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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