“I can think of my aunt better here,” Cynthia said, “the beautiful and the good. I feel her nearer me here than in that dark, gloomy hall; the statue beneath which is only written, ‘No. XIII,’ may be her likeness, but I love to think of her as Claudius told me always to think of her—passed from the darkness of earth into the Light of God, wearing the Crown of Light, after bearing the Cross of suffering. All earthly things fade and vanish, but that Crown fadeth not away. Ah! I am glad I am a Christian!”
And now the shadow of the Great Past closes over those whose lives, or rather the fragments of whose lives, we have followed through long years in this little story. The silence which throws its mantle like a veil over the ruins of the temple and the atrium of the Vestals cannot be broken.
The statues of the Vestales Maximæ stand like voiceless messengers from that time of darkness—a darkness which was, as we know, the darkness before the dawn. In the old Rome, which is so continually brought to the surface from the covering dust of centuries, there can scarcely be a figure round which so much interest might be supposed to gather as round the nameless statue of the Vestal, whose story imagination may supply in many colours and in many forms—each one, for himself, as he stands before it, may clothe it as he will. But that of the noble, earnest soul struggling towards the Light, and rising from the dry chrysalis of a worn-out faith to the flight of the unimprisoned spirit upward to God—who is the Light—has seemed as full of probability as of charm. And it is easy to believe that a woman like Cœlia Concordia, herself unable to soar and yet conscious that her aims were after all but earthly and sordid, might grudge one of the most beloved and most highly gifted of the priestesses the unsparing meed of praise which the inscription commemorates. Yet, she might have reflected, if the inscription remained without a name the identity of Hyacintha would never be discovered, and thus the once-honoured and beloved Vestal would be known henceforth only as
Number Thirteen.
THE END.
PRINTING OFFICE OF THE PUBLISHER.
FOOTNOTES: