‘Because you are ignorant of the danger you stand in. To such as you, of all people in the world, the pestilential air of this island is fraught with dire peril.’
‘I care not, for I am with you.’
‘Your position admits of little jesting, believe me,’ said Martialis, in a voice which exhibited an amount of stern impatience; ‘you are wasting precious moments—I am here at your request: let me know in what I am to serve you, and I will at once answer whether I can be of help. Were the hand of Caesar to drop upon us now you would find your safeguard in as sorry a plight as yourself. That you know right well, Plautia, and you delivered the raillery with effective gravity. I neither ask nor desire to know the cause of your extraordinary presence in this spot, but my apprehension certainly is that you wish me to assist you to leave.’
‘Your apprehension is wrong,’ replied the Roman beauty, in low, nervous tones, barely to be heard; ‘I came hither impelled by a feeling against which it was impossible to strive. It urged me through the hideous fatigue and disgust of the voyage hither, and it upholds me, undismayed, at the presence [pg 213]of danger. You impress upon me that I am beset with dire peril. It may be so—I can well believe it; but I am careless of it. Fear I never knew, and in this hour of all it can find less room than ever in my heart.’
Her head sank down, and her murmured words seemed to struggle with her hurried breathing, begot by a state of extreme tremor.
The Centurion knitted his brows, and, for a few moments, he remained in silent embarrassment. The deep shade of the thicket was friendly to his companion, and shrouded the outward symptoms of her feelings from his glance, but what his ears drank in was sufficient to make his mind uneasy and suspicious. He had really been under the impression that his companion’s presence in the island was probably due to some affair of intrigue, and, indeed, if her explanation had not seemed to so fully confirm the protection or connivance of Sejanus, he would at once have arrived at that conclusion, from the well-known fact of her intimacy with him. In expectation, therefore, of some political plan or plot in which she required him to join, he had been anxious to bring the interview to an end, being utterly averse to entangle himself in anything of the kind, or even to run the chance of being discovered in her company. But now he was as little disposed to force the matter to a conclusion, as before he had been anxious, and, in uncomfortable doubt, he began, very naturally, to chafe for having allowed himself to be so carelessly led into such a position. Had he only been prudent enough to consider, he might have at once concluded that nothing but mischief lay planted between the lines of an anonymous letter.
But the lady vouchsafed no other speech, and, anxious to appear quite unconscious of any particular purport in her words, he hastened to break the silence, in an assumed manner of artlessness and lightness, which is often used, alike to stave off an unpleasant subject and to play with one as delightful.
‘Fear, I am well assured, is a weakness unaccustomed to your breast,’ he said, ‘and, if I gather rightly from your words, you confess to be in subjection, no less than the rest of your sex, to the passion which they say rules feminine nature. [pg 214]Nevertheless I wish, on this occasion, for your own sake, fear had tempered curiosity a little.’
‘Curiosity!’ she returned with passionate scorn; then her voice sank to its former nervous intonation. ‘And yet I said false, Martialis, when I boasted of my fearlessness. I thought I was proof,—thus far without it, and now, lo, it has found me out.’
‘No! no!’ she continued rapidly, as he uttered some halting commonplace, ‘not business of Prefect, nor of Caesar, nor yet whim, nor curiosity, but only my heart and thee, Martialis,—Lucius! Have you not seen? Do you not see?’