“I am glad,” said Marcia’s mother to her husband when they went home that night, leaving their daughter and young Mamurius standing together at their own door, “that everything went so well, without a single unlucky or unhappy thing to spoil the good fortune. Marcia well deserves to be happy,—but I shall miss her every day I live.”
She sighed, and Felic’la looked rather sober. She knew very well that they would all miss Marcia, but she determined in her careless little heart to be a better girl and do so much for her mother and brothers that when her turn came, they would all be sorry to see her go.
“I am glad,” said Colonus, “for more than one reason. I have been rather anxious for fear that in this new place our young people would not remember the old ways as they might if they had grown up in our old home. It was important to have the first wedding one that they would all remember with pleasure, and wish to follow as an example. I am very glad Marcia has so good a husband. Mamurius is a youth who will go far and be a leader among the young men. I suppose that now they will all be thinking of marriage.”
There were, in fact, several other marriages in the colony within a year or two, but nobody who was at that first wedding ever forgot it. Marcia was often called upon to tell how the garlands were made, and just how much honey they put in the cakes for the feast, and how the other little matters were arranged that all seemed to be managed exactly right. In fact, that wedding set a fashion and a standard, and as Marcia’s father was shrewd enough to see, it is a good thing [pg 173]in a new community to have the standards rather high. There was nothing in what Marcia and Mamurius did that other people could not follow if they chose, but the simple comfort and grace of their way of living did mean that they cared enough for their home to take it seriously. Girls who might not have thought much about cleanliness, thrift, cheerfulness and beauty began to see, when they visited Marcia, how pleasant it was to have a home like hers. She did not tell them so; she was herself, and that was enough.
XV
THE TRUMPERY MAN
One autumn day a little while after the harvest, a squat, brown man with large black eyes under great arched eyebrows set in a large head, and with unusually muscular shoulders and arms, was paddling slowly in a small boat across the yellow river. As he crossed he looked up attentively at the range of hills near the riverside, now partly covered with wooden huts. It was his experience that villages were good places to trade. They were especially so when, as now, pipes were sounding and the people were keeping holiday in honor of some god. He had gone to many places with his wares, but he had not as yet visited the town by the river. He was not even quite sure of its name. Some called it Rumon and some Roma. The people of his race were not very quick of ear, and often pronounced letters alike or confused them when they sounded alike,—as o and u, or b and p, or t and d. He himself was called Utuze, Otuz, or [pg 175]Odisuze, or Toto, according to the place where he happened to be. He came from Caere, the Etruscan seaport near the mouth of the river.
He had landed on this bank when he went up the river and approached the men from the settlement when they were working on their lands outside the walls, but they did not pay much attention to him. He could not tell whether they did not want his wares, or were suspicious, or simply did not understand what he was talking about. Now he was going to find out,—for he was of a persistent nature. Perhaps there would be some one at the festival who could speak both his language and theirs and tell them what he wanted to say. Then it would be easy.