"Never the weapon in a daughter's hand to strike a father," answered Paullus, "no! though he were himself a parricide!"
"He is!—he is a parricide!—the parricide of Rome itself!—the murderer of our common mother!—the sacrilegious stabber of his holy country! Hear me, and tremble! It lacks now two days of the Consular election. If Catiline go not down ere that day cometh, then Rome goes down, on that day, and forever?"
"You are mad, girl, to say so."
"You are mad, youth, if you discredit me. Do not I know? am not I the sharer? the tempter to the guilt myself? and am not I the mistress of its secrets? Was it not for this, that I gave myself to you? was it not unto this that I bound you by the oath, which now I restore to you? was it not by this, that I would have held you my [pg 178]minion and my paramour? And is it not to reveal this, that I now have come? I tell you, I discovered, how he would yesternight have slain you by the gladiator's sword; discovered how he now would slay you, by the perverted sword of Justice, as Medon's, as Volero's murderer; convicting you of his own crimes, as he hath many men before, by his suborned and perjured clients—his comrades on the Prætor's chair! I tell you, I discovered but just now, that me too he will cut off in the flower of my youth; in the heat of the passions, he fomented; in the rankness of the soft sins, he taught me—cut me off—me, his own ruined and polluted child—by the same poisoned chalice, which made his house clear for my wretched mother's nuptials!"
"Can these things be," cried Paullus, "and the Gods yet withhold their thunder?"
"Sometimes I think," the girl answered wildly, "that there are no Gods, Paullus. Do you believe in Mars and Venus?"
"In Gods, whose worship were adultery and murder?" said Arvina. "Not I, indeed, poor Lucia."
"If these be Gods, there is no truth, no meaning in the name of virtue. If not these, what is God?"
"All things!" replied the young man solemnly. "Whatever moves, whatever is, is God. The universe is but the body, that clothes his eternal spirit; the winds are his breath; the sunshine is his smile; the gentle dews are the tears of his compassion! Time is the creature of his hand, eternity his dwelling place, virtue his law, his oracles the soul of every living man!"
"Beautiful," cried the girl. "Beautiful, if it were but true!"