All travelling was long and dangerous in those times. The tribes of Gaul—the Burgundæ—had risen in 287, and Carausius, who had carried all before him for ten years in Britain, had once been amongst them.
The troop which Burrhus commanded did not pass through the country without several fierce encounters with the Burgundæ, and the women were terror-struck with the clash of arms, and the savage cries of the wild bands which again and again attacked them. The wife of Burrhus was attended by several ladies and slaves, and Hyacintha and Casca each had their own attendant. Hyacintha’s was a girl of Roman birth, who thought it an honour to be the servant of a young aspirant to the office of a priestess in the temple of Vesta.
In one of the most alarming encounters Casca was wounded in the shoulder. His father had given Burrhus instructions to lose no opportunity of hardening his son, and to do everything that might make him worthy to be a Roman soldier, so that he was placed in the front rank of this skirmish.
Poor Casca suffered terribly from his wound, though in the eyes of the soldiers it was but a trifling one.
His sensitive organism, so widely different from that of the big and burly Burrhus, excited contempt rather than pity, and as it was a drag upon their movements to have to carry a litter with a wounded man, Burrhus determined to embark his troop on board two Roman galleys which were lying in the port of Marseilles, and perform the rest of the journey by water.
This plan was hailed gladly by the ladies of the party, and especially by Hyacintha, who could sit continually by her brother, as he lay on the deck of the galley, and talk to him, or be silent, as he liked; but Casca was gloomy and sad, and lamented that the spear of the wild warrior who had overpowered him had not made an end of him altogether.
The galley was lying one evening off the coast of that part of southern France and northern Italy we know as the Riviera.
Beyond the rugged outline of the rocky range, lofty mountains rose—the peaks of eternal snow, the white-crowned line of the Alpes Maritimes. The evening was fair and calm, and the sails of the galley hung idly in the gentle breeze.
Hyacintha’s soul was filled with the beauty before her, and Casca’s large mournful eyes were turned towards the snowy peaks, now blushing rosy-red with the last kiss of the setting sun.
“That,” Casca said, “looks like the city Ebba murmured about. I never could make out where it was, nor how it was to be reached. Poor Ebba!” he repeated. “I wonder if she is dead, like Alban, and passed hence? and if so, whither?”