His blue eyes turned upon her with looks of the deepest, the most fervent gratitude, and again the wild love surged up in her heart, and threatened to swamp every consideration but its own irresistible longing. His answer, however, sent it ebbing coldly back again.
“We shall be ever grateful; oh! that either of us could prove it! We shall not forget Valeria.”
Myrrhina thought her mistress had never looked so queenly, as when she called her up at this juncture, and bade her fetch a purse of gold from her own cabinet, and one of the swords that hung in the vestibule, and deliver them to Esca. Then, very erect and pale, Valeria walked towards the house, apparently insensible to his thanks and protestations, but turned round ere she had reached the threshold, and gave him her hand to kiss. Myrrhina returning from her errand, saw the face that was bent over him as he stooped in act of homage, and even that hollow‐hearted girl was touched by its wild, tender, and mournful expression, but ere he could look up, it was cold and passionless as marble once more. Then she disappeared slowly through the porch, and Myrrhina with all her daring had not the courage to follow her into the privacy of her own chamber.
The stars shone brilliantly down on the roofs of the great city—roofs that covered in how various a multitude of hopes, fears, wishes, crimes, joys, study, debaucheries, toil, and repose. What enormities were veiled by a tile some half an inch thick! What contrasts separated by a partition of a deal plank, and a crevice stopped with mortar! Here, a poor worn son of toil, working with bleared eyes and hollow cheeks to complete the pittance that a whole day’s labour was insufficient to attain; there, a sleek pampered slave, snoring greasily on his pallet, drenched with pilfered wine, and gorged with the fat leavings of his master’s meal. On this side the street, a whole family penned helplessly together in a stifling garret; on that, a spacious palace, with marble floors, and airy halls, and lofty corridors, devoted to the occasional convenience and the shameful pleasures of one man—a patrician in rank, a senator in office; yet, notwithstanding, a profligate, a coward, a traitor, and a debauchee. Could those roofs have been taken off; could those chambers have been bared to the million eyes of night that seemed to be watching her so intently, what a mass of corruption would Imperial Rome have laid bare! There were plague‐spots under her purple, festering and spreading and eating into the very marrow of the mistress of the world. Up six storeys, under the slanting roof, in a miserable garret, a scene was being enacted, bad as it was, far below the nightly average of vice and treachery in Rome.