“Come, Aldo,” he added. “We must go. Go thou by the Via Latina to Tusculum and await me there at the theatre entrance. Here is some money. Beg thy way. Use the money only when necessary. Keep thy lips sealed. I shall be at Tusculum at midday on the morrow. Fare thee well, my Nana.”
“The gods guard thy life, O my Gyges!” sobbed the good woman.
Wrapping their cloaks about them as a protection from the rain, Gyges and Aldo left the house. At the Porta Capena they separated, the master taking the Via Appia, the road that led to Albanum. He went directly to Alcmaeon’s house. The door had been left partly open. As Gyges entered, he felt the key in the lock on the outside, as it had been left by Hera. With a spark from the embers in the fireplace he lit a lamp. The house was as dreary as a tenantless cave. He felt some satisfaction at the prospect of destroying Gannon’s message; but he could not find the tunic. In a flash he concluded that Psyche had confessed. He felt as if a breath from an unfathomable abyss had breathed upon his soul. “She is lost forever!” he groaned aloud. As if incapable of further reasoning, he unconsciously extinguished the lamp, locked the door, hid the key, and went on his way towards Albanum, with a heart completely crushed.
Chapter XI
ON the border of a desert where vegetation struggles against the arid breath of sterility, appear smiling and restful oases. But these oases perish, one by one, with the drying up of the life-giving springs. When the flame of an untempered summer burns out life, when the brackish water sinks in the wells under the spade of anxious man, when all the emerald isles of the desert vanish until one only is left, there arises in that one, amid the cries of overwhelming despair, a fervent prayer for help and protection. Such was the life of Agrippina,[2] the solitary grandchild of the Divine Augustus.
The early springtime of her life was filled with sunshine and the blossoms of happiness. Her mother, Julia, was the proud daughter and only child of Augustus. Her father, Agrippa, was the greatest general of his day, and a man of noble character. She had three brothers and one sister. All were smiled upon by Fortune, and all were loved by Augustus and the Roman people. When her father died, Augustus, still living, watched over her and her family. Her widowed mother then married Tiberius. The entrance of this man into the Julian family was the ominous cloud that first veiled the effulgence of her springtime.
She had married Germanicus, the son of Drusus, and brother of Claudius and Livilla. He was the noblest endowed, both in body and mind, of any Roman of that day. He was a man of handsome appearance, of extraordinary courage, of wonderful oratorical talents, and of powerful influence. Happy in the possession of the love of this best of men, the life of Agrippina was as beautiful and joyous as a perfect day in spring.
Suddenly, in the clear day of her life, her brother Caius was murdered in Lycia. Eighteen months later another brother, Lucius, was murdered in Marseilles. Shortly after, her mother was exiled to the island of Pandataria, and her sister to another island, Trimetus. When her mother left Rome, Tiberius crawled from his vile nest at Rhodes, and braving the insult and opprobrium of the people, came back to the city.
But the terrible disaster which then happened to the legions under Varus in Germany threw the aged emperor into paroxysms of grief and fear. Too old to go in person to the borders of the empire, he despatched Tiberius. The voluntary retreat of the Germans removed the menace that hung over Italy; but the people suffered the indignity of seeing the standards of the Roman legions fall into the hands of barbarians. Tiberius was then recalled. The old emperor chose him as his heir, in conjunction with Agrippa, Agrippina’s only surviving brother. Some time afterward Agrippa, becoming demented, was sent away in exile. In making his final choice of an heir, Augustus wavered between Tiberius and Germanicus; but that important title was finally bestowed upon Tiberius on account of his years and military experience. Germanicus was forced to become the adopted son of the new heir.
With increasing anxiety Agrippina beheld the gradual extinction of her family. When her brother Lucius fell a victim to the intrigues of the mother of Tiberius, she was distressed, but not dismayed. She was still loved by her aged grandfather, for her noble character and virtuous life. Before the emperor died she had given birth to eight children. The first and second died in infancy. A third, a boy, was so beautiful that his statue, carved in marble, was placed in the Temple of Venus on the Capitoline Hill. In the bedroom of the emperor was placed a similar statue, which Augustus kissed every time he entered the apartment. But this child also died. Of the other five children,—two girls and three boys,—Caligula, the youngest, was three years old when Augustus died. Three years after that event, the last child, Julia, was born.