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New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

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NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Antonina

W >> Wilkie Collins >> Antonina




These embryo reflections, disconnected and unsustained, flitted to and
fro over his dark mind as luminous exhalations over a marsh--rising and
sinking, harmless and delusive, fitful and irregular. What he remembered
of the past he remembered carelessly, viewing it with as vacant a
curiosity as if it were the visionary spectacle of another man's
struggles and misfortunes and hopes, acting under it as under a
mysterious influence, neither the end nor the reason of which he cared
to discover. For the future, it was to his thoughts a perfect blank;
for the present, it was a jarring combination of bodily weariness and
mental repose.

He shuddered as he stood shelterless under the open heaven. The cold,
that he had defied in the vaults of the rifted wall, pierced in the
farm-house garden; his limbs, which had resisted repose on the hard
journey from Rome to the camp of the Goths, now trembled so that he was
fain to rest them on the ground. For a short time he sat glaring with
vacant and affrighted eyes upon the open dwelling before him, as though
he longed to enter it but dare not. At length the temptation of the
ruddy firelight seemed to vanquish his irresolution; he rose with
difficulty, and slowly and hesitatingly entered the house.

He had advanced, thief-like, but a few steps, he had felt but for a
moment the welcome warmth of the fire, when the figure of Antonina,
still extended insensible upon the floor, caught his eye; he approached
it with eager curiosity, and, raising the girl on his arm, looked at her
with a long and rigid scrutiny.

For some moments no expression of recognition passed his lips or
appeared on his countenance, as, with a mechanical, doting gesture of
fondness, he smoothed her dishevelled hair over her forehead. While he
was thus engaged, while the remains of the gentleness of his childhood
were thus awfully revived in the insanity of his age, a musical string
wound round a small piece of gilt wood fell from its concealment in her
bosom; he snatched it from the ground--it was the fragment of her broken
lute, which had never quitted her since the night when, in her innocent
grief, she had wept over it in her maiden bed-chamber.

Small, obscure, insignificant as it was, this little token touched the
fibre in the Pagan's shattered mind which the all-eloquent form and
presence of its hapless mistress had failed to reach; his memory flew
back instantly to the garden on the Pincian Mount, and to his past
duties in Numerian's household, but spoke not to him of the calamities
he had wreaked since that period on his confiding master. His
imagination presented to him at this moment but one image--his servitude
in the Christian's abode; and as he now looked on the girl he could
regard himself but in one light--as 'the guardian restored'.

'What does she with her music here?' he whispered apprehensively. 'This
is not her father's house, and the garden yonder looks not from the
summit of the hill!'

As he curiously examined the room, the red spots on the floor suddenly
attracted his attention. A panic, a frantic terror seemed instantly to
overwhelm him. He rose with a cry of horror, and, still holding the
girl on his arm, hurried out into the garden trembling and breathless,
as if the weapon of an assassin had scared him from the house.


The shock of her rough removal, the sudden influence of the fresh, cold
air, restored Antonina to the consciousness of life at the moment when
Ulpius, unable to support her longer, laid her against the little heap
of turf which marked the position of the young chieftain's grave. Her
eyes opened wildly; their first glance fixed upon the shattered door and
the empty room. She rose from the ground, advanced a few steps towards
the house, then paused, rigid, breathless, silent, and, turning slowly,
faced the upturned turf.

The grave was all-eloquent of its tenant. His cuirass, which the
soldiers had thought to bury with the body that it had defended in
former days, had been overlooked in the haste of the secret interment,
and lay partly imbedded in the broken earth, partly exposed to view--a
simple monument over a simple grave! Her tearless, dilated eyes looked
down on it as though they would number each blade of grass, each morsel
of earth by which it was surrounded! Her hair waved idly about her
cheeks, as the light wind fluttered it; but no expression passed over
her face, no gestures escaped her limbs. Her mind toiled and quivered,
as if crushed by a fiery burden; but her heart was voiceless, and her
body was still.

Ulpius had stood unnoticed by her side. At this moment he moved so as
to confront her, and she suddenly looked up at him. A momentary
expression of bewilderment and suspicion lightened the heavy vacancy of
despair which had chased their natural and feminine tenderness from her
eyes, but it disappeared rapidly. She turned from the Pagan, knelt down
by the grave, and pressed her face and bosom against the little mound of
turf beneath her.

No voice comforted her, no arm caressed her, as her mind now began to
penetrate the mysteries, to probe the darkest depths of the long night's
calamities! Unaided and unsolaced, while the few and waning stars
glimmered from their places in the sky, while the sublime stillness of
tranquillised Nature stretched around her, she knelt at the altar of
death, and raised her soul upward to the great heaven above her, charged
with its sacred offering of human grief!

Long did she thus remain; and when at length she arose from the ground,
when, approaching the Pagan, she fixed on him her tearless, dreary eyes,
he quailed before her glance, as his dull faculties struggled vainly to
resume the old, informing power that they had now for ever lost.
Nothing but the remembrance aroused by his first sight of the fragment
of the lute lived within even yet, as he whispered to her in low,
entreating tones--

'Come home--come home! Your father may return before us--come home!'

As the words 'home' and 'father'--those household gods of the heart's
earliest existence--struck upon her ears, a change flashed with electric
suddenness over the girl's whole aspect. She raised her wan hands to
the sky; all her woman's tenderness repossessed itself of her heart; and
as she again knelt down over the grave, her sobs rose audibly through
the calmed and fragrant air.

With Hermanric's corpse beneath her, with the blood-sprinkled room
behind her, with a hostile army and a famine-wasted city beyond her, it
was only through that flood of tears, that healing passion of gentle
emotions, that she rose superior to the multiplied horrors of her
situation at the very moment when her faculties and her life seemed
sinking under them alike. Fully, freely, bitterly she wept, on the
kindly and parent earth--the patient, friendly ground that once bore the
light footsteps of the first of a race not created for death; that now
holds in its sheltering arms the loved ones, whom, in mourning, we lay
there to sleep; that shall yet be bound to the farthermost of its
depths, when the sun-bright presence of returning spirits shines over
its renovated frame, and love is resumed in angel perfection at the
point where death suspended it in mortal frailness!

'Come home--your father is awaiting you--come home!' repeated the Pagan
vacantly, moving slowly away as he spoke.


At the sound of his voice she started up, and clasping his arm with her
trembling fingers, to arrest his progress, looked affrightedly into his
seared and listless countenance. As she thus gazed on him she appeared
for the first time to recognise him. Fear and astonishment mingled in
her expression with grief and despair as she sunk at his feet, moaning
in tones of piercing entreaty--

'O Ulpius!--if Ulpius you are--have pity on me and take me to my father!
My father! my father! In all the lonely world there is nothing left to
me but my father!'

'Why do you weep to me about your broken lute?' answered Ulpius, with a
dull, unmeaning smile; 'it was not I that destroyed it!'

'They have slain him!' she shrieked distractedly, heedless of the
Pagan's reply. 'I saw them draw their swords on him! See, his blood is
on me--me!--Antonina, whom he protected and loved! Look there; that is
a grave--his grave--I know it! I have never seen him since; he is
down--down there! under the flowers I grew to gather for him! They slew
him; and when I knew it not, they have buried him!--or you--you have
buried him! You have hidden him under the cold garden earth! He is
gone!--Ah, gone, gone--for ever gone!'

And she flung herself again with reckless violence on the grave. After
looking steadfastly on her for a moment, Ulpius approached and raised
her from the earth.

'Come!' he cried angrily, 'the night grows on--your father waits!'

'The walls of Rome shut me from my father! I shall never see my father
nor Hermanric again!' she cried, in tones of bitter anguish, remembering
more perfectly all the miseries of her position, and struggling to
release herself from the Pagan's grasp.

The walls of Rome! At those words the mind of Ulpius opened to a flow
of dark remembrances, and lost the visions that had occupied it until
that moment. He laughed triumphantly.

'The walls of Rome bow to my arm!' he cried, in exulting tones; 'I
pierced them with my good bar of iron! I wound through them with my
bright lantern! Spirits roared on me, and struck me down, and grinned
upon me in the thick darkness, but I passed the wall! The thunder
pealed around me as I crawled along the winding rifts; but I won my way
through them! I came out conquering on the other side! Come, come,
come, come! We will return! I know the track, even in the darkness! I
can outwatch the sentinels! You shall walk in the pathway that I have
broken through the bricks!

The girl's features lost for a moment their expression of grief, and
grew rigid with horror, as she glanced at his fiery eyes, and felt the
fearful suspicion of his insanity darkening over her mind. She stood
powerless, trembling, unresisting, in his grasp, without attempting to
delude him into departure or to appease him into delay.

'Why did I make my passage through the wall?' muttered the Pagan in a
low, awe-struck voice, suddenly checking himself, as he was about to
step forward. 'Why did I tear down the strong brick-work and go forth
into the dark suburbs?'

He paused, and for a few moments struggled with his purposeless and
disconnected thoughts; but a blank, a darkness, an annihilation
overwhelmed Alaric and the Gothic camp, which he vainly endeavoured to
disperse. He sighed bitterly to himself--'It is gone!' and still
grasping Antonina by the hand, drew her after him to the garden gate.

'Leave me!' she shrieked, as he passed onward into the pathway that led
to the high-road. 'Oh, be merciful, and leave me to die where he has
died!'

'Peace! or I will rend you limb by limb, as I rent the stones from the
wall when I passed through it!' he whispered to her in fierce accents,
as she struggled to escape him. 'You shall return with me to Rome! You
shall walk in the track that I have made in the rifted brick-work!'


Terror, anguish, exhaustion, overpowered her weak efforts. Her lips
moved, partly in prayer and partly in ejaculation; but she spoke in
murmurs only, as she mechanically suffered the Pagan to lead her onward
by the hand.

They paced on under the waning starlight, over the cold, lonely road,
and through the dreary and deserted suburbs,--a fearful and discordant
pair! Coldly, obediently, impassively, as if she were walking in a
dream, the spirit-broken girl moved by the side of her scarce-human
leader. Disjointed exclamation, alternating horribly between infantine
simplicity and fierce wickedness, poured incessantly from the Pagan's
lips, but he never addressed himself further to his terror-stricken
companion. So, wending rapidly onward, they gained the Gothic lines;
and here the madman slackened his pace, and paused, beast-like, to glare
around him, as he approached the habitations of men.

Still not opposed by Antonina, whose faculties of observation were
petrified by her terror into perfect inaction, even here, within reach
of the doubtful aid of the enemies of her people, the Pagan crept
forward through the loneliest places of the encampment, and, guided by
the mysterious cunning of his miserable race, eluded successfully the
observation of the drowsy sentinels. Never bewildered by the darkness--
for the moon had gone down--always led by the animal instinct co-
existent with his disease, he passed over the waste ground between the
hostile encampment and the city, and arrived triumphant at the heap of
stones that marked his entrance to the rifted wall.

For one moment he stopped, and turning towards the girl, pointed proudly
to the dark, low breach he was about to penetrate. Then, drawing her
half-fainting form closer to his side, looking up attentively to the
ramparts, and stepping as noiselessly as though turf were beneath his
feet, he entered the dusky rift with his helpless charge.

As they disappeared in the recesses of the wall, Night--the stormy, the
eventful, the fatal!--reached its last limit; and the famished sentinel
on the fortifications of the besieged city roused himself from his
dreary and absorbing thoughts, for he saw that the new day was dawning
in the east.


CHAPTER 20. THE BREACH REPASSED.

Slowly and mournfully the sentinel at the rifted wall raised his eyes
towards the eastern clouds as they brightened before the advancing dawn.
Desolate as was the appearance of the dull, misty daybreak, it was yet
the most welcome of all the objects surrounding the starving soldier on
which he could fix his languid gaze. To look back on the city behind
him was to look back on the dreary charnel-house of famine and death; to
look down on the waste ground without the walls was to look down on the
dead body of the comrade of his watch, who, maddened by the pangs of
hunger which he had suffered during the night, had cast himself from the
rampart to meet a welcome death on the earth beneath. Famished and
despairing, the sentinel crouched on the fortifications which he had now
neither strength to pace nor care to defend, yearning for the food that
he had no hope to obtain, as he watched the grey daybreak from his
solitary post.

While he was thus occupied, the gloomy silence of the scene was suddenly
broken by the sound of falling brick-work at the inner base of the wall,
followed by faint entreaties for mercy and deliverance, which rose on
his ear, strangely mingled with disjointed expression of defiance and
exultation from a second voice. He slowly turned his head, and, looking
down, saw on the ground beneath a young girl struggling in the grasp of
an old man, who was hurrying her onward in the direction of the Pincian
Gate.


For one moment the girl's eye met the sentinel's vacant glance, and she
renewed, with a last effort of strength, and a greater vehemence of
supplication, her cries for help; but the soldier neither moved nor
answered. Exhausted as he was, no sight could affect him now but the
sight of food. Like the rest of the citizens, he was sunk in a heavy
stupor of starvation--selfish, reckless, brutalised. No disasters could
depress, no atrocities rouse him. Famine had torn asunder every social
tie, had withered every human sympathy among his besieged fellow-
citizens, and he was famishing like them.

At the moment when the dawn had first appeared, could he have looked
down by some mysterious agency to the interior foundations of the wall,
from the rampart on which he kept his weary watch, such a sight must
then have presented itself as would have aroused even his sluggish
observation 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 the
elevations of rising arches, the dark irregular passages broken by
Ulpius in the rotten wall would then have presented themselves to his
eyes; not stretching forth in dismal solitude, not peopled only by the
reptiles native to the place, but traced in all their mazes by human
forms. Then he would have perceived the fierce, resolute Pagan, moving
through darkness and obstacles with a sure, solemn progress, drawing
after him, like a dog devoted to his will, the young girl whose hapless
fate had doomed her to fall into his power. Her half-fainting figure
might have been seen, sometimes prostrate on the higher places of the
breach, while her fearful guide descended before her into a chasm
beyond, and then turned to drag her after him to a darker and a lower
depth yet; sometimes bent in supplication, when her lips moved once more
with a last despairing entreaty, and her limbs trembled with a final
effort to escape from her captor's relentless grasp. While still,
through all that opposed him, the same fierce tenacity of purpose would
have been invariably visible in every action of Ulpius, constantly
confirming him in his mad resolution to make his victim the follower of
his progress through the wall, ever guiding him with a strange instinct
through every hindrance, and preserving him from every danger in his
path, until it brought him forth triumphant, with his prisoner still in
his power, again free to tread the desolate streets and mingle with the
famine-stricken citizens of Rome.

And now when, after peril and anguish, she once more stood within the
city of her home, what hope remained to Antonina of obtaining her last
refuge under her father's roof, and deriving her solitary consolation
from the effort to regain her father's love? With the termination of
his passage through the breach in the wall had ended ever recollection
associated with it in the Pagan's shattered memory. A new blank now
pervaded his lost faculties, desolate as that which had overwhelmed them
in the night when he first stood in the farm-house garden by the young
chieftain's grave. He moved onward, unobservant, unthinking, without
aim or hope, driven by a mysterious restlessness, forgetting the very
presence of Antonina as she followed him, but still mechanically
grasping her hand, and dragging her after him he knew not whither.

And she, on her part, made no effort more for deliverance. She had seen
the sentinel unmoved by her entreaties, she had seen the walls of her
father's house receding from her longing eyes, as Ulpius pitilessly
hurried her father and farther from its distant door; and she lost the
last faint hope of restoration, the last lingering desire of life, as
the sense of her helplessness now weighed heaviest on her mind. Her
heart was full of her young warrior, who had been slain, and of her
father, from whom she had parted in the hour of his wrath, as she now
feebly followed the Pagan's steps, and resigned herself to a speedy
exhaustion and death in her utter despair.


They turned from the Pincian Gate and gained the Campus Martius; and
here the aspect of the besieged city and the condition of its doomed
inhabitants were fully and fearfully disclosed to view. On the surface
of the noble area, once thronged with bustling crowds passing to and fro
in every direction as their various destinations or caprices might lead
them, not twenty moving figures were now discernible. These few, who
still retained their strength or the resolution to pace the greatest
thoroughfare of Rome, stalked backwards and forwards incessantly, their
hollow eyes fixed on vacancy, their wan hands pressed over their mouths;
each separate, distrustful, and silent; fierce as imprisoned madmen;
restless as spectres disturbed in a place of tombs.

Such were the citizens who still moved over the Campus Martius; and,
besetting their path wherever they turned, lay the gloomy numbers of the
dying and the dead--the victims already stricken by the pestilence which
had now arisen in the infected city, and joined the famine in its work
of desolation and death. Around the public fountains, where the water
still bubbled up as freshly as in the summer-time of prosperity and
peace, the poorer population of beleaguered Rome had chiefly congregated
to expire. Some still retained strength enough to drink greedily at the
margin of the stone basins, across which others lay dead--their heads
and shoulders immersed in the water--drowned from lack of strength to
draw back after their first draught. Children mounted over the dead
bodies of their parents to raise themselves to the fountain's brim;
parents stared vacantly at the corpses of their children alternately
floating and sinking in the water, into which they had fallen
unsuccoured and unmourned.

In other parts of the place, at the open gates of the theatres and
hippodromes, in the unguarded porticoes of the palaces and the baths lay
the discoloured bodies of those who had died ere they could reach the
fountains--of women and children especially--surrounded in frightful
contrast by the abandoned furniture of luxury and the discarded
inventions of vice--by gilded couches--by inlaid tables--by jewelled
cornices--by obscene picture and statues--by brilliantly framed, gaudily
tinted manuscripts of licentious songs, still hanging at their
accustomed places on the lofty marble walls. Farther on, in the by-
streets and the retired courts, where the corpse of the tradesman was
stretched on his empty counter; where the soldier of the city guard
dropped down overpowered were he reached the limit of his rounds; where
the wealthy merchant lay pestilence-stricken upon the last hoards of
repulsive food which his gold had procured; the assassin and the robber
might be seen--now greedily devouring the offal that lay around them,
now falling dead upon the bodies which they had rifled but the 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 silent as
the dead; crime, suffering, despair, were all voiceless alike; the
trumpet was unheard in the guard-house; the bell never rang from the
church; even the thick, misty rain, that now descended from the black
and unmoving clouds, and obscured in cold shadows the outlines of
distant buildings and the pinnacle tops of mighty palaces, fell
noiseless to the ground. The sky had no wind; the earth no echoes--the
pervading desolation appalled the eye; the vast stillness weighed dull
on the ear--it was a scene as of the last-left city of an exhausted
world, decaying noiselessly into primeval chaos.

Through this atmosphere of darkness and death, along these paths of
pestilence and famine; unregarding and unregarded, the Pagan and his
prisoner passed slowly onward towards the quarter of the city opposite
the Pincian Mount. No ray of thought, even yet, brightened the dull
faculties of Ulpius; still he walked forward vacantly, and still he was
followed wearily by the fast-failing girl.

Sunk in her mingled stupor of bodily weakness and mental despair, she
never spoke, never raised her head, never looked forth on the one side
or the other. She had now ceased even to feel the strong, cold grasp of
the Pagan's hand. Shadowy visions of spheres beyond the world, arrayed
in enchanting beauty, and people with happy spirits in their old earthly
forms, where a long deathless existence moved smoothly and dreamily
onward, without mark of time or taint of woe, were opening before her
mind. She lost all memory of afflictions and wrongs, all apprehension
of danger from the madman at whose mercy she remained. And thus she
still moved feebly onward as the will of Ulpius guided her, with no
observation of her present peril, and no anxiety for her impending fate.


They passed the grand circular structure of the Pantheon, entered the
long narrow streets leading to the banks of the river, and finally
gained the margin of the Tiber--hard by the little island that still
rises in the midst of its waters. Here, for the first time, the Pagan
paused mechanically in his course, and vacantly directed his dull,
dreamy eyes on the prospect before him, where the walls, stretching
abruptly outward from their ordinary direction, enclosed the Janiculum
Hill, as it rose with its irregular mass of buildings on the opposite
bank of the river.

At this sudden change from action to repose, the overtasked energies
which had hitherto gifted the limbs of Antonina with an unnatural power
of endurance, abruptly relaxed. She sank down helpless and silent; her
head drooped towards the hard ground, as towards a welcome pillow, but
found no support, for the Pagan's iron grasp of her hand remained
unyielding as ever. Infirm though he was, he appeared at this moment to
be unconscious that his prisoner was now hanging at his side. Every
association connected with her, every recollection of his position with
her in her father's house, had vanished from his memory. A darker
blindness seemed to have sunk over his bodily perceptions; his eyes
rolled slowly to and fro over the prospect before him, but regarded
nothing; his panting breaths came thick and fast; his shrunk chest
heaved as if some deep, dread agony were pent within it--it was evident
that a new crisis in his insanity was at hand.