He stood quite still for a veil had descended over his eyes. The whole arena began to spin and to dance before him, the marble columns were twisted awry, thousands upon thousands of distorted faces grinned hideously upon him. Over the trees and the gra.s.s and the stream there was a film of red, the colour of blood, and through this film--which grew thicker and thicker as he gazed--he saw nothing but just opposite to him, across the width of the arena, towering high above everything around, the tall figure of Dea Flavia with her white dress falling straight from the shoulders, her fair hair crowned with diamonds, her face white as her gown and her lips parted as if uttering a cry of horror.
The next moment that cry--it was a woman"s cry--did rend the air from, end to end of the gigantic enclosure, and the cry was echoed and re-echoed by thousands and thousands of throats, as the panther, taking steady aim, leaped straight for the man.
The noise became deafening: men, women, children, everyone screamed, and right through this whirling orgy of sound a voice was shouting, strong and mighty as that of Jupiter when he sends his decrees thundering forth into the air.
"By his throat, Hortensius! By his throat, and I"ll at him whilst he pants!"
Hortensius put out his hands with a last instinctive sense of self-preservation. The mighty voice rang in his ear, it reverberated through the hot noonday air, and clanged against the copper gates as if a powerful arm had smitten them with the axe of Jove.
The man saw the beast"s leap, felt the hot breath in his face, felt the two yellow eyes gleaming on him like burning suns, and his ears buzzed with the din of thousands of shrieks; then he suddenly felt himself uplifted, whilst an agonised roar from the throat of a wounded beast overfilled the seething cauldron of sound.
The praefect of Rome was standing in the arena now, and in his strong arms lifted high above his head he held the swooning man, whilst some few paces away the panther was lying p.r.o.ne, with blood streaming from its quivering jaws.
It had all happened so suddenly that no one afterwards could say how it occurred. But there were those who retained a vision of the whole thing and afterwards shared their impressions with others.
Everyone recollected when my lord Hortensius first entered the arena and the iron gates closed in behind him, that a general feeling of horror fell upon the entire public when it realised that all means of safety, all chance of escape had been removed with those silken ladders, and that the young patrician had in truth been left at the mercy of a powerful brute, goaded to madness through baffled desire for blood.
At that same moment the praefect of Rome disappeared from the imperial tribune, and the terrible scene between the hunting beast and the hunted man had begun.
Time for the man to run round the arena! Time for the brute to stalk and play with its prey! Time, it seems, for the praefect of Rome to make his way from the imperial tribune to the east end of the arena, where was stationed the city guard of which he had full control!
A few precious seconds in making the soldiers understand what he wanted, a few more seconds to command them to obey for they stood as a phalanx against the gate, thinking the praefect mad in desiring to enter the arena--a few more seconds and Taurus Antinor was at last in the arena, shouting to the hunted man to have at the brute with his hands.
But Hortensius was weak from exhaustion brought on by a life of luxury and idleness and by the excitement of the last two days. He put out two feeble hands, and the panther was already on the leap.
And by that time Taurus Antinor was between him and the brute. With a blow of his hard fists--fashioned in far off Northern lands--and with the strength that is given to the barbarians of that sea-washed sh.o.r.e, he had drawn blood from the creature"s jaw and sent it rolling back on its haunches, momentarily dazed.
Only momentarily, however, whilst two hundred thousand throats yelled in unison:
"Habet! Habet! Habet!"
A precious moment that! With a maddened beast, a swooning man and no arms save a pair of fists, hard as iron, made with a hand slender and supple like the finest tempered steel.
And while the panther fell back roaring, and before it could prepare for a new spring, Taurus Antinor had seized the swooning man. It was his turn to run now, for he had but a few seconds in which to save the life of his bitterest foe.
Straight to the walls of the arena did he run, and his voice was heard speaking loudly and commandingly:
"The arcade, man! Rouse thyself! The arcade! The rings in the columns!
Quick!"
It needed the strength of a bullock to accomplish the deed: that, or the strength which comes from unbendable human will. The man, only half-conscious, returned to his senses by the force of that same will.
The instinct of life was strongest in the end, and when Taurus Antinor leapt upon the ledge and hoisted Hortensius" body high up above his head, the young man, with the final effort borne of hope and built upon despair, reached up and caught one of the ma.s.sive rings imbedded in the bases of the fluted columns.
For a few seconds he remained suspended, his body swinging against the marble wall, whilst the public cheered with an enthusiasm that knew no bounds. From below the praefect helped to push the feeble body up, then another jerk, a pull upwards, a push, and Hortensius Martius had found safety in one of the niches of the arcade.
"Hail to the praefect of Rome! Hail!" came in a continuous, thunderous roar from every corner of the arena, even as with a sudden bound the black panther had sprung upon Taurus Antinor, and, catching him unawares, had felled him to the ground.
CHAPTER XXIII
"Well done, thou good and faithful servant."--ST. MATTHEW XXV. 21.
A tumult amongst the people?
Aye! it was here now fully aroused. The praefect of Rome was popular with the plebs. His action in the arena had called forth unbounded enthusiasm. When he fell rolling into the sand, with the black panther snarling above him, his steel-like grip warding for the moment the brute"s jaws from off his throat, the people broke out into regular frenzy.
"The praefect! the praefect!" they shouted.
Men climbed down along the gradients leaping over other men, determined to jump down twelve feet into the arena in order to rescue the praefect from the jaws of the ferocious beast.
But above in the imperial tribune the Caesar sat snarling like the panther and rubbing his hands with glee. His trap had been over-successful, one by one the arch-traitors fell headlong into it.
First Hortensius Martius, that young fool! What mattered if he had escaped from a ravenous panther? The claws of a vengeful Caesar were sharper far than those of any beast of the desert.
And now Taurus Antinor! the praefect of Rome! the man of silence and of integrity! the idol of the people, the scorner of Caesar"s G.o.dhead. Vague rumour had reached Caligula of the praefect"s strange sayings, his refusal to enter the temples and to sacrifice to the G.o.ds. People said that the Anglica.n.u.s worshipped one who claimed to be greater than Caesar and all the deities of Rome.
Well, so be it! There he lay now in the dust, a huddled ma.s.s of man and beast, the sand of the arena reddened with his blood. Caligula screamed like the rest of his people, but his cry was:
"Habet! Habet! Habet!" And in a frenzy of rage and hate his thumb pointed downwards, downwards, as if it were a dagger which he could plunge into the Anglica.n.u.s" throat.
But the city guard were the first to break their bounds. Even whilst the imperial madman exulted and shrieked forth his murderous "Habet!" they had rushed to the rescue of their praefect.
The powerful grasp on the panther"s throat was on the point of relaxing; the brute was digging its claws in the shoulders of the fallen man, and he, feeling faint with loss of blood, looked upon death as it stared down at him from the beast"s golden eyes, and all that he was conscious of was the feeling that death was good.
When the city guard rushed to his rescue, and by dint of numbers and strength of steel tore the ferocious creature from the body of its prey, Taurus Antinor lay a while half conscious. He heard the cry of the people round him, he felt a shower of sweet-scented petals fall upon him from above, he heard the last dying roar of the panther and a scream of rage from the imperial tribune.
Then the din became deafening: the trampling of feet, the rushing hither and thither, the cries, the imprecations, and from beneath the tribunes in their distant prisons, the roar of caged beasts like the far-off rumbling of thunder.
Taurus Antinor raised himself on his knees. Both his shoulders had been lacerated by the panther; he was bleeding from several wounds about the legs and arms, and his whole body felt bruised and stiff.
But he struggled to his feet, and now, leaning against a large tree trunk which had formed part of the setting of the scene, he tried to take in every detail of what was going on around him. There was, of course, a great deal of shouting and a general stampede in the tribunes of the plebs. In the midst of this shouting, which buzzed incessantly like the war of a great cataract, two cries resounded very distinctly above all the others.
Thousands of people were shouting:
"Hail to the praefect! Hail to the G.o.d of valour and of strength! Hail!
Taurus Antinor, hail!"
Whilst others cried more dully, yet equally distinctly:
"Death to the tyrant! Death to the madman! Death to Caesar! Death!"
That he himself was for the moment the object of enthusiasm of this irresponsible crowd, he could not doubt for an instant. That this same irresponsible enthusiasm was leading the crowd to treachery and rebellion was equally certain.
The city guard egged on by the people had forced open the heavy iron gates through which Hortensius Martius had pa.s.sed a while ago, and which led up the marble steps straight to the imperial tribune.