“He crossed my path, Esca, and he met the fate of all who are rash enough to oppose Valeria. What motives of pity, or love, or honour, would avail with Placidus? When did he ever swerve a hair’s-breadth from his goal for any consideration but self? I knew him, ah! too well. There was but one invincible argument for the tribune, and I used it. I slew him—slew him there, upon his couch; but it was to save you!”
Perhaps he felt he was ungrateful. Perhaps he tried to think that he, at least, had no right to judge her harshly; that such devotion for his sake should have made him look with indulgent eye, even on so foul a crime as murder; but he could not control the repugnance and horror that now rose in him for this beautiful, reckless, and unscrupulous woman: but while he strove to conceal his feelings, and to mask them with an air of deference and gratitude, she knew by the instinct of love all that was passing in his breast, and suffered, as those only can suffer, who have thrown honour, virtue, conscience, everything to the winds, to purchase but the conviction that their shameful sacrifice has been in vain. She determined to put a period to the tortures she was enduring. Ere this, they had reached the street, from which opened the private entrance into her own grounds. Myrrhina, though within sight, still kept discreetly in the rear. This was the situation, this was the moment that Valeria had pictured to herself in many a rapturous day-dream, that seemed too impossibly happy ever to come to pass. To have ransomed him from some great danger at some equivalent price; to have led him off with her in triumph; those two pacing by themselves through the deserted streets at the witching sunset hour; to have brought him home her own, her very own, to this identical gate exactly in this manner; to have none between them, none to watch them, except faithful Myrrhina, and to see before her a long future of uninterrupted sunshine, this it had been ecstasy to dream of—and now it had come, and brought with it a dull sickening [pg 197]sensation that was worse than pain. She had a brave rebellious nature, in keeping with the haughty head and stately form hereditary in her line. No scion of that noble old house would shrink or quiver under mental, any more than under bodily, torture. Among the ancestral busts that graced her cornices, was that of one who endured with a calm set face to watch his own hand shrivelled up and crackling in the glowing coals. His descendants, male and female, partook of that unflinching character; and not Mutius Scævola himself, erect and stern before the Tuscan king, had more of the desperate tenacity which sets fate itself at defiance, than lurked under the soft white skin, and the ready smile, and the voluptuous beauty of proud Valeria.
She looked prouder and fairer than ever now, as she stopped at her own gate and confronted the Briton.
‘You are safe she said’
“You are safe,” she said, and what it cost her to say it none knew but herself. “You are free besides, and at liberty to go where you will.”
The rapture with which he kissed her hand while she spoke, the gleam of delight that lit up his whole face, the intense gratitude with which he bowed himself to the ground before her, smote like repeated strokes of a dagger to her heart. She continued in accents of well-acted indifference, though a less preoccupied observer might have marked the quivering eyelid and dilated nostril—
“You may have friends whom you long to see—friends who have been anxious about your safety. Though it seems,” she added, ironically, “they have taken but little pains to set you out of danger.”
Esca was always frank and honest; this was, perhaps, the charm that, combined with his yellow locks and broad shoulders, so endeared him to the Roman lady. She was unaccustomed to these qualities in the men she usually met.
“I have no friends,” he answered, rather sadly; “none in the whole of this great city, except perhaps yourself, noble lady, who care whether I am alive or dead. Yet I have one mission, for the power of performing which this very night I thank you far more than for saving my life. To-morrow, it would be too late.”