The old woman glanced up into the girl’s face, and, divin[pg 402]ing the signs of terror which dwelt there, took her hand caressingly.
‘It is no new trouble, thank the gods,’ she faltered. ‘We have had plenty of that. Nay, I must call it rather happiness——’
‘Ah, I thought you were about to tell me something terrible of Lucius,’ murmured Neæra, drawing a deep breath, as a great load, like the shadow of death, slid from her mind.
‘No! It is of yourself. It is time you must know all,’ said Tibia. ‘Child, you must never call me mother any more.’
It hardly needs to tell the start of surprise which Neæra gave at these words. Through her amazement, the strange wistfulness of the dame’s glance and her broken, pathetic tones struck to her heart. She threw her arms around her aged neck.
‘What is it you are saying?’ she cried. ‘Why do you look like that? What is it I am to know? Am I to lose mother as well? Mother you are, and always must be.’
For some moments Tibia remained in silence within the arms of the young girl, as if unable to force herself from the warmth of what might be the last heartfelt, daughterlike caress. Then at length she slowly uplifted the shapely arms, and, as she did so, pressed one hand of the girl to her lips, whilst the tears trickled down from her eyes.
‘Neæra,’ she said, ‘I have lost my husband, and now the gods will that you shall be taken from me. I have tended you, watched you, and loved you like a mother; but—but, Neæra, we never thought the time would come, nor yet the need to tell you that—that you are not our child. For I have been a barren stock—I never bore a child into the world.’
They sat looking at each other. Tibia, with a pleading, timid expression in her meek eyes, which the tender-hearted girl could not withstand, despite her speechless incredulity and wonder. She thought for the moment that the dame’s sufferings had, perhaps, deranged her faculties, and then, as with a sudden and swift ray of light, her mind recalled one or two circumstances which had puzzled her strangely hitherto. She remembered on that day just as Cestus first appeared in the workshop at home, when addressing the potter as father, he replied in the negative with all the evidences of powerful [pg 403]emotion. Nothing had been ever added in explanation, and the hasty disavowal of relationship had presently sunk out of active speculation beneath other matters, and had been thought of no more. Again, the frantic words of Martialis, as he was hurried away from the presence of Caesar, had been wild and inexplicable to her ears at the moment of their utterance, but, in the agony of her thoughts, they had also fallen unheeded. What did it all mean?
‘I—not your child, mother,’ she said slowly. ‘Do you know what you are saying? You are forgetting—alas, this cruel trouble—it has been too much for you to bear!’