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Read books online » Fiction » Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero by Henryk Sienkiewicz (good ebook reader txt) 📖

Book online «Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero by Henryk Sienkiewicz (good ebook reader txt) 📖». Author Henryk Sienkiewicz



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always with roses, and that the odor of violets is dearer to me than stench from my foul neighbor of the Subura.

“These are reasons why thy happiness is not for me. But there is one reason more, which I have reserved for the last: Thanatos summons me. For thee the light of life is beginning; but my sun has set, and twilight is embracing my head. In other words, I must die, carissime.

“It is not worth while to talk long of this. It had to end thus. Thou, who knowest Ahenobarbus, wilt understand the position easily. Tigellinus has conquered, or rather my victories have touched their end. I have lived as I wished, and I will die as pleases me.

“Do not take this to heart. No God has promised me immortality; hence no surprise meets me. At the same time thou art mistaken, Vinicius, in asserting that only thy God teaches man to die calmly. No. Our world knew, before thou wert born, that when the last cup was drained, it was time to go,—time to rest,—and it knows yet how to do that with calmness. Plato declares that virtue is music, that the life of a sage is harmony. If that be true, I shall die as I have lived,—virtuously.

“I should like to take farewell of thy godlike wife in the words with which on a time I greeted her in the house of Aulus, ‘Very many persons have I seen, but thy equal I know not.’

“If the soul is more than what Pyrrho thinks, mine will fly to thee and Lygia, on its way to the edge of the ocean, and will alight at your house in the form of a butterfly or, as the Egyptians believe, in the form of a sparrowhawk. Otherwise I cannot come.

“Meanwhile let Sicily replace for you the gardens of Hesperides; may the goddesses of the fields, woods, and fountains scatter flowers on your path, and may white doves build their nests on every acanthus of the columns of your house.”





Chapter LXXIII

PETRONIUS was not mistaken. Two days later young Nerva, who had always been friendly and devoted, sent his freedman to Cumæ with news of what was happening at the court of Cæsar.

The death of Petronius had been determined. On the morning of the following day they intended to send him a centurion, with the order to stop at Cumæ, and wait there for further instructions; the next messenger, to follow a few days later, was to bring the death sentence.

Petronius heard the news with unruffled calmness.

“Thou wilt take to thy lord,” said he, “one of my vases; say from me that I thank him with my whole soul, for now I am able to anticipate the sentence.”

And all at once he began to laugh, like a man who has came upon a perfect thought, and rejoices in advance at its fulfilment.

That same afternoon his slaves rushed about, inviting the Augustians, who were staying in Cumæ, and all the ladies, to a magnificent banquet at the villa of the arbiter.

He wrote that afternoon in the library; next he took a bath, after which he commanded the vestiplicæ to arrange his dress. Brilliant and stately as one of the gods, he went to the triclinium, to cast the eye of a critic on the preparations, and then to the gardens, where youths and Grecian maidens from the islands were weaving wreaths of roses for the evening.

Not the least care was visible on his face. The servants only knew that the feast would be something uncommon, for he had issued a command to give unusual rewards to those with whom he was satisfied, and some slight blows to all whose work should not please him, or who had deserved blame or punishment earlier. To the cithara players and the singers he had ordered beforehand liberal pay. At last, sitting in the garden under a beech, through whose leaves the sun-rays marked the earth with bright spots, he called Eunice.

She came, dressed in white, with a sprig of myrtle in her hair, beautiful as one of the Graces. He seated her at his side, and, touching her temple gently with his fingers, he gazed at her with that admiration with which a critic gazes at a statue from the chisel of a master.

“Eunice,” asked he, “dost thou know that thou art not a slave this long time?”

She raised to him her calm eyes, as blue as the sky, and denied with a motion of her head.

“I am thine always,” said she.

“But perhaps thou knowest not,” continued Petronius, “that the villa, and those slaves twining wreaths here, and all which is in the villa, with the fields and the herds, are thine henceforward.”

Eunice, when she heard this, drew away from him quickly, and asked in a voice filled with sudden fear,—

“Why dost thou tell me this?”

Then she approached again, and looked at him, blinking with amazement. After a while her face became as pale as linen. He smiled, and said only one word,—

“So!”

A moment of silence followed; merely a slight breeze moved the leaves of the beech.

Petronius might have thought that before him was a statue cut from white marble.

“Eunice,” said he, “I wish to die calmly.”

And the maiden, looking at him with a heart-rending smile, whispered,—

“I hear thee.”

In the evening the guests, who had been at feasts given by Petronius previously, and knew that in comparison with them even Cæsar’s banquets seemed tiresome and barbarous, began to arrive in numbers. To no one did it occur, even, that that was to be the last “symposium.” Many knew, it is true, that the clouds of Cæsar’s anger were hanging over the exquisite arbiter; but that had happened so often, and Petronius had been able so often to scatter them by some dexterous act or by a single bold word, that no one thought really that serious danger threatened him. His glad face and usual smile, free of care, confirmed all, to the last man, in that opinion. The beautiful Eunice, to whom he had declared his wish to die calmly, and for whom every word of his was like an utterance of fate, had in her features a perfect calmness, and in her eyes a kind of wonderful radiance, which might have been considered delight. At the door of the triclinium, youths with hair in golden nets put wreaths of roses on the heads of the guests, warning them, as the custom was, to pass the threshold right foot foremost. In the hall there was a slight odor of violets; the lamps burned in Alexandrian glass of various colors. At the couches stood Grecian maidens, whose office it was to moisten the feet of guests with perfumes. At the walls cithara players and Athenian choristers were waiting for the signal of their leader.

The table service gleamed with splendor, but that splendor

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