The sky lurid and dark, the soil trembling beneath the feet of thousands of men and women, and there, far away, outlined against that sky, a figure stretched out upon a Cross. The head was bent in agony, the eyes half-closed, the lips livid and parted, the body broken with torments had the rigidity of death. But the arms were stretched out, straight and wide, as if with one last gesture of appeal and of longing, and in this storm-laden air there floated tender words, intangible and soft as a memory.
"Come unto me, all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you."
It was but a vision, swift as the lightning flash that conjured it and the words had already died on the stillness of the air.
But the tortured soul had found its anchorage. Taurus Antinor's hands fell from before his face.
"In Thy service, O Jesus of Galilee!" he said, and the mighty effort of subjection brought the perspiration to his brow and caused his limbs to tremble. "I saw Thine agony, Thy sacrifice; it should be so easy to do this for Thy sake. Give me the strength to render unto Cæsar that which is Cæsar's, and do Thou take from me all that is Thine."
She heard his words, she saw the look and knew that she had failed.
Back on the cruel wings of remembrance came the words of Menecreta the slave.
"May thine every deed of mercy be turned to sorrow and to humiliation, thine every act of pity prove a curse to him who receives it, until thou on thy knees art left to sue for pity to a heart that knoweth it not, and findest a deaf ear turned unto thy cry!"
And the curse of the broken-hearted mother seemed like the tangible response to the defiance which she, in her arrogance and her pride, had hurled against him who was called Jesus of Nazareth. She would have blessed Menecreta and Menecreta was dead; she would have given her life for the Cæsar and the Cæsar was a cowardly fugitive, and now on her knees she had sued for pity, and the heart which she had fought for to possess had turned from her as if it knew neither mercy nor love, and whilst her very soul had cried with longing she had found a deaf ear turned to her cry.
That unknown Galilean who died upon the cross had been stronger than her love. It was he who was filching it from its allegiance, he who was brushing and crushing this heart ere he wrested it finally from her—Dea Flavia Augusta of the imperial House of Cæsar!