‘Asclepiades teaches,’ answered the physician, with the scarcely veiled sneer which marked his tone of voice, ‘how good it is that the pains of dying men should be dissipated by comedy and song. The Empress can order some comedians to play in the adjoining chamber. If they cannot avail the divine Claudius, they will at least serve to amuse my humble self, and I have now been in this room for many hours.’
‘No, Augusta,’ he answered. ‘To dissipate the too suspicious silence, I have occasionally made curious sounds, at which I am an adept. They will delude any chance listener into the belief that my patient is still alive.’
For a moment her soul was shocked by the suggestion of sending for the mummers. But she saw that it would help to prevent the truth from leaking out. For one instant she lifted the purple robe and looked on the old man of sixty-four, who had thus ended his reign of fourteen years. She dropped it over the features, which, in the majesty of death, had lost all their coarseness and imbecility, and showed the fine lineaments of his ancestors. The moment afterwards she was sorry that she had done it. That dead face haunted all her after life.
Leaving the chamber without a word, she gave orders that, as the Emperor was now awake, and had asked for something to amuse him, some skilled actors of comedy should be sent for to play to him from the adjoining room. They came and did their best, little knowing that their coarse jests and riotous fun did but insult the sacred majesty of death. After an hour or two Xenophon, who had been laughing uproariously, came out, thanked them in the Emperor’s name, and dismissed them.
But Agrippina had hastened to one of the audience rooms, in which the Palace abounded, and sent for Britannicus and Octavia, and for their half-sister Antonia. She embraced them with effusive fondness. It was her special object to detain Britannicus in her presence, lest if but one faithful friend discovered that Claudius was dead, he might summon the adherents of the young prince, and present him to the people as the true heir to the throne. With pretext after pretext she detained him by her side, telling him of the pride and comfort which she felt in his resemblance to the Emperor, calling him a true Cæsar, a true Claudius. Again and again she drew him to her knee; she held him by the hand; she passed her jewelled fingers through his hair; she amused him with the pretence of constant messages to the sick-room of his father. And all the while her soul was half-sick with anxiety, for the Chaldæans still sent to say that the hour was inauspicious, and she did not fail to observe that the boy, as much as he dared to show his feelings, saw through her hypocrisy, resented her caresses. He burned to visit the bedside of his father, and was bitterly conscious that something was going on of which he and his sisters were the special victims. For he was a noble and gifted boy. Something he had of the high bearing of his race, something, too, of the soft beauty of his mother. His tutor, the grammarian Sosibius, had done for him all that had been permitted, and though Britannicus had purposely been kept in the background by the wiles of his stepmother, the teacher had managed to inspire him with liberal culture, and to enrich his memory with some grand passages of verse. Nero was more than three years his senior, and in superficial qualities and graces outshone him; but keen observers whispered that though Britannicus could not sing or paint or drive a chariot like his stepbrother, and was less fascinating in manner and appearance, he would far surpass Nero in all manly and Roman virtues. The heart of Octavia was full of unspeakable misgivings. Motherless, unloved, neglected, she had known no aspect of life except its tragedy, and none had as yet taught her any possible region in which to look for comfort under the burden of the intolerable mystery.