The Silver Chalice (61 page)

“Then it is as I thought.” Helena’s mind had gone busily to work. “Have you ever spoken of me to your wife?”

“I told her of meeting you in Jerusalem.”

“Do you think that was wise?” She did not wait for an answer. “It is always the way. Men cannot keep anything from their wives. I am sure she was not pleased. Of this I am certain: you must not speak of coming to see me here.”

“She wanted me to see you. She made me promise I would do so.”

Helena looked surprised. “Your wife is wiser than most would have been. She is wiser than I expected.”

She had seated herself near the one window in the room and had arranged the linen folds of her robe gracefully over her crossed knees. He could see her bare feet. They were small and white and shapely. She asked, “Does this mean you will give up your ambitions?”

“No, no!” cried Basil. “I am more determined than ever.”

“I am glad you have no intention of living on your wife’s bounty.” Helena gave him the benefit of an open scrutiny. “I have already made some moves in the hope you would remember your promise. We have important connections at the imperial court. You see, Simon’s appearance before Nero was a great success, and at this moment he is the most talked-of man in Rome.” She paused and looked at him with a smile that said, How happy it will make me if I can be of help to you. “The Emperor
has been told about you. If you still desire it, you can be taken to him.”

Basil hesitated and then shook his head. “I have every intention of striving for a career. But not by the favor of the Emperor. I have other matters to attend to while I am here, and there will not be time to seek favor at the court of Nero. Things press at home, at Antioch. My stay here must be a brief one.”

“I was afraid of this.” Helena sat in deep thought for several moments and then clapped her hands together. “I have been very thoughtless. You must have a cup of wine.” She gave instructions to the maidservant who answered the summons. “As soon as you have quenched your thirst, I shall have more to say.”

When the servant returned with a flagon that awakened memories in his mind, Helena insisted that he bring a chair and sit near her while he quaffed it. Her eyes had achieved a soft and dreamy look. “Is the wine to your taste?” she asked.

Basil, in a defensive mood, was thinking: “This will be a test. Will it have the same effect on me as that other time? Luke laughs at love potions and says it is the good or bad in one that counts. Well, now we shall see.”

He took a deep draught. It was cool and refreshing and it sent a tingle through his veins. He kept his eyes fixed on his companion. Helena had turned and was gazing out of the window at the inner court, where many activities were in progress if they could judge by the sounds that reached them. Her profile seemed more delicate than he had remembered it to be. She brought her head back and leaned close toward him.

“You will make a great mistake if you let this chance slip. The Emperor is the vainest man in the world: If you did a model of him that he liked, he would shower you with favors.”

She sat in silence for a moment, studying him closely. She was making it clear that her emotions had been stirred. Her eyes had acquired a suggestion of moisture and she was breathing hard. She reached out her hands to him impulsively.

“Basil! Are you not glad to see me? It makes me happy to sit here so close to you.” Then she began to whisper. “Oh, I understand. I can see it has been made hard for you. You will forget your ambition. You will forget—me.”

When he gave no indication of responding she allowed her hands to drop to her lap. Her eyes told him that his coldness had hurt her.

“The forgetfulness is starting, Basil. What else could I expect? But I
wish you would believe me when I say I put your interests above everything. It is the truth. I want you to become a great man. Whether it is with my help or not does not matter. Basil, that much you must believe.”

“I know your generosity. You have given me proof of it.”

“You are not drinking your wine. Can you not wait long enough for that before rushing away on your other concerns?”

Basil raised the familiar flagon to his lips again. “It is good wine. I hope, Helena, that what I have said will not make you think me ungrateful.”

There was a knock on the door, and then it swung in to reveal the tall figure of Idbash. He looked at them with an interest he made no effort to conceal.

“Clients are arriving,” he said to Helena. “The widow from the provinces is here. A poet who needs some stimulation of his muse is coming. A senator is on his way;
the
senator, mistress. I can get no response from —from the one who sits on the rooftop. He waved me away angrily and said you would see them.”

“They will not like it,” declared Helena. “They want to see Simon himself. Our trade will fall off if he keeps this up.”

“The senator will be pleased,” commented Idbash with an ugly curl of the lips that was meant for a smile.

“I will attend to them. Get a cup of wine for the widow. Plain wine with a dash of some drug to make it taste strange. She will never know the difference.”

When the long nose of Idbash had seemed to fold up and disappear and the door had closed on his narrow, arched back, Helena rose slowly to her feet. “You
must
return. It is so important. Where are you staying?”

“With an old man who keeps a sort of inn.”

She asked in a tone that contained a trace of sharpness, “Are the people there Christians?” Not waiting for an answer, she went on: “Keep away from all of them! They are falling into the ill will of the Emperor. One of the reasons that Simon is in such high favor is because he is throwing doubts on the miracles of Jesus. This delights Nero. Basil, this is most important. It would not be safe for you to be associated with them in any way.”

He rose to his feet, and they faced each other for a moment. A hurt look had come into her eyes. Then she yielded again to impulse and, taking one of his hands, pressed the palm of it against her face.

“The pretty little boy who came to the house of my master will not forget the poor little slave girl?” Her voice seemed choked with emotion.
“Oh, Basil, Basil, do not forget me! Do not put me out of your mind!”

She turned so suddenly then that the linen skirt twirled about her, allowing him a brief glimpse of white ankles. The door closed after her.

On leaving the room Helena sought Idbash. “That man I have left,” she said in low and urgent tones. “Have him followed. I must know where he is living.”

The young Samaritan’s lips curled up in another unpleasant suggestion of a smile. Seeing his hesitation, she caught him by the sleeve.

“Listen to me, Long-ears!” she cried. “You will do as I say. I want you to send the most reliable man in the house. Attend to it at once unless you want me to have you driven out on the streets! You would not like it, my Idbash. The streets of Rome hold out no welcome to a man who has quarreled with his master.”

After her departure from the room Basil lifted the flagon and drank the wine to the last drop. Then he began to laugh.

“Luke was right. To believe in love potions is an absurdity. I have finished this one and it has had no effect on me at all. She gave it to me with a purpose; I am certain of that, but I am equally certain that the purpose has failed. I shall never see her again and I have no regrets about it. I never want to see her.”

He replaced the flagon and made his way to the door. “That other time it was my own evil instincts that made her attractive to me,” he thought. “I must face the truth. There is evil in me and I allowed it to come out. But thanks to the wisdom of my wife, I am now cured of that particular evil.”

He left the busy house of Simon on jubilant feet. He was happy, so very happy over the discovery he had made that he wanted to shout out to the world about it. He had come to the realization that he was in love with his wife!

“How could I have been so blind?” he demanded of himself with a feeling of chagrin for what now seemed to him a monumental lack of discernment. “My Deborra is sweet and loyal and brave. Each time I saw her I grew more conscious of her loveliness. But I allowed myself to look at someone else. I allowed this other one to stay in my mind and so I
could not enter with a whole heart into my marriage with Deborra.” He stood still and looked up earnestly at the blue sky above him. “I thank Thee, O Lord, that my eyes have been opened at last.”

It was a beautiful day. A touch of fall was in the air, and he stepped out briskly, conscious of a new sense of well-being as well as jubilation over the change that had come about inside himself. How wonderful it would be, he thought, if Deborra were here with him! They would join hands, perhaps, as they had done that day when she threw the stone at the Roman soldiers and they had raced for their lives through the Valley of the Cheesemakers. He wished so much to have her with him for his first clear look at the great city of the Caesars that it was like a physical pain.

“How wise you were, my Deborra,” he said aloud. People passing in the street turned to stare at him. A solid citizen, wearing his toga with an air of importance, stopped and said in a bitter voice: “These crazy foreigners! Our great city is filled with them. It is being ruined.”

Basil continued his train of thought, but he was careful to keep it to himself. “My sweet and wise Deborra asked me to see Helena with new eyes,” he thought. “I have done so, and she has become a shadow of the past. But that is not all. I am seeing everything with new eyes. Myself, my future, my work. And Rome! I am able to look at this city and see things that were hidden from me before. The whole world is new and the life we shall live in it, my wife and I, will be full of happiness and, I hope, achievement. And all this comes to me as I make use of these new eyes.

“But most of all I see you, my Deborra, with new eyes. I see your fine white brow; your own eyes, which are so understanding and so very bright and lovely; your mouth, which I have kissed once, and once only, and that a fleeting one that we allowed ourselves to please an old prince from Seen. I shall hurry back to you on feet burning with impatience, my wife, and I shall spend the rest of my life making up to you for my blindness in the past!”

He had reached the entrance to the Forum Romanorum. It was filled with people and pulsing with the continuous drama that the life of Rome generated. He came to a stop and said to himself, “I don’t care if they think I am mad. I cannot keep all this inside myself any longer.” Raising his voice, he shouted, “Deborra, I love you, I love you, I love you!”

B
asil was ushered into an anteroom that had something of the appearance of a temple because of its high ceiling supported on pillars of the darkest variety of tufa. What caught his eye at once, however, was a display of shields propped at intervals along the walls. They were uniform in size, but each one was painted a different color. Despite the resplendent newness of them, they looked what they were: war shields for legion soldiers to carry into battle, being very long and obviously of great strength and weight.

A bald-headed man with a parrot nose and a hint of the rodent in his eyes planted himself flat-footed in the path of the visitor.

“What do you come for?” he demanded. “To ask a favor?”

Basil nodded his head. “I come to ask a favor of Christopher who is called Kester of Zanthus. He has granted me a hearing at this hour.”

“I granted you the hearing, young man,” said the assistant. “I granted it on my own authority, which is considerable, I may tell you. You see me here with a pen in my hand, but if you think I am a mere clerk you are wrong. As wrong as Pompey. But now I must tell you this: seeing that you ask favors, you may as well turn on your heels and walk out again.”

“But——”

The assistant interrupted him with a wave of his hand. “I am as hard as these shields,” he said with an air of satisfaction. “It is my inclination always to refuse things, to say no to callers, to knock down rather than to help up. But compared to the man in there”—he motioned over his shoulder with his thumb in the direction of an inner door—“I am as soft as pulp, I am a weak giver-in, I am a fair mark for beggars.”

“But,” said Basil in a tone of distress, “but, surely, I am to be allowed to state my request.”

The clerk considered the point with a judicial squint. “Well,” he said finally, “I will go this far. I will ask the man in there.”

He left the room, closing the inside door after him. On his almost immediate return, he gave his knobby head a reluctant bob of assent. “You are to go in when he calls. But I must give you warning. The man in there is in a very bad humor. He will be short and ugly with you. Do not expect anything else.”

Basil had employed the interval by examining the shields and had made a discovery that puzzled him. He looked inquiringly at the assistant. “May I ask a question?”

“I do not promise to answer it. No information can be given out about army supplies.”

“I have noticed that each shield in the room has a name painted on it, a different name for each one. I cannot help wondering why.”