Samuel Johnson - "Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language"

trans. by George Henry Needler - "The Nibelungenlied"

George Washington Plunkitt - "Plunkitt of Tammany Hall "

J. Henri Fabre - "More Hunting Wasps"

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Books: Antonina

W >> Wilkie Collins >> Antonina




Though the fire of her past fever had raged again through her veins, and
though startling visions of the murders at Aquileia had flashed before
her mind as the wild lightning before her eyes, she had traced her way
through the suburbs and along the high-road, and down the little path to
the farm-house gate, without straying, without hesitating. Regardless
of the darkness and the storm, she had prowled about the house, had
raised the latch, had waited for a loud peal of thunder ere she passed
the door, and had stolen shadow-like into the darkest corner of the
room, with a patience and a determination that nothing could disturb.
And now, when she stood at the goal of her worst wishes, even now, when
she looked down upon the two beings by whom she had been thwarted and
deceived, her fierce self-possession did not desert her; her lips
quivered over her locked teeth, her bosom heaved beneath her drenched
garments, but neither sighs nor curses, not even a smile of triumph or a
movement of anger escaped her.

She never looked at Antonina; her eyes wandered not for a moment from
Hermanric's form. The quickest, faintest gleam of firelight that
gleamed over it was followed through its fitful course by her eager
glance, rapid and momentary as itself. Soon her attention was fixed
wholly upon his hands, as they lay over the scabbard of his sword; and
then, slowly and obscurely, a new and fatal resolution sprung up within
her. The various emotions pictured in her face became resolved into one
sinister expression, and, without removing her eyes from the Goth, she
slowly drew from the bosom-folds of her garment a long sharp knife.

The flames alternately trembled into light and subsided into darkness as
at first; Hermanric and Antonina yet continued in their old positions,
absorbed in their thoughts and in themselves; and still Goisvintha
remained unmoved as ever, knife in hand, watchful, steady, silent as
before.

But beneath the concealment of her outward tranquillity raged a
contention under which her mind darkened and her heart writhed. Twice
she returned the knife to its former hiding-place, and twice she drew it
forth again; her cheeks grew paler and paler, she pressed her clenched
hand convulsively over her bosom, and leant back languidly against the
wall behind her. No thought of Antonina had part in this great strife
of secret emotions; her wrath had too much of anguish in it to be spent
against a stranger and an enemy.

After the lapse of a few moments more, her strength returned--her
firmness was aroused. The last traces of grief and despair that had
hitherto appeared in her eyes vanished from them in an instant. Rage,
vengeance, ferocity, lowered over them as she crept stealthily forward
to the very side of the Goth, and, when the next gleam of the fire
played upon him, drew the knife fiercely across the back of his hands.
The cut was true, strong, and rapid--it divided the tendons from first
to last--he was crippled for life.

At that instant the fire touched the very heart of the log that had been
laid on it. It crackled gaily; it blazed out brilliantly. The whole
room was as brightly illuminated as if a Christmas festival of ancient
England had been preparing within its walls!

The warm, cheerful light showed the Goth the figure of his assassin, ere
the first cry of anguish had died away on his lips, or the first start
of irrepressible horror ceased to vibrate through his frame. The cries
of his hapless companion, as the whole scene of vengeance, treachery,
and mutilation flashed in one terrible instant before her eyes, seemed
not even to reach his ears. Once he looked down upon his helpless
hands, when the sword rolled heavily from them to the floor. Then his
gaze directed itself immovably upon Goisvintha, as she stood at a little
distance from him, with her blood-stained knife, silent as himself.


There was no fury--no defiance--not even the passing distortion of
physical suffering in his features, as he now looked on her. Blank,
rigid horror--tearless, voiceless, helpless despair, seemed to have
petrified the expression of his face into an everlasting form,
unyouthful and unhopeful--as if he had been imprisoned from his
childhood, and a voice was now taunting him with the pleasures of
liberty, from a grating in his dungeon walls. Not even when Antonina,
recovering from her first agony of terror, pressed her convulsive kisses
on his cold cheek, entreating him to look on her, did he turn his head,
or remove his eyes from Goisvintha's form.

At length the deep steady accents of the woman's voice were heard
through the desolate silence.

'Traitor in word and thought you may be yet, but traitor in deed you
never more shall be!' she began, pointing to his hands with her knife.
'Those hands, that have protected a Roman life, shall never grasp a
Roman sword, shall never pollute again by their touch a Gothic weapon!
I remembered, as I watched you in the darkness, how the women of my race
once punished their recreant warriors when they fled to them from a
defeat. So have I punished you! The arm that served not the cause of
sister and sister's children--of king and king's nation--shall serve no
other! I am half avenged of the murders at Aquileia, now that I am
avenged on you! Go, fly with the Roman you have chosen to the city of
her people! Your life as a warrior is at an end!'

He made her no answer. There are emotions, the last of a life, which
tear back from nature the strongest barriers that custom raises to
repress her, which betray the lurking existence of the first rude social
feeling of the primeval days of a great nation, in the breasts of their
most distant descendants, however widely their acquirements, their
prosperities, or their changes may seem to have morally separated them
from their ancestors of old. Such were the emotions now awakened in the
heart of the Goth. His Christianity, his love, his knowledge of high
aims, and his experience of new ideas, sank and deserted him, as though
he had never known them. He thought on his mutilated hands, and no
other spirit moved within him, but the ancient Gothic spirit of
centuries back; the inspiration of his nation's early Northern songs and
early Northern achievements--the renown of courage and the supremacy of
strength.

Vainly did Antonina, in the midst of the despair that still possessed
her, yearn for a word from his lips or a glance from his eyes; vainly
did her trembling fingers, tearing the bandages from her robe, stanch
the blood on his wounded hands; vainly did her voice call on him to fly
and summon help from his companions in the camp! His mind was far away,
brooding over the legends of the battle-fields of his ancestors,
remembering how, even in the day of victory, they slew themselves if
they were crippled in the fray, how they scorned to exist for other
interests than the interests of strife, how they mutilated traitors as
Goisvintha had mutilated him! Such were the objects that enchained his
inward faculties, while his outward senses were still enthralled by the
horrible fascination that existed for him in the presence of the
assassin by his side. His very consciousness of his existence, though
he moved and breathed, seemed to have ceased.

'You thought to deceive me in my sickness, you hoped to profit by my
death,' resumed Goisvintha, returning contemptuously her victim's
glance. 'You trusted in the night, and the darkness, and the storm; you
were secure in your boldness, in your strength, in the secrecy of this
lurking-place that you have chosen for your treachery, but your
stratagems and your expectations have failed you! At Aquileia I learnt
to be wily and watchful as you! I discovered your desertion of the
warriors and the camp; I penetrated the paths to your hiding-place; I
entered it as softly as I once departed from the dwelling where my
children were slain! In my just vengeance I have treated you as
treacherously as you would have treated me! Remember your murdered
brother; remember the child I put into your arms wounded and received
from them dead; remember your broken oaths and forgotten promises, and
make to your nation, to your duties, and to me, the atonement--the last
and the only one--that in my mercy I have left in your power--the
atonement of death.'


Again she paused, and again no reply awaited her. Still the Goth
neither moved nor spoke, and still Antonina--kneeling unconsciously upon
the sword, now useless to him for ever--continued to stanch the blood on
his hands with a mechanical earnestness that seemed to shut out the
contemplation of every other object from her eyes. The tears streamed
incessantly down her cheeks, but she never turned towards Goisvintha,
never suspended her occupation.

Meanwhile, the fire still blazed noisily on the cheerful hearth; but the
storm, as if disdaining the office of heightening the human horror of
the farm-house scene, was rapidly subsiding. The thunder pealed less
frequently and less loudly, the wind fell into intervals of noiseless
calm, and occasionally the moonlight streamed, in momentary brightness,
through the ragged edges of the fast breaking clouds. The breath of the
still morning was already moving upon the firmament of the stormy night.

'Has life its old magic for you yet?' continued Goisvintha, in tones of
pitiless reproach. 'Have you forgotten, with the spirit of your people,
the end for which your ancestors lived? Is not your sword at your feet?
Is not the knife in my hand? Do not the waters of the Tiber, rolling
yonder to the sea, offer to you the grave of oblivion that all may seek?
Die then! In your last hour be a Goth; even to the Romans you are
worthless now! Already your comrades have discovered your desertion;
will you wait till you are hung for a rebel? Will you live to implore
the mercy of your enemies, or, dishonoured and defenceless, will you
endeavour to escape? You are of the blood of my family, but again I say
it to you--die!'

His pale lips trembled; he looked round for the first time at Antonina,
but his utterance struggled ineffectually, even yet, against unyielding
despair. He was still silent.

Goisvintha turned from him disdainfully, and approaching the fire sat
down before it, bending her haggard features over the brilliant flames.
For a few minutes she remained absorbed in her evil thoughts, but no
articulate word escaped her; and when at length she again abruptly broke
the silence, it was not to address the Goth or to fix her eyes on him as
before.

Still cowering over the fire, apparently as regardless of the presence
of the two beings whose happiness she had just crushed for ever as if
they had never existed, she began to recite, in solemn, measured,
chanting tones, a legend of the darkest and earliest age of Gothic
history, keeping time to herself with the knife that she still held in
her hand. The malignity in her expression, as she pursued her
employment, betrayed the heartless motive that animated it, almost as
palpably as the words of the composition she was repeating: thus she
now spoke:--

'The tempest-god's pinions o'ershadow the sky, The waves leap to welcome
the storm that is nigh, Through the hall of old Odin re-echo the shocks
That the fierce ocean hurls at his rampart of rocks, As, alone on the
crags that soar up from the sands, With his virgin SIONA the young AGNAR
stands; Tears sprinkle their dew on the sad maiden's cheeks, And the
voice of the chieftain sinks low while he speaks:--

"Crippled in the fight for ever, Number'd with the worse than slain;
Weak, deform'd, disabled!--never Can I join the hosts again!--With the
battle that is won AGNAR'S earthly course is run!

"When thy shatter'd frame must yield, If thou seek'st a future field;
When thy arm, that sway'd the strife, Fails to shield thy worthless
life; When thy hands no more afford Full employment to the sword; Then,
preserve--respect thy name; Meet thy death--to live is shame! Such is
Odin's mighty will; Such commands I now fulfil!"'

At this point in the legend, she paused and turned suddenly to observe
its effect on Hermanric. All its horrible application to himself
thrilled through his heart. His head drooped, and a low groan burst
from his lips. But even this evidence of the suffering she was
inflicting failed to melt the iron malignity of Goisvintha's
determination.


'Do you remember the death of Agnar?' she cried. 'When you were a
child, I sung it to you ere you slept, and you vowed as you heard it,
that when you were a man, if you suffered his wounds you would die his
death! He was crippled in a victory, yet he slew himself on the day of
his triumph; you are crippled in your treachery, and have forgotten your
boy's honour, and will live in the darkness of your shame! Have you
lost remembrance of that ancient song? You heard it from me in the
morning of your years; listen, and you shall hear it to the end; it is
the dirge for your approaching death!'

She continued--

"SIONA, mourn not!--where I go The warriors feel nor pain nor woe; They
raise aloft the gleaming steel, Their wounds, though warm, untended
heal; Their arrows bellow through the air In showers, as they battle
there; In mighty cups their wine is pour'd, Bright virgins throng their
midnight board!

"Yet think not that I die unmov'd; I mourn the doom that sets me free,
As I think, betroth'd--belov'd, On all the joys I lose in thee! To form
my boys to meet the fray, Where'er the Gothic banner streams; To guard
thy night, to glad thy day, Made all the bliss of AGNAR'S dreams--Dreams
that must now be all forgot, Earth's joys have passed from AGNAR'S lot!

"See, athwart the face of light Float the clouds of sullen Night! Odin's
warriors watch for me By the earth-encircling sea! The water's dirges
howl my knell; 'Tis time I die--Farewell-Farewell!"

'He rose with a smile to prepare for the spring, He flew from the rock
like a bird on the wing; The sea met her prey with a leap and a roar,
And the maid stood alone by the wave-riven shore! The winds mutter'd
deep, with a woe-boding sound, As she wept o'er the footsteps he'd left
on the ground; And the wild vultures shriek'd, for the chieftain who
spread Their battle-field banquets was laid with the dead!'

As, with a slow and measured emphasis, Goisvintha pronounced the last
lines of the poem she again approached Hermanric. But the eyes of the
Goth sought her no longer. She had calmed the emotions that she had
hoped to irritate. Of the latter divisions of her legend, those only
which were pathetic had arrested the lost chieftain's attention, and the
blunted faculties of his heart recovered their old refinement as he
listened to them. A solemn composure of love, grief, and pity appeared
in the glance of affection that he now directed on the girl's despairing
countenance. Years of good thoughts, an existence of tender cares, an
eternity of youthful devotion spoke in that rapt, momentary, eloquent
gaze, and imprinted on his expression a character ineffably beautiful
and calm--a nobleness above the human, and approaching the angelic and
divine.

Intuitively Goisvintha followed the direction of his eyes, and looked,
like him, on the Roman girl's face. A lowering expression of hatred
replaced the scorn that had hitherto distorted her passionate features.
Mechanically her hand again half raised the knife, and the accents of
her wrathful voice once more disturbed the sacred silence of affection
and grief.

'Is it for the girl there that you would still live?' she cried sternly.
'I foreboded it, coward, when I first looked on you! I prepared for it
when I wounded you! I made sure that when my anger again threatened
this new ruler of your thoughts and mover of your actions, you should
have lost the power to divert it from her again! Think you that,
because my disdain has delayed it, my vengeance on her is abandoned?
Long since I swore to you that she should die, and I will hold to my
purpose! I have punished you; I will slay her! Can you shield her from
the blow to-night, as you shielded her in your tent? You are weaker
before me than a child!'

She ceased abruptly, for at this moment a noise of hurrying footsteps
and contending voices became suddenly audible from without. As she
heard it, a ghastly paleness chased the flush of anger from her cheeks.
With the promptitude of apprehension she snatched the sword of Hermanric
from under Antonina, and ran it through the staples intended to hold the
rude bar of the door. The next instant the footsteps sounded on the
garden path, and the next the door was assailed.

The good sword held firm, but the frail barrier that it sustained
yielded at the second shock and fell inwards, shattered, to the floor.
Instantly the gap was darkened by human forms, and the firelight glowed
over the repulsive countenances of two Huns who headed the intruders,
habited in complete armour and furnished with naked swords.

'Yield yourself prisoner by Alaric's command,' cried one of the
barbarians, 'or you shall be slain as a deserter where you now stand!'

The Goth had risen to his feet as the door was burst in. The arrival of
his pursuers seemed to restore his lost energies, to deliver him at once
from an all-powerful thraldom. An expression of triumph and defiance
shone over his steady features when he heard the summons of the Hun.
For a moment he stooped towards Antonina, as she clung fainting round
him. His mouth quivered and his eye glistened as he kissed her cold
cheek. In that moment all the hopelessness of his position, all the
worthlessness of his marred existence, all the ignominy preparing for
him when he returned to the camp, rushed over his mind. In that moment
the worst horrors of departure and death, the fiercest rackings of love
and despair, assailed but did not overcome him. In that moment he paid
his final tribute to the dues of affection, and braced for the last time
the fibres of manly dauntlessness and Spartan resolve!

The next instant he tore himself from the girl's arms, the old hero-
spirit of his conquering nation possessed every nerve in his frame, his
eye brightened again gloriously with its lost warrior-light, his limbs
grew firm, his face was calm, he confronted the Huns with a mien of
authority and a smile of disdain, and, as he presented to them his
defenceless breast, not the faintest tremor was audible in his voice,
while he cried in accents of steady command--

'Strike! I yield not!'

The Huns rushed forward with fierce cries, and buried their swords in
his body. His warm young blood gushed out upon the floor of the
dwelling which had been the love-shrine of the heart that shed it.
Without a sigh from his lips or a convulsion on his features, he fell
dead at the feet of his enemies; all the valour of his disposition, all
the gentleness of his heart, all the vigour of his form, resolved in one
humble instant into a senseless and burdensome mass!

Antonina beheld the assassination, but was spared the sight of the death
that followed it. She fell insensible by the side of her young
warrior--her dress was spotted with his blood, her form was motionless
as his own.

'Leave him there to rot! His pride in his superiority will not serve
him now--even to a grave!' cried the Hun leader to his companions, as he
dried on the garments of the corpse his reeking sword.

'And this woman,' demanded one of his comrades, 'is she to be liberated
or secured?'

He pointed as he spoke to Goisvintha. During the brief scene of the
assassination, the very exercise of her faculties seemed to have been
suspended. She had never stirred a limb or uttered a word.

The Hun recognised her as the woman who had questioned and bribed him at
the camp. 'She is the traitor's kinswoman and is absent from the tents
without leave,' he answered. 'Take her prisoner to Alaric; she will
bear us witness that we have done as he commanded us. As for the girl,'
he continued, glancing at the blood on Antonina's dress, and stirring
her figure carelessly with his foot, 'she may be dead too, for she
neither moves nor speaks, and may be left like her protector to lie
graveless where she is. For us, it is time that we depart--the king is
impatient of delay.'


As they led her roughly from the house, Goisvintha shuddered, and
attempted to pause for a moment when she passed the corpse of the Goth.
Death, that can extinguish enmities as well as sunder loves, rose awful
and appealing as she looked her last at her murdered brother, and
remembered her murdered husband. No tears flowed from her eyes, no
groans broke from her bosom; but there was a pang, a last momentary pang
of grief and pity at her heart as she murmured while they forced her
away--'Aquileia! Aquileia! have I outlived thee for this!'

The troops retired. For a few minutes silence ruled uninterruptedly
over the room where the senseless girl still lay by the side of all that
was left to her of the object of her first youthful love. But ere long
footsteps again house door, and two Goths, who had formed part of the
escort allotted to the Hun, approached the young chieftain's corpse.
Quickly and silently they raised it in their arms and bore it into the
garden. There they scooped a shallow hole with their swords in the
fresh, flower-laden turf, and having laid the body there, they hastily
covered it, and rapidly departed without returning to the house.

These men had served among the warriors committed to Hermanric's
command. By many acts of frank generosity and encouragement, the young
chieftain had won their rough attachment. They mourned his fate, but
dared not obstruct the sentence, or oppose the act that determined it.
At their own risk they had secretly quitted the advancing ranks of their
comrades, to use the last privilege and obey the last dictate of human
kindness; and they thought not of the lonely girl as they now left her
desolate, and hurried away to reassume their appointed stations ere it
was too late.

The turf lay caressingly round the young warrior's form; its crushed
flowers pressed softly against his cold cheek; the fragrance of the new
morning wafted its pure incense gently about his simple grave! Around
him flowered the delicate plants that the hand of Antonina had raised to
please his eye. Near him stood the dwelling, sacred to the first and
last kiss that he had impressed upon her lips; and about him, on all
sides, rose the plains and woodlands that had engrossed, with her image,
the devotion of all her dearest thoughts. He lay, in his death, in the
midst of the magic circle of the best joys of his life! It was a fitter
burial-place for the earthly relics of that bright and generous spirit
than the pit in the carnage-laden battle-field, or the desolate
sepulchres of a northern land!


CHAPTER 19. THE GUARDIAN RESTORED.

Not long is the new-made grave left unwatched to the solemn guardianship
of Solitude and Night. More than a few minutes have scarcely elapsed
since it was dug, yet already human footsteps press its yielding
surface, and a human glance scans attentively its small and homely
mound.

But it is not Antonina, whom he loved; it is not Goisvintha, through
whose vengeance he was lost, who now looks upon the earth above the
young warrior's corpse. It is a stranger, an outcast; a man lost,
dishonoured, abandoned--it is the solitary and ruined Ulpius who now
gazes with indifferent eyes upon the peaceful garden and the eloquent
grave.

In the destinies of woe committed to the keeping of the night, the pagan
had been fatally included. The destruction that had gone forth against
the body of the young man who lay beneath the earth had overtaken the
mind of the old man who stood over his simple grave. The frame of
Ulpius, with all its infirmities, was still there, but the soul of
ferocious patience and unconquerable daring that had lighted it grandly
in its ruin was gone. Over the long anguish of that woeful life the
veil of self-oblivion had closed for ever!


He had been dismissed by Alaric, but he had not returned to the city
whither he was bidden. Throughout the night he had wandered about the
lonely suburbs, striving in secret and horrible suffering for the
mastery of his mind. There did the overthrow of all his hopes from the
Goths expand rapidly into the overthrow of the whole intellect that had
created his aspirations. There had reason burst the bonds that had so
long chained, perverted, degraded it! At length, wandering hither and
thither, he had dragged the helpless body, possessed no longer by the
perilous mind, to the farm-house garden in which he now stood, gazing
alternately at the upturned sods of the chieftain's grave and the red
gleam of the fire as it glowed from the dreary room through the gap of
the shattered door.

His faculties were fatally disordered rather than utterly destroyed.
His penetration, his firmness, and his cunning were gone; but a wreck of
memory, useless and unmanageable--a certain capacity for momentary
observation still remained to him. The shameful miscarriage in the tent
of Alaric, which had overthrown his faculties, had passed from him as an
event that never happened, but he remembered fragments of his past
existence--he still retained a vague consciousness of the ruling purpose
of his whole life.