“Impostor,” he shrieked, “let Imagination, so it can, preserve thee from my wrath.”
He flew at the artist, who sped before him, across and round the room, until, reaching the foot of the painted steps, up the flight sprang Wu Taotsz, and, with a laugh, disappeared within the golden gates.
Following blindly in his anger, the Emperor rushed at the steps, staggered, recovered himself, gave a mortal gasp, and fell back. Before his eyes was just the blank wall of the room. The Palace and Wu Taotsz had vanished together.
Cleopatra and the Decurion
On the headland of Lochias, where it pushed towards the overlapping promontory of Pharos, stood the palace and gardens of the Ptolemies. The great lighthouse on the opposite shore glowed across the strait, and in the deep waters between were planted a number of islets, like gigantic stepping-stones, their intervals closed with booms and chains. These, and the arms of land, enlocked the harbour of Alexandria, all round whose mighty circumference the city flamed like a belt of fire, impassable, magnificent. It was thirty years before the birth of Christ, and the battle of Actium had been fought and, for all that it meant to Egypt and the world, lost. Cleopatra was doomed, and Magdalen, perhaps, conceived.
Mark Antony, desperate, though infatuated still, had come out of his retirement on Pharos, whither he had retreated to brood over his leman’s treachery. The two were reconciled in a way, and sought perpetually to drown in revelry the horror of an impending judgment. The beautiful queen, last expression of a monstrous demonism, its heir and epitome, had no instinct at the last but to gore the world that crushed her—to glut herself with blood and suffering. In these final days her inhumanity surpassed itself. And crowned Antony, glooming in his purple and diamonds, watched and was silent.
One night they sat at supper in the Palace, a fierce nucleus, where enthroned, to all the blazing splendour of the hall. It was so alight with torches that the marble columns on which those hung aloft looked, in their deep reflections in the pavement, as if they were rooted in hell fire. Not a sleek Nubian crossing the floor with a golden dish in his hands but had his “fellow in the cellarage” keeping step with him, like a devil reversed and busy in that under inferno. There were far faint cries in the air—of a doomed city, of some nearer anguish—punctuating the throb and swoon of harps. The swaying of peacock fans in soft undulating arms stirred the floating incense, lest the rank breath of torture should enter and overpower it. There was not a man or woman there whose heart, for all the sensuous glamour, was void of fear—unless it were, perhaps, the Decurion Dentatus. He was young, cold, beautiful as Antinous—a Græco-Roman of the heroic type—and he loved his master Antony.
A Hebe, sweet in years and looks, filled the wine cups of the King and Queen. Antony, lifting his, hesitated on the draught. His eyes, already inflamed, sought his partner’s, half covertly, half challengingly. Cleopatra laughed, and putting her glass to her full lips, drank. She followed a formula in doing so, conceding it agreeably to the very madness of his passion. He was haunted, since his defeat, with the thought that she would poison him to save herself. And yet he loved her. It was not the first or the last time in the history of worship that the supreme egotism had evoked the supreme adoration.
Presently, amidst some amorous fondlings, the Queen took the lily chaplet from her hair and shredded a petal or two from it into her lord’s wine.
“Do you the same by mine, my soul,” she whispered, “and let us drink the very perfume of each other’s wit.”