CHAPTER IX.
Shortly after Sabinus reappeared, and bidding adieu to our tonsor, we walked with him towards the paternal mansion,—and we soon reached it; for, as I have already said, it was but a little way out from the village.
The dwelling was modest enough, having no external ornament but a single portico, with a few statues ranged between its pillars. We entered by this portico, and found the feeble old man sitting by himself in an apartment immediately adjacent, wherein the beams of the moon, having partial access, were mingled with the subdued light of a painted lamp suspended from the ceiling. The father of my friend had all the appearance of sinking apace; yet he received me with an air, not of cheerfulness, but of kindness. The breeze found admission through the open pillars, and his countenance exhibited in its wan and faint lines the pleasure with which the coolness affected him. Beside him were placed baskets of roses, gathered from the abundance of his gardens. The young Vernæ, who from time to time brought in these flowers, came into the chamber with a decent appearance of sobriety and concern; but they were never long gone before we could hear them [pg 250]laughing again at their play.—“Poor children,” quoth the old man; “why should they trouble themselves with thinking of the not remote victim of Orcus?”—To which the Centurion replied, somewhat softening that loud and cheerful tone with which he was accustomed to address all persons—“Courage, my dear father, you must not speak so. Cerberus, I perceive, has only been making an ineffectual snap at you, and you will be growing younger after all this.”
At which the old man shook his head, without any external sign of emotion, and replied, in a low monotonous voice,—“Younger in the wrong way, my boy; for I become every day smaller in body, and feebler, and less able to do any thing to help myself. Nor am I unconscious that I have seen my due proportion of time. And yet, oh! fast sliding gentle brook, which I see between these paternal trees—I am still loath to exchange thee for Styx, and to lose the cheerful and sacred light of the sun and moon. I wish only I were once more able to repair with thy stream to the banks of father Tiber, that I might salute the good Emperor, who has been so kind to my son, and who would treat even an old broken-down, and long-retired soldier, like myself, with more favour than is to be expected from Rhadamanthus. As clouds let down their drops, so the many-peopled earth lets fall dismissed ghosts upon the Stygian shore.”
While he was saying things in the same strain, an ancient Egyptian, who seemed to have the chief management of every thing, came into the chamber, and after desiring some of the boys to bring forth refreshments, took his place on a low stool by the foot of his master’s [pg 251]couch. “Come, Tarna,” said the Centurion, “what has become of all your philosophy? Why do you not inspire our friend with less of gloominess? Why is it that you do not bring out for his use some of those old stories, with which, when I was young, you were more willing to treat my ears than they were to attend?”
“Nay,” said the invalid, before the Egyptian could make any answer,—“I liked well to listen to his Epicurean theories when I was able to walk about the fields; but now I would rather have him be silent. Do not trouble me any more, good Tarna, with any of your speeches. Allow me to believe as all my fathers did, and to contemplate not only the sepulchre in which their urns are placed, but the same dim regions in which many dear shades expect the greeting of a descendant.”
“To me,” said the slave modestly, “it still seems, that by the rushing shower of atoms which moves every where through space, the mind is soothed, as by the sound of a great river carrying continually the watery offspring of the mountains into the bosom of ocean. The mind, sirs, appears to me to be calmed by the contemplation of infinity, even as the ear of an Egyptian sleeper is calmed by the eternal music of rolling Nilus. It mingles itself with that which it contemplates; it perceives—it feels itself to be a liquid part of that vast endless stream of universal being: a part which has been casually arrested and detained, but which will soon mingle again and be scattered away in a thousand fragments, to wander, no one knows whither, through the great all-receiving void—not to lose existence, for in that my dear master entirely [pg 252]misunderstands me—but to cease from feeling as a Sabinus, or a Tarna.”
The old man kept regarding his Egyptian with a placid smile; but I could not help interposing: “What is this you have said? Do you assert that I can cease to be Valerius, to feel as Valerius, and yet not lose my existence? Can I be, and yet not be myself?”
“Most easily,” replied he; “the divided fragments may move about for a thousand years, before it befall any of them to be stopped in some future combination of atoms. These, it is manifest, only tremble and suffer when they form part of a soul, but are immediately released from all pain or mischance, when this confinement and cohesion are at an end, and they, being dispersed, regain liberty and wander about singly, as of yore; for, as our great dispeller of delusion says—When death is, we are not. If, therefore, Sabinus shrinks from the fear of death, it is an idle fear. Does he not perceive that when death arrives, Sabinus is no longer to be found. Whatever its effects may be, they must affect not him, but an army of innumerable disjointed essences, in no one of which could he by any means be able to recognize himself.”
“To make a short story out of a very long one,” interrupted the Centurion; “life, you think, is not worthy of the name of existence—that being so, it is no wonder you should think lightly of death.”