Hic Habitat Felicitas
“Ah!” I said, as I hammered at the portal with the brass knob of my weapon, “if, indeed, happiness is landlord here, then Phra the Phœnician is the man to be his tenant!” But it would not do. Bacchus was too bibulous in that little abode, and Cupid too blind and indiscriminate. So it was left behind, and presently an open villa was reached where travelers might rest, and here I took a chamber on one side of the square marble courtyard, facing on a garden and fountain, and looking over a fair stretch of country.
No sooner had I eaten, than, very curious to understand the nature of the bath slave’s discoveries upon my skin, I went to the disrobing-room of the private baths, and, discarding my gorgeous cuirass, and piling the gilded arms and silken wrappings with which a new-born vanity had swathed me, in a corner, I stood presently revealed in the common integument—the one immutable fashion of humanity. But rarely before had the naked human body presented so much diversity as mine did. I was mottled and pictured, from my waist upward, in the most bewildering manner, all in blue and purple tints, just as the slave had said. There were more pictures on me than there are on an astrologer’s celestial globe; and as I turned hither and thither, before my great burnished metal mirror, a whole constellation, of dim, uncertain meaning, rose and set upon my sphere! Now this was the more curious, because, as I have said, I had never in my life submitted me for a moment to the needle and unguents of those who in British times made a practice of the art of tattooing. I had seen young warriors under that painful process, and had stood by as they yelled in pain and reluctant patience while the most elaborate designs grew up, under the stolid draftsman’s hands, upon their quivering cuticle. But, to Blodwen’s grief, who would have had me equal to any of her tribesmen in pattern as in place, I had ever scorned to be made a mosaic of superstition and flourishes. How, then, had this mighty maze, this pictorial web of blue myth and marvel, grown upon me during the night time of my sleep? On studying it closely it evolved itself into some order, and, though that night I made not very much of it, yet, as time went on, and my body grew sleek and fair with good living, the design came up with constantly increasing vigor. Indeed, the narrative I translated from it was so absorbingly interesting to one in my melancholy circumstances that again and again I would hurry away to my closet and mirror to see what new detail, what subtle deduction of stroke or line, had come into view upon the scroll of the strangest diary that ever was written.
For, indeed, it was Blodwen’s diary that circled me thus. It began in the small of my back with the year of my demise upon the Druid altar, and ever as she wrote it she must have rolled, with tender industry, her journal over and over, and so worked up from my back, in a splendid widening zone of token and hieroglyphic, for twenty changing seasons, until my chest was reached, and there the tale ran out in a thin and tremulous way, which it made my heart ache to understand.
There is no need to describe exactly the mode of deduction, or how I came to comprehend, without key or help, the sense of the things before me, but you will understand my wits were sharp in the quest, and once the main scheme of the idea was understood the rest came easily enough. The Princess, then, had taken a sheaf of corn as her symbol of the year. There were twenty of them upon me, and I judged their very varying sizes were intended to indicate good or bad harvest seasons in the territories of my careful chieftainess. Round these central signs she had grouped such other marks or outlines as served to hint the changing fortunes of the times. There were heads of oxen by each sheaf, varying in size according to the conditions of her herds; and fishes, big or small, to indicate what luck her salmon spearsmen had met with by the tuneful rapids of that ancient stream I knew so well.
Following these early designs was one that interested me greatly. The gentle chieftainess had, when I left her, expectation of another member to her tribe of her own providing. I had thought when we should have beaten the Romans to hurry back, and mayhap be in time to welcome this little one; but you know how I was prevented; and now here upon my skin, nigh over to my heart, was the sketch and outline of what seemed a small, new-born maid, all beswaddled in the British fashion, and very lovingly limned. But what was more curious, was that its wraps were turned back from its baby shoulder, and there, to my astonished interpretation, in that silent maternal narrative, was just the likeness, broad, lasting, indelible, of the frightful scar I wore myself! Long I pondered upon this. Had that red-haired slave-princess by some chance received me back—perhaps at Sempronius’s compassionate hands—all hurt as I was, and had that portentous wound set its seal during anxious vigils upon the unborn babe? I could not guess—I could but wonder—and, wondering still, pass on to what came next.
Here was a graphic picture, no bigger than the palm of my hand, and not hard to unriddle. An eagle—no doubt the Roman one—engaged in fierce conflict with a beaver—that being Blodwen’s favorite tribal sign, for there were many of those animals upon her river. Jove! how well ’twas done! There were the flying feathers, and the fur, and the turmoil and the litter of the fight, and well I guessed the proud Roman bird—that day he brought my gallant tribe under the yoke—had lost many a stalwart quill, and damaged many a lordly pinion!
And besides these main records of this fair and careful chancelloress of her State, there were others that moved me none the less. Yes! by every gloomy spirit that dwelt in the misty shadows of the British oaks, it gave me a hot flush of gratified revenge to see—there by the symbol of the first year—a severed, bleeding head, still crowned with the Druid oak.
“Oh! oh! Dhuwallon, my friend,” I laughed, as I guessed the meaning of that bloody sign, “so they tripped you up at last, my crafty villain. By all the fiends of your abominable worship, I should like to have seen the stroke that made that grisly trophy! Well, I can guess how it came about! Some slighted tribesman who saw me die peached upon you. Liar and traitor! I can see you stand in that old British hall, strong in your sanctity and cunning, making your wicked version of the fight and my undoing, and then, methinks, I see Blodwen leap to her feet, red and fiery with her anger. Accursed priest! how you must have sickened and shrunk from her fierce invective, the headlong damnation of her bitter accusation, with all the ready evidence with which she supported it. Mayhap your cheeks were as pale that day, good friend, as your infernal vestments, and first you frowned, and pointed to the signs and symbols of your office, and pleaded your high appointment before the assembled people against the answering of the charge. And then, when that would not do, you whined and cringed, and called her kinswoman. Oh, but I can fancy it, and how my pretty Princess—there upon her father’s steps—scorned and cursed you before them all, and how some ready, faithful hand struck you down, and how they tore your holy linen from you and dragged you, screaming, to the gateway, and there upon the threshold log struck your wicked head from your abominable shoulders! By the sacred mistletoe, I can read my Blodwen’s noble anger in every puncture of that revenge-commemorating outline!”
Here again, in the years that followed, it pleasured me to see her little State grow strong and wide. At one time she typified the coming and destruction of two peak-sailed southern pirates, and then the building of a new stockade. She also made (perhaps to the worship of my manes!) a mighty circle. It began with a single upright on my side. The next year there were two. In the summer that followed she crossed them by a third great slab, and so on for ten years the tribesmen seemed to have toiled and labored until they had such a temple of the sun as must have given my sweet heathen vast pleasure to look upon! She feared comments and portents much, and punctured me with them most exactly; she kept her memoranda of corn-pots and stores of hides upon me, like the clever, frugal mother of her tribe she was; and now and then she acquired territory, or made new alliances—printing the special tokens of their heads in a circle with her own, until I was illustrated from waist to shoulder—a living lexicon of history.