‘He is a runaway slave, whom for great misdemeanours the Emperor has ordered to be scourged,’ said Callicles, stepping forward.
‘Dare you disobey the Virgo Maxima?’ asked Lælia, with flashing eye. ‘Do you think that even the Emperor will insult the majesty of Vesta and her sacred fire, by questioning the immemorial prerogative of her eldest vestal? Take off the furca at once!’
The very lictors were overawed by her gesture of command. They hastily unbound the tired arms of Onesimus, and took the furca off his neck. What would happen to him he knew not, but he knew that for the time his life was saved.
‘Thanks, kindest of vestals,’ said Titus, gratefully kissing the purple hem of her suffibulum, and not betraying by look or sign that Onesimus was known to him. ‘I never saw a vestal exercise her prerogative before, and I am so glad to have seen it. May Vesta reward your sleep with her divinest dreams! May Opiconsiva bless you!’
‘Opiconsiva?’ said the vestal with difficulty suppressing a smile; ‘is the boy laughing at me? What do you know of Opiconsiva?’
‘Not much,’ said Titus, ‘except that she has something to do with vestals; and if so, Lælia must be very dear to her!’
Onesimus, with his usual quickness, took his cue from the conduct of Titus. The right of the vestals was well known in Rome, though it was rarely used, for they were not often seen in the streets. But it was understood that, in order to be valid, the meeting of vestal and criminal must be accidental. Lælia would have been seriously displeased had she known that she was in reality the victim of a little plot on the part of her boy-friend, and Titus was in some trepidation till he had hurried the vestal past the prisoner, and to the choice book-stall which was spread with the purple bindings of Atrectus. There she not only purchased for him the copy of Virgil, but, as he had quoted Seneca, she also gave him a radiant little volume of some of his treatises from the shop of his bookseller, Dorus, hard by. When she gave him this second gift the delighted youth felt a little compunction at his manœuvre.
No one knew what he had done; but, when he narrated the incident to Pudens, the tribune suspected the real state of the case, for the boy’s eye twinkled suspiciously as he told his little story with the most innocent candour.
BOOK II