Veranilda | Page 4

plague, crouched under the
rapacious tyranny of governors from Byzantium.
Though children born when King Theodoric still reigned had yet scarce
grown to manhood, that golden age seemed already a legend of the past.

Athalaric, Amalasuntha, Theodahad, last of the Amal blood, had held
the throne in brief succession and were gone; warriors chosen at will by
the Gothic host, mere kings of the battlefield, had risen and perished;
reduced to a wandering tribe, the nation which alone of her invaders
had given peace and hope to Italy, which alone had reverenced and
upheld the laws, polity, culture of Rome, would soon, it was thought,
be utterly destroyed, or vanish in flight beyond the Alps. Yet war did
not come to an end. In the plain of the great river there was once more a
chieftain whom the Goths had raised upon their shields, a king, men
said, glorious in youth and strength, and able, even yet, to worst the
Emperor's generals. His fame increased. Ere long he was known to be
moving southward, to have crossed the Apennines, to have won a battle
in Etruria. The name of this young hero was Totila.
In these days the senators of Rome, heirs to a title whose ancient power
and dignity were half-forgotten, abode within the City, under constraint
disguised as honour, the conqueror's hostages. One among them, of
noblest name, Flavius Anicius Maximus, broken in health by the
troubles of the time and by private sorrow, languishing all but unto
death in the heavy air of the Tiber, was permitted to seek relief in a
visit to which he would of his domains in Italy. His birth, his repute,
gave warrant of loyalty to the empire, and his coffers furnished the
price put upon such a favour by Byzantine greed. Maximus chose for
refuge his villa by the Campanian shore, vast, beautiful, half in ruin,
which had been enjoyed by generations of the Anician family; situated
above the little town of Surrentum it caught the cooler breeze, and on
its mountainous promontory lay apart from the tramp of armies. Here,
as summer burned into autumn, the sick man lived in brooding silence,
feeling his strength waste, and holding to the world only by one desire.
The household comprised his unwedded sister Petronilla, a lady in
middle age, his nephew Basil, and another kinsman, Decius, a student
and an invalid; together with a physician, certain freedmen who
rendered services of trust, a eunuch at the Command of Petronilla, and
the usual body of male and female slaves. Some score of glebe-bound
peasants cultivated the large estate for their lord's behoof.
Notwithstanding the distress that had fallen upon the Roman nobility,
many of whom were sunk into indigence, the chief of the Anicii still
controlled large means; and the disposal of these possessions at his

death was matter of interest to many persons-- not least to the clergy of
Rome, who found in the dying man's sister a piously tenacious
advocate. Children had been born to Maximus, but the only son who
reached mature years fell a victim to pestilence when Vitiges was
camped about the City. There survived one daughter, Aurelia. Her the
father had not seen for years; her he longed to see and to pardon ere he
died. For Aurelia, widowed of her first husband in early youth, had
used her liberty to love and wed a flaxen-haired barbarian, a lord of the
Goths; and, worse still, had renounced the Catholic faith for the
religion of the Gothic people, that heresy of Arianism condemned and
abhorred by Rome. In Consequence she became an outcast from her
kith and kin. Her husband commanded in the city of Cumae, hard by
Neapolis. When this stronghold fell before the advance of Belisarius,
the Goth escaped, soon after to die in battle; Aurelia, a captive of the
Conquerors, remained at Cumae, and still was living there, though no
longer under restraint. Because of its strength, this ancient city became
the retreat of many ladies who fled from Rome before the hardships
and perils of the siege; from them the proud and unhappy woman. ever
held apart, yet she refused to quit the town when she would have been
permitted to do so. From his terrace above the Surrentine shore,
Maximus gazed across the broad gulf to the hills that concealed Cumae,
yearning for the last of his children. When at length he wrote her a
letter, a letter of sad kindness, inviting rather than beseeching her to
visit him, Aurelia made no reply. Wounded, he sunk again into silence,
until his heart could no longer bear its secret burden, and he spoke--not
to Petronilla, from whose austere orthodoxy little sympathy was to be
expected--but to his nephew Basil, whose generous mettle willingly
lent itself to