The proconsul lifted his carefully plucked eyebrows under the brim of his elaborate helmet. “Attend to your servant,” he said. “Do you not feel him tugging at your arm? Surely one so precious to you should not be ignored.”
He leaned against an onyx column, his eyes glinting with mirth. Lucanus stared at him a moment, then gave his attention to Ramus, whom he forced down on the bed. “Be calm,” he said, sternly. “You must not struggle. This may be painful, but the pain will be of short duration.” He glanced over his shoulder at the proconsul. “I beg of you to wait until I have completed this.”
“I have only twenty insistent Greeks waiting for me,” said the proconsul. “That is of no matter, of course. A charming house. I have been investigating it. Ah, what a day it is when slaves and peasants and rough-handed men can acquire such delightfulness!”
Lucanus did not answer him. The last bloodstained layer was now under his tender fingers. The proconsul, suddenly interested, craned his neck. Lucanus drew a deep breath, then removed the last cloth. He closed his own eyes so not to see the awful ruin for a moment or two.
Silence surrounded him, and his forehead burst into sweat. No one moved, and then the proconsul said, “Eheu! There is nothing wrong with the slave’s eyes! What nonsense is this?”
The physician’s eyes flew open. He looked at Ramus, who was smiling radiantly up at him. The large and limpid black eyes were full, shining, and without a mar. Lucanus, trembling, bent over the black man and blinked away a dimness. He was incredulous. He could not believe it. He seized Ramus’ chin in his sweating fingers and turned his head about. Then he ran to a window and flung aside the draperies. His knees quivered under him. He returned to the bed, and stared, disbelieving, at the eyes raised to him.
Medical skill could not have accomplished this. He had been wrong again! He recalled the plague, the cancer of Callias, the other strange cases he had attended, and now this. He cried to Ramus, “Can you see me? In the name of God, can you see, my friend?”
Ramus nodded. He reached out his hand and touched Lucanus’ hand, and a pure light beamed from his face. Then he lifted the hem of Lucanus’ robe and kissed it, as one kisses the hem of a god, and laid his head against the physician’s hip, like a child.
“I tell you,” said Lucanus, through cold lips, “that I saw his eyes! I am a physician. They were diminished, torn, bleeding; the pupil had shrunk to nothingness; the vital fluid had leaked away from it. He was blind!”
The proconsul ceased to smile. He moved a few steps backward and regarded Lucanus with fear. The physician was in a frenzy. “He was blind!” he shouted. “I know blindness when I see it! This cannot have happened!”
“Sorcery,” muttered the Roman, backing away a little more. He coughed. He glanced at Tiberius’ ring on Lucanus’ hand and paused. Then he said, “My dear Lucanus, you know how sensitive the Greeks are to sorcery. I advise you to leave Athens as quietly as possible. I, as a Roman, am above superstitions, but I have to administer this accursed land, and I wish no trouble.”
Lucanus’ head whirled with confused noises and flashes of light. He ran to the proconsul and reached out for his arm, but the Roman, affrighted, stepped back. “The peasant!” said Lucanus. “What of the peasant, after I made so terrible a mistake?”
“I shall counsel his dismissal after a month in prison, for assaulting the person of the servant of Lucanus, and injuring his house, and inciting a riot,” said the proconsul, and fled. The sound of his hurrying sandals awakened echoes. Turbo came in timidly. “Master,” he said, “the noble proconsul ran from this house as if the Furies were after him. Did I offend him in any way?”
“No,” said Lucanus, distracted. He pointed to Ramus. “You see he is not blind, Turbo. I was fearfully mistaken. I am not truly a physician; I make too many errors. But I am happy that I was wrong . . . .”
Turbo approached Ramus and looked into his smiling eyes. Then he stared at Lucanus. Ramus rose from the bed, lifted his hands above his head, palms together, brought them to his breast, and prostrated himself at Lucanus’ feet.
“My poor friend,” said Lucanus, in a shaken tone. “I have caused you many days of suffering, for I told you you were blind. I ask your forgiveness.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
In later years Lucanus often thought of the time that followed that quick flight from Athens — though he returned quietly many times later — as a period of his ‘dryness’. He moved through the glowing, murmurous, and simmering Empire listlessly, even if his skill and tenderness as a physician increased. Never voluble, he became even more silent. His personal life narrowed; he was like a seed in its shell, awaiting spring and the waters of spring, to grow into a great tree. The seed which was himself in these years did not stir, thrust out no green tendrils, but lay parched and without much thought or emotion. He communicated less and less to others. Only when Sara appeared unexpectedly in some port did his planed face lighten and his blue eyes shine; but he saw Sara only once or twice a year. Ramus could not speak to him; they had devised a code of eloquent signals which conveyed more than speech. They moved like benevolent but quiet spirits through the seething ports, and sat in silence in Lucanus’ little houses and gardens, or stood at ships’ railings to watch the stars and the moon, the dawns and the sunsets. Lucanus preferred to arrive at his houses at night, for fear of a crowd greeting him, as it had done a few times. When he visited Athens he had to devise means short of lies to avoid partaking of Turbo’s hospitality. Thousands loved him; thousands regarded him as a god. He shrank from them, except when they came to him in anguish and pain. His listlessness grew; there was a kind of dull abeyance in him. He eagerly awaited letters from home, and especially delighted in those from Priscus and Aurelia, but his few letters in answer were brief. He was like one starving, but who yet has an intense aversion for food. He went home to Rome once a year, and each time he determined that he would remain longer. But invariably, after a few days, a sick restlessness came to him, and he would leave among cries of lamentation, reproach, and love.
Once he said to his mother, “Do not ask me what is wrong with me, for I do not know. When I reach into my mind I encounter nothing but dustiness, yet in that dustiness I always feel the movement of pain. I am afraid to penetrate deeper.”
Sometimes he reread the vast quantities of writing which Keptah had left to him. There was one which he read over and over, frowning in puzzlement, but feeling that stir of muffled pain. ‘He who looks to man for his meaning in life looks to a delusion, for men are nothing except in their relation to God. Do not center your heart upon mankind, for it is a chimera, a mirage. There have been those who have glorified man, have elevated humanity as an absolute in itself; they vehemently declare man to be valuable only in his external manifestations. This teaching has reached almost all civilized countries, to their disaster, for law and justice and mercy and kindness are not rooted in men, but in God, and without Him they cannot truly exist, Him who made them. Man is only the receptacle of grace; he is not grace itself.’
When Lucanus read this, it was as though old and rusty gates creaked imploringly on their hinges within him, wishing to be opened. But he turned away. There was no passionate anger in him any longer against God, for he thought of God very seldom now. If God intruded into his mind, he recoiled wearily, for God was indeed now a terrible weariness to him, not to be discerned, not to be wondered over, not to be engaged in battle, not to be regarded even as a philosophy or a theorem. Sometimes he contemplated the useless ages behind him, and the shadowed ages before him, and an immense tiredness would overwhelm his senses. He would look at the stars and remember the conjectures of the Egyptian astronomers, who asked if those mighty constellations were not endless planets revolving around the suns, and if new constellations, with new worlds and suns, were not constantly being created. The thought intensified Lucanus’ spiritual exhaustion and feeling of futility.
Once, in Corinth, an old priest, very poor, very humble, and very gentl
e, had told him, “When I lie awake on my pallet at night a great, strange surety comes to me, as if I had received a message. God is never absent from the affairs of men, though we are not conscious of Him very often. But now I know that a tremendous revelation is at hand whose form is not clear to me. God will manifest Himself powerfully again to His children, as He has done in the ages past, and the very earth quivers expectantly. I feel it! I know it! For the whole world has lost the vision of His face, and again He will reveal it, perhaps in anger, but surely also with love.”
“Why this faded leaf from an endless forest?” asked Lucanus, cynically. “Why this grain of sand on a beach without borders? Why this mote of dust in a hurricane of dust? This is conceit!”
They were sitting in the old priest’s dusty garden, in which chickens scratched hopefully. The priest smiled and pointed to a hen with many little chickens. They followed her, sometimes scuttling under her wings, sometimes wandering a distance. “They know her voice,” said the priest. “There are many hens and many chickens here, but they know their own. That poor hen cannot count; her children cannot count, and there are many of them. But if one is lost, the smallest and the dirtiest and the feeblest, she searches for him and finds him. Perhaps that little weak one wonders why his mother should care for him, with his ragged down and his utter worthlessness as a fowl, and his insignificance. How can she, he may ask himself, know where I am, she who has many children, and what is it to her that I must have my share of food, that I must receive her affection and protection? I tell you, my dear Lucanus, that to love nothing is worthless, nothing is too much, too many, too little. Love never abandons. To God this mote of dust on which we stand is as dear to Him as is His vastest crown of stars in space beyond our comprehension.”
He added, “You reason with your mind, which is the blind slave of your five uncertain senses. The greatest of the Greek philosophers, who adored reason, finally had to return to the Mysterious, the Unknowable, and always with reluctance, for it is beyond their reason, that tiny little flickering in a dark and unexplored cavern. God can be comprehended only by the spirit.”
But always Lucanus was filled with weariness, and he would rise and go away. He wanted no revelation. At times he longed only for death.
When he received letters from his sister, Aurelia, he thought of her as a child. When he returned to Rome on his few visits, he was disturbed to see her growing into womanhood. And now she was to be married, and he must be present at her marriage to Clodius Flamminius, the son of an ancient and aristocratic family. She was nineteen years old, and far beyond the time of normal marrying, which had worried her mother, Iris. Suitors had been in profusion, for the daughter of Diodorus Cyrinus, with her dowry, was to be desired; she was also extremely beautiful. But Aurelia had shown no urge to marry at fourteen, nor at sixteen or even seventeen. She had smiled at her mother’s anxieties, and had not been disturbed when Iris had said, “The girls of your age have been wives and mothers for years. Are you contemplating becoming a Vestal Virgin?”
But Lucanus knew that his sister had no particular devotion to the gods, though she accepted them serenely. He also suspected that she was not unusually intelligent, for he had listened to old Cusa’s complaints about her pleasant distaste for books. “This is no female companion for a Pericles!” he had grunted once to Lucanus. “Philosophy is beyond her. She is not interested in politics, stocks, law, and banks, as are all the other women of Rome. She does not even know of the existence of the stock markets, business and brokerage houses on the north side of the Forum, as do other Roman women of her age. When her friends, young matrons, sit with her, gabbling of their investments and discussing a sensational case in the courts, or bragging of their own and their husbands’ bank accounts, and anticipating social events and winter travels to the south, and the newest fashions, and the games and gladiators, she sits, smiling agreeably, but yawning.”
“She appears to want nothing,” said Iris, whose wonderful hair was a flowing mass of pure silver now. “But how long can a woman who is no longer young remain contentedly at a fireside, without desire?”
Once Lucanus, persuaded by his anxious mother, talked with Aurelia when she was eighteen, and an old maiden. He did this reluctantly; he believed that no one should interfere with another’s life. But he said, “Why is this, my sister, that you have no concern for your future? Our mother is very old, and has lived long beyond the time of normal life. She is fifty-four; how can it be expected that she will live much longer to protect you? Your brother, Priscus, is a soldier with Drusus, and is the father of a family; our younger brother is immersed in his books, and desires to be a teacher, and will probably never marry. Do you expect to live out your days on this land, the unwanted old sister of Priscus, when our mother dies and Priscus brings his wife and family to this house as the heir?”
But Aurelia had given him her slow deep smile, and had called his attention to a flock of yellow butterflies hovering over the roses. It had been useless. Yet now she was to be married, to Iris’ great relief, and the young man was Aurelia’s own age. Lucanus must go again to Rome for the wedding.
Now, as Lucanus leaned on the railing of a fast but small Roman galleon which had picked him up from an obscure African port, he gave Aurelia considerable thought. Iris, who knew so strongly of love, had not arranged a marriage for her daughter; unlike other women, she believed in the joyous consent of the bride to her wedding. Her friend, the wife of Plotius, though much younger than she, had brought about the meeting between the family of Clodius Flamminius and Iris, and Clodius and Aurelia, at first sight, had apparently fallen into engrossing love, though the young man could reasonably have chosen a more suitable bride of fourteen or fifteen rather than a woman of nineteen. On this point Lucanus had detected a cryptic note in Iris’ letters. This puzzled Lucanus, and explained nothing. Iris surely should have shown more happiness and relief in the prospect of a marriage between a member of so distinguished and patrician a family and her daughter. Though Lucanus’ restlessness returned whenever it was necessary to think of those who loved him, and their personal affairs, he forced himself to an interest.
Then a whole flood of pictures rose before him of his sister in her childhood and womanhood. He saw her peaceful brown eyes, full of light; he heard her soft laughter. He saw her running to pick up a fallen bird and to hold it against her breast; he saw the dogs of the estate following her with adoring and fatuous eyes; even the bulls gentled when she came to them; horses worshiped her; the servants could not do enough for her. Watching the hot and crowded port, with its vehement mobs milling on the docks, and listening to the endless cries of the East, and smelling its fetid, aromatic odors, Lucanus wondered over this. There was a riddle here which moved his interest.
Ramus stood by his side and watched the loading of the ship. The African’s majestic face, as usual, had a look of eager searching upon it, and yet a confident waiting. His black and thickly curling hair had become intertwined with threads of coarse gray, but his body showed no signs of aging, retaining its muscular strength and litheness. His swimming eyes questioned every approaching face. By instinct, over all these years, he knew when Lucanus had turned to him, and had begun to think of him, and he glanced at Lucanus with love, and smiled, then resumed his study of the crowds on the docks.
The ship sailed, and seemed to stand rather than to move over the flat blue silk of the quiet sea. The shore fell back, as if retreating. The sun stared down from a hot white sky, and the sails barely swelled. The next port of call was a port higher up on the continent, where a load of spices waited, and this would be reached in two hours. Lucanus sat down under the red-and-white-striped awning of the deck; there were few passengers, for this was a courier and cargo ship. The Greek began to think of his life; all his temperament heretofore had been objective; he had forced himself to be so, for he feared to be subjective, knowing that to indulge himself in introspection would reduce him to despair. He looked back on his life as one who stan
ds on the highest mountain can look upon the plains of the cities, the far rivers, the distant ocean, the fields, and the hamlets. Yet when he looked now at his life it was as if all were obscured, or barren or fruitless or without color. He forgot the countless thousands he had healed and comforted, or whom he had guided, with mercy, to an inevitable but peaceful death. Never had he thought of himself like this, and it disturbed him, for his rootlessness had been of his own choice, and he had made his own life. Now he was confronted by himself, and he saw himself as one who had given nothing and had received nothing, one who would never be missed. His melancholy became a taste of heavy metal in his mouth, a stone on his chest. Ramus looked at him from the railing, and thought in his heart, My Master is sorrowful. He searches, though he does not know for what or whom he searches.
Before sunset the ship docked at the next port, and a centurion with six soldiers came on board. The centurion had his family with him also; he was a dark and eagle man, like most Roman soldiers, but his expression was gentle and patient, and this attracted Lucanus’ wandering interest. It was most unusual for a Roman officer to speak so kindly to his soldiers and show such solicitude, in public, for his family, and to wear such an air of tolerant understanding. When he spoke to slaves carrying his household goods — it was apparent that he was returning home to Rome, for he was not a young man — his grating voice had an odd depth and compassion, and he smiled at the slaves and encouraged them. Yet his bearing retained a certain arrogance, his broad, strong body was powerful in spite of his age; his sun-darkened face, somewhat coarse, held its earlier lines of past intolerance. He walked firmly, and he looked about him with the bold scrutiny of the Roman. When his eye fell on Ramus at the railing, Ramus in the rough garb of either a slave or a poor freedman, it did not fall away, though for an instant it hesitated. Then he smiled at Ramus as a man smiles at his brother, and Ramus smiled in return.
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