Agrippa's Daughter Read Free Page A

of her will and control. She could be lying now, mocking at him, deriding him—or telling the truth. The truth would be pleasant.
    Berenice sensed now that even the. possibility of gossip at so small and unimportant a place as Chalcis about the goodness of Agrippa was terribly important. Goodness was a drug he had begun to take only four years ago, but now he was an addict. He existed for goodness; he would kill, plot, lie, and scheme to uphold it—and nothing would stand in the way of the saintliness he proposed for himself. Toward that end, he would believe the unbelievable.
    “What do they say at Chalcis, daughter?” he asked, watching her as he moved toward the buffet of food and took a handful of raisins and dates. The others watched too. Her brother, Agrippa, was chuckling inwardly at her pose. The two priests made note of what she was doing and were amazed that the king could not see through it.
    “They tell a story. It’s all over town. Everyone is telling it.”
    “What story?”
    “Oh—” Berenice shrugged diffidently. “Probably something you forgot a day after it happened. They say that you went out of Tiberias dressed as a common woodcutter, so that you might be among your people and feel them and know them, and presently you came to a woodcutter’s hut, and he was poor because the arthritis was in his hands and fingers, so you gave him two pieces of gold, enough to last a year, but did not reveal yourself. And so you did with two other poor woodcutters. But then—then you came to a hut where the woodcutter and all his family were stricken with leprosy—”
    Berenice was inventing as she went along, fashioning the story in a mixture of skill and contempt; and faltering for the moment at what a king in disguise might do at a hut of lepers—the more so since their Hasmonean blood was the holy priest’s blood, and thus the injunction not to approach the unclean was strong upon them. The king was well aware of this, for since the beginning of his period of saintliness he had become stricter and stricter in his observance of the Law.
    “Go on! Go on!” the king cried.
    “Well—it was unclean, and even the ground all about for thirty paces in every direction was unclean, and who in the whole world does not know that the king of the Jews keeps the Law? So as you stood there, your heart breaking with pity, but with no way to approach these sick and abhorrent people, an angel came down from heaven, and took the gold and gave it to the lepers and said to you, Blessed art thou, Agrippa, beloved King—”
    Her voice trailed away as she finished the story, staring at her father, the king, with wide-open eyes. Suddenly, her brother was overcome with fear, and the two priests waited with satisfaction for the king’s wrath to explode and destroy this arrogant, clever, and contemptuous princess, whom they hated so. But nothing exploded. Agrippa had stopped eating. He stood for a moment, the fruit in his hands, his eyes closed—and then he shook his head.
    “Foolish child,” he said. “Of course you know that the story is not true. An invention out of the whole cloth. The times have gone when angels descended to earth to intervene in the affairs of men. God leaves us to our own solutions, and the punishment is ours if we fail Him. But what interests me is that such a story should arise and get around. All over Chalcis, did you say?”
    “If I heard it once, I heard it twenty times,” Berenice replied.
    “I should think my brother would have written concerning it.”
    “Only the very great take pleasure in the glory of others.”
    “Oh?” He had forgotten entirely his earlier irritation. Now he smiled at the manner in which she complimented herself and himself, the two bracketed.
    “May I pour your wine, Father?” Berenice’s brother asked brightly.
    As the young Agrippa poured a goblet of wine for the older Agrippa, and then tasted it himself—for the king drank no wine that was not tasted by