She now followed with beating heart. Her cheeks were flushed, a sparkle was in her eye, her breath came fast through her nostrils, her teeth were set.
Without were many lictors lining the way, filling the court.
He led into that portion of the villa where were the baths and entered the warm room. There Domitia saw at once Lamia, stripped almost to the skin, held by soldiers of the prince’s guard, his mouth gagged, and a surgeon standing by with a razor.
She would have sprung to him and thrown her arms around him, had she not been restrained.
“Domitia,” said the young Cæsar; “you will see how that to divorce you is in my power, unless you consent to it yourself, and give yourself to me.”
Domitia trembled in every limb. She looked with distended eyes at Lamia, who had no power to speak, save with his eyes, and they were fixed on her.
A large marble bath stood near, and both hot and cold water could be turned on into it.
She knew but too well what the threat was. Seneca had so perished under Nero,—by the cutting of the veins he had bled to death.
Petronius, master of the Revels to the same tyrant, had suffered in the same manner, and as his blood flowed he had mocked and hearkened to ribald verses till the power to listen and to flaunt his indifference were at an end.
And now the second Nero, not yet full blown, but giving earnest of what he would be, was threatening Lamia with the same death. It was not a gradual and painless extinction, but a death of great suffering, for it led to agonizing cramps, knotting the muscles, and contracting the limbs. Domitia knew this—she had heard the dying agonies of Seneca and Petronius described,—and she looked with quivering lips and bloodless cheeks on him whom she loved best—on the only one in the world she loved, threatened with the same awful death.