“But father, my dear father, it is not the son of Ptolemy, but the palace-steward that he desires shall go to hire.”
“Mere chop-logic!--you have nothing to say, not a step do I take to go to him.”
The girl clasped her hands over her face, and sobbed loudly and pitifully. Keraunus started up and cried out, beside himself.
“By great Serapis. I can bear this no longer. What are you whimpering about?”
The girl plucked up courage and going up to the indignant man she said, though more than once interrupted by tears.
“You must go father--indeed you must. I spoke to the foreman, and he told me coolly and decidedly that the architect was placed here in Caesar’s name, and that if you do not obey him you will at once be superseded in your office. And if that were to happen, if that--O father, father, only think of blind Helios and poor Berenice! Arsinoe and I could earn our bread, but the little ones--the little ones.”
With these words the girl fell on her knees lifting her hands in entreaty to her obstinate parent. The blood had mounted to the man’s face and eyes, and pressing his hand to his purple forehead he sank back in his chair as if stricken with apoplexy. His daughter sprang up and offered him the cup full of wine and water which was standing on the table; but Keraunus pushed it aside with his hands, and panted out, while he struggled for breath:
“Supersede me--in my place--turn me out of this palace! Why there, in that ebony trunk, lies the rescript of Euergetes which confers the stewardship of this residence on my ancestor Philip, and as a hereditary dignity in his family. Now Philip’s wife had the honor of being the king’s mistress--or, as some say, his daughter. There lies the document, drawn up in red and black ink on yellow papyrus and ratified with the seal and signature of Euergetes the Second. All the princes of the Lagides have confirmed it, all the Roman prefects have respected it, and now--now.”
“But father” said the girl interrupting her father, and wringing her hands in despair, “you still hold the place and if you will only give in.”
“Give in, give in,” shrieked the corpulent steward shaking his fat hands above his blood-shot face. “I will give in--I will not bring you all to misery--for my children’s sake I will allow myself to be ill-treated and down-trodden, I will go--I will go directly. Like the pelican I will feed my children with my heart’s blood. But you ought to know what it costs me, to humiliate myself thus; it is intolerable to me, and my heart is breaking--for the architect, the architect has trampled upon me as if I were his servant; he wished--I heard him with these ears--he shrieked after me a villainous hope that I might be smothered in my own fat--and the physician has told me I may die of apoplexy! Leave me, leave me. I know those Romans are capable of anything. Well--here I am; fetch me my saffron-colored pallium, that I wear in the council, fetch me my gold fillet for my head. I will deck myself like a beast for sacrifice, and I will show him--”