Before Titianus could open his lips to reply, the principal door of the
room was opened cautiously but widely, and the praetor Lucius Aurelius
Verus, his wife Domitia Lucilla, the young Balbilla and, last of all,
Annaeus Florus, the historian, entered. All four were in the best
spirits, and immediately after the preliminary greetings, were eager to
report what they had seen at Lochias; but Sabina waved silence with her
hand, and breathed out:
"No, no; not at present. I feel quite exhausted. This long waiting, and
then--my smelling-bottle, Verus. Leukippe, bring me a cup of water with
some fruit-syrup--but not so sweet as usual."
The Greek slave-girl hastened to execute this command, and the Empress,
as she waved an elegant bottle carved in onyx, under her nostrils, went
on:
"It is a little eternity--is it not, Titianus, that we have been
discussing state affairs? You all know how frank I am and that I cannot
be silent when I meet with perverse opinions. While you have been away I
have had much to hear and to say; it would have exhausted the strength of
the strongest. I only wonder you don't find me more worn out, for what
can be more excruciating for a woman, that to be obliged to enter the
lists for manly decisiveness against a man who is defending a perfectly
antagonistic view? Give me water, Leukippe."
While the Empress drank the syrup with tiny sips twitching her thin lips
over it, Verus went up to the prefect and asked him in an under tone:
"You were a long while alone with Sabina, cousin?"
Yes," replied Titianus, and he set his teeth as he spoke and clenched his
fist so hard that the praetor could not misunderstand, and replied in a
low voice:
"She is much to be pitied, and particularly just now she has hours--"
"What sort of hours?" asked Sabina taking the cup from her lips.
"These," replied Verus quickly, "in which I am not obliged to occupy
myself in the senate or with the affairs of state. To whom do I owe them
but to you?"
With these words he approached the mature beauty, and taking the goblet
out of her hand with affectionate subservience, as a son might wait on
his honored and suffering mother, he gave it to the Greek slave. The
Empress bowed her thanks again and again to the praetor with much
affability, and then said, with a slight infusion of cheerfulness
in her tones:
"Well--and what is there to be seen at Lochias?"
"Wonderful things," answered Balbilla readily and clasping her little
hands.
"A swarm of bees, a colony of ants, have taken possession of the palace.
Hands black, white and brown--more than we could count, are busy there
and of all the hundreds of workmen which are astir there, not one got in
the way of another, for one little man orders and manages them all, just
as the prescient wisdom of the gods guides the stars through the
'gracious and merciful night' so that they may never push or run against
each other."
"I must put in a word on behalf of Pontius the architect," interposed
Verus. "He is a man of at least average height."
"Let us admit it to satisfy your sense of justice," returned Balbilla.
"Let us admit it--a man of average height, with a papyrus-roll in his
right-hand and a stylus in the left, controls them. Now, does my way of
stating it please you better?"
"It can never displease me," answered the praetor. "Let Balbilla go on
with her story," commanded the Empress.
"What we saw was chaos," continued the girl, "still in the confusion we
could divine the elements of an orderly creation in the future; nay, it
was even visible to the eye."
"And not unfrequently stumbled over with the foot," laughed the praetor.
"If it had been dark, and if the laborers had been worms, we must have
trodden half of them to death--they swarmed so all over the pavement."
"What were they doing?"
"Every thing," answered Balbilla quickly. "Some were polishing damaged
pieces, others were laying new bits of mosaic in the empty places from
which it had formerly been removed, and skilled artists were painting
colored figures on smooth surfaces of plaster. Every pillar and every
statue was built round with a scaffolding reaching to the ceiling on
which men were climbing and crowding each other just as the sailors climb
into the enemy's ships in the Naumachia."
The girl's pretty cheeks had flushed with her eager reminiscence of what
she had seen, and, as she spoke, moving her hands with expressive
gestures, the tall structure of curls which crowned her small head shook
from side to side.
"Your description begins to be quite poetical," said the Empress,
interrupting her young companion. "Perhaps the Muse may even inspire you
with verse."
"All the Pierides," said the praetor, "are represented at Lochias. We
saw eight of them, but the ninth, that patroness of the arts, who
protects the stargazer, the lofty Urania, has at present, in place of a
head--allow me to leave it to you to guess divine Sabina?"
"Well--what?"
"A wisp of straw."
"Alas," sighed the Empress. "What do you say, Florus? Are there not
among your learned and verse spinning associates certain men who resemble
this Urania?"
"At any rate," replied Florus, "we are more prudent than the goddess, for
we conceal the contents of our heads in the hard nut of the skull, and
under a more or less abundant thatch of hair. Urania displays her straw
openly."
"That almost sounds," said Balbilla laughing and pointing to her abundant
locks, "as if I especially needed to conceal what is covered by my hair."
"Even the Lesbian swan was called the fair-haired," replied Florus.
"And you are our Sappho," said the praetor's wife, drawing the girl's arm
to her bosom.
"Really! and will you not write in verse all that you have seen to-day?"
asked the Empress.
Balbilla looked down on the ground a minute and then said brightly: "It
might inspire me, everything strange that I meet with prompts me to write
verse."
"But follow the counsel of Apollonius the philologer," advised Florus.
"You are the Sappho of our day, and therefore you should write in the
ancient Aeolian dialect and not Attic Greek." Verus laughed, and the
Empress, who never was strongly moved to laughter, gave a short sharp
giggle, but Balbilla said eagerly:
"Do you think that I could not acquire it and do so? To-morrow morning
I will begin to practise myself in the old Aeolian forms."
"Let it alone," said Domitia Lucilla; "your simplest songs are always the
prettiest."
"No one shall laugh at me!" declared Balbilla pertinaciously. "In a few
weeks I will know how to use the Aeolian dialect, for I can do anything
I am determined to do--anything, anything."
"What a stubborn little head we have under our curls!" exclaimed the
Empress, raising a graciously threatening finger.
"And what powers of apprehension," added Florus.
"Her master in language and metre told me his best pupil was a woman of
noble family and a poetess besides--Balbilla in short."
The girl colored at the words, and said with pleased excitement:
"Are you flattering me or did Hephaestion really say that?"
"Woe is me!" cried the praetor, "for Hephaestion was my master too, and
I am one of the masculine scholars beaten by Balbilla. But it is no news
to me, for the Alexandrian himself told me the same thing as Florus."
"You follow Ovid and she Sappho," said Florus; "you write in Latin and
she in Greek. Do you still always carry Ovid's love-poems about with
you?"
"Always," replied Verus, "as Alexander did his Homer."
"And out of respect for his master your husband endeavors, by the grace
of Venus, to live like him," added Sabina, addressing herself to Domitia
Lucilla.
The tall and handsome Roman lady only shrugged her shoulders slightly in
answer to this not very kindly-meant speech; but Verus said, while he
picked up Sabina's silken coverlet, and carefully spread it over her
knees:
"My happiest fortune consists in this: that Venus Victrix favors me. But
we are not yet at the end of our story; our Lesbian swan met at Lochias
with another rare bird, an artist in statuary."
"How long have the sculptors been reckoned among birds?" asked Sabina.
"At the utmost can they be compared to woodpeckers."
"When they work in wood," laughed Verus. "Our artist, however, is an
assistant of Papias, and handles noble materials in the grand style.
On this occasion, however, he is building a statue out of a very queer
mixture of materials."
"Verus may very well call our new acquaintance a bird," interrupted
Balbilla, "for as we approached the screen behind which he is working he
was whistling a tune with his lips, so pure and cheery, and loud, that it
rang through the empty hall above all the noise of the workmen. A
nightingale does not pipe more sweetly. We stood still to listen till
the merry fellow, who had no idea that we were by, was silent again; and
then hearing the architect's voice, he called to him over the screen.
'Now we must clap Urania's head on; I saw it clearly in my mind and would
have had it finished with a score of touches, but Papias said he had one
in the workshop. I am curious to see what sort of a sugarplum face,
turned out by the dozen, he will stick on my torso--which will please me,
at any rate, for a couple of days. Find me a good model for the bust of
the Sappho I am to restore. A thousand gadflies are buzzing in my brain
--I am so tremendously excited! What I am planning now will come to
something!'"
Balbilla, as she spoke the last words, tried to mimic a man's deep voice,
and seeing the Empress smile she went on eagerly.
"It all came out so fresh, from a heart full to bursting of happy
vigorous creative joy, that it quite fired me, and we all went up to the
screen and begged the sculptor to let us see his work."
"And you found?" asked Sabina.
"He positively refused to let us into his retreat," replied the praetor;
"but Balbilla coaxed the permission out of him, and the tall young fellow
seems to have really learnt something. The fall of the drapery that
covers the Muse's figure is perfectly thought out with reference to
possibility--rich, broadly handled, and at the same time of surprising
delicacy. Urania has drawn her mantle closely round her, as if to
protect herself from the keen night-air while gazing at the stars. When
he has finished his Muse, he is to repair some mutilated busts of women;
he was fixing the head of a finished Berenice to-day, and I proposed to
him to take Balbilla as the model for his Sappho."
"A good idea" said the Empress. "If the bust is successful I will take
him with me to Rome."
"I will sit to him with pleasure," said the girl. "The bright young
fellow took my fancy."
"And Balbilla his," added the praetor's wife; he gazed at her as a
marvel, and she promised him that, with your permission, she would
place her face at his disposal for three hours to-morrow."
"He begins with the head," interposed Verus. "What a happy man is an
artist such as he! He may turn about her head, or lay her peplum in
folds without reproof or repulse, and to-day when we had to get past bogs
of plaster, and lakes of wet paint, she scarcely picked up the hem of her
dress, and never once allowed me--who would so willingly have supported
her--to lift her over the worst places."
Balbilla reddened and said angrily:
"Really Verus, in good earnest, I will not allow you to speak to me in
that way, so now you know it once for all; I have so little liking for
what is not clean that I find it quite easy to avoid it without
assistance."
"You are too severe," interrupted the Empress with a hideous smile.
"Do not you think Domitia Lucilla, that she ought to allow your husband
to be of service to her?"
"If the Empress thinks it right and fitting," replied the lady raising
her shoulders, and with an expressive movement of her hands. Sabina
quite took her meaning, and suppressing another yawn she said angrily:
"In these days we must be indulgent toward a husband who has chosen
Ovid's amatory poems as his faithful companion. What is the matter
Titianus?"
While Balbilla had been relating her meeting with the sculptor Pollux, a
chamberlain had brought in to the prefect an important letter, admitting
of no delay. The state official had withdrawn to the farther side of the
room with it, had broken the strong seal and had just finished reading
it, when the Empress asked her question.
Nothing of what went on around her escaped Sabina's little eyes, and she
had observed that while the governor was considering the document
addressed to him he had moved uneasily. It must contain something of
importance.
"An urgent letter," replied Titianus, "calls me home. I must take my
leave, and I hope ere long to be able to communicate to you something
agreeable."
"What does that letter contain?"
"Important news from the provinces," said Titianus.
"May I inquire what?"
"I grieve to say that I must answer in the negative. The Emperor
expressly desired that this matter should be kept secret. Its settlement
demands the promptest haste, and I am therefore unfortunately obliged to
quit you immediately."
Sabina returned the prefect's parting salutations with icy coldness and
immediately desired to be conducted to her private rooms to dress herself
for supper.
Balbilla escorted her, and Florus betook himself to the "Olympian table,"
the famous eating-house kept by Lycortas, of whom he had been told
wonders by the epicures at Rome.
When Verus was alone with his wife he went up in a friendly manner and
said:
"May I drive you home again?"
Domitia Lucilla had thrown herself on a couch, and covered her face with
her hands, and she made no reply. "May I?" repeated the praetor. As
his wife persisted in her silence, he went nearer to her, laid his hand
on her slender fingers that concealed her face, and said:
"I believe you are angry with me!" She pushed away his hand, with a
slight movement, and said: "Leave me."
"Yes, unfortunately I must leave you. Business takes me into the city
and I will--"
"You will let the young Alexandrians, with whom you revelled through the
night, introduce you to new fair ones--I know it."
"There are in fact women here of incredible charm," replied Verus quite
coolly. White, brown, copper-colored, black--and all delightful in their
way. I could never be tired of admiring them."
"And your wife?" asked Lucilla, facing him, sternly. "My wife? yes, my
fairest. Wife is a solemn title of honor and has nothing to do with the
joys of life. How could I mention your name in the same hour with those
of the poor children who help me to beguile an idle hour."
Domitia Lucilla was used to such phrases, and yet on this occasion they
gave her a pang. But she concealed it, and crossing her arms she said
resolutely and with dignity:
"Go your way--through life with your Ovid, and your gods of love, but do
not attempt to crush innocence under the wheels of your chariot."
"Balbilla do you mean," asked the praetor with a loud laugh. "She knows
how to take care of herself and has too much spirit to let herself get
entangled in erotics. The little son of Venus has nothing to say to two
people who are such good friends as she and I are."
"May I believe you?"
"My word for it, I ask nothing of her but a kind word," cried he, frankly
offering his hand to his wife. Lucilla only touched it lightly with her
fingers and said:
"Send me back to Rome. I have an unutterable longing to see my children,
particularly the boys."
"It cannot be," said Verus. "Not at present; but in a few weeks, I
hope."
"Why not sooner?"
"Do not ask me."
"A mother may surely wish to know why she is separated from her baby in
the cradle."
"That cradle is at present in your mother's house, and she is taking care
of our little ones. Have patience, a little longer for that which I am
striving after, for you, and for me, and not last, for our son, is so
great, so stupendously great and difficult that it might well outweigh
years of longing."
Verus spoke the last words in a low tone, but with a dignity which
characterized him only in decisive moments, but his wife, even before he
had done speaking, clasped his right-hand in both of hers and said in a
low frightened voice:
"You aim at the purple?" He nodded assent.
"That is what it means then!"
"What?"
"Sabina and you--"
"Not on that account only; she is hard and sharp to others, but to me she
has shown nothing but kindness, ever since I was a boy."
"She hates me."
"Patience, Lucilla; patience! The day is coming when the daughter of
Nigrinus, the wife of Caesar, and the former Empress--but I will not
finish. I am, as you know, warmly attached to Sabina, and sincerely wish
the Emperor a long life."
"And he will adopt."
"Hush!--he is thinking of it, and his wife wishes It."
"Is it likely to happen soon?"
"Who can tell at this moment what Caesar may decide on in the very next
hour. But probably his decision may be made on the thirtieth of
December."
"Your birthday."
"He asked what day it was, and he is certainly casting my horoscope, for
the night when my mother bore me--"
"The stars then are to seal our fate?"
"Not they alone. Hadrian must also be inclined to read them in my
favor."
"How can I be of use to you?"
"Show yourself what you really are in your intercourse with the Emperor"
"I thank you for those words--and I beg you do not provoke me any more.
If it might yet be something more than a mere post of honor to be the
wife of Verus, I would not ask for the new dignity of becoming wife to
Caesar."
"I will not go into the town to-day; I will stay with you. Now are you
happy?"
"Yes, yes," cried she, and she raised her arm to throw it round her
husband's neck, but he held her aside and whispered:
"That will do. The idyllic is out of place in the race for the purple."