“As soon as you like. Two of my slaves will accompany you. This snake-ring, with my signet, will be your token.”
He drew off a ring, broken in its continuity as the law prescribed, and gave it to the girl, who was trembling with joy.
“Not an instant will I lose,” she cried excitedly. “You will see, his pride will melt like the snow on Soracte when spring returns.”
She hurried out into the atrium in front of the slaves, and got into her litter.
The governor of the prison had been duly warned; he came himself to the gate, and received the visitor with the politeness which seemed due to her misfortunes, her dignified demeanor, and her beauty, even more than to her rank and position. When she showed him the ring, which Titus Claudius had lent her, the governor bowed, as though to say that no such guarantee was needed. He begged her, however, to leave the slaves with the litter-bearers, and to follow him unescorted to the cell, where she was to be allowed a strictly private interview with Quintus. In an hour he would return and conduct her back.
The door turned heavily on its hinges, and with a half-suppressed cry of rapture and sorrow, Quintus and Cornelia were in each other’s arms. Pain and love, despair and hope, broke in that cry from their trembling hearts.
After the first storm of feeling had subsided, Cornelia took her lover’s hand, and looked up to him like a child beseeching a favor.
“Quintus,” she began tenderly, “how cruel you have grown. Do men then understand the meaning of no other word than Pride? Must everything be sacrificed to that idol—even all that is sweetest and most sacred? Your father—but why should I speak of others, when no one can suffer so much as I do! Woe, woe, and three times woe on the pride of your house! Accident threw you in the way of these Nazarenes, and so you have pledged yourself to defend their cause, even unto death, as if it were your own!”
“It is mine,” said Quintus, sadly looking at the ground.
“Oh yes! you will say so. A Claudius is not to be frightened into yielding! That is grand, magnanimous!—But what threats cannot do, love may. Quintus, only reflect, only think; try to comprehend all that your refusal involves. You are the son of a family whose happiness is centred in you, and the very idol of a devoted girl, who must die.—Do you hear me, Quintus? I shall die, if this hideous law hurts even a hair of your head. But I know, I know: in the eyes of a Roman and a Claudius, the only virtue is to persist in a thing you have once undertaken. Your poets praise tenacity as the crown of glory.[98] You would rather run headlong into error, than turn round and seek the right path. But in this case, Quintus—you must own it yourself—there is a tenacity, a wilfulness, which is a crime. You cannot possibly regard the wild stories of these Nazarenes as true?”