Her beautiful bosom was exposed to the light, which lingered in a pencil of mellowed lustre, upon its soft, yet sculptured loveliness. The delicate veil of fine muslin which should have veiled those secret beauties, had been violently rent asunder, and hung down in natural folds below her jeweled cincture. On each of her voluptuous bosoms, which hardly heaved under the influence of the chill despair which had frozen up the very sources of her grief, there was a small gout of gore, a speck such as covers the orifice of the smallest punctured wound; but beyond those tiny witnesses there was no stain upon her snow-white kerchief, no trace as of blood which had flowed freely and been wiped away.
Her hands were folded in her lap, the fingers unconsciously playing with a chain of mingled strands of golden thread and dark, auburn hair. Her face was very pale, and cold, and almost stern in its passionless rigidity—the eye was cast downward, immovably riveted on the countenance of the mighty dead; but, from the long, dark lashes there hung no tear. All was composed, silent, self-restrained grief. An occasional shudder crept, as it were, electrically through her whole frame, and now and then her lips moved, as though she were communing with some viewless form; but beyond this there was no motion or no sound.
At a distance from the miserable mistress sat a group of women, attired, as has been said, most gorgeously, but their sad and clouded aspects offered a fearful contrast to their sumptuous garments; near them, and on a table of the richest porphyry, negligently strewn with instruments of music, the Grecian lute, the wild Egyptian systrum, and the Italian pipe, with jeweled tiaras, perfumes, cosmetics, and all the luxuries of a regal toilet, pateræ of solid emerald, drinking-cups of agate, vases and flasks of crystal, there stood a plain, country-looking basket, woven of the slender reeds that grow beside the lake of Mœris, filled with the dark, glossy leaves and purple fruits of the fig-tree.
To a casual glance it might have seemed that there was nothing in the contents of the basket beyond the casual offering of some simple rustic’s gratitude to his queen; but on a nearer view, there might be seen upon the foliage long, slimy trails, twining hither and thither, as if left by the passage of some loathsome reptile. At times, too, there was a slight, rustling sound, a motion of the leaves, not waving regularly as if shaken by the breeze, but heaving up at intervals from the life-like motions of something beneath; and now a scaly back, a small, black head, with eyes glowing like sparks of fire, and an arrowy tongue quivering and darting about like a lambent flame—it was the deadly aspic of the Nile, the most fatal, the most desperately venomous of all the serpents of Africa.
Deeply, fearfully skilled, in all the dark secrets of poisoning and incantation, the wife and sister of the Ptolemies had chosen this abhorred way of avenging upon herself the wrongs of Antony; of baffling the cool malignance of the little-minded man whom Rome’s adulation had even then began to style the August; of freeing herself from the chains, not emblematic, of Roman servitude; from the humiliation of being led along in gliding fetters behind the chariot wheels of the perpetual consul; from the dungeon, the scaffold, the rod, and the axe, which closed alike the triumph of the victor and the misery of the vanquished. Already had the news been conveyed to her—the stunning news that, save in name, she was no more a queen—but the rumor had fallen on a deaf or unregarding ear.
An earthquake, it is written, shook the earth unnoticed by those who fought at Thrasymene, an empire crumbled into ruins unmarked by her who had lost, who had destroyed, an Antony. After the first burst of agony was over, when the self-immolated victim was borne to her in place of the burning, feeling, living lover, she had caused those hated reptiles to be brought to the tomb, which she had entered while yet alive, in the very recklessness of dissimulation and caprice; she had applied them to her delicate bosom, and a thrill of triumphant ecstasy had rushed through her frame as she felt the keen pang of their venomed fangs piercing her flesh, and imbuing the very sources of life with the ingredients of death.
And now she sat in patient expectation, brooding over the ruin she had wrought, calmly awaiting the agony that she well knew must convulse her limbs and distort her features from their calm serenity; while her attendant maidens, with strange and unaccountable devotion, had needlessly and almost unmeaningly followed the example of her, whom they were determined to accompany faithfully not merely to the portals of the tomb, but into the dark regions of futurity. Now, however, when the step was taken from which there is no returning, the courage, which had buoyed them up for a moment and impelled them to the fatal measure, had deserted them.
In the aspect of each, remorse, or pain, or terror was engraved in fearful variety. One gazed with straining eyes, over the glowing landscape, gloriously bathed in the radiance of that setting luminary which would arise, indeed, in renewed splendor but not for her. She saw the distant hills on which she had sported in the uncontaminated freshness of her youth, ere she had been acquainted with the sin and sorrow of courts—the nearer palaces, in whose vaulted halls she had often led the dance in happy, because thoughtless merriment—and her whole spirit was absorbed in that long, wistful view of scenes never to be viewed again.
Another stood, as motionless as the marble column against which she leaned, staring upon her beloved mistress and the lifeless body; but it was evident that the images which were painted on her eye were not reflected on her mind. At intervals a large, bright tear stole slowly down her cheeks and literally plashed on the Mosaic pavement as it fell.
A third, already sensible of the physical agonies that accompany the action of poison on the human system, rocked her body to and fro, every separate nerve writhing and quivering in the extremity of pain, yet still retained so much mastery over her tortures as to repress all outward indications of her suffering and approaching dissolution, beyond a low, choking sob, a fearful and indescribable sound, between a hiccough and a groan.