ON the first of March were celebrated the Matronalia, the female Kalends, held in honour of those august women who put an end to the Sabine war. Now the ladies received a return for their own gifts at the Saturnalia of December, and it was the custom that their husbands, lovers and friends should bring handsome presents upon this festival.
Her spouse had given Ceres a necklace of emeralds and Hilarion also had promised her something, concerning which she felt curious, for what had Hilarion to give anybody? But the little matter of the Matronalia was not much in their thoughts, since a far greater event happened to be at hand.
Now Arcadius climbed to see his brother while the East wind’s enchantment was over all things. For Eurus is a rare painter and can do more with his pigments upon the naked sky than Zephyr, for all those peaks and pinnacles of cloud that he lifts from old ocean. The East Wind knows not the crystal clarity of rain-soaked air. He works with dry brushes and hides the horizon under magic colours, so that though earth curdle beneath his stroke, the woods ache through and through, the waters show their teeth, the cattle turn their shivering backs, yet aloft float fairy feathers and the hills lie under tender veils and gauzes. The tyrant loves to go in delicate raiment of azure, silver, rose, draped Orient-wise over his steely bosom; his dagger leaps from a sheath of pearl and opal, and he smiles while he stabs.
Thus thought Arcadius as he drew a sheepskin about him and climbed upward through the mastic and lavender and myrtle scrub until he reached his brother’s home. Hilarion was on his knees and he rose in some concern, for the visitor greeted him with such asperity of tone that he grew fearful. But there was no need, and for once the voice of conscience happened to be mistaken. Only a nip of the East wind had touched Arcadius.
“Rise from your prayer and draw the curtain against this infernal blast,” he said. “Excuse me for striking into your meditations; but there is a good reason.”
“You do nothing without reason, brother,” replied Hilarion, pulling the curtain and bringing a rug of wolf-skin for his pallet. “Wrap this about you. Shall I make a fire?”
“Yes,” answered Arcadius, “make a fire by all means — not for me, but for tenderer souls who design to visit you presently. Ceres and her cousin, Erotion, ascend anon, that you may give my wife her promised gift. You look down in the mouth this morning. Another cold?”
“No,” answered Hilarion rather sadly. “I am not cold enough. It is borne in upon me, brother, that my life falls short of what it should be. Day by day the conviction grows. I am uneasy and suffer from a bad conscience.”
Arcadius showed interest.
“What is this Christian malady of a bad conscience?” he asked.
“I must go,” answered Hilarion ignoring the question. “No, it is not the East wind. The wind is tonic, wholesome. It tells the truth to me in its trenchant and penetrating way. You bid me to draw the curtain, Arcadius, and I draw it. But that — I was going to say ‘accursed’ — curtain is a symbol of much more important things than itself.”
At this moment the badgers emerged from their arcanum. They were immensely sleek, plump and prosperous.
“My husband ate too much pickled anchovy last night,” explained the badger’s wife placidly. “So we’re just going out in the air a bit to pull him together.”
They shuffled off and Hilarion’s lustrous eyes regarded them sadly.
“I am like those poor brutes,” he declared. “I am comfortable, prosperous, putting on weight at every meal. Instead of growing thinner, I grow fatter; instead of feeling my flesh become more and more a vesture, from which I shall be glad to escape, I find myself hale and hearty and sound as a nut — not a weak spot, not an ache or pain. This is all wrong. One ought, physically, to go down the hill as, spiritually, one goes up it. Instead — well, look at me. I am more like you than ever — even harder and tougher than you.”
Arcadius laughed.
“The result of a blameless life,” he declared. “You can’t have it both ways, dear brother. The average recluse generally looks on the wine when it is red, and gathers a few rosebuds where he may, ere he assumes the cord and cowl, and shaves his top-knot. He has laid in his rheumatism and sciatica before he started; but Nature is a plain dealer and eminently just. You must not expect to suffer, if you and your parents before you have done nothing to suffer for. That is where the Eternal Mother appears so much fairer than ourselves. Cheer up, however; and be sure there’s a bad time coming.”
Hilarion shook his head and repeated his determination to depart and seek more arid circumstances and severer discipline.
Then his brother told him the great news.
“Pan has no quarrel with your recent activities,” he announced. “I refer to Ceres. Of course I knew that you were trying to make her a Christian with all your might; and now you have succeeded. She is a Christian down to her toes, and I hope good may come of it.”
“Pan doesn’t mind!” exclaimed Hilarion.
“Not in the least. Believe in my god or no, this you must own: that he is large-minded, tolerant and generous to all created things.”
Hilarion, however, felt a little suspicious.
“There’s no catch in this?” he asked.
“None — unless it be for Ceres. I hope Christianity will prove a great catch in every way for her. I rejoice to see her happy, and she is gloriously happy as a result of my agreement with her desires.”
“It is like yourself to take this exalted line,” murmured Hilarion in some emotion. “You will never forget it, dear brother. By their light ye shall know them. Ceres will go from strength to strength.”
“She couldn’t be a better woman than she is,” declared Arcadius. “A good wife and a good house-wife, a perfect mother, charitable to the needy, sympathetic to the weak and patient with the pig-headed — a noble character in fact. I have never seen such another.”
“She will rise to still greater heights,” prophesied Hilarion. “You have done me much good, banished idle fears, heartened me to wrestle with my own doubts and difficulties. My gift for Ceres was my most treasured missal — the Epistle of our St. James. But I did not intend to give it her until I had asked your permission.”
“Certainly, certainly,” replied Arcadius. “Give her anything but that death’s head. And if you would permit this relic of a man who has breathed and lived and hoped and desired happiness as much as we do — if you would allow that fragment of what was once one of us, and therefore worthy of decent burial, to return to earth, I should regard it as a favour. Christianity is overdoing this rag and bone business.”
Thus one by one Hilarion’s little comforts slipped away from him. Under the circumstances and at such a moment it had been churlish to deny his brother’s request. And yet the skull was more than a mere skull to him. He entertained a real friendship for the relic: the withered bone had received many confidences and become in some sort his familiar. Now, however, he did not hesitate.
“You are right,” he admitted. “You have a clean, Roman way of regarding things, and much that a monk takes for granted may, perhaps, admit of question. With all its errors Paganism never traded in hairs from the head of Jupiter, or parings from Aphrodite’s fingernail. But think not that Christianity is less logical and pure-minded than any other creed. Charity is our watchword and humility our countersign. I will bury my skull, and I wish it were possible to take it back to the Egyptian desert whereon I found it, that its ultimate reunion with fellow-fragments might be more readily effected when the coming Trump shall sound. These details, however, may be safely left to the Creator of us all. I will inter this emblem of mortality under the crocuses and utter a becoming prayer.”
“Do,” said his twin brother.
They parted with utmost affection and, later in the day, slaves brought up a litter from which emerged Ceres and her cousin, Erotion. The latter was but seventeen and exquisitely beautiful. Princes had desired to wed this girl, yet a certain trait, common to the maidens of her race, distinguished her. She was seriously minded, entertained no great regard for man and desired goodness rather than experience. This ideal at seventeen, manifested in one with violet eyes, hair like autumn gold and a lovely face, after the impassive perfection of the Greek, was matter for amazement. Her parents — worldly people — held Erotion to be a changeling; but Ceres adored her, saw her own opinions and ideals reflected in the beautiful child and hoped for her a future of intellectual distinction akin to the learned females of Attic renown, yet innocent of certain undesirable features recorded concerning them.
And now, joyous above measure in her newly found liberty to join Hilarion on the plane of his religion, Ceres already began to see in Erotion another convert. Converted she must be without delay, and who more likely to accomplish the task than the brother of Arcadius? Indeed not a shadow clouded this ambition. The cousin of Ceres had already harkened to the new teachers and declined to go with her parents to the cosy temple of Vesta by Tiber, where the little they did in this line was done. Erotion possessed the Christian virtues as a precious gift from Providence, and it remained only for her to learn the beauty, mystery and pathos of Hilarion’s glorious evangel to receive it with gratitude if not passion.
Ceres was right. Erotion perceived the joy which now irradiated the countenance of her cousin and, indeed, as they sat together in the litter covered with the skins of tiger and bear, the Christian girl had already lighted the first spark of a flame that her brother-in-law would quickly kindle to a blaze.
They joined him presently and he blessed Ceres and welcomed her to the bosom of the Church. He was full of plans for her formal reception, and then he turned to her cousin and from his heart spoke comfortable and eloquent words.
Erotion struck without a struggle, for Hilarion excelled himself. The badgers, after their little airing, sneaked back to their establishment utterly unobserved before the enthralling splendour of his exposition.
To be plain, Erotion was converted in five minutes; then they discussed worldly things and how Marcus Severus Pomponius was prospering with his teeth.
Hilarion blessed them both, and they promised to see him again on the following Wednesday; but twenty-four hours later, Erotion, with that stark absence of any coquetry which marked her character, came up again quite alone and enjoyed another long conversation on her own account.
To Hilarion it seemed not twenty-four hours, but twenty-four years since he had seen her. She brought him some difficulties and he solved them; she put to him a number of intelligent questions and he answered them. At last both sank into silence and merely sat humbly looking into each other’s eyes. They were two pairs of the most beautiful eyes in Italy, and each thought the other pair the loveliest things that life had ever revealed.
Erotion rose to depart, and Hilarion went half a mile out of bounds to see her on the path. He was suddenly alarmed for her, that a rude beast might accost her, or a stone slip under her delicate feet. Indeed he would not let her go until a peasant passed that way and was directed to escort her back to the villa.
She came again with Ceres, with Arcadius, by herself; and he liked best the visits when she approached him unattended.
Familiar phenomena now overgot Hilarion. He found himself on several occasions sighing to the moon, who, as she swam into the unclouded sky, was as white as the shoulder of Erotion. That came out of Horace — an unbeliever. He remembered something else in Horace — a poet who had given him pleasure in the past on the lips of a literate though earthy monk. “Soften life’s crosses with a smile, for there’s nothing happy on every side.” Yet what were these emotions — not happy certainly, but ineffable, precious, yearning — moony? And what the mischief had he to do with the pagan moon, or the moon with him?
Spring was now in the air. Life sought its mate. Even the badgers were giggling and talking nonsense to each other. Every bird carried a twig, or a wisp of wool from the thorny sheep-track; the young devotees came in couples — boy and girl together — and looked more at each other than at him. He missed his skull and was in a mind to dig it up again. Perhaps it might help him to banish this phantom in a crocus-coloured gown, with violet eyes and a voice like the wood doves. The brook, whence he drew his weekly carp, murmured one word monotonously; and whereas it had been wont to sing inspiriting early Christian canticles, now the crystal could babble but a single, blessed name. “Erotion” — “Erotion” it throbbed, and the lark on high tinkled “Erotion”; the nightingale cried her at twilight; and even the raven croaked of her as he flew heavily high overhead. The spring flowers also wrote “Erotion” upon the herbage, and by night the galaxies of heaven spelled her name across the sky.
Hilarion wrestled with this unparalleled experience and certainly did grow thinner; but he could not banish the maiden from his mind, and since he had ever been a man of austere principles who never looked twice at, or thought twice about a girl, the flame of this arrow, sped through his monkish habit by Cupid, burned with a mordant intensity that confounded him.
When Erotion came for more Light, his knees turned to water, and while she could not fail to perceive his increasing pallor, for his part he observed that a new loveliness sat upon her countenance. She told him one day, in faltering words, that her visit to Ceres was about to end.
“Don’t go — don’t go,” he said, and marvelled what strange voice spoke within him.
“I don’t want to; but there is nothing to keep me longer. It will be better — wiser to return home,” she answered.
He saw her to the very gates of the villa, exacted a promise that she would come once again before she departed, and so far forgot himself as to kneel and kiss the hem of her robe.
Then he tottered back to his cave, and reaching it, fell trembling upon the silver sand of the floor. He had at last found out what was the matter and now voiced his awful discovery in hollow accents that echoed in despair among the crannies of the grotto.
“Good God — I’m in love!” cried the dumb-foundered hermit; and he devoted all that night to devising penitential exercises.