"Healing? Nay, how should it heal when each day fresh salt is rubbed into it? Take a look at it now, if you will, for hereafter we'll let it bide and rankle as it must. Tell me; have not your eyes seen changes, mental as well as physical, concerning which your lips have not questioned?"
"Changes? in you?" said Livinius, dropping into the other's more distant tone. "Ay, that is true, and my heart aches to see them. That is another reason why I urge your return to Rome. New scenes, new faces—your life is broken, yet a broken pitcher may be mended."
"True," Eudemius admitted evenly. "But who expects it to hold water again? Is it not rather placed upon the shelf and forgotten—if, indeed, it be not flung upon the rubbish-heap?"
"But think of this—" Livinius persisted. Eudemius broke in.
"Ay, I have thought of this and that, and this is all it comes to!" he said harshly. "That when I am gone, my name, blazoned in the annals of Rome before great Cæsar was, must dwindle out to nothing with a weak girl. It came to me great, unstained, heavy with memories of soldiers, heroes, statesmen, who had borne it worthily and left it clean for their sons and their sons' sons. I made it the name of wealth as well as of greatness; I thought to hand it down to my sons and my sons' sons, as the fires of Vesta are handed down from one generation to the next. A son I prayed for—what any sodden carter is judged worthy to beget; a male child to uprear in the traditions of his house, to add, an he might, his share to the glory of it. A son to serve Rome as his fathers served. And what was born to me? A puling fool, not worthy even to breed her kind into the world. Were she blessed with wit, she might mate with one worthy of her blood and keep her name thus from complete extinction. As it is—what man would have her to bear him mindless brats? Who would become sire to a race of idiots?"
Livinius scratched the wax of his tablet absently, and rubbed his finger over the mark.
"I have wondered often why you never married again," he remarked, tentatively. "It is fifteen years since Constantia's death; surely in that time you might have found a woman to become the mother of your sons."
"True, I might," Eudemius admitted, coolly. "But those fifteen years ago, through mine own folly and hatred of life after that double blow of her death and knowledge of the girl's condition,—for it was a blow, Livinius, since I was not then the wooden image of to-day,—there fell on me the judgment of the gods for such rebellion as mine." He turned his sombre eyes full on Livinius. "Would you believe, to see me as I sit here, that mine is a body racked by the tortures of the damned, drained of the very sap of life by disease that eats into every nerve and leaves it raw and quivering, yet that only numbs when its fury is spent, and will not kill? That time after time, when its throes are on me, I have turned craven and begged Claudius for a potion to end it all?" He laughed shortly, with no sound of merriment. "I marry again—a rotten hulk fit only for carrion!"
Livinius listened, shocked.
"Oh, my dear!" he exclaimed in honest sympathy, "is it indeed thus with thee? And I had thought of thee entering the harbor of thy rest, wealthy, honored, reconciled, perhaps, to what the gods in their wisdom had ordained for thee, to end thy days in quiet and content. For fifteen years, thou sayest. Man, how hast thou lived to tell it?"