Saul Of Tarsus Part 50

"I shall await your happier mood," she said, gathering her robes about her.

"Any mood is happy enough for the Jew," was the retort.

Antonia unmistakably eyed the old man.

"Say on, good Antonia," he urged uncomfortably. "I have not forsworn justice."

"Agrippa asks nothing more. His charioteer robbed him, and when he was captured and in danger of punishment, he claimed that he had information against Agrippa which concerns thy welfare. It is simply a device to put off punishment. He hath appealed to thee and thou hast not yet heard him. The Herod is eager that the matter be settled and begs that the slave be heard at once."

"Eh! what a fanfare of probity!" the emperor mumbled. "Leave it to a Jew to flourish his righteousness. If he is innocent, he can wait; if he is guilty, we shall overtake him soon enough. I owe him a sentence of uncertainty for his slights to my grandson, the little Tiberius."

"And thou hast but this moment said that thou hadst not forsworn justice!" Antonia exclaimed.

"Jupiter, but thou art provoking!" he fumed. "Hither, Euodus!"

Junia made a slight movement as if she meant to step between her father and the emperor, but was suddenly reminded of her part. She stopped again.

"How my sentimental heart cries out against my obligation to Flaccus!"

she said to herself. "Here must I stand idly by, while this new Penelope to a dead Ulysses works the Herod's ruin!"

Euodus bowed beside Caesar.

"Bring me the Jew's slave that hath a charge for me to hear. Bring him hither, and haste!"

The old man turned to Antonia.

"Go tell thy valiant Herod that he shall have justice. Justice! Say that. It may not please him so much to have that message."

The gilded lectica moved on. The widow went back to her litter and was borne away. Junia remounted her chair and followed the emperor.

"O lady," she said, looking after Antonia's litter, "it may be very superior to live aloof from the world, and ignorant of its intrigues, but it is fatal for thy friends, I observe."

At the brink of a precipitous descent into the valley west of Tusculum, Euodus returned with Eutychus, whom Piso, at Agrippa's defiant instigation, had been forced to send to Tusculum to be available in event of Caesar's summons.

Junia looked at Eutychus, livid with fear in the presence of the unspeakable might of the emperor, and held debate with herself. She had not agreed that Agrippa should be other than alienated from his wife. She was human enough not to wish the death of any man to whom she was indifferent, and for a moment she seemed about to alight from her chair. Even Flaccus' power over her for the time seemed to lose its effect, for a picture of Marsyas' suffering was a more distinct image. But one of the causes of Marsyas' concern, nay, the chief cause--the protection of Lydia to be achieved by the Herod's success--occurred to her in an evil moment. She turned her face away from the colloquy between Caesar and the charioteer and studied the summer-green Alban Hills that shouldered the sky behind her.

Eutychus collapsed to his knees at sight of the emperor.

"Speak, slave," Euodus ordered.

"O Caesar," the charioteer panted when his voice would obey him, "once I drove the Herod and Caligula, the Roman prince, to the Hippodrome in this place and they talked of the succession. And Herod said that he wished that thou wast dead and Caligula emperor in thy stead."

The emperor's eyes glittered.

"What else?" Euodus demanded.

"Somewhat about the young Prince Tiberius which I did not hear,"

Eutychus trembled.

"And what said Caligula to that?"

"That the Herod had his own making and not Caligula's to achieve!"

"A Roman's answer," Junia said to herself.

"Is there nothing more?" the questioner insisted.

"Nothing, lord!"

Euodus bowed to the emperor and waited.

"Give him ten stripes and turn him loose," Tiberius said. Two of the praetorians led Eutychus away.

"_Eheu_!" Junia sighed. "I could have stared the knave between the eyes and made him discredit himself in a breath! Ai! Owl-faced Lydia!

thou art a destroyed peril, but at what a price!"

The bearers stood patiently under the glow of the morning sun, waiting their royal burden's humor to go on. But Tiberius shrank into the relaxation of thought. He had outlived every plot to a.s.sa.s.sinate him; he held in his hands consummate might; he was surely approaching the Shades; but the example of his infallible fortune, the fear of his merciless hand and the fact that he would not stand long in the way of ambitions, had not quieted the fatal tongue which bespoke him evil! He was sick of blood and torture, tale-bearing and intrigue, because he was surfeited with it all. But here, now, was this precarious Herod, barely escaping disaster which had pursued him for twenty years, wishing brutally and incautiously that he might die! Tiberius was at a loss to know what to do with the man. The thought wearied him. He wished now that he had ordered a hundred stripes for Eutychus instead of ten. What an officious creature Antonia had become!

Euodus folded his arms and waited; the patricians, approaching in chairs of their own, alighted, bowed, pa.s.sed out of the path and went around, remounted their chairs and disappeared. The birds in the trees about, hushed by the talk below them, twittered and flew again.

Euodus, casting a sidelong glance at the emperor, nodded at the nearest bearer.

"To the palace," he said.

The slaves turned back up the slanting street and the motion of the lectica aroused Tiberius.

"Whither?" he demanded irritably.

"To the palace, Caesar," Euodus answered.

"Did I command thee? To the Hippodrome, slaves!"

The bearers turned once more and began the ticklish descent of the paved roadway to the valley below, where the Circus of Tusculum was built.

The huge elliptical structure stood out in the plain, alone and solid except for the low, heavy arch of the vomitoria which broke the round of masonry. The trees about it were dwarfed in contrast, the columns shrunken, the viae, approaching it from all directions straight as arrows fly, curbed and paved with stone, were as mere taut ribbons.

But in the great slope of the Campagna, under the immense and sparkling blue of the Italian sky, it was only a detail in rock.

Rome had long since outgrown her walls and ceased to contemplate them except as landmarks and conventionalities, useless but as significant as Caesar's paludamentum. Inns and mile-stones along the viae proved them once to have been things distinctly suburban, but the city crying for room had pa.s.sed the walls and built its own characteristics--temples, tombs, villas, circuses, fora and arches as far as Tusculum along the roads.

Lovelier beyond comparison than Rome's loveliest spots, it was small wonder that to fill their Augustan lungs with the freshness of the Campagna, the idle were borne out of the contained airs of the city, which were of such seasonal peculiarities that temples in propitiation of Mephitis and the G.o.ddess Febris had been erected.

So daily groups of patricians collected at the Hippodrome of Tusculum, with laughter and badinage, the flashing of jewels and the glittering of cars, the flutter of l.u.s.trous silks and the tossing of feathers, to spend the bright hours of the day watching the races that proceeded in the arena below.

The races had not begun, the crowds had not a.s.sembled. The gilded lectica was borne through the tunnel-like entrance up the stairs, not to the amphitheater but to the arena. Slaves with blanketed horses and cl.u.s.ters of betting patricians were here and there over the sanded ellipse within. The bustle of preparation slackened at the approach of the august visitor.

The eyes of the emperor opened and closed dully. Nothing was here to interest a man worn out with seventy years of change and excitement.

Nothing new could have aroused him, for his attention rebelled against the call.

Presently, during one of the intervals that his eyes were open, he saw, within touch of his hand, Agrippa and Caligula side by side, talking to a gladiator. The emperor scowled and looked away. The bearers plodded on, rounded the upper end of the ellipse and, pa.s.sing down the side, neared the mouth of the cunicula.