Nicanor - Teller of Tales Part 26

"Get married, sweet, to him who loves thee, and then thou mayest have him whom thou dost love," said Nigidia. "If one has courage to do as one wills, and cleverness not to be found out, may not one do as one chooses? I know that Rubria, wife of Maximus Crispus, hath two lovers, and one of them is guest in this house. Who is thy lover, dear? What his name and station?"

Varia hesitated. The impulse which kept her from revealing the truth was dumb and blind, but it was there, and it saved her. She bit her lip.

"I will not tell!" she said in distress.

"We promise not to take him from thee," said Nigidia, and laughed with the rest.

"He sure must be the highest in the land, to win thy love," chimed in Paula, ready to carry on the game. "Perhaps it is Fabian, the friend of Marius, who hath the eyes of a G.o.d. Or perhaps it is old Aulus Plautus, of Gobannium. He is a widower these twenty years, and hath no teeth and but one eye--but his jewels sparkle enough for the other."

But Varia's face changed, and her eyes grew dark and hunted.

"Now you do make sport of me!" she cried. "What have I done that ye should bait me thus?" Before any girl could answer she faced them in a mist of quick, angry tears. "I am glad that my father's guests may be thus easily amused!"

They started upon her, in a moment all contrition, ready to embrace her and make amends; but she jumped off the couch and fled from them into her bedchamber and closed the door.

"We are as mean as we can be!" said Gratia, with reproach. "I think it great shame for us that we should not have remembered how it is with her. I am glad I was not first to start it!"

Paula and Nigidia took fire.

"What have we done save what we would do to any bride?" asked Paula.

"Who could have thought she would take it so? But she is not so different from the rest of us, perhaps!"

"Perhaps no better!" said Nigidia.

"Then would she have thy teaching to thank for that!" Gratia flashed back. "And it is in my mind that the less she gets of it the better it will be for her."

When Nerissa came again, shortly, it was to find her lady alone and weeping. But this was no new thing of late. Nerissa came prepared to speak solemnly, as was her duty; Varia turned a petulant shoulder to her.

"Why will ye not let me be in peace?" she cried. "I do not wish to wed--I am happy as I am. I will _not_ be meek and obedient, and incline in all things unto my lord husband! I do not wish him for husband! I hate him. And oh, Nerissa, in three days--"

She wept afresh. Nerissa stroked her hair.

"There, then, lady-bird, never take it so! It is right that all maids should wed. The lord Marius will be kind to thee; he will give thee great affection. At least, the G.o.ds grant that he may! Thou wilt have jewels such as thou hast never dreamed of, and robes such as thou hast never seen. Thou wilt be a very great lady, little nursling o' mine. Ay me, but it is strange! These arms were the first to cradle thee; these hands dressed thee in the first little clothes of thy babyhood. Such _little_ clothes! Now they deck thee for thy bridal--and perhaps it may not be so long before they have other little clothes to handle. See, child of my heart, wouldst not be glad to have a tiny son of thine own, to love and play with? Wouldst not like to feel a round little head against thy heart, two so tiny hands opening the gates of all happiness before thee? Wouldst not see two baby eyes lulled into sleep by thy drowsy crooning? Say, sweet one, wouldst thou not like this?"

Varia raised her face slowly, starry eyes wide and very sweet with awe, young lips parting in reverent wonder.

"Ay," she breathed, and flushed and trembled. "I should like that. A little son, of all mine own! But I would not have it his son, O Nerissa!

I would he might be son of a man such as I have dreamed of; a man brave, and rough, and tender--ay, all these! What should I care that he had no gold--have I found it such a blessing? For he would have more than gold--that which no man could give him, and no man take away. And his son should be like him; and the son of such a man I could love, and be proud that he was mine."

Nerissa smiled, a tender hand on Varia's head.

"Ay, I know, I know! Poor little one, we all have our dreams--even thou--and we all must wake from them. If this son of thine should be as the one who is to be his father, it will be very well. For the lord Marius is an honorable man, and strong."

Varia made a gesture of fierce protest.

"Bah! If he looked at me with those eyes, black and haughty, if his mouth was thin and his nose like an eagle's beak, and his hair stiff, so that I could not run it through my fingers, I should hate him even as I hate his father!"

Nerissa laughed.

"Sweet, my baby girl, it would be long or ever thou couldst see haughtiness in the eyes of that baby of thine, or thin lips; and as for the nose--! And I dare swear that when thou first dost look, thou wilt not find any hair at all, much less what is stiff. Come, cheer thee, my very dear! Believe that thy lord father knoweth what is best for thee.

Thou art his own; he would never do thee wrong."

"Now am I not so sure of that!" said Varia, and her voice changed and was strange. "Oh, Nerissa, it is not that I would not wed! I, too, would know what joy and fulness a woman's life may hold, and perhaps I am not too much fool to understand. But one cannot teach me from whom I shrink with every breath I draw. These things I cannot understand. When I would think and question, there is something just beyond me, which I cannot grasp,--" she raised a hand, groping,--"something which escapes me, and when I think I have it, lo! it vanishes, and I wander in the dark. Birds I can understand, and trees, and little flowers, and clouds, and sunlight, and rippling brooks; but men and women I cannot understand; they all are strange to me, and I do not at all know why. I fear them; I am restless and unhappy. One only in all the world have I seen who was not strange. Him I could understand; when he spoke, all my heart sang in answer; it was what I longed to say and could not, and I do not at all know why. There was that in him which was in me, and yet I am fool and he is not, and this also I cannot understand. Will it ever be that I shall understand, O Nerissa?"

Nerissa sat on the couch beside her and drew her into her arms.

"Some day, surely, my pet," she soothed. "Think of it no more--never fret thyself with foolish fancies. Now it groweth late and is time to sleep. Thou shalt be my baby once again, for this night is the last I shall have thee all mine own."

She called slave women, and had them pack away the scattered silks and gauzes in the chests from which they had been taken, and make all ready for the night. Thereafter she sent them all away, even the body-slaves and tire-women, and herself waited upon her mistress. She freed Varia's hair from the jewelled pins which held it, combed its dusky length, and braided it in two long braids. She brought water in a great brazen jar, and filled the sunken marble bath in the red-tiled bathroom, and bathed her lady with scented soaps and perfumes. She cradled her in her arms, wrapped in warm rugs, and rocked and crooned old slumber songs as though her charge had been in fact a child again.

The lamps burned low, the room was warm and still. Varia, nestled in the arms that had been to her a mother's arms, stirred drowsily once or twice, and each time Nerissa bent over her, and felt her feet beneath the rugs to see that they were warm, studying with tender care the soft outline of rounded cheek, the long lashes down-dropped to hide the starry eyes, the quiet rise and fall of breath.

"She is but a child! She will forget!" she murmured.

But Varia spoke, in a voice straight from the land of dreams, opening upon her eyes misty with sleep.

"One does not forget!" she said drowsily. "One loses a thing, for a long time, it may be, but some shadow of that thing is always left, even to a fool. Is it not so?"

"Ay, if thou sayest," said Nerissa, as readily as she would have agreed that pigs were b.u.t.terflies if her lady had willed them so. But Varia was asleep before she spoke.

All through that night Nerissa held her nursling in fond, anxious arms that knew no weariness, brooding over her as a mother with her child.

Just as gray dawn came drifting in at the windows, the feast in the great house broke up, and the guests, most of them half drunken, sought their rooms. And just at dawn word began to pa.s.s from station to station, and from town to town, of a city set in flames--fair Anderida in the South, as the crow flies, sixty Roman miles away. But of this, and what it portended, the villa knew nothing.

IV

Many things happened that day which the villa and the world came to know too well. The sun was scarcely an hour high when mounted men rode to the villa, demanding to see its lord. Of these, one was Aurelius Menotus, one of the two duumviri or governors of Anderida; and with him was his son Felix, small and fair of skin, with weak eyes and a loose, stubborn mouth, who wore no sword and whose arm was in a sling. Slaves brought them to Eudemius, and he welcomed them, and they told their tale.

Aurelius was a shrunken man, with a baboon face, straggling gray hair, and hands perfect as those of a G.o.d. He had ridden hard all night, and was pasty pale with fatigue and trouble; and his staff, mostly old men, were in hardly better plight. Two of the servants with them were wounded; it was told that a third had died on the road. They were cared for and given food and wine, and Eudemius sent for Marius to hear also what they had to tell. No other guests were stirring.

"Two nights ago men came upon us," Aurelius said, in his thin and nervous voice. "They come, men say, from Gaul, driven thence by Attila the Hun, and seek safety among their kinsfolk who are already here. No man can tell how the trouble first began. The first that we in the palace knew, a soldier of the watch came and warned the guard that there was fighting in the lower quarters of the city. For long no one could tell what was the trouble; it was dark, and there was much confusion. I sent out milites stationarii to quell the tumult; these reported that the insurgents, who have given much trouble of late, had joined openly with the barbarians; had overthrown the temple of Jupiter and slain the Flamen Dialis. Two hours before midnight, that night, the public baths were blown up in their own steam, and fire broke out in various parts of the city. The barbarians, inflamed with wine and the example of the insurgents, began to plunder. Thou knowest my forces have been steadily diminished these last three years, and together the barbarians and the insurgents outnumbered the Augustans five to one. My colleague in office, t.i.tus Honius the Abulcian, going out to pacify the people, was slain. I and my companions fled just before daybreak yesterday. Many people have taken to the forest. The city is now a very h.e.l.l of drunkenness, rapine, fire, and smoke. And this, it seems to me, is but the beginning. Those barbarians who have long been settled here, upon the Eastern Sh.o.r.e, and those who still keep coming, will together outnumber us, insurgents and Augustans both. It is in my mind to propose that we, the lords of the cities, send again to aetius, proconsul in Gaul, for help, even as we did two years ago."

"I fear that is what it must come to," said Eudemius, thoughtfully. He turned to Marius. "Think you that aetius can spare us a legion again?"

Marius shrugged his shoulders.

"It is hard to say," he answered. "I think it likely that he will, if he be not himself too hard pressed."

"Marcus Pomponius and Quintus Fabius are here, with many others of the lords," said Eudemius. "We celebrate this day the betrothal feast of my daughter and Marius here,--" he laid a hand on the young tribune's shoulder,--"and in three days the marriage. If you will stay, we may talk of this together."

"I feel scarce in humor for marriage feasts and gaiety," said Aurelius.

"My people are dead, my city falling to ashes. But I will stay at least long enough to discuss what plans we may think of for relief. If aught is to be done it should be done quickly."

"Rest now," Eudemius said, "and to-night, if you will, join us at the feasting." He clapped his hands, and when slaves came, ordered that his new guests be taken to rooms and baths prepared for them. They went away, a weary and dejected set of men. Eudemius and Marius paced the gallery together.

"If aetius cannot send help--" said Eudemius, following his own train of thought.

"Have you arms in the house and slaves who can use them?" said Marius, following his. "Anderida is but sixty miles away, and if these barbarians be, as Aurelius thinks, inflamed with wine and blood, they will not stop to think whether or not they attack those who have attacked them."