So it was with a feeling of profound terror that Acté ascended the stairs leading to the apartments of Lucius; and so powerful had this feeling grown that, on reaching the door, and just as Sporus was about to turn the key, she stopped and placed one hand on his shoulder, laying the other on her heart, the beating of which almost stifled her. At last, after a moment’s hesitation, she motioned to Sporus to open the door; the slave obeyed, and at the further end of the apartment she perceived Lucius, clothed in a simple white tunic and half-reclining on a couch. All sad recollections were at once effaced from her memory. She had thought that she could not help seeing some change in this man, now that she had learnt him to be the master of the world; but at a single glance she recognised in him Lucius, the handsome young man with the golden beard, whom she had guided to her father’s house. She had found again her Olympian victor; Caesar had disappeared. She tried to run to him, but her strength failed her half-way; she sank on one knee, extending her hands towards her lover and murmuring with difficulty:

  “Lucius — you are still Lucius, are you not?”

  “Yes, yes, my fair Corinthian, be not uneasy!” answered Caesar gently, and motioning her to come to him: “still Lucius. Was it not under this name that you loved me, loved me for myself, and not for my crown or for my empire, like all the women by whom I am surrounded? Come, my Acté, rise! the world at my feet, but you in my arms!”

  “Oh! I knew it!” cried Acté, throwing herself upon her lover’s neck; “I knew it was not true that my Lucius was cruel!”

  “Cruel!” said Lucius. “Who has told you that already?”

  “No, no, forgive me!” interrupted Acté: “but the lion, who is noble and courageous like yourself, and who is king among animals as you are Emperor among men, is sometimes regarded as cruel because, not knowing his strength, he slays with his embrace. O my lion, take care of your gazelle!”

  “Fear nothing, Acté,” replied Caesar smiling; “the lion thinks not of his claws and teeth except for those who wish to fight against him. There, you see, he lies at your feet like a lamb.”

  “It is not Lucius whom I fear. In my eyes Lucius is my host and my lover, the man who took me from my country and my father, and who ought to repay me in love what he has robbed me of in chastity. But the man whom I do fear” — she hesitated, and Lucius gave her a sign of encouragement — “is Caesar, who has exiled Octavia — is Nero, the future husband of Poppaea!”

  “You have seen my mother!” cried Lucius, springing to his feet and looking Acté full in the face.

  “Yes,” murmured the girl, trembling.

  “Yes,” went on Nero bitterly; “and it was she who told you that I was cruel, was it not? that my embrace was fatal, and that I had inherited nothing from Jove but the devouring thunderbolt? It was she who told you of this Octavia, whom she protects and whom I detest; whom she thrust into my arms against my will and whom I have rid myself of with so much difficulty! — whose barren love has never yielded me more than forced and submissive caresses. Ah! they are mistaken and in the wrong, if they think to obtain anything from me by wearying me with entreaties or threats. I would fain have forgotten this woman, the last of a cursed race! Let them not give me cause to remember her then!”

  Hardly had Lucius uttered these words ere he was alarmed to see the impression they had produced. Acté, with pallid lips, with head thrown backward and eyes filled with tears, had fallen against the back of the couch, terrified by the first explosion of his wrath to which she had ever listened. His voice, the soft tones of which had at first thrilled the innermost chords of her heart, had assumed in a moment a terrible and menacing tone, while his eyes, in which she had hitherto read nothing but love, gleamed with that terrible glance before which Rome herself quailed and hid her face.

  “O father, father!” sobbed Acté, “forgive me, father!”

  “Yes, for Agrippina has doubtless told you that your love for me will cost you dear; she has pointed out to you what kind of wild beast you were in love with; has told you of the death of Britannicus, of Julius Montanus and I know not how much more. But she has been very careful not to tell you that the one wanted to rob me of my throne, and that the other struck me in the face with a stick. I understand it; my mother’s own life is such a pure one!”

  “Lucius! Lucius!” cried Acté, “hush! in God’s name, hush!”

  “Oh!” continued Nero, “she has confided half of our family secrets to you. Well, listen to the other half. This woman, who reproaches me for the death of a child and of a scoundrel, was banished on account of her licentiousness by her own brother Caligula, whom nobody would accuse of being a severe censor in respect to morals. Recalled from banishment when Claudius ascended the throne, she married Crispus Passienus, a patrician of noble family, who was foolish enough to will his immense fortune to her, and whose assassination she procured because he did not die with sufficient promptness. Then began the struggle between her and Messalina. Messalina got the worst of it, and Claudius was the prize of victory. Agrippina became her uncle’s mistress; it was then that she conceived the scheme of reigning in my name. Octavia, the Emperor’s daughter, was betrothed to Silanus. She tore Silanus from the steps of the altar and procured false witnesses who accused him of incest. Silanus committed suicide, and Octavia was a widow. She was thrown weeping into my arms, and I was forced to take her, though her heart was full of love for another. Presently a woman tried to rob her of her imbecile lover. The witnesses who had accused Silanus of incest accused Lollia Paulina of witchcraft, and Lollia Paulina, who was reputed the most beautiful woman of the day, whom Caligula had espoused after the fashion of Romulus and Augustus, and had exhibited to the Romans wearing a tiara of emeralds and pearls valued at forty million sesterces, died of slow torture. Nothing now stood between her and the throne. The niece married the uncle. I was adopted by Claudius, and the Senate decreed to Agrippina the title of Augusta. Wait, that is not all,” continued Nero, pushing aside Acté’s hands, with which she tried to stop her ears, so as not to hear the accusations of the son against his mother. “There came a day when Claudius condemned to death an adulteress. This sentence made Agrippina and Pallas tremble. On the next day the Emperor dined at the Capitol with the priests. Halotus placed before him a dish of mushrooms prepared by Locusta; and as the dose of poison was not strong enough and when the Emperor, falling backwards on his banqueting couch, was writhing in his agony, his physician Xenophon, on pretence of giving him an emetic, passed a poisoned feather down his throat, and Agrippina found herself a widow for the third time. She passed over this first chapter of her history in silence, did she not? and began it at the moment when she placed me on the throne with the intention of reigning in my name, in the belief that she would be the substance and I the shadow, she the reality and I the phantom. And this state of things did, indeed, last for a while; she had a praetorian guard; she presided over the meetings of the Senate; she issued decrees, condemned the freedman Narcissus to death, and poisoned the Proconsul Julius Silanus. Then one day when, seeing so many sentences inflicted, I complained that she left me nothing to do, she told me that, as it was, I exercised too much authority for one who was not a member of the family, but merely an adopted child, and that fortunately she and the gods had preserved the life of Britannicus. I swear to you that, when she said that, I was no more thinking of that boy than I am thinking to-day of Octavia, and this threat, and not the poison which I gave him, was the actual blow that caused his death. So my crime was not that of being a murderer, but of wishing to be veritably Emperor! Then it was — have patience, I have all but finished, listen carefully to this, you who even in your love are still a maiden chaste and pure — then it was that she attempted to recover, in the capacity of mistress, the ascendancy over me which, as mother, she had lost.”

  “Oh, hush!” cried Acté, in horror.

  “Ah, you mentioned Octavia and Poppaea, but you did not suspect that you had a third rival.”

  “Hush! hush!”

  “And it was not in the silence of the night, in the lonely and mysterious darkness of a retired chamber that she came to me with this intention; no, it was at a banquet, in the midst of an orgy, in the presence of my court. Seneca was present, Burrhus was there, Paris and Phaon were there; everybody was there. In the midst of the singing, in the full blaze of the lights, she advanced towards me, crowned with flowers and almost naked And then it was that her enemies, alarmed at her project and her beauty — for beautiful she undoubtedly is — pushed Poppaea between her and me. Well, what think you of my mother, Acté?”

  “Horrible! horrible!” murmured the girl, putting up her hands to hide her face that was blushing with deadly shame.

  “Yes, ours is a strange family, is it not? So, thinking us unworthy to be men, they have made gods of us! My uncle smothered his tutor with a pillow and his father-in-law in a bath. My father knocked out the eye of a knight in the Forum with a stick; on the Appian Way he crushed beneath the wheels of his chariot a young Roman who did not get out of his way quickly enough; and one day at table, when sitting near the young Caesar, who had accompanied him to the East, he stabbed his freedman for refusing to drink, with the knife which he was using for cutting up his meat. As for my mother, I have told you of her deeds; she killed Passienus, Lollia Paulina, and Claudius, and I, the last of the race, I, with whom our name will become extinct, were I to act as a just Emperor instead of being a dutiful son, I should kill my mother!”

  Acté uttered a terrible cry and fell on her knees, her arms extended towards Caesar.

  “Well, what are you about?” continued Nero with a strange smile; “you are taking seriously what is merely a joke; some verses which have stuck in my memory since the last time I sang ‘Orestes,’ and which have got mixed up with my prose. Come, make your mind easy, foolish child. Besides, you have not come here to supplicate and to be frightened. Did I send for you hither that you should bruise your knees and twist your arms? Come, get up. Am I Caesar? am I Nero? is Agrippina my mother? You have dreamt all this, my fair Corinthian; I am Lucius, the wrestler, the chariot-driver, the singer with the golden lyre and sweet voice, and nothing more.”

  “Oh!” answered Acté, resting her head against his shoulder, “it is true there are moments when I could believe that I was under the influence of a dream and should wake up to find myself in my father’s house, were it not that I feel in the depths of my heart the reality of my love. Oh, Lucius! Lucius! do not trifle with me thus; do you not see that I am suspended by a thread over the yawning gulf of hell? Have pity on my weakness; do not drive me mad.”

  “And whence come these fears and this grief? Has my fair Helen any complaint against her Paris? Is not the palace in which she dwells sufficiently magnificent to satisfy her? We will build her another with silver columns and capitals of gold. Have the slaves who serve her been wanting in respect? She has the power of life and death over them. What does she wish for? what does she desire? and all that a man, all that an Emperor, all that a God can grant, let her ask and she shall have it.”

  “Yes, I know that you are all-powerful, I believe that you love me, and that you would give me everything I asked you for; everything except peace of mind and the inward conviction that Lucius is mine, even as I am his. There is now a whole side of your personality, a whole part of your life that escapes me, that is wrapped in shadow and buried in darkness. It is Rome, the empire, the world, which claims you, and you are not mine, except at the single point at which I touch you. You have secrets, you cherish hatreds which I cannot share, loves which I must not know. Amid our tenderest outpouring, our sweetest discourse, our most intimate moments, a door will be opened as yonder door is opening at this moment, and a freedman with impassive countenance will give you some mysterious signal which I cannot, and must not, understand. See, here is the beginning of my apprenticeship.”

  “What is it, Anicetus?” said Nero.

  “The woman whom the divine Caesar asked for is here, waiting.”

  “Tell her that I will come to her,” replied the Emperor.

  The freedman went out.

  “There, you see,” said Acté, looking at him sadly.

  “Explain yourself,” said Nero.

  “There is a woman there?”

  “Certainly.”

  “And I felt you give a start when she was announced.”

  “Does nothing except love make people start?”

  “That woman, Lucius.”

  “Go on — I am waiting.”

  “That woman.”

  “Well! that woman?”

  “Her name is Poppaea.”

  “You are wrong,” answered Nero, “her name is Locusta.”

  CHAPTER IX

  NERO rose and followed the freedman; after taking several turnings through the secret corridors which were known only to the Emperor and his most trusted slaves, they entered a small chamber without any windows, which was lighted and ventilated from the roof. The opening in this was constructed, not so much to give light to the room as to give a means of escape to the smoke which, at certain times, exhaled from bronze chafing-dishes, extinguished at the present moment, but on which the coal lay ready, wanting only breath and sparks, those two great authors of all life and light, around the chamber were ranged vessels of glass and of earthenware of strange and elongated shapes, which seemed to have been modelled by some capricious designer on vague recollections of quaint birds and unknown fishes; jars of various sizes, carefully closed with lids on which the astonished eye tried to decipher conventional characters belonging to no language, were arranged on circular shelves and surrounded the magic laboratory like those mysterious bands which swathe the figures of mummies, and above these were hung from golden nails plants, either dried or still green, according as they were to be used with fresh leaves or powdered. The greater number of these herbs had been culled at the times prescribed by magicians, that is to say, at the commencement of the dog-days, at that precise and short period of the year when the magician could be seen neither by the sun nor by the moon. The jars contained the most rare and valuable preparations: in some were salves which rendered people invisible, composed, at great expense and with great trouble, of the head and tail of a flying serpent, hair plucked from a tiger’s head, lion’s marrow, and the foam of a winning horse; others contained basilisk’s blood, called also blood of Saturn, a potent prescription for the accomplishment of every wish; lastly, there were vases which could not be purchased for their weight in diamonds, in which were sealed-up packets of that perfume so rare that only Julius Caesar, it was said, could have procured it, and which is found in apyrine gold, that is to say, gold which has not yet been submitted to the ordeal of fire. Among these plants were wreaths of sun-gold, that flower which bestows favour and glory, and bunches of vervain uprooted with the left hand, the leaves, stalks, and roots of which had been dried separately in the dark. This latter was for joy and pleasure; for by sprinkling the dining-hall with water in which a few of its leaves had been steeped, there was no guest so morose, no philosopher so grave, but soon thawed to a condition of the wildest gaiety.

  A woman was waiting for Nero in this chamber; she was dressed in black, her robe gathered up on one side as high as her knee with a brooch of carbuncle; in her left hand was a hazel wand, a plant that had the property of discovering hidden treasure. She was sitting down, and was buried in such a profound reverie that the entrance of the Emperor could not distract her from her preoccupation. Nero approached her, and as he advanced, her face assumed a curious expression of fear, dislike, and contempt. When he was quite close to her, he motioned to Anicetus, who touched the woman’s shoulder with his hand, upon which she slowly raised her head, shook it to throw back her hair which, falling down freely without comb or fillet, covered her face like a veil every time she bent her head. This movement allowed the countenance of the sorceress to be seen; it was that of a woman of from thirty-five to thirty-seven, who had once been beautiful, but was withered before her time by insomnia, debauchery, and possibly remorse.

  She was the first to speak, addressing Nero without rising or making any other movement than that of her lips.

  “What do you want with me now?” she said to him.

  “In the first place,” said Nero, “do you remember the past?”

  “Ask Theseus if he remembers the infernal regions.”

  “You remember that I took you from a loathsome prison, where you were slowly dying, rotting in the mud in which you lay, while odious reptiles crawled over your hands and face.”

  “It was so cold that I did not feel them.”

  “You know where I placed you, in a house which I built for you and furnished as though for a mistress; your occupation was called a criminal one, I called it an art; your accomplices were hunted down, I gave you pupils.”

  “And in exchange I endowed you with half the power of Jupiter: I placed at your service — Death — that blind and deaf daughter of Sleep and Night.”

  “Good! I see that you remember: I have sent for you again.”

  “Who is to die now?”

  “Oh, for that matter, you must guess, for I cannot tell you; it is an enemy so powerful and so dangerous that I cannot breathe the name even to the statue of Silence. Only, you must be careful; for the poison must not be slow, as in the case of Claudius, or fail at the first attempt, as happened to Britannicus; it must kill instantaneously without giving time for him or for her whom it attacks to utter one word or make one sign; in short, I must have a poison like the one we compounded, in this very place, and with which we experimented on a boar.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22