Charles E. Morris - "The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox"

Gustave Droz - "Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, v1"

Marie Corelli - "The Master Christian"

Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne - "Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, V4"

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.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
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





Neither by word nor look did the hunchback answer the senator's menaces.
For him, the voice of the living was stifled in the presence of the
dead. The retribution that had gone forth against him had struck his
moral, as a thunderbolt might have stricken his physical being. His
soul strove in agony within him, as he thought on the awful fatality
which had set the dead mother in judgment on the degraded son--which had
directed the hand of the senator unwittingly to select the corpse of the
outraged parent as the object for the infidel buffoonery of the reckless
child, at the very close of his impious career. His past life rose
before him, for the first time, like a foul vision, like a nightmare of
horror, impurity, and crime. He staggered up the room, groping his way
along the wall, as if the darkness of midnight had closed round his
eyes, and crouched down by the open window. Beneath him rose the evil
and ominous voices from the street; around him spread the pitiless array
of his masters; before him appeared the denouncing vision of the corpse.

He would have remained but a short time unmolested in his place of
refuge, but for an event which now diverted from him the attention of
Vetranio and his guests. Drinking furiously to drown all recollection
of the catastrophe they had just witnessed, three of the revellers had
already suffered the worst consequences of an excess, which their
weakened frames were ill-fitted to bear. One after another, at short
intervals, they fell back senseless on their couches; and one after
another, as they succumbed, the three lamps burning nearest to them were
extinguished. The same speedy termination to the debauch seemed to be
in reserve for the rest of their companions, with the exception of
Vetranio and the two patricians who reclined at his right hand and his
left. These three still preserved the appearance of self-possession,
but an ominous change had already overspread their countenances. The
expression of wild joviality, of fierce recklessness, had departed from
their wild features; they silently watched each other with vigilant and
suspicious eyes; each in turn, as he filled his wine-cup, significantly
handled the torch with which the last drinker was to fire the funeral
pile. As the numbers of their rivals decreased, and the flame of lamp
after lamp was extinguished, the fatal contest for a suicide supremacy
assumed a present and powerful interest, in which all other purposes and
objects were forgotten. The corpse at the foot of the banqueting-table,
and the wretch cowering in his misery at the window, were now alike
unheeded. In the bewildered and brutalised minds of the guests, one
sensation alone remained--the intensity of expectation which precedes
the result of a deadly strife.

But ere long--awakening the attention which might otherwise never have
been aroused--the voice of the hunchback was heard, as the spirit of
repentance now moved within him, uttering, in wild, moaning tones, a
strange confession of degradation and sin--addressed to none;
proceeding, independent of consciousness or will, from the depths of his
stricken soul. He half raised himself, and fixed his sunken eyes upon
the dead body, as these words dropped from his lips: 'It was the last
time that I beheld her alive, when she approached me--lonely, and
feeble, and poor--in the street, beseeching me to return to her in the
days of her old age and her solitude, and to remember how she had loved
me in my childhood for my very deformity, how she had watched me
throughout the highways of Rome, that none should oppress or deride me!
The tears ran down her cheeks, she knelt to me on the hard pavement, and
I, who had deserted her for her poverty, to make myself a slave in
palaces among the accursed rich, flung down money to her as to a beggar
who wearied me, and passed on! She died desolate; her body lay
unburied, and I knew it not! The son who had abandoned the mother never
saw her more, until she rose before him there--avenging, horrible,
lifeless--a sight of death never to leave him! Woe, woe to the accursed
in his deformity, and the accursed of his mother's corpse!'

He paused, and fell back again to the ground, grovelling and speechless.
The tyrannic Thascius, regarding him with a scowl of drunken wrath,
seized an empty vase, and poising it in his unsteady hand, prepared to
hurl it at the hunchback's prostrate form, when again a single cry--a
woman's--rising above the increasing uproar in the street, rang shrill
and startling through the banqueting-hall. The patrician suspended his
purpose as he heard it, mechanically listening with the half-stupid,
half-cunning attention of intoxication. 'Help! help!' shrieked the
voice beneath the palace windows--'he follows me still--he attacked my
dead child in my arms! As I flung myself down upon it on the ground, I
saw him watching his opportunity to drag it by the limbs from under me--
famine and madness were in his eyes--I drove him back--I fled--he
follows me still!--save us, save us!'


At this instant her voice was suddenly stifled in the sound of fierce
cries and rushing footsteps, followed by an appalling noise of heavy
blows, directed at several points, against the steel railings before the
palace doors. Between the blows, which fell slowly and together at
regular intervals, the infuriated wretches, whose last exertions of
strength were strained to the utmost to deal them, could be heard
shouting breathlessly to each other: 'Strike harder, strike harder! the
back gates are guarded against us by our comrades admitted to the
pillage of the palace instead of us. You who would share the booty,
strike firm! the stones are at your feet, the gates of entrance yield
before you.'

Meanwhile a confused sound of trampling footsteps and contending voices
became audible from the lower apartments of the palace. Doors were
violently shut and opened--shouts and execrations echoed and re-echoed
along the lofty stone passages leading from the slaves' waiting-rooms to
the grand staircase; treachery betrayed itself as openly within the
building as violence still proclaimed itself in the assault on the gates
outside. The chief slaves had not been suspected by their fellows
without a cause; the bands of pillage and murder had been organised in
the house of debauchery and death; the chosen adherents from the street
had been secretly admitted through the garden gates, and had barred and
guarded them against further intrusion--another doom than the doom they
had impiously prepared for themselves was approaching the devoted
senators, at the hands of the slaves whom they had oppressed, and the
plebeians whom they had despised.

At the first sound of the assault without and the first intimation of
the treachery within, Vetranio, Thascius, and Marcus started from their
couches; the remainder of the guests, incapable either of thought or
action, lay, in stupid insensibility, awaiting their fate. These three
men alone comprehended the peril that threatened them, and, maddened
with drink, defied, in their ferocious desperation, the death that was
in store for them. 'Hark! they approach, the rabble revolted from our
rule,' cried Vetranio scornfully, 'to take the lives that we despise and
the treasures that we have resigned! The hour has come; I go to fire
the pile that involves in one common destruction our assassins and
ourselves!'

'Hold!' exclaimed Thascius, snatching the torch from his hand; 'the
entrance must first be defended, or, ere the flames are kindled, the
slaves will be here! Whatever is movable--couches, tables, corpses--let
us hurl them all against the door!'

As he spoke he rushed towards the black-curtained recess, to set the
example to his companions by seizing the corpse of the woman; but he had
not passed more than half the length of the apartment, when the
hunchback, who had followed him unheeded, sprang upon him from behind,
and, with a shrill cry, fastening his fingers on his throat, hurled him
torn and senseless to the floor. 'Who touches the body that is mine?'
shrieked the deformed wretch, rising from his victim, and threatening
with his blood-stained hands Vetranio and Marcus, as they stood
bewildered, and uncertain for the moment whether first to avenge their
comrade or to barricade the door--'The son shall rescue the mother! I
go to bury her! Atonement! Atonement!'

He leaped upon the table as he spoke, tore asunder with resistless
strength the cords which fastened the corpse to the throne, seized it in
his arms, and the next instant gained the door. Uttering fierce,
inarticulate cries, partly of anguish and partly of defiance, he threw
it open, and stepped forward to descend, when he was met at the head of
the stairs by the band of assassins hurrying up, with drawn swords and
blazing torches, to their work of pillage and death. He stood before
them--his deformed limbs set as firmly on the ground as if he were
preparing to descend the stairs at one leap--with the corpse raised high
on his breast; its unearthly features were turned towards them, its bare
arms were still stretched forth as they had been extended over the
banqueting-table, its grey hair streamed back and mingled with his own:
under the fitful illumination of the torches, which played red and wild
over him and his fearful burden, the dead and the living looked joined
to each other in one monstrous form.


Huddled together, motionless, on the stairs, their shouts of vengeance
and fury frozen on their lips, the assassins stood for one moment,
staring mechanically, with fixed, spell-bound eyes, upon the hideous
bulwark opposing their advance on the victims whom they had expected so
easily to surprise. The next instant a superstitious panic seized them;
as the hunchback suddenly moved towards them to descend, the corpse
seemed to their terror-stricken eyes to be on the eve of bursting its
way through their ranks. Ignorant of its introduction into the palace,
imagining it, in the revival of their slavish fears, to be the spectral
offspring of the magic incantations of the senators above, they turned
with one accord and fled down the stairs. The sound of their cries of
fear grew fainter and fainter in the direction of the garden as they
hurried through the secret gates at the back of the building. Then the
heavy, regular tamp of the hunchback's footsteps, as he paced the
solitary corridors after them, bearing his burden of death, became
audible in awful distinctness; then that sound also died away and was
lost, and nothing more was heard in the banqueting-room save the sharp
clang of the blows still dealt against the steel railings from the
street.

But now these grew rare and more rare in their recurrence; the strong
metal resisted triumphantly the utmost efforts of the exhausted rabble
who assailed it. As the minutes moved on, the blows grew rapidly
fainter and fewer; soon they diminished to three, struck at long
intervals; soon to one, followed by deep execrations of despair; and,
after that, a great silence sank down over the palace and the street,
where such strife and confusion had startled the night-echoes but a few
moments before.

In the banqueting-hall this rapid succession of events--the marvels of a
few minutes--passed before Vetranio and Marcus as visions beheld by
their eyes, but neither contained nor comprehended by their minds.
Stolid in their obstinate recklessness, stupefied by the spectacle of
the startling perils--menacing yet harmless, terrifying though
transitory--which surrounded them, neither of the senators moved a
muscle or uttered a word, from the period when Thascius had fallen
beneath the hunchback's attack, to the period when the last blow against
the palace railings, and the last sound of voices from the street, had
ceased in silence. Then the wild current of drunken exultation,
suspended within them during this brief interval, flowed once more,
doubly fierce, in its old course. Insensible, the moment after they had
passed away, to the warning and terrific scenes they had beheld, each
now looked round on the other with a glance of triumphant levity.
'Hark!' cried Vetranio, 'the mob without, feeble and cowardly to the
last, abandon their puny efforts to force my palace gates! Behold our
banqueting-tables still sacred from the intrusion of the revolted
menials, driven before my guest from the dead, like a flock of sheep
before a single dog! Say, O Marcus! did I not well to set the corpse at
the foot of our banqueting-table? What marvels has it not effected,
borne before us by the frantic Reburrus, as a banner of the hosts of
death, against the cowardly slaves whose fit inheritance is oppression,
and whose sole sensation is fear! See, we are free to continue and
conclude the banquet as we had designed! The gods themselves have
interfered to raise us in security above our fellow-mortals, whom we
despise! Another health, in gratitude to our departed guest, the
instrument of our deliverance, under the auspices of omnipotent Jove!'

As Vetranio spoke, Marcus alone, out of all the revellers, answered his
challenge. These two--the last-remaining combatants of the strife--
having drained their cups to the health proposed, passed slowly down
each side of the room, looking contemptuously on their prostrate
companions, and extinguishing every lamp but the two which burnt over
their own couches. Then returning to the upper end of the tables, they
resumed their places, not to leave them again until the fatal rivalry
was finally decided, and the moment of firing the pile had actually
arrived.

The torch lay between them; the last vases of wine stood at their sides.
Not a word escaped the lips of either, to break the deep stillness
prevailing over the palace. Each fixed his eyes on the other, in stern
and searching scrutiny, and cup for cup, drank in slow and regular
alternation. The debauch, which had hitherto presented a spectacle of
brutal degradation and violence, now that it was restricted to two men
only--each equally unimpressed by the scenes of horror he had beheld,
each vying with the other for the attainment of the supreme of
depravity--assumed an appearance of hardly human iniquity; it became a
contest for a satanic superiority of sin.

For some time little alteration appeared in the countenances of either
of the suicide-rivals; but they had now drunk to that final point of
excess at which wine either acts as its own antidote, or overwhelms in
fatal suffocation the pulses of life. The crisis in the strife was
approaching for both, and the first to experience it was Marcus.
Vetranio, as he watched him, observed a dark purple flush overspreading
his face, hitherto pale, almost colourless. His eyes suddenly dilated;
he panted for breath. The vase of wine, when he strove with a last
effort to fill his cup from it, rolled from his hand to the floor. The
stare of death was in his face as he half-raised himself and for one
instant looked steadily on his companion; the moment after, without word
or groan, he dropped backward over his couch.

The contest of the night was decided! The host of the banquet and the
master of the palace had been reserved to end the one and to fire the
other!

A smile of malignant triumph parted Vetranio's lips as he now arose and
extinguished the last lamp burning besides his own. That done, he
grasped the torch. His eyes, as he raised it, wandered dreamily over
the array of his treasures, and the forms of his dead or insensible
fellow-patricians around him, to be consumed by his act in annihilating
fire. The sensation of his solemn night-solitude in his fated palace
began to work in vivid and varying impressions on his mind, which was
partially recovering some portion of its wonted acuteness, under the
bodily reaction now produced in him by the very extravagance of the
night's excess. His memory began to retrace confusedly the scenes with
which the dwelling that he was about to destroy had been connected at
distant or at recent periods. At one moment the pomp of former
banquets, the jovial congregation of guests since departed or dead,
revived before him; at another, he seemed to be acting over again his
secret departure from his dwelling on the night before his last feast,
his stealthy return with the corpse that he had dragged from the street,
his toil in setting it up in mockery behind the black curtain, and
inventing the dialogue to be spoken before it by the hunchback. Now his
thoughts reverted to the minutest circumstances of the confusion and
dismay among the members of his household when the first extremities of
the famine began to be felt in the city; and now, without visible
connection or cause, they turned suddenly to the morning when he had
hurried through the most solitary paths in his grounds to meet the
betrayer Ulpius at Numerian's garden gate. Once more the image of
Antonina--so often present to his imagination since the original was
lost to his eyes--grew palpable before him. He thought of her, as
listening at his knees to the sound of his lute; as awakening,
bewildered and terrified, in his arms; as flying distractedly before her
father's wrath; as now too surely lying dead, in her beauty and her
innocence, amid the thousand victims of the famine and the plague.

These and other reflections, while they crowded in whirlwind rapidity on
his mind, wrought no alteration in the deadly purpose which they
suspended. His delay in lighting the torch was the unconscious delay of
the suicide, secure in his resolution ere he lifts the poison to his
lips--when life rises before him as a thing that is past, and he stands
for one tremendous moment in the dark gap between the present and the
future--no more the pilgrim of Time--not yet the inheritor of Eternity!

So, in the dimly lighted hall, surrounded by the victims whom he had
hurried before him to their doom, stood the lonely master of the great
palace; and so spoke within him the mysterious voices of his last
earthly thoughts. Gradually they sank and ceased, and stillness and
vacancy closed like dark veils over his mind. Starting like one
awakened from a trance he once more felt the torch in his hand, and once
more the expression of fierce desperation appeared in his eyes as he lit
it steadily at the lamp above him.

The dew was falling pure to the polluted earth; the light breezes sang
their low daybreak anthem among the leaves to the Power that bade them
forth; night had expired, and morning was already born of it, as
Vetranio, with the burning torch in his hand, advanced towards the
funeral pile.


He had already passed the greater part of the length of the room, when a
faint sound of footsteps ascending a private staircase which led to the
palace gardens, and communicated with the lower end of the banqueting-
hall by a small door of inlaid ivory, suddenly attracted his attention.
He hesitated in his deadly purpose, listening to the slow, regular
approaching sound, which, feeble though it was, struck mysteriously
impressive upon his ear in the dreary silence of all things around him.
Holding the torch high above his head, as the footsteps came nearer, he
fixed his eyes in intense expectation upon the door. It opened, and the
figure of a young girl clothed in white stood before him. One moment he
looked upon her with startled eyes; the next the torch dropped from his
hand, and smouldered unheeded on the marble floor. It was Antonina!

Her face was overspread with a strange transparent paleness; her once
soft, round cheeks had lost their girlish beauty of form; her
expression, ineffably mournful, hopeless, and subdued, threw a simple,
spiritual solemnity over her whole aspect. She was changed, awfully
changed to the profligate senator from the being of his former
admiration; but still there remained in her despairing eyes enough of
the old look of gentleness and patience, surviving through all anguish
and dread, to connect her, even as she was now, with what she had been.
She stood in the chamber of debauchery and suicide between the funeral
pile and the desperate man who was vowed to fire it, a feeble, helpless
creature, yet powerful in the influence of her presence, at such a
moment and in such a form, as a saving and reproving spirit, armed with
the omnipotence of Heaven to mould the purposes of man.

Awed and astounded, as if he beheld an apparition from the tomb,
Vetranio looked upon this young girl--whom he had loved with the least
selfish passion that ever inspired him; whom he had lamented as long
since lost and dead with the sincerest grief he had ever felt; whom he
now saw standing before him at the very moment ere he doomed himself to
death, altered, desolate, supplicating--with emotions which held him
speechless in wonder, and even in dread. While he still gazed upon her
in silence, he heard her speaking to him in low, melancholy, imploring
accents, which fell upon his ear, after the voices of terror and
desperation that had risen around him throughout the night, like tones
never addressed to it before.

'Numerian, my father, is sinking under the famine,' she began; 'if no
help is given to him, he may die even before sunrise! You are rich and
powerful; I have come to you, having nothing now but his life to live
for, to beg sustenance for him!' She paused, overpowered for the
moment, and bent her eyes wistfully on the senator's face. Then seeing
that he vainly endeavoured to answer her, her head drooped upon her
breast, and her voice sank lower as she continued:--

'I have striven for patience under much sorrow and pain through the long
night that is past; my eyes were heavy and my spirit was faint; I could
have rendered up my soul willingly in my loneliness and feebleness to
God who gave it, but that it was my duty to struggle for my life and my
father's, now that I was restored to him after I had lost all beside! I
could not think, or move, or weep, as, looking forth upon your palace, I
watched and waited through the hours of darkness. But, as morning
dawned, the heaviness at my heart was lightened; I remembered that the
palace I saw before me was yours; and, though the gates were closed, I
knew that I could reach it through your garden that joins to my father's
land. I had none in Rome to ask mercy of but you; so I set forth
hastily, ere my weakness should overpower me, remembering that I had
inherited much misery at your hands, but hoping that you might pity me
for what I had suffered when you saw me again. I came wearily through
the garden; it was long before I found my way hither; will you send me
back as helpless as I came? You first taught me to disobey my father in
giving me the lute; will you refuse to aid me in succouring him now? He
is all that I have left in the world! Have mercy upon him!--have mercy
upon me!'


Again she looked up in Vetranio's face. His trembling lips moved, but
still no sound came from them. The expression of confusion and awe yet
prevailed over his features as he pointed slowly towards the upper end
of the banqueting-table. To her this simple action was eloquent beyond
all power of speech; she turned her feeble steps instantly in the
direction he had indicated.

He watched her, by the light of the single lamp that still burnt,
passing--strong in the shielding inspiration of her good purpose--amid
the bodies of his suicide companions without pausing on her way. Having
gained the upper end of the room, she took from the table a flask of
wine, and from the wooden stand behind it the bowl of offal disdained by
the guests at the fatal banquet, returning immediately to the spot where
Vetranio still stood. Here she stopped for a moment, as if about to
speak once more; but her emotions overpowered her. From the sources
which despair and suffering had dried up, the long-prisoned tears once
more flowed forth at the bidding of gratitude and hope. She looked upon
the senator, silent as himself, and her expression at that instant was
destined to remain on his memory while memory survived. Then, with
faltering and hasty steps, she departed by the way she had come; and in
the great palace, which his evil supremacy over the wills of others had
made a hideous charnel-house, he was once more left alone.

He made no effort to follow or detain her as she left him. The torch
still smouldered beside him on the floor, but he never stooped to take
it up; he dropped down on a vacant couch, stupefied by what he had
beheld. That which no entreaties, no threats, no fierce violence of
opposition could have effected in him, the appearance of Antonina had
produced--it had forced him to pause at the very moment of the execution
of his deadly design.

He remembered how, from the very first day when he had seen her, she had
mysteriously influenced the whole progress of his life; how his ardour
to possess her had altered his occupations, and even interrupted his
amusements; how all his energy and all his wealth had been baffled in
the attempt to discover her when she fled from her father's house; how
the first feeling of remorse that he had ever known had been awakened
within him by his knowledge of the share he had had in producing her
unhappy fate. Recalling all this; reflecting that, had she approached
him at an earlier period, she would have been driven back affrighted by
the drunken clamour of his companions; and had she arrived at a later,
would have found his palace in flames; thinking at the same time of her
sudden presence in the banqueting-hall when he had believed her to be
dead, when her appearance at the moment before he fired the pile was
most irresistible in its supernatural influence over his actions--that
vague feeling of superstitious dread which exists intuitively in all
men's minds, which had never before been aroused in his, thrilled
through him. His eyes were fixed on the door by which she had departed,
as if he expected her to return. Her destiny seemed to be portentously
mingled with his own; his life seemed to move, his death to wait at her
bidding. There was no repentance, no moral purification in the emotions
which now suspended his bodily faculties in inaction; he was struck for
the time with a mental paralysis.