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Books: Antonina

W >> Wilkie Collins >> Antonina




While he spoke, Goisvintha had entered the temple. The street was still
desolate; no help was at hand.

Not advancing at once, she concealed herself near the door behind a
projection in the pile of idols, watching from it until Ulpius, in the
progress of his frenzy, should turn away from Antonina, whom he stood
fronting at this instant. But she had not entered unperceived; Antonina
had seen her again. And now the bitterness of death, when the young die
unprotected in their youth, came over the girl, and she cried in a low
wailing voice, as she knelt by Numerian's side: 'I must die, father, I
must die, as Hermanric died! Look up at me, and speak to me before I
die!'

Her father was still praying; he heard nothing, for his heart was
bleeding in atonement at the shrine of his boyish home, and his soul
still communed with its Maker. The voice that followed hers was the
voice of Ulpius.

'Oh, beautiful are the gardens round the sacred altars, and lofty the
trees that embower the glittering shrines!' he exclaimed, rapt and
ecstatic in his new visions. 'Lo, the morning breaks, and the spirits
of light are welcomed by a sacrifice! The sun goes down behind the
mountain, and the beams of evening tremble on the victim beneath the
knife of the adoring priest! The moon and stars shine high in the
firmament, and the Genii of Nights are saluted in the still hours with
blood!'

As he paused, the lament of Antonina was continued in lower and lower
tones: 'I must die, father, I must die!' And with it murmured the
supplicating accents of Numerian: 'God of Mercy! deliver the helpless
and forgive the afflicted! Lord of Judgment! deal gently with Thy
servants who have sinned!' While, mingling with both in discordant
combination, the strange music of the temple still poured on its lulling
sound--the rippling of the running waters and the airy chiming of the
bells!


'Worship!--emperors, armies, nations, glorify and worship me!' shouted
the madman, in thunder-tones of triumph and command, as his eye for the
first time encountered the figure of Numerian prostrate at his feet.
'Worship the demi-god who moves with the deities through spheres unknown
to man! I have heard the moans of the unburied who wander on the shores
of the Lake of the Dead--worship! I have looked on the river whose
black current roars and howls in its course through the caves of
everlasting night--worship! I have seen the furies lashed by serpents
on their wrinkled necks, and followed them as they hurled their torches
over the pining ghosts! I have stood unmoved in the hurricane-tumult of
hell--worship! worship! worship!'

He turned round again towards the altar of idols, calling upon his gods
to proclaim his deification, and at the moment when he moved, Goisvintha
sprang forward. Antonina was kneeling with her face turned from the
door, as the assassin seized her by her long hair and drove the knife
into her neck. The moaning accents of the girl, bewailing her
approaching fate, closed in one faint groan; she stretched out her arms,
and fell forward over her father's body.

In the ferocious triumph of the moment, Goisvintha raised her arm to
repeat the stroke; but at that instant the madman looked round. 'The
sacrifice--the sacrifice!' he shouted, leaping at one spring like a wild
beast at her throat. She struck ineffectually at him with the knife, as
he fastened his long nails in her flesh and hurled her backwards to the
floor. Then he yelled and gibbered in frantic exultation, set his foot
on her breast, and spat on her as she lay beneath him.

The contact of the girl's body when she fell--the short but terrible
tumult of the attack that passed almost over him--the shrill, deafening
cries of the madman, awoke Numerian from his trance of despairing
remembrance, aroused him in his agony of supplicating prayer. He looked
up.

The scene that met his eyes was one of those scenes which crush every
faculty but the faculty of mechanical action--before which, thought
vanishes from men's minds, utterance is suspended on their lips,
expression is paralysed on their faces. The coldness of the tomb seemed
breathed over Numerian's aspect by the contemplation of the terrible
catastrophe: his eyes were glassy and vacant, his lips parted and
rigid; even the remembrance of the discovery of his brother seemed lost
to him as he stooped over his daughter and bound a fragment of her robe
round her neck. The mute, soulless, ghastly stillness of death looked
settled on his features, as, unconscious now of weakness or age, he rose
with her in his arms, stood motionless for one moment before the
doorway, and looked slowly round on Ulpius; then he moved forward with
heavy regular steps. The Pagan's foot was still on Goisvintha's breast
as the father passed him; his gaze was still fixed on her; but his cries
of triumph were calmed; he laughed and muttered incoherently to himself.

The moon was rising, soft, faint, and tranquil, over the quiet street as
Numerian descended the temple steps with his daughter in his arms, and,
after an instant's pause of bewilderment and doubt, instinctively
pursued his slow, funereal course along the deserted roadway in the
direction of home. Soon, as he advanced, he beheld in the moonlight,
down the long vista of the street at its termination, a little
assemblage of people walking towards him with calm and regular progress.
As they came nearer, he saw that one of them held an open book, that
another carried a crucifix, and that others followed these two with
clasped hands and drooping heads. And then, after an interval, the
fresh breezes that blew towards him bore onward these words, slowly and
reverently pronounced:--

'Know, therefore, that God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity
deserveth.

'Canst thou, by searching, find out God? Canst thou find out the
Almighty to perfection?'

Then the breeze fell, the words grew indistinct, but the procession
still moved forward. As it came nearer and nearer, the voice of the
reader was again plainly heard:--

'If iniquity be in thy hand, put it far away, and let not wickedness
dwell in thy tabernacles.

'For then shalt thou lift up thy face without spot; yea, thou shalt be
steadfast, and shalt not fear;

'Because thou shalt forget thy misery, and remember it as waters that
pass away:

And thine age shall be clearer than the noonday; thou shalt shine forth,
thou shalt be as the morning.'

The reader stopped and closed the book; for now Numerian had met the
members of the little procession, and they looked on him standing
voiceless before them in the clear moonlight, with his daughter's head
drooping over his shoulder as he carried her in his arms.

There were some among those who gathered round him whose features he
would have recognised at another time as the features of the surviving
adherents of his former congregation. The assembly he had met was
composed of the few sincere Christians in Rome, who had collected, on
the promulgation of the news that Alaric had ratified terms of peace, to
make a pilgrimage through the city, in the hopeless endeavour, by
reading from the Bible and passing exhortation, to awaken the reckless
populace to a feeling of contrition for their sins, and of devout
gratitude for their approaching deliverance from the horrors of the
siege.

But now, when Numerian confronted them, neither by word nor look did he
express the slightest recognition of any who surrounded him. To all the
questions addressed to him, he replied by hurried gestures that none
could comprehend. To all the promises of help and protection heaped
upon him in the first outbreak of the grief and pity of his adherents of
other days, he answered but by the same dull, vacant glance. It was
only when they relieved him of his burden, and gently prepared to carry
the senseless girl among them back to her father's house, that he spoke;
and then, in faint entreating tones, he besought them to let him hold
her hand as they went, so that he might be the first to feel her pulse
beat--if it yet moved.

They turned back by the way they had come--a sorrowful and slow-moving
procession! As they passed on, the reader again opened the Sacred Book;
and then these words rose through the soothing and heavenly tranquillity
of the first hours of night:--

'Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not
thou the chastening of the Almighty:

'For he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make
whole.'


CHAPTER 26. RETRIBUTION.

As, in the progress of Life, each man pursues his course with the
passions, good and evil, set, as it were, on either side of him; and
viewing their results in the actions of his fellow-men, finds his
attention, while still attracted by the spectacle of what is noble and
virtuous, suddenly challenged by the opposite display of what is mean
and criminal--so, in the progress of this narrative, which aims to be
the reflection of Life, the reader who has journeyed with us thus far,
and who may now be inclined to follow the little procession of Christian
devotees, to walk by the side of the afflicted father, and to hold with
him the hand of his ill-fated child, is yet, in obedience to the
conditions of the story, required to turn back for awhile to the
contemplation of its darker passages of guilt and terror--he must enter
the temple again; but he will enter it for the last time.

The scene before the altar of idols was fast proceeding to its fatal
climax.


The Pagan's frenzy had exhausted itself in its own fury--his insanity
was assuming a quieter and a more dangerous form; his eye grew cunning
and suspicious; a stealthy deliberation and watchfulness appeared in all
his actions. He now slowly lifted his foot from Goisvintha's breast,
and raised his hands at the same time to strike her back if she should
attempt to escape. Seeing that she lay senseless from her fall, he left
her; retired to one of the corners of the temple, took from it a rope
that lay there, and returning, bound her arms behind her at the hands
and wrists. The rope cut deep through the skin--the pain restored her
to her senses; she suffered the sharp agony in her own body, in the same
place where she had inflicted it on the young chieftain at the farm-
house beyond the suburbs.

The minute after, she felt herself dragged along the ground, farther
into the interior of the building. The madman drew her up to the iron
gates of the passage through the partition, and fastening the end of the
rope to them, left her there. This part of the temple was enveloped in
total darkness--her assailant addressed not a word to her--she could not
obtain even a glimpse of his form, but she could hear him still laughing
to himself in hoarse, monotonous tones, that sounded now near, and now
distant again.

She abandoned herself as lost--prematurely devoted to the torment and
death that she had anticipated; but, as yet, her masculine resolution
and energy did not decline. The very intensity of the anguish she
suffered from the bindings at her wrists, producing a fierce bodily
effort to resist it, strengthened her iron-strung nerves. She neither
cried for help nor appealed to the Pagan for pity. The gloomy fatalism
which she had inherited from her savage ancestors sustained her in a
suicide-pride.

Ere long the laughter of Ulpius, while he moved slowly hither and
thither in the darkness of the temple, was overpowered by the sound of
her voice--deep, groaning, but yet steady--as she uttered her last
words--words poured forth like the wild dirges, the fierce death-songs
of the old Goths when they died deserted on the bloody battle-field, or
were cast bound into deep dungeons, a prey to the viper and the asp.
Thus she spoke:-- 'I swore to be avenged! while I went forth from
Aquileia with the child that was killed and the child that was wounded;
while I climbed the high wall in the night-time, and heard the tumult of
the beating waves near the bank where I buried the dead; while I
wandered in the darkness over the naked heath and through the lonely
forest; while I climbed the pathless sides of the mountains, and made my
refuge in the cavern by the waters of the dark lake.

'I swore to be avenged! while the warriors approached me on their march,
and the roaring of the trumpets and the clash of the armour sounded in
my ears; while I greeted my kinsman, Hermanric, a mighty chieftain, at
the king's side, among the invading hosts; while I looked on my last
child, dead like the rest, and knew that he was buried afar from the
land of his people, and from the others that the Romans had slain before
him.

'I swore to be avenged! while the army encamped before Rome, and I stood
with Hermanric, looking on the great walls in the misty evening; while
the daughter of the Roman was a prisoner in our tent, and I eyed her as
she lay on my knees; while for her sake my kinsman turned traitor, and
withheld my hand from the blow; while I passed unseen into the lonely
farm-house to deal judgment on him with my knife; while I saw him die
the death of a deserter at my feet, and knew that it was a Roman who had
lured him from his people, and blinded him to the righteousness of
revenge.

'I swore to be avenged! while I walked round the grave of the chieftain
who was the last of my race; while I stood alone out of the army of my
people in the city of the slayers of my babes; while I tracked the
footsteps of the Roman who had twice escaped me, as she fled through the
street; while I watched and was patient among the pillars of the temple,
and waited till the sun went down, and the victim was unshielded for the
moment to strike.


'I swore to be avenged! and my oath has been fulfilled--the knife that
still bleeds drops with her blood; the chief vengeance has been wreaked!
The rest that were to be slain remain for others, and not for me! For
now I go to my husband and my children; now the hour is near at hand
when I shall herd with their spirits in the Twilight World of Shadows,
and make my long-abiding place with them in the Valley of Eternal
Repose! The Destinies have willed it--it is enough!'

Her voice trembled and grew faint as she pronounced the last words. The
anguish of the fastenings at her wrists was at last overpowering her
senses--conquering, in spite of all resistance, her stubborn endurance.
For a little while yet she spoke at intervals, but her speech was
fragmentary and incoherent. At one moment she still gloried in her
revenge, at another she exulted in the fancied contemplation of the
girl's body still lying before her, and her hands writhed beneath their
bonds in the effort to repossess themselves of the knife and strike
again. But soon all sounds ceased to proceed from her lips, save the
loud, thick, irregular breathings, which showed that she was yet
conscious and yet lived.

Meanwhile the madman had passed into the inner recess of the temple, and
had drawn the shutter over the opening in the wall, through which light
had been admitted into the place when Numerian and Antonina first
entered it. Even the black chasm formed by the mouth of the vault of
the dragon now disappeared, with all other objects, in the thick
darkness. But no obscurity could confuse the senses of Ulpius in the
temple, whose every corner he visited in his restless wanderings by
night and by day alike. Led as if by a mysterious penetration of sight,
he traced his way unerringly to the entrance of the vault, knelt down
before it, and placing his hands on the first of the steps by which it
was descended, listened, breathless and attentive, to the sounds that
rose from the abyss--listened, rapt and unmoving, a formidable and
unearthly figure--like a magician waiting for a voice from the oracles
of Hell--like a spirit of Night looking down into the mid-caverns of the
earth, and watching the mysteries of subterranean creation, the giant
pulses of Action and Heat, which are the life-springs of the rolling
world.

The fitful wind whistled up, wild and plaintive; the river chafed and
bubbled through the iron grating below; the loose scales of the dragon
clashed as the night breezes reached them: and these sounds were still
to him as the language of his gods, which filled him with a fearful
rapture, and inspired him, in the terrible degradation of his being, as
with a new soul. He listened and listened yet. Fragments of wild
fancies--the vain yearnings of the disinherited mind to recover its
divine birthright of boundless thought--now thrilled through him, and
held him still and speechless where he knelt.

But at length, through the gloomy silence of the recess, he heard the
voice of Goisvintha raised once more, and in hoarse, wild tones calling
aloud for light and help. The agony of pain and suspense, the awful
sense of darkness and stillness, of solitary bondage and slow torment,
had at last effected that which no open peril, no common menace of
violent death could have produced. She yielded to fear and despair--
sank prostrate under a paralysing, superstitious dread. The misery that
she had inflicted on others recoiled in retribution on herself, as she
now shuddered under the consciousness of the first emotions of helpless
terror that she had ever felt.

Ulpius instantly rose from the vault, and advanced straight through the
darkness to the gates of the partition; but he passed his prisoner
without stopping for an instant, and hastening into the outer apartment
of the temple, began to grope over the floor for the knife which the
woman had dropped when he bound her. He was laughing to himself once
more, for the evil spirit was prompting him to a new project, tempting
him to a pitiless refinement of cruelty and deceit.

He found the knife, and returning with it to Goisvintha, cut the rope
that confined her wrists. Then she became silent when the first
sharpness of her suffering was assuaged; he whispered softly in her ear,
'Follow me, and escape!'


Bewildered and daunted by the darkness and mystery around her, she
vainly strained her eyes to look through the obscurity as Ulpius drew
her on into the recess. He placed her at the mouth of the vault, and
here she strove to speak; but low, inarticulate sounds alone proceeded
from her powerless utterance. Still there was no light; still the
burning, gnawing agony at her wrists (relieved but for an instant when
the rope was cut) continued and increased; and still she felt the
presence of the unseen being at her side, whom no darkness could blind,
and who bound and loosed at his arbitrary will.

By nature fierce, resolute, and vindictive under injury, she was a
terrible evidence of the debasing power of crime, as she now stood,
enfeebled by the weight of her own avenging guilt, upraised to crush her
in the hour of her pride; by the agency of Darkness, whose perils the
innocent and the weak have been known to brave; by Suspense, whose agony
they have resisted; by Pain, whose infliction they have endured in
patience.

'Go down, far down the steep steps, and escape!' whispered the madman,
in soft, beguiling tones. 'The darkness above leads to the light below!
Go down, far down!'

He quitted his hold of her as he spoke. She hesitated, shuddered, and
drew back; but again she was urged forward, and again she heard the
whisper, 'The darkness above leads to the light below! Go down, far
down!'

Despair gave the firmness to proceed, and dread the hope to escape. Her
wounded arms trembled as she now stretched them out and felt for the
walls of the vault on either side of her. The horror of death in utter
darkness, from unseen hands, and the last longing aspiration to behold
the light of heaven once more, were at their strongest within her as she
began slowly and cautiously to tread the fatal stairs.

While she descended, the Pagan dropped into his former attitude at the
month of the vault, and listened breathlessly. Minutes seemed to elapse
between each step as she went lower and lower down. Suddenly he heard
her pause, as if panic-stricken in the darkness, and her voice ascended
to him, groaning, 'Light! light! oh, where is the light!' He rose up,
and stretched out his hands to hurl her back if she should attempt to
return; but she descended again. Twice he heard her heavy footfall on
the steps--then there was an interval of deep silence--then a sharp,
grinding clash of metal echoed piercingly through the vault, followed by
the noise of a dull, heavy fall, faintly audible far beneath--and then
the old familiar sounds of the place were heard again, and were not
interrupted more. The sacrifice to the Dragon was achieved!

*****

The madman stood on the steps of the sacred building, and looked out on
the street shining before him in the bright Italian moonlight. No
remembrance of Numerian and Antonina, and of the earlier events in the
temple, remained within him. He was pondering imperfectly, in vague
pride and triumph, over the sacrifice that he had offered up at the
shrine of the Dragon of brass. Thus secretly exulting, he now remained
inactive. Absorbed in his wandering meditations, he delayed to trace
the subterranean passages leading to the iron grating where the corpse
of Goisvintha lay washed by the waters, as they struggled onward through
the bars, and waiting but his hand to be cast into the river, where all
past sacrifices had been engulphed before it.

His tall solitary figure was lit by the moonlight streaming through the
pillars of the portico; his loose robes waved slowly about him in the
wind, as he stood firm and erect before the door of the temple: he
looked more like the spectral genius of departed Paganism than a living
man. But, lifeless though he seemed, his quick eye was still on the
watch, still directed by the restless suspicion of insanity. Minute
after minute quietly elapsed, and as yet nothing was presented to his
rapid observation but the desolate roadway, and the high, gloomy houses
that bounded it on either side. It was soon, however, destined to be
attracted by objects which startled the repose of the tranquil street
with the tumult of action and life.


He was still gazing earnestly on the narrow view before him, vaguely
imagining to himself, the while, Goisvintha's fatal descent into the
vault, and thinking triumphantly of her dead body that now lay on the
grating beneath it, when a red glare of torchlight, thrown wildly on the
moon-brightened pavement, whose purity it seemed to stain, caught his
eye.

The light appeared at the end of the street leading from the more
central portion of the city, and ere long displayed clearly a body of
forty or fifty people advancing towards the temple. The Pagan looked
eagerly on them as they came nearer and nearer. The assembly was
composed of priests, soldiers, and citizens--the priests bearing
torches, the soldiers carrying hammers, crowbars, and other similar
tools, or bending under the weight of large chests secured with iron
fastenings, close to which the populace walked, as if guarding them with
jealous care. This strange procession was preceded by two men, who were
considerably in advance of it--a priest and soldier. An expression of
impatience and exultation appeared on their pale, famine-wasted
countenances, as they approached the temple with rapid steps.

Ulpius never moved from his position, but fixed his piercing eyes on
them as they advanced. Not vainly did he now stand, watchful and
menacing, before the entrance of his gloomy shrine. He had seen the
first degradations heaped on fallen Paganism, and he was now to see the
last. He had immolated all his affections and all his hopes, all his
faculties of body and mind, his happiness in boyhood, his enthusiasm in
youth, his courage in manhood, his reason in old age, at the altar of
his gods; and now they were to exact from him, in their defence, lonely
criminal, maddened, as he already was in their cause, more than all
this! The decree had gone forth from the Senate which devoted to
legalised pillage the treasures in the temples of Rome.

Rulers of a people impoverished by former exactions, and comptrollers
only of an exhausted treasury, the government of the city had searched
vainly among all ordinary resources for the means of paying the heavy
ransom exacted by Alaric as the price of peace. The one chance of
meeting the emergency that remained was to strip the Pagan temples of
the mass of jewelled ornaments and utensils, the costly robes, the idols
of gold and silver which they were known to contain, and which, under
that mysterious hereditary influence of superstition, whose power it is
the longest labour of truth to destroy, had remained untouched and
respected, alike by the people and the senate, after the worship that
they represented had been interdicted by the laws, and abandoned by the
nation.

This last expedient for freeing Rome from the blockade was adopted
almost as soon as imagined. The impatience of the starved populace for
the immediate collection of the ransom allowed the government little
time for the tedious preliminaries of deliberation. The soldiers were
provided at once with the necessary implements for the task imposed on
them; certain chosen members of the senate and the people followed them,
to see that they honestly gathered in the public spoil; and the priests
of the Christian churches volunteered to hallow the expedition by their
presence, and led the way with their torches into every secret apartment
of the temples where treasure might be contained. At the close of the
day, immediately after it had been authorised, this strange search for
the ransom was hurriedly commenced. Already much had been collected;
votive offerings of price had been snatched from the altars, where they
had so long hung undisturbed; hidden treasure-chests of sacred utensils
had been discovered and broken open; idols had been stripped of their
precious ornaments and torn from their massive pedestals; and now the
procession of gold-seekers, proceeding along the banks of the Tiber, had
come in sight of the little temple of Serapis, and were hastening
forward to empty it, in its turn, of every valuable that it contained.