Chapter 8

In the meantime Marcus had been having adventures. His pasture was on a grassy plateau of a mountain slope, edged by heavy green cypresses and dotted with holm-oaks. In the woods above him chestnut and walnut trees showed vividly against the silver olives. Below stretched the shining waters of the Larian Lake. Here, while the sheep browsed happily, he was wont to feed his little soul on dreams. Sitting to-day where he could look out to a distant horizon, his blue tunic seeming to insert into the varied greens about him a bit of colour from sky or lake, he dug his toes into the soft grass and for the hundredth time tried to think out how he could attain his heart's desire. He knew exactly what that was. He wanted to go to school! If anyone had tried to find out why, he would have discovered in the boy's mind a tangled mass of hopes--hopes of helping his mother and owning once more their big fields and vineyards, of going to Rome and coming home again, rich and famous. But to any glorious future school was the portal, of that he was sure. The nearest boys' school was in Milan, and to Milan he must go. The golden fleece on the borders of strange seas, the golden apples in unknown gardens, never seemed to lords of high adventure more remote or more desirable than a provincial school-room thirty miles away seemed to this little shepherd. He dreamed of it by day and by night. Last night, when the Lady of the Spring held out her hand to him he had been sure that what it held would help him to go to Milan. He knew he must have money, and that was why he had never told his mother what he wanted. She would be unhappy, he knew, that she could not give it to him. He wanted her to think that he asked for nothing better than to mind the sheep all day. Sometimes his heart would be so hot with desire that only tears could cool it, and all alone in the pasture he would bury his face in the grass and sob until his dog came and licked his neck. At other times it was his pan's-pipe that brought ease. His father had taught him to play on it when he was a mere baby, and sometimes he would forget his burden in making high, clear notes come out of the slender reeds. To-day, especially, tears seemed far away, and he piped and piped until his heart was at rest, and the sun, now nearly in mid-heaven, made him warm and drowsy.

An hour later he woke with a start into a strange noonday silence. Every blade, and twig, and flower, was hushed. A soft white light dimmed the brilliant colours of the day. No sound was heard from bird or insect, and the only movement was among his white sheep, which noiselessly, like a distant stream of foamy water, seemed to flow down a winding path. The goats were standing quite still. Suddenly they flung up their heads, as if at an imperious call, and in wild abandon rushed toward the shadowy woods above. The dog, as if roused from a trance, gave chase, shattering the silence with yelping barks. The boy, his heart beating violently, followed. It took all the afternoon to collect and quiet the flock, and when Marcus started home he had himself not lost the awed sense of a Presence in his pasture. The nearness seemed less familiar than that of his Lady of Gifts, and yet she must have been concerned in it, for the thrill that remained with him was a happy one.

It was late, but to-day more than ever he must stop at her shrine. Near his regular path, below a narrow gorge, there was a marvellous spring. It rose in the mountains, ran down among the rocks, and was received in an artificial chamber. After a short halt there, it fell into the lake below. The extraordinary thing about it was that three times in each day it increased and decreased with regular rise and fall. One could lie beside it and watch its measured movements. Everybody from far and near came to see it, even the grand people from the villas. But Marcus, coming in the early morning or evening, had almost never met anyone there and had grown to feel that the spot was his own. In the dusk or at dawn it often seemed to him as if a lovely lady, with eyes such as his mother might have had, came up out of the spring and laid smooth, cool hands on his face. Because the Goddess of Gifts had become associated in his mind with the first day he could remember in his early childhood--a radiant and merry day--he had come to identify with her this Lady of the Spring, who alone gave romance to the harsher, soberer years that followed his father's death. To-day Marcus could have sworn she smiled at him before she disappeared, as the water receded after the gushing flow which he had come just in time to watch. He was rising from his knees when his eye fell upon a strange, green gleam upon the wet rock. For a moment he thought it was the gleam of a lizard's back, but as he took the little object into his hand he realised that it was hard, and inert, and transparent. Even in the dusk he could see the light in it. It almost burned in his hand. He felt sure that it was a gift from his Lady, but he did not stop to think what he could do with it. He was filled with happiness just in looking at it. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and he could take it to his mother and it would make her smile. Full of joy, he hurried homeward. Even on ordinary occasions he loved the end of summer days. His grandfather would go to sleep and cease saying strange things, and, after he and his mother had finished the evening tasks in house and court-yard and sheepfold, they would sit for a while together in the warm doorway, and she would tell him stories of his father and of many other people and things. Sometimes when he leaned against her and her voice grew sweet and low he forgot he was a man and a shepherd.

To-night this did not happen, although the air was sweet with roses, and the stars were large and bright. Marcus had shown his mother the green marvel and told her how the Lady of the Spring had brought it out to him from her secret recesses. She had caught her breath and turned it over and over, and then she had put her arms close round him and explained to him that this beautiful thing was a jewel, an emerald, and must have belonged in a great lady's ring. Her father had been a goldsmith and she had often seen such jewels in their setting. They were bought with great sums of money, and to lose one was like losing money. And that was true, too, of finding one. Money must be returned and so must this.

Money--money--his head swam. Could he have bought his heart's desire with the little green gleam? He put his head on his mother's knee and, for all his efforts, a sob sounded in his throat. She lifted him up against her warm, soft breast, and her hands were smoother and cooler than his Lady's, and he told her all that was in his heart, and she told him all that was in hers, for him.

Later they talked like comrades and partners about the emerald, and decided that it must belong to someone in Pliny's villa, either to Calpurnia herself or to one of her guests. They agreed that they could not sleep until it was returned. The mother had to stay near the sleeping old man, but the villa was only two miles away, the neighbourhood was safe, with a dog as companion, and Marcus was a fast walker on his strong bare feet. At the villa he could ask for Lucius, who came to the farm twice a week for eggs and chickens. "He is an old servant," she said, "loyal to his master and friendly toward us. He is sure to be kind to you. I will do the jewel up in a little package and put father's seal on it, and you can trust it to him. Be sure to give it to no one else."

So Marcus, with his dog, long past his usual bed-time, trudged forth into the night whose cavernous shadows deepened the shadows in his little heart. The worst of the adventure was walking up through the grounds of the villa and facing the porter at the servants' door and asking for Lucius. When he came, the boy thrust the package into his hand, stammered out an explanation, and ran away before the bewildered old man knew what had happened. On the way home the dog seemed to share his master's discouragement and left unchallenged the evening music of the bull-frogs. When Marcus stretched his tired legs out in bed he thought of to-morrow with the sheep again, and wondered dully why his Lady and her mysterious comrade in the pasture had cheated him. His mother, going into the kitchen to see that the wood was ready for the morning, snatched the red roses from the table spread for Fors Fortuna and threw them fiercely on the ashes.

II

The day at the villa had been the most trying one of a trying week for Pliny and Calpurnia. A restful house-party of their dearest friends had been spoiled by the arrival of Quadratilla, heralded by one of her incredible letters dated at Baiae:

"I lost at the dice last night," she had written. "The dancers from Cadiz had thick ankles. The oysters were not above suspicion and the sows'-bellies were unseasoned. We have exhausted the love affairs and debts of our neighbours, and made each other's wills. (I am to leave my money--I rely on you to tell Quadratus--to a curled darling here who hums Alexandrian dance tunes divinely). And we have discussed _ad nauseam_ the rainfall in Upper Egypt, the number of legions on the Rhine and the ships in from Africa. That clever Spanish friend of yours--what was his name?--Martial--was quite right about our conversations. It is a pity he had to pay out his obol for the longer journey before he could get back to Rome.

"My digestion demands fresh eggs and lettuce to the rhythm of hexameters. Or is it sapphics to which we eat this year? I must know what the next crop of the stylus is to be. I cannot sleep at night for wondering who is to teach in your new school. Will he be as merry a guide as your Quintilian was? And will the Como boys become sparkling little Plinies?

"I must see the grown-up Pliny's noble brow and my Calpurnia's eyes--and the Tartarean frown of Tacitus, who, I hear, is with you. Quadratus says you are at the smallest of your Como villas. The mood suits me. At Tusculum or Tibur or Praeneste or Laurentum you might have longed for me in vain. In your Arcadian retreat expect me on the tenth day."

The hale old woman took a terrible advantage of her years and her tongue to do as she chose among her acquaintances. And Pliny was more or less at her mercy, because his mother and she had been friends in their girlhood, and because her grandson, Quadratus, was among the closest of his own younger friends. Unluckily, too, she had taken a violent fancy to Calpurnia. She spared her none of her flings, but evidently in some strange way the exquisite breeding and candid goodness of the younger woman appealed to her antipodal nature. She had lived riotously through seven imperial reigns, gambling, owning and exhibiting pantomimes, nourishing all manner of luxurious whims, whether the state lay gasping under a Nero or Domitian, or breathed once more in the smile of Trajan. Her liking for Calpurnia was of a piece, her acquaintances thought, with her bringing up of her grandson. No boy in Rome had had an austerer training. He was never allowed to mingle with her coarser companions, and when the dice were brought in she always sent him out of the room--"back to his books." No breath of scandal had ever touched his good name, and his tastes could not have been more prudent, his grandmother used to say, with uplifted eyebrows, had he had the "inestimable advantage of being brought up by Pliny's uncle."

After a winter and spring of varied activities the friends gathered at Pliny's villa had eagerly looked forward to a brief peace. Pliny's law business had been unusually exacting. He had worked early and late, and made a series of crucial speeches, and when spring came on he had allowed neither work nor social demands to interfere with his attendance at the almost numberless literary readings. His "conscientious and undiscriminating concern for dead matter," Quadratilla once said, "rivalled Charon's." Calpurnia, never strong, but always supplementing at every turn her husband's work, had felt especially this year the strain of Roman life. Tacitus, already a figure in the literary world through his _Agricola_ and _Germania_, had made a beginning on his more elaborate _Histories_ and been enslaved to his genius. Pompeius Saturninus and his clever wife, Cornelia, were hoping for a little rustic idleness before beginning the summer entertaining at their place in Tuscany. The group under Pliny's roof was completed by Calpurnia's lovely aunt, Hispulla, and Fannia, whose famous ancestry was accentuated in her own distinguished character. Pliny's old schoolfellow, Caninus Rufus, had come to his adjacent villa, bringing with him their common friend, Voconius Romanus. These friends had entered upon one of the holiday seasons rarely granted to people of importance. Their debts to the worlds of business or society or literature held in abeyance, they were lightly devoting their days to fishing and hunting, sailing and riding, while the keenness of their intellectual interests--they belonged to a very different set from Quadratilla's--was restfully tempered and the sincerity of them deepened by a thorough-going intimacy.

Upon the second fortnight of this life Quadratilla broke like a thunder-squall. Whatever feelings had prompted her to leave her fashionable resort, her mood after she arrived was characteristically Bacchanal. She had a genius for making the tenderest feeling or the deepest conviction seem absurd. Rufus did not know whether to be more angry at her open hint to Pliny that his childlessness was like that of so many millionaires of the day, a voluntary lure for the attention of legacy hunters, or at her sardonic inquiries after Tacitus's dyspepsia. His best friends knew that his gloom issued from the travail of a mind which had sickened mortally under Domitian and could not find in the present tranquillity more than a brief interruption to the madness of men and the wrath of gods. It was not that Quadratilla failed to perceive the massive intellectual force of Tacitus. On the contrary, she enraged Rufus and the others still further by a covert irony about Pliny's classing himself as a man of letters with the historian, an innocent vanity which endeared him only the more to those whose experience of his loyal and generous heart left no room for critical appraisement of his mental calibre.

The day in question had been full of small annoyances. Calpurnia, wishing, on the Feast of Fors Fortuna, to excuse the dining-room servants from a noonday attendance, had had a luncheon served in the grotto of the tidal spring. Unluckily, while they were testing the ebb and flow by putting rings and other small objects on a dry spot and watching the water cover them, Quadratilla lost out of one of her rings a very valuable emerald. From that moment until the stone was returned by Marcus everybody's patience had been strained to the breaking point by the old lady's peevish temper. After dinner, when they were sitting in the loggia overlooking the lake, which lay dark and still beneath the June stars, they all united in a tacit effort to divert her attention. Pliny told a story of some neighbours to illustrate that the same kind of courage existed in the middle class as in the aristocracy. A wife, finding that her husband was wasting away with an incurable disease, not only urged him to end his life, but joined him in the brave adventure, fastening his weakened body to hers and then leaping with him from a window overlooking the lake.

Fannia agreed enthusiastically that the deed was as brave as the one by which her famous grandmother had shown her husband the way to meet an emperor's command to die; and she went on to say that she and Pliny had decided once that some of the unknown hours of Arria's life were as courageous as the final one of death. "Mother has told me all kinds of things about her," she said. "Once her husband and son were both desperately ill, and the son died. It wasn't safe to tell grandfather, and grandmother went through it all, even the funeral, without his knowing it. She would go into his room and answer questions about the boy, saying he had slept well and eaten more. When she couldn't bear it any longer she would go to her own room and give way, and come back again, calm and serene, to nurse her husband."

"I wonder," said Cornelia, "if blood counted more in that apparently simpler thing. Do you think a middle-class woman could have controlled herself so finely?" Voconius broke in with a quick answer: "It is nothing against Arria, whose memory we all reverence, if I say I think she might. It seems to me that the kind of thing that only an aristocrat could do was done by Corellius Rufus. It isn't a matter of courage but of humour. Tell the story, Pliny. I haven't heard it since the year he died--let me see, seven years ago, that was. It's time we heard it again."

Tacitus leaned forward to listen as Pliny willingly complied: "Corellius was, you know, a Stoic of the Stoics, believing in suicide. When the doctors had assured him that he could never be cured of a most dreadful disease, all his reasons for living, his wealth and position and fame, his wife and daughter and grandchildren and sisters and friends, became secondary to his reasons for dying. He had held the disease in check, while he was younger, by the most temperate living. But in old age it gained on him; he was bedridden and had only weakening torments to face. I went to see him one day while Domitian was still living. His wife went out of the room, for, although she had his full confidence, she was tactful enough to leave him alone with his friends. He turned his eyes to me and said: 'Why do you think I have endured this pain so long? It is because I want to survive our Hangman at least one day.' As soon as we were rid of Domitian he began to starve himself to death. I agree with Voconius that only an aristocrat could have thought of outwitting a tyrant by outliving him."

"It is a pity, is it not," said Cornelia, "that Juvenal could not have known men like Corellius and your uncle, Pliny, and all the rest of you? He might be less savage in his attacks on our order." "And equally a pity," Pliny gallantly responded, "that he could not modify his views on your sex by knowing such ladies as are in this room." Tacitus bowed gravely to Quadratilla as their host said this. A retort trembled on the wicked old lips, but Calpurnia, seeing it, made haste to ask if any of them had ever talked with Juvenal. "I asked Martial once," she said, "to bring him to see us, but he never came. I cannot help feeling that, if he could know us better, his arraignment would be less harsh." "Dear Lady," said Tacitus, "you forget that people like you are cut jewels, very different from the rough rock of our order as well as from the shifting sands of the populace." "Dear Cynic," laughed Calpurnia, "do we know any more about the populace than Juvenal knows about us?"

But in Tacitus's unfortunate figure Quadratilla saw her chance to annoy him by belittling the conversation. To everyone's despair, she intruded maliciously: "To my thinking, the finding of my emerald would show to advantage the cut of our aristocratic wits." Cornelia had just whispered to Rufus, "I wish we could lose her as adequately out of our setting," when Lucius came into the loggia with the sealed package for Pliny. A question from his master gave him a chance to tell Marcus's story, which lost nothing in the friendly, rustic narration. A chorus of praise for the boy rose from the eager listeners. Even Quadratilla remarked that he was a decent little clod-hopper, as she demanded a lamp by which to examine her jewel. Pliny and Calpurnia's eyes met in swift response to each other's thoughts. They examined the farmer's seal and questioned Lucius more closely. Calpurnia's eyes filled with tears at his account of the old grandfather--"ruined," she exclaimed to the others, "in the very month that Pliny's name, as we afterwards discovered, was put on the prescription list. We were so anxious at the time--that must explain our never following the family up. I will go early to-morrow," she added, turning to her husband, "and see the mother. We must make up for lost time." "Find out," said Pliny, "whether the boy wants to go to school."

A cackle of laughter came from Quadratilla's chair back of the group that had gathered around the servant. "How like my Pliny!" she remarked genially. "A dirty little rascal restores my property in the hope of picking up a reward. His heart's desire is doubtless a strip of bacon for his stomach on a holiday. And Pliny offers him an education!"

III

Marcus had been in his pasture for many an hour when Calpurnia came to the farm. His mother was on her knees washing up the stone floor of the kitchen. A sweet voice sounded in her ears, and she looked up to see a goddess--as she thought in the first blinding moment--a goddess dressed in silvery white with a gleam of gold at her throat. Neither woman ever told all that passed between them in their long talk in the sunlit courtyard, where they sought solitude, but when Marcus's mother kissed her visitor's hands at parting, Calpurnia's eyes shone with tears and her own were bright as with a vision.

When she went back into the kitchen, she found on the stone table a great hamper, from which a bottle of wine generously protruded. Her father-in-law from his chair in the window began an excited and incoherent story. She ran to him and knelt by his side and begged him to understand while she told him of a miracle. The dull old eyes looked only troubled. So she choked back her tears and stroked his hands gently and said over and over, until his face brightened, "You are never going to be cold or hungry again--never cold or hungry."

Even with her many tasks the summer day seemed unending to her. Finally, as the shadows lengthened, she could no longer endure to wait and started out to meet Marcus. Across a green meadow she saw him coming, walking soberly and wearily in front of his herded flock. As he saw her, his listlessness fell from him and he ran forward anxiously. But when he reached her and saw her eyes, his heart almost stopped beating in glad amazement. And she held out her hands, while the dog jumped up on them both in an ecstasy, and said to him, "My son, Fors Fortuna, your Lady of the Spring, has blessed us. You are to go to school."

Later in the evening, when the wonderful supper from the hamper had been eaten and cleared away, and the grandfather had fallen peacefully asleep, and the sheep and goats and hens had been tended for the night, Marcus and his mother sat in the doorway beside the red rosebush and dreamed dreams together of a time when house and courtyard, renewed, should once more exercise a happy sovereignty over fruitful acres. The world seemed Marcus's because he was to go to school, this very year, in their own Como. They had not known before that Pliny had offered to share with the citizens the expense of a school of their own, so that boys need not go as far as Milan. Marcus was awed into speechlessness when his mother told him that the great man was personally to see to his registration and fees and clothes and books. The evening wore on, and the boy's head, heavy with visions, fell sleepily against his mother's breast. As she held him to her, her thoughts wandered from him to the radiant lady who had brought such light into their darkness. Could Fors Fortuna herself, she wondered, be any happier, laden with beauty and riches and power, and making of them a saving gift for mortals?