“There have always been strange happenings about this man,” said Calvo thoughtfully. “His very birth was strange; his appearance among us was sudden and unexpected. What the gods send they can also take away.”
“Do you think then,” asked Cossus, “that he was taken by the gods to heaven?”
“I do not know,” said Calvo. “You say you found no trace of him? But even a man struck by lightning is not destroyed.”
The frightened men looked at each other.
Fabius the priest was the first to speak.
“It is at any rate not true that we have murdered him,” he said boldly, “and that is what men are saying in the streets.”
“And it may be true that he has been taken by the gods,” said Naso eagerly. They went out, still talking, and Calvo smiled to himself. He did not know just what had happened, but Romulus had told him that after this last appearance to the people he was going away, never to come back. Apparently that was what he had done. It did not surprise the old pontiff at all when he heard, an hour or two after, that Fabius had made a speech and told the people that Romulus had been taken bodily to the skies, in the [pg 259]midst of the crashing and flaring of the thunder and lightning, and that he would no more be seen on earth. There were some unbelievers, but after a time this was quite generally thought to be true.
It had the effect of settling all quarrels at once. When they had time to think it over, both factions agreed that Romulus was right. They could see it themselves. Within a few years his memory was better loved, more powerful, and more closely followed in all his ways and sayings than ever he had been in life.
He never returned to Rome, but far away, in [pg 260]a cavern on a mountain height, there lived for many years an old shepherd who became very dear to the simple people around him. He had a servant named Peppo who loved him well and whom he treated more as a son than as a slave. He had a little plot of ground which he cultivated, with nine bean-rows and various kinds of herbs, and a row of beehives stood near the entrance to his cave. There was nothing he could not do with animals, and the birds used to come and perch on his fingers and his shoulders and head, and sing. Even the wolves would not harm him, and one year a mother fox brought up a litter of four cubs within a few yards of his door. The young people used to come to him to get him to tell their fortunes, and if he advised against a thing they never went contrary to what he said. When he died and was buried, his servant returned to the place from which he came, and then Tertius Calvo, who was by that time a very old man, learned certainly where Romulus the founder of Rome had gone. But he kept the story to himself.