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Books: Antonina

W >> Wilkie Collins >> Antonina




The ultimate destiny of the dragon of brass was the destiny of the
religion whose bloodiest superstitions it embodied: it fell beneath the
resistless advance of Christianity. Shortly after the date of our
narrative, the interior of the building beneath which it was placed
having suffered from an accident, which will be related farther on, the
exterior was dismantled, in order that its pillars might furnish
materials for a church. The vault in the wall was explored by a monk
who had been present at the destruction of other Pagan temples, and who
volunteered to discover its contents. With a torch in one hand, and an
iron bar in the other, he descended into the cavity, sounding the walls
and the steps before him as he proceeded. For the first and the last
time the sword protruded harmless from the monster's throat when the
monk pressed the fatal stair, before stepping on it, with his iron bar.
The same day the machine was destroyed and cast into the Tiber, where
its victims had been thrown before it in former years.

*****


Some minutes have elapsed since we left the father and daughter standing
by the Pagan's side before the mouth of the vault; and as yet there
appears no change in the several positions of the three. But already,
while Ulpius still looks down steadfastly into the cavity at his feet,
his voice, as he continues to speak, grows louder, and his words become
more distinct. Fearful recollections associated with the place are
beginning to stir his weary memory, to lift the darkness of oblivion
from his idle thoughts.

'They go down, far down there!' he abruptly exclaimed, pointing into the
black depths of the vault, 'and never arise again to the light of the
upper earth! The great Destroyer is watchful in his solitude beneath,
and looks through the darkness for their approach! Hark! the hissing of
his breath is like to the clash of weapons in a deadly strife!'

At this moment the wind moved the loose scales of the dragon. During an
instant Ulpius remained silent, listening to the noise they produced.
For the first time an expression of dread appeared on his face. His
memory was obscurely reviving the incidents of his discovery of the
deadly machinery in the vault when he first made his sojourn in the
temple, when--filled with the confused remembrance of the mysterious
rites and incantations, the secret sacrifices which he had witnessed and
performed at Alexandria--he had found and followed the subterranean
passage which led to the iron grating beneath the dragon. As the wind
lulled again, and the clashing of the metal ceased with it, he began to
give these recollections expression in words, uttering them in slow,
solemn accents to himself.

'I have seen the Destroyer; the Invisible has revealed himself to me!'
he murmured. 'I stood on the iron bars; the restless waters toiled and
struggled beneath my feet as I looked up into the place of darkness. A
voice called to me, "Get light, and behold me from above! Get light!
get light!" Sun, and moon, and stars gave no light there! but lamps
burnt in the city, in the houses of the dead, when I walked by them in
the night-time; and the lamp gave light when sun, and moon, and stars
gave none! From the top steps I looked down, and saw the Powerful One in
his golden brightness; and approached not, but watched and listened in
fear. The voice again!--the voice was heard again!--"Sacrifice to me in
secret, as thy brethren sacrifice! Give me the living where the living
are, and the dead where the dead!" The air came up cold, and the voice
ceased, and the lamp was like sun, and moon, and stars--it gave no light
in the place of darkness!'

While he spoke, the loose metal again clashed in the vault, for the wind
was strengthening as the evening advanced. 'Hark! the signal to prepare
the sacrifice!' cried the Pagan, turning abruptly to Numerian. 'Listen,
bondman! the living and the dead are within our reach. The breath of
the Invisible strikes them in the street and in the house; they stagger
in the highways, and drop at the temple steps. When the hour comes we
shall go forth and find them. Under my hand they go down into the
cavern beneath. Whether they are hurled dead, or whether they go down
living, they fall through to the iron bars, where the water leaps and
rejoices to receive them! It is mine to sacrifice them above, and thine
to wait for them below, to lift the bars and give them to the river to
be swallowed up! The dead drop down first, the living that are slain by
the Destroyer follow after!'

Here he paused suddenly. Now, for the first time, his eye rested on
Antonina, whose very existence he seemed hitherto to have forgotten. A
revolting smile of mingled cunning and satisfaction instantly changed
the whole character of his countenance as he gazed on her and then
looked round significantly to the vault. 'Here is one,' he whispered to
Numerian, taking her by the arm. 'Keep her captive--the hour is near!'

Numerian had hitherto stood unheedful while he spoke; but when he
touched Antonina the bare action was enough to arouse the father to
resistance--hopeless though it was--once more. He shook off the grasp
of Ulpius from the girl's arm, and drew back with her--breathless,
vigilant, desperate--to the side-wall behind him.

The madman laughed in proud approval. 'My bondman obeys me and seizes
the captive!' he cried. 'He remembers that the hour is near and loosens
not his hold! Come,' he continued, 'come out into the hall beyond!--it
is time that we watch for more victims for the sacrifice till the sun
goes down. The Destroyer is mighty and must be obeyed!'


He walked to the entrance leading into the first apartment of the
temple, and then waited to be followed by Numerian, who, now for the
first time separated from Ulpius, remained stationary in the position he
had last occupied, and looked eagerly around him. No chance of escape
presented itself; the mouth of the vault on one side, and the passage
through the partition on the other, were the only outlets to the place.
There was no hope but to follow the Pagan into the great hall of the
temple, to keep carefully at a distance from him, and to watch the
opportunity of flight through the doorway. The street, so desolate when
last beheld, might now afford more evidence that it was inhabited.
Citizens, guards might be passing by, and might be summoned into the
temple--help might be at hand.

As he moved forward with Antonina, such thoughts passed rapidly through
the father's mind, unaccompanied at the moment by the recollection of
the stranger who had followed them from the Pincian Gate, or of the
apathy of the famished populace in aiding each other in any emergency.
Seeing that he was followed as he had commanded, Ulpius passed on before
them to the pile of idols; but a strange and sudden alteration appeared
in his gait. He had hitherto walked with the step of a man--young,
strong, and resolute of purpose; now he dragged one limb after the other
as slowly and painfully as if he had received a mortal hurt. He
tottered with more than the infirmity of his age, his head dropped upon
his breast, and he moaned and murmured inarticulately in low, long-drawn
cries.

He had advanced to the side of the pile, half-way towards the doorway of
the temple, when Numerian, who had watched with searching eyes the
abrupt change in his demeanour, forgetting the dissimulation which might
still be all-important, abandoned himself to his first impulse, and
hurriedly pressing forward with Antonina, attempted to pass the Pagan
and escape. But at the moment Ulpius stopped in his slow progress,
reeled, threw out his hands convulsively, and seizing Numerian by the
arm, staggered back with him against the side-wall of the temple. The
fingers of the tortured wretch closed as if they were never to be
unlocked again--closed as if with the clutch of death, with the last
frantic grasp of a drowning man.

For days and nights past he had toiled incessantly under the relentless
tyranny of his frenzy, building up higher and higher his altar of idols,
and pouring forth his invocations before his gods in the place of the
sacrifice; and now, at the moment when he was most triumphant in his
ferocious activity of purpose, when his fancied bondman and his fancied
victim were most helpless at his command--now, when his strained
faculties were strung to their highest pitch, the long-deferred paroxysm
had seized him, which was the precursor of his repose, of the only
repose granted by his awful fate--a change (the mournful change already
described) in the form of his insanity. For at those rare periods when
he slept, his sleep was not unconsciousness, not rest: it was a trance
of hideous dreams--his tongue spoke, his limbs moved, when he slumbered
as when he woke. It was only when his visions of the pride, the power,
the fierce conflicts, and daring resolutions of his maturer years gave
place to his dim, quiet, waking dreams of his boyish days, that his
wasted faculties reposed, and his body rested with them in the
motionless languor of perfect fatigue. Then, if words were still
uttered by his lips, they were as murmurs of an infant--happy sleep; for
the innocent phrases of his childhood which they then revived, seemed
for a time to bring with them the innocent tranquillity of his childhood
as well.

'Go! go!--fly while you are yet free!' cried Numerian, dropping the hand
of Antonina, and pointing to the door. But for the second time the girl
refused to move forward a step. No horror, no peril in the temple could
banish for an instant her remembrance of the night at the farm-house in
the suburbs. She kept her head turned towards the vacant entrance, fixed
her eyes on it in the unintermitting watchfulness of terror, and
whispered affrightedly, 'Goisvintha! Goisvintha!' when her father
spoke.


The clasp of the Pagan's fingers remained fixed and deathlike as at
first; he leaned back against the wall, as still as if life and action
had for ever departed from him. The paroxysm had passed away; his face,
distorted but the moment before, was now in repose, but it was a repose
that was awful to look on. Tears rolled slowly from his half-closed
eyes over his seamed and wrinkled cheeks--tears which were not the
impressive expression of mental anguish (for a vacant and unchanging
smile was on his lips), but the mere mechanical outburst of the physical
weakness that the past crisis of agony had left behind it. Not the
slightest appearance of thought or observation was perceptible in his
features: his face was the face of an idiot.

Numerian, who had looked on him for an instant, shuddered and averted
his eyes, recoiling from the sight before him. But a more overpowering
trial of his resolution was approaching, which he could not avoid. Ere
long the voice of Ulpius grew audible once more; but now its tones were
weak, piteous, almost childish, and the words they uttered were quiet
words of love and gentleness, which dropping from such lips, and
pronounced in such a place, were fearful to hear. The temple and all
that was in it vanished from his sight as from his memory. Swayed by
the dread and supernatural influences of his disease, the madman passed
back in an instant over the dark valley of life's evil pilgrimage to the
long-quitted precincts of his boyish home. While in bodily presence he
stood in the place of his last crimes, the outcast of reason and
humanity, in mental consciousness he lay in his mother's arms, as he had
lain there ere yet he had departed to the temple at Alexandria; and his
heart communed with her heart, and his eyes looked on her as they had
looked before his father's fatal ambition had separated for ever parent
and child!

'Mother!--come back, mother!' he whispered. 'I was not asleep: I saw
you when you came in, and sat by my bedside, and wept over me when you
kissed me! Come back, and sit by me still! I am going away, far away,
and may never hear your voice again! How happy we should be, mother, if
I stayed with you always! But it is my father's will that I should go
to the temple in another country, and live there to be a priest; and his
will must be obeyed. I may never return; but we shall not forget one
another! I shall remember your words when we used to talk together
happily, and you shall still remember mine!'

Hardly had the first sentence been uttered by Ulpius when Antonina felt
her father's whole frame suddenly tremble at her side. She turned her
eyes from the doorway, on which they had hitherto been fixed, and looked
on him. The Pagan's hand had fallen from his arm: he was free to
depart, to fly as he had longed to fly but a few minutes before, and yet
he never stirred. His daughter touched him, spoke to him, but he
neither moved nor answered. It was not merely the shock of the abrupt
transition in the language of Ulpius from the ravings of crime to the
murmurs of love--it was not merely astonishment at hearing from him, in
his madness, revelations of his early life which had never passed his
lips during his days of treacherous servitude in the house on the
Pincian Hill, that thus filled Numerian's inmost soul with awe, and
struck his limbs motionless. There was more in all that he heard than
this. The words seemed as words that had doomed him at once and for
ever. His eyes, directed full on the face of the madman, were dilated
with horror, and his deep, gasping, convulsive breathings mingled
heavily, during the moment of silence that ensued, with the chiming of
the bells above and the bubbling of the water below--the lulling music
of the temple, playing its happy evening hymn at the pleasant close of
day.

'We shall remember, mother!--we shall remember!' continued the Pagan
softly, 'and be happy in our remembrances! My brother, who loves me
not, will love you when I am gone! You will walk in my little garden,
and think on me as you look at the flowers that we have planted and
watered together in the evening hours, when the sky was glorious to
behold, and the earth was all quiet around us! Listen, mother, and kiss
me! When I go to the far country, I will make a garden there like my
garden here, and plant the same flowers that we have planted here, and
in the evening I will go out and give them water at the hour when you go
out to give my flowers water at home; and so, though we see each other
no more, it will yet be as if we laboured together in the garden as we
labour now!'


The girl still fixed her eager gaze on her father. His eyes presented
the same rigid expression of horror; but he was now wiping off with his
own hand, mechanically, as if he knew it not, the foam which the
paroxysms had left round the madman's lips, and, amid the groans that
burst from him, she could hear such words as, 'Lord God!--mercy, Lord
God! Thou, who hast thus restored him to me--thus, worse than dead!--
mercy! mercy!'

The light on the pavement beneath the portico of the temple was fading
visibly--the sun had gone down.

For the third time the madman spoke, but his tones were losing their
softness; they were complaining, plaintive, unutterably mournful; his
dreams of the past were already changing. 'Farewell, brother--farewell
for years and years!' he cried. 'You have not given me the love that I
gave you. The fault was not mine that our father loved me the best, and
chose me to be sent to the temple to be a priest at the altar of the
gods! The fault was not mine that I partook not in your favoured
sports, and joined not the companions whom you sought; it was our
father's will that I should not live as you lived, and I obeyed it! You
have spoken to me in anger, and turned from me in disdain; but farewell
again, Cleander--farewell in forgiveness and in love!'

He might have spoken more, but his voice was drowned in one long shriek
of agony which burst from Numerian's lips, and echoed discordantly
through the hall of the temple, and he sank down with his face to the
ground at the Pagan's feet. The dark and terrible destiny was
fulfilled. The enthusiast for the right and the fanatic for the wrong;
the man who had toiled to reform the Church, and the man who had toiled
to restore the Temple; the master who had received and trusted the
servant in his home, and the servant who in that home had betrayed the
master's trust--the two characters, separated hitherto in the sublime
disunion of good and bad, now struck together in tremendous contact, as
brethren who had drawn their life from one source, who as children had
been sheltered under the same roof!

Not in the hours when the good Christian succoured the then forsaken
Pagan, wandering homeless in Rome, was the secret disclosed; no chance
word of it was uttered when the deceiver told the feigned relation of
his life to the benefactor whom he was plotting to deceive, or when, on
the first morning of the siege, the machinations of the servant
triumphed over the confidence of the master: it was reserved to be
revealed in the words of delirium, at the closing years of madness, when
he who discovered it was unconscious of all that he spoke, and his eyes
were blinded to the true nature of all that he saw; when earthly voices
that might once have called him back to repentance, to recognition, and
to love, were become to him as sounds that have no meaning; when, by a
ruthless and startling fatality, it was on the brother who had wrought
for the true faith that the whole crushing weight of the terrible
disclosure fell, unpartaken by the brother who had wrought for the
false! But the judgments pronounced in Time go forth from the tribunal
of that Eternity to which the mysteries of life tend, and in which they
shall be revealed--neither waiting on human seasons nor abiding by human
justice, but speaking to the soul in the language of immortality, which
is heard in the world that is now, and interpreted in the world that is
to come.

Lost, for an instant, even the recollection that Goisvintha might still
be watching her opportunity from without, calling despairingly on her
father, and vainly striving to raise him from the ground, Antonina
remembered not, in the overwhelming trial of the moment, the revelations
of Numerian's past life that had been disclosed to her in the days when
the famine was at its worst in Rome. The name of 'Cleander', which she
had then heard her father pronounce, as the name that he had abandoned
when he separated himself from the companions of his sinful choice,
passed unheeded by her when the Pagan unconsciously uttered it. She saw
the whole scene but as a fresh menace of danger, as a new vision of
terror, more ominous of ill than all that had preceded it.


Thick as was the darkness in which the lulling and involuntary memories
of the past had enveloped the perceptions of Ulpius, the father's
piercing cry of anguish seemed to have penetrated it with a sudden ray
of light. The madman's half-closed eyes opened instantly and fixed,
dreamily at first, on the altar of idols. He waved his hands to and fro
before him, as if her were parting back the folds of a heavy veil that
obscured his sight; but his wayward thoughts did not resume as yet their
old bias towards ferocity and crime. When he spoke again, his speech
was still inspired by the visions of his early life--but now of his
early life in the temple at Alexandria. His expressions were more
abrupt, more disjointed than before; yet they continued to display the
same evidence of the mysterious, instinctive vividness of recollection,
which was the result of the sudden change in the nature of his insanity.
His language wandered (still as if the words came from him undesignedly
and unconsciously) over the events of his boyish introduction to the
service of the gods, and, though confusing them in order, still
preserved them in substance, as they have been already related in the
history of his 'apprenticeship to the temple'.

Now he was in imagination looking down once more from the summit of the
Temple of Serapis on the glittering expanse of the Nile and the wide
country around it; and now he was walking proudly through the streets of
Alexandria by the side of his uncle, Macrinus, the high priest. Now he
was wandering at night, in curiosity and awe, through the gloomy vaults
and subterranean corridors of the sacred place; and now he was
listening, well pleased, to the kindly greeting, the inspiring praises
of Macrinus during their first interview. But at this point, and while
dwelling on this occasion, his memory became darkened again; it vainly
endeavoured to retrace the circumstances attending the crowning evidence
of the high priest's interest in his pupil, and anxiety to identify him
completely with his new protector and his new duties, which had been
displayed when he conferred on the trembling boy the future distinction
of one of his own names.

And here, let it be remembered, as a chief link in the mysterious chain
of fatalities which had united to keep the brothers apart as brethren
after they had met as men, that both had, from widely different causes,
abandoned in after-life the names which they bore in their father's
house; that while one, by his own act and for his own purpose,
transformed himself from Cleander, the associate of the careless and the
criminal, to Numerian, the preacher of the Gospel and reformer of the
Church, the other had (to quote the words of the fourth chapter),
'become from the boy Emilius the student Ulpius,' by the express and
encouraging command of his master, Macrinus, the high priest.

While the Pagan still fruitlessly endeavoured to revive the events
connected with the change in his designation on his arrival in
Alexandria, and, chafing under the burden of oblivion that weighed upon
his thoughts, attempted for the first time to move from the wall against
which he had hitherto leaned; while Antonina still strove in vain to
recall her father to the recollection of the terrible exigencies of the
moment as he crouched prostrate at the madman's feet--the doorway of the
temple was darkened once more by the figure of Goisvintha. She stood on
the threshold, a gloomy and indistinct form in the fading light, looking
intently into the deeply shadowed interior of the building. As she
marked the altered positions of the father and daughter, she uttered a
suppressed ejaculation of triumph; but, while the sound passed her lips,
she heard, or thought she heard, a noise in the street behind. Even now
her vigilance and cunning, her deadly, calculating resolution to await
in immovable patience the fitting time for striking the blow
deliberately and with impunity, did not fail her. Turning instantly,
she walked to the top step of the temple, and stood there for a few
moments, watchfully surveying the open space before her.


But in those few moments the scene in the building changed once more.
The madman, while he still wavered between relapsing into the raving fit
and continuing under the influence of the tranquil mood in which he had
been prematurely disturbed, caught sight of Goisvintha when her approach
suddenly shadowed the entrance to the temple. Her presence, momentary
though it was, was for him the presence of a figure that had not
appeared before; that had stood in a strange position between the shade
within and the faint light without; it was a new object, presented to
his eyes while they were straining to recover such imperfect faculties
of observation as had been their wont, and it ascendancy over him was
instantaneous and all-powerful.

He started, bewildered like a deep sleeper suddenly awoke; violent
shudderings ran for a moment over his frame; then it strengthened again
with its former unnatural strength; the demon raged within him in
renewed fury as he tore his robe which Numerian held as he lay at his
feet from the feeble grasp that confined it, and, striding up to the
pile of idols, stretched out his hands in solemn deprecation. 'The high
priest has slept before the altar of the gods!' he cried loudly, 'but
they have been patient with their well-beloved; their thunder has not
struck him for his crime! Now the servant returns to his service--the
rites of Serapis begin!'

Numerian still remained prostrate, spirit-broken; he slowly clasped his
hands together on the floor, and his voice was now to be heard, still
supplicating in low and stifled accents, as if in unceasing prayer lay
his last hope of preserving his own reason. 'God! Thou art the God of
Mercy; be merciful to him!' he murmured. 'Thou acceptest of repentance;
grant repentance to him! If at any time I have served Thee without
blame, let the service be counted to him; let the vials of Thy wrath be
poured out on me!'

'Hark! the trumpet blows for the sacrifice!' interrupted the raving
voice of the Pagan, as he turned from the altar, and extended his arms
in frenzied inspiration. 'The roar of music and the voice of exultation
soar upward from the highest mountain-tops! The incense smokes, and in
and out, and round and round, the dancers whirl about the pillars of the
temple! The ox for the sacrifice is without spot; his horns are gilt;
the crown and fillet adorn his head. The priest stands before him naked
from the waist upwards; he heaves the libation out of the cup; the blood
flows over the altar! Up! up! tear forth with reeking hands the heart
while it is yet warm, futurity is before you in the quivering entrails,
look on them and read! read!'