Henryk Sienkiewicz
translation: Jeremiah Curtin

QUO VADIS
A Narrative of the Time of Nero
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Chapter LXXIII

PETRONIUS was not mistaken. Two days later young Nerva, who had always been friendly and devoted, sent his freedman to Cuma with news of what was happening at the court of Casar.

The death of Petronius had been determined. On the morning of the following day they intended to send him a centurion, with the order to stop at Cuma, and wait there for further instructions; the next messenger, to follow a few days later, was to bring the death sentence.

Petronius heard the news with unruffled calmness.

"Thou wilt take to thy lord," said he, "one of my vases; say from me that I thank him with my whole soul, for now I am able to anticipate the sentence."

And all at once he began to laugh, like a man who has came upon a perfect thought, and rejoices in advance at its fulfilment.

That same afternoon his slaves rushed about, inviting the Augustians, who were staying in Cuma, and all the ladies, to a magnificent banquet at the villa of the arbiter.

He wrote that afternoon in the library; next he took a bath, after which he commanded the vestiplica to arrange his dress. Brilliant and stately as one of the gods, he went to the triclinium, to cast the eye of a critic on the preparations, and then to the gardens, where youths and Grecian maidens from the islands were weaving wreaths of roses for the evening.

Not the least care was visible on his face. The servants only knew that the feast would be something uncommon, for he had issued a command to give unusual rewards to those with whom he was satisfied, and some slight blows to all whose work should not please him, or who had deserved blame or punishment earlier. To the cithara players and the singers he had ordered beforehand liberal pay. At last, sitting in the garden under a beech, through whose leaves the sun-rays marked the earth with bright spots, he called Eunice.

She came, dressed in white, with a sprig of myrtle in her hair, beautiful as one of the Graces. He seated her at his side, and, touching her temple gently with his fingers, he gazed at her with that admiration with which a critic gazes at a statue from the chisel of a master.

"Eunice," asked he, "dost thou know that thou art not a slave this long time?"

She raised to him her calm eyes, as blue as the sky, and denied with a motion of her head.

"I am thine always," said she.

"But perhaps thou knowest not," continued Petronius, "that the villa, and those slaves twining wreaths here, and all which is in the villa, with the fields and the herds, are thine henceforward."

Eunice, when she heard this, drew away from him quickly, and asked in a voice filled with sudden fear,--

"Why dost thou tell me this?"

Then she approached again, and looked at him, blinking with amazement. After a while her face became as pale as linen. He smiled, and said only one word,--

"So!"

A moment of silence followed; merely a slight breeze moved the leaves of the beech.

Petronius might have thought that before him was a (...)

(......)