“And what was his name, what was the name ... of this Goth?”
The coppersmith’s son knew all about it. So he answered at once:
“He called himself Agapit; he was working quite near here, in an armourer’s workshop.”
And with a shriek, Maria fell face downwards on the floor.
Maria was ill for a long while, for many weeks. On the first day of her illness a child was born prematurely, a pitiful lump of flesh which it was impossible to call either a boy or a girl. Florentia, with all her harshness, loved her daughter. While Maria lay unconscious for many days her mother tended her and never left her side. She called in a midwife and a priest. When at length Maria came to her senses Florentia had no reproachful tears for her, she only wept inconsolably and pressed her daughter to her bosom. Her mother-soul had divined everything. Later on, when Maria was a little better her mother told her all that had happened and did not reproach her.
But Maria listened to her mother with a strange distrust. How could Rhea Silvia believe it, when she was destined, by the will of the gods, to bring forth the twins Romulus and Remus? Either the girl’s mind was entirely overclouded or she believed her former dreams more than actuality—at the words of her mother she merely shook her head in weakness. She thought her mother was deceiving her, that during her illness she had borne twins which had been taken from her, put into a wicker-basket and thrown into the Tiber. But Maria knew that a wolf would find and nourish them, for they must be the founders of the new Rome.
As long as Maria was so weak that she could not raise her head no one wondered that she would answer no questions and would be silent whole days, neither asking for food nor drink nor wishing to pronounce a monosyllable. But when she recovered a little and found strength to go about the house Maria continued to be silent, hiding in her soul some treasured thought. She did not even want to talk to her father any more and she was not pleased when he began to declaim verses from the ancient poets.
At length, one morning when her father had gone out on business and her mother was at market Maria unexpectedly disappeared from home. No one noticed her departure. And no one saw her again alive. But after some days the muddy waters of the Tiber cast her lifeless body on the shore.
Poor girl! Poor vestal of the broken vows! One would like to believe that throwing thy body into the cold embraces of the water thou wert convinced that thy children, the twins Romulus and Remus, were at that moment drinking the warm milk of the she-wolf, and that in time to come they would raise up the first rampart of the future Eternal City. If in the moment of thy death thou hadst no doubt of this, thou wert perhaps the happiest of all the people in that pitiful half-destroyed Rome towards which were already moving from the Alps the hordes of the wild Lombards.