Greeting her with extreme reverence, he yet ventured to make her an unsuspecting agent in his little plot.
‘Noble Lælia,’ he said, with the charm of manner which few could resist, and with a ready fertility of invention, ‘I have just seen in the book-shop of Atrectus, in the Argiletum, just opposite the Forum of Julius, a charming little copy of Virgil’s Eclogues with such a good portrait! You promised me a present on my last birthday, and said I should choose it myself. May I have that book, and will you come and buy it for me? It is my birthday to-day.’
‘Certainly,’ said the vestal, with a smile. ‘For a boy like you, so good and steady, I would do much more than that.’ She little guessed that the birthday was a fib extemporised by Titus for his own purposes, for his birthday was on December 30.
‘Thanks, dear vestal,’ said Titus. ‘Will you not come by this short cut?’
He led her by the hand, her lictor following, into the Vicus Tuscus, which was close by the Argiletum, where he well knew that she would not fail to meet Onesimus and his escort. As they approached he said:
‘Oh, Lælia, how I should like to have your privilege of saving the lives of the wretched! See, there is some miserable slave whom they are taking to scourge or crucify. Will you not intercede for him?’
‘For a poor furcifer like that?’ asked Lælia. ‘Our high privilege is used for nobles—at the lowest, for freedmen.’
‘Are not slaves men like ourselves?’ he asked. ‘Musonius says so; and Seneca says so. Look, what a fine youth he is! He looks as if he had been free-born; and I dare say he has done nothing really wrong.’
Lælia glanced at the pallid, beautiful face of the sufferer. It would hardly have touched her heart, accustomed as she had been to the massacres of the arena, to which Nero of late years had invited the vestal virgins. But there was something in his youth, and something in the earnest pleading of her favourite Titus—something perhaps also in the sense of power—which decided her to interfere.
‘Stop!’ she said to the lictors and soldiers, as they bowed reverently before her majestic presence. ‘By virtue of my office, I bid you take off that furca, and spare the life of your prisoner.’