THE TEMPLE AND THE CHURCH.
It was Ulpius. The Pagan was changed in bearing and countenance as
well as in apparel. He stood more firm and upright; a dull, tawny hue
overspread his face; his eyes, so sunken and lustreless in other days,
were now distended and bright with the glare of insanity. It seemed as
if his bodily powers had renewed their vigour, while his mental
faculties had declined towards their ruin.
No human eye had ever beheld by what foul and secret means he had
survived through the famine, on what unnatural sustenance he had
satisfied the cravings of inexorable hunger; but there, in his gloomy
shelter, the madman and the outcast had lived and moved, and suddenly
and strangely strengthened, after the people of the city had exhausted
all their united responses, lavished in vain all their united wealth,
and drooped and died by thousands around him!
His grasp still lay heavy on the father and daughter, and still both
confronted him--silent, as if death-struck by his gaze; motionless, as
if frozen at his touch. His presence was exerting over them a fatal
fascination. The power of action, suspended in Antonina as she entered
their ill-chosen refuge, was now arrested in Numerian also; but with
him no thought of the enemy in the street had any part, at this moment,
in the resistless influence which held him helpless before the enemy in
the temple.
It was a feeling of deeper awe and darker horror. For now, as he
looked upon the hideous features of Ulpius, as he saw the forbidden
robe of priesthood in which the Pagan was arrayed, he beheld not only
the traitor who had successfully plotted against the prosperity of his
household, but the madman as well,--the moral leper of the whole human
family--the living Body and the dead Soul--the disinherited of that
Divine Light of Life which it is the awful privilege of mortal man to
share with the angels of God.
He still clasped Antonina to his side, but it was unconsciously. To
all outward appearance he was helpless as his helpless child, when
Ulpius slowly removed his grasp from their shoulders, separated them,
and locking the hand of each in his cold, bony fingers, began to speak.
His voice was deep and solemn, but his accents, in their hard,
unvarying tone, seemed to express no human emotion. His eyes, far from
brightening as he spoke, relapsed into a dull, vacant insensibility.
The connection between the action of speech and the accompanying and
explaining action of look which is observable in all men, seemed lost
in him. It was fearful to behold the death-like face, and to listen at
the same moment to the living voice.
'Lo! the votaries come to the temple!' murmured the Pagan. 'The good
servants of the mighty worship gather at the voice of the priest! In
the far provinces, where the enemies of the gods approach to profane
the sacred groves, behold the scattered people congregating by night to
journey to the shrine of Serapis! Adoring thousands kneel beneath the
lofty porticoes, while within, in the secret hall where the light is
dim, where the air quivers round the breathing deities on their
pedestals of gold, the high priest Ulpius reads the destinies of the
future, that are unrolled before his eyes like a book!'
As he ceased, and, still holding the hands of his captives, looked on
them fixedly as ever, his eyes brightened and dilated again; but they
expressed not the slightest recognition either of father or daughter.
The delirium of his imagination had transported him to the temple at
Alexandria; the days were revived when his glory had risen to its
culminating point, when the Christians trembled before him as their
fiercest enemy, and the Pagans surrounded him as their last hope. The
victims of his former and forgotten treachery were but as two among the
throng of votaries allured by the fame of his eloquence, by the
triumphant notoriety of his power to protect the adherents of the
ancient creed.
But it was not always thus that his madness declared itself: there
were moments when it rose to appalling frenzy. Then he imagined
himself to be again hurling the Christian assailants from the topmost
walls of the besieged temple, in that past time when the image of
Serapis was doomed by the Bishop of Alexandria to be destroyed. His
yells of fury, his frantic execrations of defiance were heard afar, in
the solemn silence of pestilence-stricken Rome. Those who, during the
most fatal days of the Gothic blockade, dropped famished on the
pavement before the little temple, as they endeavoured to pass it on
their onward way, presented a dread reality of death, to embody the
madman's visions of battle and slaughter. As these victims of famine
lay expiring in the street, they heard above them his raving voice
cursing them for Christians, triumphing over them as defeated enemies
destroyed by his hand, exhorting his imaginary adherents to fling the
slain above on the dead below, until the bodies of the besiegers of the
temple were piled, as barriers against their living comrades, round its
walls. Sometimes his frenzy gloried in the fancied revival of the foul
and sanguinary ceremonies of Pagan superstition. Then he bared his
arms, and shouted aloud for the sacrifice; he committed dark and
nameless atrocities--for now again the dead and the dying lay before
him, to give substance to the shadow of his evil thoughts; and Plague
and Hunger were as creatures of his will, and slew the victim for the
altar ready to his hands.
At other times, when the raving fit had passed away, and he lay panting
in the darkest corner of the interior of the temple, his insanity
assumed another and a mournful form. His voice grew low and moaning;
the wreck of his memory--wandering and uncontrollable--floated back,
far back, on the dark waters of the past; and his tongue uttered
fragments of words and phrases that he had murmured at his father's
knees--farewell, childish wishes that he had breathed in his mother's
ear--innocent, anxious questions which he had addressed to Macrinus,
the high priest, when he first entered the service of the gods at
Alexandria. His boyish reveries--the gentleness of speech and poetry of
thought of his first youthful days, were now, by the unsearchable and
arbitrary influences of his disease, revived in his broken words,
renewed in his desolate old age of madness and crime, breathed out in
unconscious mockery by his lips, while the foam still gathered about
them, and the last flashes of frenzy yet lightened in his eyes.
This unnatural calmness of language and vividness of memory, this
treacherous appearance of thoughtful, melancholy self-possession, would
often continue through long periods, uninterrupted; but, sooner or
later, the sudden change came; the deceitful chain of thought snapped
asunder in an instant; the word was left half uttered; the wearied
limbs started convulsively into renewed action; and as the dream of
violence returned and the dream of peace vanished, the madman rioted
afresh in his fury; and journeyed as his visions led him, round and
round his temple sanctuary, and hither and thither, when the night was
dark and death was busiest in Rome, among the expiring in deserted
houses, and the lifeless in the silent streets.
But there were other later events in his existence that never revived
within him. The old familiar image of the idol Serapis, which had
drawn him into the temple when he re-entered Rome, absorbed in itself
and in its associated remembrances all that remained active of his
paralysed faculties. His betrayal of his trust in the house of
Numerian, his passage through the rifted wall, his crushing repulse in
the tent of Alaric, never for a moment occupied his wandering thoughts.
The clouds that hung over his mind might open to him parting glimpses
of the toils and triumphs of his early career; but they descended in
impenetrable darkness on all the after-days of his dreary life.
Such was the being to whose will, by a mysterious fatality, the father
and child were now submitted; such the existence--solitary, hopeless,
loathsome--of their stern and wily betrayer of other days!
Since he had ceased speaking, the cold, death-like grasp of his hand
had gradually strengthened, and he had begun to look slowly and
inquiringly round him from side to side. Had this change marked the
approaching return of his raving paroxysm, the lives of Numerian and
Antonina would have been sacrificed the next moment; but all that it
now denoted was the quickening of the lofty and obscure ideas of
celebrity and success, of priestly honour and influence, of the
splendour and glory of the gods, which had prompted his last words.
He moved suddenly, and drew the victims of his dangerous caprice a few
steps farther into the interior of the temple; then led them close up
to the lofty pile of objects which had first attracted Numerian's eyes
on entering the building. 'Kneel and adore!' cried the madman
fiercely, replacing his hands on their shoulders and pressing them to
the ground--'You stand before the gods, in the presence of their high
priest!'
The girl's head sank forward, and she hid her face in her hands; but
her father looked up tremblingly at the pile. His eyes had insensibly
become more accustomed to the dim light of the temple, and he now saw
more distinctly the objects composing the mass that rose above him.
Hundreds of images of the gods, in gold, silver, and wood--many in the
latter material being larger than life; canopies, vestments, furniture,
utensils, all of ancient Pagan form, were heaped together, without
order or arrangement, on the floor, to a height of full fifteen feet.
There was something at once hideous and grotesque in the appearance of
the pile. The monstrous figures of the idols, with their rude carved
draperies and symbolic weapons, lay in every wild variety of position,
and presented every startling eccentricity of line, more especially
towards the higher portions of the mass, where they had evidently been
flung up from the ground by the hand that had raised the structure.
The draperies mixed among the images and the furniture were here coiled
serpent-like around them, and there hung down towards the ground,
waving slow and solemn in the breezes that wound through the temple
doorway. The smaller objects of gold and silver, scattered irregularly
over the mass, shone out from it like gleaming eyes; while the pile
itself, seen in such a place under a dusky light, looked like some
vast, misshapen monster--the gloomy embodiment of the bloodiest
superstitions of Paganism, the growth of damp airs and teeming ruin, of
shadow and darkness, of accursed and infected solitude!
Even in its position, as well as in the objects of which it was
composed, the pile wore an ominous and startling aspect; its crooked
outline, expanding towards the top, was bent over fearfully in the
direction of the doorway; it seemed as if a single hand might sway it
in its uncertain balance, and hurl it instantly in one solid mass to
the floor.
Many toilsome hours had passed away, long secret labour had been
expended in the erection of this weird and tottering structure; but it
was all the work of one hand. Night after night had the Pagan entered
the deserted temples in the surrounding streets, and pillaged them of
their contents to enrich his favoured shrine: the removal of the idols
from their appointed places, which would have been sacrilege in any
meaner man, was in his eyes the dread privilege of the high priest
alone.
He had borne heavy burdens, and torn asunder strong fastenings, and
journeyed and journeyed again for hours together over the same gloomy
streets, without loitering in his task; he had raised treasures and
images one above another; he had strengthened the base and heightened
the summit of this precious and sacred heap; he had repaired and
rebuilt, whenever it crumbled and fell, this new Babel that he longed
to rear to the Olympus of the temple roof, with a resolute patience and
perseverance that no failure or fatigue could overcome.
It was the dearest purpose of his dreamy superstition to surround
himself with innumerable deities, as well as to assemble innumerable
worshippers; to make the sacred place of his habitation a mighty
Pantheon, as well as a point of juncture for the scattered
congregations of the Pagan world. This was the ambition in which his
madness expanded to the fiercest fanaticism; and as he now stood erect
with his captives beneath him, his glaring eyes looked awe-struck when
he fixed them on his idols; he uplifted his arms in solemn, ecstatic
triumph, and in low tones poured forth his invocations, wild,
intermingled, and fragmentary, as the barbarous altar which his
solitary exertions had reared.
Whatever was the effect on Numerian of his savage and confused
ejaculations, they were unnoticed, even unheard, by Antonina; for now,
while the madman's voice softened to an undertone, and while she hid
all surrounding objects from her eyes, her senses were awakened to
sounds in the temple which she had never remarked before.
The rapid current of the Tiber washed the foundation walls of one side
of the building, within which the clear, lulling bubble of the water
was audible with singular distinctness. But besides this another and a
shriller sound caught the ear. On the summit of the temple roof still
remained several rows of little gilt bells, originally placed there,
partly with the intention of ornamenting this portion of the outer
structure, partly in order that the noise they produced, when agitated
by the wind, might scare birds from settling in their flight on the
consecrated edifice. The sounds produced by these bells were silvery
and high pitched; now, when the breeze was strong, they rang together
merrily and continuously; now, when it fell, their notes were faint,
separate, and irregular, almost plaintive in their pure metallic
softness. But, however their tone might vary under the capricious
influences of the wind, it seemed always wonderfully mingled within the
temple with the low, eternal bubbling of the river, which filled up the
slightest pauses in the pleasant chiming of the bells, and ever
preserved its gentle and monotonous harmony just audible beneath them.
There was something in this quaint, unwonted combination of sounds, as
they were heard in the vaulted interior of the little building,
strangely simple, attractive, and spiritual; the longer they were
listened to, the more completely did the mind lose the recollection of
their real origin, and gradually shape out of them wilder and wilder
fancies, until the bells as they rang their small peal seemed like
happy voices of a heavenly stream, borne lightly onward on its airy
bubbles, and ever rejoicing over the gliding current that murmured to
them as it ran.
Spite of the peril of her position, and of the terror which still fixed
her speechless and crouching on the ground, the effect on Antonina of
the strange mingled music of the running water and the bells was
powerful enough, when she first heard it, to suspend all her other
emotions in a momentary wonder and doubt. She withdrew her hands from
her face, and glanced round mechanically to the doorway, as if she
imagined that the sounds proceeded from the street.
When she looked, the declining sun, gliding between two of the outer
pillars which surrounded the temple, covered with a bright glow the
smooth pavement before the entrance. A swarm of insects flew drowsily
round and round in the warm mellow light; their faint monotonous
humming deepened, rather than interrupted, the perfect silence
prevailing over all things without.
But a change was soon destined to appear in the repose of the quiet,
vacant scene; hardly a minute had elapsed while Antonina still looked
on it before she saw stealing over the sunny pavement a dark shadow,
the same shadow that she had last beheld when she stopped in her flight
to look behind her in the empty street. At first it slowly grew and
lengthened, then it remained stationary, then it receded and vanished
as gradually as it had advanced, and then the girl heard, or fancied
that she heard, a faint sound of footsteps, retiring along the lateral
colonnades towards the river side of the building.
A low cry of horror burst from her lips as she sank back towards her
father; but it was unheeded. The voice of Ulpius had resumed in the
interval its hollow loudness of tone; he had raised Numerian from the
ground; his strong, cold grasp, which seemed to penetrate to the old
man's heart, which held him motionless and helpless as if by a fatal
spell, was on his arm.
'Hear it! hear it!' cried the Pagan, waving his disengaged hand as if
he were addressing a vast concourse of people--'I advance this man to
be one of the servants of the high priest! He has travelled from a far
country to the sacred shrine; he is docile and obedient before the
altar of the gods; the lot is cast for his future life; his dwelling
shall be in the temple to the day of his death! He shall minister
before me in white robes, and swing the smoking censer, and slay the
sacrifice at my feet!'
He stopped. A dark and sinister expression appeared in his eyes as the
word 'sacrifice' passed his lips; he muttered doubtingly to
himself--'The sacrifice!--is it yet the hour of the sacrifice?'--and
looked round towards the doorway.
The sun still shone gaily on the outer pavement; the insects still
circled slowly in the mellow light; no shadow was now visible; no
distant footsteps were heard; there was nothing audible but the happy
music of the bubbling water, and the chiming, silvery bells.
For a few moments the madman looked out anxiously towards the street,
without uttering a word or moving a muscle. The raving fit was nearly
possessing him again, as the thought of the sacrifice flashed over his
darkened mind; but once more its approach was delayed.
He slowly turned his head in the direction of the interior of the
temple. 'The sun is still bright in the outer courts,' he murmured in
an undertone, 'the hour of the sacrifice is not yet! Come!' he
continued in a louder voice, shaking Numerian by the arm. 'It is time
that the servant of the temple should behold the place of the
sacrifice, and sharpen the knife for the victim before sunset! Arouse
thee, bondman, and follow me!'
As yet, Numerian had neither spoken, nor attempted to escape. The
preceding events, though some space has been occupied in describing
them, passed in so short a period of time, that he had not hitherto
recovered from the first overwhelming shock of the meeting with Ulpius.
But now, awed though he still was, he felt that the moment of the
struggle for freedom had arrived.
'Leave me, and let us depart!--there can be no fellowship between us
again!' he exclaimed with the reckless courage of despair, taking the
hand of Antonina, and striving to free himself from the madman's grasp.
But the effort was vain; Ulpius tightened his hold and laughed in
triumph. 'What! the servant of the temple is in terror of the high
priest, and shrinks from walking in the place of the sacrifice!' he
cried. 'Fear not, bondman! The mighty one, who rules over life and
death, and time and futurity, deals kindly with the servant of his
choice! Onward! onward! to the place of darkness and doom, where I
alone am omnipotent, and all others are creatures who tremble and obey!
To thy lesson, learner! by sunset the victim must be crowned!'
He looked round on Numerian for an instant, as he prepared to drag him
forward, and their eyes met. In the fierce command of his action, and
the savage exultation of his glance, the father saw repeated in a
wilder form the very attitude and expression which he had beheld in the
Pagan on the morning of the loss of his child. All the circumstances
of that miserable hour--the vacant bed-chamber--the banished
daughter--the triumph of the betrayer--the anguish of the
betrayed--rushed over his mind, and rose up before it vivid as a
pictured scene before his eyes.
He struggled no more; the powers of resistance in mind and body were
crushed alike. He made an effort to remove Antonina from his side, as
if, in forgetfulness of the hidden enemy without, he designed to urge
her flight through the open door, while the madman's attention was yet
distracted from her. But, beyond this last exertion of the strong
instinct of paternal love, every other active emotion seemed dead
within him.
Vainly had he striven to disentangle the child from the fate that might
be in store for the parent. To her the dread of the dark shadow on the
pavement was superior to all other apprehensions. She now clung more
closely to her father, and tightened her clasp round his hand. So,
when the Pagan advanced into the interior of the temple, it was not
Numerian alone who followed him to the place of sacrifice, but Antonina
as well.
They moved to the back of the pile of idols. Behind it appeared a high
partition of gilt and inlaid wood reaching to the ceiling, and
separating the outer from the inner part of the temple. A low archway
passage, protected by carved gates similar to those at the front of the
building, had been formed in the partition, and through this Ulpius and
his prisoners now passed into the recess beyond.
This apartment was considerably smaller than the first hall of the
temple which they had just left. The ceiling and the floor both sloped
downwards together, and here the rippling of the waters of the Tiber
was more distinctly audible to them than in the outer division of the
building. At the moment when they entered it the place was very dark;
the pile of idols intercepted even the little light that could have
been admitted through its narrow entrance; but the dense obscurity was
soon dissipated. Dragging Numerian after him to the left side of the
recess, Ulpius drew back a sort of wooden shutter, and a vivid ray of
sunlight immediately streamed in through a small circular opening
pierced in this part of the temple.
Then there became apparent, at the lower end of the apartment, a vast
yawning cavity in the wall, high enough to admit a man without
stooping, but running downwards almost perpendicularly to some lower
region which it was impossible to see, for no light shot upwards from
this precipitous artificial abyss, in the darkness of which the eye was
lost after it had penetrated to the distance of a few feet only from
the opening. At the base of the confined space thus visible appeared
the commencement of a flight of steps, evidently leading far downwards
into the cavity. On the abruptly sloping walls, which bounded it on
all sides, were painted, in the brilliant hues of ancient fresco,
representations of the deities of the mythology--all in the attitude of
descending into the vault, and all followed by figures of nymphs
bearing wreaths of flowers, beautiful birds, and other similar adjuncts
of the votive ceremonies of Paganism. The repulsive contrast between
the bright colours and graceful forms presented by the frescoes, and
the perilous and gloomy appearance of the cavity which they decorated,
increased remarkably the startling significance in the character of the
whole structure. Its past evil uses seemed ineradicably written over
every part of it, as past crime and torment remain ineradicably written
on the human face; the mind imbibed from it terrifying ideas of deadly
treachery, of secret atrocities, of frightful refinements of torture,
which no uninitiated eye had ever beheld, and no human resolution had
ever been powerful enough to resist.
But the impressions thus received were not produced only by what was
seen in and around this strange vault, but by what was heard there
besides. The wind penetrated the cavity at some distance, and through
some opening that could not be beheld, and was apparently intercepted
in its passage, for it whistled upwards towards the entrance in shrill,
winding notes, sometimes producing another and nearer sound, resembling
the clashing of many small metallic substances violently shaken
together. The noise of the wind, as well as the bubbling of the
current of the Tiber, seemed to proceed from a greater distance than
appeared compatible with the narrow extent of the back part of the
temple, and the proximity of the river to its low foundation walls.
It was evident that the vault only reached its outlet after it had
wound backwards, underneath the building, in some strange complication
of passages or labyrinth of artificial caverns, which might have been
built long since as dungeons for the living, or as sepulchres for the
dead.
'The place of the sacrifice--aha! the place of the sacrifice!' cried
the Pagan exultingly, as he drew Numerian to the entrance of the
cavity, and solemnly pointed into the darkness beneath.
The father gazed steadily into the chasm, never turning now to look on
Antonina, never moving to renew the struggle for freedom. Earthly
loves and earthly hopes began to fade away from his heart--he was
praying. The solemn words of Christian supplication fell in low,
murmuring sounds from his lips, in the place of idolatry and bloodshed,
and mingled with the incoherent ejaculations of the madman who kept him
captive, and who now bent his glaring eyes on the darkness of the
vault, half forgetful, in the gloomy fascination which it exercised
even over him, of the prisoners whom he held at its mouth.
The single ray of light, admitted from the circular aperture of the
wall, fell wild and fantastic over the widely-differing figures of the
three, as they stood so strangely united together before the abyss that
opened beneath them. The shadows were above and the shadows were
around; there was no light in the ill-omened place but the one vivid
ray that streamed over the gaunt figure of Ulpius, as he still pointed
into the darkness; over the rigid features of Numerian, praying in the
bitterness of expected death; and over the frail youthful form of
Antonina as she nestled trembling at her father's side. It was an
unearthly and a solemn scene!
Meanwhile the shadow which the girl had observed on the pavement before
the doorway of the temple now appeared there again, but not to retire
as before; for, the instant after, Goisvintha stealthily entered the
outer apartment of the building left vacant by its first occupants.
She passed softly around the pile of idols, looked into the inner
recess of the temple, and saw the three figures standing together in
the ray of light, gloomy and motionless, before the mouth of the
cavity. Her first glance fixed on the Pagan, whom she instinctively
doubted and dreaded, whose purpose in keeping captive the father and
daughter she could not divine; her next was directed on Antonina.
The girl's position was a guarded one; still holding her father's hand,
she was partly protected by his body; and stood unconsciously beneath
the arm of Ulpius, as it was raised while he grasped Numerian's
shoulder. Marking this, and remembering that Antonina had twice
escaped her already, Goisvintha hesitated for a moment, and then, with
cautious step and lowering brow, began to retire again towards the
doorway of the building. 'Not yet--not yet the time!' she muttered, as
she resumed her former lurking-place; 'they stand where the light is
over them--the girl is watched and shielded--the two men are still on
either side of her! Not yet the moment of the blow; the stroke of the
knife must be sure and safe! Sure, for this time she must die by my
hand! Safe, for I have other vengeance to wreak besides the vengeance
on her! I, who have been patient and cunning since the night when I
escaped from Aquileia, will be patient and cunning still! If she
passes the door, I slay her as she goes out; if she remains in the
temple--'
At the last word, Goisvintha paused and gazed upward; the setting sun
threw its fiery glow over her haggard face; her eye brightened fiercely
in the full light as she looked. 'The darkness is at hand!' she
continued; 'the night will be thick and black in the dim halls of the
temple; I shall see her when she shall not see me!--the darkness is
coming; the vengeance is sure!'
She closed her lips, and with fatal perseverance continued to watch and
wait, as she had resolutely watched and waited already. The Roman and
the Goth; the opposite in sex, nation, and fate; the madman who dreamed
of the sanguinary superstitions of Paganism before the temple altar,
and the assassin who brooded over the chances of bloodshed beneath the
temple portico, were now united in a mysterious identity of
expectation, uncommunicated and unsuspected by either--the hour when
the sun vanished from the heaven was the hour of the sacrifice for both!
* * * * *
There is now a momentary pause in the progress of events. Occurrences
to be hereafter related render it necessary to take advantage of this
interval to inform the reader of the real nature and use of the vault
in the temple wall, the external appearance of which we have already
described.
The marking peculiarity in the construction of the Pagan religion may
be most aptly compared to the marking peculiarity in the construction
of the pagan temples. Both were designed to attract the general eye by
the outward effect only, which was in both the false delusive
reflection of the inward substance.
In the temple, the people, as they worshipped beneath the long
colonnades, or beheld the lofty porticoes from the street, were left to
imagine the corresponding majesty and symmetry of the interior of the
structure, and were not admitted to discover how grievously it
disappointed the brilliant expectations which the exterior was so well
calculated to inspire; how little the dark, narrow halls of the idols,
the secret vaults and gloomy recesses within, fulfilled the promise of
the long flights of steps, the broad extent of pavement, the massive
sun-brightened pillars without. So in the religion, the votary was
allured by the splendour of processions; by the pomp of auguries; by
the poetry of the superstition which peopled his native woods with the
sportive Dryads, and the fountains from which he drank with their
guardian Naiads; which gave to mountain and lake, to sun and moon and
stars, to all things around and above him, their fantastic allegory, or
their gracious legend of beauty and love: but beyond this, his first
acquaintance with his worship was not permitted to extend, here his
initiation concluded. He was kept in ignorance of the dark and
dangerous depths which lurked beneath this smooth and attractive
surface; he was left to imagine that what was displayed was but the
prelude to the future discovery of what was hidden of beauty in the
rites of Paganism; he was not admitted to behold the wretched
impostures, the loathsome orgies, the hideous incantations, the bloody
human sacrifices perpetrated in secret, which made the foul, real
substance of the fair exterior form. His first sight of the temple was
not less successful in deceiving his eye than his first impression of
the religion in deluding his mind.
With these hidden and guilty mysteries of the Pagan worship, the vault
before which Ulpius now stood with his captives was intimately
connected.
The human sacrifices offered among the Romans were of two kinds; those
publicly and those privately performed. The first were of annual
recurrence in the early years of the Republic; were prohibited at a
later date; were revived by Augustus, who sacrificed his prisoners of
war at the altar of Julius Caesar; and were afterwards--though
occasionally renewed for particular purposes under some subsequent
reigns--wholly abandoned as part of the ceremonies of Paganism during
the later periods of the empire.
The sacrifices perpetrated in private were much longer practised. They
were connected with the most secret mysteries of the mythology; were
concealed from the supervision of government; and lasted probably until
the general extinction of heathen superstition in Italy and the
provinces.
Many and various were the receptacles constructed for the private
immolation of human victims in different parts of the empire--in its
crowded cities as well as in its solitary woods--and among all, one of
the most remarkable and the longest preserved was the great cavity
pierced in the wall of the temple which Ulpius had chosen for his
solitary lurking-place in Rome.
It was not merely as a place of concealment for the act of immolation,
and for the corpse of the victim, that the vault had been built. A
sanguinary artifice had complicated the manner of its construction, by
placing in the cavity itself the instrument of the sacrifice; by making
it, as it were, not merely the receptacle, but the devourer also of its
human prey. At the bottom of the flight of steps leading down into it
(the top of which, as we have already observed, was alone visible from
the entrance in the temple recess) was fixed the image of a dragon
formed in brass.
The body of the monster, protruding opposite the steps almost at a
right angle from the wall, was moved in all directions by steel
springs, which communicated with one of the lower stairs, and also with
a sword placed in the throat of the image to represent the dragon's
tongue. The walls around the steps narrowed so as barely to admit the
passage of the human body when they approached the dragon. At the
slightest pressure on the stair with which the spring communicated, the
body of the monster bent forward, and the sword instantly protruded
from its throat, at such a height from the steps as ensure that it
should transfix in a vital part the person who descended. The corpse,
then dropping by its own weight off the sword, fell through a tunnelled
opening beneath the dragon, running downward in an opposite direction
to that taken by the steps above, and was deposited on an iron grating
washed by the waters of the Tiber, which ran under the arched
foundations of the temple. The grating was approached by a secret
subterranean passage leading from the front of the building, by which
the sacrificing priests were enabled to reach the dead body, to fasten
weights to it, and opening the grating, to drop it into the river,
never to be beheld again by mortal eyes.
In the days when this engine of destruction was permitted to serve the
purpose for which the horrible ingenuity of its inventors had
constructed it, its principal victims were young girls. Crowned with
flowers, and clad in white garments, they were lured into immolating
themselves by being furnished with rich offerings, and told that the
sole object of their fatal expedition down the steps of the vault was
to realise the pictures adorning its walls (which we have described a
few pages back), by presenting their gifts at the shrine of the idol
below.
At the period of which we write, the dragon had for many years--since
the first prohibitions of Paganism--ceased to be fed with its wonted
prey. The scales forming its body grew gradually corroded and loosened
by the damp; and when moved by the wind which penetrated to them from
beneath, whistling up in its tortuous course through the tunnel that
ran in one direction below, and the vault of the steps that ascended in
another above, produced the clashing sound which has been mentioned as
audible at intervals from the mouth of the cavity. But the springs
which moved the deadly apparatus of the whole machine being placed
within it, under cover, continued to resist the slow progress of time
and of neglect, and still remained as completely fitted as ever to
execute the fatal purpose for which they had been designed.
The ultimate destiny of the dragon of brass was the destiny of the
religion whose bloodiest superstitions it embodied: it fell beneath
the resistless advance of Christianity. Shortly after the date of our
narrative, the interior of the building beneath which it was placed
having suffered from an accident, which will be related farther on, the
exterior was dismantled, in order that its pillars might furnish
materials for a church. The vault in the wall was explored by a monk
who had been present at the destruction of other Pagan temples, and who
volunteered to discover its contents. With a torch in one hand, and an
iron bar in the other, he descended into the cavity, sounding the walls
and the steps before him as he proceeded. For the first and the last
time the sword protruded harmless from the monster's throat when the
monk pressed the fatal stair, before stepping on it, with his iron bar.
The same day the machine was destroyed and cast into the Tiber, where
its victims had been thrown before it in former years.
* * * * *
Some minutes have elapsed since we left the father and daughter
standing by the Pagan's side before the mouth of the vault; and as yet
there appears no change in the several positions of the three. But
already, while Ulpius still looks down steadfastly into the cavity at
his feet, his voice, as he continues to speak, grows louder, and his
words become more distinct. Fearful recollections associated with the
place are beginning to stir his weary memory, to lift the darkness of
oblivion from his idle thoughts.
'They go down, far down there!' he abruptly exclaimed, pointing into
the black depths of the vault, 'and never arise again to the light of
the upper earth! The great Destroyer is watchful in his solitude
beneath, and looks through the darkness for their approach! Hark! the
hissing of his breath is like to the clash of weapons in a deadly
strife!'
At this moment the wind moved the loose scales of the dragon. During
an instant Ulpius remained silent, listening to the noise they
produced. For the first time an expression of dread appeared on his
face. His memory was obscurely reviving the incidents of his discovery
of the deadly machinery in the vault when he first made his sojourn in
the temple, when--filled with the confused remembrance of the
mysterious rites and incantations, the secret sacrifices which he had
witnessed and performed at Alexandria--he had found and followed the
subterranean passage which led to the iron grating beneath the dragon.
As the wind lulled again, and the clashing of the metal ceased with it,
he began to give these recollections expression in words, uttering them
in slow, solemn accents to himself.
'I have seen the Destroyer; the Invisible has revealed himself to me!'
he murmured. 'I stood on the iron bars; the restless waters toiled and
struggled beneath my feet as I looked up into the place of darkness. A
voice called to me, "Get light, and behold me from above! Get light!
get light!" Sun, and moon, and stars gave no light there! but lamps
burnt in the city, in the houses of the dead, when I walked by them in
the night-time; and the lamp gave light when sun, and moon, and stars
gave none! From the top steps I looked down, and saw the Powerful One
in his golden brightness; and approached not, but watched and listened
in fear. The voice again!--the voice was heard again!--"Sacrifice to
me in secret, as thy brethren sacrifice! Give me the living where the
living are, and the dead where the dead!" The air came up cold, and
the voice ceased, and the lamp was like sun, and moon, and stars--it
gave no light in the place of darkness!'
While he spoke, the loose metal again clashed in the vault, for the
wind was strengthening as the evening advanced. 'Hark! the signal to
prepare the sacrifice!' cried the Pagan, turning abruptly to Numerian.
'Listen, bondman! the living and the dead are within our reach. The
breath of the Invisible strikes them in the street and in the house;
they stagger in the highways, and drop at the temple steps. When the
hour comes we shall go forth and find them. Under my hand they go down
into the cavern beneath. Whether they are hurled dead, or whether they
go down living, they fall through to the iron bars, where the water
leaps and rejoices to receive them! It is mine to sacrifice them
above, and thine to wait for them below, to lift the bars and give them
to the river to be swallowed up! The dead drop down first, the living
that are slain by the Destroyer follow after!'
Here he paused suddenly. Now, for the first time, his eye rested on
Antonina, whose very existence he seemed hitherto to have forgotten. A
revolting smile of mingled cunning and satisfaction instantly changed
the whole character of his countenance as he gazed on her and then
looked round significantly to the vault. 'Here is one,' he whispered
to Numerian, taking her by the arm. 'Keep her captive--the hour is
near!'
Numerian had hitherto stood unheedful while he spoke; but when he
touched Antonina the bare action was enough to arouse the father to
resistance--hopeless though it was--once more. He shook off the grasp
of Ulpius from the girl's arm, and drew back with her--breathless,
vigilant, desperate--to the side-wall behind him.
The madman laughed in proud approval. 'My bondman obeys me and seizes
the captive!' he cried. 'He remembers that the hour is near and loosens
not his hold! Come,' he continued, 'come out into the hall beyond!--it
is time that we watch for more victims for the sacrifice till the sun
goes down. The Destroyer is mighty and must be obeyed!'
He walked to the entrance leading into the first apartment of the
temple, and then waited to be followed by Numerian, who, now for the
first time separated from Ulpius, remained stationary in the position
he had last occupied, and looked eagerly around him. No chance of
escape presented itself; the mouth of the vault on one side, and the
passage through the partition on the other, were the only outlets to
the place. There was no hope but to follow the Pagan into the great
hall of the temple, to keep carefully at a distance from him, and to
watch the opportunity of flight through the doorway. The street, so
desolate when last beheld, might now afford more evidence that it was
inhabited. Citizens, guards might be passing by, and might be summoned
into the temple--help might be at hand.
As he moved forward with Antonina, such thoughts passed rapidly through
the father's mind, unaccompanied at the moment by the recollection of
the stranger who had followed them from the Pincian Gate, or of the
apathy of the famished populace in aiding each other in any emergency.
Seeing that he was followed as he had commanded, Ulpius passed on
before them to the pile of idols; but a strange and sudden alteration
appeared in his gait. He had hitherto walked with the step of a
man--young, strong, and resolute of purpose; now he dragged one limb
after the other as slowly and painfully as if he had received a mortal
hurt. He tottered with more than the infirmity of his age, his head
dropped upon his breast, and he moaned and murmured inarticulately in
low, long-drawn cries.
He had advanced to the side of the pile, half-way towards the doorway
of the temple, when Numerian, who had watched with searching eyes the
abrupt change in his demeanour, forgetting the dissimulation which
might still be all-important, abandoned himself to his first impulse,
and hurriedly pressing forward with Antonina, attempted to pass the
Pagan and escape. But at the moment Ulpius stopped in his slow
progress, reeled, threw out his hands convulsively, and seizing
Numerian by the arm, staggered back with him against the side-wall of
the temple. The fingers of the tortured wretch closed as if they were
never to be unlocked again--closed as if with the clutch of death, with
the last frantic grasp of a drowning man.
For days and nights past he had toiled incessantly under the relentless
tyranny of his frenzy, building up higher and higher his altar of
idols, and pouring forth his invocations before his gods in the place
of the sacrifice; and now, at the moment when he was most triumphant in
his ferocious activity of purpose, when his fancied bondman and his
fancied victim were most helpless at his command--now, when his
strained faculties were strung to their highest pitch, the
long-deferred paroxysm had seized him, which was the precursor of his
repose, of the only repose granted by his awful fate--a change (the
mournful change already described) in the form of his insanity. For at
those rare periods when he slept, his sleep was not unconsciousness,
not rest: it was a trance of hideous dreams--his tongue spoke, his
limbs moved, when he slumbered as when he woke. It was only when his
visions of the pride, the power, the fierce conflicts, and daring
resolutions of his maturer years gave place to his dim, quiet, waking
dreams of his boyish days, that his wasted faculties reposed, and his
body rested with them in the motionless languor of perfect fatigue.
Then, if words were still uttered by his lips, they were as murmurs of
an infant--happy sleep; for the innocent phrases of his childhood which
they then revived, seemed for a time to bring with them the innocent
tranquillity of his childhood as well.
'Go! go!--fly while you are yet free!' cried Numerian, dropping the
hand of Antonina, and pointing to the door. But for the second time
the girl refused to move forward a step. No horror, no peril in the
temple could banish for an instant her remembrance of the night at the
farm-house in the suburbs. She kept her head turned towards the vacant
entrance, fixed her eyes on it in the unintermitting watchfulness of
terror, and whispered affrightedly, 'Goisvintha! Goisvintha!' when her
father spoke.
The clasp of the Pagan's fingers remained fixed and deathlike as at
first; he leaned back against the wall, as still as if life and action
had for ever departed from him. The paroxysm had passed away; his
face, distorted but the moment before, was now in repose, but it was a
repose that was awful to look on. Tears rolled slowly from his
half-closed eyes over his seamed and wrinkled cheeks--tears which were
not the impressive expression of mental anguish (for a vacant and
unchanging smile was on his lips), but the mere mechanical outburst of
the physical weakness that the past crisis of agony had left behind it.
Not the slightest appearance of thought or observation was perceptible
in his features: his face was the face of an idiot.
Numerian, who had looked on him for an instant, shuddered and averted
his eyes, recoiling from the sight before him. But a more overpowering
trial of his resolution was approaching, which he could not avoid. Ere
long the voice of Ulpius grew audible once more; but now its tones were
weak, piteous, almost childish, and the words they uttered were quiet
words of love and gentleness, which dropping from such lips, and
pronounced in such a place, were fearful to hear. The temple and all
that was in it vanished from his sight as from his memory. Swayed by
the dread and supernatural influences of his disease, the madman passed
back in an instant over the dark valley of life's evil pilgrimage to
the long-quitted precincts of his boyish home. While in bodily
presence he stood in the place of his last crimes, the outcast of
reason and humanity, in mental consciousness he lay in his mother's
arms, as he had lain there ere yet he had departed to the temple at
Alexandria; and his heart communed with her heart, and his eyes looked
on her as they had looked before his father's fatal ambition had
separated for ever parent and child!
'Mother!--come back, mother!' he whispered. 'I was not asleep: I saw
you when you came in, and sat by my bedside, and wept over me when you
kissed me! Come back, and sit by me still! I am going away, far away,
and may never hear your voice again! How happy we should be, mother,
if I stayed with you always! But it is my father's will that I should
go to the temple in another country, and live there to be a priest; and
his will must be obeyed. I may never return; but we shall not forget
one another! I shall remember your words when we used to talk together
happily, and you shall still remember mine!'
Hardly had the first sentence been uttered by Ulpius when Antonina felt
her father's whole frame suddenly tremble at her side. She turned her
eyes from the doorway, on which they had hitherto been fixed, and
looked on him. The Pagan's hand had fallen from his arm: he was free
to depart, to fly as he had longed to fly but a few minutes before, and
yet he never stirred. His daughter touched him, spoke to him, but he
neither moved nor answered. It was not merely the shock of the abrupt
transition in the language of Ulpius from the ravings of crime to the
murmurs of love--it was not merely astonishment at hearing from him, in
his madness, revelations of his early life which had never passed his
lips during his days of treacherous servitude in the house on the
Pincian Hill, that thus filled Numerian's inmost soul with awe, and
struck his limbs motionless. There was more in all that he heard than
this. The words seemed as words that had doomed him at once and for
ever. His eyes, directed full on the face of the madman, were dilated
with horror, and his deep, gasping, convulsive breathings mingled
heavily, during the moment of silence that ensued, with the chiming of
the bells above and the bubbling of the water below--the lulling music
of the temple, playing its happy evening hymn at the pleasant close of
day.
'We shall remember, mother!--we shall remember!' continued the Pagan
softly, 'and be happy in our remembrances! My brother, who loves me
not, will love you when I am gone! You will walk in my little garden,
and think on me as you look at the flowers that we have planted and
watered together in the evening hours, when the sky was glorious to
behold, and the earth was all quiet around us! Listen, mother, and kiss
me! When I go to the far country, I will make a garden there like my
garden here, and plant the same flowers that we have planted here, and
in the evening I will go out and give them water at the hour when you
go out to give my flowers water at home; and so, though we see each
other no more, it will yet be as if we laboured together in the garden
as we labour now!'
The girl still fixed her eager gaze on her father. His eyes presented
the same rigid expression of horror; but he was now wiping off with his
own hand, mechanically, as if he knew it not, the foam which the
paroxysms had left round the madman's lips, and, amid the groans that
burst from him, she could hear such words as, 'Lord God!--mercy, Lord
God! Thou, who hast thus restored him to me--thus, worse than
dead!--mercy! mercy!'
The light on the pavement beneath the portico of the temple was fading
visibly--the sun had gone down.
For the third time the madman spoke, but his tones were losing their
softness; they were complaining, plaintive, unutterably mournful; his
dreams of the past were already changing. 'Farewell, brother--farewell
for years and years!' he cried. 'You have not given me the love that I
gave you. The fault was not mine that our father loved me the best,
and chose me to be sent to the temple to be a priest at the altar of
the gods! The fault was not mine that I partook not in your favoured
sports, and joined not the companions whom you sought; it was our
father's will that I should not live as you lived, and I obeyed it!
You have spoken to me in anger, and turned from me in disdain; but
farewell again, Cleander--farewell in forgiveness and in love!'
He might have spoken more, but his voice was drowned in one long shriek
of agony which burst from Numerian's lips, and echoed discordantly
through the hall of the temple, and he sank down with his face to the
ground at the Pagan's feet. The dark and terrible destiny was
fulfilled. The enthusiast for the right and the fanatic for the wrong;
the man who had toiled to reform the Church, and the man who had toiled
to restore the Temple; the master who had received and trusted the
servant in his home, and the servant who in that home had betrayed the
master's trust--the two characters, separated hitherto in the sublime
disunion of good and bad, now struck together in tremendous contact, as
brethren who had drawn their life from one source, who as children had
been sheltered under the same roof!
Not in the hours when the good Christian succoured the then forsaken
Pagan, wandering homeless in Rome, was the secret disclosed; no chance
word of it was uttered when the deceiver told the feigned relation of
his life to the benefactor whom he was plotting to deceive, or when, on
the first morning of the siege, the machinations of the servant
triumphed over the confidence of the master: it was reserved to be
revealed in the words of delirium, at the closing years of madness,
when he who discovered it was unconscious of all that he spoke, and his
eyes were blinded to the true nature of all that he saw; when earthly
voices that might once have called him back to repentance, to
recognition, and to love, were become to him as sounds that have no
meaning; when, by a ruthless and startling fatality, it was on the
brother who had wrought for the true faith that the whole crushing
weight of the terrible disclosure fell, unpartaken by the brother who
had wrought for the false! But the judgments pronounced in Time go
forth from the tribunal of that Eternity to which the mysteries of life
tend, and in which they shall be revealed--neither waiting on human
seasons nor abiding by human justice, but speaking to the soul in the
language of immortality, which is heard in the world that is now, and
interpreted in the world that is to come.
Lost, for an instant, even the recollection that Goisvintha might still
be watching her opportunity from without, calling despairingly on her
father, and vainly striving to raise him from the ground, Antonina
remembered not, in the overwhelming trial of the moment, the
revelations of Numerian's past life that had been disclosed to her in
the days when the famine was at its worst in Rome. The name of
'Cleander', which she had then heard her father pronounce, as the name
that he had abandoned when he separated himself from the companions of
his sinful choice, passed unheeded by her when the Pagan unconsciously
uttered it. She saw the whole scene but as a fresh menace of danger,
as a new vision of terror, more ominous of ill than all that had
preceded it.
Thick as was the darkness in which the lulling and involuntary memories
of the past had enveloped the perceptions of Ulpius, the father's
piercing cry of anguish seemed to have penetrated it with a sudden ray
of light. The madman's half-closed eyes opened instantly and fixed,
dreamily at first, on the altar of idols. He waved his hands to and
fro before him, as if he were parting back the folds of a heavy veil
that obscured his sight; but his wayward thoughts did not resume as yet
their old bias towards ferocity and crime. When he spoke again, his
speech was still inspired by the visions of his early life--but now of
his early life in the temple at Alexandria. His expressions were more
abrupt, more disjointed than before; yet they continued to display the
same evidence of the mysterious, instinctive vividness of recollection,
which was the result of the sudden change in the nature of his
insanity. His language wandered (still as if the words came from him
undesignedly and unconsciously) over the events of his boyish
introduction to the service of the gods, and, though confusing them in
order, still preserved them in substance, as they have been already
related in the history of his 'apprenticeship to the temple'.
Now he was in imagination looking down once more from the summit of the
Temple of Serapis on the glittering expanse of the Nile and the wide
country around it; and now he was walking proudly through the streets
of Alexandria by the side of his uncle, Macrinus, the high priest. Now
he was wandering at night, in curiosity and awe, through the gloomy
vaults and subterranean corridors of the sacred place; and now he was
listening, well pleased, to the kindly greeting, the inspiring praises
of Macrinus during their first interview. But at this point, and while
dwelling on this occasion, his memory became darkened again; it vainly
endeavoured to retrace the circumstances attending the crowning
evidence of the high priest's interest in his pupil, and anxiety to
identify him completely with his new protector and his new duties,
which had been displayed when he conferred on the trembling boy the
future distinction of one of his own names.
And here, let it be remembered, as a chief link in the mysterious chain
of fatalities which had united to keep the brothers apart as brethren
after they had met as men, that both had, from widely different causes,
abandoned in after-life the names which they bore in their father's
house; that while one, by his own act and for his own purpose,
transformed himself from Cleander, the associate of the careless and
the criminal, to Numerian, the preacher of the Gospel and reformer of
the Church, the other had (to quote the words of the fourth chapter),
'become from the boy Emilius the student Ulpius,' by the express and
encouraging command of his master, Macrinus, the high priest.
While the Pagan still fruitlessly endeavoured to revive the events
connected with the change in his designation on his arrival in
Alexandria, and, chafing under the burden of oblivion that weighed upon
his thoughts, attempted for the first time to move from the wall
against which he had hitherto leaned; while Antonina still strove in
vain to recall her father to the recollection of the terrible
exigencies of the moment as he crouched prostrate at the madman's
feet--the doorway of the temple was darkened once more by the figure of
Goisvintha. She stood on the threshold, a gloomy and indistinct form
in the fading light, looking intently into the deeply shadowed interior
of the building. As she marked the altered positions of the father and
daughter, she uttered a suppressed ejaculation of triumph; but, while
the sound passed her lips, she heard, or thought she heard, a noise in
the street behind. Even now her vigilance and cunning, her deadly,
calculating resolution to await in immovable patience the fitting time
for striking the blow deliberately and with impunity, did not fail her.
Turning instantly, she walked to the top step of the temple, and stood
there for a few moments, watchfully surveying the open space before her.
But in those few moments the scene in the building changed once more.
The madman, while he still wavered between relapsing into the raving
fit and continuing under the influence of the tranquil mood in which he
had been prematurely disturbed, caught sight of Goisvintha when her
approach suddenly shadowed the entrance to the temple. Her presence,
momentary though it was, was for him the presence of a figure that had
not appeared before; that had stood in a strange position between the
shade within and the faint light without; it was a new object,
presented to his eyes while they were straining to recover such
imperfect faculties of observation as had been their wont, and it
ascendancy over him was instantaneous and all-powerful.
He started, bewildered like a deep sleeper suddenly awoke; violent
shudderings ran for a moment over his frame; then it strengthened again
with its former unnatural strength; the demon raged within him in
renewed fury as he tore his robe which Numerian held as he lay at his
feet from the feeble grasp that confined it, and, striding up to the
pile of idols, stretched out his hands in solemn deprecation. 'The
high priest has slept before the altar of the gods!' he cried loudly,
'but they have been patient with their well-beloved; their thunder has
not struck him for his crime! Now the servant returns to his
service--the rites of Serapis begin!'
Numerian still remained prostrate, spirit-broken; he slowly clasped his
hands together on the floor, and his voice was now to be heard, still
supplicating in low and stifled accents, as if in unceasing prayer lay
his last hope of preserving his own reason. 'God! Thou art the God of
Mercy; be merciful to him!' he murmured. 'Thou acceptest of
repentance; grant repentance to him! If at any time I have served Thee
without blame, let the service be counted to him; let the vials of Thy
wrath be poured out on me!'
'Hark! the trumpet blows for the sacrifice!' interrupted the raving
voice of the Pagan, as he turned from the altar, and extended his arms
in frenzied inspiration. 'The roar of music and the voice of
exultation soar upward from the highest mountain-tops! The incense
smokes, and in and out, and round and round, the dancers whirl about
the pillars of the temple! The ox for the sacrifice is without spot;
his horns are gilt; the crown and fillet adorn his head. The priest
stands before him naked from the waist upwards; he heaves the libation
out of the cup; the blood flows over the altar! Up! up! tear forth with
reeking hands the heart while it is yet warm, futurity is before you in
the quivering entrails, look on them and read! read!'
While he spoke, Goisvintha had entered the temple. The street was
still desolate; no help was at hand.
Not advancing at once, she concealed herself near the door behind a
projection in the pile of idols, watching from it until Ulpius, in the
progress of his frenzy, should turn away from Antonina, whom he stood
fronting at this instant. But she had not entered unperceived;
Antonina had seen her again. And now the bitterness of death, when the
young die unprotected in their youth, came over the girl, and she cried
in a low wailing voice, as she knelt by Numerian's side: 'I must die,
father, I must die, as Hermanric died! Look up at me, and speak to me
before I die!'
Her father was still praying; he heard nothing, for his heart was
bleeding in atonement at the shrine of his boyish home, and his soul
still communed with its Maker. The voice that followed hers was the
voice of Ulpius.
'Oh, beautiful are the gardens round the sacred altars, and lofty the
trees that embower the glittering shrines!' he exclaimed, rapt and
ecstatic in his new visions. 'Lo, the morning breaks, and the spirits
of light are welcomed by a sacrifice! The sun goes down behind the
mountain, and the beams of evening tremble on the victim beneath the
knife of the adoring priest! The moon and stars shine high in the
firmament, and the Genii of Nights are saluted in the still hours with
blood!'
As he paused, the lament of Antonina was continued in lower and lower
tones: 'I must die, father, I must die!' And with it murmured the
supplicating accents of Numerian: 'God of Mercy! deliver the helpless
and forgive the afflicted! Lord of Judgment! deal gently with Thy
servants who have sinned!' While, mingling with both in discordant
combination, the strange music of the temple still poured on its
lulling sound--the rippling of the running waters and the airy chiming
of the bells!
'Worship!--emperors, armies, nations, glorify and worship me!' shouted
the madman, in thunder-tones of triumph and command, as his eye for the
first time encountered the figure of Numerian prostrate at his feet.
'Worship the demi-god who moves with the deities through spheres
unknown to man! I have heard the moans of the unburied who wander on
the shores of the Lake of the Dead--worship! I have looked on the
river whose black current roars and howls in its course through the
caves of everlasting night--worship! I have seen the furies lashed by
serpents on their wrinkled necks, and followed them as they hurled
their torches over the pining ghosts! I have stood unmoved in the
hurricane-tumult of hell--worship! worship! worship!'
He turned round again towards the altar of idols, calling upon his gods
to proclaim his deification, and at the moment when he moved,
Goisvintha sprang forward. Antonina was kneeling with her face turned
from the door, as the assassin seized her by her long hair and drove
the knife into her neck. The moaning accents of the girl, bewailing her
approaching fate, closed in one faint groan; she stretched out her
arms, and fell forward over her father's body.
In the ferocious triumph of the moment, Goisvintha raised her arm to
repeat the stroke; but at that instant the madman looked round. 'The
sacrifice--the sacrifice!' he shouted, leaping at one spring like a
wild beast at her throat. She struck ineffectually at him with the
knife, as he fastened his long nails in her flesh and hurled her
backwards to the floor. Then he yelled and gibbered in frantic
exultation, set his foot on her breast, and spat on her as she lay
beneath him.
The contact of the girl's body when she fell--the short but terrible
tumult of the attack that passed almost over him--the shrill, deafening
cries of the madman, awoke Numerian from his trance of despairing
remembrance, aroused him in his agony of supplicating prayer. He
looked up.
The scene that met his eyes was one of those scenes which crush every
faculty but the faculty of mechanical action--before which, thought
vanishes from men's minds, utterance is suspended on their lips,
expression is paralysed on their faces. The coldness of the tomb
seemed breathed over Numerian's aspect by the contemplation of the
terrible catastrophe: his eyes were glassy and vacant, his lips parted
and rigid; even the remembrance of the discovery of his brother seemed
lost to him as he stooped over his daughter and bound a fragment of her
robe round her neck. The mute, soulless, ghastly stillness of death
looked settled on his features, as, unconscious now of weakness or age,
he rose with her in his arms, stood motionless for one moment before
the doorway, and looked slowly round on Ulpius; then he moved forward
with heavy regular steps. The Pagan's foot was still on Goisvintha's
breast as the father passed him; his gaze was still fixed on her; but
his cries of triumph were calmed; he laughed and muttered incoherently
to himself.
The moon was rising, soft, faint, and tranquil, over the quiet street
as Numerian descended the temple steps with his daughter in his arms,
and, after an instant's pause of bewilderment and doubt, instinctively
pursued his slow, funereal course along the deserted roadway in the
direction of home. Soon, as he advanced, he beheld in the moonlight,
down the long vista of the street at its termination, a little
assemblage of people walking towards him with calm and regular
progress. As they came nearer, he saw that one of them held an open
book, that another carried a crucifix, and that others followed these
two with clasped hands and drooping heads. And then, after an
interval, the fresh breezes that blew towards him bore onward these
words, slowly and reverently pronounced:--
'Know, therefore, that God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity
deserveth.
'Canst thou, by searching, find out God? Canst thou find out the
Almighty to perfection?'
Then the breeze fell, the words grew indistinct, but the procession
still moved forward. As it came nearer and nearer, the voice of the
reader was again plainly heard:--
'If iniquity be in thy hand, put it far away, and let not wickedness
dwell in thy tabernacles.
'For then shalt thou lift up thy face without spot; yea, thou shalt be
steadfast, and shalt not fear;
'Because thou shalt forget thy misery, and remember it as waters that
pass away:
And thine age shall be clearer than the noonday; thou shalt shine
forth, thou shalt be as the morning.'
The reader stopped and closed the book; for now Numerian had met the
members of the little procession, and they looked on him standing
voiceless before them in the clear moonlight, with his daughter's head
drooping over his shoulder as he carried her in his arms.
There were some among those who gathered round him whose features he
would have recognised at another time as the features of the surviving
adherents of his former congregation. The assembly he had met was
composed of the few sincere Christians in Rome, who had collected, on
the promulgation of the news that Alaric had ratified terms of peace,
to make a pilgrimage through the city, in the hopeless endeavour, by
reading from the Bible and passing exhortation, to awaken the reckless
populace to a feeling of contrition for their sins, and of devout
gratitude for their approaching deliverance from the horrors of the
siege.
But now, when Numerian confronted them, neither by word nor look did he
express the slightest recognition of any who surrounded him. To all
the questions addressed to him, he replied by hurried gestures that
none could comprehend. To all the promises of help and protection
heaped upon him in the first outbreak of the grief and pity of his
adherents of other days, he answered but by the same dull, vacant
glance. It was only when they relieved him of his burden, and gently
prepared to carry the senseless girl among them back to her father's
house, that he spoke; and then, in faint entreating tones, he besought
them to let him hold her hand as they went, so that he might be the
first to feel her pulse beat--if it yet moved.
They turned back by the way they had come--a sorrowful and slow-moving
procession! As they passed on, the reader again opened the Sacred
Book; and then these words rose through the soothing and heavenly
tranquillity of the first hours of night:--
'Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not
thou the chastening of the Almighty:
'For he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make
whole.'