The band had broken up into pairs, and were hard at work with their favourite pastime, old as the Alban hills, and handed down to the Roman Empire from the dynasty of the Pharaohs. It consisted in gambling for small coins at the following trial of skill:—the players sat or stood, face to face; each held the left hand erect, on which he marked the progress of his game. With the right he shot out any one or more of his four fingers and thumb, or all together, with immense rapidity, guessing aloud at the same time the sum-total of the fingers thus brandished by himself and his adversary, who was employed in the same manner. Whoever guessed right won a point, which was immediately marked on the left, held immovable at shoulder-height for the purpose, and when five of these had been won the game began again. Nothing could be more simple, nothing apparently less interesting, and yet it seemed to engross the attention of the gladiators to the exclusion of all other subjects, even the prospect of supper and the flavour of the Falernian.[14]
“They are children now,” said Placidus contemptuously. “They will be men presently, and tigers to-night. Hippias, the slave has escaped. We must attack the palace forthwith.”
“I know it,” replied the other quietly. “But the Germans are relieving guard at this hour. My own people are hardly ready, and it is not dark enough yet.”
“You know it,” repeated Placidus, even more irritated than astonished by his companion’s coolness, “you know it, and yet you have not hastened your preparations? Do you know, too, that this yellow-haired barbarian has got your head, and mine, and all the empty skulls of our intelligent friends who are amusing themselves yonder, under his belt? Do you know that Cæsar, true to his swinish propensities, will turn like a hunted boar, when he suspects the least shadow of danger? Do you know that not one of us may live to eat the very supper waiting for us in the next room? What are you made of, man, that you can thus look me so coolly in the face with the sword at both our throats?”
“I can keep my own throat with my hand,” replied the other, totally unmoved by his host’s agitation. “And I am certainly not accustomed to fear danger before it comes. But that the barbarian has escaped I saw with my own eyes, for I left him ten minutes since within a hundred paces of your own gate.”
The tribune’s eyebrows went up in unfeigned surprise.
“Then he has not reached the palace!” he exclaimed, speaking rather to himself than his informant.
“Not reached the palace certainly,” replied the latter calmly, “since I tell you I saw him here. And in very good company too,” he added with a smile.
The tribune’s astonishment had for once deprived him of his self-command.
“With Valeria?” he asked unguardedly; and directly he had spoken, a vague suspicion made him wish that he had held his tongue.