A ROMAN CITIZEN
"Look at him—a subject for his own verses—a grandfather metamorphosed into an infant Bacchus! Will he be a Mercury in swaddling clothes by next year? O, father, father, the gods certainly laid their own youth in your cradle fifty-two years ago!"
The speaker, a young matron, smiled into her father's eyes, which were as brilliant and tender as her own. Ovid and his daughter were singularly alike in a certain blitheness of demeanour, and in Fabia's eyes they made a charming picture now, both of them in festal white against the March green of the slender poplars. Perilla's little boy had climbed into his grandfather's lap and laid carefully upon his hair, still thick and black, a wreath of grape leaves picked from early vines in a sunny corner. Fabia and Perilla's husband, Fidus Cornelius, smiled at each other in mutual appreciation of a youth shared equally, it seemed to them, by the other three with the new-born spring.
It was Ovid's birthday and they were celebrating it in their country place at the juncture of the Flaminian and Clodian roads. The poet had a special liking for his gardens here, and he had preferred to hold his fête away from the city, in family seclusion, because Fidus was about to take Perilla off to Africa, where he was to be proconsul. The shadow of the parting had thrown into high relief the happiness of the day. Perilla had always said that it was worth while to pay attention to her father's birthday, because he could accept family incense without strutting like a god and was never so charming as when he was being spoiled. To-day they had spared no pains, and his manner in return had fused with the tenderness kept for them alone the gallantry, at once that of worldling and of poet, which made him the most popular man in Roman society. Now, as the afternoon grew older and his grandson curled comfortably into his arms, the conversation turned naturally to personal things. Perilla's jest led her father to talk of his years, and to wonder whether he was to have as long a life as his father, who had died only two or three years before at ninety.
"At least, having no sons," he went on, "I shall be spared some of his disappointments. It was cruel that my brother, who could have satisfied him by going into public life, should have died. Father had no use for literature. He used to point out to me that not even Homer made money, so what could I expect? But I believe that even he saw that my student speeches sounded like metreless verse, and later on he accepted the bad bargain with some grace. He had sniffed at what I considered my youthful successes. I was immensely proud over seeing Virgil once in the same room as myself, and when I came to know Horace and Propertius fairly intimately I felt myself quite a figure in Rome. But father had little or no respect for them—except when Horace turned preacher—and no patience at all with what I wrote. Before he died, however, when these greater men had passed off the stage and he saw young men look up to me as I had looked up to them, and found I could sell my wares, he began to grant that I had, after all, done something with my time."
"I never can realise," Perilla exclaimed, "that you are old enough to have seen Virgil! Why, I wasn't even born when he died! I suppose those times, when Augustus was young, were very fiery and inspiring, but I am so glad I live in this very year. I would rather have you the chief poet of Rome than a hundred solemn Virgils, and surely life can never have been as lovely as it is now. Isn't Rome much finer and more finished?"
Fidus smiled. "You are your father's own child," he said. "We certainly are getting the rustic accent out of our mouths and the rustic scruples out of our morals. In the meantime"—he added lightly—"some of us have to plod along with our old habits, or where would the Empire be? I don't expect to improve much on the proconsulship of my father."
Ovid's eyes rested whimsically on the young man, and after a pause he said: "Art is one thing and conduct is another. I trust Perilla to you but with no firmer assurance of her happiness than I have of Fabia's entrusted to me. Soldiering and proconsuling have their place, but so has the service of the Muses. While you are looking after taxes in Africa, we will make Rome a place to come back to from the ends of the earth. After all, to live is the object of life, and where can you live more richly, more exquisitely than here? You will find you cannot stay away long. Rome is the breath we breathe. I like to believe that will prove true of you. I cannot give up Perilla long, even with this young Roman as a hostage." The child had fallen asleep, and with a light kiss on his tousled curls the grandfather turned him over to his mother's arms. "Let us leave these connoisseurs to discuss his dimples," he said to his son-in-law, "drag our other boy out of his bee-hives and have one more game of ball before I get too old."
Perilla watched the two men as they walked off toward the apiary, and when she turned to her stepmother her eyes were wet with sudden tears. "Fidus was almost impertinent to father, wasn't he? And father was so perfect to him! That is what I tell Fidus, when he talks like grandfather and says we are all going to the dogs—I tell him that at least we are keeping our manners as we go, which is more than can be said of the reformers. I am always nervous when he and father get on to social questions, they feel so differently. Fidus was quite angry with me the other day because I said I was thankful that we had learned to have some appreciation of taste and good form and elegance and that we should never go back to being boors and prudes. He insisted that if by boors and prudes I meant men and women who cared more for courage and virtue than for 'hypocrisy' and 'license,' I should see them become the fashion again in Rome, before I knew it. Augustus was not blindfolded, if he was old. But, although Fidus doesn't understand father, he does love him. He said about coming here that he would rather spend his last day with father than with any other man in Rome. And what a happy day it has been!"
Perilla rose impulsively and, tucking her sleeping child in among the cushions of a neighbouring bench, threw herself on the grass by the older woman. Her forty-five years sat lightly upon Fabia, leaving her still lovely in the sensitive eyes of her husband and stepdaughter. A temperamental equableness and a disciplined character gave to her finely modelled face an inward tranquillity which was a refuge to their ardent natures. She only smiled now, as Perilla's lively tongue began again: "How happy you make father all the time! It keeps me from feeling too dreadfully about going off to Africa. Do you know, when you first came to us, I had an idea you wouldn't understand him! I was just old enough to realise that all your traditions were very austere ones, that your family belonged to the old order and had done wonderful things that weren't poetry and the joy of living at all. But I was far too young to understand that just because you did belong to people like that, when you married a man you would sink your life in his. That seems to me now to be the strongest thing about you. I have a feeling that inside you somewhere your character stands like a rock upon which father's ideas could beat forever without changing it. But you never let that character make you into a force separate from him. You have made his home perfect in every detail, but outside of it you are just his wife. Tell me, does that really satisfy you?"
Fabia's smile grew into a laugh. "I seem very old-fashioned to you, do I not, dear child? It is not because of my age, either, for plenty of middle-aged women agree with you. It is quite in the air, isn't it, the independence of women, their right to choose their own paths? I was invited to a reading of theLysistratathe other day, and actually one woman said afterwards that she believed Aristophanes was only foreseeing a time when women would take part in the government! She was laughed down for that, but most of the others agreed that the whole progress of society since Aristophanes's time lay in the emancipation of women from the confines of the home and from intellectual servility. I, too, believe in mental freedom, but you all insist a great deal upon the rights involved in being individuals. I have never been able to see what you gain by that. My husband is a citizen of Rome. To be called his wife is my proudest title. It makes no difference to the state what I am or do of myself. I live to the state only through him."
The younger woman had begun to speak almost before Fabia had finished, but the conversation was interrupted by the nurse coming for the child. Perilla went back to the house with them, confessing, with a laugh, that an hour with her boy at bed-time was more important than trying to change her perfect mother. It was not yet time to dress for the birthday dinner, which was to crown the day, and Fabia lingered on in the garden to watch the gathering rose in the late afternoon sky above the tree-tops. An enchanted sense of happiness came to her in the silence of the hour. She did not agree with her husband that happiness was the main object of life, but she was very grateful to the gods who had allowed her to be happy ever since she was a little girl, left to the care of a devoted uncle by parents she was too young to mourn. The latter half of her life these gods had crowned with a love which made her youth immortal. She had been married when she was a mere girl to a young soldier who had not lived long enough to obtrude upon her life more than a gentle memory of his bravery. The bearing of a child had been the vital part of that marriage, and the child had come into her new home with her, leaving it only for a happy one of her own. Her husband's child had been like a second daughter to her, and throughout the twenty years of her life with Ovid joy had consistently outweighed all difficulties. Insolent tongues had been busy with his faithlessness to her. But after the first fears she had come to understand that, although other women often touched the poet and artist in him, none save herself knew the essential fidelity and the chivalrous tenderness of the husband. She had accepted with pride his shining place in public regard. It was no wonder that he loved Rome, for Rome loved him.
A nightingale broke into song among the rose bushes. Her face was like a girl's as she thought of Ovid, with the grape leaves above his vivid face, young as the gods are young, seeking her eyes with his. A faint smell, as of homely things, rose from the familiar earth. Lights began to appear in the windows of the villa. She had come to this home when she and Ovid were married, and this morning she had again offered her tranquil prayers to the Penates so long her own. The happy years broke in upon her. Ah, yes, she and her husband had the divine essence of youth within them. But they had something finer too, something that comes only to middle age—the sense of security and peace, the assurance that, except for death, no violent changes lay ahead of them. She had only to nurture, as they faced old age together, a happiness already in full measure theirs.
As she turned toward the house she met her husband, come himself to seek her. In the recurrent springs of her after life the faint smell of the burgeoning earth filled her with an unappeasable desire.
The next week Fidus and Perilla started for Libya, leaving the two children with their grandfather rather than expose them to the dangers of the African climate. Ovid and Fabia spent the summer as usual in the cool Apennines at the old family homestead at Sulmo. They lingered on into the autumn for the sake of the vintage, a favourite season with them, and did not return to their beautiful town house at the foot of the Capitoline hill until late in October. While Fabia was busy with the household readjustments entailed by the presence of the children with their attendants and tutors, and before social engagements should become too numerous, Ovid spent several hours each day over hisMetamorphoses, to which he was giving the final polish. Patient work of this kind was always distasteful to him and he welcomed any chance to escape from it. At the end of November Fabia's cousin, Fabius Maximus, went to the island of Elba to look after some family mines, and Ovid made his wife's business interests a pretext for a short trip up the Tuscan coast in his company. He was to be back for a dinner at Macer's, his fellow poet's, on the Ides of December, to meet some friends of both from Athens.
On the morning of the eighth day before the Ides a message came to Fabia from the Palace asking where Ovid was. The inquiry seemed flattering and Fabia wondered what pleasant attention was in store for her husband. As it happened, she saw no one outside of her own household either that day or the next, being kept indoors by the necessity of installing new servants sent down from the estate at Sulmo. She was, therefore, entirely unprepared for the appalling public news which her uncle, Rufus, brought to her in the early evening of the seventh day before the Ides. There was something almost terrifying in the wrenching of her mind from the placid details of linen chests and store-rooms to the disasters in Cæsar's household. Augustus, without warning, at the opening of what promised to be a brilliant social season, had risen in terrible wrath; and Julia, his granddaughter, her lover, Decimus Junius Silanus, and, it was rumoured, several other prominent men had been given the choice of accepting banishment or submitting to a public prosecution. There was really no choice for them. The courts would condemn relentlessly, and the only way to save even life was to leave Rome.
"But the brutal suddenness of it!" Fabia exclaimed. "It seems more tragic, somehow, than her mother's punishment. Isn't everybody aghast? And do you think she has deserved it?" Rufus looked grave and troubled. "It is not easy to know what one does think," he said. "There has been a great deal of boasting about our prosperity, our victories abroad and our lustre at home. But some of us who have been watching closely have wondered how long this would last. The Empire has been created at a great cost and cannot be preserved at a lesser price. Insurrections have to be put down in the provinces, harmony and efficiency have to be maintained in the capital. It takes harsh courage, inflexible morals to do all that. Julia and with her Roman society have defied Cæsar's desires, just as her mother and her set defied them ten years ago. Imagine the grief and despair of our old Emperor! He must do something savage, drastic, irrevocable, to save his state. My heart breaks for him, and yet I cannot help pitying our imperial lady. With her light grace, her audacious humour, among our stern old standards, she has often made me think of a Dryad moving with rosy feet and gleaming shoulders in a black forest. All our family, Fabia, have been like the trees. But perhaps Rome needs the Dryads too. What is moral truth?" Fabia smiled suddenly. "Ovid would say it is beauty," she said. "That is an old dispute between us." Her face fell again. "He will be deeply distressed by this calamity. Julia has been very gracious to him and he admires her even more than he did her mother."
"When is he coming home?" Rufus asked. "I didn't expect him until the day before the Ides," Fabia answered, "but I think now he may come earlier. Cæsar sent this morning to inquire where he was, and perhaps some honour is going to be offered that will bring him back immediately—a reading at the Palace, perhaps, or—but, uncle," she exclaimed, "what is the matter? You have turned so white. You are sick." She came near him with tender, anxious hands, and he gathered them into his thin, old ones and drew her to him. "No, dear heart," he said. "I am not sick. For a moment fear outwitted me, a Fabian. You must promise me not to be afraid, whatever happens. Is it cruel to warn you of what may never come to you? But our days are troubled. Jove's thunderstorm has broken upon us. Your husband is among the lofty. It is only the obscure who are sure of escaping the lightning. Send for me, if you need me. Remember whose blood is in you. I must go—there may yet be time." He kissed her forehead hurriedly and was gone.
Fabia never knew accurately what happened before the sun rose a second time after this night. Afterwards she recognised the linked hours as the bridge upon which she passed, without return, from joy to pain, from youth to age, from ignorance to knowledge. But the manner of the crossing never became clear in her memory. Details stood out mercilessly. Their relationship, their significance were at the time as phantasmagoric as if she had been lost in the torturing unrealities of a nightmare. Just after her uncle left she was called to the room of Perilla's youngest child who had awakened with a sore throat and fever. Against the protests of the nurse, she sat up with him herself because through the shadows that darkened her mind she groped after some service to her husband. When she was an old woman she could have told what was carved on the cover of the little box from which she gave the medicine every hour until the fever broke, and the colour of the nurse's dress as she hurried in at dawn. Practical matters claimed her attention after she had bathed and dressed. The doctor was sent for to confirm her own belief that the child had nothing more than a cold. The older boy's tutor consulted her about a change in the hours of exercise. A Greek artist came to talk over new decorations for the walls of the dining room.
The forenoon passed. The cold wind, which had been blowing all night, an early herald of winter, died down. A portentous silence seemed to isolate her from the rest of the city. At noon Ovid came home. She felt no surprise. They clung to each other in silence and when he did speak he seemed to be saying what she had known already. The words made little impression. She only thought how white he was, and how old, as old as she was herself. His voice seemed to reach her ears from a great distance. He was to go away from her to the world's end, to a place called Tomi on the terrible Black Sea. The formal decree had stated as the cause the immorality of hisArt of Love—yes, the volume had been published ten years ago and he had enjoyed the imperial favour as much since then as before. The real reason, so the confidential messenger had explained to him, was something quite different. It was not safe to tell her. Her ignorance was better for them both. He had made a terrible blunder, the Emperor called it a crime, but he was innocent of evil intent. No, there was no use in making any plea. He had talked the matter over with Maximus, although he had not told him what the "crime" was. Maximus had been sure that nothing could be done, that denial would lead only to a public trial, the verdict of which would be still more disastrous. The Emperor was clement, his anger might cool, patience for a year or two might bring a remission of the sentence. The only hope lay in obedience. Maximus had not been allowed to return with him in the hurried journey by government post. The officers had held out little hope to him. A change had come over Cæsar. Banishment was banishment. "Anexile?"—no, he was not that! He was still a citizen of Rome, he still had his property and his rights—she was no exile's wife! Yes, she must stay in Rome. It was futile for her to argue. Cæsar was inexorable. She asked him when he must go. He said before another sunrise, to-morrow must not see him within the city limits. The words held no new meaning for her. What were hours and minutes to the dead? They talked in broken sentences. She promised to comfort Perilla. He was glad his father and mother were dead. He hoped her daughter could come to her at once from Verona.
They were interrupted by the stormy arrival of a few faithful friends—how few they were she did not realise until later. Rufus was the first to come and she thought it strange that he should break down and sob while Ovid's eyes were dry and hard. Knowing the servants, he undertook to tell them what had happened to their master. Their noisy grief throughout the house brought a dreary sense of disorder. Sextus Pompeius arrived and characteristically out of the chaos of grief plucked the need of practical preparation for the long journey. He brought out maps and went over each stage of the way. Only the sea journey from Brindisi to Corinth would be familiar to Ovid, but Pompeius had seen many years of military service in various northern stations, from the Hellespont to the Danube, and knew what to recommend. Although Tomi was a seaport, he advised making the last part of the journey by land through Thrace. He knew what dangers to fear from the natives, what precautions to take against sickness, and what private supplies a traveller might advantageously carry with him. They made a list of necessary things and Pompeius sent some of Ovid's servants out to procure what they could before night. The rest could be sent on to Brindisi before the ship sailed. He would see to that, Fabia need have no care. It was a great disadvantage that they could not control the choice of the travelling companions, but he would go at once and see if he could exercise any influence.
The packing consumed several hours. This unemotional activity would have strengthened Fabia, had it not had a completely unnerving effect on Ovid. The preparations for a wild and dangerous country seemed to bring him face to face with despair. He rushed to the fire and threw upon it the thick manuscript of hisMetamorphoses. Looking sullenly at the smouldering parchment he began to talk wildly, protesting first that no one should see any of his work unfinished and then passing to a paroxysm of rage against all his poetry, to which he attributed his ruin. He began to walk up and down the room, pushed his wife aside, and declared that he was going to end his life. In the long nightmare Fabia found this hour the most terrifying. She could never express her gratitude to Celsus who had come after Pompeius left and who now alone proved able to influence Ovid. By a patient reasonableness he made headway against his hysterical mood, bringing him back, step by step, to saner thoughts.
The servants, stimulated to their duties by Rufus, brought in food. Fabia made Ovid eat some bread and fruit. The evening wore on. The December moon was mounting the sky. Voices and footsteps of passers-by were vaguely heard. In the distance a dog barked incessantly. Lights were lit, but the usual decorum of the house was broken. The fire died dully upon the hearth. The children were brought into the room, looking pale and worn with the unwonted hour. Midnight came and went. All sounds of the city died away. Even the dog ceased his howling. They were alone with disaster. Ovid went to the window and drew aside the heavy curtain. The moon rode high over the Capitol. Suddenly he stretched out his arms and they heard him praying to the great gods of his country. In this moment Fabia's self-control, like a dam too long under pressure, gave way. Except on ceremonial occasions she had never heard her husband pray. Now, he who had had the heart of a child for Rome and for her was cast out by Rome and was beyond her help. From her breast he must turn to the indifferent gods in heaven. She broke into hard, terrible sobs and threw herself down before the hearth, kissing the grey ashes. Unregardful of those about her, she prayed wildly to the lesser gods of home, her gods. From the temple on the Capitoline, from the Penates came no answer.
His friends began to urge Ovid to start. His carriage was ready, he must run no risk of not clearing Rome by daylight. Why should he go, he asked with a flicker of his old vivacity, when to go meant leaving Rome and turning toward Scythia? He called the children to him and talked low to them of their mother. Again his friends urged him. Three times he started for the door and three times he came back. At the end Fabia clung to him and beat upon his shoulders and declared she must go with him. What was Augustus's command to her? Love was her Cæsar. Rufus came and drew her away. The door opened. The cold night air swept the atrium. She caught sight of Ovid's face, haggard and white against the black mass of his dishevelled hair. His shoulders sagged. He stumbled as he went out. She was conscious of falling, and knew nothing more.
Ovid's second birthday in exile had passed. The hope of an early release, harboured at first by his family and friends, had died away. None of them knew what the "blunder" or "crime" was which had aroused the anger of Augustus, and every effort to bring into high relief the innocence of Ovid's personal life and his loyalty to the imperial family simply made them more cognisant of a mystery they could not fathom. Access to Cæsar was easy to some of them, and through Marcia, Maximus's wife, they had hoped to reach Livia. But these high personages remained inscrutable and relentless. At times it seemed as if even Tiberius, although long absent from the city, might be playing a sinister rôle in the drama. All that was clear was that some storm-wind from the fastnesses of the imperial will had swept through the gaiety of Rome and quenched, like a candle, the bright life of her favourite poet. It was easy to say that an astonishing amount of freedom was still Ovid's. His books had been removed from the public libraries, but the individual's liberty to own or read them was in no way diminished. Nor was the publication of new work frowned upon. In the autumn before his banishment Ovid had given out one or two preliminary copies of hisMetamorphoses, and his friends now insisted that a work so full of charm, so characteristic of his best powers, so innocent of questionable material should be published, even if it had not undergone a final revision. The author sent back from Tomi some lines of apology and explanation which he wished prefixed. He also arranged with the Sosii for the bringing out of his work on the Roman Calendar when he should have completed it. And he was at liberty not only to keep up whatever private correspondence he chose, but to have published a new set of elegiac poems in the form of frank letters about his present life to his wife and friends. A third volume of these poems, which he calledTristia, had just appeared and more were likely to follow. He had an extraordinary instinct for self-revelation.
But in spite of this freedom to raise his voice in Rome, it was obvious that all that made life dear to Ovid had been taken away. The lover of sovereign Rome, of her streets and porticoes and theatres, her temples and forums and gardens, must live at the farthest limit of the Empire, in a little walled town from whose highest towers a constant watch was kept against the incursions of untamed barbarians. The poet to whom war had meant the brilliance of triumphal pageants in the Sacred Way must now see the rude farmers of a Roman colony borne off as captives or sacrificing to the enemy their oxen and carts and little rustic treasures. The man of fifty who had spent his youth in writing love poetry and who through all his life had had an eye for Venus in the temple of Mars must wear a sword and helmet, and dream at night of poisoned arrows and of fetters upon his wrists. The son of the Italian soil, bred in warmth, his eye accustomed to flowers and brooks and fertile meadows, must shiver most of the year under bitter north winds sweeping over the fields of snow which melted under neither sun nor rain; and in spring could only watch for the breaking up of the ice in the Danube, the restoration of the gloomy plains to their crop of wormwood, and the rare arrival of some brave ship from Italy or Greece. The acknowledged master of the Latin tongue, the courted talker in brilliant circles in Rome must learn to write and speak a barbarous jargon if he wished to have any intercourse with his neighbours. The husband with the heart of a child, whose little caprices and moods, whose appetite and health had been the concern of tender eyes, must learn to be sick without proper food or medicine or nursing, must before his time grow old and grey and thin and weak, dragged from the covert of a woman's love.
It was spring again and the late afternoon air, which came through the open window by which Fabia was sitting, was sweet with the year's new hope, even though borne over city roofs. Fabia had dwelt with sorrow day and night until there was no one of its Protean shapes which she did not intimately know. She had even attained to a certain tolerance of her own hysteria that first night when her uncle and her servants had had to care for her till morning. It was the last service she had required of others. Her daughter had hurried to her and spent weeks with her in watchful companionship. Perilla had come back in the summer and gone with her to Sulmo. But neither the love of the one child nor the grief of the other passed into the citadel where her will stood at bay before the beleaguering troops of pain. They were newer to her than they usually are to a woman of her age. The death of her child's father had brought regret rather than sorrow. Her will had been disciplined only by the habitual performance of simple duties which had given her happiness. But untaught, unaided, it slew her enemies and left her victor. Her daughters had long since given over worrying about her, had, indeed, begun to draw again upon her generous stores. Only her uncle, who knew the cost of warfare better, still silently watched her eyes. He knew that her victory had to be won afresh every night as soon as the aegis of the day was lifted. For a long time this had meant nights of dry-eyed anguish, which threatened her sanity, or nights of weakening tears. Through these months her uncle had come to see her every day. He had not doubted the strength of her will, but he had feared that the strength of her body might be sacrificed to its triumph. Her long days of self-control, however, repaired the ravages of the night hours, and little by little her strong mind, from which she had resolutely withheld all narcotics, reasserted its sway over her nerves. She recovered her power to think. To her a clear understanding of principles by which she was to decide the details of conduct had always been essential.
To-day, in this favourite hour of hers, when the mask laid by a busy day over the realities of life began to be gently withdrawn, she had set herself the task of analysing certain thoughts which had been with her hazily for over a week. On Ovid's birthday she had sent little presents to the grandchildren and written to her stepdaughter a letter which she hoped would make her feel that she was still the daughter of her father's house. In doing this she had been poignantly reminded of the birthday fête two years ago, of Perilla's sweetness to her, and of their conversation, so light-hearted at the time, about woman's place in the state. Since then she had been wondering whether she could still say that it was enough for her to be a wife. She was perfectly sure that she did not miss the outer satisfactions of being Ovid's wife. Except as they indicated his downfall, she did not regret the loss of her former place in society or the desertion of many of their so-called friends. Indeed, she had welcomed as her only comfort whatever share she could have in his losses. But was it true that her life as a whole had no meaning or value apart from his? Had the hard, solitary fight to be brave meant nothing except that she could write her husband stimulating letters and help his child to take up again the joys of youth? She had found and tested powers in herself that were not Ovid's. What meaning was there in her phrase—"The wife of a Roman citizen?" She began to think over Ovid's idea of citizenship. Suddenly she realised, in one of those flashes that illuminate a series of facts long taken for granted, that the time he had shown most emotion over being a citizen was on the night he had left home, when he had insisted that he still retained his property and his rights. Before that indeed, on the annual occasions when the Emperor reviewed the equestrian order and he rode on his beautiful horse in the procession, he had always come home in a glow of enthusiasm. But she had often felt vaguely, even then, that the citizen's pride was largely made up of the courtier's devotion to a ruler, the artist's delight in a pageant and the favourite's pleasure in applause in which he had a personal share. That he loved Rome she had never doubted. He loved the external city because it was fair to the eye. He loved Roman life because it was free from all that was rustic, because it gave the prizes to wit and imagination and refinement. The culture of Athens had at last become domiciled in the capital of a world-empire. Ovid's idea of citizenship, Fabia said to herself, was to live, amid the beauties of this capital and in the warmth of imperial and popular favour, freely, easily, joyfully.
And what was her own idea? Fabia's mind fled back to the days when she was a little girl in Falerii and her uncle used to come to the nursery after his dinner and take her on his lap and tell her stories until she was borne off to bed. The stories had always been about brave people, and her nurse used to scold, while she undressed her, about her flushed cheeks and shining eyes. The procession of these brave ones walked before her now, as a child's eyes had seen them—Horatius, Virginia, Lucretia, Decius, Regulus, Cato—men and women who had loved the honour and virtue demanded by Rome, or Rome's safety better than their lives. The best story of all had been the one about her own ancestors, the three hundred and six Fabii who, to establish their country's power, fought by the River Cremera until every man was dead.
She had grown old enough to read her own stories, to marry, and to tell stories to a child and to grandchildren, but the time had never come when her heart had not beat quicker at the thought of men sacrificing their life or their children, their will or their well-being to their country's need. She had become a widely read woman in both Latin and Greek. Her reason told her that appreciation of beauty in nature and art, grace and elegance in manners, intellectual freedom and a zest for individual development were essential factors in the progress of civilisation. She knew that if her husband had not believed in these things he could not have been the poet he was, and she knew his poetry had done something for Roman letters that Virgil's had not done. She had not only loved, with all the pure passion of her maturity, his charm and his blitheness and his gifted sensitiveness, but she had been proud of his achievements. His citizenship had satisfied her. But always, within the barriers of her own individuality, that faith which is deeper, warmer, more masterly than reason, had kept her the reverent lover of duty, the passionate guardian of character, for whose sake she would deny not only ease and joy, but, even, if the dire need came, beauty itself. Art the Romans had had to borrow. Their character they had hewn for themselves, with a chisel unknown to the Greeks, out of the brute mass of their instincts. Its constancy, its dignity, its magnanimity, probity and fidelity Cicero had described in words befitting their massive splendour. To possess this character was to be a Roman citizen, in the Forum and on the battlefield, in the study and the studio, in exile and in prison, in life and in death. Ovid's citizenship, save for the empty title, had been ended by an imperial decree. In losing Rome he had ceased to be a Roman. His voice came back only in cries in which there was no dignity and no fortitude. He was tiring out his friends. Perilla no longer let Fidus see his letters. Even in her own heart the sharpest sorrow was not his exile but his defeat. Her love had outlived her pride.
The dreaded night was coming on. Would he moan in his sleep again, without her quieting hand upon his face, or wake from dreams of her to loneliness? She rose impetuously and looked up through the narrow window. The sky was filled with the brightness of the April sunset. Of pain she was no longer afraid. But she was afraid to go on fighting with nothing to justify the cost of her successive battles or to glorify their result. Against the sunset sky rose the Capitol. Burnished gold had been laid upon its austere contours. Strength was aflame with glory. She never knew how or why, but suddenly an answering flame leaped within her. In that majestic temple dwelt the omnipotent gods of her country. Why should all her prayers be said to the Penates on her hearth? What did her country need, save, in manifold forms, which obliterated the barriers of sex, the sacrifice of self, the performance of duty, the choice of courage? The feverish talk of women about their independence had failed to hold her attention. Now a mightier voice, borne from the graves of the dead, trumpeted from the lives of the living, called to her, above the warring of her will with sorrow, to be a Roman citizen. She had neither arms nor counsels to give to her country. She could not even give sons born of her body, taught of her spirit. She was a woman alone, she was growing old, she was ungifted. She would be nothing but a private in the ranks, an obscure workman among master builders. But she could offer her victory over herself, and ask her country to take back and use a character hewn and shaped in accordance with its traditions. Her husband's citizenship had become a legal fable. She would take it and weld it with her own, and, content never to know the outcome, lay them both together upon the altar of Rome's immortal Spirit.
The new moon hung in the still radiant west. On a moonlit night she had fallen by the ashes of her hearth and prayed in futile agony to the gods of her home. Now she stood erect and looked out upon the city and with a solemn faith prayed to the greater gods. Later she slept peacefully, for the first time in fifteen months, as one whose taskmaster has turned comrade.
In the morning her uncle, who had been in Falerii for a few weeks, came to see her. He looked keenly into her eyes as she hastened across the wide room to greet him. Then his own eyes flashed and with a sudden glad movement he bent and kissed her hands. "Heart of my heart," he said, "in an exile's house I salute a Roman."
FORTUNE'S LEDGER
His Lady of Gifts smiled at him and held out her hand with something shut tight inside of it. The white fingers were just about to open into his palm, when he felt his mother's hand on his and heard her say: "Come, Marcus, come, the sun will get ahead of you this morning." He knew that she had kissed his eyes and hurried away again before he could open them upon the faint, grey light in his tiny room. A piercing thought put an end to sleepiness and brought him swiftly from his bed. This was the day of his Lady's festival! His mother seemed to have forgotten it, but he could say a prayer for her as well as for himself at the shrine by the Spring. He must make haste now, however, for before the June sun should fairly have come up over the tops of the hills he must get his sheep and goats to their pasture on the lower slopes.
When he had slipped into his blue cotton tunic, which reached just to his knees, leaving bare his stout brown legs, he went into his mother's room and plunged his head into a copper basin of water standing ready for his use. Shaking the drops from his black curls, he hastened on to the kitchen for his porridge. His grandfather was already there, sitting in his large chair, mumbling half-heard words to himself, while his daughter-in-law dipped out his breakfast from a pot hung over a small fire laid frugally in the middle of the wide, stone hearth. Marcus went up to him and kissed his forehead before he threw his arms around the neck of the big white sheep-dog which had leaped forward as he entered. His mother smiled out of her tired eyes as she gave him his morning portion, and then began to wrap up in a spotless napkin the dry bread and few olives which were to be his lunch in the pasture. When the last bit of hot porridge and the cup of goat's milk had been finished, he kissed her hand, gave the signal to the impatient dog, and ran across the courtyard to the fold where his meagre flock awaited their release. The sky was turning pink and gold, the sweet air of dawn filled his nostrils and, in spite of his mother's forgetfulness, he knew that on this day of all days in the year Good Fortune might be met by mortals face to face. As he and his dog marshalled the sheep and goats out of the gate, he turned happily toward the long, hard road which to him was but a pathway to his upland pasture and his Lady's shrine.
His mother came to the gate and watched the springing step with which he met the day. Her most passionate desire was that he might, throughout his life, be spared the sorrow, the disillusionment and the exhaustion which were her daily portion. But what chance was there of such a desire being fulfilled? A cry from the house, half frightened, half peevish, called her back from dreams to duties.
Marcus was the last child of a long line of independent farmers. When he was born his father was sharing with his grandfather the management of a prosperous estate. But before Marcus could talk plainly the crash had come. It seemed incredible that the Emperor in Rome should have known anything about the owners of a farm in Como. But Domitian's evil nature lay like a blight over the whole empire, and his cruelty, mean-spirited as well as irrational, was as likely to touch the low as the high. Angered by some officer's careless story of an insolent soldier's interview with Marcus's grandfather, he used a spare moment to order the confiscation of the rich acres and the slaves of the farm, and the imprisonment of their owner. The imprisonment had been short, as no one was concerned to continue it after Domitian's death. But it had been long enough to break the victim's spirit and hasten his dotage. By this time he knew almost nothing of what went on around him. He did not know that Domitian had been killed and that at last men breathed freely under the good Trajan. He was still full of old fears, pathetically unable to grasp the joy of this tranquillity, which, like recreative sunshine, penetrated to every corner of the exhausted empire. Nor, in fretting over the absence of his son, did he remember the brave fight that he had made for a livelihood as a muleteer in the Alps just above Como, nor the manner, almost heroic, of his death.
The burden fell upon Marcus's young mother. It was no wonder that her eyes were always tired, her hands rough and red, and her shoulders no longer straight. The actual farmstead had been left to them, but its former comfort now imposed only a heavy load. Once the servants had been almost as numerous as in the great villas along the lake. There had been stables for oxen and horses and sheep, lofts full of hay and corn, spacious tool-rooms, store-rooms for olive oil and fruits and wine, hen-yards and pigsties, and generous quarters for the workmen. Most of this was now falling into decay, year by year. Only a few bedrooms were used—the smallest and warmest—and the great kitchen was the only living room. It had been large enough for all the farm-servants to eat in and for the spinning and weaving of the women. Now the family of three gathered lonesomely close to the hearth when a rare fire was indulged in on stormy winter nights. The only source of income were the few sheep and goats and hens. In the old days great flocks of sheep on the farm had sent fleeces to Milan. Now there were only enough to furnish lambs on feast days and occasional fleeces to more prosperous neighbors. The few goats provided the family with milk. Far oftener than anyone knew, in the winters, they were in actual distress, lacking food and fuel.
But it was not her own hunger that burdened the nights of Marcus's mother. In letting her old father-in-law be hungry she felt that she was false to a trust. And her boy must be saved to a happier life than his father's had been. He was eleven years old and must soon, if ever, turn to something better than tending sheep in a lonely pasture from sunrise till sunset. She did not let him know it, thinking that he was too young to look beyond the passing days in which he seemed able to find happiness, but she had laid aside every year, heedless of the sacrifice, some little part of the scanty money that came from the eggs and chickens. What she could do with it she did not know. It grew so slowly. But there was always the hope that some day Marcus would find it a full-grown treasure to face the world with. When, seven years ago, the great Pliny had given to Como a fund to educate freeborn orphans, she had thought bitterly that her baby would be better off without her. Sometimes, since then, she had been mad enough to think of trying to see Pliny when he came to the villa which was nearest to her farm. He was there now. Stories of his magnificent kindnesses were rife. His tenants were the most contented in the country-side and his slaves were better treated than many Roman citizens. He had given his old nurse a little farm to live on and sent one of his freedmen to Egypt when he was threatened with consumption. But she had never found the courage—she could not find it now—to believe that he would care what happened to a child in no way connected with him. His wealth, by no means the largest known in his own circle, to her seemed appalling. The Emperor could not have been more distant from her than this magnate, who, although he had been born in Como and was said to love his Como villas better than any of his other houses, yet had about him the awful remoteness of Rome. Of course she could never be admitted to his presence. She could only store up a few more coins each year and trust to the gods.
With a start she realised that to-day was the festival of Fors Fortuna. In the hurried morning she had forgotten to remind Marcus of his prayers. In the days when the farm had been sure of the largest harvest in the neighbourhood this summer festival had been brilliantly celebrated, and as long as Marcus's father had lived the family had still cherished the quaint rites and the merrymaking of a holiday especially dear to the common people of both city and country. But in these later years there had been neither time nor money for any fêtes. Piety, however, was still left, and it was characteristic of the scrupulousness persisting in Marcus's mother through all the demoralising experiences of poverty that, after she had finished the heavier tasks, she should set to work to mark the religious day by a freshly washed cloth upon the table, with a bowl of red roses picked from the bush that grew by the doorway, and a gala supper of new-laid eggs, lentil soup and goat's milk cheese.
In the meantime Marcus had been having adventures. His pasture was on a grassy plateau of a mountain slope, edged by heavy green cypresses and dotted with holm-oaks. In the woods above him chestnut and walnut trees showed vividly against the silver olives. Below stretched the shining waters of the Larian Lake. Here, while the sheep browsed happily, he was wont to feed his little soul on dreams. Sitting to-day where he could look out to a distant horizon, his blue tunic seeming to insert into the varied greens about him a bit of colour from sky or lake, he dug his toes into the soft grass and for the hundredth time tried to think out how he could attain his heart's desire. He knew exactly what that was. He wanted to go to school! If anyone had tried to find out why, he would have discovered in the boy's mind a tangled mass of hopes—hopes of helping his mother and owning once more their big fields and vineyards, of going to Rome and coming home again, rich and famous. But to any glorious future school was the portal, of that he was sure. The nearest boys' school was in Milan, and to Milan he must go. The golden fleece on the borders of strange seas, the golden apples in unknown gardens, never seemed to lords of high adventure more remote or more desirable than a provincial school-room thirty miles away seemed to this little shepherd. He dreamed of it by day and by night. Last night, when the Lady of the Spring held out her hand to him he had been sure that what it held would help him to go to Milan. He knew he must have money, and that was why he had never told his mother what he wanted. She would be unhappy, he knew, that she could not give it to him. He wanted her to think that he asked for nothing better than to mind the sheep all day. Sometimes his heart would be so hot with desire that only tears could cool it, and all alone in the pasture he would bury his face in the grass and sob until his dog came and licked his neck. At other times it was his pan's-pipe that brought ease. His father had taught him to play on it when he was a mere baby, and sometimes he would forget his burden in making high, clear notes come out of the slender reeds. To-day, especially, tears seemed far away, and he piped and piped until his heart was at rest, and the sun, now nearly in mid-heaven, made him warm and drowsy.
An hour later he woke with a start into a strange noonday silence. Every blade, and twig, and flower, was hushed. A soft white light dimmed the brilliant colours of the day. No sound was heard from bird or insect, and the only movement was among his white sheep, which noiselessly, like a distant stream of foamy water, seemed to flow down a winding path. The goats were standing quite still. Suddenly they flung up their heads, as if at an imperious call, and in wild abandon rushed toward the shadowy woods above. The dog, as if roused from a trance, gave chase, shattering the silence with yelping barks. The boy, his heart beating violently, followed. It took all the afternoon to collect and quiet the flock, and when Marcus started home he had himself not lost the awed sense of a Presence in his pasture. The nearness seemed less familiar than that of his Lady of Gifts, and yet she must have been concerned in it, for the thrill that remained with him was a happy one.
It was late, but to-day more than ever he must stop at her shrine. Near his regular path, below a narrow gorge, there was a marvellous spring. It rose in the mountains, ran down among the rocks, and was received in an artificial chamber. After a short halt there, it fell into the lake below. The extraordinary thing about it was that three times in each day it increased and decreased with regular rise and fall. One could lie beside it and watch its measured movements. Everybody from far and near came to see it, even the grand people from the villas. But Marcus, coming in the early morning or evening, had almost never met anyone there and had grown to feel that the spot was his own. In the dusk or at dawn it often seemed to him as if a lovely lady, with eyes such as his mother might have had, came up out of the spring and laid smooth, cool hands on his face. Because the Goddess of Gifts had become associated in his mind with the first day he could remember in his early childhood—a radiant and merry day—he had come to identify with her this Lady of the Spring, who alone gave romance to the harsher, soberer years that followed his father's death. To-day Marcus could have sworn she smiled at him before she disappeared, as the water receded after the gushing flow which he had come just in time to watch. He was rising from his knees when his eye fell upon a strange, green gleam upon the wet rock. For a moment he thought it was the gleam of a lizard's back, but as he took the little object into his hand he realised that it was hard, and inert, and transparent. Even in the dusk he could see the light in it. It almost burned in his hand. He felt sure that it was a gift from his Lady, but he did not stop to think what he could do with it. He was filled with happiness just in looking at it. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and he could take it to his mother and it would make her smile. Full of joy, he hurried homeward. Even on ordinary occasions he loved the end of summer days. His grandfather would go to sleep and cease saying strange things, and, after he and his mother had finished the evening tasks in house and court-yard and sheepfold, they would sit for a while together in the warm doorway, and she would tell him stories of his father and of many other people and things. Sometimes when he leaned against her and her voice grew sweet and low he forgot he was a man and a shepherd.
To-night this did not happen, although the air was sweet with roses, and the stars were large and bright. Marcus had shown his mother the green marvel and told her how the Lady of the Spring had brought it out to him from her secret recesses. She had caught her breath and turned it over and over, and then she had put her arms close round him and explained to him that this beautiful thing was a jewel, an emerald, and must have belonged in a great lady's ring. Her father had been a goldsmith and she had often seen such jewels in their setting. They were bought with great sums of money, and to lose one was like losing money. And that was true, too, of finding one. Money must be returned and so must this.
Money—money—his head swam. Could he have bought his heart's desire with the little green gleam? He put his head on his mother's knee and, for all his efforts, a sob sounded in his throat. She lifted him up against her warm, soft breast, and her hands were smoother and cooler than his Lady's, and he told her all that was in his heart, and she told him all that was in hers, for him.
Later they talked like comrades and partners about the emerald, and decided that it must belong to someone in Pliny's villa, either to Calpurnia herself or to one of her guests. They agreed that they could not sleep until it was returned. The mother had to stay near the sleeping old man, but the villa was only two miles away, the neighbourhood was safe, with a dog as companion, and Marcus was a fast walker on his strong bare feet. At the villa he could ask for Lucius, who came to the farm twice a week for eggs and chickens. "He is an old servant," she said, "loyal to his master and friendly toward us. He is sure to be kind to you. I will do the jewel up in a little package and put father's seal on it, and you can trust it to him. Be sure to give it to no one else."
So Marcus, with his dog, long past his usual bed-time, trudged forth into the night whose cavernous shadows deepened the shadows in his little heart. The worst of the adventure was walking up through the grounds of the villa and facing the porter at the servants' door and asking for Lucius. When he came, the boy thrust the package into his hand, stammered out an explanation, and ran away before the bewildered old man knew what had happened. On the way home the dog seemed to share his master's discouragement and left unchallenged the evening music of the bull-frogs. When Marcus stretched his tired legs out in bed he thought of to-morrow with the sheep again, and wondered dully why his Lady and her mysterious comrade in the pasture had cheated him. His mother, going into the kitchen to see that the wood was ready for the morning, snatched the red roses from the table spread for Fors Fortuna and threw them fiercely on the ashes.