Glory and the Lightning (49 page)

“Silence, woman!” cried infuriated Daedalus, lifting his hand as if to strike her. She subsided and renewed her whimperings, shrinking from her father.

“The aristocratical party has induced Thucydides the Alopece, kinsman of Cimon, to oppose him, a good and intrepid man. He will succeed! Thucydides is no hypocrite, to woo the people to advance his own power. You have not read the writings on the walls of Athens, infamous accusations against Pericles scrawled by the very people he defends against the aristocrats. I tell you he lusts to be king and that Athens will not endure!”

Dejanira could only sniffle forlornly. Her father regarded her with exasperation. “He is your husband,” he said. “He is the father of your sons. You must prevail upon him to listen to you, that if he continues his plan to defend Ichthus not only he may be destroyed, but you and your children also.”

Dejanira broke into fresh tears, and her face turned very red. She averted her face and said, “I have no influence on Pericles, my father. Rarely do I encounter him. He avoids me. I fear he despises me. I enter his chamber no more, not since the birth of Paralus. He has abandoned me for dissolute women. You have said that when you spoke to him today he turned on his heel and left you, after daunting words. You are an Archon, a man of position. If he will not listen to his father-in-law, why should he listen to me?”

Daedalus stood up, shaking with rage. He looked down at his stricken daughter and he, who rarely felt pity, felt it now. He laid his hand on her head and said in a trembling voice, “My daughter, I did not know of this indignity laid upon you, and your mother did not know for she would have told me. There is but one solution: You must leave him and petition for a divorce, and return to your father’s house with your children. Only then will the people realize that you are blameless, that you renounced your husband for his treason, and removed your children from his house lest they be dishonored and punished in their father’s name.”

“Leave Pericles?” wailed Dejanira, her small black eyes bulging with grief. “He is my husband! I love him, no matter the humiliations he has heaped upon me, and in the presence of the very slaves.”

Daedalus seized her fat shoulder and shook it. “Have you thought of your parents, my daughter? I am an Archon. Do you not realize that not only you and your children will be destroyed by the impetuous actions of this man but your parents also? Five innocent people! You will let us all die, or be exiled and our fortunes confiscated? You will serenely permit yourself, and your family, to live in dire poverty far from Athens, on some barbarous island? Have I begotten a human daughter, or a female Cyclops who sees with but one eye but who is blind to those she should dutifully love?”

Dejanira stared up at Daedalus through her tears and saw that her father was truly desperate and affrighted, and the color fled from her face and it was a yellowish white. Daedalus nodded at her grimly. “Our fortunes, if not our lives, are in deadly danger from the man you call your husband. Dare you defend him, and remain with him until we sink into the Styx?”

She could not speak for her own terror and anguish. She wrung her hands and sobbed deep in her breast.

“Speak to him!” her father commanded. “Speak to him this night. If he is adamant, send me a message and I will dispatch litters for you and your children and you will return to your father’s house and will procure a divorce. Tell him this.”

Dejanira pressed her hands to her breast and her stolid face was contorted with fear and suffering and hopeless love. She whispered, “I will try. I swear by Hera that I will try. That is all I can promise. If I fail,” she paused and wept louder, “I will return to your house, my father, and that tomorrow.”

“And he will be forced to return your dowry and what has accrued to it,” said Daedalus, sighing with relief. It seemed to him, as a covetous man, that the loss of Dejanira’s dowry would be a worse blow to Pericles than the loss of his family.

Dejanira said almost inaudibly, “He loves his sons. He may not permit their removal.”

“Then, once you have left his house, and he is ruined, we will petition for the return of your children from the nefarious influence of their father. Do not be distressed, my daughter. Attempt, as your duty, to prevail upon him to reconsider. If not, then you must flee at any cost.” He rubbed his bony hand over his face and sighed. “I am a man not without influence. Your children will be given to me as their guardian. I would that I had never consented to this marriage, but my sister besought me to consent.”

Dejanira was not without shrewdness. She knew it was her father who had proposed the marriage and not Agariste. She thought of Agariste with a sudden venom, Agariste who did not conceal from her her contempt for her daughter-in-law.

“It was through me that he was assisted to power,” said the Archon. “One must never forget it. Would that the Furies had paralysed my tongue before I did that!”

He embraced his daughter and departed, and after long and shivering thought Dejanira sent a slave to Pericles, beseeching him to permit his wife to visit him immediately. While she waited for his reply she bathed her reddened eyes, combed her hair and changed her rumpled garments and rubbed her arms and throat with attar of roses. Dismally, she looked into her silver mirror and for the first time confessed to herself that she had no graces and no beauty and no attributes to enchant a man, especially a man like Pericles. She had thought herself desirable for her money and her father’s position in Athens. Now she vaguely comprehended that Pericles did not need her money, and that he was far more powerful than her father. Hence, she could not appeal to him on these grounds. Ah, if I had but beauty and were young! she cried in herself. But I am ugly, and I am old, and there are white hairs on my head and I have three chins. She was devastated as never she had been before.

Still, she consoled herself with the thought that Pericles might listen to wise counsel for the sake of his sons if not for her sake. There was also his mother, who would be in deadly peril.

Dejanira paused, the glittering and jeweled mirror in her hand, and stared into space. Agariste. Much as she disliked the older woman and much as she had tried to relegate her to an inferior position, Agariste, at the last, might be a formidable ally. Waddling fast and ponderously, she went to Agariste’s quarters.

Agariste had not surrendered her own exquisite and tasteful rooms to the new mistress of the house. After dining at night she would retire to her chamber and go to bed, for she was increasingly infirm and physicians spoke of her heart. She could not forget her husband, Xanthippus, and found him enlarging in stature and virtues through the years. She often accused herself of stupidity in not understanding him, and her pride, for upbraiding him. He had loved her even if he had disliked her. He had seen her at a distance and so theirs had not been an arranged marriage in the true meaning of the word. He had, himself, gone to her father and beseeched him to consent to the marriage, declaring his love. In his way he had honored her for several years and had not resorted to a hetaira or any other woman. It was I who drove him from me, she would say in the sleepless midnights, with my presumptions and my vanity. I was too insistent that he admire me for my intelligence. I did not know until after he died that he did so admire me for it, even if he never confessed that to me.

It came to her, sadly, that one never gained wisdom until it was too late. The gods were malign.

She very seldom slept deeply but only drowsed, to awaken to gaspings for breath and a piercing pain in her heart. She had fallen into a sick doze when a slave entered her chamber softly and said, “Lady, the Lady Dejanira would speak to you for a moment on a matter of the most extreme importance.”

Agariste, blinking in the soft light of the lamps, forced herself to sit upright. Her breath was loud and struggling in the fine chamber. A warm night wind scented with roses blew into the room through the open window. She stared at the slave. What would Dejanira have with her, she who had never entered these rooms and had never been invited? The two women avoided each other as much as possible. Dejanira had never asked her advice except on a few occasions. Whenever they did speak together Dejanira would gaze at Agariste with sullen resentment and, as always, would try to impose her authority as mistress of the household on Agariste. She was invariably and coldly rejected by the older woman, but still she persisted in her stubborn way. Only yesterday they had had a quarrel, Agariste disdainful and aloof, Dejanira stammering with surly anger and insistence. At last Agariste had said, “You may be the daughter of my brother, the Archon, but to me you have the manners of a kitchen wench, and an insolent one. Your father is my brother, and so is descended from a noble house, but your mother is as vulgar as you and had only money to distinguish herself. She has taught you well and you are as insufferable as she.” Dejanira had heavily stamped away, muttering and helpless.

Agariste said to the slave woman, “The Lady Dejanira wishes to speak to me? Is one of my grandsons ill?” She pushed herself even higher on the bed and was frightened, for her son’s children were very dear to her.

“I do not know, Lady,” said the slave woman. “But the Lady Dejanira implores you to receive and listen to her.”

Only a great emergency could have driven Dejanira to her, and Agariste sipped at the cup of medicine at her bedside, and trembled inwardly as she awaited the coming of her daughter-in-law. She pulled her shift more easily over her still beautiful breasts, but her face was haggard and lined with pain and very white, and her golden hair had long lost its lustre and was dull and streaked with gray. An agonizing pang shot through her heart and she gasped and leaned back on her cushions, and a cold sweat of apprehension and mortality bathed her whole body. It seemed to her that an icy wind swept through the warm chamber. Her colorless lips dried and she thought she tasted blood.

Dejanira entered the chamber, sobbing. But she had the shallowness of mind of the stupid and was easily distracted by trifles even when in great distress. She glanced about her curiously while the tears ran down her fat cheeks. She almost forgot, at least for a moment or two, the mission which had brought her here, as her swollen black eyes darted disapprovingly about the room and noted the costly lemonwood tables with their delicate lamps of gold and Egyptian glass, and the Damascene brocades at the window, the chairs of ivory and ebony inlaid with enamels, the painted walls depicting Pan and fauns in woodland settings, the flowers in tall and graceful vases of inestimable value, the thick Persian rugs on the marble floor. The bed was not the plain bed of the usual Greek chamber, but opulent with silk, and wool of such fine weave that the coverings appeared woven of air and gossamer. There were many small marble statues about in niches, all of incomparable workmanship. There are several fortunes here, thought Dejanira, fortunes which should be invested in ships and cargoes and banks, and she was filled with vexation and umbrage. Then she sank, unasked, onto a fragile chair—which creaked ominously with her weight—and began to wail loudly.

“In the name of the gods, tell me!” cried Agariste and turned even paler. Dejanira was stolid and without much emotion, so Agariste assumed that the news she brought was appalling. She wanted to strike that shapeless woman in her anxiety.

Dejanira said, “We are ruined, we are destroyed, and all with us!” Her voice was hoarse and harsh and she rocked on her massive buttocks and her tears streamed. “Pericles has brought the Furies down upon us, and we are lost!”

Agariste regarded her incredulously. Her impassive son, so remote and self-disciplined and laconic in speech except when addressing the Assembly, could hardly have been so impetuous and reckless as Dejanira indicated. She sank back on her cushions and said in a cold and peremptory voice, “Tell me.”

It was almost impossible for Dejanira to tell a coherent story for her thoughts invariably flittered onto irrelevances. So Agariste was forced to strain her attention upon the flood of stammering words which poured from that thick wet mouth. Loud sobs interrupted the flow; Dejanira spoke of the honor of her parents, the delinquencies of the slaves in her husband’s house, the depredations of the cooks on the larder and the money, the fate of her sons, her threatened self, her father’s fear and offer, his importunities that she talk with Pericles, her general dissatisfaction with the ordering of the household, her fright, impending bankruptcy, her premonitions of disaster which had haunted her for many months, Pericles’ indiscretion and his mistresses, her unfortunate fate which marriage had brought upon her, the failure of Pericles’ last investment in ships to Egypt, her meekness and virtue under insufferable trials in this house, the lack of appreciation she received for all her scrupulousness and thrift, and sundry other things.

Agariste wanted to scream. She reached out her thin hand and clutched Dejanira’s enormous wrist. “Tell me!” she almost shouted. “You fool! Can you not bring your feeble wits to order and enlighten me? What has all this to do with the disaster you spoke of?”

The flood of meaningless complaints came to an abrupt halt, and Dejanira was outraged by her aunt’s voice and the fierce seizing of her wrist. She strove for dignity. “Have I not been telling you, Agariste?” she said. “But you will never listen to me! We are undone.”

But Agariste’s eyes were quelling and enlarged, so Dejanira dropped her head and her moist face became sullen. She could hardly remember her father’s specific denunciations of Pericles, for she was always confused by rapid speech, which she could not follow. But Agariste, sitting stiffly upright on her bed, was finally able to grasp a little of what Daedalus had imparted to his daughter. At last she dropped the wrist she had been clutching and lay back on her pillows, panting. She stared at the gilded and painted ceiling for a long time after that whining and sniveling voice had ceased and broken sobs had replaced it.

The lamplight, golden and soft, fluttered over the walls and the furniture and a nightingale began to sing in the gardens in sad and poignant music. Agariste thought rapidly. Surely Pericles was not insensible to the peril and jeopardy into which he was hurling his family. He was not volatile or heedless. His emotions, however stirred, did not rush him into fatalities. His friendships were temperate if strong. Anaxagoras had taught him that; but he was innately prudent. Agariste was again incredulous, though she knew that Dejanira had so little imagination that it was impossible for her to be inventive, and exaggerate.