CHAPTER V.

Pontius had gone to the steward’s room, with a frowning brow, but it was with a smile on his strongly-marked lips, and a brisk step that he returned to his work-people.  The foreman came to meet him with looks of enquiry as he said.  “The steward was a little offended and with reason; but now we are capital friends and he will do what he can in the matter of lighting.”

In the hall of the Muses he paused outside the screen, behind which Pollux was working, and called out: 

“Friend sculptor, listen to me, it is high time to have supper.”

“It is, indeed,” replied Pollux, “else it will be breakfast.”

“Then lay aside your tools for a quarter of an hour and help me and the palace-steward to demolish the food that has been sent me.”

“You will need no second assistant if Keraunus is there.  Food melts before him like ice before the sun.”

“Then come and save him from an overloaded stomach.”

“Impossible, for I am just now dealing most unmercifully with a bowl full of cabbage and sausages.  My mother had cooked that food of the gods and my father has brought it in to his first-born son.”

“Cabbage and sausages!” repeated the architect, and its tone betrayed that his hungry stomach would fain have made closer acquaintance with the savory mess.

“Come in here,” continued Pollux, “and be my guest.  The cabbage has experienced the process which is impending over this palace—­it has been warmed up.”

“Warmed-up cabbage is better than freshly-cooked, but the fire over which we must try to make this palace enjoyable again, burns too hotly and must be too vigorously stirred.  The best things have been all taken out, and cannot be replaced.”

“Like the sausages, I have fished out of my cabbages,” laughed the sculptor.  “After all I cannot invite you to be my guest, for it would be a compliment to this dish if I were now to call it cabbage with sausages.  I have worked it like a mine, and now that the vein of sausages is nearly exhausted, little remains but the native soil in which two or three miserable fragments remain as memorials of past wealth.  But my mother shall cook you a mess of it before long, and she prepares it with incomparable skill.”

“A good idea, but you are my guest.”

“I am replete.”

“Then come and spice our meal with your good company.”

“Excuse me, sir; leave me rather here behind my screen.  In the first place, I am in a happy vein, and on the right track; I feel that something good will come of this night’s work.”

“And tomorrow—­”

“Hear me out.”

“Well.”

“You would be doing your other guest an ill-service by inviting me.”

“Do you know the steward then?”

“From my earliest youth, I am the son of the gatekeeper of the palace.”