When Numisia spoke Bambilio let go Brinnaria’s arm and stepped back a pace. “My daughter,” he said, “you have been punished enough. Your punishment is accomplished. This is sufficient.”
Then Brinnaria spoke, in a voice tense, not with pain, but with fury:
“You won’t hit me again?”
“No, my daughter,” said Bambilio, “no more.”
“You have quite done beating me?” she demanded.
“Quite done,” he replied.
Then, unexpectedly to herself, Brinnaria’s wrath boiled over.
“Then,” she fairly yelled at him, “I’m going to begin beating you. Shut your eyes. I’m going to pull down the curtain!”
Numisia made a horrified grab at Brinnaria and missed her. Brinnaria gave her a push; Numisia slipped, fell her length on the floor, struck her head and either fainted or was stunned.
Bambilio, his eyes tight shut, the instant after Numisia’s head cracked the floor, heard snap the string supporting the curtain.
He shut his eyes tighter.
He felt the scourge wrenched from his limp fingers, felt the back of his neck grasped by a muscular young hand, felt the impact of the twenty-four sheep-hoofs on his back.
Through his clothing they stung and smarted.
There came another blow and another. Bambilio tried to get away, but he dreaded unseemly contact with a naked Vestal and did not succeed in his efforts.
The blows fell thick and fast. He was an old man exhausted by a long day of excitement and by his exertions while scourging Brinnaria.
His knees knocked together, he gasped, he snorted: the pain of the blows made him feel faint; he collapsed on the floor.
Then Brinnaria did beat him, till the blood ran from his back almost as from hers, beat him till the old man fainted dead away.
When her arm was tired she gave him a kick, threw the scourge on him and groped for Numisia.
Numisia had sat up.
“My child,” she said, “why did you do it?”
“I don’t know,” snarled Brinnaria. “I was furious. I did it before I thought. Are you hurt?”
“No,” said Numisia. “Don’t tell anyone you pushed me. I’ll never tell. I don’t blame you, dear.” She fainted again.
Causidiena, waiting under the colonnade of the courtyard, was appalled to descry in the gloom a totally naked Brinnaria, a mass of clothing hanging over her arm.
“My child,” she protested, “why did you not put on your clothes?”
“I don’t care who sees me!” Brinnaria retorted. “I’m boiling hot; I’m all over sweat and blood and my back’s cut to ribbons.”
“What are you going to do?” Causidiena queried.
“I’m going to bed,” Brinnaria replied. “Please send Utta to me and tell her to bring the turpentine jug and the salt box.”
“My dear,” Causidiena objected, “you’ll never endure the pain!”
“Yes, I shall,” Brinnaria maintained. “I’ll set my teeth and stand the smart. I don’t mean to have a festered back. I’ll have Utta rub me with salt and turpentine from neck to hips; I’ll be asleep before she’s done rubbing.”
“I’ll come and see she does it properly,” Causidiena said.
“Better not,” said Brinnaria. “Numisia and Bambilio need you worse than I do.”
“Why?” queried Causidiena.
“After Bambilio was done beating me,” Brinnaria explained calmly, “I beat him. Numisia tried to stop me and somehow fell on the floor and was stunned. She came to after I was done with Bambilio, but she fainted again. I beat him till he is just a lump of raw meat, eleven-twelfths dead, wallowing in his blood like a sausage in a plate of gravy.”
“My child!” Causidiena cried, “this is sacrilege!”
“Not a bit of it!” Brinnaria maintained, a tall, white shape in the star-shine, waving her armful of clothing.
“I have pored over the statutes of the order. It was incumbent on me to keep still and silent all through my licking. But I defy you or any other Vestal or any Pontiff or Flamen or either of the Emperors to show me a word on the statutes of the order or in any other sacred writing that forbids a Vestal, after her thrashing, to beat the Pontifex to red pulp. I have. You’d better go help him; he might die. And poor Numisia needs reviving. I’m all right; send me Utta and the salt and turpentine, and I’ll be fit for duty in a day or two.”
“You terrible child!” said Causidiena.
THE next year was the year of the great pestilence. Pestilence, indeed, had ravaged Italy for five consecutive summers previous to that year. But the great pestilence, for two centuries afterwards spoken of merely as “the pestilence,” fell in the nine hundred and nineteenth year after the founding of Rome, the year 166 of our era, when Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus had been co-Emperors for a little more than five years and Brinnaria had been almost five years a Vestal. It devastated the entire Empire from Nisibis in upper Mesopotamia to Segontium, opposite the isle of Anglesea. Every farm, hamlet and village suffered; in not one town did it leave more than half the inhabitants alive; few cities escaped with so much as a third of the population surviving. Famine accompanied the pestilence in all the western portions of the Roman world, and from famine perished many whom the plague had spared.
This disaster was, in fact, the real deathblow to Rome’s greatness and from it dates the decline of the Roman power. It broke the tradition of civilization and culture which had grown from the small beginnings of the primitive Greeks and Etruscans more than two thousand years before. During all those two thousand years there had been a more or less steady and a scarcely interrupted development of the agriculture, manufactures, arts, skill, knowledge and power of the mass of humanity about the Mediterranean Sea; men who fought with shields and spears and swords, also with arrows and slings, believed in approximately the same sort of gods; wore clothing rather wrapped round them than upholstered on their bodies as with us; reclined on sofas at meals; lived mostly out of doors all the year round; built their houses about courtyards, and made rows of columns the chief feature of their architecture, and sheltering themselves in colonnades, sunny or shady according to the time of the year, the chief feature of their personal comfort. Up to the year of the great pestilence that civilization had prospered, had produced a long series of generals, inventors, architects, sculptors, painters, musicians, poets, authors, and orators. Everywhere men had shown self-confidence, capacity, originality, power and competence and had achieved success for two thousand years.
The great pestilence of 166 so depleted the population that Rome never again pushed forward the boundaries of her Empire. Some lucky armies won occasional victories, but Rome never again put on the field an overwhelming army for foreign conquest, never again could fully man, even defensively, the long line of her frontiers.
All classes of the people suffered, but most of all the rich, the well-to-do, the educated and the cultured classes of the towns and cities. And the main point of difference between the great pestilence and the others which had preceded it was the universality of its incidence. For two thousand years pestilence had occurred at intervals, but previously not everywhere at once.
If one country suffered others did not; if half the Mediterranean world, even, was devastated, the other half escaped. From the immune regions competence and capacity had flowed into the ruined areas and civilization had gone on. But the great pestilence left no district unharmed. In six months it killed off all the brains and skill, all the culture and ingenuity in the Empire. There were so few capable men left in any line of activity that the next generation grew up practically untaught. The tradition of two thousand years was broken. In all the Mediterranean world, until centuries later, descendants of the savage invaders developed their new civilization on the ruins of the old; no man ever again made a great speech, wrote a great book or play or poem, painted a good picture, carved a good statue, or contrived a good campaign or battle. The brains of the Roman world died that year, the originality of the whole nation was killed at once, the tradition broke off.
Of course, the survivors did not realize the finality of the disaster, but they did realize its magnitude. In Italy, fed almost wholly by imported food, the famine was most severe. In Italy the pestilence was most virulent. Men disputed as to whether the great army of Lucius Verus, returned home from its splendid victories in Parthia, had brought with it a form of pestilence worse than that of the five previous years, or whether the returned soldiers had merely been a specially easy prey to the pestilence already abroad in Rome. Whichever was true, the veterans died like flies. So did the residents of Rome. Whole blocks of tenements were emptied of their last occupier and stood wholly vacant; many palaces of the wealthy were left without so much as a guardian, the last inmate dead; the splendid furnishings, even the silver plate, untouched in every room; for the plague had so ravaged Rome that there were not even robbers and thieves left to steal To the survivors, since genuine piety as they knew it was all but universal among the Romans, it was some small comfort, a faint ray of hope, a sign that the gods were not inexorably wrathful, that, after Rabulla’s death, there was no case of pestilence in the Atrium, not even among the servitors, that no Vestal so much as sickened. Through it all the six remained hale and sound.
But when the plague abated, only Manlia had any living relations left her. The other five had lost every kinsman and kinswoman, to the ninth and tenth degree.
Brinnaria’s parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins were all among the victims. This left her grave and sobered with grief, with no trace of her girlish wildness apparent.
It also left her enormously rich, one of the wealthiest women in Rome.
Not a tenth so wealthy, but still very rich, it left Almo, Vocco and Flexinna, all of whom survived.
As the plague had been rife, worse each year, for some seasons before the year of the great pestilence, so, ebbing yearly, it continued for some years after its acme. As soon as the worst was manifestly over the life of Rome began to revive to some degree, the city dwellers plucked up heart, the refugees began to return to their town houses, hunger and terror were forgotten, industry and commerce rallied, bustle and activity increased from day to day, and, slowly indeed, but steadily, Rome returned to its normal activity and appearance. The survivors reconstructed their life on the old lines, the streets and squares were again thronged, the public baths, those vast casinos of ancient club-life, were daily crowded with idlers.
The repopulation of the city brought into it many rich families from towns all over the Roman world.
Their influx sent up the price of large residences and caused much activity in the renting and selling of properties suitable for the homes of people of ample means.
Brinnaria, without a male relation of even the remotest degree, came to lean more and more on Vocco, the husband of her chum Flexinna. He was a young man of not unpleasing appearance and of courtly manners, but very haughty, reserved and silent by nature; and exceedingly spare, lean and wiry, with black hair and brows, a complexion as if tanned and weatherbeaten and an habitual frown. He was fond of Brinnaria and unbent to her more than to most of his acquaintances. She treated him as a sort of honorary cousin and turned over to him many details of the care of her large and scattered property. He took upon himself in her interest the sale or management of her distant estates, found for them capable overseers or purchasers at advantageous prices, bought slaves where they were needed, arranged for the marketing of the more important products and accounted to her for the proceeds.
About her town properties he had more trouble and some exasperation, for he found the apparently practical and unsentimental Brinnaria oddly unwilling to disturb the contents of the palaces in which her kinsmen had lived and died. She was naturally a good business woman and all her instincts urged her to increase her capital and her income by every means within her power and at every opportunity. Yet, when Vocco came to her with offers of high prices for the various buildings which she had inherited he could induce her to arrange for the sale only of the smaller and less valuable houses, or of those tenements which had been owned merely to rent, but had never been inhabited by any members of the Brinnarian clan. At the suggestion of preparing for sale any of the palaces of her near kinsfolk she balked; from the barest hint towards moving the furniture in her father’s home she recoiled in horror.
Vocco found himself faced by invincible femininity, with the possession of which he would not have credited Brinnaria. At first he was irritated. As he missed sale after sale he became more and more aggravated. But he kept his temper, held his tongue and waited for Brinnaria’s mood to alter. Her sentimentality gradually waned as the prices offered steadily mounted. After long hesitation she gave orders to sell at auction the furniture from the house of a distant cousin, and to rent the house. That broke the spell. One by one the late abodes of the Brinnarii were cleared and sold; sold furniture and all, cleared and rented, or rented furnished.
The former dwellings of her aunts and uncles she was reluctant to disturb. She felt a sort of sacredness about these splendid houses where she had been merry as a child. When at last she made up her mind to part with one she would not give the order to sell it until she had gone over it herself and selected some pieces of furniture which she specially valued. Vocco tried to dissuade her, but she would not listen to him.
Her visit to the vast, empty palace had a most depressing effect on her. All her grief at her countless bereavements rushed back over her in a flood and overwhelmed her. She would not allow a stick of furniture to be moved and withdrew her consent to the sale.
Vocco was patient and silent.
After a time this mood, too, wore off.
She had that particular dwelling emptied and sold and, once that first step taken, under the pressure of hugely profitable offers, sold all the other properties.
In each case she insisted on inspecting the houses room by room before anything was moved. After the first she had no hysterical qualms, did not show any outward emotion, selected what she meant to keep for herself, ordered the sale of the rest, remained calm through it all.
Finally Vocco came to her with a most tempting offer for her childhood home. Brinnaria took a night to think it over.
She had not entered the place since her father’s funeral. He had been the last of the family to die, three months after his wife, and some days after his last surviving son. During the lengthy interval the palace had stood shut fast, cared for only by a few slaves, and those not lifelong family servants, but recent purchases; for the pestilence had carried off with their masters nearly all the home-bred house slaves.
At the thought of going through the deserted halls and silent rooms Brinnaria winced. But she nerved herself up to it. She named a day on which she meant to face the ordeal, asked Vocco to order the palace swept and dusted, and announced to Guntello, almost the sole survivor of her father’s personal servitors, that he was to accompany her.
When the day came she set out, not in her carriage, but in her litter with eight Cilician bearers, her lictor running ahead and Guntello and Utta walking behind.
She began her survey accompanied by Guntello and Utta. But when she came to the nursery and schoolroom she sent the two away, told them to wait for her in the peristyle, shut herself in and had a long, hard cry; precisely as if she had been, as of old, a little girl hurt or angry or vexed. After she had wept till no more tears flowed she felt relieved and comforted.
She called Utta, had her bring water, bathed her face and sent the maid away again.
Then she resolutely examined room after room. The second floor took a long while, for there were many doors to open and close for the last time.
There was a third floor, a feature possessed by few dwellings in Rome in ancient times. The Imperial Palace, which later towered to even seven stories, was unique in Brinnaria’s time, in the possession of five superposed floors. The great palace of Sallust, near the Salarian Gate, had but three.
To the third floor she mounted. Before she had investigated half the rooms she found a door fast. What was more, as she tried it, she thought she heard a sound, as of human movement, inside that room.
Brinnaria was no weakling. Methodically she tried that door with her full, young strength, tried it all along its edge opposite its hinges, tried it at the middle, at the top, at the bottom. She made sure the door was not stuck or jammed; she was convinced that it was bolted within the room.
She leaned over the railing of the gallery and called Guntello.
The odd note in her voice brought that faithful giant up the stairs, two steps at a time; the beams of the house, even the marble steps of the stair, seemed to quiver under his tread.
She had him try the door. He agreed that it was bolted.
“Can you break it in?” she queried.
Guntello laughed. “Without half trying, little Mistress,” he replied.
Brinnaria’s voice came hard and sharp.
“You in that room!” she called, “unbolt that door and come out, or it will be the worse for you. I’ll count ten and then order the door burst open.” She began to count.
She heard the bolt shot back.
She nodded to Guntello.
He gave the door a push.
Before them stood Calvaster, his attitude and countenance expressing cringing cowardice, cloaked by ill-assumed effrontery. He did not speak, trying to appear unconcerned.
“What are you doing in my house?” Brinnaria demanded.
“I do not wonder that you are astonished to see me here and angry as well,” Calvaster replied, “but the explanation is simple. I learned that you were proposing to sell the property. I had a curiosity to see it as it is. I found means to slip in and go over the building. I counted on leaving before you arrived. I miscalculated, that is all. Awkward for both of us, but unintentional on my part.”
“I don’t believe half of that rigmarole,” snapped Brinnaria.
“It is all true, nevertheless,” Calvaster asserted with an air of injured innocence.
“One thing is plain, anyhow,” Brinnaria declared. “You bribed one of my slaves. Which one did you bribe?”
Calvaster kept his lips pressed tight together.
“March him downstairs, Guntello,” Brinnaria commanded.
Calvaster winced and made as if to dodge. Big as he was Guntello was wonderfully quick. In a flash he had the intruder by the neck. Utterly helpless Calvaster was marched down the stairs.
In the courtyard Brinnaria had brought before her the half dozen slaves who had charge of the empty house. They stood in a row fidgeting and glancing at each other.
“Now,” she demanded of Calvaster, “point out which one you bribed.” Calvaster remained motionless and mute.
“Hurt him, Guntello,” said Brinnaria.
Guntello applied a few simple twists and squeezes, such as schoolboys of all climes employ on their victims.
Calvaster yielded at once and indicated one of the suspects.
“Throw him out, Guntello,” said Brinnaria.
When Guntello returned he cheerfully inquired, with the easy assurance of an indulged favorite.
“Shall I kill Tranio, Mistress?”
“No!” said Brinnaria viciously. “I wouldn’t have a toad killed on the word of that contemptible scoundrel. Give Tranio a moderate beating and hand him over to Olynthides to be sold at auction without a character.” Her survey of her former home and her selection of the ornaments, pictures, statues, articles of furniture and other objects which she desired reserved for herself she completed with an air less of melancholy than of puzzled thought.
She was off duty for all of that day and night and was to dine with Flexinna and Vocco. In the course of the pestilence they had inherited a magnificent abode on the Esquiline. In particular it had a private bath with a large swimming-pool. The Vestals were the only ladies in Rome who might not enjoy the magnificent public baths, to which all Roman society flocked every afternoon, somewhat as we moderns throng a beach at a fashionable seaside resort. Brinnaria, who loved swimming, felt the deprivation keenly. The Atrium had luxurious baths, but no swimming-pool. Whenever Brinnaria dined with Flexinna she particularly enjoyed the swim the two always took together before dinner. On that afternoon, while they were revelling in the water, Brinnaria told Flexinna of her adventure.
“I can’t conjecture,” she said, “what motive brought him there. I have been racking my brains about it ever since it happened and it is an enigma to me.”
“No riddle to me,” Flexinna declared. “It’s as c-c-clear as d-d-daylight.”
“If you are so sure,” said Brinnaria, “explain. I have no guess even.”
“Why,” expounded Flexinna, “he was there to c-c-collect evidence against you. He hates you because you wouldn’t marry him and he is t-t-tenaciously resolved to be revenged. He is on the lookout for anything that might d-d-discredit you. He hoped to spy on an interview b-b-between you and Almo, for he surmised that you would arrange to have Almo meet you in the empty house!”
“The nasty beast!” cried Brinnaria, shocked. “How dare he?”
“Oh, b-b-be sensible,” Flexinna admonished her. “You know the k-k-kind he is. He’s b-b-bound to impute to everybody what he would d-d-do in their p-p-place. Any man under the same circumstances would jump at the same suspicions.”
“But why?” queried Brinnaria, bewildered and angry.
“Think a minute,” said Flexinna. “To suspect all women is a c-c-convention, almost an axiom, with most men. All men like C-C-Calvaster assume that every married woman is interested in some man b-b-besides her husband, or in almost any man, and if married women are under suspicion, on the assumption that one husband is not enough, of c-c-course you Vestals, who haven’t even a husband, are doubly under suspicion.”
“Bah!” snarled Brinnaria, “you make me cross!”
“Facts are facts,” Flexinna summed up.
Brinnaria did not retort. She had climbed out of the tank and was seated on the edge, the drops streaming off her in rivulets, watching the ripples her toes’ made in the water.
“Facts are facts,” she echoed, “and conjectures are merely conjectures; what is more, conjectures ought to have some basis in fact. You assert, as if you know it to be true, that Calvaster expected Almo to meet me to-day. But Almo is at Falerii.”
“No, he’s not,” Flexinna retorted; “he’s b-b-been in t-t-town t-t-ten d-d-days and has had the old house on the C-C-Carinae reopened. He’s settling d-d-down to live in Rome.”
Brinnaria flushed.
“I think,” she said, scrambling to her feet, “that he might have had enough consideration for me to stay in the country.”
“So d-d-do I,” said Flexinna.
SOME months later, during one of the brief and infrequent breathing spells in his ten years’ fight to beat off the raids of the Marcomanni and other Germanic tribes, Aurelius returned from the Rhine frontier to Rome. As soon as she was reasonably sure that the Emperor was rested from the fatigues of his journey and had disposed of the worst of his accumulated routine duties, Brinnaria sought a second audience with the chief of the nation.
She was then a tall, grave girl of nineteen, looking and behaving like a woman of twenty-five. Very handsome she was, full-fleshed without a trace of plumpness, fun breasted without a hint of overabundance. Her brown hair, now grown long again after its ceremonial shearing at her entrance into the order of Vestals, was so dark that it was almost black. Arranged in the six braids traditional for Vestals and wound round her head like a coronet it became her notably. Her complexion was creamy, with a splendid brilliant color that came and went in her cheeks. Her expression of face was an indescribable blend of kindliness and haughtiness towards others, of austerity and cheerfulness inwardly, of intellectuality and comprehension towards life at large. She had acquired the statuesqueness of the conventional Vestal attitudes and movements, but she sat and stood so that all beholders felt a vivid impression of her vitality, of reserve strength, incomparably beyond anything possessed by her five colleagues.
Her stately pacing as she walked always appeared the conscious restraint of what, of itself, would have been a swinging stride. She wore her clothes with an unanalyzable difference, with a sort of effrontery, as Calvaster put it in talking of her to his cronies.
On her way to the palace, erect in her white robe amid the gorgeous crimson hangings of her gilded state coach, she meditated on the great dissimilarity between the feelings with which she had gone to her first audience with the Emperor and those with which she now approached his abode. Then she had been palpitating with conscientious scruples and childish dreads, now she was sure of herself and of her errand; then she had thought chiefly of her mother and of the traditions of her family and clan, now not only her mother was dead, but the whole family of the Epulones had perished except herself and the Brinnarian clan was represented by but three families, her relationship to which was fainter than any assignable degree of cousinship; then she had been full of elation at her lofty position in the world, now she was perfectly at home in her environment and felt no emotion at the thought of it.
At the palace she found herself in the same vast room, alone with a somewhat older and graver Emperor, now sole ruler of their world since the death of his colleague, Lucius Verus. He greeted her kindly, with an air of effort to conceal his weariness, and when both were seated asked her errand.
“In the first place,” she said, “I want you to tell me whether you are satisfied with the reports you have had of me.”
Aurelius half smiled.
“I am well pleased in respect to all your actions but one,” he said. “You have certainly done better than I expected or hoped. You have curbed your wild nature so well that, of late years, you have behaved altogether as a Vestal should. Even earlier your conduct was creditable, since from the very day of your promise to me, your outbursts were less and less frequent and also less and less violent. Once only have you acted so that I felt displeased when I heard what you had done and feel somewhat displeased even yet.”
“I suppose,” Brinnaria ruminated, “you mean my larruping Bambilio.”
“Yes,” Aurelius admitted. “That was in a sense unforgivable. Had I been in Rome at the time I must have animadverted upon it with the greatest severity.”
“If you had been in Rome at the time,” spoke Brinnaria boldly, “I should not have been flogged by any mere deputy Pontifex of Vesta. It would have been incumbent upon you, as Pontifex Maximus, yourself to give me my ceremonial scourging. To you I should have been, of course, as submissive after my beating as while it was going on. No harm would have been done.”
The Emperor smiled more than a half smile.
“I am not sure,” he said, “that any harm was done, anyhow.”
“What!” cried Brinnaria. “You excuse me? You defend me?”
“Softly! Softly!” the Emperor caveatted, raising his hand. “I do not acquit you nor exonerate you. But I do make allowances. And we must distinguish. We must not confuse the causes of my disapprobation of what you did with my reasons for believing that no harm resulted. Nor, for that matter, must we confound with either of them those qualities in yourself and those circumstances of the case which make me feel, illogically perhaps, but very possibly, more inclined to thank you than to censure you.”
“Castor be good to me!” cried Brinnaria. “Am I dreaming?”
“Don’t interrupt, you disrespectful minx,” the Emperor laughed; “this is a lecture. Hear it out.
“In the first place you were technically right in saying that there is not one word in any sacred writing or in the pronouncements of the Pontiffs or the statutes of the Vestals to forbid a flogged Vestal from beating her scourger. Just as Solon in the code of laws which he drew up for the Athenians prescribed no penalty for the slayer of his father or mother, because, as he explained when the omission was pointed out to him, he had thought that no child would ever kill its parents; so no framer of rubrics ever foresaw the necessity of forbidding what no one conceived of as possible. All persons were assumed to be too much in awe of Pontiffs, for anyone to dare to raise a hand against any Pontiff, least of all a Vestal against her spiritual father. The world had to wait for a Brinnaria to demonstrate that the unimaginable could come to pass.
“Yet the very fact that it was nowhere written down that you must not do it makes your act all the worse. It was monstrous.
“But fortunately it was not sacrilegious. The person of the Pontifex of Vesta is not sacrosanct and a blow inflicted on him is not to be rated as impious. Your act called for no expiation, personal or official. It did not desecrate him, or you, nor the place where it occurred.
“Besides, I cannot resist admitting to you,”—and the Emperor smiled an unmistakable smile—“that this particular Pontiff of Vesta is farther from being sacrosanct than any of his predecessors. As far as I can learn, Faltonius is a worthy man, pious and scrupulous. But he is absurdly unfitted for his office in appearance and in manner. The self-importance he assumes, the pomposity with which he performs his duties, would be too great even for an Emperor. He irritates all of us. All of us have wished, secretly or openly, many, many times, that Bambilio would be soundly thrashed. He has been. You did it. The story was too good to keep. It has not, of course, been allowed to leak out, and become common property. But it is known to all the Flamens, Augurs and Pontiffs.
“I need not describe to you the feelings of my colleagues, nor my own. To hint them is perhaps too much; to particularize them would be unseemly. I may say, however, that just as street-boys acclaim you by shouting:
“‘That’s the girl that saved the dog;’ just as all over the Empire you are talked of as the lady who rescued the retiarius; so at any festival or ceremonial in which the Vestals take part, many a dignitary is likely to nudge his neighbor, indicate you and whisper:
“‘That’s the priestess who walloped Bambilio!’ You are not infamous, you are famous.
“As for myself I am the more inclined to feel indulgent towards you because I understand how you felt. You were boiling with rage at being struck by any one, as any noble girl would be. Yet you would have controlled your fury but for the fact that you knew that you yourself had done nothing to deserve chastisement, that you were suffering for another’s fault.”
“What!” cried Brinnaria.
“Oh, yes,” Aurelius continued, easily. “Causidiena and I are quite agreed on that point. Neither she nor I have questioned Meffia, and we do not mean to; partly because we are sure enough, without any admission from her; partly because the matter is best left as it is, without any further notice. But, with the exception of Meffia, it is quite certain that, from the Vestals themselves down to the last slave-girl, every resident of the Atrium believes that not you but Meffia let the fire go out, and that you took the blame due her. And we can all conjecture your motives, as we all applaud them.
“Meffia might never have survived a scourging, might have been ailing for months. Rome wants no sick Vestals nor dead Vestals. Causidiena is grateful to you, all the Atrium is grateful, I am grateful.”
“But,” said Brinnaria, wide-eyed, “I had supposed that, if Meffia was suspected, there would be an inquisition and testimony under oath and that it would be obligatory that the Vestal actually at fault must be scourged.”
“For once,” the Emperor smiled, “you have failed to read accurately the statutes of the order. It is positively refreshing. I was beginning to feel that you were altogether too accurate. In fact the scourging of a delinquent Vestal is a mere disciplinary regulation, designed to assure the maintenance of the fire. It is not in the nature of a mandatory atonement. It has nothing in common with an act of expiation. It has nothing to do with placating or propitiating the Goddess. It has no likeness whatever to the punishment of a guilty Vestal.”
“That reminds me,” said Brinnaria, “of what I came for. I’m as grateful as possible for what you have said to me, surprised that Causidiena and you so easily saw through my deception, delighted that you take it as you have, more than delighted to find you so kindly disposed towards me. I need all the kindness you can feel towards me. I want to come to the point, to the reason why I am here. I want you to answer me this question: Suppose I were accused of the worst possible misconduct, formally accused before you, what then?”
“Then,” said Aurelius, “you would have a fair trial.”
“I believe I should,” said Brinnaria. “You would be perfectly fair and entirely just. And a fair trial would be a novelty. Almost never has an accused Vestal had a fair trial.”
“Not even if acquitted?” the Emperor suggested slyly.
“No,” Brinnaria retorted vigorously. “Even most of those absolved were not tried fairly. Postumia was, if the records from so long ago are to be trusted. The first trial of the third Licinia was perfectly fair, the minutes are very full and there is no shade of bias in the discussion of her many interviews with Crassus, while the court was plainly genuinely amused at his greed for desirable real-estate and at his artifices to induce her to sell cheap. Fabia, in the same year, was justly treated. But most of the other acquittals were quite as bad as most of the convictions to my mind. I can discover almost no trial where both sides had a full hearing, where the judges tried to get at the facts and kept their attention on the evidence, where the finding as the expression of the opinions rather than of the partiality of the Pontiffs. Almost every verdict on record, it seems to me, was dictated by favoritism or influence or prejudice or wrath.”
“You seem to think you know a great deal about the subject of trials of Vestals,” Aurelius remarked.
“I feel justified in thinking so,” Brinnaria maintained. “Where the minutes of the court have perished, as, of course, in the case of all the trials before the capture and burning of the city by the Gauls, I have read what records remain. Where the court records are extant I have pored over every word of the minutes of the proceedings and of every document attached.”
“That is more than ever I found time to do,” Aurelius meditated. “Your conclusions ought to be of interest. What are they?”
Brinnaria drew a deep breath and went on. “I am convinced,” she said, “that sometimes the accused received what she deserved, but generally by accident. The judges were swayed by politics or expediency or clan-feeling or popular clamor or self-interest, not by reason.
“Nobody could form any judgment, at this distance of time, about the guilt or innocence of Oppia or Opimia or Popilia or Porphilia or Orbilia or Orbinia or whatever her real name was, it all happened so long ago. But Minucia and Sextilia and Floronia and the rest were just victims of judicial ferocity, as far as I can make out.”
“You are then of the opinion,” the Emperor asked, “that there never was a guilty Vestal?”
“No,” Brinnaria replied judicially, “I don’t go as far as that. Varonilla was probably depraved and with her the two Oculatas. I don’t think their suicides prove anything against them, for a woman is just as likely to hang herself because she despairs of a fair hearing as because she is conscious of guilt. What weighs with me is that they were brought up in the dissolute times of Messalina and Nero and that their relatives were leaders of the most profligate set in Rome, cronies of Vitellius and his coterie. But although Cornelia was bred and raised in the same social atmosphere, I am quite as sure of her innocence as all the world was the day she was buried and as everybody has been ever since. Domitian just murdered her without a trial, for political reasons and for moral effect. So likewise Marcia and the second Licinia were judicially murdered by that fierce old Cassius Longinus Ravilla. He was elected to convict them, not to try them, and he conducted the trial not to arrive at a fair verdict, but to force a conviction. He had some excuse, for their acquittal on their former trial had been brought about by idiotic bribing and family influence. On the face of the evidence at both trials they were clearly blameless. What ruined them was their trying to shield Aurelia, surely the worst Vestal on record, for she had everything in her favor, ancestry, upbringing and surroundings; she was beyond doubt innately vicious. She was the only Vestal ever justly convicted and justly punished, in my opinion. All the others were irreproachable women, doomed to a frightful fate by prejudiced judges. In general, an accused Vestal is as good as condemned, the whole population so dreads the results of acquitting an unclean priestess. And it is the easiest thing in the world for a Vestal to be accused. Refuse to sell a farm for half its value, snub a bore, order a slave flogged for some unbearable blunder, and the result is the same; false accusation with perjured witnesses and a quick conviction most likely to follow.”
“The subject seems to have occupied your mind a great deal,” Aurelius ruminated.
“Do you wonder?” Brinnaria flamed at him. “What in all the tragic, dramatic history of Rome is half so dramatic or a tenth so tragic as the burial of a Vestal? In all our centuries of ferocity, what seems half so cruel?
“I know that cruelty played no part in the invention of burial alive as a punishment for a convicted Vestal. I know that no caitiff could be found so vile as to dare to lay hands on a Vestal, no ruffian so reckless as to venture to end her life by sword or axe, by strangling or drowning. The most impious miscreant has too much fear of the gods to injure a consecrated priestess. The only way to dispose of a delinquent Vestal is to bury her alive. But the cruelty of it makes me choke. I think of the last hours of each of those who were punished, of their thoughts as the time drew near, of their feelings alone in the dark waiting for death to release them from their sufferings.
“I think of these underground cells as they are now, out there under that awful unkempt, ragged waste lot by the Colline Gate. I think of the skeletons mouldering on the mouldering cots, of the bones, the fragments of crumbling bones, the dust of crumbled bones on the stone floors, as they have been for hundreds of years, as they will be for thousands of years to come. The cot cannot yet have decayed from under what is left of poor Cornelia; her bones must still be entire and in order on the webbing; Aurelia’s bones must be whole yet and Licinia’s and Marcia’s; of Floronia there can hardly be left a trace by now, where Minucia died there can be only an empty stone cell. Do you wonder that the subject haunts me?”
“I do and I do not,” Aurelius replied. “I’ve let you relieve your mind by talking yourself tired. Now listen to me. I think I understand you perfectly. When you came to me before the novel responsibilities of your office had worn on your nerves and you were quivering with dread for fear you might be an unworthy priestess. Now the perils of your situation are wearing on your nerves and you are brooding over the possibility of accusation, trial, conviction and burial alive.
“I sympathize with you. As an Emperor I am exposed to the perpetual danger of assassination. You would be amazed if I detailed to you my various narrow escapes from death at the hands of disappointed seekers after preferment, of incompetent officials, of knaves with grievances of every conceivable and inconceivable variety and of fools with no grievance at all. You would be astonished if I merely reckoned the occasions on which I have just missed being killed. It gets on my nerves, more or less, of course. But I strive to bear up and remain calm and I succeed more or less. I keep before me the fact that as an Emperor I am obnoxious to countless hatreds from fancied slights and to uncountable schemes of revenge. I reflect that the danger is inseparable from the state of my being an Emperor. I try to be philosophical about it.
“So you must attempt to remain placid under the strain of the knowledge that you are exposed to perpetual danger of a horrible death from conviction on false accusation. It is part of the condition of being a Vestal. If anything goes wrong in the way of earthquake, flood, famine, pestilence, conflagrations or defeats, the populace are likely to cry out that some Vestal is unclean and bringing down on the Empire the wrath of the gods. That nothing of the kind has occurred during our recent afflictions has been clearly due to the holiness of Dossonia and Causidiena and to their reputation for strict discipline. But the danger of popular outcry is always real. Then there is the fact that far too large a proportion of our population are dissolute and that, among the dissolute-minded, all Vestals are under suspicion because they are the only women among our nobility who remain unmarried long after they have reached marriageable years. You must learn to take all this as a matter of course and to go sedately about your duties.
“Of course, I lessen my danger by keeping about me many trusty guards. It is right that you should appeal to me in your anxiety. I shall do what I can to lessen your danger. I believe in you. If you were accused before me it would take notably plain and convincing evidence to make me believe anything against you. I shall put my opinion of you on record among my papers of instructions to my successor. I shall declare it to all the Chief Pontiffs. I shall verbally and in writing make it clear to all concerned that you seem to me all you should be, that you are in an unusually difficult and delicate position and that in case of accusation all presumption should be in favor of your innocence and against the sincerity of your accusers.
“And now I think that ought to satisfy you and cover all the general considerations. Let us come to the special consideration that interests me chiefly. You have never come to me because you became gradually unnerved by brooding which had no specific origin or cause:
“Tell me plainly and outspokenly what has happened to you lately to fill your mind with thoughts of buried Vestals, trials, accusations and terrors?”
Brinnaria thereupon related her encounter with Calvaster and her conversation with Flexinna.
The Emperor stroked his beard and reflected.
“I have never liked Calvaster,” he said, “and if I had been in the city to consider recommendations for appointments he would, assuredly, never have become a member of Rome’s hierarchy. I deem him gravely unsuited for even the most minor grade of Pontiff. He appears to me to be mean-spirited, narrow-minded and base. I am inclined to believe of him all that you impute. But, even to such as Calvaster, we should be just. You complained, a while ago, that the judges of the Vestals had ignored both the facts and the evidence. Let us weigh the evidence and stick to the facts. The only fact you present is that you caught Calvaster lurking in your house. You confess that you were completely puzzled as to what motive brought him there. Your friend surmises an explanation which disgusts, insults and alarms you. You instantly credit it completely, think and act as if it were unquestionably true. I am prejudiced against Calvaster, as I have told you, yet I am by no means ready to admit that your beliefs about him are evidence against him, more particularly as they rest solely on Flexinna’s ingenious conjectures. The notion is plausible and it is entirely congruent with Calvaster’s character as I imagine it. Yet it is, after all, merely a plausible surmise. I am just as inclined to accept Calvaster’s own explanation; he is an inquisitive busybody.
“My verdict is that you need feel no alarm.”
“But I do,” Brinnaria maintained; “I do not feel safe with Calvaster anywhere about.”
The Emperor reflected.
“The peace of mind of a Vestal,” he said, “is a matter of such importance to the state that I should not hesitate about ordering Calvaster banished to some comfortable and healthy island and there detained permanently, were it not that the fellow has made himself almost indispensable. The pestilence has carried off practically all the adepts at interpretation of the sacred writings, the prophetic books, the rubrics and rituals of the various temples, the statutes of the brotherhoods and other orders of the hierarchy. Only Numerius Aproniarius remains of the older experts, and he is afflicted by an incurable and loathsome disease which he cannot long survive. Of the younger men only Calvaster has displayed any aptitude for learning this delicate and complex art, only he has attained any reputation. He is, in the circumstances, indispensable, I cannot banish him merely to please you. You will have to endure Calvaster.”
Brinnaria pulled a wry face, as in her mutinous girlhood. She felt entirely at ease with Aurelius.
“I perceive that I must endure him,” she said, “but if you cannot banish Calvaster, perhaps you’ll oblige me by banishing Almo.”
“Almo!” the Emperor exclaimed, “what can you have against that gallant lad? Have you turned against him? I thought you were unshakably resolved to marry him, thought you loved him unalterably!”
“I shall marry him, if we both live,” Brinnaria replied, “and most unalterably love him. But I love life and daylight and fresh air and my full meals even more. I have a splendid appetite, I loath stuffy places, I hate the dark. The idea of being shut in an underground cell to suffocate slowly or starve to death even more slowly goes against my gorge. I see myself in my mind’s eye climbing down that ladder, like poor Cornelia, I see myself stretched out on my cot, watching the ladder being pulled up by the executioner, watching the workmen fitting in the last stone of the vault. I imagine myself staring at the wick of the lamp and wondering how long the oil will last and debating whether it would be better to blow out the light and save the oil to drink and so live longer in the dark, or to let the lamp burn out and have the discomfort of the light a little longer. I fancy myself conning over the trifle of bread, milk, fruit and wine left on the stone slab, and speculating as to how long they’ll keep me alive.
“Bah!
“No burial alive for me.
“Acquittal on a trial is a poor way for a Vestal to escape the worst possible fate, a last resort, at best, and an unchancy reliance, even as a last resort. A far better way is never to be tried, and the best way never to be tried is never to be accused. You’ve been good enough to tell me that if I were accused you’d be predisposed to favor me in all possible ways and that you’ll give instructions as to your opinion of me. Any directions of yours would be respected by any heir of yours. But you yourself have just remarked how slender is an Emperor’s hold on life or on power. I may survive both yourself and your son. I might be tried before men we should never think of now. I must arrange so that I shall never be tried at all, I must live so that I shall never be accused.
“Now I am unlikely ever to be accused in relation to any man except Almo. Everybody knows I mean to marry Almo when my service is at an end, everybody knows he means to marry me, everybody knows we are in love with each other. That puts me in the most delicate position any Vestal ever was placed in. I have been extremely careful. I have never spoken to Almo since I was taken for a Vestal, have never met him except by accident, have never set eyes on him except against my will; have never even written a letter to him or received one from him. I have been, I think, wise, judicious and controlled. But Almo has not behaved well towards me.”
“Indeed!” Aurelius interjected. “You surprise me! What has he done?”
Brinnaria flushed.
“A girl in love,” she said, “is a fool, but she has sense enough to conceal her foolishness. A man is different. I suppose men are made that way and can’t help themselves. But a man in love is not only a fool, but he parades his foolishness. Almo sent me messages by all sorts of mutual acquaintances, by his people and mine, by Flexinna, by Nemestronia, by Vocco, begging me to exchange letters with him. I was angry and said so and repeatedly sent him word that he was most foolish and most inconsiderate. I sent him word that if he wanted to please me he’d ignore my existence and stay as far from me as possible.
“He actually begged his father to be allowed to come to Rome. His father had the good sense to keep him at Falerii. Now that all his relatives are dead and he is his own master he has come to Rome. If he had any real consideration for me he’d go to Aquileia, at least he might be satisfied with a popular resort like Baiae or a place like Capua; Capua has enough baths and shows and horse-races and gladiators for anybody.
“But he must come to Rome, when a spark of sense and decency would tell him to keep as far away as he could. It stands to reason that I could never be accused of misconduct with him if he had never been within a hundred miles of me since I was taken for a Vestal.
“But he must needs come to Rome. He has opened his house on the Carinae and had it put in order and has settled down to such a life here as is usual with wealthy leisured idlers. He has bought additional furniture, as if his father’s house wasn’t stuffed with everything magnificent, he has bought curios and antiques and statuary and pictures and books. He spends most of his time in the barracks of his favorite gladiatorial company or at the stables of the Greens, and the rest of it at the afternoon baths. I sent Vocco to him to protest and to urge him to leave Rome for my sake. The selfish wretch said he loved me and always would, but he just could not live anywhere except at Rome. He stays here, in defiance of my wishes and against all reason.”
“That is not what I should have expected of him,” the Emperor meditated. “I am surprised and far from pleased. I shall certainly find means to relieve your mind as far as he is concerned.”
“There is worse yet to tell,” Brinnaria went on. “You’d think that, if he must stay in Rome he’d at least have the decency to keep away from me and from places where he is likely to encounter me. He does just the reverse. He haunts me, he waylays me. He prowls up and down the Via Sacra and the Via Nova, he stands in the moonlight and stares up at the outside windows of the Atrium; on festival days he waits outside of our entrance to the Colosseum or of the Circus Maximus to watch me enter; on any day he loiters about the portal of the Atrium to watch me come out to my litter or my carriage, he dogs me on my airings.”
“Hercules!” Aurelius exclaimed. “This is too bad!”
“Too bad indeed,” Brinnaria pursued; “it would be bad enough from anybody in his position, from him it is ten times worse than from anyone else. You know how individual Almo is, how almost peculiar he looks, how no one would mistake him for anyone else or forget him or fail to recognize him. I have often tried to analyze the factors that go to make him look so striking, but I cannot. He is perfectly proportioned in every measurement, yet, somehow, he has a long-armed and long-legged appearance different from that of any young man in Rome, he gives almost the effect of reminding one of a spider or of a grasshopper or of a daddy-long-legs. It makes him the most conspicuous, the most recognizable man in all Rome. Why, if your son were to mingle in a crowd, habited like any other boy in that crowd and Almo did the same, and nobody in the crowd had any reason to expect to see either, Almo would most likely be noticed sooner than Antoninus, recognized more generally, more readily, further off and quicker.”
“You are right,” Aurelius mused, “I never thought of that, but Almo is unforgettable, striking and arresting to the eye beyond any lad in our nobility.”
“And being what he is,” Brinnaria raged, “he must needs arrange that nearly every crowd I am in should see him at the same time as me. Already thousands of reputable Romans must remember seeing us at the same glance. Before long the majority will be ready to recall, if the subject is broached, that they have habitually seen him wherever they saw me. Some one will start the talk and presently all Rome will buzz with the gossip that we are continually seen together. A charming state of affairs for me if some busybody or some enemy of mine raises the question of my fitness for my holy duties! I have protested. I’ve had Vocco go to Almo and urge all these considerations on him, and the silly boy says he can’t live without seeing me, that he longs for the sight of me so he cannot control himself. How’s that for lover’s folly? One minute he can’t live away from Rome, he loves Rome more than he loves me; the next minute I’m the one object on earth which he must behold or die. I’ve no patience with such imbecility.”
“And I have very little,” said the Emperor; “just enough to imagine a better way of disburdening you and of disposing of Almo than banishing him would be. The lad is far too good to be wasting his time with the horse-jockeys and charioteers and ostlers of the Greens, or brutalizing himself with the companionship of ruffianly prize-fighters, belonging to this or that speculator in the flesh of ferocious savages. He must find some outlet for his energies and interests and is carried away by the fashionable mania, which is corrupting our whole population, especially our young nobles, and which, even at his tender age, fills the thoughts of my son, to the despair of his tutors.
“All Almo needs is worthy occupation. I’ll put the sea between him and you and so put your mind at rest. I’ll make a man of him at the same time. I’ll appeal to his pride and his patriotism. Rome needs such keen-minded, capable youths on the frontiers. I’ll not give him too hard or too unpleasant employment, not relegate him to Britain or Dacia or Syria. I’ll send him to Africa to chase the desert nomads who are harrying the borders of Numidia and Mauretania. He can gain credit there without danger, can learn to command men and to know the great game of war. Nepte and Bescera are pleasant little cities—he will be comfortable between campaigns. I’ll see he sets out the day after to-morrow, at latest.”