Well, so long as the little Love-god was only an infant, the stepmother found it easy to disguise her guilty blushes and say nothing about the affair. But when he grew up and began playing his mad tricks, setting her whole soul in a cruel blaze with his arrows of fire, she had to sham ill as the only possible means of hiding her torment. Now, everyone knows that the physical symptoms of love are not readily distinguishable from those of ordinary illness: for example, an unhealthy pallor, dull eyes, weakness of the knees, insomnia and fits of sighing which increase in intensity the longer the crisis is protracted. Her complaint might, in fact, have been fairly diagnosed as influenza but for the complication of her continual bursts of weeping. 'Alas, when prophets are such fools', as Virgil says somewhere, and 'Alas, when doctors are such fools', as I say here. Those who attended her were puzzled by her rapid pulse, her irregular temperature, the difficulty she seemed to have in breathing, her frequent tossing and turning in bed, and had no notion what to prescribe. Good God, any simple student of love could have diagnosed the fever at once!
Her condition got worse and worse until she could bear the pain no longer and broke her silence by sending for her elder son. Son! oh, if only she had never been obliged to call him that, or if only she could cease using the word, which was a perpetual reproach to her feelings.
He went to her bedroom at once, with anxiety puckering his forehead like an old man's. He had no notion what she wanted of him, but since she was his father's wife and his brother's mother, he felt that he ought to go. When he entered the room, though the effort of keeping silence so long had nearly killed her, somehow she could not say what she wanted. She went aground on the sands of doubt, so to speak, and felt too deeply ashamed to use any of the conversational openings which she had carefully thought out for this embarrassing interview. Presently the unsuspecting stepson asked her without any prompting and very sympathetically: 'Mother, what is really wrong with you?'
She burst into tears, hid her face in a corner of her nightdress and managed to sob out: 'You. It's you who are making me ill. And what's more you're the only remedy for my fever. I'll die unless you cure me.'
'I,' he cried aghast. 'What have I done to make you ill?'
'You looked at me. You looked into my eyes and set something inside me on fire. I'm being slowly burned to death. Don't let any silly scruples about your father's rights prevent you from taking pity on me. It's all your fault that I'm lying here in such agony, and if you do as I ask you'll act in his best interests: you'll be saving his wife from death. You can't blame me for loving you: you're a younger edition of your dear father. Come, darling, nobody is about, there's nothing to fear; it's a wonderful chance for you to enjoy yourself. You may call it incest, but it's something that you simply must do, and you know the proverb: "No crime discovered, no crime committed".'
The suddenness of this disastrous revelation so confused him that, though he shuddered at the very idea of consenting to her request, he thought it best not to upset her by too blunt a refusal. He played for safety by asking her to wait a little longer, meanwhile promising her all she wanted. 'Now, Mother,' he said, 'take proper care of your health and be easy in your mind. I'll soon find an opportunity to be with you, but we must wait until father has gone out riding!' Then he left the room in a hurry. Even to look at her now made him feel ill. Realizing that the whole family would be ruined unless he did the right thing, and that he must confide in someone really wise and sensible, he hurried at once to his old schoolmaster and explained what had happened.
The old man thought for a long time before telling him that the best advice he could give was to fly before the storm of fate by leaving home immediately. But while he was making the necessary arrangements, his stepmother, who could not bear to wait even a day or two longer, found a pretext for sending her husband off in a hurry to inspect one of his distant farms. No sooner was he out of the house than, in a state of frantic passion, she sent her stepson a note holding him to his word.
His loathing for her was so strong that he could not face a fresh interview. He sent back a message excusing himself and when she twice repeated her demand made a different excuse on each occasion. She understood in the end that he had no intention of keeping his promise. At once her mood changed, and her incestuous passion turned to diabolical hatred. She called one of her slaves, who had formed part of her dowry and who held emancipated views on the dignity of crime, and disclosed all her guilty secrets to him. They put their heads together and decided that the best thing to do in the circumstances was to poison the stepson. She sent the scoundrel out at once to buy a packet of the deadliest poison on sale. When he came back with it she dissolved it in a cupful of wine which she put aside for the innocent stepson to drink.
About midday, while they were still busily discussing the best means of administering the poison, this wicked woman's own son came home from school, ate his lunch, felt thirsty, found the cup of poisoned wine, and of course without suspecting that it contained poison for his elder brother, drank it off at a gulp. He fell senseless to the ground. The slave whose task was to take him to and from school was horrified by the catastrophe and shouted at the top of his voice for the mother and the house-slaves. When it became known that the boy had just drunk a cup of wine it was agreed that he must have been poisoned, but the question was, by whom; and on that there was no agreement at all.
Stepmothers have a reputation for maliciousness which was perfectly justified in this case. She was by no means dismayed by the dreadful death of her own son, or by the guilt of being his murderess, or by the prospect of her husband's grief when he returned home. All that occurred to her was a splendid opportunity for revenge. She sent a messenger at once to recall her husband with news of the disaster and, when he hurried home, she had the audacity to tell him that her son had been poisoned by his stepbrother. This was true in a figurative sense: it was his brother's poison which had killed him. But her version was that the stepson had made incestuous proposals to her and that when she had refused to listen he had retaliated by poisoning her son. She embroidered this terrible lie by saying that when she accused him of the murder he had drawn his sword and threatened to kill her.
The councillor was in a dreadful state of mind. One son was awaiting burial; the other was bound to be condemned to death for incest and fratricide, and he could feel no pity for him either, but only hatred, when the wife whom he loved and trusted came weeping to him with this shocking story. After making arrangements for the child's funeral, the unhappy old man with tears still running down his cheeks and ashes on his white hair, which he tore out by the handful, went straight to the market place from the yet unlighted pyre. There, in a passionate address to the magistrates, he did all he could to make them condemn his surviving son to death, pleading, sobbing and going so far as to embrace the knees of his fellow-councillors.
The magistrates were moved to indignant sympathy, and so were the townspeople, who wished to waive the formalities of a trial, with its routine of tedious depositions by witnesses for the prosecution and long-winded arguments for the defence. They shouted: 'Stone him! Stone him!' and 'A crime against public morality should be publicly avenged.' However, the magistrates feared that to condone an act of rough justice would weaken the popular respect for law and order and encourage mass-rioting. They asked the councillors' support for their decision to hold a properly conducted trial, with witnesses called on both sides and carefully examined, and a verdict authoritatively delivered. 'No man,' they said, 'should be condemned without a hearing, as if this were a barbarous or tyrannical community; especially in such peaceful times as the present. That would constitute a dreadful precedent.'
Their sound decision was accepted unanimously, and the town clerk was sent at once to convene a meeting of the judicial council. The members were soon assembled in court, seated in order of rank and seniority. Then the town clerk summoned the prosecution to prepare their case, ordered the accused to be brought in, and finally announced that in conformity with Attic Law and the procedure adopted by the Areopagus, counsel on both sides must plead without preamble or any unnecessary appeal to the emotions of the court. Since I was not present at the trial myself, but tied up to my manger, my story is necessarily derived at second hand from the casual conversation of various visitors to the stable; but I will be careful to record only what I found, after checking the accounts, to be the exact truth.
When both barristers had finished their pleas, counsel for the defence being content with a general denial of all the charges, the court ruled that they could not give their verdict in a case of such importance merely on circumstantial evidence and called the stepmother's slave, who was quoted by the prosecution as the only witness who knew all the facts of the case. That gallows bird showed no nervousness when he stepped up to give his evidence: although it was a very serious case and the court was packed, he had no doubt about the verdict and no qualms of conscience. He made a long statement on oath, improving his mistress's story with inventions of his own. His version was that the stepson, mortified by the repulse of his incestuous advances, had bought a packet of poison, then sent for him and, bribing him with a large sum of money to keep his mouth shut, had ordered him to administer it to the child.
'At that, your worships, though I assure the accused that I'll never do so wicked a thing and that he can keep his money, the accused gives me the poisoned cup-he mixes it before my eyes-and says I must give it to the young gentleman to drink, and if I don't, why, then he'll kill me instead. Well, I take the cup off with me but I don't give it to the young gentleman, and then the accused comes after me and suspects that I'm keeping it to show his father as evidence against him, so he gets it back from me and hands it to the young gentleman himself, and the young gentleman drinks it off.'
The witness was a good actor and when he had concluded his speech, with a convincing show of respectful agitation, the case was declared closed, counsel for defence being given no opportunity to call the evidence of the schoolmaster in whom the stepson had confided, or of the slave who had been present when the child had picked up the cup and drunk it, or even of the innocent defendant himself. The court, with one sole dissentient, was convinced of his guilt and however tender-hearted they might be, saw no alternative but to sentence him, as the Law provided, to be sewn up in a leather sack with four living creatures, a dog, a cock, a viper and an ape, emblems of the four deadly sins, and cast into a river. It now remained to drop their ballots into the brass urn; if this registered a sentence of death the proceedings would be at an end and the condemned man would be handed over to the public executioner.
At the last moment, the single dissentient-an old doctor, widely respected and of unquestioned integrity-came forward, and putting one hand over the mouth of the urn to prevent anyone from dropping his ballot in prematurely, addressed the court:
'My lords and gentlemen. I am proud to think that I have never in all my life forfeited your good opinion, and hope not to do so today by my refusal to acquiesce in the judicial murder of an innocent man-my refusal to let you be deceived by the eloquent lies of a slave into breaking the oath you have all sworn, to deliver a fair and impartial verdict. It would be easy enough to pretend I concur with you, but I will not trick my own conscience or smother the reverence which I owe the gods by voting for the death sentence. Listen attentively and I will give you the true facts of the case.
'The criminal who has just been giving evidence came to me two days ago and offered me two hundred gold pieces for a quick and deadly poison. He said he needed it for a friend suffering from an incurable disease who wanted to free himself by suicide from the misery of life. His story was glib but unconvincing, and I suspected foul play; so though I gave him his packet, I was careful hot to become a party to whatever crime he had in mind, by accepting immediate payment of the fee. I asked him to leave the money-bag at my pharmacy and to come with me to the goldsmith's on the following day, which was yesterday, to have the coins weighed in case any of them were counterfeit or of light weight. Meanwhile, at my request, he sealed the string at the neck with his thumb-ring.
'When he did not come as we had arranged, and when I heard in court just now that he was to be called as a witness, I hastily sent a slave back to my house to fetch the bag. Here it is. Will you show him the impression of his seal and ask him whether he acknowledges it? If it proves to be his, you will wonder how he dares accuse the prisoner of buying the poison which he bought himself.'
The slave began to tremble violently, his face turned ashen and he burst into a cold sweat. Shifting his weight from one foot to another, he gaped and scratched his head, stammering out such wild nonsense that no reasonable person could possibly have believed him innocent. However, he presently recovered his self-composure, denied ever having visited the doctor and accused him of lying. Not only was the doctor on oath to deliver a just verdict in this case but his professional honour was now impugned. He redoubled his efforts to bring the slave to book, and at last the magistrates ordered the court officials to seize the fellow's hand and compare the seal on the ring with the wax-impression at the neck of the bag. They corresponded exactly.
According to Greek custom an attempt was then made to extort a confession from the slave by racking him on the wheel, making him ride the wooden horse with weights tied to his feet and flogging him; but he was remarkably tough and would not recant even when they burned his soles in the brazier. At last the doctor exclaimed: 'Upon my word, I refuse either to let the young man in the dock be punished by you for a crime of which he is not guilty, or to let this slave make fools of the Court and escape punishment for his wickedness. Allow me to give you clear proof of the truth of my statements. When this shameless rogue came to me for a quick and deadly poison, I remembered that the art of medicine was invented for the saving, not the taking, of human life and decided that it would be a breach of my professional principles if I sold poison to a potential murderer. But I feared that, if I refused to sell, he might go elsewhere for poison or commit the murder which he had in mind by some other means-a sword, for instance, or the first weapon that lay handy. So what I gave him was not really a poison: it was a soporific called mandragora, which is of such powerful action that the trance it induces is practically indistinguishable from death. You need not be surprised that this slave has been prepared, in his desperation, to face the traditional tortures to which he has been condemned; after all, they are nothing in comparison with the punishment to which an immediate confession of his guilt would have subjected him. But if the boy really did take the drug I prepared, then he must still be alive, though in a coma; as soon as the effect has worn off, he will wake up and this murder trial will automatically come to an end. But if he is really dead, then a further investigation will be needed; his death will be due to causes of which I am ignorant.'
This was fair enough, and the trial was adjourned at once. Excitement ran so high that everyone set off at a run for the pyre, the magistrates and other members of the court as well as the general public. The father won the race and lifted the coffin-lid himself, just as the child, coming out of his death-like trance, was trying to sit up. He hugged him close but, finding no words wonderful enough to express his joy and relief, carried him down in silence for everyone to see, and presently brought him into Court still swathed in his grave-clothes.
The facts of the case were no longer in dispute: the wickedness of the slave, and the still greater wickedness of the stepmother were finally exposed. She was condemned to perpetual exile, he was crucified; and, by a unanimous vote, the bag and its contents were presented to the good old doctor as a reward for the coma which he had induced with such happy results. So the story came to an extraordinarily dramatic end, almost as if a god had stepped down from his heavenly car; for the councillor, who a moment before had believed himself childless, was once more the father of two sons.
聚合中文网 阅读好时光 www.juhezwn.com
小提示:漏章、缺章、错字过多试试导航栏右上角的源