"Either it must be Severus, or else you!" said Marcia. "Which is it to be?"

Pertinax folded his arms.

"I would feel it my duty to preserve Rome from Severus. But you go too fast. Our Commodus is on the throne-"

"And writes proscription lists!" said Marcia. "Who knows what names are on the lists already? Who knows what Bultius Livius may have told him? Who knows which of us will be alive tomorrow morning? Who knows what s.e.xtus is doing? If s.e.xtus has heard of this crisis he will seize the moment and either arouse the praetorian guard to mutiny or else reach Commodus himself and slay him with his own hand! s.e.xtus is a man! Are you no more than Flavia t.i.tiana's cuckold and Cornificia's plaything?"

"I am a Roman," Pertinax retorted angrily. "I think of Rome before myself. You women only think of pa.s.sion and ambition. Rome-city of a thousand triumphs!" He turned away, pacing the floor again, knitting his fingers behind him. "Pertinax would offer up himself if he might bring back the Augustan days-if he might win the warfare that Tiberius lost. One Pertinax is nothing in the life of Rome. One life, three- quarters spent, is but a poor pledge to the G.o.ds-yet too much to be thrown away in vain. The auguries are all mixed nowadays. I doubt them. I mistrust the shaven priests who dole out answers in return for minted money. I have knelt before the holy shrine of Vesta, but the Virgins were as vague as the Egyptian who prophesied-"

He hesitated.

"What?" demanded Marcia.

"That I should serve Rome and receive ingrat.i.tude. What else does any man receive who serves Rome? They who cheat her are the ones who prosper!"

"Send for Cornificia," said Marcia. "She keeps your resolution. Let her come and loose it!" Pertinax turned sharply on her.

"Flavia t.i.tiana shall not suffer that indignity. Cornificia can not enter this house."

But the mention of Cornificia's name wrought just as swift a change in him as had the name of Lucius Severus. He began to bite his finger- nails, then clenched his hands again behind him, Galen and Marcia watching.

"You are the only one who can replace Commodus without drenching Rome in blood," said Marcia, remembering a phrase of Cornificia's. And since the words were Cornificia's, and stirred the chords of many memories, they produced a sort of half-way resolution.

"It is now or never," Marcia said, goading him. But Pertinax shook his head.

"I am not convinced, though I would do my best to save Rome from Severus. Dioscuri!-do you realize, this plot to make me emperor is known to not more than a dozen-"

"Therein safety lies," said Marcia. "Yourself included there can only be a dozen traitors!"

"Rome is too much ruled by women! I will not kill Commodus, and I will give him this one chance," said Pertinax. "I will protect him, unless and until I shall discover proof that he intends to turn on you, or me, or any of my friends."

"You may discover that too late!" said Marcia; but she seemed to understand him and looked satisfied. "Come tonight to the palace- Galen," she added, "come you also-and bring poison!"

Galen met her gaze and shut his lips tight.

"Galen," she said, "either you will do this or-I have been your friend.

Now be you mine! It is too risky to send one of my slaves to fetch a poison. You are to come tonight and bring the poison with you.

Otherwise-you understand?"

"You are extremely comprehensible!" said Galen, pursing up his lips.

"You will obey?"

"I must," said Galen. But he did not say whether he would obey her or his inclination. Pertinax, eyeing him doubtfully, seemed torn between suspicion of him and respect for long-tried friendship.

"May we depend on you?" he asked. He laid a hand on Galen's shoulder, bending over him.

"I am an old man," Galen answered. "In any event I have not long to live. I will do my best-for you."

Pertinax nodded, but there was still a question in his mind. He bade farewell to Marcia, turning his back toward Galen. Marcia whispered:

"Be a man now, Pertinax! If we should lose this main, we two can drink the stuff that Galen brings."

"There was a falling star last night," said Pertinax. "Whose was it?"

Marcia studied his face a moment. Then:

"There will be a rising sun tomorrow!" she retorted. "Whose will it be?

Yours! Play the man!"

XI. GALEN

Galen's house was one he rented from a freedman of the emperor-a wise means of retaining favor at the palace. Landlords having influence were careful to protect good tenants. Furthermore, whoever rented, rather than possessed, escaped more easily from persecution. Galen, like Tyanan Apollonius, reduced his private needs, maintaining that philosophy went hand in hand with medicine, but wealth with neither.

It was a pleasant little house, not far away from Cornificia's, within a precinct that was rebuilt after all that part of Rome burned under Nero's fascinated gaze. The street was crescent-shaped, not often crowded, though a score of pa.s.sages like wheel-spokes led to it; and to the rear of Galen's house was a veritable maze of alleys. There were two gates to the house: one wide, with decorated posts, that faced the crescent street, where Galen's oldest slave sat on a stool and blinked at pa.s.sers-by; the other narrow, leading from a little high-walled courtyard at the rear into an alley between stables in which milch-a.s.ses were kept. That alley led into another where a dozen midwives had their names and claims to excellency painted on the doors-an alley carefully to be avoided, because women of that trade, like barbers, vied for custom by disseminating gossip.

So s.e.xtus used a pa.s.sage running parallel to that one, leading between workshops where the burial-urn makers' slaves engraved untruthful epitaphs in baked clay or inlaid them on the marble tomb-slabs-to be gilded presently with gold-leaf (since a gilded lie, though costlier, is no worse than the same lie unadorned.)

He drummed a signal with his knuckles on the panel of a narrow door of olive-wood, set deep into the wall under a projecting arch. An overleaning tree increased the shadow, and a visitor could wait without attracting notice. A slave nearly as old as Galen presently admitted him into a paved yard in which a fish-pond had been built around an ancient well. A few old fruit-trees grew against the wall, and there were potted shrubs, but little evidence of gardening, most of Galen's slaves being too old for that kind of work. There were a dozen of them loafing in the yard; some were so fat that they wheezed, and some so thin with age that they resembled skeletons. There was a rumor that the fatness and the thinness were accounted for by Galen's fondness for experiments. Old Galen had a hundred jealous rivals and they even said he fed the dead slaves to the fish; but it was Roman custom to give no man credit for humaneness if an unclean accusation could be made to stick.

Another fat old slave led s.e.xtus to a porch behind the house and through that to a library extremely bare of furniture but lined with shelves on which rolled ma.n.u.scripts were stacked in tagged and numbered order; they were dusty, as if Galen used them very little nowadays. There were two doors in addition to the one that opened on the porch; the old slave pointed to the smaller one and s.e.xtus, stooping and turning sidewise because of the narrowness between the posts, went down a step and entered without knocking.

For a moment he could not see Galen, there was such confusion of shadow and light. High shelves around the walls of a long, shed-like room were crowded with retorts and phials. An enormous, dusty human skeleton, articulated on concealed wire, moved as if annoyed by the intrusion. There were many kinds of skulls of animals and men on brackets fastened to the wall, and there were jars containing dead things soaked in spirit. Some of the jars were enormous, having once held olive oil. On a table down the midst were instruments, a scale for weighing chemicals, some measures and a charcoal furnace with a blow-pipe; and across the whole of one end of the room was a system of wooden pigeon-holes, stacked with chemicals and herbs, for the most part wrapped in parchment.

Sunlight streaming through narrow windows amid dust of drugs and spices made a moving mystery; the room seemed under water. Galen, stooping over a crucible with an unrolled parchment on the table within reach, was not distinguishable until he moved; when he ceased moving he faded out again, and s.e.xtus had to go and stand where he could touch him, to believe that he was really there.

"You told me you had ceased experiments."

"I lied. The universe is an experiment," said Galen. "Such G.o.ds as there are perhaps are looking to evolve a decent man, or possibly a woman, from the mess we see around us. Let us hope they fail."

"Why?"

"There appears to be hope in failure. Should the G.o.ds fail, they will still be G.o.ds and go on trying. If they ever made a decent man or woman all the rest of us would turn on their creation and destroy it. Then the G.o.ds would turn into devils and destroy us."

"What has happened to you, Galen? Why the bitter mood?"

"I discover I am like the rest of you-like all Rome. At my age such a discovery makes for bitterness." For a minute or two Galen went on sc.r.a.ping powder from the crucible, then suddenly he looked up at s.e.xtus, stepping backward so as to see the young man's face more clearly in a shaft of sunlight.

"Did you send that Christian into the tunnel to kill Commodus?" he asked.

"I? You know me better than that, Galen! When the time comes to slay Commodus-but is Commodus dead? Speak, don't stand there looking at me!

Speak, man!"

Galen appeared satisfied.

"No, not Commodus. The blow miscarried. Somebody slew Nasor. A mistake. A coward's blow. If you had been responsible-"

"When-if-I slay, it shall be openly with my own hand," said s.e.xtus. "Not I alone, but Rome herself must vomit out that monster. Why are you vexed?"

"That wanton blow that missed its mark has stripped some friends of mine too naked. It has also stripped me and revealed me to myself. Last night I saw a falling star-a meteor that blazed out of the night and vanished."