CHAPTER XXX.

THE SAME DAY: ITS THIRD PART.

Tertullus hastened at once to the palace: fortunately, or unfortunately, for these candidates for martyrdom. There he met Corvinus, with the prepared rescript, elegantly engrossed in _unical_, that is, large capital letters. He had the privilege of immediate admission into the imperial presence; and, as a matter of business, reported the death of Agnes, exaggerated the public feeling likely to be caused by it, attributed it all to the folly and mismanagement of Fulvius, whose worst guilt he did not disclose for fear of having to try him, and thus bringing out what he was now doing; depreciated the value of Agnes’s property, and ended by saying that it would be a gracious act of clemency, and one sure to counteract unpopular feelings, to bestow it upon her relative, who by settlement was her next heir. He described Fabiola as a young lady of extraordinary intellect and wonderful learning, who was most zealously devoted to the worship of the gods, and daily offered sacrifice to the genius of the emperors.

“I know her,” said Maximian, laughing, as if at the recollection of something very droll. “Poor thing! she sent me a splendid ring, and yesterday asked me for that wretched Sebastian’s life, just as they had finished cudgelling him to death.” And he laughed immoderately, then continued: “Yes, yes, by all means; a little inheritance will console her, no doubt, for the loss of that fellow. Let a rescript be made out, and I will sign it.”

Tertullus produced the one prepared, saying he had fully relied on the emperor’s magnanimous clemency; and the imperial barbarian put a signature to it which would have disgraced a schoolboy. The prefect at once consigned it to his son.

Scarcely had he left the palace, when Fulvius entered. He had been home to put on a proper court attire, and remove from his features, by the bath and the perfumer’s art, the traces of his morning’s passion. He felt a keen presentiment that he should be disappointed. Eurotas’s cool discussion of the preceding evening had prepared him; the cross of all his designs, and his multiplied disappointments that day, had strengthened this instinctive conviction. One woman, indeed, seemed born to meet and baffle him whichever way he turned; but, “thank the gods,” he thought, “she cannot be in my way here. She has this morning blasted my character for ever; she cannot claim my rightful reward; she has made me an outcast; it is not in her power to make me a beggar.” This seemed his only ground of hope. Despair, indeed, urged him forward; and he determined to argue out his claims to the confiscated property of Agnes, with the only competitor he could fear, the rapacious emperor himself. He might as well risk his life over it, for if he failed, he was utterly ruined. After waiting some time, he entered the audience-hall, and advanced with the blandest smile that he could muster to the imperial feet.

“What want you here?” was his first greeting.

“Sire,” he replied, “I have come humbly to pray your royal justice, to order my being put into immediate possession of my share of the Lady Agnes’s property. She has been convicted of being a Christian upon my accusation, and she has just suffered the merited penalty of all who disobey the imperial edicts.”

“That is all quite right; but we have heard how stupidly you mismanaged the whole business as usual, and have raised murmurings and discontent in the people against us. So, now, the sooner you quit our presence, palace, and city, the better for yourself. Do you understand? We don’t usually give such warnings twice.”

“I will obey instantly every intimation of the supreme will. But I am almost destitute. Command what of right is mine to be delivered over to me, and I part immediately.”

“No more words,” replied the tyrant, “but go at once. As to the property which you demand with so much pertinacity, you cannot have it. We have made over the whole of it, by an irrevocable rescript, to an excellent and deserving person, the Lady Fabiola.”

Fulvius did not speak another word; but kissed the emperor’s hand and slowly retired. He looked a ruined, broken man. He was only heard to say, as he passed out of the gate: “Then, after all, she _has_ made me a beggar too.” When he reached home, Eurotas, who read his answer in his nephew’s eye, was amazed at his calmness.

“I see,” he drily remarked, “it is all over.”

“Yes; are your preparations made, Eurotas?”

“Nearly so. I have sold the jewels, furniture, and slaves, at some loss; but, with the trifle I had in hand, we have enough to take us safe to Asia. I have retained Stabio, as the most trusty of our servants; he will carry our small travelling requisites on his horse. Two others are preparing for you and me. I have only one thing more to get for our journey, and then I am ready to start.”

“Pray what is that?”

“The poison. I ordered it last night, but it will only be ready at noon.”

“What is that for?” asked Fulvius, with some alarm.

“Surely you know,” rejoined the other, unmoved. “I am willing to make one more trial any where else; but our bargain is clear; my father’s family must not end in beggary. It must be extinguished in honor.”

Fulvius bit his lip, and said, “Well, be it as you like, I am weary of life. Leave the house as soon as possible, for fear of Ephraim, and be with your horses at the third mile on the Latin gate soon after dusk. I will join you there. For I, too, have an important matter to transact before I start.”

“And what is that?” asked Eurotas, with a rather keen curiosity.

“I cannot tell even you. But if I am not with you by two hours after sunset, give me up, and save yourself without me.”

Eurotas fixed upon him his cold dark eye, with one of those looks which ever read Fulvius through; to see if he could detect any lurking idea of escape from his gripe. But his look was cool and unusually open, and the old man asked no more. While this dialogue was going on, Fulvius had been divesting himself of his court garments, and attiring himself in a travelling suit. So completely did he evidently prepare himself for his journey, without necessity of returning home, that he even took his weapons with him; besides his sword, securing in his girdle, but concealed under his cloak, one of those curved daggers, of highest temper and most fatal form, which were only known in the East.

Eurotas proceeded at once to the Numidian quarters in the palace, and asked for Jubala; who entered with two small flasks of different sizes, and was just going to give some explanations, when her husband, half-drunk, half-furious, was seen approaching. Eurotas had just time to conceal the flasks in his belt, and slip a coin into her hand, when Hyphax came up. His wife had mentioned to him the offers which Eurotas had made to her before marriage, and had excited in his hot African blood a jealousy that amounted to hatred. The savage rudely thrust his wife out of the apartment, and would have picked a quarrel with the Syrian; had not the latter, his purpose being accomplished, acted with forbearance, assured the archer-chief that he should never more see him, and retired.

It is time, however, that we return to Fabiola. The reader is probably prepared to hear us say, that she returned home a Christian: and yet it was not so. For what as yet did she know of Christianity, to be said to profess it? In Sebastian and Agnes she had indeed willingly admired the virtue, unselfish, generous, and more than earthly, which now she was ready to attribute to that faith. She saw that it gave motives of actions, principles of life, elevation of mind, courage of conscience, and determination of virtuous will, such as no other system of belief ever bestowed. And even if, as she now shrewdly suspected, and intended in calmer moments to ascertain, the sublime revelations of Syra, concerning an unseen sphere of virtue, and its all-seeing Ruler, came from the same source, to what did it all amount more than to a grand moral and intellectual system, partly practical, partly speculative, as all codes of philosophic teaching were? This was a very different thing from Christianity. She had as yet heard nothing of its real and essential doctrines, its fathomless, yet accessible, depths of mystery; the awful, vast, and heaven-high structure of faith, which the simplest soul may contain; as a child’s eye will take in the perfect reflection and counterpart of a mountain, though a giant cannot scale it. She had never heard of a God, One in Trinity; of the co-equal Son incarnate for man. She had never been told of the marvellous history, of Redemption by God’s sufferings and death. She had not heard of Nazareth, or Bethlehem, or Calvary. How could she call herself a Christian, or be one, in ignorance of all this?

How many names had to become familiar and sweet to her which as yet were unknown, or barbarous--Mary, Joseph, Peter, Paul, and John? Not to mention the sweetest of all, His, whose name is balm to the wounded heart, or as honey dropping from the broken honeycomb. And how much had she yet to learn about the provision for salvation on earth, in the Church, in grace, in sacraments, in prayer, in love, in charity to others! What unexplored regions lay beyond the small tract which she had explored!

No; Fabiola returned home, exhausted almost by the preceding day and night, and the sad scenes of the morning, and retired to her own apartment, no longer perhaps even a philosopher, yet not a Christian. She desired all her servants to keep away from the court which she occupied, that she might not be disturbed by the smallest noise; and she forbade any one to have access to her. There she sat in loneliness and silence, for several hours, too excited to obtain rest from slumber. She mourned long over Agnes, as a mother might over a child suddenly carried off. Yet, was there not a tinge of light upon the cloud that overshadowed her, more than when it hung over her father’s bier? Did it not seem to her an insult to reason, an outrage to humanity, to think that _she_ had perished; that she had been permitted to walk forward in her bright robe, and with her smiling countenance, and with her joyous, simple heart, straight on--into nothing; that she had been allured by conscience, and justice, and purity, and truth, on, on, till with arms outstretched to embrace them, she stepped over a precipice, beneath which yawned annihilation? No. Agnes, she felt sure, was happy somehow, somewhere; or justice was a senseless word.

“How strange,” she further thought, “that every one whom I have known endowed with superior excellence, men like Sebastian, women like Agnes, should turn out to have belonged to the scorned race of Christians! One only remains, and to-morrow I will interrogate her.”

When she turned from these, and looked round upon the heathen world, Fulvius, Tertullus, the Emperor, Calpurnius,--nay, she shuddered as she surprised herself on the point of mentioning her own father’s name--it sickened her to see the contrast of baseness with nobleness, vice with virtue, stupidity with wisdom, and the sensual with the spiritual. Her mind was thus being shaped into a mould, which some form of practical excellence must be found to fill, or it must be broken; her soul was craving as a parched soil, which heaven must send its waters to refresh, or it must become an eternal desert.

Agnes, surely, well deserved the glory of gaining, by her death, her kinswoman’s conversion; but was there not one, more humble, who had established a prior claim? One who had given up freedom, and offered life, for this unselfish gain?

While Fabiola was alone and desolate, she was disturbed by the entrance of a stranger, introduced under the ominous title of “A messenger from the emperor.” The porter had at first denied him admittance; but upon being assured that he bore an important embassy from the sovereign, he felt obliged to inquire from the steward what to do; when he was informed that no one with such a claim could be refused entrance.

Fabiola was amazed, and her displeasure was somewhat mitigated, by the ridiculous appearance of the person deputed in such a solemn character. It was Corvinus, who with clownish grace approached her, and in a studied speech, evidently got up very floridly, and intrusted to a bad memory, laid at her feet an imperial rescript, and his own sincere affection, the Lady Agnes’s estates, and his clumsy hand. Fabiola could not at all comprehend the connection between the two combined presents, and never imagined that the one was a bribe for the other. So she desired him to return her humble thanks to the emperor for his gracious act; adding, “Say that I am too ill to-day to present myself, and do him homage.”

“But these estates, you are aware, were forfeited and confiscated,” he gasped out in great confusion, “and my father has obtained them for you.”

“That was unnecessary,” said Fabiola, “for they were settled on me long ago, and became mine the moment”--she faltered, and after a strong effort at self-mastery, she continued--“the moment they ceased to be another’s; they did not fall under confiscation.”

Corvinus was dumb-foundered: at last he stumbled into something, meant for an humble petition to be admitted as an aspirant after her hand, but understood by Fabiola to be a demand of recompense, for procuring or bringing so important a document. She assured him that every claim he might have on her should be fully and honorably considered at a more favorable moment; but as she was exceedingly wearied and unwell, she must beg him to leave her at present. He did so quite elated, fancying that he had secured his prize.

After he was gone she hardly looked at the parchment, which he had left open on a small table by her couch, but sat musing on the sorrowful scenes she had witnessed, till it wanted about an hour to sunset. Sometimes her reveries turned to one point, sometimes to another of the late events; and, at last, she was dwelling on her being confronted with Fulvius, that morning, in the Forum. Her memory vividly replaced the entire scene before her, and her mind gradually worked itself into a state of painful excitement, which she at length checked by saying aloud to herself: “Thank heaven! I shall never behold that villain’s face again.”

The words were scarcely out of her mouth, when she shaded her eyes with her hand, as she raised herself up on her couch, and looked towards the door. Was it her overheated fancy which beguiled her, or did her wakeful eyes show her a reality? Her ears decided the question, by these words which they heard:

“Pray, madam, who is the man whom you honor by that gracious speech?”

“You, Fulvius,” she said, rising with dignity. “A further intruder still; not only into the house, the villa, and the dungeon, but into the most secret apartments of a lady’s residence; and what is worse, into the house of sorrow of one whom you have bereaved. Begone at once, or I will have you ignominiously expelled hence.”

“Sit down and compose yourself, lady,” rejoined the intruder; “this is my last visit to you; but we have a reckoning to make together of some weight. As to crying out, or bringing in help, you need not trouble yourself; your orders to your servants to keep aloof, have been too well obeyed. There is no one within call.”

It was true. Fulvius found the way prepared unwittingly for him by Corvinus; for upon presenting himself at the door the porter, who had seen him twice dine at the house, told him of the strict orders given, and assured him that he could not be admitted unless he came from the emperor, for such were his instructions. That, Fulvius said, was exactly his case; and the porter, wondering that so many imperial messengers should come in one day, let him pass. He begged that the door might be left unfastened, in case the porter should not be at his post when he retired; for he was in a hurry, and should not like to disturb the house in such a state of grief. He added that he required no guide, for he knew the way to Fabiola’s apartment.

Fulvius seated himself opposite to the lady, and continued:

“You ought not to be offended, madam, with my unexpectedly coming upon you, and overhearing your amiable soliloquies about myself; it is a lesson I learned from yourself in the Tullian prison. But I must begin my scores from an earlier date. When, for the first time, I was invited by your worthy father to his table, I met one whose looks and words at once gained my affections,--I need not now mention her name,--and whose heart, with instinctive sympathy, returned them.”

“Insolent man!” Fabiola exclaimed, “to allude to such a topic here; it is false that any such affection ever existed on either side.”

“As to the Lady Agnes,” resumed Fulvius, “I have the best authority, that of your lamented parent, who more than once encouraged me to persevere in my suit, by assuring me that his cousin had confided to him her reciprocating love.”

Fabiola was mortified; for she now remembered that this was too true, from the hints which Fabius had given her, of his stupid misunderstanding.

“I know well, that my dear father was under a delusion upon this subject; but I, from whom that dear child concealed nothing----”

“Except her religion,” interrupted Fulvius, with bitter irony.

“Peace!” Fabiola went on; “that word sounds like a blasphemy on your lips--I knew that you were but an object of loathing and abhorrence to her.”

“Yes, after you had made me such. From that hour of our first meeting you became my bitter and unrelenting foe, in conspiracy with that treacherous officer, who has received his reward, and whom you had destined for the place I courted. Repress your indignation, lady, for I _will_ be heard out,--you undermined my character, you poisoned her feelings, and you turned my love into necessary enmity.”

“Your love!” now broke in the indignant lady; “even if all that you have said were not basely false, what love could you have for _her_? How could _you_ appreciate her artless simplicity, her genuine honesty, her rare understanding, her candid innocence, any more than the wolf can value the lamb’s gentleness, or the vulture the dove’s mildness? No, it was her wealth, her family connection, her nobility, that you grasped at, and nothing more; I read it in the very flash of your eye, when first it fixed itself, as a basilisk’s, upon her.”

“It is false!” he rejoined; “had I obtained my request, had I been thus worthily mated, I should have been found equal to my position, domestic, contented, and affectionate; as worthy of possessing her as----”

“As any one can be,” struck in Fabiola, “who, in offering his hand, expresses himself equally ready, in three hours, to espouse or to murder the object of his affection. And she prefers the latter, and he keeps his word. Begone from my presence; you taint the very atmosphere in which you move.”

“I will leave when I have accomplished my task, and you will have little reason to rejoice when I do. You have then purposely, and unprovoked, blighted and destroyed in me every honorable purpose of life, withered my only hope, cut me off from rank, society, respectable ease, and domestic happiness.

“That was not enough. After acting in that character, with which you summed up my condemnation, of a spy, and listened to my conversation, you this morning threw off all sense of female propriety, and stood forward prominently in the Forum, to complete in public what you had begun in private, excite against me the supreme tribunal, and through it the emperor, and arouse an unjust popular outcry and vengeance; such as, but for a feeling stronger than fear, which brings me hither, would make me now skulk, like a hunted wolf, till I could steal out of the nearest gate.”

“And, Fulvius, I tell you,” interposed Fabiola, “that the moment you cross its threshold, the average of virtue will be raised in this wicked city. Again I bid you depart from my house, at least; or at any rate I will withdraw from this offensive intrusion.”

“We part not yet, lady,” said Fulvius, whose countenance had been growing every moment more flushed, as his lips had been becoming more deadly pale. He rudely grasped her arm, and pushed her back to her seat; “and beware,” he added, “how you attempt again either to escape or to bring aid; your first cry will be your last, cost me what it may.

“You have made me, then, an outcast, not only from society but from Rome, an exile, a houseless wanderer on a friendless earth; was not that enough to satisfy your vengeance? No: you must needs rob me of my gold, of my rightfully, though painfully earned wealth; peace, reputation, my means of subsistence, all _you_ have stolen from me, a youthful stranger.”

“Wicked and insolent man!” exclaimed now the indignant Roman lady, reckless of consequences, “you shall answer heavily for your temerity. Dare you, in my own house, call me a thief?”

“I dare; and I tell you this is your day of reckoning, and not mine. I have earned, even if by crime, it is nothing to you, my full share of your cousin’s confiscated property. I have earned it hardly, by pangs and rendings of the heart and soul, by sleepless nights of struggles with fiends that have conquered; ay, and with one at home that is sterner than they; by days and days of restless search for evidence, amidst the desolation of a proud, but degraded spirit. Have I not a right to enjoy it?

“Ay, call it what you will, call it my blood-money; the more infamous it is, the more base in you to step in and snatch it from me. It is like a rich man tearing the carrion from the hound’s jaws, after he has swollen his feet and rent his skin in hunting it down.”

“I will not seek for further epithets by which to call you; your mind is deluded by some vain dream,” said Fabiola, with an earnestness not untinged with alarm. She felt she was in the presence of a madman, one in whom violent passion, carried off by an unchecked, deeply-moved fancy, was lashing itself up to that intensity of wicked excitement, which constitutes a moral frenzy,--when the very murderer thinks himself a virtuous avenger. “Fulvius,” she continued, with studied calmness, and looking fully into his eyes, “I now _entreat_ you to go. If you want money, you shall have it; but go, in heaven’s name go, before you destroy your reason by your anger.”

“What vain fancy do you mean?” asked Fulvius.

“Why, that I should have ever dreamt about Agnes’s wealth or property on such a day, or should have taken any advantage of her cruel death.”

“And yet it is so; I have it from the emperor’s mouth that he has made it over to you. Will you pretend to make me believe, that this most generous and liberal prince ever parted with a penny unsolicited, ay, or unbribed?”

“Of this I know nothing. But I know, that I would rather have died of want than petitioned for a farthing of such property!”

“Then would you make me rather believe, that in this city there is any one so disinterested as, undesired, to have petitioned for you? No, no, Lady Fabiola, all this is too incredible. But what is that?” And he pounced with eagerness on the imperial rescript, which had remained unlooked at, since Corvinus had left it. The sensation to him was like that of Æneas when he saw Pallas’s belt upon the body of Turnus. The fury, which seemed to have been subdued by his subtlety, as he had been reasoning to prove Fabiola guilty, flashed up anew at the sight of this fatal document. He eyed it for a minute, then broke out, gnashing his teeth with rage:

“Now, madam, I convict you of baseness, rapacity, and unnatural cruelty, far beyond any thing you have dared to charge on me! Look at this rescript, beautifully engrossed, with its golden letters and emblazoned margins; and presume to say that it was prepared in the one hour that elapsed between your cousin’s death and the emperor’s telling me that he had signed it? Nor do you pretend to know the generous friend who procured you the gift. Bah! while Agnes was in prison at latest; while you were whining and moaning over her; while you were reproaching me for cruelty and treachery towards her,--me, a stranger and alien to her! you, the gentle lady, the virtuous philosopher, the loving, fondling kinswoman, you, my stern reprover, were coolly plotting to take advantage of my crime, for securing her property, and seeking out the elegant scribe, who should gild your covetousness with his pencil, and paint over your treason to your own flesh and blood, with his blushing _minium_.”[212]

“Cease, madman, cease!” exclaimed Fabiola, endeavoring in vain to master his glaring eye. But he went on in still wilder tone:

“And then, forsooth, when you have thus basely robbed me, you offer me money. You have out-plotted me, and you pity me! You have made me a beggar, and then you offer me alms,--alms out of my own wages, the wages which even hell allows its fated victims while on earth!”

Fabiola rose again, but he seized her with a maniac’s gripe, and this time did not let her go. He went on:

“Now listen to the last words that I will speak, or they may be the last that you will hear. Give back to me that unjustly obtained property; it is not fair that I should have the guilt, and you its reward. Transfer it by your sign manual to me as a free and loving gift, and I will depart. If not, you have signed your own doom.” A stern and menacing glance accompanied these words.

Fabiola’s haughty self rose again erect within her; her Roman heart, unsubdued, stood firm. Danger only made her fearless. She gathered her robe with matronly dignity around her, and replied:

“Fulvius, listen to my words, though they should be the last that I may speak; as certainly they shall be the last that you shall hear from me.

“Surrender this property to you? I would give it willingly to the first leper that I might meet in the street, but to you never. Never shall you touch thing that belonged to that holy maiden, be it a gem or be it a straw! That touch would be pollution. Take gold of mine, if it please you; but any thing that ever belonged to her, from me no treasures can ransom. And one legacy I prize more than all her inheritance. You have now offered me two alternatives, as last night you did her, to yield to your demands, or die. Agnes taught me which to choose. Once again, I say, depart.”

“And leave you to possess what is mine? leave you to triumph over me, as one whom you have outwitted--you honored, and I disgraced--you rich, and I penniless--you happy, and I wretched? No, never! I cannot save myself from what you have made me; but I can prevent your being what you have no right to be. For this I have come here; this is my day of Nemesis.[213] Now die!” While he was speaking these reproaches, he was slowly pushing her backwards with his left hand towards the couch from which she had risen; while his right was tremblingly feeling for something in the folds of his bosom.

As he finished his last word, he thrust her violently down upon the couch, and seized her by the hair. She made no resistance, she uttered no cry; partly a fainting and sickening sensation came over her; partly a noble feeling of self-respect checked any unseemly exhibition of fear, before a scornful enemy. Just as she closed her eyes, she saw something like lightning above her; she could not tell whether it was his glaring eye or flashing steel.

In another moment she felt oppressed and suffocated, as if a great weight had fallen upon her; and a hot stream was flowing over her bosom.

A sweet voice full of earnestness sounded in her ears:

“Cease, Orontius; I am thy sister Miriam!”

Fulvius, in accents choked by passion, replied:

“It is false; give me up my prey!”

A few words more were faintly spoken in a tongue unknown to Fabiola; when she felt her hair released, heard the dagger dashed to the ground, and Fulvius cry out bitterly, as he rushed out of the room:

“O Christ! this is Thy Nemesis!”

Fabiola’s strength was returning; but she felt the weight upon her increase. She struggled, and released herself. Another body was lying in her place, apparently dead, and covered with blood.

It was the faithful Syra, who had thrown herself between her mistress’s life and her brother’s dagger.