"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 cla.s.ses 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 a.s.sert 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 cla.s.ses, there were unbelievers of various degrees everywhere in the towns and cities. But the ma.s.s of the population, not only universally, all over the countryside, but collectively in the urban centers, believed in their G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds. Under the Republic every election had appeared to the Romans who partic.i.p.ated in it to be a rite for ascertaining what man would be most pleasing to the G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds' 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 G.o.ds, 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 G.o.ds 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 cla.s.ses, 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 a.s.sembled 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 G.o.ds, 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 gla.s.s.

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, h.o.r.n.y half-hoofs of a newborn white lamb, eight to a thong, twenty-four in all. These bits of h.o.r.n.y 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 G.o.ds 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.