CHAPTER VII.
ROME.
There are many travellers in the present day who, when they reach Rome, and exchange the railway for an omnibus, feel a throb of disappointment.
The “eternal city” of their dreams vanishes for the moment into thin air, and in place of it there is only a modern town, where the voices of the great past are lost in the noise and din of the present.
But the Rome upon which the eyes of Casca and Hyacintha gazed with intense wonder, on the September afternoon of 303, may hardly be adequately described, even by the aid of those wonderful discoveries which the zeal and untiring exertions of exploring labourers in the work of excavation have lately brought to light.
There has been, indeed, a partial resurrection of the buried Rome; the city lying beneath the heaped-up excrescences of a degenerate age has been unearthed. We can now dimly picture the glories of the noble Forum, with its temples and statues, the long stretch of the Appian Way, and the vast and almost illimitable proportions of the Circus Maximus, with its belt of distant mountains, and over all the cloudless sky, which seemed, on this glowing autumn day, to be hanging like one great canopy of celestial blue over the city set upon her seven hills.
The good Caius had taken the tired boy and girl to his mother’s house, as he had promised, with their two attendants. The stately old Roman matron received her son with a smile of welcome; and as they stood in the little atrium, uncertain what to do, she advanced to Casca and Hyacintha, and bade them welcome to enter, and rest for a season.
Caius, in a few words, related the events of the past few weeks; and when he came to the encounter with the pirates, and the deliverance of the small galley under his command, Clœlia clasped her hands, and said—
“Neptune has been pleased to receive my offerings, made daily for you, my son, since you left me for the region of the barbarian, now three years ago.”
“Nay, good mother, we speak not of barbarians now in Britain. Verulam is a little Rome, and as fair a daughter of our great mother as you can picture. The villa of Severus, which is the home of this fair maiden and her brother, is scarcely to be excelled here in all its furnishings and appointments, though, of course, less in size and extent.”
Clœlia led Hyacintha and her attendant to a small chamber, separated from her own by a curtain, and Caius took Casca, who was still weakened by the effects of his wound, to his own apartments, which in his absence were always prepared for his return at any moment.