A faintness—a sudden weakness born of her recent journey—served for excuse, which Calavius seemed not unwilling to voice, and, surrounded by a guard of slaves, her litter bore her back to his house, through streets littered with drunken men and fluctuant with the figured robes of courtesans.
VI.
ALLIES.
Night had come again, before Marcia could arouse herself from the deep sleep with which exhaustion of mind and body had overwhelmed her. She remembered the scenes of the banquet as the phantasms of a dream—strange and terrible; for her thoughts were slow to gather the threads and weave the woof. Only a feeling of failure, of fruitless abasement, was ever present. Hannibal had admired her, but, proof against any controlling attraction, he had put her words aside with little short of contempt. A dread, even, lest the strange acumen of this wonderful man had pierced her mask, and that her very motive and mission were already suspected, was not lacking to add dismay to discouragement. Such thoughts were but wretched company, and they brought with them a vague conception of her own vain egotism in imagining the possibility of other outcome. She tried to sleep again, but could not. What mattered it though, by some shifting of hours, her day had become night and her night day! She must arise and talk with some one, if it were only the host whom she so heartily despised.
Attendants entered at her summons, and the refreshment of the bath and the labour of the toilet were once more passed through. Then, dismissing the slaves, she walked out alone into the garden and sat down on a softly cushioned seat of carved marble. A fountain plashed soothingly in the foliage near by, the stars were shining again, while, from without, the jarring sounds of the city came to her ears.
How long she sat, awake yet thinking of nothing, dull and dazed, she could not tell. Then she was aroused by a sandalled step upon the pavement. A man was standing before her, whose face, despite its youthful contours, was deep-lined and melancholy. He was short of stature and slenderly though gracefully built, and his black curls clustered over brow and eyes that seemed rather those of a poet or a dreamer than of a man of action. In the sombre, dark blue garments of mourning, without ornaments or jewels, so different from the gay banqueting robes in which she had last seen him, Marcia gazed a moment, before she recognized Perolla, the son of Pacuvius.
"You are not pretty to-night, Scylla," he said tauntingly, "though you left us early. There are dark circles under the eyes that looked kindly at the enemy of your country."
Marcia flushed crimson, and he went on: "Yes; I watched you smiling and ogling, but it will take greater traitors than you to snare him. He is like Minos, in that he did not reach out to take from your hands the purple lock shorn from your father's head: he is not like him otherwise: he is not just, and he will not give honourable terms."
"You, at least, are faithful to Rome?" said Marcia, slowly, and ignoring his insults.