One day there came to the Apostle a lady deeply veiled attended by a Christian freedwoman. She was so agitated that, when she had sunk on one of the humble seats, she could scarcely find words in which to pour forth her anguish. When she grew a little calmer, she lifted her veil, and Celsus rose and made her a respectful salutation, for he recognised the mourning robes and sad but beautiful face of the wife of Aulus Plautius.
‘The Lady Pomponia,’ he said, ‘may speak freely, and fear not. I will unloose the coupling-chain, and go into the outer room,’
Pomponia thanked him, and told the Apostle that she had long been a baptised sister, and had read his letters to Rome and other churches, and had now come to him for consolation in unutterable distress of heart. She had but one son—the young and beautiful Aulus, the heir and the hope of their great house. But Nero had begun to hate her husband and herself, and was jealous lest some day the army should prefer the Conqueror of Britain to the tenth-rate actor and singer. For Agrippina, in one of her fits of rage, had, before her death, unwisely and unkindly mentioned the youthful Aulus as a virtuous boy who might one day wear the purple more worthily than Nero, who disgraced it; and Nero, wounded in his vanity, had determined on revenge. With a wicked cruelty which would have been infamous even in a Tiberius or a Caligula, he had invited the boy to the Palace, had subjected him to the deadliest insults, and had then ordered him to be slain, accompanying the order with a brutal jest against his mother Agrippina. And the people knew of the crime, and hardly did more than laugh and shrug their shoulders; and the Senate knew of the crime, and did not cease for a single day from its adulation to the tyrant; and the army knew of the crime, and not one sword flashed from its scabbard; and the philosophers and the poets knew of the crime, and not one denunciation scathed that deed of hell.
Pomponia’s heart was broken. Did God deal thus with His servants? Was the Christ far away in His blue heaven, and heeded not these things? And was it not lawful, was it not a duty, for Christians to help to sweep away from the earth such a monster of iniquity? Might she not rouse her husband, Aulus Plautius—not to avenge the individual wrong which was breaking his heart, and bringing him down to the gates of the grave—but to rid mankind from the incubus of an intolerable curse?
The Apostle saw that his task was difficult. For a moment he bowed his head, and clasped his hands in prayer. He needed threefold wisdom—to console the mother’s anguish; to avert the thought of vengeance; to strengthen the faith which had been assailed by sore perplexity. And the grace came to him. He banished from Pomponia’s heart the dread that because her Aulus had died unbaptised, he was doomed to perish: he told her not to dream that the boy, who had thus gone home, had departed unloved by his Heavenly Father. Fearful times were coming on the earth, and her beloved son, in whom the signs of virtue had not been wanting, might have been taken only to save him from the furnace of moral temptation and the wrath to come. Then taking from the hand of Luke the scroll in which he had been writing the great discourse on the Mount of Olives, he read to her the words of Jesus: ‘Ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake. And yet a hair from your head shall not perish. In your endurance ye shall acquire your souls.’
‘Alas!’ she cried, ‘how may I interpret this promise that a hair of our heads shall not fall, when my very heart is cleft in twain?’
He answered that the Lord spake not of earthly things. He warned us that in the world we should have tribulation; but He has overcome the world. And he prayed her not to dream of hastening the tyrant’s punishment. ‘Leave him in God’s hands. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”’
When his voice ceased, the passion of Pomponia’s grief had sunk to rest. The tears which still coursed down her cheeks were but the natural tears of a mother’s bereavement. Her beautiful soul was prepared for consolation, and her faith had but bowed for a moment like the upper foliage of a tree under the stress of some mighty storm. To calm her yet further, the Beloved Physician began to read aloud a passage here and there from the Evangel which occupied his daily thoughts. He read of the love of Jesus for children; he read the beatitudes; he read the story of the Cross. The music of the words and thoughts, borne on the music of his sweet and solemn voice, sank into Pomponia’s soul. She thanked the Evangelist, and, asking for the blessing of the Apostle, dropped her veil and departed to her desolate home.
The Heavenly Father who had suffered anguish to fall upon her had also sent medicine and a physician of the soul to heal her sickness. When she reached her palace on the Aventine, she was able to devote her whole strength to save her husband from succumbing to a sorrow which for him was beyond the reach of consolation.He had chosen for the epitaph of his boy’s tomb the defiant words, ‘I Aulus, the son of Aulus Plautius, uplift my hands against the gods, who took me hence in my innocence, at the age of fifteen years.’[91] But she dissuaded him. ‘Why complain,’ she said, ‘against the decree of Heaven? It may be good, and even the best, did we but know it. Nay, my Aulus, carve rather on his tomb a green leaf, and the two words, “In peace,” and add, if thou wilt, the line of Euripides,
‘“Who knows if life be death, and death be life?”’