So she had called aloud the evening after the refusal to set her at liberty, perched high among the branches of the pine-tree into which she liked to climb to dream alone, and at the same moment stretched her beautiful arms, with a gesture of longing entreaty, toward the northwest, where lightning was flashing over the mountain peaks.
On the evening after the inspection (it was the day of the assembly on the Holy Mountain) she walked through the streets of the camp, thinking and dreaming of her liberation, also of her liberator. She had tied faithful Bruna firmly to the poles of her tent; for there had repeatedly been serious trouble when she took the animal with her: boys belonging to the camp followers pelted her with stones, from safe hiding-places, till she was greatly infuriated.
To Ausonius's nephew, especially, the bear showed intense antipathy, rising on her hind legs and growling furiously whenever she saw him, though he anxiously kept out of her way and never teased her. Only with the utmost difficulty, by clasping her arms around the animal, had she prevented Bruna from attacking him.
"Your she-bear understands Latin," said Saturninus, who had sprung to help her, smiling. "She knew what Herculanus said when he swore that some day she should pay in the amphitheatre at Rome, under the teeth of his Thessalian dogs, for the mischief she meant to do him here."
"Bruna in Rome?" the girl cried defiantly. "No more--than Bissula in Burdigala!" But as she spoke she almost wept from rage, hate, and fear.
CHAPTER XLI.
Oppressed by sad yearning and anxiety, the usually light-hearted child had again walked this evening from her tent to the lake gate, and thence, driven back by the shouts of the Thracian sentries, wandered through the whole camp to her beloved pine-tree, which had begun to supply the place of the oak beside her forest home: for the tree of the earth-goddess also afforded a convenient ascent like a stairway on its broad branches drooping to the sacrificial stones, while on the central trunk was a hiding-place invisible from below, with a comfortable back, and the beloved view over the Roman fortifications to the mountain peaks rising in the distance.
The sun had set long before, and darkness gathered quickly in that region as soon as the glowing ball had vanished behind the wooded western shores of the lake. There was no moon; only a few stars were in the sky.
The wind bore to her ears from the distance scattered sounds: the neighing of a horse, the rattle of a weapon, the shout of a sentinel at the gate. Oh, those guards, who also watched her here in her spacious prison, prevented her escape, her return to her people--for how much longer? Sorrow overpowered her, and she felt that tears were about to flow. But her tyrants should not see them; she would weep her fill, up above there!
Bissula glided lightly up and sat so still in her hiding-place among the boughs that a belated bird--a blackbird--perched for the night, without seeing her, a few branches above her head.