THE BREACH REPASSED.
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 every 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 ere 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 struggle
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!