Varus enforced silence.
'Probus,' said he, as order was restored, 'I shall still hope the best for thee. Thou art of different stuff from him whom we first had before us, and leisure for reflection may bring thee to another mind. I shall not therefore condemn thee either to the rack or to death. Soldiers, bear him to the prisons at the Fabrician bridge.'
Whereupon he was led from the tribunal, and conducted by a guard to the place of his confinement.
The fate of Probus we now regard as sealed. In what manner he will finally be disposed of it is vain to conjecture, so various are the ways, each one more ingenious in cruelty than another, in which Christians are made to suffer and die. Standing as he does, as virtually the head of the Christian community, we can anticipate for him a death only of more refined barbarity.
Felix too, we learn, is confined in the same prison: and with him all the other principal Christians of Rome.
We have visited Probus in his confinement. You do not remember, Fausta, probably you never saw, the prison at the Fabrician bridge. It seems a city itself, so vast is it, and of so many parts, running upwards in walls and towers to a dizzy height, and downwards to unknown depths, where it spreads out in dungeons never visited by the light of day. In this prison, now crowded with the Christians, did we seek our friend. We were at once, upon making known our want, shown to the cell in which he was confined.
We found him, as we entered, seated and bending over a volume which he was reading, aided by the faint light afforded by a lamp which his jailer had furnished him. He received us with cheerfulness, and at his side on the single block of stone which the cell provided for its inmates, we sat and long conversed. I expressed my astonishment that the favor of a lamp had been allowed him. 'It is not in accordance,' I said, 'with the usages of this place.'
'You will be still more amazed,' he replied, 'when I tell you through whose agency I enjoy it.'