CHAPTER 20.
THE BREACH REPASSED.
Slowly and mournfully the sentinel at the rifted wall raised his eyestowards the eastern clouds as they brightened before the advancingdawn. Desolate as was the appearance of the dull, misty daybreak, itwas yet the most welcome of all the objects surrounding the starvingsoldier on which he could fix his languid gaze. To look back on thecity behind him was to look back on the dreary charnel-house of famineand death; to look down on the waste ground without the walls was tolook down on the dead body of the comrade of his watch, who, maddenedby the pangs of hunger which he had suffered during the night, had casthimself from the rampart to meet a welcome death on the earth beneath.Famished and despairing, the sentinel crouched on the fortificationswhich he had now neither strength to pace nor care to defend, yearningfor the food that he had no hope to obtain, as he watched the greydaybreak from his solitary post.
While he was thus occupied, the gloomy silence of the scene wassuddenly broken by the sound of falling brick-work at the inner base ofthe wall, followed by faint entreaties for mercy and deliverance, whichrose on his ear, strangely mingled with disjointed expression ofdefiance and exultation from a second voice. He slowly turned hishead, and, looking down, saw on the ground beneath a young girlstruggling in the grasp of an old man, who was hurrying her onward inthe direction of the Pincian Gate.
For one moment the girl's eye met the sentinel's vacant glance, and sherenewed, with a last effort of strength, and a greater vehemence ofsupplication, her cries for help; but the soldier neither moved noranswered. Exhausted as he was, no sight could affect him now but thesight of food. Like the rest of the citizens, he was sunk in a heavystupor of starvation--selfish, reckless, brutalised. No disasters coulddepress, no atrocities rouse him. Famine had torn asunder every socialtie, had withered every human sympathy among his besiegedfellow-citizens, and he was famishing like them.
At the moment when the dawn had first appeared, could he have lookeddown by some mysterious agency to the interior foundations of the wall,from the rampart on which he kept his weary watch, such a sight mustthen have presented itself as would have aroused even his sluggishobservation 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 theelevations of rising arches, the dark irregular passages broken byUlpius in the rotten wall would then have presented themselves to hiseyes; not stretching forth in dismal solitude, not peopled only by thereptiles native to the place, but traced in all their mazes by humanforms. Then he would have perceived the fierce, resolute Pagan, movingthrough darkness and obstacles with a sure, solemn progress, drawingafter him, like a dog devoted to his will, the young girl whose haplessfate had doomed her to fall into his power. Her half-fainting figuremight have been seen, sometimes prostrate on the higher places of thebreach, while her fearful guide descended before her into a chasmbeyond, and then turned to drag her after him to a darker and a lowerdepth yet; sometimes bent in supplication, when her lips moved oncemore with a last despairing entreaty, and her limbs trembled with afinal effort to escape from her captor's relentless grasp. Whilestill, through all that opposed him, the same fierce tenacity ofpurpose would have been invariably visible in every action of Ulpius,constantly confirming him in his mad resolution to make his victim thefollower of his progress through the wall, ever guiding him with astrange instinct through every hindrance, and preserving him from everydanger in his path, until it brought him forth triumphant, with hisprisoner still in his power, again free to tread the desolate streetsand mingle with the famine-stricken citizens of Rome.
And now when, after peril and anguish, she once more stood within thecity of her home, what hope remained to Antonina of obtaining her lastrefuge under her father's roof, and deriving her solitary consolationfrom the effort to regain her father's love? With the termination ofhis passage through the breach in the wall had ended every recollectionassociated with it in the Pagan's shattered memory. A new blank nowpervaded his lost faculties, desolate as that which had overwhelmedthem in the night when he first stood in the farm-house garden by theyoung chieftain's grave. He moved onward, unobservant, unthinking,without aim or hope, driven by a mysterious restlessness, forgettingthe very presence of Antonina as she followed him, but stillmechanically grasping her hand, and dragging her after him he knew notwhither.
And she, on her part, made no effort more for deliverance. She hadseen the sentinel unmoved by her entreaties, she had seen the walls ofher father's house receding from her longing eyes, as Ulpius pitilesslyhurried her father and farther from its distant door; and she lost thelast faint hope of restoration, the last lingering desire of life, asthe sense of her helplessness now weighed heaviest on her mind. Herheart was full of her young warrior, who had been slain, and of herfather, from whom she had parted in the hour of his wrath, as she nowfeebly followed the Pagan's steps, and resigned herself to a speedyexhaustion and death in her utter despair.
They turned from the Pincian Gate and gained the Campus Martius; andhere the aspect of the besieged city and the condition of its doomedinhabitants were fully and fearfully disclosed to view. On the surfaceof the noble area, once thronged with bustling crowds passing to andfro in every direction as their various destinations or caprices mightlead them, not twenty moving figures were now discernible. These few,who still retained their strength or the resolution to pace thegreatest thoroughfare of Rome, stalked backwards and forwardsincessantly, their hollow eyes fixed on vacancy, their wan handspressed over their mouths; each separate, distrustful, and silent;fierce as imprisoned madmen; restless as spectres disturbed in a placeof tombs.
Such were the citizens who still moved over the Campus Martius; and,besetting their path wherever they turned, lay the gloomy numbers ofthe dying and the dead--the victims already stricken by the pestilencewhich had now arisen in the infected city, and joined the famine in itswork of desolation and death. Around the public fountains, where thewater still bubbled up as freshly as in the summer-time of prosperityand peace, the poorer population of beleaguered Rome had chieflycongregated to expire. Some still retained strength enough to drinkgreedily at the margin of the stone basins, across which others laydead--their heads and shoulders immersed in the water--drowned fromlack of strength to draw back after their first draught. Childrenmounted over the dead bodies of their parents to raise themselves tothe fountain's brim; parents stared vacantly at the corpses of theirchildren alternately floating and sinking in the water, into which theyhad fallen unsuccoured and unmourned.
In other parts of the place, at the open gates of the theatres andhippodromes, in the unguarded porticoes of the palaces and the bathslay the discoloured bodies of those who had died ere they could reachthe fountains--of women and children especially--surrounded infrightful contrast by the abandoned furniture of luxury and thediscarded inventions of vice--by gilded couches--by inlaid tables--byjewelled cornices--by obscene picture and statues--by brilliantlyframed, gaudily tinted manuscripts of licentious songs, still hangingat their accustomed places on the lofty marble walls. Farther on, inthe by-streets and the retired courts, where the corpse of thetradesman was stretched on his empty counter; where the soldier of thecity guard dropped down overpowered ere he reached the limit of hisrounds; where the wealthy merchant lay pestilence-stricken upon thelast hoards of repulsive food which his gold had procured; the assassinand the robber might be seen--now greedily devouring the offal that layaround them, now falling dead upon the bodies which they had rifled butthe 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 silentas the dead; crime, suffering, despair, were all voiceless alike; thetrumpet was unheard in the guard-house; the bell never rang from thechurch; even the thick, misty rain, that now descended from the blackand unmoving cloud
s, and obscured in cold shadows the outlines ofdistant buildings and the pinnacle tops of mighty palaces, fellnoiseless to the ground. The sky had no wind; the earth no echoes--thepervading desolation appalled the eye; the vast stillness weighed dullon the ear--it was a scene as of the last-left city of an exhaustedworld, decaying noiselessly into primeval chaos.
Through this atmosphere of darkness and death, along these paths ofpestilence and famine; unregarding and unregarded, the Pagan and hisprisoner passed slowly onward towards the quarter of the city oppositethe Pincian Mount. No ray of thought, even yet, brightened the dullfaculties of Ulpius; still he walked forward vacantly, and still he wasfollowed wearily by the fast-failing girl.
Sunk in her mingled stupor of bodily weakness and mental despair, shenever spoke, never raised her head, never looked forth on the one sideor the other. She had now ceased even to feel the strong, cold graspof the Pagan's hand. Shadowy visions of spheres beyond the world,arrayed in enchanting beauty, and people with happy spirits in theirold earthly forms, where a long deathless existence moved smoothly anddreamily onward, without mark of time or taint of woe, were openingbefore her mind. She lost all memory of afflictions and wrongs, allapprehension of danger from the madman at whose mercy she remained.And thus she still moved feebly onward as the will of Ulpius guidedher, with no observation of her present peril, and no anxiety for herimpending fate.
They passed the grand circular structure of the Pantheon, entered thelong narrow streets leading to the banks of the river, and finallygained the margin of the Tiber--hard by the little island that stillrises in the midst of its waters. Here, for the first time, the Paganpaused mechanically in his course, and vacantly directed his dull,dreamy eyes on the prospect before him, where the walls, stretchingabruptly outward from their ordinary direction, enclosed the JaniculumHill, as it rose with its irregular mass of buildings on the oppositebank of the river.
At this sudden change from action to repose, the overtasked energieswhich had hitherto gifted the limbs of Antonina with an unnatural powerof endurance, abruptly relaxed. She sank down helpless and silent; herhead drooped towards the hard ground, as towards a welcome pillow, butfound no support, for the Pagan's iron grasp of her hand remainedunyielding as ever. Infirm though he was, he appeared at this momentto be unconscious that his prisoner was now hanging at his side. Everyassociation connected with her, every recollection of his position withher in her father's house, had vanished from his memory. A darkerblindness seemed to have sunk over his bodily perceptions; his eyesrolled slowly to and fro over the prospect before him, but regardednothing; his panting breaths came thick and fast; his shrunk chestheaved as if some deep, dread agony were pent within it--it was evidentthat a new crisis in his insanity was at hand.
At this moment one of the bands of marauders--the desperate criminalsof famine and plague--who still prowled through the city, appeared inthe street. Their trembling hands sought their weapons, and theirhaggard faces brightened, when they first discerned the Pagan and thegirl; but as they approached nearer they saw enough in the figures ofthe two, at a glance, to destroy their hopes of seizing on them eitherplunder or food. For an instant they stood by their intended victims,as if debating whether to murder them only for murder's sake, when theappearance of two women, stealthily quitting a house farther on in thestreet, carrying a basket covered by some tattered garments, attractedtheir attention. They turned instantly to follow the bearers of thebasket, and again Ulpius and Antonina were left alone on the river'sbank.
The appearance of the assassins had been powerless, as every othersight or event in the city, in arousing the faculties of Ulpius. Hehad 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 directionby which they had departed. His gaze wandered over the wet flagstonesof 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 oneof the houses, exerting her last energies to drink from the turbidrain-water which ran down the kennel by her side; and still his eyesremained unregardful of all that they encountered. The next objectwhich by chance attracted his vacant attention was a deserted temple.This solitary building fixed him immediately in contemplation--it wasdestined to open a new and a warning scene in the dark tragedy of hisclosing life.
In his course through the city he had passed unheeded many temples farmore prominent in situation, far more imposing in structure, than this.It was a building of no remarkable extent or extraordinary beauty. Itsnarrow porticoes and dark doorway were more fitted to repel than toinvite the eye; but it had one attraction, powerful above all gloriesof architecture and all grandeur of situation to arrest in him thosewandering faculties whose sterner and loftier aims were now suspendedfor ever; it was dedicated to Serapis--to the idol which had been thedeity of his first worship, and the inspiration of his last strugglefor the restoration of his faith. The image of the god, with thethree-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 theinstant when he discerned the long-loved, well-known image of theEgyptian god, there was nothing for some moments outwardly visible inhim to betray. His moral insensibility appeared but to be deepened ashis gaze was now fixed with rigid intensity on the temple portico.Thus he continued to remain motionless, as if what he saw had petrifiedhim where he stood, when the clouds, which had been closing in deeperand deeper blackness as the morning advanced, and which, still chargedwith 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 signalawaited to arouse him, as if in one brief moment it awakened everyrecollection of all that he had resolutely attempted during the nightof thunder that was past, he started into instant animation. Hiscountenance brightened, his form expanded, he dropped the hand ofAntonina, raised his arm aloft towards the wrathful heaven in frantictriumph, then staggering forwards, fell on his knees at the base of thetemple steps.
Whatever the remembrances of his passage through the wall at thePincian Hill, and of the toil and peril succeeding it, which hadrevived when the thunder first sounded in his ear, they now vanished asrapidly as they had arisen, and left his wandering memory free torevert to the scenes which the image of Serapis was most fitted torecall. Recollections of his boyish enjoyments in the temple atAlexandria, of his youth's enthusiasm, of the triumphs of his earlymanhood--all disjointed and wayward, yet all bright, glorious,intoxicating--flashed before his shattered mind. Tears, the first thathe had shed since his happy youth, flowed quickly down his witheredcheeks. He pressed his hot forehead, he beat his parched hand inecstasy on the cold, wet steps beneath him. He muttered breathlessejaculations, he breathed strange murmurs of endearment, he humbledhimself in his rapturous delight beneath the walls of the temple like adog that has discovered his lost master and fawns affectionately at hisfeet. Criminal as he was, his joy in his abasement, his glory in hismiserable isolation from humanity, was a doom of degradation pitiableto behold.
After an interval his mood changed. He rose to his feet, his tremblinglimbs strengthened with a youthful vigour as he ascended the templesteps and gained its doorway. He turned for a moment, and looked forthover the street, ere he entered the hallowed domain of his distemperedimagination. To him the cloudy sky above was now shining with theradiance of the sun-bright East. The death-laden highways of Rome, asthey stretched before him, were beautiful with lofty trees, andpopulous with happy figures; and along the dark flagstones beneath,where still lay the corpses which he had no eye to see, he beheldalready the priests of Serapis with his revered guardian, his belovedMacrinus of former days, at their head, advancing to meet and welcomehim in the hall of the Egyptian god. Visions such as these passedgloriously before the Pagan's eyes as he stood triumphant on the stepsof the temple, and brightened to him with a n
oonday light its duskyrecesses when, after his brief delay, he turned from the street anddisappeared through the doorway of the sacred place.
The rain poured down more thickly than before; the thunder, oncearoused, now sounded in deep and frequent peals as Antonina raisedherself from the ground and looked around her, in momentary expectationthat the dreaded form of Ulpius must meet her eyes. No living creaturewas visible in the street. The forsaken slave still reclined near thewall of the house where she had first appeared when the Pagan gainedthe approaches to the temple; but she now lay there dead. No freshbands of robbers appeared in sight. An uninterrupted solitudeprevailed 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 notexhausted beyond all power of sensation or all capacity for thought.While she lay on the cold pavement of the street, her mind stillpursued its visions of a speedy death, and a tranquil life-in-death tosucceed it in a future state. But, as minute after minute elapsed, andno harsh voice sounded in her ear, no pitiless hand dragged her fromthe ground, no ominous footsteps were audible around her, a changepassed gradually over her thoughts; the instinct of self-preservationslowly revived within her, and, as she raised herself to look forth onthe gloomy prospect, the chances of uninterrupted flight and presentsafety presented by the solitude of the street, aroused her like avoice of encouragement, like an unexpected promise of help.
Her perception of outer influences returned; she felt the rain thatdrenched her garments; she shuddered at the thunder sounding over herhead; she marked with horror the dead bodies lying before her on thestones. An overpowering desire animated her to fly from the place, toescape from the desolate scene around, even though she should sinkexhausted by the effort in the next street. Slowly she arose--her limbstrembled with a premature infirmity; but she gained her feet. Shetottered onward, turning her back on the river, passed bewilderedbetween long rows of deserted houses, and arrived opposite a publicgarden surrounding a little summer-house, whose deserted porticooffered both concealment and shelter. Here, therefore, she tookrefuge, crouching in the darkest corner of the building, and hiding herface in her hands, as if to shut out all view of the dreary thoughaltered scenes which spread before her eyes.
Woeful thoughts and recollections now moved within her in bewilderingconfusion. All that she had suffered since Ulpius had dragged her fromthe farm-house in the suburbs--the night pilgrimage over the plain--thefearful passage through the wall--revived in her memory, mingled withvague ideas, now for the first time aroused, of the plague and faminethat were desolating the city; and, with sudden apprehensions thatGoisvintha might still be following her, knife in hand, through thelonely streets; while passively prominent over all these varyingsources of anguish and dread, the scene of the young chieftain's deathlay like a cold weight on her heavy heart. The damp turf of his graveseemed still to press against her breast; his last kiss yet trembled onher lips; she knew, though she dared not look down on them, that thespots of his blood yet stained her garments.
Whether she strove to rise and continue her flight; whether shecrouched down again under the portico, resigned for one bitter momentto perish by the knife of Goisvintha--if Goisvintha were near; to fallonce more into the hands of Ulpius--if Ulpius were tracking her to herretreat,--the crushing sense that she was utterly bereaved of herbeloved protector--that the friend of her brief days of happiness waslost to her for ever--that Hermanric, who had preserved her from death,had been murdered in his youth and his strength by her side, neverdeserted her. Since the assassination in the farm-house, she was nowfor the first time alone; and now for the first time she felt the fullseverity of her affliction, and knew how dark was the blank which wasspread before every aspiration of her future life.
Enduring, almost eternal, as the burden of her desolation seemed now tohave become, it was yet to be removed, ere long, by feelings of atenderer mournfulness and a more resigned woe. The innate and innocentfortitude of disposition, which had made her patient under the rigourof her youthful education, and hopeful under the trials that assailedher on her banishment from her father's house; which had never desertedher until the awful scenes of the past night of assassination and deathrose in triumphant horror before her eyes; and which, even then, hadbeen suspended but not destroyed--was now destined to regain itshealing influence over her heart. As she still cowered in her lonelyrefuge, the final hope, the yearning dependence on a restoration to herfather's presence and her father's love, that had moved her over theyoung chieftain's grave, and had prompted her last effort for freedomwhen 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 thestormy sky, but now with mild and unshrinking eyes. Her recollectionsof the past grew tender in their youthful grief; her thoughts for thefuture became patient, solemn, and serene. Images of her first and herlast-left protector, of her old familiar home, of her garden solitudeon the Pincian Mount, spread beautiful before her imagination asresting-places to her weary heart. She descended the steps of thesummer-house with no apprehension of her enemies, no doubt of herresolution; for she knew the beacon that was now to direct her onwardcourse. The tears gathered full in her eyes as she passed into thegarden; but her step never faltered, her features never lost theircombined expression of tranquil sorrow and subdued hope. So she oncemore entered the perilous streets, and murmuring to herself, 'Myfather! my father!' as if in those simple words lay the hand that wasto guide, and the providence that was to preserved her, she began totrace her solitary way in the direction of the Pincian Mount.
It was a spectacle--touching, beautiful, even sublime--to see thisyoung girl, but a few hours freed, by perilous paths and by criminalhands, 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 inhuman crime. It was a noble evidence of the strong power over theworld and the world's perils, with which the simplest affection may armthe frailest being--to behold her thus pursuing her way, superior toevery 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 thatsustained her--the steady heroism that ever held her in her doubtfulcourse. The storms of heaven poured over her head--the crimes andsufferings of Rome darkened the paths of her pilgrimage; but she passedfirmly onward through all, like a ministering spirit, journeying alongearthly shores in the bright inviolability of its merciful mission andits holy thoughts--like a ray of light living in the strength of itsown beauty, amid the tempest and obscurity of a stranger sphere.
Once more she entered the Campus Martius. Again she passed the publicfountains, still unnaturally devoted to serve as beds for the dying andas sepulchres for the dead; again she trod the dreary highways, wherethe stronger among the famished populace yet paced hither and thitherin 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 abandonedlike herself.
The robber, when he passed her by, saw that she was worthless for theinterests of plunder as the poorest of the dying citizens around him.The patrician, loitering feebly onward to the shelter of his palacehalls, avoided her as a new suppliant among the people for the charitywhich he had not to bestow, and quickened his pace as she approachedhim in the street. Unprotected, yet unmolested, hurrying from herloneliness and her bitter recollections to the refuge of her father'slove, as she would have hurried when a child from her firstapprehension of ill to the refuge of her father's arms, she gained atlength the foot of the Pincian Hill--at length ascended the streets sooften trodden in the tranquil days of old!
The portals and outer buildings of Vetranio's palace, as she passedthem, presented a striking and ominou
s spectacle. Within the loftysteel railings, which protected the building, the famine-wasted slavesof the senator appeared reeling and tottering beneath full vases ofwine which they were feebly endeavouring to carry into the interiorapartments. Gaudy hangings drooped from the balconies, garlands of ivywere wreathed round the statues of the marble front. In the midst ofthe besieged city, and in impious mockery of the famine and pestilencewhich were wasting it, hut and palace, to its remotest confines, wereproceeding in this devoted dwelling the preparations for a triumphantfeast!
Unheedful of the startling prospect presented by Vetranio's abode, hereyes bent but in one absorbing direction, her steps hurrying faster andfaster with each succeeding instant, Antonina approached the home fromwhich she had been exiled in fear, and to which she was returning inwoe. Yet a moment more of strong exertion, of overpoweringanticipation, and she reached the garden gate!
She dashed back the heavy hair matted over her brows by the rain; sheglanced rapidly around her; she beheld the window of her bed-chamberwith the old simple curtain still hanging at its accustomed place; shesaw the well-remembered trees, the carefully tended flower-beds, nowdrooping mournfully beneath the gloomy sky. Her heart swelled withinher, her breath seemed suddenly arrested in her bosom, as she trod thegarden path and ascended the steps beyond. The door at the top wasajar. With a last effort she thrust it open, and stood oncemore--unaided and unwelcomed, yet hopeful of consolation, of pardon, oflove--within her first and last sanctuary, the walls of her home!