“Nothing is settled,” he replied, “it is true; but I am much troubled about it. _You_ might go, though I do not like the idea of your following the camp; but these dear girls—and yet they cannot be separated from you.”
The unhappy wife saw the truth only too clearly. If the times had been quiet, she might herself have possibly accompanied the legion in its march southward; but even then she could not have taken her daughters with her, her daughters whom she never allowed to go within the precincts of the camp, except on the one day, the Emperor’s birthday, when all the officers’ families were expected to be present at the ceremony of saluting the Imperial likeness. And this had of late been omitted when it was difficult to say from day to day what Emperor the troops acknowledged. The centurion had spoken only too truly; the legion might go, but they must stay behind. She covered her face with her hands and wept.
“Lucia,” cried the elder girl to her sister, “we will enlist; we will take the oath; I should make just as good a soldier as many of the Briton lads they are filling up the cohorts with now; though you, I must allow, are a little too small,” she added, ruefully, as she looked at her sister’s plump little figure, too hopelessly feminine ever to admit the possibility of a disguise. “Cheer up, mother,” she went on, “we shall find a way out of the difficulty somehow.” And she threw her arms round the weeping woman, and kissed her repeatedly.
There was silence for a few minutes, broken at last by the timid, hesitating voice of the younger girl.
“But must you go, father?” she said. “Surely they don’t keep soldiers in the camp for ever. And have you not served long enough? You were in the legion, I have heard you say, before even Maria was born.”
“My child,” said the centurion, “it is true that my time is at least on the point of being finished. Yet I can’t leave the service just now. Just because I am the oldest officer the Legate counts on me, and I can’t desert him. It would be almost as bad as asking for one’s discharge on the eve of a battle. And besides, though I don’t like troubling your young spirits with such matters, I cannot afford it. Were I to resign now I should get no pension, or next to none. But in a year or two’s time, when things are settled down, I hope to get something worth having—some post, perhaps, that would give me a chance of making a home for you.”