His servant found him in a delirium and for a week his fever ran high.  In it were consumed the illusions of which it had been born.  As he gained strength again, he found that his anger against Caelius was more contemptuous than regretful; he discovered a sneering desire for Lesbia’s beauty divorced from a regard for her purity.  The ashes of his old love for her, the love that Valerius had understood, in the dusk, coming home from Mantua, were hidden away in their burial urn.  Should he hold out his cold hands to this new fire?  Should he go to her as a suppliant and pay in reiterated torture for Clytemnestra’s embrace and for Juno’s regilded favours?  He was unaccustomed to weighing impulses, to resisting emotions.  For the first time in his life slothful reason arose and fought with desire.

The issue of the conflict was still in the balance when, a few days later, a little gold box was brought to him without name or note.  Opening it he found a round, white stone.  Loosened flame could have leaped no more swiftly to its goal.  Lesbia had said a white stone marked in her memory the day she had first given herself to him.  She wanted him to come to her.  She was holding out to him her white arms.  He trembled with a passion which no longer filtered through shyness.  The listlessness of his body was gone.  His house was not a prison and the Palatine was near.  Valerius would never come back from Asia, but Lesbia stood within his hand’s sweet reach.

As he made his way through the Forum two drunken wretches shambled past him, and he caught a coarse laugh and the words, “Our Palatine Medea.”  Why did his ears ring, suddenly, strangely, with the laughter of bright, blue waves and the cadences of a voice telling a child Medea’s story?  Did he know that not the unawakening night but this brief, garish day separated him from one who had listened to that story with him in the covert of his mother’s arms; that not the salt waves of trackless seas but the easy passage of a city street marked his distance from a soldier’s grave?  He had blamed death for his separation from Valerius.  But what Death had been powerless to accomplish his own choice of evil had brought about.  Between him and his brother there now walked the Estranger—­Life.

A POET’S TOLL

I

The boy’s mother let the book fall, and, walking restlessly to the doorway, flung aside the curtains that separated the library from the larger and open hall.  The December afternoon was sharp and cold, and she had courted an hour’s forgetfulness within a secluded room, bidding her maid bring a brazier and draw the curtains close, and deliberately selecting from her son’s books a volume of Lucretius.  But her oblivion had been penetrated by an unexpected line, shot like a poisoned arrow from the sober text:—­

Breast of his mother should pierce with a wound sempiternal, unhealing.