Agrippina lifted up her arm as if she would have struck him, but Pallas interposed. Firmly, but not ungently, he laid his hand on the young prince’s mouth.
‘Hush,’ he said, ‘ere you do yourself fatal harm. Boy, these questions are not for you or me to settle. They are for the Senate, and the Prætorians, and the Roman people. If the soldiers have elected Nero, and the senators have confirmed their choice, he is your Emperor, and you must obey.’
‘It is useless to resist, my brother,’ said Octavia, sadly. ‘Our father is dead. Narcissus has been sent away. We have none to help us.’
‘None to help you, ungrateful girl!’ said Agrippina. ‘Are not you now the Empress? Have you not the glory of being Nero’s bride?’
Octavia answered not. ‘Our father is dead,’ she said again. ‘May we not go, Augusta, and weep by his bedside?’
‘Go!’ answered Agrippina; ‘and I for my part will see that he is enrolled among the gods, and honoured with a funeral worthy of the House of Cæsar.’ Then, turning to her attendants, she issued her orders.
‘Put a cypress at the door of the Palace. Let the body be dressed in imperial robes, and incense burned in the chamber. See that every preparation is made for a royal funeral, and that the flute-players, the wailing-women, the _designatores_, with their black lictors, be all in readiness.’
But while Agrippina was giving directions to the _archimimus_ who was to represent the dead Emperor at the funeral, and was examining the waxen masks of his ancestral Claudii, which were to be worn in the procession, the boy and girl were permitted to visit the chamber of the dead. They bent over the corpse of their father, and fondled his cold hands, and let their tears fall on his pale face, and felt something of the bitterness of death in that sudden and shattering bereavement, which changed for ever the complexion of their lives.
Nero, meanwhile, was addressing the Senate amidst enraptured plaudits in the finely turned and epigrammatic phrases of Seneca, which breathed the quintessence of wise government and Stoic magnanimity. He would rule, he said, on the principles which guided Augustus; and the senators seemed as if they would never end their plaudits when to the offer of the title ‘Father of his Country’ he modestly replied, ‘Not till I shall have deserved it.’