Slowly and mournfully the sentinel at the rifted wall raised his eyes
towards the eastern clouds as they brightened before the advancing dawn.
Desolate as was the appearance of the dull, misty daybreak, it was yet
the most welcome of all the objects surrounding the starving soldier on
which he could fix his languid gaze. To look back on the city behind
him was to look back on the dreary charnel-house of famine and death; to
look down on the waste ground without the walls was to look down on the
dead body of the comrade of his watch, who, maddened by the pangs of
hunger which he had suffered during the night, had cast himself from the
rampart to meet a welcome death on the earth beneath. Famished and
despairing, the sentinel crouched on the fortifications which he had now
neither strength to pace nor care to defend, yearning for the food that
he had no hope to obtain, as he watched the grey daybreak from his
solitary post.
While he was thus occupied, the gloomy silence of the scene was suddenly
broken by the sound of falling brick-work at the inner base of the wall,
followed by faint entreaties for mercy and deliverance, which rose on
his ear, strangely mingled with disjointed expression of defiance and
exultation from a second voice. He slowly turned his head, and, looking
down, saw on the ground beneath a young girl struggling in the grasp of
an old man, who was hurrying her onward in the direction of the Pincian
Gate.
For one moment the girl's eye met the sentinel's vacant glance, and she
renewed, with a last effort of strength, and a greater vehemence of
supplication, her cries for help; but the soldier neither moved nor
answered. Exhausted as he was, no sight could affect him now but the
sight of food. Like the rest of the citizens, he was sunk in a heavy
stupor of starvation--selfish, reckless, brutalised. No disasters could
depress, no atrocities rouse him. Famine had torn asunder every social
tie, had withered every human sympathy among his besieged fellow-
citizens, and he was famishing like them.
At the moment when the dawn had first appeared, could he have looked
down by some mysterious agency to the interior foundations of the wall,
from the rampart on which he kept his weary watch, such a sight must
then have presented itself as would have aroused even his sluggish
observation to rigid attention and involuntary surprise.
Winding upward and downward among jagged masses of ruined brick-work,
now lost amid the shadows of dreary chasms, now prominent over the
elevations of rising arches, the dark irregular passages broken by
Ulpius in the rotten wall would then have presented themselves to his
eyes; not stretching forth in dismal solitude, not peopled only by the
reptiles native to the place, but traced in all their mazes by human
forms. Then he would have perceived the fierce, resolute Pagan, moving
through darkness and obstacles with a sure, solemn progress, drawing
after him, like a dog devoted to his will, the young girl whose hapless
fate had doomed her to fall into his power. Her half-fainting figure
might have been seen, sometimes prostrate on the higher places of the
breach, while her fearful guide descended before her into a chasm
beyond, and then turned to drag her after him to a darker and a lower
depth yet; sometimes bent in supplication, when her lips moved once more
with a last despairing entreaty, and her limbs trembled with a final
effort to escape from her captor's relentless grasp. While still,
through all that opposed him, the same fierce tenacity of purpose would
have been invariably visible in every action of Ulpius, constantly
confirming him in his mad resolution to make his victim the follower of
his progress through the wall, ever guiding him with a strange instinct
through every hindrance, and preserving him from every danger in his
path, until it brought him forth triumphant, with his prisoner still in
his power, again free to tread the desolate streets and mingle with the
famine-stricken citizens of Rome.
And now when, after peril and anguish, she once more stood within the
city of her home, what hope remained to Antonina of obtaining her last
refuge under her father's roof, and deriving her solitary consolation
from the effort to regain her father's love? With the termination of
his passage through the breach in the wall had ended ever recollection
associated with it in the Pagan's shattered memory. A new blank now
pervaded his lost faculties, desolate as that which had overwhelmed them
in the night when he first stood in the farm-house garden by the young
chieftain's grave. He moved onward, unobservant, unthinking, without
aim or hope, driven by a mysterious restlessness, forgetting the very
presence of Antonina as she followed him, but still mechanically
grasping her hand, and dragging her after him he knew not whither.
And she, on her part, made no effort more for deliverance. She had seen
the sentinel unmoved by her entreaties, she had seen the walls of her
father's house receding from her longing eyes, as Ulpius pitilessly
hurried her father and farther from its distant door; and she lost the
last faint hope of restoration, the last lingering desire of life, as
the sense of her helplessness now weighed heaviest on her mind. Her
heart was full of her young warrior, who had been slain, and of her
father, from whom she had parted in the hour of his wrath, as she now
feebly followed the Pagan's steps, and resigned herself to a speedy
exhaustion and death in her utter despair.
They turned from the Pincian Gate and gained the Campus Martius; and
here the aspect of the besieged city and the condition of its doomed
inhabitants were fully and fearfully disclosed to view. On the surface
of the noble area, once thronged with bustling crowds passing to and fro
in every direction as their various destinations or caprices might lead
them, not twenty moving figures were now discernible. These few, who
still retained their strength or the resolution to pace the greatest
thoroughfare of Rome, stalked backwards and forwards incessantly, their
hollow eyes fixed on vacancy, their wan hands pressed over their mouths;
each separate, distrustful, and silent; fierce as imprisoned madmen;
restless as spectres disturbed in a place of tombs.
Such were the citizens who still moved over the Campus Martius; and,
besetting their path wherever they turned, lay the gloomy numbers of the
dying and the dead--the victims already stricken by the pestilence which
had now arisen in the infected city, and joined the famine in its work
of desolation and death. Around the public fountains, where the water
still bubbled up as freshly as in the summer-time of prosperity and
peace, the poorer population of beleaguered Rome had chiefly congregated
to expire. Some still retained strength enough to drink greedily at the
margin of the stone basins, across which others lay dead--their heads
and shoulders immersed in the water--drowned from lack of strength to
draw back after their first draught. Children mounted over the dead
bodies of their parents to raise themselves to the fountain's brim;
parents stared vacantly at the corpses of their children alternately
floating and sinking in the water, into which they had fallen
unsuccoured and unmourned.
In other parts of the place, at the open gates of the theatres and
hippodromes, in the unguarded porticoes of the palaces and the baths lay
the discoloured bodies of those who had died ere they could reach the
fountains--of women and children especially--surrounded in frightful
contrast by the abandoned furniture of luxury and the discarded
inventions of vice--by gilded couches--by inlaid tables--by jewelled
cornices--by obscene picture and statues--by brilliantly framed, gaudily
tinted manuscripts of licentious songs, still hanging at their
accustomed places on the lofty marble walls. Farther on, in the by-
streets and the retired courts, where the corpse of the tradesman was
stretched on his empty counter; where the soldier of the city guard
dropped down overpowered were he reached the limit of his rounds; where
the wealthy merchant lay pestilence-stricken upon the last hoards of
repulsive food which his gold had procured; the assassin and the robber
might be seen--now greedily devouring the offal that lay around them,
now falling dead upon the bodies which they had rifled but the moment
before.
Over the whole prospect, far and near, wherever it might extend,
whatever the horrors by which it might be occupied, was spread a blank,
supernatural stillness. Not a sound arose; the living were as silent as
the dead; crime, suffering, despair, were all voiceless alike; the
trumpet was unheard in the guard-house; the bell never rang from the
church; even the thick, misty rain, that now descended from the black
and unmoving clouds, and obscured in cold shadows the outlines of
distant buildings and the pinnacle tops of mighty palaces, fell
noiseless to the ground. The sky had no wind; the earth no echoes--the
pervading desolation appalled the eye; the vast stillness weighed dull
on the ear--it was a scene as of the last-left city of an exhausted
world, decaying noiselessly into primeval chaos.
Through this atmosphere of darkness and death, along these paths of
pestilence and famine; unregarding and unregarded, the Pagan and his
prisoner passed slowly onward towards the quarter of the city opposite
the Pincian Mount. No ray of thought, even yet, brightened the dull
faculties of Ulpius; still he walked forward vacantly, and still he was
followed wearily by the fast-failing girl.
Sunk in her mingled stupor of bodily weakness and mental despair, she
never spoke, never raised her head, never looked forth on the one side
or the other. She had now ceased even to feel the strong, cold grasp of
the Pagan's hand. Shadowy visions of spheres beyond the world, arrayed
in enchanting beauty, and people with happy spirits in their old earthly
forms, where a long deathless existence moved smoothly and dreamily
onward, without mark of time or taint of woe, were opening before her
mind. She lost all memory of afflictions and wrongs, all apprehension
of danger from the madman at whose mercy she remained. And thus she
still moved feebly onward as the will of Ulpius guided her, with no
observation of her present peril, and no anxiety for her impending fate.
They passed the grand circular structure of the Pantheon, entered the
long narrow streets leading to the banks of the river, and finally
gained the margin of the Tiber--hard by the little island that still
rises in the midst of its waters. Here, for the first time, the Pagan
paused mechanically in his course, and vacantly directed his dull,
dreamy eyes on the prospect before him, where the walls, stretching
abruptly outward from their ordinary direction, enclosed the Janiculum
Hill, as it rose with its irregular mass of buildings on the opposite
bank of the river.
At this sudden change from action to repose, the overtasked energies
which had hitherto gifted the limbs of Antonina with an unnatural power
of endurance, abruptly relaxed. She sank down helpless and silent; her
head drooped towards the hard ground, as towards a welcome pillow, but
found no support, for the Pagan's iron grasp of her hand remained
unyielding as ever. Infirm though he was, he appeared at this moment to
be unconscious that his prisoner was now hanging at his side. Every
association connected with her, every recollection of his position with
her in her father's house, had vanished from his memory. A darker
blindness seemed to have sunk over his bodily perceptions; his eyes
rolled slowly to and fro over the prospect before him, but regarded
nothing; his panting breaths came thick and fast; his shrunk chest
heaved as if some deep, dread agony were pent within it--it was evident
that a new crisis in his insanity was at hand.
At this moment one of the bands of marauders--the desperate criminals of
famine and plague--who still prowled through the city, appeared in the
street. Their trembling hands sought their weapons, and their haggard
faces brightened, when they first discerned the Pagan and the girl; but
as they approached nearer they saw enough in the figures of the two, at
a glance, to destroy their hopes of seizing on them either plunder or
food. For an instant they stood by their intended victims, as if
debating whether to murder them only for murder's sake, when the
appearance of two women, stealthily quitting a house farther on in the
street, carrying a basket covered by some tattered garments, attracted
their attention. They turned instantly to follow the bearers of the
basket, and again Ulpius and Antonina were left alone on the river's
bank.
The appearance of the assassins had been powerless, as every other sight
or event in the city, in arousing the faculties of Ulpius. He had
neither looked on them nor fled from them when they surrounded him; but
now when they were gone he slowly turned his head in the direction by
which they had departed. His gaze wandered over the wet flagstones of
the street, over two corpses stretched on them at a little distance,
over the figure of a female slave who lay forsaken near the wall of one
of the houses, exerting her last energies to drink from the turbid rain-
water which ran down the kennel by her side; and still his eyes remained
unregardful of all that they encountered. The next object which by
chance attracted his vacant attention was a deserted temple. This
solitary building fixed him immediately in contemplation--it was
destined to open a new and a warning scene in the dark tragedy of his
closing life.
In his course through the city he had passed unheeded many temples far
more prominent in situation, far more imposing in structure, than this.
It was a building of no remarkable extent or extraordinary beauty. Its
narrow porticoes and dark doorway were more fitted to repel than to
invite the eye; but it had one attraction, powerful above all glories of
architecture and all grandeur of situation to arrest in him those
wandering faculties whose sterner and loftier aims were now suspended
for ever; it was dedicated to Serapis--to the idol which had been the
deity of his first worship, and the inspiration of his last struggled
for the restoration of his faith. The image of the god, with the three-
headed monster encircled by a serpent, obedient beneath his hand, was
carved over the portico.
What flood of emotions rushed into the vacant mind of Ulpius at the
instant when he discerned the long-loved, well-known image of the
Egyptian god, there was nothing for some moments outwardly visible in
him to betray. His moral insensibility appeared but to be deepened as
his gaze was now fixed with rigid intensity on the temple portico. Thus
he continued to remain motionless, as if what he saw had petrified him
where he stood, when the clouds, which had been closing in deeper and
deeper blackness as the morning advanced, and which, still charged with
electricity, were gathering to revive the storm of the past night, burst
abruptly into a loud peal of thunder over his head.
At that warning sound, as if it had been the supernatural signal awaited
to arouse him, as if in one brief moment it awakened every recollection
of all that he had resolutely attempted during the night of thunder that
was past, he started into instant animation. His countenance
brightened, his form expanded, he dropped the hand of Antonina, raised
his arm aloft towards the wrathful heaven in frantic triumph, then
staggering forwards, fell on his knees at the base of the temple steps.
Whatever the remembrances of his passage through the wall at the Pincian
Hill, and of the toil and peril succeeding it, which had revived when
the thunder first sounded in his ear, they now vanished as rapidly as
they had arisen, and left his wandering memory free to revert to the
scenes which the image of Serapis was most fitted to recall.
Recollections of his boyish enjoyments in the temple at Alexandria, of
his youth's enthusiasm, of the triumphs of his early manhood--all
disjointed and wayward, yet all bright, glorious, intoxicating--flashed
before his shattered mind. Tears, the first that he had shed since his
happy youth, flowed quickly down his withered cheeks. He pressed his
hot forehead, he beat his parched hand in ecstasy on the cold, wet steps
beneath him. He muttered breathless ejaculations, he breathed strange
murmurs of endearment, he humbled himself in his rapturous delight
beneath the walls of the temple like a dog that has discovered his lost
master and fawns affectionately at his feet. Criminal as he was, his
joy in his abasement, his glory in his miserable isolation from
humanity, was a doom of degradation pitiable to behold.
After an interval his mood changed. He rose to his feet, his trembling
limbs strengthened with a youthful vigour as he ascended the temple
steps and gained its doorway. He turned for a moment, and looked forth
over the street, ere he entered the hallowed domain of his distempered
imagination. To him the cloudy sky above was now shining with the
radiance of the sun-bright East. The death-laden highways of Rome, as
they stretched before him, were beautiful with lofty trees, and populous
with happy figures; and along the dark flagstones beneath, where still
lay the corpses which he had no eye to see, he beheld already the
priests of Serapis with his revered guardian, his beloved Macrinus of
former days, at their head, advancing to meet and welcome him in the
hall of the Egyptian god. Visions such as these passed gloriously
before the Pagan's eyes as he stood triumphant on the steps of the
temple, and brightened to him with a noonday light its dusky recesses
when, after his brief delay, he turned from the street and disappeared
through the doorway of the sacred place.
The rain poured down more thickly than before; the thunder, once
aroused, now sounded in deep and frequent peals as Antonina raised
herself from the ground and looked around her, in momentary expectation
that the dreaded form of Ulpius must meet her eyes. No living creature
was visible in the street. The forsaken slave still reclined near the
wall of the house where she had first appeared when the Pagan gained the
approaches to the temple; but she now lay there dead. No fresh bands of
robbers appeared in sight. An uninterrupted solitude prevailed in all
directions as far as the eye could reach.
At the moment when Ulpius had relinquished his grasp of her hand,
Antonina had sunk to the ground, helpless and resigned, but not
exhausted beyond all power of sensation or all capacity for thought.
While she lay on the cold pavement of the street, her mind still pursued
its visions of a speedy death, and a tranquil life-in-death to succeed
it in a future state. But, as minute after minute elapsed, and no harsh
voice sounded in her ear, no pitiless hand dragged her from the ground,
no ominous footsteps were audible around her, a change passed gradually
over her thoughts; the instinct of self-preservation slowly revived
within her, and, as she raised herself to look forth on the gloomy
prospect, the chances of uninterrupted flight and present safety
presented by the solitude of the street, aroused her like a voice of
encouragement, like an unexpected promise of help.
Her perception of outer influences returned; she felt the rain that
drenched her garments; she shuddered at the thunder sounding over her
head; she marked with horror the dead bodies lying before her on the
stones. An overpowering desire animated her to fly from the place, to
escape from the desolate scene around, even though she should sink
exhausted by the effort in the next street. Slowly she arose--her limbs
trembled with a premature infirmity; but she gained her feet. She
tottered onward, turning her back on the river, passed bewildered
between long rows of deserted houses, and arrived opposite a public
garden surrounding a little summer-house, whose deserted portico offered
both concealment and shelter. Here, therefore, she took refuge,
crouching in the darkest corner of the building, and hiding her face in
her hands, as if to shut out all view of the dreary though altered
scenes which spread before her eyes.
Woeful thoughts and recollections now moved within her in bewildering
confusion. All that she had suffered since Ulpius had dragged her from
the farm-house in the suburbs--the night pilgrimage over the plain--the
fearful passage through the wall--revived in her memory, mingled with
vague ideas, now for the first time aroused, of the plague and famine
that were desolating the city; and, with sudden apprehensions that
Goisvintha might still be following her, knife in hand, through the
lonely streets; while passively prominent over all these varying sources
of anguish and dread, the scene of the young chieftain's death lay like
a cold weight on her heavy heart. The damp turf of his grave seemed
still to press against her breast; his last kiss yet trembled on her
lips; she knew, though she dared not look down on them, that the spots
of his blood yet stained her garments.
Whether she strove to rise and continue her flight; whether she crouched
down again under the portico, resigned for one bitter moment to perish
by the knife of Goisvintha--if Goisvintha were near; to fall once more
into the hands of Ulpius--if Ulpius were tracking her to her retreat,--
the crushing sense that she was utterly bereaved of her beloved
protector--that the friend of her brief days of happiness was lost to
her for ever--that Hermanric, who had preserved her from death, had been
murdered in his youth and his strength by her side, never deserted her.
Since the assassination in the farm-house, she was now for the first
time alone; and now for the first time she felt the full severity of her
affliction, and knew how dark was the blank which was spread before
every aspiration of her future life.
Enduring, almost eternal, as the burden of her desolation seemed now to
have become, it was yet to be removed, ere long, by feelings of a
tenderer mournfulness and a more resigned woe. The innate and innocent
fortitude of disposition, which had made her patient under the rigour of
her youthful education, and hopeful under the trials that assailed her
on her banishment from her father's house; which had never deserted her
until the awful scenes of the past night of assassination and death rose
in triumphant horror before her eyes; and which, even then, had been
suspended but not destroyed--was now destined to regain its healing
influence over her heart. As she still cowered in her lonely refuge,
the final hope, the yearning dependence on a restoration to her father's
presence and her father's love, that had moved her over the young
chieftain's grave, and had prompted her last effort for freedom when
Ulpius had dragged her through the passage in the rifted wall, suddenly
revived.
Once more she arose, and looked forth on the desolate city and the
stormy sky, but now with mild and unshrinking eyes. Her recollections
of the past grew tender in their youthful grief; her thoughts for the
future became patient, solemn, and serene. Images of her first and her
last-left protector, of her old familiar home, of her garden solitude on
the Pincian Mount, spread beautiful before her imagination as resting-
places to her weary heart. She descended the steps of the summer-house
with no apprehension of her enemies, no doubt of her resolution; for she
knew the beacon that was now to direct her onward course. The tears
gathered full in her eyes as she passed into the garden; but her step
never faltered, her features never lost their combined expression of
tranquil sorrow and subdued hope. So she once more entered the perilous
streets, and murmuring to herself, 'My father! my father!' as if in
those simple words lay the hand that was to guide, and the providence
that was to preserved her, she began to trace her solitary way in the
direction of the Pincian Mount.
It was a spectacle--touching, beautiful, even sublime--to see this young
girl, but a few hours freed, by perilous paths and by criminal hands,
from scenes which had begun in treachery, only to end in death, now
passing, resolute and alone, through the streets of a mighty city,
overwhelmed by all that is poignant in human anguish and hideous in
human crime. It was a noble evidence of the strong power over the world
and the world's perils, with which the simplest affection may arm the
frailest being--to behold her thus pursuing her way, superior to every
horror of desolation and death that clogged her path, unconsciously
discovering in the softly murmured name of 'father', which still fell at
intervals from her lips, the pure purpose that sustained her--the steady
heroism that ever held her in her doubtful course. The storms of heaven
poured over her head--the crimes and sufferings of Rome darkened the
paths of her pilgrimage; but she passed firmly onward through all, like
a ministering spirit, journeying along earthly shores in the bright
inviolability of its merciful mission and its holy thoughts--like a ray
of light living in the strength of its own beauty, amid the tempest and
obscurity of a stranger sphere.
Once more she entered the Campus Martius. Again she passed the public
fountains, still unnaturally devoted to serve as beds for the dying and
as sepulchres for the dead; again she trod the dreary highways, where
the stronger among the famished populace yet paced hither and thither in
ferocious silence and unsocial separation. No word was addressed,
hardly a look was directed to her, as she pursued her solitary course.
She was desolate among the desolate; forsaken among others abandoned
like herself.
The robber, when he passed her by, saw that she was worthless for the
interests of plunder as the poorest of the dying citizens around him.
The patrician, loitering feebly onward to the shelter of his palace
halls, avoided her as a new suppliant among the people for the charity
which he had not to bestow, and quickened his pace as she approached him
in the street. Unprotected, yet unmolested, hurrying from her
loneliness and her bitter recollections to the refuge of her father's
love, as she would have hurried when a child from her first apprehension
of ill to the refuge of her father's arms, she gained at length the foot
of the Pincian Hill--at length ascended the streets so often trodden in
the tranquil days of old!
The portals and outer buildings of Vetranio's palace, as she passed
them, presented a striking and ominous spectacle. Within the lofty
steel railings, which protected the building, the famine-wasted slaves
of the senator appeared reeling and tottering beneath full vases of wine
which they were feebly endeavouring to carry into the interior
apartments. Gaudy hangings drooped from the balconies, garlands of ivy
were wreathed round the statues of the marble front. In the midst of
the besieged city, and in impious mockery of the famine and pestilence
which were wasting it, hut and palace, to its remotest confines, were
proceeding in this devoted dwelling the preparations for a triumphant
feast!
Unheedful of the startling prospect presented by Vetranio's abode, her
eyes bent but in one absorbing direction, her steps hurrying faster and
faster with each succeeding instant, Antonina approached the home from
which she had been exiled in fear, and to which she was returning in
woe. Yet a moment more of strong exertion, of overpowering
anticipation, and she reached the garden gate!
She dashed back the heavy hair matted over her brows by the rain; she
glanced rapidly around her; she beheld the window of her bed-chamber
with the old simple curtain still hanging at its accustomed place; she
saw the well-remembered trees, the carefully tended flower-beds, now
drooping mournfully beneath the gloomy sky. Her heart swelled within
her, her breath seemed suddenly arrested in her bosom, as she trod the
garden path and ascended the steps beyond. The door at the top was
ajar. With a last effort she thrust it open, and stood once more--
unaided and unwelcomed, yet hopeful of consolation, of pardon, of love--
within her first and last sanctuary, the walls of her home!