THE UNWILLING VESTAL
A Tale of Rome under the Caesars
By Edward Lucas White
Author of “El Supremo”
Original Project Gutenberg editor’s note: First published in
1918, this book went through sixteen printings before it
ceased to be a money-maker for its publishers. It provides a
fascinating glimpse into a world most of us know nothing
about.
It has been slightly re-edited for ease in reading as an
E-text. The author’s spellings have been left alone even when
they are incorrect in English English, American English, and
Latin.
CONTENTS
[ BOOK I—THE RAGE OF DISAPPOINTMENT ]
[ BOOK II—THE REVOLT OF DESPONDENCY ]
[ BOOK III—THE REBELLION OF DESPERATION ]
[ CHAPTER XV - REHABILITATION ]
[ CHAPTER XVII - RECKLESSNESS ]
[ BOOK IV—THE REVULSION OF DELIGHT ]
JACKET BLURB:
EDWARD LUCAS WHITE Author of “El Supremo”
This book presents, for the first time in fiction, a correct and adequate account of the Vestal Virgins, their powers and privileges, as well as of many strange Roman customs and beliefs.
The author combines the power of writing a rattling good story with a sound and full knowledge of conditions of the life which he is depicting. Mr. White brings to the history of Rome all the picturesqueness and power which made his South American novel, “El Supremo,” so remarkable. The result is a vivid pageant of imperial Rome and Roman life at the height of its power and splendor.
PUBLISHERS’ NOTE
Readers of The Unwilling Vestal who are not acquainted at first hand with the lighter and more intimate literature of the Romans may be surprised to discover that the lights of Roman high society talked slang and were interested in horseracing. Most writers who have tried to draw Roman society for us have been either ignorant or afraid of these facts. The author of The Unwilling Vestal is neither. He presents to us the upper class Romans exactly as they reveal themselves in the literature of their day; excitable, slangy, sophisticated and yet strangely credulous, enthusiastic sportsmen, hearty eaters and drinkers, and unblushingly keen on the trail of the almighty denarius. In a word, very much like the most up-to-date American society of to-day.
The Publishers feel that it is only fair that it should be made plain that the great difference between the Roman society folk of The Unwilling Vestal and those appearing in other novels is due to the author’s thorough acquaintance with the people and the period about which he is writing.
Incidentally, the Publishers wish to thank Mr. C. Powell Minnegerode, the Curator of the Corcoran Gallery of Art of Washington, D. C., for his permission to reproduce Leroux’ beautiful painting “The Vestal Tuccia” for use on the wrapper of the volume.
PREFACE BY AUTHOR
The title of this romance is likely to prejudice any reader against it. There exists a popular delusion that fiction with a classical setting is bound to be dull and lumbering, that it is impossible for it to possess that quality of bravura slangily denominated “punch.” Anybody will be disabused of that notion upon reading this story.
PG EDITOR’S NOTE: The slang is now, alas, over ninety years
old. It now sounds even more stilted than the classical
language does.
On the other hand, after having read it, almost any one will be likely to imagine that a novel with so startling a heroine and with incidents so bizarre cannot possibly be based on any sound and genuine knowledge of its background; that the author has conjured out of his fantasy not only his plot and chief characters, but also their world; that he has created out and out not merely his Vestal, but his Vestals, their circumstances and the life which they are represented as leading: that he has manufactured his local color to suit as he went along.
Nothing could be further from the actuality. The details of rule and ritual, of dress and duties, of privileges and punishments are set forth in accordance with a full first-hand and intimate acquaintance with all available evidence touching the Vestals; including all known inscriptions relating to them, every passage in Roman or Greek literature in any way concerning them, the inferences drawn from all existing or recorded sculptures and coins which add to our knowledge of them, and every treatise written since the revival of learning in Europe in which the Vestals are discussed. The story contains no preposterous anachronisms or fatuous absurdities. Throughout, it either embodies the known facts or is invented in conformity with the known facts.
Any one to whom chapter twenty-one seems incredible should consult an adequate encyclopedia article or an authoritative treatise on physics and read up on the surface tension of liquids.
BOOK I—THE RAGE OF DISAPPOINTMENT
CHAPTER I - PRECOCITY
“Brinnaria!” he said severely, “you will marry any man I designate.”
“I never shall marry any man,” she retorted positively, “except the man I want to marry.”
She gazed unflinchingly into her father’s imperious eyes, wide-set on either side of a formidable Roman nose. His return gaze was less incensed than puzzled. All his life he had been habituated to subserviency, had never met opposition, and to find it from his youngest daughter, and she a mere child, amazed him. As she faced him she appeared both resolute and tremulous. He looked her up and down from the bright blue velvety leather of her little shoes on which the gilt sole-edges and gilt laces glittered to the red flower in her brown hair. Inside her clinging red robe the soft outlines of her young shape swelled plump and healthy, yet altogether she seemed to him but a fragile creature. Resistance from her was incredible.
Perhaps this was one more of her countless whims. While he considered her meditatively he did not move his mighty arms or legs; the broad crimson stripe down his tunic rose and fell slowly above his ample paunch and vaster chest as his breath came evenly; on his short bull neck his great bullet head was as moveless as if he had been one of the painted statues that lined the walls all about. As the two regarded each other they could hear the faint splash of the fountain in the tank midway of the courtyard.
Her father, a true Roman to his marrow, with all a Roman’s arbitrary instincts, reverted to the direct attack.
“You will marry Pulfennius Calvaster,” he commanded.
“I will not!” she declared.
He temporized.
“Why not?” he queried.
The obstinacy faded from Brinnaria’s handsome, regular face. She looked merely reflective.
“In the first place,” she said, “because I despise him and hate him worse than any young man I ever knew; I would not marry Calvaster if he were the only man left alive. In the second place, because, if all the men on earth were courting me at once, all rich and all fascinating and Caius were poor and anything and everything else that he isn’t, I’d marry nobody ever except Caius. You hear me, Father. Caius Segontius Almo is the only, only man I’ll ever marry. Nothing can shake my resolution, never.”
She was breathing eagerly, her cheeks flushed a warm red through her olive complexion, her eyes shining till tiny specks sparkled green and yellow in the wide brown of her big irises.
Her father’s jaw set.
“I’ve listened to you, daughter,” he said. “Now you listen to me. I have no objections to Almo; I rather like him. I have thought of marrying you to him; if Segontius and I had not quarreled, we might have arranged it. There is no possibility of it now. And just now, for some reason or other, Pulfennius is keen on arranging a marriage between you and Calvaster. His offers are too tempting to be rejected and the chance is to good to be missed. Our properties adjoin not only here and at Baiae, but also at Praeneste, at Grumentum and at Ceneta. With our estates so marvellously paired the marriage seems divinely ordained when one comes to think it over. Don’t be a fool. Anyhow, if you insist on making trouble for yourself, it will do you no good. My mind is made up. You are to marry Calvaster.”
“I won’t!” Brinnaria maintained
Her father smiled, a menacing smile
“Perhaps not,” he said, “but there will be only one alternative. Unless you agree to obey me I shall go at once to the Pontifex and offer you for a Vestal.”
Every trace of apprehension vanished from Brinnaria’s expression. She grinned saucily, almost impudently, at her father, and snapped her fingers in his face.
“You can’t scare me that way, Daddy!” she mocked him. “I know better than that. There can be only six Vestals. You can offer, if you like, but the Emperors themselves can’t take me for a Vestal while the six are alive.”
The laugh muffled in her throat; she was fairly daunted. Never had she seen her father’s face so dark, so threatening. Not in all her life had he so much as spoken harshly to her; she had been his pet since she had begun to remember. But now, for one twinkling, she feared a blow from him. She almost shrank back from him.
He did not move and he spoke softly.
“Rabulla died this morning before dawn,” was all he said.
Instantly Brinnaria was fluttering with panic.
“You aren’t in earnest, Daddy!” she protested. “You can’t be in earnest. You’re only fooling; you’re only trying to frighten me. You don’t really mean it; oh, please, Daddy, say you don’t really mean it!”
“I really mean it,” her father answered heavily. “I never meant anything more genuinely in my life. You know my influence with the Emperors and with the Pontifex of Vesta. You know that if I made the proposal they would disregard any rival petitioners, would override all unnecessary formalities, would have the matter despatched at once. Unless you obey me you will be a Vestal before sunset to-morrow.”
Brinnaria was now fairly quivering with terror.
“Oh, Daddy!” she quivered, “you couldn’t be so cruel. I’d rather die than have to be a Vestal. I couldn’t imagine any life so terrible. Oh, Daddy, please say you are not in earnest.”
He frowned.
“I swear,” he said, “that I was never more in earnest. I say it solemnly, as sure as my name is Marcus Brinnarius Epulo, I’ll have you made a Vestal unless you agree this moment to give up all thoughts of Almo, to obey me about marrying Calvaster, and to be properly polite to him and Pulfennius.”
“Daddy!” Brinnaria cried. “Only don’t have me made a Vestal and I’ll do anything. I’ll forget there ever was an Almo. I’ll be sweet as honey to Pulfennius till he loves me better than Secunda, and I’ll marry Calvaster; I’ll marry anybody. Why, Daddy, I’d marry a boar pig rather than be a Vestal.”
Her father smiled.
“I thought my little daughter would behave properly,” he soothed her, “and you are just in time. That may be your future husband and father-in-law coming now.”
In fact they were in a moment ushered in. Pulfennius was a tall man, lean and loose-jointed, with straggling, greenish-gray hair; a long, uneven head, broad at the skull and narrow at the chin; puffy, white bags of flabby flesh under his eyes; irregular yellow teeth and sagging cheeks that made his face look squarish. Calvaster was a mere boy, with a leaden complexion, shifty gray eyes, thin lips, and an expression at once sly and conceited.
“You come opportunely,” said their host after the greetings had been exchanged, “for you happen to find me alone with the very daughter of whom you and I were talking. This is Brinnaria.”
“This!” Pulfennius exclaimed. “This the girl we were talking about? Impossible! Incredible! There must be some mistake.”
“There is no mistake,” his host assured him. “This is the girl we were talking about, this is Brinnaria.”
The visitor regarded her, respectfully standing now, her brown eyes down-cast, the flush faded from her olive-skinned cheeks, her arms hanging limply at her sides. She was tall for a girl and while slenderly built was well muscled, a fine handsome figure in her red robe.
“This!” he exclaimed again. “Indeed. So this is Brinnaria. I am very glad to have seen her. And now having seen her, do you not think that our business would be better transacted by us three males together?”
“Certainly, if you prefer,” Brinnarius asserted.
He patted Brinnaria and kissed her.
“Run away now, little girl,” he said, “and wait in the peristyle until I want you.”
Brinnaria, once in the rear courtyard, instantly called:
“Guntello!”
Her call was answered by a great brute of a slave, bigger even than her father, a gigantic Goth, pink-skinned, blue-eyed and yellow-haired.
“Now listen to me, Guntello,” his little mistress said, “for if you make any mistake about my errand you’ll get me into no end of trouble.”
The Goth, manifestly devoted to her, leaned his ear close and grinned amiably. She repeated her directions twice and made him repeat them after her in his broken Latin. When she was sure that he understood, she despatched him with a whispered injunction:
“Hurry! Hurry!”
Meanwhile, in the gorgeous atrium, the fathers’ conference had continued. The moment she had gone Pulfennius said:
“I do not believe in discussing misunderstandings before females; evidently there is some misunderstanding here. I want for my son a bride younger than he is, even if he has to wait two or even four years to claim her. You assured me that your daughter Brinnaria was not yet ten years of age and you show me a grown woman and tell me that she is Brinnaria. What is the explanation?”
“A very simple explanation,” he was answered. “Merely that Brinnaria is unusually well grown and well developed for her age. I have seen other cases of early ripening in children and so must you.”
“I’ve seen girls grown beyond their years,” Pulfennius admitted, “but no case comparable to this. Why, man, that girl who has just left us would be taken for over eighteen years old by any stranger at first sight of her, and no one on earth could look at her carefully and hazard the conjecture that she might possibly be under sixteen.”
“Quite so,” his host agreed, “and the better you know Brinnaria the more you wonder at her. She not only looks sixteen or eighteen and acts as if she were that age, but she talks as if she were that old and thinks as if she were even older, and she is actually three full months, more than three months, to be precise three months and twelve days, under ten years of age.”
“Amazing!” spluttered Pulfennius, “astounding! inexplicable!”
“Don’t you believe me?” Brinnarius queried sharply.
“Certainly I believe you,” his guest disclaimed, “but I cannot realize that it can be true; I am bewildered; I am dazed.”
“Perhaps,” the other suggested, “you would realize it better if Quartilla added her assurances to mine.”
“Oh,” the other deprecated, “I do not require anybody’s corroboration to your statement. But if her mother is at home, perhaps her presence would be as well for other reasons.”
When summoned his host’s wife appeared as a medium-sized woman, neither plump nor slender, with a complexion neither brown nor white, with yellow-brown hair, gray-brown eyes, and in every outline, hue, and feature as neutral and inconspicuous a creature as could be conceived of.
“Yes,” Quartilla said, “everybody is surprised at Brinnaria’s growth. I was scared, when she first began to grow so fast, and had special prayers offered and sacrifices made at the temples of Youth and Health. Also I had a Babylonian seer consult the stars concerning her birth-signs. Everybody said she was born to long life, good health and great luck. But I can’t fancy what ever made her grow so. She was fed like her brothers and sisters and she never seems to eat any heartier or any oftener. Till she was two and a half she was just like any other child. But she has grown more in seven years than any other child I ever knew of ever grew in fourteen and she’s so old for her years too. Not but that she plays with dolls and toys and jacks; and she runs about just like any other child of her age, in spite of her size; but she says such grown-up things and she has such a womanly mind. She understands the family accounts better than I do, is keen on economy and could oversee the providing for the entire household. She astonishes me over and over. But there is no doubt about her age. Both my sisters were with me when she was born and Nemestronia too. Ask any of the three. Or I can tell you a dozen other ladies who know just as well. Brinnaria will not be ten years old until the Ides of September.”
“Wonderful! marvellous!” Pulfennius exclaimed. “Madam, you amaze me. But if this is true so much the better. I had thought my boy must wait two years or more for a wife, as I am determined that no more of my sons shall marry wives of their own age, let alone older. If your daughter is so young, she will just suit me, and since she is already grown up we shall not have to wait for her to grow up. We can arrange for the wedding for this month.”
They chaffered a long time about the marriage settlement, Calvaster sitting silent, biting his lips, staring about him and fidgetting; Quartilla equally silent, but entirely placid, without the twitch of a muscle or any shift of gaze; the two men doing all the talking. Some of the talking was almost vehement, Pulfennius disclaiming promises which his host declared he had made. Once they came to a deadlock and then Brinnarius, his voice suddenly mild and soft, mentioned Rabulla’s death and his notion of offering Brinnaria for her successor. At once Pulfennius became manageable and supple and all eagerness for the happiness of the young couple.
When it seemed that they had reached an agreement on every point Quartilla had her say.
“I think you will find Brinnaria everything you could wish as a daughter-in-law. The most uncanny thing about her precocious habits of thought is her tenacity of any resolve and her grave and earnest attitude towards all questions of duty and propriety. She takes clan traditions very seriously and is determined to comport herself according to ancestral precedents. You will have no fault to find with her respectfulness towards you and Herrania or with her behavior as a wife. She will be circumspect in her deportment towards all men and is sure to turn out an excellent housewife. She has lofty inherited standards to live up to and she is deeply devoted to them.
“This is the more to be wondered at since she is strangely undignified in many ways. I trust this will wear off as she grows up. It is only in this respect that Brinnaria has ever given me any cause for concern. She is more like a boy than a girl in many ways. She not only plays with boys and plays boys’ games and plays them as well as boys or better, not only climbs trees when she is in the country, and rides bareback and goes fishing and swimming in any stream or pool, and ranges the woods and cannot be restrained; but also she will indulge in the wildest pranks, the most unthinkable freaks, play rough practical jokes on anybody and everybody, laugh out loud, shout and yell, gesticulate and contort herself into undignified postures and act generally in an uproarious and uncurbed fashion. She keeps up that sort of thing even in town, and is boisterous and unexpected beyond anything I ever heard of in any young girl She is most docile in all really important things, but in respect to her jokings and shriekings and carryings-on she is really beyond my control. She is never openly disobedient, yet she is most ingenious at devising methods for avoiding obedience. Sometimes I lose patience with Brinnaria. But, when I really think it all over, there is no harm in any of it. Strangers, however, would think her a very terrible girl; she belies herself so. Any one becoming cognizant of some of her vagaries would form a very unfavorable judgment of her and most unjustly. In her heart she is anything but the wild creature she makes herself appear. Her squawks of merriment, her rude interruptions of her elders, her pert remarks, her sarcastic jokes, are all the manifestations of mere overflowing animal spirits, of warm-blooded youth and hearty health. She will tone down. She is the most startling and incalculable child I ever heard of. No one could anticipate her eccentricities. There is an originality of invention about her pranks which amazes me. But I am sure she will turn out all that I could wish.”
“I trust so, indeed,” said Pulfennius dryly. “I am grateful to you for warning me; I promise not to misjudge her because of any childish freakishness. And now it seems to me that we should make the young lady herself a party of this conference and bring the matter to a final settlement.”
Brinnarius called a slave and bade him fetch Brinnaria.
Almost at once the fellow, a dark-skinned, obsequious Lydian, returned looking scared and yet on the verge of laughter. He could barely control his merriment, yet was plainly afraid to utter what he had to say. His master ordered him to speak.
“Instead of coming with me,” he said, “the young lady sent a message. But I am afraid to give it to you. I am afraid of a thrashing if I give the message as she gave it to me.”
“Another of her jokes,” her father growled. “You shan’t suffer for any of her impudence. Repeat her exact words; I’ll hold you excused, Dastor.”
Dastor, reassured, grinned with anticipated enjoyment and said:
“She says she is sitting down and very comfortable where she is, that she will not stand up till she feels inclined, and that if you want to see her you can come to her, for she will not come to you.”
For a moment there was a tense silence.
Pulfennius spoke first.
“If this is a sample of the sort of deportment which my future daughter-in-law is expected to outgrow I might as well be shown just what this kind of behavior is like. Let us acquiesce and go to the little witch, if you do not object.”
“I don’t object at all to going,” his host replied, “but I object to her behavior; I’ll make her smart for it. Come, let us have it over with; I’ll show you a submissive Brinnaria or I’ll know the reason why.”
They stood up and from the open atrium passed into a narrow passage lighted only from the two ends and so into the larger courtyard with gleaming marble columns at each end and long rows of them down each side. The tank under the open sky was much larger than that in the atrium and had two fountains in it. Pigeons cooed on the tiles of the roofs, and two or three of them strutted on the mosaic pavement among the columns.
The party, dumbfounded and stunned, stood without voice or movement, gazing at the picture before them.
The pavement was a cool grayish white in effect, for its mosaic work was all of pale neutral tints. Above it the background was all white,—white marble walls, the white marble polished pillars of the peristyle, white marble entablature above them, the general whiteness emphasized by the mere streak of red tiled roof visible against the intense blue of the sky.
The only color in the picture was to the left of the tank and close to it, where there had been set a big armchair upholstered in blue tapestry. In it sat a tall, fair-haired, curly-headed lad, with merry blue eyes. He wore a robe of pale green, the green of young onion tops. Against that green the red of Brinnaria’s gown showed strident and glary, for Brinnaria was sitting on his lap. His arms were round her waist, hers about his neck. She was slowly swinging her blue-shod feet rhythmically and was kissing the lad audibly and repeatedly. As her elders stood still, petrified, mute and motionless with amazement, she imprinted a loud smack on the lad’s lips, laid her cheek roguishly to his and peered archly at them, saying:
“Glad to see you again, Pulfennius; what do you think of me for a daughter-in-law?”
“I do not think of you for a daughter-in-law,” Pulfennius snarled furiously.
He turned angrily to Brinnarius.
“What does this mean?” he queried.
His host echoed him.
“Brinnaria!” he called, imperatively. “What does this mean?”
“Mean?” she repeated. “It means that I am making the most of Almo while I can. I love Almo; I’ve promised to forget him, to be a good wife to Calvaster, and of course I’m going to keep my word. From the moment I’m married to Calvaster I’ll never so much as look at Almo, let alone touch him. So I’m touching him all I can while I have the chance.”
She paused, kissed Almo twice, lingeringly and loudly, and looked up again.
“How’s that for kissing, Calvaster?” she chirped. “Don’t you wish it was you?”
“Come, son!” Pulfennius spluttered, “let us be gone! This is no place for us. We are being mocked and insulted.”
“Nonsense, Pulfennius!” his host exclaimed. “Can’t you see that I had no part in this, that the minx devised it all by herself expressly to thwart me? Don’t let her have the satisfaction of outmanoeuvering both of us. Don’t let a mere prank of a child spoil all our arrangements. She’ll be a good wife as she says.”
“A good wife!” Pulfennius snorted. “I much doubt whether she can now ever be a good wife to any man. I’m sure she’ll never be a wife to my son. You’d never convince me that she’s fit to be my son’s wife. Make her a Vestal, indeed! She a Vestal? She’s much more likely to be something very different!”
“Do you mean to insinuate—” his host began.
“I mean to insinuate anything and everything appropriate to her wanton behavior,” Pulfennius raged.
The two men glared at each other in a silence through which could be heard the cooing of the doves, the trickle of the two fountains, Brinnaria’s low chuckle and the faint lisping sound of three distinct kisses.
“I beg your pardon!” spoke a voice behind them.
The four looked around.
“What brings you here, Segontius?” Brinnarius asked.
“One of my slaves brought me word,” the intruder explained, “that my son had entered this house. I knew you had not changed your mind since you forbade him to cross your threshold, so I came here at once to disclaim any share in his intrusion and to take him home. I feared he might get into mischief.”
“He has,” Brinnarius replied, sententiously, “as you may see.”
Brinnaria, entirely at her ease, hugged Almo rapturously and kissed him repeatedly.
“And I thought,” Segontius pursued, “that you would probably smash every bone in his body if you caught him.”
“I don’t know why I haven’t,” spoke the big man reflectively.
“I know,” shouted Pulfennius, “I can tell you. It is because this whole comedy has been rehearsed between you just to make me ridiculous. I know your way, your malignity, your tenacity of a grudge, your pretence of reconciliation, your ingenuity, your well-laid traps. I’ll be revenged for this yet!”
“You won’t live to be revenged,” Brinnarius told him, “unless you get out of here quick. I’ll break every bone in your body, for certain, if you address another word to me.”
“Come, son, said Pulfennius, and shambled away.
“And now,” spoke Segontius, “don’t you think, Marcus, that you and I had best forget our quarrels and be friends again? These young folks were plainly meant for each other by all the gods who favor lovers. Let us not stand in the way.”
“Indeed, Lucius,” spoke the big man, holding out his huge hand. “I am of the same mind. But both of them deserve some punishment for their presumption. They should wait four years at least before they marry. My girl is too young.”
“I agree,” said Segontius, “and I’ll send my boy to Falerii for the present. That will keep them apart and ensure propriety of behavior.”
“That is well,” growled Brinnarius, “and I’ll send my girl to her aunt Septima’s.”
Brinnaria sprang up.
“Aunt Septima’s?” she cried. “Spinach and mallows and a tiny roast lark for dinner every day. I’ll starve to death And prim! I’d almost as lief be a Vestal!”
CHAPTER II - SIEVES
To her luxurious but austerely managed villa, Aunt Septima welcomed Brinnaria with heartfelt, if repressed affection. Until the second sunrise Brinnaria controlled herself. Then the good lady endured her overgrown niece for some strenuous days, suffered impatiently for a few more, but finally packed off to Rome “that unspeakable child.” At home again Brinnaria demanded pork and cabbage.
“My insides are as empty as the sky,” she wailed. “Asparagus is all very well, but it’s none too filling, even if you can eat all you want, and aunty says ten stalks is enough for any one meal. Chicken-breast is good, hot or cold, but aunty would never let me have a second helping. She wouldn’t even let me have as much bread as I wanted and only one little dish of strawberries. I filled up on raw eggs, all I could find in the nests. But, my six days of raw eggs was five days too many for me. I’m wild for cabbage, all I want, and pork, big hunks of it.”
She got it and slept a sound night’s sleep.
The next day she craved an outing on foot. Her mother, prone to the shortest cut to peace on all occasions, acquiesced at once and let her go out with her one-eyed maid, Utta.
Utta, born somewhere beyond the Rhine, had been brought to Rome when a small child and had no memories except memories of Italy. She was the most placid and acquiescent creature imaginable. Her little mistress led her first of all to the nearest pastry-cook’s shop where the two ate till they could not swallow another crumb.
Brinnaria, like many eccentric children born to wealth and position, had special favorites, almost cronies, among the lowly. Chief among them was the old sieve-maker of the Via Sacra. To his shop she made Utta lead her. Utta interposed no objection. Utta never objected to anything. But in this case she was especially complaisant, since opposite the sieve-maker’s was a fascinating embroidery shop, the keeper of which was entirely willing, when he had no customers, to let Utta lounge on one of his sofas and inspect embroideries to her heart’s content. So lounging, rapt in the contemplation of Egyptian appliques, Syrian gold-thread borders, Spanish linen-work, silk flower patterns from Cos, Parthian animal designs and Celtic cord-labyrinths after originals in leather thongs, Utta could glance up from time to time and make sure that her charge was safe with the sieve-maker.
Safe she would have been without any maid to watch her, for old Truttidius adored her. He was a small, hale, merry, wizened man, his seamed and wrinkled face brown as berry in spite of his lifelong habit of indoor labor and comparative inertia. He had more than a little tact and was an excellent listener. Brinnaria was entirely at ease with him.
His shop was rather large for those days, nearly fifteen feet wide and fully twenty deep. It faced directly on the street, from which it was separated only by the stone counter which occupied all the front except a narrow entrance at one side. Above the counter projected the heavy shutters which closed the shop at night and which, being hinged at the top, were by day pushed upward and outward so as to form a sort of pent like a wooden substitute for an awning. The entrance by the end of the counter was closed by a solid little gate. Behind the counter was the low stool from which Truttidius rose to chaffer with customers, and on which, when not occupied in trading, he sat at work, his bench and brazier by his side, his tools hanging on the wall by his hand, orderly in their neat racks or on their neat rows of hooks. Except for the trifling wall-space which they occupied, the walls were hidden under sieves hanging close together; bronze sieves, copper sieves, rush sieves with rims of white willow wood, white horse-hair sieves whose hoops were stout ash, sieves of black horse-hair stretched in rims of clean steamed oak and linen sieves hooped about with birch. Sieves were piled on the counter, mostly fancy sieves with hoops of carved wood strung with black and white horse-hair interlaced in bold patterns, or copper sieves, polished till they shone, they being most likely to catch the eyes of the passing throng.
Brinnaria, sprawled on the sofa against the wall behind the work-bench, surveyed her surroundings and sighed happily, entirely at home. Truttidius was beating copper wire, a process always fascinating to watch.
“I’ve had an awful time in the country with Aunt Septima,” Brinnaria chatted, “and I had an awful scare before they sent me to the country. Daddy threatened to make me a Vestal.”
“In place of Rabulla?” Truttidius queried, glancing up.
“Yes,” Brinnaria answered, “but I got off; my, but I was scared though.”
“You didn’t want to be a Vestal?” Truttidius asked, eyeing her over his work.
“Not I!” Brinnaria declared. “I can’t think of anything worse except being killed.”
“Well,” mused Truttidius, “there is no accounting for tastes. Most girls would be wild with delight at the idea. But there would be no sense in being a Vestal unless you wanted to be one.”
“I don’t,” Brinnaria proclaimed emphatically, “but I have been thinking about Vestals ever since Daddy threatened me and scared me so; I’ve been thinking about Vestals and sieves. Did anybody ever really carry water in a sieve, Truttidius?”
“Water in a sieve?” the old man exclaimed. “Not anybody that ever I saw. What do you mean?”
“You must have heard the story of Tuccia, the Vestal,” Brinnaria wondered, wide-eyed. “She lived ages ago, before Hannibal invaded Italy, when everything was different. They said she was bad and she said it was a lie and they said she could not prove it was a lie and she said she could. She said if she was all she ought to be the Goddess would show it by answering her prayer. And she took a sieve and walked down to the river, right by the end of the Sublician bridge, where the stairs are on the right-hand side. And the five other Vestals, and the flamens, and all the priests, and the Pontifex, and the consuls went with her. And she stood on the lowest step with her toes in the water and prayed out loud to the Goddess to help her and show that she had told the truth and then she stooped over and dipped up water with her sacrificing ladle and poured it into the sieve and it didn’t run through, and she dipped up more and more until the sieve was half full of water, as if it had been a pan. And then she hung her ladle at her girdle-hook and took the sieve in both hands and carried the water all the way to the temple. And everybody said that that proved that she had told the truth.
“That’s the story. Had you ever heard it?”
“Yes, little lady,” Truttidius said, “I have heard it.”
“What I want to know,” Brinnaria pursued, “is this: Is it a made-up story or is it a true story?”
“Little lady,” spoke Truttidius, “it is impious to doubt the truth of pious stories handed down from days of old.”
“That isn’t answering my question,” said the practical Brinnaria. “What I want you to tell me is to say right out plain do you believe it. Did anybody really ever carry water in a sieve?”
“You must remember, dear little lady,” the sieve-maker said, “that she was a most holy priestess, most pleasing in the eyes of her Goddess, that she was in dire straits and that she prayed to the Goddess to aid her. The Goddess helped her votary; the gods can do all things.”
“The gods can do all things,” Brinnaria echoed, her eyes flashing, “but the gods don’t do all things, not even for their favorites. There are lots and lots of things no god ever did for any votary or ever will. What I want to know is this: Is carrying water in a sieve one of the things the gods not only can do but do do? Did anybody ever carry water in a sieve truly?”
Truttidius smiled, his wrinkles doubling and quadrupling till his face was all a network of tiny folds of hard, dry skin. He put down his work and regarded his guest, his face serious after the fading of his brief smile. The soft-footed sandalled throng that packed the narrow street shuffled and padded by unnoticed. No customer interrupted them. They might have been alone in a Sibyl’s cell on a mountain side.
“Little lady,” spoke the sieve-maker, “you are, indeed, very old for your age, not only in height and build, but in heart and mind. What other child would bother her head about so subtle a problem? What other child would perceive the verity at the heart of the puzzle and put it so neatly in so few words? To you an old man cannot help talking as to an experienced matron, because to you an old man can talk as to a woman of sense. You deserve to be answered in the spirit of the question.”
He reflected. Brinnaria, fascinated and curious, hardly breathed in her intentness, watching his face and waiting for his answer.
“Little lady,” he said, after a long silence, “the gods can, indeed, do all things. But as you have yourself perceived the gods do not do all things, even for their favorites. The gods work miracles to vindicate their votaries, but as you divine, each miracle is the happening by the special ordinance of the gods of what might happen even without their mandate, but which does not happen because it is only once in countless ages that all the circumstances necessary to bring about that sort of happening concur to produce so unusual an effect. What folks call a miracle is the occurrence, by the beneficent will of heaven, at just the right time and place, of what might happen anywhere to any one, but almost never does happen anywhere to any one, because it is so unlikely that all things should conspire to bring about so unlikely a result.
“So of carrying water in a sieve.
“Anybody might carry water in a sieve any day. But very seldom, oh, very, very seldom can it come to pass that the kind of person capable of carrying water in a sieve can be just in the condition of muscle and mood to do so and can at just that moment be in possession of just the kind of sieve that will hold water and not let it through. For an actual breathing woman of flesh and blood to carry water in a real ordinary sieve of rush-fibres, or linen thread or horsehair or metal wire, in such a sieve as pastry-cooks use to sift their finest flour; for that to happen in broad daylight under the open sky before a crowd of onlookers, that requires the special intervention of the blessed gods, or of the most powerful of them. And not even all of them together could make that happen to a woman of ordinary quality of hand and eye, with a usual sieve, as most sieves are.”
“Explain!” Brinnaria half whispered, “what kind of woman could actually carry water in a sieve and in what kind of a sieve, and under what circumstances?”
“That’s three questions,” Truttidius counted, “and one at a time is enough.
“In the first place, no god, not all the gods together, could give any votary power to carry water in a sieve, be it rush or linen or horse-hair or metal, of which the meshes had been first scrubbed with natron or embalmers’ salt or wood-ashes or fullers’ earth. Water would run through such a sieve, did even all the gods will that it be retained. No one ever dipped a sieve into water and brought it up with water in it and saw that water retained by the meshes. Once wet the under side of a sieve and water will run through to the last drop.
“But if a sieve were ever so little greasy or oily, not dripping with oil or clogged with grease, but greasy as a working slave’s finger is greasy on a hot day; if such a sieve were free of any drop of water on the underside, if into such a sieve water were slowly and carefully poured, as you say that Tuccia in the story ladled water into her sieve with her libation-dipper, then that water might spread evenly over the meshes to the rim all around, might deepen till it was as deep as the width of two fingers or of three, and might be retained by the meshes even for an hour, even while the sieve was carried over a rough road, up hill and down, through crowded streets.
“But few are the women who could so carry a sieve of water or could even so hold it that the water would not run through at once.”
“How could the water be retained at all?” queried Brinnaria the practical. “What is the explanation?”
Truttidius wrinkled up his face in deep thought.
“You have seen wine spilled at dinner,” he illustrated. “You have seen a drop of it or a splash of it fall on a sofa-cover, and you have seen it soak in and leave an ugly stain?”
“Of course,” Brinnaria agreed, “often and often.”
“And then again, not very often,” the sieve-maker went on, “you see a patch of spilt wine stand up on a perfectly dry fabric and remain there awhile without soaking in, its surface shining wet and its edges gleaming round and smooth and curved, bright as a star. Well, the retaining of water in a sieve by the open meshes is like the momentary holding up of spilt wine on a woven fabric. I can’t explain any better, but the two happenings are similar, only the not soaking in of the splashed liquid is far, oh, far more frequent, countless, uncountable times more frequent, than the sustaining of fluid in a sieve. But as the one can happen and does, so the other could happen and might.”
“I see,” Brinnaria breathed. “You have made me see that. Now, next point: How must the sieve be held?”
The old man smiled again.
“You keep close to the subject,” he chuckled. “You talk like a grandmother of consuls. You have a head on your shoulders.”
“That does not answer my question,” Brinnaria persisted.
“Your question is easily answered,” he said. “For the miracle to happen, in fact, the sieve must be held as level as the top rail of a mason’s T-shaped plumb-line frame, and as steady as if clamped in a vise. For a woman to carry water in a sieve the weather must be dry, for in damp weather the water would run through the meshes, even if the threads or wires were just oily enough and not too oily, even if the meshes were just the right size to favor the forming in each mesh of a little pocket of water underneath, like the edges of the upstanding drop of wine on a sofa-cushion. I don’t know how it comes to pass, but somehow, if all the conditions are right, little bags of water form on the underside of a sieve, one to each mesh, like drops after a rain hanging from the edge of my shop-shutters, or from the mutules on the cornice of a temple. They are capable of sustaining one or even two finger-thicknesses of water on the upper side of the sieve-web. But if the sieve-web is unevenly woven or unevenly stretched, it will not retain water an instant, and if the sieve-web bags anywhere the water, even if the rest of the sieve-web promises to retain it, will run through at that point. And even if the sieve is perfect, the slightest tilt, the very slightest tilt, will cause the little bags of water to break at the lowest point, and so start all the water to running through. I know; I have tried; I have seen the sieve hold up the water for some breaths. But for the marvel to last any length of time, that would require the intervention of the gods; that would be a miracle. For a woman to hold a sieve so that it would retain water would mean that her hand was as steady as the hand of a sleep-walker or of the priestess of Isis in her trance in the great yearly mystery-festival. That could happen seldom to any woman; such a woman would be rare.”
“I see,” Brinnaria barely whispered, so intent was she on the old man’s words. “Now, what kind of woman could do such a wonder?”
“A very exceptional and unusual kind of woman,” the old man declared. “Women, the run of them, are not steady-handed. Even steady-handed women are easily distracted, their attention is readily called away from any definite task. Even a woman usually steady-handed would find her hand tremble if she were conscious of guilt, even a woman high-hearted with her sense of her own worthiness might glance aside at some one in a great crowd of people about her, might let her thoughts wander.
“That is where the miracle would come in. Only a woman directly favored by the mighty gods could so ignore the throng about her, could so forget herself, could so concentrate all her faculties on the receptacle she held, could so perfectly control her muscles or could so completely let her muscles act undisturbed by her will, could possess muscles capable of so long tension at so perfect an adjustment.”
“I see,” Brinnaria sighed. “The thing may have happened in fact, may happen again, but it could happen only once out of ten times ten thousand times ten thousand chances. I understand. It is a possibility in the ordinary course of events. It was a miracle if it ever took place; it will be a miracle if it ever comes to pass again. It is not impossible, but it’s too improbable for anybody to believe it could be, in fact.”
“You have it,” the sieve-maker assured her.
“I’m glad I have,” she said. “Now it’ll go out of my head and quit bothering me. I’ve thought about it day and night ever since Daddy threatened me. Now I’ll forget it and sleep sound.”
CHAPTER III - STUTTERING
When Brinnaria returned from her outing she found waiting for her her best friend, chum and crony, Flexinna, a girl four years older, not so tall, decidedly more slender and much prettier. Brinnaria was robustly handsome; Flexinna was delicately lovely, yet they did not differ much in tints of hair, eyes or skin and might have been sisters. In fact, they were not infrequently taken for sisters.
They chatted of their girlish interests and of local gossip and family news, like any pair of girls, until Brinnaria described the escapade that led to her rustication.
Flexinna’s eyes were wide and wider as she listened.
“D-d-do-you really m-m-mean,” she stuttered, “that you had a c-c-chance to be a V-V-Vestal and d-d-didn’t jump at it?”
“Jump at it!” exclaimed Brinnaria. “I jumped away from it! I can’t think of anything, except death, that would fill me with more horror than the very idea of being made a Vestal. It makes me shiver now just to speak of it.”
“You’re a f-f-fool,” Flexinna declared, “the f-f-foolest kind of a f-f-fool. This is the f-f-first f-f-foolish thing I ever knew you to d-d-do. I always th-th-thought you s-s-so s-s-sensible, t-t-too. And you’ve m-m-missed a ch-ch-chance to be a V-V-Vestal. I’ve n-n-no p-p-patience with you. Any other g-g-girl would j-j-jump at the ch-ch-chance.”
“Jump at it!” cried Brinnaria. “Why?”
“Why?” sneered Flexinna, blazing with excitement. “Why, just think what you’ve m-m-missed! You’re as wild as I am to see g-g-gladiators fight, k-k-keener than I am to see a real horse-race in the circus, and you’ll have to wait until you’re g-g-grown up, as I’ll have to, before you s-s-see either. And you’d have g-g-gone to every spectacle, from the very day you were t-t-taken, and not have m-m-missed one. Think of it! F-F-Front seats in the circus, front seats in the amphitheatre, all your life, or for thirty years at least, for certain! And you’ve m-m-missed it. And that’s not half. Your lictor to c-c-clear the way for you whenever you g-g-go out and your choice to g-g-go out in your litter with eight b-b-bearers or in your c-c-carriage, your own c-c-carriage, all your own, and the right to d-d-drive any where in the city any d-d-day in the year. Oh, you f-f-fool, you s-s-silly f-f-fool! A ch-ch-chance to be one of the s-s-seven m-m-most imp-p-portant women in Rome, one of the s-s-six who are on a level with the Empress, and you m-m-missed it! Fancy it; to b-b-be mistress of an income so large that it m-m-makes you d-d-dizzy to think of it, and you throw away the ch-ch-chance! To be able the m-m-moment you were taken, to m-m-make your own w-w-will! To have every legacy c-c-cadger in Rome running after you and m-m-making you p-p-presents and d-d-doing you favors and angling for your n-n-notice all your 1-l-life 1-1-long, and you m-m-miss the ch-ch-chance!”
“Yes,” Brinnaria admitted, reflectively, “I have missed all that, that’s so. But that’s not all there is to think of, when you think about being a Vestal. I’ve missed a lot of fine privileges, mighty valuable to any girl that would care for that sort of thing; but I’ve escaped a lot of things that would go with those privileges. I love bright colors, I always did and I look ghastly in white—I look like a ghost. And I’d have had to wear white and nothing else, even white flowers, like a corpse. And a Vestal has to keep her eyes on the ground and walk slow and stately and stand straight and dignified, and talk soft and low. I’d suffer, even if I could learn all the tricks they teach them as well as Gargilia has. And I don’t believe I ever could. I’d keep my eyes cast down for a month or a year and then, right in the middle of a sacrifice, I’d see something funny, like the gander squawking under the feet of the pall-bearers at poor old Gibba’s funeral at the farm last summer, and I’d wink at the head Vestal or roll my eyes at the whole congregation and spoil the prayers; or, after keeping meek and mum for a year or so I’d be so wild to laugh that I’d roar right out and break up the whole service. I think I’m the last girl alive to be a Vestal. A Vestal mustn’t answer back or make a pun, no matter how good a chance she gets. I just can’t help cutting in, if I see a chance; the words come out of my mouth before I know it, and, if I trained myself to keep still and look as mild as a lamb, I’d be boiling inside and sometime I’d burst out with a yell just to relieve my feelings or I’d jab a shawl-pin into the Pontifex to see him jump, or put out my toe and trip up somebody just to see him sprawl. I couldn’t help it. The more I’d bottle myself up the farther the naughtiness in me would spurt when it burst through the skin. I know. No Vestaling for me! I wasn’t born for that trade!”
“Nonsense!” Flexinna disclaimed vigorously. “You’d g-g-get used to the whole thing in a m-m-month and be the most s-s-statuesque of the six in t-t-ten years. Think of it! I’m just raging inside at your f-f-folly. To have the right to an interview with the Emperor whenever you d-d-demand it, to see the m-m-magistrates’ lictors lower their fasces to you and s-s-stand aside at the s-s-salute and let you p-p-pass whenever you m-m-meet them in p-p-public. To live in one of the finest p-p-palaces in Rome, one of the most m-m-magnificent residences on earth, to have the ch-ch-chance at all that and m-m-miss it; I’ve no p-p-patience with you!”
“That’s all very fine,” Brinnaria countered, “but there’s much to be said on the other side. I’ve been in the Atrium. Aunt Septima took me there to call on Causidiena. It’s big, it’s gorgeous, it’s luxurious, that’s all true. But I love sunlight. I’d loathe living in that hole in the ground; why, the shadow of the Palace falls across the courtyard before noon and for all the rest of the day it’s gloomy as the bottom of a well. I heard Causidiena tell Aunt Septima how shoes mould and embroideries mildew and what a time they have with the inlays popping off the furniture on account of the dampness and about the walls and lamp-standards sweating moisture. I’d hate the dark, poky, cold place.”
“Oh,” Flexinna admitted, “there are d-d-drawbacks to any s-s-situation in life, but, really the higher the s-s-station the fewer the drawbacks. The p-p-plain truth is that being a Vestal is the highest s-s-station in Rome except being an Empress. No g-g-girl dare aspire to be an Empress; it would be treason. If any g-g-girl d-d-dreams of it she k-k-keeps her d-d-dreams to herself. But any g-g-girl has a right to aspire to be a Vestal, if she is made perfect and is under ten and has her f-f-father and m-m-mother noble and alive. You’ve got all that and you are offered what any g-g-girl would envy you and you throw it away! I’ve no patience with you.”
“You forget,” Brinnaria argued, “that I’m in love with Almo and I’d have to give up Almo.”
“Not f-f-forever,” Flexinna retorted. “He’s enough in love with you to wait for you, to wait for you! You could have pledged him to wait till your term of service was up and then you two could have married just the same.”
“Just the same!” Brinnaria echoed. “A lot of good it’d do me to marry after I’d be an old wrinkled, gray-haired woman of forty, dried up and withered.”
“Nemestronia,” Flexinna cited, “has married twice since she was forty, and she’s not withered yet, not by a great deal, even if she is gray-haired and has a wrinkle or two.”
“What’s the use of arguing,” Brinnaria summed up. “I hate the very idea of being a Vestal. I’d hate the fact a million times more. I’d hate it even if I were not in love with Almo, furiously in love with Almo. Daddy says I’ve got to wait four years to marry him. I roll around in bed and bite the pillows with rage to think of it, night after night. A fine figure I’d cut trying to wait thirty years for him. I’d swoon with longing for him and write him a note or peep out of the temple to see him go by and then I’d get accused of misbehavior, and accused is convicted for a Vestal; well, you know it. I’d look fine being buried alive in a seven-by-five underground stone cell, with half a pint of milk and a gill of wine to keep me alive long enough to suffer before I starved to death and a thimbleful of oil in a lamp to make me more scared of the dark when the lamp burned out. No burial alive for me. I’m in love. I’m too much in love to balance arguments. I’m not sorry I missed my chance, as you call it. I’m glad I escaped; the chance isn’t missed for that matter. Rabulla’s place hasn’t been filled yet.”
“Do you know who is g-g-going to be ch-ch-chosen to fill it?” Flexinna asked. “You d-d-don’t? The choice has about narrowed d-d-down to that execrable, weasel-faced little M-M-Meffia.”
“Meffia!” Brinnaria cried. “There’s no one alive I despise as much as that detestable ninny. I’ve a mind to chuck Almo and ask Daddy to offer me, just to spite Meffia.”
“Why d-d-don’t you?” Flexinna stuttered. “D-d-do it n-n-now, right n-n-now. You might be t-t-too late.”
“Oh bosh,” Brinnaria groaned. “What’s the use of talking nonsense? What would be the sense in my spoiling my life to spite Meffia? I hate her. I’ll hate to see her putting on airs as a Vestal, but I’d hate worse to be a Vestal myself, and worst of all to lose Almo. I just couldn’t give up Almo.”
“I wish I were you,” Flexinna raged. “If I were only under ten and d-d-didn’t s-s-stutter, I’d d-d-do all I c-c-could to g-g-get D-D-Daddy to offer m-m-me.”
“Bosh!” Brinnaria sneered. “You’re in love with Vocco and you know you wouldn’t even think of giving him up if you had the chance.”
“Just wouldn’t I!” Flexinna retorted. “I love Quintus dearly. But if I had a ch-ch-chance to be a V-V-Vestal, I’d fling poor Quintus hard and never regret him. Not I. Think of the influence a V-V-Vestal has! Every man who wants p-p-promotion in the army or in the fleet, or who wants an appointment to any office would set his sisters and all his women relations to besieging me to use my influence for him. Every temple-carver and shrine-painter in Rome would have his wife showing me attentions. I know; I’ve heard the talk.
“And b-b-besides, in all the Empire a Vestal is the nearest thing to a p-p-princess we have. We read a lot about Egyptian princesses, and Asiatic princesses and we hear about P-P-Parthian p-p-princesses, but the only p-p-princesses we ever see are the Vestals. They are the only p-p-princesses in the Empire, in Italy, in Rome, the six of them. And you had a chance to be one of the only six p-p-princesses in our world and you didn’t take it. Oh, you f-f-fool, you f-f-fool!”
They wrangled about their conflicting views for a long time.
It was only as Flexinna was leaving that she inquired casually:
“Have you heard what Rabulla d-d-died of?”
“No,” said Brinnaria, “what was it?”
“Hadn’t you heard?” Flexinna wondered. “It was the p-p-pestilence.”
CHAPTER IV - PESTILENCE
Pestilence!
Brinnaria heard the word often during the next few days. Rome talked of little else. It had begun with a few deaths along the river front in the sailors’ quarters, and among the stevedores and porters of the grain-warehouses, southwest of the Aventine Hill in the thirteenth ward. Next it came to notice when there were many deaths along the Subura in the very centre of the city. From there the infection had spread to every wind. Panic seized the people. There was an exodus of all who could afford it, to their country estates, to the mountains, to the seaside. Brinnarius and Quartilla discussed arrangements for their departure to his mountain farm in the Sabine hills above Carsioli. Their difficulty was to decide to whom to commit their great house in Rome. They had no slave whom they implicitly trusted, and no one certainly who would be willing to stay in the city. To close the house was to invite burglary, for in the general panic watchmen were unreliable and house-breakings were frequent. Into their consultation Brinnaria thrust herself uninvited.
“Why don’t you leave me in town?” she suggested. “I hate the country and I hate it near Carsioli worse than any neighborhood I ever saw. I want to stay right here. I love Rome. And I’m not afraid of pestilence. Nobody can die more than once and nobody dies till the gods will it. There’s more danger of dying of fright and worry than of pestilence. Anyhow a pestilence never kills all the people in a city, most of the towns- folk stay right at home and keep alive all right. Half the people that die scare or fret themselves to death. I won’t fret or worry and I’ll keep well here; but if you take me with you I’ll be miserable and chafe myself ill. I can run the house as well as mother can. Most of the slaves worship me and will obey me for love, the rest are deadly afraid of me and will not dare to disobey me. I’ll keep order and I will not waste a sesterce. Can’t I stay, Father?”
Brinnarius knit his brows and looked at his wife. Her eyes answered his.
“It would save a deal of trouble,” he said, reflectively.
“It would make a deal of gossip,” Quartilla declared. “All my enemies would say that I am an unnatural mother, that I do not love my youngest child, that I hate her, that I am exposing her to certain death, that I am as bad as a murderess.”
“Nonsense!” her husband retorted. “We can’t bother about all the malice of all the slanderers in Rome. Other people’s daughters are remaining. Lucconius means to stay here in Rome with his family. If he ventures to keep Flexinna here we might venture to leave Brinnaria behind.”
“You might,” that self-assertive child cut in, “and you know there is really no use in taking me if I do not want to go. You know how much trouble it will make for both of you.”
Quartilla sighed.
“Perhaps we had best leave her,” she said. “Certainly the house will be safe and the slaves kept in order. I shan’t have an instant’s anxiety about that. Then Brinnaria is so genuinely brave that she will really not dread the pestilence, and all the doctors say that there is nothing like that feeling to protect any one from the danger. She makes me feel that she will be safe. I don’t believe I’ll worry about that either.”
“Fine!” Brinnaria squealed. “I’m to stay.”
“Not so fast,” her father rebuked her. “I haven’t said yet that you may stay. But if I say so, then you must stay. I’ll not have you changing your mind and deciding to leave Rome after we have arranged to put you in charge here. It would make trouble indeed to have you shutting up this house in a hurry and chasing after us to Carsioli.”
“Epulo!” his wife reproached him, “the child has her faults, but changeableness is not one of them. She is the most resolute child I ever knew. If you leave her, she will not fail us. If she gives her word she will keep it. I never knew Brinnaria to break an earnestly made promise.”
“Will you promise?” her father asked her.
“I promise,” Brinnaria shouted, “I pledge myself. I take oath. I swear by my love of both of you, by my respect for our clan, by my hopes of marrying Almo, that I’ll stick it out here in Rome, going out only when necessary, unless you send for me to come away. If anything happens that makes me think I ought to leave the city I shall send a message to you, but I shall not cross the city boundaries nor relax my watch on this house without your permission. I swear.”
“That’s enough, dearie,” her father said, “enough and too much. If your judgment tells you that you ought to flee from Rome, you have my permission to send me a messenger; I know you will not resort to that without real need. I rely on your judgment. The gods be with you, child. You have taken a load of my shoulders, two loads, in fact.”
Thereupon preparations for departure were pushed and soon after sunrise on the next day Brinnaria found herself left to her own resources, responsible for the welfare of a large retinue of obsequious slaves, autocrat over them, and mistress of one of the largest private houses in Rome. She acquitted herself well of her duties. She had been right in claiming that she was loved by most and feared by the rest. Certainly she was trusted and respected by all as if she had been five times her age. She made them as comfortable as town-slaves could be and they knew it. To her they accorded instant and implicit obedience. The life of the household went on as smoothly as if the master had been at home. And its life was not gloomy. Although the main subject of conversation was the pestilence, open forebodings were not indulged in and the house was outwardly cheerful.
Equally cheerful was Flexinna, whom Brinnaria saw daily. Neither of them had the slightest fear of the pestilence and no member of either household had shown the slightest symptoms of any kind of illness. Of the daily deaths among their large acquaintance or among the nobilities of the city, they talked calmly, without any feeling of gloom or of dread, secure in the confidence of youth and health.
On the tenth day after Brinnaria had been left to her own devices Flexinna visited her as usual. Early in their talk she said:
“D-D-Dossonia died last night.”
“The Chief Vestal?” Brinnaria queried.
“Yes,” Flexinna replied, a bright tear in each eye.
“She couldn’t live forever,” Brinnaria said. “She was ninety-four, wasn’t she?”
“Ninety-four years and eight months yesterday,” Flexinna replied. “She had been Chief Vestal ever since C-C-Calpurnia P-P-Praetextata died, and that’s fifty- six years ago. She had been Chief Vestal longer than any ever and she had lived longer than any Vestal ever.”
“Well,” said Brinnaria, the practical, “she ought to have been glad to go, and she stone blind for twenty years.”
“Yes, I know,” Flexinna rejoined, “but she was such an old d-d-dear, she looked so much younger than her age, her face so healthy and pink, and b-b-beautiful even with all its wrinkles, so calm and placid and holy I loved to look at her sitting in her big chair like a great white b-b-butterfly, so plump and handsome and soft-looking. She always put out her hand to my face and recognized me at the first t-t-touch, almost, and gave me her blessing so b-b-beautifully. Sometimes Manlia let me read to the old dear, and she always seemed to enjoy it so much. I’m real shaken at her d-d-death. I really loved her.”
“Everybody loved her,” Brinnaria declared. “But everybody loves Causidiena too, and she’s Chief Vestal now. She’s not fat and placid like Dossonia, but she is wonderfully dignified. My, I admire that woman!”
“I wonder,” Flexinna reflected, “who will be chosen in her p-p-place.”
“Poor wretch!” Brinnaria commented. “I’m sorry for her, whoever she is. Just think, she’ll have to pair with that unspeakable little muff of a Meffia. I hate that girl.”
“Whoever she is,” Flexinna continued, “she is sure to be chosen and taken mighty quick. For with this p-p-pestilence in the city, and all the trouble the P-P-Parthians are making in the East, of the Marcomanni on the Rhine colonies, and the thunder-storms that have raged about lately, there’ll be need felt for all the p-p-prayers all the offer. They’ll not leave the vacancy open long. I’ll bet they have it filled by d-d-day after to-morrow. Old B-B-Bambilio is a stickler for pious precision an observance of all ritual matters and the Emperors are with him.”
“Marcus is,” Brinnaria agreed, pertly, “but Lucius doesn’t care what happens so long as he has his fun.”
“You mustn’t t-t-t-talk that way about the Emperors,” Flexinna cautioned her. “If you were overheard you’d get into no end of trouble. Anyhow, Verus defers to Aurelius in everything, so that whatever Aurelius wishes is as if both wished it. And there never was a more p-p-pious Emperor than Aurelius. So the place is certain to be filled p-p-promptly.”
“At once, for sure,” Brinnaria agreed. “I wonder who the victim will be? Do you suppose it will be Occurnea?”
“It would have been Occurnea, I think,” Flexinna said. “You know it was a chance for a while whether she’d get it instead of Meffia. But she’s not eligible now. Her mother d-d-died yesterday.”
“Tallentia, perhaps,” Brinnaria hazarded.
“Impossible,” Flexinna declared. “You remember how recklessly she rode and how her horse f-f-fell on her. She has limped ever since and always will.”
“Cuppiena?” suggested Brinnaria.
“Not she,” said Flexinna; “she has some k-k-kind of skin rash and has lost almost all her hair.”
“Sabbia,” Brinnaria proposed.
“Her mother’s d-d-dead too,” Flexinna reminded her; “has been for months.”
“Fremnia,” came the next suggestion.
“She’s off to Aquileia with her family,” said Flexinna; “they all left the d-d-day your folks went.”
“Eppia,” ventured Brinnaria.
“She’s ten years old now,” Flexinna demurred. “She celebrated her b-b-birthday three days before the Kalends. I was at the party.”
“Pennasia, perhaps,” Brinnaria suggested.
“D-d-deaf in one ear like her mother and grandmother,” said Flexinna, “and you know it.”
“Licinia,” Brinnaria ventured.
“She’d be the last they’d choose on account of the b-b-bad luck Vestals of her family have had;” Flexinna reminded her. “The very name suggests disgrace. Anyhow, she’s in Baiae with her p-p-people.”
“Rentulana,” came the next conjecture.
“Has a b-b-big wen on the side of her head,” Flexinna proclaimed.
“Numledia?” came next.
“You’ve lost your memory, Brinnaria,” said Flexinna, severely. “She’s got a b-b-big purple birthmark on her neck.”
“Magnonia,” Brinnaria proposed.
“She’s far away, in Britain, with her father and mother; might as well be out of the world.”
Brinnaria was at a loss. She meditated. “Gavinna!” she said at last.
“She has a bad squint and you know it,” laughed Flexinna. “Why don’t you think of an eligible c-c-candidate?”
They tried a dozen more names, all of girls out of the city or defective in some way, or with one parent dead.
“But who will it be?” Brinnaria wondered. “It’s bound to be somebody and quick.”
She jumped to her feet.
She screamed.
“They’ll take me! They’ll take me! Oh, what am I to do, what am I to do? I’m the only possible candidate in the city. And they’ll be after me the moment they run over the lists and find no one else is in town.”
She stood a moment, considering, then she called Guntello, and a lean Caledonian slave called Intinco. She gave them each a written journey-order to show to any patrol that questioned them, told Guntello to take the best horse in the stable and to give the next best to Intinco, bade Intinco ride to Carsioli and Guntello to Falerii, gave Guntello a letter for Almo and Intinco a letter to her father and told them verbally, in case the letter was lost, to make it plain that she was in danger of being taken for a Vestal and bid her father come quickly to interfere and her lover to ride fast to claim her in time. She enjoined both slaves to spur their horses, gave them money in case they needed to hire fresh mounts and wound up:
“Kill Rhaebus, kill Xanthus, kill as many hired horses as need be, ride without halt or mercy. Get there and get father and Almo here. Be quick. You can’t be too quick.”
She watched them ride off at a sedate walk, for no man was allowed to trot a horse in the streets of Rome. Both had assured her that they would ride at full gallop from the moment they passed the gates.
Then began for Brinnaria a tense and anxious period of waiting. Flexinna obtained her parents’ permission and remained with her friend. The entire household continued in good health and there was nothing to distract t he two from their dread on the one hand that the Pontifex might come to claim Brinnaria before Almo and her father arrived, and their hope on the other hand of seeing them come in time.
On the whole the strain told on Flexinna more than on Brinnaria, who never once shed a tear, attended to her housewifely duties calmly and steadily and talked little. Flexinna fidgeted constantly and talked a good deal.
“If I were in your place,” she said, “I shouldn’t be waiting here inertly for Faltonius to come and claim me. Instead of dispatching messengers for your father and Almo, you ought to have left the city at once and made your best speed for Carsioli yourself.”
“I couldn’t,” Brinnaria declared, “and you know why. I passed my word to stay in this house and not so much as to go out unless some compelling necessity arose. I pledged myself not to leave here unless I sent a messenger saying I needed to leave and received permission before I started. I took my oath not to cross the city limits without Father’s consent. I can’t break my oath and I shouldn’t break my word, even if I hadn’t sworn in addition to promising.”
“You f-f-fool!” Flexinna declared.
“All members of our clan keep their word,” said Brinnaria proudly. “We do not ask whether it is advantageous to keep our word or pleasant; when we have passed our word we keep it. I’ve given my word and there’s nothing to do but to wait for Almo and Daddy and hope that both, or at least a message from Daddy will get here before Faltonius.”
“There is something else you might do,” Flexinna suggested. “You might easily arrange to be ineligible before Bambilio comes for you.”
“I shall,” spoke the matter-of-fact Brinnaria. “The moment Daddy and Almo come, I’ll be Alma’s wife in less time than it takes to tell it and will be able to snap my fingers at Bambilio.”
“Suppose he comes before your father,” Flexinna suggested.
“I’d be a Vestal and all hope gone,” said Brinnaria,
“I mean,” said Flexinna, “suppose Almo comes before your father.”
“I’ve thought of that,” Brinnaria admitted. “But I’d hate to break the record of which our family is so proud. None of our women ever were so much as accused of any misbehavior before marriage.”
“I’ve no p-p-patience with you,” Flexinna raged. “You’ll throw away your life for a mere scruple. You risk being made a Vestal every moment. Faltonius may be on the way here now. If I were in your place I’d make sure. I’d not wait for Almo. Any lad would do for me. You c-c-could make sure, if you had sense. Almo would forgive you and marry you anyway. Your father would forgive you; he’d never approve, I know.”
“Not he!” Brinnaria proclaimed, “and he’ll never have any such dishonor to forgive. No man of our clan ever had reason to be ashamed of his daughter or of his sister. I’ll not be the first to disgrace the clan. If Faltonius comes he’ll find me as eligible as the hour I was born, unless Daddy and Almo come in time for me to be married first.”
“At least,” Flexinna persisted, “you might say no when he asks you. That would stall the whole ceremony and give you t-t-time.”
“Do you suppose,” Brinnaria sneered, “that I haven’t thought of that? I’m tempted, of course. But that would be to advertise myself a disgrace to the Pontifex during a solemn interrogatory.”
“At least,” Flexinna pleaded, “you might say you are over age. You look sixteen to anybody, and no one would imagine you are under fourteen. You could halt the proceedings, at least, and gain t-t-time.”
“Faltonius has the lists,” said Brinnaria wearily, “with all the birthdays sworn to by both parents for every girl on them and attested by four excellent witnesses, besides. He’d know I was lying and it would do me no good.”
Flexinna changed the subject.
But when the next day dawned and neither Brinnarius nor Almo appeared, she returned to the attack. Brinnaria was very pale, very tense, but obdurate. She controlled herself, did not forget, did not express her feelings, but she posted a slave at each street corner, right and left of the house-door, and had them look out for what she hoped and what she feared.
Dastor brought word that the Pontifex and his retinue were approaching; three litters, each with eight bearers, preceded by the lictor of the Chief Vestal.
Brinnaria, pale and tense, did her best to look collected and controlled. She succeeded well, heard calmly the announcement of her august visitors, ordered them shown into the atrium, and received them with proper dignity. Her self-possession did not desert her when she recognized in the train of the Pontifex her rejected suitor Calvaster, sly, malignant and with an air of suppressed elation.
Faltonius Bambilio, the Pontifex of Vesta, was a pursy, pudgy, pompous old man, immensely self-important, almost ridiculous in his fussiness, but clothed with a certain impressiveness by the mere fact of his religious office. He gazed about him, stared at Brinnaria, hemmed and hawed and threw himself into poses intended to be stately.
With him was Causidiena, now Chief Vestal, a tall, spare woman of about forty-five, her austere face kindly and reassuring, her dark hair barely showing under her official head-dress, a statuesque figure in her white robes of office.
“My daughter,” spoke Faltonius to Brinnaria, “Rome has but five Vestals. I have come to take you into the vacant place. You have been chosen, as best suited to this high dignity, from among those whose names were on the lists of those fit for the office. Was it proper that your name should be on the lists?”
“I believe so,” spoke Brinnaria, weakly, almost in a whisper.
“Are you fit to be taken as a Vestal, my daughter?”
“I believe so,” came the answer.
“Have you any blemish or defect of body, any impediment of speech, any difficulty of hearing?”
Brinnaria’s awe was wearing off, and the irritating pomposity of Faltonius was producing its usual effect of arousing antagonism, as it generally did in those he talked to. Brinnaria felt all her wild self surge up in her.
“I’m sound as a two-year-old racing filly,” she replied. “I’m clean as fresh curd; I hear you perfectly and you can hear me perfectly.”
Bambilio bristled like a bantam rooster.
“That is not the way for a Vestal to speak,” he rebuked.
“I’m not a Vestal yet,” Brinnaria retorted, “and that was my answer to those questions. If you don’t like it I don’t care a shred of bran.”
“Come! come!” fussed Bambilio, “answer the interrogatories properly.”
“I have and I shall,” Brinnaria maintained mutinously.
“Are you fit in mind and in faculties to be a Vestal?” he continued.
“Fit to be Flaminica or Empress,” Brinnaria responded.
“Are you pure?” came the next query.
“As when I was born,” said Brinnaria emphatically.
“What is your age?” the Pontifex queried his victim.
“I’ll be ten on the Ides of next September,” quoth his victim.
“Are your parents both alive?” he asked.
“They were the last time I heard of them,” spoke Brinnaria flippantly.
“When was that?” he insisted.
“This is the twelfth day since they left Rome,” said Brinnaria, “and I’ve not heard from them since they sent a messenger back from the ninth milestone on the road to Tibur.”
Faltonius was irritating her more and more, and she added:
“They may both be dead by this time, for all I know.”
“This will not do,” spoke Faltonius. “We must be sure that they are both alive.”
“Find out,” snapped Brinnaria.
Up spoke young Calvaster, his pasty face alight with a sort of malicious glee.
“I passed Quartilla’s travelling carriage at Varia last night. Quartilla was alive and well. I passed Brinnarius this morning at dawn, this side of Tibur. He was alive then and puffing.”
“How did you get here ahead of him?” Brinnaria interjected.
“I am light built,” Calvaster explained with obvious relish, “and I rode the best horse in Italy. His mount labored heavily under his load.”
“Both parents are then alive,” spoke Faltonius. “I hereupon and hereby pronounce you in all respects fit to be taken as a Vestal. Are you willing?”
“Not I!” Brinnaria fairly shouted.
“Not willing!” Faltonius cried, incredulous.
“Not a fibre of me!” she proclaimed emphatically.
“Wretched girl!” expostulated the Pontiff. “Have you no sense of patriotism? Do you not realize your duty to your country, to the Roman people, to Rome, to the Emperor, to all of us, to the commonwealth? Do you not realize Rome’s need of you? Shall it be said that Rome has need of one of her daughters and that her unnatural child refuses?”
“I have not refused,” said Brinnaria. “I only said I was unwilling.”
“It is the same thing,” declared the bewildered ecclesiastic.
“Not a bit the same thing,” Brinnaria disclaimed. “I know my duty in this matter perfectly. Castor be good to me, I know it too well. I know that a refusal would avail me nothing, if I did refuse. I have not refused. I would not, even if I could escape by refusal I realize my duty. If I am taken I shall be all that a Vestal is expected to be, all that she must be to ensure the glory and prosperity and safety of the city and the Empire. I shall not fail the Emperor nor the Roman people, nor Rome. But I am unwilling, and I said so. Little good it will do me. But I am no liar, not even in the tightest place.”
“Stand up, my daughter,” said Faltonius, rising himself, suddenly clothed in dignity, a really impressive figure, in spite of his globular proportions.
Brinnaria stood, her eyes on the door to the vestibule, her face very pale, trembling a little, but controlled.
The Pontifex took her hand and spoke:
“As priestess of Vesta, to perform those rites which it is fitting that a priestess of Vesta perform for the Roman People and the citizens, as a girl who has been chosen properly, so I take you, Beloved.”
At the word “Beloved,” which made her irretrievably a Vestal, Brinnaria could not repress a little gasp. Her eyes no longer watched the vestibule door. She looked at the Pontiff. He let go her hand.
“You will now go with your servitor to be clothed as befits your calling.”
He indicated one of Causidiena’s attendants, a solidly built woman, like a Tuscan villager, who carried over her arm a mass of fresh white garments and robes.
With her and Causidiena Brinnaria left the atrium; with them she presently returned, a slim white figure, her hair braided and the six braids wound round her forehead like a coronet, above them the folds of the plain square headdress of the Vestals.
“I thought,” she said, “that my hair would be cut off.”
“That will be after you are made at home in the Atrium of Vesta,” spoke the Pontiff.
“And remember,” he continued sternly, “that you are now a Vestal and that young Vestals may not speak unless spoken to.”
Brinnaria bit her lip.
At that moment they heard hoofs and voices outside, the door burst open and Brinnarius entered.
“Too late, Daddy!” cried Brinnaria. “You can’t help me now. I’m not your little girl any more; I don’t count as your daughter; you don’t count as my father; I’m daughter to the Pontifex from now on. I’m a Vestal.”
She was trembling, but she kept her countenance. Brinnarius uttered no sound, the whole gathering was still and mute, the noises of the street outside were plainly audible. They heard horse-hoofs again, again the door flew open wide. In burst Almo, wide-eyed and panting.
At him Brinnaria launched a sort of shriek of expostulation.
“Why couldn’t you ride! You call yourself a horseman! And you’ve come too late! I mustn’t even kiss you good-bye. And I mustn’t speak to you, I mustn’t see you, I mustn’t so much as think of you for thirty years, for thirty years, for thirty years!”
CHAPTER V - ESCAPADES
WHEN Brinnaria found herself actually domiciled in the House of the Vestals she experienced an odd mingling of awe and elation. The mere size of it was impressive, for it was nearly two hundred feet wide and almost four hundred feet long. Also it stood alone, bounded by four streets. Besides, it gained much dignity from its location, near the southeast corner of the great Forum of Rome, that most famous of all city squares, and under the very shadow of the Imperial Palace, the walls of which towered nearly three hundred feet above it, where it crouched as it were, on a site scooped out of the huge flank of the Palatine Hill.
Completely as it was dominated by the enormous bulk of the Palace it yet looked very large, having three lofty stories. Inside it was both spacious and stately. Brinnaria was habituated to space and stateliness, for her father’s house had both, yet the Atrium of Vesta, as the House of the Vestals was officially denominated, impressed her as vast and splendid. That this immense and magnificent building was to be her home gave her sense of her own importance that thrilled her through and through. Its numerous retinue of deft and obsequious maid-servants added to this impression. Brinnaria’s personal attendants, entirely at her beck and call and serving her alone, made up a considerable retinue by themselves. She found herself, like each of the other Vestals, served by a special waitress at table, by a waitress who had nothing to do but look after her wants. Then she had a sort of maid-of-honor, who had no duties except to act as companion, make herself agreeable, read aloud, if requested, accompany her on her outings and help to pass her leisure pleasantly. As she was a mere child in years she had a sort of governess to instruct her in all those subjects in which a Roman girl of good family was generally given lessons: correct reading; a smattering of mathematics, about equivalent to the simple arithmetic of our days; some knowledge of literature; a steady and efficient drill in reading and talking Greek; instrumental music, similar to the guitar-playing of modern times, and embroidery. She had a personal maid to bathe her, arrange her hair and otherwise make her comfortable; also a special maid to attend to her private apartment, which included what we would call a sitting-room, a tiny bedroom, and a large bath-room. The largest room was used mostly as a school-room for lessons with her instructress. Outside the Atrium Brinnaria had her private stable, her carriages, her coachman and ostlers, and her lictor, the red-cloaked runner, who preceded her carriage, announced its coming and cleared the way for it through the crowds of foot-passengers who thronged the streets of Rome. Life in the Atrium was austere and formal, but in no respect ascetic. The austerities extended only to attire and behavior. The decorations of the courtyard, of the corridors and stairs, of the two hundred rooms, were bewilderingly varied and overpoweringly gorgeous. Every appointment of the Atrium was luxurious to the last degree; the furnishings were beautiful and precious, every object a work of art; the bathrooms cunningly devised for comfort, the beds deep and soft, scarcely less so the sofas on which the Vestals reclined at their meals, the table service of exquisite glass-ware and elaborately chased silver, the food abundant and including every delicacy and rarity most appetizing and enjoyable.
Except Meffia her co-Vestals were immediately liked and speedily loved by Brinnaria. Meffia, a month older than herself and looking six years younger, was a small, awkward, ungainly girl, with pale blue eyes, pale yellow hair and babyish pink complexion. She had never had an ill hour in her life, yet she always appeared ailing, shrank from any effort, hated exercise and exertion and at every necessity for movement asserted that she was tired, often that she felt weak. Brinnaria thought her merely innately lazy and a natural shirk. The more she saw of her the more her loathing for her and her hatred of her intensified. Quite the reverse with the others. Manlia was a large young woman of about twenty-two, a typical Roman aristocrat, her hair between dark brown and black, her complexion swarthy, her figure abundant. Gargilia was older than Manlia; a tall, slender creature with intensely black hair and piercing black eyes that looked straight at you out of a face healthfully tinted indeed, but of a whiteness which was the envy of half the beauties in Rome. Numisia Maximilla was much like an older Manlia, but sparer and of markedly haughty bearing and carriage. Causidiena, newly become Chief Vestal, was a woman of about forty-five years of age, mild, gentle, and charming, with cool gray eyes and glossy brown hair, a being who aroused affection, inspired admiration and compelled love from all her household.
She won Brinnaria’s heart at once by telling her that she herself, when she had first entered the Atrium of Vesta, had found it difficult to learn the etiquette of the order, had wanted to shout and sing and laugh out loud, to run up and down stairs instead of walking, to skip and jump.
That Causidiena had triumphed over similar tendencies comforted Brinnaria and helped her to try to overcome her own. Most difficult to curb was her tendency to be rude to Meffia. This Causidiena noticed at once and set herself to obliterate. Brinnaria unbosomed herself and Causidiena listened so sympathetically that Brinnaria sat silent through the long lecture that followed and was very submissive during a searching interrogatory. She promised to comport herself as a Vestal should.
“But,” she said, “I shall suffer. That girl is unpleasant in ten thousand ways, but the smell of her is the most unpleasant thing about her. She’s been tubbed and scrubbed and massaged and perfumed twice a day ever since I came here and she smells worse than a polecat, anyhow, all day long, even the moment after her maid has finished her toilet. A whiff of Meffia sets me frantic. I’d be capable of any crime to get rid of her.”
More lecturing followed.
“But it’s true!” Brinnaria maintained. “You can’t help smelling her yourself; she smells like nothing else on earth. It isn’t the smell of a dirty girl or of an ill girl, nor the smell of a girl at all or of any kind of a human being. I can’t describe it, but it’s a thin sour smell, sharp and shrill like the note of a cricket, if a sound and a smell can be compared. It’s horrible; it’s not human.”
More lecturing, a long session of lecturing, followed this outburst. At the end of it the victim was meek and pliable, or so professed herself. For at least five days Brinnaria kept up her effort to be comradely with Meffia. By the sixth day she was completely exhausted and the two avoided each other as before.
Agonies indeed Brinnaria suffered in her efforts to live up to Causidiena’s ideas of what she should be. On the whole she succeeded pretty well and committed few errors of deportment. Outwardly she controlled herself from the first; for, before her first cowed sensations had worn off, her adoration of Causidiena had gained full sway over her. Yet inwardly she suffered more and more acutely as time went on, partly feeling that she must burst out in spite of herself, partly dreading that she would.
At last, after many days, she perpetrated her first and most undignified prank. It was a terrific occurrence, judged by the standards of the Atrium.
The great peristyle of the House of the Vestals, including nearly three-fourths of the whole courtyard, was beautified with a splendid double colonnade, two tiers of pillars, one above the other, the lower of delicately mottled Carystian marble wavily veined with green streaks varying its whiteness, the upper of coral-red brecchia. Midway of the court was a tank lined with marbles and always filled with clear water.
One morning Meffia, walking about the court, in her irritatingly aimless fashion, passed between Brinnaria and the edge of the tank. There was no earthly reason for her so doing, as Brinnaria was barely a yard from the margin of the pool, and on the other side of Brinnaria was the ample expanse of the pavement of the spacious court.
Brinnaria was exasperated by Meffia’s proximity, by her lackadaisical manner, by her shambling gait, by her sleep-walking attitude, most of all by the peculiar thin, sour odor which Meffia exhaled. At the sight of Meffia’s elaborately disagreeable demeanor of isolation, all Brinnaria’s natural self began to boil in her; at the whiff which assailed her nostrils she boiled over, all her uncurbed instincts surging up at once. She put out one foot and gave Meffia a push.
Meffia, with a squall and a great splash, fell into the tank.
She not only fell in, but she went under the water.
She went under and did not come up.
For an instant Brinnaria thought she was shamming to scare her; but, in a twinkling she realized that Meffia had fainted.
Promptly she plunged in and rescued her victim.
Numisia, hurrying to the sound of Meffia’s squawk, was horrified at the sight of a dripping Vestal toiling up the steps of the tank carrying over her shoulder another Vestal, equally dripping and limp as a meal-sack, her arms and legs trailing horribly.
Agitation at Meffia’s prolonged insensibility postponed inquiry as to how she came to fall into the tank. It so happened that Causidiena first questioned some of the maid-servants, who all hated Meffia and liked Brinnaria. Therefore the ones interrogated told a story as much at variance with the facts as they saw fit.
Brinnaria, after she was again dry-clad, quaked inwardly in anticipation of Causidiena’s wrath and suffered a good deal more at the thought of her pained, silent displeasure. Hours passed, long hours passed and nothing was said on the subject. From none of her sister Vestals did she hear a word of reproach, not one of them behaved towards her any differently from what was usual.
Finally one of the maids enlightened Brinnaria. Promptly she sought a private audience with Causidiena. First she made sure that none of the maids would suffer for their duplicity and partiality; then she confessed.
The Chief Vestal was not wrathful, not even stern. She talked mildly and gently, yet made Brinnaria feel very much ashamed of herself and acutely penitent.
The end of the interview was that Causidiena said:
“You are such a robust child that you do not realize how frail Meffia is. She is perfectly healthy, but is very easily unnerved or exhausted. You have given her such a shock that she is unfit for duty. Any Vestal is allowed to be ill for two nights and one day, if the trouble seems trifling. But, if any Vestal is ill for a longer time, she is promptly removed from the Atrium for nursing. I fear that Meffia may not recover within the permitted time. I am most anxious that there should be as few as possible cases of recorded illness in the Atrium under my management. As you have caused the situation you must help me to avoid what I fear. Go to Meffia and nurse her out of this and get her about to-morrow morning.”
“Castor be good to me!” Brinnaria cried. “Smell that girl for a day and a night! Whew! Pretty severe punishment! But I deserve that and worse. And I’ll do anything for you, Causidiena.”
Meffia hated Brinnaria cordially, yet she found her a deft, tactful and silent nurse. But the very sight of Brinnaria was to her an irritant tonic. She was entirely fit for duty the next day, not a trace of slackness, unwillingness or sullenness.
Causidiena early made up her mind that Brinnaria’s intentions were good and that she was far from planning her outbursts. She had herself no prevision of what was coming, not an inkling of what was about to happen, she blurted out her shocking remarks without herself knowing what she was going to say and was overwhelmed with confusion when her own ears heard the totally unexpected words which she had uttered; she contemplated aghast the havoc she had wrought. Generally she made a pretty fair attempt at demeaning herself as a Vestal should; but, every once in a while, without warning, something of her old wild self surged up in her and the speech was spoken or the action completed before she realized she was about to speak or act at all.
One such freak gave her a sort of notoriety, brought her name to the lips of every gossip in Rome.
She was as pleased with her privileges as a normal child of her age with a set of new toys, as warily insistent on them as any aristocrat of her build and appearance.
She learned the precise nature and extent of her prerogatives and did her utmost to enjoy them all. Being an adept at accounts she ascertained the character of the various estates and investments that went to make up the great property which was her jointure as a Vestal, made sure of the exact income from each of its components, also the total amount; both how far she was allowed to have her way in spending it and how soon she would be free of supervision in that respect. She made her will before she had been a Vestal for a month, leaving all her property to Almo, should she die before him; but the whole to the order of Vestals if he died before her.
Of all her privileges the one she enjoyed most was the right to drive where she pleased through the city in her private carriage, with her lictor running ahead and clearing the way for it. Carriage-driving within the city limits was restricted in Rome by severe regulations rigorously enforced.* Ordinary travelling carriages might use only the great main thoroughfares leading to the city gates. The owner of one, unless he happened to live on one of those chief arteries of the traffic, might not step from his house door into his carriage but must have it halted at some point on the permitted avenues and must reach it on foot or by litter. But there was no street or alley in Rome wide enough for a carriage which a Vestal might not drive through; a. Vestal might drive anywhere. Brinnaria was first taken out driving by Causidiena and Numisia, then by the others in succession. Driving with Meffia was no pleasure to her, but it was the etiquette of the order that each Vestal in turn should offer the courtesy of her carriage to a new member of the sisterhood.
*In fact, wheeled vehicles except for those of the Emperor and the Vestals were forbidden in the city during the daytime.
After that formality had been complied with Brinnaria was permitted to drive where she pleased, with what guest she chose, or accompanied only by her official companion or by her maid. Systematically she drove everywhere, once alone with her maid, once with each of the other Vestals, often with her mother, often with Flexinna. It gave her great pleasure to drive up the long zigzag approach to the Capitol, where no human being save the Vestals and the Empress might be driven, and where few Empresses had ever ventured to drive, to have her carriage halted before the great Temple of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, where no carriage except the carriages of the Vestals had been seen for more than a hundred years, to enter the temple and say her prayers. It gave her even more pleasure to take her mother or Flexinna with her, as was her privilege; to make them sharers in her right to be driven to Rome’s chief temple, to which all other Romans, even the Emperors, must walk or be carried by litter-bearers.
She discovered another privilege of her position. Roman women of the better classes never went out of doors alone. On the streets a lady, if not companioned by one or more equals, was always accompanied by a maid-servant. This had been the custom from time immemorial and had come to have the force of a moral law. The sight of a woman of wealth and position entirely alone in her carriage would have been startling, to see a lady in her litter without a maid walking behind the bearers would have been shocking: the spectacle of a lady alone on foot would have given scandal.
But, by some survival of the simplicity of the manners in those primitive days in which the order originated, the Vestals were exceptions to this mandatory fashion. A Vestal might never go abroad on foot, except in one of the solemn processions. But, in her litter or her carriage, she might go anywhere in Rome unaccompanied, protected only by her lictor and her bearers or coachman. This privilege, like many others, marked the Vestals as being apart from and exalted above the rest of woman-kind.
As soon as Brinnaria learned that she possessed this right she proceeded to exercise it. Though she felt lonesome when driving alone and enjoyed her outing far more when she had a companion, yet she drove alone day after day, merely because it was her prerogative. So driving she had, in one day, two thrilling experiences. She had told her coachman to drive where he pleased and hardly noticed where she was being driven.
Suddenly turning from a side street into one of the main thoroughfares of the city, she encountered the co-Emperor Lucius Verus with his official escort. It was during the busy days preceding his departure for Antioch and his great campaign against the Parthians. Verus, roused from his devotion to sport and pleasure, was feverish with enthusiasm and full of mercurial energy. He bustled in and out of Rome, inspecting camps, presiding at ceremonials and keeping everything in a ferment.
That day he was returning from an inspection amid a large and gorgeous retinue. Brinnaria had a blurred vision of splendid uniforms and dazzling accoutrements. Her vision was blurred because her eyes filled with tears; she turned hot and cold and almost fainted with emotion, when the Emperor’s twenty-four lictors lowered their fasces, the whole procession halted, the escort and the Emperor himself swerved their horses aside to let her pass and remained at the salute until she had passed. The sudden realization of the importance of her official position overwhelmed her.
As she drove on, when she recovered herself, she meditated on the experience, and told herself that she must live up to her exalted station, that she must never, never, never for such as one instant, forget herself or behave otherwise than as became a Vestal. On the very same drive, before she returned to the Atrium, she completely forgot herself.
It was a hot, sultry afternoon and it suited her coachman to drive homeward along the Subura, that thronged and unsavory Bowery of ancient Rome. Three street urchins were teasing and maltreating a rough coated, muddy little cur. Brinnaria called imperiously to her lictor to interfere. He was too far ahead to hear her. Her coachman had all he could do to control her mettlesome span of Spanish mares. She spoke to the boys and they laughed at her. Before she knew it she had flung open her carriage door, had leapt out, had cuffed soundly the ears of the three dumbfounded gamins, and was back among her cushions, the dog in her arms.
This escapade brought upon her a visit from the Pontifex of Vesta, the semi-globular Faltonius Bambilio, diffusing pomposity. From him she had to listen to a long lecture on deportment and to a reading of the minutes of the meeting of the College of Pontiffs which had discussed her public misbehavior.
CHAPTER VI - NOTORIETY
WITHIN a month she did far worse. She perpetrated, in fact, a deed with the fame of which not only the city, but the Empire rang; made herself notorious everywhere.
It was on the occasion of her introductory visit to the Colosseum when, for the first time, she was a spectator at an exhibition of fighting gladiators. She was in a high-strung state of elation and anticipation. Going to the Amphitheatre, in itself, was a soul-stirring experience. Meffia, to Brinnaria’s joy, had been on duty that day, along with Numisia. This alone was enough to put Brinnaria in a good humor. Meffia’s presence spoiled for her any sort of pleasure. Then, besides, they drove to the Colosseum, not in their light carriages, but two by two in their gorgeous state coaches, huge vehicles, of which the woodwork was elaborately carved and heavily gilded and whose cushions and curtains were all of that splendid official color, the imperial purple. The name conveys to us a false impression, for the hue known then as imperial purple was not what we should call a purple, but a deep, dark crimson, like the tint of claret in a goblet. Against a background of this magnificent color, the Vestals, habited all in white, showed conspicuously. Their stately progress through the streets, gazed at and pointed at by the admiring crowds, was conducive to high spirits. Still more so was it to be ushered obsequiously through cool corridors and up carpeted stairs to the Vestals’ private loge, a roomy space immediately to the right of the imperial pavilion. To be inside the Colosseum at last set her eyes dancing and her heart thumping; the anticipation of actually viewing the countless fights of many hundreds of gladiators increased her excitement; to be seated in front seats, with nothing but the carved stone coping between her and the arena was most exhilarating of all. She was delighted with her great, carved arm-chair, deeply cushioned and so heavy that it was as firm on its solid oak legs as if bolted to the stone floor. She settled herself in it luxuriously, gazed across the smooth yellow sand, glanced up at the gay, parti-colored awning, and then conned the vast audience, line after line of rose-crowned heads rising tier above tier all about her.
She scanned the faces in the front row to left and right as far as she could make them out clearly. She peered across the open space of the arena, puckering her eyes to see better. When she caught sight of what she was looking for she turned timidly, leaned past Manlia and asked Causidiena:
“May I wave my hand to mother?”
“Certainly, my child,” Causidiena assured her.
Brinnaria waved her little hand and was seen, and felt the thrill of a general family handwaving in reply.
Suddenly she experienced a qualm of bashfulness, as if every one in the enormous gathering were looking at her, watching her. She cast down her eyes, wrapped her white robe close about her, hiding her hands under it, and shrank into her arm-chair. For a while, for a long while, she fanned herself nervously, very slowly, and striving to appear calm. Gradually she became calm and laughed to herself at her own folly, realizing that nobody was noticing her.
Nobody noticed her. Many spectators noticed the Vestals, but no one noticed her individually. This she realized acutely before the day was over.
At about the time when she began to feel herself at ease the entrance of the Emperor and his suite distracted her attention from herself. When the trumpet blew, announcing the approach of the Imperial party, a hush fell on the vast audience and all eyes turned towards the grand pavilion. When the trumpet blew the second time, just before the Emperor came in sight, the hush deepened and the spectators watched intently. When his head appeared as he mounted the stairs the audience burst into the short, sharply staccato song of welcome, something like a tuneful, sing-song college yell, with which Roman crowds greeted their master. This vocal salute, a mere tag of eight or nine syllables, each with its distinctive note, was repeated over and over until the Emperor was seated.
Then the audience settled themselves into their seats. Brinnaria had instinctively started to rise when she caught sight of the Emperor. Manlia had put out a restraining hand. The Vestals, alone of all Romans, remained seated in the presence of the Emperor, not even rising when he appeared.
Marcus Aurelius was a tall, spare man of over forty years of age, with abundant hair curling in long ringlets over his chest and shoulders, and a full beard mingling with the carefully disposed curls. He was a serious-faced man, careworn and solemn.
Brinnaria regarded him with interest. She had never seen him so close and she felt a sudden fellow-feeling for him from the sense of semi-equality with him that flooded through her at having remained seated. She recalled vividly the half-dozen times she had watched from balconies the passage of processions in which the Emperor took part, how her mother had made her stand up the moment he came in sight and had kept her standing until he was far away. Her sudden exaltation in social position was borne in upon her with startling emphasis. Not even her carriage rides had impressed her so tellingly with the sensation of her own importance in the great world of Imperial Rome.
“How does he look to you?” Manlia asked. They were seated in the order of their seniority, Causidiena on the right, then Gargilia, Manlia next Brinnaria.
“He looks crushed under his responsibilities and anxieties,” Brinnaria replied. “He looks depressed, even sad.”
“He is all that, poor man,” her neighbor agreed, “and no wonder in these days. The Parthians are at us on the east, the Germans in the north, and there have been more than twelve deaths in the palace each day for twenty consecutive days now. This pestilence is enough to make anybody sad.”
“More than that,” Brinnaria countered. “He looks irritated and bored. Everybody else is alert and keyed up with anticipation. His eyes are dull and he looks as if he wished that the show was over and he could go home.”
“You have read him right,” Manlia told her. “He detests all kinds of spectacles, takes no interest in races and hates beast-fights. Most of all he loathes gladiatorial combats. Father has told me about it more than once and Causidiena says the same thing. I can’t understand it. I never get tired of sword-fighting, myself. What I like about it is its endless variety. I never saw any two fights exactly alike, never saw two closely alike. Each fight is a spectacle by itself, entirely different from any other. I don’t mean the difference between the fighters in respect to their equipment and appearance, though that contributes to the variety also; I mean the difference in posture, method of defense and attack, style of lunge and parry, and all that; and the countless variations in form in the men, the subtle differences of character which makes them face similar situations so very differently. You’ll get the feeling for it in a half a dozen shows and be as keen on it as the rest of us.
“But the Emperor is different. Perhaps it’s because he is such a booky man and spends so much time in reading and study. But I think not. There never was anybody more of a bookworm than Numisia and she is as wild over the shows as any street-boy in Rome. Anyhow, whatever the cause is, that is the way he is. He was more than surfeited with shows before he was Emperor. While he was nothing but a boy, soon after he was adopted and made Caesar, he often had to preside in the Circus or here, when Hadrian was away travelling and Antonius and Verus were on the frontiers. He used to bring his tutors with him and have two of them sit on each side of him a little behind him. Then, after the shows had started, he would put a tablet on his knee and write a theme or work out a problem in geometry and when he had finished it, would pass it to one of his tutors for comment, or he would have them make out sets of questions on history or something else and he would write out the answers the best he could. Sometimes he would read. All this he did as calmly as if he were alone in a closed room with nothing to call off his attention. Yet he was most careful to seem to watch the shows and would look up every little while and gaze about the arena. But nothing ever distracted him from his lessons. That is the kind he is. He simply never cared for this sort of thing. He says that what oppresses him is the maddening monotony of gladiatorial shows. Fancy anybody thinking sword-fighting monotonous! But he does. He says every combat is just like every other. All he sees in a fight is two men facing each other and one being killed. He gets no thrills from the uncertainties of the outcome, no pleasure from the dexterity and skill of the fighters. To him it’s just butchery, and the same kind of butchery over and over. He says he might get some enjoyment out of a show if something novel would happen, something he never saw before, something unexpected. But nothing ever does.”
Brinnaria regarded curiously this grave, earnest man, who derived so little pleasure from the most coveted position on earth. She continued to watch him until everybody turned to the procession around the arena of all who were to fight that day, the invariable preliminary of a gladiatorial show and always a splendid spectacle. When the fights began Brinnaria felt at first an unexpected tightening of the chest, as if a band were being drawn tight just under her armpits. Her breath came short and hard and her heart thumped her ribs.
The first sight of blood made her feel faint and the horrible contortions just below her of a dying man, who writhed in strong convulsions like a fish out of water, made her qualmish and sick. But all that soon passed off. She was a Roman and the Romans were professional killers, had been professional killers for a thousand years. Success in hand to hand combat with any individual foe was every male Roman’s ideal of the crowning glory of human life; the thought of it was in every Roman’s mind from early childhood, every act of life was a preparation for it. Their wives and sisters shared their enthusiasm for fighting and their daughters inherited the instinct. Combat on the field of battle was felt as the chief business of a man, to which all other activities merely led up. By reflected light, as it were, every kind of combat acquired a glamour in the thoughts of a Roman. The idea of men killing men, of men being killed by men, was familiar to all Romans, of whatever sex or age. Brinnaria was not affected as a modern girl would be by the sight of blood or of death. The novelty revolted her at first, but only briefly. Soon she was absorbed in the interest of the fighting.
Almost at once her eye was caught by a young and handsome fighter who reminded her strongly of Almo.
His adversary was that kind of gladiator known technically as a secutor, a burly ruffian in complete armor, with huge shin-guards like jack-boots, a kilt of broad leather straps hanging in two overlapping rows, the upper set plated with bronze scales, a bronze corselet, and, fitting closely to his shoulders, covering head and neck together, a great, heavy helmet. He carried a large shield, squarish in shape, but curving to fit him as if he were hiding behind a section of the outer bark of a big tree. He was armed with a keen, straight bladed Spanish sword.
Facing this portentous tower of metal was a gladiator of the sort known as a retiarius, equipped solely with a long-handled, slender-shafted trident, like a fisherman’s eel-spear, and a voluminous, wide-meshed net of thin cord. His only clothing was a scanty body-piece of bright blue. His feet were small with high-arched insteps. Brinnaria particularly noticed his perfectly shaped toes. His bare legs, body and arms were in every proportion the perfection of form, the supple muscles rippling exquisitely under his warm tanned skin. His face was almost beautiful, with a round chin, thin curled lips, a straight nose, and a wide brow. Its expression was lively, even merry, almost roguish, his lips parted in an alert smile, his blue eyes sparkling. He seemed to enjoy the game in which he was engaged, to be brimming over with self-confidence, to anticipate success, to relish his foretaste of combat with a sort of impish delight.
Roman children heard as much talk of gladiators as modern children hear of baseball or cricket. Brinnaria knew perfectly well that the betting on a set-to between such a pair was customarily five to three against the secutor and on the retiarius. Yet she felt the sensation usual with onlookers in such a case, the sensation purposed by the device of pairing men so differently equipped, the sensation that the mailed secutor was invincible and the naked retiarius helpless against him. She was keyed up with interest.
In fact the combat was interesting. The secutor, of course, could have disposed of his antagonist in a trice, if he had only been able to reach him. But a clumsy, heavy secutor never could reach a nimble, agile retiarius. The one Brinnaria was watching was more than usually light-footed and skipped about his adversary in a taunting, teasing way. Again and again he cast his net intentionally too short, merely to show how easily he could recover it and escape his opponent’s onset. He danced, capered, pretended to be lame and that he could not avoid being overtaken, led his pursuer on, out-manoeuvred him, derided him; twice he lunged through the flapping straps of his kilt and grazed his thigh. The secutor was barely scratched, but his blood trickled down his shin-guard and he was limping.
Then, all in a flash, the retiarius pirouetted too rashly, slipped on ton the sand, fell sprawling, failed to rise in time, and was slashed deeply all down one calf. He rolled over in a last effort to escape, but the secutor kicked him in the ribs and, before he could recover, sent the trident spinning with a second kick and set his foot upon his victim’s neck. So standing he rolled his eyes over that part of the audience nearest him to discover whether it was the pleasure of the lookers-on that the defeated man should be killed or spared.
Now it so happened that nearly all the spectators in that part of the audience were watching a far more exciting contest farther out in the arena, where two Indian elephants, each manned by a crew of five picked men, were clashing in a terrific struggle No one, except Brinnaria, had any eyes for the plight of the young retiarius below them The secutor beheld indifferent faces gazing over his head The few thumbs he could see pointed outward. Brinnaria, to be sure, was holding out her right arm, thumb flat, and doing her best to attract the secutor’s attention. She failed. He glanced, indeed, at the Vestals, but as three of them sat impassive he missed Brinnaria’s imperious gesture. He prepared to put his foe to death. First, however, he looked further along the front rows to make sure that he had the permission of the general audience, since the occupants of the Imperial box and of the Vestals loge seemed to ignore him.
Brinnaria perceived that he would probably not look again in her direction; that as soon as his roving eyes came back from their unhurried survey of the audience, he would deliver the fatal blow. She quickly knotted the corner of her robe to the arm of her chair, squirmed out of it, and threw it over the parapet. The robe of a Roman lady was sleeveless and seamless, rather like a very long pair of very thin blankets, all in one piece. Tied, as she had tied it, by one corner, it made a sort of rope as it hung. She had acted so quickly that no one noticed her, not even Manlia, who sat next her, staring fascinatedly at the spectacle of the wrestling elephants and their warring crews.
Grasping her robe firmly with both hands, escaping by a hair’s-breadth the despairing clutch of the horrified Manlia, Brinnaria half vaulted, half rolled over the parapet, swung sailor-fashion to the rope her robe formed, went down it, hand over hand, raced across the sand and faced the victorious secutor.
He, although a foreigner and a savage, had been long enough in Rome to know perfectly what a Vestal was and he recoiled from her in a panic no less than he would have felt had the goddess Vesta herself come down from the sky to balk him of his prey.
The next instant no one was regarding the death-struggle of the elephants, nor any other of the scores of fights ended, ending, under way or just begun. Every human being in the audience was staring at the amazing spectacle of a Vestal virgin, clad only in her thin, clinging tunic, standing over a fallen retiarius and facing an appalled and dumbfounded secutor.
The place fell very still. So still that the shrill voice of a street-gamin, a boy from the Via Sacra, was audible throughout the vast enclosure from gallery to gallery. He yelled in his cutting falsetto: “Good for you, Sis!”
But his neighbors silenced him at once and not even any other ragamuffin lifted his voice. The audience were startled mute. They were quite ready to applaud the girl’s daring, but the shocking impropriety of her breach of decorum struck them dumb.
The Emperor, roused from his meditations by the sudden hush, looked about him for the cause of it and saw the situation. He leaned forward, arm out, thumb flat against the extended fingers. The secutor sheathed his sword.
Manlia, with great presence of mind, untied the dangling robe and dropped it over the parapet. One of the arena attendants carried it to Brinnaria and she put it on. But she would not stir and stood straddling the fallen lad until one of the Emperor’s aides came out of one of the low doors in the arena-wall, crossed to her and assured her that the defeated retiarius would be spared and cared for. Then she suffered herself to be led back to her seat, by way of the door in the wall and passages and stairs never meant for any Vestal to tread.
Not until they saw Brinnaria move off in charge of the staff-officer did the audience let loose their pent-up feelings. The place pulsated with a roar like that of a great waterfall in a deep gorge, salvo after salvo of cheers swelling and merging. The deep boom of their applause pursued Brinnaria and made her cower. The people would never forget her now. They were in ecstasy. She was their darling.
CHAPTER VII - AUDIENCE
ON the drive homeward from that unforgettable gladiatorial exhibition Manlia and Gargilia shared the second state coach: in the first sat Brinnaria by Causidiena.
“My child,” Causidiena queried, “what ever made you do it?”
“I don’t know,” Brinnaria replied. “I did it before I thought.”
“Well!” said her elder philosophically. “It is done now and cannot be helped. But please try to remember that a Vestal is expected to control herself at all times, never to act without forethought, to reflect long before she acts, to do nothing unusual, to be very sure in each instance that what she is about to do is wholly becoming to a Vestal.”
“I’ll keep on trying,” Brinnaria replied mutinously, “but I was not constructed to be a Vestal. I always knew it; I know it now and I am afraid I’ll continue my blundering through the conventions. I’m built that way.”
She had to endure a second long lecture from Faltonius Bambilio. She listened submissively enough, but vouchsafed not one word of self-defence, rejoinder or comment; and, when urged to speak, she was obstinately silent.
“My daughter,” Faltonius droned at her, “remember that, since your entrance into the order of Vestals, I stand to you in the relation of parent to his own child. You should confide in me as in your spiritual father.”
“I should do nothing of the kind,” Brinnaria refuted him. “I know the statutes of the order better than that. Up to the days of the Divine Augustus, the Pontifex Maximus inhabited the house next to the house of the Vestals and stood in the closest relation of fatherhood towards them. But since he went to live on the Palatine and made us a present of his house we have occupied all this Atrium which was built in the place of the two houses. Since then no one has been in the same intimate relation of control over us. The Emperors have always held the office of Pontifex Maximus and as such each Emperor has been the spiritual father of the Vestals. The Emperor is my spiritual father and you are not.”
“Your self-opinionated talk does you little credit,” Faltonius retorted. “Since you know so much you must know also that for many years each Emperor has designated some priest as Pontifex of Vesta to be his deputy and to stand in the closest relation of parental oversight towards the members of your consecrated order; I am that deputy.”
“I have no desire to confide in a deputy,” Brinnaria told him, “or to consider the deputy as my real spiritual father. If I feel inclined to confide I’ll make my confidences to my genuine spiritual father, not to his understrapper.”
Bambilio was piqued and spoke sourly.
“The Emperor,” he said, “will be far from pleased with my report of you.”
“It will make no difference to me or to him what you report or whether you make any report or not,” spoke Brinnaria. “I’m going to have a talk with him myself.”
“Doubtless,” Bambilio meditated. “He has sent for you to rebuke you.”
“He has done nothing of the kind,” she retorted vigorously. “He has more sense. And if he had sent for me I should not have gone. I know my rights. If he wanted to talk to me, he’d have to come to me here. But as, in this case, I wanted to talk to him, I have asked for an audience and the day and the hour have been fixed. I am to have an audience to-morrow morning. And now, as I am to talk to him myself, I see no reason why I should spend more time being bored by his deputy. If you please, I should be obliged if you would terminate this interview.”
Astounded and dumb, Faltonius bowed himself out.
Causidiena suggested that she accompany Brinnaria on her visit to the Palace.
“It would be lovely to have you with me,” Brinnaria said, “and I am ever so grateful for your offer. You are a dear and I love you. I shall want you and wish for you all the way there, all the time I am there and all the way back. I shall be scared to death. But I must go alone. In the first place it is my right, if I were only six years old, to have audience with the Emperor alone whenever I ask for it and as often as I ask for it. I am not going to abate an iota of my rights merely for my own comfort. In the second place, I must go through this unhelped and unsupported all by myself. I know it; I must fight it out alone and come through alone. He’ll be sympathetic, if I deserve it. If I don’t deserve sympathy from him I don’t deserve it from you, nor your company and your countenance, either.”
Scared Brinnaria was, but even through her worst qualms of panic she was uplifted by an elating sense of her own importance. Not her encounter with Verus and his retinue, not her having remained seated when Aurelius entered the Colosseum had so poignantly made her realize how exalted was a Vestal. She drove to the Palace alone, not in her light carriage, but in her huge state coach, feeling very small in her white robes amid all that crimson upholstery, but also feeling herself a very great personage.
Her reception at the Palace made her feel even more so. The magnificence of the courtyard in which her coach came to a standstill, the ceremonial of turning out the guard in her honor, the formality with which she was conducted from corridor to corridor and from hail to hail, the immensity and gorgeousness of the vast audience hall in which she was finally left alone with the Emperor; all these did not so much overwhelm her as exalt her. She felt herself indeed a princess.
The Emperor greeted Brinnaria kindly, was as sympathetic as possible and put her at her ease at once. He soothed her, made her seat herself comfortably and said:
“Don’t worry about what you have done. You are certainly the most startling Vestal since Gegania, but you have really done nothing actually wrong. So do not agitate yourself about what cannot be altered. The question which concerns me is, what will you do next?”
“I think,” said Brinnaria, “that the next thing I shall do will be to procure a good strong rope and hang myself.”
“My child,” the shocked Emperor exclaimed, “you really should not speak so flippantly of so dreadful an idea!”
“I’m not a particle flippant this time,” Brinnaria declared. “I know I am often flippant, but not now, not a bit. I am just as serious as life and death. I have thought of nothing but suicide since Trebellius conducted me back to my seat. I can’t get the idea out of my head and that is why I have come to you.”
“Tell me all about it from the beginning,” the Emperor said, comfortingly. “What put the notion into your head?”
“In the beginning,” said Brinnaria, “you know that I didn’t want to be a Vestal.”
“Yes, I know,” he assured her.
“Well,” she went on, “now I am a Vestal and must serve out my thirty years, I’m really trying to do my best to be all I ought to be. I really am. I’ve tried hard to be sedate and grave and collected and reticent and slow-spoken, and all the rest of it. And I think I haven’t done badly most of the time. But after all, I’m myself and I can’t be changed. Every once in a while myself boils up in me under the scum of convention I’ve spread on top of the cauldron, so to speak. I don’t mean to let go and be natural and spontaneous. I’ve done the awful thing before I know I’m going to do it. I didn’t mean to pour the pork gravy over old Gubba’s head; but she looked so funny I just did it without knowing what I was going to do. I didn’t mean to throw Manlia’s pet monkey out of the window on to Moccilo’s head. But her shock of red curls looked to be just the place on which to drop little Dito, and I dropped Dito before I thought. It’s just the same way about all the other dreadful things I do. I don’t mean to do them, but I do do them.”
“Don’t worry,” the Emperor said, “you’ll outgrow all that.”
“I trust I may,” Brinnaria sighed, “but how about the harm I’m doing as I go along?”
“You haven’t done any harm, not any harm that matters,” the Emperor soothed her.
“Are you perfectly sure of that?” she persisted. “If you could make me perfectly sure of that, I should feel a great deal better. Are you sure?”
“I can’t see any real harm in your pranks,” the Emperor said. “I certainly should not encourage you to continue or repeat such conduct or to revert to it, but I see no real harm in it.”
“You think I have not unfitted myself for my duties?”
The Emperor meditated.
“To a certainty,” he said, “if your conduct was intentional, if you thought up these pranks of yours and perpetrated them, with deliberate consciousness of what you were about to do, I should hold you gravely unfitted for your position. But you are manifestly sincere in your efforts to be all you ought to be and are trying genuinely to overcome your tendencies and to outgrow your coltishness. I am of the opinion that, if you curb yourself from now on, you have done no harm.”
“Do you think,” Brinnaria insisted, “that if you called a meeting of all the colleges of pontiffs and put the question to them, that they would make the same answer you have made?”
“You amazing child!” Aurelius exclaimed. “Why should you assume the attitude of advocate against yourself? Why suggest a synod to discuss your conduct and express an official opinion on it? Is not my opinion enough? Even if I saw fit to call a synod and all the members of it held the same views and expressed them never so cogently, do you not realize that, if my views were contrary to theirs, it would be my view that would prevail; that it would not only be my privilege and my right but my imperative duty to override any opposition and to enforce my decision? Are you not satisfied with the opinions of the man who is at once Emperor and Chief Pontifex of Rome?”
“But,” Brinnaria persisted, “I am not at all sure that you are speaking as Emperor and Chief Pontifex. To me you seem to speak as a kindly husband and father very sympathetic towards another man’s little daughter who comes to you in deep trouble of spirit.”
“You amazing child!” the Emperor repeated. “You talk as if you were forty years old. Tell me precisely what is troubling you, for I must have failed to fathom it, and be sure I shall reply officially as Emperor and Pontifex.”
“What troubles me,” said Brinnaria, “is the dread that my wild and tomboyish behavior may be as displeasing to the Goddess as coquettishness or wantonness. I am in terror for fear my ministrations may be unpleasant to her, may be sacrilegious, may not only fail to win her blessing upon Rome but may draw down her curse upon all of us. I never thought of that until I stood there all alone out in the arena, astraddle of that beautiful boy whom I just had to save, feeling all of a sudden horribly naked in my one thin, clinging undergarment, with two hundred thousand eyes staring at me. It came over me with a rush that I was not only never going to be fit for a Vestal but that I wasn’t fit for a Vestal and I hadn’t been fit for a Vestal; that I not only was going to do harm, not only was doing harm, but had done harm. If the Parthians are devastating the frontier along the Euphrates and the Marcommani and the Quadi are storming the outposts along the Danube and the Rhine, perhaps that is because my presence in the Atrium is an offence in the eyes of Vesta, my prayers an affront to my Goddess, my care of her altar-fire an insult to her. I tremble to think of it. And I cannot get it out of my head. I wake up in the dark and think of it and it keeps me awake, sometimes, longer than I ever lay awake in the dark in my life. It scares me. I am a Vestal to bring prosperity and glory to the Empire, to pray prayers that will surely be answered. Suppose the Goddess is deaf to my prayers because I am unworthy to pray to her? Suppose that my prayers infuriate her because I am vile in her sight? Suppose I am causing disaster to the Empire? I keep thinking all that. Do you wonder that I think of suicide, of hanging myself, like the two Oculatas?”
“My child!” Aurelius cut in. “You have not done anything that justifies your comparing yourself to the Oculata sisters.”
“We’ll come back to that later,” Brinnaria replied. “Just now let us stick to the point. Do you think my fears justified or not?”
“Decidedly not,” the Emperor rejoined, without an instant’s hesitation, “and I speak not as a soft-hearted parent who sees the soul of his own daughter looking at him out of the eyes of every little girl whose heart troubles her, I speak as the guardian of the interests of the Empire, as the warder of the destinies of Rome.
“Your misbehavior has certainly been grave, I admit; and, if done maliciously, would entail all the harm you imagine. But the Goddess can see not only your actions but your thoughts. Your scruples do you high credit. I will not say you are as pleasing to the Goddess as would be a grave and sedate ministrant, but I do solemnly decide and declare that you need have no further dread of any past, present or future harm to the Empire or to Rome from your past behavior, if you honestly try to err no more. This is my official decision. Be at peace in your heart.”
Brinnaria drew a deep breath.
“You certainly comfort me,” she said, “but I just know I’ll boil over again and not once, but many times.”
“Vesta will comprehend,” he said, “if your derelictions are less and less frequent and less and less violent; if you succeed a little better from month to month and from year to year. She will not be pleased with your lapses, if you lapse again, but she will be pleased at your struggles with yourself and with your good intentions. She will smile upon your ministrations and hearken to your petitions. Be comforted.”
“I am,” said Brinnaria, “as far as that trifle goes, but now we come to my real and chief concern. Suppose I am as detestable in the sight of my Goddess as the Oculata sisters were, and for a similar reason; suppose I ought to hang myself as dead as they hanged themselves. Oughtn’t I, then, to hang myself?”
“You incredible creature!” Aurelius cried. “I’ve met women by the thousand, by the tens of thousands, but never a girl like you. What do you mean? What can you mean? You cannot mean what you seem to mean. Explain yourself. Be explicit. Tell me all about what is troubling you. I’ll understand and put your mind at ease.”
“I trust you may,” Brinnaria sighed, “but I dread that you cannot. I mean just what I seem to mean.”
“Impossible!” the Emperor cried, “a child of ten, but a few months out of her mother’s care and those few months in the care of Causidiena! And I wouldn’t believe it of you if you were twice your age.”
“Oh,” said Brinnaria, “I haven’t acted like Caparronia and the two Oculatas, and I shouldn’t if I were never so much left to myself. But you said yourself that Vesta can read my thoughts and I knew that without your telling me so. Suppose that my thoughts are as abominable in the sight of my Goddess as was the behavior of those three unfortunates? Oughtn’t I to hang myself and be done with myself?”
“Indubitably,” said the Emperor, “if the facts were as your words imply. But you are just frightening yourself to death with vapors like a child afraid of its own shadow. Be explicit, be definite, and I can put you at peace with yourself at once and permanently.”
Brinnaria drew a deep breath.
“To begin with,” she said, “you know that, before I was taken for a Vestal, I was plighted to Caius Segontius Almo.”
“Certainly, I knew that,” Aurelius replied. “All Rome knew of his ride from Falerii and of his arriving just too late.”
“You knew I was in love with him?”
“I assumed that,” the Emperor told her.
“Well,” she said, a pathetic break in her voice, “I can’t make myself stop loving Almo. I always have loved him, I always shall, I love him now.”
“I assumed that too,” the Emperor said. “All Rome knows of his resolve to remain unmarried, to wait thirty years for you, to marry you the very day you are free. I assumed that he would not be so constant unless he believed you equally constant. No harm in that! You have a right to marry at the end of your service and a right to look forward to it.”
“That is what troubles me,” Brinnaria said. “I cannot feel that I have a right to look forward to it.”
“Now listen to me,” said the Emperor. “Few Vestals have left the Atrium at the end of their thirty years. Not every one that has left has married, the third Terentia withdrew at the end of her term and did not marry, nor did the only Licinia who ever completed her service. But Appellasia married and so did Quetonia and Seppia. Others have married after their service, though it is thought unlucky. The right to leave the order implies the right to marry after leaving. The right to leave implies the right to mean to leave, to plan to leave, to look forward to leaving and marrying. You have that right, like any other Vestal. Does that satisfy you?”
“It does not,” Brinnaria asserted. “I know a Vestal has a right to leave and marry and to plan to leave and marry. But, after thirty years of service, or nearly thirty years of service, to plan to leave and marry and to look forward to it for a few days or months appear to me very different from looking forward to it from the first hour of my service, and knowing not only that I mean to marry, but just the man I mean to marry, and loving him all the time, and longing for him. I can’t help it; I feel that way, and I dread that I am not an acceptable ministrant and I tremble for fear of the consequences to you and to Rome. I think I ought to hang myself and be done with it. You haven’t comforted me a bit.”
The Emperor stood up.
“Sit still!” he commanded, sharply.
He paced up and down the huge audience hail; paced its full length three times each way.
Then he reseated himself.
“Do you sleep soundly?” he queried.
“Like a top, mostly,” said Brinnaria. “I go to sleep the instant I put my head on the pillow. Generally I sleep all night long until my maid wakes me up in the morning. Many nights, but not every night, nor most nights, I wake up with a dreadful start, as if I had had a nightmare, and lie there quaking for fear I am ruining Rome. But even then I generally go to sleep again pretty quick.”
“Do you think of Almo when you wake up in the dark?” he pursued.
“Mighty little,” she declared. “In the dark all I can think of is Rome and my duty. I often reflect how immediately and how greatly being taken for a Vestal changes a girl and alters, not only her outlook on life and her ways of thinking, but also her feelings. It has cooled and steadied me more than I could have believed. When Daddy quarrelled with Segontius and told me he would not let me marry Caius I used to feel as if I were going to suffocate, used to feel that way sometimes for hours at a time, used to suffer horribly, used to wake up in the dark and feel as if, if I could not get to Almo right then, at once, I should die, as if I should be choked to death by the thumping of my heart. I used to feel that way at dinner, when out visiting any time of day, for hours. I never feel that way now. And after Daddy and Segontius made up their quarrel and it was arranged that I was to marry Almo, I used to feel as if it would kill me to wait four years, I used to grit my teeth to think of it, of waiting four years for him; used to think of it an day long, no matter what I was doing. And I used to wake up in the dark and roll round in bed and bite the bed-clothes with rage at the thought of the long waiting ahead of me. I wanted Almo the way you want a drink, just before noon of a hot day, when you have been travelling since before sunrise and the carriage creaks and jolts and the road is all dusty and there is no wind and you feel as if you would rather die than go any longer without a drink. I used to want that way to be married to Almo.
“I never feel that way now. I want him and I want to be married to him, but I look forward to it as I look forward to the next race-day at the Circus or the next fight of gladiators at the Colosseum, as a desirable and delightful time sure to come but by no means to be hurried, as something I can very well do without until the time comes. The thought of Almo is always somewhere back in my mind ready to come forward when I have nothing else to think of. But I think of him placidly and calmly and never when on duty nor when at my lessons nor when at meals. And at night, never.”
“My daughter,” said Aurelius, smiling at her, “listen well to me. I speak as Chief Pontifex and as Emperor of Rome. I command you to forget your qualms and to banish your fears. Officially as Chief Pontifex I judge you a ministrant most acceptable to your Goddess, as a most fit and suitable Vestal. I judge that no girl naturally austere, frigid and self-contained could be half so pleasing to Vesta as a tempestuous child like you who curbs her temper and schools her outward behavior all she can in the effort to be all she ought to be; whose feelings even tame themselves without any effort of hers in the holy atmosphere of the Atrium.
“Manifestly you are telling the truth about your acts, your impulses and your thoughts, I judge you a pure-minded, clean-hearted Vestal, most suitable for her duties. Vesta understands and is glad of your good intentions and pleased with your struggles to master yourself. You are most acceptable to her. You will bring no curses on Rome, but your prayers will be heard and you will bring many blessings on the Empire. Be comforted!”
“I am,” said Brinnaria simply, “and I shall stay comforted.”
BOOK II—THE REVOLT OF DESPONDENCY
CHAPTER VIII - SCOURGING
AFTER her audience with the Emperor, Brinnaria felt more at peace with herself, succeeded better in curbing her native wildness, incurred less and less disapprobation and won increasingly the respect and affection of her elders. Her outbursts were less frequent and less violent; she learned to hold her tongue, to appear calm, to stand with dignity, to move with deliberation. Her admiration for Causidiena and Numisia and of their statuesque attitudes and queenly movements helped her a great deal by both conscious and unconscious imitation. It helped her more to find that she was succeeding better than Meffia. At first Brinnaria had been notably more prone than Meffia to assume gawky or ungainly postures, and, as she was the bigger of the two, she was the more conspicuous.
Before long she began to improve in her bearing, but Meffia did not. Brinnaria held herself erect, head up and shoulders back. Meffia slouched and sagged along, a semi-boneless creature, her clothing hanging on her baggily and unbecomingly.
The difference was particularly noticeable at meals.
In the Roman world all well-to-do people lay down to meals luxuriously extended on broad sofas. Brinnaria had always had trouble about her meal-time attitudes, and her mild easy-going mother had often had to speak to her and bid her remember herself. In the Atrium she had found her legs kept up their old habits of getting into strange postures, her feet seemed distressingly in evidence, and her knees always in the wrong place.
Causidiena, tactful and sympathetic, solved the problem of how to influence her by getting her to watch Meffia and to contrast her with Manlia and Gargilia.
They were almost as statuesque as their two elders, who reclined at table in attitudes scarcely less majestic than those of the Fates on the Parthenon pediment. Meffia sprawled uncouthly and was forever spreading her knees apart, generally with one up in the air. Her postures were so disgusting that Brinnaria was hot all over with determination not to be like Meffia.
She succeeded.
Great was her exultation when she perceived that it was no longer Brinnaria and Meffia who gave cause for concern to Causidiena, but Meffia and Brinnaria, great her triumph when she made sure that Causidiena had ceased worrying about her, or worried only at long intervals, but was perpetually solicitous concerning Meffia.
Meffia was indeed a cause of solicitude. She was stupid, slow and idle about her lessons, tearful on the slightest provocation, inert at all times and generally ailing, though never actually ill. She never looked clean, no matter how faithfully her maid toiled over her; she could somehow reduce, in an amazingly short time, the neatest attire to the semblance of mussed and rumpled rags; she slouched and shambled rather than walked, she lolled rather than sat.
Her hands were feeble and ineffective, her writing remained a childish scrawl, no matter how much she was made to practice, she dropped things continually and frequently spilt her food at meal-time. Most of all was her awkwardness manifest in the temple.
The temple was circular, its roof supported by eighteen splendid marble columns, the intervals between which were walled up to the height of not much more than five feet, the space from the top of the low wall to the roof being filled in with magnificent lattices of heavy cast bronze; so that the temple was a pleasant, breezy place on warm days, but very draughty in chilly weather and bitterly cold in winter. It contained no statue, nor any other object of worship, except in the center of its floor the circular altar on which burned the sacred fire, solemnly extinguished and ceremonially rekindled on each first of March, the New Year’s day of the primitive Roman Calendar, but which must never at any other time be permitted to go out, upon whose continual burning depended the prosperity of Rome, according to the belief implicitly held by all Romans from the earliest days until Brinnaria’s time, and for centuries after. The extinction of the perpetual fire, whether by accident or by neglect, was looked upon as a presage of frightful disaster to the nation, as an omen of impending horrors, almost as the probable cause of national misfortunes. Without qualification or doubt the people of Brinnaria’s world believed that, as long as Vesta’s holy fire burned steadily and brightly, Rome was assured the favor and protection of her gods; that, should it die out, their wrath was certain to be manifested in terrible afflictions involving the entire population.
The care of the fire was the chief duty of Brinnaria and her five associates, as it had been of their predecessors for more than nine hundred years. As maple was the sacred wood in the Roman ritual, maple only was used for the holy fire. The size of the pieces used and their shape was also a matter of immemorial ordinance. Each piece was about a cubit long, about the length of the forearm of an average adult, measured from elbow to finger-tips. Each piece must be wedge-shaped, with the bark on the rounded side and the other two sides meeting at a sharp edge where had been the heart of the trunk or branch from which it had been cut. Each piece must have been clean cleft with a strong sweep of the axe. The pieces varied from sections of stout trunks to mere slivers from slender boughs. All were of dry, well-seasoned wood, carefully prepared.
The placing of these on the fire was a matter of ritual and might be done no otherwise than as prescribed. It was quite a delicate art to lay the necessary piece in just the right place and at just the right angle; it required more than a little good sense and discretion to know just when a piece was required, for the fire must not burn violently nor must it smoulder, it must be steady but not strong. This discretion, this good sense, Meffia was slow to acquire. The art of laying the wood properly she acquired very imperfectly. She did it well enough under direction; but, even with Causidiena watching her, she was likely to drop the piece of wood on the floor, or, what was worse, to drop it on the fire instead of laying it on. The scattering of ashes on the floor of the temple was held unseemly, that live coals should fall from the Altar was considered almost sacrilegious. Meffia, more than once, perpetrated such appalling blunders. Very tardily did she learn her duties; only after four years could she be trusted to take her regular turn in care of the fire and to stand her watch of half a night each time her turn came between sunset and sunrise.
During these four years she had grown into a not unpersonable young woman, for Roman girls were generally young women at fourteen years of age. She was never ruddy or robust, always pale, delicate-looking and fragile-seeming, never actually ill, but usually ailing, peevish, limp and querulous. Life in the Atrium largely consisted in the effort to keep Meffia well, to make sure that she was not overtired, to foresee and forestall opportunities for her to blunder, to repair the consequences of her mistakes, generally to protect and guide her.
In the same four years Brinnaria had developed into a muscular girl, tall, amply fleshed, robust, rosy, full of healthy vigor, lithe and strong. She was radiantly handsome, knew it, and was proud of it. Her duties she knew to the last, least detail, and Causidiena trusted her quite as much as Manlia or Gargilia.
One spring night it was Mafia’s watch until midnight, at which time Brinnaria was to relieve her. It was the custom that, at the end of her watch, the Vestal on duty made sure that the fire was burning properly and then left it and herself waked her relief, it being entirely inconceivable that, under roof and protected all round by bronze lattices, a properly burning fire could go out in the brief space of time required to leave the temple, enter the court-yard, cross it, ascend the stairs and for the relieving Vestal to reach the temple by the same path reversed.
Brinnaria was a sound sleeper. She woke in the pitch dark with the instant conviction that she had slept long past midnight, with a sudden qualm of apprehension, of boding, almost of terror.
She was a methodical creature for all her wildness, and very neat in her habits. By touch, almost without groping, she dressed in the dark. Silently she slipped out of her room, noiselessly she closed the door, softly she groped her way to the stairs, down the stairs out into the courtyard to the corner of the colonnade.
There, a pace or two beyond the pillars, under the open sky, she peered up.
The gray light of dawn was faintly hinted in the blackish canopy of cloud above her.
Swiftly she flitted the length of the court, whisking past the dimly-seen columns; swiftly she traversed the three small rooms at its eastern end, panting she plunged through the dark doorway into the dark temple.
There was no flicker of fire-light on the carved and gilded panels of the lofty ceiling; the ceiling, in fact, was invisible, unguessable in the gloom.
There was no glow upon the altar, not even a glimmer of redness through the ashes.
Brinnaria held her hand over the ashes. Nowhere could she discern more than the merest hint of warmth.
On the back of her hands, as on the back of her neck, she could feel the chill of the faintly stirring dawn wind that breathed through the bronze lattices and across the temple interior.
She felt among the wood piled ready, found a slender sliver of a cleft branchlet, and methodically ploughed the ashes across and across. She did bring to the surface a faint redness, but not even one coal which could have been blown into sufficient heat to start a flame on her splinter of dry maple.
A sound assailed her ears.
Meffia snoring!
Guided by the gurgling noise she found Meffia crumpled in a heap on the mosaic floor against the base of one of the pillars.
Brinnaria kicked her once viciously and shook her repeatedly.
Slowly, dazedly, Meffia half awoke, whining:
“Where am I?” she gasped.
“In the temple!” Brinnaria replied.
“Oh!” Meffia exclaimed, “what has happened?”
“You went to sleep, you little fool,” Brinnaria raged at her, “and the fire has gone out.”
“Oh! what shall we do?” wailed Meffia, “what shall we do?”
“Do?” snarled Brinnaria. “It’s plain enough what you have to do. Go to your room, go to bed and go’ to sleep, stay asleep, keep your mouth shut, say nothing, pretend you woke me at midnight, pretend you had nothing to do with the fire going out, pretend you know nothing about it, keep your face straight, keep mum, leave the rest to me!”
“But,” wailed Meffia, “if they think you let the fire go out you’ll be scourged for it.”
“Well,” snapped Brinnaria, “what’s that to you? Go to bed.”
“But,” Meffia insisted, “I let it go out. I ought to take the blame, not you. I ought to be scourged with you.”
“You insufferable little idiot,” Brinnaria hurled at her, “you never could stand a flogging, you’d die of it most likely. To a certainty you’d be ill, and have to be sent off to be nursed and kept away for a month or more to recover. I won’t have Causidiena worried with any such performances. And as sure as the fire is out, you’d behave like the poor creature you are. You’d scream and howl and faint and shame us all.
“No flogging of you if I can help it!
“Now, go to bed!”
“But,” protested Meffia, “why need either of us be flogged? I have tinder and flint and steel in my room. We could light the fire and no one ever know it.”
“You imbecile child! You silly baby! You wicked, horrible, sacrilegious girl!” Brinnaria stormed. “You irreligious, atheistical, blasphemous wretch! To save your hide you’d desecrate the temple, pollute the Altar, anger Vesta, make all our prayers in vain, bring down curses without count on Rome and all of us. Be silent! Don’t you dare to speak another word! Off to bed with you!”
“But,” Meffia trembled, “you hate me; why do you take my punishment?”
“I don’t hate you,” hissed Brinnaria. “I despise you! And I’ve told you why I’m going to take the licking. Off to bed with you!”
“But,” Meffia still persisted, “what will you do?”
“Do?” whispered Brinnaria. “Do? Why I’ll curl up where you’ve left a warm spot on the floor and go to sleep and sleep till some one finds me. I can sleep any time.”
“But think of the scourging!” Meffia insisted.
“I shan’t,” Brinnaria maintained. “I shan’t think of it a moment. I never did mind a licking. It’s bad enough while it lasts, but soon over. No licking will worry me. I’ll sleep like a top. Now to bed with you, or I’ll break every bone in your worthless body!” Meffia started to speak again; Brinnaria caught her gullet in one strong, young hand, clutched her neck with the other, and craftily pressed one thumb behind one of Meffia’s ears.
Meffia squeaked like a snared rabbit.
“There!” Brinnaria whispered fiercely. “Now you know how badly I can hurt you when I try. If you let on that it was you and not I that let the fire go out what I did to you then won’t amount to anything to what I’ll do to you. I’ll kill you. Promise you’ll keep mum.”
“I promise,” gasped Meffia.
“Go to bed!” Brinnaria hissed.
Meffia went.
Brinnaria, left alone, did all she could to make the ashes on the Altar look like the remains of a fire that had died out of itself, to efface all signs of her efforts to find live coals under the ashes. She judged that she had succeeded pretty well.
Then she composed herself on the floor and was asleep in ten breaths.
There Manlia found her when the daylight was already strong.
When wakened Brinnaria merely remarked:
“It can’t be helped. I always did sleep too sound.” That day was a gloomy day in Rome. The report was noised abroad that the holy fire had gone out and a chill of horror spread through all classes of the population, from the richest to the poorest.
The Romans were very far from being what they are represented to have been by unsympathetic modern writers on them. Practically all modern writers have been unsympathetic with the Romans, for the Romans were Pagans and all modern writers on them have been more or less Christians, chiefly interested in Pagans because most Pagans were in the later centuries converted to Christianity. With that fact in the foreground of their thoughts and with the utterances of Roman skeptics and dilettantes well in view, most modern writers assert what they sincerely believe, that the Romans had only the vaguest and most lukewarm religious faith, and no vivid devout convictions at all.
The facts were entirely the other way. There were agnostics among the cultured leisure classes, there were unbelievers of various degrees everywhere in the towns and cities. But the mass of the population, not only universally, all over the countryside, but collectively in the urban centers, believed in their gods as implicitly as they believed in heat and cold, birth and death, fire and water, pleasure and pain. Government, from the Roman point of view, was a partnership between the Roman people, as represented by their senate, and the gods. Under the Republic every election had appeared to the Romans who participated in it to be a rite for ascertaining what man would be most pleasing to the gods to fill the position in question. Under the Empire the selection of a new Emperor, whether a confirmation by the senate of the previous Emperor’s accredited heir, or an acclamation by the army of the soldiers’ favorite, appeared to the Romans as the determination of the gods’ preference for a particular individual as their chief partner.
The choice of war or peace, of battle or maneuvering for delay, seemed to the Romans the taking of the advice of the gods, who manifested their injunctions by various signs, by the appearance of the liver, heart, lungs and kidneys of the cattle and sheep sacrificed, by the flight of birds, by the shape of the flames of altar-fires, all regarded as definite answers to explicit questions; who also made suggestions or gave warnings by means of earthquakes, floods, conflagrations, pestilences, eclipses, by the aurora borealis, by any sort of strange happening.
The extinction of the sacred fire in the Temple of Vesta was looked upon as a categorical warning that the behavior of the Romans or of some part of them or the conduct of the government was so displeasing to the gods that the Empire would come to a sudden end unless matters were at once corrected. All Romans believed that as implicitly as they believed that food would keep them alive or that steel could kill them.
Therefore the days after Meffia let the fire go out were gloomy days in Rome. The report of a great defeat for their army, with a terrible slaughter of their best soldiers would not have depressed the crowds more.
The people were as dazed, numb and silent as after the first news of a terrific disaster. Every kind of public amusement or diversion was postponed, merry-making ceased everywhere, the wildest and most reckless felt no inclination towards frivolity, even the games of children were checked and repressed, gravity and solemnity enveloped the entire city and its vast suburbs. The men talked soberly, as if at a funeral; while for women of every degree, but especially for the matrons of the upper classes, the three ensuing days were days of prayer and fasting.
For the Pontiffs they were anxious and busy days.
Both Emperors were away from Rome, Lucius Verus in Greece, on his way home from Antioch and the great victories of his three years’ campaign against the Parthians, Marcus Aurelius in Germany hastening from point to point along the headwaters of the Rhine and Danube, desperately resisting the pertinacious attacks of the Marcomanni. The Pontiffs were without their chief and acted under the leadership of Faltonius Bambilio, Pontifex of Vesta, the busiest and most anxious of them all. In consultation with the august College of Pontiffs, hastily assembled at the Regia, a splendid building occupying the site of Numa’s rustic palace, near the great Forum and close to the Temple of Vesta, he arranged for the necessary ceremonial of expiation and atonement.
Besides the fasting of the women all over the city, besides their day-long and night-long prayers, besides the sacrifices which each matron must personally offer in her own house, besides the sacrifices which must be offered for the matrons in the Temple of Castor and in the less popular women’s temples in every quarter of the city, there must he public sacrifices of cattle, sheep and swine, there must be solemn and gorgeous processions; every sort of ceremonial traditionally supposed to mitigate the wrath of the gods, to placate them, to win their favor, must be carried out with every detail of care, with the utmost magnificence.
Meanwhile, and above all, the negligent Vestal must be punished; and at once the sacred fire must be ritually rekindled.
The ritual rekindling worried and exhausted Bambilio not a little.
The procedure was traditional and rigidly prescribed in every detail. The sacred fire might not be rekindled by anything so modern as a flint and steel, far less by anything so much more modern as a burning glass.
The primitive fire drill must be used and the fresh fire produced by the friction of wood on wood.
The ritual prescribed that a plank of apple wood, about two inches thick, about two feet wide and about three feet long, should be placed on a firm support, upon which it would rest solidly without any tendency to joggle. At its middle was bored a small circular depression, about the size of a man’s thumb-nail and shallow. Into this was thrust the tapered end of a round rod of maple wood about as thick as a large man’s thumb. The upper end of the rod fitted freely into a socket in a ball of maple wood of suitable size to be held in the left hand and pressed down so as to press the lower end of the rod into the hole in the apple wood plank. Round the middle of the rod was looped a bow-string kept taut by a strong bow. By grasping the bow in his right hand and sawing it back and forth, the operator caused the rod to whirl round, first one way and then the other, with great velocity. The friction of its lower end soon heated up the hole in the apple-wood plank, and round that were piled chips of dry apple-wood, which, if the operator was strong and skilled, soon burst into flame.
Bambilio was fat and clumsy. Before he had succeeded he was dripping with perspiration, limp with weariness and ready to faint. But succeed he did. The quart or more of apple-wood chips burst into flame at last; Causidiena, standing ready with the prescribed copper sieve, caught the blazing chips as they were tilted off the plank, conveyed them to the Altar, placed maple splinters on them, and soon had the sacred fire burning properly.
The punishment of the guilty Vestal was even more a matter of concern, of trepidation. She must be scourged that very night, and, as in respect to the rekindling of the fire, every detail of what must be done was prescribed by immemorial tradition, long since committed to writing, among the statutes of the order.
The scourging must be done by the Pontiff himself.
The scourge must be one with a maple-wood handle and three thongs of leather made from the hide of a roan heifer. In each thong were knotted the tiny, horny half-hoofs of a newborn white lamb, eight to a thong, twenty-four in all. These bits of horny hoof tore and cut terribly the bare back of the victim. It was prescribed that the scourge must be laid on vigorously, not lightly.
The Vestal scourged must be entirely nude. As it would have been sacrilege unspeakable for a man to see the ankle or shoulder of a Vestal, let alone her entire body, it was enjoined that the scourging take place at midnight, in a shut room, and that a woolen curtain should hang between the Pontifex and his victim.
Bambilio was terribly wrought up at the prospect of the perplexing and delicate duty before him. He was fat and short-winded and would suffer from the effort of laying on the blows. He was as pious as possible and quaked inwardly with the dread that, in spite of the dark room and the curtain, he might catch a glimpse of his victim and bring down the wrath of the gods on himself and on Rome. And, apart from all else, he was shame-faced and hot and cold at the idea of being in the same room, even in a darkened room screened by a curtain, with a naked Vestal. He blushed and shuddered. To be sure, it was prescribed that one other Vestal was to be in the room, on the same side of the curtain as the victim, to say when the scourging had continued long enough and the negligent Vestal had been sufficiently punished. But this comforted Bambilio very little.
He wished the ordeal over.
At midnight he stood in the dark, close to the curtain. The darkness was not as dark as he should have liked. Some ghost of a glimmer of starshine filtered into the room and he could make out the shape of the curtain. He waited, scourge in hand.
Presently Numisia spoke, told him that Brinnaria was prepared for her beating, took his left hand and guided it in the dark. He felt the curtain’s edge against his wrist, felt a warm soft elbow, grasped it, and at once gained a notion of the direction in which he was to lay on his blows.
He struck round the other side of the curtain and felt that the scourge met its mark, but slantingly and draggingly. He tried again and seemed to do better.
For the third blow he made the scourge whistle through the air.
“Hit harder, you old fool,” spoke Brinnaria, “you’re barely tapping me!” That made him angry and Brinnaria experienced as severe a scourging as any fat old gentleman could have compassed.
She did not shriek, sob or whimper: not a sound escaped her. She suffered, suffered acutely, particularly when one of the lamb hoofs struck a second time on a bleeding gash in her back or on a swollen weal. But her physical pain was drowned in a rising tide of anger and wrath. She felt the long repressed, half-forgotten tomboy, hoyden Brinnaria surging up in her and gaining mastery. She fairly boiled with rage, she blazed and flamed inwardly with a conflagration of resentment. It was all she could do not to tear down the curtain, spring on Bambilio, wrench his scourge from his hand and lay it on him. She kept still and silent, but she felt her inward tornado of emotion gaining strength.
When Numisia spoke Bambilio let go Brinnaria’s arm and stepped back a pace. “My daughter,” he said, “you have been punished enough. Your punishment is accomplished. This is sufficient.”
Then Brinnaria spoke, in a voice tense, not with pain, but with fury:
“You won’t hit me again?”
“No, my daughter,” said Bambilio, “no more.”
“You have quite done beating me?” she demanded.
“Quite done,” he replied.
Then, unexpectedly to herself, Brinnaria’s wrath boiled over.
“Then,” she fairly yelled at him, “I’m going to begin beating you. Shut your eyes. I’m going to pull down the curtain!”
Numisia made a horrified grab at Brinnaria and missed her. Brinnaria gave her a push; Numisia slipped, fell her length on the floor, struck her head and either fainted or was stunned.
Bambilio, his eyes tight shut, the instant after Numisia’s head cracked the floor, heard snap the string supporting the curtain.
He shut his eyes tighter.
He felt the scourge wrenched from his limp fingers, felt the back of his neck grasped by a muscular young hand, felt the impact of the twenty-four sheep-hoofs on his back.
Through his clothing they stung and smarted.
There came another blow and another. Bambilio tried to get away, but he dreaded unseemly contact with a naked Vestal and did not succeed in his efforts.
The blows fell thick and fast. He was an old man exhausted by a long day of excitement and by his exertions while scourging Brinnaria.
His knees knocked together, he gasped, he snorted: the pain of the blows made him feel faint; he collapsed on the floor.
Then Brinnaria did beat him, till the blood ran from his back almost as from hers, beat him till the old man fainted dead away.
When her arm was tired she gave him a kick, threw the scourge on him and groped for Numisia.
Numisia had sat up.
“My child,” she said, “why did you do it?”
“I don’t know,” snarled Brinnaria. “I was furious. I did it before I thought. Are you hurt?”
“No,” said Numisia. “Don’t tell anyone you pushed me. I’ll never tell. I don’t blame you, dear.” She fainted again.
Causidiena, waiting under the colonnade of the courtyard, was appalled to descry in the gloom a totally naked Brinnaria, a mass of clothing hanging over her arm.
“My child,” she protested, “why did you not put on your clothes?”
“I don’t care who sees me!” Brinnaria retorted. “I’m boiling hot; I’m all over sweat and blood and my back’s cut to ribbons.”
“What are you going to do?” Causidiena queried.
“I’m going to bed,” Brinnaria replied. “Please send Utta to me and tell her to bring the turpentine jug and the salt box.”
“My dear,” Causidiena objected, “you’ll never endure the pain!”
“Yes, I shall,” Brinnaria maintained. “I’ll set my teeth and stand the smart. I don’t mean to have a festered back. I’ll have Utta rub me with salt and turpentine from neck to hips; I’ll be asleep before she’s done rubbing.”
“I’ll come and see she does it properly,” Causidiena said.
“Better not,” said Brinnaria. “Numisia and Bambilio need you worse than I do.”
“Why?” queried Causidiena.
“After Bambilio was done beating me,” Brinnaria explained calmly, “I beat him. Numisia tried to stop me and somehow fell on the floor and was stunned. She came to after I was done with Bambilio, but she fainted again. I beat him till he is just a lump of raw meat, eleven-twelfths dead, wallowing in his blood like a sausage in a plate of gravy.”
“My child!” Causidiena cried, “this is sacrilege!”
“Not a bit of it!” Brinnaria maintained, a tall, white shape in the star-shine, waving her armful of clothing.
“I have pored over the statutes of the order. It was incumbent on me to keep still and silent all through my licking. But I defy you or any other Vestal or any Pontiff or Flamen or either of the Emperors to show me a word on the statutes of the order or in any other sacred writing that forbids a Vestal, after her thrashing, to beat the Pontifex to red pulp. I have. You’d better go help him; he might die. And poor Numisia needs reviving. I’m all right; send me Utta and the salt and turpentine, and I’ll be fit for duty in a day or two.”
“You terrible child!” said Causidiena.
CHAPTER IX - ALARMS
THE next year was the year of the great pestilence. Pestilence, indeed, had ravaged Italy for five consecutive summers previous to that year. But the great pestilence, for two centuries afterwards spoken of merely as “the pestilence,” fell in the nine hundred and nineteenth year after the founding of Rome, the year 166 of our era, when Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus had been co-Emperors for a little more than five years and Brinnaria had been almost five years a Vestal. It devastated the entire Empire from Nisibis in upper Mesopotamia to Segontium, opposite the isle of Anglesea. Every farm, hamlet and village suffered; in not one town did it leave more than half the inhabitants alive; few cities escaped with so much as a third of the population surviving. Famine accompanied the pestilence in all the western portions of the Roman world, and from famine perished many whom the plague had spared.
This disaster was, in fact, the real deathblow to Rome’s greatness and from it dates the decline of the Roman power. It broke the tradition of civilization and culture which had grown from the small beginnings of the primitive Greeks and Etruscans more than two thousand years before. During all those two thousand years there had been a more or less steady and a scarcely interrupted development of the agriculture, manufactures, arts, skill, knowledge and power of the mass of humanity about the Mediterranean Sea; men who fought with shields and spears and swords, also with arrows and slings, believed in approximately the same sort of gods; wore clothing rather wrapped round them than upholstered on their bodies as with us; reclined on sofas at meals; lived mostly out of doors all the year round; built their houses about courtyards, and made rows of columns the chief feature of their architecture, and sheltering themselves in colonnades, sunny or shady according to the time of the year, the chief feature of their personal comfort. Up to the year of the great pestilence that civilization had prospered, had produced a long series of generals, inventors, architects, sculptors, painters, musicians, poets, authors, and orators. Everywhere men had shown self-confidence, capacity, originality, power and competence and had achieved success for two thousand years.
The great pestilence of 166 so depleted the population that Rome never again pushed forward the boundaries of her Empire. Some lucky armies won occasional victories, but Rome never again put on the field an overwhelming army for foreign conquest, never again could fully man, even defensively, the long line of her frontiers.
All classes of the people suffered, but most of all the rich, the well-to-do, the educated and the cultured classes of the towns and cities. And the main point of difference between the great pestilence and the others which had preceded it was the universality of its incidence. For two thousand years pestilence had occurred at intervals, but previously not everywhere at once.
If one country suffered others did not; if half the Mediterranean world, even, was devastated, the other half escaped. From the immune regions competence and capacity had flowed into the ruined areas and civilization had gone on. But the great pestilence left no district unharmed. In six months it killed off all the brains and skill, all the culture and ingenuity in the Empire. There were so few capable men left in any line of activity that the next generation grew up practically untaught. The tradition of two thousand years was broken. In all the Mediterranean world, until centuries later, descendants of the savage invaders developed their new civilization on the ruins of the old; no man ever again made a great speech, wrote a great book or play or poem, painted a good picture, carved a good statue, or contrived a good campaign or battle. The brains of the Roman world died that year, the originality of the whole nation was killed at once, the tradition broke off.
Of course, the survivors did not realize the finality of the disaster, but they did realize its magnitude. In Italy, fed almost wholly by imported food, the famine was most severe. In Italy the pestilence was most virulent. Men disputed as to whether the great army of Lucius Verus, returned home from its splendid victories in Parthia, had brought with it a form of pestilence worse than that of the five previous years, or whether the returned soldiers had merely been a specially easy prey to the pestilence already abroad in Rome. Whichever was true, the veterans died like flies. So did the residents of Rome. Whole blocks of tenements were emptied of their last occupier and stood wholly vacant; many palaces of the wealthy were left without so much as a guardian, the last inmate dead; the splendid furnishings, even the silver plate, untouched in every room; for the plague had so ravaged Rome that there were not even robbers and thieves left to steal To the survivors, since genuine piety as they knew it was all but universal among the Romans, it was some small comfort, a faint ray of hope, a sign that the gods were not inexorably wrathful, that, after Rabulla’s death, there was no case of pestilence in the Atrium, not even among the servitors, that no Vestal so much as sickened. Through it all the six remained hale and sound.
But when the plague abated, only Manlia had any living relations left her. The other five had lost every kinsman and kinswoman, to the ninth and tenth degree.
Brinnaria’s parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins were all among the victims. This left her grave and sobered with grief, with no trace of her girlish wildness apparent.
It also left her enormously rich, one of the wealthiest women in Rome.
Not a tenth so wealthy, but still very rich, it left Almo, Vocco and Flexinna, all of whom survived.
As the plague had been rife, worse each year, for some seasons before the year of the great pestilence, so, ebbing yearly, it continued for some years after its acme. As soon as the worst was manifestly over the life of Rome began to revive to some degree, the city dwellers plucked up heart, the refugees began to return to their town houses, hunger and terror were forgotten, industry and commerce rallied, bustle and activity increased from day to day, and, slowly indeed, but steadily, Rome returned to its normal activity and appearance. The survivors reconstructed their life on the old lines, the streets and squares were again thronged, the public baths, those vast casinos of ancient club-life, were daily crowded with idlers.
The repopulation of the city brought into it many rich families from towns all over the Roman world.
Their influx sent up the price of large residences and caused much activity in the renting and selling of properties suitable for the homes of people of ample means.
Brinnaria, without a male relation of even the remotest degree, came to lean more and more on Vocco, the husband of her chum Flexinna. He was a young man of not unpleasing appearance and of courtly manners, but very haughty, reserved and silent by nature; and exceedingly spare, lean and wiry, with black hair and brows, a complexion as if tanned and weatherbeaten and an habitual frown. He was fond of Brinnaria and unbent to her more than to most of his acquaintances. She treated him as a sort of honorary cousin and turned over to him many details of the care of her large and scattered property. He took upon himself in her interest the sale or management of her distant estates, found for them capable overseers or purchasers at advantageous prices, bought slaves where they were needed, arranged for the marketing of the more important products and accounted to her for the proceeds.
About her town properties he had more trouble and some exasperation, for he found the apparently practical and unsentimental Brinnaria oddly unwilling to disturb the contents of the palaces in which her kinsmen had lived and died. She was naturally a good business woman and all her instincts urged her to increase her capital and her income by every means within her power and at every opportunity. Yet, when Vocco came to her with offers of high prices for the various buildings which she had inherited he could induce her to arrange for the sale only of the smaller and less valuable houses, or of those tenements which had been owned merely to rent, but had never been inhabited by any members of the Brinnarian clan. At the suggestion of preparing for sale any of the palaces of her near kinsfolk she balked; from the barest hint towards moving the furniture in her father’s home she recoiled in horror.
Vocco found himself faced by invincible femininity, with the possession of which he would not have credited Brinnaria. At first he was irritated. As he missed sale after sale he became more and more aggravated. But he kept his temper, held his tongue and waited for Brinnaria’s mood to alter. Her sentimentality gradually waned as the prices offered steadily mounted. After long hesitation she gave orders to sell at auction the furniture from the house of a distant cousin, and to rent the house. That broke the spell. One by one the late abodes of the Brinnarii were cleared and sold; sold furniture and all, cleared and rented, or rented furnished.
The former dwellings of her aunts and uncles she was reluctant to disturb. She felt a sort of sacredness about these splendid houses where she had been merry as a child. When at last she made up her mind to part with one she would not give the order to sell it until she had gone over it herself and selected some pieces of furniture which she specially valued. Vocco tried to dissuade her, but she would not listen to him.
Her visit to the vast, empty palace had a most depressing effect on her. All her grief at her countless bereavements rushed back over her in a flood and overwhelmed her. She would not allow a stick of furniture to be moved and withdrew her consent to the sale.
Vocco was patient and silent.
After a time this mood, too, wore off.
She had that particular dwelling emptied and sold and, once that first step taken, under the pressure of hugely profitable offers, sold all the other properties.
In each case she insisted on inspecting the houses room by room before anything was moved. After the first she had no hysterical qualms, did not show any outward emotion, selected what she meant to keep for herself, ordered the sale of the rest, remained calm through it all.
Finally Vocco came to her with a most tempting offer for her childhood home. Brinnaria took a night to think it over.
She had not entered the place since her father’s funeral. He had been the last of the family to die, three months after his wife, and some days after his last surviving son. During the lengthy interval the palace had stood shut fast, cared for only by a few slaves, and those not lifelong family servants, but recent purchases; for the pestilence had carried off with their masters nearly all the home-bred house slaves.
At the thought of going through the deserted halls and silent rooms Brinnaria winced. But she nerved herself up to it. She named a day on which she meant to face the ordeal, asked Vocco to order the palace swept and dusted, and announced to Guntello, almost the sole survivor of her father’s personal servitors, that he was to accompany her.
When the day came she set out, not in her carriage, but in her litter with eight Cilician bearers, her lictor running ahead and Guntello and Utta walking behind.
She began her survey accompanied by Guntello and Utta. But when she came to the nursery and schoolroom she sent the two away, told them to wait for her in the peristyle, shut herself in and had a long, hard cry; precisely as if she had been, as of old, a little girl hurt or angry or vexed. After she had wept till no more tears flowed she felt relieved and comforted.
She called Utta, had her bring water, bathed her face and sent the maid away again.
Then she resolutely examined room after room. The second floor took a long while, for there were many doors to open and close for the last time.
There was a third floor, a feature possessed by few dwellings in Rome in ancient times. The Imperial Palace, which later towered to even seven stories, was unique in Brinnaria’s time, in the possession of five superposed floors. The great palace of Sallust, near the Salarian Gate, had but three.
To the third floor she mounted. Before she had investigated half the rooms she found a door fast. What was more, as she tried it, she thought she heard a sound, as of human movement, inside that room.
Brinnaria was no weakling. Methodically she tried that door with her full, young strength, tried it all along its edge opposite its hinges, tried it at the middle, at the top, at the bottom. She made sure the door was not stuck or jammed; she was convinced that it was bolted within the room.
She leaned over the railing of the gallery and called Guntello.
The odd note in her voice brought that faithful giant up the stairs, two steps at a time; the beams of the house, even the marble steps of the stair, seemed to quiver under his tread.
She had him try the door. He agreed that it was bolted.
“Can you break it in?” she queried.
Guntello laughed. “Without half trying, little Mistress,” he replied.
Brinnaria’s voice came hard and sharp.
“You in that room!” she called, “unbolt that door and come out, or it will be the worse for you. I’ll count ten and then order the door burst open.” She began to count.
She heard the bolt shot back.
She nodded to Guntello.
He gave the door a push.
Before them stood Calvaster, his attitude and countenance expressing cringing cowardice, cloaked by ill-assumed effrontery. He did not speak, trying to appear unconcerned.
“What are you doing in my house?” Brinnaria demanded.
“I do not wonder that you are astonished to see me here and angry as well,” Calvaster replied, “but the explanation is simple. I learned that you were proposing to sell the property. I had a curiosity to see it as it is. I found means to slip in and go over the building. I counted on leaving before you arrived. I miscalculated, that is all. Awkward for both of us, but unintentional on my part.”
“I don’t believe half of that rigmarole,” snapped Brinnaria.
“It is all true, nevertheless,” Calvaster asserted with an air of injured innocence.
“One thing is plain, anyhow,” Brinnaria declared. “You bribed one of my slaves. Which one did you bribe?”
Calvaster kept his lips pressed tight together.
“March him downstairs, Guntello,” Brinnaria commanded.
Calvaster winced and made as if to dodge. Big as he was Guntello was wonderfully quick. In a flash he had the intruder by the neck. Utterly helpless Calvaster was marched down the stairs.
In the courtyard Brinnaria had brought before her the half dozen slaves who had charge of the empty house. They stood in a row fidgeting and glancing at each other.
“Now,” she demanded of Calvaster, “point out which one you bribed.” Calvaster remained motionless and mute.
“Hurt him, Guntello,” said Brinnaria.
Guntello applied a few simple twists and squeezes, such as schoolboys of all climes employ on their victims.
Calvaster yielded at once and indicated one of the suspects.
“Throw him out, Guntello,” said Brinnaria.
When Guntello returned he cheerfully inquired, with the easy assurance of an indulged favorite.
“Shall I kill Tranio, Mistress?”
“No!” said Brinnaria viciously. “I wouldn’t have a toad killed on the word of that contemptible scoundrel. Give Tranio a moderate beating and hand him over to Olynthides to be sold at auction without a character.” Her survey of her former home and her selection of the ornaments, pictures, statues, articles of furniture and other objects which she desired reserved for herself she completed with an air less of melancholy than of puzzled thought.
She was off duty for all of that day and night and was to dine with Flexinna and Vocco. In the course of the pestilence they had inherited a magnificent abode on the Esquiline. In particular it had a private bath with a large swimming-pool. The Vestals were the only ladies in Rome who might not enjoy the magnificent public baths, to which all Roman society flocked every afternoon, somewhat as we moderns throng a beach at a fashionable seaside resort. Brinnaria, who loved swimming, felt the deprivation keenly. The Atrium had luxurious baths, but no swimming-pool. Whenever Brinnaria dined with Flexinna she particularly enjoyed the swim the two always took together before dinner. On that afternoon, while they were revelling in the water, Brinnaria told Flexinna of her adventure.
“I can’t conjecture,” she said, “what motive brought him there. I have been racking my brains about it ever since it happened and it is an enigma to me.”
“No riddle to me,” Flexinna declared. “It’s as c-c-clear as d-d-daylight.”
“If you are so sure,” said Brinnaria, “explain. I have no guess even.”
“Why,” expounded Flexinna, “he was there to c-c-collect evidence against you. He hates you because you wouldn’t marry him and he is t-t-tenaciously resolved to be revenged. He is on the lookout for anything that might d-d-discredit you. He hoped to spy on an interview b-b-between you and Almo, for he surmised that you would arrange to have Almo meet you in the empty house!”
“The nasty beast!” cried Brinnaria, shocked. “How dare he?”
“Oh, b-b-be sensible,” Flexinna admonished her. “You know the k-k-kind he is. He’s b-b-bound to impute to everybody what he would d-d-do in their p-p-place. Any man under the same circumstances would jump at the same suspicions.”
“But why?” queried Brinnaria, bewildered and angry.
“Think a minute,” said Flexinna. “To suspect all women is a c-c-convention, almost an axiom, with most men. All men like C-C-Calvaster assume that every married woman is interested in some man b-b-besides her husband, or in almost any man, and if married women are under suspicion, on the assumption that one husband is not enough, of c-c-course you Vestals, who haven’t even a husband, are doubly under suspicion.”
“Bah!” snarled Brinnaria, “you make me cross!”
“Facts are facts,” Flexinna summed up.
Brinnaria did not retort. She had climbed out of the tank and was seated on the edge, the drops streaming off her in rivulets, watching the ripples her toes’ made in the water.
“Facts are facts,” she echoed, “and conjectures are merely conjectures; what is more, conjectures ought to have some basis in fact. You assert, as if you know it to be true, that Calvaster expected Almo to meet me to-day. But Almo is at Falerii.”
“No, he’s not,” Flexinna retorted; “he’s b-b-been in t-t-town t-t-ten d-d-days and has had the old house on the C-C-Carinae reopened. He’s settling d-d-down to live in Rome.”
Brinnaria flushed.
“I think,” she said, scrambling to her feet, “that he might have had enough consideration for me to stay in the country.”
“So d-d-do I,” said Flexinna.
CHAPTER X - CONFERENCE
SOME months later, during one of the brief and infrequent breathing spells in his ten years’ fight to beat off the raids of the Marcomanni and other Germanic tribes, Aurelius returned from the Rhine frontier to Rome. As soon as she was reasonably sure that the Emperor was rested from the fatigues of his journey and had disposed of the worst of his accumulated routine duties, Brinnaria sought a second audience with the chief of the nation.
She was then a tall, grave girl of nineteen, looking and behaving like a woman of twenty-five. Very handsome she was, full-fleshed without a trace of plumpness, fun breasted without a hint of overabundance. Her brown hair, now grown long again after its ceremonial shearing at her entrance into the order of Vestals, was so dark that it was almost black. Arranged in the six braids traditional for Vestals and wound round her head like a coronet it became her notably. Her complexion was creamy, with a splendid brilliant color that came and went in her cheeks. Her expression of face was an indescribable blend of kindliness and haughtiness towards others, of austerity and cheerfulness inwardly, of intellectuality and comprehension towards life at large. She had acquired the statuesqueness of the conventional Vestal attitudes and movements, but she sat and stood so that all beholders felt a vivid impression of her vitality, of reserve strength, incomparably beyond anything possessed by her five colleagues.
Her stately pacing as she walked always appeared the conscious restraint of what, of itself, would have been a swinging stride. She wore her clothes with an unanalyzable difference, with a sort of effrontery, as Calvaster put it in talking of her to his cronies.
On her way to the palace, erect in her white robe amid the gorgeous crimson hangings of her gilded state coach, she meditated on the great dissimilarity between the feelings with which she had gone to her first audience with the Emperor and those with which she now approached his abode. Then she had been palpitating with conscientious scruples and childish dreads, now she was sure of herself and of her errand; then she had thought chiefly of her mother and of the traditions of her family and clan, now not only her mother was dead, but the whole family of the Epulones had perished except herself and the Brinnarian clan was represented by but three families, her relationship to which was fainter than any assignable degree of cousinship; then she had been full of elation at her lofty position in the world, now she was perfectly at home in her environment and felt no emotion at the thought of it.
At the palace she found herself in the same vast room, alone with a somewhat older and graver Emperor, now sole ruler of their world since the death of his colleague, Lucius Verus. He greeted her kindly, with an air of effort to conceal his weariness, and when both were seated asked her errand.
“In the first place,” she said, “I want you to tell me whether you are satisfied with the reports you have had of me.”
Aurelius half smiled.
“I am well pleased in respect to all your actions but one,” he said. “You have certainly done better than I expected or hoped. You have curbed your wild nature so well that, of late years, you have behaved altogether as a Vestal should. Even earlier your conduct was creditable, since from the very day of your promise to me, your outbursts were less and less frequent and also less and less violent. Once only have you acted so that I felt displeased when I heard what you had done and feel somewhat displeased even yet.”
“I suppose,” Brinnaria ruminated, “you mean my larruping Bambilio.”
“Yes,” Aurelius admitted. “That was in a sense unforgivable. Had I been in Rome at the time I must have animadverted upon it with the greatest severity.”
“If you had been in Rome at the time,” spoke Brinnaria boldly, “I should not have been flogged by any mere deputy Pontifex of Vesta. It would have been incumbent upon you, as Pontifex Maximus, yourself to give me my ceremonial scourging. To you I should have been, of course, as submissive after my beating as while it was going on. No harm would have been done.”
The Emperor smiled more than a half smile.
“I am not sure,” he said, “that any harm was done, anyhow.”
“What!” cried Brinnaria. “You excuse me? You defend me?”
“Softly! Softly!” the Emperor caveatted, raising his hand. “I do not acquit you nor exonerate you. But I do make allowances. And we must distinguish. We must not confuse the causes of my disapprobation of what you did with my reasons for believing that no harm resulted. Nor, for that matter, must we confound with either of them those qualities in yourself and those circumstances of the case which make me feel, illogically perhaps, but very possibly, more inclined to thank you than to censure you.”
“Castor be good to me!” cried Brinnaria. “Am I dreaming?”
“Don’t interrupt, you disrespectful minx,” the Emperor laughed; “this is a lecture. Hear it out.
“In the first place you were technically right in saying that there is not one word in any sacred writing or in the pronouncements of the Pontiffs or the statutes of the Vestals to forbid a flogged Vestal from beating her scourger. Just as Solon in the code of laws which he drew up for the Athenians prescribed no penalty for the slayer of his father or mother, because, as he explained when the omission was pointed out to him, he had thought that no child would ever kill its parents; so no framer of rubrics ever foresaw the necessity of forbidding what no one conceived of as possible. All persons were assumed to be too much in awe of Pontiffs, for anyone to dare to raise a hand against any Pontiff, least of all a Vestal against her spiritual father. The world had to wait for a Brinnaria to demonstrate that the unimaginable could come to pass.
“Yet the very fact that it was nowhere written down that you must not do it makes your act all the worse. It was monstrous.
“But fortunately it was not sacrilegious. The person of the Pontifex of Vesta is not sacrosanct and a blow inflicted on him is not to be rated as impious. Your act called for no expiation, personal or official. It did not desecrate him, or you, nor the place where it occurred.
“Besides, I cannot resist admitting to you,”—and the Emperor smiled an unmistakable smile—“that this particular Pontiff of Vesta is farther from being sacrosanct than any of his predecessors. As far as I can learn, Faltonius is a worthy man, pious and scrupulous. But he is absurdly unfitted for his office in appearance and in manner. The self-importance he assumes, the pomposity with which he performs his duties, would be too great even for an Emperor. He irritates all of us. All of us have wished, secretly or openly, many, many times, that Bambilio would be soundly thrashed. He has been. You did it. The story was too good to keep. It has not, of course, been allowed to leak out, and become common property. But it is known to all the Flamens, Augurs and Pontiffs.
“I need not describe to you the feelings of my colleagues, nor my own. To hint them is perhaps too much; to particularize them would be unseemly. I may say, however, that just as street-boys acclaim you by shouting:
“‘That’s the girl that saved the dog;’ just as all over the Empire you are talked of as the lady who rescued the retiarius; so at any festival or ceremonial in which the Vestals take part, many a dignitary is likely to nudge his neighbor, indicate you and whisper:
“‘That’s the priestess who walloped Bambilio!’ You are not infamous, you are famous.
“As for myself I am the more inclined to feel indulgent towards you because I understand how you felt. You were boiling with rage at being struck by any one, as any noble girl would be. Yet you would have controlled your fury but for the fact that you knew that you yourself had done nothing to deserve chastisement, that you were suffering for another’s fault.”
“What!” cried Brinnaria.
“Oh, yes,” Aurelius continued, easily. “Causidiena and I are quite agreed on that point. Neither she nor I have questioned Meffia, and we do not mean to; partly because we are sure enough, without any admission from her; partly because the matter is best left as it is, without any further notice. But, with the exception of Meffia, it is quite certain that, from the Vestals themselves down to the last slave-girl, every resident of the Atrium believes that not you but Meffia let the fire go out, and that you took the blame due her. And we can all conjecture your motives, as we all applaud them.
“Meffia might never have survived a scourging, might have been ailing for months. Rome wants no sick Vestals nor dead Vestals. Causidiena is grateful to you, all the Atrium is grateful, I am grateful.”
“But,” said Brinnaria, wide-eyed, “I had supposed that, if Meffia was suspected, there would be an inquisition and testimony under oath and that it would be obligatory that the Vestal actually at fault must be scourged.”
“For once,” the Emperor smiled, “you have failed to read accurately the statutes of the order. It is positively refreshing. I was beginning to feel that you were altogether too accurate. In fact the scourging of a delinquent Vestal is a mere disciplinary regulation, designed to assure the maintenance of the fire. It is not in the nature of a mandatory atonement. It has nothing in common with an act of expiation. It has nothing to do with placating or propitiating the Goddess. It has no likeness whatever to the punishment of a guilty Vestal.”
“That reminds me,” said Brinnaria, “of what I came for. I’m as grateful as possible for what you have said to me, surprised that Causidiena and you so easily saw through my deception, delighted that you take it as you have, more than delighted to find you so kindly disposed towards me. I need all the kindness you can feel towards me. I want to come to the point, to the reason why I am here. I want you to answer me this question: Suppose I were accused of the worst possible misconduct, formally accused before you, what then?”
“Then,” said Aurelius, “you would have a fair trial.”
“I believe I should,” said Brinnaria. “You would be perfectly fair and entirely just. And a fair trial would be a novelty. Almost never has an accused Vestal had a fair trial.”
“Not even if acquitted?” the Emperor suggested slyly.
“No,” Brinnaria retorted vigorously. “Even most of those absolved were not tried fairly. Postumia was, if the records from so long ago are to be trusted. The first trial of the third Licinia was perfectly fair, the minutes are very full and there is no shade of bias in the discussion of her many interviews with Crassus, while the court was plainly genuinely amused at his greed for desirable real-estate and at his artifices to induce her to sell cheap. Fabia, in the same year, was justly treated. But most of the other acquittals were quite as bad as most of the convictions to my mind. I can discover almost no trial where both sides had a full hearing, where the judges tried to get at the facts and kept their attention on the evidence, where the finding as the expression of the opinions rather than of the partiality of the Pontiffs. Almost every verdict on record, it seems to me, was dictated by favoritism or influence or prejudice or wrath.”
“You seem to think you know a great deal about the subject of trials of Vestals,” Aurelius remarked.
“I feel justified in thinking so,” Brinnaria maintained. “Where the minutes of the court have perished, as, of course, in the case of all the trials before the capture and burning of the city by the Gauls, I have read what records remain. Where the court records are extant I have pored over every word of the minutes of the proceedings and of every document attached.”
“That is more than ever I found time to do,” Aurelius meditated. “Your conclusions ought to be of interest. What are they?”
Brinnaria drew a deep breath and went on. “I am convinced,” she said, “that sometimes the accused received what she deserved, but generally by accident. The judges were swayed by politics or expediency or clan-feeling or popular clamor or self-interest, not by reason.
“Nobody could form any judgment, at this distance of time, about the guilt or innocence of Oppia or Opimia or Popilia or Porphilia or Orbilia or Orbinia or whatever her real name was, it all happened so long ago. But Minucia and Sextilia and Floronia and the rest were just victims of judicial ferocity, as far as I can make out.”
“You are then of the opinion,” the Emperor asked, “that there never was a guilty Vestal?”
“No,” Brinnaria replied judicially, “I don’t go as far as that. Varonilla was probably depraved and with her the two Oculatas. I don’t think their suicides prove anything against them, for a woman is just as likely to hang herself because she despairs of a fair hearing as because she is conscious of guilt. What weighs with me is that they were brought up in the dissolute times of Messalina and Nero and that their relatives were leaders of the most profligate set in Rome, cronies of Vitellius and his coterie. But although Cornelia was bred and raised in the same social atmosphere, I am quite as sure of her innocence as all the world was the day she was buried and as everybody has been ever since. Domitian just murdered her without a trial, for political reasons and for moral effect. So likewise Marcia and the second Licinia were judicially murdered by that fierce old Cassius Longinus Ravilla. He was elected to convict them, not to try them, and he conducted the trial not to arrive at a fair verdict, but to force a conviction. He had some excuse, for their acquittal on their former trial had been brought about by idiotic bribing and family influence. On the face of the evidence at both trials they were clearly blameless. What ruined them was their trying to shield Aurelia, surely the worst Vestal on record, for she had everything in her favor, ancestry, upbringing and surroundings; she was beyond doubt innately vicious. She was the only Vestal ever justly convicted and justly punished, in my opinion. All the others were irreproachable women, doomed to a frightful fate by prejudiced judges. In general, an accused Vestal is as good as condemned, the whole population so dreads the results of acquitting an unclean priestess. And it is the easiest thing in the world for a Vestal to be accused. Refuse to sell a farm for half its value, snub a bore, order a slave flogged for some unbearable blunder, and the result is the same; false accusation with perjured witnesses and a quick conviction most likely to follow.”
“The subject seems to have occupied your mind a great deal,” Aurelius ruminated.
“Do you wonder?” Brinnaria flamed at him. “What in all the tragic, dramatic history of Rome is half so dramatic or a tenth so tragic as the burial of a Vestal? In all our centuries of ferocity, what seems half so cruel?
“I know that cruelty played no part in the invention of burial alive as a punishment for a convicted Vestal. I know that no caitiff could be found so vile as to dare to lay hands on a Vestal, no ruffian so reckless as to venture to end her life by sword or axe, by strangling or drowning. The most impious miscreant has too much fear of the gods to injure a consecrated priestess. The only way to dispose of a delinquent Vestal is to bury her alive. But the cruelty of it makes me choke. I think of the last hours of each of those who were punished, of their thoughts as the time drew near, of their feelings alone in the dark waiting for death to release them from their sufferings.
“I think of these underground cells as they are now, out there under that awful unkempt, ragged waste lot by the Colline Gate. I think of the skeletons mouldering on the mouldering cots, of the bones, the fragments of crumbling bones, the dust of crumbled bones on the stone floors, as they have been for hundreds of years, as they will be for thousands of years to come. The cot cannot yet have decayed from under what is left of poor Cornelia; her bones must still be entire and in order on the webbing; Aurelia’s bones must be whole yet and Licinia’s and Marcia’s; of Floronia there can hardly be left a trace by now, where Minucia died there can be only an empty stone cell. Do you wonder that the subject haunts me?”
“I do and I do not,” Aurelius replied. “I’ve let you relieve your mind by talking yourself tired. Now listen to me. I think I understand you perfectly. When you came to me before the novel responsibilities of your office had worn on your nerves and you were quivering with dread for fear you might be an unworthy priestess. Now the perils of your situation are wearing on your nerves and you are brooding over the possibility of accusation, trial, conviction and burial alive.
“I sympathize with you. As an Emperor I am exposed to the perpetual danger of assassination. You would be amazed if I detailed to you my various narrow escapes from death at the hands of disappointed seekers after preferment, of incompetent officials, of knaves with grievances of every conceivable and inconceivable variety and of fools with no grievance at all. You would be astonished if I merely reckoned the occasions on which I have just missed being killed. It gets on my nerves, more or less, of course. But I strive to bear up and remain calm and I succeed more or less. I keep before me the fact that as an Emperor I am obnoxious to countless hatreds from fancied slights and to uncountable schemes of revenge. I reflect that the danger is inseparable from the state of my being an Emperor. I try to be philosophical about it.
“So you must attempt to remain placid under the strain of the knowledge that you are exposed to perpetual danger of a horrible death from conviction on false accusation. It is part of the condition of being a Vestal. If anything goes wrong in the way of earthquake, flood, famine, pestilence, conflagrations or defeats, the populace are likely to cry out that some Vestal is unclean and bringing down on the Empire the wrath of the gods. That nothing of the kind has occurred during our recent afflictions has been clearly due to the holiness of Dossonia and Causidiena and to their reputation for strict discipline. But the danger of popular outcry is always real. Then there is the fact that far too large a proportion of our population are dissolute and that, among the dissolute-minded, all Vestals are under suspicion because they are the only women among our nobility who remain unmarried long after they have reached marriageable years. You must learn to take all this as a matter of course and to go sedately about your duties.
“Of course, I lessen my danger by keeping about me many trusty guards. It is right that you should appeal to me in your anxiety. I shall do what I can to lessen your danger. I believe in you. If you were accused before me it would take notably plain and convincing evidence to make me believe anything against you. I shall put my opinion of you on record among my papers of instructions to my successor. I shall declare it to all the Chief Pontiffs. I shall verbally and in writing make it clear to all concerned that you seem to me all you should be, that you are in an unusually difficult and delicate position and that in case of accusation all presumption should be in favor of your innocence and against the sincerity of your accusers.
“And now I think that ought to satisfy you and cover all the general considerations. Let us come to the special consideration that interests me chiefly. You have never come to me because you became gradually unnerved by brooding which had no specific origin or cause:
“Tell me plainly and outspokenly what has happened to you lately to fill your mind with thoughts of buried Vestals, trials, accusations and terrors?”
Brinnaria thereupon related her encounter with Calvaster and her conversation with Flexinna.
The Emperor stroked his beard and reflected.
“I have never liked Calvaster,” he said, “and if I had been in the city to consider recommendations for appointments he would, assuredly, never have become a member of Rome’s hierarchy. I deem him gravely unsuited for even the most minor grade of Pontiff. He appears to me to be mean-spirited, narrow-minded and base. I am inclined to believe of him all that you impute. But, even to such as Calvaster, we should be just. You complained, a while ago, that the judges of the Vestals had ignored both the facts and the evidence. Let us weigh the evidence and stick to the facts. The only fact you present is that you caught Calvaster lurking in your house. You confess that you were completely puzzled as to what motive brought him there. Your friend surmises an explanation which disgusts, insults and alarms you. You instantly credit it completely, think and act as if it were unquestionably true. I am prejudiced against Calvaster, as I have told you, yet I am by no means ready to admit that your beliefs about him are evidence against him, more particularly as they rest solely on Flexinna’s ingenious conjectures. The notion is plausible and it is entirely congruent with Calvaster’s character as I imagine it. Yet it is, after all, merely a plausible surmise. I am just as inclined to accept Calvaster’s own explanation; he is an inquisitive busybody.
“My verdict is that you need feel no alarm.”
“But I do,” Brinnaria maintained; “I do not feel safe with Calvaster anywhere about.”
The Emperor reflected.
“The peace of mind of a Vestal,” he said, “is a matter of such importance to the state that I should not hesitate about ordering Calvaster banished to some comfortable and healthy island and there detained permanently, were it not that the fellow has made himself almost indispensable. The pestilence has carried off practically all the adepts at interpretation of the sacred writings, the prophetic books, the rubrics and rituals of the various temples, the statutes of the brotherhoods and other orders of the hierarchy. Only Numerius Aproniarius remains of the older experts, and he is afflicted by an incurable and loathsome disease which he cannot long survive. Of the younger men only Calvaster has displayed any aptitude for learning this delicate and complex art, only he has attained any reputation. He is, in the circumstances, indispensable, I cannot banish him merely to please you. You will have to endure Calvaster.”
Brinnaria pulled a wry face, as in her mutinous girlhood. She felt entirely at ease with Aurelius.
“I perceive that I must endure him,” she said, “but if you cannot banish Calvaster, perhaps you’ll oblige me by banishing Almo.”
“Almo!” the Emperor exclaimed, “what can you have against that gallant lad? Have you turned against him? I thought you were unshakably resolved to marry him, thought you loved him unalterably!”
“I shall marry him, if we both live,” Brinnaria replied, “and most unalterably love him. But I love life and daylight and fresh air and my full meals even more. I have a splendid appetite, I loath stuffy places, I hate the dark. The idea of being shut in an underground cell to suffocate slowly or starve to death even more slowly goes against my gorge. I see myself in my mind’s eye climbing down that ladder, like poor Cornelia, I see myself stretched out on my cot, watching the ladder being pulled up by the executioner, watching the workmen fitting in the last stone of the vault. I imagine myself staring at the wick of the lamp and wondering how long the oil will last and debating whether it would be better to blow out the light and save the oil to drink and so live longer in the dark, or to let the lamp burn out and have the discomfort of the light a little longer. I fancy myself conning over the trifle of bread, milk, fruit and wine left on the stone slab, and speculating as to how long they’ll keep me alive.
“Bah!
“No burial alive for me.
“Acquittal on a trial is a poor way for a Vestal to escape the worst possible fate, a last resort, at best, and an unchancy reliance, even as a last resort. A far better way is never to be tried, and the best way never to be tried is never to be accused. You’ve been good enough to tell me that if I were accused you’d be predisposed to favor me in all possible ways and that you’ll give instructions as to your opinion of me. Any directions of yours would be respected by any heir of yours. But you yourself have just remarked how slender is an Emperor’s hold on life or on power. I may survive both yourself and your son. I might be tried before men we should never think of now. I must arrange so that I shall never be tried at all, I must live so that I shall never be accused.
“Now I am unlikely ever to be accused in relation to any man except Almo. Everybody knows I mean to marry Almo when my service is at an end, everybody knows he means to marry me, everybody knows we are in love with each other. That puts me in the most delicate position any Vestal ever was placed in. I have been extremely careful. I have never spoken to Almo since I was taken for a Vestal, have never met him except by accident, have never set eyes on him except against my will; have never even written a letter to him or received one from him. I have been, I think, wise, judicious and controlled. But Almo has not behaved well towards me.”
“Indeed!” Aurelius interjected. “You surprise me! What has he done?”
Brinnaria flushed.
“A girl in love,” she said, “is a fool, but she has sense enough to conceal her foolishness. A man is different. I suppose men are made that way and can’t help themselves. But a man in love is not only a fool, but he parades his foolishness. Almo sent me messages by all sorts of mutual acquaintances, by his people and mine, by Flexinna, by Nemestronia, by Vocco, begging me to exchange letters with him. I was angry and said so and repeatedly sent him word that he was most foolish and most inconsiderate. I sent him word that if he wanted to please me he’d ignore my existence and stay as far from me as possible.
“He actually begged his father to be allowed to come to Rome. His father had the good sense to keep him at Falerii. Now that all his relatives are dead and he is his own master he has come to Rome. If he had any real consideration for me he’d go to Aquileia, at least he might be satisfied with a popular resort like Baiae or a place like Capua; Capua has enough baths and shows and horse-races and gladiators for anybody.
“But he must come to Rome, when a spark of sense and decency would tell him to keep as far away as he could. It stands to reason that I could never be accused of misconduct with him if he had never been within a hundred miles of me since I was taken for a Vestal.
“But he must needs come to Rome. He has opened his house on the Carinae and had it put in order and has settled down to such a life here as is usual with wealthy leisured idlers. He has bought additional furniture, as if his father’s house wasn’t stuffed with everything magnificent, he has bought curios and antiques and statuary and pictures and books. He spends most of his time in the barracks of his favorite gladiatorial company or at the stables of the Greens, and the rest of it at the afternoon baths. I sent Vocco to him to protest and to urge him to leave Rome for my sake. The selfish wretch said he loved me and always would, but he just could not live anywhere except at Rome. He stays here, in defiance of my wishes and against all reason.”
“That is not what I should have expected of him,” the Emperor meditated. “I am surprised and far from pleased. I shall certainly find means to relieve your mind as far as he is concerned.”
“There is worse yet to tell,” Brinnaria went on. “You’d think that, if he must stay in Rome he’d at least have the decency to keep away from me and from places where he is likely to encounter me. He does just the reverse. He haunts me, he waylays me. He prowls up and down the Via Sacra and the Via Nova, he stands in the moonlight and stares up at the outside windows of the Atrium; on festival days he waits outside of our entrance to the Colosseum or of the Circus Maximus to watch me enter; on any day he loiters about the portal of the Atrium to watch me come out to my litter or my carriage, he dogs me on my airings.”
“Hercules!” Aurelius exclaimed. “This is too bad!”
“Too bad indeed,” Brinnaria pursued; “it would be bad enough from anybody in his position, from him it is ten times worse than from anyone else. You know how individual Almo is, how almost peculiar he looks, how no one would mistake him for anyone else or forget him or fail to recognize him. I have often tried to analyze the factors that go to make him look so striking, but I cannot. He is perfectly proportioned in every measurement, yet, somehow, he has a long-armed and long-legged appearance different from that of any young man in Rome, he gives almost the effect of reminding one of a spider or of a grasshopper or of a daddy-long-legs. It makes him the most conspicuous, the most recognizable man in all Rome. Why, if your son were to mingle in a crowd, habited like any other boy in that crowd and Almo did the same, and nobody in the crowd had any reason to expect to see either, Almo would most likely be noticed sooner than Antoninus, recognized more generally, more readily, further off and quicker.”
“You are right,” Aurelius mused, “I never thought of that, but Almo is unforgettable, striking and arresting to the eye beyond any lad in our nobility.”
“And being what he is,” Brinnaria raged, “he must needs arrange that nearly every crowd I am in should see him at the same time as me. Already thousands of reputable Romans must remember seeing us at the same glance. Before long the majority will be ready to recall, if the subject is broached, that they have habitually seen him wherever they saw me. Some one will start the talk and presently all Rome will buzz with the gossip that we are continually seen together. A charming state of affairs for me if some busybody or some enemy of mine raises the question of my fitness for my holy duties! I have protested. I’ve had Vocco go to Almo and urge all these considerations on him, and the silly boy says he can’t live without seeing me, that he longs for the sight of me so he cannot control himself. How’s that for lover’s folly? One minute he can’t live away from Rome, he loves Rome more than he loves me; the next minute I’m the one object on earth which he must behold or die. I’ve no patience with such imbecility.”
“And I have very little,” said the Emperor; “just enough to imagine a better way of disburdening you and of disposing of Almo than banishing him would be. The lad is far too good to be wasting his time with the horse-jockeys and charioteers and ostlers of the Greens, or brutalizing himself with the companionship of ruffianly prize-fighters, belonging to this or that speculator in the flesh of ferocious savages. He must find some outlet for his energies and interests and is carried away by the fashionable mania, which is corrupting our whole population, especially our young nobles, and which, even at his tender age, fills the thoughts of my son, to the despair of his tutors.
“All Almo needs is worthy occupation. I’ll put the sea between him and you and so put your mind at rest. I’ll make a man of him at the same time. I’ll appeal to his pride and his patriotism. Rome needs such keen-minded, capable youths on the frontiers. I’ll not give him too hard or too unpleasant employment, not relegate him to Britain or Dacia or Syria. I’ll send him to Africa to chase the desert nomads who are harrying the borders of Numidia and Mauretania. He can gain credit there without danger, can learn to command men and to know the great game of war. Nepte and Bescera are pleasant little cities—he will be comfortable between campaigns. I’ll see he sets out the day after to-morrow, at latest.”
CHAPTER XI - FAREWELL
Two days later, Brinnaria had a visit from Flexinna. Flexinna’s eyes were dancing.
“G-G-Guess where I’ve been,” she challenged.
“I’m not good at guessing,” Brinnaria parried; “better tell me.”
“I’ve b-b-been to the Palace,” Flexinna revealed.
“What took you there?” Brinnaria queried, surprised.
“I was sent for,” Flexinna declared, elated.
“Who’d you see?” Brinnaria enquired.
“The Emperor himself,” proclaimed Flexinna triumphantly.
Brinnaria was very much astonished.
“Better tell me the whole story,” she suggested.
“Not much story,” said Flexinna. “Aurelius t-t-told me that he wanted t-t-to see you again and that, as a formal visit from the Emperor as P-P-Pontifex Maximus at the Atrium was unusual and was likely to c-c-cause g-g-gossip, whereas you Vestals are c-c-continually at the Palace to ask favors for all sorts of people who p-p-pester you to use your influence with the Emperor, he thought it b-b-best to suggest that you apply for an audience t-t-to-morrow. He said he wanted the intimation c-c-conveyed to you as unobtrusively as p-p-possible and d-d-desired p-p-particularly that no one should ever know or g-g-guess that it had b-b-been g-g-given. So he sent for me, as your b-b-best friend, since he was sure I would never t-t-tell anybody.
“B-B-Better send along your application for an audience. It was p-p-plain to me that he has something agreeable to t-t-tell you. His face was just as g-g-grave as usual but his eyes sparkled at me, as d-d-different as p-p-possible from their habitual dull filmed appearance. He was all k-k-kindliness and anticipation.”
“I’m willing to take the hint, of course,” Brinnaria replied.
Next morning she found Aurelius most cordial and informal in his greeting to her.
“I’ve been investigating Almo,” he said, “and I am more than pleased with all I can learn of him. I see no reason for not telling you that, from the very day you were taken as a Vestal, some of the most expert, secret and trustworthy men in the employ of the information department have had no other duties than to keep close watch upon you and Almo. I have been over all the papers relating to him and to you, I have talked with the men themselves. They all assure me that never once have you and Almo met since he reached your father’s house a half hour too late. They also report that, in the course of his injudicious moonings about your haunts, he has always kept at a respectful distance. And except for those same loverly danglings about places where he might catch glimpses of you, I can find nothing against the lad. Everybody speaks most highly of him. His former tutors and preceptors are enthusiastic in their laudations of his capacities, abilities, diligence and attainments in all matters pertaining to books and study. About Falerii he was regarded as a fine specimen of a young nobleman, huntsman and swimmer, good at all rustic sports, as haughty as the proudest when he was given good cause to assert himself, but habitually affable, unassuming and sunny tempered. Towards his father’s tenants and slaves he was most kindly and nothing could be more to any man’s credit than his downright heroic behavior from the very day the pestilence appeared on his estates, all through the frightful period of its raging about Falerii, until the neighborhood had somewhat recovered after the plague had abated.
“The most extraordinary feature of the reports about him is that they all agree as to his amazing devotion to you. All persons who know him or know of him are unanimous in the opinion that he has never taken the slightest personal interest in any human being except yourself; all are emphatic in stating that he has certainly never manifested any affection for anyone else. This is unprecedented. I never heard of such another case. There is nothing astonishing about a young Roman declaring that he would remain unmarried for thirty years in order to mate, ultimately, with the girl of his choice. There is nothing wonderful about his keeping his word. But any other youth I ever heard of would have consoled himself variously, and variedly. Almo’s austere celibacy is a portent in our world and altogether marvellous. It lifts his affair with you out of the humdrum atmosphere of to-day and puts it on a level with the legendary stories of heroic times, with the life-long fidelities of the Milesian tales.
“Under the stress of such severe and unflinching self isolation I do not wonder that his broodings drove him to overstep the bounds of common sense, that he was irresistibly compelled to leave Falerii, to come to Rome, to loiter where he might, at least, behold you at a distance. I shall make sure that he does so no longer. This very day he sets out for Carthage, Theveste and the deserts to the south beyond the lagoons of Nepte. But I cannot be angry with him for being unable to restrain his longing at least to set eyes on you. And I see no reason why you two, who have not exchanged a word in more than nine years, should not meet here in this room and say farewell to each other before I put the Mediterranean between you.”
Brinnaria sprang up.
“I see many reasons,” she declared, “and my feelings are all against seeing Almo until my service as a Vestal is ended.”
“I can well believe,” came the answer, “that you feel that way at the first presentation of the idea. But I am your Emperor and also Chief Pontiff of Rome. I am engaged at present in solving the problem of ow best to ensure peace of mind to one of Rome’s Vestals. To ensure her peace of mind I am about to relegate her future husband to important duties on a far frontier of the Empire. I judge that he will better perform his duties, that she will better perform hers, if she bids him farewell in my presence. I am a lover of wisdom and a student of wisdom.* I believe I possess some pretensions to wisdom. Will you not defer to me in this? I am of the opinion that he will worry less about you and you less about him if you see each other once before your twenty years of certain separation begins.”
*The wisdom of Marcus Aurelius was recognized during his
lifetime and is highly regarded even today, over 1900 years
later. His book, Meditations, remains in print and is
available through Project Gutenberg.—PG Ed.
Brinnaria looked mutinous and gazed at the Emperor in silence. In silence he waited for her to speak. At last she said, curtly:
“I bow to your authority.”
The Emperor struck his silver gong and a page appeared. Aurelius gave a brief order. A few moments later Almo was ushered in. After his formal salute to the Emperor he stood silent, his eyes fixed on Brinnaria.
They made a fine picture. The ceiling of the immense hall was a barrel-vault, of which the beams were stuccoed in cream-white, picked out with gilding, while between them the depth of each soffit was colored an intense deep blue, against which stood out a great gilt rosette. The mighty pilasters, whose gilded capitals supported the vaulting, were of many-veined dark yellow marble, polished and gleaming like the slabs of pale yellow marble which panelled the interspaces. The high-moulded wainscot was of red and green porphyry, somberly smooth and shining. Against it, below the wall-panels, were set great chests of carved and gilded wood, while about the bases of the pilasters were placed groups of settees and armchairs, similarly carved and gilded and richly upholstered. The floor was paved with an intricate mosaic of parti-colored bits of marble, its expanse broken only by the great gorgeous carpet before the throne, by the chair set for Brinnaria, by the onyx table, supported on sculptured monsters like griffons, beside the throne, and by the throne itself, a curule seat of ivory mounted with gold, its crimson cushion glowing, set far out in the room.
Before the throne stood Aurelius, his head bare, the long ringlets of his hair and beard sweeping his shoulders and his bosom, one foot a trifle advanced, the gold eagle embroidered on his sky-blue buskin showing beneath the crimson silk robes, lavishly embroidered with a complicated pattern of winding vines, bright blue and green, edged with gold, which the etiquette of the time imposed upon even a philosophically austere Emperor; on his right Brinnaria, erect and tense in her white official habit, her square white headdress all but hiding her coronet of dark braids, her veil pushed back from her flushed face; the tassels and ribbons of her head-band, her great pearl necklace, the big pearl brooch that fastened the folds of her headdress where they crossed on her breast, and the bunch of fresh white flowers which it clasped, rising and falling with the heaving of her bosom; facing her, splendid in the gilded armor and scarlet cloak of a commander of irregular cavalry, Almo.
“You know why I have sent for you,” Aurelius reminded him. “Speak out.”
Like a school-boy repeating a lesson by rote, Alma spoke.
“Brinnaria,” he said, “the Emperor has remonstrated with me on my recent folly. I am sincerely ashamed of myself and I wish to apologize to you for my lack of self-control and for my lack of consideration for you. I leave Rome before sunset and shall not return until I may return without danger to you.”
Aurelius looked at Brinnaria.
“Caius,” she said, “I forgive you. I trust that you will win promotion and honor where you are going and I am sure that you will do your duty to the Empire. May the blessing of all the gods be on you and may you return to me safe and well.”
“And may I find you safe and well when I return,” spoke Almo. “Farewell, Brinnaria.”
“Farewell, Caius,” said she.
The Emperor nodded and Almo bowed himself out.
“Do you know,” said Aurelius, when they were alone, “I have been thinking over what you said about Almo’s peculiar notability of looks. It puzzles me as it puzzles you. He is not merely of distinguished appearance, he is unusual, striking, unforgettable, conspicuous. I have talked about it to several of my gentlemen-in-waiting, equerries and orderlies. They have seen him lately about the stables of the Greens. They all say that he is, in fact, as normally proportioned as any youth alive, but they confirm what you said about his long-legged appearance. Julianus used almost the same word you used, said Almo looked ‘Grasshoppery.’ They all say Almo is precisely the most unmistakable, the most readily and quickly recognizable youth in all our young nobility.”
Brinnaria rose to go. Aurelius bent on her a kindly smile.
“I have been talking about you with Faustina,” he said. “We are both much interested by the strangeness of your fate, by the difficulty and delicacy of your situation and by the wonderful constancy of you both. Faustina and I are a most united pair, never happy out of each other’s company and very proud of our domestic felicity. We are, if I may use the word, rather prone to gloat over it, and, while continually congratulating ourselves and each other, we cannot but mourn the infrequency of such happiness throughout our Italian nobility. There are few matrons in Rome as serenely happy as your friend Flexinna, few indeed who find all their happiness in children, husband and household. And of those who really enjoy their homes most are remarried after a divorce, or even after two or more. Our society suffers from a plague worse than the pestilence itself, a plague of greed for excitement, eagerness for novelty, of peevishness and fickleness.
“In this unhealthy atmosphere such households as Vocco’s are most notable. And that you, who seem by nature fitted for just such blessedness as has befallen Flexinna, should have been robbed of it by a strange series of peculiar circumstances wins for you our interest and our solicitude. Still more are our hearts drawn towards you by your unwavering fidelity, alike to your present duties and all that they imply and to that love which you have had to put away and forget, to the ideal of that felicity which you have had to postpone so far.
“Faustina desires an interview with you. She is now in the amber gallery. I shall have you conducted there, if you do not object.”
Brinnaria could not very well object and after an equerry, very stately in his garb of duty, and two gaudily clad pages had escorted her through what seemed like miles of corridors, she found herself alone with the Empress.
The Empress she had so far seen infrequently and spoken with only seldom. It was impossible to be a Vestal, in the heyday of Rome’s Imperial times, and not meet and know the Empress of Rome. Brinnaria had seen her whenever they were both present at the Circus or the Amphitheatre; had been close to her at all important state functions; had occasionally dined with her at formal Palace banquets, when the curved sofa about the Empress’ table was always occupied by the Empress, the wives of the chief Flamens and the Vestals; but had hardly ever exchanged a word with her.
Faustina was endowed with the general healthiness with which Roman noblewomen were blessed. But she had had the bad luck to suffer from many and severe illnesses. These and her slow recoveries from them had kept her away from very many official functions and public festivals. Numerous had been the occasions on which Aurelius had appeared without her. When she was well, indeed, they were always together, if possible. A great proportion of his time, however, was occupied with official duties of such a nature that, according to Roman etiquette, no woman could participate in them. During such enforced separations Faustina sought amusement. And with the overflowing energy and abounding vigor which she displayed between her illness, she threw herself into the whirl of her pleasures with such impetuosity, there was so much rollicking and roistering about her favorite diversions that she attracted to herself and kept around her just those elements of Roman society with which the Vestals were least likely to mingle, professional idlers, and what we moderns would call the fast set. Naturally, therefore, Brinnaria and Faustina had never had any familiar intercourse. This was their first real conversation.
Faustina was not a large woman. She was of medium height, slender and graceful. She was noted for the originality of her coiffures, which made the most of her magnificent hair. Her hair Brinnaria noticed the moment her eyes fell on her.
Her habitual expression of haughtiness and boredom had vanished from the Empress’s face and she was all kindliness and solicitude.
Faustina put her at her ease at once.
“I have always been so sorry,” she began, “that I was ill the day you climbed over the balustrade of the podium and rescued the retiarius. I’ve missed many a sight I regretted, I miss so much by falling ill again and again, but I never missed a sight I regretted missing more than that. Nothing more worth seeing ever happened in the Colosseum.”
“I was terribly ashamed when I found what I had done,” said Brinnaria.
“Of course you were,” the Empress agreed.
This broke the ice between them and Faustina led her into a long talk about all her past, her love affair, her life as a Vestal, her bereavements, her embarrassing circumstances, her future, her hopes.
Brinnaria left the Empress, feeling that she had found a real friend and also feeling comforted at heart.
CHAPTER XII -OBSERVANCES
BRINNARIA found that, with Almo definitely and permanently out of the way, she did not worry about Calvaster. She also found that she did not worry about Almo and that her glimpse of him had rather calmed her feelings. She confessed as much to Aurelius when she had a third audience with him before he left for the Rhine frontier, and she thanked him for his insistence.
With her mind at peace Brinnaria settled more and more into the routine of her life and enjoyed it more and more.
She came to feel keenly the spiritual significance of every detail of the ritual observances in which she took part. Besides the maintenance of the sacred fire, the Vestals had many obligatory duties. Every sacrifice of the Roman public worship involved the sprinkling of the sacred meal upon the head of the victim, if a live animal was offered, or upon the fire, if the sacrifice was bloodless. Early in each ceremony one of the small boys assisting the priest carried around to all the participants in the act of worship a maple-wood box containing the holy meal; from it each worshipper ladled a small portion into the palm of his right hand; at a specified point in the course of the ceremonial each participant sprinkled the meal as prescribed.
The holy meal was made of very coarsely ground wheat, a sort of grits, salted and toasted. It was prepared by the Vestals according to immemorial custom. They were supplied with a sufficient quantity of heads of wheat, the best of the produce of two of their estates, one near Caere, the other near Lanuvium. These wheat ears were packed in baskets and stored on the farms in dry, airy barns. There they were kept drying and hardening their grains until the next spring. Then the allotted baskets were brought into Rome. On the seventh of May, after a ceremonial of prayer, the three elder Vestals began going over these wheat-ears, sorting out those entirely perfect, and placing them in larger baskets shaped like the big earthen jars in which the Romans commonly tored wheat, olives, oil, wine and other similar supplies. On the next day the wheat from the first day’s selection of ears was separated from the straw, beards and chaff, was roasted and coarsely ground. The resultant groats were then put away in great earthen jars in the outer storeroom of the temple. On the third day they again selected wheat ears, on the fourth they again prepared wheat-grits, and so on alternately for eight days. By the evening of the eighth day they had stored enough groats to make the sacred meal for one year’s ceremonies of the entire Roman ritual.
The salt with which they salted the holy meal was prepared with similar invariable formality. Crude salt, obtained from evaporated sea-water out of the sand-pits on the seashore near Lavinium, was conveyed to the Atrium in small two-handled earthenware jars. This coarse, dirty, dark-colored salt was dissolved by the three younger Vestals in boiling water, which water might not be obtained from the lead pipes which connected the Atrium with the general water-supply of the city’s aqueducts, but must be drawn by the Vestals themselves and carried by them in the earthenware jars from the famous fountain of Jaturna, at which Castor and Pollux were fabled to have watered their white horses after bringing to Rome the news of the victory at Lake Regillus. The solution was purified by repeated boilings, the impurities being gotten rid of by successive careful decantings of the liquid from one vessel into another, so that the sediment might be left behind as the top part was poured off. When sufficiently boiled down the solution was recrystallized in shallow earthenware pans. The resulting slabs of salt were harder than the pans and were freed from them by breaking the earthenware with an ancient stone hammer, said to have been captured by AEneas himself from a king of Ardea. The slabs of salt were sawed into pieces with an iron saw, the pieces were pounded in a mortar, the fine salt was thrown into an earthenware bowl and dried out in a kiln. When dried a little powdered gypsum was stirred through it to prevent it from again becoming moist. It was then stored in a tall jar with a tight lid, which was kept in the outer storeroom of the temple, along with the jars of meal. Three times a year, on the ninth of June, on the thirteenth of September and on the fifteenth of February, with solemn prayers the Vestals mixed the prepared salt with the prepared grits, the resultant mixture being the sacred meal.
On each First of March the fire in the temple was allowed to go out and was solemnly rekindled by the friction of maple wood on apple wood, as when the fire went out by accident. The temple was then decorated with fresh boughs of green laurel, after the boughs put up the year before had been removed.
On May fifteenth the Vestals were the chief figures in a solemn procession of the entire Roman hierarchy to the Sublician bridge, from which the Vestals threw into the Tiber thirty dolls made of rushes, fifteen representing men, fifteen women, each about two feet high.
This offering to the river of effigies of men and women commemorated the primitive human sacrifices by which the river was each year placated, that it might not drown more by floods.
On June fifth the inner storeroom of the temple was opened and its treasures inspected by the Pontifex wearing his antique vestments. With him entered always also the Chief Vestal clad in her austere habit with all her badges of office. They were attended by the other Vestals, who went through traditional pacings, haltings and prayers. The Temple of Vesta was an enclosure from which all men were rigidly excluded. The only exceptions to this immemorial taboo were a few of the more important Pontiffs, and they might only enter on specified festal days, and then must be in their full regalia. Also, in general, the temple was closed against all women except the Vestals and their assistants. It was open, however, from sunrise on the morning of each seventh of June until sunset on the evening of the fourteenth of June. During this period it was incumbent upon every Roman matron to visit the temple. And each worshipper must walk the entire distance from her home to the temple and must leave her house barefoot, barefoot she must walk from the temple to her home. Only illness excused a Roman woman from this religious duty. Few ever omitted it from indifference.
During these eight days the temple was thronged.
During these eight days also fell the great yearly festival of Vesta, on the ninth of June, on which day also all millers kept holiday, with processions and picnics to which the mill-donkeys were led decorated with wreaths of flowers and strings of tiny, crisp-baked rolls.
On June fifteenth the temple was ceremonially cleaned and the sweepings and the ashes collected from the sacred fire for the year past were solemnly carried in a stately procession to a prescribed spot on the slope of the Capitol where a great pit was closed by a heavy maple-wood door. In this pit the ashes were reverently buried.
Besides these observances of their special cult the Vestals took part in nearly every important sacrifice, procession and festival of the public worship of Rome. They were busy women and among them Brinnaria was anything but idle. She never found time hang heavy on her hands.
So busied with her duties she passed three peaceful years, contented and happy. There was but one drawback to life in the Atrium from Brinnaria’s point of view. That drawback was Meffia. Meffia was never ill but never well. Everything tired her. It tired her to walk upstairs, to stand for any length of time, to do anything. She was forever sitting down to rest or lying down to rest. Excitement exhausted her totally. She was a perpetual worry to the other Vestals.
Otherwise Brinnaria was very happy. Through Flexinna she had frequent news of Almo. Ancient Rome had no institution, public or private, in any way corresponding to our post office. But routes of trade and travel by land and sea were well defined and traffic along them fairly regular, on the most used routes almost continual. There were private organizations, vaguely resembling our modern express companies, which forwarded merchandise along the main-travelled routes and even into remote regions. Their messengers took charge of bales, boxes and packages of all sizes and also of letters. The service on the roads of Africa, from Bescera, Nepte and Putea along the frontier of the desert, through Lambese, Capsa and Thysdrus, to Carthage, by well-built vehicles with frequent relays of horses on the excellent highroads was fairly good. The ships from Sicily plied with almost the regularity of our ocean-liners. Roads and road-service in Sicily were of a high quality of excellence. The transit to Italy at Messina was a sort of ferry. Italy was served by a network of roads always busy. Almo’s letters to Flexinna were fairly regular and Vocco heard frequently from his friends among Almo’s brother officers and sometimes from his military superiors.
Almo was an immediate and brilliant success as a leader of scouting expeditions, cavalry dashes, and, within a year, of raids in considerable force. His men adored him at once; his fellow-officers found him excellent company, unassuming and companionable, his commanders came early to rely on him. He won an excellent reputation and was universally regarded as a young officer of great promise, likely to rise to high position and not unlikely to become famous.
This kind of news delighted Brinnaria and promoted her peace of mind. In great contentment she went about her duties, loving them more and more from month to month, preparing the blessed salt, assisting at sacrifices, participating in processions.
Also interest in music and enjoyment of music came to play more and more a part in her spiritual life. As a child she had hated music and had been in continual conflict with her musical governesses. Even after she entered the Atrium her aversion to learning anything about music had given Causidiena a great deal of trouble. Later Brinnaria was docile, but the reverse of enthusiastic. Only after Almo’s departure for Africa did music begins to mean anything to her.
But one keyed instrument was known to the ancients. That was a form of organ, in effect and appearance not very dissimilar to a small portable modern organ, with one bank of keys. Its mechanism, however, was very different in respect to the construction of the pipe stops and bellows. In particular, the steady flow of air to the pipes was obtained from the pressure of water, and a receptacle partly filled with water was an essential part of every Roman organ. From this feature it was called the water-organ. The Emperor Nero had been a notable performer on the water-organ and had interested himself in some improvements in its mechanism.
As with the modern organ, so with the Roman water-organ, the sonorous, sustained and resonant notes lent themselves naturally to the expression of religious emotion.
Religious emotions, Brinnaria, at this period of her life, felt to an overwhelming extent. She expressed them in long colloquies with Numisia and Causidiena, in a tendency to be unnecessarily careful about her duties, to pet her daily routine, as it were; and in an awakening to the charms of music in general and of organ music in particular. She developed into a capable performer on the water-organ, bought for herself the finest to be found in all Rome, had it set up in the Atrium in place of the old one which had belonged to the order of Vestals, and sat before it for hours at a time.
Her solitary communings with her favorite instrument became her chief solace when she was: low-spirited, which was seldom, and her favorite diversion when she was high-spirited, which was often. Moreover, her rendition of well-known airs and he improvisings came to be a great pleasure to all the inmates of the Atrium, most of all to Causidiena.
Besides her many duties and her indoor amusements, Brinnaria found time for much activity outside the Atrium. She had kept up her girlish friendship for the sieve-maker Truttidius, and saw him occasionally, sometimes ordering her litter halted before his shop and leaning out to ask after his health and that of his family. Truttidius had an ailing household, though he himself was always well and never seemed to get any older.
From her talks with Truttidius she came to take a personal interest in the welfare of the countless tenants in her many properties in the poorer quarters of the city. She visited some of them-a sort of approach to modern slumming by the philanthropic rich. Such actions on the part of a landowner and such an attitude of mind from any rich person toward the poor was very unusual in the ancient world. Her behavior in this regard won Brinnaria a sort of fame among the poor, as if she were a live goddess moving among them.
She had a healthy love of mere enjoyment too. Except when she happened to be on duty watching the sacred fire, she never missed a theatrical performance, a gladiatorial display or an exhibition of chariot-racing in anyone of the vast race-courses flanked by tiers of stone-seats, which the Romans called circuses. At all shows, whether of scenic artists, fighting men or speeding horses, the Vestals had specified seats, as good as the best.
Besides these formal pleasures, she took great delight in mixing in society merely for society’s sake. Moderns are likely to imagine that the Vestals of ancient Rome were nuns or something like nuns. They were nothing of the sort. They were maiden ladies of wealth and position whose routine duties brought them into familiar association with all the men important in the Roman government, hierarchy, nobility and gentry and with their wives and daughters. They were women of such importance in their world that their acquaintance was sought by all who had any pretensions to being entitled to meet them and by shoals of social bounders who had none. Their influence was so powerful that they were unremittingly sought, waylaid, pursued and besieged by persons who hoped to enlist their interest in the appointment or promotion of this, that or the other connection or relative; by the same persons they were continually overwhelmed with presents of flowers, fruit, delicacies, dainties, ornaments, laces, garments, pieces of furniture, horses, slaves, and of anything and everything capable of being made a present of in the Roman world; likewise with social invitations-chiefly to dinners, banquets and feasts. Invitations to banquets and dinners Brinnaria seldom declined, unless her duties made acceptance impossible or the invitation came from people beneath her notice. As she had said to Aurelius, she had an excellent appetite. She had an epicurean tendency from her early years and was fond of oysters, sweetbreads, eels, thrushes, turbot and other articles of food esteemed as delicacies by the Romans. But she was a hearty eater and consumed generous portions of roast meats, particularly of pork, which even in late imperial times was the staple of Roman diet. She never lost her childish relish for boiled pork and cabbage, for bacon, for ham, hot or cold. She was by no means a glutton, ate deliberately and daintily, and while she ate, joined in the general conversation or even led it. She had a quick wit and a sharp tongue and her sallies were acclaimed. She was sought after as a guest not merely because she was a Vestal, but for herself, for her gaiety and her unexpected utterances.
On the whole she preferred informal dinners to formal banquets and liked better to dine with her friends than with the most luxurious entertainers in Roman society.
With Vocco and Flexinna she dined frequently, three times a month at least and generally oftener. Brinnaria loved children, especially babies, and there was always a baby in the Istorian household—Flexinna’s babies were all healthy and grew famously. Of the six children, Brinnaria could not have told which she loved or which loved her most. Her arrivals were always heralded with shouts of glee, her romps with the children always put her in a good humor, her swim with Flexinna sharpened an appetite which needed no edge, while the cosiness and informality of Flexinna’s dining-room, where each of the three had undivided possession of one entire sofa, made it certain that nothing marred her enjoyment.
CHAPTER XIII - PERVERSITY
ABOUT three years after her farewell to Almo, on entering Vocco’s house one afternoon, Brinnaria had a presentiment of something wrong. The children were as vociferous and as whimsical as usual, but there was a nameless difference in Flexinna’s expression and bearing. As soon as they were alone in their bath, after she had had one good plunge in the pool, Brinnaria, treading water in the deepest part of the tank, shaking her head like a wet spaniel, demanded:
“What is the matter? There’s something wrong. You might as well tell me.”
But Flexinna put her off and laughed at her insistence.
To Brinnaria the laughter seemed forced and so did the talk at dinner. No sooner was the dinner over and the tray of figs, almonds and pomegranates and other fruit on the table, than she whispered to Flexinna:
“Tell the servants to stay out. I want to talk.” Flexinna signed to Vocco and they exchanged glances.
“Why did you keep up the farce so long?” Brinnaria sneered. “I saw through it from the first.”
“We were afraid,” Vocco apologized, “that what I have to tell you would spoil your appetite.”
“It would take something pretty bad to spoil my appetite,” Brinnaria reflected. “Is Almo dead?”
“Not so b-b-bad as that,” spoke Flexinna.
“Tell me, Quintus,” Brinnaria breathed.
Vocco fidgeted.
“It’s an amazing story,” he began.
“All his story, all my story, all our story,” Brinnaria cut in, “is amazing. Leave out the comments and tell the story.”
“While Almo was away on the expedition against the nomads of the plateau,” Vocco narrated, “Pennasius fell ill, was allowed to resign his governorship and Grittonius took his place. On Almo’s return Grittonius complimented him most highly and promised him any reward he asked for. Almo amazed him by asking for a full and honorable discharge from the army. Grittonius expostulated with him but Almo held him to his promise. In spite of the governor’s appeals to his pride and to his patriotism he insisted, and Grittonius gave him his full official discharge. At once Almo applied for permission to sell himself as a slave. This so astounded Grittonius that he made him repeat the application before witnesses and give his reasons. Almo explained that he had always been devoted to horseracing and that he wanted formally and regularly to article himself to one of the racing companies as a charioteer; that he had always craved that life and had longed for it more and more as his career as a soldier went on. He said there was no use in his continuing a life he detested, nor missing the happiness he anticipated as a charioteer.
“Grittonius had him examined by a committee of the most reputed physicians of the province. They reported Almo entirely sane. Grittonius wanted to hold the matter over until he had special permission from the Emperor. Almo craftily maintained that Grittonius had been made governor with the fullest powers on all lines specifically to save the Emperor from being bothered about such trifles. Grittonius yielded. The necessary papers were drawn up, all the depositions were made out in duplicate. Every formality was fulfilled and Almo was publicly sold as a slave in the market place of Hippo.”
“What company did he enter?” Brinnaria queried.
“Veppius did not state,” Vocco replied; “he merely said that Almo sailed the next day for Spain.”
“The fool!” Brinnaria cried. “The three fools; a fool of a Veppius to write so vaguely, a fool of a governor to be persuaded so easily and Almo the biggest fool of all!
“What a fool of a lover I have! Are all men like that? I’m as much in love with him as he with me and I can behave myself decently and keep outwardly calm and observe the conventions of life. Why can’t he be decent? How can it comfort a man in love to throw away a splendid career, abandon a great income and vanish from the ken of all who love him? What madness is this with which the gods afflict him? Oh, I could tear my hair with rage!”
To trace Almo everything was done that could be done. Vocco himself set out at once for Hippo. He found that Almo had been sold to a Greek slave-dealer named Olynthides, brother of the well-known dealer at Rome. He found Olynthides a small man with a club-foot. He said he remembered the matter, that he had been employed to buy Almo and resell him for cash, especially to conceal the real purchaser.
When Vocco expressed astonishment Olynthides said:
“There is nothing to be surprised at, the thing happens every day. It is a regular feature of slave-trading. There are all sorts of reasons why a man wants a slave without any past. Such sales are customary and habitual.”
When pressed further he retorted:
“Of course I did not ask the buyer’s name; equally of course, I did not take any note of him, it was my business to forget him. I didn’t notice him when he came into the courtyard, there are always knots of people coming in all day, looking over the slaves I offer for sale, and going out again. He came in like anybody else and looked over my stock. When he spoke to me he had a servant with him carrying a stout leather bag. He indicated Almo and asked his price. I named it.
“‘Cash sale,’ says he; ‘no papers except a bare sale certificate.’
“‘Done,’ says I.
“He counted out the cash from his servant’s bag and I gave him the customary certificate, with a description of Almo and the statement:
“‘Sold on this day and date for cash’ and my signature and seal. That was all there was to it.”
When Vocco was persistent, Olynthides averred that he had “heard” that the purchaser’s name was Jegius and that he came from Cadiz. Vocco could not discover anyone in Hippo who had ever heard of a slave-dealer named Jegius.
When Vocco returned to Rome with his report Brinnaria set in motion all the forces of her world which could be utilized under the circumstances. Aurelius was on the Rhine frontier, but Brinnaria had, by this time, a close acquaintance with all important court officers and was on terms of the utmost cordiality with the officials who governed Rome in the Emperor’s absence. They sympathized with her and put at her disposal all the machinery of the government secret service. They agreed with her that the matter must be kept quiet, there must be no proclamations, posters, no rewards offered by crier or placard, no publishing of descriptions. With emphatic injunctions of secrecy they sent warnings to every provincial governor, to every local magistrate, to the aldermen of every free city, to institute unobtrusive investigations and to keep unostentatious watch. Brinnaria insisted that these mandates should be sent all over the Empire, pointing out that no one could conjecture what port of the Mediterranean or of the Black Sea might be the destination of any nameless trading ship. But, with special care, full orders were distributed throughout Spain.
Towards Spain, likewise, Brinnaria directed the energies of those organizations of the ancient world which were analogous to our modern private detective bureaus, and upon Spain she focussed the energies of the managers of the racing companies.
These great corporations were among the most important money-making enterprises of the Roman world. They maintained luxurious headquarters in the most congested business districts of the capital. They had offices adjacent to each of the circuses, they possessed huge congeries of buildings utilized as stables for their crack racers and barracks for their charioteers, and provided with spacious courtyards for training their teams. Outside of Rome they had similar offices and training-stables in every city and in most towns of any size or wealth. Besides they owned countless stud-farms, estates and ranches in every province of the Empire and maintained an army of herdsmen, ostlers and drovers to convoy their horses by land and whole fleets of ships to transport them by sea.
They were joint-stock companies, and while many smaller ones existed in various parts of the Empire and a few even at Rome, the small concerns were insignificant and generally ignored. When one spoke of the racing-companies one meant the six great companies whose central organizations were domiciled at Rome and whose ramifications penetrated every district of the Empire. These were known, after the racing-colors of their jockeys, as the Greens, the Blues, the Reds, the Whites, the Crimsons and the Golds. The Reds and the Whites were the oldest companies, the Crimsons and the Golds were companies established in the heyday of the Empire by coteries of millionaires, the Blues and the Greens were the largest, the wealthiest and the most popular, especially the Greens. In the Greens, somewhere, Brinnaria expected to find Almo, as he had been enthusiastic about the Greens from boyhood. He had been wearing their leek-green colors the day she had sat in his lap in her father’s courtyard. He had haunted their training-stables during his brief sojourn at Rome before Aurelius sent him to Africa, he had inherited a big block of stock in the Greens. In the Greens, likewise, Brinnaria owned stock; and, having entered into inheritances from more than seventy different wealthy relatives who had died during the pestilence, she happened to own stock in every one of the six great companies. She had personal friends among the directors of each of the six. Therefore it was especially easy for her to enlist their help in her efforts to find Almo. It would have been easy, anyhow, since to be able to oblige a Vestal was a refreshing novelty for almost anyone at Rome and to find a Vestal seeking one’s influence and one’s help, equally novel and refreshing; generally the shoe was on the other foot—most persons in public life in Rome were used to attempting to enlist the help and the interests of the Vestals for their purposes and were generally utterly at a loss for any means of requital, if the interest of a Vestal was enlisted and her help obtained.
Consequently all that the racing-companies could do to find Almo was done as well as all that could be done by the private detective agencies and by government officials.
All that was done was utterly in vain. No trace of Almo could be discovered after he had sailed from Hippo with Jegius. No slave-dealer named Jegius could be found nor anyone who knew such a slave-dealer. No clue, no ghost of a clue came to light. The Greens, like the other companies, could find among their charioteers, their jockeys, their free employees, their slaves, no individual in the least answering to descriptions of Almo. All governmental efforts, all professional efforts, all private efforts, all Vocco’s efforts, all Brinnaria’s efforts, were completely baffled.
Almo had completely vanished.
When Aurelius, passing through Rome on his way from the Rhine frontier to Syria, was in his capital for a brief period, Brinnaria had an audience with him.
“Daughter!” he said, “it is all my fault. I should have given Grittonius explicit injunctions about the boy. But the assaults of the Marcomanni were particularly furious just at that time; I was feverishly hurrying from point to point along the frontier; I accepted the resignation of Pennasius; by letter. I appointed Grittonius by letter; I assumed that Grittonius would have sense; I assumed that Pennasius would impart to him his secret instructions. I erred by inadvertence; I should have set a special watch on the boy. But I never thought of it. He was doing so well and he seemed so interested in his work. He was wonderfully fitted for frontier duty along the desert. I was watching him with keen interest; each report of him gave me greater pleasure. I do not hesitate to tell you that I had him in my mind’s eye to command this very expedition which I must now command myself, as there is no other man in the Empire fit to take charge of it.
“Is it not a shame that a man whom the Empire needs, who had before him so splendid an opportunity, who was fitting himself for so brilliant a career, should throw it all away from mere perversity? Yet I am not wrathful against him; I see many reasons for sympathizing with him.
“Rigid and unflinching celibacy affects different individuals very differently. Some it does not affect at all, apparently. It does not seem to affect you. You are as plump and rosy, as healthy and alert, as happy and normal a young woman, to all appearance, as could be found among matrons of your age in all the Empire. Celibacy seems to agree with you.
“Manifestly it did not agree with Almo. It got on his nerves somehow. That is the most probable explanation of his eccentric vagary. Don’t be discouraged. He’ll turn up somewhere, after a while, safe and sound and none the worse for his experiences.”
Brinnaria, in fact, was not discouraged. She resolutely and unweariedly prosecuted her efforts to find Almo. Nor was she despondent. She scouted the suggestion that he might be dead. She kept up her spirits, did not mope or brood and never lost her hearty appetite. She was the life of the dinners she attended and as talkative and witty as ever.
But the strain affected her greatly. She was outwardly controlled, statuesque and dignified, but the inward turmoil of emotion that surged through her manifested itself in an unremitting activity. She slept well and soundly, but rose early and kept on the go. Besides her duties, her music and her participation in social gatherings, she must needs find other outlets for her energy, other means to pass her time and distract her thoughts.
In the course of her dealings with the racing companies she became interested in them not merely as means towards locating Almo, but for themselves. She became particularly interested in their stables, their jockeys and their horses. There was no bar of religious tradition or of social custom which hindered a Vestal from freely mingling with men visibly in the open daylight in public. Visiting the stables of the racing companies had long been a fad with Rome’s social leaders, men and women alike. Brinnaria availed herself of her freedom in this regard and followed her inclination. She haunted the training-stables of all six corporations, but mostly of the Greens, always in company with Manlia, or Flexinna, or Nemestronia or some other of her women friends; she visited the barracks almost daily, chatted with the charioteers, grooms and ostlers, watched the exercising of the teams, inspected the stalls, conned the racers.
She made herself an excellent judge of a jockey and a better judge of a horse.
She interested herself in the methods by which the companies obtained and selected their animals. She became an adept on the entire subject of horse-raising. It engrossed her thoughts.
Then she herself took over the management of several of her estates in the environs of Rome; of all, in fact, which were near enough for her to visit personally. She redistributed the force of slaves that managed them, sold some, bought others and fitted up the properties as stud-farms. Herself she selected the brood mares and stallions with which to stock these estates. She herself laid down the principles guiding their management and she herself dictated the methods of breeding them. She herself superintended the carrying out of her orders, visiting each estate frequently and inspecting everything carefully and intelligently.
Her first offering of two-year-olds sold at good prices. She was encouraged, felt herself completely an adept, and would take no one’s word about anything relating to horses, relying solely on her own judgment.
All this would have subjected her to much reprehension had Faltonius Bambilio survived. But he had died just about the time of Almo’s disappearance. His son, also named Faltonius Bambilio, had taken up a political rather than a priestly life and was not to be thought of as his successor. In his place Aurelius, on his way to Syria, had nominated Lutorius Rusco, a man who impressed everyone at first sight, and more and more the better anyone knew him, as the paragon of a Pontifex. He was not lacking in ecclesiastical unction, but did not wallow in it as had Bambilio. He was pious, but did not think it necessary to advertise it day and night unremittingly. He was not lax in religious matters, but he was no stickler for minute trifles. He inspired confidence by every characteristic of his appearance and behavior. He was a man somewhat over medium height, well built, neither heavy nor large, with an unusually dignified bearing and carriage, not a hint of self-assertion and with a genially comprehending smile. It was impossible not to confide in him and unthinkable that confiding in him should ever be regretted. Brinnaria confided in him and never regretted it.
Of Almo’s disappearance she talked to him freely; freely also she talked of her feelings for Almo. He was as sympathetic and comprehending as the Emperor and Empress and he encouraged her to hope that Almo was yet alive, which she sometimes doubted.
Of her stock farms he said to her:
“I should certainly not have advised any woman to enter upon such an enterprise, least of all a Vestal. I know of no other member of our hierarchy who has any similar interests, except Calvaster, whose haunting of the gladiatorial schools and association with trainers of gladiators has given some scandal. Some people would call your horse-breeding unseemly for a Vestal. But I see no harm in it. I have talked with Causidiena and it is clear that you do not neglect or skimp your duties, that you give them full time and close attention. Your leisure is your own to do with as you please. And your immediate success appears an evidence that, to say the least, your undertakings give no offence to the gods.”
During the latter months of Bambilio’s oversight Brinnaria had felt restive and as if some inward force was forever driving her to feverish activities; under the care of Lutorius she became placid and thought less of her stock-raising, journeys to and fro to her estates, talks with grooms and such like activitie and devoted herself with more cool ardor to her duties.