Dear and Glorious Physician Read Online Free Page B

noses. Terror seized him as he again touched Rubria’s hair and saw the tremor of the small hands on the sheet. Surely he had honored the gods all his life, and they would not take from him his very heartbeat. Never have I feared a sword or a spear, nor any man, nor any thing, yet I am weakened by fear tonight, he said to himself. It is not that this illness is something new, but my soul trembles as if with premonition.
     
    He renewed his prayers, and added one to Juno, the mother of children. To him the gods of Rome had never been depraved, not even Jupiter, for all his propensities with regard to maidens. He wondered if he should not implore Mars, his special deity, the patron of soldiers. He decided against it; Mars would not understand a soldier who held a child more precious and important even than war. Such a prayer to him might inspire his anger. Diodorus hastily besought Mercury again, with his winged sandals and his staff of serpents.
     
    When Diodorus joined Aurelia again he found her in the anteroom of her chamber, industriously spinning fine wool into cloth for her child’s capitium. She was the very personification of a matron of old Rome as she sat there, her foot moving rhythmically on the treadle, her hand at the wheel, her black hair braided severely about her round head, her pink face serious and absorbed. Her white garments flowed about her full figure in modest folds, and sleeves half covered her voluptuous arms. To Diodorus she was a reassuring figure. Rather than wail uselessly over her child, she spun warm cloth for her. Diodorus touched her head lovingly with his hand, and then his lips. The busy foot and hand did not falter, but Aurelia smiled. “Why do you not, my beloved, walk among the gardens in the sunset? You will find comfort there, as always.” Her voice was steady and calm.
     
    Diodorus thought of his books. Today, by special messenger, he had received a roll containing the philosophies of Philo. Rumor had it that Philo was considered superior to Aristotle. This Diodorus did not believe, but he was both excited and curious. But all at once a flatness and heaviness of heart came to him, and he decided to do as his wife had advised. The book could wait; he was too restless to give it his full and thoughtful attention.
     
    He stepped out into the courtyard. A dark crimson was drifting through the fronds of the palms; the scent of jasmine rose in clouds in the warm air. The ornamental orange and lemon trees were globed in golden and green fruit. Insects hummed with a sound of thin wires, and suddenly a nightingale sang to the purpling sky. The white stones set among the exotic flower beds were flooded with heliotrope shadows, and a dim blue light filled the arches of the colonnades which surrounded the courtyard. A fountain, in which stood a marble faun, tinkled sweetly, mingled its frail song with the song of the nightingale. The mingled purple and crimson of the sunset glimmered in the bowl of the fountain, which was alive with brilliant little fish. Now the palms clattered a little in a freshening wind from the distant sea, and through the moving fronds of one Diodorus could see the gleaming radiance of the evening star. The trunks of the trees, set along the high walls of the yard, resembled gray-white ghosts.
     
    No sound came from the high square of the house behind Diodorus; the pillars shimmered in the half-light as if made of some unsubstantial material and not marble. Diodorus found the silence suddenly oppressive; the voice of the nightingale failed to entrance him as usual. It was a voice that had no consolation in it, but only melancholy, and the fountain murmured of non-human sorrows. Diodorus, assaulted again by his loneliness, thought of Antioch, and the celebrations begun there in honor of Saturn. They would end in a general debauch, as usual, but at least there would be the sound of men and women. He considered riding back to Antioch and summoning a few of his officers