Page:Henryk Sienkiewicz - Quo Vadis (1897 Curtin translation).djvu/66

50 her half-childlike heart for the sweetness of his doctrine, the bitterness of his death, and the glory of his resurrection.

She was confident too that now neither Aulus nor Pomponia would be answerable for her actions; she was thinking therefore whether it would not be better to resist and not go to the feast. On the one hand fear and alarm spoke audibly in her soul; on the other there rose in her the wish to show courage in suffering, in exposure to torture and death. The Divine Teacher commanded thus. He had himself given the example. Pomponia had told her that the most earnest among the adherents desire with all their souls such a test, and pray for it. And Lygia, when she was still in the house of Aulus, had been mastered at moments by a similar desire. She had seen herself as a martyr, with wounds on her hands and feet, white as snow, beautiful with a beauty not of earth, and borne by equally white angels into the azure sky; and her imagination admired such a vision. There was in it much childish brooding, but there was in it also something of self-delight, which Pomponia had reprimanded. But now, when opposition to the will of Cæsar might draw after it some terrible punishment, and when the martyrdom scene of imagination might become a reality, there was added to the beautiful visions and to the delight a kind of curiosity mixed with dread, as to how they would punish her, and what kind of torments they would provide. And her soul, half childish yet, was hesitating on two sides. But Acte, hearing of these hesitations, looked at her with astonishment as if the maiden were talking in a fever. To oppose Cæsar’s will, expose oneself from the first moment to his anger? To act thus one would need to be a child that knows not what it says. From Lygia’s own words it appears that she is, properly speaking, not really a hostage, but a maiden forgotten by her own people. No law of nations protects her; and even if it did, Cæsar is powerful enough to trample on it in a moment of anger. It has pleased Cæsar to take her, and he will dispose of her. Thenceforth she is at his will, above which there is not another in the world.

“So it is,” continued Acte. “I too have read the letters of Paul of Tarsus, and I know that above the earth is God, and the Son of God, who rose from the dead; but on the earth there is only Cæsar. Think of this, Lygia. I know too that thy doctrine does not permit thee to be what I was, and that to you as to the Stoics,—of whom Epictetus has told me,—