Listlessly he turned into another chamber, when, what was it that met his startled vision!—
VALERIA DORMIT IN PACE.
There slept in the sleep of death another victim of his perfidy, one whom he had longed to save, one whose beauty had fascinated his imagination, whose goodness had touched his heart. Overcome by his emotion he flung himself on the ground, and bursting into convulsive sobs that shook his frame, he passionately kissed the cold stone slab on which was written the much-loved name.
"Would that I, too, slept the sleep of death," he exclaimed; "if I might also sleep in peace; if I might seek celestial realms.... So near and yet so far ... A great gulf fixed ... Never to see thee more ... in time nor in eternity."
Here the drip, drip of water which had infiltrated through the roof and fell upon the floor, jarred upon his excited nerves, and suddenly, with a hissing splash, fell a great drop on his taper and utterly extinguished its light. For a moment, so intense and sudden was the darkness, he was almost dazed; but instantly the greatness of his peril flashed upon his mind.
"Lost! Lost!" he frantically shrieked. "The outer darkness, the eternal wailing while she is in the light of life! Well I remember now the words of Primitius, in this very vault, as he spoke of the joys of heaven, the pains of hell;" and in the darkness he tried to trace with his finger the words, "DORMIT IN PACE"—"Sleeps in peace."
"Vale! Vale! Eternum Vale!" he sobbed, as he kissed once more the marble slab, "an everlasting farewell! I must try to find the Christians, or the soldiers, or a way of escape from this prison-house of graves."
He groped his way to the door of the vault and listened, oh! so eagerly—all the faculties of his body and mind seeming concentered in his sense of hearing. But "the darkness gave no token and the silence was unbroken." Nay, so awful was the stillness that brooded over this valley of death, that it seemed as if the motion of the earth on its axis must be audible, and the pulses of his temples were to his tortured ear like the roaring of the distant sea.
Venturing forth, he groped his way from grave to grave, from vault to vault, from corridor to corridor, but no light, no sound, no hope! Ever denser seemed the darkness, ever deeper the silence, ever more appalling the gloom. For hours he wandered on and on till, faint with hunger, parched with thirst, the throbbings, of his heart shaking his unnerved frame, he fell into a merciful swoon from which he never awoke. Centuries after, an explorer of this vast necropolis found crouching in the corner of one of its chambers a fleshless skeleton, and on the tomb above he read the words, VALERIA DORMIT IN PACE. Was it accident or Providence, or some strange instinct of locality that had brought this poor blighted wreck to breathe his latest sigh at the tomb of one whom he had so loved and so wronged?
The peasants of the Campagna tell to the present day of certain strange sounds heard at midnight from those hollow vaults—at times like the hooting of an owl, at times like the wailing of the wind, and at times, they whisper with bated breath, like the moaning of a soul in pain. And the guides to the Catacombs aver, that ever on the anniversary of the martyrdom of Valeria Callirhoë, sighs and groans echo through the hollow vaults—the sighs and groans, tradition whispers, of a wretched apostate who in the ages of persecution betrayed the early Christians to a martyr's doom.