‘He breathed his last,’ answered the man, ‘within an hour of being carried from the feast.’
Something disquieted Nero. Furtively pointing his finger towards the dead boy, he said something to Tigellinus.
‘A little chalk will set that right,’ whispered Tigellinus in reply, and he gave an order into the ear of his confidential slave. Leave the corpse a moment,’ he said aloud to the attendants; ‘the Emperor wishes to take a last look at his brother.’
The slave of Tigellinus brought a piece of chalk; and Nero, with his own hand, chalked over some livid patches on the dead boy’s face, which already betrayed the horrible virulence of the poison.
‘Why linger in the charnel-house?’ said Senecio affectedly. ‘Cæsar, may we not have some more wine to refresh our sorrow?’
They turned away, and, before they were outside the hall, a light laugh woke a shuddering echo along the fretted roof.
The bearers were on the point of lifting the bier when Agrippina entered. The dullest of the spectators could see that there was nothing feigned in her anguish as she wept and tore her hair. She grieved for Britannicus, whom she had so irreparably wronged, but hers was a wild and selfish grief, the grief of rage and frustrated purposes. She had built upon this boy’s life to keep her son in terror of her influence. She saw now of what crimes Nero had already become capable. He who in so brief a space had developed into a fratricide, how long would it be ere he would spare the life of an obnoxious mother? She felt, even then, in a bitterness of soul which could not be expressed, that even-handed justice was commending the ingredients of the poisoned chalice to her own lips.
The obsequies were not only disgracefully hurried, but disgracefully mean. Every ceremony which marked a great public funeral was omitted. There were no lictors dressed in black; no siticines with mourning strains; nor præficæ, or wailing women; no lessus, or funeral dirge. Happily too, as some thought, there were not the customary buffoons, nor the archimimus to imitate the words and actions of the deceased. Though he was the noblest of the noble, no liberated slaves walked before his bier, nor men who wore the waxen images of his long line of ancestors. No relations followed him—men with veiled heads, women with unbound tresses. Many a freedman, even many a slave, had a longer funeral procession than the last of the Claudii.
They bore him to his funeral amid storms of rain, which seemed to betoken the wrath of Heaven. The spectators were few, but those few saw by the struggling light of their lanterns that where the rain had washed off the chalk the pale face was marked with patches of black. They saw this, and pointed it out to one another in silence.
The last offices were paid in haste by the drenched and half-frightened attendants. The body was laid on the small rough pyre. Julius Densus was there, and Pudens, and Titus, and Flavius Clemens. Nero had not the grace to be present. With averted face Pudens thrust in the torch. The rain had damped the wood, and at first it would not kindle, but they threw oil and resin into it. At last it blazed up; the body was consumed: the glowing embers were quenched with wine. A handful of white ashes in a silver urn, a sad memory in a few loving hearts, were all that remained on earth of the poisoned son of an emperor of Rome.