The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) - The UK Mirror Service

THE MEN 5
popular faction.
It was at this untimely hour, that a man might have been seen
lurking beneath the shadows of an antique archway, decorated
with half-obliterated sculptures of the old Etruscan school, in
one of the narrow and winding streets which, lying parallel to
the Suburra, ran up the hollow between the Viminal and Quirinal
hills.
He was a tall and well-framed figure, though so lean as to
seem almost emaciated. His forehead was unusually high and
narrow, and channelled with deep horizontal lines of thought and
passion, across which cut at right angles the sharp furrows of
a continual scowl, drawing the corners of his heavy coal-black
eyebrows into strange contiguity. Beneath these, situated far
back in their cavernous recesses, a pair of keen restless eyes
glared out with an expression fearful to behold—a jealous, and
unquiet, ever-wandering glance—so sinister, and ominous, and
above all so indicative of a perturbed and anguished spirit, that
it could not be looked upon without suggesting those wild tales,
which speak of fiends dwelling in the revivified and untombed
carcasses of those who die in unrepented sin. His nose was keenly
Roman; with a deep wrinkle seared, as it would seem, into the
sallow flesh from either nostril downward. His mouth, grimly
compressed, and his jaws, for the most part, firmly clinched
together, spoke volumes of immutable and iron resolution; while
all his under lip was scarred, in many places, with the trace of
wounds, inflicted beyond doubt, in some dread paroxysm, by the
very teeth it covered.
The dress which this remarkable looking individual at that
time wore, was the penula, as it was called; a short, loose [13]
straight-cut overcoat, reaching a little way below the knees, not
fitted to the shape, but looped by woollen frogs all down the
front, with broad flaps to protect the arms, and a square cape or
collar, which at the pleasure of the wearer could be drawn up so
as to conceal all the lower part of the countenance, or suffered to