ghost of a cracked voice a few bars from
Stradella's 'Amor amor, non dormir piu.' 'And you playing on the violin,
it seems such a short time ago, and yet so long, long, long. Addio,
amore, a rivederti.' She drank off the draught and, lying back on the
pillow, closed her eyes. Sir Hercules kissed her hand and tiptoed away,
as though he were afraid of waking her. He returned to his closet, and
having recorded his wife's last words to him, he poured into his bath
the water that had been brought up in accordance with his orders. The
water being too hot for him to get into the bath at once, he took down
from the shelf his copy of Suetonius. He wished to read how Seneca had
died. He opened the book at random. 'But dwarfs,' he read, 'he held in
abhorrence as being lusus naturae and of evil omen.' He winced as though
he had been struck. This same Augustus, he remembered, had exhibited in
the amphitheatre a young man called Lucius, of good family, who was
not quite two feet in height and weighed seventeen pounds, but had
a stentorian voice. He turned over the pages. Tiberius, Caligula,
Claudius, Nero: it was a tale of growing horror. 'Seneca his preceptor,
he forced to kill himself.' And there was Petronius, who had called
his friends about him at the last, bidding them talk to him, not of the
consolations of philosophy, but of love and gallantry, while the life
was ebbing away through his opened veins. Dipping his pen once more in
the ink he wrote on the last page of his diary: 'He died a Roman death.'
Then, putting the toes of one foot into the water and finding that it
was not too hot, he threw off his dressing-gown and, taking a razor in
his hand, sat down in the bath. With one deep cut he severed the artery
in his left wrist, then lay back and composed his mind to meditation.
The blood oozed out, floating through the water in dissolving wreaths
and spirals. In a little while the whole bath was tinged with pink. The
colour deepened; Sir Hercules felt himself mastered by an invincible
drowsiness; he was sinking from vague dream to dream. Soon he was sound
asleep. There was not much blood in his small body."

CHAPTER XIV.

For their after-luncheon coffee the party generally adjourned to the
library. Its windows looked east, and at this hour of the day it was the
coolest place in the whole house. It was a large room, fitted, during
the eighteenth century, with white painted shelves of an elegant design.
In the middle of o