In happier circumstances Balthazar would have gloated over Marcus’ discomfiture, and tasted to the full the irony of hearing Marcus, who had always seemed to despise him, lauding his abilities and virtues.
“I’ll believe all that when I have reason to,” the Lady said. And to Balthazar, “Straighten your fingers, man I’ “Madam, it is impossible. They have grown this way. For many years now.”
“Let me look,” she said, less sharply; almost kindly; and innocently he had extended his hand.
She. took it in hers which were satin soft, plump, decorated with many rings, pretty, feminine, harmless-looking hands, but they were strong as steel as, with a quick movement, she clutched his wrist in one hand and with the other attempted to bend back the-crooked fingers. It hurt much more than the pressure between the two boards, for then the contracture had not been so complete. Balthazar’s black face turned grey, sweat sprang out on his forehead, he was obliged to lock his teeth to prevent the escape of a cry of agony. Worst of all, as she flung him back his hand, was the sight of her face with its look of pleasure, of satisfaction. A person who enjoys the pain of others, he thought, with a feeling of complete despair; and I belong to her!
To Marcus, immune from physical ill-treatment, she said: “And why should you bring me a black? You know how I loathe them. They stink I’ “This one is clean,” Marcus said placatingly. He might have been speaking of a pet dog, housetrained.
Balthazar realised that never until now had he plumbed the depths of humiliation which being a slave involved. How fortunate he had been hitherto. First the old slave-trainer in Alexandria, anxious only to produce the most marketable product; then the Greek, busy with his money-making and valuing anything which contributed to it; then the Roman, reasonable and just, and in the end dependent. He had been a slave for a long time, but this was his first taste of slavery.
Now, at the end of six miserable years, he stood apart while his fellow slaves called on their gods, and worked their magic, and upstairs the Lady shook the dice-box. And he was empty, of hope, of vigour, of everything except what he knew now to be a nebulous dream. Suddenly he could not bear any longer the company of his fellow slaves, so he went to the open door and sidled out into the courtyard.
This was a very different place from the dusty, dung-scented yard of the Greek’s house in Tyre. Every corner of the Lady’s house was swept and scrubbed, polished, fussed-over. This courtyard was enclosed on three sides by the walls, with their arched openings, of the house itself; the fourth was the terrace with its marble balustrade, upon which, at intervals, were set marble vases filled with flowers. Immediately below the terrace the land fell away, first to the Lady’s pleasure ground, and then, lower, the vegetable garden and below that again, the orchard. Still farther down the slope were the towers and the roofs of the city. On suitable days, midway between the winter’s chill and the summer’s heat, people would sit on this terrace with the Lady and congratulate her upon her view and she always accepted the compliments as though she had made the slight slope with her own hands.
Tonight, in the darkening, slightly purplish twilight, the rail, the struts, the vases at the terrace’s edge looked black against the sky. From overhead came the sharp rattle of the shaken dice-box and the shrill voices of excited women. Balthazar moved to the edge of the terrace and stood there thinking of tomorrow, and of all the tomorrows that would follow after. To a certain extent, during the last six years, he and the Lady had come to terms, terms of her choosing. He was of value to her, he knew, and to a certain extent she trusted him; in the service of any sane woman his position would have been assured and he would have been immune from ill-usage; but in this woman there was something dark and dreadful, unreasonable and perverse; the thing
which had once, when he had done her a service that nobody without a knowledge of accountancy and law could have done, had made her, thanking him, suddenly take off her shoe and hit him in the face with it, and split his lip and make the blood run.
He stood on the dark terrace, thinking his dark thoughts and, without realising it, staring at one of the black curving urns, freshly planted that day with sweet-scented flowers.
And there he was, dressed as before, with those two men, instantly recognisable; and this time they were riding into the gateway of what could only be a great city; he could see the high walls to the left and right, made of enormous blocks of stone and within the walls tall towers and the upper stories of buildings that must be either temples or palaces. The gateway and as much of the street as he could see was as crowded as the busiest parts of Tyre.
He stared and stared in amazement—not that he should be seeing a vision, for while it was happening it seemed to be real, the only thing happening in the world—but that the men with him should have been so instantly recognisable, their faces as familiar as though he had known them always. The old man, very thin, with high cheek-bones and mild, study-wrinkled eyes, the young man with a face like a hawk’s: queer company for one another, and queer company for him.
From the upper room came the sound of a slight crash, followed by a cry. Balthazar gave a little start and instantly the picture was gone; there was the black, smooth-sided urn, no different from its fellows.
He at least had something to think about during the next day, when the Lady who had lost heavily, was so intent on making everyone wretched that her ill-will extended even to peasant farmers she had never seen, men who wrested a meagre living from an outlying estate of hers, two days’ journey away to the East. They were all, she shouted at Balthazar, to pay increased rents, either in cash or kind, and he could tell them so when he went, at the end of the next week, to do the rent-collecting. It was not a prospect that he relished. They lived such miserable lives already, that sometimes when he left them he would compare their lot with his; a slave was reasonably certain of his next meal, at least; then, as he walked and the distance between him and the Lady decreased, his pity for them would change into envy.
Her losses on that evening had convinced the Lady that she was on the verge of penury; everybody’s ration was reduced, and when Balthazar asked could he have a new pair of shoes before he set out on his long walk to the estate she said, “No. Wear what you have,” and hit him on the head with a heavy silver comfit box which happened to be handy.
“And don’t pretend that hurt,” she said as a slow trickle of blood ran out of his hair down his forehead.
“A skull of wood, and woollier than a sheep!”
That evening he went, as he had gone every evening since that of the disastrous gambling party, and stared fixedly at the urn in which he had seen the picture. He knew that by doing so he was merely inviting yet one more disappointment, but he felt drawn to the place, to the urn. He remembered Cleo and how she had often said, “It has nothing to tell me.” What governed such things? he wondered. Were those two men—and himself—there, in the urn and he unable to see them? Had he merely imagined the experience which had now visited him three times? Or was it, each time, a dream? In which case, over the death of his master, he and Cleo had dreamed the same dream almost simultaneously.
While he was thinking in this way, something moved in the dark depths of the urn. It was a “star, much larger, much brighter than any of those that scattered the heavens and it moved, perceptibly, down, down until it was very low; then it seemed to swell and splinter into something that he could never describe, a great burst of glory and beauty and wonder, very real and yet unreal, as though colour had sound, and sound had taste and taste had shape. An entirely new world, he thought, obliged to close his eyes against the dazzle of the revelation.
When, timid and dizzy, he opened his eyes again the urn was as it had been at other times, and loneliness weighed on him like a sickness. To whom could he say, I saw a star burst and the world was made new, with