“Then it is God’s will that I be taken. I cannot help myself. I am glad I said No to the offer of Glyceria.”
The deacon ascended a flight of limestone steps to the upper story. The slabs were worn and cracked, and had not been repaired owing to his poverty. He entered a room that looked out on the street, and went to the window.
The street above his doorway was dense with people, below it was completely empty. Torches threw up a glare illumining the white façades of the houses. He saw a sea of heads below. He heard the growl of voices breaking into a foam of coarse laughter. Curses uttered against the Christians, blasphemies against Christ, words of foulness, threats, brutal jests, formed the matter of the hubbub below. A man bearing a white wand with a sprig of artificial mistletoe at the end, gave directions to the people where to go, where to stop, what to do. He was the head of the branch of the guild of the Cultores Nemausi for that portion of the town.
Someone in the mob lifting his face, looked up and saw the deacon at the window, and at once shouted, “There! there he is! Baudillas Macer, [pg 131]come down, sacrilegious one! That is he who carried the maiden away.”
Then rose hoots and yells, and a boy putting his hands together and blowing produced an unearthly scream.
“He is one of them! He is a ringleader! He has an ass’s head in the house to which he sacrifices our little ones. He it was who stuck needles into the child of the potter Fusius, and then gnawed off the cheeks and fingers. He can inform where is the daughter of Aulus Harpinius who was snatched from the basin of the god. Let us avenge on him the great sacrilege that has been committed. It was he who struck off the head of the god.”
Then one flung a stone that crashed into the room, and had not Baudillas drawn back, it would have struck and thrown him down stunned.
“Let the house be ransacked!” yelled the mob. “We will seek in it for the bones of the murdered children. Break open the door if he will not unfasten. Bring a ladder, we will enter by the windows. Someone ascend to the roof and drop into the atrium.”
Then ensued a rush against the valves, but they were too solid to yield; and the bars held them [pg 132]firm, run as they were into their sockets in the solid wall.
The slave Pedo now knocked on the inside. This was the signal that he was about to open.