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s bitter eyes unlightened. "Ay, fifteen years--and yet not so bad as that!" he said shortly. "Or it would have been well over with me by now. But I have known from the first what lay ahead. I won it from Claudius,--poor fool, how he trembled to tell me!--knew that each attack must be more severe than the one before; that each day the disease would stride forward a slow inch, no more, and no human skill might advance it or hold it back." His harsh voice sank a note lower. "At such times, when that grip closes upon me, I know not what I do. Rather, I know, yet am powerless to act otherwise. I tell thee, Livinius, I have had slaves flogged, ay, tortured, before my eyes, to see if by chance I might find suffering greater than mine own. And if they died, I have had tortured those who let them die, for it is not death I want, but what I have found to be worse than death. Judge then if I were not better out of the world! Yet the only way of release open to me I will not take, since I have not yet lost courage enough to brand myself a coward. I have told Claudius, on pain of death for disobedience, that no matter how I cry to him for peace, he shall pay no heed. Strange, is it not, that in this house the only happy thing is the cause of all the sorrow that hath entered it? And yet--perhaps it is not so strange. She is but the cause; on others fall the effects, ... and in their wisdom the gods have ordered that only effects shall count in their scheme of things." He put a hand over Livinius's hand, held it a moment, and let it go. For the first time he fell into the intimacy of the other's speech. "Thank thee, old friend, for thy sympathy. It is not often that the gall of my bitterness overflows, for I have learned the wisdom of the Stoic at first hand. But I can claim scant sympathy here,--and would not if I could,--where men call me the Torturer behind my back and cringe like curs before my face. I am hard and cruel and calloused to the bone; yet were I not thus, in the name of the high gods, what should I be? A thing lower than man, who can be lower than the beasts; from which gods and men--ay, and beasts themselves--would turn in loathing. Thou art my childhood's friend; thy sympathy hath been sweet to me, and I've bared my heart to thee. I have said: 'The world runs thus and so with me; were it in my power, I'd have it otherhow. As it is, no good will come of its discussion, so let there be an end to it, now and for all
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