Even in my bedroom, opening on the side
gallery of the peristyle, we heard, from over the roofs, cries of:
"The tyrant is dead! The despot is dead! The prize-fighter is dead! The
murderer is dead!"
"The news is out!" Agathemer ejaculated, and he breathed a prayer to
Mercury, in which I joined. When finally he had told all he had to tell I
marvelled:
"Can it be possible that the most intimate and secret conversations of the
Prince of the Republic, of the most sedulously guarded man on earth, are
thus overheard by underlings and so promptly communicated even to
outsiders presumably to be reckoned among his enemies?"
"I conjecture," Agathemer rejoined, "that I am not the only outsider in
receipt of information of this kind."
"If you have been, all along," I asked, "in receipt of such information,
why have you always talked of Furfur's presence in the Palace and his
utilization as a dummy Emperor while Commodus masqueraded as Palus, as a
conjecture of yours which you believed, but of which you could not be
certain? Why have you not frankly spoken of it as a fact, which many knew
of and of which some in a position to know, repeatedly informed you?"
"Because no one ever did so inform me," Agathemer answered, "they merely
dropped hints, mostly hints, unnoticed by themselves, unintentionally
dropped by them, and uncertainly pieced together by me.
Pages:
778
779
780
781
782
783
784
785
786
787
788
789
790
791
792
793
794
795
796
797
798
799
800
801
802