“If your dull wit can invent no death to satisfy your cruelty, the blood-hound Zminis can aid you.  You are a worthy couple.  Curses on you! . . .

“At him!” yelled the emperor to Macrinus and the legate, for no substitute had appeared for the centurion he had dismissed.

But while the nobles advanced warily upon the madman, and Macrinus called to the Germanic body-guard in the anteroom, Philip had turned like lightning and disappeared through the window.

The legates and Caesar came too late to hold him back, and from below came cries of:  “Crushed!—­dead! . . .  What crime has he committed?  They cast him down! . . .  He can not have done it himself . . .  Impossible! . . .  His arms are bound. . . .  A new manner of death invented specially for the Alexandrians!”

Then another whistle sounded, and the shout, “Down with the tyrant!”

But no second cry followed.  The place was too full of soldiers and lictors.

“Caracalla heard it all.  He turned back into the room, wiped the perspiration from his brow, and said in a voice of studied unconcern, yet with horrible harshness: 

“He deserved his death-ten times over.  However, I have to thank him for a good suggestion.  I had forgotten the Egyptian Zminis.  If he is still alive, Macrinus, take him from his dungeon and bring him here.  But quickly—­in a chariot!  Let him come just as he is.  I can make use of him now.”

The prefect bowed assent, and by the rapidity with which he departed he betrayed how willingly he carried out this order of his master’s.

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A THORNY PATH

By Georg Ebers

Volume 11.

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?”