Roads from Rome Part 5

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 fas.h.i.+on 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 cus.h.i.+ons of a neighbouring bench, threw herself on the gra.s.s 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 the _Lysistrata_ the 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 t.i.tle. 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 G.o.ds 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 a.s.surance 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.

II

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 his _Metamorphoses_, 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 Caesar'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 Sila.n.u.s, 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 l.u.s.tre 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 Caesar'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. Caesar 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 pa.s.sed, 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 relations.h.i.+p, 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 pa.s.sed. 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 his _Art 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 Caesar. Banishment was banishment.

"An _exile_?"--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. Caesar 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.

s.e.xtus 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 h.e.l.lespont 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 s.h.i.+p 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 ma.n.u.script of his _Metamorphoses_. 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 pa.s.sing 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 grat.i.tude 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 pa.s.sers-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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds of home, her G.o.ds. 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 Caesar. 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 ma.s.s of his dishevelled hair. His shoulders sagged. He stumbled as he went out. She was conscious of falling, and knew nothing more.

III

Ovid's second birthday in exile had pa.s.sed. 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 Caesar 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 role 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 his _Metamorphoses_, 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 called _Tristia_, 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 s.h.i.+ver 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 s.h.i.+p 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 appet.i.te 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 companions.h.i.+p. 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 pa.s.sed 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, rea.s.serted 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 a.n.a.lysing 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 fete 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 citizens.h.i.+p. 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 citizens.h.i.+p, 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 pa.s.sion of her maturity, his charm and his blitheness and his gifted sensitiveness, but she had been proud of his achievements.

His citizens.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sionate 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 ma.s.s of their instincts. Its constancy, its dignity, its magnanimity, probity and fidelity Cicero had described in words befitting their ma.s.sive 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 citizens.h.i.+p, save for the empty t.i.tle, 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 fort.i.tude.

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 G.o.ds 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 s.e.x, 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 citizens.h.i.+p 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 G.o.ds of her home. Now she stood erect and looked out upon the city and with a solemn faith prayed to the greater G.o.ds. Later she slept peacefully, for the first time in fifteen months, as one whose taskmaster has turned comrade.