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Books: Antonina

W >> Wilkie Collins >> Antonina





Alaric was seated alone on the wooden chest already described,
contemplating with bent brow and abstracted gaze some old Runic
characters, traced upon the carved surface of a brass and silver shield,
full five feet high, which rested against the side of the tent. The
light of the lamp falling upon the polished surface of the weapon--
rendered doubly bright by the dark skins behind it--was reflected back
upon the figure of the Goth chief. It glowed upon his ample cuirass; it
revealed his firm lips, slightly curled by an expression of scornful
triumph; it displayed the grand, muscular formation of his arm, which
rested--clothed in tightly-fitting leather--upon his knee; it partly
brightened over his short, light hair, and glittered steadily in his
fixed, thoughtful, manly eyes, which were just perceptible beneath the
partial shadow of his contracted brow; while it left the lower part of
his body and his right hand, which was supported on the head of a huge,
shaggy dog couching at his side, shadowed almost completely by the thick
skins heaped confusedly against the sides of the wooden chest. He was
so completely absorbed in the contemplation of the Runic characters,
traced among the carved figures on his immense shield, that he did not
notice the entry of Hermanric and the stranger until the growl of the
watchful dog suddenly disturbed him in his occupation. He looked up
instantly, his quick, penetrating glance dwelling for a moment on the
young chieftain, and then resting steadily and inquiringly on his
companion's feeble and mutilated form.

Accustomed to the military brevity and promptitude exacted by his
commander in all communications addressed to him by his inferiors,
Hermanric, without waiting to be interrogated or attempting to preface
or excuse his narrative, shortly related the conversation that had taken
place between the stranger and himself on the plain near the Pincian
Gate; and then waited respectfully to receive the commendation or incur
the rebuke of the king, as the chance of the moment might happen to
decide.

After again fixing his eyes in severe scrutiny on the person of the
Roman, Alaric spoke to the young warrior in the Gothic language thus:--

'Leave the man with me--return to your post, and there await whatever
commands it may be necessary that I should despatch to you to-night.'

Hermanric immediately departed. Then, addressing the stranger for the
first time, and speaking in the Latin language, the Gothic leader
briefly and significantly intimated to his unknown visitant that they
were now alone.

The man's parched lips moved, opened, quivered; his wild, hollow eyes
brightened till they absolutely gleamed, but he seemed incapable of
uttering a word; his features became horribly convulsed, the foam
gathered about his lips, he staggered forward and would have fallen to
the ground, had not the king instantly caught him in his strong grasp,
and placed him on the wooden chest that he had hitherto occupied
himself.

'Can a starving Roman have escaped from the beleaguered city?' muttered
Alaric, as he took the skull cup, and poured some of the wine it
contained down the stranger's throat.

The liquor was immediately successful in restoring composure to the
man's features and consciousness to his mind. He raised himself from
the seat, dashed off the cold perspiration that overspread his forehead,
and stood upright before the king--the solitary, powerless old man
before the vigorous lord of thousands, in the midst of his warriors--
without a tremor in his steady eye or a prayer for protection on his
haughty lip.

'I, a Roman,' he began, 'come from Rome, against which the invader wars
with the weapon of famine, to deliver the city, her people, her palaces,
and her treasures into the hands of Alaric the Goth.'

The king started, looked on the speaker for a moment, and then turned
from him in impatience and contempt.

'I lie not,' pursued the enthusiast, with a calm dignity that affected
even the hardy sensibilities of the Gothic hero. 'Eye me again! Could
I come starved, shrivelled, withered thus from any place but Rome?
Since I quitted the city an hour has hardly passed, and by the way that
I left it the forces of the Goths may enter it to-night.'

'The proof of the harvest is in the quantity of the grain, not in the
tongue of the husbandman. Show me your open gates, and I will believe
that you have spoken truth,' retorted the king, with a rough laugh.

'I betray the city,' resumed the man sternly, 'but on one condition;
grant it me, and--'

'I will grant you your life,' interrupted Alaric haughtily.


'My life!' cried the Roman, and his shrunken form seemed to expand, and
his tremulous voice to grow firm and steady in the very bitterness of
his contempt, as he spoke. 'My life! I ask it not of your power! The
wreck of my body is scarce strong enough to preserve it to me a single
day! I have no home, no loves, no friends, no possessions! I live in
Rome a solitary in the midst of the multitude, a pagan in a city of
apostates! What is my life to me? I cherish it but for the service of
the gods, whose instruments of vengeance against the nation that has
denied them I would make you and your hosts! If you slay me, it is a
sign to me from them that I am worthless in their cause. I shall die
content.'

He ceased. The king's manner, as he listened to him, gradually lost the
bluntness and carelessness that had hitherto characterised it, and
assumed an attention and a seriousness more in accordance with his high
station and important responsibilities. He began to regard the stranger
as no common renegade, no ordinary spy, no shallow impostor, who might
be driven from his tent with disdain; but as a man important enough to
be heard, and ambitious enough to be distrusted. Accordingly, he
resumed the seat from which he had risen during the interview, and
calmly desired his new ally to explain the condition, on the granting of
which depended the promised betrayal of the city of Rome.

The pain-worn and despondent features of Ulpius became animated by a
glow of triumph as he heard the sudden mildness and moderation of the
king's demand; he raised his head proudly, and advanced a few steps, as
he thus loudly and abruptly resumed:--

'Assure to me the overthrow of the Christian churches, the extermination
of the Christian priests, and the universal revival of the worship of
the gods, and this night shall make you master of the chief city of the
empire you are labouring to subvert!'

The boldness, the comprehensiveness, the insanity of wickedness
displayed in such a proposition, and emanating from such a source, so
astounded the mind of Alaric, as to deprive him for the moment of
speech. The stranger, perceiving his temporary inability to answer him,
broke the silence which ensued and continued--

'Is my condition a hard one? A conqueror is all-powerful; he can
overthrow the worship, as he can overthrow the government of a nation.
What matters it to you, while empire, renown, and treasure are yours,
what deities the people adore? Is it a great price to pay for an easy
conquest, to make a change which threatens neither your power, your
fame, nor your wealth? Do you marvel that I desire from you such a
revolution as this? I was born for the gods, in their service I
inherited rank and renown, for their cause I have suffered degradation
and woe, for their restoration I will plot, combat, die! Assure me then
by oath, that with a new rule you will erect our ancient worship, and
through my secret inlet to the city I will introduce men enough of the
Goths to murder with security the sentinels at the guard-houses, and
open the gates of Rome to the numbers of your whole invading forces.
Think not to despise the aid of a man unprotected and unknown! The
citizens will never yield to your blockade; you shrink from risking the
dangers of an assault; the legions of Ravenna are reported on their way
hitherward. Outcast as I am, I tell it to you here, in the midst of
your camp--your speediest assurance of success rests on my discovery and
on me!'

The king started suddenly from his seat. 'What fool or madman!' he
cried, fixing his eyes in furious scorn and indignation on the
stranger's face, 'prates to me about the legions of Ravenna and the
dangers of an assault! Think you, renegade, that your city could have
resisted me had I chosen to storm it on the first day when I encamped
before its walls? Know you that your effeminate soldiery have laid
aside the armour of their ancestors, because their puny bodies are too
feeble to bear its weight, and that the half of my army here trebles the
whole number of the guards of Rome? Now, while you stand before me, I
have but to command, and the city shall be annihilated with fire and
sword, without the aid of one of the herd of traitors cowering beneath
the shelter of its ill-defended walls!'


As Alaric spoke thus, some invisible agency seemed to crush, body and
mind, the lost wretch whom he addressed. The shock of such an answer as
he now heard seemed to strike him idiotic, as a flash of lightning
strikes with blindness. He regarded the king with a bewildered stare,
waving his hand tremulously backwards and forwards before his face, as
if to clear some imaginary darkness off his eyes; then his arm fell
helpless by his side, his head drooped upon his breast, and he moaned
out in low, vacant tones, 'The restoration of the gods--that is the
condition of conquest--the restoration of the gods!'

'I come not hither to be the tool of a frantic and forgotten
priesthood,' cried Alaric disdainfully. 'Wherever I meet with your
accursed idols I will melt them down into armour for my warriors and
shoes for my horses; I will turn your temples into granaries and cut
your images of wood into billets for the watchfires of my hosts!'

'Slay me and be silent!' groaned the man, staggering back against the
side of the tent, and shrinking under the merciless words of the Goth
like a slave under the lash.

'I leave the shedding of such blood as yours to your fellow Romans,'
answered the king; 'they alone are worthy of the deed.'

No syllable of reply now escaped the stranger's lips, and after an
interval of silence Alaric resumed, in tones divested of their former
fiery irritation, and marked by a solemn earnestness that conferred
irresistible dignity and force on every word that he uttered.

'Behold the characters engraven there!' said he, pointing to the shield;
'they trace the curse denounced by Odin against the great oppressor,
Rome! Once these words made part of the worship of our fathers; the
worship has long since vanished, but the words remain; they seal the
eternal hatred of the people of the North to the people of the South;
they contain the spirit of the great destiny that has brought me to the
walls of Rome. Citizen of a fallen empire, the measure of your crimes
is full! The voice of a new nation calls through me for the freedom of
the earth, which was made for man, and not for Romans! The rule that
your ancestors won by strength their posterity shall no longer keep by
fraud. For two hundred years, hollow and unlasting truces have
alternated with long and bloody wars between your people and mine.
Remembering this, remembering the wrongs of the Goths in their
settlements in Thrace, the murder of the Gothic youths in the towns of
Asia, the massacre of the Gothic hostages in Aquileia, I come--chosen by
the supernatural decrees of Heaven--to assure the freedom and satisfy
the wrath of my nation, by humbling at its feet the power of tyrannic
Rome! It is not for battle and bloodshed that I am encamped before
yonder walls. It is to crush to the earth, by famine and woe, the pride
of your people and the spirit of your rulers; to tear from you your
hidden wealth, and to strip you of your boasted honour; to overthrow by
oppression the oppressors of the world; to deny you the glories of a
resistance, and to impose on you the shame of a submission. It is for
this that I now abstain from storming your city, to encircle it with an
immovable blockade!'

As the declaration of his great mission burst thus from the lips of the
Gothic king, the spirit of his lofty ambition seemed to diffuse itself
over his outward form. His noble stature, his fine proportions, his
commanding features, became invested with a simple, primeval grandeur.
Contrasted as he now was with the shrunken figure of the spirit-broken
stranger, he looked almost sublime.


A succession of protracted shuddering ran through the Pagan's frame, but
he neither wept nor spoke. The unavailing defence of the Temple of
Serapis, the defeated revolution at Alexandria, and the abortive
intrigue with Vetranio, were now rising on his memory, to heighten the
horror of his present and worst overthrow. Every circumstance connected
with his desperate passage through the rifted wall revived, fearfully
vivid, on his mind. He remembered all the emotions of his first night's
labour in the darkness, all the miseries of his second night's torture
under the fallen brickwork, all the woe, danger, and despondency that
accompanied his subsequent toil--persevered in under the obstructions of
a famine-weakened body and a helpless arm--until he passed, in delusive
triumph, the last of the hindrances in the long-laboured breach. One
after another these banished recollections returned to his memory as he
listened to Alaric's rebuking words--reviving past infirmities, opening
old wounds, inflicting new lacerations. But, saving the shudderings
that still shook his body, no outward witness betrayed the inward
torment that assailed him. It was too strong for human words, too
terrible for human sympathy;--he suffered it in brute silence.
Monstrous as was his plot, the moral punishment of its attempted
consummation was severe enough to be worthy of the projected crime.

After watching the man for a few minutes more, with a glance of pitiless
disdain, Alaric summoned one of the warriors in attendance; and, having
previously commanded him to pass the word to the sentinels, authorising
the stranger's free passage through the encampment, he then turned, and,
for the last time, addressed him as follows:--

'Return to Rome, through the hole whence, reptile-like, you emerged!--
and feed your starving citizens with the words you have heard in the
barbarian's tent!'

The guard approached, led him from the presence of the king, issued the
necessary directions to the sentinels, and left him to himself. Once he
raised his eyes in despairing appeal to the heaven that frowned over his
head; but still, no word, or tear, or groan, escaped him. He moved
slowly on through the thick darkness; and turning his back on the city,
passed, careless whither he strayed, into the streets of the desolate
and dispeopled suburbs.


CHAPTER 16. LOVE MEETINGS.

Who that has looked on a threatening and tempestuous sky, has not felt
the pleasure of discovering unexpectedly a small spot of serene blue,
still shining among the stormy clouds? The more unwillingly the eye has
wandered over the gloomy expanse of the rest of the firmament, the more
gladly does it finally rest on the little oasis of light which meets at
length its weary gaze, and which, when it was dispersed over the whole
heaven, was perhaps only briefly regarded with a careless glance.
Contrasted with the dark and mournful hues around it, even that small
spot of blue gradually acquires the power of investing the wider and
sadder prospect with a certain interest and animation that it did not
before possess--until the mind recognises in the surrounding atmosphere
of storm an object adding variety to the view--a spectacle whose
mournfulness may interest as well as repel.

Was it with sensations resembling these (applied, however, rather to the
mind than to the eye) that the reader perused those pages devoted to
Hermanric and Antonina? Does the happiness there described now appear
to him to beam through the stormy progress of the narrative as the spot
of blue beams through the gathering clouds? Did that small prospect of
brightness present itself, at the time, like a garden of repose amid the
waste of fierce emotions which encompassed it? Did it encourage him,
when contrasted with what had gone before, to enter on the field of
gloomier interest which was to follow? If, indeed, it has thus affected
him, if he can still remember the scene at the farm-house beyond the
suburbs with emotions such as these, he will not now be unwilling to
turn again for a moment from the gathering clouds to the spot of blue,--
he will not deny us an instant's digression from Ulpius and the city of
famine to Antonina and the lonely plains.

During the period that has elapsed since we left her, Antonina has
remained secure in her solitude, happy in her well-chosen concealment.
The few straggling Goths who at rare intervals appeared in the
neighbourhood of her sanctuary never intruded on its peaceful limits.
The sight of the ravaged fields and emptied granaries of the deserted
little property sufficed invariably to turn their marauding steps in
other directions. Day by day ran smoothly and swiftly onwards for the
gentle usurper of the abandoned farm-house. In the narrow round of its
gardens and protecting woods was comprised for her the whole circle of
the pleasures and occupations of her new life.


The simple stores left in the house, the fruits and vegetables to be
gathered in the garden, sufficed amply for her support. The pastoral
solitude of the place had in it a quiet, dreamy fascination, a novelty,
an unwearying charm, after the austere loneliness to which her former
existence had been subjected in Rome. And when evening came, and the
sun began to burnish the tops of the western tress, then, after the calm
emotions of the solitary day, came the hour of absorbing cares and happy
expectations--ever the same, yet ever delighting and ever new. Then the
rude shutters were carefully closed; the open door was shut and barred;
the small light--now invisible to the world without--was joyfully
kindled; and then, the mistress and author of these preparations
resigned herself to await, with pleased anxiety, the approach of the
guest for whose welcome they were designed.

And never did she expect the arrival of that treasured companion in
vain. Hermanric remembered his promise to repair constantly to the
farm-house, and performed it with all the constancy of love and all the
enthusiasm of youth. When the sentinels under his command were arranged
in their order of watching for the night, and the trust reposed in him
by his superiors exempted his actions from superintendence during the
hours of darkness that followed, he left the camp, passed through the
desolate suburbs, and gained the dwelling where the young Roman awaited
him--returning before daybreak to receive the communication s regularly
addressed to him, at that hour, by his inferior in the command.

Thus, false to his nation, yet true to the new Egeria of his thoughts
and actions--traitor to the requirements of vengeance and war, yet
faithful to the interests of tranquility and love--did he seek, night
after night, Antonina's presence. His passion, though it denied him to
his warrior duties, wrought not deteriorating change in his disposition.
All that it altered in him it altered nobly. It varied and exalted his
rude emotions, for it was inspired, not alone by the beauty and youth
that he saw, but by the pure thoughts, the artless eloquence that he
heard. And she--the forsaken daughter, the source whence the Northern
warrior derived those new and higher sensations that had never animated
him until now--regarded her protector, her first friend and companion,
as her first love, with a devotion which, in its mingled and exalted
nature, may be imagined by the mind, but can be but imperfectly depicted
by the pen. It was a devotion created of innocence and gratitude, of
joy and sorrow, of apprehension and hope. It was too fresh, too
unworldly to own any upbraidings of artificial shame, any self-
reproaches of artificial propriety. It resembled in its essence, though
not in its application, the devotion of the first daughters of the Fall
to their brother-lords.

But it is now time that we return to the course of our narrative;
although, ere we again enter on the stirring and rapid present, it will
be necessary for a moment more to look back in another direction to the
eventful past.

But it is not on peace, beauty, and pleasure that our observation now
fixes itself. It is to anger, disease, and crime--to the unappeasable
and unwomanly Goisvintha, that we now revert.

Since the day when the violence of her conflicting emotions had deprived
her of consciousness, at the moment of her decisive triumph over the
scruples of Hermanric and the destiny of Antonina, a raging fever had
visited on her some part of those bitter sufferings that she would fain
have inflicted on others. Part of the time she lay in a raving
delirium; part of the time in helpless exhaustion; but she never forgot,
whatever the form assumed by her disease, the desperate purpose in the
pursuit of which she had first incurred it. Slowly and doubtfully her
vigour at length returned to her, and with it strengthened and increased
the fierce ambition of vengeance that absorbed her lightest thoughts and
governed her most careless actions.


Report informed her of the new position, on the line of blockade, on
which Hermanric was posted, and only enumerated as the companions of his
sojourn the warriors sent thither under his command. But, though thus
persuaded of the separation of Antonina and the Goth, her ignorance of
the girl's fate rankled unintermittingly in her savage heart. Doubtful
whether she had permanently reclaimed Hermanric to the interests of
vengeance and bloodshed; vaguely suspecting that he might have informed
himself in her absence of Antonina's place of refuge or direction of
flight; still resolutely bent on securing the death of her victim,
wherever she might have strayed, she awaited with trembling eagerness
that day of restoration to available activity and strength which would
enable her to resume her influence over the Goth, and her machinations
against the safety of the fugitive girl. The time of her final and long-
expected recovery, was the very day preceding the stormy night we have
already described, and her first employment of her renewed energy was to
send word to the young Goth of her intention of seeking him at his
encampment ere the evening closed.

It was this intimation which caused the inquietude mentioned as
characteristic of the manner of Hermanric at the commencement of the
preceding chapter. The evening there described was the first that saw
him deprived, through the threatened visit of Goisvintha, of the
anticipation of repairing to Antonina, as had been his wont, under cover
of the night; for to slight his kinswoman's ominous message was to risk
the most fatal of discoveries. Trusting to the delusive security of her
sickness, he had hitherto banished the unwelcome remembrance of her
existence from his thoughts. But, now that she was once more capable of
exertion and of crime, he felt that if he would preserve the secret of
Antonina's hiding-place and the security of Antonina's life, he must
remain to oppose force to force and stratagem to stratagem, when
Goisvintha sought him at his post, even at the risk of inflicting, by
his absence from the farm-house, all the pangs of anxiety and
apprehension on the lonely girl.

Absorbed in such reflections as these, longing to depart, yet determined
to remain, he impatiently awaited Goisvintha's approach, until the
rising of the storm with its mysterious and all-engrossing train of
events forced his thoughts and actions into a new channel. When,
however, his interviews with the stranger and the Gothic king were past,
and he had returned as he had been bidden to his appointed sojourn in
the camp, his old anxieties, displaced but not destroyed, resumed their
influence over him. He demanded eagerly of his comrades if Goisvintha
had arrived in his absence, and received the same answer in the negative
from each.

As he now listened to the melancholy rising of the wind and the
increasing loudness of the thunder, to the shrill cries of the distant
night-birds hurrying to shelter, emotions of mournfulness and awe
possessed themselves of his heart. He now wondered that any events,
however startling, however appalling, should have had the power to turn
his mind for a moment from the dreary contemplations that had engaged it
at the close of day. He thought of Antonina, solitary and helpless,
listening to the tempest in affright, and watching vainly for his long-
delayed approach. His fancy arrayed before him dangers, plots, and
crimes, robed in all the horrible exaggerations of a dream. Even the
quick, monotonous dripping of the rain-drops outside aroused within him
dark and indefinable forebodings of ill. The passion that had hitherto
created for him new pleasures was now fulfilling the other half of its
earthly mission, and causing him new pains.