The Emperor — Complete

CHAPTER XXII

A night and a day had slipped away since the death of the Bithynian. Ships and boats from every part of the province had collected before Besa to seek for the body of the drowned youth, the shores swarmed with men, and cressets and torches had dimmed the moonlight on river and shore all through the night; but they had not yet succeeded in finding the body of the beautiful youth.

Hadrian had heard in what way Antinous had perished. He had required Mastor to repeat to him more than once the last words of his faithful companion and neither to add nor to omit a single syllable. Hadrian’s accurate memory cherished them all and now he had sat till dawn and from dawn till the sun had reached the meridian, repeating them again and again to him self. He sat gloomily brooding and would neither eat nor drink. The misfortune which had threatened him had fallen—and what a grief was this! If indeed Fate would accept the anguish he now felt in the place of all other suffering it might have had in store for him he might look forward to years free from care, but he felt as though he would rather have spent the remainder of his existence in sorrow and misery with his Antinous by his side than enjoy, without him, all that men call happiness, peace and prosperity.

Sabina and her escort had arrived-a host of men; but he had strictly ordered that no one, not even his wife, was to be admitted to his presence. The comfort of tears was denied him, but his grief gripped him at the heart, clouded his brain and made hint so irritably sensitive that an unfamiliar voice, though even at a distance, disturbed him and made him angry.

The party who had arrived by water were not allowed to occupy the tents which had been pitched for them not far from his, because he desired to be alone, quite alone, with his anguish of spirit. Mastor, whom he had hitherto regarded rather a useful chattel than as a human creature, now grew nearer to him—had he not been the one witness of his darling’s strange disappearance. Towards the close of this, the most miserable night he had ever known, the slave asked him whether he should not fetch the physician from the ships, he looked so pale; but Hadrian forbade it.

“If I could only cry like a woman,” he said, “or like other fathers whose sons are snatched away by death, that would be the best remedy. You poor souls will have a bad time now, for the sun of my life has lost its light and the trees by the way-side have lost their verdure.”

When he was alone once more he sat staring into vacancy and muttered to himself:

“All mankind should mourn with me for if I had been asked yesterday how perfect a beauty might be bestowed on one of their race I could have pointed proudly to you, my faithful boy and have said, ‘Beauty like that of the gods.’ Now the crown is cut off from the trunk of the palm and the maimed thing can only be ashamed of its deformity; and if all humanity were but one man it would look like one who has had his right eye torn out. I will not look on the monsters, lean and fat, that they may not spoil my taste for the true type! Oh faithful, lovable, beautiful boy! What a blind, mad fool have you been! And yet I cannot blame your madness. You have pierced my soul with the deepest thrust of all and yet I cannot even be angry with you. Superhuman! godlike was your faithful devotion. Aye, indeed, it was!” As he thus spoke he rose from his seat and went on resolutely and decidedly:

“Here I stretch out this my right hand-hear me, ye Immortals! Every city in the Empire shall raise an altar to Antinous, and the friend of whom you have robbed me I will make your equal and companion. Receive him tenderly, oh, ye undying rulers of the world! Which among you can boast of beauty greater than his? and which of you ever displayed so much goodness and faithfulness as your new associate?”

This vow seemed to have given Hadrian some comfort. For above half an hour he paced his tent with a firmer tread, then he desired that Heliodorus his secretary might be called.

The Greek wrote what his sovereign dictated. This was nothing less than that henceforth the world should worship a new divinity in the person of Antinous.

At noonday a messenger in breathless haste came to say that the body of the Bithynian had been found. Thousands flocked to see the corpse, and among them Balbilla, who had behaved like a distracted creature when she heard to what an end her idol had come. She had rushed up and down the river-bank, among the citizens and fishermen, dressed in black mourning robes and with her hair flying about her. The Egyptians had compared her to the mourning Isis seeking the body of her beloved husband, Osiris. She was beside herself with grief, and her companion implored her in vain to calm herself and remember her rank and her dignity as a woman. But Balbilla pushed her vehemently aside, and when the news was brought that Nile had yielded up his prey she rushed on foot to see the body, with the rest of the crowd.

Her name was in every mouth, everyone knew that she was the Empress’ friend, and so she was willingly and promptly obeyed when she commanded the bearers who carried the bier on which the recovered body lay to set it down and to lift up the sheet which shrouded it. Pale and trembling, she went up to it and gazed down at the drowned man; but only for a moment could she endure the sight. She turned away with a shudder, and desired the bearers to go on. When the funeral procession had disappeared and she could no longer hear the shrill wailing of the Egyptian women, and no longer see them streaking their breast, head, and hair with damp earth and flinging up their arms wildly in the air, she turned to her companion and said calmly: “Now, Claudia, let us go home.”

In the evening at supper she appeared dressed in black, like Sabina and all the rest of the suite, but she was calm and ready with an answer to every observation.

Pontius had travelled with them from Thebes to Besa, and she had spared him nothing that could punish him for his long absence, and had mercilessly compelled him to listen to all her verses on Antinous.

He meanwhile had been perfectly cool about it, and had criticised her poems exactly as if they had referred not to a man of flesh and blood but to some statue or god. This epigram he would praise, the next he would disparage, a third condemn. Her confession that she had been in the habit of complimenting Antinous with flowers and fruit he heard with a shrug of the shoulders, saying pleasantly: “Give him as many presents as you will; I know that you expect no gifts from your divinity in return for your sacrifices.”

His words had surprised and delighted her. Pontius always understood her, and did not deserve that she should wound him. So she let him gaze into her soul, and told him how much she loved Antinous so long as he was absent. Then she laughed and confessed that she was perfectly indifferent to him as soon as they were together.

When, after the Bithynian’s death, she lost all self-control he simply let her alone, and begged Claudia to do the same.

The same day that the body was found it was burnt on a pile of precious wood. Hadrian had refused to see it when he learnt that the death by drowning had terribly distorted the lad’s features.

A few hours after the ashes of the Bithynian had been collected and brought in a golden vase to Hadrian, the Nile fleet was once more under sail, this time with the Emperor on board one of the boats, to proceed without farther halt to Alexandria.

Hadrian remained alone with only his slave and his secretary on the boat that conveyed him; but he several times sent to Pontius to desire him to come from the ship on which he was and visit him on his. He liked to hear the architect’s deep voice, and discussed with him the plans which Pontius had sketched for his mausoleum in Rome and the monument to his lost favorite which he proposed to have erected from designs of his own in the large city which he intended should stand on the site of the little town of Besa, and which he had already named Antinoe. But these discussions only took up a limited number of hours, and then the architect was at liberty to return to Sabina’s boat, on which Balbilla also lived.

A few days after they had quitted Besa he was sitting alone with the poetess on the deck of the Nile boat which, borne by the current and propelled by a hundred oars, was rapidly and steadily nearing its destination. Ever since the death of the hapless favorite Pontius had avoided mentioning him to her. She had now become as observant and as talkative as before, and in her eyes there even shone at times a ray of the old sunny gayety of her nature. The architect thought he comprehended the characteristic change in her sentiments, and would not allude to the cause of the violent but transient fever under which she had suffered. “What did you discuss with Caesar to-day?” asked Balbilla of her friend. Pontius looked down at the ground and considered whether he could venture to utter the name of Antinous before the poetess. Balbilla observed his hesitation and said:

“Speak on; I can hear anything. That folly is past and over.”

“Caesar is at work at the plans for a new town to be built and called Antinoe, and a sketch for a monument to his ill-fated favorite,” said Pontius. “He will not accept any help, but I have to teach him to discriminate what is possible from what is impossible.”

“Ah! he is always gazing at the stars and you look steadily at the road on which you are walking.”

“An architect can make no use of anything that is unsteady or that has no firm foundation.”

“That is a hard saying, Pontius. It is true that during the last few weeks I have behaved like a fool.”

“I only wish that every tottering structure could recover its balance as quickly and as certainly as you! Antinous was a demigod for beauty, and a good faithful fellow besides.”

“Do not speak of him any more,” exclaimed Balbilla shuddering. “He looked dreadful. Can you forgive me for my conduct?”

“I never was angry with you.”

“But I lost your esteem.”

“No, Balbilla. Beauty, which is dear to us all, and which the Muse has kissed, attracted your easily moved poet’s soul and it fluttered off at random. Let it fly! My friend’s true womanly nature was never carried away by it. She stands on a rock, that I am sure of.”

“How good and kind in you to say so—too good, too kind! for I am a feeble creature, turned by every breeze that blows, a vain little fool who does not know one hour what she may do the next, a spoilt child that likes best to do the thing it ought to leave undone, a weak girl who finds a pleasure in doing battle with men. For all in all—”

“For all in all a darling of the gods who to-day can climb the rocks with a firm step and to-morrow lies dreaming in the sunshine among flowers—for all in all a nature that has no equal and which lacks nothing, nothing whatever that constitutes a true woman excepting—”

“I know what I lack,” cried Balbilla. “A strong man on whom I can depend, whose warnings I can respect. You, you are that man; you and none other, for as soon as I feel you by my side I find it difficult to do what I know to be wrong. Here I am, Pontius! Will you have me with all my moods, with all my faults and weaknesses?”

“Balbilla!” cried the architect, beside himself with heartfelt agitation and surprise, and he pressed her hand long and fervently to-his lips.

“You will? You will take me? You will never leave me, you will warn, support me and protect me?”

“Till my last day, till death, as my child, as the apple of my eye, as—dare I say it and believe it?—as my love, my second self, my wife.”

“Oh! Pontius, Pontius,” she exclaimed, grasping his broad, right hand in both her own. “This hour restores to the orphaned Balbilla, father and mother and gives her besides the husband that she loves.”

“Mine, mine!” cried the architect. “Immortal gods! During half a lifetime I have never found time, in the midst of labor and fatigue, to indulge in the joys of love and now you give me with interest and compound interest the treasure you have so long withheld.”

“How can you, a reasonable man, so over-estimate the value of your possession? But you shall find some good in it. Life can no longer be conceived of as worth having without the possessor.”

“And to me it has so long seemed empty and cold without you, you strange, unique, incomparable creature.”

“But why did you not come sooner, and so give me no time to behave like a fool?”

“Because, because,” said Pontius, gravely, “such a flight towards the sun seemed to me too bold; because I remember that my father’s father—”

“He was the noblest man that the ancestor of my house attracted to its greatness.”

“He was—consider it duly at this moment—he was your grandfather’s slave.”

“I know it, but I also know, that there is not a man on earth who is worthier of freedom than you are, or whom I could ask as humbly as I ask you: Take me, poor, foolish Balbilla, to be your wife, guide me and make of me whatever you can, for your own honor and mine.”

The brief Nile voyage brought days and hours of the highest happiness to Balbilla and her lover. Before the fleet sailed into the Mareotic harbor of Alexandria, Pontius revealed his happy secret to the Emperor. Hadrian smiled for the first time since the death of his favorite, and desired the architect to bring Balbilla to him.

“I was wrong in my interpretation of the Pythian oracle,” said he, as he laid the poetess’s hand in that of Pontius. “Would you like to know how it runs Pontius—do not prompt me, my child. Anything that I have read through once or twice I never forget. Pythia said:

“You have chosen well girl. The oracle guaranteed you a safe road to tread through life. As to the dust of which it speaks, it exists no doubt in a certain sense, but this hand wields the broom that will sweep it away. Solemnize your marriage in Alexandria as soon as you will, but then come to Rome, that is the only condition I impose. A thing I always have at heart is the introduction of new and worthy members into the class of Knights, for it is in that way alone that its fallen dignity can be restored. This ring, my Pontius, gives you the rank of eques, and such a man as you are, the husband of Balbilla and the friend of Caesar may no doubt by-and-bye find a seat in the Senate. What this generation can produce in stone and marble, my mausoleum shall bear witness to. Have you altered the plan of the bridge?”

CHAPTER XXIII.

In Alexandria the news of the nomination of the “sham Eros” to be the Emperor’s successor was hailed with joy, and the citizens availed themselves gladly of his fresh and favorable opportunity to hold one festival after another. Titianus took care to provide for the due performance of the usual acts of grace, and among others he threw open the prison-gates of Canopus, and the sculptor Pollux was set at liberty.

The hapless artist had grown pale, it is true, in durance vile, but neither leaner nor enfeebled in body; on the other hand all the vigor of his intellect, all his bright courage for life and his happy creative instinct, seemed altogether crushed out of him. His face, as in his dirty and ragged chiton, he journeyed from Canopus to Alexandria, revealed neither eager thankfulness for the unexpected boon of liberty, nor happiness at the prospect of seeing again his own people and Arsinoe.

In the town he went, unintelligently dreaming as he walked, from one street to another, but he was familiar with every stone of the way, and his feet found their way to his sister’s house. How happy was Diotima, how her children rejoiced, how impatient was each one to conduct him to the old folks! How high in the air the Graces frisked and leaped in front of the new little home to welcome the returned absentee! And Doris, poor Doris, almost fainted with joyful surprise and her husband had to support her in his arms when her long vanished son, whom she had never given up for lost, however, suddenly stood before her and said: “Here am I.” How fondly she kissed and caressed her dear, cruel, restored fugitive. The singer too loudly expressed his joy alike in verse and in prose, and fetched his best theatrical dress out of the chest to put it on his son in the place of his ragged chiton.

A mighty torrent of curses and execrations flowed from the old man’s lips as Pollux told his story. The sculptor found it difficult to bring it to an end, for his father interrupted him at every word, and all the while he was talking his mother forced him to eat and drink incessantly, even when he could no more. After he had assured her that he was long since replete, she pushed two more pots on to the fire, for he must have been half-starved in prison, and what he did not want now he would find room for two hours hence. Euphorion himself conducted Pollux to the bath in the evening, and as they went home together he never for an instant left his side; the sense of being near him did him good and was like some comfortable physical sensation.

The singer was not usually inquisitive, but on this occasion he never ceased asking questions till Doris led her son to the bed she had freshly made for him. After the artist had gone to rest, the old woman once more slipped into his room, kissed his forehead, and said:

“To-day you have still been thinking too much of that hideous prison—but to-morrow my boy, to-morrow you will be the same as before, will you not?”

“Only leave me alone mother; I shall soon be better,” he replied. “This bed is as good as a sleeping-draught; the plank in the prison was quite a different thing.”

“You have never asked once for your Arsinoe,” said Doris.

“What can she matter to me? Only let me sleep.” But the next morning Pollux was just the same as he had been the previous evening, and as the days went on his condition remained unchanged. His head drooped on his breast, he never spoke but when he was spoken to, and when Doris or Euphorion tried to talk to him of the future, he would ask: “Am I a burden to you?” or begged them not to worry him.

Still, he was gentle and kind, took his sister’s children in his arms, played with the Graces, whistled to the birds, went in and out, and played a valiant part at every meal. Now and again he would ask after Arsinoe. Once he allowed himself to be guided to the house where she lived, but he would not knock at Paulina’s door and seemed overawed by the grandeur of the house. After he had been brooding and dreaming for a week, so idle, listless, and absent that his mother’s heart was filled with anxious fears every time she looked at him, his brother Teuker hit upon a happy idea.

The young gem-cutter was not usually a frequent visitor to his parents’ house, but since the return of the hapless Pollux he called there almost daily. His apprenticeship was over and he seemed on the high-road to become a great master in his art; nevertheless he esteemed his brother’s gifts as far beyond his own and had tried to devise some means of reawakening the dormant energies of the luckless man’s brain.

“It was at this table,” said Teuker to his mother, “that Pollux used to sit. This evening I will bring in a lump of clay and a good piece of modelling wax. Just put it all on the table and lay his tools by the side of it; perhaps when he sees them he will take a fancy again to work. If he can only make up his mind to model even a doll for the children he will soon get into the vein again, and he will go on from small things to great.”

Teuker brought the materials, Doris set them out with the modelling tools, and next morning watched her son’s proceedings with an anxious heart. He got up late, as he had always done since his return home, and sat a long time over the bowl of porridge which his mother had prepared for his breakfast. Then he sauntered across to his table, stood in front of it awhile, broke off a piece of clay and kneaded and moulded it in his fingers into balls and cylinders, looked at one of them more closely and then, flinging it on the ground, he said, as he leaned across the table supporting himself on both hands to put his face near his mother’s:

“You want me to work again; but it is of no use—I could do no good with it.”

The old woman’s eyes filled with tears, but she did not answer him. In the evening Pollux begged her to put away the tools.

When he was gone to bed she did so, and while she was moving about with a light in the dark, lumber-room in which she had kept them with other disused things, her eye fell on the unfinished wax model which had been the last work of her ill-starred son. A new idea struck her. She called Euphorion, made him throw the clay into the court-yard and place the model on the table by the side of the wax. Then she put out the very same tools as he had been using on the fateful day of their expulsion from Lochias, close to the cleverly-sketched portrait, and begged her husband to go out with her quite early next morning and to remain absent till mid-day.

“You will see,” she said, “when he is standing face to face with his last work and there is no one by to disturb him or look at him, he will find the ends of the threads that have been cut and perhaps be able to gather them up again and go on with the work where it was interrupted.”

The mother’s heart had hit upon the right idea. When Pollux had eaten his breakfast he went to his table exactly as he had done the clay before; but the sight of the work in hand had quite a different effect to the mere raw clay and wax. His eyes sparkled; he walked round the table with an attentive gaze examining his work as keenly and as eagerly as if it were some fine thing he saw for the first time. Memory revived in his mind. He laughed aloud, clasped his hands and said to himself, “Capital! Something may be made of that!”

His dull weariness slipped off him, as it were; a confident smile parted his lips and he seized the wax with a firm hand. But he did not begin to work at once; he only tried whether his fingers had not lost their cunning, and whether the yielding material was obedient to his will. The wax was no less docile to his touch than in former days, as he pinched or pulled it. Perhaps then the tormenting thought that blighted his life, the dread that in the prison he had ceased to be an artist, and had lost all his faculty was nothing more than a mad delusion! He must at any rate try how he could get on at the work.

No one was by to observe him—he might dare the attempt at once. The sweat of anguish stood in large beads on his brow as he finally concentrated his volition, shook back the hair from his face and took up a lump of the wax in both hands. There stood the portrait of Antinous with the head only half-finished. Now—could he succeed in modelling that lovely head free-hand and from memory?

His breath came fast, and his hands trembled as he set to work; but soon his hand was as steady as ever, his eye was calm and keen again, and the work progressed. The fine features of the young Bithynian were distinct to his mind’s eye, and when, about four hours after, his mother looked in at the window to see what Pollux was doing, whether her little stratagem had succeeded, she cried out with surprise, for the favorite’s bust, a likeness in every feature, stood on a plinth side by side with the original sketch. Before she could cross the threshold her son had run to meet her, lifted her in his arms, and kissing her forehead and lips he exclaimed, radiant with delight:

“Mother, I still can work. Mother, mother, I am not lost!”

In the afternoon his brother came in and saw what he had been doing, and now—and not till now—could Teuker honestly be glad to have found his brother again.

While the two artists were sitting together, and the gem-cutter was suggesting to the sculptor, who had complained of the bad light in his parent’s house, that he should carry the statue to his master’s workshop—which was much lighter—to complete it, Euphorion had quietly gone to some remote corner of his provision-shed and brought to light an amphora full of noble Chian wine which had been given to him by a rich merchant, for whose wedding he had performed the part of Hymenaeus with a chorus of youths. For twenty years had he still preserved this jar of wine for some specially happy occasion. This jar and his best lute were the only objects which Euphorion had carried with his own hand from Lochias to his daughter’s house and then again to his own new abode. With an air of dignified pride the singer set the old amphora before his sons, but Doris laid hands upon it at once and said:

“I am glad to bestow the good gift upon you, and would willingly drink a cup of it with you; but a prudent general does not celebrate his triumph before he has won the battle. As soon as the statue of the beautiful lad is completed, I myself, will wreathe this venerable jar with ivy, and beg you spare it to us, my dear old man—but not before.”

“Mother is right,” said Pollux. “And if the amphora is really destined for me, if you will allow it, my father shall not remove the pitch wig from its venerable head, till Arsinoe is mine once more!”

“That is well my boy,” cried Doris, “and then I will crown, not merely the jar but all of us too, with nothing but sweet roses.”

The next day Pollux, with his unfinished statue, removed to the workshop of his brother’s master. The worthy man cleared the best place for the young sculptor, for he thought highly of him and wished to make good, as far as lay in his power, the injustice the poor fellow had suffered from the treachery of Papias. Now, from sunrise till evening fell, Pollux was constant to his work. He gave himself up to the resuscitated pleasure and power of creation with real passion. Instead of using wax he had recourse to clay, and formed a tall figure which represented Antinous as the youthful Bacchus, as the god might have appeared to the pirates. A mantle fell in light folds from his left shoulder to his ankles, leaving the broad breast and right aria entirely free; vine-leaves and grapes wreathed his flowing locks, and a pine-cone, flame-shaped, crowned his brow. The left arm was raised in a graceful curve, and his fingers lightly grasped a thyrsus which rested on the ground and stood taller than the god’s head; by the side of this magnificent figure stood a mighty wine-jar, half hidden by the drapery.

For a whole week Pollux had devoted himself to this task during all the hours of daylight with unflagging zeal and diligence. Before night fell he was accustomed to leave his work and walk up and down in front of Paulina’s house, but for the present he refrained from knocking at the door and asking after the girl he loved. He had heard from his mother how anxiously she was guarded from him and his; still Paulina’s severity would certainly not have hindered the artist from making the attempt to possess himself of his dearest treasure. What held him back from even approaching Arsinoe, was the vow he had made to himself never to tempt her to quit her new and sheltered home till he had acquired a firm certainty of being once for all an artist, a true artist, who might hope to do something great, and who might dare to link the fate of the woman he loved, with his own.

When, on the eighth morning of his labors, he was taking a few minutes rest, his brother’s master came past the rapidly advancing work, and after contemplating it for some time exclaimed:

“Splendid, splendid! Our time has produced nothing to compare with it!”

An hour later Pollux was standing at the door of Paulina’s town-house, and let the knocker fall heavily on the door. The steward opened to him and asked him what he wanted. He asked to speak with dame Paulina, but she was not at home. Then he asked after Arsinoe, the daughter of Keraunus, who had found a home with the rich widow. The servant shook his head.

“My mistress is having her searched for,” he said. “She disappeared yesterday evening. The ungrateful creature! She has tried to run away several times before now.”

The artist laughed, slapped the steward on the back, and said:

“I will soon find her!” and he sprang away down the street, and back to his parents.

Arsinoe had received much kindness in Paulina’s house, but she had also gone through many bad hours. For months she had been obliged to believe that her lover was dead. Pontius had told her that Pollux had entirely vanished and her benefactress persisted in al ways speaking of him as of one dead. The poor child had shed many tears for him, and when the longing to talk of him with some one who had known him had taken possession of her she had entreated Paulina to allow her to go to see his mother or to let Doris visit her. But the widow had desired her to give up all thought of the idol-maker and his belongings, speaking with contempt of the gate-keeper’s worthy wife. Just at that time Selene also left the city, and now Arsinoe’s longing for her old friends grew to a passionate craving to see them again.

One day she yielded to the promptings of her heart and slipped out into the street to seek Doris; but the door-keeper, who had been charged by Paulina never to allow her to go outside the door without his mistress’s express permission, noticed her and brought her back to her protectress—not this time only, but, on several subsequent occasions when she attempted to escape.

It was not merely her longing to talk about Pollux which made her new home unendurable to Arsinoe, but many other reasons besides. She felt like a prisoner; and in fact she was one, for after each attempt at flight her freedom of movement was still farther impeded. It is true that she had soon ceased to submit patiently to all that was required of her and even had often opposed her adoptive mother with vehement words, tears and execrations, but these unpleasant scenes, which always ended by a declaration on Paulina’s part that she forgave the girl, had always resulted in a long break in her drives and in a variety of small annoyances. Arsinoe was beginning to hate her benefactress and everything that surrounded her, and the hours of catechising and of prayer, which she could not escape, were a positive martyrdom. Ere long the doctrine to which Paulina sought to win her was confounded in her mind with that which it was intended to drive out, and she defiantly shut her heart against it.

Bishop Eumenes, who had been elected in the spring Patriarch of the Christians of Alexandria, visited her oftener than usual during the summer when Paulina lived in her suburban villa. Paulina, it is true, had fancied she could do without his help, and that she could and must carry her task through to the end by herself; but the worthy old man had felt sympathetically drawn to the poor ill-guided child, and sought to soothe and calm her mind and show her the goal, towards which Paulina desired to lead her, in all its beauty. After such discourses Arsinoe would be softened and felt inclined to believe in God and to love Christ, but no sooner had her protectress called her again into the school-room and put the very same things before her in her own way than the girl’s heartstrings drew close again; and when she was desired to pray she raised her hands, indeed, but out of sheer defiance, she prayed in spirit to the Greek gods.

Frequently Paulina received visits from heathen acquaintances in rich dresses and the sight of them always reminded Arsinoe of former days. How poor she had been then! and yet she had always had a blue or a red ribbon to plait in her hair and trim the edge of her peplum. Now she might wear none but white dresses and the least scrap of colored ornament to dress her hair or smarten her robe was strictly forbidden. Such vain trifles, Paulina would say, were very well for the heathen, but the Lord looked not at the body but at the heart.

Ah! and the poor little heart of the hapless child could not offer a very pleasing sight to the Father in Heaven, for hatred and disgust, sadness, impatience, and blasphemy seethed in it from morning till night. This young nature was surely formed for love and contentment, and both had left her weeping. Still Arsinoe never ceased to yearn for them.

When November had begun and another attempt to run away during their move back to the town-house had failed, Paulina tried to punish her by never speaking a word to her for a fortnight, and forbidding even the slave-women to speak to her. In these two weeks the talkative girl was reduced almost to desperation, and she even thought of throwing herself off the roof down into the court-yard. But she clung too dearly to life to carry this horrible project into execution. On the first of December Paulina once more spoke to her, forgave her ingratitude, as usual in a long, kind speech, and told her how many hours she had spent in praying for her enlightenment and improvement.

Paulina spoke the truth, and yet but half the truth, for she had never felt a real love for Arsinoe, and had now for a long time watched her come and go with actual dislike; but she required her conversion in order that the warmest wish of her heart might find fulfilment. It was for the happiness of her daughter, and not for the sake of her recalcitrant companion, that she prayed for her enlightenment and never ceased in her efforts to open the callous heart of her adopted child to the true faith.

In the afternoon preceding that morning when Pollux had at last knocked at the Christian widow’s door, the sun shone with particular brilliancy, and Paulina had allowed the girl to go out with her. They spent some little time with a Christian family who dwelt on the shore of Lake Mareotis, and so it fell out that they did not return home till late in the evening. Arsinoe had long learnt, while she sat apparently gazing at the ground, to keep her eyes out of the carriage and to see everything that was going on around her; and as the chariot turned into their own street she spied in the distance a tall man who looked like her long-wept Pollux. She fixed her eyes upon him, and had some difficulty in keeping herself from calling out aloud, for he it was who walked slowly down the street. She could not be mistaken, for the torches of two slaves who were walking in front of a litter had broadly lighted up his face and figure.

He was not lost—he was living, and seeking her. She could have shouted aloud for joy, but she did not stir till Paulina’s chariot was standing still in front of her house. The door-keeper bustled out as usual to help his mistress to step out of the high-slung vehicle. Thus Paulina for an instant turned her back, and in that moment Arsinoe sprang out of the opposite side of the chariot, and was flying down towards the street where she had seen her lover. Before Paulina could discover that she was gone the runaway found herself in the midst of the throng which, when the day’s work was over, poured out from the workshops and factories on their way home.

Paulina’s slaves, who were sent out at once to seek the fugitive, had to return home this time empty-handed; but Arsinoe, on her part, had not succeeded in finding him she sought. For an hour she looked round and about her in vain; then she perceived that her search must be unsuccessful, and wondered how she might find her way to his parents’ house. Rather than return to her benefactress she would have joined the roofless crew who passed the night on the hard marble pavement of the forecourts of the temple.

At first she rejoiced in the sense of recovered liberty, but when none of the passers-by could tell her where Euphorion, the singer, lived, and some young men followed her and addressed her with impudent speeches, terror made her turn aside into a street which led to the Bruchiom; her persecutors had not even then ceased to follow her, when a litter, escorted by lictors and several torch-bearers, was carried past. It was Julia, the kind wife of the prefect, who sat in it; Arsinoe recognized her at once, followed her, and reached the door of her residence at the same moment as she herself. As the matron got out of her litter she observed the girl who placed herself modestly, but with hands uplifted in entreaty, at the side of her path. Julia greeted the pretty creature in whom she had once taken a motherly interest with affectionate sympathy, beckoned Arsinoe to her, smiled as she listened to her request for a night’s shelter, and led her with much satisfaction to her husband.

Titianus was ill; still he was glad once more to see the ill-fated palace-steward’s pretty daughter; he listened to her story of her flight with many signs of disapprobation, but kindly withal, and expressed the warmest satisfaction at hearing that the sculptor Pollux was still in the land of the living.

The grand and lordly bed in one of the strangers’ rooms in the prefect’s house had held many a more illustrious guest, but never one whose sleep was brightened by happier dreams than the poor orphaned “little fugitive,” who, no longer ago than yesterday, had cried herself to sleep.

CHAPTER XXIV.

Arsinoe was up betimes on the following morning; much embarrassed by all the splendor that surrounded her, she walked up and down her room thinking of Pollux. Then she stopped to take pleasure in her own image displayed in a large mirror which stood on a dressing-table, and between whiles she compared the couch, on which she lay clown again at full length, with those in Paulina’s house. Once more she felt herself a prisoner, but this time she liked her prison, and presently, when she heard slaves passing by her room, she flew to the door to listen, for it was just possible that Titianus might have sent to fetch Pollux, and would allow him to come to see her. At last a slave-woman came in, brought her some breakfast, and desired her from Julia to go into the garden and look at the flowers and aviaries till she should be sent for.

Early that morning the news had reached the prefect that Antinous had sought his death in the Nile, and it had shocked him greatly, less on account of the hapless youth than for Hadrian’s sake. When he had given the proper officials orders to announce the melancholy news and to desire the citizens to give some public expression of their sympathy with the Emperor’s sorrow, he gave audience to the Patriarch Eumenes.

This venerable man, ever since the transactions which he had conducted—with reference to the thanksgiving of the Christians for the safety of the Emperor after the fire, had been one of the most esteemed friends of Titianus and Julia. The prefect discussed with the Patriarch the inauspicious effects that the death of the young fellow might be expected to have on the Emperor, and as a result, on the government, although the favorite had had no qualities of mind to distinguish him.

“Whenever Hadrian,” continued Titianus, “would give his unresting brain an hour’s relaxation, and release himself from disappointment and vexation and the severe toil and anxiety of which his life is overfull, he would go out hunting with the bold youth or would have the handsome, good-hearted boy into his own room. The sight of the Bithynian’s beauty delighted his eye, and how well Antinous knew how to listen to him—silent, modest and attentive! Hadrian loved him as a son, and the poor fellow clung to his master in return with more than a son’s fidelity; his death itself proved it. Caesar himself said to me once; ‘In the midst of the turmoil of waking life, when I see Antinous a feeling comes over me as if a beautiful dream stood incorporate before my eyes.’

“Caesar’s grief at losing him must indeed be great,” said the Patriarch.

“And the loss will add to the gloom of his grave and brooding nature, render his restless scheming and wandering still more capricious, and increase his suspiciousness and irritability.”

“And the circumstances under which Antinous perished,” added Eumenes, “will afford new ground for his attachment to superstitions.”

“That is to be feared. We have not happy days before us; the revolt in Judaea, too, will again cost thousands of lives.”

“If only it had been granted to you to assume the government of that province.”

“But you know, my worthy friend, the condition I am in. On my bad days I am incapable of commanding a thought or opening my lips. When my breathlessness increases I feel as if I were being suffocated. I have placed many decades of my life at the disposal of the state, and I now feel justified in devoting the diminished strength which is left me to other things. I and my wife think of retiring to my property by lake Larius, and there to try whether we may succeed, she and I, in becoming worthy of the salvation and capable of apprehending the truth that you have offered us. You are there Julia? As the determination to retire from the world has matured in us, we have, both of us, remembered more than once the words of the Jewish sage, which you lately told us of. When the angel of God drove the first man out of Paradise, he said: ‘Henceforth your heart must be your Paradise.’ We are turning our backs on the pleasure of a city life—”

“And we do so without regret,” said Julia, interrupting her husband, “for we bear in our minds the germ of a more indestructible, purer, and more lasting happiness.”

“Amen!” said the Patriarch. “Where two such as you dwell together there the Lord is third in the bond.” “Give us your disciple Marcianus to be our travelling-companion,” said Titianus.

“Willingly,” said Eumenes. “Shall he come to visit you when I leave you?”

“Not immediately,” replied Julia. “I have this morning an important and at the same time pleasant business to attend to. You know Paulina, the widow of Pudeus. She took into her keeping a pretty young creature—”

“And Arsinoe has run away from her.”

“We took her in here,” said Titianus. “Her protectress seems to have failed in attracting her to her, or in working favorably on her nature.”

“Yes,” said the Patriarch. “There was but one key to her full, bright heart—Love—but Paulina tried to force it open with coercion and persistent driving. It remained closed—nay, the lock is spoiled.—But, if I may ask, how came the girl into your house?”

“That I can tell you later, we did not make her acquaintance for the first time yesterday.”

“And I am going to fetch her lover to her,” cried the prefect’s wife.

“Paulina will claim her of you,” said the Patriarch. “She is having her sought for everywhere; but the child will never thrive under her guidance.”

“Did the widow formally adopt Arsinoe?” asked Titianus.

“No; she proposed doing so as soon as her young pupil—”

“Intentions count for nothing in law, and I can protect our pretty little guest against her claim.”

“I will fetch her,” said Julia. “The time must certainly have seemed very long to her already. Will you come with me, Eumenes?”

“With pleasure,” replied the old man, “Arsinoe and I are excellent friends; a conciliatory word from me will do her good, and my blessing cannot harm even a heathen. Farewell, Titianus, my deacons are expecting me.”

When Julia returned to the sitting-room with her protegee, the child’s eyes were wet with tears, for the kind words of the venerable old man had gone to her heart and she knew and acknowledged that she had experienced good as well as evil from Paulina.

The matron found her husband no longer alone. Wealthy old Plutarch with his two supporters was with him, and in black garments, which were decorated with none but white flowers, instead of many colored garments; he presented a singular appearance. The old man was discoursing eagerly to the prefect; but as soon as he saw Arsinoe he broke off his harangue, clapped his hands and was quite excited with the pleasure of seeing once more the fair Roxana for whom he had once visited in vain all the gold-workers’ shops in the city.

“But I am tired,” cried Plutarch, with quite youthful vivacity, “I am quite tired of keeping the ornaments for you. There are quite enough other useless things in my house. They belong to you, not to me, and this very day I will send them to the noble Julia, that she may give them to you. Give me your hand, dear child; you have grown paler but more womanly. What do you think, Titianus, she would still do for Roxana; only your wife must find a dress for her again. All in white, and no ribband in your hair!—like a Christian.”

“I know some one who will find out the way to fitly crown these soft tresses,” replied Julia. “Arsinoe is the bride of Pollux, the sculptor.”

“Pollux!” exclaimed Plutarch, in extreme excitement. “Move me forward, Antaeus and Atlas, the sculptor Pollux is her lover? A great, a splendid artist! The very same, noble Titianus, of whom I just now speaking to you.”

“You know him?” asked the prefect’s wife.

“No, but I have just left the work-shop of Periander, the gem-cutter, and there I saw the model of a statue of Antinous that is unique, marvellous, incomparable! The Bithynian as Dionysus! The work would do no discredit to a Phidias, to a Lysippus. Pollux was out of the way, but I laid my hand at once on his work; the young master must execute it immediately in marble. Hadrian will be enchanted with this portrait of his beautiful and devoted favorite. You must admire it, every connoisseur must! I will pay for it, the only question is whether I or the city should present it to Caesar. This matter your husband must decide.”

Arsinoe was radiant with joy at these words, but she stepped modestly into the background as an official came in and handed Titianus a dispatch that had just arrived.

The prefect read it; then turning to his friend and his wife, he said:

“Hadrian ascribes to Antinous the honors of a god.”

“Fortunate Pollux!” exclaimed Plutarch. “He has executed the first statue of the new divinity. I will present it to the city, and they shall place it in the temple to Antinous of which we must lay the first stone before Caesar is back here again. Farewell, my noble friends! Greet your bridegroom from me, my child. His work belongs to me. Pollux will be the first among his fellow-artists, and it has been my privilege to discover this new star—the eighth artist whose merit I have detected while he was still unknown. Your future brother-in-law too, Teuker, will turn out well. I am having a stone cut by him with a portrait of Antinous. Once more farewell; I must go to the Council. We shall have to discuss the subject of a temple to the new divinity. Move on you two!”

An hour after Plutarch had quitted the prefect’s house Julia’s chariot was standing at the entrance of a lane, much too narrow to admit a vehicle with horses, and which ended in a little plot on which stood Euphorion’s humble house. Julia’s outrunners easily found out the residence of the sculptor’s parents, led the matron and Arsinoe to the spot, and showed them the door they should knock at.

“What a color you have, my little girl!” said Julia. “Well, I will not intrude on your meeting, but I should like to deliver you with my own hand into those of your future mother. Go to that little house, Arctus, and beg dame Doris to step out here. Only say that some one wishes to speak with her, but do not mention my name.”

Arsinoe’s heart beat so violently that she was incapable of saying a word of thanks to her kind protectress. “Step behind this palm-tree,” said the lady. Arsinoe obeyed; but she felt as though it was some outside volition, and not her own, that guided her to her hiding-place. She heard nothing of the first words spoken by the Roman lady and Doris. She only saw the dear old face of her Pollux’s mother, and in spite of her reddened eyes and the wrinkles which trouble had furrowed in her face, she could not tire of looking at it. It reminded her of the happiest days of her childhood, and she longed to rush forward and throw her arms round the neck of the kindly, good-hearted woman. Then she heard Julia say: “I have brought her to you. She is just as sweet and as maidenly and lovely as she was the first time we saw her in the theatre.”

“Where is she? Where is she?” asked Doris in a trembling voice.

Julia pointed to the palm, and was about to call Arsinoe, but the girl could no longer restrain her longing to fall on the neck of some one dear to her, for Pollux had come out of the door to see who had asked for his mother, and to see him and to fly to his breast with a cry of joy had been one and the same act to Arsinoe.

Julia gazed at the couple with moistened eyes, and when, after many kind words for old and young alike, she took leave of the happy group, she said:

“I will provide for your outfit my child, and this time I think you will wear it, not merely for one transient hour but through a long and happy life.”

Joyful singing sounded out that evening from Euphorion’s little home. Doris and her husband, and Pollux and Arsinoe, Diotima and Teuker, decked with garlands, reclined round the amphora which was wreathed with roses, drinking to pleasure and joy, to art and love, and to all the gifts of the present. The sweet bride’s long hair was once more plaited with handsome blue ribbons.

Three weeks after these events Hadrian was again in Alexandria. He kept aloof from all the festivals instituted in honor of the new god Antinous, and smiled incredulously when he was told that a new star had appeared in the sky, and that an oracle had declared it to be the soul of his lost favorite.

When Plutarch conducted the Emperor and his friends to see the Bacchus Antinous, which Pollux had completed in the clay, Hadrian was deeply struck and wished to know the name of the master who had executed this noble work of art. Not one of his companion’s had the courage to speak the name of Pollux in his presence; only Pontius ventured to come forward for his young friend. He related to Hadrian the hapless artist’s history and begged him to forgive him. The Emperor nodded his approval, and said:

“For the sake of this lost one he shall be forgiven.”

Pollux was brought into his presence, and Hadrian, holding out his hand said as he pressed the sculptor’s:

“The Immortals have bereft me of his love and faithfulness, but your art has preserved his beauty for me and for the world—”

Every city in the Empire vied in building temples and erecting statues to the new god, and Pollux, Arsinoe’s happy husband, was commissioned to execute statues and busts of Antinous for a hundred towns; but he refused most of the orders, and would send out no work as his own that he had not executed himself on a new conception. His master, Papias, returned to Alexandria, but he was received there by his fellow-artists with such insulting contempt, that in an evil hour he destroyed himself. Teuker lived to be the most famous gem-engraver of his time.

Soon after Selene’s martyrdom dame Hannah quitted Besa; the office of Superior of the Deaconesses at Alexandria was intrusted to her, and she exercised it with much blessing till an advanced age. Mary, the deformed girl, remained behind in the Nile-port, which under Hadrian was extended into the magnificent city of Antmoe. There were there two graves from which she could not bear to part.

Four years after Arsinoe’s marriage with Pollux, Hadrian called the young sculptor to Rome; he was there to execute the statue of the Emperor in a quadriga. This work was intended to crown and finish his mausoleum constructed by Pontius, and Pollux carried it out in so admirable a manner, that when it was ended, Hadrian said to him with a smile:

“Now you have earned the right to pronounce sentence of death on the works of other masters.” Euphorion’s son lived in honor and prosperity to see his children, the children of his faithful wife Arsinoe—who was greatly admired by the Tiber-grow up to be worthy citizens. They remained heathen; but the Christian love which Eumenes had taught Paulina’s foster-daughter was never forgotten, and she kept a kindly place for it in her heart and in her household. A few months before the young couple left Alexandria, Doris had peacefully gone to her last rest, and her husband died soon after her; the want of his faithful companion was the complaint he succumbed to.

On the shores of the Tiber, Pontius was still the sculptor’s friend. Balbilla and her husband gave their corrupt fellow-citizens the example of a worthy, faithful marriage on the old Roman pattern. The poetess’s bust had been completed by Pollux in Alexandria, and with all its tresses and little curls, it found favor in Balbilla’s eyes.

Verus was to have enjoyed the title of Caesar even during Hadrian’s lifetime, but after a long illness he died the first. Lucilla nursed him with unfailing devotion and enjoyed the longed-for monopoly of his attentions through a period of much suffering. It was on their son that in later years the purple devolved.

The predictions of the prefect Titianus were fulfilled, for the Emperor’s faults increased with years and the meaner side of his mind and nature came into sharper relief. Titianus and his wife led a retired life by lake Larius, far from the world, and both were baptized before they died. They never pined for the turmoil of a pleasure-seeking world or its dazzling show, for they had learnt to cherish in their own hearts all that is fairest in life.

It was the slave Mastor who brought to Titianus the news of the sovereign’s death. Hadrian had given him his freedom before he died and had left him a handsome legacy.

The prefect gave him a piece of land to farm and continued in friendly relations with his Christian neighbor and his pretty daughter, who grew up among her father’s co-religionists.

When Titianus had told his wife the melancholy news he added solemnly:

“A great sovereign is dead. The pettinesses which disfigured the man Hadrian will be forgotten by posterity, for the ruler Hadrian was one of those men whom Fate sets in the places they belong to, and who, true to their duty, struggle indefatigably to the end. With wise moderation he was so far master of himself as to bridle his ambition and to defy the blame and prejudice of all the Romans. The hardest, and perhaps the wisest, resolution of his life was to abandon the provinces which it would have exhausted the power of the Empire to retain. He travelled over every portion of his dominion within the limits he himself had set to it, shrinking from neither frost nor heat, and he tried to be as thoroughly acquainted with every portion of it as if the Empire were a small estate he had inherited. His duties as a sovereign forced him to travel, and his love of travel lightened the duty. He was possessed by a real passion to understand and learn everything. Even the Incomprehensible set no limits to his thirst for knowledge, but ever striving to see farther and to dig deeper than is possible to the mind of man, he wasted a great part of his mighty powers in trying to snatch aside the curtain which hides the destinies of the future. No one ever worked at so many secondary occupations as he, and yet no former Emperor ever kept his eye so unerringly fixed on the main task of his life, the consolidation and maintenance of the strength of the state and the improvement and prosperity of its citizens.”