"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 a.s.surance 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 circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.sume 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 a.s.sumption 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 a.s.sert, 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 acc.u.mulated 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 att.i.tudes 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 una.n.a.lyzable 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 a.s.signable 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 inc.u.mbent 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 circ.u.mstances 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 p.r.o.nouncements 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 a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.s.

"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 a.s.sumes, 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.