“Fie! to be thus withstood by a fameless mercenary. Why thus must I, unaccustomed, sue this one—the least worthy of them all—and lavish on his dull plebeian ears the sighs that many another would give a province or two to hear?—I, who have slighted the homage of silk and scarlet, and Imperial purple, even! Lucullus was not half so dull—or Palladius, or Decius; and that last of many others, my witty Publius Torquatus, would have diagnosed my disease and prescribed for it all in one whisper.”
Poor lady! It was not within me—though she did not know it—to hold out for long against the sunshine and storm of her impetuous nature. Neither her abominable cruelties nor her reckless rapacity could suffice to dim her attractions—many a time since, when that comely personage has been as clearly wiped from the page of life, as utterly obliterated from the earth as the very mound of her final resting-place, have I regretted that she was not born to better days, and then, perchance, her fine material might have been run into a nobler mold.
She was jealous, too; and it came about in this way. Very soon after I had taken service with her, whom should I espy, one morning, feeding the golden pheasants outside the veranda, but my little friend, Numidea. Often I had thought of that maid, and determined to discover that “big house” where she had told me she was bondwoman, and the “great lady” who sent her tripping long journeys into the town for the powders and silk stuffs none could better choose. And now here she was on my path again, a roofmate by strange chance, with her graceful, tender figure, and her dainty ways, and that chronic friendly smile upon her mouth that brought such strange fancies to my mind every time I looked upon it. Of course, I befriended the maid as though she were my own little one, not so many times removed, and equally, of course, Lady Electra noticed and misread our friendship. Poor Numidea! She had a hard life before I came, and a harder, perhaps, afterward. You compassionate moderns will wonder when I tell you that Numidea has shown me her white silk shoulders laced with the red scars of old floggings laid on by Electra herself, and the blood-spotted dimples here and there, where that imperious dame had thrust, for some trivial offense, a golden bodkin from her hair deep into that innocent flesh. No one knew better than my noble mistress how to give acute torture to a slave without depreciating the market price of her property.
But when I became of more weight—when, in brief, my comely tigress was too fast bound to be dangerous—I spoke up, and Electra grew to be jealous and to hate the small Christian slave-girl with all the unruly strength that marked her other passions.
Thus, one day having discovered Numidea weeping over a new-made wound, I sought out the offender, and as she sauntered up and down her tessellated pavements I shook my fist at her Queenship, and said:
“By the bright flame of Vesta, Lady Electra, and by every deity, old or new, in the endless capacity of the skies, if you get out your abominable flail for that girl again, or draw but once upon her one of your accursed bodkins, I will—marry her among the smoking ruins of this white sty of yours!”
When I spoke to her thus under the lash of my anger, she would uprise to the topmost reach of her height, and thence, frowning down upon me, her shapely head tossed back, and her draperies falling from her crossed arms and ample shoulders to the marble floor, she would regard me with an imperious start that might have withered an ordinary mortal. So beautiful and statuesque was her ladyship on these occasions, towering there in her own white hall like an image of an offended Juno in the first flush of her queenly wrath, that even I would involuntarily step back a pace. But I did not cower or drop my eyes, and when we had glowered at each other so for a minute or two the royal instinct within her was no match for traitor Love. Slowly then the woman would come welling into her proud face, and the glow of anger gave way upon her cheeks; her arms dropped by her sides; she shrank to mortal proportions, and lastly sank on the ebony and ivory couch in a wild gust of weeping, wofully asking to know, as I turned upon my heels, why the slave’s trivial scars were more to me than the mistress’s tears.
My Vice-Prefect was avaricious, too. There was stored in the spacious hollows below her villa I know not how much bronze and gold squeezed from those reluctant British hinds whose old-world huts clustered together in the oak clumps dotting the fertile vales as far as the eye could see from our roof-ledges on every hand. Had all the offices of the Imperial Government been kept as she kept her duties of tax collecting, the great empire would have been further by many a long year from its ruin. And the closer Electra made her accounts, the more deadly became her exactions, the more angry and rebellious grew the natives around us.
Already they had heard whispers of how hard barbarians were pressing upon Rome, day by day they saw Britain depleted of the stalwart legionaries who had occupied the land four hundred years, and as phalanx after phalanx went south through Gaul to protect the mother city on the Tiber, their demagogues secretly stirred the people up to ambition and discontent.
Nor can it be denied the villains had something to grumble for. Society was dissolute and debased, while the country was full of those who made the good Roman name a byword. The British peasant had to toil and sweat that a hundred tyrants, the rank production of social decay, might squander and parade in the luxury and finery his labor purchased. Added to this, the pressing needs of the Emperor himself demanded the services of those who had taken upon themselves for centuries the protection of the country. As they retired, Northern rovers, at first fitfully, but afterward with increasing rigor, came down upon the unguarded coasts, and sailing up the estuaries, harried the rich English vales on either side, and rioted amid the accumulated splendor and plenty of the luckless land to their heart’s content.