Did she dishonor me
there, I wonder? She dismissed the Legate Quintillus, who was so
anxious to please me--I may thank that fool of a woman that he became my
enemy--but he was older even than I, and she likes young men best. She
is like all the rest of them, and I of all men might have known it. It
is the way of the world: to-day one gives a blow and to-morrow takes
one.”
A sad smile passed over his lips, then his features settled into a stern
gravity, for various unwelcome images rose clearly before his mind, and
would not be got rid of.
His conscience stood in inverse relation to the vigor of his body. When
he was well, his too darkly stained past life troubled him little;
but when he was unmanned by weakness, he was incapable of fighting the
ghastly demon that forced upon his memory in painful vividness those
very deeds which he would most willingly have forgotten. In such hours
he must need remember his friend, his benefactor, and superior officer,
the Tribune Servianus, whose fair young wife he had tempted with a
thousand arts to forsake her husband and child, and fly with him into
the wide world; and at this moment a bewildering illusion made him fancy
that he was the Tribune Servianus, and yet at the same time himself.
Every hour of pain, and the whole bitter anguish that his betrayed
benefactor had suffered through his act when he had seduced Glycera, he
himself now seemed to realize, and at the same time the enemy that had
betrayed him, Servianus, was none other than himself, Phoebicius, the
Gaul. He tried to protect himself and meditated revenge against the
seducer, and still he could not altogether lose the sense of his own
identity.
This whirl of mad imagining, which he vainly endeavored to make clear
to himself, threatened to distract his reason, and he groaned aloud; the
sound of his own voice brought him back to actuality.
He was Phoebicius again and not another, that he knew now, and yet he
could not completely bring himself to comprehend the situation. The
image of the lovely Glycera, who had followed him to Alexandria, and
whom he had there abandoned, when he had squandered his last piece of
money and her last costly jewels in the Greek city, no longer appeared
to him alone, but always side by side with his wife Sirona.
Glycera had been a melancholy sweetheart, who had wept much, and laughed
little after running away from her husband; he fancied he could hear
her speaking soft words of reproach, while Sirona defied him with loud
threats, and dared to nod and signal to the senator’s son Polykarp.
The weary dreamer angrily shook himself, collected his thoughts, doubled
his fist, and lifted it angrily; this movement was the first sign of
returning physical energy; he stretched his limbs like a man awaking
from sleep, rubbed his eyes, pressed his hands to his temples; by
degrees full consciousness returned to him, and with it the recollection
of all that had occurred in the last hour or two.
He hastily left the dark room, refreshed himself in the kitchen with a
gulp of wine, and went up to the open window to gaze at the stars.
It was long past midnight; he was reminded of his companions now
sacrificing on the mountain, and addressed a long prayer “to the crown,”
“the invincible sun-god,” “the great light,” “the god begotten of the
rock,” and to many other names of Mithras; for since he had belonged to
the mystics of this divinity, he had become a zealous devotee, and could
fast too with extraordinary constancy. He had already passed through
several of the eighty trials, to which a man had to subject himself
before he could attain to the highest grades of the initiated, and the
weakness which had just now overpowered him, had attacked him for the
first time, after he had for a whole week lain for hours in the snow,
besides fasting severely, in order to attain the grade of “lion.”
Sirona’s rigorous mind was revolted by all these practices, and the
decision with which she had always refused to take any part in them,
had widened the breach which, without that, parted her from her husband.
Phoebicius was, in his fashion, very much in earnest with all these
things; for they alone saved him in some measure from himself, from dark
memories, and from the fear of meeting the reward of his evil deeds in
a future life, while Sirona found her best comfort in the remembrance of
her early life, and so gathered courage to endure the miserable present
cheerfully, and to hold fast to hope for better times.
Phoebicius ended his prayer to-day--a prayer for strength to break
his wife’s strong spirit, for a successful issue to his revenge on her
seducer--ended it without haste, and with careful observance of all the
prescribed forms. Then he took two strong ropes from the wall, pulled
himself up, straight and proud, as if he were about to exhort his
soldiers to courage before a battle, cleared his throat like an orator
in the Forum before he begins his discourse, and entered the bedroom
with a dignified demeanor. Not the smallest suspicion of the possibility
of her escape troubled his sense of security, when, not finding Sirona
in the sleeping-room, he went into the sitting-room to carry out the
meditated punishment. Here again--no one.
He paused in astonishment; but the thought that she could have fled
appeared to him so insane, that he immediately and decisively dismissed
it. No doubt she feared his wrath, and was hidden under her bed or
behind the curtain which covered his clothes. “The dog,” thought he, “is
still cowering by her--” and he began to make a noise, half whistling
and half hissing, which Iambe could not bear, and which always provoked
her to bark angrily--but in vain. All was still in the vacant room,
still as death. He was now seriously anxious; at first deliberately, and
then with rapid haste, he threw the light under every vessel, into
every corner, behind every cloth, and rummaged in places that not even
a child--nay hardly a frightened bird could have availed itself of for
concealment. At last his right hand fairly dropped the ropes, and his
left, in which he held the lamp, began to tremble. He found the shutters
of the sleeping-room open; where Sirona had been sitting on the seat
looking at the moon, before Hermas had come upon the scene. “Then she is
not here!” he muttered, and setting the lamp on the little table, from
which he had just now flung Polykarp’s glass, he tore open the door, and
hurried into the courtyard. That she could have swung herself out into
the road, and have set out in the night for the open desert, had not yet
entered into his mind. He shook the door that closed in the homestead,
and found it locked; the watch-dogs roused themselves, and gave tongue,
when Phoebicius turned to Petrus’ house, and began to knock at the door
with the brazen knocker, at first softly and then with growing anger; he
considered it as certain that his wife had sought and found protection
under the senator’s roof. He could have shouted with rage and anguish,
and yet he hardly thought of his wife and the danger of losing her,
but only of Polykarp and the disgrace he had wrought upon him, and the
reparation he would exact from him, and his parents, who had dared to
tamper with his household rights--his, the imperial centurion’s.
What was Sirona to him? In the flush of an hour of excitement he had
linked her destiny to his.
At Arelas, about two years since, one of his comrades had joined their
circle of boon-companions, and had related that he had been the witness
of a remarkable scene. A number of young fellows had surrounded a boy
and had unmercifully beaten him--he himself knew not wherefore. The
little one had defended himself bravely, but was at last overcome by
numbers. “Then suddenly,” continued the soldier, “the door of a house
near the circus opened, and a young girl with long golden hair flew out,
and drove the boys to flight, and released the victim, her brother, from
his tormentors. She looked like a lioness,” cried the narrator, “Sirona
she is called, and of all the pretty girls of Arelas, she is beyond
a doubt the prettiest.” This opinion was confirmed on all sides, and
Phoebicius, who at that time had just been admitted to the grade of
“lion” among the worshippers of Mithras, and liked very well to hear
himself called “the lion,” exclaimed, “I have long been seeking a
lioness, and here it seems to me that I have found one. Phoebicius and
Sirona--the two names sound very finely together.”
On the following day he asked Sirona of her father for his wife, and
as he had to set out for Rome in a few days the wedding was promptly
celebrated. She had never before quitted Arelas, and knew not what she
was giving up, when she took leave of her father’s house perhaps for
ever. In Rome Phoebicius and his young wife met again; there many
admired the beautiful woman, and made every effort to obtain her favor,
but to him she was only a lightly won, and therefore a lightly valued,
possession; nay, ere long no more than a burden, ornamental no doubt
but troublesome to guard. When presently his handsome wife attracted
the notice of the legate, he endeavored to gain profit and advancement
through her, but Sirona had rebuffed Quintillus with such insulting
disrespect, that his superior officer became the centurion’s enemy, and
contrived to procure his removal to the oasis, which was tantamount to
banishment.
From that time he had regarded her too as his enemy, and firmly believed
that she designedly showed herself most friendly to those who seemed
most obnoxious to him, and among these he reckoned Polykarp.
Once more the knocker sounded on the senator’s door; it opened, and
Petrus himself stood before the raging Gaul, a lamp in his hand.