"Hip! but thou art the same glib liar thou always wast, Aulus," the bankrupt laughed. "Take me into the light, and slap me with thy sword if I am frank beyond the privileges of mine acquaintance with thee!"
The gate-keeper, in response to a short word from the dubious Aulus, let down the chains with a rattle and a small side portal swung in, revealing an interior of semi-dusk.
The centurion conducted his visitor within. Torches stuck in sconces high up in the walls lighted a quadrangle of tessellated pavement, terminating distantly in banks of marble stairs of such breadth and stature that their limits were lost in the unilluminated night.
After a quick glance, the centurion started and slapped his helmet in salute to the bankrupt. The other responded with a skill and grace that could not have been assumed for the moment. The dexterity of the camp was written in the movement.
"I am expected of Capito," the bankrupt said, which was true only in a very limited sense.
"I know, and do thou follow. Thou shalt see him. Were he dead and inurned he would arise to thee."
The man in scarlet smiled a little grimly and followed his conductor out of the light up the marble heights of stairs duly set with sentinels, to a porch that even the Royal Colonnade of the Temple could not shame. A huge cresset with a jeweled hood, depending from a groining so high that its light was feeble, showed dimly the giant compound arch of the portal. An orderly, a veritable pygmy within the outline of the dark entrance, appeared and saluted.
"A visitor for the proconsul and his guest," the centurion said, passing the man in scarlet to the orderly.
He was led through a valve groaning on its granite hinges into the vestibule of Herod the Great's palace.
It was a lofty hall, nobly vaulted, lined with costly Indian onyx and florid with pagan friezes, arabesques and frescoes. Yet, though its jeweled lamps were dark and cold, its fountains still, its hangings and its carpets gone, its bloody genius held despotic sway from a shadowy throne, over the note of brute force which the Roman garrison had infused into it.