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When a maid summoned me into her tablinum, I found her alone, seated in her favorite lounging chair, charmingly attired and, I thought, more lovely than I had ever seen her. "Oh, Caia!" I cried. She bridled and stared at me haughtily. "'Vedia," if you please, she said coldly. "You have no manner of right to 'Caia' me, Andivius."
On the morning of the nineteenth day before the Kalends of September one of the runners brought me a letter. It read: "Vedia gives greetings to Andivius. If you are well I am well also." But this formal opening altered at once to familiar writing. "You are acting like a silly boy.
I saw nothing whatever, yet I seemed to feel a presence, seemed to hear a faint footfall, seemed to be aware of another human being standing close to me. Then I heard a deep, resonant, healthy, pleasant-sounding voice ask: "Brother in misfortune, who are you?" I was past any impulse towards dissimulation or any belief in its utility. "I am Andivius Hedulio."
I thought I was lucid and convincing. When I paused Vedius leered at me. "Andivius," he said, "I am not such a fool as you take me for. I am not in any way deceived by all that rigmarole. I see through you and your words as I saw through your actions. I comprehend perfectly that you connived with the Satronians to entice my people into a roadside brawl to discredit our clan.
When I finished the story of my giving warning of the plot in the ergastulum at Nuceria I paused. "Go on, lad!" he urged. "You have had adventures and you narrate them tellingly." I hesitated and then, utterly reckless, I blurted out: "If I am to go on with my story you might as well know right now, that I am not only Andivius Hedulio, but also Felix the Horse-Wrangler." He swore a great oath.
His expression was malign and sneering, his tone sarcastic, but his mere words were not discourteous. "I am delighted to see you, Andivius," he said, "and very much amazed to see you here.
Pass the word swiftly to all your satellites, here and in Sabinum. Let them all know that if Andivius Hedulio dies by poison or violence or is injured by any weapon, you two at Rome and your brother at Villa Vedia and your son, Satro, at Villa Satronia, will not see two more sunrises. I know how to enforce my will, and well you know that.
"I could hear it all," he managed to say. "You two stand facing me," Commodus commanded. "Stand on either side of Andivius." They so placed themselves with a very bad grace. The Emperor raised his voice. "Come near, all you senators," he commanded. "I want all of you to hear what I am about to say and to be witnesses to it."
The danger to my former self as Andivius Hedulio, implicated in a conspiracy against Caesar, appeared now far off and unimportant, in spite of the fact that the secret service might still be keen to catch me and the hue and cry out after me from the Alps to Rhegium; the danger to my present self from the enmity of Bulla, of his ruffians, of their partisans in Umbria, of their Chief, the King of the Highwaymen, whoever he might be, appeared close and menacing.
"How did you know of it?" I queried. Up to his neck in leaves, arms under too, only his head out, Agathemer blushed all over his handsome face. "Before Andivius won the suit," he said, "while Philargyrus was still Furfur's tenant, I had an impassioned love-affair with one of Furfur's slave-girls.
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