Part 15 (2/2)
”So d-d-do I,” said Flexinna.
CHAPTER X - CONFERENCE
SOME months later, during one of the brief and infrequent breathing spells in his ten years' fight to beat off the raids of the Marcomanni and other Germanic tribes, Aurelius returned from the Rhine frontier to Rome. As soon as she was reasonably sure that the Emperor was rested from the fatigues of his journey and had disposed of the worst of his acc.u.mulated routine duties, Brinnaria sought a second audience with the chief of the nation.
She was then a tall, grave girl of nineteen, looking and behaving like a woman of twenty-five. Very handsome she was, full-fleshed without a trace of plumpness, fun breasted without a hint of overabundance. Her brown hair, now grown long again after its ceremonial shearing at her entrance into the order of Vestals, was so dark that it was almost black. Arranged in the six braids traditional for Vestals and wound round her head like a coronet it became her notably. Her complexion was creamy, with a splendid brilliant color that came and went in her cheeks. Her expression of face was an indescribable blend of kindliness and haughtiness towards others, of austerity and cheerfulness inwardly, of intellectuality and comprehension towards life at large. She had acquired the statuesqueness of the conventional Vestal att.i.tudes and movements, but she sat and stood so that all beholders felt a vivid impression of her vitality, of reserve strength, incomparably beyond anything possessed by her five colleagues.
Her stately pacing as she walked always appeared the conscious restraint of what, of itself, would have been a swinging stride. She wore her clothes with an una.n.a.lyzable difference, with a sort of effrontery, as Calvaster put it in talking of her to his cronies.
On her way to the palace, erect in her white robe amid the gorgeous crimson hangings of her gilded state coach, she meditated on the great dissimilarity between the feelings with which she had gone to her first audience with the Emperor and those with which she now approached his abode. Then she had been palpitating with conscientious scruples and childish dreads, now she was sure of herself and of her errand; then she had thought chiefly of her mother and of the traditions of her family and clan, now not only her mother was dead, but the whole family of the Epulones had perished except herself and the Brinnarian clan was represented by but three families, her relations.h.i.+p to which was fainter than any a.s.signable degree of cousins.h.i.+p; then she had been full of elation at her lofty position in the world, now she was perfectly at home in her environment and felt no emotion at the thought of it.
At the palace she found herself in the same vast room, alone with a somewhat older and graver Emperor, now sole ruler of their world since the death of his colleague, Lucius Verus. He greeted her kindly, with an air of effort to conceal his weariness, and when both were seated asked her errand.
”In the first place,” she said, ”I want you to tell me whether you are satisfied with the reports you have had of me.”
Aurelius half smiled.
”I am well pleased in respect to all your actions but one,” he said.
”You have certainly done better than I expected or hoped. You have curbed your wild nature so well that, of late years, you have behaved altogether as a Vestal should. Even earlier your conduct was creditable, since from the very day of your promise to me, your outbursts were less and less frequent and also less and less violent. Once only have you acted so that I felt displeased when I heard what you had done and feel somewhat displeased even yet.”
”I suppose,” Brinnaria ruminated, ”you mean my larruping Bambilio.”
”Yes,” Aurelius admitted. ”That was in a sense unforgivable. Had I been in Rome at the time I must have animadverted upon it with the greatest severity.”
”If you had been in Rome at the time,” spoke Brinnaria boldly, ”I should not have been flogged by any mere deputy Pontifex of Vesta. It would have been inc.u.mbent upon you, as Pontifex Maximus, yourself to give me my ceremonial scourging. To you I should have been, of course, as submissive after my beating as while it was going on. No harm would have been done.”
The Emperor smiled more than a half smile.
”I am not sure,” he said, ”that any harm was done, anyhow.”
”What!” cried Brinnaria. ”You excuse me? You defend me?”
”Softly! Softly!” the Emperor caveatted, raising his hand. ”I do not acquit you nor exonerate you. But I do make allowances. And we must distinguish. We must not confuse the causes of my disapprobation of what you did with my reasons for believing that no harm resulted. Nor, for that matter, must we confound with either of them those qualities in yourself and those circ.u.mstances of the case which make me feel, illogically perhaps, but very possibly, more inclined to thank you than to censure you.”
”Castor be good to me!” cried Brinnaria. ”Am I dreaming?”
”Don't interrupt, you disrespectful minx,” the Emperor laughed; ”this is a lecture. Hear it out.
”In the first place you were technically right in saying that there is not one word in any sacred writing or in the p.r.o.nouncements of the Pontiffs or the statutes of the Vestals to forbid a flogged Vestal from beating her scourger. Just as Solon in the code of laws which he drew up for the Athenians prescribed no penalty for the slayer of his father or mother, because, as he explained when the omission was pointed out to him, he had thought that no child would ever kill its parents; so no framer of rubrics ever foresaw the necessity of forbidding what no one conceived of as possible. All persons were a.s.sumed to be too much in awe of Pontiffs, for anyone to dare to raise a hand against any Pontiff, least of all a Vestal against her spiritual father. The world had to wait for a Brinnaria to demonstrate that the unimaginable could come to pa.s.s.
”Yet the very fact that it was nowhere written down that you must not do it makes your act all the worse. It was monstrous.
”But fortunately it was not sacrilegious. The person of the Pontifex of Vesta is not sacrosanct and a blow inflicted on him is not to be rated as impious. Your act called for no expiation, personal or official. It did not desecrate him, or you, nor the place where it occurred.
”Besides, I cannot resist admitting to you,”--and the Emperor smiled an unmistakable smile--”that this particular Pontiff of Vesta is farther from being sacrosanct than any of his predecessors. As far as I can learn, Faltonius is a worthy man, pious and scrupulous. But he is absurdly unfitted for his office in appearance and in manner. The self-importance he a.s.sumes, the pomposity with which he performs his duties, would be too great even for an Emperor. He irritates all of us. All of us have wished, secretly or openly, many, many times, that Bambilio would be soundly thrashed. He has been. You did it. The story was too good to keep. It has not, of course, been allowed to leak out, and become common property. But it is known to all the Flamens, Augurs and Pontiffs.
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