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408 DARKNESS AND DAWN
'
not.
and feai
The Lady Pomponia,' he said, '
may speak freely,
I will unloose the coupling- chain, and go into the outer
room.'
Pomponia thanked him, and told the Apostle that she had
long been a baptised sister, and had read his letters to Home
and other churches, and had now come to him for consolation
in unutterable distress of heart. She had but one son the
young and beautiful Aulus, the heir and the hope of their
great house. But Nero had begun to hate her husband and
herself, and was jealous lest some day the army should prefer
the Conqueror of Britain to the tenth-rate actor and singer.
For Agrippina, in one of her fits of rage, had, before her death,
unwisely and unkindly mentioned the youthful Aulus as a
virtuous boy who might one day wear the purple more worthily
than Nero, who disgraced
it ;
and Nero, wounded in his
vanity, had determined on revenge. With a wicked cruelty
which would have been infamous even in a Tiberius or a
Caligula, he had invited the boy to the Palace, had subjected
him to the deadliest insults, and had then ordered him to be
slain, accompanying the order with a brutal jest against his
mother Agrippina. And the people knew of the crime, and
hardly did more than laugh and shrug their shoulders and
;
the Senate knew of the crime, and did not cease for a single
day from its adulation to the tyrant and the ; army knew of
the crime, and not one sword flashed from its scabbard ;
and
the philosophers and the poets knew of the crime, and not
one denunciation scathed that deed of hell.
Pompouia's heart was broken. Did God deal thus with
His servants ? Was the Christ far away in His blue heaven,
and heeded not these things
? And was it not lawful, was it
not a duty, for Christians to help to sweep away from the
earth such a monster of iniquity
?
Might she not rouse her
husband, Aulus Plautius not to avenge the individual
wrong which was breaking his heart, and bringing him down
to the gates of the grave but to rid mankind from the incubus
of an intolerable curse ?
The Apostle saw that his task was difficult. For a moment
he bowed his head, and clasped his hands in prayer. He
needed threefold wisdom to console the mother's anguish ;
to avert the thought of vengeance; to strengthen the faith
which had been assailed by sore perplexity. And the grace