Cethegus smiled.
"You do not believe in heavenly vengeance? Well, then, believe in the vengeance of a miserable mother! You shall tremble! I will hasten to the Queen and tell her all! You shall die!"
"And you will die with me."
"With a smile--if only I can see you perish!" and she would have hurried away, but Cethegus held her back with an iron grasp.
"Stop, woman! Do you think that I am not on my guard with such as you? Your sons, Anicius and Severinus, are here in Italy, secretly--in Rome--in my house. You know that death is the penalty of their return. A word--and they die with us. Then you may take to your husband your sons, as well as your daughter, who has died by your means. Her blood upon your head!" and quickly turning the angle of the corridor, he disappeared.
"My sons!" cried Rusticiana, and sank down upon the marble pavement.
A few days after, the widow of Boëthius, with Corbulo and Daphnidion, left the court for ever. In vain the Queen sought to detain her.
The faithful freedman took her back to the sheltered Villa of Tifernum, which she now deeply regretted ever having left. There, in the place of the little Temple of Venus, she erected a basilica, in the crypt of which an urn was placed, containing the hearts of the two lovers.
In her passionate soul her prayers for the salvation of her child were inseparably bound up with a petition for revenge upon Cethegus, whose real share in Camilla's death she did not even suspect; she only felt that he had used mother and daughter as tools for his plans, and had sacrificed the girl's happiness and life with heartless coldness.
And scarcely less continuously than the flame of the eternal lamp before the urn, the prayer and the curse of the lonely mother rose up to heaven.