Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [164]
But the barrier that she had put between them in recent years was not easily broken down now, and often it seemed to her that Porteus said he was tired when she suspected he was not.
She did not complain. A certain toughness, almost a coldness about the increasingly successful Roman made her, for the first time, a little shy of him.
As for Porteus, he had long ago closed off and sealed the door of his old passion for his wild Celtic bride. He no longer wished to open it again. Besides, he was busy.
The completion of the villa had occupied a good deal of his time; but when he returned for a spell to Aquae Sulis, Porteus was glad to find that the slave girl was still there, and he soon resumed his talks with her.
She told him many things he did not know, not only about her all-powerful Jewish God, but about recent events in Palestine. He listened with interest, for the girl was well informed, and it seemed to him that the whole area was in a ferment of mysticism: as she earnestly described the various sects and their quarrels, it made his head spin. There was one new sect, she told him, that had been founded by a Jewish prophet who had been crucified a generation before: a Nazarene who some said was a false prophet who deserved to die, and who others claimed to be the Jewish Messiah himself. Whichever was the case, it appeared that the movement was attracting a huge following and was spreading far beyond the confines of Judaea.
He had never heard of it. No doubt these new fanatics would give the government in Rome trouble in due course.
But always the girl came back to her idea of a single God, a God who had no physical body, no human attributes, a God wholly unlike any in his Roman pantheon; and sometimes if they had talked for some time she would gaze at him with her solemn, childish eyes and ask: “What do you think?”
To hear the girl speak in this way used to confuse him.
“You ask questions like a philosopher,” he would laugh, “not like a woman.”
His own education had taught him that philosophy was a subject properly reserved only for gentlemen. Such matters were to be considered quietly in the state of otium cum dignitate – dignified leisure – that was appropriate to men of his class.
“Never discuss philosophy with the people,” his teacher had been fond of saying: “it excites them and turns them into fanatics.”
Religion, he knew very well, was not a fit subject for women: nor should it be allowed more than a passing interest by educated men. As for the spiritual passions, the commitment to unseen forces who refused to show their face, there was no place for them that he could see. The Roman virtues of balanced judgement, of sobriety, restraint, courage and manly patriotism: these were all a man needed in his path through life. It was the proper sacrifices to the gods which pleased them and which were a man’s civic duty. It was a question of observance, not mystical encounter.
Yet, as he watched the dark-haired young girl reduced almost to tears in his presence at the thought of her invisible God, to whom no Roman sacrificed, he found that he was strangely moved.
It was inevitable that one evening when he had been absent from his wife for a month, he should take her in his arms. And although her religion, which was all she had to cling to, expressly forbade it, it was not so surprising either that the young slave girl yielded to what seemed to her, in her loneliness, to be his affection.
Despite the fact that the girl was only a child, the affair opened new worlds for the Roman. For now her reserve with him was gone. As they lay in each other’s arms at night, Naomi would tell him stories from her holy books: stories of the prophets and their faith in Jahveh: of the ancient Jewish commanders: of Moses and his journey to the promised land. She would tell them in an ecstasy, for these stories were her most precious possessions; or she would whisper snatches from the Song of Solomon in her native tongue, her eyes taking on