"Have no fear, my lord. I've seen hemlock enough growing in these marshy meadows to poison our whole army. I have already begun to gather and dry it. Do you the same, and as soon--"
Loud voices and the clank of weapons were heard; the face vanished, and the slave passed through the doorway of the tent into the open air.
CHAPTER IX.
Directly after, Ausonius and Saturninus entered the Praefectorian tent from the Via Principalis, while Herculanus, coming from the rear, passed in with them. The host shared his seat on the couch with his two guests.
He was a man of fifty-two, but his stately figure showed few signs of approaching age, and his noble face lacked none of the characteristics of the patrician Roman in the modelling of the forehead, nose, and finely arched brows.
But the mouth had smiled so often--probably far too often in self complacency--that it had forgotten how to close with firm decision; it was much too weak for a man. And the light-brown eyes, so pleasant and kindly, so content with everything and everybody--and not least with Ausonius--betrayed more plainly than any other feature the approach of age; their glance had lost the fire of youth. They seemed weary, not of life but of reading; for Ausonius had been professor, rhetorician, tutor of princes, and poet. In those days that meant a man who read an immense amount and, in default of elevating thoughts of his own, extracted with the industry of a bee the ideas of the writers of four centuries, tore them asunder, and put them together again in such tiny fragments that his readers and himself believed them to be new ones of his own and would have found it very difficult to separate the mosaic into its borrowed portions. Passions had never furrowed this smooth face: the lines around the eyes were not graven by pain, but by the passage of the years.
This kindly natured man, who himself saw everything on its best side, thought the whole world most admirably arranged. He believed seriously that all men who had not committed great crimes, and therefore deserved punishment, fared just as well as the very, very wealthy, benevolent, and much praised Decimus Magnus Ausonius of Burdigala (Bordeaux), the delightful city of villas; that they fared as well as Ausonius, who was petted by all who surrounded him, and who in the opinion of his contemporaries--and especially his own--was the greatest poet of his age. Even had this been true, it certainly would not have meant much.
This really amiable, kindly man, whose only fault was a little undue self-satisfaction, was now playing the part which best suited him,--far better than that of poet or statesman,--the part of the host who, comfortable himself, desires to make all his guests equally so. His pleasant, cheery, friendly kindness of heart, which would fain see everybody happy, though of course without too much self-sacrifice, found in this rôle its fullest expression.
"There! now go, slaves." He waved his hand to those who had again entered. "Look after yourselves--as we are doing. Go, too, my faithful Prosper: take for yourself--and give to the others--the better wine from Rhodanus; you know it. I saw how hard it was to drag the skins up the steep hill. Go: we will serve ourselves." He stretched himself comfortably on the lectus, thrusting under his head a soft downy pillow filled with the feathers of German geese. "Give yonder amethyst goblet to the Tribune, my dear nephew, for our Illyrian Hercules must drink deeply! No, Saturninus, don't take the mixing vessel! The first cup--unmixed. To the genius of the Emperor Gratianus!"
"It's lucky that the Emperor himself doesn't hear you," cried the Tribune, laughing, as he put down the empty goblet. "I am neither Christian nor pagan, only a soldier, and nobody asks about my faith. But you! Gratianus's teacher! The Emperor is zealous in the true religion. And you drink to his genius, as though we were living in the reign of Diocletian! Are you a pagan, Prefect of Gaul?"