"Unto Caesar". Baroness Emmuska Orczy Orczy
on the face.
She had spoken as if to the humblest of her menials, finding pleasure in putting this insult on the man who had dared to thwart and irritate her; but she had not spoken deliberately; it had been an impulse, an irresistible desire to see him down on his knees, in a position only fit for slaves.
Directly the words had left her mouth, she already regretted them, for his refusal now would have been doubly humiliating for herself, and her good sense had told her already that no patrician—least of all Taurus Antinor—would submit quietly to public insult and ridicule even from her.
The quick, more gentle word was already on her lips, the look of mute apology was struggling to her eyes, when to her astonishment the praefect, without a word, was down on his knees before her.
"Nay!" she said, "I did but jest."
"The honour," he said quietly, "is too great, O daughter of Cæsar, that I should forego it now."
His powerful shoulders were bent almost to the level of the ground, and she looked down on him, more puzzled than ever at this stranger whose every action seemed different from those of his fellow-men. She put her little foot slightly forward, and as he tied the string of her shoe she saw how slender was his hand, firm yet tapering down to the elegant finger-tips; the hand of a patrician even though he hailed from the barbaric North.
Suddenly she smiled. But this he did not see for he was still intent upon the shoe, but she felt that those slender hands of his were singularly clumsy. And she smiled because she had recollected how like his fellowmen he really was, how he evidently forgot his wrath and sank his pride for the pleasure of kneeling at her feet.
To this homage she was well accustomed. Many there were in Rome who at this moment would gladly have changed places with the praefect. More than one great patrician had craved the honour of tying her shoe, more than one patrician hand had trembled whilst performing this service.
And Dea Flavia smiled because already she guessed—or thought that she guessed—what would follow the tying of her shoe—a humble kiss upon her foot, the natural homage of a man to her beauty and to her power.
The daughter of Cæsar smiled because the spirit of child-like waywardness was in her, and she thought that she would like the slave-like homage from this man whom her wrath and threats had left impassive but whom her beauty had at last brought down to his knees; and thus smiling she waited patiently, content that he should be clumsy, glad that in the distance, under the arcade of the tabernae, she had spied Hortensius Martius watching with wrathful eyes every movement of the praefect. She wondered if the young exquisite had heard the wordy warfare between herself and the proud man who now knelt quite awkwardly at her feet, and she guessed that what Hortensius had seen and heard, that he would retail at full length to his friends in the course of the banquet given by Caius Nepos to-morrow night.
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