Caesar Dies | Page 8

and you will commit ten follies. You are lucky if you have but ten failures to detract from one success--as lucky as a man who has but ten mistresses to interfere with his enjoyment of his wife!"
He spoke of mistresses because the girls were coming down the temple steps to take part in the sunset ceremony. The torches they carried were unlighted yet; their figures, draped in linen, looked almost super-humanly lovely in the deepening twilight, and as they laid their garlands on the marble altar near the temple steps and grouped themselves again on either side of it their movements suggested a phantasmagoria fading away into infinite distance, as if all the universe were filled with women without age or blemish. There began to be a scent of incense in the air.
"We only imitate this kind of thing in Rome," said Pertinax. "A larger scale, a coarser effect. What I find thrilling is the sensation they contrive here of unseen mysteries. Whereas--"
"There won't be any mystery left presently! They'll strip your last veil from imagination!" Sextus interrupted, laughing. "Men say Hadrian tried to chasten this place, but he only made them realize the artistic value of an appearance of chastity, that can be thrown off. Hark! The evening hymn."
The torches suddenly were lighted by attendant slaves. The stirring, shaken sistra wrought a miracle of sound that set the nerves all tingling as the high priest, followed by his boys with swinging censers and the members of the priestly college, four by four, came chanting down the temple steps. To an accompanying pleading, sobbing note of flutes the high priest laid an offering of fruit, milk, wine and honey in the midst of the heaped-up garlands (for Apollo was the god of all fertility as well as of healing and war and flocks and oracles). Then came the grand Homeric hymn to Glorious Apollo, men's and boys' and women's voices blending in a surging paean like an ocean's music.
The last notes died away in distant echoes. There was silence for a hundred breaths; then music of flute and lyre and sistra as the priests retreated up the temple steps followed by fanfare on a dozen trumpets as the door swung to behind the priests. Instantly, then, shouts of laughter--torchlight scattering the shadows amid gloom--green cypresses --fire--color splurging on the bosom of the water--babel of hundreds of voices as the gay Antiochenes swarmed out from behind the trees--and a cheer, as the girls by the altar threw their garments off and scampered naked along the river-bank toward a bridge that joined the temple island to the sloping lawns, where the crowd ran to await them.
"Apollo having healed the world of sin, we now do what we like!" said Sextus. "Pertinax, I pledge you continence for this one night! Good Galen, may Apollo's wisdom ooze from you like sweat; for all our sakes, be you the arbiter of what we drink, lest drunkenness deprive us of our reason! Comites, let us eat like warriors--one course, and then discussion of tomorrow's plan."
"Your military service should have taught you more respect for your seniors, as well as how to eat and drink temperately," said Pertinax. "Will you teach your grandmother to suck eggs? I was the first grammarian in Rome before you were born and a tribune before you felt down on your cheek. I am the governor of Rome, my boy. Who are you, that you should lecture me?"
"If you call that a lecture, concede that I dared," Sextus answered. "I did not flatter you by coming here, or come to flatter you. I came because my father tells me you are a Roman beyond praise. I am a Roman. I believe praise is worthless unless proven to the hilt--as for instance: I have come to bare my thoughts to you, which is a bold compliment in these days of treachery."
"Keep your thoughts under cover," said Pertinax, glancing at the steward and the slaves who were beginning to carry in the meal. But he was evidently pleased, and Sextus's next words pleased him more:
"I am ready to do more than think about you, I will follow where you lead--except into licentiousness!"
He lay on both elbows and stared at the scene with disgust. Naked girls, against a background of the torchlit water and the green and purple gloom of cypresses, was nothing to complain of; statuary, since it could not move, was not as pleasing to the eye; but shrieks of idiotic laughter and debauchery of beauty sickened him.
There came a series of sounds at the pavilion entrance, where a litter was set down on marble pavement and a eunuch's shrill voice criticized the slow unrolling of a carpet.
"What did I warn you?" Norbanus whispered, laughing in Sextus's ear.
Pertinax got to his feet, long-leggedly