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Books: Antonina

W >> Wilkie Collins >> Antonina




Strong in the imaginative and weak in the reasoning faculties; gifted
with large moral perception and little moral firmness; too easy to be
influenced and too difficult to be resolved, Hermanric had deserted the
girl's interests from an infirmity of disposition, rather than from a
determination of will. Now, therefore, when the employments of the day
had ceased to absorb his attention; now when silence and solitude led
his memory back to his morning's abandonment of his helpless charge,
that act of fatal impatience and irresolution inspired him with the
strongest emotions of sorrow and remorse. If during her sojourn under
his care, Antonina had insensibly influenced his heart, her image, now
that he reflected on his guilty share in their parting scene, filled all
his thoughts, at once saddening and shaming him, as he remembered her
banishment from the shelter of his tent.

Every feeling which had animated his reflections on Antonina on the
previous night, was doubled in intensity as he thought on her now.
Again he recalled her eloquent words, and remembered the charm of her
gentle and innocent manner; again he dwelt on the beauties of her
outward form. Each warm expression; each varying intonation of voice
that had accompanied her petition to him for safety and companionship;
every persuasion that she had used to melt him, now revived in his
memory and moved in his heart with steady influence and increasing
power. All the hurried and imperfect pictures of happiness which she
had drawn to allure him, now expanded and brightened, until his mind
began to figure to him visions that had been hitherto unknown to
faculties occupied by no other images than those of rivalry, turbulence,
and strife. Scenes called into being by Antonina's lightest and
hastiest expressions, now rose vague and shadowy before his brooding
spirit. Lovely places of earth that he had visited and forgotten now
returned to his recollection, idealised and refined as he thought of
her. She appeared to his mind in every allurement of action, fulfilling
all the duties and enjoying all the pleasures that she had proposed to
him. He imagined her happy and healthful, journeying gaily by his side
in the fresh morning, with rosy cheek and elastic step; he imagined her
delighting him by her promised songs, enlivening him by her eloquent
words, in the mellow stillness of evening; he imagined her sleeping,
soft and warm and still, in his protecting arms--ever happy and ever
gentle; girl in years, and woman in capacities; at once lover and
companion, teacher and pupil, follower and guide!

Such she might have been once! What was she now?


Was she sinking under her loneliness, perishing from exposure and
fatigue, repulsed by the cruel, or mocked by the unthinking? To all
these perils and miseries had he exposed her; and to what end? To
maintain the uncertain favour, to preserve the unwelcome friendship, of
a woman abandoned even by the most common and intuitive virtues of her
sex; whose frantic craving for revenge, confounded justice with
treachery, innocence with guilt, helplessness with tyranny; whose claims
of nation and relationship should have been forfeited in his estimation,
by the openly-confessed malignity of her designs, at the fatal moment
when she had communicated them to him in all their atrocity, before the
walls of Rome. He groaned in despair, as he thought on this, the most
unworthy of the necessities, to which the forsaken girl had been
sacrificed.

Soon, however, his mind reverted from such reflections as these, to his
own duties and his own renown; and here his remorse became partially
lightened, though his sorrow remained unchanged.

Wonderful as had been the influence of Antonina's presence and
Antonina's words over the Goth, they had not yet acquired power enough
to smother in him entirely the warlike instincts of his sex and nation,
or to vanquish the strong and hostile promptings of education and
custom. She had gifted him with new emotions, and awakened him to new
thought; she had aroused all the dormant gentleness of his disposition
to war against the rugged indifference, the reckless energy, that
teaching and example had hitherto made a second nature to his heart.
She had wound her way into his mind, brightening its dark places,
enlarging its narrow recesses, beautifying its unpolished treasures.
She had created, she had refined, during her short hours of
communication with him, but she had not lured his disposition entirely
from its old habits and its old attachments; she had not yet stripped
off the false glitter from barbarian strife, or the pomp from martial
renown; she had not elevated the inferior intellectual, to the height of
the superior moral faculties, in his inward composition. Submitted
almost impartially to the alternate and conflicting dominion of the two
masters, Love and Duty, he at once regretted Antonina, and yet clung
mechanically to his old obedience to those tyrannic requirements of
nation and name, which had occasioned her loss.

Oppressed by his varying emotions, destitute alike of consolation and
advice, the very inaction of his present position sensibly depressed
him. He rose impatiently, and buckling on his weapons, sought to escape
from his thoughts, by abandoning the scene under the influence of which
they had been first aroused. Turning his back upon the city, he
directed his steps at random, through the complicated labyrinth of
streets, composing the extent of the deserted suburbs.

After he had passed through the dwellings comprised in the occupation of
the Gothic lines, and had gained those situated nearer to the desolate
country beyond, the scene around him became impressive enough to have
absorbed the attention of any man not wholly occupied by other and more
important objects of contemplation.

The loneliness he now beheld on all sides, was not the loneliness of
ruin--the buildings near him were in perfect repair; it was not the
loneliness of pestilence--there were no corpses strewn over the
untrodden pavements of the streets; it was not the loneliness of
seclusion--there were no barred windows, and few closed doors; it was a
solitude of human annihilation. The open halls were unapproached; the
benches before the wine-shops were unoccupied; remains of gaudy
household wares still stood on the counters of the street booths,
watched by none, bought by none; particles of bread and meat (treasures,
fated to become soon of greater value than silver and gold, to
beleaguered Rome) rotted here in the open air, like garbage upon
dunghills; children's toys, women's ornaments, purses, money, love-
tokens, precious manuscripts, lay scattered hither and thither in the
public ways, dropped and abandoned by their different owners, in the
hurry of their sudden and universal flight. Every deserted street was
eloquent of darling projects desperately resigned, of valued labours
miserably deserted, of delighting enjoyments irretrievably lost. The
place was forsaken even by those household gods of rich and poor, its
domestic animals. They had either followed their owners into the city,
or strayed, unhindered and unwatched, into the country beyond. Mansion,
bath, and circus, displayed their gaudy pomp and luxurious comfort in
vain; not even a wandering Goth was to be seen near their empty halls.
For, with such a prospect before them as the subjugation of Rome, the
army had caught the infection of its leader's enthusiasm for his exalted
task, and willingly obeyed his commands for suspending the pillage of
the suburbs, disdaining the comparatively worthless treasures around
them, attainable at any time, when they felt that the rich coffers of
Rome herself were now fast opening to their eager hands. Voiceless and
noiseless, unpeopled and unravaged, lay the far-famed suburbs of the
greatest city of the universe, sunk alike in the night of Nature, the
night of Fortune, and the night of Glory!

Saddening and impressive as was the prospect thus presented to the eyes
of the young Goth, it failed to weaken the powerful influence that his
evening's meditations yet held over his mind. As, during the hours that
were passed, the image of the forsaken girl had dissipated the
remembrance of the duties he had performed, and opposed the
contemplation of the commands he was yet to fulfil, so it now denied to
his faculties any impressions from the lonely scene, beheld, yet
unnoticed, which spread around him. Still, as he passed through the
gloomy streets, his vain regrets and self-accusations, his natural
predilections and acquired attachments, ruled over him and contended
within him, as sternly and as unceasingly as in the first moments when
they had arisen with the evening, during his sojourn in the terrace of
the deserted house.

He had now arrived at the extremest boundary of the buildings in the
suburbs. Before him lay an uninterrupted prospect of smooth, shining
fields, and soft, hazy, indefinable woods. At one side of him were some
vineyards and cottage gardens; at the other was a solitary house, the
outermost of all the abodes in his immediate vicinity. Dark and
cheerless as it was, he regarded it for some time with the mechanical
attention of a man more occupied in thought than observation,--gradually
advancing towards it in the moody abstraction of his reflections, until
he unconsciously paused before the low range of irregular steps which
led to its entrance door.

Startled from its meditations by his sudden propinquity to the object
that he had unwittingly approached, he now, for the first time, examined
the lonely abode before him with real attention.

There was nothing remarkable about the house, save the extreme
desolateness of its appearance, which seemed to arise partly from its
isolated position, and partly from the unusual absence of all decoration
on its external front. It was too extensive to have been the dwelling
of a poor man, too void of pomp and ornament to have been a mansion of
the rich. It might, perhaps, have belonged to some citizen, or
foreigner, or the middle class--some moody Northman, some solitary
Egyptian, some scheming Jew. Yet, though it was not possessed, in
itself, of any remarkable or decided character, the Goth experienced a
mysterious, almost an eager curiosity to examine its interior. He could
assign no cause, discover no excuse for the act, as he slowly mounted
the steps before him. Some invisible and incomprehensible magnet
attracted him to the dwelling. If his return had been suddenly
commanded by Alaric himself; if evidences of indubitable treachery had
lurked about the solitary place, at the moment when he thrust open its
unbarred door, he felt that he must still have proceeded upon his onward
course. The next instant he entered the house. The light streamed
through the open entrance into the gloomy hall; the night-wind, rushing
upon its track, blew shrill and dreary among the stone pillars, and in
the hidden crevices and untenanted chambers above. Not a sign of life
appeared, not a sound of a footstep was audible, not even an article of
household use was to be seen. The deserted suburbs rose without, like a
wilderness; and this empty house looked within, like a sepulchre--void
of corpses, and yet eloquent of death!

There was an inexplicable fascination to the eyes of the Goth about this
vault-like, solitary hall. He stood motionless at its entrance, gazing
dreamily at the gloomy prospect before him, until a strong gust of wind
suddenly forced the outer door further backwards, and at the same moment
admitted a larger stream of light.

The place was not empty. In a corner of the hall, hitherto sunk in
darkness, crouched a shadowy form. It was enveloped in a dark garment,
and huddled up into an indefinable and unfamiliar shape. Nothing
appeared on it, as a denoting sign of humanity, but one pale hand,
holding the black drapery together, and relieved against it in almost
ghastly contrast under the cold light of the moon.


Vague remembrances of the awful superstitions of his nation's ancient
worship, hurried over the memory of the young Goth, at the first moment
of his discovery of the ghost-like occupant of the hall. As he stood in
fixed attention before the motionless figure, it soon began to be
endowed with the same strange influence over his will, that the lonely
house had already exerted. He advanced slowly towards the crouching
form.

It never stirred at the noise of his approach. The pale hand still held
the mantle over the compressed figure, with the same rigid immobility of
grasp. Brave as he was, Hermanric shuddered as he bent down and touched
the bloodless, icy fingers. At that action, as if endowed with instant
vitality from contact with a living being, the figure suddenly started
up.

Then, the folds of the dark mantle fell back, disclosing a face as pale
in hue as the stone pillars around it; and the voice of the solitary
being became audible, uttering in faint, monotonous accents, these
words:--

'He has forgotten and abandoned me!--slay me if you will!--I am ready to
die!'

Broken, untuned as it was, there yet lurked in that voice a tone of its
old music, there beamed in that vacant and heavy eye a ray of its native
gentleness. With a sudden exclamation of compassion and surprise, the
Goth stepped forward, raised the trembling outcast in his arms; and, in
the impulse of the moment quitting the solitary house, stood the next
instant on the firm earth, and under the starry sky, once more united to
the charge that he had abandoned--to Antonina whom he had lost.

He spoke to her, caressed her, entreated her pardon, assured her of his
future care; but she neither answered nor recognised him. She never
looked in his face, never moved in his arms, never petitioned for mercy.
She gave no sign of life or being, saving that she moaned at regular
intervals in piteous accents:--'He has forgotten and abandoned me!' as
if that one simple expression comprised in itself, her acknowledgment of
the uselessness of her life, and her dirge for her expected death.

The Goth's countenance whitened to his very lips. He began to fear that
her faculties had sunk under her trials. He hurried on with her with
trembling steps towards the open country, for he nourished a dreamy,
intuitive hope, that the sight of those woods and fields and mountains
which she had extolled to him, in her morning's entreaty for protection,
might aid in restoring her suspended consciousness, if she now looked on
them.

He ran forward, until he had left the suburbs at least half a mile
behind him, and had reached an eminence, bounded on each side by high
grass banks and clustering woods, and commanding a narrow, yet various
prospect, of the valley ground beneath, and the fertile plains that
extended beyond.

Here the warrior paused with his burden; and, seating himself on the
bank, once more attempted to calm the girl's continued bewilderment and
terror. He thought not on his sentinels, whom he had abandoned--on his
absence from the suburbs, which might be perceived and punished by an
unexpected visit, at his deserted quarters, from his superiors in the
camp. The social influence that sways the world; the fragile idol at
whose shrine pride learns to bow, and insensibility to feel; the soft,
grateful influence of yielding nature yet eternal rule--the influence of
woman, source alike of virtues and crimes, of earthly glories and
earthly disasters--had, in this moment of anguish and expectation,
silenced in him every appeal of duty, and overthrown every obstacle of
selfish doubt. He now spoke to Antonina as alluringly as a woman, as
gently as a child. He caressed her as warmly as a lover, as cheerfully
as a brother, as kindly as a father. He--the rough, northern warrior,
whose education had been of arms, and whose youthful aspirations had
been taught to point towards strife and bloodshed and glory--even he was
now endowed with the tender eloquence of pity and love--with untiring,
skilful care--with calm, enduring patience.


Gently and unceasingly he plied his soothing task; and soon, to his joy
and triumph, he beheld the approaching reward of his efforts, in the
slow changes that became gradually perceptible in the girl's face and
manner. She raised herself in his arms, looked up fixedly and vacantly
into his face, then round upon the bright, quiet landscape, then back
again more stedfastly upon her companion; and at length, trembling
violently, she whispered softly and several times the young Goth's name,
glancing at him anxiously and apprehensively, as if she feared and
doubted while she recognised him.

'You are bearing me to my death,'--said she suddenly. 'You, who once
protected me--you, who forsook me!--You are luring me into the power of
the woman who thirsts for my blood!--Oh, it is horrible--horrible!'

She paused, averted her face, and shuddering violently, disengaged
herself from his arms. After an interval, she continued:--

'Through the long day, and in the beginning of the cold night, I have
waited in one solitary place for the death that is in store for me! I
have suffered all the loneliness of my hours of expectation, without
complaint; I have listened with little dread, and no grief, for the
approach of my enemy who has sworn that she will shed my blood! Having
none to love me, and being a stranger in the land of my own nation, I
have nothing to live for! But it is a bitter misery to me to behold in
you the fulfiller of my doom; to be snatched by the hand of Hermanric
from the heritage of life that I have so long struggled to preserve!'

Her voice had altered, as she pronounced these words, to an impressive
lowness and mournfulness of tone. Its quiet, saddened accents were
expressive of an almost divine resignation and sorrow; they seemed to be
attuned to a mysterious and untraceable harmony with the melancholy
stillness of the night-landscape. As she now stood looking up with
pale, calm countenance, and gentle, tearless eyes, into the sky whose
moonlight brightness shone softly over her form, the Virgin watching the
approach of her angel messenger could hardly have been adorned with a
more pure and simple loveliness, than now dwelt over the features of
Numerian's forsaken child.

No longer master of his agitation; filled with awe, grief, and despair,
as he looked on the victim of his heartless impatience; Hermanric bowed
himself at the girl's feet, and, in the passionate utterance of real
remorse, offered up his supplications for pardon and his assurances of
protection and love. All that the reader has already learned--the
bitter self-upbraidings of his evening, the sorrowful wanderings of his
night, the mysterious attraction that led him to the solitary house, his
joy at once more discovering his lost charge--all these confessions he
now poured forth in the simple yet powerful eloquence of strong emotion
and true regret.

Gradually and amazedly, as she listened to his words, Antonina awoke
from her abstraction. Even the expression of his countenance and the
earnestness of his manner, viewed by the intuitive penetration of her
sex, wrought with kind and healing influence on her mind. She started
suddenly, a bright flush flew over her colourless cheeks; she bent down,
and looked earnestly and wistfully into the Goth's face. Her lips
moved, but her quick convulsive breathing stifled the words that she
vainly endeavoured to form.

'Yes,' continued Hermanric, rising and drawing her towards him again,
'you shall never mourn, never fear, never weep more! Though you have
lost your father, and the people of your nation are as strangers to you,
though you have been threatened and forsaken, you shall still be
beautiful--still be happy; for I will watch you, and you shall never be
harmed; I will labour for you, and you shall never want! People and
kindred--fame and duty, I will abandon them all to make atonement to
you!'

Its youthful freshness and hope returned to the girl's heart, as water
to the long-parched spring, when the young warrior ceased. The tears
stood in her eyes, but she neither sighed nor spoke. Her frame trembled
all over with the excess of her astonishment and delight, as she still
steadfastly looked on him and still listened intently as he proceeded:--


'Fear, then, no longer for your safety--Goisvintha, whom you dread, is
far from us; she knows not that we are here; she cannot track our
footsteps now, to threaten or to harm you! Remember no more how you
have suffered and I have sinned! Think only how bitterly I have
repented our morning's separation, and how gladly I welcome our meeting
of to-night! Oh, Antonina! you are beautiful with a wondrous
loveliness, you are young with a perfected and unchildlike youth, your
words fall upon my ear with the music of a song of the olden time; it is
like a dream of the spirits that my fathers worshipped, when I look up
and behold you at my side!'

An expression of mingled confusion, pleasure, and surprise, flushed the
girl's half-averted countenance as she listened to the Goth. She rose
with a smile of ineffable gratitude and delight, and pointed to the
prospect beyond, as she softly rejoined:--

'Let us go a little further onward, where the moonlight shines over the
meadow below. My heart is bursting in this shadowy place! Let us seek
the light that is yonder; it seems happy like me!'

They walked forward; and as they went, she told him again of the sorrows
of her past day; of her lonely and despairing progress from his tent to
the solitary house where he had found her in the night, and where she
had resigned herself from the first to meet a death that had little
horror for her then. There was no thought of reproach, no utterance of
complaint, in this renewal of her melancholy narration. It was solely
that she might luxuriate afresh in those delighting expressions of
repentance and devotion, which she knew that it would call forth from
the lips of Hermanric, that she now thought of addressing him once more
with the tale of her grief.

As they still went onward; as she listened to the rude fervent eloquence
of the language of the Goth; as she looked on the deep repose of the
landscape, and the soft transparency of the night sky; her mind, ever
elastic under the shock of the most violent emotions, ever ready to
regain its wonted healthfulness and hope--now recovered its old tone,
and re-assumed its accustomed balance. Again her memory began to store
itself with its beloved remembrances, and her heart to rejoice in its
artless longings and visionary thoughts. In spite of all her fears and
all her sufferings, she now walked on blest in a disposition that woe
had no shadow to darken long, and neglect no influence to warp; still as
happy in herself; even yet as forgetful of her past, as hopeful for her
future, as on that first evening when we beheld her in her father's
garden, singing to the music of her lute.

Insensibly as they proceeded, they had diverged from the road, had
entered a bye-path, and now stood before a gate which led to a small
farm house, surrounded by its gardens and vineyards, and, like the
suburbs that they had quitted, deserted by its inhabitants on the
approach of the Goths. They passed through the gate, and arriving at
the plot of ground in front of the house, paused for a moment to look
around them.

The meadows had been already stripped of their grass, and the young
trees of their branches by the foragers of the invading army, but here
the destruction of the little property had been stayed. The house with
its neat thatched roof and shutters of variegated wood, the garden with
its small stock of fruit and its carefully tended beds of rare flowers,
designed probably to grace the feast of a nobleman or the statue of a
martyr, had presented no allurements to the rough tastes of Alaric's
soldiery. Not a mark of a footstep appeared on the turf before the
house door; the ivy crept in its wonted luxuriance about the pillars of
the lowly porch; and as Hermanric and Antonina walked towards the fish-
pond at the extremity of the garden, the few water-fowl placed there by
the owners of the cottage, came swimming towards the bank, as if to
welcome in their solitude the appearance of a human form.


Far from being melancholy, there was something soothing and attractive
about the loneliness of the deserted farm. Its ravaged outhouses and
plundered meadows, which might have appeared desolate by day, were so
distanced, softened, and obscured, by the atmosphere of night, that they
presented no harsh contrast to the prevailing smoothness and luxuriance
of the landscape around. As Antonina beheld the brightened fields and
the shadowed woods, here mingled, there succeeding each other, stretched
far onward and onward until they joined the distant mountains, that
eloquent voice of nature, whose audience is the human heart, and whose
theme is eternal love, spoke inspiringly to her attentive senses. She
stretched out her arms as she looked with steady and enraptured gaze
upon the bright view before her, as if she longed to see its beauties
resolved into a single and living form--into a spirit human enough to be
addressed, and visible enough to be adored.