To the Lions by Alfred J. Church

IN THE VINEYARD

“Give me joy, Cleone,” he said; “the letter from the Emperor arrived this morning, and it grants the Governor’s request. I am to have the Roman citizenship; and now everything is open to me.”

The girl could not refuse her sympathies to his manifest delight; but her mind was somewhat sad, [46] and it was with a forced gaiety that she answered, “Well, my lord—for you will soon be one of the lords of us poor provincials—how shall we speak to you? What Roman name shall you be pleased to adopt? Shall you be a Julius C?sar or a Tullius Cicero?”

“To you, Cleone,” said the young man, “I shall always be Clitus, the name under which I had the happiness to know you. But, seriously, the Governor is kind enough to let me take his own family name, and I shall be Quintus C?cilius.”

“And when do you leave us for Rome?” said the girl, giving all her attention, it seemed, to binding up a refractory shoot.

“Leave you? for Rome? I said nothing about leaving.”

“But the career—in this poor place there is nothing to satisfy you. You said that all things were now open to you, and where are ‘all things’ to be found, but at Rome?”

“You misunderstand me—you wrong me, Cleone. I have no such ambition as you seem to think. I desire nothing better than to spend the rest of my days here, if I can but find here the thing that I want. I did but mean that no road by which I may find it well to travel will be shut to me when I am a citizen of Rome. But be [47] sure that the road, whatever it is, will never take me very far from Nic?a.”

The girl was silent. She had seen from the first, with a woman’s quick apprehension of such things, that there was a serious purpose in the young Greek’s manner, and she had tried, as women will try, even when they are not face to face with such perplexities as were troubling poor Cleone, to put off the crisis.

Clitus went on: “I am to have the government business as a notary in the province. The Governor promises that other things will follow. But I am afraid this does not interest you.”

“I am sure,” answered the girl, “we all feel the greatest interest in you.”

“But you, Cleone, you!” cried the young man, and he caught her hand in his as he spoke. “You know that this is my ambition: to have something which I can ask you to share. I came to tell you that it seems to be within my reach, and you ask me when I am going to Rome! Oh! it is cruel; and when I have been hoping all the time that there might be something to work for.”

Poor Cleone was in a sad strait. The struggle between love and duty is often a hard one; but at least the issue is clear, and a loyal heart crushes down its pain, and chooses the better course. But here there seemed to be love on both sides, and [48] duty on both sides. Which was she to choose? She knew that Clitus loved her, and though she had never looked quite closely and steadfastly into her own heart, she felt that she loved him. And he was worthy, too. Any woman might be proud of him. Why should she not do as her mother had done before her, and give herself to a good man who loved her? There was love and there was duty here. But then, on the other side, there was the Church, its claim upon her, the work that lay ready for her hand—and Rhoda, who was her second self, from whom she had never had a thought apart, whose love had been the better half of her life ever since she could remember anything. It was a sore perplexity in which she was entangled.

She stood silent. But her silence was eloquent. Clitus, though he was no confident lover, saw that it was not her indifference that he had to fear. If he had been no more to her than other men, she could easily have found words—kind, doubtless, but plain and decisive enough—in which to bid him go. She had even left her hand in his. She was scarcely conscious of it, so full was her mind of the struggle; but consciousness would have come quickly enough if his touch had been repugnant to her.

At last she spoke: “Oh, Clitus, this is not a [49] time for such things as you talk of. Remember what the elder said the other day. There is danger at hand, and we must be ready to meet it. Would it be right to hamper ourselves with things of this world? Does not the holy Apostle Paul tell that they who marry——”

She paused, blushing crimson when she remembered that her lover, though his meaning was plain enough, had not gone as far as speaking of marriage.

“Ah! if you were only my wife,” cried Clitus, “I should fear nothing.

“Has he not said,” she went on, “that they who marry shall have trouble in the flesh? And, when I might be comforting and strengthening others, to have to think of myself! O, Clitus, I feel that I am called to other things. Rhoda and I are not as other women; she tells me so, and she is always right. I could not go against her.”

Perhaps it was as well that just at that moment, Bion, who had finished his work for the time among the vines, advanced with outstretched hands to greet the guest. It was a relief to both to have the interruption.

A PLOT

[50] ON the evening of the day when Clitus and Cleone held their conversation among the vines, as described in the last chapter, another conversation, which was to have no little influence on their fate, was going on. The place was a wine-shop, kept by a certain Theron, in the outskirts of Nic?a, and not far from the Christian meeting-house. Theron’s customers were, for the most part, of the artisan class. But he kept a room reserved for his few patrons that were of a higher rank. In this room three persons were sitting at a citron-wood table, one of the innkeeper’s most cherished possessions, which only favoured customers were permitted to see uncovered. A flagon, which could not have held less than two gallons stood in the middle of the table. It was about half full of the potent wine from Mount Tmolus, mixed, however, with about half its bulk of water. [51] From this flagon each guest ladled out the liquid into his own drinking-cup.

One of the three is already known to us. This is Verus, the unworthy member whose banishment from the Christian community has been described. The second, to whom, it may be observed, his companions pay a certain respect, is an elderly man, in the ordinary dress of a well-to-do merchant. There is a certain air of intelligence in his face. But the keen, hungry look of the eyes, the pinched nose, the thin, bloodless lips, tightly closed, but sometimes parting in a smile that never reaches the eyes, give it a sinister look. Lucilius—for this was his name—was a man of good birth and education, but he had given up all his thoughts to money-making, and the tyrant passion had set the mark of his servitude on his face.

The third is a professional soothsayer or fortune-teller. The fortune-teller of to-day commonly exercises his art by means of a pack of cards, while he sometimes consults a tattered book of dreams, or even professes to gather his knowledge of the future from the motions of the planets. Cards were not then invented; dream-interpreting and star-reading were not held in very great repute. Our soothsayer practised the curious art of discovering the future by the signs that might be discerned in the entrails of animals. My [52] readers would think it tedious were I to give them the details of this system. Let it suffice to say that the liver was held to carry most meaning in its appearance. If the proper top to it were wanting, something terrible was sure to happen. There were lines of life in it, and lines of wealth. Each of the four “fibres” into which it was divided had its own province. From this you could discern perils by water, from that perils by fire; a third warned you of losses in business, a fourth gave you hopes of a legacy. This was the art, then, which the third of the three guests professed. He called himself Arruns, but this was not his real name. Arruns is Etruscan, whilst the man was a Sicilian, who, after trying almost everything for a livelihood, had settled down as an haruspex in Nic?a. But the Etruscans were famous over all the Roman world as the inventors of the soothsaying art, and professors of it found an Etruscan name as useful as singers sometimes find one that is borrowed from Italy, or French teachers a supposed birthplace in Paris. Arruns, if he had little of the Etruscan about him in his language, which was Latin of the rudest kind, spoken in a broad Greek accent, had at least the corpulence for which the foretellers of the future [53] were proverbial. His small dull eyes, sometimes lit up with a little spark of greed or cunning, his thick sensual lips, and heavy bloated cheeks, flushed with habitual potations, showed how the animal predominated in him.