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."
"Not at all, most certainly not at all," Melissa sympathetically assured
him. He, however, went on:
"Yet what I endured meanwhile!--and while I passed so many long weeks of
pain and impatience on a couch, the words my mother had said about the
brother whom I murdered rang constantly in my ears as though a reciter
were engaged by day and night to reiterate them.
"But even this passed away. With the pain, which had spoiled many good
hours for me, the quie
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