At length the toilette was completed, and the lady, richly dressed, repaired to the public bath, which was as much frequented in Verulam as in Rome. The baths of these times answered to the fashionable clubs and resorts of to-day. Acquaintances and friends met there, discussed the news, expressed surprise at the slow arrival of the post from Rome, one of the chief stations for news being placed at Verulam, talked gossip and scandal, as is the custom with unoccupied women of every rank and every nation, in that time, as in our own.
Cæcilia was accounted beautiful, and a person of distinction. She was one of the leaders of fashion, and her cosmetics and perfumes were the admiration of her friends, and the envy of her enemies.
Perhaps the word “enemy” is too strong a word to use. Cæcilia had scarcely enough character to provoke an enemy. Her colourless nature knew no strong shadows and no bright lights. She lived for herself and the passing hour, and the maternal instinct was dead within her—dead, so far as any trouble about her children was concerned. She could love them till they needed anything at her hands, but if that point were reached, her love could not show itself in taking any trouble on their behalf. From all we can gather in contemporary records, the atmosphere in which the fashionable Roman lady of these times lived and moved was a deadening one. A few sprang out of it, who read and studied their own Latin authors and the Greek tongue, and with a wonderful persistency of purpose mastered many abstruse questions, and hungered after higher and better things, and nobler aims.
But Cæcilia, the wife of Severus, was content to be ignorant; she thought this Christianity, which had cost her the services of her slave, low and vulgar, too low and vulgar for her to give it a thought, if she had one to give. And when she had settled herself on a couch in the public baths with her three attendants, she was not well pleased to find Junia, the sister of Claudius, next her, and intent on asking questions and getting them answered.
Junia was the daughter of a British chief, or noble, as the Romans preferred that title, who had married an Italian girl, previously attached to the person of one of the ladies brought by a former governor from Rome.
The stern and rough old Briton had become enslaved by the beauty and fascination of the young Cornelia, and had laid himself and all he possessed at her feet.
She had withered under the cold breath of the north country, and the rude luxury of the Briton’s home had been little in harmony with the early life Cornelia had spent in Italy. She had died and left her husband disconsolate, with two children on his hands, whom he found it hard to manage. They united the bold daring of the Briton with the quick, hot passions of the Italian, and before Junia was fifteen she had thrust a stiletto, in a fit of rage, into the breast of a slave, and killed her!
To our notions this dreadful act would have brought upon the girl a lifelong misery, and she would have been for ever withdrawn from the society of her friends and relations. But it was widely different then. The sharp and highly-polished stiletto was always at hand, and a prick from it, which drew blood, was frequently administered to a careless or idle slave.
If the wound had by chance been deeper than was intended—well, it was only the loss of a piece of property, and the master would bear it!
One slave, more or less, was not of very great moment to a wealthy proprietor. And the slave herself, unless, as in the case of Ebba, who had suited the whims of her mistress, was scarcely missed.