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"Fairer than the children of men." "Hun Rhavas, dost mind thy promise made to Menecreta?" whispered a timid voice in the African's ear. "Aye, aye!" he replied curtly, "I had not forgotten." There was a lull in the trade whilst the scribes were making entries on their tablets. The auctioneer had descended from the rostrum.
Hun Rhavas was publicly scourged and branded, but he lost neither ears, tongue, nor hand, nor was he deprived of the peculium with which ultimately he hoped to purchase his own freedom and that of his children.
It was Caius Nepos who was here that he might betray those of his accomplices who had swerved from their allegiance to himself, and behind him well hidden by the draperies of the couch cowered Hun Rhavas, the dusky slave of the treasury, he who yesterday had appeared before the tribunal of the praefect of Rome for conspiracy to defraud the State in connection with the sale of the slave-girl Nola.
The slaves all round the room were trembling with fear; Hun Rhavas, huddled under the couch, was shaking like a leaf. But Caius Nepos, calm and dignified, waited in silence until the paroxysm had abated, then he quietly went on with his tale. "There is but little else to tell, O Cæsar.
"And thou, Cheiron," continued the praefect, addressing a fair-skinned slave up on the rostrum who had been assistant hitherto in the auction, "do thou take the place vacated by Hun Rhavas." He gave a few quick words of command to the lictors. "Take the hat from off that girl's head," he said, "and put the inscribed tablet round her neck. Then she can be set up for sale as the State hath decreed."
He had not moved away from the rostrum all the while that the throng of obsequious sycophants and idle lovesick youths had crowded round Dea Flavia. Now he spoke over his shoulder at Hun Rhavas, who had no thought, whilst his comfortable little plot was succeeding so well, that the praefect was paying heed.
All his slaves save the most valuable were thrown on the market, and the patient, hard-working mother saw the fulfilment of her hopes well within sight. It was but a question of gaining Hun Rhavas' ear and of tempting his greed. The girl, publicly offered under unfavourable conditions, and unbacked by the auctioneer's laudatory harangues, could easily be knocked down for twenty aurei or even less.
Even whilst her accomplice, Hun Rhavas, received the full brunt of the praefect's wrath she had scarcely dared to breathe, scarcely felt that she lived in this agony of fear.
No! it was not the gaping crowd that mattered, the exposure on the public platform, the many pairs of indifferent eyes fixed none too kindly upon her: it was that hat upon her head which brought forth in her such a sense of shame that the hot blood rushed to her cheeks; that, and the absence of the tablet round her neck, and Hun Rhavas' disparaging words about her person.
Thou didst know all this, Hun Rhavas, for the duplicate list is before thee even now." "My lord's grace," murmured Hun Rhavas, his voice quivering now, his limbs shaking with the fear in him, "I did not know I " "Thou didst endeavour to defraud the State for purposes of thine own," interposed the praefect calmly.
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