Unto Caesar

  CHAPTER XIX

  "Thou art become guilty in the blood that thou hastshed."--EZEKIEL XXII. 4.

  The hunter and the hunted! the lithe supple sinewy creature crawlingwith belly almost touching the ground and stealthy steps that made nosound on the sand of the arena.

  Wary and silent the black beast crawled, now hiding amidst the scrubbygrass, now bounding over trees and stream as if playing with herself,with her own desire for a taste of human blood.

  At first terror had kept the two men rooted to the spot, paralysed, andwith feet deeply imbedded in the sand. Only their eyes seemed alive,roaming along the wall, all round to where on either side the silkenladders made vivid crimson streaks on the white smoothness of themarble.

  The panther waiting, watched them till they moved. The public,entranced, scarcely dared to draw breath.

  Then came a sudden cry from thousands of throats; the two men, as ifdriven by a sudden sense of approaching death, had made a quickdesperate rush, one to the right the other to the left, towards thecrimson silk which meant safety to them.

  But the panther was on guard and quicker twice than they. It seemed asif the brute had divined exactly where lay escape for its prey. It wasguarding both sides of the arena at once, bounding from left to right,and back from right to left with giant leaps, soundless and swift.

  The men paused again, because it seemed that when they were still, thepanther too lay still and watched.

  There was another lull, and from the imperial tribune above Dea Flaviawatched the horrible spectacle, and Taurus Antinor drank into his soulthe beauty of her eyes as they watched--fascinated--every movement ofthe sleek black panther, and of those fair-skinned giants trying toescape from death; she watched the stealthy approach of the beast towardits prey; she watched, motionless and still, the while great beads ofperspiration matted the fair curls on her brow.

  And to the man who loved her, and who saw her thus watching the horriblespectacle which must have made her feel sick and faint, to him it seemedas if in her mind the hideous sight meant something more than just thebrutal display of cruelty which was a familiar one enough in Rome.

  It seemed as if to her some hidden meaning lay in this teasing of aferocious brute, and in this apparent clemency in allowing the victims achance of escape, for every now and then she turned as if involuntarilytoward the Caesar, and a quick glance of understanding seemed to passbetween her and that inhuman monster.

  Taurus Antinor, with his gaze fixed upon her every movement, wonderedwhat all that could mean.

  After a quarter of an hour of tense excitement, of alternate cries ofhorror and screams of delight, the two men had, by dint of cunning andagility, succeeded in evading the panther. They were safe within theprotecting niches; the panther down below was roaring with baffled rage,and the public clapped and cheered vociferously.

  Two more men were thrust into the arena, dressed in the same way as theothers, pushed forward like the others to the accompaniment of abrazier's glow and the smell of burnt flesh.

  The panther, more wary this time, did not allow both men to escape. Yetthey had made a clever dash for safety; one of them was already swinginghimself aloft, but the other had missed his footing once, when he jumpedupon the ledge; he regained it and seized the swinging end of theladder, but the panther, with a bound, had reached him and caught hisfoot in its jaws.

  That hideous noise--the scrunching of a human bone--was drowned intumultuous applause as the miserable wretch with the maimed and bleedingleg, but with that almighty instinct for life at any cost, toiledmangled and bleeding up that ladder less crimson than the trail which heleft in his wake.

  Dea Flavia's head fell forward on the cushion. But she fought againstthe swoon. The ironical laughter of the Augustas round her quicklybrought her to herself.

  "The heat is overpowering," she said calmly in reply to a coarse commentfrom the Caesar.