The emperor, acting in his capacity as Pontifex Maximus, had confirmed as virgin priestess of Vesta, Flavia, a child of ten, daughter of Valerian and Valeria. To celebrate the event Valerian gave the people games. Held in the new Amphitheatre, the spectacle drew all Rome. The emperor honoured the donor by his presence. Gladiators contended, after strange fashions, with beasts of the wood and the plain and with one another. Valerian, a successful general, lately returned from the west, had brought prisoners, great flaxen-headed men, who now fought, divided into two bands, kin against kin, with freedom the prize for the surviving.

The Amphitheatre was huge, one oval, hollow wave of men and women. The people came early, struggling for good seats, desirous of being on hand for every important entrance,—the emperor, the senators, the prefect of the city, the vestals, the donors of the games, the famed, the rich, the knowing. Down streamed the sun, hot and bare upon the arena, broken elsewhere by awnings of rose and blue. Flowers withered in garlands, perfumes were burning in silver braziers. A sea of sound steadfastly beat against the ear, a vast blend of voices, male and female, of every quality. Vigiles kept order. In the arena, in the sloping passways between the divisions of the benches, jugglers and buffoons and pantomimists kept the many amused until there should arrive the glittering few. Fruit and a kind of{239} comfit were carried about and distributed. The people acclaimed Valerian the Generous.

The freedwoman Lais picked a great bunch of grapes for herself, and another for her daughter Iras, a child a year or so older than the little new vestal. “Valeria has a marble chair while I have a stone bench,” quoth Lais. “But she can eat no better grapes than these! Moreover, she has kissed her girl for the last time to-day, while I can kiss mine any day! Still the gods keep planting thistles with roses!”

“Mother, mother!” whispered Iras. “Is it over there that father will sit?”

“Hush, and eat your grapes!” answered Lais.

The oceanic voice of the place deepened to a roar. The great were coming. The buffoons, jugglers, pantomimists, passers to and fro stood still. Up and down the dizzy slopes the mass scrambled to its feet. “Hail, C?sar! Hail, C?sar!”

With pomp came the emperor, pr?torians, and civic officers; with pomp came the six vestals, the virgo vestalis maxima and her five sister priestesses, splendidly attended. The six were robed in white, stola and pallium, their hair bound with ribands of white wool. They took the seats of the vestals, over against the emperor. With them, to-day, came the newly chosen young vestal, the child of ten, daughter of Valerian and Valeria. She was dressed like the older priestesses, but her hair had been cut upon her taking the vows. She had an especial place; she sat stiffly, in view of all, a little figure all in white, with folded hands. Her vows were for thirty years. For ten of these she would be trained in the service of Vesta, for ten she would watch the sacred fire, bring the sacred water, offer the sacrifices{240} of salt cakes, the libations of wine and oil, pray for the Roman State, guard the Palladium; for ten she would teach the youthful vestals. She would have enormous honour, great privileges.

The freedwoman and her daughter, leaning forward in their places, whispering each to the other, watched the child in white. “See the people look at her! Are the games for Flavia?” asked the child Iras, and she spoke with a child’s jealousy.

“Eat thy grapes, my poor babe! Thou wilt not have a great house and riches and honour like the vestals!” Lais gave her rich, chuckling laugh. “Neither, if thou lettest the fire go out at home, shalt thou be cruelly scourged! Nor, when thou art older, if thou slippest once—just once—just one little time—shalt thou be buried alive!”

The little, new vestal sat still, with her hands crossed before her. Her eyes filled with tears, they rolled down her cheeks. The attendants having her in charge whispered to her hastily. She must not weep! “Then turn me so that I cannot see my mother.”

Valerian with Valeria his wife had bowed before the emperor. Now they sat quietly, with a studied lack of state, as was fitting, about them friends of the soberer sort. Valerian talked with the Stoic Paulinus. Valeria sat still as a figure of ivory and gold, her long-fingered hands clasped in her lap, her eyes upon the garlanded place of the vestals, upon the little figure sitting so stiffly.... Down in the arena they were making ready, and in the meantime five hundred dancing fauns and nymphs gave entertainment.

Not till there began the struggle between man and beast and man and man would tense interest stop the voice of the{241} host. Up and down the sound was as of the sea, or of a high wind in those endless barbarian forests on the edge of empire where Valerian had been. Behind the freedwoman and her child crowded market men and women, provincials of low estate, half a dozen soldiers. Of these last it appeared that Valerian had been general. Their general figured in their talk, and they did not scant their praise. They called him brave and wary, good father to his cohorts. A provincial asked about the children of his body. Lais turned a little toward the speakers.—“All but this one died. He adopted a son so that his name should last—see, the young man standing up! But he has no own children save the little vestal.”

Lais, with a jerk of her head, went back to eating grapes and contemplating the fauns and nymphs.

“No lawful children, you mean?” said the provincial.

“Of course,” answered the soldier: “owned children. There are owned children and there are unowned children.—Ha! Watch them leap and dance!”

Lais ate the purple grapes, spitting out the seeds. Iras, leaning forward, watched the wreathing fauns and nymphs. “Mother, mother! When I am grown I will be a dancer!”

“Who is the old man talking to the general?”

“Paulinus the Stoic.—Once Valerian thought no more of his soul than another—”

“Ha! We begin!”

The five hundred dancing nymphs and fauns swirled from the arena like wind-blown coloured leaves and petals. A grating slid back, there came forth a hollow roar. Forth upon the sand walked a lion from Africa, a king among lions. Another gate opened; there stepped forth, naked, a{242} yellow-headed giant. The games began.... Presently there were many beasts and many men.

Valeria sat with her hands in her lap, and for a long time had no thought save for the child that was going from her. Her will had bowed to that going. It was a great and honourable destiny, and many competed for the nomination for their daughters. Flavia did not pass from life. She, Valeria, would hear of her, see her, might visit her in the great, rich House of the Vestals. But the mother grieved that she would not see her every day, would no more lie beside her nor bear her in her arms. She was so sunken in the thought of the little one that she gave scant attention to the place in which she was, to the sloping wilderness where men and women took the place of trees, and down below, as in a vast pit, men fought with and like the beasts of the wood. Upon the slopes held breathlessness, a leaning forward and down as though bent by a wind. Down in the arena held heavy breathing, straining, bestial sounds of struggle, shouts, groans, cries of triumph and despair.... Flavia stepped aside in her mind. Out of mind went the other vestals, the emperor, all the great, and the massed people; aside stepped also Valerian. She had been to the games before, but she had not before felt woe and sadness like this. Her soul plunged into black depths, then rose. For the first time she hated the games; she found them smeared with guilt. It seemed to her that veils parted; she caught wider glimpses of life and its ways. How long she had lived, and how bent and crooked, here starved and here swollen, was living! These hateful games—C?sar’s empurpled face—the multitude craving and lusting for the red, the loud, the suffering of another.... She felt for all a sick distaste. She wished to rise and go away, Flavia{243} in her arms and beside her Valerian.... She went farther. Faint as first dawn in an old deep forest she experienced a sense of oneness with all within the range of perception, with the breathless tiers, with the panting, the groaning arena. Very faintly, she would have had all rise and go away, very faintly the whole rose and moved with her. But it was only like a breath of dawn; in a moment she thought again only of Flavia and Valerian. But it had been, and might be again. Down in the pit a man, struggling with a brute, gave a short cry of agony. A man and a woman, near her, leaning from marble seats, showed gloating faces, drew in their breath with a sound of delight. She felt again the wave of pain, resistance, the effort to lift and remove, the straining as against grave-clothes.

The day, short to the most but long and long to many, drew to an end. The huge spectacle given by Valerian closed with a final clanging feat, red colour and uproar. Forth went the emperor, forth the vestals, forth the prefect, senators, knights, the pr?torians, the huge people. The Amphitheatre emptied by many ways, but without, in the columned space that fronted it, all orders blended. Patrician and plebeian pressed each against the other. In the seething colour and sound, Valerian and Valeria, with them many friends, came against a great knot and concourse of market-people. At cross-directions there occurred a momentary halting. The folk, recognizing Valerian, shouted his name. He, as donor of the show, must continue to exhibit good-will. What he showed he felt. He had been long in savage forests; returning, he felt Rome and the Romans warm about his heart. He greeted the folk as they greeted him, laughter and good words passed between them. Then Lais, the freedwoman, the{244} flower-seller, pushed herself, or was pushed, toward the front. She had in her hand Iras her daughter. Together they came as fully as might be before Valerian and Valeria. Now Iras was a beautiful child. Valerian looked on Lais whom he remembered, but Valeria looked at Iras. “Hail, General!” chanted the flower-seller, and with deliberation pushed before her the child. “Hail, General! Did you see any fairer, out there among barbarians?”

If Valerian had or had not did not appear, for now others came between. In especial young men came, roisterers from the Palatine. These pushed against the market-folk, and one, curled and garlanded, threw his arms around Lais, who yet possessed beauty. When she released herself, Valerian and Valeria and their following had passed by.

That night was feasting in Valerian’s house in Rome. The next day was business in C?sar’s house and elsewhere. The third day he went with Valeria to his country house in the Alban Hills.

At sunset the two paced the terrace, all the air sweet with flowers, spread beneath them the wide, darkling plain. They had not been alone together since the day of the games. Now they walked up and down in silence, husband and wife, in much understanding each the other, yet in much each to the other barbarian, loving much, yet at not a few points drawn widely apart. Outwardly, they were at rich, first prime, and both of them fair to the eye.

The west was crimson, their vineyards and olive trees caught the last bright light, white doves fluttered about a dovecote and walked the terrace with them.

Valerian drew deep breath. “How sweet it is to be at home!... Who first thought of home deserves well!{245}”

“It is sweet.... Valerian, the captives, the miserable in the arena the other day! A kind of captivity and misery to be the watchers....”

“Have you felt that? I have felt it too. But not one man nor many men can change the world.... A man would be torn to pieces who said to the people, ‘The games are done with, things of the past!’”

“Yes.... Ill customs perhaps ignorantly begun, and we go on because we have gone on so long.... Yet are we never to end ill, begin better?”

“In the long, long run, perhaps, yes.... I suppose we all sleep, or are poisoned.... However, I said to myself, there in the Amphitheatre, ‘When needs must, I will go to these games, but not for pleasure. But not again, though I become thrice as rich as I am, shall I furnish them!’”

“I am glad of that.—See Flavia’s grey dove in the almond tree!”

They watched the dove. It rose, showed dark against the carmine sky, then passed into the black depths of a cypress.

“Cease now to mourn for Flavia,” said Valerian. “She will be happy.”

“Perhaps.... Men love children, I know, but hardly as women love them.”

“Nature allows that. But a man may do wisely by his children.”

“Oh, ofttimes!—and ofttimes unwisely! But whatever and however he does they lie in his hand. Utterly, utterly they lie in his hand! He makes all the laws for them. He puts them to death when he wills. O earth! The mother is in his hand and the child is in his hand, and we bow our heads and worship where he bids!{246}”

“What ails thee, Valeria? Do not I, Valerian, love thee and love Flavia?”

“Yes, Valerian, yes!”

“Then—”

“There is much cause for wonder in this world.... How did it ever come that men made men fight with beasts upon the sands of an arena for show? How did it ever come that men have over women the whole power of law and the state? Oh, I answer myself! It came in many ways, here a little and there a little—”

“Nature and the gods—”

“Valerian, do you believe that?”

“Yes, I believe it.”

“It flatters your pride to believe it, and so you believe!... But I say, too, that women must have erred and erred.... Both you and I stray in a vast wood!”

“Rome and the parting with the child have fevered you.... But you were always subtle and thinking, thinking—”

“Look how the light sprinkles the plain!—Here is Faustus.”

A grey-headed man leaning upon a staff came to meet them. It was Faustus the philosopher to whom Valerian gave house-room.

“Hail, Valerian and Valeria! Good is the city, but good indeed is the country! How beautiful are the olive trees and the sea of gold!”

They paced the terrace up and down, by the marble statues and the flowering trees. “Faustus, I have read that Zeno said, ‘All men are by nature equal. In degree of virtue alone are they different.’”

“He said so, Valeria. And so do all Stoics, his followers.{247}”

“And slaves and captives and strangers—”

“They also. Underneath and above they are one with the master and the victor and the Roman.”

“And women—and women, Faustus?”

Faustus leaned upon his staff. “They also, Valeria.”

Valerian made a movement of impatience. “O Faustus, where is that last said?”

“It follows, Valerian.”

“It is theory! It has never been, nor will it ever be. As we cannot free the slaves, so women cannot walk equal with men. But goodness to slaves, goodness and love to women I grant!”

Faustus was silent.

Said Valeria, “That is much to grant, but not enough.”

They were standing beneath a high-raised marble figure of Ceres. Valerian struck with his hand the base of the statue. His brow darkened. “O, Valeria, you and I have struggled together before now—struggled long, struggled hard! Now we are at peace. I value peace. Let us stay there!”

“You make a slavery and call it peace!”

He stamped with his foot. “Let it be! Let it be!”

The wife raised her arms to the skies, then let them drop. She could sing most sweetly. Now, suddenly, she broke into song, a wild folk-carol of sun and earth and gods and d?mons. She sang a charmed silence upon the terrace and the garden below. Tree, vine, and flower, bird upon the bough, light in the west, seemed to dream, listening. Faustus sat upon a bench, his hands crossed over his staff, his eyes upon the brightening evening star. Valerian sighed. He leaned against the wall and shadowed his face with his hand, and the inward light beat against the{248} inward eye, but the eye was not yet strengthened enough to receive it strongly. The woman ceased to sing, the dusk thickened, the dank and chill of the evening were felt, they went into the house.

Later, in the great chamber, the house master and mistress being alone for the night, Valeria standing trimming the lamp that burned, fed by perfumed oil, before the little figures of the household deities, said suddenly, “She was your child—that lovely brown-haired one a woman thrust before us, leaving the Amphitheatre. She was so like you!—more like than is Flavia.”

Valerian came and stood beside her. “The woman was Lais the Greek. Five years since I freed her, and bought for her a flower shop. Then we became as strangers. Thou knowest that illness I had, five years ago, and how, recovering, I changed much in my life.... The freedwoman has her shop of flowers, and if I remember her aright will be ever warm and kind to the child.”

“What is her name—the child’s?”

“Her name?... I cannot,” said Valerian, “remember it.”

 

From the Rhine, from post to post, along the Roman roads, came with swiftness tidings that again the Marcomanni had risen in revolt. Back to his legion, encamped upon that river, hastened Valerian. Arrived, he made junction with an endangered legion stationed inland, and drove with twin eagles against the Marcomanni. These broke, these fled; a host was slain, a host taken. The brand of revolt, dashed against earth, had its fire put out. The auxiliaries who brought to Rome, over hundreds of leagues, over Roman roads, to slavery, to the games of the Amphi{249}theatre, the huge many of prisoners, brought also praise of Valerian. The victory praised him, the safety of the legions praised him. The emperor nodded, looked aslant, made the sign that kept away evil. Said one under his breath to another in the house of C?sar, “Do not win too much nor be liked too well, for that is the road to the Mamertine!”

Valerian, far from Rome and that savour of incense and look of danger, obeyed soldierly duty and something higher. Revolt subdued, he conciliated, organized, administered, and all was done well. It took time. Months rolled away in the northern forests, by the northern streams. The months became a year, the year two years, the two three. Valerian wrote to Rome, asking permission to return for a while to family and estate. Permission was denied. He had thought that it would be so, for letters told him that ever more and more C?sar hated other men’s successes, and that, besides, certain foes of his worked against him in Rome. Upon the heels of that denial came an order to proceed to the command of a legion in Britain. That was to leave a famous legion for one not so famed. That was to leave captain and soldiers who engaged for victory wheresoever he led for others who knew him not. It was to leave a region that he knew for obscure struggles with the Caledonians at the edge of the world. Valerian sat with his chin in his hand, and pondered his own revolt—his own and the famed legion, drawing with it other legions. He shook his head; he consulted loyalty and the public good. Obeying the imperial word, he set his face to the west, he travelled long and far, and crossed the narrow sea and came to Britain and travelled the Roman road to the legion in the north. Here he stayed two years and did well, so well that at the end of that time he was sent to command not a{250} legion, but auxiliary troops in a poor and drowsy corner of the empire where Opportunity might be expected never to show her face. Expectation was disappointed; in the third year Opportunity appeared with suddenness. Valerian took her by both hands. His name once more became sonorous. When he had been almost ten years from Rome he was summoned home. He was sure that it was to ruin.

There were lines in his forehead, a little silver in his hair and short beard. The rime, the breath of the fir wood clung about him. In Valeria’s hair there was silver. She met him alone, beneath the old olive tree, upon the slope before the villa in the Alban Hills. He had sent those with him another way; he came to her alone with, in his step, the eagerness of youth. She stood robed in white; she had for him who, in the wilderness, had increased in inward stature, a new beauty and majesty.

“Hail, Valerian!”

“Hail, Valeria!” Each held the other, embraced. “Long—long—long has it been!”

They climbed the hillside. “Are you safe, Valerian,—are you safe, here at Rome, where you should be so safe—”

“Not I! To-morrow, C?sar may send to tell me, ‘Open your veins. Die, and ease me of a jealousy!’—Well, what odds? It comes one day. What matter which day?”

The old household slaves came about them. It was springtime and evening and loveliness. As they reclined at supper, as afterwards they walked the terrace, and at last in their chamber he watched Valeria. Love rekindled in him, but a graver love, a love that was beginning to think.{251}

“We have changed,” he said.

“Yes. There is a worker, a sculptor, a musician dealing with us.”

“Life?”

“Life also is under its hand.... In these years that I have dwelled here, lonely but for it, I have felt it working. It works from a place that our places hide.”

“I learned something of that in those dark, northern woods, by those cold and deathly waters. There is something more than we know or feel.”

“There is a sky above the sky. But that is all I know. I do not yet breathe under it.”

Days and nights passed. Valerian rested with Valeria in the villa among the hills, unbidden to Rome, possibly unthought of, perhaps unthreatened. He began to feel in the peace about him that he had dreamed that there was lightning in the clouds and an ambush in the way. And then he was bidden, he with his wife, to a feast in C?sar’s house.... When he came there, he saw that all the time the sky had been truly overcast.

C?sar made a feast of phantasy and extravagance. The colours seemed all gold, or else the hue of wine. The emperor reclined, garlanded, and all the guests were garlanded, and beautiful slaves served the tables with drink and viands fantastically choice, and flower petals were shred upon them from above. Voluptuous music mixed with the silver fall of fountains. At intervals dwarfs or jugglers or gladiators made entertainment, or dancers came like snow or fire into the huge pillared room. There flowed talk and talk and laughter. Valerian and Valeria had their places where C?sar might observe that general, too liked by soldiers and provincials! To an............