The British, hot on the track, were shouting to one another in the dark pursuit, so the little maid was picked up securely, and, with her in my left arm upon my hip, her warm wrists about my neck, and my other hand on the guide-rope, we went back into the stream again. By the sacred fane of Vesta, it ran stronger than a mill sluice, and tugged and worried at my limbs like the fingers of a fury! I felt the pebbly gravel sifting and rolling beneath my feet, and the strong lift of the water, as it swirled, flying by in the moonlight, hissing and bubbling at my heaving chest in a way that frightened me—even me. At last, with every muscle on fire with the strain and turmoil, and my head giddy with the dancing torrent all about it, I saw the farther bank loom over us once more, and, heaving a heavy sigh of fatigue, collected myself for one more crowning effort.
But I had forgotten that royal harpy, my mistress; and, even as I gathered my last strength in the swirl of the black water below, she sprang to the verge of the bank overhead, vengeance and hatred flashing in the eyes that I had left full of gentleness and tears, and gleaming there in her wrath, her white robes shining in the moonlight against the ebony setting of the night, and glowered down upon us.
“Down with the maid!” she screamed, with all the tyrant in her voice. “Down with her, Centurion, or you die together!”
“Never! never!” I shouted, for my blood was boiling fiercely, and I could have laughed at a hundred such as she. But while I shouted my heart sank, for Electra was terrible to behold—an incarnation of beautiful cruelty, hot, reckless hatred ruling the features that had never turned upon me before but in sweetness and love. For one minute the passion gathered head, and then, while I stood in the current with dread of the coming deed, she snatched my own naked sword from the ground. “Die, then!” she yelled; “and may a thousand curses weigh down your souls!” As she said it the blade whirled into the moonlight, descending on the guide-rope just where it ran taut and hard over the posts, severing it clean to the last strands with one blow of those effective white arms, and the next minute the hempen cord was torn out of my grasp, and over and over in a drowning, bewildered cascade of foam we were swept away down the stream.
“Die, then!” she yelled; “and may a thousand curses weigh down your souls!”
It was the wildest swim that ever a mortal took. So fiercely did we spin and fly that heaven and earth seemed mixed together, and the white clouds overhead were not whiter than the sheets of foam that ran down seaward with us. I am a good swimmer, but who could make the bank in such a caldron of angry waters? and now Numidea was on top, and now I. It went to my heart to hear the poor little Christian gasp out on “Good St. Christopher!” and to feel the flutter of her breast against my leather jerkin, and then presently I did not feel it at all. Many an island of wreckage passed us, but none that I could lay hold on, until presently a mighty log came foaming down upon us, laboring through that torrent surf like a full-sailed ship. As it passed I threw an arm over a strong root, and thus, for an hour, behind that black midnight javelin we flew downward, I knew not whither. Then it presently left the strong stream, and towing me toward a soft alluvial beach, just as dawn was breaking in the east, deposited me there, and slowly disappeared again into the void.
This is all I know of Roman Britain; this is the end of the chapter.
As I reeled ashore with my burden some friendly fisherfolk came forward to help, but I saw them not. Numidea was dead! my poor little slave-girl—the one speck of virtue in that tyrant world—and I bent over her, and shut her kindly eyes, and spread on the sand her long wet braids, and smoothed the modest white gown she was so careful of, with a heart that was heavier than it ever felt yet in storm or battle!
Then all my grief and exertions came upon me in a flood, and the last thing I remember was stooping down in the morning starlight to kiss the fair little maid upon that pallid face that looked so wan and strange amid the wild-spread tangles of her twisted hair.