f vestal will not refuse
thee."

"But if Lygia dies of the fever?"

"The Christians say that Christ is vengeful, but just; maybe thou wilt
soften Him by thy wish alone."

"Let Him give me some sign that will heal Rufius."

Petronius shrugged his shoulders.

"I have not come as His envoy; O divinity, I merely say to thee, Be on
better terms with all the gods, Roman and foreign."

"I will go!" said Poppaea, with a broken voice.

Petronius drew a deep breath. "At last I have done something," thought
he, and returning to Vinicius he said to him,--

"Implore thy God that Lygia die not of the fever, for should she
survive, the chief vestal will give command to free her. The Augusta
herself will ask her to do so."

"Christ will free her," said Vinicius, looking at him with eyes in which
fever was glittering.

Poppaea, who for the recovery of Rufius was willing to burn hecatombs to
all the gods of the world, went that same evening through the Forum to
the vestals, leaving care over the sick child to her faithful nurse,
Silvia, by whom she herself had been reared.

But on the Palatine sentence had been issued against the child already;
for barely had Poppaea's litter vanished behind the great gate when two
freedmen entered the chamber in which her son was resting. One of these
threw himself on old Silvia and gagged her; the other, seizing a bronze
statue of the Sphinx, stunned the old woman with the first blow.

Then they approached Rufius. The little boy, tormented with fever and
insensible, not knowing what was passing around him, smiled at them,
and blinked with his beautiful eyes, as if trying to recognize the men.
Stripping from the nurse her girdle, they put it around his neck and
pulled it. The child called once for his mother, and died easily. Then
they wound him in a sheet, and sitting on horses which were waiting,
hurried to Ostia, where they threw the body into the sea.

Poppaea, not finding the virgo magna, who with other vestals was at the
house of Vatinius, returned soon to the Palatine. Seeing the empty bed
and the cold body of Silvia, she fainted, and when they restored her she
began to scream; her wild cries were heard all that night and the day
following.

But Caesar commanded her to appear at a feast on the third day; so,
arraying herself in an amethyst-colored tunic, she came and sat with
stony face, golden-haired, silent, wonderful, and as ominous as an angel
of death.

Chapter LV