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272 DARKNESS AND DAWN
who was in her confidence, she sent him to a physician
to purchase poison, which she mixed in a cup of wine
and placed ready for the youth at the next meal. It
happened, however, that her own boy, returning hot and
thirsty from school, saw the wine on the table and drank
it. He had scarcely finished the draught, when he fell
to the ground as dead. The slave who attended him filled
the air with his clamour, and when the inmates of the house
came flocking in, one accused another of the crime. The
master of the house was out, and his wife sent to inform
him that her boy had been poisoned, that her step-son was
the murderer. The husband was crushed to the earth by the
double calamity. His boy was dead ;
the elder son, of whom
he had been so proud, was to be tried for murder. Scarcely
were the boy's obsequies finished when the hapless father, his
grey hairs defiled with dust, hastened to the Forum, and
there embraced the knees of the magistrates, and besought
them to avenge him on the fratricide. The local Senate was
assembled, and the herald summoned the accuser. Onesirnus,
who had nothing to do that day, was present at the
trial. He heard the old man plead pathetically against the
son who had been the pride of his life and home ;
he heard
the youth, with all the calm of innocence, deny the charge.
There was no evidence against him but the word of his stepmother
and her confidential slave. This man stood up with
a front of brass, and declared that the youth had been actuated
by jealousy of his brother, and had poisoned him.
There was nothing to rebut this evidence, and every juryman
was prepared to drop into the brazen urn the fatal
ticket marked with the letter C, for condemno, which would
have handed over the offender to be first scourged until his
bones were laid bare, and then to be sewed up in a sack witk
a cock, a dog, and a viper, and to be flung into the sea.
The heart of Onesimus bled for the youth. With his instinctive
power of reading character, he felt convinced of
his innocence. But while with palpitating heart he awaited
the voting, an aged physician arose, and, covering the orifice
'
of the voting-urn with his hand, he said :
Fathers, let me
prevent the triumph of an infamous woman and a perjured
slave. That wretch came to me as a physician, and offered
me a hundred gold pieces for a poison. I read crime in the