“A storm, a storm is coming on,” said the Emperor; “there’ll be storms everywhere, and lightning falling on all sides—portents they say. So be it! as the sword of heaven smites, so does mine. But it falls not on me, but on my enemies. Domitia,” said he, leaving the window, “there has been a conspiracy entered into against my life, and the fools thought to set up Clemens—he, that weakling, that coward; but I have sent him to his death, and those who were associated with him, the sentence is gone forth against them also.”
“I marvel only that any in Rome are suffered to live.”
“Minerva gives me wisdom—to defend myself.”
“Any wild beast can employ teeth and claws.”
“Domitia,” he came close to her, “I am the most lonely of men. I have no friends; my kinsmen either have been, or hate me; my friends are the most despicable of flatterers, who would betray their own parents to save their own throats; I use them, but I scorn them. You know not what it is to be alone!”
“I! I have been alone ever since you tore me from Lamia.”
“Lamia!” he ground his teeth; “still Lamia! But by the Gods! not for long. And you—you my wife whom I have loved, for whom I would have done anything—you are against me; you take counsel with a Chaldæan how long I have to live; the Senate, the nobles hate me, and by Jupiter, they have good cause, for I cut them with a scythe like ripe wheat. That was a good lesson of Tarquin to his son Sextus to nip off the heads of the tallest poppies. And the people—you have been currying favor with them—against me; the soldiers alone love me, because I have doubled their pay; let another offer to treble it and, to a man, they will desert me. By the Immortals! it is terrible to be alone—and to be plotted against, even by one’s wife.”
He walked the room, flourishing his tablets, then halted in front of the clepsydra.
“What said that star-gazer about the twelfth hour?” he asked. “Walls have ears, nothing is said that does not reach me. So, old Saturn, with thy scythe, dost thou threaten? Then I defy thee—ha! I saw the storm was coming up over Rome.”
A long-drawn growl of thunder muttered through the passages of the palace.