A night and a day had slipped away since the death of the Bithynian.
Ships and boats from every part of the province had collected before
Besa to seek for the body of the drowned youth, the shores swarmed with
men, and cressets and torches had dimmed the moonlight on river and
shore all through the night; but they had not yet succeeded in finding
the body of the beautiful youth.
Hadrian had heard in what way Antinous had perished. He had required
Mastor to repeat to him more than once the last words of his faithful
companion and neither to add nor to omit a single syllable. Hadrian’s
accurate memory cherished them all and now he had sat till dawn and from
dawn till the sun had reached the meridian, repeating them again and
again to him self. He sat gloomily brooding and would neither eat nor
drink. The misfortune which had threatened him had fallen--and what a
grief was this! If indeed Fate would accept the anguish he now felt in
the place of all other suffering it might have had in store for him he
might look forward to years free from care, but he felt as though he
would rather have spent the remainder of his existence in sorrow and
misery with his Antinous by his side than enjoy, without him, all that
men call happiness, peace and prosperity.
Sabina and her escort had arrived-a host of men; but he had strictly
ordered that no one, not even his wife, was to be admitted to his
presence. The comfort of tears was denied him, but his grief gripped
him at the heart, clouded his brain and made hint so irritably sensitive
that an unfamiliar voice, though even at a distance, disturbed him and
made him angry.
The party who had arrived by water were not allowed to occupy the tents
which had been pitched for them not far from his, because he desired to
be alone, quite alone, with his anguish of spirit. Mastor, whom he had
hitherto regarded rather a useful chattel than as a human creature, now
grew nearer to him--had he not been the one witness of his darling’s
strange disappearance. Towards the close of this, the most miserable
night he had ever known, the slave asked him whether he should not fetch
the physician from the ships, he looked so pale; but Hadrian forbade it.
“If I could only cry like a woman,” he said, “or like other fathers
whose sons are snatched away by death, that would be the best remedy.
You poor souls will have a bad time now, for the sun of my life has lost
its light and the trees by the way-side have lost their verdure.”
When he was alone once more he sat staring into vacancy and muttered to
himself:
“All mankind should mourn with me for if I had been asked yesterday how
perfect a beauty might be bestowed on one of their race I could have
pointed proudly to you, my faithful boy and have said, ‘Beauty like that
of the gods.’ Now the crown is cut off from the trunk of the palm
and the maimed thing can only be ashamed of its deformity; and if all
humanity were but one man it would look like one who has had his right
eye torn out. I will not look on the monsters, lean and fat, that
they may not spoil my taste for the true type! Oh faithful, lovable,
beautiful boy! What a blind, mad fool have you been! And yet I cannot
blame your madness. You have pierced my soul with the deepest thrust
of all and yet I cannot even be angry with you. Superhuman! godlike was
your faithful devotion. Aye, indeed, it was!” As he thus spoke he rose
from his seat and went on resolutely and decidedly:
“Here I stretch out this my right hand-hear me, ye Immortals! Every city
in the Empire shall raise an altar to Antinous, and the friend of whom
you have robbed me I will make your equal and companion. Receive him
tenderly, oh, ye undying rulers of the world! Which among you can boast
of beauty greater than his? and which of you ever displayed so much
goodness and faithfulness as your new associate?”
This vow seemed to have given Hadrian some comfort. For above half
an hour he paced his tent with a firmer tread, then he desired that
Heliodorus his secretary might be called.
The Greek wrote what his sovereign dictated. This was nothing less than
that henceforth the world should worship a new divinity in the person of
Antinous.
At noonday a messenger in breathless haste came to say that the body of
the Bithynian had been found. Thousands flocked to see the corpse, and
among them Balbilla, who had behaved like a distracted creature when she
heard to what an end her idol had come. She had rushed up and down the
river-bank, among the citizens and fishermen, dressed in black mourning
robes and with her hair flying about her. The Egyptians had compared her
to the mourning Isis seeking the body of her beloved husband, Osiris.
She was beside herself with grief, and her companion implored her in
vain to calm herself and remember her rank and her dignity as a woman.
But Balbilla pushed her vehemently aside, and when the news was brought
that Nile had yielded up his prey she rushed on foot to see the body,
with the rest of the crowd.
Her name was in every mouth, everyone knew that she was the Empress’
friend, and so she was willingly and promptly obeyed when she commanded
the bearers who carried the bier on which the recovered body lay to set
it down and to lift up the sheet which shrouded it. Pale and trembling,
she went up to it and gazed down at the drowned man; but only for a
moment could she endure the sight. She turned away with a shudder,
and desired the bearers to go on. When the funeral procession had
disappeared and she could no longer hear the shrill wailing of the
Egyptian women, and no longer see them streaking their breast, head, and
hair with damp earth and flinging up their arms wildly in the air, she
turned to her companion and said calmly: “Now, Claudia, let us go home.”
In the evening at supper she appeared dressed in black, like Sabina and
all the rest of the suite, but she was calm and ready with an answer to
every observation.
Pontius had travelled with them from Thebes to Besa, and she had
spared him nothing that could punish him for his long absence, and had
mercilessly compelled him to listen to all her verses on Antinous.
He meanwhile had been perfectly cool about it, and had criticised her
poems exactly as if they had referred not to a man of flesh and blood
but to some statue or god. This epigram he would praise, the next he
would disparage, a third condemn. Her confession that she had been in
the habit of complimenting Antinous with flowers and fruit he heard with
a shrug of the shoulders, saying pleasantly: “Give him as many presents
as you will; I know that you expect no gifts from your divinity in
return for your sacrifices.”
His words had surprised and delighted her. Pontius always understood
her, and did not deserve that she should wound him. So she let him gaze
into her soul, and told him how much she loved Antinous so long as
he was absent. Then she laughed and confessed that she was perfectly
indifferent to him as soon as they were together.
When, after the Bithynian’s death, she lost all self-control he simply
let her alone, and begged Claudia to do the same.
The same day that the body was found it was burnt on a pile of precious
wood. Hadrian had refused to see it when he learnt that the death by
drowning had terribly distorted the lad’s features.
A few hours after the ashes of the Bithynian had been collected and
brought in a golden vase to Hadrian, the Nile fleet was once more under
sail, this time with the Emperor on board one of the boats, to proceed
without farther halt to Alexandria.
Hadrian remained alone with only his slave and his secretary on the boat
that conveyed him; but he several times sent to Pontius to desire him
to come from the ship on which he was and visit him on his. He liked to
hear the architect’s deep voice, and discussed with him the plans which
Pontius had sketched for his mausoleum in Rome and the monument to his
lost favorite which he proposed to have erected from designs of his
own in the large city which he intended should stand on the site of the
little town of Besa, and which he had already named Antinoe. But
these discussions only took up a limited number of hours, and then the
architect was at liberty to return to Sabina’s boat, on which Balbilla
also lived.
A few days after they had quitted Besa he was sitting alone with the
poetess on the deck of the Nile boat which, borne by the current and
propelled by a hundred oars, was rapidly and steadily nearing its
destination. Ever since the death of the hapless favorite Pontius had
avoided mentioning him to her. She had now become as observant and as
talkative as before, and in her eyes there even shone at times a ray
of the old sunny gayety of her nature. The architect thought he
comprehended the characteristic change in her sentiments, and would not
allude to the cause of the violent but transient fever under which she
had suffered. “What did you discuss with Caesar to-day?” asked Balbilla
of her friend. Pontius looked down at the ground and considered whether
he could venture to utter the name of Antinous before the poetess.
Balbilla observed his hesitation and said:
“Speak on; I can hear anything. That folly is past and over.”
“Caesar is at work at the plans for a new town to be built and called
Antinoe, and a sketch for a monument to his ill-fated favorite,” said
Pontius. “He will not accept any help, but I have to teach him to
discriminate what is possible from what is impossible.”
“Ah! he is always gazing at the stars and you look steadily at the road
on which you are walking.”
“An architect can make no use of anything that is unsteady or that has
no firm foundation.”
“That is a hard saying, Pontius. It is true that during the last few
weeks I have behaved like a fool.”
“I only wish that every tottering structure could recover its balance as
quickly and as certainly as you! Antinous was a demigod for beauty, and
a good faithful fellow besides.”
“Do not speak of him any more,” exclaimed Balbilla shuddering. “He
looked dreadful. Can you forgive me for my conduct?”
“I never was angry with you.”
“But I lost your esteem.”
“No, Balbilla. Beauty, which is dear to us all, and which the Muse has
kissed, attracted your easily moved poet’s soul and it fluttered off at
random. Let it fly! My friend’s true womanly nature was never carried
away by it. She stands on a rock, that I am sure of.”
“How good and kind in you to say so--too good, too kind! for I am a
feeble creature, turned by every breeze that blows, a vain little fool
who does not know one hour what she may do the next, a spoilt child that
likes best to do the thing it ought to leave undone, a weak girl who
finds a pleasure in doing battle with men. For all in all--”
“For all in all a darling of the gods who to-day can climb the rocks
with a firm step and to-morrow lies dreaming in the sunshine among
flowers--for all in all a nature that has no equal and which lacks
nothing, nothing whatever that constitutes a true woman excepting--”
“I know what I lack,” cried Balbilla. “A strong man on whom I can
depend, whose warnings I can respect. You, you are that man; you and
none other, for as soon as I feel you by my side I find it difficult to
do what I know to be wrong. Here I am, Pontius! Will you have me with
all my moods, with all my faults and weaknesses?”
“Balbilla!” cried the architect, beside himself with heartfelt agitation
and surprise, and he pressed her hand long and fervently to-his lips.
“You will? You will take me? You will never leave me, you will warn,
support me and protect me?”
“Till my last day, till death, as my child, as the apple of my eye,
as--dare I say it and believe it?--as my love, my second self, my wife.”
“Oh! Pontius, Pontius,” she exclaimed, grasping his broad, right hand in
both her own. “This hour restores to the orphaned Balbilla, father and
mother and gives her besides the husband that she loves.”
“Mine, mine!” cried the architect. “Immortal gods! During half a
lifetime I have never found time, in the midst of labor and fatigue,
to indulge in the joys of love and now you give me with interest and
compound interest the treasure you have so long withheld.”
“How can you, a reasonable man, so over-estimate the value of your
possession? But you shall find some good in it. Life can no longer be
conceived of as worth having without the possessor.”
“And to me it has so long seemed empty and cold without you, you
strange, unique, incomparable creature.”
“But why did you not come sooner, and so give me no time to behave like
a fool?”
“Because, because,” said Pontius, gravely, “such a flight towards the
sun seemed to me too bold; because I remember that my father’s father--”
“He was the noblest man that the ancestor of my house attracted to its
greatness.”
“He was--consider it duly at this moment--he was your grandfather’s
slave.”
“I know it, but I also know, that there is not a man on earth who is
worthier of freedom than you are, or whom I could ask as humbly as I ask
you: Take me, poor, foolish Balbilla, to be your wife, guide me and make
of me whatever you can, for your own honor and mine.”
The brief Nile voyage brought days and hours of the highest happiness to
Balbilla and her lover. Before the fleet sailed into the Mareotic harbor
of Alexandria, Pontius revealed his happy secret to the Emperor. Hadrian
smiled for the first time since the death of his favorite, and desired
the architect to bring Balbilla to him.
“I was wrong in my interpretation of the Pythian oracle,” said he, as he
laid the poetess’s hand in that of Pontius. “Would you like to know how
it runs Pontius--do not prompt me, my child. Anything that I have read
through once or twice I never forget. Pythia said:
‘That which thou boldest most precious and dear shall be torn from
thy keeping,
And from the heights of Olympus, down shalt thou fall in the dust;
Still the contemplative eye discerns under mutable sand-drifts
Stable foundations of stone, marble and natural rock.’
“You have chosen well girl. The oracle guaranteed you a safe road to
tread through life. As to the dust of which it speaks, it exists no
doubt in a certain sense, but this hand wields the broom that will sweep
it away. Solemnize your marriage in Alexandria as soon as you will, but
then come to Rome, that is the only condition I impose. A thing I always
have at heart is the introduction of new and worthy members into the
class of Knights, for it is in that way alone that its fallen dignity
can be restored. This ring, my Pontius, gives you the rank of eques, and
such a man as you are, the husband of Balbilla and the friend of Caesar
may no doubt by-and-bye find a seat in the Senate. What this generation
can produce in stone and marble, my mausoleum shall bear witness to.
Have you altered the plan of the bridge?”