His voice shook and his whole frame quivered with fear, nevertheless Esca recognised the speaker. It was his old antagonist Spado, a favourite eunuch of the household, in dire terror for his life, yet showing the one redeeming quality of fidelity to the hand that fed him. His comrades kept behind him, taking their cue from his conduct as the bellwether of the flock, yet trusting fervently his wisdom would counsel immediate flight.
“I know you,” said Esca hurriedly. “I struck you that night in anger. It is all over now. I have come to save your lives, all of you, and to rescue Cæsar.”
“How?” said Spado, ignoring his previous injuries in the alarm of the hour. “You can save us? You can rescue Cæsar? Then it is true. The tumult is grown to a rebellion! The Germans are driven in, and the game is lost!”
The others caught up their mantles, girded themselves, and prepared for instant flight.
“The guard can hold the palace for half an hour yet,” replied Esca coolly. “But the Emperor must escape. Julius Placidus will be here forthwith, at the head of two hundred gladiators, and the tribune means to murder his master as surely as you stand trembling there.”
Ere he had done speaking, he was left alone in the room with Spado. The tribune’s character was correctly appreciated, even by the eunuchs of the palace, and they stayed to hear no more; but Spado only looked blankly in the Briton’s face, wringing his fat hands, and answered to the other’s urgent appeals, “His orders were explicit. Cæsar is busy. He must not be disturbed. He said so himself. Cæsar is busy!”
CHAPTER XVIII
THE BUSINESS OF CÆSAR
Thrusting Spado aside without ceremony, and disregarding the eunuch’s expostulations in obedience to the orders he had received, Esca burst through a narrow door, tore down a velvet curtain, and found himself in the private apartment of the Emperor. Cæsar’s business was at that moment scarcely of an urgency to weigh against the consideration of Cæsar’s life. Vitellius was reclining on a couch, his dress disordered and ungirt, a garland of roses at his feet, his heavy face, of which the swollen features had lost all their early comeliness, expressing nothing but sullen torpid calm; his eye fixed on vacancy, his weak nerveless hands crossed in front of his unwieldy person, and his whole attitude that of one who had little to occupy his attention, save his own personal indulgence and comfort. Yet for all this, the mind was busy within that bloated form. There are moments in existence, when the past comes back to us day by day, and incident by incident, shining out in colours vivid and lifelike as the present. On the eve of an important crisis, during the crisis itself if we are not permitted to take an active part in it but compelled to remain passive, the mere sport of its contingencies, for the few minutes that succeed a complete demolition of the fabric we have been building all our lives, we become possessed of this faculty, and seem, in a strange dream-like sense, to live our time over again.