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Books: Antonina

W >> Wilkie Collins >> Antonina




Not one of them, in their new-born security, marked the ruined building
on the high-road; not one of them observed the closely-robed figure that
stole out from it to join them in their rear; and then, with stealthy
footstep and shrouded face, soon mingled in the thickest of their ranks.
The attention of the ambassadors was still engrossed by their
forebodings of failure in collecting the ransom; the eyes of the people
were fixed only on the Pincian Gate; their ears were open to no sounds
but their own ejaculations of delight. Not one disguised stranger only,
but many, might now have joined them in their tumultuous progress, alike
unquestioned and unobserved.

So they hastily re-entered the city, where thousands of heavy eyes were
strained to look on them, and thousands of attentive ears drank in their
joyful news from the Gothic camp. Then were heard in all directions the
sounds of hysterical weeping and idiotic laughter, the low groans of the
weak who died victims of their sudden transport, and the confused
outbursts of the strong who had survived all extremities, and at last
beheld their deliverance in view.

Still silent and serious, the ambassadors now slowly penetrated the
throng on their way back to the Forum; and as they proceeded the crowd
gradually dispersed on either side of them. Enemies, friends, and
strangers, all whom the ruthless famine had hitherto separated in
interests and sympathies, were now united together as one family, by the
expectation of speedy relief.


But there was one among the assembly that was now separating who stood
alone in her unrevealed emotions, amid the rejoicing thousands around
her. The women and children in the throng, as, preoccupied by their own
feeling, they unheedfully passed her by, saw not the eager, ferocious
attention in her eyes, as she watched them steadily till they were out
of sight. Within their gates the stranger and the enemy waited for the
treacherous darkness of night, and waited unobserved. Where she had
first stood when the thick crowd hemmed her in, there she still
continued to stand after they slowly moved past her and space grew free.

Yet beneath this outward calm and silence lurked the wildest passions
that ever raged against the weak restraint of human will; even the firm
self-possession of Goisvintha was shaken when she found herself within
the walls of Rome.

No glance of suspicion had been cast upon her; not one of the crowd had
approached to thrust her back when she passed through the gates with the
heedless citizens around her. Shielded from detection, as much by the
careless security of her enemies as by the stratagem of her disguise,
she stood on the pavement of Rome, as she had vowed to stand, afar from
the armies of her people--alone as an avenger of blood!

It was no dream; no fleeting, deceitful vision. The knife was under her
hand; the streets stretched before her; the living beings who thronged
them were Romans; the hours of the day were already on the wane; the
approach of her vengeance was as sure as the approach of darkness that
was to let it loose. A wild exultation quickened in her the pulses of
life, while she thought on the dread projects of secret assassination
and revenge which now opposed her, a solitary woman, in deadly enmity
against the defenceless population of a whole city.

As her eyes travelled slowly from side to side over the moving throng;
as she thought on the time that might still elapse ere the discovery and
death--the martyrdom in the cause of blood--which she expected and
defied, would overtake her, her hands trembled beneath her robe, and she
reiterated in whispers to herself: 'Husband, children, brother--there
are five deaths to avenge! Remember Aquileia! Remember Aquileia!'

Suddenly, as she looked from group to group among the departing people,
her eyes became arrested by one object; she instantly stepped forwards,
then abruptly restrained herself and moved back where the crowd was
still thick, gazing fixedly ever in the same direction. She saw the
victim twice snatched from her hands--at the camp and in the farm-
house--a third time offered to her grasp in the streets of Rome.

The chance of vengeance last expected was the chance that had first
arrived. A vague, oppressing sensation of awe mingled with the triumph
at her heart--a supernatural guidance seemed to be directing her with
fell rapidity, through every mortal obstacle, to the climax of her
revenge!

She screened herself behind the people; she watched the girl from the
most distant point; but concealment was now vain--their eyes had met.
The robe had slipped aside when she suddenly stepped forward, and in
that moment Antonina had seen her.

Numerian, moving slowly with his daughter through the crowd, felt her
hand tighten round his, and saw her features stiffen into sudden
rigidity; but the change was only for an instant. Ere he could speak,
she caught him by the arm, and drew him forward with convulsive energy.
Then, in accents hardly articulate, low, breathless, unlike her wonted
voice, he heard he exclaim, as she struggled on with him, 'She is
there--there behind us! to kill me, as she killed him! Home! home!'

Exhausted already, through long weakness and natural infirmity, by the
rough contact of the crowd, bewildered by Antonina's looks and actions,
and by the startling intimation of unknown peril, conveyed to him in her
broken exclamations of affright, Numerian's first impulse, as he hurried
onward by her side, led him to entreat protection and help from the
surrounding populace. But even could he have pointed out to them the
object of his dread amid that motley throng of all nations, the appeal
he now made would have remained unanswered.


Of all the results of the frightful severity of privation suffered by
the besieged, none were more common than those mental aberrations which
produced visions of danger, enemies, and death, so palpable as to make
the persons beholding them implore assistance against the hideous
creation of their own delirium. Accordingly, most of those to whom the
entreaties of Numerian were addressed passed without noticing them.
Some few carelessly bid him remember that there were no enemies now;
that the days of peace were approaching; and that a meal of good food,
which he might soon expect to enjoy, was the only help for a famished
man. No one, in that period of horror and suffering, which was now
drawing to a close, saw anything extraordinary in the confusion of the
father and the terror of the child. So they pursued their feeble flight
unprotected, and the footsteps of Goisvintha followed them as they went.

They had already commenced the ascent of the Pincian Hill, when Antonina
stopped abruptly, and turned to look behind her. Many people yet
thronged the street below; but her eyes penetrated among them, sharpened
by peril, and instantly discerned the ample robe and the tall form,
still at the same distance from them, and pausing as they had paused.
For one moment, the girl's eyes fixed in the wild, helpless stare of
terror on her father's face; but the next, that mysterious instinct of
preservation, which is co-existent with the instinct of fear--which
gifts the weakest animal with cunning to improve its flight, and takes
the place of reason, reflection, and resolve, when all are banished from
the mind--warned her against the fatal error of permitting the pursuer
to track her to her home.

'Not there! not there!' she gasped faintly as Numerian endeavoured to
lead her up the ascent. 'She will see us as we enter the doors!--
through the streets! Oh, father, if you would save me! we may lose her
in the streets!--the guards, the people are there! Back! back!'

Numerian trembled as he marked the terror in her looks and gestures; but
it was vain to question or oppose her. Nothing short of force could
restrain her,--no commands or entreaties could draw from her more than
the same breathless exclamation: 'Onward, father; onward, if you would
save me!' She was insensible to every sensation but fear, incapable of
any other exertion than flight.

Turning and winding, hurrying forward ever at the same rapid pace, they
passed unconsciously along the intricate streets that led to the river
side; and still the avenger tracked the victim, constant as the shadow
to the substance; steady, vigilant, unwearied, as a bloodhound on a hot
scent.

And now, even the sound of the father's voice ceased to be audible in
the daughter's ears; she no longer felt the pressure of his hand, no
longer perceived his very presence at her side. At length, frail and
shrinking, she again paused, and looked back. The street they had
reached was very tranquil and desolate: two slaves were walking at its
further extremity. While they were in sight, no living creature
appeared in the roadway behind; but as soon as they had passed away, a
shadow stole slowly forward over the pavement of a portico in the
distance, and the next moment Goisvintha appeared in the street.

The sun glared down fiercely over her dark figure as she stopped and for
an instant looked stealthily around her. She moved to advance, and
Antonina saw no more. Again she turned to renew her hopeless flight;
and again her father--perceiving only as the mysterious cause of her
dread a solitary woman, who, though she followed, attempted not to
arrest, or even to address them--prepared to accompany her to the last,
in despair of all other chances of securing her safety.

More and more completely did her terror now enchain her faculties, as
she still unconsciously traced her rapid way through the streets that
led to the Tiber. It was not Numerian, not Rome, not daylight in a
great city, that was before her eyes: it was the storm, the
assassination, the night at the farm-house, that she now lived through
over again.


Still the quick flight and the ceaseless pursuit were continued, as if
neither were ever to have an end; but the close of the scene was,
nevertheless, already at hand. During the interval of the passage
through the streets, Numerian's mind had gradually recovered from its
first astonishment and alarm; at length he perceived the necessity of
instant and decisive action, while there was yet time to save Antonina
from sinking under the excess of her own fears. Though a vague, awful
foreboding of disaster and death filled his heart, his resolution to
penetrate at once, at all hazards, the dark mystery of impending danger
indicated by his daughter's words and actions, did not fail him; for it
was aroused by the only motive powerful enough to revive all that
suffering and infirmity had not yet destroyed of the energy of his
former days--the preservation of his child. There was something of the
old firmness and vigour of the intrepid reformer of the Church, in his
dim eyes, as he now stopped, and enclosing Antonina in his arms,
arrested her instantly in her flight.

She struggled to escape; but it was faintly, and only for a moment. Her
strength and consciousness were beginning to abandon her. She never
attempted to look back; she felt in her heart that Goisvintha was still
behind, and dared not to verify the frightful conviction with her eyes.
Her lips moved; but they expressed an altered and a vain petition:
'Hermanric! O Hermanric!' was all they murmured now.

They had arrived at the long street that ran by the banks of the Tiber.
The people had either retired to their homes or repaired to the Forum to
be informed of the period when the ransom would be paid. No one but
Goisvintha was in sight as Numerian looked around him; and she, after
having carefully viewed the empty street, was advancing towards them at
a quickened pace.

For an instant the father looked on her steadily as she approached, and
in that instant his determination was formed. A flight of steps at his
feet led to the narrow doorway of a small temple, the nearest building
to him.

Ignorant whether Goisvintha might not be secretly supported by
companions in her ceaseless pursuit, he resolved to secure this place
for Antonina, as a temporary refuge at least; while standing before it,
he should oblige the woman to declare her purpose, if she followed them
even there. In a moment he had begun the ascent of the steps, with the
exhausted girl by his side. Arrived at the summit, he guided her before
him into the doorway, and stopped on the threshold to look round again.
Goisvintha was nowhere to be seen.

Not duped by the woman's sudden disappearance into the belief that she
had departed from the street--persisting in his resolution to lead his
daughter to a place of repose, where she might most immediately feel
herself secure, and might therefore most readily recover her self-
possession, Numerian drew Antonina with him into the temple. He
lingered there for a moment, ere he departed to watch the street from
the portico outside.

The light in the building was dim,--it was admitted only from a small
aperture in the roof, and through the narrow doorway, where it was
intercepted by the overhanging bulk of the outer portico. A crooked pile
of dark heavy-looking substances on the floor, rose high towards the
ceiling in the obscure interior. Irregular in form, flung together one
over the other in strange disorder, for the most part dusky in hue, yet
here and there gleaming at points with a metallic brightness, these
objects presented a mysterious, indefinite, and startling appearance.
It was impossible, on a first view of their confused arrangement, to
discover what they were, or to guess for what purpose they could have
been pile together on the floor of a deserted temple. From the moment
when they had first attracted Numerian's observation, his attention was
fixed on them, and as he looked a faint thrill of suspicion--vague,
inexplicable, without apparent cause or object--struck chill to his
heart.


He had moved a step forward to examine the hidden space at the back of
the pile, when his further advance was instantly stopped by the
appearance of a man who walked forth from it dressed in the floating,
purple-edged robe and white fillet of the Pagan priests. Before either
father or daughter could speak, even before they could move to depart,
he stepped up to them, and, placing his hand on the shoulder of each,
confronted them in silence.

At the moment when the stranger approached, Numerian raised his hand to
thrust him back, and, in so doing, fixed his eyes on the man's
countenance, as a ray of light from the doorway floated over it.
Instantly his arm remained outstretched and rigid, then it dropped to
his side, and the expression of horror on the face of the child became
reflected, as it were, on the face of the parent. Neither moved under
the hand of the dweller in the temple when he laid it heavily on each,
and both stood before him speechless as himself.


CHAPTER 25. THE TEMPLE AND THE CHURCH.

It was Ulpius. The Pagan was changed in bearing and countenance as well
as in apparel. He stood more firm and upright; a dull, tawny hue
overspread his face; his eyes, so sunken and lustreless in other days,
were now distended and bright with the glare of insanity. It seemed as
if his bodily powers had renewed their vigour, while his mental
faculties had declined towards their ruin.

No human eye had ever beheld by what foul and secret means he had
survived through the famine, on what unnatural sustenance he had
satisfied the cravings of inexorable hunger; but there, in his gloomy
shelter, the madman and the outcast had lived and moved, and suddenly
and strangely strengthened, after the people of the city had exhausted
all their united responses, lavished in vain all their united wealth,
and drooped and died by thousands around him!

His grasp still lay heavy on the father and daughter, and still both
confronted him--silent, as if death-struck by his gaze; motionless, as
if frozen at his touch. His presence was exerting over them a fatal
fascination. The power of action, suspended in Antonina as she entered
their ill-chosen refuge, was now arrested in Numerian also; but with him
no thought of the enemy in the street had any part, at this moment, in
the resistless influence which held him helpless before the enemy in the
temple.

It was a feeling of deeper awe and darker horror. For now, as he looked
upon the hideous features of Ulpius, as he saw the forbidden robe of
priesthood in which the Pagan was arrayed, he beheld not only the
traitor who had successfully plotted against the prosperity of his
household, but the madman as well,--the moral leper of the whole human
family--the living Body and the dead Soul--the disinherited of that
Divine Light of Life which it is the awful privilege of mortal man to
share with the angels of God.

He still clasped Antonina to his side, but it was unconsciously. To all
outward appearance he was helpless as his helpless child, when Ulpius
slowly removed his grasp from their shoulders, separated them, and
locking the hand of each in his cold, bony fingers, began to speak.

His voice was deep and solemn, but his accents, in their hard, unvarying
tone, seemed to express no human emotion. His eyes, far from
brightening as he spoke, relapsed into a dull, vacant insensibility. The
connection between the action of speech and the accompanying and
explaining action of look which is observable in all men, seemed lost in
him. It was fearful to behold the death-like face, and to listen at the
same moment to the living voice.

'Lo! the votaries come to the temple!' murmured the Pagan. 'The good
servants of the mighty worship gather at the voice of the priest! In
the far provinces, where the enemies of the gods approach to profane the
sacred groves, behold the scattered people congregating by night to
journey to the shrine of Serapis! Adoring thousands kneel beneath the
lofty porticoes, while within, in the secret hall where the light is
dim, where the air quivers round the breathing deities on their
pedestals of gold, the high priest Ulpius reads the destinies of the
future, that are unrolled before his eyes like a book!'


As he ceased, and, still holding the hands of his captives, looked on
them fixedly as ever, his eyes brightened and dilated again; but they
expressed not the slightest recognition either of father or daughter.
The delirium of his imagination had transported him to the temple at
Alexandria; the days were revived when his glory had risen to its
culminating point, when the Christians trembled before him as their
fiercest enemy, and the Pagans surrounded him as their last hope. The
victims of his former and forgotten treachery were but as two among the
throng of votaries allured by the fame of his eloquence, by the
triumphant notoriety of his power to protect the adherents of the
ancient creed.

But it was not always thus that his madness declared itself: there were
moments when it rose to appalling frenzy. Then he imagined himself to
be again hurling the Christian assailants from the topmost walls of the
besieged temple, in that past time when the image of Serapis was doomed
by the Bishop of Alexandria to be destroyed. His yells of fury, his
frantic execrations of defiance were heard afar, in the solemn silence
of pestilence-stricken Rome. Those who, during the most fatal days of
the Gothic blockade, dropped famished on the pavement before the little
temple, as they endeavoured to pass it on their onward way, presented a
dread reality of death, to embody the madman's visions of battle and
slaughter. As these victims of famine lay expiring in the street, they
heard above them his raving voice cursing them for Christians,
triumphing over them as defeated enemies destroyed by his hand,
exhorting his imaginary adherents to fling the slain above on the dead
below, until the bodies of the besiegers of the temple were piled, as
barriers against their living comrades, round its walls. Sometimes his
frenzy gloried in the fancied revival of the foul and sanguinary
ceremonies of Pagan superstition. Then he bared his arms, and shouted
aloud for the sacrifice; he committed dark and nameless atrocities--for
now again the dead and the dying lay before him, to give substance to
the shadow of his evil thoughts; and Plague and Hunger were as creatures
of his will, and slew the victim for the altar ready to his hands.

At other times, when the raving fit had passed away, and he lay panting
in the darkest corner of the interior of the temple, his insanity
assumed another and a mournful form. His voice grew low and moaning;
the wreck of his memory--wandering and uncontrollable--floated back, far
back, on the dark waters of the past; and his tongue uttered fragments
of words and phrases that he had murmured at his father's knees--
farewell, childish wishes that he had breathed in his mother's ear--
innocent, anxious questions which he had addressed to Macrinus, the high
priest, when he first entered the service of the gods at Alexandria.
His boyish reveries--the gentleness of speech and poetry of thought of
his first youthful days, were now, by the unsearchable and arbitrary
influences of his disease, revived in his broken words, renewed in his
desolate old age of madness and crime, breathed out in unconscious
mockery by his lips, while the foam still gathered about them, and the
last flashes of frenzy yet lightened in his eyes.

This unnatural calmness of language and vividness of memory, this
treacherous appearance of thoughtful, melancholy self-possession, would
often continue through long periods, uninterrupted; but, sooner or
later, the sudden change came; the deceitful chain of thought snapped
asunder in an instant; the word was left half uttered; the wearied limbs
started convulsively into renewed action; and as the dream of violence
returned and the dream of peace vanished, the madman rioted afresh in
his fury; and journeyed as his visions led him, round and round his
temple sanctuary, and hither and thither, when the night was dark and
death was busiest in Rome, among the expiring in deserted houses, and
the lifeless in the silent streets.


But there were other later events in his existence that never revived
within him. The old familiar image of the idol Serapis, which had drawn
him into the temple when he re-entered Rome, absorbed in itself and in
its associated remembrances all that remained active of his paralysed
faculties. His betrayal of his trust in the house of Numerian, his
passage through the rifted wall, his crushing repulse in the tent of
Alaric, never for a moment occupied his wandering thoughts. The clouds
that hung over his mind might open to him parting glimpses of the toils
and triumphs of his early career; but they descended in impenetrable
darkness on all the after-days of his dreary life.

Such was the being to whose will, by a mysterious fatality, the father
and child were now submitted; such the existence--solitary, hopeless,
loathsome--of their stern and wily betrayer of other days!

Since he had ceased speaking, the cold, death-like grasp of his hand had
gradually strengthened, and he had begun to look slowly and inquiringly
round him from side to side. Had this change marked the approaching
return of his raving paroxysm, the lives of Numerian and Antonina would
have been sacrificed the next moment; but all that it now denoted was
the quickening of the lofty and obscure ideas of celebrity and success,
of priestly honour and influence, of the splendour and glory of the
gods, which had prompted his last words.

He moved suddenly, and drew the victims of his dangerous caprice a few
steps farther into the interior of the temple; then led them close up to
the lofty pile of objects which had first attracted Numerian's eyes on
entering the building. 'Kneel and adore!' cried the madman fiercely,
replacing his hands on their shoulders and pressing them to the
ground--'You stand before the gods, in the presence of their high
priest!'

The girl's head sank forward, and she hid her face in her hands; but her
father looked up tremblingly at the pile. His eyes had insensibly
become more accustomed to the dim light of the temple, and he now saw
more distinctly the objects composing the mass that rose above him.

Hundreds of images of the gods, in gold, silver, and wood--many in the
latter material being larger than life; canopies, vestments, furniture,
utensils, all of ancient Pagan form, were heaped together, without order
or arrangement, on the floor, to a height of full fifteen feet.

There was something at once hideous and grotesque in the appearance of
the pile. The monstrous figures of the idols, with their rude carved
draperies and symbolic weapons, lay in every wild variety of position,
and presented every startling eccentricity of line, more especially
towards the higher portions of the mass, where they had evidently been
flung up from the ground by the hand that had raised the structure.

The draperies mixed among the images and the furniture were here coiled
serpent-like around them, and there hung down towards the ground, waving
slow and solemn in the breezes that wound through the temple doorway.
The smaller objects of gold and silver, scattered irregularly over the
mass, shone out from it like gleaming eyes; while the pile itself, seen
in such a place under a dusky light, looked like some vast, misshapen
monster--the gloomy embodiment of the bloodiest superstitions of
Paganism, the growth of damp airs and teeming ruin, of shadow and
darkness, of accursed and infected solitude!