When he spoke he said:
"It is my opinion that Phorbas is innocent. I have inspected the house
where the murder took place. From the condition of the looted rooms it is
plain that more jewelry was stolen than any one man could carry off.
Manifestly two men participated in the robbery and murder and escaped
with their booty, very likely the same pair who robbed Falco's
_triclinium_ on the Nones of May. The janitor's confessed delinquency
explains how they entered and got away unhindered and unseen. The dead
man's heirs should punish the janitor. I hold no other slave at fault. Has
any man anything which he wishes to say before I pass formal judgment for
official record?' Lustralis asked permission to speak and amazed me by his
fluency, his ingratiating delivery, his vehemence, his ingenuity and the
fantastic malignity of his contentions. Corbulo heard him out to the end,
unmoving as a statue.
"You do not look like a lunatic nor act like one, Lustralis," he said,
"but you talk like one. Phorbas has impressed me by every feature of his
tale. He appears to have told the truth. He seems to have been a sincere
friend to his late master. I cannot credit the wild suggestion that a man
of his character would plot his master's death, or that a man of his
intelligence, with a full knowledge of the terms of his master's will,
would expose himself to suspicion by so plotting; far less that such a man
as he would ignore the perils of such a crime and so desire his freedom
and the legacies promised him as to league himself with two criminals,
assist them to enter the house and to escape from it, and hope to come off
unscathed and unsuspected and forever unbetrayed.
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