“Come,” quoth he, “there is more cunning in these British eyes than I ever should have dreamt of. Fill your cup to the brim, boy, and since you are to leave us so speedily, I shall have no secrets for you. I have seen service;—true, but what of that? I have kept a [pg 360]light heart in all my campaigns. But my day, it must be confessed, begins to wear a little, a very little, towards the evening; and, Castor! if you allow supper-time to slip over, I don’t know but you must go to bed with a light stomach. Now or never was the word, my boy; and the widow is mine own.”
“And Xerophrastes?” said I.
“And as for the most sagacious and venerable Xerophrastes, why, to tell you the truth, I see nothing for him but that he should allow his beard to curl as it pleases, drop his long cloak over his ambitious pair of shanks, forswear moonlight, purchase for himself a dark lantern instead, and see whether he can’t find, within the four walls of Rome, an honest Greek, and a constant widow, to make one blessed wedding withal. That is my advice to the Stoic—Stoic no longer—but, if there be hoops upon a tub, the most cynical of all Cynics.”
When it was at last necessary that I should move—“Dear Caius,” said the Centurion, “you know the Prefect has set a price on their heads, and I promise you it is such a temptation as no virtue, that keeps watch beneath any common prætorian breast-plate, could well be trusted to wrestle with. But hope, and dare. And here, take once more this helmet, and cloak, and sword, and with them share the password of the night.”
Sabinus then gave private orders to one of his troop, and walked with me towards the Esquiline.—But why should I linger over what little remains of this story? Why pain you with the parting which I witnessed between my Athanasia and the holy Aurelius, after[pg 361]wards numbered among the martyrs of Christ?—Behold us at last issued from the Catacombs, and mounted on the trusty horses which our friend had caused to be waiting at no great distance from the thicket that clothed their entrance. Behold us arrived without interruption at the Ostian Gate of Rome.
The soldiers on guard challenged us cheerily as we came up to them.
“The word, comrades?”
“Titus!” quoth the Centurion.
“Pass on—whom bear you with you, comrades!”
“A Christian—a Christian prisoner,” said I.