CHAPTER VI
"I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last."—Revelations xxii. 13.
And after that silence and peace.
Silence save for the moanings of the child Nola, who in a passionate outburst of grief had thrown herself on the body of her mother.
Dea Flavia stood there still and calm, her young face scarce less white than the clinging folds of her tunic, her unfathomable eyes fixed upon the pathetic group at her feet: the weeping girl and the dead woman.
She seemed almost dazed—like one who does not understand and a quaint puzzled frown appeared upon the whiteness of her brow.
Once she raised her eyes to the praefect and encountered his gaze—strangely contemptuous and wrathful—fixed upon her own, and anon she shuddered when a pitiable moan from Nola echoed from end to end along the marble walls around.
And the crowd of idlers began slowly to disperse. In groups of twos and threes they went, their sandalled feet making a soft rustling noise against the flagstones of the Forum, and their cloaks of thin woollen stuff floating out behind them as they walked.
The young patricians were the first to go. The scene had ceased to be amusing and Dea Flavia was not like to bestow another smile. They thought it best to retire to their luxurious homes, for they vaguely resented the majesty of death which clung round the dead freedwoman and the young living slave. They hoped to forget in the course of the noonday sleep, and the subsequent delights of the table, the painful events which had so unpleasantly stirred their shallow hearts.
Dea Flavia paid no heed to them as they murmured words of leave-taking in her ear. 'Tis doubtful if she saw one of them or cared if they went or stayed.
At an order from the praefect the auction sale was abruptly suspended. The lictors drove the herds of human cattle together preparatory to taking them to their quarters on the slopes of the Aventine where they would remain until the morrow; whilst the scribes and auctioneers made haste to scramble down from the heights of the rostrum, the heat of the day having rendered that elevated position well-nigh unbearable. Only Dea Flavia's retinue lingered in the Forum. Standing at a respectful distance they surrounded the gorgeously draped litter, waiting, silently and timorous, the further pleasure of their mistress; and behind Dea Flavia her two Ethiopian slaves, stolidly holding the palm leaves to shield her head against the blazing sun which so mercilessly seared their own naked shoulders.
"Grant me leave to escort thee to thy litter, Augusta!" murmured a timid voice.
It was young Hortensius Martius who spoke. He had approached the catasta and now stood timid, and a suppliant, beside Dea Flavia, with his curly head bare to the scorching sun and his back bent in slave-like deference. But the young girl seemed not to hear him and even after he had twice repeated his request she turned to him with uncomprehending eyes.
"I would not leave thee, Dea," he said, "until I saw thee safely among thy slaves and thy clients."
Then at last did she speak. But her voice sounded toneless and dull, as of one who speaks in a dream.
"I thank thee, good Hortensius," she said, "but my slaves are close at hand and I would prefer to be left alone."
To insist further would have been churlish. Hortensius Martius, well versed in every phase of decorum, bowed his head in obedience and retired to his litter. But he told his slaves not to bear him away from the Forum altogether but to place the litter down under the arcades of the tabernae, and then to stand round it so that it could not be seen, whilst he himself could still keep watch over the movements of Dea Flavia.
But she in the meanwhile remained in the same inert position, standing listlessly beside the body of Menecreta, her face expressing puzzlement rather than horror, as if within her soul she was trying to reconcile the events of the last few moments with her previous conceptions of what the tenor of her life should be.
The curse of Menecreta had found sudden and awful fulfilment, and Dea Flavia remained vaguely wondering whether the gods had been asleep on this hot late summer's day and forgotten to shield their favoured daughter against the buffetings of fate. A freedwoman had roused superstitious fear in the heart of a daughter of the Cæsars! Surely there must be something very wrong in the administration of the affairs of this world. Nay, more! for the freedwoman, unconscious of her own impiety, had triumphed in the end; her death—majestic and sublime in its suddenness—had set the seal upon her malediction.
And Dea Flavia marvelled that the dead woman remained so calm, her eyes so still, when—if indeed Jupiter had been aroused by the monstrous sacrilege—she must now be facing the terrors of his judgments.
And Taurus Antinor watched her in silence whilst she stood thus, unconscious of his gaze, a perfect picture of exquisite womanhood set in a frame of marble temples and colonnades, a dome of turquoise above her head, the palm leaves above her throwing a dense blue shadow on her golden hair and the white tunic on her shoulders.
He had heard much of Dea Flavia—the daughter of Claudius Octavius and now the ward of the Emperor Caligula—since his return from Syria a year ago, and he had oft seen her gilded and rose-draped litter gliding along the Sacra Via or the Via Appia, surrounded with its numberless retinue: but he had never seen her so close as this, nor had he heard her speak.
She was a mere child and still under the tutelage of her despotic father when he—Taurus Antinor—tired of the enervating influences of decadent Rome, had obtained leave from the Emperor Tiberius to go to Syria as its governor. The imperator was glad enough to let him go. Taurus Antinor, named Anglicanus, was more popular with the army and the plebs than any autocratic ruler could wish.
He went to Syria and remained there half a dozen years. The jealousy of one emperor had sent him thither and 'twas the jealousy of another that called him back to Rome. Syria had liked its governor over well, and Caius Julius Cæsar Caligula would not brook rivalry in the allegiance owed to himself alone by his subjects—even by those who dwelt in the remotest provinces of the Empire.
But on his return to Rome the powerful personality of Taurus Antinor soon imposed itself upon the fierce and maniacal despot. Caligula—though he must in reality have hated the Anglicanus as much and more than he hated all men—gave grudging admiration to his independence of spirit and to his fearless tongue. In the midst of an entourage composed of lying sycophants and of treacherous minions, the Cæsar seemed to feel in the presence of the stranger a sense of security and of trust. Some writers have averred that Caligula looked on Taurus Antinor as a kind of personal fetish who kept the wrath of the gods averted from his imperial head. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that tyrant exerted his utmost power to keep Taurus near his person, showering upon him those honours and titles of which he would have been equally ready to deprive him had the stranger at any time run counter to his will. Anon, when the Cæsar thought it incumbent upon his dignity to start on a military expedition, he forced Antinor to accept the praefecture of the city in order to keep him permanently settled in Rome.
The Anglicanus accepted the power—which was almost supreme in the absence of the Cæsar. He even gave the oath demanded of him by the Emperor that he would remain at his post until the termination of the proposed military expedition, but it was easy to see that the dignities for which others would have fought and striven to their uttermost were not really to the liking of Taurus Antinor.
Avowedly wilful of temper, he had since his return from Syria become even more silent, more self-centred than before. Many called him morose and voted him either treacherous or secretly ambitious; others averred that he was either very arrogant or frankly dull. Certain it is that he held himself very much aloof from the society of his kind and persistently refused to mix with the young elegants of the day either in their circles or their baths, their private parties or public entertainments.
Thus it was that the praefect found himself to-day for the first time in the near presence of Dea Flavia, the acknowledged queen of that same society which he declined to frequent, and as he grudgingly admitted to himself that she was beautiful beyond what men had said of her, he remembered all