Dear and Glorious Physician Read Online Free PDF Page A

who were the least repugnant to him. But he knew he would bore them; they would want to participate in the riotous gaiety, and he would just inhibit them. If only I had a companion, thought the lonely tribune. If only there was just one with whom I could talk, in order to drown out the voice of the fear in me, one with whom to share a cup of wine and discuss those things which are of importance to me. A philosopher, perhaps, or a poet, or just a man who is wise.
     
    He heard the slightest movement, almost the breath of a movement, and he turned towards the fountain again. The sunset sky brightened for an instant above the muttering heads of the palms, and it struck on the fair head of a child leaning against the marble bowl of the fountain in complete enchantment, unaware of the presence of Diodorus.
     
    Moving silently, Diodorus advanced towards the child, who was sitting on the coarse green grass and staring up at Rubria’s window. When he reached the opposite side of the wide and shallow bowl, Diodorus thought, Why, it is the young Lucanus, son of my freedman, Aeneas. His heart bounded with a nameless longing, and he thought of Iris, his old playmate, Iris with her aureate hair, her wonderful blue eyes, soft white flesh, and round, dimpled chin, and her slender Grecian nose. He heard, as from echoing down long and clouded corridors, the sound of her child’s laughter, the questioning of her call to him. Iris, for him, had not existed even as a remembered playmate since her marriage to that stilted and precise mediocrity of an Aeneas. But now he remembered that when he had been off on his campaigns, before the death of his parents, Iris had shone like a star in his mind, sweet, wise Iris, his mother’s young slave, his mother’s petted handmaiden who had been to her as a daughter.
     
    He, a tribune, young and ambitious and stalwart, of unimpeachable family, had even dreamt of being married to Iris. His parents, he believed, in spite of their love for Iris, would have expired of humiliation if their son had condescended to a slave, and if she had said to him, “Where thou art, Caius, there am I, Caia.” Yet when he had heard of their deaths, while still stationed in Jerusalem, his first thought, after the initial pang of sorrow, had been of Iris. He had returned, to find her not only freed but married and pregnant, and he had put her sternly out of his mind. Surely, then, his loneliness had begun, and he had thought it merely a yearning to return to his active life in the Orient.
     
    The whole courtyard filled with soft mauve shadows, in which the leaning head of Lucanus was like a yellow harvest moon. Diodorus could see his fine profile, and he thought, It is the face of the child, Iris. He had never been interested in children, except his daughter, Rubria, and though he had wished for sons he had thought of them as young soldiers, and his heirs. Now he peered at Lucanus, his eyes straining through the colored twilight, and again his heart bounded and was filled with tenderness.
     
    Lucanus sat in motionless silence, still gazing at the dwindling square of Rubria’s window. He wore a thin white tunic; his long legs, so pale that they resembled alabaster, were folded under him. In his hands there lay a large stone of unusual form and hue, restless with dull light. The whole attitude of Lucanus was one of prayerful rapture, yet he was very still. His rosy lips were parted, and the hollows of his eyes were filled with a strange blueness. It was as if he were listening, and Diodorus, superstitious as were all Romans, watched with a kind of nervous fear, his skin prickling.
     
    He spoke suddenly and loudly: “It is you, Lucanus.”
     
    The boy did not start. He only moved a little and turned his entranced face to Diodorus. He did not leap to his feet; he merely sat there, the stone in his hands. It was as if he did not see the tribune at all.
     
    Diodorus was about to speak again, more roughly, when the boy smiled