“They do not understand,” Romulus said thoughtfully, when they had been all over the struggle between the two parties, from beginning to end. “They do not see that the thing which must be done is the thing which is right, whether it be by my will or another’s.”
“They are ready, some of them, to declare that a thing is wrong because you saw it before they did,” said Calvo dryly.
“The people are with me—I believe,” said Romulus, “the soldiers, and the common folk—but they have no voice in the government. Yet are they men, Tertius Calvo,—many of them children of Mars as we are. Am I not bound to do what is right for them, as well as for the dwellers within the palaces?”
“I have always believed so,” nodded Calvo. “When a man makes a road or a bridge, he does not make it for the strong and powerful alone; it is even more for the weak, the ignorant and those who cannot work for themselves. If the gods meant not this to be so, they would arrange it so that the sun should shine only on a few, and the rest should dwell in twilight; they would give rain only to those whom they favor, and good water only to the chosen of the gods. But the world is not made in that way. Therefore we who are the chosen of the gods to do their will on earth should be of equal mind toward all—men, women and children.”
Calvo paused, as if he were thinking how he should say what he thought, and then went on.
“Whether men are high or low, Romulus, founder of the city, they have minds and they think, and the gods, who know all men’s souls, hear their unspoken thoughts as well as ours. Therefore it is not a small thing when many believe in a man, for their belief, like a river, will grow and grow until it makes itself felt by those who hold themselves as greater. I have seen this happen when a good man whom all men loved came to die. He was greater after his death than when he was alive, for the grief and the love of the poor encompassed his spirit and made it strong.”
Romulus smiled in the way he did when he was thinking more than he meant to say. “I shall be very strong when I am dead,” was his only comment. And Calvo knew that it was the truth.
Romulus was now fifty-eight years old, and Calvo was seventy-two. Both of them were thinking that it would not be many years when they would both, perhaps, be talking together in the world of shadows as they were talking now. Then Romulus told Calvo what he was going to do.