Читать книгу Fabiola; Or, The Church of the Catacombs онлайн
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“I will serve you with delight, my good and truly noble boy! Hush! did you not hear the Lady Fabiola’s name just mentioned? There again, and with an epithet expressive of no good will.”
Pancratius approached the window; two voices were conversing together so close under them that the cornice between prevented their seeing the speakers, evidently a woman and a man. After a few minutes they walked out into the moonlight, almost as bright as day.
“I know that Moorish woman,” said Sebastian; “it is Fabiola’s black slave, Afra.”
“And the man,” added Pancratius, “is my late school-fellow, Corvinus.”
They considered it their duty to catch, if possible, the thread of what seemed a plot; but, as the speakers walked up and down, they could only make out a sentence here and there. We will not, however, confine ourselves to these parts, but give the entire dialogue. Only, a word first about the interlocutors.
Of the slave we know enough for the present. Corvinus was son, as we have said, to Tertullus, originally prefect of the Prætorium. This office, unknown in the republic, and of imperial creation, had, from the reign of Tiberius, gradually absorbed almost all civil as well as military power; and he who held it often discharged the duties of chief criminal judge in Rome. It required no little strength of nerve to occupy this post to the satisfaction of despotic and unsparing masters. To sit all day in a tribunal, surrounded with hideous implements of torture, unmoved by the moans or the shrieks of old men, youths, or women, on whom they were tried; to direct a cool interrogatory to one stretched upon the rack, and quivering in agony on one side, while the last sentence of beating to death with bullet-laden scourges was being executed on the other; to sleep calmly after such scenes, and rise with appetite for their repetition, was not an occupation to which every member of the bar could be supposed to aspire. Tertullus had been brought from Sicily to fill the office, not because he was a cruel, but because he was a cold-hearted, man, not susceptible of pity or partiality. His tribunal, however, was Corvinus’s early school; he could sit, while quite a boy, for hours at his father’s feet, thoroughly enjoying the cruel spectacles before him, and angry when any one got off. He grew up sottish, coarse, and brutal; and not yet arrived at man’s estate, his bloated and freckled countenance and blear eyes, one of which was half closed, announced him to be already a dissolute and dissipated character. Without taste for any thing refined, or ability for any learning, he united in himself a certain amount of animal courage and strength, and a considerable measure of low cunning. He had never experienced in himself a generous feeling, and he had never curbed an evil passion. No one had ever offended him, whom he did not hate, and pursue with vengeance. Two, above all, he had sworn never to forgive—the school-master who had often chastised him for his sulky idleness, and the school-fellow who had blessed him for his brutal contumely. Justice and mercy, good and evil done to him, were equally odious to him.