‘Yet why did you draw from me?’ she said fawningly; ‘it was even as you say. It was an expedient arranged by another for landing on the island, and I simply followed my instructions, knowing nothing further. It has achieved my purpose—here I am!’

‘You are in the tiger’s lair, and the man who conducted you hither is a creature of Caesar, and a vile reptile who fattens on his patronage.’

‘He dare not break his trust, knowing who gave him his charge.’

‘I can guess who that same person is; nevertheless it does not abate my opinion one jot. I dare swear your secrecy will be hardly worth the name in a few hours—perhaps even now. There is no trust to be put in such a wretch. Lose no time in putting the straits between you and the island, let me commend you. Whatever business has brought you hither, despatch it at once—this night should see you away if possible.’

‘I have no fear.’

‘Because you are ignorant of the danger you stand in. To such as you, of all people in the world, the pestilential air of this island is fraught with dire peril.’

‘I care not, for I am with you.’

‘Your position admits of little jesting, believe me,’ said Martialis, in a voice which exhibited an amount of stern impatience; ‘you are wasting precious moments—I am here at your request: let me know in what I am to serve you, and I will at once answer whether I can be of help. Were the hand of Caesar to drop upon us now you would find your safeguard in as sorry a plight as yourself. That you know right well, Plautia, and you delivered the raillery with effective gravity. I neither ask nor desire to know the cause of your extraordinary presence in this spot, but my apprehension certainly is that you wish me to assist you to leave.’

‘Your apprehension is wrong,’ replied the Roman beauty, in low, nervous tones, barely to be heard; ‘I came hither impelled by a feeling against which it was impossible to strive. It urged me through the hideous fatigue and disgust of the voyage hither, and it upholds me, undismayed, at the presence [pg 213]of danger. You impress upon me that I am beset with dire peril. It may be so—I can well believe it; but I am careless of it. Fear I never knew, and in this hour of all it can find less room than ever in my heart.’

Her head sank down, and her murmured words seemed to struggle with her hurried breathing, begot by a state of extreme tremor.

The Centurion knitted his brows, and, for a few moments, he remained in silent embarrassment. The deep shade of the thicket was friendly to his companion, and shrouded the outward symptoms of her feelings from his glance, but what his ears drank in was sufficient to make his mind uneasy and suspicious. He had really been under the impression that his companion’s presence in the island was probably due to some affair of intrigue, and, indeed, if her explanation had not seemed to so fully confirm the protection or connivance of Sejanus, he would at once have arrived at that conclusion, from the well-known fact of her intimacy with him. In expectation, therefore, of some political plan or plot in which she required him to join, he had been anxious to bring the interview to an end, being utterly averse to entangle himself in anything of the kind, or even to run the chance of being discovered in her company. But now he was as little disposed to force the matter to a conclusion, as before he had been anxious, and, in uncomfortable doubt, he began, very naturally, to chafe for having allowed himself to be so carelessly led into such a position. Had he only been prudent enough to consider, he might have at once concluded that nothing but mischief lay planted between the lines of an anonymous letter.

But the lady vouchsafed no other speech, and, anxious to appear quite unconscious of any particular purport in her words, he hastened to break the silence, in an assumed manner of artlessness and lightness, which is often used, alike to stave off an unpleasant subject and to play with one as delightful.

‘Fear, I am well assured, is a weakness unaccustomed to your breast,’ he said, ‘and, if I gather rightly from your words, you confess to be in subjection, no less than the rest of your sex, to the passion which they say rules feminine nature. [pg 214]Nevertheless I wish, on this occasion, for your own sake, fear had tempered curiosity a little.’

‘Curiosity!’ she returned with passionate scorn; then her voice sank to its former nervous intonation. ‘And yet I said false, Martialis, when I boasted of my fearlessness. I thought I was proof,—thus far without it, and now, lo, it has found me out.’

‘No! no!’ she continued rapidly, as he uttered some halting commonplace, ‘not business of Prefect, nor of Caesar, nor yet whim, nor curiosity, but only my heart and thee, Martialis,—Lucius! Have you not seen? Do you not see?’

‘Plautia——’

‘It might have been months ere Rome could see you again. The city seemed void. I loathed it. My house seemed turned to a dungeon. My occupations palled upon me. I was weary, and everything was distasteful. I was no longer mistress of myself, and where my mind dwelt, thither I was fated to follow. What could stay me? Not toil and fatigue, nor yet the risk of the lynx-eyed warders of this rocky hermitage of Caesar. Where the will is there is the way, and what were a thousand times the obstacles in the way of mine? I am near thee, Martialis—I have accomplished my purpose. I have come and I confess to thee the reason, and I a woman. To you the world would apportion the voice, and to me the silence; but I own no law, no guide, but you and the promptings of my own heart. I have broken the cold forms and rules which bind a woman’s unsought secret within her breast, even at the risk of her life. I make no excuse—I crave no pardon. Wherefore should I hide the truth? Could my lips alter it, or you blame it? You cannot chide me. Am I less a woman now than before? I have bared my heart to thee, Martialis, but it is still a woman’s, and it has never bent to any sway but yours.’

Could the young soldier’s senses have been more subtly stirred had he been a mariner of old, rousing himself in his idly-floating boat to listen to the fatal, sweet ditties of a siren song stealing into his ears through the tranquil, yellow mist of evening?

He felt his hand imprisoned tightly within the warm grasp of her soft, white palms. Her breath played upon his cheek, [pg 215]and the gloom of their leafy shelter could not hide the shadowy, star-like lustre of her eyes close upturned to his. His ears drank in the rich, thrilling tones of her voice, quivering, like her glorious form, with excess of passion. The delicate perfumes of her attire welled around him, and invaded his faculties like the very essences of her overpowering loveliness. The touch, the eloquent motions, the soft abandon of this creature of superb womanhood: the strange, bewitching phenomenon of her haughty imperiousness sinking into the overwhelming flood of passionate love and tender submission beglamoured his mind. His senses seemed overcharged. As one might seek relief from a choking sensation, he reared his head backwards, with a deep, noiseless breath, and swept his eyes athwart his shoulder round the sea and star-lit heavens. Extraordinary and dream-like as his whole experience of that night was, it was no illusion, such as he began to think it might be. There was the horned moon, bright and tranquil in the dark sky; and there was the track of its silvery radiance dancing on the softly-rippling waters below. The night-air, too, palpably rustled the leaves around his head, and a soft, velvety touch at that moment quivered through him. It was the delicate pressure of her ripe, warm lips on his hand. It awoke the Pretorian to himself and brushed away the brief mist of sensuous sweetness which had enthralled him. To have remained wholly indifferent to such a passionate revelation of the loveliest lips—to have rested unmoved by the soft contact and surrender of the richest wealth of female beauty Rome could show, would have been to renounce all in common with human nature, even on the part of one bred with the phlegmatic coldness and self-possession of a northern clime. But Plautia had cast herself before one born to the same native characteristics of ardent and impulsive blood as herself, though not perhaps in an equal degree of intensity. With his pulses yet tingling he recalled, by a flash of thought, all the evident signs of pleasure and satisfaction with which she had hitherto greeted his presence when chance had thrown them together for a brief period. Her relaxed haughtiness, her glances and smiles were now, it seemed, only too well fraught with real meaning. Her excuses and pretexts for companionship, and a hundred little arts, which had never caused [pg 216]him more thought than an amused gratification, down to the latest evidence of all, in the gift she had sent to the camp, were now supplemented and concluded with a startling explanation. In common with the rest of Rome he had admired her magnificent beauty of face and form, and, by a most natural process of a man in love, he had as often criticised her by the standard of the maiden enthroned in his heart of hearts. He ever found the contrast, morally and physically, to be wellnigh complete. As before, but now with tenfold more vividness, his mind spanned the intervening distance and dwelt upon the fair girl he had left but a short time before. It acted like the sudden transition from the oppressive glow of a tropic dream steeped in narcotic odours, to the waking freshness and cool relief of a breezy dawn. NeÆra’s image, ever ready to his invocation, rose before him in its changeless purity and sweetness, its noble dignity and calmness, and purged his spirit of the grosser intoxication which burdened it.

While yet his mind was agitated by such fleeting emotions and reflections, it was vaguely burdened with pain and dread, on account of the vehement nature of the self-willed woman before him. He was simple and chivalrous; and as he thought how she, who could command so much, had dared everything to follow him to this spot for the sake of an unfortunate attachment, his heart ached with pain and pity—all the more as she was doomed to disappointment. The only return she could accept he was unable to make, and the fact of his entire innocence brought him no comfort.

Such was the main current of his thoughts in the short pause which followed on the passionate words of Plautia. In his simple, soldier way, he would rather have been summoned to face a legion single-handed than be under the necessity of administering the coup-de-grace to the dearest hopes and wishes of a woman. Her posture was at the moment half-reclining against his breast.

‘You are cruelly silent,’ she murmured in his ear. ‘Shame! Would you have me say more?’

‘You have done me great honour—great and unexpected,’ he answered, stammering with embarrassment; ‘but I was not prepared to meet such a surprise. If I am confused there is [pg 217]an excuse for it. I thought—and yet, no—I do not know. That I should have held such place in your regard is almost beyond my belief, and I should be little surprised to discover that Plautia is beguiling a tedious evening with a frolic. If so, I shall laugh with as much zest as herself.’

‘O brave frolic for a shallow wit!’ she cried vehemently; ‘and how am I to go about to convince thee, if thou hast not already been convinced? Do I merit no worthier words than those, Martialis?’

‘I made no assertion,’ said the Centurion. ‘If I am answerable for my utterances just for the time, I probably meant no more than to point out more effectively my feelings of astonishment and incredulity as to what has befallen me this night.’

‘But that has passed,’ she said, in a low voice, and inclining herself again closely to him. ‘Though surprised, Lucius, why unbelieving? Can it be so beyond belief? Had you been hideous, deformed, and as vile in mind as person,—a base negro, or Numidian slave, it had been then time to wonder! But thank the gods for being what you are—then why do you so undervalue yourself? Have women the eyes of bats and hearts impenetrable as granite? Have I not said enough? Would you have me plead? No—you cannot!’

‘What of my brother Caius?’ said he, with a sterner accent in his voice.

‘What of him—why, what of him?’

‘He loves you—nay, more, he is infatuated with you. It is public knowledge.’

‘And am I to blame? Can you reproach me? I have never wished it nor desired it. I have scorned him. I would have driven him away from me, but he would not be driven. Can I help his misfortune? It is impossible. It must be a task for himself. I can never love him, nor can he demand it, nor any force compel me.’

‘You say true. If it be his own misfortune to love without return there is no law or force to help him. The same law, Plautia, stands good between all. Poor Caius! there are more than himself in the same unhappy plight.’

The Centurion gently withdrew his hand from beneath hers, [pg 218]and, turning half aside toward the sea, folded his arms across his breast. Her hands fell down before her, and her eyes contracted on his profile. The deep gravity of his manner alarmed her and grated ominously on her mind.

‘But you are in no such wretchedness?’ she said, with painful earnestness.

‘I—no! the gods be thanked, far from it,’ he replied quickly, almost lightly and gladly.

‘Then why speak so meaningly? Such a common truth hardly needed it.’

He did not respond, but remained stolidly gazing over the cliffs upon the sea.

‘Will you not speak?’ she said, after a pause.

He turned upon her and took her hand.

‘Plautia, I would you had never come to this spot. It had been better if you had never left home. Return at once. Let me see you safely away, this night if possible.’

Her face grew as ghastly white as the limestone rock bathed in the moonlight, and a deadly sickness seized upon her heart and numbed her faculties for a moment.

‘You wish to be quit of me—you spurn me!’ she cried, catching her breath.

‘I wish to seek your safety and—and, Plautia, it is impossible that I can love you,’ returned he, wringing the tardy words out of his heart.

She caught her hand away and struck it against her breast, and reared her form aloft in a moment’s ominous silence.

‘I have demeaned myself, then,’ she gasped, ‘to a man without a heart. I have stooped myself, most likely, to be the butt of a guard-room, and thence of the city—O miserable, weak, blinded fool!’

No tornado ever broke more fiercely and suddenly on a peaceful landscape than the fit of fury on the dull torpor of her disenchanted mind. Shame and the keen anguish of disappointment resolved themselves into a whirlwind of rage. It choked her voice.

‘Fool—fool!’ she reiterated hoarsely. Her jewelled hand caught at the drapery about her throat, and rent it away from the gleaming beauty of her neck and wildly heaving breast, as if to relieve a horror of suffocation.