The City of Delight

But the dwellers of that little huddle of huts had nothing to do but

to sit in their doorways and suspect. Whatever came their way from the

sea for many months had brought them disaster and long since they had

learned to defend themselves. So now, when a party riding at breakneck

speed, bearing with them an old man on whom the inertia of death was

plain, came across the frontiers of their little town, they met them

with the convenient stones of their rocky streets, with their savage,

stark-ribbed dogs, with offal from kitchen heap and donkey stall and

with insults and curses.

"Away, ye bringers of plague! Out, lepers; be gone, ye unclean!"

Laodice and Aquila who rode in the open were fair targets for half the

hail that fell about them. The girl groaned as the missiles fell into

the howdah upon the helpless shape of Costobarus, who did not lift a

hand to fend off the stones. The pagan, bruised and raging, drew his

weapon and spurred his horse to ride down his assailants, but they

scattered before him and from safe refuge continued their assault with

redoubled determination.

Momus, seeing only injury in attempting to enforce hospitality, turned

his camel and, swinging around the outermost limits of the settlement,

fled. Aquila followed him, and a moment later the rest of the party

joined them.

Without the range of the village, the party halted. Momus and Aquila

lifted Costobarus down and laid him on a rug that Laodice had spread

for him. But when she would have knelt by him, he motioned to Aquila

not to permit her to approach. The mute stood by his master. In that

countenance fast passing under shade was written charge and injunction

as solemn as the darkness that approached him.

"Here, O faithful servant, is the wife of a prince, the daughter of

thy master, the joy of thine own declining days. Shield her against

wrong and misfortune by all the strength that in thee lies, as thou

hopest in the King to come and the reward of the steadfast. Promise!"

They were silent lips that once knew the art and the sound of speech.

The old habit never entirely fell away from them. Under this anguish

they moved--fruitlessly; over the deformed face flitted the keen

agony of regret; then he lifted his great left arm and bent it upward

at the elbow; the huge, even monstrous muscles, knotted and kinked

from shoulder to elbow, sank down under the broad barbarian bracelet

of bronze and rippled under and rose again from elbow to wrist,

ferocious, superhuman! In that movement the dying man read the mute's

consecration of his one great strength to the protection of the

tenderly loved Laodice. Costobarus motioned to the shittim-wood casket

and Momus undid it and strapped it on his own belt.