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If Pratinas really owned the poor girl as a slave, he could do anything he listed with her, and no law could be invoked to say him nay. There was only one recourse left to Agias, and that was fairly desperate to carry off Artemisia and keep her in hiding until Pratinas should give up the quest and depart for Egypt. That there was peril in such a step he was well aware.
It was Cornelia who spoke; and, with the daughter crying softly on one arm, and the father dragged along in a confused state of ecstasy on the other, she led them both out of the room. Pratinas was on his knees before Cæsar. The Hellene was again eloquent eloquent as never before. In the hour of extremity his sophistry and his rhetoric did not leave him.
Pratinas had lorded it over him and patronized him, in a way which drove the mild-tempered man of learning to desperation. The spirit of evil entered into the heart of Pisander as he left the room.
What disgrace and trouble, if it should all come out!" "Come, come, Ahenobarbus," thrust in Marcus Læca, who had been educated in Catilina's school for polite villains and cut-throats. "Pratinas is only proposing what, if you were a man of spirit, would have been done long ago. You can't complain of Fortune, when she's put a handsome estate in your hands for the asking."
Artemisia had practically told all her story in her letter. It was clear that Calatinus had caught sight of her several times, though she had remained in blissful ignorance, and Pratinas had deliberately planned to waylay him as a customer who would pay a good price for the girl, whom it would be manifestly inconvenient for him to take with Valeria on his premeditated flight to Egypt.
At his right thigh hung, from a silver set girdle, by weighty bronze chains, a heavy sabre, of which the steel scabbard banged noisily as its owner advanced. "Holla! Pratinas," cried the Gaul, as he came close. "By the holy oak! but I'm glad to see you! Come to my room. Have a flagon of our good northern mead." "Hist," said the Greek, cautiously. "Not so boisterous. Better stay here in the dark.
All these later additions and details are, I fear, calculated to detract from the reader's interest in this theater, which I should indeed regret for nothing can be more certain than that this is the veritable stone theater which was built when the wooden one broke down, at the great competition of Æschylus and Pratinas; and tho front seats may have been added, and slight modifications introduced, the general structure can never have required alteration.
And then came a great disappointment. When Cornelia asked and how much the request cost her, only she herself knew to be let into the plot, Lucius owned that he had left the details in the hands of Pratinas, and did not himself know just how or when the blow was to fall.
"I'm Sesostris, servant of Pratinas the Greek." Agias pricked up his ears. "And you live " "In the top story of this tenement;" and Sesostris tried to pick up the hamper. "Oh!" laughed his rescuer, "you must let me save you that trouble. I will carry up the basket. Your master is a brute to pile on such loads."
Lucius Lentulus, his purple-lined tunic dirty and torn, his hair disordered, his face knitted into a bitter frown, crouched on a stool in the little low-ceiled room, confronting the Hellene. Cowering on a mass of filthy straw, his head bowed, his body quaking in a paroxysm of fear, was another whose name Cornelia knew full well. Pratinas was evidently just concluding a series of remarks.
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