CHAPTER V.
The post house, or mansio,[27] to which allusion has been made, situated about four or five miles south of Formiæ, on the Appian road, was a large, rambling, two-storied brick house, capable of accommodating a vast number of travellers. It was not, therefore, merely one of the many relay-houses where the imperial couriers, as well as all who could produce a special warrant for the purpose, from a consul, or a prætor, or even a quæstor, were allowed to obtain a change of horses; still less was it one of the low canal-town taverns, whose keepers Horace abused; but it was a regular country inn, where man and beast found shelter for the apparently infinitesimal charge of one as, (or not quite a penny,) and good cheer at proportionably moderate cost. It was well supplied from its own farm-yards, olive-groves, orchards, vineyards, pastures, and tilled fields, with vegetables, beef, mutton, poultry, geese, ducks, attagens, and other meats; eggs, wine, butter, cheese, milk, honey, bread, and fruit; a delicious plate of fish occasionally, an equally delicious array of quail, produced upon table in a state aromatic and frothy with their own fat juices.
This excellent and celebrated house of entertainment for belated or way-worn travellers, as well as for all who desired a change from the monotony of their usual life, was kept by a remarkably worthy old couple, formerly slaves, a freedman and freedwoman of the illustrious Æmilian family. The reader will have noticed that the youth whom it is necessary, we suppose, to acknowledge in the capacity of our hero, has been called Paulus Æmilius Lepidus; that his father had borne the same style; and likewise that his father's brother, the former sovereign magistrate or triumvir in the second and great triumvirate, was named Marcus Æmilius Lepidus. In all these names, that of Æmilius occurs; and Æmilius was the noblest of the patronymics which once this great family boasted. Now, theirs had been the house in which Crispus and Crispina, the good innkeeper and his wife, at present free and prosperous, had been boy and girl slaves. The wife, indeed, had been nurse to a son of Marcus Lepidus, the triumvir.
That son, some years before the date of our narrative, had been engaged in a conspiracy against Augustus; and the conspiracy having been discovered by Mæcenas, the youth had been put to death. Marcus Æmilius Lepidus, the father, was exculpated from all knowledge of this attempt on the part of his son, but had ever since lived in profound retirement at a lonely sea-shore castle some twenty or thirty miles from Crispus's inn, near Monte Circello; a silent, brooding, timid man, no longer very wealthy, entirely without weight in the society which he had abandoned, and without any visible influence in the political world, from which he had fled in some terror and immense disgust.
As Sejanus rode slowly up to the inn-door, a centurion came out of the porch with the air of one who had been waiting for him. Saluting the general, this officer said that he had been left behind by Velleius Paterculus to say that the sister of the youth whom Tiberius had placed under the charge of Paterculus had fainted on the road; that being unable to proceed, she and her mother had taken a lodging in the inn; that the youth had at once begged Paterculus to allow him to remain instead of proceeding to Formiæ, in order that he might attend to his poor sister, for whose life he was alarmed, giving his promise that he would faithfully report himself, and not attempt to escape; that Paterculus considered himself justified, under the circumstances, in acceding to so natural a request; consequently, that the young man was now in the inn, along with his mother and sister; and that he, the centurion, had been ordered to await Sejanus's arrival, and inform him of what had occurred, so that he might either confirm his subordinate's decision, or repair the mistake, if it was one, and cause the youth to go forward at once to Formiæ according to the letter of Tiberius's original command.
"It is well," said Sejanus, after a moment's reflection. "This is not the sort of lad who will break his word. Carthaginians, and rubbish like them, knew long ago how to believe a Roman knight and patrician, and this lad seems to be of the Regulus breed. Does the Cæsar himself, however, know of this?"
"I had no orders to tell him," answered the centurion; "and if I had had, it would have been difficult; he passed at full gallop a quarter of an hour ago, his head down, not so much as looking aside."
Sejanus then put the following question with a sneer,
"Has a god, or a stranger, with two attendants on horseback, passed this way?"
"No god, unless he be a god, and he had no attendants," said the astonished centurion.
"You have not seen three figures on horseback, nor a flash of bluish light?"
"I certainly thought I saw three figures on horseback, but I could not be sure. It was on the farther side of the way, general, which is broad," continued the man apologetically, "and there was no sound of hoofs; my impression, too, was gone in a moment. As to a flash of bluish light, there are several flashes of red and white light inside the inn kitchen, and they make the road outside all the darker; but there has been no flash in the road."
"Good! now follow me."
And Sejanus rode on in the direction of Formiæ, the centurion and the soldier behind him.