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The Unwilling Vestal

by Edward Lucas White · English · Gutenberg #6070 · 509,980 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Unwilling Vestal

Author: Edward Lucas White


        
Release date: July 1, 2004 [eBook #6070]
                Most recently updated: November 20, 2016

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNWILLING VESTAL ***




Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer






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.




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.




LIST OF CONTENTS

     Book I

     The Rage of Disappointment

     I.                 Precocity
     II.                 Sieves
     III.                 Stutterings
     IV.                 Pestilence
     V.                 Escapades
     VI.                 Notoriety
     VII.                 Audience

     Book II

     The Revolt of Despondency

     VIII.         Scourging
     IX.                 Alarms
     X.                 Conference
     XI.                 Farewell
     XII.                 Observances
     XIII.         Perversity
     XIV.                 Amazement

     Book III

     The Rebellion of Desperation

     XV.                 Rehabilitation
     XVI.                 Vagary
     XVII.         Recklessness
     XVIII.         Fury
     XIX.                 Comfort

     Book IV

     The Revulsion of Delight

     XX.                Accusation
     XXI.                Ordeal
     XXII                Triumph
     XXII.                Salvage




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 parti

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