They would not go to the gate and the lodge with the prætorians there—that would be almost certainly never to pass! They sought where they might climb the garden wall. A stream went by, close below the walls, flowing to Tiber. Turning from the road, they went along this water, moving out of the moonlight, under the shadow of the wall, seeking some stout twist of the over-covering ivy. What they should do when they reached the garden, when they reached the house where spread before every door would be guards and slaves, they did not know. They knew that what they did must be called hopeless. Yet was there a wildness of hope. They did not think at all of themselves. One saw only Flavia, the other Iras. They themselves were already dead, and Valerian was dead, but there were the daughters....
They came, still seeking through the ivy, to a door in the wall, clamped with iron. They tried it, but it was fast, resisting all their strength. Lais leaned against it. “I tremble, I tremble!... O Iras! thou wast truly my all!”
They went a little farther, still creeping by the wall. The bank here was steep, the stream turbid and swollen from a recent storm among the mountains. It went by them with a hollow sound, and the moon whitened the wave. Something lay beside the bank, caught and uplifted by a great stone, half in, half out of the water. When they came to it they saw that it was the naked body of a woman.... Lais put her arms beneath and raised it wholly upon the bank. There was no life, and there had been many a wrong inflicted before life went. Lais began to laugh. “Iras! Get up and dance, Iras! Dance for Cæsar, and every man his friend!”
When Valeria saw that there was no moving her, nor making her attend, nor drawing her farther, nor winning her to go back, nor help for her, nor any sense that might be appealed to, she left the flower-seller there, the dead girl in her arms. She herself went on, feeling among the ivy for that twisted stem to climb by. She found such an one, put hand and foot to it and mounted to the top of the wall, crept over it and dropped into the garden beneath. She was in a laurel grove with a white statue rising from the middle, then in a long alley of like trees. The branches arched into a low roof, the moon was shut out, she had a sense of suffocation, she felt the chamber underground by the Sabine Gate. Her hands, locked before her, beat the dark. The alley widened, she came out into the light and saw and heard Cæsar’s house, flaming with lamps, yelling with drunken mirth.
Slaves stopped her ere she reached the door. Her will, one-pointed, strove to bear all through. “I have a message for Cæsar! Woe is, if he does not hear it!”
“Who let her pass? She came on a wind from the mountains.—She is a sibyl!—Cæsar may flay us if we do not let her in.—Call the Captain of the Guard!”
He came—a man who had been bred upon the hills in sight of Rome.
“I have a message for Cæsar. It imports him to hear!”
“Take the mantle from her.—Valeria, wife of Valerian, I guess that message!”
Yet she saw Cæsar, and flung herself at his feet. He was drunken and sated. “Take her away! Send her to Rome. Let her see the vestal punished who defiled the House of Vesta!”