“I am very weary of the siege,” said he, stretching his limbs on the couch with affected indifference, “weary of the daily drudgery, the endless consultations, the scorching climate, above all, this suffocating atmosphere, where a man can hardly breathe. Would that I had never seen this accursed tent, or aught that it contains!”
“You cannot be more weary of it than I am,” she replied, in the same contemptuous quiet tone that maddened him.
“Why did you come?” he retorted, with a bitter laugh. “Nobody wanted such a delicate dainty lady in a soldier’s tent—and certainly nobody ever asked you to share it with him!”
She gave a little gasp, as though something touched her to the quick, but recovered herself on the instant, and answered calmly and scornfully, “It is kindly said, and [pg 356]generously, considering all things. Just what I might have expected from a gladiator!”
“There was a time you liked the Family well enough!” he exclaimed angrily; and then, softened by his own recollections of that time, added in a milder tone, “Valeria, why will you thus quarrel with me? It used not to be so when I brought the foils and dumbbells to your portico, and spared no pains to make you the deadliest fencer, as you were the fairest, in Rome. Those were happy days enough, and so might these be, if you had but a grain of common sense. Can you not see, when you and I fall out, who must necessarily be the loser? What have you to depend on now but me?”
He should have stopped at his tender recollections. Argument, especially if it has any show of reason in it, is to an angry woman but as the bandillero’s goad to the Iberian bull. Its flutter serves to irritate rather than to scare, and the deeper its pointed steel sinks in, the more actively indeed does the recipient swerve aside, but returns the more rapidly and the more obstinately to the charge. Of all considerations, that which most maddened Valeria, and rendered her utterly reckless, was that she should be dependent on a gladiator. The cold eyes flashed fire; but she would not give him the advantage over her of acknowledging that he could put her in a passion, so she restrained herself, though her heart was ready to burst. Had she cared for him she might have stabbed him to death in such a mood.
“I thank you for reminding me,” she answered bitterly. “It is not strange that one of the Mutian line should occasionally forget her duty to Hippias, the retired prize-fighter. A patrician, perhaps, would have brought it more delicately to her remembrance; but I have no right to blame the fencing-master for his plebeian birth and bringing up.”
“Now, by the body of Hercules, this is too much!” he exclaimed, springing erect on the couch, and grinding his teeth with rage. “What! you tax me with my birth! You scout me for my want of mincing manners and white hands, and syllables that drop like slobbered wine from the close-shaven lip! You, the dainty lady, the celebrated beauty, the admired, forsooth, of all admirers, whose porch was choked with gilded chariots, whose litter was thronged with every curly-headed, white-shouldered, crimson-cloaked, young Narcissus in Rome, and yet who sought her chosen lovers in the amphitheatre—who scanned with judicious eye the points [pg 357]and the vigour and the promise of naked athletes, and could find at last none to serve her turn, but war-worn old Hippias, the roughest and the rudest, and the worst-favoured, but the strongest, nevertheless, amongst them all!”
The storm was gathering apace, but she still tried hard to keep it down. An experienced mariner might have known by the short-coming breath, the white cheek, and the dilated nostril, that it was high time to shorten sail, and run for shelter before the squall.
“It was indeed a strange taste,” she retorted. “None can marvel at it more than myself.”