“It wants half an hour of midnight,” replied Blepyrus, his body-servant.
“Very good--I do not want to sleep yet. Open the window; the air here is suffocating. Blepyrus, give me my dagger.”
“A useless question--when do I ever use any other?”
“Here, my lord,” said Blepyrus, taking the dagger out of a closet in the wall.
“It is only as a precaution. Lately all sorts of wild rabble have haunted Baiae and the neighborhood. I am going to take a walk for an hour or so,” and he went to the door. “But mind,” he added, “this late expedition is a secret.”
“You know us, my lord!” they said with one accord.
Quintus went out again into the arcades. The colonnaded court lay white and dream-like in the moonshine, the shadows of the statues fell blackly sharp on the dewy grass-plot and the chequered outlines of the mosaic pavement. Quintus hastened noiselessly to the postern-gate, which led from the peristyle into the park; he pushed back the bolt and was out on the terrace. Complete silence reigned around; only the very tops of the trees bent to the soft night-breeze. Quintus looked down upon Baiae. Here and there a light twinkled in the harbor; otherwise it was like a city of the dead. Then he looked down the black darkness of the shrubbery paths into the wilderness and seemed to waver, but he drew a little letter out of the belt of his tunic and studied it, meditating.
“In fact,” said he to himself, “the whole affair wears the aspect of a mad adventure; it would not be the first time that malice had assumed such a disguise! But no! Such a scheme would be too clumsy; what warranty would the traitor have, that I should come alone? Besides, if I have any knowledge of love-intrigue, these lines were undoubtedly written by a woman’s hand.”
He opened the note,[93] which was written on pale yellow Alexandrian paper with the finest ink. The red silk that tied it was sealed with yellow wax, and bore the impression of a finely-cut intaglio. The handwriting betrayed practice, and the whole thing looked as if it had come from the hands of a cultivated and distinguished fine lady. The contents answered to this supposition; the style was marked by aristocratic affectations and rhetorical grace, while it revealed that vein of eager, jealous passion, which stamps the Roman woman to this day.