Of Merchants & Heros by Paul Waters Read Free Book Online Page B

barn where Caecilius had dumped my father’s library. When I had first found them there, the books were cast into a heap, piled up with no care for the order of the volumes, food for the rats. Knowing what they had meant to him I had picked them up and placed them out of reach of the damp, thinking thereby to preserve some part of his memory.
    Now, seeing them, Mouse reached out and touched them reverentially one by one with her stubby fingers, turning the fluttering labels and whispering, ‘Oh, oh,’ to herself. In the dusty halflight the happiness shone in her face. It touched my heart. Her unselfconscious joy made her seem almost beautiful.
    Presently, after we had spent some time picking through the scrolls, I said I must go; the farmhands would be waiting. But before I left I said, ‘Mouse?’
    She turned from the books and looked at me with her big eyes.
    ‘I just wanted to say . . . I am glad you are here. Everyone needs a home, so this is yours, for as long as ever you want. Don’t forget.’
    Priscus our neighbour stopped calling at the house. But about a month after the marriage, when I had gone up to the town on some farm matter, I ran into him at the market.
    For a little while we spoke inconsequentially. Then there was a pause and he said lightly, as if carrying on from what had gone before, ‘I met your stepfather the other day, while I was walking in the orchard.’
    ‘Oh?’ I said, catching his eye. ‘Then you are fortunate. He seldom ventures from the house.’
    He paused and coughed, and pretended to look over a stall selling knives and hooks. ‘He called me over . . . I think, actually, he thought I was one of the farmhands. He was looking up at a tree and wanted to know what was wrong with the apples. I told him there was nothing wrong with the apples, if I was any judge, but that he was looking at a plumtree.’
    I laughed out loud.
    ‘Still,’ went on Priscus, frowning, ‘it is an easy enough mistake, after all, and I suppose he grew up in the city, where one does not learn such things.’
    ‘The city? Not at all. He’s from Campania, where the people take in farming with their mother’s milk. But not Caecilius, it seems. He despises farming. He is a man of business, so he says.’
    Priscus raised his grey brows and walked on, and when I caught his eye he said, ‘Ah, a man of business. Well, indeed.’
    We carried on down the narrow cobbled street in silence. Then I could restrain myself no longer and I burst out, ‘I tell you, Priscus, Father would have hated such a man. Everything has a price, and he makes it his business to know it. He thinks all things may be bought and sold. He calls it “business”, and now he says I must learn it.’
    Priscus nodded into his beard. One never quite knew, with Priscus, whether he was amused or not. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s no harm in learning the value of things, or how else will you learn judgement? What price, I wonder, does he buy friendship at?’
    I laughed. ‘Friendship?’
    ‘Or love?’
    I shook my head.
    ‘Then, it seems, he does not know the price of everything, after all. But what of you, Marcus, who know so much less than he about “business”? What price, would you say, do these things fetch?’
    ‘Why, no price at all, Priscus!’ I cried. ‘A man cannot buy and sell such things!’
    ‘And yet,’ he said, ‘they have a value.’
    We had come out at a small, paved square. I had often played here as a child, and knew it well. On one side, shaded by a spreading lime, there was a stone bench beside a fountain. Here we sat, and looked out over the valley. The sound of goat-clappers came tinkling across the terraced fields, and, from somewhere beyond my view, the voice of a herdboy singing.
    Priscus said, ‘You see, Marcus, some things have value yet have no price, and a wise man learns them and their worth. So do not let the standard of the marketplace be your guide. A man goes there for flour and greens, but not for