The Christians wept and embraced each other; they were led away to separate rooms in the prison. Quintus’ turn came last, and to him the governor had assigned a separate cell. He crossed its threshold with calm deliberation; the gaoler set down some food and drink—not a better sort of food, such as was usually granted to prisoners of rank, but the ordinary criminal’s fare. Then he shut the heavy, iron-plated door, and pushed the three outside bolts.
Quintus sank on the stone bench[90] that served as a bed-place, utterly annihilated; the last drop of his self-command seemed to evaporate, as the echoing steps of the gaoler died into silence. He covered his face with his hands, and a wild groan broke from him; then for nearly an hour he sat stunned and motionless.
Exhaustion and cold recalled him to his senses; a raw, damp atmosphere pervaded the underground vault. He shuddered and drew his cloak, which had fallen off, over his shoulders; then he looked round him.
The cell was rather longer than it was wide, rectangular, and just high enough to allow of his standing upright. By day a niggardly ray of light might be admitted through a round hole in the roof; at present a smoky little oil-lamp was burning on one side of the room, opposite the bed-place. Besides this couch the cell contained a rough wooden bench and a short iron rivet, furnished with rings and chains, to which the temporary resident in the cell could be secured, and he perceived a second rivet of the same kind on the opposite side near the bed.
With a tremulous hand he lightly touched the rattling irons; it made him shiver. He started to his feet, and began to pace the cell in feverish excitement. He involuntarily remembered that Gaetulian mountain lion which, at Ostia, had rushed so fiercely at the bars of its cage.... He, a proud and noble Roman, was caged now, no better off than a wild beast.—No better! His scornful laughter echoed uncannily through the vaults. He compared the lion’s airy and open cage with the hideous dungeon that held a man but just now free and happy—and he envied the brute. That clumsy, dull, black door confronted him as though it could never open again; he went close up to it, struck it with his fists, and tried to shake it. It neither moved nor rattled. It was as immovable in the masonry as the lid of some huge primeval sarcophagus. He suddenly felt helplessly inconsolable, and pressing his forehead against the cold iron plate, he cried like a child.
What was that written in Greek characters—carefully, elaborately scratched by hands that had all-too-much time? He read through his tears a message of promise.
“Jesus, my Saviour and Redeemer.—To Thee I live and die.”
Then some other follower of the Christian faith, some fellow-sufferer in the cause, had here awaited his fate. Laboriously, and to comfort his stricken heart, he had left a record in the dungeon, where he lingered and pined, to greet and console a successor. And it was no cowardly lament, no cry of despair, but a brave confession, a word of heavenly confidence and beatific submission to the Master. Quintus felt, what so many thousands have felt since: the overpowering attractiveness of example; the bliss, the charm of martyrdom. This creed, which made the most agonizing death so easy, and filled the most wretched with peace, calmness, joy—must indeed be the creed of redemption, high above all that the wisdom of men had yet devised—and it would surely pour balm even into his aching wounds, and bear him up on the wings of enthusiasm to triumph over the terrors of death.
Strangely comforted, he carefully examined the walls all round, and he found numbers of inscriptions, some hardly legible in the rough stone, but all telling the same tale of suffering and of supreme faith, of death for the truth’s sake and the beatitude of a godly frame of mind.
In one place, in Latin, he read as follows: “I, Sericus, forty-three years old, and I, Psyche, the daughter of Sericus, seventeen years old, write this; imprisoned here by the city-prefect under Nero. We are Christians; we die for the faith. We forgive our enemies and hope for God’s mercy.” Close by, in Greek, was written: