“Let us go,” said the young man, frowning. “It is only a dumb, unconscious brute, and I am ashamed to have been so shaken by his mere roar. Aye, blink away, you hairy old villain. Thirty inches of steel between your ribs will reduce even you to silence, and that must be your fate at last, however wildly you may rage and foam over bleeding men first.”
“That is a thorough bad one,” said the negro keeper, who spoke Latin with difficulty. “I have tamed more than fifty; but all trouble is thrown away on this one. He is one of the mountain lions, and his father was a magician. I saw that at once, when the hunters brought him, that black tuft on his forehead shows it plainly.”
And, in fact, a tangled lock of black hair hung from the brute’s mane between his eyes.
“Is it your business to tame lions?” asked Quintus.
“I tame the mildest, and the fierce ones are kept for the fights. I have brought up three tame ones for the centennial games—as high as this—and they do the most wonderful things that have ever been shown in Rome. They take live hares[380] in their jaws and carry them three times round the arena, without even squeezing them.”
But Quintus was not listening; he had turned away. The brute’s scowl, as he kept his glaring eyes fixed on him, filled him with an uneasy feeling. Cneius Afranius appealed to him, too—with a pressing reminder, that a welcome was awaiting him—not to forget the young ladies and his mother in favor of rhinoceroses and giraffes; so they got away from the crowd and back to the high-road, where the chariot was waiting with the slaves.
The venerable Fabulla had received her guests at the garden gate, and had conducted them with repeated effusions of delight and gratitude to her pretty little house, almost hidden among olives and holm oaks, and bowered in ivy and vines. Here the young girls were seated under an autumn-tinted arbor-porch, and helped themselves to the grapes which hung within reach overhead. In front of them, on a round-table of pine-wood, stood a wicker basket of sweet-smelling wheat-bread, a half-emptied bowl of milk, and a dish of apples and pears. Near them lay a distaff, tied round with scarlet ribbons, and a spindle, for Fabulla was never for an instant idle, and spun her yarn even in the presence of such illustrious strangers.
“Children,” said Cneius Afranius, “this is the true Elysium.... The shade, the dull green of the olives, the vine-garlands, the delicious air, the fresh milk—it is superb! But to feel fully equipped for the enjoyment of it all, I must first get rid of all my business; for the present, then, I leave you to your fate. I must drink a cup of this milk—and then farewell. We shall live to meet again! Within an hour I shall be here again.” And with the tragic air of an actor playing the dying Socrates, he took up one of the red clay cups and solemnly lifted it to his lips.
“Stop, stop!” cried the good mistress. “You are taking mistress Lucilia’s cup.”
“Ah!” cried Afranius, replacing the cup he had drained on the table with mock penitence. "Mistress Lucilia will not be too severe, I hope, to forgive the mistake on the ground of my thirst and absence of mind.... Mother, your cows are improving, decidedly improving. Never did this nectar taste so truly Olympian as to-day. Great Pan himself must bless them."[381]