Cousin Basil,
you delay the letter; I should wish her to have it before nightfall,
for she thinks anxiously of me.'
'I go. When may I again speak with you?'
'You shall hear when I am at leisure.'
Basil despatched his servant to Cumae not with one letter only, but
with two. Greatly daring, he had himself written to Veranilda; in
brief terms, but every word tremulous with his passion. And for half
an hour he stood watching the sail which wafted his messenger over
the gulf, ruffled to-day by a south-west wind, driver of clouds.
Little thought had he to give to the dying Maximus, but at the ninth
hour he turned his steps to the oratory, once a temple of Isis, and
heard the office, and breathed a prayer for his kindly relative.
Which duty discharged, he prayed more fervently, to whatever saint
or deity has ear for such petitions, that he might be loved by the
Gothic maid.
This evening Maximus seemed to suffer less. He lay with closed eyes,
a look of calm on his worn countenance. Beside him sat Decius,
reading in low tones from that treatise on the Consolation of
Philosophy, which Boethius wrote in prison, a hook wherein Maximus
sought comfort, this last year or two more often than in the
Evangel, or the Lives of Saints.
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