CHAPTER XXIX.

THE DOOM OF THE TRAITOR

But what, meantime, had become of the pursuers? Baffled in their effort to seize their prey, and fearful of losing their way in this tangled labyrinth they had sullenly retreated, tracing their steps by the chalk-marks they had made upon the walls. At last, they returned to the stairway by which they had entered and so found their way above ground.

"This is no work for soldiers," muttered the disgusted officer, "hunting these rats through their underground runs. They are a skulking set of vermin."

"What has become of that coward Greek?" asked the second in command. "He didn't seem to half like the job."

"Is he not here? Then he must have made his escape," said the Centurion. "But if he is caught in that rat-trap, there let him stay. I'll not risk a Roman soldier's life to save a craven Greek," and he gave the command to march back to the city.

Meanwhile, how fares it with the unhappy Isidorus?

When the soldiers caught sight of the Christians and began their pursuit, he had no heart to join in it, and lingered in the vaulted chamber where the funeral rites had been interrupted. The first thing that caught his eye was the epitaph of the noble Adauctus. With quavering voice he read the lines we have already given: "With unfaltering faith, despising the lord of the world, having confessed Christ, thou dids't seek the celestial realms."

"And this was he," he soliloquised, "who gave up name, and fame, and fortune, high office, and the favour of the Emperor, and embraced shame, and persecution, and a cruel death for conscience sake. How grand he was that day when I warned him of the machinations of his foes--so undaunted and calm. But grander he is as he lies in the majesty of death behind that slab. I felt myself a coward in his living presence then, but in the presence of this dead map, I feel a greater coward still. His memory haunts, it tortures me, I must away!" and turning from, the chamber, he wandered by the dim light of his taper down the grave-lined corridor, pausing at times to read their humble inscriptions:--

Rudely written, but each letter Full of hope, and yet of heart-break, Full of all the tender pathos Of the here and the hereafter.

And their calmness and peacefulness seemed to reproach his conscience-smitten and unrestful soul.

Listlessly he turned into another chamber, when, what was it that met his startled vision!--

VALERIA DORMIT IN PACE.

There slept in the sleep of death another victim of his perfidy, one whom he had longed to save, one whose beauty had fascinated his imagination, whose goodness had touched his heart. Overcome by his emotion he flung himself on the ground, and bursting into convulsive sobs that shook his frame, he passionately kissed the cold stone slab on which was written the much-loved name.

"Would that I, too, slept the sleep of death," he exclaimed; "if I might also sleep in peace; if I might seek celestial realms.... So near and yet so far ... A great gulf fixed ... Never to see thee more ... in time nor in eternity."

Here the drip, drip of water which had infiltrated through the roof and fell upon the floor, jarred upon his excited nerves, and suddenly, with a hissing splash, fell a great drop on his taper and utterly extinguished its light. For a moment, so intense and sudden was the darkness, he was almost dazed; but instantly the greatness of his peril flashed upon his mind.

"Lost! Lost!" he frantically shrieked. "The outer darkness, the eternal wailing while she is in the light of life! Well I remember now the words of Primitius, in this very vault, as he spoke of the joys of heaven, the pains of hell;" and in the darkness he tried to trace with his finger the words, "DORMIT IN PACE"--"Sleeps in peace."

_"Vale! Vale! Eternum Vale!"_ he sobbed, as he kissed once more the marble slab, "an everlasting farewell! I must try to find the Christians, or the soldiers, or a way of escape from this prison-house of graves."

He groped his way to the door of the vault and listened, oh! so eagerly--all the faculties of his body and mind seeming concentered in his sense of hearing. But "the darkness gave no token and the silence was unbroken." Nay, so awful was the stillness that brooded over this valley of death, that it seemed as if the motion of the earth on its axis must be audible, and the pulses of his temples were to his tortured ear like the roaring of the distant sea.

Venturing forth, he groped his way from grave to grave, from vault to vault, from corridor to corridor, but no light, no sound, no hope! Ever denser seemed the darkness, ever deeper the silence, ever more appalling the gloom. For hours he wandered on and on till, faint with hunger, parched with thirst, the throbbings, of his heart shaking his unnerved frame, he fell into a merciful swoon from which he never awoke. Centuries after, an explorer of this vast necropolis found crouching in the corner of one of its chambers a fleshless skeleton, and on the tomb above he read the words, VALERIA DORMIT IN PACE. Was it accident or Providence, or some strange instinct of locality that had brought this poor blighted wreck to breathe his latest sigh at the tomb of one whom he had so loved and so wronged?

The peasants of the Campagna tell to the present day of certain strange sounds heard at midnight from those hollow vaults--at times like the hooting of an owl, at times like the wailing of the wind, and at times, they whisper with bated breath, like the moaning of a soul in pain. And the guides to the Catacombs aver, that ever on the anniversary of the martyrdom of Valeria Callirhoë, sighs and groans echo through the hollow vaults--the sighs and groans, tradition whispers, of a wretched apostate who in the ages of persecution betrayed the early Christians to a martyr's doom.