CHAPTER 19.
THE GUARDIAN RESTORED.
Not long is the new-made grave left unwatched to the solemnguardianship of Solitude and Night. More than a few minutes havescarcely elapsed since it was dug, yet already human footsteps pressits yielding surface, and a human glance scans attentively its smalland homely mound.
But it is not Antonina, whom he loved; it is not Goisvintha, throughwhose vengeance he was lost, who now looks upon the earth above theyoung warrior's corpse. It is a stranger, an outcast; a man lost,dishonoured, abandoned--it is the solitary and ruined Ulpius who nowgazes with indifferent eyes upon the peaceful garden and the eloquentgrave.
In the destinies of woe committed to the keeping of the night, thepagan had been fatally included. The destruction that had gone forthagainst the body of the young man who lay beneath the earth hadovertaken the mind of the old man who stood over his simple grave. Theframe of Ulpius, with all its infirmities, was still there, but thesoul of ferocious patience and unconquerable daring that had lighted itgrandly in its ruin was gone. Over the long anguish of that woefullife the veil of self-oblivion had closed for ever!
He had been dismissed by Alaric, but he had not returned to the citywhither he was bidden. Throughout the night he had wandered about thelonely suburbs, striving in secret and horrible suffering for themastery of his mind. There did the overthrow of all his hopes from theGoths expand rapidly into the overthrow of the whole intellect that hadcreated his aspirations. There had reason burst the bonds that had solong chained, perverted, degraded it! At length, wandering hither andthither, he had dragged the helpless body, possessed no longer by theperilous mind, to the farm-house garden in which he now stood, gazingalternately at the upturned sods of the chieftain's grave and the redgleam of the fire as it glowed from the dreary room through the gap ofthe shattered door.
His faculties were fatally disordered rather than utterly destroyed.His penetration, his firmness, and his cunning were gone; but a wreckof memory, useless and unmanageable--a certain capacity for momentaryobservation still remained to him. The shameful miscarriage in thetent of Alaric, which had overthrown his faculties, had passed from himas an event that never happened, but he remembered fragments of hispast existence--he still retained a vague consciousness of the rulingpurpose of his whole life.
These embryo reflections, disconnected and unsustained, flitted to andfro over his dark mind as luminous exhalations over a marsh--rising andsinking, harmless and delusive, fitful and irregular. What heremembered of the past he remembered carelessly, viewing it with asvacant a curiosity as if it were the visionary spectacle of anotherman's struggles and misfortunes and hopes, acting under it as under amysterious influence, neither the end nor the reason of which he caredto discover. For the future, it was to his thoughts a perfect blank;for the present, it was a jarring combination of bodily weariness andmental repose.
He shuddered as he stood shelterless under the open heaven. The cold,that he had defied in the vaults of the rifted wall, pierced in thefarm-house garden; his limbs, which had resisted repose on the hardjourney from Rome to the camp of the Goths, now trembled so that he wasfain to rest them on the ground. For a short time he sat glaring withvacant and affrighted eyes upon the open dwelling before him, as thoughhe longed to enter it but dare not. At length the temptation of theruddy firelight seemed to vanquish his irresolution; he rose withdifficulty, and slowly and hesitatingly entered the house.
He had advanced, thief-like, but a few steps, he had felt but for amoment the welcome warmth of the fire, when the figure of Antonina,still extended insensible upon the floor, caught his eye; he approachedit with eager curiosity, and, raising the girl on his arm, looked ather with a long and rigid scrutiny.
For some moments no expression of recognition passed his lips orappeared on his countenance, as, with a mechanical, doting gesture offondness, he smoothed her dishevelled hair over her forehead. While hewas thus engaged, while the remains of the gentleness of his childhoodwere thus awfully revived in the insanity of his age, a musical stringwound round a small piece of gilt wood fell from its concealment in herbosom; he snatched it from the ground--it was the fragment of herbroken lute, which had never quitted her since the night when, in herinnocent grief, she had wept over it in her maiden bed-chamber.
Small, obscure, insignificant as it was, this little token touched thefibre in the Pagan's shattered mind which the all-eloquent form andpresence of its hapless mistress had failed to reach; his memory flewback instantly to the garden on the Pincian Mount, and to his pastduties in Numerian's household, but spoke not to him of the calamitieshe had wreaked since that period on his confiding master. Hisimagination presented to him at this moment but one image--hisservitude in the Christian's abode; and as he now looked on the girl hecould regard himself but in one light--as 'the guardian restored'.
'What does she with her music here?' he whispered apprehensively.'This is not her father's house, and the garden yonder looks not fromthe summit of the hill!'
As he curiously examined the room, the red spots on the floor suddenlyattracted his attention. A panic, a frantic terror seemed instantly tooverwhelm him. He rose with a cry of horror, and, still holding thegirl on his arm, hurried out into the garden trembling and breathless,as if the weapon of an assassin had scared him from the house.
The shock of her rough removal, the sudden influence of the fresh, coldair, restored Antonina to the consciousness of life at the moment whenUlpius, unable to support her longer, laid her against the little heapof turf which marked the position of the young chieftain's grave. Hereyes opened wildly; their first glance fixed upon the shattered doorand the empty room. She rose from the ground, advanced a few stepstowards the house, then paused, rigid, breathless, silent, and, turningslowly, faced the upturned turf.
The grave was all-eloquent of its tenant. His cuirass, which thesoldiers had thought to bury with the body that it had defended informer days, had been overlooked in the haste of the secret interment,and lay partly imbedded in the broken earth, partly exposed to view--asimple monument over a simple grave! Her tearless, dilated eyes lookeddown on it as though they would number each blade of grass, each morselof earth by which it was surrounded! Her hair waved idly about hercheeks, as the light wind fluttered it; but no expression passed overher face, no gestures escaped her limbs. Her mind toiled and quivered,as if crushed by a fiery burden; but her heart was voiceless, and herbody was still.
Ulpius had stood unnoticed by her side. At this moment he moved so asto confront her, and she suddenly looked up at him. A momentaryexpression of bewilderment and suspicion lightened the heavy vacancy ofdespair which had chased their natural and feminine tenderness from hereyes, but it disappeared rapidly. She turned from the Pagan, kneltdown by the grave, and pressed her face and bosom against the littlemound of turf beneath her.
No voice comforted her, no arm caressed her, as her mind now began topenetrate the mysteries, to probe the darkest depths of the longnight's calamities! Unaided and unsolaced, while the few and waningstars glimmered from their places in the sky, while the sublimestillness of tranquillised Nature stretched around her, she knelt atthe altar of death, and raised her soul upward to the great heavenabove her, charged with its sacred offering of human grief!
Long did she thus remain; and when at length she arose from the ground,when, approaching the Pagan, she fixed on him her tearless, drearyeyes, he quailed before her glance, as his dull faculties struggledvainly to resume the old, informing power that they had now for everlost. Nothing but the remembrance aroused by his first sight of thefragment of the lute lived within even yet, as he whispered to her inlow, entreating tones--
'Come home--come home! Your father may return before us--come home!'
As the words 'home' and 'father'--those household gods of the heart'searliest existence--struck upon her ears, a change flashed withelectric suddenness over the girl's whole aspect. She raised her wanhands to the sky; all her woman's tenderne
ss repossessed itself of herheart; and as she again knelt down over the grave, her sobs roseaudibly through the calmed and fragrant air.
With Hermanric's corpse beneath her, with the blood-sprinkled roombehind her, with a hostile army and a famine-wasted city beyond her, itwas only through that flood of tears, that healing passion of gentleemotions, that she rose superior to the multiplied horrors of hersituation at the very moment when her faculties and her life seemedsinking under them alike. Fully, freely, bitterly she wept, on thekindly and parent earth--the patient, friendly ground that once borethe light footsteps of the first of a race not created for death; thatnow holds in its sheltering arms the loved ones, whom, in mourning, welay there to sleep; that shall yet be bound to the farthermost of itsdepths, when the sun-bright presence of returning spirits shines overits renovated frame, and love is resumed in angel perfection at thepoint where death suspended it in mortal frailness!
'Come home--your father is awaiting you--come home!' repeated the Paganvacantly, moving slowly away as he spoke.
At the sound of his voice she started up, and clasping his arm with hertrembling fingers, to arrest his progress, looked affrightedly into hisseared and listless countenance. As she thus gazed on him she appearedfor the first time to recognise him. Fear and astonishment mingled inher expression with grief and despair as she sunk at his feet, moaningin tones of piercing entreaty--
'O Ulpius!--if Ulpius you are--have pity on me and take me to myfather! My father! my father! In all the lonely world there is nothingleft to me but my father!'
'Why do you weep to me about your broken lute?' answered Ulpius, with adull, unmeaning smile; 'it was not I that destroyed it!'
'They have slain him!' she shrieked distractedly, heedless of thePagan's reply. 'I saw them draw their swords on him! See, his bloodis on me--me!--Antonina, whom he protected and loved! Look there; thatis a grave--his grave--I know it! I have never seen him since; he isdown--down there! under the flowers I grew to gather for him! Theyslew him; and when I knew it not, they have buried him!--or you--youhave buried him! You have hidden him under the cold garden earth! Heis gone!--Ah, gone, gone--for ever gone!'
And she flung herself again with reckless violence on the grave. Afterlooking steadfastly on her for a moment, Ulpius approached and raisedher from the earth.
'Come!' he cried angrily, 'the night grows on--your father waits!'
'The walls of Rome shut me from my father! I shall never see my fathernor Hermanric again!' she cried, in tones of bitter anguish,remembering more perfectly all the miseries of her position, andstruggling to release herself from the Pagan's grasp.
The walls of Rome! At those words the mind of Ulpius opened to a flowof dark remembrances, and lost the visions that had occupied it untilthat moment. He laughed triumphantly.
'The walls of Rome bow to my arm!' he cried, in exulting tones; 'Ipierced them with my good bar of iron! I wound through them with mybright lantern! Spirits roared on me, and struck me down, and grinnedupon me in the thick darkness, but I passed the wall! The thunderpealed around me as I crawled along the winding rifts; but I won my waythrough them! I came out conquering on the other side! Come, come,come, come! We will return! I know the track, even in the darkness!I can outwatch the sentinels! You shall walk in the pathway that Ihave broken through the bricks!
The girl's features lost for a moment their expression of grief, andgrew rigid with horror, as she glanced at his fiery eyes, and felt thefearful suspicion of his insanity darkening over her mind. She stoodpowerless, trembling, unresisting, in his grasp, without attempting todelude him into departure or to appease him into delay.
'Why did I make my passage through the wall?' muttered the Pagan in alow, awe-struck voice, suddenly checking himself, as he was about tostep forward. 'Why did I tear down the strong brick-work and go forthinto the dark suburbs?'
He paused, and for a few moments struggled with his purposeless anddisconnected thoughts; but a blank, a darkness, an annihilationoverwhelmed Alaric and the Gothic camp, which he vainly endeavoured todisperse. He sighed bitterly to himself--'It is gone!' and stillgrasping Antonina by the hand, drew her after him to the garden gate.
'Leave me!' she shrieked, as he passed onward into the pathway that ledto the high-road. 'Oh, be merciful, and leave me to die where he hasdied!'
'Peace! or I will rend you limb by limb, as I rent the stones from thewall when I passed through it!' he whispered to her in fierce accents,as she struggled to escape him. 'You shall return with me to Rome!You shall walk in the track that I have made in the rifted brick-work!'
Terror, anguish, exhaustion, overpowered her weak efforts. Her lipsmoved, partly in prayer and partly in ejaculation; but she spoke inmurmurs only, as she mechanically suffered the Pagan to lead her onwardby the hand.
They paced on under the waning starlight, over the cold, lonely road,and through the dreary and deserted suburbs,--a fearful and discordantpair! Coldly, obediently, impassively, as if she were walking in adream, the spirit-broken girl moved by the side of her scarce-humanleader. Disjointed exclamation, alternating horribly between infantinesimplicity and fierce wickedness, poured incessantly from the Pagan'slips, but he never addressed himself further to his terror-strickencompanion. So, wending rapidly onward, they gained the Gothic lines;and here the madman slackened his pace, and paused, beast-like, toglare around him, as he approached the habitations of men.
Still not opposed by Antonina, whose faculties of observation werepetrified by her terror into perfect inaction, even here, within reachof the doubtful aid of the enemies of her people, the Pagan creptforward through the loneliest places of the encampment, and, guided bythe mysterious cunning of his miserable race, eluded successfully theobservation of the drowsy sentinels. Never bewildered by thedarkness--for the moon had gone down--always led by the animal instinctco-existent with his disease, he passed over the waste ground betweenthe hostile encampment and the city, and arrived triumphant at the heapof stones that marked his entrance to the rifted wall.
For one moment he stopped, and turning towards the girl, pointedproudly to the dark, low breach he was about to penetrate. Then,drawing her half-fainting form closer to his side, looking upattentively to the ramparts, and stepping as noiselessly as though turfwere beneath his feet, he entered the dusky rift with his helplesscharge.
As they disappeared in the recesses of the wall, Night--the stormy, theeventful, the fatal!--reached its last limit; and the famished sentinelon the fortifications of the besieged city roused himself from hisdreary and absorbing thoughts, for he saw that the new day was dawningin the east.