CHAPTER XXX.

Scarcely had Macrinus closed the door behind him, when Caracalla threw himself exhausted on the throne, and ordered wine to brought.

The gloomy gaze he bent upon the ground was not affected this time.  The physician noted with anxiety how his master’s breast heaved and his eyelids quivered; but when he offered Caesar a soothing potion, he waved him away, and commanded him to cease from troubling him.

For all that, he listened a little later to the legate, who brought the news that the youths of the city assembled on the race-course were beginning to be impatient.  They were singing and applauding boisterously, and the songs they so loudly insisted on having repeated would certainly not contain matter flattering to the Romans.

“Leave them alone,” answered Caesar, roughly.  “Every line is aimed at me and no other.  But the condemned are always allowed their favorite meal before the last journey.  The food they love is venomous satire.  Let them enjoy it to the full once more!—­Is it far to Zminis’s prison?”

The reply was in the negative; and as Caracalla exclaimed, “So much the better!” a significant smile played on his lips.

The high-priest of Serapis had looked on in much distress of mind.  He, as the head of the Museum, had set high hopes on the youth who had come to such a terrible end.  If Caesar should carry his threats into execution, there would be an end to that celebrated home of learning which, in his opinion, bore such noble fruits of study.  And what could Caracalla mean by his dark saying that the sport and mockery of those youths below was their last meal?  The worst might indeed be expected from the fearful tyrant who was at once so deeply wounded and so grievously offended; and the high-priest had already sent messengers—­ Greeks of good credit—­to warn the insurgent youths in the stadium.  But, as the chief minister of the divinity, he also esteemed it his duty, at any risk to himself, to warn the despot, whom he saw on the verge of being carried away to deeds of unparalleled horror.  He thought the time had come, when Caracalla looked up from the brooding reverie into which he had again sunk, and with an ominous scowl asked Timotheus whether his wife, under whose protection Melissa had been seen the day before, had known that the false-hearted girl had given herself to another man while she feigned love for him.

The high-priest repelled the suspicion with his usual dignity, and went on to adjure Caesar not to visit on an industrious and dutiful community the sins of a light-minded girl’s base folly and falsehood.

But Caracalla would not suffer him to finish; he wrathfully inquired who had given him a right to force his advice on Caesar.

On this Timotheus replied, with calm dignity: