Even as I did so there was a mighty crack, a groaning of a thousand timbers, and there before my very face, with a resounding roar, Electra’s lordly mansion, and all the wings, and buttresses, and basements, the rooms, and colonnades, and corridors of that splendid home of luxury and power, lurched forward, and heaved, and collapsed in one mighty red ruin that tinctured the sky from east to west, and buried alike in one vast, glowing hecatomb besiegers and besieged!
It had fallen, the last stronghold of Roman authority, and there was nothing more to defend! I turned, and took me to the quiet forest pathways, every nook and bend of which I knew. As I ran, the sweet, moist air of the evening was like an elixir to my heated frame; now into the black shadows I plunged, and anon brushing the silver moonlight dew from bramble and bracken, while a thousand fancies of our stubborn fight danced around me.
In a little time the road went down to a river that sparkled in flood under the moonbeams. Here the laden mules had crossed into comparative safety, and now I had to follow them with a single guide-rope to feel my way alone across the dangerous ford. I struggled through the swollen stream safely, though it rose high above my waist, and then who should loom out of the dark on the far side but Electra, standing alone and expectant at the brink.
Faithful, stately matron! She was so glad to see me again I was really sorry I did not love her more. I told her something of the fight, and she a little of the retreat. Some time before the long train of mules and slaves had gone on up the steep slowing bank, and into the coppice beyond, and now I and the Roman dame lingered a minute or so by the brink of the turgid stream to see the last flickers of her burning home. We were on the point of turning; indeed, Lady Electra seemed anxious to be gone, when, stepping out of the dark pathway into a patch of moonlight on the farther shore, a little silver casket in her duteous hands, and those dainty skirts in which she took so much pride muddy and soiled, appeared the poor little slave Numidea.
She tripped fearfully forth from the shadows and down to the brink, where the water was swirling against the stones in an ivory and silver inlay; and when she saw (not perceiving us in the shadow) that all the people had gone on and she was deserted to the tender mercies of the foemen behind, she dropped her burden, and threw up her white, clasped hands in the moonlight, and wailed upon us in a way that made my steel cuirass too small for my swelling heart.
Surely such a pitiful sight ought to have moved any one, yet Electra only cursed those nimble feet under her breath, and from this, though I may do her heavy injustice, I have since feared she had planned the desertion and sent the maid back to be killed or taken on some false errand which for her jealous purpose was too quickly executed.
That noble Roman lady pulled me by the hand, and would have had me leave the girl to her fate, scolding and entreating; and when I angrily shook myself free, turning her wild, untutored passions into the channels of love, told me she had guessed my project of leaving her “for Numidea,” and clung to me, and endeared me, and promised me “the tallest porch on Palatina” (as I threw off my buckler and broadsword to be lighter in the stream) and “the whitest arms for welcome there that ever a Roman matron spread” (as I pitched my gilded helmet into the bushes and strode down to the torrent), if I would but turn my back once for all upon my little kinswoman.
Three times the white arms of that magnificent wanton closed round me, and three times I wrenched them apart and hurled her back, three times she came anew to the struggle, squandering her wild, queenly love upon me, while, under the white light overhead, the tears shone in her wonderful upturned eyes like very diamonds; three times she invoked every deity in the hierarchy of the southern skies to witness her perjured love, and cursed, for my sake, all those absent youths who had fallen before her. Three times she knelt there on the black and white turf, and wrung her fair hands and shook out her long, thick hair, and came imploring and begging down to the very lapping of the water. And there I stood—for I too was a Southern, and could be hot and fierce—and spoke such words as she had never heard before—abused and scoffed and derided her: laughed at her sorrow and mocked her grief, and then turned and plunged into the torrent.
The ford was not long: in a minute or two I struggled out on the farther shore, and Numidea, with a cry of pleasure and trustfulness, came to my dripping arms.