Then, frantic, he seized Furfur and strangled him to death long before
Eclectus had revived Marcia from her swoon.
As Agathemer told it to me all this came out in a haphazard tangle of unfinished sentences, interruptions, fresh starts, questions, answers, repetitions and explanations.
Meanwhile the day had dawned gray and lowering. Of all my strange experiences none were more eery than that talk with Agathemer, beginning in the dark and, with his form and features and expressions effaced, gradually becoming more and more visible. And towards the end of his disclosures he checked himself in the middle of a word and, raising his hand, whispered:
"Hark!"
Silent and tense, we listened. Even in my bedroom, opening on the side gallery of the peristyle, we heard, from over the roofs, cries of:
"The tyrant is dead! The despot is dead! The prize-fighter is dead! The murderer is dead!"
"The news is out!" Agathemer ejaculated, and he breathed a prayer to Mercury, in which I joined. When finally he had told all he had to tell I marvelled:
"Can it be possible that the most intimate and secret conversations of the Prince of the Republic, of the most sedulously guarded man on earth, are thus overheard by underlings and so promptly communicated even to outsiders presumably to be reckoned among his enemies?"
"I conjecture," Agathemer rejoined, "that I am not the only outsider in receipt of information of this kind."
"If you have been, all along," I asked, "in receipt of such information, why have you always talked of Furfur's presence in the Palace and his utilization as a dummy Emperor while Commodus masqueraded as Palus, as a conjecture of yours which you believed, but of which you could not be certain? Why have you not frankly spoken of it as a fact, which many knew of and of which some in a position to know, repeatedly informed you?"