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.”
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