“I was then but two years old.  It was at Mediolanum, soon after Geta’s birth.  An egg was found in the court of the palace; a hen had laid it close to a pillar.  It was of a purple hue-red all over like the imperial mantle, and this indicated that the newly born infant was destined to sovereignty.  Great was the rejoicing.  The purple marvel was shown even to me who could but just walk.  I, like a naughty boy, flung it down; the shell cracked, and the contents poured out on the pavement.  My mother saw it, and her exclamation, ‘Wicked child, you have murdered your brother!’ was often repeated to me in after-years.  It never struck me as particularly motherly.”

Here he paused, gazing meditatively into vacancy, and then asked the girl, who had listened intently: 

“Were you never haunted by a word so that you could not be rid of it?”

“Oh, yes,” cried Melissa; “a striking rhythm in a song, or a line of poetry—­”

Caracalla nodded agreement, and went on more vehemently:  “That is what I experienced at the words, ‘You have murdered your brother!’ I not only heard them now and then with my inward ear, but incessantly, like the dreary hum of the flies in my camp-tent, for hours at a time, by day and by night.  No fanning could drive these away.  The diabolical voice whispered loudest when Geta had done anything to vex me; or if things had been given him which I did not wish him to have.  And how often that happened!  For I—­I was only Bassianus to my mother; but her youngest was her dear little Geta.

“So the years passed.  We had, while still quite young, our own teams in the circus.  One day, when we were driving for a wager-we were still boys, and I was ahead of the other lads—­the horses of my chariot shied to one side.  I was thrown some distance on the course.  Geta saw this.  He turned his horses to the right where I lay.  He drove over his brother as he would over straw and apple-parings in the dust; and his wheel broke my thigh.  Who knows what else it crushed in me?  One thing is certain—­from that date the most painful of my sufferings originated.  And he, the mean scoundrel, had done it intentionally.  He had sharp eyes.  He knew how to guide his steeds.  He had never driven his wheel over a hazel-nut in the sand of the arena against his will; and I was lying some distance from the driving course.”

Caesar’s eyelids blinked spasmodically as he uttered this accusation, and his very glance revealed the raging fire that was burning in his soul.  Melissa’s sad cry of: 

“What terrible suspicion!” he answered with a short, scornful laugh and the furious assertion: 

“Oh, there were friends enough who informed me what hope Geta had founded on this act of treachery.  The disappointment made him irritable and listless, when Galenus had succeeded in curing me so far that I was able to throw away my Crutch; and my limp—­at least so they tell me—­is hardly perceptible.”