The Roman Traitor, Vol. 2

by Henry William Herbert

The boy raised his hand joyously, and cried aloud, without any fear of being heard, well knowing that all eyes and ears of the defenders of the place were turned to the side when the fight was raging, "Be of good cheer; you are saved, Julia. Paullus is nigh at hand, but ere he come, I will save you! Be of good courage, watch well these windows, but seem to be observing nothing."

And with the words, he turned away, and was lost to her sight in an instant, among the thickly-set underwood. Ere long, however, she caught a glimpse of him again, mounted upon a beautiful white horse, and gallopping like the wind down the sandy road, which wound through the wooded knolls toward the bridge below.

Again she lost him; and again he glanced upon her sight, for a single second, as he spurred his fleet horse across the single arch of brick, and dashed into the woods on the hither side of the torrent.

Two weary hours passed; and the sun was nigh to his setting, and she had seen, heard nothing more. Her heart, sickening with hope deferred, and all her frame trembling with terrible excitement, she had almost begun to doubt, whether the whole appearance of the boy might not have been a mere illusion of her feverish senses, a vain creation of her distempered fancy.

Still, fiercer than before, the battle raged without, and now there was no intermission of the uproar; to which was added the crashing of the roofs beneath heavy stones, betokening that engines of some kind had been brought up from the host, or constructed on the spot.

At length, however, her close watch was rewarded. A slight stir among the evergreen bushes on the brink of the opposite cliff caught her quick eye, and in another moment the head of a man, not of the boy whom she had seen before, nor yet, as her hope suggested, of her own Paullus, but of an aquiline-nosed clean-shorn Roman soldier, with an intelligent expression and quick eye, was thrust forward.

Perceiving Julia at the window, he drew back for a second; and the boy appeared in his place, and then both[pg 181] showed themselves together, the soldier holding in his hand the bow and arrows of the hunter youth.

"He is a friend," said the boy, "do all that he commands you."

But so fiercely was the battle raging now, that it was his signs, rather than his words, which she comprehended.

The next moment, a gesture of his hand warned her to withdraw from the embrasure; and scarcely had she done so before an arrow whistled from the bow and dropped into the room, having a piece of very slender twine attached to the end of it.