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226 DARKNESS AND DAWN
slave. Leave the corpse a moment,' he said aloud to the
'
attendants ;
the Emperor wishes to take a last look at his
brother.'
The slave of Tigellinus brought a piece of chalk ;
and Nero,
with his own hand, chalked over some livid patches on the
dead boy's face, which already betrayed the horrible virulence
of the poison.
'
Why linger in the charnel-house ? said Senecio affectedly.
'
'Csesar, may we not have some more wine to refresh our
sorrow ?
'
They turned away, and, before they were outside the
fretted
hall, a light laugh woke a shuddering echo along the
roof.
The bearers were on the point of lifting the bier when
Agrippina entered. The dullest of the spectators could see
that there was nothing feigned in her anguish as she wept
and tore her hair. She grieved for Britannicus, whom she
had so irreparably wronged, but hers was a wild and selfish
grief, the grief of rage and frustrated purposes. She had
built upon this boy's life to keep her son in terror of her influence.
She saw now of what crimes Nero had already
become capable. He who in so brief a space had developed
into a fratricide, how long would it be ere he would spare
the life of an obnoxious mother ? She felt, even then, in a
bitterness of soul which could not be expressed, that evenhanded
justice was commending the ingredients of the
poisoned chalice to her own lips.
The obsequies were not only disgracefully hurried, but disgracefully
mean. Every ceremony which marked a great
public funeral was omitted. There were no lictors dressed in
black
;
no siticines with mourning strains nor
; prceficce, or wailing
women no
; lessus, or funeral dirge. Happily too, as some
thought, there were not the customary buffoons, nor the archimimus
to imitate the words and actions of the deceased.
Though he was the noblest of the noble, no liberated slaves
walked before his bier, nor men who wore the waxen images
of his long line of ancestors. No relations followed him
men with veiled heads, women with unbound tresses. Many
a freedman, even many a slave, had a longer funeral procession
than the last of the Claudii.
They bore him to his funeral amid storms of rain, which