She paused, expecting a suitable reply, but the slave, albeit not insensible to the compliment, only blushed again and was silent. Valeria, meanwhile, whose motives in summoning him to her litter had been in the first instance of simple curiosity to see the stalwart barbarian who had so excited Myrrhina’s admiration, and whom that sharp-sighted damsel had recognised in an instant amongst the populace, now found herself pleased and interested by the quiet demeanour and noble bearing of this foreign slave. She had always been susceptible to manly beauty, and here she beheld it in its noblest type. She was rapacious of admiration in all quarters; and here she could not but flatter herself she gathered an undoubted tribute to the power of her charms. She owned all a woman’s interest in anything that had a spice of mystery or romance, and a woman’s unfailing instinct in discovering high birth and gentle breeding under every [pg 35]disguise; and here she found a delightful puzzle in the manner and appearance of her kinsman’s messenger, whose position seemed so at variance with his looks. She had never in her life laid the slightest restraint on her thoughts, and but little on her actions—she had never left a purpose unfulfilled, nor a wish ungratified—but a strange and new feeling, at which even her courageous nature quailed, seemed springing up in her heart while she gazed with half-closed eyes at the Briton, and hesitated to confess, even to herself, that she had never seen such a man as this in her life before. It was in a softened tone that she again addressed him, moving on her couch to show an ivory shoulder and a rounded arm to the best advantage.
“You are a confidential servant of my kinsman’s? You are attached to his person, and always to be found in his household?” she asked, more with a view of detaining him than for any fixed purpose.
“I would give my life for Licinius!” was the prompt and spirited reply.
“But you are gentle born,” she resumed, with increasing interest; “how came you in your present dress, your present station? Licinius has never mentioned you to me. I do not even know your name. What is it?”
“Esca,” answered the slave proudly, and looking the while anything but a slave.
“Esca!” she repeated, dwelling on the syllables, with a slow soft cadence; “Esca! ’Tis none of our Latin names; but that I might have known already. Who and what are you?”
There was something of defiance in the melancholy tone with which he answered—
“A prince in my own country, and a chief of ten thousand. A barbarian and a slave in Rome.”
She gave him her hand to kiss, with a gesture of pity that was almost a caress, and then, as though ashamed of her own condescension, bade the Liburnians angrily to “go on.”
Esca looked long and wistfully after the litter as it disappeared; but Hirpinus, clapping him on the back with his heavy hand, burst into a hearty laugh while he declared—