It was the time of vintage; all day songs had been echoing along the
hill-sides around the pleasant Gulf of Naples.
In the favourite country of the Romans, at Baiæ, famous for its
sulphur-baths, Baiæ of which the Augustan poets used to say,
_Nullus in orbe sinus Baiis prælucet amoenis,--_
idle folk were delighting in the country and Nature; there fairer and
more voluptuous than man.
It was an inviolate corner of that charming country, where the
imaginations of Horace, Propertius, and Tibullus lingered yet. Not a
single shadow of the monkish age had yet dulled that sunny littoral
between Vesuvius and Cape Misenum. Christianity it is true was not
denied there; but it was smilingly put by. Feminine sinners there were
not yet repentant. On the contrary honest women grew shy of virtue as
old-fashioned. When news of the Sibyl's prophecies arrived, menacing
the decrepit world with earthquake, or when came news of fresh crimes
and bigotries of Constantius, or of Persians invading the East, or
barbarians threatening the North, the lucky inhabitants of Baiæ,
closing their eyes, inhaled their delicious breeze full of the odour
of Falernian half-crushed in the wine-press, and consoled themselves
with an epigram. To forget the misfortunes of Rome and soothsay about
the end of the world, all that they needed was to send each other
gifts of pretty verses--
_Calet unda, friget æthra,
Simul innatat choreis
Amathusium renidens
Salis arbitræ et vaporis,
Flos siderum Dione!_
On the faces of the gayest Epicureans could be seen something at once
senile and puerile. Neither the fresh salt water of the sea bath nor
the warm sulphurous springs of Baiæ could completely cure the bodies
of these withered and chilly young men, bald and old at twenty, not
through their own debauches, but through sins of their ancestors;
youths on whom women, wisdom, and literature had begun to pall; witty
and impotent young men, in whose veins ran the blood of too late a
generation.
In one of the most flowery and pleasant nooks between Baiæ and Puteoli
and under the dark slopes of the Apennine, rose the white marble walls
of a villa.
Near the wide window, opening directly on the sea, so that from the
chamber sky and sea alone were visible, Myrrha was lying on a bed.
The doctors had not understood her malady; but Arsinoë, who watched
her sister day by day losing strength and vitality, had brought her
from Rome to the sea-coast.
Notwithstanding her illness Myrrha would clean and arrange her chamber
with her own hands, in imitation of nuns and hermits; and would
herself bring water, and attempt to wash linen, and do her own
cookery. For weeks, and to the very last stage of her illness, she
obstinately refused to go to bed, spending whole nights in prayer.
One day the terrified Arsinoë found a hair-shirt on the weak body of
her sister. Myrrha had taken all articles of luxury from her little
chamber, stripping it of curtains and ornaments, and leaving nothing
but a bed and a coarse wooden crucifix. The bare-walled room was "her
cell." She also fasted strictly and Arsinoë found it difficult to
oppose the gentle obstinacy of her will.
From the life of Arsinoë all listlessness had disappeared. She wavered
continually between hope of restoring Myrrha to health and despair at
losing her. And although she could not love her sister more
passionately than before, yet, dominated by the fear of their eternal
separation, she understood her own love more clearly.
Sometimes, with motherly pity, Arsinoë would gaze upon that wasted
face, and the little body in which so fierce a fire was burning. When
the sick girl refused wine and food prescribed by the physician,
Arsinoë would say in vexation--
"Do you think I am blind, Myrrha? Are you trying to kill yourself?"
"Are not life and death equal in our eyes?" answered the young girl,
with such earnestness that Arsinoë could only reply--
"You do not love me!..."