establish safeguards,” declared Quintus briskly. He was now on familiar ground and quite sure of himself. “You must see Hiram of Silenus at once and sweeten his memory with a rich reward, richer than Linus can afford to offer. Then there are the magistrates. Their friendship will be necessary if Linus appeals to the law. They must be given presents at once. All this I can arrange for you if you have a reluctance to such matters.”
“Must I bribe men to tell the truth?” cried Basil, his mind revolted at the need to begin a new life by such methods. “This is dishonest, base, unclean!”
The secretary seemed unwilling to acquaint this unworldly youth with the full peril of his position. He paused a long time before saying anything more.
“You were sold to Ignatius,” he declared finally. “If Linus can convince the magistrates you were not sold for adoption, what, then, was the basis of the transaction? You were sold—as a slave.” Quintus looked steadily into the eyes of the new head of the family, his mouth drawn into a tight, straight line. “There is no middle ground for you. Either you are master here or a slave, subject to the orders of Linus. Think of this well! It would be a mistake, a terrible mistake, not to take every step to protect yourself against the”—his composure left him suddenly and he allowed his voice to rise—“against the greed of this man, this unworthy brother who is like to a boar’s snout, this hoof of a sick camel, this fester on a leper’s skull!”
5
Angry, incredulous, filled with the bitterness of self-blame, Basil rose and left the court. Heads were turned carefully in the other direction as he strode out through the crowded room. No one looked up or nodded to him. The decision had left him an outcast, one to whom free men did not speak.
One thought filled his mind to the exclusion of everything else, even of speculation as to what lay before him now. He could not escape from the face of the magistrate who had presided. It represented the forces which had led to his undoing. It seemed to him the embodiment of everything evil, the face of a satyr run to seed. The eyes of this evil old man had been fixed on him from the moment the hearingbegan, filled with scorn and ill will. They seemed to be saying: “You have been the luckiest of all men, raised from the gutter of the Ward to untold wealth; you have everything in your favor; you are heir to the greatest fortune in Antioch, and people scrape before you and agree with what you say and declare you to be handsome and gifted; you can have your pick of friends and your choice of wives. But I, Marius Antonius, represent the law, and because you have been too blind and too haughty to seek my favor and pay me what it is worth, I have it in my power to break your pride, to cast you from the heights to the depths; and that is what I propose to do, O Basil, son so-called of Ignatius, who shall be forevermore now Basil, son of Theron, seller of pens and ink.”
Whether Basil would have persuaded himself to the need of bribing the magistrates and the one important witness, as Quintus Annius had advised, was something he would never know himself. Linus, the brother of the dead merchant, had moved too fast. While the heir still debated the issue in his mind, rebelling at the dishonesty of it, the taurine brother had brought his action, claiming that he, Basil, was not an adopted son.
It had required no more than one glance at the face of Marius Antonius, who was called in the city the Bottomless Pocket, to convince the rightful heir that he had made a mistake. The magistrate was bitter and biting to him but affable to the plaintiff. He had shown himself from the first to be biased, directing the questions and prompting the witnesses when they seemed unsure of their answers. He had snapped off any tendency to give evidence friendly to the son of the house.
Hiram of Silenus was as unsatisfactory as a witness as the secretary had