"Silence, Hortensius!" admonished Ancyrus, the elder.
"Nay, I'll not be silent!" retorted the young man, who seemed at last to have lost all control over his jealous passion. His eyes, in which gleamed the fire of intense hate, swept from the face of his enemy to that of his friends whom they challenged. His voice had become raucous and hoarse and his tongue refused him service, making his words sound inarticulate.
"Do ye not see," he shouted, turning his flushed face toward the others, "do you not see how you are being fooled? The praefect stands high in the Cæsar's favour, he has the Cæsar's ear——"
"Silence!" broke in in peremptory accents the voice of Caius Nepos, the host.
"Silence!" cried some of the younger men.
"No! No! I'll shout! I'll shout!" persisted Hortensius with the crazy obstinacy of one whose mind is obscured with liquor and with passion, "I'll shout until you understand. Fools, I tell ye! Fools are ye all! You tell this man of your schemes, of your plans! He listens blandly to you!... You fools! you fools! Not to have suspected ere this that his so-called loyalty to Cæsar masks his treachery to us!"
He was kneeling now upon his couch, and with clenched hands was pounding against the cushions like an angry child. The tumult became general; everyone was shouting. Those who were nearest to this raving young maniac were trying to seize him, but he waved his arms about like the wings of a night bird, and anon he seized a goblet of heavy solid metal and struck out with it to the right and left of him, so that none dared come nigh.
But the praefect stood quietly beside him, with arms held very tightly across his mighty chest, his dark eyes fixed upon the raving figure on the couch. No one had ventured to approach him, for the feeling of superstitious awe which he had aroused in them a while ago had not wholly died down, and now there was such a look of contempt and of wrath in his face that instinctively the most sober drew away from him, and those whose minds were obscured with wine looked upon him in ever growing terror.
Suddenly Hortensius, brandishing the heavy goblet, raised it high above his head, and with a drunken and desperate gesture he flung it in the direction of the praefect, but his hand had trembled and his arm was unsteady. The goblet missed the head of Taurus Antinor and fell crashing along the marble-topped table, bringing a quantity of crystal down with it in its fall.
A few drops of the wine from the goblet had fallen on Taurus Antinor's tunic, and from the parched throat of young Hortensius there rose a hoarse and immoderate laugh and a string of violent oaths. But even before these had fully escaped his lips he saw the praefect's dark face quite close to his own, and felt a grip as of a double vice of steel fastening on both his shoulders.