"You are Titus Denter's slave?" asked Fabia. The other nodded. "And your master is a very sick man?"
"Your most noble ladyship shall judge for herself."
"Take me to him at once, if he can see me."
"He is waiting."
The two went through the narrow passageway which led from the outer court of the atrium into the inner court of the peristylium. Fabia was surprised to see that here all the marble work had been carefully washed clean, the little enclosed garden was in beautiful order, and in various corners and behind some of the pillars were bronze and sculptured statues of really choice art. The slave stopped and pointed to a couch upholstered in crimson, beside the fish tank, where tame lampreys were rising for a bit of food.
"Take me to your master!" repeated Fabia, puzzled by the gesture. "I am not weary. You say he waits me?"
"He will be here," replied the servant, with another bow.
"Here?" exclaimed the Vestal, now really alarmed. "Here? He, a man sick unto death?"
"Certainly; here!" broke in a strange voice; and forth from behind a pillar stepped Publius Gabinius, all pomaded and rouged, dressed only in a gauzy, many-folded scarlet synthesis.[108]
Fabia gave a scream and sprang back in instinctive alarm. In the twinkling of an eye it flashed over her that for some purpose or other she had been trapped. Gabinius she knew barely by sight; but his reputation had come to her ears, and fame spoke nothing good of him. Yet even at the moment when she felt herself in the most imminent personal peril, the inbred dignity and composed hauteur of the Vestal did not desert her. At the selfsame instant that she said to herself, "Can I escape through the atrium before they can stop me?" recovering from her first surprise, and with never a quiver of eyelash or a paling of cheek, she was saying aloud, in a tone cold as ice, "And indeed, most excellent Gabinius, you must pardon me for being startled; for all that I know of you tells me that you are likely to find a sombre Vestal sorry enough company."