LOVE MEETINGS.
Who that has looked on a threatening and tempestuous sky, has not felt
the pleasure of discovering unexpectedly a small spot of serene blue,
still shining among the stormy clouds? The more unwillingly the eye
has wandered over the gloomy expanse of the rest of the firmament, the
more gladly does it finally rest on the little oasis of light which
meets at length its weary gaze, and which, when it was dispersed over
the whole heaven, was perhaps only briefly regarded with a careless
glance. Contrasted with the dark and mournful hues around it, even that
small spot of blue gradually acquires the power of investing the wider
and sadder prospect with a certain interest and animation that it did
not before possess--until the mind recognises in the surrounding
atmosphere of storm an object adding variety to the view--a spectacle
whose mournfulness may interest as well as repel.
Was it with sensations resembling these (applied, however, rather to
the mind than to the eye) that the reader perused those pages devoted
to Hermanric and Antonina? Does the happiness there described now
appear to him to beam through the stormy progress of the narrative as
the spot of blue beams through the gathering clouds? Did that small
prospect of brightness present itself, at the time, like a garden of
repose amid the waste of fierce emotions which encompassed it? Did it
encourage him, when contrasted with what had gone before, to enter on
the field of gloomier interest which was to follow? If, indeed, it has
thus affected him, if he can still remember the scene at the farm-house
beyond the suburbs with emotions such as these, he will not now be
unwilling to turn again for a moment from the gathering clouds to the
spot of blue,--he will not deny us an instant's digression from Ulpius
and the city of famine to Antonina and the lonely plains.
During the period that has elapsed since we left her, Antonina has
remained secure in her solitude, happy in her well-chosen concealment.
The few straggling Goths who at rare intervals appeared in the
neighbourhood of her sanctuary never intruded on its peaceful limits.
The sight of the ravaged fields and emptied granaries of the deserted
little property sufficed invariably to turn their marauding steps in
other directions. Day by day ran smoothly and swiftly onwards for the
gentle usurper of the abandoned farm-house. In the narrow round of its
gardens and protecting woods was comprised for her the whole circle of
the pleasures and occupations of her new life.
The simple stores left in the house, the fruits and vegetables to be
gathered in the garden, sufficed amply for her support. The pastoral
solitude of the place had in it a quiet, dreamy fascination, a novelty,
an unwearying charm, after the austere loneliness to which her former
existence had been subjected in Rome. And when evening came, and the
sun began to burnish the tops of the western tress, then, after the
calm emotions of the solitary day, came the hour of absorbing cares and
happy expectations--ever the same, yet ever delighting and ever new.
Then the rude shutters were carefully closed; the open door was shut
and barred; the small light--now invisible to the world without--was
joyfully kindled; and then, the mistress and author of these
preparations resigned herself to await, with pleased anxiety, the
approach of the guest for whose welcome they were designed.
And never did she expect the arrival of that treasured companion in
vain. Hermanric remembered his promise to repair constantly to the
farm-house, and performed it with all the constancy of love and all the
enthusiasm of youth. When the sentinels under his command were
arranged in their order of watching for the night, and the trust
reposed in him by his superiors exempted his actions from
superintendence during the hours of darkness that followed, he left the
camp, passed through the desolate suburbs, and gained the dwelling
where the young Roman awaited him--returning before daybreak to receive
the communications regularly addressed to him, at that hour, by his
inferior in the command.
Thus, false to his nation, yet true to the new Egeria of his thoughts
and actions--traitor to the requirements of vengeance and war, yet
faithful to the interests of tranquility and love--did he seek, night
after night, Antonina's presence. His passion, though it denied him to
his warrior duties, wrought not deteriorating change in his
disposition. All that it altered in him it altered nobly. It varied
and exalted his rude emotions, for it was inspired, not alone by the
beauty and youth that he saw, but by the pure thoughts, the artless
eloquence that he heard. And she--the forsaken daughter, the source
whence the Northern warrior derived those new and higher sensations
that had never animated him until now--regarded her protector, her
first friend and companion, as her first love, with a devotion which,
in its mingled and exalted nature, may be imagined by the mind, but can
be but imperfectly depicted by the pen. It was a devotion created of
innocence and gratitude, of joy and sorrow, of apprehension and hope.
It was too fresh, too unworldly to own any upbraidings of artificial
shame, any self-reproaches of artificial propriety. It resembled in
its essence, though not in its application, the devotion of the first
daughters of the Fall to their brother-lords.
But it is now time that we return to the course of our narrative;
although, ere we again enter on the stirring and rapid present, it will
be necessary for a moment more to look back in another direction to the
eventful past.
But it is not on peace, beauty, and pleasure that our observation now
fixes itself. It is to anger, disease, and crime--to the unappeasable
and unwomanly Goisvintha, that we now revert.
Since the day when the violence of her conflicting emotions had
deprived her of consciousness, at the moment of her decisive triumph
over the scruples of Hermanric and the destiny of Antonina, a raging
fever had visited on her some part of those bitter sufferings that she
would fain have inflicted on others. Part of the time she lay in a
raving delirium; part of the time in helpless exhaustion; but she never
forgot, whatever the form assumed by her disease, the desperate purpose
in the pursuit of which she had first incurred it. Slowly and
doubtfully her vigour at length returned to her, and with it
strengthened and increased the fierce ambition of vengeance that
absorbed her lightest thoughts and governed her most careless actions.
Report informed her of the new position, on the line of blockade, on
which Hermanric was posted, and only enumerated as the companions of
his sojourn the warriors sent thither under his command. But, though
thus persuaded of the separation of Antonina and the Goth, her
ignorance of the girl's fate rankled unintermittingly in her savage
heart. Doubtful whether she had permanently reclaimed Hermanric to the
interests of vengeance and bloodshed; vaguely suspecting that he might
have informed himself in her absence of Antonina's place of refuge or
direction of flight; still resolutely bent on securing the death of her
victim, wherever she might have strayed, she awaited with trembling
eagerness that day of restoration to available activity and strength
which would enable her to resume her influence over the Goth, and her
machinations against the safety of the fugitive girl. The time of her
final and long-expected recovery, was the very day preceding the stormy
night we have already described, and her first employment of her
renewed energy was to send word to the young Goth of her intention of
seeking him at his encampment ere the evening closed.
It was this intimation which caused the inquietude mentioned as
characteristic of the manner of Hermanric at the commencement of the
preceding chapter. The evening there described was the first that saw
him deprived, through the threatened visit of Goisvintha, of the
anticipation of repairing to Antonina, as had been his wont, under
cover of the night; for to slight his kinswoman's ominous message was
to risk the most fatal of discoveries. Trusting to the delusive
security of her sickness, he had hitherto banished the unwelcome
remembrance of her existence from his thoughts. But, now that she was
once more capable of exertion and of crime, he felt that if he would
preserve the secret of Antonina's hiding-place and the security of
Antonina's life, he must remain to oppose force to force and stratagem
to stratagem, when Goisvintha sought him at his post, even at the risk
of inflicting, by his absence from the farm-house, all the pangs of
anxiety and apprehension on the lonely girl.
Absorbed in such reflections as these, longing to depart, yet
determined to remain, he impatiently awaited Goisvintha's approach,
until the rising of the storm with its mysterious and all-engrossing
train of events forced his thoughts and actions into a new channel.
When, however, his interviews with the stranger and the Gothic king
were past, and he had returned as he had been bidden to his appointed
sojourn in the camp, his old anxieties, displaced but not destroyed,
resumed their influence over him. He demanded eagerly of his comrades
if Goisvintha had arrived in his absence, and received the same answer
in the negative from each.
As he now listened to the melancholy rising of the wind and the
increasing loudness of the thunder, to the shrill cries of the distant
night-birds hurrying to shelter, emotions of mournfulness and awe
possessed themselves of his heart. He now wondered that any events,
however startling, however appalling, should have had the power to turn
his mind for a moment from the dreary contemplations that had engaged
it at the close of day. He thought of Antonina, solitary and helpless,
listening to the tempest in affright, and watching vainly for his
long-delayed approach. His fancy arrayed before him dangers, plots,
and crimes, robed in all the horrible exaggerations of a dream. Even
the quick, monotonous dripping of the rain-drops outside aroused within
him dark and indefinable forebodings of ill. The passion that had
hitherto created for him new pleasures was now fulfilling the other
half of its earthly mission, and causing him new pains.
As the storm strengthened, as the darkness lowered deeper and deeper,
so did his inquietude increase, until at length it mastered the last
feeble resistance of his wavering firmness. Persuading himself that,
after having delayed so long, Goisvintha would now refrain from seeking
him until the morrow, and that all communications from Alaric, had they
been despatched, would have reached him ere this; unable any longer to
combat his anxiety for the safety of Antonina; determined to risk the
worst possibilities rather than be absent at such a time of tempest and
peril from the farm-house, he made a last visit to the stations of the
watchful sentinels, and quitted the camp for the night.