What pathos is there in the fact that even the worst and most criminal of human souls have rarely died entirely unloved! Even a Marat, even a Robespierre, even a Borgia, even an Agrippina, found at least one to mourn when they were dead.
CHAPTER XXXVII
VICTOR OVER THE PUBLIC SERVITUDE
‘Palliduamque visa
Matris lampade respicis Neronem.’
Stat. Sylv. II. vii. 118.
‘Prima est hæc ultio, quod se
Judice nemo nocens absolvitur.’
Juv. Sat. xiii. 2.
There is a marvellous force of illumination in a great crime, but it is the lurid illumination of the lightning-flash, revealing to the lost Alpine wanderer the precipices which yawn on every side of him. While the murder was yet to do, Nero could talk of it lightly and eagerly among the accomplices who were in the secret. To the irresponsible Emperor of the world it did not seem so great a matter to order the murder of a mother. But when the deed was done, when he had got back to his Baian villa, when the pale face flecked with crimson bloodstains came hauntingly back upon his memory, a horror of great darkness fell upon him. Then first he realised the atrocious magnitude of his crime, and every moment there rang in his ears a damning accusation. The very birds of the air seemed to flit away from him, twittering ‘Matricide! matricide!’ He drank more Falernian from the glittering table, on which yet lay the remains of the banquet, but it seemed as if all his senses were too preternaturally acute with horror to be dulled by wine. He lay down to sleep, but strange sounds seemed to be creeping through the dead stillness of the night, which made him shudder with alarm. If he closed his eyes, there flashed at once upon them the pale face, the firm-set lips, the splashes of blood. The dead eyes of his mother seemed to open upon him with a gleam of vengeance. Till that night he had never known what it was to dream. He started up with a shriek and summoned his attendants round him, and paced up and down in a frenzy of delirium, declaring that when the dawn came he would certainly be slain. They persuaded him to lie down again, but scarcely had he dropped into an uneasy sleep when it seemed to him as though he saw the three Furies sweeping down upon him with the blue snakes gleaming in their hair and the torches shaken in their hands, while his mother, who pointed them to him, shrieked aloud, ‘Ho! murderer of thy mother! no sleep henceforth for thee!’
Leaping once more from that couch of agony, he sat mute, and trembling in every limb, his clenched hands buried in his hair, waiting in anguish the break of day. When the first beam of dawn lit the east, it showed a youth whose pallid features were haggard with agonies of fear.