Dear and Glorious Physician (20 page)

Lucanus was stunned by his patron’s appearance, at the ashen color of his cheeks, at the dryness of his mouth, at the hollows in which his dull eyes lurked without sparkle or interest. The very flesh of the tribune seemed to have withered; his shoulders sagged listlessly, and when he moved a little it was with an effort. Lucanus suddenly felt his own youth, the strength of his body, the flexibility of his limbs, the vitality of his blood in spite of his sorrow and his bottomless anger. Here, as his mother had said, was absolute despair, beyond the reach of consolation.

“What?” murmured Diodorus, as though he did not recognize the young man. He watched Lucanus approach him, and with complete uninterest he watched while Lucanus knelt beside him, his head bent on his chest. A muffled sound came from Diodorus, a weary and fathomless sound. Then he dropped his head in his hands again and forgot his visitor.

Words involuntarily came to Lucanus’ lips. “Master, there is an old story which my father told me. An old man lost his only son, and his friends came to him and said, ‘Why do you weep? Nothing can bring back your son’. And the old man said, ‘That is why I weep’.”

The one high window in the library admitted wandering and crepuscular light, shadowy and vague. Silence filled the room. The youth knelt by the man, and both were motionless. Then Diodorus slowly and falteringly put his hand on Lucanus’ shoulder. He said, in that rusty voice, “You too loved her. But you are not her father.”

“I lost my father,” said Lucanus, and turned his cheek so that it rested on the hand of Diodorus. His words came in a fierce rush. “Look upon me, noble Tribune. I am a son who came not to hate his father, but to despise him lightly as a man of little learning and of many pretensions. I became arrogant and impatient, and condescending. I forgot all he had suffered, all he had known. I no longer found his bombast touching; I found it risible. I did not lose my father in those years, but my father lost a son. And now the son has lost his father, and I cannot reach him and ask his forgiveness for cruelty and impatience and the pride of youth.”

Diodorus’ hand lay still on Lucanus’ shoulder, and for the first time life returned to the tribune’s eyes, and sympathy. He could not see the face of Lucanus, hidden as it was in the shadow of the hood. He said, very gently, “Surely the gods do not reject contrition, and surely the shades in the regions of death are aware of repentance.”

But Lucanus shook his head, unable to speak.

“I honored my father,” said Diodorus, compassionately. “I am not a man without understanding. I can imagine what it must be to remember that one despised his father.” He paused. “Aeneas was a good man, and honorable, and I trusted him without reservation. If he strove for wisdom the striving was not despicable. It is only when a man does not strive that he is less than an excellent dog. Let us honor those who know in their hearts that they are not great, for they respect and reverence greatness.”

“Yes,” said Lucanus. “But that does not absolve me.”

Diodorus did not speak for a few moments. Then he said, as if thinking aloud, “It is good so to live that when a loved one dies one has no regrets. But who does not have regrets? Who has not been rude and harsh and unfeeling at times? Who has not been human, with all faults? Why, then, should we punish ourselves and cry aloud, ‘If only I had known! If only I had watched! Then, perhaps, I could have held back death with my bare hands, before it was too late!’ ”

Wonder ran like frail light over his tortured face, and his shoulders lifted. He said, “I have often said to myself that I was remiss, that I did not guard my child more closely, that if I had been more careful she might not have died. But now I see that the gods have their hours of choosing, and we can do nothing but pray for the souls who have left us, that they will have peace and that they will know we have loved them and will continue to love them.”

But the dryness became dustier in Lucanus, and what Diodorus had said was only an echo with no meaning.

“Yes, yes!” cried Diodorus. “Why have I drawn away from life? Why have I been less than a brute, who mourns, and then resumes his living? What the gods have willed, so be it. They need not answer us, for their nature is beyond our understanding.” He shook his head vehemently. His hand clenched on Lucanus’ shoulder. “I have left my poor wife to cry alone in her bed, and she the mother of my daughter, and heavy with child. I have abandoned her, and when she came to console me I turned from her. Did she suffer? Did she wander into an empty room? Did she miss a maiden’s voice, and that maiden her very flesh? What was that to me, the hating, the embittered, who wished to revenge himself for the loss of his daughter? Lucanus, surely the merciful gods sent you to me today! Had I brooded much more I should have fallen on my own sword!”

“I will revenge her,” Lucanus whispered to himself. “I will revenge her all my life.”

Diodorus looked down at the kneeling youth, whose hard white face was hidden in the hood, and it seemed to the tribune that here was a messenger from Olympus itself. He put his knotted soldier’s arms about the young man’s shoulders as a father embraces a son.

“We have no longer to pray to be absolved of our crimes against the dead, but of our crimes against the living,” said Diodorus. “Let us, then, rise like men and go about the business of life. The living await us.”

Then, like Odysseus and his son, they wept together, and the tears of Diodorus were healing, but the tears of Lucanus were like scalding acid.

Lucanus went through the dripping forest to his home, and he said, numbly and incredulously, “What was it that I said to him? What message did I bring him? In truth, I said nothing at all. I talked about my father, for whom I do not truly grieve, but for whom I feel only regret. When I spoke, my thoughts were with Rubria, and not with Aeneas, my father. And she I will avenge against whatever gods there be.”

Diodorus went into his wife’s chamber, where she was lying in sadness on her bed. She started up when her husband entered, and when she saw his face she knelt on her bed with a sobbing cry and held out her arms to him, and he held her to him while she cried on his shoulder.

“Forgive me, beloved,” he said to her, and his tears mingled with hers.

Iris, standing in the gloomy and foggy dusk of the evening at her door, saw her son approach, and she waited for him, not hailing him or greeting him. He came into the house and threw off his cloak, and she saw the pallor of his lips, the blue and stony hardness of his eyes. She said, “You have seen Diodorus. I prayed that you would go to him, for you have remembered that he is as a father to you. Tell me. Is he still broken with sorrow?”

Lucanus’ eyes flickered. “There is something which I do not understand, and which I may have understood when I was a thoughtless child. I spoke with Diodorus. I spoke with him not of Rubria, but of my father. And he stood up, and he was like a man reborn. Do not ask me what I said for I do not remember.”

Iris had lit a lamp. She turned and faced her son, and never had she seemed so beautiful to him, so clothed in golden light, so like a statue carved by Phidias. She went to Lucanus and put her hand gently against his cheek.

“They to whom the gods give a message do not always understand that message,” she said, and for the first time since Aeneas had died she smiled. “Others hear, and their hearts answer.”

Never had Lucanus spoken roughly to his mother, but now he did so. “You talk foolishly,” he said. “You talk as a woman, and women babble of nothing. Ah,” and his voice changed, “I am sorry. Do not cry, Mother. You have the tenderest heart. But I feel nothing except hatred and a desire for revenge. And that revenge I shall have!”

He went into his room, not aimlessly, but with purpose. He took rolls of books from his shelves, lit a lamp, and began to study.

Cusa thought, Archimedes asserted that with the proper lever he could move the world. But O goddess of Cyprus, mightiest of all the immortals, you can move not only the world, but worlds, and the gods themselves, can lift life from the very arms of Pluto and give man such stature that he can defy Olympus with a single oath which will be heard by the farthest star!

He looked with concealed commiseration at Lucanus, who no longer seemed to sleep but devoured lessons as though he had all the eyes of Hydra. Once he said to Lucanus with a smile, but also with alarm, “Virgil has said that the prerogative of gods and men is laughter. You never laugh now. Is it that you hate? Remember that hatred has only Pyrrhic victories.” But Lucanus gave him a short glance and unrolled another book and bent his golden head over it as if Cusa had uttered the most asinine of comments.

Cusa said with some irritability, “Virgil also remarked that humanity aroused the laughter of the gods. Is it because men are too serious, especially when they are young? By Athene, you will soon run me out of material to teach you!”

On another occasion he said, “There is more in the world than medicine. Wait until you arrive at Alexandria!” He shook his head ominously. “Claudius Vesalius, there, a mincing little person, will put you through your paces in mathematics, about which you know as much as a monkey.”

Walking alone through the forests, or beside the river, or in the gardens, or lying on his bed, or eating and drinking sparely, or working at his lessons, or assisting Keptah, Lucanus had only one enormous question: Where is Rubria? All the color and the light and the marvelous shapes of trees and flowers and blades of grass, of birds and animals and insects, of butterflies and bees and stars had gone from Lucanus’ sight. All his work was only a means to a vengeful end, and beauty had left the measurement and awareness of his eyes. He responded to nothing but a cry of pain; when a slave died he was inconsolable for days. No hand was gentler or more compassionate than his, and no glance more bitter when Keptah was impotent to help a sufferer.

“If this is all you can do, then you can do nothing,” he would say. Keptah would reply mildly, but with some sternness, “Are men immortal?”

Comfortless, Lucanus would ask himself, If we are not immortal, then why were we born? If only I could believe there is no God! But I believe in Him, and from Him I will have His victims, if not His answer! He haunts me. He haunts all men for the satisfaction of His hatred.

Once the aspect of the world seemed lighted by some deep radiance that did not come from the sun or the moon or the stars, but from some emanation that lay beneath and yet around its physical appearance, and within it. Now the world was illuminated by a fierce glare to his sight, hurtful to the eye, carrying with it an incandescence from hell. As the days passed, his wrath and anguish did not decrease. He was like a fire that is endlessly fed; each night when he slept he was burned to ashes; in the morning he rose from those ashes like a phoenix, winged with agony. Keptah, watching him surreptitiously, would think, He is like Jacob, wrestling with the angel, but my poor pupil wrestles in hatred and torment. He does not have a vision of the ladder on which the angels climbed to God; his ladder has steps of flame, leading down into the infernal regions. Like the King of Nemi, he walks his groves of wrath with a drawn sword, waiting for the destroyer. And Keptah would pray, “O You Most Holy, Most Merciful, Most Divine, Most Compassionate, Who walks this earth today in a place I do not know, in the guise of a child, look with compassion on one who is only a little older in the flesh than You! As Job cried to You, so he cries in his heart, and he has not yet heard Your voice. Be merciful, Lord, be merciful!”

When Lucanus had been a child he had asked the simplest and most innocent of things, “Are You here? Or there?” But now when he noticed his surroundings at all he asked, “Where is Rubria?” The only mitigation of his pain was when he was ministering to some sufferer. The slaves would watch him approach, and Keptah would marvel at the sudden bright eagerness on their faces, and how their moans would stop when Lucanus would gently question them, and how they would answer humbly and with hope. He had only to put his hand on a feverish forehead to banish that fever, and to give the poor slave sleep. His blue eyes had a deep and penetrating quality now, and a passionate tenderness. He helped Keptah deliver children, and he would hold the little ones in his arms like a father, close to his breast, as if protecting them. The slaves forgot that he was the son of a former slave; they forgot, the older ones, that once they had ridiculed him for his pretensions, and had railed at him when he had been a child, and had scolded him and envied him, and had even slapped him. In a few short weeks he had become a deliverer, someone holy who could ease them, whose eyes could cause their own to close in rest, whose hands had a strange quality of comfort, whose voice could drive away terror or guilt. “Apollo has touched him,” they whispered to each other. They regarded him with superstitious awe, with fear and reverence. When a husband or a wife or a child died, relatives caught Lucanus’ hand and begged him, the uncomforted, for comfort. He had only tears to give them, but they saw those tears and thought of them as one thinks of the merciful tears of the gods, and were consoled. Keptah was not surprised at these manifestations and the magic power of healing that Lucanus possessed. His only trouble was with Lucanus himself. When he was away from the little hospital the soft brightness of the youth’s face would disappear; it would become almost harsh, most austere and withdrawn.

One day Keptah called Lucanus to him in his own quarters. The physician sat at his table with many books unrolled about him, and his face was grave and somber. “You are aware, of course, my Lucanus, that you have the gift of healing. You are surprised? Do not be so. Enough, I cannot discuss it now. We are in deep trouble.” He held up a vial of murky urine. “Tell me, what is it you see here?”

Lucanus took the vial, smelled of its contents, let those contents slide along the clear crystal. Then he said, “This man is very ill; the urine is full of poisons, condensed, bad, and dark of color. I think I see the presence of blood. His kidneys are dangerously involved.” The youthful face quickened. “We must order large quantities of water, and prohibit salt, and command steam baths immediately for profuse sweat.”

Keptah said, “This is no man. This urine comes from a woman who will soon give birth. She is edematous about the belly and face, and about the ankles.”

“Then we must withdraw the fluid,” said Lucanus, questioningly. He examined the vial again. “She may die.”

“Yes,” said Keptah. He sighed heavily. “It is at least six weeks until the child will be ready to be delivered. Yet I must induce birth at once. The child will most probably die of prematurity. This is a terrible choice I must make. The only opportunity to save the mother now, who is being poisoned by her own fetus, is quick delivery. In truth, there is no choice at all! The situation is desperate.”

“And the child cannot live?”

“A very small chance.” Keptah put his head in his hands, and his sigh was almost a groan.

Lucanus was sorry for him, and for the poor woman, and sorrier for the child inevitably condemned to death whether delivery was induced at once or not. Then he said to himself, Still, is it good to live? He said to Keptah, “The woman will bear other children and can afford to lose this one. Has she borne a previous child?”

Keptah looked at him strangely. “Yes. One. And that child died. The woman is not young; she has waited for this child for many years, and now she will be inconsolable when it dies, too. And the husband will be as much grieved, or even more, for he has long wanted an heir.”

Lucanus sat down suddenly, and his face turned white. Then his hands clenched on the table. “Aurelia,” he whispered.

Keptah said, “All was fairly well until five days ago. It is the toxemia of pregnancy, and a lethal thing. I was afraid of it when the Lady Aurelia developed headaches lately, and some fever. You have observed her urine. You know now what all this means. I need your help. I am sending a slave for your mother. It is fortunate that the noble tribune has not gone to Antioch today.”

He stood up and regarded Lucanus sternly. “Aurelia has had two convulsions this morning. I have given her a sedative, and her nurses are with her, not to leave her for a moment. I will bleed her very shortly, and I will need your assistance.” He paused, and his gaze became more fixed on the young man. “How is this? You sit like one stricken to death.” He lifted his hand forbiddingly. “There is serious work to be done, and if you fail me in this then I shall advise Diodorus that he is wasting his time, and will waste his money, in your education. Come!”

Keptah led the way from his quarters through the house and to the library, where Diodorus was awaiting him impatiently. His fierce eyes were stark with fear. “Well!” he exclaimed. “Is it not time, by the gods? You sent me a message to remain at home this morning, in connection with the Lady Aurelia! What is it, what is it!”

Lucanus stared at him with pity and dread. He had not exactly loved Diodorus, for his naturally austere and reserved temperament was antipathetic to strong violence and strongly expressed emotion, and it was rare that he displayed temper or fury. To him Diodorus was too rapid in all his reactions, too ferocious, too contentious, and often alarming in his tumultuous changes of mood. He suspected Diodorus of instability, though he honored him for his learning and his love for the beauty of the written poem or high prose, and his vast and sometimes, to Lucanus, his incredible learning. Lucanus knew that the proconsul loved him, not as a son but perhaps as a favorite nephew, and he was grateful in his calm way, and tried, at all times, to return that fondness with respect and sympathy. Nevertheless, to his regret, he did not, and could not, return the full measure of Diodorus’ affection.

He had been stricken less at the thought of Aurelia’s impending travail and possible death than at the sudden resurgence of his grief for Rubria in a house which had known death only a short time ago. It was not Aurelia in herself who was in such jeopardy to Lucanus, but the mother of Rubria.

But now as he looked in silence at Diodorus his heart squeezed, and he felt the love of a son for a father in him, and he longed to fall on his knees, like a son, before the proconsul and lay his cheek against the other’s hand and cover it with tears. He knew instantly that the fierce-eyed, beak-nosed Roman was about to endure the agony of sorrow again, if not for a wife, then again for a child, and he would have given his own life in that instant to spare Diodorus that unspeakable torture.

Keptah said, “Master, I have sad news for you. I must go to the Lady Aurelia immediately, but still I must prepare you. I must deliver the child at once, if your wife is to live at all.” He stopped, and his dusky face became livid with emotion.

Diodorus fell heavily into a chair. He tried to moisten his big lips. Then he went into a paroxysm of dry coughing, as if choking. He could not look at the physician who stood beside him like a gaunt statue of grief in his gray linen robe.

Keptah continued rapidly, “We have no choice, Master. I cannot say to you, ‘Shall I save the lady or shall I save the child?’ Unless she is delivered she will die, and will not then carry the child to term, and the child will expire in her body. I wished to prepare you for the fact that the babe will be premature when born and will most probably die at once. Now I must go.”

Diodorus caught a fold of Keptah’s robe and clutched it tightly, and there was the most abject despair on his face. “Save Aurelia!” he pleaded, in a stifled voice. He looked wildly, almost blindly, at the physician, and he pulled himself to the edge of his chair, and his strong body trembled violently. “What is a child to me if my wife dies? What are a dozen children?” The veins in his temples turned purple and knotted, and huge pulses throbbed in his brown throat. “You will save her? You must save her!” There was a prayer in his broken voice, and a mounting anguish.

Lucanus went to him quickly and put his hand on that broad shoulder. He said in a clear, strong voice, “You have been as a father to me, Master, and as a son let me console you. I give my strength to you! I would give my life for you!”

Keptah, in the very act of moving, looked over his shoulder at Lucanus and smiled faintly and strangely. But Diodorus had only let the robe of the physician slip from his enfeebled hand, and though he turned his haggard face to Lucanus it was most evident that he did not see him or even understand him. “Come,” said Keptah, “I will need your help, and we cannot delay another instant.”

“I cannot stay with him?”

“No. Do you think him a woman? He is a man.” Keptah swept from the room, his robe billowing, his sandaled feet gliding swiftly over the marble floor. Lucanus hesitated. Drops of sweat, like great wet stones, slipped weightily from Diodorus’ forehead, and then lay intact on the breast of his tunic, or rolled down it. Lucanus ran to the table and poured a goblet of wine and held it to Diodorus’ parched lips. Like one in stupefaction, and stunned out of human resistance, the tribune obediently swallowed, one slow sip after another.

If I could only pray! thought Lucanus, and there was a cold terror in him, and he realized fully, for the first time, what estrangement from God meant to a man in his supreme hours, and he realized his own awful loneliness. But one did not pray to a God of affliction, Who cared nothing for human travail but rather ordained it.

Diodorus whispered harshly, “If she dies, then surely I cannot live, for I have been unfaithful to her in my heart, and she the most loving and tender of wives, the most sacrificial, the most dear.”

Lucanus knew that the stricken man was hardly aware of him as more than a ministering shadow. He could not endure that dry rustle of a whisper. He said:

“Master, permit me: you have been the best of husbands, and the — the gods — will not desert you. Surely she will live!”

The eyes of Diodorus were tearless; all that he could shed he shed from his dripping forehead. But Lucanus wept, bending his head over the head of the older man so that his cheek lay on the rough and bristling hair. Diodorus listened to that lamenting sound, and he moved vaguely and restlessly, then saw Lucanus for the first time.

“Ah, it is you,” he muttered. “You comforted me before. You comfort me now, Lucanus.”

Lucanus set down the emptied goblet, and pulled the brazier of burning charcoal closer to the shivering tribune, and caught up a woolen robe from a chair and wrapped it about those arched shoulders, for it was a chill day with pale sunshine without color. Diodorus permitted these small services of love, and a faint astonishment flitted across his face, and then was replaced by a vacant staring.

“I must go to help Keptah,” said Lucanus, and he felt the dreadful loneliness in himself again. Without looking back, he ran from the room, the tears still on his cheeks.

Keptah had found Aurelia dulled from the drug he had administered to her. But she panted on her bed, and there was a terrible blueness on her puffed face. She had drawn up her legs under the rugs, and one hand was pressed against her belly in pain. Her muscles twitched all over her body as though possessing a life of their own apart from her. Her swollen tongue half protruded from her bloated lips, and there was a bloody foam in the corners. Her stertorous breathing filled the chamber. Her eyes fixed themselves on Keptah, and they were glazed and starting. The nurses gave the physician the news that until a few moments ago the poor lady had been quiet, and apparently asleep.

Keptah felt her pulse; he bent his ear against her breast and listened to her heart. It was very rapid and bounding. He lifted his head, and Aurelia began to thresh against the heaped cushions tucked about her, which had been placed there to prevent her from throwing herself out of bed during a convulsion. Yet she became more and more conscious as her suffering body writhed. She said to Keptah, “You must save the child. I am very ill. I will possibly die. That does not matter. Save the child for my dear husband.” She half raised herself on her bed and caught his lean arm, and her wet dark tresses fell in tangled lengths over her shoulders and breast.

Keptah reached to a tray held for him by a nurse, and he poured a golden liquid, viscous and gleaming, into a small goblet. The gasping Aurelia regarded it dubiously, and with the quickened apprehension of the almost moribund. “It will save the child?” she begged, piteously.