The latter obeyed without demur on learning the reason for his required presence. Cestus shut the door and took his former position on his stool.
‘Brother-in-law, since you will not listen to reason concerning this errand of yours to Capreae, and since I have small hope of ever seeing you return, Tibia must hear, in your presence, what I have already told you alone. Your life is your own, and if you are determined to shorten it at once you can do so, I suppose. That is your own matter, and you can settle it with or without your wife’s help. But in the matter of [pg 282]the child called Neæra, I am concerned; and as you are about to rob me of my best witness in her case, I must arrange matters as best I may, so as to be able to do without you.’
‘You put it in a pleasant way, kinsman,’ returned Masthlion, smiling; ‘but as you are bent on putting me to death I won’t argue the point. Nevertheless I agree with you that it is time Tibia should know what we know about our child—I still call her ours, you see. It was only at your wish that I have kept silence as long as this. Tell her the story—I cannot.’
Tibia sat looking from one to the other in her mute way, her hands lying folded in her lap, and her eyes full of anxious curiosity. What new trouble was this which was about to be launched upon her? Was it the secret which had darkened her husband’s face so long? Was it not enough to be told that he was about to throw away his life on the morrow? Cestus, her brother, was the cloud upon her house. It was time he left it, since matters had seemed to go strangely wrong with the hour of his arrival. What of the child Neæra? He had brought her there—did he want to take her away again?
Her gaze fixed on the Suburan as this thought broke upon her slow brain. Her brows knitted slightly, and her eyes seemed to contract and congeal, for a moment, into lifeless glassy balls. She had a manner of meeting bitter trouble, as it were, with a motionless, voiceless, passive numbness. It resembled the action of some animals and reptiles when seized in the grip of a ferocious enemy. The functions of body and brain seemed withdrawn into an impenetrable inner casket, leaving all else relaxed, lifeless, and torpid. It is the supreme effort to resist exquisite torture, this power of self-paralysation, this contraction of all sense into the numbness of oblivion; whilst to the beholder the spectacle of mute suffering is the most heartrending of all.
Cestus, without further delay, began the same narrative he had already related to Masthlion. Tibia sat like a carven image, with her hands clenched in her lap and her head half bowed. Once only during the recital she started slightly, when she heard the noble parentage of the child she had tended, and she gave a swift, half-startled glance, first at Cestus, and [pg 283]then at her husband. When the end came and the speaker’s voice ceased, and she heard the decree that Neæra was to be given up to her own people, her fingers twitched nervously for a time.
‘This, then, is what has haunted thee and darkened the house!’ she cried out sharply to her husband, as she threw her apron over her head.
The anguish of her glance cut the potter to the heart. A silence fell on the room for a minute. Masthlion could not summon a word, and Cestus swung uneasily on his stool. Then the latter cleared his throat and tried to smooth matters, with arguments already familiar to the reader.
‘Why, Tibia, you have tended the child till she has become like your own, and it is hard, I admit, to hear she must leave you. But consider, she was bound to go, for the Centurion will marry her and take her away to Rome, at all events. Why trouble them? The only way, if you cannot abide without being near her, is to go after her. I have already told Masthlion this, with all the common sense one can be capable of, and shown him how it is the best place for employment in all his work.’
‘I have already agreed; if Tibia is willing we will go to the great city,’ said Masthlion.