A powerful, vigorous woman, Cœlia Concordia carried things with a high hand. The little children, timid and tearful in the first few weeks of their discipleship, did not come to her with their sorrows. The maidens confided in her none of their hopes and fears. Cœlia loved the power the office gave her too well to resign it. Strong in body as in mind, she saw her old companions pass away, the children fade and die, the maidens droop and lose their fresh bloom; and she persecuted by a thousand little acts of tyranny two or three whom she suspected of having embraced the Christian faith; and Hermione was one who felt the full bitterness of her satire, and often quailed beneath it.
CHAPTER XVI.
ONWARD AND UPWARD.
When Claudius turned away from the Vestals’ home on the day of Hyacintha’s death, there was in his noble heart only one longing—to follow her whither she was gone.
Casca and little Cynthia were his guests, with the faithful Anna; and when Casca spoke of returning to Alexandria, Claudius begged him to delay. It seemed to Claudius like a second parting from the love of his whole life to lose the child who bore her name, and who returned the devotion of the old soldier with a childish affection which was inexpressibly sweet to him.
But Casca was anxious to return to Alexandria, where now he had made his home. Rome had lost its charm for him; there were few left to sympathise with him in his learned researches, and the great Museum of Alexandria, with its inexhaustible treasury of literature and art, had no rival in Rome.
To linger about the place where Hyacintha had lived, to recall her in all the long years of faithful and pure devotion which he had lavished upon her—this was the comfort of Claudius’s heart, but, naturally, with Casca it was wholly different.
He had loved her as a brother, and had retained his affection for her in the long years of separation, thinking tenderly of her as his little sister in the old home at Verulam, when she cheered him in the struggles which his early boyhood had known, in the consciousness of physical weakness, and the inward conviction that he had the mental power which, if it were but allowed scope, would stand him in far better stead than the sword and the battle-axe.
But he had made new ties, and gathered round him the joys of home. While his young wife lived he had been happy in the present; and the past, which was all to his friend Claudius, was to him like a pleasant but fading dream.