They were a lawless and a desperate band, that body of gladiators which Hippias had brought with him to the siege of Jerusalem. None of them but were deeply stained with blood; most of them were branded with crime; all were hopeless of good, fearless and defiant of evil. In many a venturous assault, in many a hand-to-hand encounter, fought out with enemies as fierce and almost as skilful as themselves, they had earned their ominous title; and the very legionaries, though they sneered at their discipline, and denied their efficiency in long-protracted warfare, could not but admit that to head a column of attack, to run a battering-ram under the very ramparts of a citadel, to dash in with a mad cheer over the shattered ruins of a breach, or to carry out any other hot and desperate service, there were no soldiers in the army like the Legion of the Lost. They had dwindled away, indeed, sadly from slaughter and disease; yet there were still some five or six hundred left, and this remnant consisted of the strongest and staunchest in the band. They still con[pg 410]stituted a separate legion, nor would it have been judicious to incorporate them with any other force, which, indeed, might have been as unwilling to receive them as they could be to enrol themselves in its ranks; and they performed the same duties, and made it their pride to guard the same posts they had formerly watched when thrice their present strength. Under these circumstances a fresh draft would have been highly acceptable to the Legion of the Lost; and in their daily increasing want of men, even a single recruit was not to be despised. Occasionally one of the Syrian auxiliaries, or a member of any of the irregular forces attached to the Roman army, who had greatly distinguished himself by his daring, was admitted into their band, and these additions became less rare as the original number decreased day by day.
An appeal to the good-nature of old Hirpinus, backed by a heavy bribe to one of his centurions, ensured Valeria’s enrolment into this wild, disorderly, and dangerous force; nor in their present lax state of discipline, with the prospect of an immediate assault, had she much to dread from the curiosity of her new comrades. Even in a Roman camp, money would purchase wine, and wine would purchase everything else. Valeria had donned in earnest the arms she had often before borne for sport. “Hippias taught me to use them,” she thought, with bitter, morbid exultation; “he shall see to-morrow how I have profited by his lessons!” Then she resolved to feed her fancy by gazing at the walls of Jerusalem; and she had little difficulty in persuading a comrade to whom she brought a jar of strong Syrian wine, that he had better suffer her to relieve him for the last hour or two of his watch.
The Amazons of old, with a courage we might look for in vain amongst the other sex, were accustomed to amputate their right breast that it might not hinder the bowstring when they drew the arrow to its head. Did they never feel, after the shapely bosom was thus mutilated and defaced, a throb of anguish, or a weight of dull dead pain where the flesh was now scarred, and hardened, and cicatrised—nay, something worse than pain beneath the wound, when they beheld a mother nursing a sucking-child? Valeria, too, had resolved, so to speak, that she would cut the very heart from out of her breast—that she would never feel as a woman feels again. She knew she was miserable, degraded, desperate—she believed she could bear it nobly now, because she was turned to stone. Yet, as she leaned on her spear in the [pg 411]moonlight, and gazed on the city which contained the prize she had so coveted and lost, she was compelled to acknowledge that the fibres of that heart she had thought to tear out and cast away, retained their feelings still. For all that was come and gone, she loved him, oh! so dearly, yet; and the eyes of the lost, maddened, desperate woman filled with tears of as deep and unselfish affection as could have been shed by Mariamne herself in her pure and stainless youth.
Valeria, as Hippias had learned by painful experience, was resolute for good and evil. It was this decision of character, joined to the impulsive disposition which springs from an undisciplined life, that had given him his prey. But it was this that thwarted all the efforts he made to obtain the ascendency over her which generally follows such a link as theirs; and it was this, too, that ere long caused her to tear the link asunder without a moment’s apprehension or remorse. With all his energy and habits of command, the gladiator found he could not control the proud Roman lady, who in a moment of caprice had bowed her head to the very dust for the sake of following him. He could neither intimidate her into obedience, nor crush her into despair, though he tried many a haughty threat, and many an unmanly taunt at her shame. But all in vain; and as he would not yield an inch in their disputes, there was but little peace in the tent of the brave leader who ruled so sternly over the Legion of the Lost. The pair, indeed, went through the usual phases that accompany such bonds as those they chose to wear; but the changes were more rapid than common, as might well be expected, when their folly had not even the excuse of true affection on both sides. Valeria indeed tired first; for as far as the gladiator was capable of loving anything but his profession, he loved her, and this perhaps only embittered the guilty cup that was already sufficiently unpalatable to both. Weariness, as usual, followed fast on the heels of satiety, to be succeeded by irritation, discontent, and dislike; then came rude words, angry gestures, and overt aggression from the man, met by the woman with trifling provocations, mute defiance, and sullen scorn. To love another, too, so hopelessly and so dearly, made Valeria’s lot even more difficult to bear, rendering her fretful, intolerant, and inaccessible to all efforts at reconciliation. Thus the breach widened hour by hour; and on the day when Hippias returned to his tent from the council of war before which Calchas had been brought, Valeria quitted it, vowing never to return. She had but one object left for which to live. [pg 412]Maddened by shame, infuriated by the insults of the gladiator, her great love yet surged up in her heart with an irresistible tide; and she resolved that she would see Esca once more, ay, though the whole Jewish army stood with levelled spears between them. After that, she cared not if she died on the spot at his feet!
To get within the works was indeed no easy matter; and so close a watch was kept by the Romans on all movements between the lines of the hostile forces, now in such dangerous proximity, that it was impossible to escape from the camp of Titus and join the enemy behind the wall, though the Jews, notwithstanding the vigilance of their countrymen, were trooping to the besiegers’ camp by scores, to implore the protection of the conqueror, and throw themselves on his well-known clemency and moderation.
Valeria, then, had taken the desperate resolution of entering the city with the assault on the morrow. For this purpose she had adopted the dress and array of the Lost Legion. She would at least, she thought in her despair, be as forward as any of those reckless combatants. She would, at least, see Esca once more. If he met her under shield, not knowing her, and hurled her to the ground, the arm that smote her would be that of her glorious and beloved Briton. There was a wild, sweet sadness in the thought that she might perhaps die at last by his hand. Full of such morbid fancies—her imagination over-excited, her courage kindled, her nerves strung to their highest pitch—it brought with it a fearful reaction to learn that even her last consolation might be denied her—that the chance of meeting her lover once more was no longer in her own hands. What! had she undergone all these tortures, submitted to all this degradation, for nothing? And was Esca to die after all, and never learn that she had loved him to the last? She could not have believed it, but for the calm, hopeless misery that she read in Mariamne’s eyes.
For a while Valeria covered her face and remained silent; then she looked down scornfully on the Jewess, who was still on her knees, holding the hem of the Roman lady’s garment, and spoke in a cold, contemptuous tone—
“Bound and condemned to death, and you are here? You must indeed love him very dearly to leave him at such a time!”
Mariamne’s despair was insensible to the taunt.
“I am here,” said she, “to save him. It is the only chance. Oh, lady, help me! help me if only for his dear sake!”