This softer feeling on her part had, besides, been greatly brought about by her having noticed, since their arrival in Ravenna, a change in the King's behaviour towards herself.
She thought that she observed in him traces of remorse for having so forcibly encroached upon her life, and she involuntarily softened her harsh and blunt manner to him during their rare interviews, which always took place in the presence of witnesses.
Witichis considered the change as a sign that a step had been taken towards reconciliation, and silently acknowledged and rewarded it, on his part, by a more friendly manner.
All this was sufficient to induce Mataswintha, with her emotional nature, to repulse the overtures of the Prefect, even when they sometimes reached her by means of the clever Moor.
Now the Prefect had already learned from Syphax during the march to Ravenna, that which was known later by other means, namely, that the Goths expected assistance from the Franks.
He had therefore forthwith renewed his old and intimate relations with the aristocrats and great men who ruled in the name of the mock Kings of the Merovingians in the courts of Mettis (Metz), Aurelianum (Orleans) and Suessianum (Soissons), in order to induce the Franks--whose perfidy, even then become a proverb, gave good hope that his efforts would be successful--to renounce the Gothic alliance.
And when the affair had been properly introduced by these friends, he himself wrote to King Theudebald, who held his court in Mettis, impressively warning him of the risk he would run if he supported such a ruined cause as that of the Goths had undeniably become since their ill-success in the siege of Rome.
This letter had been accompanied by rich gifts to his old friend, the Major Domus of the weak-minded King, and the Prefect impatiently waited, day by day, for the reply; the more impatiently because the altered demeanour of Mataswintha had cut off all the hopes he had entertained of effecting a more speedy conquest of the Goths.
The answer came--at the same time with an imperial letter from Byzantium--on a day which was equally pregnant with the fate of the heroes both in and out of Ravenna.