CHAPTER XLVIII

THE FORGED SERMON

Claud. IV. Cons. Honor. 257–62.

No sooner had she read the first sentence than the haughty, passionate woman flamed into uncontrollable rage. She knew that Chrysostom, because his name was John, and his life was that of an ascetic, and his moral attitude inflexible, was often compared with John the Baptist. The free street-cries of Constantinople could not leave her unaware that she was often called Jezebel and Herodias. She did not suspect the deceit which the Bishop of Gabala had practised upon her credulity, and she had so few opportunities of seeing the world, except through the medium of contaminated minds, that she rarely arrived at the real truth. She accepted the report as genuine; and that such language should be used of her in St. Sophia, and by the man whom she had recalled two months earlier, and who had then lauded her piety and beneficence, was a fact which lay on her heart like a spark of fire. Severian, as he observed how hate and rage and wounded pride changed her face from red to pale and pale to red, and how her bosom heaved and her breath quivered and hissed as she turned over the leaves, felt that now at last his work was finally and effectually done, and exulted in his abominable heart.

Leaving his lie to produce its full effect, he took his leave; and she, knowing that the Emperor was alone, burst unannounced into his presence.

There was nothing which more shook the nerves and 417 worried the immobile passivity of Arcadius than these sudden inroads from Eudoxia. Eutropius had formerly protected him from them, but now they were matters of constant occurrence. If we could imagine what would be the feelings of an automaton which found itself mated with a whirlwind we can realise what he felt.

When they were in public the Emperor and Empress never neglected the most rigid conventions of imperial etiquette. Were they not both august, and their infant already an Augustus? Were they not both ‘adored’? Did not their courtiers cover their eyes with their hands as they approached them, as though to shield themselves from the too sun-like radiance? In their public relations nothing disturbed the quotidian ague and frozen routine of gorgeous Byzantinism elaborated by Oriental servility. But when they were alone they indemnified themselves for this ponderous parade of functional ineptitude by relapsing into interchanges of spleen as frankly human as those of the meanest of their subjects. Slaves, eunuchs, pages, chamberlains, and courtiers heard from the inmost recesses of the purple chambers voices raised into tones of the shrillest vehemence, and sometimes even scraps of objurgation with which they were not unfamiliar at the Chalcedonian Stairs and other resorts of ordinary human clay.

Arcadius knew that he had to prepare for the worst whenever Eudoxia invaded his privacy unaccompanied by any of her children. At certain times of the day, above all when she entered his room with a certain flounce of her imperial robes, as she did on this occasion, he made up his mind for a bad quarter of an hour.

‘It is intolerable!’ she began, flinging herself down on a golden chair; ‘it is quite sickeningly intolerable! I would rather be a drudge in the bazaar than the Augusta if I am to submit to this.’

‘What is the matter now?’ asked Arcadius with an air of weary and irritated displeasure.

‘The matter is that you are no longer Emperor of the East,’ she said, with frigid scorn.

‘Indeed!’ replied Arcadius with studied indifference. ’Then who is Emperor?’

‘That man!’ she almost screamed; ‘and until you get rid of that man neither city, nor Church, nor Empire will have a moment’s peace!’

‘That man being——?’

‘That Patriarch, that John of Antioch, who has been condemned by a synod of all sorts of crimes, and yet comes back!’

‘Why, it is but two months,’ said Arcadius, ‘since you yourself were here on your knees, screeching and sobbing that night of the earthquake, and saying that God was destroying us because we had driven out that saint. It was you who drove him out——’,

‘I never did!’ said Eudoxia defiantly.

‘I know you said you did not,’ replied the Emperor; ’but, if so, who did? You wrote to Theophilus; you were daily caballing with the bishops; you got him banished by falsehoods——’

‘This is too much,’ said the Empress, as she listened with tightened lips.

‘Then you summoned him back all in a hurry; you sent messenger after messenger for him; you went out to meet him; you kissed and hugged him——’

‘Oh!’ shrieked Eudoxia, ‘is there no one to avenge me?’

‘And now,’ said Arcadius, continuing his placid course with no regard to these interruptions, and feeling that for once he was, to use a vulgar expression, scoring—’and now you come raging and shrieking again, and want him banished; and then, after another earthquake, I feel no doubt you will rage and shriek again to have him recalled. I hate these scenes!’

‘Very well,’ she exclaimed, livid with wrath; ‘so Arcadius is such a pale-blooded phantom as to suffer the wife who has borne him four children to be publicly called a Jezebel and an Herodias before the lewd, seditious mob in his own church, not a stone’s-throw from his own palace. Would God,’ she muttered, ‘I had but married a man!’

Arcadius was about to adopt his usual plan, of doing nothing, and letting affairs take their course; but after a pause, in which Eudoxia had been indulging in inarticulate 419 sobs, she started up, and flung the spurious sermon at his feet in a perfect storm of passion.

‘Read that!’ she said.

Arcadius, in a helpless way, picked it up, glanced at it, and let it drop, as if it did not particularly interest him.

‘What are you going to do?’

Arcadius did not answer.

‘Am I to be thus grossly and daily insulted with impunity?’

Still the same sullen silence, more maddening to Eudoxia than any speech.

‘Are you a man, or a dastard?’

‘Are you a woman, or a fury?’

‘Would that I had never left the house of Promotus!’

‘One thing only is clear to me,’ said the Emperor: ’which is, that I was quite infinitely less worried in the days of Eutropius.’

‘Then choose out some slave from the dregs of your eunuchs, and make him lord over you,’ screamed Eudoxia; ’but understand that you will be made the veiled joke of the comedians in the theatre. The meanest clown in Constantinople will sneer at the man who is more cowardly than himself; for even such a clown would hit the man who insulted his wife.’

‘Do what you like; have it your own way; only leave me in peace,’ said Arcadius in a tone of unspeakable disgust. He sank back on the cushions of his divan, utterly wretched, and closed his heavy eyes. He was much to be pitied. Had his wife been the sweet and gentle woman that his mother had been he might have been a better ruler and a less miserable man. But—