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 compa.s.sed.

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 ma.s.s 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 inc.u.mbent 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 ma.s.s 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 G.o.ds; 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.