He looked before him down the stately street, with its majestic porticoes, its towering palaces, and its rows of lofty pillars, stretching on in grand perspective till they met the dusky crimson of the evening sky; and perhaps he was thinking of a free upland, and blue hills, and laughing sunshine glittering on the mere and trembling in the green wood far away at home, for he only answered by repeating her last word with a sigh, and adding: “There is none for me; a wanderer, an outcast, and a degraded man.”
She seemed to check the outburst that was rising to her lips, and she kept her eyes off his face, while she whispered—
“I have determined to save you. Do you not know that there is nothing you can ask me which I will not grant?”
He raised her hand to his lips, but the gesture partook more of the dependant’s homage than the lover’s rapture. She felt instinctively that it was a tribute of gratitude and loyalty, not an impassioned caress. For the second time, something seemed to warn her she had better have left that day’s work undone. Then she began to talk rapidly of the dangers they might undergo from pursuit, of the necessity for immediate flight to her house, and close concealment when there; wandering wildly on from one subject to another, and apparently but half-conscious of anything she said. At last he asked her eagerly, even sternly—
“And the tribune? What of him? How could you release me from his power? I tell you, I had the life of Placidus in my hand, as completely as if I had been standing over him in the amphitheatre with my foot on his neck. Would any price have purchased me from him, with all I knew?”
The crimson rose to her brow as she answered hurriedly, “No price! Believe me, no price that man could offer, or woman either! Esca, do not think worse of me than I deserve!”
“Then why am I here?” he continued, with a softened [pg 196]look; “I would like well to discover the secret by which Valeria can charm such a man as Placidus to her will.”
She was very pale now.
“The tribune will claim you no more,” said she; “I have settled that account for ever.”
He did not understand her, yet he dropped the hand he held and walked on a little farther from her side. She felt her punishment had already commenced, and when she spoke again it was in hard cold accents quite unlike her own.