"Tyrant!" muttered Theodore. "Base, ungrateful tyrant!"
"Let your indignation swallow up your grief, my Theodore!" replied Marcian; "but let it not injure your country. Great as it is, great as it well may be, still greater will it become when you hear that Valens, your father's bosom friend, has been since sacrificed for no other crime than his love for Paulinus; that several of your household slaves have been slain by the emperor's orders; and that all the wealth of Paulinus has been bestowed upon Chrysapheus!"
Theodore again started up, exclaiming--"I swear by all my hopes, and by my father's spirit--"
But Marcian caught his arm. "Swear nothing against your country, my son," he cried: "Theodore, we have need of every Roman!"
"Hear me! hear me!" cried Theodore. "Naught against my country. No, never, let the temptation be what it may, will I draw the sword against Rome. So help me the God in whom I trust! But should ever the time come when this hand can reach a tyrant, or a tyrant's minister, it shall doom him to death as remorselessly as he has doomed my noble father;" and having spoken, he cast himself down, and again covered his face in his mantle.
Never, perhaps, through all the long tragic record of human woes and suffering which the past, the sad and solemn past, holds in its melancholy treasury--never was there yet a scene in which the dark feeling of desolation penetrated more deeply into every bosom, than in the one which surrounded the tribune Marcian. The horrors, the fatigues, the destruction of the preceding night, had laid every heart prostrate in the general calamity; and when the blow of individual grief fell heavy upon all alike, it seemed to crush and trample out in every breast the last warm kindly hopes--the last bright delusions of our phantasm-like existence.
Flavia gazed on her children and on the orphans in deep melancholy; while Theodore, with his face buried in his robe, sat apart, and Eudochia hid her streaming eyes upon her adoptive mother's lap. Ildica, with clasped hands, and cheeks down which the large bright tears rolled slow, now gazed upon her young and mourning lover; now turned an inquiring, anxious, longing glance towards Marcian; who, on his part, again, with knitted brow and downcast eyes, sat in the midst, stifling emotions which struggled hard against control. Even the slaves of Flavia and Paulinus, among whom the news had spread, gathered round the open tent, and, standing wrapped up in their dark penulæ, gazed with mournful and sympathizing looks upon the sad group beneath its shade; while, mingled among them, here and there, were seen some of the stout soldiers who had accompanied the tribune, evidently sharing, notwithstanding all their own habits of danger and suffering, and their frequent familiarity with death itself, in the grief of the young and hapless beings before them.
One only of the party seemed occupied with other thoughts, and yet the seeming belied him. Ammian, reclining by the side of the little sandy path which crossed the meadow where they sat, seemed busy, in his usual abstracted manner, in tracing figures on the dust. One of the soldiers moved across to see what he was employed in, and by that action drew the attention of Marcian, whose eyes turned thither too; when, to his surprise, he beheld written in the Greek character upon the sand--
"Death to all tyrants! The blood of the guilty for the blood of the innocent! Vengeance for Paulinus!"
Rising at once, he set his foot upon the writing ere the slower soldier could decipher what it meant; and then, raising his finger to Ammian, he said, with emphasis, "Beware!"