Antonina

Or The Fall Of Rome

by Wilkie Collins
"La ville cesse d'etre:
Le Romain est esclave, et le Goth est son maltre."
Soddere, "Alarique"
Preface.

IN preparing to compose a fiction founded on history, the writer of these pages thought it no
necessary requisite of such a work that the principal characters appearing in it should be
drawn from the historical personages of the period. On the contrary, he felt that some very
weighty objections attached to this plan of composition. He knew well that it obliged a
writer to add largely from invention to what was actually known--to fill in with the coloring
of romantic fancy the bare outline of historic fact--and thus to place the novelist's fiction in
what he could not but consider most unfavorable contrast to the historian's truth. He was,
further, by no means convinced that any story, in which historical characters supplied the
main agents, could be preserved in its fit unity of design, and restrained within its due limits
of development, without some falsification or confusion of historical dates--a species of
poetical license of which he felt no disposition to avail himself, as it was his main anxiety to
make his plot invariably arise and proceed out of the great events of the era, exactly in the
order in which they occurred.

Influenced therefore by these considerations, he thought that by forming all his principal
characters from imagination, he should be able to mold them as he pleased to the main
necessities of the story; to display them, without any impropriety, as influenced in whatever
manner appeared most strikingly interesting by its minor incidents; and further to make
them, on all occasions, without trammel or hinderance, the practical exponents of the spirit
of the age, of all the various historical illustrations of the period, which the Author's
researches among conflicting but equally important authorities had enabled him to garner
up. While, at the same time, the appearance of verisimilitude necessary to an historical
romance might, he imagined, be successfully preserved by the occasional introduction of the
living characters of the era, in those portions of the plot comprising events with which they
had been remarkably connected.

On this plan the present work has been produced.

 To the fictitious characters alone is committed the task of representing the spirit of the age.
The Roman emperor, Honorius, and the Gothic king, Alaric, mix but little personally in the
business of the story--only appearing in such events, and acting under such circumstances,
as the records of history strictly authorize--but exact truth in respect to time, place, and
circumstance is observed in every historical event introduced in the plot, from the period of
the march of the Gothic invaders over the Alps to the close of the first barbarian blockade of
Rome.

Chapter I.
Goisvintha.

THE mountains forming the range of Alps which border on the northeastern confines of
Italy were, in the autumn of the year 408, already furrowed in numerous directions by the
tracks of the invading forces of those Northern nations generally comprised under the
appellation of Goths. In some places these tracks were denoted on either side by fallen trees,
and occasionally assumed, when half obliterated by the ravages of storms, the appearance of
desolate and irregular marshes. In other places they were less palpable. Here, the temporary
path was entirely hidden by the incursions of a swollen torrent; there, it was faintly
perceptible in occasional patches of soft ground, or partly traceable by fragments of
abandoned armor, skeletons of horses and men, and remnants of the rude bridges which had
once served for passage across a river, or transit over a precipice.

Among the rocks of the topmost of the range of mountains immediately overhanging the
plains of Italy, and presenting the last barrier to the exertions of a traveler, or the march of
an invader, there lay, at the beginning of the fifth century, a little lake. Bounded on three
sides by precipices, its narrow banks barren alike of verdure or habitations, and its dark,
stagnant water brightened but rarely by the presence of the lively sunlight, this solitary spot-
-at all times mournful--presented, on the autumn of the day when our story commences, an
aspect of desolation at once dismal to the eye and oppressive to the heart.

It was near noon; but no sun appeared in the heaven. The dull clouds, monotonous in color
and form, hid all beauty in the firmament, and shed heavy darkness on the earth. Dense
stagnant vapors clung to the mountain summits; from the drooping trees dead leaves and
rotten branches sunk, at intervals, on the oozy soil, or whirled over the gloomy precipice;
and a small, steady rain fell, slow and unintermitting, upon the deserts around. Standing
upon the path which armies had once trodden, and which armies were still destined to tread,
and looking toward the solitary lake, you heard, at first, no sound but the regular dripping of
the raindrops from rock to rock; you saw no prospect but the motionless waters at your feet,
and the dusky crags which shadowed them from above. When, however, impressed by the
mysterious loneliness of the place, the eye grew more penetrating, and the ear more
attentive, a cavern became apparent in the precipices round the lake; and, in the intervals of
the heavy raindrops, were faintly perceptible the sound of a human voice.

The mouth of the cavern was partly concealed by a large stone, on which were piled some
masses of rotten brush-wood, as if for the purpose of protecting any inhabitant it might
contain from the coldness of the atmosphere without. Placed at the eastward boundary of the
lake, this strange place of refuge commanded a view not only of the rugged path
immediately below it, but of a large plot of level ground at a short distance to the west,
which overhung a second and lower range of rocks. Prom this spot might be seen far
beneath, on days when the atmosphere was clear, the olive grounds that clothed the
mountain's base; and beyond, stretching away to the distant horizon, the plains of fated Italy,
whose destiny of defeat and shame was now hastening to its dark and fearful
accomplishment.

The cavern within was low and irregular in form. From its rugged walls the damp oozed
forth upon its floor of decayed moss. Lizards and noisome animals had tenanted its
comfortless recesses undisturbed, until the period we have just described, when their
miserable rights were infringed on for the first time by human intruders.

A woman crouched near the entrance of the place. More within, on the driest part of the
ground, lay a child asleep. Between them were scattered some withered branches and
decayed leaves, which were arranged as if to form a fire. in many parts this scanty collection
of fuel was slightly blackened; but, wetted as it was by the rain, all efforts to light it
permanently had evidently been fruitless.

The woman's head was bent forward, and her race, hid in her hands, rested on her knees. At
intervals she muttered to herself, in a hoarse, moaning voice. A portion of her scanty
clothing had been removed to cover the child. What remained on her was composed partly
of skins of animals, partly of coarse cotton cloth. In many places this miserable dress was
marked with blood, and her long, flaxen hair bore upon its disheveled locks the same
ominous and repulsive stain.

The child seemed scarcely four years of age, and showed on his pale thin face all the
peculiarities of his Gothic origin. His features seemed to have been once beautiful, both in
expression and form; but a deep wound, extending the whole length of his cheek, had now
deformed him forever. He shivered and trembled in his sleep, and every now and then
mechanically stretched forth his little arms toward the dead, cold branches that were
scattered before him. Suddenly a large stone became detached from the rock in a distant part
of the cavern, and fell noisily to the ground. At this sound he woke with a scream--raised
himself--endeavored to advance toward the woman, and staggered backward against the
side of the cave. A second wound in the leg had wreaked that destruction on his vigor which
the first had effected on his beauty. He was a cripple.
At the instant of his awakening the woman had started up. She now raised him from the
ground, and taking some herbs from her bosom, applied them to his wounded check. By this
action her dress became discomposed; it was stiff at the top with coagulated blood, which
had evidently flowed from a cut in her neck. All her attempts to compose the child were in
vain; he moaned and wept piteously, muttering, at intervals, his disjointed exclamations of
impatience at the coldness of the place and the agony of his recent wounds. Speechless and
tearless the wretched woman looked vacantly down on his face. There was little difficulty in
discerning from that fixed, distracted gaze the nature of the tie that bound the mourning
woman to the suffering boy. The expression of rigid and awful despair that lowered in her
fixed, gloomy eyes; the livid paleness that discolored her compressed lips; the spasms that
shook her firm, commanding form, mutely expressing in the divine eloquence of human
emotion, that between the solitary pair there existed the most intimate of earth's
relationships--the connection of mother and child.

For some time no change occurred in the woman's demeanor. At last, as if struck by some
sudden suspicion, she rose, and, clasping the child in one arm, displaced with the other the
brush-wood at the entrance of her place of refuge, cautiously looking forth on all that the
mists left visible of the western landscape. After a short survey, she drew back as if
reassured by the unbroken solitude of the place, and turning toward the lake looked down
upon the black waters at her feet.

"Night has succeeded to night," she muttered gloomily; "and has brought no succor to my
body, and no hope to my heart! Mile on mile have I journeyed, and danger is still behind,
and loneliness forever before. The shadow of death deepens over the boy; the burden of
anguish grows weightier than I can bear. For me, friends are murdered, defenders are
distant, possessions are lost. The God of the Christian priests has abandoned us to danger
and deserted us in woe. It is for me to end the struggle for us both. Our last refuge has been
in this place-our sepulcher shall be here as well!"

With one last look at the cold and comfortless sky, she advanced to the very edge of the
lake's precipitous bank. Already the child was raised in her arms, and her body bent to
accomplish successfully the fatal spring, when a sound in the east--faint, distant, and
fugitive--caught her ear. In an instant her eye brightened, her chest heaved, her cheek
flushed. She exerted the last relics of her wasted strength to gain a prominent position upon
a ledge of the rocks behind her, and waited in an agony of expectation for a repetition of that
magic sound.

In a moment more she heard it again--for the child, stupefied with terror at the action that
had accompanied her determination to plunge with him into the lake, now kept silence, and
she could listen undisturbed. To unpracticed ears the sound that so entranced her would
have been scarcely audible. Even the experienced traveler would have thought it nothing
more than the echo of a fallen stone among the rocks in the eastward distance. But to her it
was no unimportant sound, for it gave the welcome signal of deliverance and delight.

As the hour wore on, it came nearer and nearer, tossed about by the sportive echoes, and
now clearly betraying that its origin was, as she had at first divined, the note of the Gothic
trumpet. Soon the distant music ceased, and was succeeded by another sound low and
rumbling, as of an earthquake afar off, or a rising thunder-storm, and changing, ere long, to
a harsh, confused noise, like the rustling of a mighty wind through whole forests of
brushwood. At this instant the woman lost all command over herself; her former patience
and caution deserted her; reckless of danger, she placed the child upon the ledge on which
she had been standing; and, though trembling in every limb, succeeded in mounting so
much higher on the crag as to gain a fissure near the top of the rock, which commanded an
uninterrupted view of the vast tracts of uneven ground, leading in an easterly direction to the
next range of precipices and ravines.

One after another the long minutes glided on, and, though much was still audible, nothing
was yet to be seen. At length, the shrill sound of the trumpet again rang through the dull,
misty air; and the next instant the advance-guard of an army of Goths emerged from the
distant woods.

Then, after an interval, the multitudes of the main body thronged through every outlet in the
trees, and spread in dusky masses over the ground that lay between the woods and the rocks
about the borders of the lake. The front ranks halted, as if to communicate with the crowds
of the rear-guard, and the stragglers among the baggage-wagons, who still poured forth,
apparently in interminable hosts, from the concealment of the distant trees, The advanced
troops, evidently with the intention of examining the roads, still marched rapidly on, until
they gained the foot of the ascent leading to the crags to which the woman still clung, and
from which, with eager attention, she still watched their movements.

Placed in a situation of the extremest peril, her strength was her only preservative against
the danger of slipping from her high and narrow elevation. Hitherto, the moral excitement of
expectation had given her the physical power necessary to maintain her position; but just as
the leaders of the guard arrived at the cavern, her overwrought energies suddenly deserted
her; her hands relaxed their grasp; she tottered, and would have sunk backward to instant
destruction, had not the skins wrapped about her bosom and waist become entangled with a
point of one of the jagged rocks immediately around her. Fortunately--for she could utter no
cry--the troops sited at this instant to enable their horses to gain breath. Two among them at
once perceived her position and detected her nation. They mounted the rocks, and, while
one possessed himself of the child, the other succeeded in rescuing the mother and bearing
her safely to the ground.
The snorting of horses, the clashing of weapons, the confusion of loud, rough voices, which
now startled the native silence of the solitary lake, and which would have bewildered and
overwhelmed west persons in the woman's exhausted condition, seemed, on the contrary, to
reassure her feelings and reanimate her powers. She disengaged herself from her preserver's
support, and, taking her child in her arms, advanced toward a man of gigantic stature, whose
rich armor sufficiently announced that his position in the army was one of command.

"I am Goisvintha"--said she, in a firm, calm voice--"sister to Hermanric. I have escaped

from the massacre of the hostages of Aquileia with one child. Is my brother with the army
of the king?"

This declaration produced a marked change in the bystanders. The looks of indifference, or
curiosity, which they had at first cast on the fugitive, changed to the liveliest expression of
wonder and respect. The chieftain whom she had addressed raised the visor of his helmet so
as to uncover his face, answered her question in the affirmative, and ordered two soldiers to
conduct her to the temporary encampment of the main army in the rear. As she turned to
depart, an old man advanced, leaning on his long, heavy sword, and accosted her thus:

"I am Withimer, whose daughter was left hostage with the Romans, in Aquileia. Is she of
the slain, or of the escaped?"

"Her bones rot under the city walls," was the answer. "The Romans made of her a feast for
the dogs."

No word or tear escaped the old warrior. He turned in the direction of Italy; but, as he
looked downward toward the plains, his brow lowered, and his hands tightened
mechanically round the hilt of his enormous weapon.

The same gloomy question was propounded to Goisvintha by the two men who guided her
to the army that had been asked by their aged comrade. it received the same terrible answer,
which was borne with the same stern composure, and followed by the same ominous glance
in the direction of Italy, as in the instance of the veteran Withimer.

Leading the horse that carried the exhausted woman with the utmost care, and yet with
wonderful rapidity, down the paths which they had so recently ascended, the men in a short
space of time reached the place where the army had halted, and displayed to Goisvintha, in
all the majesty of numbers and repose, the vast martial assemblage of the warriors of the
North.

No brightness gleamed from their armor; no banners waved over their heads; no music
sounded among their ranks. Backed by the dreary woods which still disgorged unceasing
additions to the warlike multitude already encamped; surrounded by the desolate crags
which showed dim, wild, and majestic through the darkness of the mist; covered with the
dusky

which hovered motionless over the barren mountain-tops, and poured their stormy waters
the uncultivated plains; all that the appearance of the Goths had of solemnity in itself was in
awful harmony with the cold and mournful aspect that the face of Nature had assumed.
Silent--menacing--dark--the army looked the fit embodiment of its leader's tremendous
purpose--the subjugation of Rome.

Conducting Goisvintha quickly through the front flies of warriors, her guides, pausing at a
spot of ground which shelved upward at right angles with the main road from the woods,
desired her to dismount; and, pointing to the group that occupied the place, said: "Yonder is
Alaric, the king; and with him is Hermanric, thy brother."

At whatever point of view it could have been regarded, the assemblage of persons thus
indicated to Goisvintha must have arrested inattention itself. Near a confused mass of
weapons, scattered on the ground, reclined a group of warriors apparently listening to the
low, muttered conversation of three men of great age, who rose above them, seated on
pieces of rock, and whose long, white hair, rough skin dresses, and lean, tottering forms,
appeared in strong contrast with the iron-clad and gigantic figures of their auditors beneath.
Above the old men, on the high-road, was one of Alaric's wagons; and on the heaps of
baggage piled against its clumsy wheels had been chosen the resting-place of the future
conqueror of Rome. The top of the vehicle seemed absolutely teeming with a living burden.
Perched in every available nook and corner were women and children of all ages, and
weapons and live stock of all varieties. Now a child--lively, mischievous, inquisitive--
peered forth over the head of a battering-ram. Now a lean, hungry sheep advanced his
inquiring nostrils sadly to the open air, and displayed by the movement the head of a
withered old woman, pillowed on his woolly flanks. Here appeared a young girl, struggling
half entombed in shields. There gasped an emaciated camp-follower, nearly suffocated in
heaps of furs. The whole scene, with its background of great woods, drenched in a vapor of
misty rain; with its striking contrasts at one point and its solemn harmonies at another,
presented a vast combination of objects that either startled or awed--a gloomy conjunction
of the menacing and the sublime.

Bidding Goisvintha wait near the wagon, one of her conductors approached and motioned
aside a young man standing near the king. As the warrior rose to obey the demand, he
displayed, with all the physical advantages of his race, an ease and elasticity of movement
unusual among the men of his nation. At the instant when he joined the soldier who had
accosted him, his face was partially concealed by an immense helmet, crowned with a boar's
head, the mouth of which, forced open at death, gaped wide, as if still raging for prey. But
the man had scarcely stated his errand when he started violently, removed the grim
appendage of war, and hastened bareheaded to the side of the wagon where Goisvintha
awaited his approach.

The instant he was beheld by the woman she hastened to meet him, placed the wounded
child In his arms, and greeted him with these words:

"Your brother served in the armies of Rome when our people were at peace with the
Empire. Of his household and his possessions this is all that the Romans have left!"

She ceased; and for an instant the brother and sister regarded each other in touching and
expressive silence. Though, in addition to the general characteristics of country, the
countenances of the two naturally bore the more particular evidences of community of
blood, all resemblance between them, at this instant--so wonderful is the power of
expression over feature--had utterly vanished. The face and manner of the young man (he
had numbered only twenty years) expressed a deep sorrow; manly in its stern tranquillity;
sincere in its perfect innocence of display. As he looked on the child, his blue eyes--bright,
piercing, and lively--softened like a woman's; his lips, hardly hidden by his short beard,
closed and quivered; and his chest heaved under the armor that lay upon its noble
proportions. There was in this simple, speechless, tearless melancholy--this exquisite
consideration of triumphant strength for suffering weakness, something almost sublime;
opposed as it was to the emotions of malignity and despair, that appeared in Goisvintha's
features. The ferocity that gleamed from her dilated, glaring eyes; the sinister markings that
appeared round her pale and parted lips; the swelling of the large veins, drawn to their
extremest point of tension on her lofty forehead, so distorted her countenance that the
brother and sister, as they stood together, seemed in expression to have changed sexes for
the moment. From the warrior, came pity for the sufferer--from the mother, indignation for
the offense.

Arousing himself from his melancholy contemplation of the child, and as yet answering not
a word to Goisvintha, Hermanric mounted the wagon, and placing the last of his sister's
offspring in the arms of a decrepit old woman, who sat brooding over some bundles of herbs
spread out upon her lap, addressed her thus:

"These wounds are from the Romans. Revive the child, and you shall be rewarded from the
spoils of Rome."

"Ha, ha, ha!" chuckled the crone; "Hermanric is an illustrious warrior, and shall be obeyed.
Hermanric is great, for his arm can slay; but Brunechild is greater than he, for her cunning
can cure."

As if anxious to verify this boast before the warrior's eyes, the old woman immediately
began the preparation of the necessary dressings from her store of herbs; but Hermanric
waited not to be a witness of her skill. With one final look at the pale, exhausted child, he
slowly descended from the wagon, and, approaching Goisvintha, drew her toward a
sheltered position near the ponderous vehicle. Here he seated himself by her side, prepared
to listen with the deepest attention to her recital of the scenes of terror and suffering through
which she had so recently passed.

"You," she began, "born while our nation was at peace; transported from the field of war to
those distant provinces where tranquillity still prevailed; preserved throughout your
childhood from the chances of battle; advanced to the army in your youth, only when its
toils are past, and its triumphs are already at hand--you, alone, have escaped the miseries of
our people, to partake in the glory of their approaching revenge.

"Hardly had a year passed since you had been removed from the settlements of the Goths
when I wedded Priulf. The race of triflers to whom he was then allied, spite of their Roman
haughtiness, deferred to him in their councils, and confessed among their legions that he
was brave. I saw myself with joy the wife of a warrior of renown; I believed, in my pride,
that I was destined to be the mother of a race of heroes; when suddenly there came news to
us that the Emperor Theodosius was dead. Then followed anarchy among the people of the
soil, and outrages on the liberties of their allies, the Goths. Ere long, the call to arms arose
among our nation. Soon our wagons of war were rolled across the frozen Danube; our
soldiers quitted the Roman camp; our husbandmen took their weapons from their cottage
walls; we that were women prepared with our children to follow our husbands to the field;
and Alaric, the king, came forth as the leader of our hosts.

"We marched upon the territories of the Greeks. But how shall I tell you of the events of
those years of war that followed our invasion; of the glory of our victories; of the hardships
of our defenses; of the miseries of our retreats; of the hunger that we vanquished; of the
diseases that we endured; of the shameful peace that was finally ratified, against the wishes
of our king! How shall I tell of all this, when my thoughts are on the massacre from which I
have just escaped--when those first evils, though once remembered in anguish, are, even
now, forgotten in the superior horrors that ensued!

"The truce was made. Alaric departed with the remnant of his army, and encamped at
Aemona, on the confines of that land which he had already invaded, and which he is now
prepared to conquer. Between our king and Stilicho, the general of the Romans, passed
many messages, for the leaders disputed on the terms of the peace that should be finally
ordained. Meanwhile, as an earnest of the Gothic faith, bands of our warriors, and among
them Priulf, were dispatched into Italy to be allies once more of the legions of Rome, and
with them they took their wives and their children, to be detained as hostages in the cities
throughout the land.
"I and my children were conducted to Aquileia. In a dwelling within the city we were
lodged with our possessions. It was night when I took leave of Priulf, my husband, at the
gates. I watched him as he departed with the army, and, when the darkness hid him from my
eyes, I reentered the town; from which I am the only woman of our nation who has escaped
alive."

As she pronounced these last words, Goisvintha's manner, which had hitherto been calm and
collected, began to change; she paused abruptly in her narrative, her head sunk upon her
breast, her frame quivered as if convulsed with violent agony. When she turned toward
Hermanric, after an interval of silence, to address him again, the same malignant expression
lowered over her countenance that had appeared on it when she presented to him her
wounded child; her voice became broken, hoarse, and unfeminine; and pressing closely to
the young man's side, she laid her trembling fingers on his arm, as if to bespeak his most
undivided attention.

"Time grew on," she continued, "and still there came no tidings that the peace was finally
secured. We, that were hostages, lived separate from the people of the town; for we felt
enmity toward each other even then. In my captivity there was no employment for me, but
patience--no pursuit, but hope. Alone with my children, I was wont to look forth over the
sea, toward the camp of our king; but day succeeded to day, and his warriors appeared not
on the plains; nor did Priulf return with the legions to encamp before the gates of the town.
So I mourned in my loneliness; for my heart yearned toward the homes of my people; I
longed once more to look upon my husband's face, and to behold again the ranks of our
warriors, and the majesty of their battle array.

"But already, when the great day of despair was quickly drawing near, a bitter outrage was
preparing for me alone. The men who had hitherto watched us were changed, and of the
number of the new guards was one who cast on me the eyes of lust. Night after night he
poured his entreaties into my unwilling ear; for, in his vanity and shamelessness, he
believed that I, who was Gothic, and the wife of a Goth, might be won by him whose
parentage was but Roman! Soon, from prayers he rose to threats; and, one night, appearing
before me with smiles, he cried out--that Stilicho, whose desire was to make peace with the
Goths, had suffered, for his devotion to our people, the penalty of death; that a time of ruin
was approaching for us all; and that he alone--whom I despised--could preserve me from the
anger of Rome. As he ceased, he approached me; but I, who had been in many battlefields,
felt no dread at the prospect of war; and spurned him with laughter from my presence.

"Then, for a few nights more, my enemy approached me not again. Until, one evening, as I
sat on the terrace before the house, with the child that you have beheld, a helmet-crest
suddenly fell at my feet, and a voice cried to me from the garden beneath, 'Priulf, thy
husband, has been slain in a quarrel by the soldiers of Rome! Already the legions with
whom he served are on their way to the town; for a massacre of the hostages is ordained.
Speak but the word, and I can save thee even yet!'

"I looked on the crest. It was bloody, and it was his! For an instant my heart writhed within
me, as I thought on my warrior whom I had loved! Then, as I heard the messenger of death
retire, cursing, from his lurking-place in the garden, I recollected that now my children had
none but their mother to defend them; and that peril was preparing for them from the
enemies of their race. Besides the little one in my arms, I had two that were sleeping in the
house. As I looked round, bewildered and in despair, to see if a chance were left us to
escape, there rang through the evening stillness the sound of a trumpet; and the tramp of
armed men was audible in the street beneath. Then, from all quarters of the town, rose, as
one sudden sound, the shrieks of women and the yells of men. Already, as I rushed toward
my children's beds, the fiends of Rome had mounted the stairs, and waved in bloody
triumph their reeking swords! I gained the steps; and as I looked up, they flung down at me
the body of my youngest child. Oh, Hermanric! Hermanric! it was the most beautiful and
the most beloved! What the priests say that God should be to us, that, the fairest one of my
offspring, was to me! As I saw it, mutilated and dead--I, who but an hour before had hushed
it on my bosom to rest!--my courage forsook me, and when the murderers advanced on me,
I staggered and fell. I felt the sword-point enter my neck; I saw the dagger gleam over the
child in my arms; I heard the death-shriek of the last victim above; and then my senses
failed me, and I could listen and move no more!

"Long must I have lain motionless at the foot of those fatal stairs; for when I awoke from
my trance, the noises in the city were hushed; and from her place in the firmament the moon
shone softly into the deserted house. I listened, to be certain that I was alone with my
murdered children. No sound was in the dwelling; the assassins had departed, believing that
their labor of blood was ended when I fell beneath their swords; and I was able to crawl
forth in security, and to look my last upon my offspring that the Romans had slain. The
child that I held to my breast still breathed. I stanched with some fragments of my garment
the wounds that he had received, and laying him gently by the stairs--in the moonlight, so
that I might see him when he moved--I groped in the shadow of the wall for my first
murdered and my last born; for that youngest and fairest one of my offspring, whom they
had slaughtered before my eyes! When I touched the corpse it was wet with blood; I felt its
face, and it was cold beneath my hands; I raised its body in my arms, and its limbs already
were rigid in death! Then I thought of the eldest child, who lay dead in the chamber above.
But my strength was failing me fast. I had an infant who might yet be preserved; and I knew
that, if morning dawned on me in the house, all chances of escape were lost forever. So,
though my heart was cold within me at leaving my child's corpse to the mercy of the
Romans, I took up the dead and the wounded one in my arms, and went forth into the
garden, and thence toward the seaward quarter of the town.
"I passed through the forsaken streets. Sometimes I stumbled against the body of a child--
sometimes the moonlight showed me the death-pale face of some woman of my nation
whom I bad loved, stretched upward to the sky; but I still advanced until I gained the wall of
the town, and heard on the other side the waters of the river running onward to the port of
Aquileia and the sea.

"I looked around. The gates I knew were guarded and closed. By the wall was the only
prospect of escape; but its top was high and its sides were smooth, when I felt them with my
hands. Despairing and wearied, I laid my burdens down where they were hidden by the
shade, and walked forward a few paces; for to remain still was a torment that I could not
endure. At a short distance I saw a soldier sleeping against the wall of a house. By his side
was a ladder placed against the window. As I looked up, I beheld the head of a corpse
resting on its top. The victim must have been lately slain, for her blood still dripped slowly
down into an empty winepot that stood within the soldier's reach. When I saw the ladder,
hope revived within me. I removed it to the wall--I mounted and laid my dead child on the
great stones at its top--I returned, and placed my wounded boy by the corpse. Slowly, and
with many efforts, I dragged the ladder upward, until from its own weight one end fell to the
ground on the other side. As I had arisen so I descended. In the sand of the river bank I
scraped a hole, and buried there the corpse of the infant; for I could carry the weight of two
no longer. Then, with my wounded child, I reached some caverns that lay onward near the
sea-shore. There throughout the next day I lay hidden--alone with my sufferings of body,
and my affliction of heart--until the night came on, when I set forth on my journey to the
mountains; for I knew that at Aemona, in the camp of the warriors of my people, lay the
only refuge that was left to me on earth. Feebly and slowly, hiding by day and traveling by
night, I kept on my way until I gained that lake among the rocks where the guards of the
army came forward and rescued me from death."

She ceased. Throughout the latter portion of her narrative, her demeanor had been calm and
sad; and as she dwelt, with the painful industry of grief, over each minute circumstance
connected with the bereavements she had sustained, her voice softened to those accents of
quiet mournfulness which make impressive the most simple words, and render musical the
most unsteady tones. It seemed as if those tenderer and kinder emotions which the
attractions of her off-spring had once generated in her character had, at the bidding of
memory, become revivified in her manner, while she lingered over the recital of their
deaths. For a brief space of time she looked fixedly and anxiously upon the countenance of
Hermanric, which was half averted from her, and expressed a fierce and revengeful gloom
that sat unnaturally on its noble lineaments. Then, turning from him, she buried her face in
her hands, and made no effort more to attract him to attention or incite him to reply.
This solemn silence kept by the bereaved woman and the brooding man had lasted but a few
minutes, when a harsh, trembling voice was heard from the top of the wagon calling at
intervals, "Hermanric! Hermanric!"

At first the young man remained unmoved by those discordant and repulsive tones. They
repeated his name, however, so often and so perseveringly, that he noticed them ere long,
and, rising suddenly, as if impatient of the interruption, advanced toward the side of the
wagon from which the mysterious summons appeared to come.

As he looked up toward the vehicle the voice ceased; and he saw that the old woman to
whom he had confided the child was the person who had called him so hurriedly but a few
moments before. Her tottering body, clothed in bear-skins, was bent forward over a large
triangular shield of polished brass, on which she leaned her lank, shriveled arms. Her head
shook with a tremulous, palsied action--a leer, half smile, half grimace, distended her
withered lips, and lightened her sunken eyes. Sinister, cringing, repulsive; her face livid
with the reflection from the weapon that was her support, and her figure scarce human in the
rugged garments that encompassed its gaunt proportions, she seemed a deformity set up by
evil spirits to mock the majesty of the human form--an embodied satire on all that is most
deplorable in infirmity and most disgusting in age.

The instant she discerned Hermanric, she stretched her body out still further over the shield,
and, pointing to the interior of the wagon, muttered softly that one fearful and expressive
word--dead!

Without waiting for any further explanation, the young Goth mounted the vehicle, and
gaining the old woman's side, saw stretched on her collection of herbs--beautiful in the
sublime and melancholy stillness of death--the corpse of Goisvintha's last child.

"Is Hermanric wroth?" whined the hag, quailing before the steady, rebuking glance of the
young man. "When I said that Brunechild was greater than Hermanric, I lied. It is
Hermanric that is most powerful! See, the dressings were placed on the wounds; and,
though the child has died, shall not the treasures that were promised me be mine? I have
done what I could, but my cunning begins to desert me, for I am old--old--old! I have seen
my generation pass away! Aha! I am old, Hermanric; I am old!"

When the young warrior looked on the child, he saw that the hag had spoken truth, and that
the victim had died from no fault of hers. Pale and serene, the countenance of the boy
showed how tranquil had been his death. The dressings had been skillfully composed and
carefully applied to his wounds, but suffering and privation had annihilated the feebleness
of human resistance in their march toward the last dread goal; and the treachery of Imperial
Rome had once more triumphed as was its wont, and triumphed over a child!
As Hermanric descended with the corpse, Goisvintha was the first object that met his eyes
When he alighted on the ground. The mother received from him the lifeless burden without
an exclamation or a tear. That emanation from her former and kinder self which had been
produced by the closing recital of her sufferings was, henceforth, at the signal of her last
child's death, extinguished in her forever!

"His wounds had crippled him," said the young man, gloomily. "He could never have fought
with the warriors! Our ancestors slew themselves when they were no longer vigorous for the
fight. It is better that he has died!"

"Vengeance!" gasped Goisvintha, pressing up closely to his side. "We will have vengeance
for the massacre of Aquileia! When blood is streaming in the palaces of Rome, remember
my murdered children, and hasten not to sheathe thy sword!"

At this instant, as if to rouse still further the fierce determination that appeared already in the
face of the young Goth, the voice of Alaric was heard commanding the army to advance.
Hermanric started, and drew the panting woman after him to the resting-place of the king.
There, armed at all points, and rising, by his superior stature, high above the throng around
him, stood the dreaded captain of the Gothic hosts. His helmet was raised, so as to display
his clear blue eyes gleaming over the multitude around him; he pointed with his sword in
the direction of Italy; and as, rank by rank, the men started to their arms, and prepared
exultingly for the march, his lips parted with a smile of triumph, and ere he moved to
accompany them he spoke thus:

"Warriors of the Goths, our halt is a short one among the mountains; but let not the weary
repine, for the glorious resting-place that awaits our labors is the City of Rome! The curse of
Odin, when in the infancy of our nation he retired before the myriads of the Empire, it is our
privilege to fulfill! That future destruction, which he denounced against Rome, it is ours to
effect! Remember your hostages, that the Romans have slain; your possessions. that the
Romans have seized; your trust, that the Romans have betrayed! Remember that I, your
king, have within me that Supernatural impulse which never deceives, and which calls to me
in a voice of encouragement--Advance and the Empire is thine? Assemble the warriors, and
the City of the World shall be delivered to the conquering Goths! Let us onward without
delay! Our prey awaits us! Our triumph is near! Our vengeance is at hand!"

He paused; and at that moment the trumpet gave signal for the march.

"Up! up!" cried Hermanric, seizing Goisvintha by the arm, and pointing to the wagon,
which had already begun to move; "make ready for the journey! I will charge myself with
the burial of the child. Yet a few days and our encampment may be before Aquileia. Be
patient, and I will avenge thee in the palaces of Rome!"
 The mighty mass moved. The multitude stretched forth over the barren ground; and, even
now, the warriors in front of the army might be seen by those in the rear mounting the last
range of passes that lay between the plains of Italy and the Goths.

Chapter II.
The Court.

THE traveler who so far departs from the ordinary track of tourists in modern Italy as to
visit the city of Ravenna, remembers with astonishment, as he treads its silent and
melancholy streets, and beholds vineyards and marshes spread over an extent of four miles
between the Adriatic and the town, that this place, now half deserted, was once the most
populous of Roman fortresses; and that where fields and woods now present themselves to
his eyes, the fleets of the Empire once rode securely at anchor, and the merchant of Rome
disembarked his precious cargoes at his warehouse door.

As the power of Rome declined, the Adriatic, by a strange fatality, began to desert the
fortress, whose defense it had hitherto secured. Coeval with the gradual degeneracy of the
people was the gradual withdrawal of the ocean from the city walls; until, at the beginning
of the sixth century, a grove of pines already appeared where the port of Augustus once
existed.

At the period of our story--though the sea had even then receded perceptibly--the ditches
round the walls were yet filled, and the canals still ran through the city, in much the same
manner as they intersect Venice at the present time.

On the morning that we are about to describe, the autumn had advanced some days since the
events mentioned in the preceding chapter. Although the sun was now high in the eastern
horizon, the restlessness produced by the heat emboldened a few idlers of Ravenna to brave
the sultriness of the atmosphere, in the vain hope of being greeted by a breeze from the
Adriatic, as they mounted the seaward ramparts of the town. On attaining their destined
elevation, these sanguine citizens turned their faces with fruitless and despairing industry
toward every point of the compass, but no breath of air came to reward their perseverance.
Nothing could be more thoroughly suggestive of the undiminished universality of the heat
than the view, in every direction, from the position they then occupied. The stone houses of
the city behind them glowed with a vivid brightness overpowering to the strongest eyes. The
light curtains hung motionless over the lonely windows. No shadows varied the brilliant
monotony of the walls, or softened the lively glitter on the waters of the fountains beneath.
Not a ripple stirred the surface of the broad channel that now replaced the ancient harbor.
Not a breath of wind unfolded the scorching sails of the deserted vessels at the quay. Over
the marshes in the distance hung a hot, quivering mist; and in the vineyards, near the town,
not a leaf waved upon its slender stem. On the seaward side lay, vast and level, the prospect
of the burning sand, and beyond it the main ocean--waveless, torpid, and suffused in a flood
of fierce brightness--stretched out to the cloudless horizon that closed the sunbright view.

Within the town, in those streets where the tall houses cast a deep shadow on the flag-stones
of the road, the figures of a few slaves might, here and there, be seen sleeping against the
walls, or gossiping languidly on the faults of their respective lords. Sometimes an old
beggar might be observed hunting on the well-stocked preserves of his own body the lively
vermin of the South. Sometimes a restless child crawled from a doorstep to paddle in the
stagnant waters of a kennel; but with the exception of these doubtful evidences of human
industry the prevailing characteristic of the few groups of the lowest orders of the people
which appeared in the streets was the most listless and utter indolence. All that gave
splendor to the city at other hours of the day was at this period hidden from the eye. The
elegant courtiers reclined in their lofty chambers; the guards on duty ensconced themselves
in angles of walls and recesses of the porticoes; the graceful ladies slumbered on perfumed
couches in darkened rooms; the gilded chariots were shut into the carriage-houses; the
prancing horses were confined in the stables; and even the wares in the market-places were
removed from exposure to the sun. It was clear that the luxurious inhabitants of Ravenna
recognized no duties of sufficient importance, and no pleasures of sufficient attraction, to
necessitate the exposure of their susceptible bodies to the noontide heat.

To give the reader some idea of the manner in which the indolent patricians of the court
loitered away their noon, and to satisfy, at the same time, the exigencies attaching to the
conduct of this story, it is requisite to quit the lounging-places of the plebeians in the streets
for the couches of the nobles in the emperor's palace.

Passing through the massive entrance gates, crossing the vast hall of the imperial abode,
with its statues, its marbles, and its guards in attendance, and thence ascending the noble
staircase, the first object that might on this occasion have attracted the observer, when he
gained the approaches to the private apartments, was a door at an extremity of the corridor,
richly carved, and standing half open. At this spot were grouped some fifteen or twenty
individuals, who conversed by signs, and maintained in all their movements the most
decorous and complete silence. Sometimes, one of the party stole on tiptoe to the door, and
looked cautiously through, returning almost instantaneously, and expressing to his next
neighbor, by various grimaces, his immense interest in the sight he had just beheld.
Occasionally, there came from this mysterious chamber sounds resembling the cackling of
poultry; varied, now and then, by a noise like the falling of a shower of small, light
substances upon a hard floor. Whenever these sounds were audible, the members of the
party outside the door looked round upon each other and smiled--some sarcastically, some
triumphantly. A few among these patient expectants grasped rolls of vellum in their hands;
the rest held nosegays of rare flowers, or supported in their arms small statues and pictures
in mosaic. Of their number, some were painters and poets; some orators and philosophers;
and some statuaries and musicians. Among such a motley assemblage of professions,
remarkable in all ages of the world for fostering in their votaries the vice of irritability, it
may seem strange that so quiet and orderly a behavior should exist as that just described.
But it is to be observed that in attending at the palace these men of genius made sure at least
of outward unanimity among their ranks, by coming equally prepared with one
accomplishment; and equally animated by one hope, they waited to employ a common
agent--flattery, to attain a common end--gain.

The chamber thus sacred, even from the intrusion of intellectual inspiration, although richly
ornamented, was of no remarkable extent. At other times the eye might have wandered with
delight on the exquisite plants and flowers, scattered profusely over a noble terrace, to
which a second door in the apartment conducted; but, at the present moment, the
employment of the occupant of the room was of so extraordinary a nature, that the most
attentive observation must have missed all the inferior characteristics of the place, to settle
immediately on its inhabitant alone.

In the midst of a large flock of poultry, which seemed strangely misplaced on a floor of
marble and under a gilded roof, stood a pale, thin, debilitated youth, magnificently clothed,
and holding in his hand a silver vase filled with grain, which he ever and anon distributed to
the cackling multitude at his feet. Nothing could be more pitiably effeminate than the
appearance of this young man. His eyes were heavy and vacant; his forehead low and
retiring; his cheeks sallow; and his form curved as if with a premature old age. An
unmeaning smile dilated his thin, colorless lips; and as he looked down on his strange
favorites, he occasionally whispered to them a few broken expressions of endearment,
almost infantine in their simplicity. His whole soul seemed to be engrossed by the labor of
distributing his grain, and he followed the different movements of the poultry with an
earnestness of attention which seemed almost idiotic in its ridiculous intensity. If it be
asked, why a person so contemptible as this solitary youth has been introduced with so
much care, and described with so much minuteness, it must be answered that, though
destined to form no important figure in this work, he played, from his position, a remarkable
part in the great drama on which it is founded--for this feeder of chickens was no less a
person than Honorius, Emperor of Rome.

It is the very imbecility of this man, at such a time as that we now write on, which invests
his character with a fearful interest in the eye of posterity. In himself the impersonation of
the meanest vices inherent in the vicious civilization of his period, to his feebleness was
accorded the terrible responsibility of liberating the long-prisoned storm, whose elements
we have attempted to describe in the preceding chapter. With just intellect enough to be
capricious, and just determination enough to be mischievous, he was an instrument fitted for
the uses of every ambitious villain who could succeed in gaining his ear. To flatter his
puerile tyranny, the infatuated intriguers of the court rewarded the heroic Stilicho for the
rescue of his country with the penalty of death, and defrauded Alaric of the moderate
concessions that they had solemnly pledged themselves to perform. To gratify his vanity, he
was paraded in triumph through the streets of Rome, for a victory that others had gained. To
pander to his arrogance, by an exhibition of the vilest privilege of that power which had
been intrusted to him for good, the massacre of the helpless hostages, confided by Gothic
honor to Roman treachery, was unhesitatingly ordained; and, finally, to soothe the
turbulence of his unmanly fears, the last act of his unscrupulous councilors, ere the Empire
fell, was to authorize his abandoning his people in the hour of peril, careless who suffered in
defenseless Rome, while he was secure in fortified Ravenna. Such was the man under whom
the mightiest of the world's structures was doomed to totter to its fall! Such was the figure
destined to close a scene which Time and Glory had united to hallow and adorn! Raised and
supported by a superhuman daring, that invested the nauseous horrors of incessant
bloodshed with a rude and appalling magnificence, the mistress of nations was now fated to
sink by the most ignoble of defeats, under the most abject of tremblers. For this had the
rough old Kingdom shaken off its enemies by swarms from its vigorous arms! For this had
the doubtful virtues of the Republic, and the perilous magnificence of the Empire, perplexed
and astonished the world! In such a conclusion as Honorius, ended the dignified barbarities
of a Brutus, the polished splendors of an Augustus, the unearthly atrocities of a Nero, and
the immortal virtues of a Trajan! Vainly, through the toiling ages, over the ruin of her
noblest hearts, and the prostitution of her grandest intellects, had Rome stridden pitilessly
onward, grasping at the shadow--Glory; the fiat had now gone forth that doomed her to
possess herself finally of the substance--Shame!

When the imperial trifler had exhausted his store of grain, and satisfied the cravings of his
voracious favorites, he was relieved of his silver vase by two attendants. The flock of
poultry was then ushered out at one door, while the flock of geniuses was ushered in at the
other.

Leaving the emperor to cast his languid eyes over objects of art for which he had no
admiration, and to open his unwilling ears to panegyrical orations for which he had no
comprehension, we proceed to introduce the reader to an apartment on the opposite side of
the palace, in which are congregated all the beauty and elegance of his court.

Imagine a room two hundred feet long and proportionably broad. Its floor is mosaic,
wrought into the loveliest patterns. Its sides are decorated with immense pillars of
variegated marble, the recesses formed by which are occupied by statues, all arranged in
exquisite variety of attitude, so as to appear to be offering to whoever approaches them the
rare flowers which it is the duty of the attendants to place in their hands. The ceiling is
painted in fresco, in patterns and colors harmonizing with those on the mosaic floor. The
cornices are of silver, and decorated with mottoes from the amatory poets of the day, the
letters of which are formed by precious stones. In the middle of the room is a fountain
throwing up streams of perfumed water, and surrounded by golden aviaries, containing birds
of all sizes and nations. Three large windows, placed at the eastern extremity of the
apartment, look out upon the Adriatic, but are covered at this hour, from the outside, with
silk curtains of a delicate green shade, which cast a soft, luxurious light over every object,
but are so thinly woven and so skillfully arranged, that the slightest breath of air which
moves without finds its way immediately to the languid occupants of the court waiting-
room. The number of these individuals amounts to about fifty to sixty persons. By far the
larger half of the assemblage are women Their black hair, tastefully braided. into various
forms, and adorned with flowers or precious stones, contrasts elegantly with the brilliant
whiteness of the robes in which they are for the most part clothed. Some of them are
occupied in listlessly watching the movements of the birds in the aviaries; others hold a
languid and whispered conversation with such of the courtiers as happen to be placed near
them. The men exhibit in their dresses a greater variety of color, and in their occupations a
greater fertility of resource than the women. Their garments, of the lightest rose, violet or
yellow tints, diversify fantastically the monotonous white robes of their gentle companions.
Of their employments, the most conspicuous are, playing on the lute, gaming with dice,
teasing their lapdogs, and insulting their parasites. Whatever their occupation, it is
performed with little attention, and less enthusiasm. Some recline on their couches with
closed eyes, as if the heat made the labor of using their organs of vision too much for them;
others, in the midst of a conversation, suddenly leave a sentence unfinished, apparently
incapacitated by lassitude from giving expression to the simplest ideas. Every sight in the
apartment that attracts the eye, every sound that gains the ear, expresses a luxurious repose.
No brilliant light mars the pervading softness of the atmosphere; no violent color
materializes the light, ethereal hues of the dresses; no sudden noises interrupt the fitful and
plaintive notes of the lute, jar with the soft twittering of the birds in the aviaries, or drown
the still, regular melody of the ladies' voices. All objects, animate and inanimate, are in
harmony with each other. It is a scene of spiritualized indolence--a picture of dreamy
beatitude, in the inmost sanctuary of unruffled repose.

Amid this assemblage of beauty and nobility, the members of which were rather to be
generally noticed than particularly observed, there was, however, one individual who, both
by the solitary occupation he had chosen and his accidental position in the room, was
personally remarkable among the listless patricians around him.

His couch was placed nearer the window than that of any other occupant of the chamber.
Some of his indolent neighbors--especially those of the gentler sex--occasionally regarded
him with mingled looks of admiration and curiosity; but no one approached him, or
attempted to engage him in conversation. A piece of vellum lay by his side, on which, from
time to time, he traced a few words, and then resumed his reclining position, apparently
absorbed in reflection, and utterly regardless of all the occupants--male and female--of the
imperial apartment. Judging from his general appearance, he could scarcely be twenty-five
years of age. The conformation of the upper part of his face was thoroughly intellectual--the
forehead high, broad, and upright; the eyes clear, penetrating, and thoughtful--but the lower
part was, on the other hand, undeniably. sensual. The lips, full and thick, formed a
disagreeable contrast to the delicate chiseling of the straight Grecian nose; while the
fleshiness of the chin, and the jovial redundancy of the cheeks, were, in their turn, utterly at
variance with the character of the pale, noble forehead, and the expression of the quick,
intelligent eyes. in stature he was barely of the middle size; but every part of his body was
so perfectly proportioned that he appeared, in any position, taller than he really was. The
upper part of his dress, thrown open from the heat, partly disclosed the fine statuesque
formation of his neck and chest. His ears, hands, and feet were of that smallness and
delicacy which is held to denote the aristocracy of birth; and there was in his manner that
indescribable combination of unobtrusive dignity and unaffected elegance which in all ages
and countries, and through all changes of manners and customs, has rendered the demeanor
of its few favored possessors the instantaneous interpreter of their social rank.

While the patrician was still occupied over his vellum, the following conversation took
place in whispers between two ladies placed near the situation he occupied.

"Tell me, Camilla," said the eldest and stateliest of the two, "who is the courtier so occupied
in composition? I have endeavored, I know not how often, to catch his eye; but the man will
look at nothing but his roll of vellum, or the corners of the room."

"What! are you so great a stranger in Italy as not to know him?" replied the other, a lively
girl of small, delicate form, who fidgeted with persevering restlessness on her couch, and
seemed incapable of giving an instant's steady attention to any of the objects around her.
"By all the saints, martyrs, and relics of my uncle the bishop!"

"Hush! You should not swear!"

"Not swear! Why, I am making a new collection of oaths, intended solely for ladies' use! I
intend to set the fashion of swearing by them myself!"

"But answer my question, I beseech you! Will you never learn to talk on one subject at a
time?"

"Your question--ah, your question! It was about the Goths?"

"No, no! It was about that man who is incessantly writing, and will look at nobody. He is
almost as provoking as Camilla herself!"
"Don't frown so! That man, as you call him, is the Senator Vetranio."

The lady started. It was evident that Vetranio had a reputation.

"Yes!" continued the lively Camilla. "That is the accomplished Vetranio; but he will be no
favorite of yours, for he sometimes swears--swears by the ancient gods, too, which is
forbidden!"

"He is handsome."

"Handsome? He is beautiful! Not a woman in Italy but is languishing for him!"

"I have heard that he is clever."

"Who has not? He is the author of some of the most celebrated sauces of the age. Cooks of
all nations worship him as an oracle. Then he writes poetry, and composes music, and paints
pictures! And as for philosophy--he talks it better than my uncle the bishop!"

"Is he rich?"

"Ah! my uncle the bishop!--I must tell you how I helped Vetranio to make a satire on him!
When I was staying with him at Rome, I used often to see a woman in a veil taken across
the garden to his study; so, to perplex him, I asked him who she was. And he frowned and
stammered, and said, at first, that I was disrespectful; but he told me afterward that she was
an Arian whom he was laboring to convert. So I thought I should like to see how this
conversion went on, and I hid myself behind a book-case. But it is a profound secret; I tell it
you in confidence."

"I don't care to know it. Tell me about Vetranio."

"How ill-natured you are! Oh! I shall never forget how we laughed when I told Vetranio
what I had seen! He took up his writing materials, and made the satire immediately. The
next day all Rome heard of it. My uncle was speechless with rage! I believe he suspected
me; but he gave up converting the Arian lady; and--"

"I ask you again--is Vetranio rich?"

"Half Sicily is his. He has immense estates in Africa, olive-grounds in Syria, and corn-fields
in Gaul. I was present at an entertainment he gave at his villa in Sicily. He fitted up one of
his vessels from the descriptions of the furnishing of Cleopatra's galley, and made his slaves
swim after us, as attendant Tritons. Oh! it was magnificent!"
"I should like to know him."

"You should see his cats! He has a perfect legion of them at his villa. Twelve slaves are
employed to attend on them. He is mad about cats, and declares that the old Egyptians were
right to worship them. He told me, yesterday, that when his largest cat is dead, he will
canonize her, in spite of the Christians! And then he is so kind to his slaves! They are never
whipped or punished, except when they neglect or disfigure themselves; for Vetranio will
allow nothing that is ugly or dirty to come near him.

You must visit his banqueting-hall at Rome. It is perfection!"

"But why is he here?"

"He has come to Ravenna, charged with some secret message from the Senate, and has
presented a rare breed of chickens to that foolish--"

"Hush; you may be overheard!"

"Well!--to that wise emperor of ours! Ah, the palace has been so pleasant since he has been
here!"

At this instant the above dialogue--from the frivolity of which the universally-learned
readers of modern times will, we fear, recoil with contempt--was interrupted by a movement
on the part of its hero, which showed that his occupation was at an end. With the elaborate
deliberation of a man who disdains to exhibit himself as liable to be hurried by any mortal
affair, Vetranio slowly folded up the vellum he had now filled with writing, and, depositing
it in his bosom, made a sign to a slave, who happened to be then passing near him with a
dish of fruit.

Having received his message, the slave retired to the entrance of the apartment, and,
beckoning to a man who stood outside the door, motioned him to approach Vetranio's
couch.

This individual immediately hurried across the room, to the window where the elegant
Reman awaited him. Not the slightest description of him is needed; for he belonged to a
class with which moderns are as well acquainted as ancients--a class which has survived all
changes of nations and manners--a class which came in with the first rich man in the world,
and will only go out with the last. In a word, he was a parasite.

He enjoyed, however, one great superiority over his modern successors. In his day flattery
was a profession--in ours it has sunk to a pursuit.
"I shall leave Ravenna this evening," said Vetranio.

The parasite made three low bows and smiled ecstatically.

"You will order my traveling equipage to be at the palace gates an hour before sunset."

The parasite declared he. should never forget the honor of the commission, and left the
room.

The sprightly Camilla, who had overheard Vetranio's command, jumped off her couch, as
soon as the parasite's back was turned, and, running up to the senator, began to reproach him
for the determination he had just formed.

"Have you no compunction at leaving me to the dullness of this horrible palace, to satisfy
your idle fancy for going to Rome?" said she, pouting her pretty lip, and playing with a lock
of the dark brown hair that clustered over Vetranio's brow.

"Has the senator Vetranio so little regard for his friends as to leave them to the mercy of the
Goths;" said another lady, advancing with a winning smile to Camilla's side.

"Ah, those Goths!" exclaimed Vetranio, turning to the last speaker; "tell me, Julia, is it not
reported that the barbarians are really marching into Italy?"

"Everybody has heard of it. The emperor is so discomposed by the rumor, that he has
forbidden the very name of the Goths to be mentioned in his presence again."

"For my part," continued Vetranio, drawing Camilla toward him, and playfully tapping her
little dimpled hand, "I am in anxious expectation of the Goths, for I have designed a statue
of Minerva, for which I can find no model so fit as a woman of that troublesome nation. I
am informed upon good authority that their limbs are colossal, and their sense of propriety
most obediently pliable under the discipline of the purse."

"If the Goths supply you with a model for anything," said a courtier, who had joined the
group while Vetranio was speaking, "it will be with a representation of the burning of your.
palace at Rome, which they will enable you to paint in blood, from the inexhaustible
reservoir: of your own wounds." The individual who uttered this last observation was
remarkable among the brilliant circle around him by his excessive ugliness. Urged by his
personal disadvantages, and the loss of all his property at the gaming-table, he had latterly
personated a character, the accomplishments attached to which rescued him, by their
disagreeable originality in that frivolous age, from oblivion or contempt. He was a Cynic
philosopher.
His remark, however, produced no other effect on his hearers' serenity than to excite their
merriment. Vetranio laughed, Camilla laughed, Julia laughed. The idea of a troop of
barbarians ever being able to burn a palace at Rome was too wildly ridiculous for any one's
gravity; and as the speech was repeated in other parts of the room, in spite of their dullness
and lassitude, the whole court laughed.

"I know not why I should be amused at that man's nonsense," said Camilla, suddenly
becoming grave, at the very crisis of a most attractive smile, "when I am so melancholy at
the thought of Vetranio's departure. What will become of me when he is gone? Alas! who
will be left in the palace to compose songs to my beauty and music for my lute? Who will
paint me as Venus, and tell me stories about the ancient Egyptians and their cats? Who at
the banquet will direct what dishes I am to choose, and what I am to reject? Who?"--and
poor little Camilla stopped suddenly in her enumeration of the pleasures she was about to
lose, and seemed on the point of weeping as piteously as she had been laughing rapturously
but the instant before.

Vetranio was touched--not by the compliment to his more intellectual powers, but by the
admission of his convivial supremacy, as a guide to the banquet, contained in the latter part
of Camilla's remonstrance. The sex were then, as now, culpably deficient in gastronomic
enthusiasm. It was, therefore, a perfect triumph to have made a convert to the science of the
youngest and loveliest of the ladies of the court.

"If she can gain leave of absence," said gratified senator, "Camilla shall accompany me to
Rome, and shall be present at the first celebration of my recent discovery of a Nightingale
Sauce."

Camilla was in ecstasies. She seized Vetranio's cheeks between her rosy little fingers, kissed
him as enthusiastically as a child kisses a new toy, and darted gayly off to prepare for her
departure.

"Vetranio would be better employed," sneered the Cynic, "in inventing new salves for future
wounds, than new sauces for future nightingales! His carcass will be carved by Gothic
swords as a feast for the worms, before his birds are spitted with Roman skewers as a feast
for his guests! Is this a time for cutting statues and concocting sauces? Fie on the senators
who abandon themselves to such pursuits as Vetranio's!"

"I have other designs," replied the object of all this moral indignation, looking with insulting
indifference on the Cynic's repulsive countenance, "which, from their immense importance
to the world, must meet with universal approval. The labor that I have just achieved forms
one of a series of three projects, which I have for some time held in contemplation. The first
is an analysis of the new priesthood; the second a true personification, both by painting and
sculpture, of Venus; the third a discovery of what has been hitherto uninvented--a
nightingale sauce. By the inscrutable wisdom of Fate, it has been so willed that the last of
the objects I proposed to myself has been the first attained. The sauce is composed, and I
have just concluded on this vellum the ode that is to introduce it at my table. The
analyzation will be my next labor. It will take the form of a treatise, in which, making the
experience of past years the groundwork of prophecy for the future, I shall show the precise
number of additional dissensions, controversies, and quarrels that will be required to enable
the new priesthood to be themselves the destroyers of their own worship. I shall ascertain by
an exact computation the year in which this destruction will be consummated; and I have by
me, as the materials for my work, a historical summary of Christian schisms and disputes in
Rome for the last hundred years. As for my second design, the personification of Venus, it is
of appalling difficulty. It demands an investigation of the women of every nation under the
sun, a comparison of the relative excellencies and peculiarities of their several charms, and a
combination of all that is loveliest in the infinite variety of their most prominent attractions,
under one form. To forward the execution of this arduous project, my tenants at home and
my slave-merchants abroad have orders to send to my villa in Sicily all women who are
born most beautiful in the empire, or can be brought most beautiful from the nations around.
I will have them displayed before me, of every shade in complexion and of every peculiarity
in form! At the fitting period I shall commence my investigations, undismayed by difficulty
and determined on success. Never yet has the true Venus been personified! Should I
accomplish the task, how exquisite will be my triumph! My work will be the altar at which
thousands will offer up the softest emotions of the heart. It will free the prisoned
imagination of youth, and freshen the fading recollections on the memory of age!"

Vetranio paused. The Cynic was struck dumb with indignation. A solitary zealot for the
Church, who happened to be by, frowned at the analyzation. The ladies tittered at the
personification. The gastronomists chuckled at the nightingale sauce; but for the first few
minutes no one spoke. During this temporary embarrassment, Vetranio whispered a few
words in Julia's ear, and, just as the Cynic was sufficiently recovered to retort--accompanied
by the lady, he quitted the room.

Never was popularity more unalloyed than Vetranio's. Gifted with a disposition, the
pliability of which adapted itself to all emergencies, his generosity disarmed enemies, while
his affability made friends. Munificent without assumption, successful without pride, he
obliged with grace, and shone with safety. People enjoyed his hospitality, for they knew that
it was disinterested; and admired his acquirements, for they felt that they were unobtrusive.
Sometimes (as in his dialogue with the Cynic) the whim of the moment, or the sting of a
sarcasm, drew from him a hint at his station, or a display of his eccentricities; but as he was
always the first soon afterward to lead the laugh at his own outbreak, his credit as a noble
suffered nothing by his infirmity as a man. Gayly and attractively he moved in all grades of
the society of his age, winning his social laurels in every rank, without making a rival to
dispute their possession, or an enemy to detract from their value.
On quitting the court waiting-room, Vetranio and Julia descended the palace stairs and
passed into the emperor's garden. Used generally as an evening lounge, this place was now
untenanted, save by the few attendants engaged in cultivating the flower-beds and watering
the smooth, shady lawns. Entering one of the most retired of the numerous summer-houses
among the trees, Vetranio motioned his companion to a seat, and then abruptly addressed
her in the following words:

"I have heard that you are about to depart for Rome--is it true?"

He asked this question in a low voice, and with a manner in its earnestness strangely at
variance with the volatile gayety which had characterized him but a few moments before
among the nobles of the court. As Julia answered him in the affirmative, his countenance
expressed a lively satisfaction; and, seating himself by her side, he continued the
conversation thus:

If I thought that you intended to stay for any length of time in the city, I should venture
upon a fresh extortion from your friendship, by asking you to lend me your little villa at
Aricia!"

You shall take with you to Rome an order on my steward to place everything there at your
entire disposal."

"My generous Julia! You are of the gifted few who really know how to confer a favor!
Another woman would have asked me why I wanted the villa--you give it unreservedly. So
delicate an unwillingness to intrude on a secret reminds me that the secret should now be
yours!"

To explain the easy confidence that existed between Vetranio and Julia, it is necessary to
inform the reader that the lady--although still attractive in appearance--was of an age to
muse on her past, rather than to meditate on her future, conquests. She had known her
eccentric companion from his boyhood, had been once flattered in his verses, and was
sensible enough--now that her charms were on the wane--to be as content with the
friendship of the senator, as she had formerly been enraptured with the adoration of the
youth.

"You are too penetrating"--resumed Vetranio, after a short pause--"not to have already
suspected that I only require your villa to assist me in the concealment of an intrigue. So
peculiar is my adventure in its different circumstances that to make use of my palace as the
scene of its development would be to risk a discovery which might produce the immediate
subversion of all my designs. But I fear the length of my confession will exceed the duration
of your patience!"
"You have aroused my curiosity. I could listen to you forever!"

"A short time before I took my departure from Rome for this place," continued Vetranio, "I
encountered an adventure of the most extraordinary nature, which has haunted me with the
most extraordinary perseverance, and which will have, I feel assured,, the most
extraordinary results. I was sitting one evening in the garden of my palace on the Pincian
Mount, occupied in trying a new composition on my lute. In one of the pauses of the
melody, which was tender and plaintive, I heard sounds that resembled the sobbing of some
one in distress among the trees behind me. I looked cautiously round, and discerned, half
hidden by the verdure, the figure of a young girl, who appeared to be listening to the music
with the most entranced attention. Flattered by such a testimony to my skill, and anxious to
gain a nearer view of my mysterious visit ant, I advanced toward her hiding-place,
forgetting in my haste to continue playing on the lute. The instant the music ceased, she
discerned me and disappeared. Determined to behold her, I again struck the chords, and in a
few minutes I saw her white robe once more among the trees. I redoubled my efforts. I
played with the utmost expression the most pathetic parts of the melody. As if under the
influence of a charm, she began to advance toward me, now hesitating, now moving back a
few steps,- now approaching. half reluctantly, half willingly, until, utterly vanquished by the
long trembling close of the last cadence of the air, she ran suddenly up to me, and, falling at
my feet, raised her hands as if to implore my pardon."

"Truly this was no common tribute to your skill! Did she speak to you?"

"She uttered not a word," continued Vetranio. "Her large soft eyes, bright with tears, looked
piteously up in my face; her delicate lips trembled as if she wished to speak, but dared not;
her smooth round arms were the very perfection of beauty. Child as she seemed in years and
emotions, she looked a woman in loveliness and form. For the moment, I was too much
astonished by the suddenness of her supplicating action to move or speak. As soon as I
recovered myself, I attempted to fondle and console her, but she shrank from my embrace,
and seemed inclined to escape from me again, until I touched once more the strings of the
lute, and then she uttered a subdued exclamation of delight, nestled close up to me, and
looked into my face with such a strange expression of mingled adoration and rapture that I
declare to you, Julia, I felt as bashful before her as a boy."

"You bashful! The Senator Vetranio bashful!" exclaimed Julia, looking up with an
expression of the most unfeigned incredulity and astonishment.

"The lute," pursued Vetranio, gravely, without heeding the interruption, "was my sole
means of procuring any communication with her. If I ceased playing, we were as strangers;
if I resumed, we were as friends. So, subduing the notes of the instrument, while she spoke
to me in a soft, tremulous, musical voice, I still continued to play. By this plan I discovered
at our first interview that she was the daughter of one Numerian, that she was on the point of
completing her fourteenth year, and that she was called Antonina. I had only succeeded in
gaining this mere outline of her story, when, as if struck by some sudden apprehension, she
tore herself from me with a look of the utmost terror, and entreating me not to follow her if I
ever desired to see her again, she disappeared rapidly among the trees."

"More and more wonderful! And in your new character of a bashful man, you doubtless
obeyed her injunctions?"

"I did," replied the senator; "but the next evening I revisited the garden grove; and, as soon
as I struck the chords, as if by magic she again approached. At this second interview I
learned the reason of her mysterious appearances and departures. Her father, she told me,
was one of a new sect, who imagine--with what reason. it is impossible to comprehend--that
they recommend themselves to their deity by making their lives one perpetual round of
bodily suffering and mental anguish. Not content with distorting all his own feelings and
faculties, this tyrant perpetrated his insane austerities upon the poor child as well. He
forbade her to enter a theater, to look on sculpture, to read poetry, to listen to music. He
made her learn long prayers, and attend to interminable sermons. He allowed her no
companions of her own age--not even girls like herself. The only recreation that she could
obtain was the permission--granted with much reluctance and many rebukes--to cultivate a
little garden which belonged to the house they lived in, and joined at one point the groves
round my palace. There, while she was engaged over her flowers, she first heard the sound
of my lute. For many months before I had discovered her, she had been in the habit of
climbing the inclosure that bounded her garden, and hiding herself among the trees to listen
to the music whenever her father's concerns took him abroad. She had been discovered in
this occupation by an old man appointed to watch her in his master's absence. The attendant,
however, on hearing her confession, not only promised to keep her secret, but permitted her
to continue her visits to my grove whenever I chanced to be playing there on the lute. Now
the most mysterious part of this matter is, that the girl seemed--in spite of his severity
toward her--to have a great affection for her surly parent; for, when I offered to deliver her
from his custody, she declared that nothing could induce her to desert him; not even the
attraction of living among fine pictures and hearing beautiful music every hour in the day.
But I see I weary you; and indeed it is evident, from the length of the shadows, that the hour
of my departure is at hand. Let me, then, pass from my introductory interviews with
Antonina to the consequences that had resulted from them when I set forth on my journey to
Ravenna.

"I think I can imagine the consequences already!" said Julia, smiling maliciously.

"Begin, then," retorted Vetranio, "by imagining that the strangeness of this girl's situation,
and the originality of her ideas, invested her with an attraction for me which the charms of
her person and age contributed immensely to heighten. She delighted my faculties as a poet
as much as she fired my feelings as a man; and I determined to lure her from the tyrannical
protection of her father, by the employment of every artifice that my ingenuity could
suggest. I began by teaching her to exercise for herself the talent which had so attracted her
in another. By the familiarity engendered on both sides by such an occupation, I hoped to
gain as much in affection from her as she acquired in skill from me, but, to my
astonishment, I still found her as indifferent toward the master and as tender toward the
music as she had appeared at our first interview. If she had repelled my advances, if they
bad overwhelmed her with confusion, I could have adapted myself to her humor, I should
have felt the encouragement of hope; but the coldness, the carelessness, the unnatural,
incomprehensible ease with which she received even my caresses, utterly disconcerted me.
It seemed as if she could only regard no as a moving statue, as a mere impersonation,
immaterial as the science I was teaching her. If I spoke, she hardly looked on me; if I
moved, she scarcely noticed the action. I could not consider it dislike--she seemed too
gentle to nourish such a feeling for any creature on earth. I could not believe it coldness; she
was all life, all agitation, if she heard only a few notes of music. When she touched the
chords of the instrument her whole frame trembled. Her eyes, mild, serious, and thoughtful,
when she looked on me, now brightened with delight, now softened with tears, when she
listened to the lute. As day by day her skill in music increased, so her manner toward me
grew more inexplicably indifferent. At length, weary of the constant disappointments that I
experienced, and determined to make a last effort to touch her heart by awakening her
gratitude, I presented her with the very lute which she had at first heard, and on which she
had now learned to play. Never have I seen any human being so rapturously delighted as
this incomprehensible girl, when she received the instrument from my hands. She
alternately wept and laughed over it, she kissed it, fondled it, spoke to it, as if it had been a
living thing. But when I approached to suppress the expressions of thankfulness that she
poured on me for the gift, she suddenly hid the lute in her robe, as if afraid that I should
deprive her of it, and hurried rapidly from my sight. The next day I waited for her at our
accustomed meeting-place, but she never appeared. I sent a slave disguised to her father's
house, but she would hold no communication with him. It was evident that, now she had
gained her end, she cared no more to behold me. In my first moments of irritation, I
determined to make her feel my power, if she despised my kindness; but reflection
convinced me, from my acquaintance with her character, that in such a matter force was
impolitic, that I should risk my popularity in Rome, and engage myself in an unworthy
quarrel to no purpose. Dissatisfied with myself and disappointed in the girl. I obeyed the
first dictates of my impatience, and seizing the opportunity afforded by my duties in the
senate of escaping from the scene of my defeated hopes, I departed angrily for Ravenna."

"Departed for Ravenna!" cried Julia, laughing outright. "Oh, what a conclusion to the
adventure! I confess it, Vetranio, such consequences as these are beyond all imagination!"
"You laugh, Julia," returned the senator, a little piqued; "but hear me to the end, and you
will find that I have not yet resigned myself to defeat. For the few days that I have remained
here, Antonina's image has incessantly troubled my thoughts. I perceive that my inclination,
as well as my reputation, is concerned in subduing her ungrateful aversion. I suspect that my
anxiety to gain her, will, if unremoved, so far influence my character that, from Vetranio the
Serene, I shall be changed into Vetranio the Sardonic. Pride, honor, curiosity, and love, all
urge me to her conquest. To prepare for my banquet is an excuse to the court for my sudden
departure from this place; the real object of my journey is Antonina alone."

"Ah, now I recognize my friend again in his own character," remarked the lady,
approvingly.

"You will ask me how I propose to obtain another interview with her?" continued Vetranio.
"I answer, that the girl's attendant has voluntarily offered himself as an instrument for the
prosecution of my plans. The very day before I departed from Rome he suddenly presented
himself to me, in my garden, and proposed to introduce me into Numerian's house--having
first demanded, with the air more of an equal than an inferior, whether the report that I was
still a secret adherent of the old religion, of the worship of the gods, was true. Suspicious of
the fellow's motives (for he abjured all recompense as the reward of his treachery), and
irritated by the girl's recent ingratitude, I treated his offer with contempt. Now, however,
that my dissatisfaction is calmed and my anxiety aroused, I am determined, at all hazards, to
trust myself to this man, be his motives for aiding me what they may. If my efforts at my
expected interview--and I will not spare them--are rewarded with success, it will be
necessary to obtain some refuge for Antonina that will neither be suspected nor searched.
For such a hiding-place nothing can be more admirably adapted than your Arician villa. Do
you--now that you know for what use it is intended--repent of your generous disposal of it
in aid of my design?"

"I am delighted to have had it to bestow on you," replied the liberal Julia, pressing
Vetranio's hand. "Your adventure is indeed uncommon; I burn with impatience to bear how
it will end. Whatever happens, you may depend on my secrecy and count on my assistance.
But see, the sun is already verging toward the west; and yonder comes one of your slaves to
inform you, I doubt not, that your equipage is prepared. Return with me to the palace, and I
will supply you with the letter necessary to introduce you as master to my country abode."

.....

The worthy citizens of Ravenna assembled in the square before the palace to behold the
senator's departure, had entirely exhausted such innocent materials for amusement as
consisted in staring at the guards, catching the clouds of gnats that hovered about their ears,
and quarreling with each other; and were now reduced to a state of very noisy and
unanimous impatience, when their discontent was suddenly and most effectually appeased
 by the appearance of the traveling equipage, with Vetranio and Camilla outside the palace
gates.

Uproarious shouts greeted the appearance of the senator and his magnificent retinue; but
they were increased a hundred-fold when the chief slaves, by their master's command, each
scattered a handful of small coin among the poorer classes of the spectators. Every man
among that heterogeneous assemblage of rogues, fools and idlers roared his loudest, and
capered his highest, in honor of the generous patrician. Gradually and carefully the
illustrious travelers moved through the crowd around them to the city gate. And thence,
amid incessant shouts of applause, raised with imposing unanimity of lung, and wrought up
to the most distracting discordancy of noise, Vetranio and his lively companion departed in
triumph for Rome.

.....

A few days after this event, the citizens were again assembled at the same place and hour--
probably to witness another patrician departure, when their ears were assailed by the
unexpected sound, produced by the call to arms, which was followed immediately by the
closing of the city gates. They had scarcely asked each other the meaning of these unusual
occurrences, when a peasant, half frantic with terror, rushed into the square, shouting out the
terrible intelligence that the Goths were in sight!

The courtiers heard the news, and, starting from a luxurious repast, hurried to the palace
windows to behold the portentous spectacle. For the remainder of the evening the
banqueting-tables were unapproached by the guests.

The wretched emperor was surprised among his poultry by that dreaded intelligence. He,
too, hastened to the windows, and, looking forth, saw the army of avengers passing in
contempt his solitary fortress, and moving swiftly onward toward defenseless Rome. Long
after the darkness had hidden the masses of that mighty multitude from his eyes, did he
remain staring helplessly upon the fading landscape, in a stupor of astonishment and dread;
and for the first time since he had possessed them, his flocks of fowls were left for that night
unattended by their master's hand.

Chapter III.
Rome.

THE perusal of the title to this chapter will, we fear, excite emotions of apprehension,
rather than of curiosity, in the breasts of experienced readers. They will doubtless imagine
that it is portentous of long rhapsodies on those wonders of antiquity, the description of
which has long since become absolutely nauseous to them by incessant iteration. They will
foresee wailings over the Palace of the Caesars, and meditations among the arches of the
Colosseum, loading a long series of weary paragraphs to the very chapter's end; and,
considerately anxious to spare their attention a task from which it recoils, they will
unanimously hurry past the dreaded desert of conventional reflection, to alight on the first
oasis that may present itself, whether it be formed by a new division of the story, or
suddenly indicated by the appearance of a dialogue. Animated, therefore, by apprehensions
such as these, we hasten to assure them that in no instance will the localities of our story
trench upon the limits of the well-worn Forum, or mount the arches of the exhausted
Colosseum. It is with the beings, anti not the buildings of old Rome, that their attention is to
be occupied. We desire to present them with a picture of the inmost emotions of the times--
of the living, breathing actions and passions of the people of the doomed empire.
Antiquarian topography and classical architecture we leave to abler pens, and resign to other
readers.

It is, however, necessary that the sphere in which the personages of our story are about to
act should be in some measure indicated, in order to facilitate the comprehension of their
respective movements. That portion of the extinct city which we design to revive has left
few traces of its existence in the modern town. Its sites are traditionary, its buildings are
dust. The church rises where the temple once stood, and the wine shop now lures the
passing idler where the bath invited bus ancestor of old.

The walls of Rome are in extent, at the present day, the same as they were at the period of
which we now write. But here all analogy between the ancient and modern city ends. The
houses that those walls were once scarcely wide enough to inclose have long since vanished,
and their modern successors occupy but a third of the space once allotted to the capital of
the empire.

Beyond the walls immense suburbs stretched forth in the days of old. Gorgeous villas,
luxurious groves, temples, theaters, baths--interspersed by colonies of dwellings belonging
to the lower orders of the people--surrounded the mighty city. Of these innumerable abodes
hardly a trace remains. The modern traveler, as he looks forth over the site of the famous
suburbs, beholds, here and there, a ruined aqueduct, or a crumbling tomb, tottering on the
surface of a pestilential marsh.

The present entrance to Rome by the Portal del Popolo occupies the same site as the ancient
Flaminian Gate. Three great streets now lead from it toward the southern extremity of the
city, and form with their tributaries the principal portion of modern Rome. On one side they
are bounded by the Pincian Hill, on the other by the Tiber. Of these streets, those nearest the
river occupy the position of the famous Campus Martins; those on the other side the ancient
approaches to the gardens of Sallust and Lucullus, on the Pincian Mount.

On the opposite bank of the Tiber (gained by the Ponte St. Angelo, formerly the Pons Elms),
two streets, pierced through an irregular and populous neighborhood, conduct to the modern
Church of St. Peter. At the period of our story this part of the city was of much greater
consequence, both in size and appearance, than it is at present, and led directly to the ancient
Basilica of St. Peter, which stood on the same site as that now occupied by the modern
edifice.

The events about to be narrated occur entirely in the parts of the city just described. From
the Pincian Hill, across the Campus Martius, over the Pons Elius, and on to the Basilica of
St. Peter, the reader may be often invited to accompany us, but he will be spared all
necessity of penetrating familiar ruins, or mourning over the sepulchers of departed patriots.

Ere, however, we revert to former actors, or proceed to new characters, it will be requisite to
people the streets that we here attempt to rebuild. By this process it is hoped that the reader
will gain that familiarity with the manners and customs of the Romans of the fifth century
on which the influence of this story mainly depends, and which we despair of being able to
instill by a philosophical disquisition on the features of the age. A few pages of illustration
will serve our purpose better, perhaps, than volumes of historical description. There is no
more unerring index to the character of a people than the streets of their cities.

It is near evening. In the widest part of the Campus Martius crowds of people are assembled
before the gates of a palace. They are congregated to receive several baskets of provisions,
distributed with ostentatious charity by the owner of the mansion. The incessant clamor and
agitation of the impatient multitude form a strange contrast to the stately serenity of the
natural and artificial objects by which they are inclosed on all sides.

The space they occupy is oblong in shape, and of great extent in size. Part of it is formed by
a turf walk shaded with trees, part by the paved approaches to the palace and the public
baths which stand in its immediate neighborhood. These two edifices are remarkable by
their magnificent outward adornments of statues, and the elegance and number of the flights
of steps by which they are respectively entered. With the inferior buildings, the market
places and the gardens attached to them, they are sufficiently extensive to form the
boundary of one side of the immediate view. The appearance of monotony which might at
other times be remarked in the vastness and regularity of their white fronts, is, at this
moment, agreeably broken by several gayly-colored awnings, stretched over their doors and
balconies. The sun is now shining on them with overpowering brightness; the metallic
ornaments on their windows glitter like gems of fire; even the trees which form their groves
partake of the universal flow of light, and fail, like the objects around them, to offer to the
weary eye either refreshment or repose.
Toward the north, the Mausoleum of Augustus, towering proudly up into the brilliant sky, at
once attracts the attention. From its position, parts of this noble building are already in
shade. Not a human being is visible on any part of its mighty galleries--it stands solitary and
sublime, an impressive embodiment of the emotions which it was raised to represent.

On the side opposite the palace and the baths is the turf walk already mentioned. Trees
thickly planted, and interlaced by vines, cast a luxurious shade over this spot. In their
interstices, viewed from a distance, appear glimpses of gay dresses, groups of figures in
repose, stands loaded with fruit and flowers, and innumerable white marble statues of fawns
and wood-nymphs. From this delicious retreat the rippling of fountains is to be heard,
occasionally interrupted by the rustling of leaves, or the plaintive cadences of the Roman
flute.

Southward, two pagan temples stand in lonely grandeur among a host of monuments and
trophies. The symmetry of their first construction still remains unimpaired, their white
marble pillars shine in the sunlight brightly as of old, yet they now present to the eye an
aspect of strange desolation, of unnatural, mysterious gloom. Although the laws forbid the
worship for which they were built, the hand of reform has as yet not ventured to doom them
to ruin, or adapt them to Christian purposes. None venture to tread their once crowded
colonnades. No priest appears to give the oracles from their doors--no sacrifices reek upon
their naked altars. Under their roofs, visited only by the light that steals through their narrow
entrances, stand unnoticed, unworshiped, unmoved, the mighty idols of old Rome. Human
emotion, which made them omnipotence once, has left them but stone now. The "Star in the
East" has already dimmed the fearful halo which the devotion of bloodshed once wreathed
round their forms. Forsaken and alone, they stand but as the gloomy monuments of the
greatest delusion ever organized by the ingenuity of man.

We have now, so to express it exhibited the frame surrounding the moving picture, which
we shall next attempt to present to the reader by mixing with the multitude before the palace
gates.

This assembly resolved itself into three divisions; that collected before the palace steps, that
loitering about the public baths, and that reposing in the shade of the groves. The first was
of the most consequence in numbers, and of the greatest variety in appearance. Composed
of rogues of the worst order from every quarter of the world, it might be said to present, in
its general aspect of numerical importance, the very sublime of degradation. Confident in
their rude union of common avidity, these worthy citizens vented their insolence on all
objects, and in every direction, with a careless impartiality which would have shamed the
most victorious efforts of modern mobs. The hubbub of voices was perfectly fearful. The
coarse execrations of drunken Gauls, the licentious witticisms of effeminate Greeks, the
noisy satisfaction of native Romans, the clamorous indignation of irritable Jews, all sounded
together in one incessant chorus of discordant noises. Nor were the senses of sight and smell
more agreeably assailed than the faculty of hearing by this anomalous congregation.
Immodest youth and irreverent age; woman savage, man cowardly; the swarthy Ethiopian
beslabbered with stinking oil; the stolid Briton begrimed with dirt; these, and a hundred
other varying combinations, to be imagined rather than expressed, met the attention in every
direction. To describe the odors exhaled by the heat from this seething mixture of many
pollutions, would be to force the reader to close the book; we prefer to return to the
distribution which was the cause of this degrading tumult, and which consisted of small
baskets of roasted meat packed with common fruits and vegetables, and handed, or rather
flung down, to the mob by the servants of the nobleman who gave the feast. The people
reveled in the abundance thus presented to them. They threw themselves upon it like wild
beasts; they devoured it like hogs, or bore it off like plunderers; while, secure in the
eminence on which they were placed, the purveyors of this public banquet expressed their
contempt for its noisy recipients by holding their noses, stopping their ears, turning their
backs, and other pantomimic demonstrations of lofty and excessive disgust. These actions
did not escape the attention of those members of the assembly who, having eaten their fill,
were at leisure to make use of their tongues, and who showered an incessant storm of abuse
on the heads of their benefactor's retainers.

"See those fellows!" cried one; "they are the waiters at our feast, and they mock us to our
faces! Down with the filthy kitchen thieves!"

"Excellently well said, Davus; but who is to approach them? They stink at this distance!"

"The rotten-bodied knaves have the noses of dogs and the carcasses of goats."

Then came a chorus of voices--"Down with them! Down with them!" in the midst of which
an indignant freedman advanced to rebuke the mob, receiving, as the reward of his temerity,
a shower of missiles and a volley of curses; after which he was thus addressed by a huge
greasy butcher, heisted on his companion's shoulders:

"By the soul of the emperor, could I get near you, you rogue, I would quarter you with my
fingers alone! A grinning scoundrel that jeers at others! A filthy flatterer that dirts the very
ground he walks on. By the blood of the martyrs, should I fling the sweepings of the
slaughter-house at him, he knows not where to get himself dried!"

"Thou rag of a man," roared a neighbor of the indignant butcher's, "dost thou frown upon
the guests of thy master, the very scrapings of whose skin are worth more than thy whole
carcass! It is easier to make a drinking vessel of the skull of a flea than to make an honest
man of such a villainous night-walker as thou art!"
"Health and prosperity to our noble entertainer!" shouted one section of the grateful crowd
as the last speaker paused for breath.

"Death to all knaves of parasites!" chimed in another.

"Honor to the citizens of Rome!" roared a third party, with modest enthusiasm.

"Give that freedman our bones to pick!" screamed an urchin from the outskirts of the crowd.

This ingenious piece of advice was immediately followed; and the populace gave vent to a
shout of triumph as the unfortunate freedman, scared by a new volley of missiles, retreated
with ignominious expedition to the shelter of his patron's halls.

In the slight and purified specimen of the "table-talk" of a Roman mob, which we have here
ventured to exhibit, the reader will perceive that extraordinary mixture of servility and
insolence which characterized not only the conversation, but the actions of the lower orders
of society, at the period of which we write. Oppressed and degraded, on the one hand, to a
point of misery scarcely conceivable to the public of the present day, the poorer classes in
Rome were, on the other, invested with such a degree of moral license, and permitted such
an extent of political privilege, as flattered their vanity into blinding their sense of
indignation. Slaves in their season of servitude, masters in their hours of recreation, they
presented, as a class, one of the most amazing social anomalies ever existing in any nation;
and formed, in their dangerous and artificial position, one of the most important of the
internal causes of the downfall of Rome.

The steps of the public baths were almost as crowded as the space before the neighboring
building. Incessant streams of people, either entering or departing, poured over the broad
flag-stones of its marble colonnades. This concourse, although composed in some parts of
the same class of people as that assembled before the palace, presented a certain appearance
of respectability. Here and there, checking the dusky monotony of masses of dirty tunics,
might be discerned the refreshing vision of a clean robe, or the grateful indication of a
handsome person. Little groups, removed as far as possible from the neighborhood of the
noisy plebeians, were scattered about, either engaged in animated conversation, or listlessly
succumbing to the lassitude induced by a recent bath. An instant's attention to the subject of
discourse among the more active of these individuals will aid us in pursuing our social
revelations.

The loudest voice among the speakers at this particular moment proceeded from a tall, thin,
sinister-looking man, who was haranguing a little group of listeners with great vehemence
and fluency.
"I tell you, Socius," said he, turning suddenly upon one of his companions, "that unless new
slave laws are made, my calling is at an end.

My patron's estate requires incessant supplies of these wretches. I do my best to satisfy the
demand, and the only result of my labor is that the miscreants either endanger my life, or fly
with impunity to join the gangs of robbers infesting our woods"

"Truly I am sorry for you; but what alteration would you have made in the slave-laws?"

"I would empower bailiffs to slay upon the spot all slaves whom they thought disorderly, as
an example to the rest!"

"What would such a permission avail you? These creatures are necessary, and such a law
would exterminate them in a few months. Can you not break their spirit with labor, bind
their strength with chains, and vanquish their obstinacy with dungeons?"

"All this I have done: but they die under the discipline, or escape from their prisons. I have
now three hundred slaves on my patron's estates. Against those born on our lands I have
little to urge. Many of them, it is true, begin the day with weeping and end it with death; but
for the most part, thanks to their diurnal allowance of stripes, they are tolerably submissive.
It is with the wretches that I have been obliged to purchase from prisoners of war and the
people of revolted towns that I am so dissatisfied. Punishments have no effect on them; they
are incessantly indolent, sulky, desperate. It was but the other day that ten of them poisoned
themselves while at work in the fields, and fifty more, after setting fire to a farmhouse while
my back was turned, escaped to join a gang of their companions, who are now robbers in the
woods. These fellows, however, are the last of the troop who will perpetrate such offenses.
With the concurrence of my patron, I have adopted a plan that will henceforth tame them
efficiently!"

"Are you at liberty to communicate it?"

"By the keys of St. Peter, I wish I could see it practiced on every estate in the land! it is this:
Near a sulphur lake at some distance from my farmhouse is a tract of marshy ground,
overspread here and there by the ruins of an ancient slaughter-house. I propose to dig in this
place several subterranean caverns, each of which shall be capable of holding twenty men.
Here my mutinous slaves shall sleep after their day's labor. The entrances shall be closed
until morning with a large stone, on which I will have engraven this inscription: 'These are
the dormitories invented by Gordian, bailiff of Saturninus, a nobleman, for the reception of
refractory slaves.' "

"Your plan is ingenious; but I suspect your slaves (so insensible to hardships are the brutal
herd) will sleep as unconcernedly in their new dormitories as in their old."
"Sleep! It will be a most original species of repose that they will taste there. The stench of
the sulphur lake will breathe Sabian odors for them over a couch of mud. Their anointing oil
will be the slime of attendant reptiles. Their liquid perfumes will be the stagnant oozings
from their chamber roof. Their music will be the croaking of frogs and the humming of
gnats; and as for their adornments, why they will be decked forth with head-garlands of
twining worms, and movable brooches of cockchafers and toads. Tell me now, most
sagacious Socius, do you still think that amid such luxuries as these my slaves will sleep?"

"No; they will die."

"You are again wrong. They will curse and rave, perhaps, but that is of no consequence.
They will work the longer above ground to shorten the term of their repose beneath. They
will wake at an instant's notice, and come forth at a moment's signal. I have no fear of their
dying!"

"Do you leave Rome soon?"

"I go this evening, taking with me such a supply of trustworthy assistants as will enable me
to execute my plan without delay. Farewell, Socius!"

"Most ingenious of bailiffs, I bid you farewell!"

As the worthy Gordian stalked off, big with the dignity of his new projects, the gestures and
tones of a man who formed one of a little group collected in a remote part of the portico he
was about to quit attracted his attention. Curiosity formed as conspicuous an ingredient in
this man's character as cruelty. He stole behind the base of a neighboring pillar; and as the
frequent repetition of the word "Goths" struck his ear (the report of that nation's impending
invasion having by this time reached Rome), he carefully disposed himself to listen with the
most implicit attention to the speaker's voice.

"Goths!" cried the man in the stern, concentrated accents of despair. "Is there one among us
to whom this report of their advance upon Rome does not speak of hope rather than of
dread? Have we a chance of rising from the degradation forced on us by our superiors until
this den of heartless triflers and shameless cowards is swept from the very earth that it
pollutes?"

"Your sentiments on the evils of our condition are undoubtedly most just," observed a fat,
pompous man, to whom the preceding remarks had been addressed, "but I cannot desire the
reform you so ardently hope for. Think of the degradation of being conquered by
barbarians!"
"I am the exile of my country's privileges. What interest have I in upholding her honor?--if
honor she really has!" replied the first speaker.

"Nay! Your expressions are too severe. You are too discontented to be just."

"Am I? Hear me for a moment, and you will change your opinion. You see me now, by my
bearing and appearance, superior to yonder plebeian herd. You doubtless think that I live at
my ease in the world, that I can feel no anxiety for the future about my bodily necessities.
What would you say were I to tell you that, if I want another meal, a lodging for to-night, a
fresh robe for to-morrow, I must rob or flatter some great man to gain them. Yet so it is. I
am hopeless, friendless, destitute. In the whole of the empire there is not an honest calling in
which I can take refuge. I must become a pander or a parasite--a hired tyrant over slaves, or
a chartered groveler beneath nobles--if I would not starve miserably in the streets, or rob
openly in the woods! This is what I am. Now listen to what I was. I was born free. I
inherited from my father a farm which he had successfully defended from the
encroachments of the rich, at the expense of his comfort, his health, and his life. When I
succeeded to his lands, I determined to protect them in my time as studiously as he had
defended them in his. I worked unintermittingly: I enlarged my house, I improved my fields,
I increased my flocks. One after another, I despised the threats and defeated the wiles of my
noble neighbors, who desired possession of my estate to swell their own territorial grandeur.
In process of time I married and had a child. I believed that I was picked out from my race
as a fortunate man when one night I was attacked by robbers: slaves made desperate by the
cruelty of their wealthy masters. They ravaged my cornfields, they deprived me of my
flocks. When I demanded redress, I was told to sell my lands to those who could defend
them--to those rich nobles whose tyranny had organized the band of wretches who had
spoiled me of my possessions, and to whose fraud-gotten treasures the Government were
well pleased to grant that protection which they had denied to my honest hoards. In my
pride I determined that I would still be independent. I planted new crops. With the little
remnant of my money I hired fresh servants and bought more flocks. I had just recovered
from my first disaster, when I became the victim of a second. I was again attacked. This
time we had arms, and we attempted to defend ourselves. My wife was slain before my
eyes; my house was burned to the ground; I myself only escaped, mutilated with wounds;
my child soon afterward pined and died. I had no wife, no offspring, no house, no money.
My fields still stretched round me, but I had none to cultivate them. My walls still tottered at
my feet, but I had none to rear them again--none to inhabit them if they were reared. My
father's lands were now become a wilderness to me. I was too proud to sell them to my rich
neighbor; I preferred to leave them before I saw them the prey of a tyrant, whose rank had
triumphed over my industry, and who is now able to boast that he can travel over ten
leagues of senatorial property untainted by the propinquity of a husbandman's farm.
Houseless, homeless, friendless, I have come to Rome alone in my affliction, helpless in my
degradation! Do you wonder now that I am careless about the honor of my country? I would
have served her with my life and my possessions when she was worthy of my service; but
she has cast me off, and I care not who conquers her. I say to the Goths--with thousands
who suffer the same tribulation that I now undergo--'Enter our gates! Level our palaces to
the ground! Confound, if you will, in one common slaughter, we that are victims with these
that are tyrants! Your invasion will bring new lords to the land. They cannot crush it more--
they may oppress it less. Our posterity may gain their rights by the sacrifice of lives that our
country has made worthless. Romans though we are, we are ready to suffer and submit!' "

He stopped; for by this time he had lashed himself into fury. His eyes glared, his cheeks
flushed, his voice rose. Could he then have seen the faintest vision of the destiny that future
ages had in store for the posterity of the race that now suffered throughout civilized Europe,
like him--could he have imagined how, in after years, the "middle class," despised in his
day, was to rise to privilege and power; to hold in its just hands the balance of the prosperity
of nations; to crush oppression and regulate rule; to soar in its mighty flight above thrones,
and principalities, and ranks and riches, apparently obedient, but really commanding--could
he but have foreboded this, what a light must have burst upon his gloom, what a hope must
have soothed him in his despair!

To what further extremities his anger might have carried him, to what proceedings the
indignant Gordian, who still listened from his concealment, might have had recourse, it is
difficult to say; for the complaints of the ill-fated landholder and the cogitations of the
authoritative bailiff were alike suddenly suspended by an uproar raging at this moment
round a carriage which had just emerged from the palace we have elsewhere described.

This vehicle looked one mass of silver. Embroidered silk curtains fluttered all round it, gold
ornaments studded its polished sides, and it held no less a person than the nobleman who
had feasted the people with baskets of meat. This fact had become known to the rabble
before the palace gates. Such an opportunity of showing their exultation in their bondage,
their real servility in their imaginary independence, was not to be lost; and accordingly they
let loose such a torrent of clamorous gratitude on their entertainer's appearance, that a
stranger in Rome would have thought the city in revolt. They leaped, they ran, they danced
round the prancing horses, they flung their empty baskets into the air, and patted
approvingly their "fair round bellies." From every side, as the carriage moved on, they
gained fresh recruits and acquired new importance. The timid fled before them, the noisy
shouted with them, the bold plunged into their ranks; and the constant burden of their
rejoicing chorus was--"Health to the noble Pomponius! Prosperity to the senators of Rome,
who feast us with their food, and give us the freedom of their theaters! Glory to Pomponius!
Glory to the senators!"

Fate seemed on this day to take pleasure in pampering the insatiable curiosity of Gordian,
the bailiff. The cries of the multitude had scarcely died away in the distance, as they
followed the departing carriage, when the voices of two men, pitched to a low, confidential
tone, reached his ear from the opposite side of the pillar. He peeped cautiously round, and
saw that they were priests.

"What an eternal jester is that Pomponius!" said one voice. "He is going to receive
absolution, and he journeys in his chariot of state as if he were preparing to celebrate his
triumph, instead of to confess his sins!"

"Has he committed, then, fresh imprudence?"

"Alas, yes! For a senator he is dreadfully wanting in caution! A few days since, in a fit of
passion, he flung a drinking-cup at one of his female slaves. The girl died on the spot, and
her brother, who is also in his service, threatened immediate vengeance. To prevent
disagreeable consequences to his body, Pomponius has sent the fellow to his estates in
Egypt; and now, from the same precaution for the welfare of his soul, he goes to demand
absolution from our holy and beneficent Church."

"I am afraid these incessant absolutions, granted to men who are too careless even to make a
show of repentance for their crimes, will prejudice us with the people at large."

"Of what consequence are the sentiments of the people while we have their rulers on our
side? Absolution is the sorcery that binds these libertines of Rome to our will. We know
what converted Constantine--politic flattery and ready absolution; the people will tell you it
was the sign of the Cross."

"It is true this Pomponius is rich, and may increase our revenues, but still I fear the
indignation of the people."

"Fear nothing; think how long their old institutions imposed on them, and then doubt, if you
can, that we may shape them to our wishes as we will. Any deceptions will be successful
with a mob, if the instrument employed to forward them be a religion."

The voices ceased. Gordian, who still cherished a vague intention of denouncing the fugitive
landholder to the senatorial authorities, employed the liberty afforded to his attention by the
silence of the priests in turning to look after his intended victim. To his surprise he saw that
the man had left the auditors to whom he had before addressed himself, and was engaged in
earnest conversation, in another part of the portico, with an individual who seemed to have
recently joined him, and whose appearance was so remarkable that the bailiff had moved a
few steps forward to gain a nearer view of him, when he was once more arrested by the
voices of the priests.
 Irresolute for an instant to which party to devote his unscrupulous attention, he returned
mechanically to his old position. Ere long, however, his anxiety to hear the mysterious
communications proceeding between the landholder and his friend overbalanced his delight
in penetrating the theological secrets of the priests. He turned once more, but to his
astonishment the objects of his curiosity had disappeared. He stepped to the outside of the
portico and looked for them in every direction, but they were nowhere to be seen. Peevish
and disappointed, he returned as a last resource to the pillar where he had left the priests, but
the time consumed in his investigations after one party had been fatal to his reunion with the
other. The churchmen were gone.

Sufficiently punished for his curiosity by his disappointment, the bailiff walked doggedly
off toward the Pincian Hill. Had he turned in the contrary direction, toward the Basilica of
St. Peter, he would have found himself once more in the neighborhood of the landholder and
his remarkable friend, and would have gained that acquaintance with the subjects of their
conversation which we intend that the reader shall acquire in the course of the next chapter.

Chapter IV.
The Church.

IN the year 324, on the locality assigned by rumor to the martyrdom of St. Peter, and over
the ruins of the Circus of Nero, Constantine erected the church called the Basilica of St.
Peter.

For twelve centuries, this building, raised by a man infamous for his murders and his
tyrannies, stood uninjured amid the shocks which during that long period devastated the rest
of the city. After that time it was removed, tottering to its base from its own reverend and
illustrious age, by Pope Julius II., to make way for the foundations of the modern church.

It is toward this structure of twelve hundred years' duration, erected by hands stained with
blood, and yet preserved as a star of peace in the midst of stormy centuries of war, that we
would direct the reader's attention. What art has done for the modern church, time has
effected for the ancient. If the one is majestic to the eye by its grandeur, the other is
hallowed to the memory by its age.

As this church by its rise commemorated the triumphant establishment of Christianity as the
religion of Rome, so in its progress it reflected every change wrought in the spirit of the new
worship by the ambition, the prodigality, or the frivolity of the priests. At first it stood awful
and imposing, beautiful in all its parts as the religion for whose glory it was built. Vast
porphyry colonnades decorated its approaches, and surrounded a fountain whose waters
issued from the representation of a gigantic pine-tree in bronze. Its double rows of aisles
were each supported by forty-eight columns of precious marble. Its flat ceiling was adorned
with beams of gilt metal, rescued from the pollution of heathen temples. Its walls were
decorated with large paintings of religious subjects, and its tribunal was studded with
elegant mosaics. Thus it rose, simple and yet sublime, awful and yet alluring--in this its
beginning, a type of the dawn of the worship which it was elevated to represent. But when,
flushed with success, the priests seized on Christianity as their path to politics and their
introduction to power, the aspect of the Church gradually began to change. As, slowly and
insensibly, ambitious man heaped the garbage of his mysteries, his doctrines, and his
disputes, about the pristine purity of the structure given him by God, so, one by one, gaudy
adornments and meretricious alterations arose to sully the majestic Basilica until the
threatening and reproving apparition of the Pagan Julian, when both Church and churchmen
received in their corrupt progress a sudden and impressive check.

The short period of the revival of idolatry once passed over, the priests, unmoved by the
warning they had received, returned with renewed vigor to confuse that which both in their
Gospel and their Church had been once simple. Day by day they put forth fresh treatises,
aroused fierce controversies, subsided into new sects; and day by day they altered more and
more the once noble aspect of the ancient Basilica. They hung their nauseous relics on its
mighty walls, they stuck their tiny tapers about its glorious pillars; they wreathed their
tawdry fringes around its massive altars. Here they polished, there they embroidered.
Wherever there was a window, they curtained it with gaudy cloths; wherever there was a
statue they bedizened it with artificial flowers; wherever there was a solemn recess, they
outraged its religious gloom with intruding light; until (arriving at the period we write of)
they succeeded so completely in changing the aspect of the building, that it looked within
more like a vast Pagan toy-shop than a Christian church. Here and there, it is true, a pillar or
an altar rose unencumbered as of old, appearing as much at variance with the frippery that
surrounded it, as a text of Scripture quoted in a sermon of the time. But as regarded the
general aspect of the Basilica, the decent glories of its earlier days seemed irrevocably
departed and destroyed

After what has been said of the edifice, the reader will have little difficulty in imagining that
the square in which it stool lost whatever elevation of character it might once have
possessed, with even greater rapidity than the church itself. If the cathedral now looked like
an immense toy-shop, assuredly its attendant colonnades had the appearance of the booths
of an enormous fair.

The day, whose decline we have hinted at in the preceding chapter, was fast verging toward
its close, as the inhabitants of the streets on the western bank of the Tiber prepared to join
the crowds that they beheld passing by their windows, in the direction of the Basilica of St.
Peter. The cause of this sudden confluence of the popular current in one common direction
was made sufficiently apparent to all inquirers who happened to be near a church or a public
building, by the appearance in such situations of a large sheet of vellum elaborately
illuminated, raised on a high pole, and guarded from contact with the inquisitive rabble by
two armed soldiers. The announcements set forth in these strange placards were all of the
same nature and directed to the same end. in each of them the Bishop of Rome informed his
"pious and honorable brethren," the inhabitants of the city, that as the next day was the
anniversary of the Martyrdom of St. Luke, the vigil would necessarily be held on that
evening in the Basilica of St. Peter; and that, in consideration of the importance of the
occasion, there would be exhibited, before the commencement of the ceremony, those
precious relics connected with the death of the saint which had become the inestimable
inheritance of the Church; and which consisted of a branch of the olive-tree to which St.
Luke was hanged, a piece of the noose--including the knot--which had been passed round
his neck, and a picture of the Apotheosis of the Virgin painted by his own hand. After some
sentences expressive of lamentation for the sufferings of the saint, which nobody read, and
which it is unnecessary to reproduce here, the proclamation went on to state that a sermon
would be preached in the course of the vigil, and that at a later hour the great chandelier,
containing two thousand four hundred lamps, would be lighted to illuminate the church.
Finally, the worthy bishop called upon all members of his flock, in consideration of the
solemnity of the day, to abstain from sensual pleasures, in order that they might the more
piously and worthily contemplate the sacred objects submitted to their view, and digest the
spiritual nourishment to be offered to their understandings.

From the specimen we have already given of the character of the populace of Rome, it will
perhaps be unnecessary to say that the great attractions presented by this theological bill of
fare were the relics and the chandelier. Pulpit eloquence and vigil solemnities alone must
have long exhibited their more sober allurements before they could have drawn into the
streets a fiftieth part of the immense crowd that now hurried toward the desecrated Basilica.
Indeed, so vast was the assemblage soon congregated, that the advanced ranks of sight-seers
had already filled the church to overflowing, before those in the rear had come within view
of the colonnades.

However dissatisfied the unsuccessful portion of the citizens might feel at their exclusion
from the church, they found a powerful counter-attraction in the amusements going forward
in the Place, the occupants of which seemed thoroughly regardless of the bishop's
admonitions upon the sobriety of behavior due to the solemnity of the day. As if in utter
defiance of the decency and order recommended by the clergy, popular exhibitions of all
sorts were set up on the broad flagstones of the great space before the church. Street
dancing-girls exercised at every available spot those "gliding gyrations," so eloquently
condemned by the worthy Ammianus Marcellinus of orderly and historical memory. Booths
crammed with relics of doubtful authenticity; baskets filled with neat manuscript abstracts
of furiously controversial pamphlets; Pagan images regenerated into portraits of saints;
pictorial representations of Arians writhing in damnation, and martyrs basking in halos of
celestial light, tempted, in every direction, the more pious among the spectators. Cooks
perambulated with their shops on their backs; rival slave merchants shouted petitions for
patronage; wine-sellers taught Bacchanalian philosophy from the tops of their casks; poets
recited compositions for sale; sophisters held arguments destined to convert the wavering
and perplex the ignorant. Incessant motion and incessant noise seemed to be the sole
compensations sought by the multitude for the disappointment of exclusion from the church.
If a stranger, after reading the proclamation of the day, had proceeded to the Basilica to
feast his eyes on the contemplation of the illustrious aggregate of humanity, entitled by the
bishop "his pious and honorable brethren," he must--on mixing at this moment with the
assemblage--have either doubted the truth of the episcopal appellation, or have given the
citizens credit for that refinement of intrinsic worth which is of too elevated a nature to
influence the character of the outward man.

At the time when the sun set, nothing could be more picturesque than the distant view of
this joyous scene. The deep red rays of the departing luminary cast their radiance, partly
from behind the church, over the vast multitude in the Place. Brightly and rapidly the rich
light roved over the waters that leaped toward it from the fountain in all the loveliness of
natural and evanescent form. Bathed in that brilliant glow, the smooth prophyry colonnades
reflected, chameleon-like, ethereal and varying hues; the white marble statues became
suffused in a delicate rose-color, and the sober-tinted trees gleamed in the innermost of their
leafy depths as if steeped in the exhalations of a golden mist. While, contrasting strangely
with the wondrous radiance around them, the huge bronze pine-tree in the middle of the
Place, and the wide front of the Basilica, rose up in gloomy shadow, indefinite and
exaggerated, lowering like evil spirits over the joyous beauty of the rest of the scene, and
casting their great depths of shade into the midst of the light whose dominion they despised.
Beheld from a distance, this wild combination of vivid brightness and solemn gloom; these
buildings, at one place darkened till they looked gigantic, at another lightened till they
appeared ethereal; these crowded groups, seeming one great moving mass gleaming at this
point in radiant light, obscured at that in thick shadow, made up a whole so incongruous and
yet so beautiful, so grotesque and yet so sublime, that the scene looked for the moment more
like some inhabited meteor, half eclipsed by its propinquity to earth, than a mortal and
material prospect.

The beauties of this atmospheric effect were of far too serious and sublime a nature to
interest the multitude in the Place. Out of the whole assemblage, but two men watched that
glorious sunset with even an appearance of the admiration and attention which it deserved.
One was the landholder whose wrongs were related in the preceding chapter; the other his
remarkable friend.
These two men formed a singular contrast to each other, both in demeanor and appearance,
as they gazed forth upon the crimson heaven. The landholder was an under-sized, restless-
looking man, whose features, naturally sharp, were now distorted by a fixed expression of
misery and discontent. His quick, penetrating glance wandered incessantly from place to
place, perceiving all things, hut resting on none. In his attention to the scene before him, he
appeared to have been led more by the influence of example than by his own spontaneous
feelings; for ever and anon he looked impatiently round upon his friend as if expecting him
to speak--but no word or movement escaped his thoughtful companion. Occupied
exclusively in his own contemplations, he appeared wholly insensible to any ordinary
outward appeal.

In age and appearance this individual was in the decline of life; for he had numbered sixty
years, his hair was completely gray, and his face was covered with deep wrinkles. Yet, in
spite of these disadvantages, he was in the highest sense of the word a handsome man.
Though worn and thin, his features were still bold and regular; and there was an elevation
about the habitual mournfulness of his expression, and an intelligence about his somewhat
severe and earnest eyes, that bore eloquent testimony to the superiority of his intellectual
powers. As he now stood gazing fixedly out into the glowing. sky, his tall, meager figure
half supported upon his staff, his lips firmly compressed, his brow slightly frowning, and his
attitude firm and motionless; the most superficial observer must have felt immediately that
he looked on no ordinary being. The history of a life of deep thought--perhaps of long
sorrow--seemed written in every lineament of his meditative countenance; and there was a
natural dignity in his manner, which evidently restrained his restless companion from
offering any determined interruption to the course of his reflections.

Slowly and gorgeously the sun had continued to wane in the horizon until he was now lost
to view. As his last rays sunk behind the distant hills, the stranger started from his reverie
and approached the landholder, pointing with his staff toward the fast-fading brightness of
the western sky.

"Probus," said he, in a low, melancholy voice, "as I looked on that sunset, I thought on the
condition of the Church."

"I see little in the Church to think of, or in the sunset to observe," replied his companion.

"How pure, how vivid," murmured the other, I scarcely heeding the landholder's remark,
"was the light which that sun cast upon this earth at our feet! How nobly for a time its
brightness triumphed over the shadows around; and yet, in spite of the promise of that
radiance, how swiftly did it fade ere long in its conflict with the gloom I--how thoroughly,
even now, has it departed from the earth, and withdrawn the beauty of its glory from the
heaven! Already the shadows are lengthening around us, and shrouding in their darkness
every object in the Place. But a short hour hence, and--should no moon arise--the gloom of
night will stretch unresisted over Rome!"

"To what purpose do you tell me this?"

"Are you not reminded, by what we have observed, of the course of the worship which it is
our privilege to profess? Does not that first beautiful light denote its pure and perfect rise;
that short conflict. between the radiance and the gloom, its successful preservation by the
Apostles and the Fathers; that rapid fading of the radiance, its desecration in later times; and
the gloom which now surrounds us, the destruction which has encompassed it in this age we
live in?--a destruction which nothing can avert but a return to that pure first faith that should
now be the hope of our religion, as the moon is the hope of night!"

"How should we reform? Do people who have no liberties care about a religion? Who is to
teach them?"

"I have--I will. It is the purpose of my life to restore to them the holiness of the ancient
Church; to rescue them from the snares of traitors to the faith, whom men call priests. They
shall learn through me that the Church knew no adornment once but the presence of the
pure; that the priest craved no finer vestment than his holiness; that the Gospel, which once
taught humility and now raises dispute, was in former days the rule of faith--sufficient for
all wants, powerful over all difficulties. Through me they shall know that in times past it
was the guardian of the heart; through me they shall see that in times present it is the
plaything of the proud; through me they shall fear that in times future it may become the
exile of the Church! To this task I have vowed myself; to overthrow this idolatry--which,
like another paganism, rises among us with its images, its relics, its jewels, and its gold--I
will devote my child, my life, my energies, and my possessions. From this attempt I will
never turn aside--from this determination I will never flinch. While I have a breath of life in
me, I will persevere in restoring to this abandoned city the true worship of the Most High!"

He ceased abruptly. The intensity of his agitation seemed suddenly to deny to him the
faculty of speech. Every muscle in tile frame of that stern, melancholy man quivered at the
immortal promptings of tile soul within him. There was something almost feminine in his
universal susceptibility to the influence of one solitary emotion. Even the rough, desperate
landholder felt awed by the enthusiasm of the being before him, and forgot his wrongs,
terrible as they were--and his misery, poignant as it was--as he gazed upon his companion's
face.

For some minutes neither of the men said more. Soon, however, the last speaker calmed his
agitation with the facility of a man accustomed to stifle the emotions that he cannot crush,
and advancing to the landholder, took him sorrowfully by the hand.
"I see, Probus, that I have amazed you," said he; "but the Church is the only subject on
which I have no discretion. In all other matters I have conquered the rashness of my early
manhood; in this I have to wrestle with my hastier nature still. When I look on tile
mockeries that are acting around us; when I behold a priesthood of deceivers, a people
deluded, a religion defiled, then, I confess it, my indignation overpowers my patience, and I
burn to destroy where I ought only to hope to reform."

"I knew you always violent of imagination; but when I last saw you, your enthusiasm was
love. Your wife--"

"Peace! She deceived me!"

"Your child--"

"Lives with me at Rome."

"I remember her an infant, when, fourteen years since, I was your neighbor in Gaul. On my
departure from the province, you had just returned from a journey into Italy, unsuccessful in
your attempts to discover there a trace either of your parents, or of that elder brother whose
absence you were wont so continually to lament. Tell me, have you, since that period,
discovered the members of your ancient household? Hitherto you have been so occupied in
listening to the history of my wrongs, that you have scarcely spoken of the changes in your
life since we last met."

"If, Probus, I have been silent to you concerning myself, it is because for me retrospection
has little that attracts. While yet it was in my power to return to those parents whom I
deserted in my boyhood, I thought not of repentance; and now, that they must be but too
surely lost to me, my yearning toward them is of no avail. Of my brother, from whom I
parted in a moment of childish jealousy and anger, and whose pardon and love I would give
up even my ambition to acquire, I have never yet discovered a trace. Atonement to those
whom I injured in early life is a privilege denied to the prayers of my age. From my parents
and my brother I departed unblessed, and, unforgiven by them, I feel that I am doomed to
die! My life has been careless, useless, godless, passing from rapine and violence to luxury
and indolence, and leading me to the marriage which I exulted in when I last saw you, but
which I now feel was unworthy, alike in its motives and its results. But blessed and thrice
blessed be that last calamity of my wicked existence, for it opened my eyes to the truth--it
made a Christian of me while I was yet alive

"Is it thus that the Christian can view his afflictions? I would, then, that I were a Christian
like you!" murmured the landholder in low, earnest tones.
"It was in those first days, Probus," continued the other, "when I found myself deserted and
dishonored, left alone to be the guardian of my helpless child, exiled forever from a home
that I bad myself forsaken, that I repented me in earnest of my misdeeds, that I sought
wisdom from the Book of Salvation, and the conduct of life from the Fathers of the Church.
It was at that time that I determined to devote my child, like Samuel of old, to the service of
Heaven, and myself to the reformation of our degraded worship. As I have already told you,
I forsook my abode and changed my name (remember it is as 'Numerian' that you must
henceforth address me), that of my former self no remains might be left, that of my former
companions not one might ever discover and tempt me again. With incessant care have I
shielded my daughter from the contamination of the world. As a precious jewel in a miser's
hands she has been watched and guarded in her father's house. Her destiny is to soothe the
afflicted, to watch the sick, to succor the forlorn, when I, her teacher, have restored to the
land the dominion of its ancient faith, and the guidance of its faultless Gospel. We have
neither of us an affection or a hope that can bind us to the things of earth. Our hearts look
both toward Heaven; our expectations are only from on high!"

"Do not set your hopes too firmly on your child. Remember how the nobles of Rome have
destroyed the household I once had, and tremble for your own."

"I have no fear for my daughter; she is cared for in my absence by one who is vowed to aid
me in my labors for the Church. It is now nearly a year since I first met Ulpius, and from
that time forth he has devoted himself to my service and watched over my child."

"Who is this Ulpius, that you should put such faith in him?"

"He is a man of age like mine. I found him, like me, worn down by the calamities of his
early life, and abandoned, as I had once been, to the delusions of the Pagan gods. He was
desolate, suffering, forlorn, and I had pity on him in his misery. I proved to him that the
worship he still professed was banished for its iniquities from the land; that the religion
which had succeeded it had become defiled by man, and that there remained hut one faith
for him to choose, if he would be saved--the faith of the early Church. He heard me and was
converted. From that moment he has served me patiently and helped me willingly. Under
the roof where I assemble the few who as yet are true believers, he is always the first to
come and the last to remain. No word of anger has ever crossed his lips--no look of
impatience has ever appeared in his eyes. Though sorrowful, be is gentle; though suffering,
he is industrious. I have trusted him with all I possess, and I glory in my credulity! Ulpius is
incorruptible!"

"And your daughter?--is Ulpius reverenced by her, as he is respected by you?"

"She knows that her duty is to love whom I love, and to avoid whom I avoid. Can you
imagine that a Christian virgin has any feelings disobedient to her father's wishes? Come to
my house; judge with your own eyes of my daughter and my companion. You, whose
misfortunes have left you no home, shall find one, if you will, with me. Come, then, and
labor with me in my great undertaking! You will withdraw your mind from the
contemplation of your woes, and merit by your devotion the favor of the Most High."

"No, Numerian, I will still be independent, even of my friends! Nor Rome, nor Italy, are
abiding-places for me. I go to another land to abide among another people, until the arms of
a conqueror shall have restored freedom to the brave and protection to the honest throughout
the countries of the empire."

"Probus, I implore you to stay!"

"Never! My determination is taken; Numerian, farewell!"

And the landholder hurried rapidly away, as if fearful to trust his resolution any longer
against the persuasions of his friend.

For a few minutes Numerian stood motionless, gazing wistfully in the direction taken by his
companion on his departure. At first, an expression of grief and pity softened the austerity
which seemed the habitual characteristic of his countenance when in repose, but soon these
milder and tenderer feelings appeared to vanish from his heart as suddenly as they had
arisen; his features re-assumed their customary sternness, and he muttered to himself as he
mixed with the crowd struggling onward in the direction of the Basilica, "Let him depart
unregretted; he has denied himself to the service of his Maker. He should no longer be my
friend."

In this sentence lay the index to the character of the man. His existence was one vast
sacrifice, one scene of intrepid self-immolation. Although, in the brief hints at the events of
his life which he had communicated to his friend, he had exaggerated the extent of his
errors, he had by no means done justice to the fervor of his penitence, a penitence which
outstripped the usual boundaries of repentance, and only began in despair to terminate in
fanaticism. His desertion of his father's house (into the motives of which it is not our present
intention to enter), and his long subsequent existence of violence and excess, indisposed his
naturally strong passions to submit to the slightest restraint. In obedience to their first
impulses, he contracted, at a mature age, a marriage with a woman thoroughly unworthy of
the ardent admiration that she had inspired. When he found himself deceived and
dishonored by her, the shock of such an affliction thrilled through his whole being--crushed
all his energies--struck him prostrate, heart and mind, atone blow. The errors of his youth,
committed in his prosperity with moral impunity, reacted upon him in his adversity with an
influence fatal to his future peace. His repentance was darkened by despondency; his
resolutions were unbrightened by hope. He flew to religion as the suicide flies to the knife--
in despair.
Leaving all remaining peculiarities in Numerian's character to be discussed at a future
opportunity, we will now follow him in his passage through the crowd, to the entrance of
the Basilica--continuing to designate him, here and elsewhere, by the name which he had
assumed on his conversion, and by which he had insisted on being addressed during his
interview with the fugitive landholder.

Although at the commencement of his progress toward the church our enthusiast found
himself placed among the hindermost of the members of the advancing throng, he soon
contrived so thoroughly to outstrip his dilatory and discursive neighbors as to gain, with
little delay, the steps of the sacred building. Here, in common with many others, he was
compelled to stop, while those nearest the Basilica squeezed their way through its stately
doors. In such a situation his remarkable figure could not fail to be noticed, and he was
silently recognized by many of the by-standers--some of whom looked on him with wonder,
and some with aversion. Nobody, however, approached or spoke to him. Every one felt the
necessity of shunning a man whose bold and daily exposures of the abuses of the Church
placed in incessant peril his liberty, and even his life.

Among the by-standers who surrounded Numerian, there were nevertheless two who did not
remain content with carelessly avoiding any communication with the intrepid and suspected
Reformer. These two men belonged to the lowest order of the clergy, and appeared to be
occupied in cautiously watching the actions and listening to the conversation of the
individuals immediately around them. The instant they beheld Numerian, they moved so as
to elude his observation, taking care, at the same time, to occupy such a position as enabled
them to keep in view the object of their evident distrust.

"Look, Osius," said one, "that man is here again!"

"And doubtless with the same motives which brought him here yesterday," replied the other.
"You will see that he will again enter the church, listen to the service, retire to his little
chapel near the Pincian Mount, and there, before his ragged mob of adherents, attack the
doctrines which our brethren have preached, as we know he did last night, and as we suspect
he will continue to do, until the authorities think proper to give the signal for his
imprisonment."

"I marvel that he should have been permitted to persist so long a time as he has in his course
of contumacy toward the Church. Have we not evidence enough in his writings alone to
convict him of heresy? The carelessness of the bishop upon such a matter as this is quite
inexplicable!"

"You should consider, Numerian not being a priest, that the carelessness about our interests
lies more with the Senate than the bishop. What time our nobles can spare from their
debaucheries has been lately given to discussions on the conduct of the emperor in retiring
to Ravenna, and will now be dedicated to penetrating the basis of this rumor about the
Goths. Besides, even were they at liberty, what care the Senate about theological disputes?
They only know this Numerian as a citizen of Rome, a man of some influence and
possessions, and, consequently, a person of political importance as a member of the
population. In addition to which, it would be no easy task for us, at the present moment, to
impugn the doctrines broached by our assailant; for the fellow has a troublesome facility of
supporting what he says by the Bible. Believe me, in this matter, our only way of righting
ourselves will be to convict him of scandal against the highest dignitaries of the Church."

"The order that we have lately received to track his movements and listen to his discourses,
leads me to believe that our superiors are of your opinion."

"Whether my convictions are correct or not, of this I feel assured, that his days of liberty are
numbered. It was but a few hours ago that I saw the bishop's chamberlain's head-assistant,
and he told me that he had heard, through the crevice of a door--"

"Hush! he moves; he is pressing forward to enter the church. You can tell me what you were
about to say as we follow him. Quick! let us mix with the crowd."

Ever enthusiastic in the performance of their loathsome duties, these two discreet pastors of
a Christian flock followed Numerian with the most elaborate caution into the interior of the
sacred building.

Although the sun still left a faint streak of red in the western sky, and the moon had as yet
scarcely risen, the great chandelier of two thousand four hundred lamps, mentioned by the
bishop in his address to the people was already alight. In the days of its severe and sacred
beauty, the appearance to the church would have suffered fatally by this blaze of artificial
brilliancy; but now that the ancient character of the Basilica was completely changed, now
that from a solemn temple it had been altered to the semblance of a luxurious palace, it
gained immensely by its gaudy illumination. Not an ornament along the vast extent of its
glorious nave but glittered in vivid distinctness in the dazzling light that poured downward
from the roof. The gilded rafters, the smooth inlaid marble pillars, the rich hangings of the
windows, the jeweled candlesticks on the altars, the pictures, the statues, the bronzes, the
mosaics, each and all glowed with a steady and luxurious transparency, absolutely
intoxicating to the eye. Not a trace of wear, not a vestige of tarnish now appeared on any
object. Each portion of the nave to which the attention was directed appeared too finely,
spotlessly radiant ever to have been touched by mortal hands. Entranced and bewildered, the
observation roamed over the surface of the brilliant scene, until, wearied by the unbroken
embellishment of the prospect, it wandered for repose upon the dimly-lighted aisles, and
dwelt with delight upon the soft shadows that hovered about their distant pillars, and the
gliding forms that peopled their dusky recesses or loitered past their lofty walls.
At the moment when Numerian entered the Basilica a part of the service had just concluded.
The last faint echo from the voices of the choir still hung upon the incense-laden air, and the
vast masses of the spectators were still grouped in their listening and various attitudes, as
the devoted reformer looked forth upon the church. Even he, stern as he was, seemed for a
moment subdued by the ineffable enchantment of the scene; but ere long, as if displeased
with his own involuntary emotions of admiration, his brow contracted, and he sighed
heavily, as (still followed by the attentive spies) he sought the comparative seclusion of the
aisles.

During the interval between the divisions of the service, the congregation occupied
themselves in staring at the relics, which were inclosed in a silver cabinet with crystal doors,
and placed on the top of the high altar. Although it was impossible to obtain a satisfactory
view of these ecclesiastical treasures, they nevertheless employed the attention of every one,
until the appearance of a priest in the pulpit gave signal of the commencement of the
sermon, and admonished all those who had seats to secure them without delay.

Passing through the ranks of the auditors of the sermon--some of whom were engaged in
counting the lights in the chandelier, to be certain that the bishop had not defrauded them of
one out of the two thousand four hundred lamps; others in holding whispered conversations,
and opening small boxes of sweetmeats--we again conduct the reader to the outside of the
church.

The assemblage here had by this time much diminished; the shadows flung over the ground
by the lofty colonnades had deepened and increased; and in many of the more remote
recesses of the Place hardly a human being was to be observed. At one of these extremities,
where the pillars terminated in the street and the obscurity was most intense, stood a solitary
old man keeping himself cautiously concealed in the darkness, and looking out anxiously
upon the public way immediately before him.

He had waited but a short time when a handsome chariot, preceded by a body-guard of
gayly-attired slaves, stopped within a few paces of his lurking-place, and the voice of the
person it contained pronounced audibly the following words:

"No, no! Drive on--we are later than I thought. If I stay to see this illumination of the
Basilica, I shall not be in time to receive my guests for to-night's banquet. Besides, this
inestimable kitten of the breed most worshiped by the ancient Egyptians has already taken
cold, and I would not for the world expose the susceptible animal any longer than is
necessary to the dampness of the night air. Drive on, good Carrio, drive on!"

The old man scarcely waited for the conclusion of this speech before he ran up to the
chariot, where he was immediately confronted by two heads, one that of Vetranio, the
senator, the other that of a glossy black kitten adorned with a collar of rubies, and half
enveloped in its master's ample robes. Before the astonished noble could articulate a word,
the man whispered, in hoarse, hurried accents, "I am Ulpius--dismiss your servants--I have
something important to say!"

"Ha! my worthy Ulpius! You have a most unhappy faculty of delivering a message with the
manner of an assassin. But I must pardon your unpleasant abruptness in consideration of
your diligence. My excellent Carrio, if you value my approbation, remove your companions
and yourself out of hearing!"

The freedman yielded instant obedience to his master's mandate. The following
conversation then took place, the strange man opening it thus:

"You remember your promise?"

"I do."

"Upon your honor, as a nobleman and a senator, you arc prepared to abide by it whenever it
is necessary?"

"I am."

"Then at the dawn of morning meet me at the private gate of your palace garden, and I will
conduct you to Antonina's bed-chamber."

"The time will suit me. But why at the dawn of morning?"

"Because the Christian dotard will keep a vigil until midnight, which the girl will most
probably attend. I wished to tell you this at your palace, but I heard there that you had gone
to Aricia, and would return by way of the Basilica. So I posted myself to intercept you
thus."

"Industrious Ulpius!"

"Remember your promise."

Vetranio leaned forward to reply, but Ulpius was gone.

As the senator again commanded his equipage to move on, he looked anxiously around him,
as if once more expecting to see his strange adherent still lurking near the chariot. He only
perceived, however, a man whom he did not know, followed by two others, walking rapidly
past him. They were Numerian and the spies.
 "At last my projects are approaching consummation," exclaimed Vetranio to himself, as he
and his kitten rolled off in the chariot. "It is well that I thought of securing possession of
Julia's villa to-day, for I shall now, assuredly, want to use it to-morrow. Jupiter! what a mass
of dangers, contradictions, and mysteries encompass this affair! When I think that I, who
prided myself on my philosophy, have quitted Ravenna; borrowed a private villa; leagued
myself with an uncultivated plebeian; and all for the sake of a girl, who has already
deceived my expectations by gaining me as a music-master without admitting me as a lover,
I am positively astonished at my own weakness! Still it must be owned that the complexion
my adventure has lately assumed renders it of some interest in itself. The mere pleasure of
penetrating the secrets of this Numerian's household is by no means the least among the
numerous attractions of my design. How has he gained his influence over the girl? Why
does he keep her in such strict seclusion? Who is this old, half-frantic, unceremonious man-
monster, calling himself Ulpius; refusing all reward for his villainy; raving about a return to
the old religion of the gods; and exulting in the promise he has extorted from me, as a good
Pagan, to support the first restoration of the ancient worship that may be attempted in
Rome? Where does he come from? Why does he outwardly profess himself a Christian?
What sent him into Numerian's service? By the girdle of Venus! everything connected with
the girl is as incomprehensible as herself! But patience--patience! A few hours more, and
these mysteries will be revealed. In the meantime, let me think of my banquet, and of its
presiding deity, the Nightingale Sauce!"

Chapter V.
Antonina.

WHO that has been at Rome does not remember with delight the attractions of the Pincian
Hill? Who, after toiling through the wonders of the dark, melancholy city, has not been
revived by a visit to its shady walks, and by breathing its fragrant breezes? Amid the solemn
mournfulness that reigns over declining Rome, this delightful elevation rises light, airy, and
inviting, at once a refreshment to the body and a solace to the spirit. From its smooth
summit the city is seen in its utmost majesty, and the surrounding country in its brightest
aspect. The crimes and miseries of Rome seem deterred from approaching its favored soil; it
impresses the mind as a place set apart by common consent for the presence of the innocent
and the joyful--as a scene that rest and recreation keep sacred from the intrusion of tumult
and toil.

Its appearance in modern days is the picture of its character for ages past. Successive wars
might dull its beauties for a time, but peace invariably restored them in all their pristine
loveliness. The old Romans called it "The Mount of Gardens." Throughout the disasters of
the Empire and the convulsions of the Middle Ages, it continued to merit its ancient
appellation, and a "Mount of Gardens" it still triumphantly remains to the present day.

At the commencement of the fifth century, the magnificence of the Pincian Hill was at its
zenith. Were it consistent with the conduct of our story to dwell upon the glories of its
palaces and its groves, its temples and its theaters, such a glowing prospect of artificial
splendor, aided by natural beauty, might be spread before the reader as would tax his
credulity, while it excited his astonishment. This task, however, it is here unnecessary to
attempt. it is not for the wonders of ancient luxury and taste, but for the abode of the zealous
and religious Numerian, that we find it now requisite to arouse interest and engage attention.

At the back of the Flaminian extremity of the Pincian Hill, and immediately overlooking the
city wall, stood, at the period of which we write, a small but elegantly built house,
surrounded by a little garden of its own, and protected at the back by the lofty groves and
outbuildings of the palace of Vetranio, the senator. This abode had been at one time a sport
of summer-house belonging to the former proprietor of a neighboring mansion.

Profligate necessities had obliged the owner to part with this portion of Ins possessions,
which was purchased by a merchant well known to Numerian, who received it as a legacy at
his friend's death. Disgusted, as soon as his reforming projects took possession of his mind,
at the bare idea of propinquity to the ennobled libertines of Rome, the austere Christian
determined to abandon his inheritance and to sell it to another; but at the repeated entreaties
of his daughter, he at length consented to change his purpose, and sacrifice his antipathy to
his luxurious neighbors to his child's youthful attachment to the beauties of nature, as
displayed in his legacy on the Piucian Mount. In this instance only did the natural affection
of the father prevail over the acquired severity of the reformer. Here he condescended, for
the first and the last time, to the sweet trivialities of youth. Here, indulgent in spite of
himself, he fixed his little household, and permitted to his daughter her sole recreations of
tending the flowers in the garden, and luxuriating in the loveliness of the distant view.

.....

The night has advanced an hour since the occurrences mentioned in the preceding chapter.

The clear and brilliant moonlight of Italy now pervades every district of the glorious city,
and bathes in its pure effulgence the groves and palaces on the Pincian Mount. From the
garden of Numerian the irregular buildings of the great suburbs of Rome, the rich,
undulating country beyond, and the long ranges of mountains in the distance, are now all
visible in the soft and luxurious light. Near the spot which commands this view, not a living
creature is to be seen on a first examination; but on a more industrious and patient
observation, you are subsequently able to detect at one of the windows of Numerian's house,
half hidden by a curtain, the figure of a young girl.
Soon this solitary form approaches nearer to the eye: the moonbeams that have hitherto
shone only upon the window now illuminate other objects. First, they display a small white
arm; then a light, simple robe; then a fair, graceful neck; and finally a bright, youthful,
innocent face, directed steadfastly toward the wide moon-brightened prospect of the distant
mountains.

For some time the girl remains in contemplation at her window. Then she leaves her post,
and almost immediately re-appears at a door leading into the garden. Her figure, as she
advances toward the lawn before her, is light and small; a natural grace and propriety appear
in her movements; she holds pressed to her bosom, and half concealed by her robe, a gilt
lute. When she reaches a turf bank commanding the same view as the window, she arranges
her instrument upon her knee, and with something of restraint in her manner gently touches
the chords. Then, as if alarmed at the sound she has produced, she glances anxiously around
her, apparently fearful of being overheard. Her large, dark, lustrous eyes have in them an
expression of apprehension; her delicate lips are half parted; a sudden flush rises in her soft,
olive complexion, as she examines every corner of the garden. Having completed her survey
without discovering any cause for the suspicions she seems to entertain, she again employs
herself over her instrument. Once more she strikes the chords, and now with a bolder hand.
The notes she produces resolve themselves into a wild, plaintive, irregular melody,
alternately rising and sinking, as if swayed by the fickle influence of a summer wind. These
sounds are soon harmoniously augmented by the young minstrel's voice, which is calm, still,
and mellow, and adapts itself with exquisite ingenuity to every arbitrary variation in the tone
of the accompaniment. The song that she has chosen is one of the fanciful odes of the day.
Its chief merit to her lies in its alliance to the strange Eastern air, which she heard at her first
interview with the senator who presented her with the lute. Paraphrased in English, the
words of the composition would run thus:

The Origin Of Music.

I.
Spirit, whose dominion reigns
Over Music's thrilling strains,
Whence may be thy distant birth?
Say, what tempted thee to earth?
Mortal, listen; I was born
In Creation's early years,
Singing, 'mid the stars of morn,
To the music of the spheres.
Once, as within the realms of space,
I view'd this mortal planet roll,
A yearning toward thy hapless race,
Unbidden, filled my seraph soul!
Angels, who had watch'd my birth,
 Heard me sigh to sing to earth;
'Twas transgression ne'er forgiv'n
To forget my native heav'n;
So they sternly bade me go--
Banish'd to the world below!
II.

Exil'd here, I knew no fears;

For, though darkness round me clung,
Though none heard me in the spheres,
Earth had listeners while I sung.
Young spirits of the Spring-sweet breeze,
Came thronging round me, soft and coy;
Light Wood-nymphs sported in the trees,
And laughing Echo leaped for joy!
Brooding Woe and writhing Pain
Soften'd at my gentle strain;
Bounding Joy, with footstep fleet,
Ran to nestle at my feet;
While aroused, delighted Love
Softly kissed me from above!
III.

Since those years of early time,

Faithful still to earth I've sung;
Flying through each distant clime,
Ever welcome, ever young!
Still pleas'd, my solace I impart,
Where brightest hopes are scattered dead
'Tis mine--sweet gift!--to charm the heart,
Though all its other joys have fled!
Time that withers all beside,
Harmless past me loves to glide;
Change, that mortals must obey,
Ne'er shall shake my gentle sway;
Still 'tis mine all hearts to move
In eternity of love!

As the last sounds of her voice and her lute died softly away upon the still night air, an
indescribable elevation appeared in the girl's countenance. She looked up rapturously into
the far, star-bright sky, her lip quivered, her dark eyes filled with tears, and her bosom
heaved with the excess of the emotions that the music and the scene inspired. Then she
gazed slowly around her, dwelling tenderly upon the fragrant flower-beds that were the
work of her own hands, and looking forth with an expression half reverential, half ecstatic,
over the long, smooth, shining plains, and the still, glorious mountains, that had so long
been the inspiration of her most cherished thoughts, and that now glowed before her eyes,
soft and beautiful as her dreams on her virgin couch. Then, overpowered by the artless
thoughts and innocent recollections which on the magic wings of Nature and Night came
wafted over her mind, she bent down her head upon her lute; pressed her round, dimpled
cheek against its smooth frame, and, drawing her fingers mechanically over its strings,
abandoned herself unreservedly to the reveries of maidenhood and youth.

Such was the being devoted by her father's fatal ambition to a life-long banishment from all
that is attractive in human art and beautiful in human intellect! Such was the daughter whose
existence was to be one long acquaintance with mortal woe, one unvaried refusal of mortal
pleasure, whose thoughts were to be only of sermons and fasts, whose actions were to be
confined to the binding of strangers' wounds and the drying of strangers' tears, whose life, in
brief, was doomed to be the embodiment of her father's austere ideal of the austere virgins
of the ancient Church!

Deprived of her mother, exiled from the companionship of others of her age, permitted no
familiarity with any living being--no sympathies with any other heart, commanded but never
indulged, rebuked but never applauded--she must have sunk beneath the severities imposed
on her by her father, but for the venial disobedience committed in the pursuit of the solitary
pleasure procured for her by her lute. Vainly, in her hours of study, did she read the fierce
anathemas against love, liberty, and pleasure, poetry, painting, and music, gold, silver, and
precious stones, which the ancient Fathers had composed for the benefit of the submissive
congregations of former days; vainly did she imagine, during those long hours of
theological instruction, that her heart's forbidden longings were banished and destroyed--
that her patient and childlike disposition was bowed in complete subserviency to the most
rigorous of her father's commands. No sooner were her interviews with Numerian
concluded, than the promptings of that nature within us, which artifice may warp but can
never destroy, lured her into a forgetfulness of all that she had heard, and a longing for
much that was forbidden. We live, in this existence, but by the companionship of some
sympathy, aspiration, or pursuit, which serves us as our habitual refuge from the tribulations
we inherit from the outer world. The same feeling which led Antonina, in her childhood, to
beg for a flower-garden, in her girlhood induced her to gain possession of a lute.

The passion for music which prompted her visit to Vetranio, which alone saved her
affections from pining in the solitude imposed on them, and which occupied her leisure
hours in the manner we have already described, was an inheritance of her birth.

Her Spanish mother had sung to her, hour after hour, in her cradle, for the short time during
which she was permitted to watch over her child. The impression thus made on the dawning
faculties of the infant nothing ever effaced. Though her earliest perceptions were greeted
only by the sight of her father's misery; though the form which his despairing penitence
soon assumed doomed her to a life of seclusion and an education of admonition, the
passionate attachment to the melody of sound inspired by her mother's voice, almost
imbibed at her mother's breast, lived through all neglect, and survived all opposition. It
found its nourishment in childish recollections, in snatches of street minstrelsy heard
through her window, in the passage of the night winds of winter through the groves on the
Pincian Mount, and received its rapturous gratification in the first audible sounds from the
Roman senator's lute. How her possession of an instrument, and her skill in playing, were
subsequently gained, the reader already knows from Vetranio's narrative at Ravenna. Could
the frivolous senator have discovered the real intensity of the emotions his art was raising in
his pupil's bosom while he taught her; could he have imagined how incessantly, during their
lessons, her sense of duty struggled with her love for music--how completely she was
absorbed, one moment by an agony of doubt and fear, another by an ecstasy of enjoyment
and hope, he would have felt little of that astonishment at her coldness toward himself
which he so warmly expressed at his interview with Julia in the gardens of the court. In
truth, nothing could be more complete than Antonina's childish unconsciousness of the
feelings with which Vetranio regarded her. In entering his presence, whatever remnant of
her affections remained unwithered by her fears was solely attracted and engrossed by the
beloved and beautiful lute. In receiving the instrument, she almost forgot the giver in the
triumph of possession; or, if she thought of him at all, it was to be grateful for having
escaped uninjured from a member of that class for whom her father's reiterated admonitions
had inspired her with a vague feeling of dread and distrust, and to determine that, now she
had acknowledged his kindness and departed from his domains, nothing should ever induce
her to risk discovery by her father and peril to herself, by ever entering them again.

Innocent in her isolation, almost infantine in her natural simplicity, a single enjoyment was
sufficient to satisfy all the passions of her age. Father, mother, lover, and companions;
liberties, amusements, and adornments--they were all summed up for her in that simple lute.
The archness, the liveliness, and the gentleness of her disposition; the poetry of her nature,
and the affection of her heart; the happy bloom of youth, which seclusion could not all
wither nor distorted precept taint, were now entirely nourished, expanded, and freshened--
such is the creative power of human emotion--by that inestimable possession. She could
speak to it, smile on it, caress it; and believe, in the ecstasy of her delight, in the
carelessness of her self-delusion, that it sympathized with her joy. During her long solitudes,
when she was silently watched in her father's absence by the brooding, melancholy stranger
whom he had set over her, it became a companion dearer than the flower-garden, dearer
even than the plains and mountains which formed her favorite view. When her father
returned, and she was led forth to sit in a dark place among strange, silent people, and to
listen to interminable declamations, it was a solace to think of the instrument, as it lay
hidden securely in her chamber; and to ponder delightedly on what new music of her own
she could play upon it next. And then, when evening arrived, and she was left alone in her
garden--then came the hour of moonlight and song, the moment of rapture and melody that
drew her out of herself, elevated her she felt not how, and transported her she knew not
whither.

But, while we thus linger over reflections on motives and examinations into character, we
are called back to the outer world of passing interests and events by the appearance of
another figure on the scene. We left Antonina in the garden thinking over her lute. She still
remains in her meditative position, but she is now no longer alone.

From the same steps by which she had descended, a man now advances into the garden, and
walks toward the place she occupies. His gait is limping; his stature crooked; his proportions
distorted. His large, angular features stand out in gaunt contrast to his shriveled cheeks. His
dry, matted hair has been burned by the sun into a strange, tawny brown. His expression is
one of fixed, stern, mournful thought. As he steps stealthily along, advancing toward
Antonina, he mutters to himself, and clutches mechanically at his garments, with his lank,
shapeless fingers. The radiant moonlight falling fully upon his countenance invests it with a
livid, mysterious, spectral appearance; seen by a stranger at the present moment he would
have been almost awful to look upon.

This was the man who had intercepted Vetranio on his journey home, and who had now
hurried back so as to regain his accustomed post before his master's return; for he was the
same individual mentioned by Numerian as his aged convert, Ulpius, in his interview with
the landholder at the Basilica of St. Peter.

When Ulpius had arrived within a few paces of the girl he stopped, saying, in a hoarse, thick
voice:

"Hide your toy--Numerian is at the gates!"

Antonina started violently as she listened to those repulsive accents. The blood rushed into
her cheeks; she hastily covered the lute with her robe; paused an instant, as if intending to
speak to the man, then shuddered violently, and hurried toward the house,

As she mounted the steps Numerian met her in the hall. There was now no chance of hiding
the lute in its accustomed place.

"You stay too late in the garden," said the father, looking proudly, in spite of all his
austerity, upon his beautiful daughter, as she stood by his side. "But what affects you?" he
added, noticing her confusion. "You tremble; your color comes and goes; your lips quiver;
give me your hand!"

As Antonina obeyed him, a fold of the treacherous robe slipped aside and discovered a part
of the frame of the lute. Numerian's quick eye discovered it immediately. He snatched the
instrument from her feeble grasp. His astonishment on beholding it was too great for words,
and for an instant he confronted the poor girl, whose pale face looked rigid with terror, in
ominous and expressive silence.

"This thing," said he at length, "this invention of libertines in my house--in my daughter's

possession!" and he dashed the lute into fragments on the floor.

For one moment Antonina looked incredulously on the ruins of the beloved companion
which was the center of all her happiest expectations for future days. Then, as she began to
estimate the reality of her deprivation, her eyes lost all their heaven-born brightness, and
filled to overflowing with the tears of earth.

"To your chamber!" thundered Numerian, as she knelt, sobbing convulsively, ever those
hapless fragments. "To your chamber! To-morrow shall bring this mystery of iniquity to
light!"

She rose humbly to obey him, for indignation had no part in the emotions that shook her
gentle and affectionate nature. As she moved toward the room that no lute was henceforth to
occupy, as she thought on the morrow that no lute was henceforth to enliven, her grief
almost overpowered her. She turned back, and looked imploringly at her father, as if
entreating permission to pick up even the smallest of the fragments at his feet.

"To your chamber!" he reiterated, sternly. "Am I to be disobeyed to my face?"

Without any repetition of her silent remonstrance, she instantly retired. As soon as she was
out of sight, Ulpius ascended the steps and stood before the angered father.

"Look, Ulpius," cried Numerian, "my daughter, whom I have so carefully cherished, whom
I intended for an example to the world, has deceived me, even thus!"

He pointed, as he spoke, to the ruins of the unfortunate lute; but Ulpius did not address to
him a word in reply, and he hastily continued:

"I will not sully the solemn offices of to-night by interrupting them with my worldly affairs.
To-morrow I will interrogate my disobedient child. In the meantime, do not imagine,
Ulpius, that I connect you in any way with this wicked and unworthy deception! In you I
have every confidence, in your faithfulness I have every hope!"

Again he paused, and again Ulpius kept silence. Any one less agitated, less confiding than
his unsuspicious master, would have remarked that a faint sinister smile was breaking forth
upon his haggard countenance. But Numerian's indignation was still too violent to permit
 him to observe, and, spite of his efforts to control himself, he again broke forth in
complaint.

"On this night, too, of all others," cried he, "when I had hoped to lead her among my little
assembly of the faithful, to join in their prayers, and to listen to my exhortations--on this
night I am doomed to find her a player on a Pagan lute, a possessor of the most wanton of
the world's vanities! God give me patience to worship this night with unwandering thoughts,
for my heart is vexed at the transgression of my child, as the heart of Eli of old at the
iniquities of his sons!"

He was moving rapidly away, when, as struck with a sudden recollection, he stopped
abruptly, and again addressed his gloomy companion.

"I will go by myself to the chapel to-night. said he. "You, Ulpius, will stay to keep watch
over my disobedient child. Be vigilant, good friend, over my house, for even now, on my
return, I thought that two strangers were following my steps, and I forebode some evil in
store for me as the chastisement for my sins, even greater than this misery of my daughter's
transgression. Be watchful, good Ulpius--be watchful!"

And as he hurried away, the stern, serious man felt as overwhelmed at the outrage that had
been offered to his gloomy fanaticism, as the weak, timid girl at the destruction that had
been wrecked upon her harmless lute.

After Numerian had departed, the sinister smile again appeared on the countenance of
Ulpius. He stood for a short time fixed in thought, and then began slowly to descend a
staircase near him, which led to some subterranean apartments. He had not gone far, when a
slight noise became audible at an extremity of the corridor above. As he listened for a
repetition of the sound, he heard a sob, and looking cautiously up, discovered, by the
moonlight, Antonina stepping cautiously along the marble pavement of the hall.

She held in her hand a little lamp; her small, feet were uncovered; the tears still streamed
her checks. She advanced with the greatest caution (as if fearful of being overheard) until
she gained the part of the floor still strewn with the ruins of the broken lute. Here she knelt
down, and pressed each fragment that lay before her separately to her lips. Then, hurriedly
concealing a single piece in her bosom, she arose and stole quickly away, in the direction by
which she had come.

"Be patient till the dawn," muttered her faithless guardian, gazing after her from his
concealment, as she disappeared; "it will bring to thy lute a restorer, and to Ulpius an ally!"

Chapter VI.
Apprenticeship To The Temple.

THE action of our characters, during the night included in the last two chapters, has now
come to a pause. Vetranio is awaiting his guests for the banquet; Numerian is in the chapel,
preparing the discourse that he is to deliver to his friends; Ulpius is meditating in his
master's house; Antonina is stretched upon her couch, caressing the precious fragment that
she has saved from the ruins of her lute. All the immediate agents of our story are, for the
present, in repose.

It is our purpose to take advantage of this interval of inaction, and direct the reader's
attention to a different country from that selected as the scene of our romance, and to such
historical events of past years as connect themselves remarkably with the early life of
Numerian's perfidious convert. This man will be found a person of great importance in the
future conduct of our story. It is necessary to the comprehension of his character, and the
penetration of such of his purposes as have been already hinted at, and may subsequently
appear, that the long course of his existence should be traced upward to its source.

It was in the reign of Julian, when the gods of the Pagan achieved their last victory over the
Gospel of the Christian, that a decently attired man, leading by the hand a handsome boy of
fifteen years of age, entered the gates of Alexandria, and proceeded hastily toward the high-
priest's dwelling in the Temple of Serapis.

After a stay of some hours at his destination, the man left the city alone as hastily as he
entered it, and was never after seen at Alexandria. The boy remained in the abode of the
high-priest until the next day, when he was solemnly devoted to the service of the Temple.

The boy was the young Emilius, afterward called Ulpius. He was nephew to the high-priest,
to whom he had been confided by his father, a merchant of Rome.

Ambition was the ruling passion of the father of Emilius. It had prompted him to aspire to
every distinction granted to the successful by the State, but it had not gifted him with the
powers requisite to turn his aspirations in any instance into acquisitions. He passed through
existence a disappointed man, planning but never performing, seeing his more fortunate
brother rising to the highest distinction in the priesthood, and finding himself irretrievably
condemned to exist in the affluent obscurity insured to him by his mercantile pursuits.

When his brother Macrinus, on Julian's accession to the imperial throne, arrived at the
pinnacle of power and celebrity as High-Priest of the Temple of Serapis, the unsuccessful
merchant lost all hope of rivaling his relative in the pursuit of distinction. His insatiable
ambition, discarded from himself, now settled on one of his infant sons. He determined that
his child should be successful where he had failed. Now that his brother had secured the
highest elevation in the Temple, no calling could offer more direct advantages to a member
of his household than the priesthood. His family had been from their earliest origin rigid
pagans. One of them had already attained to the most distinguished honors of his gorgeous
worship. He determined that another should rival his kinsman, and that that other should be
his eldest son. Firm in this resolution, he at once devoted his child to the great design which
he now held continually in view. He knew well that Paganism, revived though it was, was
not the universal worship that it had been; that it was now secretly resisted, and might soon
be openly opposed by the persecuted Christians throughout the empire; and that if the young
generation were to guard it successfully from all future encroachments, and to rise securely
to its highest honors, more must be exacted from them than the easy attachment to the
ancient religion required from the votaries of former days. Then the performance of the
most important offices in the priesthood was compatible with the possession of military or
political rank. Now it was to the Temple, and to the Temple only, that the future servant of
the gods should be devoted. Resolving thus, the father took care that all the son's
occupations and rewards should, from his earliest years, be in some way connected with the
career for which he was intended. His childish pleasures were to be conducted to sacrifices
and auguries; his childish playthings and prizes were images of the deities. No opposition
was offered on the boy's part to this plan of education. Far different from his younger
brother, whose turbulent disposition defied all authority, he was naturally docile; and his
imagination, vivid beyond his years, was easily led captive by any remarkable object
presented it. With such encouragement, his father became thoroughly engrossed by the
occupation of forming him for his future existence. His mother's influence over him was
jealously watched; the secret expression of her love, of her sorrow at the prospect of parting
with him, was ,ruthlessly suppressed whenever it was discovered; and his younger brother
was neglected, almost forgotten, in order that the parental watchfulness might be entirely
and invariably devoted to the eldest son.

When Emilius had numbered fifteen years, his father saw with delight that the time had
come when he could witness the commencement of the realization of all his projects. The
boy was removed from home, taken to Alexandria, and gladly left, by his proud and
triumphant father, under the especial guardianship of Macrinus, the high-priest.

The chief of the Temple fully sympathized in his brother's designs for the young Emilius.
As soon as the boy had entered on his new occupations, he was told that he must forget all
that he had left behind him at Rome; that he must look upon the high-priest as his father,
and upon the Temple, henceforth, as his home; and that the sole object of his present labors
and future ambition must be to rise in the service of the gods. Nor did Macrinus stop here.
So thoroughly anxious was he to stand to his pupil in the place of a parent, and to secure his
allegiance by withdrawing him in every way from the world in which he had hitherto lived,
that he even changed his name, giving to him one of his own appellations, and describing it
as a privilege to stimulate him to future exertions. From the boy Emilius, he was now
permanently transformed to the student Ulpius.

With such a natural disposition as we have already described, and under such guardianship
as that of the high-priest, there was little danger that Ulpius would disappoint the unusual
expectations which had been formed of him. His attention to his new duties never relaxed;
his obedience to his new masters never wavered. Whatever Macrinus demanded of him he
was sure to perform. Whatever longings he might feel to return to home, he never
discovered them--he never sought to gratify the tastes naturally peculiar to his age. The
high-priest and his colleague were astonished at the extraordinary readiness with which the
boy himself forwarded their intentions for him. Had they known how elaborately he had
been prepared for his future employments at his father's house, they would have been less
astonished at their pupil's unusual docility. Trained as he had been, he must have shown a
more than human perversity had he displayed any opposition to his uncle's wishes. He had
been permitted no childhood, either of thought or action. His natural precocity had been
seized as the engine to force his faculties into a perilous and unwholesome maturity; and
when his new duties demanded his attention, he entered on them with the same sincerity of
enthusiasm which his boyish coevals would have exhibited toward a new sport. His gradual
initiation into the mysteries of his religion created a strange, voluptuous sensation of fear
and interest in his mind. He heard the oracles, and he trembled; he attended the sacrifices
and the auguries, and he wondered. All the poetry of the bold and beautiful superstition to
which he was devoted, flowed overwhelmingly into his young heart, absorbing the service
of his fresh imagination, and transporting him incessantly from the vital realities of the outer
world to the shadowy regions of aspiration and thought.

But his duties did not entirely occupy the attention of Ulpius. The boy had his peculiar
pleasures as well as his peculiar occupations. When his employments were over for the day,
it was a strange, unearthly, vital enjoyment to him to wander softly in the shade of the
temple porticoes, looking down from his great mysterious eminence upon the populous and
sun-brightened city at his feet; watching the brilliant expanse of the waters of the Nile
glittering joyfully in the dazzling and pervading light; raising his eyes from the fields and
woods, the palaces and gardens, that stretched out before him below, to the lovely and
cloudless sky that watched round him afar and above, and that awoke all that his new duties
had left of the joyfulness, the affectionate sensibility which his rare intervals of
uninterrupted intercourse with his mother had implanted in his heart. Then, when the
daylight began to wane, and the moon and stars already grew beautiful in their places in the
firmament, he would pass into the subterranean vaults of the edifice, trembling, as his little
taper scarcely dispelled the dull, solemn gloom, and listening with breathless attention for
the voices of those guardian spirits whose fabled habitation was made in the apartments of
the sacred place. Or, when the multitude had departed for their amusements and their
homes, he would steal into the lofty halls and wander round the pedestals of the mighty
statues, breathing fearfully the still atmosphere of the temple, and watching the passage of
the cold, melancholy moonbeams through the openings in the roof, and over the colossal
limbs and features of the images of the Pagan gods. Sometimes, when the services of
Serapis and the cares attendant on his communications with the emperor were concluded,
Macrinus would lead his pupil into the garden of the priests, and praise him for his docility
till his heart throbbed with gratitude and pride. Sometimes he would convey him cautiously
outside the precincts of the sacred place, and show him, in the suburbs of the city, silent,
pale, melancholy men, gliding suspiciously through the gay, crowded streets, Those fugitive
figures he would declare were the enemies of the Temple and all that it contained;
conspirators against the emperor and the gods; wretches who were to be driven forth as
outcasts from humanity; whose appellation was "Christian;" and whose impious worship, if
tolerated, would deprive him of the uncle whom he loved, of the Temple that he reverenced,
and of the priestly dignity and renown which it should be his life's ambition to acquire.

Thus tutored in his duties by his guardian, and in his recreations by himself, as time wore on
the boy gradually lost every remaining characteristic of his age. Even the remembrance of
his mother and his mother's love grew faint on his memory. Serious, solitary, thoughtful, he
lived but to succeed in the Temple; he labored but to emulate the high-priest. All his
feelings and faculties were now enslaved by an ambition, at once unnatural at his present
age, and ominous of affliction for his future life. The design that Macrinus had
contemplated as the work of years, was perfected in a few months. The hope that his father
had scarce dared to entertain for his manhood, was already accomplished in his youth.

In these preparations for future success passed three years of the life of Ulpius. At the
expiration of that period, the death of Julian darkened the brilliant prospects of the pagan
world. Scarcely had the priests of Serapis recovered the first shock of astonishment and
grief consequent upon the fatal news of the vacancy in the imperial throne, when the edict of
toleration, issued by Jovian, the new emperor, reached the city of Alexandria, and was
elevated on the walls of the temple.

The first sight of this proclamation permitting freedom of worship to the Christians, aroused
in the highly-wrought disposition of Ulpius the most violent emotions of anger and
contempt. The enthusiasm of his character and age, guided invariably in the one direction of
his worship, took the character of the wildest fanaticism when he discovered the emperor's
careless infringement of the supremacy of the Temple. He volunteered, in the first moments
of his fury, to tear down the edict from the walls; to lead an attack on the meetings of the
triumphant Christians; or to travel to the imperial abode and exhort Jovian to withdraw his
act of perilous leniency ere it was too late. With difficulty did his more cautious
confederates restrain him from the execution of his impetuous designs. For two days he
withdrew himself from his companions, and brooded in solitude over the injury offered to
his beloved superstition, and the prospective augmentation of the influence of the Christian
sect.

But the despair of the young enthusiast was destined to be further augmented by a private
calamity, at once mysterious in its cause and overwhelming in its effect. Two days after the
publication of the edict, the High-Priest Macrinus, in the prime of vigor and manhood,
suddenly died.

To narrate the confusion and horror within and without the temple on the discovery of this
fatal event; to describe the execrations and tumults of the priests and the populace, who at
once suspected the favored and ambitious Christians of causing, by poison, the death of
their spiritual ruler, might be interesting as a history of the manners of the times, but is
immaterial to the object of this chapter. We prefer rather to trace the effect on the mind of
Ulpius, of his personal and private bereavement, of this loss--irretrievable to him--of the
master whom he loved, and the guardian whom it was his privilege to revere.

An illness of some months, during the latter part of which his attendants trembled for his life
and reason, sufficiently attested the sincerity of the grief of Ulpius for the loss of his
protector. During his paroxysms of delirium, the priests who watched round his bed drew
from his ravings many wise conclusions as to the effects that his seizure and its causes were
likely to produce on his future character; but in spite of all their penetration, they were still
far from appreciating to a tithe of its extent the revolution that his bereavement had wrought
in his disposition. The boy himself, until the moment of the high-priest's death, had never
been aware of the depth of his devotion to his second father. Warped as they had been by his
natural parent, the affectionate qualities that were the mainspring of his nature had never
been entirely destroyed; and they seized on every kind word and gentle action of Macrinus
as food which had been grudged them since their birth. Morally and intellectually, Macrinus
had been to him the beacon that pointed the direction of his course, the judge that regulated
his conduct, the Muse that he looked to for inspiration. And now, when this link which had
connected every ramification of his most cherished and governing ideas was suddenly
snapped asunder, a desolation sunk down upon his mind which at once paralyzed its
elasticity and withered its freshness. He glanced back, and he saw nothing but a home f rein
whose pleasures and affections his father's ambition had exiled him forever. He looked
forward, and as he thought of his unfitness, both from character and education, to mix in the
world as others mixed in it, he saw no guiding-star of social happiness for the conduct of his
existence to come. There was now no resource left for him, but entirely to deliver himself
up to those pursuits which had made his home as a strange place to him, which were
hallowed by their connection with the lost object of his attachment, and which would confer
the sole happiness and distinction that he could hope for in the wide world on his future life.
In addition to this motive for labor in his vocation, there existed in the mind of Ulpius a
deep and settled feeling that animated him with unceasing ardor for the prosecution of his
cherished occupations. This governing principle was detestation of the Christian sect. The
suspicion that others had entertained regarding the death of the high-priest was, to his mind,
a certainty. He rejected every idea which opposed his determined persuasion that the
jealousy of the Christians had prompted them to the murder, by poison, of the most
powerful and zealous of the pagan priests. To labor incessantly until he attained the
influence and position formerly enjoyed by his relative, and to use that influence and
position, when once acquired, as the means of avenging Macrinus, by sweeping every
vestige of the Christian faith from the face of the earth, were now the settled purposes of his
heart. Inspired by his determination, with the deliberate wisdom which is, in most men, the
result only of the experience of years, he employed the first days of his convalescence in
cautiously maturing his future plans and impartially calculating his chances of success. This
self-examination completed, he devoted himself at once and forever to his life's great
design. Nothing wearied, nothing discouraged, nothing impeded him. Outward events
passed by him unnoticed; the city's afflictions and the city's triumphs spoke no longer to his
heart. Year succeeded to year, but Time had no tongue for him. Paganism gradually sank,
and Christianity imperceptibly rose, but Change spread no picture before his eyes. The
whole outward world was a void to him until the moment arrived that beheld him successful
in his designs. His preparations for the future absorbed every faculty of his nature, and left
him, as to the present, a mere automaton, reflecting no principle and animated by no event--
a machine that moved, but did not perceive--a body that acted, without a mind that thought.

Returning for a moment to the outward world, we find that on the death of Jovian, in 364,
Valentinian, the new emperor, continued the system of toleration adopted by his
predecessor. On his death, in 375, Gratian, the successor to the imperial throne, so far
improved on the example of the two former potentates as to range himself boldly on the side
of the partisans of the new faith. Not content with merely encouraging, both by precept and
example, the growth of Christianity, the emperor further testified his zeal for the rising
religion by inflicting incessant persecutions upon the rapidly decreasing advocates of the
ancient worship; serving, by these acts of his reign, as a pioneer to his successor,
Theodosius the Great, in the religious revolution which that illustrious opponent of
Paganism was destined to effect.

The death of Gratian, in 383, saw Ulpius enrolled among the chief priests of the Temple,
and pointed out as the next inheritor of the important office once held by the powerful and
active Macrinus. Beholding himself thus secure of the distinction for which he had labored,
the aspiring priest found leisure, at length, to look forth upon the affairs of the passing day.
From every side desolation darkened the prospect that he beheld. Already, throughout many
provinces of the empire, the temples of the gods had been overthrown by the destructive
zeal of the triumphant Christians. Already hosts of the terrified people, fearing that the fate
of their idols might ultimately be their own, finding themselves deserted by their disbanded
priests, and surrounded by the implacable enemies of the ancient faith, had renounced their
worship for the sake of saving their lives and securing their property. On the wide field of
pagan ruin there now rose but one structure entirely unimpaired. The Temple of Serapis still
reared its head--unshaken, unbending, unpolluted. Here the sacrifice still prospered, and the
people still bowed in worship. Before this monument of the religious glories of ages, even
the rising power of Christian supremacy quailed in dismay. Though the ranks of its once
multitudinous congregations were now perceptibly thinned, though the new churches
swarmed with converts, though the edicts from Rome denounced it as a blot on the face of
the earth, its gloomy and solitary grandeur was still preserved. No unhallowed foot trod its
secret recesses; no destroying hand was raised, as yet, against its ancient and glorious walls.

Indignation, but not despondency, filled the heart of Ulpius as he surveyed the situation of
the pagan world. A determination nourished as his had been by the reflections of years, and
matured by incessant industry of deliberation, is above all those shocks which affect a hasty
decision or destroy a wavering intention. Impervious to failure, disasters urge it into action,
but never depress it to repose. Its existence is the air that preserves the vitality of the mind--
the spring that moves the action of the thoughts. Never, for a moment, did Ulpius waver in
his devotion to his great design, or despair of its ultimate execution and success. Though
every succeeding day brought the news of fresh misfortunes for the pagans and fresh
triumphs for the Christians, still, with a few of his more zealous comrades, he persisted in
expecting the advent of another Julian, and a day of restoration for the dismantled shrines of
the deities that he served. While the Temple of Serapis stood uninjured, to give
encouragement to his labors and refuge to his persecuted brethren, there existed for him
such an earnest of success as would spur him to any exertion, and nerve him against any
peril.

And now, to the astonishment of priests and congregations, the silent, thoughtful, solitary
Ulpius suddenly started from his long repose, and stood forth the fiery advocate of the rights
of his invaded worship. In a few days, the fame of his addresses to the pagans who still
attended the rites of Serapis spread throughout the whole city. The boldest among the
Christians, as they passed the temple walls, involuntarily trembled when they heard the
vehemence of the applause which arose from the audience of the inspired priest. Addressed
to all varieties of age and character, these harangues woke an echo in every breast they
reached. To the young they were clothed in all the poetry of the worship for which they
pleaded. They dwelt on the altars of Venus that the Christians would lay waste; on the
woodlands that the Christians would disenchant of their Dryads; on the hallowed Arts that
the Christians would arise and destroy. To the aged they called up remembrances of the
glories of the past, achieved through the favor of the gods; of ancestors who had died in
their service; of old forgotten loves and joys and successes that had grown and prospered
under the gentle guardianship of the deities of old--while the unvarying burden of their
conclusion to all was the reiterated assertion that the illustrious Macrinus had died a victim
to the toleration of the Christian sect.

But the efforts of Ulpius were not confined to the delivery of orations. Every moment of his
leisure time was dedicated to secret pilgrimages into Alexandria. Careless of peril,
regardless of threats, the undaunted enthusiast penetrated into the most private meeting-
places of the Christians, reclaiming on every side apostates to the pagan creed, and defying
the hostility of half the city from the stronghold of the temple walls. Day after day fresh
recruits arrived to swell the ranks of the worshipers of Serapis. The few members of the
scattered congregations of the provinces who still remained faithful to the ancient worship,
were gathered together in Alexandria by the private messengers of the unwearied Ulpius.
Already tumults began to take place between the pagans and the Christians; and oven now
the priest of Serapis prepared to address a protest to the new emperor in behalf of the
ancient religion of the land. At this moment it seemed probable that the heroic attempts of
one man to prop the structure of superstition, whose foundations were undermined
throughout, and whose walls were attacked by thousands, might actually be crowned with
success.

But Time rolled on; and with him came inexorable Change, trampling over the little barriers
set up against it by human opposition, and erecting its strange and transitory fabrics
triumphantly in their stead. In vain did the devoted priest exert all his powers to augment
and combine his scattered band; in vain did the mighty Temple display its ancient majesty,
its gorgeous sacrifices, its mysterious auguries. The spirit of Christianity was forth for
triumph on the earth--the last destinies of Paganism were fast accomplishing. Yet a few
seasons more of unavailing resistance passed by; and then the Archbishop of Alexandria
issued his decree that the Temple of Serapis should be destroyed.

At the rumor of their primate's determination, the Christian fanatics rose by swarms from
every corner of Egypt, and hurried into Alexandria to be present at the work of demolition.
From the arid solitudes of the desert--from their convents on rocks, and their caverns in the
earth, hosts of rejoicing monks flew to the city gates, and ranged themselves with the
soldiery and the citizens, impatient for the assault. At the dawn of morning this assembly of
destroyers was convened; and as the sun rose over Alexandria they arrived before the
temple walls.

The gates of the glorious structure were barred--the walls were crowded with their pagan
defenders. A still, dead, mysterious silence reigned over the whole edifice; and of all the
men who thronged it, one only moved from his appointed place; one only wandered
incessantly from point to point, wherever the building was open to assault. Those among the
besiegers who were nearest the temple saw in this presiding genius of the preparations for
defense the object at once of their most malignant hatred, and their most ungovernable
dread--Ulpius, the priest.

As soon as the archbishop gave the signal for the assault, a band of monks--their harsh,
discordant voices screaming fragments of psalms, their tattered garments waving in the air,
their cadaverous faces gleaming with ferocious joy--led the way, placed the first ladders
against the walls, and began the attack. Form all sides the temple was assailed by the
infuriated besiegers, and on all sides it was successfully defended by the resolute besieged.
Shock after shock fell upon the massive gates without forcing them to recede; missile after
missile was hurled at the building, but no breach was made in its solid surface. Multitudes
scaled the walls, gained the outer porticoes, and slaughtered their pagan defenders, but were
incessantly repulsed in their turn ere they could make their advantage good. Over and over
again did the assailants seem on the point of storming the temple successfully, but the figure
of Ulpius, invariably appearing at the critical moment among his disheartened followers,
acted like a fatality in destroying the effect of the most daring exertions and the most
important triumphs. Wherever there was danger, wherever there was carnage, wherever
there was despair, thither strode the undaunted priest, inspiring the bold, succoring the
wounded, reanimating the feeble. Blinded by no stratagem, wearied by no fatigue, there was
something almost demoniac in his activity for destruction, in his determination under defeat.
The besiegers marked his course round the temple by the calamities that befell them at his
every step. If the bodies of slaughtered Christians were flung down upon them from the
walls, they felt that Ulpius was there. If the bravest of the soldiery hesitated at mounting the
ladders, it was known that Ulpius was directing the defeat of their comrades above. If a sally
from the temple drove back the advanced guard upon the reserves in the rear, it was pleaded
as their excuse that Ulpius was fighting at the head of his pagan bands. Crowd on crowd of
Christian warriors still pressed forward to the attack; but, though the ranks of the
unbelievers were perceptibly thinned, though the gates that defended them at last began to
quiver before the reiterated blows by which they were assailed, every court of the sacred
edifice yet remained in the possession of the besieged, and was at the disposal of the
unconquered captain who organized the defense.

Depressed by the failure of his efforts, and horrified at the carnage already perpetrated
among his adherents, the archbishop suddenly commanded a cessation of hostilities, and
proposed to the defenders of the temple a short and favorable truce. After some delay, and
apparently at the expense of some discord among their ranks, the pagans sent to the primate
an assurance of their acceptance of his terms, which were that both parties should abstain
from any further struggle for the ascendancy until an edict from Theodosius determining the
ultimate fate of the temple should be applied for and obtained.

The truce once agreed on, the wide space before the respited edifice was gradually cleared
of its occupants. Slowly and sadly the archbishop and his followers departed from the
ancient walls whose summits they had assaulted in vain; and when the sun went down, of
the great multitude congregated in the morning a few corpses were all that remained. Within
the sacred building Death and Repose ruled with the night, where morning bad brightly
glittered on Life and Action. The wounded, the wearied, and the cold, all now lay hushed
alike, fanned by the night breezes that wandered through the lofty porticoes, or soothed by
the obscurity that reigned over the silent halls. Among the ranks of the pagan devotees but
one man still toiled and thought. Round and round the temple, restless as a wild beast that is
threatened in his lair, watchful as a lonely spirit in a city of strange tombs, wandered the
solitary and brooding Ulpius. For him there was no rest of body--no tranquillity of mind. On
the events of the next few days hovered the fearful chance that was soon, either for misery
or happiness, to influence irretrievably the years of his future life. Round and round the
mighty walls he watched with mechanical and useless anxiety. Every stone in the building
was eloquent to his lonely heart--beautiful to his wild imagination. On those barren
structures stretched for him the loved and fertile home; there was the shrine for whose glory
his intellect had been enslaved, for whose honor his youth had been sacrificed! Round and
round the secret recesses and sacred courts he paced with hurried footstep, cleansing with
gentle and industrious hand the stains of blood and the defilements of warfare from the
statues at his side. Sad, solitary, thoughtful, as in the first days of his apprenticeship to the
gods, he now roved in the same moonlit recesses where Macrinus had taught him in his
youth. As the menacing tumults of the day had aroused his fierceness, so the stillness of the
quiet night awakened his gentleness. He had combated for the temple in the morning as a
son for a parent, and he now watched over it at night as a miser over his treasure, as a lover
over his mistress, a mother over her child!

The days passed on, and at length the memorable morning arrived which was to determine
the fate of the last temple that Christian fanaticism had spared to the admiration of the
world. At an early hour of the morning the diminished numbers of the pagan zealots met
their re-enforced and determined opponents--both sides being alike unarmed--in the great
square of Alexandria. The imperial rescript was then publicly read. It began by assuring the
pagans that their priest's plea for protection for the temple had received the same
consideration which had been bestowed on the petition against the gods, presented by the
Christian archbishop; and ended by proclaiming the commands of the emperor that Serapis
and all other idols in Alexandria should immediately be destroyed.

The shout of triumph which followed the conclusion of the imperial edict still rose from the
Christian ranks when the advanced guard of the soldiers appointed to insure the execution of
the emperor's designs appeared in the square. For a few minutes the forsaken pagans stood
rooted to the spot where they had assembled, gazing at the warlike preparations around them
in a stupor of bewilderment and despair. Then, as they recollected how diminished were
their numbers, how arduous had been their first defense against a few, and how impossible
would be a second defense against many, from the boldest to the feeblest a panic seized on
them; and, regardless of Ulpius, regardless of honor, regardless of the gods, they turned with
one accord and fled from the place.

With the flight of the pagans the work of demolition began. Even women and children
hurried to join in the welcome task of indiscriminate destruction. No defenders on this
occasion barred the gates of the temple to the Christian hosts. The sublime solitude of the
tenantless building was outraged and invaded in an instant. Statues were broken, gold was
carried off, doors were splintered into fragments; but here for a while the progress of
demolition was delayed. Those to whom the labor of ruining the outward structure had been
confided were less successful than their neighbors who had pillaged its contents. The
ponderous stones of the pillars, the massive surfaces of the walls, resisted the most vigorous
of their puny efforts, and forced them to remain contented with mutilating that which they
could not destroy--with tearing off roofs, defacing marbles, and demolishing capitals. The
rest of the buildings remained uninjured, and grander even now in the wildness of ruin than
ever it had been in the stateliness of perfection and strength.

But the most important achievement still remained; the death-wound of Paganism was yet to
be struck; the idol Serapis, which had ruled the hearts of millions, and was renowned in the
remotest corners of the empire, was to be destroyed! A breathless silence pervaded the
Christian ranks as they filled the hall of the god. A superstitious dread to which they had
hitherto thought themselves superior overcame their hearts, as a single soldier, bolder than
his fellows, mounted by a ladder to the head of the colossal statue, and struck at its cheek
with an ax. The blow had scarcely been dealt when a deep groan was heard from the
opposite wall of the apartment, succeeded by a noise of retreating footsteps; and then all
was silent again. For a few minutes this incident stayed the feet of those who were about to
join their companion in the mutilation of the idol, but after an interval their hesitation
vanished; they dealt blow after blow at the statue and no more groans followed--no more
sounds were heard, save the wild echoes of the strokes of hammer, crowbar, and club
resounding through the lofty hail. In an incredibly short space of time the image of Serapis
lay in great fragments on the marble floor. The multitude seized on the limbs of the idol, and
ran forth to drag them in triumph through the streets. Yet a few minutes more, and the ruins
were untenanted, the temple was silent, Paganism was destroyed!

Throughout the ravaging course of the Christians over the temple they had been followed
with dogged perseverance, and at the same time with the most perfect impunity, by the only
pagan of all his brethren who had not sought safety by flight. This man, being acquainted
with every private passage and staircase in the sacred building, was enabled to be secretly
present at each fresh act of demolition, in whatever part of the edifice it might be
perpetrated. From hall to hall, from room to room, he tracked with noiseless step and glaring
eye the movements of the Christian mob--now hiding himself behind a pillar, now passing
into concealed cavities in the walls, now looking down from imperceptible fissures in the
roof; but, whatever his situation, invariably watching from it, with the same industry of
attention, and the same silence of emotion, the minutest acts of spoliation committed by the
most humble followers of the Christian ranks. It was only when he entered, with the
victorious ravagers, the vast apartment occupied by the idol Serapis that the man's
countenance began to give evidence of the agony under which his heart was writhing within
him. He mounted a private staircase cut in the hollow of the massive wall of the room, and
gaining a passage that ran round the extremities of the ceiling, looked through a sort of
lattice concealed in the ornaments of the cornice. As he gazed down and saw the soldier
mounting, ax in hand, to the idol's head, great drops of perspiration trickled from his
forehead. His hot, thick breath hissed through his closed teeth, and his hands strained at the
strong metal supports of the lattice until they bent beneath his grasp. When the stroke
descended on the image he closed his eyes. When the fragment detached by the blow fell on
the floor, a groan burst from his quivering lips. For one moment more he glared down, with
a gaze of horror, upon the multitude at his feet, and then with frantic speed he descended the
steep stairs by which he had mounted to the roof, and fled from the temple.

The same night this man was again seen by some shepherds, whom curiosity led to visit the
desecrated building, weeping bitterly in its ruined and deserted porticoes. As they
approached to address him, he raised his head, and with a supplicating action signed to them
to leave the place. For the few moments during which he confronted them the moonlight
shone full upon his countenance, and the shepherds, who had in former days attended the
ceremonies of the temple, saw with astonishment that the solitary mourner whose
meditations they had disturbed was no other than Ulpius, the priest.

At the dawn of day these shepherds had again occasion to pass the walls of the pillaged
temple. Throughout the hours of the night the remembrance of the scene of unsolaced,
unpartaken grief that they had beheld--of the awful loneliness of misery in which they had
seen the heartbroken and forsaken man, whose lightest words they had once delighted to
revere--inspired them with a feeling of pity for the deserted pagan, widely at variance with
the spirit of persecution which the spurious Christianity of their day would fain have
instilled in the bosoms of its humblest votaries. Bent on consolation, anxious to afford help,
these men, like the Samaritan of old, went up at their own peril to succor a brother in
affliction. They searched every portion of the empty building, but the object of their
sympathy was nowhere to be seen. They called, but heard no answering sound, save the
dirging of the winds of early morning through the ruined halls, which but a short time since
had resounded with the eloquence of the once illustrious priest. Except a few night-birds,
already sheltered by the deserted edifice, not a living being moved in what was once the
Temple of the Eastern world. Ulpius was gone.

These events took place in the year 389. In 390 pagan ceremonies were made treason by the
laws throughout the whole Roman empire.
From that period, the scattered few who still adhered to the ancient faith became divided
into three parties, each alike insignificant, whether considered as openly or secretly inimical
to the new religion of the state at large.

The first party unsuccessfully endeavored to elude the laws prohibitory of sacrifices and
divinations, by concealing their religious ceremonies under the form of convivial meetings.

The second preserved their ancient respect for the theory of Paganism, but abandoned all
hope and intention of ever again accomplishing its practice. By such timely concessions,
many were enabled to preserve--and some even to attain--high and lucrative employments
as officers of the state.

The third retired to their homes, the voluntary exiles of every religion; resigning the practice
of their old worship as a necessity, and shunning the communion of Christians as a matter of
choice.

Such were the unimportant divisions into which the last remnants of the once powerful
pagan community now subsided; but to none of them was the ruined and degraded Ulpius
ever attached.

For five weary years--dating from the epoch of the prohibition of Paganism--he wandered
through the empire, visiting in every country the ruined shrines of his deserted worship--a
friendless, hopeless, solitary man.

Throughout the whole of Europe, and all of Asia and the East that still belonged to Rome,
he bent his slow and toilsome course. in the fertile valleys of Gaul, over the burning sands
of Africa, through the sun-bright cities of Spain, he traveled--unfriended as a man under a
curse, lonely as a second Cain. Never for an instant did the remembrance of his ruined
projects desert his memory, or his mad determination to revive his worship abandon his
mind. At every relic of Paganism, however slight, that he encountered on his way, he found
a nourishment for his fierce anguish, an employment for his vengeful thoughts. Often, in the
little villages, children were frightened from their sports in a deserted temple, by the
apparition of his gaunt, rigid figure among the tottering pillars, or the sound of his hollow
voice as he muttered to himself among the ruins of the pagan tombs. Often in crowded
cities, groups of men congregated to talk over their remembrances of the fall of Paganism,
found him listening at their sides, and comforting them when they carelessly regretted their
ancient faith, with a smiling and whispered assurance that a time of restitution would yet
come. By all opinions and in all places he was regarded as a harmless madman, whose
strange delusions and predilections were not to be combated. but to be indulged. Thus he
wandered through the Christian world, regardless alike of lapse of time and change of
climate; living within himself; mourning, as a luxury, over the fall of his worship; patient of
wrongs, insults, and disappointments; watching for the opportunity that he still persisted in
believing was yet to arrive; holding by his fatal determination with all the recklessness of
ambition and all the perseverance of revenge.

The five years passed away unheeded, uncalculated, unregretted by Ulpius. For him, living
but in the past, hoping but for the future, space held no obstacles--time was an oblivion.
Years pass as days, hours as moments, when the. varying emotions which mark their
existence on the memory, and distinguish their succession on the dial of the heart, exist no
longer either for happiness or woe. Dead to all freshness of feeling, the mind of Ulpius,
during the whole term of his wanderings, lay numbed beneath the one idea that possessed it.
It was only at the expiration of those unheeded years, when the chances of travel turned his
footsteps toward Alexandria, that his faculties burst from the long bondage which had
oppressed them. Then, when he passed through those gates which he had entered in former
years a proud, ambitious boy--when he walked ungreeted through the, ruined temple where
he had once lived illustrious and revered, his dull, cold thoughts arose strong and vital
within him. The spectacle of the scene of his former glories, which might have awakened
despair in others, aroused the dormant passions, emancipated the stifled energies in him.
The projects of vengeance and the visions of restoration which he had brooded over for five
long years, now rose before him, as realized already under the vivid influence of the
desecrated scenes around. As he stood beneath the shattered porticoes of the sacred place,
not a stone crumbling at his feet but rebuked him for his past inaction, and strengthened him
for daring, for conspiracy, for revenge in the service of the outraged gods. The ruined
temples he had visited in his gloomy pilgrimages now became revived by his fancy, as one
by one they rose on his toiling memory. Broken pillars soared from the ground; desecrated
idols reoccupied their vacant pedestals; and he, the exile and the mourner, stood forth once
again--the ruler, the teacher, and the priest. The time of restitution was come: though his
understanding supplied him with no distinct projects, his heart urged him to rush blindly on
the execution of his reform. The moment had arrived--Macrinus should yet be avenged; the
temple should at last be restored.

He descended into the city: he hurried--neither welcomed nor recognized--through the

crowded streets; he entered the house of a man who had once been his friend and colleague
in the days that were past, and poured forth to him his wild determinations and disjointed
plans, entreating his assistance, and promising him a glorious success. But his old
companion had become, by a timely conversion to Christianity, a man of property and
reputation in Alexandria; and he turned from the friendless enthusiast with indignation and
contempt. Repulsed, but not disheartened, Ulpius sought others whom he had known in his
prosperity and renown. They had all renounced their ancient worship--they all received him
with studied coldness or careless disdain; but he still persisted in his useless efforts. He
blinded his eyes to their contemptuous looks; he shut his ears to their derisive words.
Persevering in his self-delusion, he appointed them messengers to their brethren in other
countries; captains of the conspiracy that was to commence in Alexandria; orators before the
people when the memorable revolution had once begun. It was in vain that they refused all
participation in his designs: he left them as the expressions of refusal rose to their lips, and
hurried elsewhere, as industrious in his efforts, as devoted to his unwelcome mission, as if
half the population of the city had vowed themselves joyfully to aid him in his frantic
attempt.

Thus, during the whole day, he continued his labor of useless persuasion among those in the
city who had once been his friends. When the evening came, he repaired, weary but not
despondent, to the earthly paradise that he was determined to regain--to the temple where he
had once taught, and where he still imagined that he was again destined to preside. Here he
proceeded, ignorant of the new laws, careless of discovery and danger, to ascertain by
divination, as in the days of old, whether failure or success awaited him ultimately in his
great design.

Meanwhile the friends whose assistance Ulpius had determined to extort were far from
remaining inactive on their parts after the departure of the aspiring priest. They remembered
with terror that the laws affected as severely those concealing their knowledge of a pagan
intrigue as those actually engaged in directing a pagan conspiracy; and their anxiety for their
personal safety, overcoming every consideration of the dues of honor or the claims of
ancient friendship, they repaired in a body to the prefect of the city, and informed him, with
all the eagerness of apprehension, of the presence of Ulpius in Alexandria, and of the
culpability of the schemes that he had proposed.

A search after the devoted pagan was immediately commenced. He was found the same
night before a ruined altar, brooding ever the entrails of an animal that he had just
sacrificed. Further proof of his guilt could not be required. He was taken prisoner; led forth
the next morning to be judged, amid the execrations of the very people who had almost
adored him once; and condemned the following day to suffer the penalty of death.

At the appointed hour the populace assembled to behold the execution. To their indignation
and disappointment, however, when the officers of the city appeared before the prison, it
only to inform the spectators that the performance of the fatal ceremony had been
adjourned. After a mysterious delay of some weeks, they were again convened, not to
witness the execution, but to receive the extraordinary announcement that the culprit's life
had been spared, and that his amended sentence now condemned him to labor as a slave for
life the copper-mines of Spain.

What powerful influence induced the prefect to risk the odium of reprieving a prisoner
whose guilt was so satisfactorily ascertained as that of Ulpius never was disclosed. Some
declared that the city magistrate was still at heart a pagan, and that he consequently shrank
from authorizing the death of a man who had once been the most illustrious among the
professors of the ancient creed. Others reported that Ulpius had secured the leniency of his
judges by acquainting them with the position of one of those secret repositories of enormous
treasure supposed to exist beneath the foundations of the dismantled Temple of Serapis. But
the truth of either of these rumors could never be satisfactorily proved. Nothing more was
accurately discovered than that Ulpius was removed from Alexandria to the place of earthly
torment set apart for him by the zealous authorities, at the dead of night, and that the sentry
at the gate through which he departed heard him mutter to himself, as he was hurried
onward, that his divinations had prepared him for defeat, but that the great day of pagan
restoration would yet arrive.

In the year 407, twelve years after the events above narrated, Ulpius entered the city of
Rome. He had not advanced far, before the gayety and confusion in the streets appeared
completely to bewilder him. He hastened to the nearest public garden that he could perceive,
and avoiding the frequented paths, flung himself down, apparently fainting with exhaustion,
at the foot of a tree.

For some time he lay on the shady resting-place which he had chosen, gasping painfully for
breath, his frame ever and anon shaken to its center by sudden spasms, and his lips
quivering with an agitation which he vainly endeavored to suppress. So changed was his
aspect, that the guards who had removed him from Alexandria, wretched as was his
appearance even then, would have found it impossible to recognize him now as the same
man whom they had formerly abandoned to slavery in the mines of Spain. The effluvia
exhaled from the copper ore in which he had been buried for twelve years, had not only
withered the flesh upon his bones, but had imparted to its surface a livid hue, almost
deathlike in its dullness. His limbs, wasted by age and distorted by suffering, bent and
trembled beneath him; and his form, once so majestic in its noble proportions, was now so
crooked and misshapen that whoever beheld him could only have imagined that he must
have been deformed from his birth. Of the former man no characteristic remained but the
expression of the stern, mournful eyes; and these, the truthful interpreters of the indomitable
mind whose emotions they seemed created to express, preserved, unaltered by suffering and
unimpaired by time, the same look, partly of reflection, partly of defiance, and partly of
despair, which had marked them in those pass days when the temple was destroyed and the
congregations of the pagans dispersed.

But the repose at this moment demanded by his worn-out body was even yet denied to it by
his untamed, unwearied mind; and as the voice of his old delusion spoke within him again,
the devoted priest rose from his solitary resting-place, and looked forth upon the great city,
whose new worship he was vowed to overthrow.

"By years of patient watchfulness," he whispered to himself, "have I succeeded in escaping

successfully from my dungeon among the mines. Yet a little more cunning, a little more
endurance, a little more vigilance, and I shall still live to people, by my own exertions, the
desert temples of Rome."

As he spoke, he emerged from the grove into the street. The joyous sunlight--a stranger to
him for years--shone warmly down upon his face, as if to welcome him to liberty and the
world. The sounds of gay laughter rang in his ears, as if to woo him back to the blessed
enjoyments and amenities of life; but Nature's influence and man's example were now silent
alike to his lonely heart. Over its dreary wastes still reigned the ruthless ambition which had
exiled love from his youth and friendship from his manhood, and which was destined to end
its mission of destruction by banishing tranquillity from his age. Scowling fiercely at all
around and above him, he sought the loneliest and shadiest streets. Solitude had now
become a necessity to his heart. The "great gulf" of his unshared aspirations had long since
socially separated him forever from his fellowmen. He thought, labored, and suffered for
himself alone.

To describe the years of unrewarded labor and unalleviated hardship endured by Ulpius in
the place of his punishment; to dwell on the day that brought with it--whatever the season in
the world above--the same unwearying inheritance of exertion and fatigue; to chronicle the
history of night after night of broken slumber one hour, of wearying thought the next, would
be to produce a picture, from the mournful monotony of which the attention of the reader
would recoil with disgust. It will be here sufficient to observe that the influence of the same
infatuation which had nerved him to the defense of the assaulted temple, and encouraged
him to attempt his ill-planned restoration of Paganism, bad preserved him through sufferings
under which stronger and younger men would have sunk forever; had prompted his
determination to escape from his slavery; and had now brought him to Rome--old, forsaken,
and feeble as he was--to risk new perils, and suffer new afflictions, for the cause to which,
body and soul, he had ruthlessly devoted himself forever.

Urged, therefore, by his miserable delusion, he had now entered a city where even his name
was unknown, faithful to his frantic project of opposing himself as a helpless, solitary man,
against the people and government of an empire. During his term of slavery, regardless of
his advanced years, he had arranged a series of projects, the gradual execution of which
would have demanded the advantages of a long and vigorous life. He no more desired, as in
his former attempt at Alexandria, to precipitate at all hazards the success of his designs. He
was now prepared to watch, wait, plot, and contrive for years on years; he was resigned to
be contented with the poorest and slowest advancement--to be encouraged by the smallest
prospect of ultimate triumph. Acting under this determination, he started his project by
devoting all that remained of his enfeebled energies to cautiously informing himself, by
every means in his power, of the private, political, and religious sentiments of all men of
influence in Rome. Wherever there was a popular assemblage he attended it, to gather the
scandalous gossip of the day; wherever there was a chance of overhearing a private
conversation, he contrived to listen to it unobserved. About the doors of taverns and the
haunts of discharged servants he lurked noiseless as a shadow, attentive alike to the careless
revelations of intoxication or the scurrility of malignant slaves. Day after day passed on, and
still saw him devoted to his occupation--which, servile as it was in itself, was to his eyes
ennobled by its lofty end--until at the expiration of some months, he found himself in
possession of a vague and inaccurate fund of information, which he stored up as a priceless
treasure in his mind. He next discovered the name and abode of every nobleman in Rome
suspected even of the most careless attachment to the ancient form of worship. He attended
Christian churches, mastered the intricacies of different sects, and estimated the importance
of contending schisms; gaining this collection of heterogeneous facts under the combined
disadvantages of poverty, solitude, and age; dependent for support on the poorest public
charities, and for shelter on the meanest public asylums. Every conclusion that he drew from
all he learned partook of the sanguine character of the fatal self-deception which had
imbittered his whole life. He believed that the dissensions which he saw raging in the
Church would speedily effect the destruction of Christianity itself; that when such a period
should arrive, the public mind would require but the guidance of some superior intellect to
return to its old religious predilections; and that to lay the foundation for effecting in such a
manner the desired revolution, it was necessary for him--impossible though it might seem,
in his present degraded condition--to gain access to the disaffected nobles of Rome, and
discover the secret of acquiring such an influence over them as would enable him to infect
them with his enthusiasm, and fire them with his determination. Greater difficulties even
than these had been overcome by other men. Solitary individuals had, ere this, originated
revolutions. The gods would favor him; his own cunning would protect him. Yet a little
more patience, a little more determination, and he might still, after all his misfortunes, be
assured of success.

It was about this period that he first heard, while pursuing his investigations, of an obscure
man who had suddenly arisen to undertake a reformation in the Christian Church; whose
declared aim was to rescue the new worship from that very degeneracy, on the fatal progress
of which rested all his hopes of triumph. It was reported that this man had been for some,
time devoted to his reforming labors, but that the difficulties attendant on the task that he
had appointed for himself, had hitherto prevented him from attaining all the notoriety
essential to the satisfactory prosecution of his plans. On hearing this rumor, Ulpius
immediately joined the few who attended the new orator's discourses, and then heard
enough to convince him that he listened to the most determined zealot for Christianity in the
city of Rome. To gain this man's confidence, to frustrate every effort that he might make in
his new vocation, to ruin his credit with his hearers, and to threaten his personal safety by
betraying his inmost secrets to his powerful enemies in the Church, were determinations
instantly adopted by the pagan as duties demanded by the exigencies of his creed. From that
moment he seized every opportunity of favorably attracting the new reformer's attention to
himself; and, as the reader already knows, he was at length rewarded for his cunning and
perseverance by being received into the household of the charitable and unsuspicious
Numerian, as a pious convert to the Christianity of the early Church.

Once installed under Numerian's roof, the treacherous pagan saw in the Christian's daughter
an instrument admirably adapted, in his unscrupulous hands, for forwarding his wild project
of obtaining the ear of a Roman of power and station who was disaffected to the established
worship. Among the patricians of whose anti-Christian predilections report had informed
him, was Numerian's neighbor, Vetranio, the senator. To such a man, renowned for his life
of luxury, a girl so beautiful as Antonina would be a bribe rich enough to enable him to
extort any promise required, as a reward for betraying her while under the protection of her
father's house. In addition to this advantage to be drawn from her ruin, was the certainty that
her loss would so affect Numerian as to render him, for a time at least, incapable of pursuing
his labors in the cause of Christianity. Fixed, then, in his detestable purpose, the ruthless
priest patiently awaited the opportunity of commencing his machinations. Nor did he watch
in vain. The victim innocently fell into the very trap that he had prepared for her, when she
first listened to the music of Vetranio's lute, and permitted her treacherous guardian to
become the friend who concealed her disobedience from her father's ear. After that first fatal
step every day brought the projects of Ulpius nearer to success. The long-sought interview
with the senator was at length obtained, the engagement imperatively demanded on the one
side, was, as we have already related, carelessly accepted on the other; the day that was to
bring success to the schemes of the betrayer, and degradation to the honor of the betrayed,
was appointed; and once more the cold heart of the fanatic warmed to the touch of joy. No
doubts upon the validity of his engagement with Vetranio ever entered his mind. He never
imagined that the powerful senator could with perfect impunity deny him the impracticable
assistance he had demanded as his reward, and thrust him as an ignorant madman from his
palace gates. Firmly and sincerely he believed that Vetranio was so satisfied with his
readiness in pandering to his profligate designs, and so dazzled by the prospect of the glory
which would attend success in the great enterprise, that he would gladly hold to the
performance of his promise whenever it should be required of him. In the meantime the
work was begun. Numerian was already, through his agency, watched by the spies of a
jealous and unscrupulous Church. Feuds, schisms, treacheries, and dissensions marched
bravely onward through the Christian ranks. All things combined to make it certain that the
time was near at hand when, through his exertions and the friendly senator's help, the
restoration of Paganism might be assured.

With the widest diversity of pursuit and difference of design, there was still a strange and
mysterious analogy between the temporary positions of Ulpius and Numerian. One was
prepared to be a martyr for the Temple, the other to be a martyr for the Church. Both were
enthusiasts in an unwelcome cause; both bad suffered more than a life's wonted share of
affliction; and both were old--passing irretrievably from their fading present on earth, to the
eternal future awaiting them in the unknown spheres beyond.
 But here, with their position, the comparison between them ends. The Christian's principle
of action, drawn from the Divinity he served, was love; the Pagan's, born of the superstition
that was destroying him, was hate. The one labored for mankind; the other for himself. And
thus the aspirations of Numerian, founded on the general good, nourished by offices of
kindness, and nobly directed to a generous end, might lead him into indiscretion, but could
never degrade him into crime--might trouble the serenity of his life, but could never deprive
him of the consolation of hope; while, on the contrary, the ambition of Ulpius, originating in
revenge and directed to destruction, exacted cruelty from his heart, and duplicity from his
mind; and, as the reward for his service, mocked him alternately throughout his whole life
with delusion and despair.

Chapter VII.
The Bed-Chamber.

IT is now time to resume our chronicle of the eventful night which marked the destruction
of Antonina's lute and the conspiracy against Antonina's honor.

The gates of Vetranio's palace were closed, and the noises in it were all hushed; the banquet
was over, the triumph of the Nightingale Sauce had been achieved, and the day-break was
already glimmering in the eastern sky, when the senator's favored servant, the freedman
Carrio, drew back the shutter of the porter's lodge, where he had been dozing since the
conclusion of the feast, and looked out lazily into the street. The dull, faint light of dawn
was now strengthening slowly over the lonely roadway and on the walls of the lofty houses.
Of the groups of idlers of the lowest class who had assembled during the evening in the
street to snuff the fragrant odors which steamed afar from Vetranio's kitchens, not one
remained; men, women and children had long since departed to seek shelter wherever they
could find it, and to fatten their lean bodies on what had been charitably bestowed on them
of the coarser relics of the banquet. The mysterious solitude and tranquillity of day-break in
a great city prevailed over all things. Nothing impressed, however, by the peculiar and
solemn attraction of the scene at this moment, the freedman apostrophized the fresh
morning air as it blew over him in strong terms of disgust, and even ventured, in lower
tones, to rail against his master's uncomfortable fancy for being awakened after a feast at the
approach of dawn. Far too well aware, nevertheless, of the necessity of yielding the most
implicit obedience to the commands he had received, to resign himself any longer to the
pleasant temptations of repose, Carrio, after yawning, rubbing his eyes, and indulging for a
few moments more in the luxury of complaint, set forth in earnest to follow the corridors
leading to the interior of the palace, and to awaken Vetranio without further delay. ,He had
not advanced more than a few steps, when a proclamation written in letters of gold on a
blue-colored board, and hung against the wall at his side, attracted his attention. This public
notice, which delayed his progress at the very outset and which was intended for the special
edification of all the inhabitants of Rome, was thus expressed:

"ON THIS DAY, AND FOR TEN DAYS FOLLOWING, THE AFFAIRS OF OUR
PATRON OBLIGE HIM TO BE ABSENT FROM ROME."

Here the proclamation ended, without descending, to particulars. It had been put forth, in
accordance with the easy fashion of the age, to answer at once all applications at Vetranio's
palace during the senator's absence. Although the coloring of the board, the writing of the
letters, and the composition of the sentence were the work of his own ingenuity, the worthy
Carrio could not prevail upon himself to pass the proclamation without contemplating its
magnificence anew. For some time he stood regarding it with the same expression of lofty
and complacent approbation which we see, in these modern days, illuminating the
countenance of a connoisseur before one of his own old pictures, which he has bought as a
great bargain; or dawning over the bland features of a linen-draper, as he surveys from the
pavement his morning's arrangement of the window of the shop. All things, however, have
their limits, even a man's approval of an effort of his own skill. Accordingly, after a
prolonged review of the proclamation, some faint ideas of the necessity of immediately
obeying his master's commands revived in the mind of the judicious Carrio, and counseled
him to turn his steps at once in the direction of the palace sleeping apartments.

Greatly wondering what new caprice had induced the senator to contemplate leaving Rome
at the dawn of day--for Vetranio had divulged to no one the object of his departure--the
freedman cautiously entered his master's bed-chamber. He drew aside the ample silken
curtains suspended around and over the sleeping-couch, from the hands of Graces and
Cupids sculptured in marble; but the statues surrounded an empty bed. Vetranio was not
there. Carrio next entered the bath-room; the perfumed water was steaming in its long
marble basin; the soft wrapping-cloths lay ready for use; the attendant slave with his
instruments of ablution, waited, half asleep, in his accustomed place; but here also no signs
of the master's presence appeared. Somewhat perplexed, the freedman examined several
other apartments. He found guests, dancing-girls, parasites, poets, painters--a motley crew--
occupying every kind of dormitory, and all peacefully engaged in sleeping off the effects of
the wine they had drunk at the banquet; but the great object of his search still eluded him as
before. At last it occurred to him that the senator, in an excess of convivial enthusiasm and
jovial hospitality, might yet be detaining some favored guest at the table of the feast.

Pausing, therefore, at some carved doors which stood ajar at one extremity of a spacious
hall, he pushed them open, and hurriedly entered the banqueting-room beyond.

A soft, dim, luxurious light reigned ever this apartment, which now presented, as far as the
eye could discern, an aspect of confusion that was at once graceful and picturesque. Of the
various lamps, of every variety and pattern, hanging from the ceiling, but few remained
alight. From those, however, which were still unextinguished there shone a mild brightness,
admirably adapted to display the objects immediately around them. The golden garlands,
and the alabaster pots of sweet ointment, which had been suspended before the guests
during the banquet, still hung from the painted ceiling. On the massive table, composed
partly of ebony and partly of silver, yet lay in the wildest confusion fragments of
gastronomic delicacies, grotesque dinner-services, vases of flowers, musical instruments,
and crystal dice; while towering over, all rose the glittering dish which had contained the
nightingales consumed by the feasters, with the four golden Cupids, which had spouted over
them that illustrious invention--the Nightingale Sauce. Around the couches, of violet and
rose color, ranged along the table, the perfumed and gayly-tinted powders that had been
strewn in patterns over the marble floor were perceptible for a few yards; but beyond this
point nothing more was plainly distinguishable. The eye roved down the sides of the
glorious chamber, catching dim glimpses of gorgeous draperies, crowded statues and marble
columns, but discerning nothing accurately until it reached the half. opened windows, and
rested upon the fresh dewy verdure, now faintly visible in the shady gardens without. There-
-waving in the morning breezes, charged on every leaf with their burden of pure and
welcome moisture--rose the lofty pine-trees, basking in the recurrence of the new day's
beautiful and undying youth, and rising in reproving contrast before the exhausted
allurements of luxury and the perverted creations of art which burdened the tables of the hall
within.

After a hasty survey of the apartment, the freedman appeared to be on the point of quitting it
in despair; when the noise of a falling dish, followed by several partly suppressed and
wholly confused exclamations of affright, caught his ear. He once more approached the
banqueting-table, re-trimmed a lamp that hung near him, and taking it in his hand passed to
the side of the room whence the disturbance proceeded. A hideous little negro, staring in
ludicrous terror at a silver oven, half filled with bread, which had just fallen beside him, was
the first object he discovered. A few paces beyond the negro reposed a beautiful boy,
crowned with vine leaves and ivy, still sleeping by the side of his lyre; and further yet,
stretched in an uneasy slumber on a silken couch, lay the identical object of the freedman's
search--the illustrious author of the Nightingale Sauce.

Immediately above the sleeping senator hung his portrait, in which he was modestly
represented as rising by the assistance of Minerva to the top of Parnassus, the nine Muses
standing round him rejoicing. At his feet reposed a magnificent white cat, whose head rested
in all the luxurious laziness of satiety on the edge of a golden saucer, half filled with
dormice stewed in milk. The most indubitable evidences of the night's debauch appeared in
Vetranio's disordered dress and flushed countenance, as the freedman regarded him. For
some minutes the worthy Carrio stood uncertain whether to awaken his master or not,
deciding finally, however, on obeying the commands he had received, and disturbing the
slumbers of the wearied voluptuary before him. To effect this purpose, it was necessary to
call in the aid of the singing-boy; for by. a refinement of luxury, Vetranio had forbidden his
attendants to awaken him by any other method than the agency of musical sounds.

With some difficulty the boy was sufficiently aroused to comprehend the service that was
required of him. For a short time the notes of the lyre sounded in vain. At last, when the
melody took a louder and more martial character, the sleeping patrician slowly opened his
eyes and stared vacantly around him.

"My respected patron," said the polite Carrio, in apologetic tones, "commanded that I should
awaken him with the dawn; the daybreak has already appeared."

When the freedman had ceased speaking Vetranio sat up on the couch, called for a basin of
water, dipped his fingers in the refreshing liquid dried them abstractedly on the long silky
curls of the singing-boy who stood beside him, gazed about him once more, repeated
interrogatively the word "Daybreak," and sunk gently back upon his couch. We are grieved
to confess it--but the author of, the Nightingale Sauce was moderately inebriated.

A short pause followed, during which the freedman and the singing-boy stared upon each
other in mutual perplexity. At length the one resumed his address of apology, and the other
his efforts on the lyre. Once more, after an interval, the eyes of Vetranio lazily unclosed,
and this time he began to speak; but his thoughts--if thoughts they could be called--were as
yet wholly occupied by the "table-talk" at the past night's banquet.

"The ancient Egyptians--oh, sprightly and enchanting Camilla--were a wise nation!"

murmured the senator, drowsily. "I am myself descended from the ancient Egyptians; and,
therefore, I hold in high veneration that cat in your lap, and all cats besides. Herodotus--an
historian whose works I feel a certain gratification in publicly mentioning as good--informs
us that when a cat died in the dwelling of an ancient Egyptian, the owner shaved his
eyebrows as a mark of grief, embalmed the defunct animal in a consecrated house, and
carried it to be interred in a considerable city of Lower Egypt called 'Bubastis'--an Egyptian
word, which I have discovered to mean The Sepulcher of all the Cats; whence it is scarcely
erroneous to infer--"

At this point the speaker's power of recollection and articulation suddenly failed him, and
Carrio--who had listened with perfect gravity to his master's oration upon cats--took
immediate advantage of the opportunity now afforded him to speak again.

"The equipage which my patron was pleased to command to carry him to Aricia," said he,
with a strong emphasis on the last word, "now stands in readiness at the private gate of the
palace gardens."
As he heard the word "Aricia," the senator's powers of recollection and perception seemed
suddenly to return to him. Among that high order of drinkers who can imbibe to the point of
perfect enjoyment, and stop short scientifically before the point of perfect oblivion, Vetranio
occupied an exalted rank. The wine he had swallowed during the night had disordered his
memory and slightly troubled his self-possession, but had not deprived him of his
understanding. There was nothing plebeian even in his debauchery; there was an art and a
refinement in his very excesses.

"Aricia--Aricia," he repeated to himself, "ah, the villa that Julia lent to me at Ravenna! The
pleasures of the table must have obscured for a moment the image of my beautiful pupil of
other days, which now revives before me again, as Love resumes the dominion that Bacchus
usurped. My excellent Carrio," he continued, speaking to the freedman, "you have done
perfectly right in awakening me; delay not a moment more in ordering my bath to be
prepared, or my man-monster Ulpius, the king of conspirators and high-priest of all that is
mysterious, will wait for me in vain! And you, Glyco," be pursued, when Carrio had
departed, addressing the singing-boy, "array yourself for a journey, and wait with my
equipage at the garden gate. I shall require you to accompany me in my expedition to
Aricia. But first, oh gifted and valued songster, let me reward you for the harmonious
symphony that has just awakened me. Of what rank of my musicians are you at present,
Glyco?"

"Of the fifth," replied the boy.

"Were you bought, or born in my house?" asked Vetranio.

"Neither; but bequeathed to you by Geta's testament," rejoined the gratified Glyco.

"I advance you," continued Vetranio, "to the privileges and the pay of the first rank of my
musicians; and I give you, as a proof of my continued favor, this ring, in return for these
obligations, I desire you to keep secret whatever concerns my approaching expedition; to
employ your softest music in soothing the ear of a young girl who will accompany us--in
calming her terrors if she is afraid, in drying her tears if she weeps; and finally, to exercise
your voice and your lute incessantly, in uniting the name 'Antonina' to the sweetest
harmonies of sound that your imagination can suggest."

Pronouncing these words with an easy and benevolent smile, and looking round
complacently on the display of luxurious confusion about him, Vetranio retired to the bath
that was to prepare for his approaching triumph.

Meanwhile a scene of a very different nature was proceeding without, at Numerian's garden
rate. Here were no singing-boys, no freedmen, no profusion of rich treasures--here appeared
only the solitary and deformed figure of Ulpius, half-hidden among surrounding trees, while
he waited at his appointed post. As time wore on, and still Vetranio did not appear, the
pagan's self-possession began to desert him. He moved restlessly backward and forward
over the soft dewy grass, sometimes in low tones calling upon his gods to hasten the tardy
footsteps of the libertine patrician, who was to be made the instrument of restoring to the
temple the worship of other days--sometimes cursing the reckless delay of the senator, or
exulting in the treachery by which he madly believed his ambition was at last to be fulfilled;
but still, whatever his words or thoughts, wrought up to the same pitch fierce, fanatic
enthusiasm which had strengthened him for the defense of his idols at Alexandria, and had
nerved him against the torment and misery of years in his slavery in the copper-mines of
Spain, the precious moments were speeding irrevocably onward. His impatience was rapidly
changing to rage and despair, as he strained his eyes for the last time in the direction of the
palace gardens, and now at length discerned a white robe among the distant trees. Vetranio
was rapidly approaching him.

Restored by his bath, no effect of the night's festivity but its exhilaration remained in the
senator's brain. But for a slight uncertainty in his gait, and an unusual vacancy in his smile,
the elegant gastronomer might now have appeared to the closest observer guiltless of the
influence of intoxicating drinks. He advanced radiant with exultation, prepared for conquest,
to the place where Ulpius awaited him, and was about to address the pagan with that
satirical familiarity so fashionable among the nobles of Rome in their communications with
the people, when the object of his intended pleasantries sternly interrupted him, saying, in
tones more of command than of advice, "Be silent! If you would succeed in your purpose,
follow me without uttering a word!"

There was something so fierce and determined in the tones of the old man's voice--low,
tremulous, and husky though they were--as he uttered those words, that the bold, confident
senator instinctively held his peace as he followed his stern guide into Numerian's house.
Avoiding the regular entrance, which at that early hour of the morning was necessarily
closed, Ulpius conducted the patrician through a small wicket into the subterranean
apartment, or rather outhouse, which was his customary though comfortless retreat in his
leisure hours, and which was hardly ever entered by the other members of the Christian's
household.

From the low, arched, brick ceiling of this place hung one earthenware lamp, whose light,
small and tremulous, left all the corners of the apartment in perfect obscurity. The thick
buttresses that projected inward from the walls, made visible by their prominence, displayed
on their surfaces rude representations of idols and temples drawn in chalk and covered with
strange, mysterious hieroglyphics. On a block of stone which served as a table lay some
fragments of small statues, which Vetranio recognized as having belonged to the old
accredited representations of pagan idols. Over the sides of the table itself were scrawled in
Latin characters these two words, "Serapis," "Macrinus," and about its base lay some pieces
of torn, soiled linen, which still retained enough of their former character both in shape,
size, and color, to convince Vetranio that they had once served as the vestments of a pagan
priest. Further than this the senator's observation did not carry him, for the close, almost
mephitic atmosphere of the place already began to affect him unfavorably. He felt a
suffocating sensation in his throat and a dizziness in his head. The restorative influence of
his recent bath declined rapidly. The fumes of the wine he had drank in the night, far from
having been, as he imagined, permanently dispersed, again mounted to his head. He was
obliged to lean against the stone table to preserve his equilibrium, as he faintly desired the
pagan to shorten their sojourn in his miserable retreat.

Without even noticing the senator's request, Ulpius hurriedly proceeded to erase the
drawings on the buttresses and the inscriptions on the table. Then collecting the fragments
of statues and the pieces of linen, he deposited them in a hiding-place in a corner of the
apartment. This done, he returned to the stone against which Vetranio supported himself,
and for a few minutes silently regarded the senator with a firm, earnest, and penetrating
gaze.

A dark suspicion that he had betrayed himself into the hands of a villain, who was then
plotting some atrocious project connected with his safety or honor, began to rise on the
senator's bewildered brain, as he unwillingly submitted to the penetrating examination of the
pagan's glance. At that moment, however, the withered lips of the old man slowly parted,
and he began to speak. Whether, as he looked on Vetranio's disturbed countenance, and
marked his unsteady gait, the heart of Ulpius, for the first time since his introduction to the
senator, misgave him when he thought of their monstrous engagement; or whether the near
approach of the moment that was henceforth, as he wildly imagined, to fix Vetranio as his
assistant and ally, so powerfully affected his mind that it instinctively sought to vent its
agitation through the natural medium of words, it is useless to inquire. Whatever his motives
for speech, the impressive earnestness of his manner gave evidence of the depth and
intensity of his emotions, as he addressed the senator thus:

"I have submitted to servitude in a Christian's house, I have suffered the contamination of a
Christian's prayers, to gain the use of your power and station when the time to employ them
should arrive. The hour has now come when my part of the conditions of our engagement is
to be performed, the hour will yet come when your part shall be exacted from you in turn!
Do you wonder at what I have done and what I will do? Do you marvel that a household
drudge should speak thus to a nobleman of Rome? Are you astonished that I risk so much as
to venture on enlisting you--by the sacrifice of the girl who now slumbers above--in the
cause, whose end is the restoration of our father's gods, and in whose service I have suffered
and grown old? Listen, and you shall hear from what I am fallen--you shall know what I
once was!"
"I adjure you, by all the gods and goddess of our ancient worship, let me hear you where I
can breathe--in the garden, on the housetop, anywhere but in this dungeon!" murmured the
senator in entreating accents.

"My birth, my parents, my education, my ancient abode--these I will not disclose,"

interrupted the pagan, raising one arm authoritatively, as if to obstruct Vetranio from
approaching the door; "I have sworn by my gods, that until the day of restitution these
secrets of my past life shall remain unrevealed to stranger's ears. Unknown I entered Rome,
and unknown I will labor in Rome until the projects I have lived for are crowned with
success! It is enough that I confess to you that with those sacred images, whose fragments
you have just beheld, I was once lodged; that those sacred vestments whose remains you
discerned at your feet, I once wore. To attain the glories of the priesthood there was nothing
that I did not resign, to preserve them there was nothing I did not perform, to recover them
there is nothing that I will not attempt! I was once illustrious, prosperous, beloved; of my
glory, my happiness, my popularity, the Christians have robbed me; and I will yet live to
requite it heavily at their hands! I had a guardian who loved me in my youth; the Christians
murdered him! A temple was under the rule of my manhood; the Christians destroyed it!
The people of a whole nation once listened to my voice; the Christians have dispersed them!
The wise, the great, the beautiful, the good, were once devoted to me; the Christians have
made me a stranger at their doors, an outcast of their affections and thoughts! For all this
shall I take no vengeance? Shall I not plot to rebuild my ruined temple, and win back, in my
age, the honors that adorned me in my youth?"

"Assuredly--at once--without delay!" stammered Vetranio, returning the stern and inquiring
gaze of the pagan with a bewildered, uneasy stare.

"To mount over the bodies of the Christian slain," continued the old man, his sinister eyes
dilating in anticipated triumph as he whispered close at the senator's ear, "to rebuild the
altars that the Christians have overthrown, is the ambition that has made light to me the
sufferings of my whole life. I have battled, and it has sustained me in the midst of carnage; I
have wandered, and it has been my home in the desert; I have failed, and it has supported
me; I have been threatened with death, and it has preserved me from fear; I have been cast
into slavery, and it has made my fetters light. You see me now, old, degraded, lonely--
believe that I long neither for wife, children, tranquillity, nor possessions; that I desire no
companion but my cherished and exalted purpose! Remember, then, in the hour of
performance the promise you have now made to aid me in the achievement of that purpose!
Remember that you are a pagan yourself! Feast, laugh, carouse with your compeers, be still
the airy jester, the gay companion; but never forget the end to which you are vowed--the
destiny of glory that the restoration of our deities has in store for us both!"
He ceased. Though his voice while he spoke never rose beyond a hoarse, monotonous, half-
whispering tone, all the ferocity of his abused and degraded nature was for the instant
thoroughly aroused by his recapitulation of his wrongs. Had Vetranio at this moment shown
any symptoms of indecision, or spoken any words of discouragement, he would have
murdered him on the spot where they stood. Every feature in the pagan's seared and livid
countenance expressed the stormy emotions that were rushing over his heart as he now
confronted his bewildered yet attentive listener. His firm, menacing position; his poor and
scanty garments; his wild, shaggy hair; his crooked, distorted form; his stern, solemn,
unwavering gaze; opposed as they were (under the fitful illumination of the expiring lamp
and the advancing daylight) to the unsteady gait, the vacant countenance, the rich robes, the
youthful grace of form and delicacy of feature of the object of his steady contemplation,
made so wild and strange a contrast between his patrician ally and himself, that they
scarcely looked like beings of the same race. Nothing could be more immense than the
difference--more wild than the incongruity between them. It was sickness hand in hand with
health; pain marshaled face to face with enjoyment; darkness ranged in monstrous
discordance by the very side of light.

The next instant--just as the astonished senator was endeavoring to frame a suitable answer
to the solemn adjuration that had been addressed to him--Ulpius seized his arm, and,
opening a door at the inner extremity of the apartment, led him up some stairs that
conducted to the interior of the house.

They passed the hall, on the floor of which still lay the fragments of the broken lute, dimly
distinguishable in the soft light of daybreak; and ascending another staircase, paused at a
little door at the top, which Ulpius cautiously opened; and in a moment afterward Vetranio
was admitted into Antonina's bed-chamber.

The room was of no great extent; its scanty furniture was of the most ordinary description;
no ornaments glittered on its walls; no frescoes adorned its ceiling; and yet there was a
simple elegance in its appearance, an unobtrusive propriety in its minutest details, which
made it at once interesting and attractive to the eye. From the white curtains at the window
to the vase of flowers standing by the bedside, the same natural refinement of taste appeared
in the arrangement of all that the apartment contained. No sound broke the deep silence of
the place save the low, soft breathing, occasionally interrupted by a long, trembling sigh, of
its sleeping occupant. The sole light in the room consisted of a little lamp so placed in the
middle of the flowers round the sides of the vase, that no extended or illumination was cast
upon any object. There was something in the decent propriety of all that was visible in the
bed-chamber, in the soft obscurity of its atmosphere, in the gentle and musical sound that
alone interrupted its magical stillness, impressive enough, it might have been imagined, to
have awakened some hesitation in the bosom of the boldest libertine, ere he deliberately
proceeded to intrude on the unprotected slumbers of its occupant. No such feeling of
indecision, however, troubled the thoughts of Vetranio as he cast a rapid glance round the
apartment which he had ventured so treacherously to invade. The fumes of the wine he had
imbibed at the banquet had been so thoroughly resuscitated by the oppressive atmosphere of
the subterranean retreat he had just quitted, as to have left him nothing of his more refined
nature. All that was honorable or intellectual in his character had now completely ceded to
all that was base and animal. He looked round, and perceiving that Ulpius had silently
quitted him, softly closed the door. Then, advancing to the bedside with the utmost caution
compatible with the involuntary unsteadiness of an intoxicated man, he took the lamp from
the vase in which it was half concealed, and earnestly surveyed by its light the figure of the
sleeping girl.

The head of Antonina was thrown back, and rested rather over than on her pillow. Her light
linen dress had become so disordered during the night that it displayed her throat and part of
her bosom, in all the dawning beauties of their youthful formation, to the gaze of the
licentious Roman. One hand half supported her head, and was almost entirely hidden in the
locks of her long black hair, which had escaped from the white cincture intended to confine
it, and now streamed over the pillow in dazzling contrast to the light bed-furniture around it.
The other hand held, tightly clasped to her bosom, the precious fragment of her broken lute.
The deep repose expressed in her position had not thoroughly communicated itself to her
face. Now and then her slightly parted lips moved and trembled, and ever and anon a
change, so faint and fugitive that it was hardly perceptible, appeared in her complexion,
breathing on the soft olive that was its natural hue the light rosy flush which the emotions of
the past night had impressed on it ere she slept. Her position, in its voluptuous negligence,
seemed the very type of Oriental loveliness, while her face, calm and sorrowful in its
expression, displayed the more refined and sober graces of the European model. And thus
these two characteristics of two different orders of beauty, appearing conjointly under one
form, produced a whole so various and yet so harmonious, so impressive and yet so
attractive, that the senator, as he bent over the couch, though the warm, soft breath of the
young girl played on his cheeks and waved the tips of his perfumed locks, could hardly
imagine that the scene before him was more than a bright, delusive dream.

While Vetranio was yet absorbed in admiration of her charms. Antonina's form slightly
moved, as if agitated by the influence of a passing dream. The change thus accomplished in
her position broke the spell that its former stillness and beauty had unconsciously wrought
to restrain the unhallowed ardor of the profligate Roman. He now passed his arm round her
warm, slender figure; and gently raising her till her head rested on his shoulder as he sat by
the bed, imprinted kiss after kiss on the pure lips that sleep had innocently abandoned to
him.

As he had foreseen, Antonina instantly awoke; but to his unmeasured astonishment, neither
started nor shrieked. The moment she had opened her eyes she had recognized the person of
Vetranio; and that overwhelming terror which suspends in its victims the use of every
faculty, whether of the body or the mind, had immediately possessed itself of her heart. Too
innocent to imagine the real motive that prompted the senator's intrusion on her slumbers,
where others of her sex would have foreboded dishonor, she feared death. All her father's
vague denunciations against the enormities of the nobles of Rome rushed in an instant over
her mind, and her childish imagination pictured Vetranio as armed with some terrible and
mysterious vengeance to be wreaked on her for having avoided all communication with him
as soon as she had gained possession of her lute. Prostrate beneath the petrifying influence
of her fears, motionless and powerless before him as its prey before the serpent, she made
no effort to move or speak; but looked up steadfastly into the senator's face, her large eyes
fixed and dilated in a gaze of overpowering terror.

Intoxicated though he was, the affrighted expression of the poor girl's pale, rigid
countenance did not escape Vetranio's notice; and he taxed his bewildered brain for such
soothing and reassuring expressions as would enable him to introduce his profligate
proposals with some chance that they would be listened to and understood.

"Dearest pupil! Most beautiful of Roman maidens," he began, in the husky, monotonous
tones of inebriety, "abandon your fears! I come hither, wafted by the breath of love, to
restore the worship of the--I would say to bear you on my bosom to a villa, the name of
which has for the moment escaped my remembrance. You cannot have forgotten that it was
I who taught you to compose the Nightingale Sauce--or, no--let me rather say to play upon
the lute. Love, music, pleasure, all await you in the arms of your attached Vetranio. Your
eloquent silence speaks encouragement to my heart. Beloved Anto--"

Here the senator suddenly paused, for the eyes of the girl, which had hitherto been fixed on
him with the same expression of blank dismay that had characterized them from the first,
slowly moved in the direction of the door. The instant afterward a slight noise caught
Vetranio's ear, and Antonina shuddered so violently as he pressed her to his side, that he felt
it through his whole frame. Slowly and unwillingly he withdrew his gaze from the pale yet
lovely countenance on which it had been fixed, and looked up.

At the open door, pale, silent, motionless, stood the master of the house.

Incapable, from the confusion of his ideas, of any other feeling than the animal instinct of
self-defense, Vetranio no sooner beheld Numerian's figure, than he rose, and, drawing a
small dagger from his bosom, attempted to advance on the intruder. He found himself,
however, restrained by Antonina, who had fallen on her knees before him, and grasped his
robe with a strength which seemed utterly incompatible with the slenderness of her form
and the feebleness of her sex and age.
The first voice that broke the silence which ensued was Numerian's. He advanced, his face
ghastly with anguish, his lip quivering with suppressed emotions, to the senator's side, and
addressed him thus:

"Put up your weapon. I come but to ask a favor at your hands."

Vetranio mechanically obeyed him. There was something in the stern calmness, frightful at
such a moment, of the Christian's manner that awed him in spite of himself.

"The favor I would petition for," continued Numerian, in low, steady, bitter tones, "is that
you would remove your harlot there to your own abode. Here are no singing-boys, no
banqueting halls, no perfumed couches. The retreat of a solitary old man is no place for such
a one as she. I beseech you, remove her to a more congenial home. She is well fitted for her
trade; her mother was a harlot before her!"

He laughed scornfully, and pointed as he spoke to the figure of the unhappy girl kneeling
with outstretched arms at his feet.

"Father, father!" she cried, in accents bereft of their native softness and melody, "have you
forgotten me?"

"I know you not!" he replied, thrusting her from him. "Return to his bosom; you shall never
more be pressed to mine. Go to his palace; my house is yours no longer! You are his harlot,
not my daughter! I command you--go!"

As he advanced toward her with fierce glance and threatening demeanor, she suddenly rose
up. Her reason seemed crushed within her, as she looked with frantic earnestness from
Vetranio to her father, and then back again from her father to Vetranio. On one side she saw
an enemy who had ruined her she knew not how, and who threatened her with she knew not
what; on the other a parent who had cast her off. For one instant she directed a final look on
the room, that, sad and lonely though it was, had still been a home to her; and then without a
word or a sigh she turned, and, crouching like a beaten dog, fled from the house.

During the whole of the scene Vetranio had stood so fixed in the helpless astonishment of
intoxication as to be incapable of moving or uttering a word. All that took place during the
short and terrible interview between father and child utterly perplexed him. He heard no
loud, violent anger on one side, no clamorous petitioning for forgiveness on the other. The
stern old man whom Antonina had called father, and who had been pointed out to him as the
most austere Christian in Rome, far from avenging his intrusion on Antonina's slumber, had
voluntarily abandoned his daughter to his licentious will. That the anger or irony of so
severe a man should inspire such an action as this, or that Numerian, like his servant, was
plotting to obtain some strange, mysterious favor from him by using Antonina as a bribe,
seemed perfectly impossible. All that passed before the senator was, to his bewildered
imagination, thoroughly incomprehensible. Frivolous, thoughtless, profligate as he might
be, his nature was not radically base; and when the scene of which he had been the
astounded witness was abruptly terminated by the flight of Antonina, the look of frantic
misery fixed on him by the unfortunate girl at the moment of her departure almost sobered
him for the instant, as he stood before the now solitary father, gazing vacantly around him
with emotions of uncontrollable confusion and dismay.

Meanwhile a third person was now approaching to join the two occupants of the bed-
chamber abandoned by its ill-fated mistress. Although. in the subterranean retreat to which
he had retired on leaving Vetranio, Ulpius had not noticed the silent entrance of the master
of the house, he had heard through the open doors the sound, low though it was, of the
Christian's voice. As he rose, suspecting all things and prepared for every emergency, to
ascend to the bed-chamber, he saw, while he mounted the lowest range of stairs, a figure in
white pass rapidly through the hall and disappear by the principal entrance of the house. He
hesitated for an instant and looked after it, but the fugitive figure had passed so swiftly in
the uncertain light of early morning that he was unable to identify it; and he determined to
ascertain the progress of events, now that Numerian must have discovered a portion at least
of the plot against his daughter and himself, by ascending immediately to Antonina's
apartment, whatever might be the consequences of his intrusion at such an hour on her
father's wrath.

As soon as the pagan appeared before him, a sensible change took place in Vetranio. The
presence of Ulpius in the chamber was a positive relief to the senator's perturbed faculties,
after the mysterious, overpowering influence that the moral command expressed in the mere
presence of the father and the master of the house, at such an hour, had exercised over them.
Over Ulpius he had an absolute right--Ulpius was his dependent; and he determined,
therefore, to extort from the servant whom he despised an explanation of the mysteries in
the conduct of the master whom he feared, and the daughter whom he began to doubt.

"Where is Antonina?" he cried, starting as if from a trance, and advancing fiercely toward
the treacherous pagan. "She has left the room--she must have taken refuge with you."

With a slow and penetrating gaze Ulpius looked round the apartment. A faint agitation was
perceptible in his livid countenance, but he uttered not a word.

The senator's face became pale and red with alternate emotions of apprehension and rage.
He seized the pagan by the throat, his eyes sparkled, his blood boiled; he began to suspect
even then that Antonina was lost to him forever.

"I ask you again where is she?" he shouted in a voice of fury. "If through this night's work
she is lost or harmed, I will revenge it on you. Is this the performance of your promise? Do
you think that I will direct your desired restoration of the gods of old for this? If evil comes
to Antonina through your treachery, sooner than assist you in your secret projects, I would
see you and your accursed deities all burning together in the Christians' hell! Where is the
girl, you slave? Villain, where was your vigilance, when you let that man surprise us at our
first interview?"

He turned toward Numerian as he spoke. Trouble and emergency gift the faculties with a
more than mortal penetration. Every word that he had uttered had eaten its burning way into
the father's heart. Hours of narrative could not have convinced him how fatally he had been
deceived more thoroughly than the few hasty expressions he had just heard. No word passed
his lips--no action betrayed his misery. He stood before the spoilers of his home, changed in
an instant from the courageous enthusiast to the feeble, helpless, heart-broken man.

Though all the ferocity of his old Roman blood had been roused in Vetranio as he
threatened Ulpius, the father's look of cold, silent, frightful despair froze it in his young
veins in an instant. His heart was still the impressible heart of youth; and, struck for the first
time in his life with emotions of horror and remorse, he advanced a step to offer such
explanation and atonement as he best might, when the voice of Ulpius suspended his
intentions, and made him pause to listen.

"She passed me in the hall," muttered the pagan, doggedly. "I did my part in betraying her
into your power--it was for you to hinder her in her flight. Why did you not strike him to the
earth," he continued, pointing with a mocking smile to Numerian, "when he surprised you?
You are wealthy and a noble of Rome; murder would have been no crime in you!"

"Stand back!" cried the senator, thrusting him from the position he had hitherto occupied in
the doorway. "She may be recovered even yet! All Rome shall be searched for her!"

The next instant he disappeared from the room, and the master and servant were left
together alone.

The silence that now reigned in the apartment was broken by distant sounds of uproar and
confusion in the streets of the city beneath. These ominous noises had arisen with the dawn
of day, but the different emotions of the occupants of Numerian's abode had so engrossed
them, that the turmoil in the outer world had passed unheeded by all. No sooner, however,
had Vetranio departed than it caught the attention of Ulpius, and he advanced to the
window. What he there saw and heard was of no ordinary importance, for it at once fixed
him to the spot where he stood in mute and ungovernable surprise.

While Ulpius was occupied at the window, Numerian had staggered to the side of the bed
which his ill-timed severity had made vacant, perhaps forever. The power of action, the
capacity to go forth and seek his child himself, was entirely suspended in the agony of her
loss, as the miserable man fell on his knees, and in the anguish of his heart endeavored to
find solace in prayer. In the positions they severally occupied the servant and the master
long remained--the betrayer watching at the window, the betrayed mourning at his lost
daughter's bed--both alike silent, both alike unconscious of the lapse of time.

At length, apparently unaware at first that he was not alone in the room, Numerian spoke. In
his low, broken, tremulous accents, none of his adherents would have recognized the voice
of the eloquent preacher--the bold chastiser of the vices of the Church. The whole nature of
the man--moral, intellectual, physical--seemed fatally and completely changed.

"She was innocent, she was innocent!" he whispered to himself. "And even had she been
guilty, was it for me to drive her from my doors? My part, like my Redeemer's, was to teach
repentance, and to show mercy. Accursed be the pride and anger that drove justice and
patience from my heart, when I beheld her, as I thought, submitting herself without a
struggle or a cry, to my dishonor, and hers! Could I not have imagined her terror, could I not
have remembered her purity? Alas, my beloved, if I myself have been the dupe of the
wicked, what marvel is it that you should have been betrayed as well? And I have driven
you from me, you, from whose mouth no word of anger ever dropped! I have thrust you
from my bosom, you, who were the adornment of my age! My death approaches, and you
will not be by to pardon my heavy offense, to close my weary eyes, to mourn by my solitary
tomb! God--oh God! if I am left thus lonely on the earth, thou hast punished me beyond
what I can bear!"

He paused--his emotions for the instant bereft him of speech. After an interval, he muttered
to himself in a low, moaning voice, "I called her harlot! My pure, innocent child! I called
her harlot--I called her harlot!"

In a paroxysm of despair, he started up and looked distractedly around him. Ulpius still
stood motionless at the window. At the sight of the ruthless pagan he trembled in every
limb. All those infirmities of age that had been hitherto spared him, seemed to overwhelm
him in an instant. He feebly advanced to his betrayer's side and addressed him thus:

"I have lodged you, taught you, cared for you; I have never intruded on your secrets, never
doubted your word; and for all this, you have repaid me by plotting against my daughter and
deceiving me! If your end was to harm me by assailing my child's happiness and honor you
have succeeded! if you would banish me from Rome, if you would plunge me into
obscurity, to serve some mysterious ambition of your own, you may dispose of me as you
will! I bow before the terrible power of your treachery! I will renounce whatever you
command, if you will restore to me my child! I am helpless and miserable; I have neither
heart nor strength to seek her myself! You, who know all things and can dare all dangers,
may restore her to pardon and bless me, if you will! Remember, whoever you really are, that
you were once helpless and alone, and that you are still old, like me! Remember that I have
 promised to abandon to you whatever you desire! Remember that no woman's voice can
cheer me, no woman's heart feel for me, now that I am old and lonely, but my daughter's! I
have guessed, from the words of the nobleman whom you serve, what are the designs you
cherish and the faith you profess: I will neither betray the one nor assault the other! I
thought that my labors for the Church were more to me than anything on earth; but now
that, through my fault, my daughter is driven from her father's roof, I know that she is dearer
to me than the greatest of my designs: I must gain her pardon; I must win back her affection
before I die! You are powerful and can recover her! Ulpius! Ulpius!"

As he spoke, the Christian knelt at the pagan's feet. It was terrible to see the man of
affection and integrity thus humbled before the man of heartlessness and crime.

Ulpius turned to behold him; then without a word he raised him from the ground, and,
thrusting him to the window, pointed with flashing eyes to the wide view without.

The sun had arisen high in the heaven and beamed in dazzling brilliancy over Rome and the
suburbs. A vague, fearful, mysterious desolation seemed to have suddenly overwhelmed the
whole range of dwellings beyond the walls. No sounds rose from the gardens, no population
idled in the streets. The ramparts, on the other hand, were crowded at every visible point
with people of all ranks, and the distant squares and amphitheaters of the city itself swarmed
like ant-hills to the eye with the crowds that struggled within them. Confused cries and
strange wild noises rose at all points from these masses of human beings. The whole of
Rome seemed the prey of a vast and universal revolt.

Extraordinary and affrighting as was the scene at the moment when he beheld it, it passed
unheeded before the eyes of the scarce conscious father. He was blind to all sights but his
daughter's form, deaf to all sounds but her voice; and he murmured, as he looked vacantly
forth upon the wild view before him, "Where is my child! where is my child!"

"What is your child to me? What are the fortunes or affections of man or woman, at such an
hour as this?" cried the pagan, as he stood by Numerian, with features horribly animated by
the emotions of fierce delight and triumph that were raging within him at the prospect he
beheld. "Dotard, look from this window! Listen to those voices! The gods whom I serve, the
gods whom you and your worship would fain have destroyed, have risen to avenge
themselves at last! Behold those suburbs--they are left desolate! Hear those cries--they are
from Roman lips! While your household's puny troubles have run their course, this city of
apostates has been doomed! in the world's annals this morning will never be forgotten! THE
GOTHS ARE AT THE GATES OF ROME!"

Chapter VIII.
The Goths.

IT was no false rumor that had driven the populace of the suburbs to fly to the security of
the city walls. It was no ill-founded cry of terror that struck the ear of Ulpius as he stood at
Numerian's window. The name of Rome had really lost its pristine terrors; the walls of
Rome, those walls which had morally guarded the empire by their renown, as they had
actually guarded its capital by their strength, were deprived at length of their ancient
inviolability. An army of barbarians had indeed penetrated for conquest and for vengeance
to the City of the World! The achievement which the invasions of six hundred years had
hitherto attempted in vain was now accomplished, and accomplished by the men whose
forefathers had once fled like hunted beasts to their native fastnesses, before the legions of
the Caesars. "The Goths were at the Gates of Rome!"

And now, as his warriors encamped around him, as he saw the arrayed hosts whom his
summons had gathered together and his energy led on; threatening at their doors the corrupt
senate who had deceived, and the boastful populace who had despised him, what emotions
stirred within the heart of Alaric! As the words of martial command fell from his lips, and
his eyes watched the movements of the multitudes around him, what exalted aspirations,
what daring resolves grew and strengthened in the mind of the man who was the pioneer of
that mighty revolution, which swept from one quarter of the world the sway, the civilization,
the very life and spirit of centuries of ancient rule! High thoughts gathered fast in his mind;
a daring ambition expanded within him--the ambition, not of the barbarian plunderer, but of
the avenger who had come to punish; not of the warrior who combated for combat's sake,
but of the hero who was vowed to conquer and to sway. From the far-distant days when
Odin was driven from his territories by the Romans, to the night polluted by the massacre of
the hostages in Aquileia, the hour of just and terrible retribution for Gothic wrongs had been
delayed through the weary lapse of years, and the warning convulsion of bitter strifes, to
approach at last under him. He looked on the towering walls before him, the only invader
since Hannibal by whom they had been beheld; and he felt, as he looked, that his new
aspirations did not deceive him, that his dreams of dominion were brightening into proud
reality, that his destiny was gloriously linked with the overthrow of Imperial Rome!

But even in the moment of approaching triumph, the leader of the Goths was still wily in
purpose and moderate in action. His impatient warriors waited but the word to commence
the assault, to pillage the city, and to slaughter the inhabitants; but he withheld it. Scarcely
had the army halted before the gates of Rome, when the news was promulgated among their
ranks that Alaric, for purposes of his own, had determined to reduce the city by a blockade.

The numbers of his forces, increased during his march by the accession of thirty thousand
auxiliaries, were now divided into battalions, varying in strength according to the service
that was required of them. These divisions stretched round the city walls, and though
occupying separate posts, and devoted to separate duties, were so arranged as to be capable
of uniting at a signal in any numbers, on any given point. Each body of men was
commanded by a tried and veteran warrior, in whose fidelity Alaric could place the most
implicit trust, and to whom he committed the duty of enforcing the strictest military
discipline that had ever prevailed among the Gothic ranks. Before each of the twelve
principal gates a separate encampment was raised. Multitudes watched the navigation of the
Tiber in every possible direction, with untiring vigilance; and not one of the ordinary inlets
to Rome, however apparently unimportant, was overlooked. By these means, every mode of
communication between the beleaguered city and the wide and fertile tracts of land around
it was effectually prevented. When it is remembered that this elaborate plan of blockade was
enforced against a place containing, at the lowest possible computation, twelve hundred
thousand inhabitants, destitute of magazines for food within its walls, dependent for
supplies on its regular contributions from the country without, governed by an irresolute
senate, and defended by an enervated army, the horrors that now impended over the
besieged Romans are as easily imagined as described.

Among the ranks of the army that now surrounded the doomed city, the division appointed
to guard the Pincian Gate will be found, at this juncture, most worthy of the reader's
attention; for one of the warriors appointed to its subordinate command was the young
chieftain Hermanric, who had been accompanied by Goisvintha through all the toils and
dangers of the march, since the time then we left him at the Italian Alps.

The watch had been set, the tents had been pitched, the defenses had been raised on a
portion of ground selected to occupy every possible approach to the Pincian Gate, as
Hermanric retired to await, by Goisvintha's side, whatever further commands he might yet
be intrusted with by his superiors in the Gothic camp. The spot occupied by the young
warrior s simple tent was on a slight eminence, apart from the positions chosen by his
comrades, eastward of the city gate, and overlooking at some distance the deserted gardens
of the suburbs and the stately palaces of the Pincian Hill. Behind his temporary dwelling
was the open country, reduced to a fertile solitude by the flight of its terrified inhabitants;
and at each side lay one unvarying prospect of military strength and preparation, stretching
out its animated confusion of soldiers, tents, and engines of warfare, as far as the sight could
reach. It was now evening. The walls of Rome, enshrouded in a rising mist, showed dim and
majestic to the eyes of the Goths. The noises in the beleaguered city softened and deepened,
seeming to be muffled in the growing darkness of the autumn night, and becoming less and
less audible as the vigilant besiegers listened to them from their respective pests. One by
one, lights broke wildly forth at irregular distances in the Gothic camp. Harshly and fitfully
the shrill call of the signal trumpets rung from rank to rank; and through the dim, thick air
rose, in the intervals of the more important noises, the clash of heavy hammers and the
shout of martial command. Wherever the preparations for the blockade were still
incomplete, neither the approach of night nor the pretext of weariness were suffered for an
instant to hinder their continued progress. Alaric's indomitable will conquered every
obstacle of nature and every deficiency of man. Darkness had no obscurity that forced him
to repose, and lassitude no eloquence that lured him to delay.

In no part of the army had the commands of the Gothic king been so quickly and
intelligently executed as in that appointed to watch the Pincian Gate. The interview of
Hermanric and Goisvintha in the young chieftain's tent was, consequently, uninterrupted for
a considerable space of time by any fresh mandate from the headquarters of the camp.

In outward appearance, both the brother and sister had undergone a change remarkable
enough to be visible, even by the uncertain light of the torch which now shone on them as
they stood together at the door of the tent. The features of Goisvintha, which at the period
when we first beheld her on the shores of the mountain lake, retained, in spite of her
poignant sufferings, much of the lofty and imposing beauty that had been their natural
characteristic in her happier days, now preserved not the slightest traces of their former
attractions. Its freshness had withered from her complexion, its fullness had departed from
her form. Her eyes had contracted an unvarying sinister expression of malignant despair,
and her manner had become sullen, repulsive, and distrustful. This alteration in her outward
aspect was but the result of a more perilous change in the disposition of her heart. The death
of her last child at the very moment when her flight had successfully directed her to the
protection of her people, had affected her more fatally than all the losses she had previously
sustained. The difficulties and dangers that she had encountered in saving her offspring
from the massacre; the dismal certainty that the child was the only one out of all the former
objects of her affection left to her to love; the wild sense of triumph that she experienced in
remembering that in this single instance her solitary efforts had thwarted the savage
treachery of the Court of Rome, had inspired her with feelings of devotion toward the last of
her household which almost bordered on insanity. And now that her beloved charge, her
innocent victim, her future warrior, had, after all her struggles for his preservation, pined
and died; now that she was childless indeed; now that Roman cruelty had won its end in
spite of all her patience, all her courage, all her endurance; every noble feeling within her
sunk, annihilated at the shock. Her sorrow took the fatal form which irretrievably destroys,
in women, all the softer and better emotions; it changed to the despair that asks no
sympathy, to the grief that holds no communion with tears.

Less elevated in intellect and less susceptible in disposition, the change to sullenness of
expression and abruptness of manner now visible in Hermanric, resulted rather from his
constant contemplation of Goisvintha's gloomy despair than from any actual revolution in
his own character. In truth. however many might be the points of outward resemblance now
discernible between the brother and sister, the difference in degree of their moral positions
implied of itself the difference in degree of the inward sorrow of each. Whatever the trials
and afflictions that might assail him, Hermanric possessed the healthful elasticity of youth
and the martial occupations of manhood to support them. Goisvintha could repose on
neither. With no employment but bitter remembrance to engage her thoughts, with no kindly
aspiration, no soothing hope to fill her heart, she was abandoned irrevocably to the influence
of unpartaken sorrow and vindictive despair.

Both the woman and the warrior stood together in silence for some time. At length, without
taking his eyes from the dusky, irregular mass before him, which was all that night now left
visible of the ill-fated city, Hermanric addressed Goisvintha thus:

"Have you no words of triumph as you look on the ramparts that your people have fought
for generations to behold at their mercy, as we now behold them? Can a woman of the
Goths be silent when she stands before the city of Rome?"

"I came hither to behold Rome pillaged, and Romans slaughtered; what is Rome blockaded
to me?" replied Goisvintha, fiercely. "The treasures within that city will buy its safety from
our king, as soon as the tremblers on the ramparts gain heart enough to penetrate a Gothic
camp. Where is the vengeance that you promised me among those distant palaces? Do I
behold you carrying that destruction through the dwellings of Rome which the soldiers of
yonder city carried through the dwellings of the Goths? is it for plunder or for glory that the
army is here? I thought, in my woman's delusion, that it was for revenge!"

"Dishonor will avenge you--Famine will avenge you--Pestilence will avenge you!"

"They will avenge my nation; they will not avenge me. I have seen the blood of Gothic
women spilled around me--I have looked on my children's corpses bleeding at my feet! Will
a famine that I cannot see, and a pestilence that I cannot watch, give me vengeance for this?
Look! Here is the helmet-crest of my husband and your brother--the helmet-crest that was
flung to me as a witness that the Romans had slain him! Since the massacre of Aquileia it
has never quitted my bosom. I have sworn that the blood which stains and darkens it, shall
be washed off in the blood of the people of Rome. Though I should perish under those
accursed walls; though you in your soulless patience should refuse me protection and aid; I,
widowed, weakened, forsaken as I am, will hold to the fulfillment of my oath!"

As she ceased she folded the crest in her mantle, and turned abruptly from Hermanric in
bitter and undissembled scorn. All the attributes of her sex, in thought, expression, and
manner, to have deserted her. The very tones she spoke in were harsh and unwomanly.

Every word she had uttered, every action she had displayed, had sunk into the inmost heart,
had stirred the fiercest passions of the young warrior whom she addressed. The first national
sentiment discoverable in the dayspring of the ages of Gothic history is the love of war; but
the second is the reverence of woman. This latter feeling--especially remarkable among so
fierce and unsusceptible a people as the ancient Scandinavians--was entirely unconnected
with those strong attaching ties which are the natural consequence of the warm
temperaments of more southern nations; for love was numbered with the base inferior
passions in the frigid and hardy composition of the warrior of the north. It was the offspring
of reasoning and observation, not of instinctive sentiment and momentary impulse. In the
wild, poetical code of the old Gothic superstition was one axiom, closely and strangely
approximating to an important theory in the Christian scheme--the watchfulness of an
omnipotent Creator over a finite creature. Every action of the body, every impulse of the
mind, vas the immediate result, in the system of worship among the Goths, of the direct
though invisible interference of the divinities they adored. When, therefore, they observed
that women were more submitted in body to the mysterious laws of nature and
temperament, and more swayed in mind by the native and universal instincts of humanity,
than themselves, they inferred as an inevitable conclusion that the female sex was more
incessantly regarded, and more constantly and remarkably influenced by the gods of their
worship, than the male. Acting under this persuasion, they committed the study of medicine,
the interpretation of dreams, and, in many instances, the mysteries of communication with
the invisible world, to the care of their women. The gentler sex became their counselors in
difficulty and their physicians in sickness--their companions, rather than their mistresses--
their objects of their veneration, rather than the purveyors of their pleasures. Although in
after years the national migrations of the Goths changed the national temperament, although
their ancient mythology was exchanged for worship of Christ, this prevailing sentiment of
their earliest existence as a people never entirely deserted them, but, with different
modifications and in different forms, maintained much of its old supremacy through all
changes of manners and varieties of customs, descending finally to their posterity among the
present nations of Europe, in the shape of that established code of universal courtesy to
women which is admitted to be one great distinguishing mark between the social systems of
the inhabitants of civilized and uncivilized lands.

This powerful and remarkable ascendency of the woman over the man, among the Goths,
could hardly be more strikingly displayed than in the instance of Hermanric. it appeared not
only in the deteriorating effect of the constant companionship of Goisvintha on his naturally
manly character, but also in the strong influence over his mind of the last words of fury and
disdain that she had spoken. his eyes gleamed with anger, his cheeks flushed with shame, as
he listened to those passages in her wrathful remonstrance which reflected most bitterly on
himself. She had scarcely ceased, and turned to retire into the tent, when he arrested her
progress, and replied, in heightened and accusing tones:

"You wrong me by your words! When I saw you among the Alps, did I refuse you
protection? When the child was wounded, did I leave him to suffer unaided? When he died,
did I forsake him to rot upon the earth, or abandon to his mother the digging of his grave?
When we approached Aquileia, and marched past Ravenna, did I forget that the sword hung
at my shoulder? Was it at my will that it remained sheathed, or that I entered not the gates of
the Roman towns, but passed by them in haste? Was it not the command of the king that
withheld me; and could I, his warrior, disobey? I swear it to you, the vengeance that I
promised I yearn to perform; but is it for me to alter the counsels of Alaric? Can I alone
assault the city which it is his command that we should blockade? What would you have of
me?"

"I would have you remember," retorted Goisvintha, indignantly, "that Romans slew your
brother, and made me childless! I would have you remember that a public warfare of years
on years is powerless to stay one hour's craving of private vengeance! I would have you less
submitted to your general's wisdom, and more devoted to your own wrongs! I would have
you--like me--thirst for the blood of the first inhabitant of yonder den of traitors who--
whether for peace or for war--passes the precincts of its sheltering walls!"

She paused abruptly for an answer, but Hermanric uttered not a word. The courageous heart
of the young chieftain recoiled at the deliberate act of assassination pressed upon him in
Goisvintha's veiled yet expressive speech. To act with his comrades in taking the city by
assault, to outdo in the heat of battle the worst horrors of the massacre of Aquileia, would
have been achievements in harmony with his wild disposition and warlike education; but to
submit himself to Goisvintha's projects was a sacrifice that the very peculiarities of his
martial character made repugnant to his thoughts. Emotions such as these he would have
communicated to his companion, as they passed through his mind; but there was something
in the fearful and ominous change that had occurred in her disposition since he had met her
among the Alps--in her frantic, unnatural craving for bloodshed and revenge, that gave her a
mysterious and powerful influence over his thoughts, his words, and even his actions. He
hesitated and was silent.

"Have I not been patient?" continued Goisvintha, lowering her voice to tones of earnest,
agitated entreaty, which jarred upon Hermanric's ear, as he thought who was the petitioner,
and what would be the object of the petition. "Have I not been patient throughout the weary
journey from the Alps? Have I not waited for the hour of retribution, even before the
defenseless cities that we passed on the march? Have I not at your instigation governed my
yearning for vengeance, until the day that should see you mounting those walls with the
warriors of the Goths, to scourge with fire and sword the haughty traitors of Rome? Has that
day come? Is it by this blockade that the requital you promised me over the corpse of my
murdered child is to be performed? Remember the perils I dared to preserve the life of that
last one of my household, and will you risk nothing to avenge his death? His sepulcher is
untended and solitary. Far from the dwellings of his people, lost in the dawn of his beauty,
slaughtered in the beginning of his strength, lies the offspring of your brother's blood. And
the rest--the two children, who were yet infants; the father, who was brave in battle and wise
in council--where are they? Their bones whiten on the shelterless plain, or rot unburied by
the ocean shore? Think--had they lived--how happily your days would have passed with
them in the time of peace! how gladly your brother would have gone forth with you to the
chase! how joyfully his boys would have nestled at your knees, to gather from your lips the
first lessons that should form them for the warrior's life! Think of such enjoyments as these,
and then think that Roman swords have deprived you of them all!"

Her voice trembled; she ceased for a moment, and looked mournfully up into Hermanric's
averted face. Every feature in the young chieftain's countenance expressed the tumult that
her words had aroused within him. He attempted to reply, but his voice was powerless in
that trying moment. His head drooped upon his heaving breast, and he sighed heavily, as,
without speaking, he grasped Goisvintha by the hand. The object she had pleaded for was
nearly attained--he was fast sinking beneath the tempter's well-spread toils!

"Are you silent still?" she gloomily resumed. "Do you wonder at this longing for vengeance,
at this craving for Roman blood? I tell you that my desire has arisen within me at
promptings from the voices of an unknown world. They urge me to seek requital on the
nation who have widowed and bereaved me--yonder, in their vaunted city, from their
pampered citizens, among their cherished homes--in the spot where their shameful counsels
take root, and whence their ruthless treacheries derive their bloody source! In the book that
our teachers worship I have heard it read, that the voice of blood crieth from the ground!
This is the voice--Hermanric, this is the voice that I have heard! I have dreamed that I
walked on a shore of corpses, by a sea of blood! I have seen, arising from that sea, my
husband's and my children's bodies, gashed throughout with Roman wounds! They have
called to me through the vapor of carnage that was around them, 'Are we yet unavenged? Is
the sword of Hermanric yet sheathed?' Night after night have I seen this vision and heard
those voices, and hoped for no respite until the day that saw the army encamped beneath the
walls of Rome, and raising the scaling-ladders for the assault! And now, after all my
endurance, how has that day arrived? Accursed be the lust of treasure! It is more to the
warriors and to you than the justice of revenge!"

"Listen! listen!" cried Hermanric, entreatingly.

"I listen no longer!" interrupted Goisvintha. "The tongue of my people is as a strange

language in my ears; for it talks but of plunder and of peace, of obedience, of patience, and
of hope! I listen no longer; for the kindred are gone that I loved to listen to: they are all slain
by the Romans but you, and you I renounce!"

Deprived of all power of consideration by the violence of the emotions awakened in his
heart by Goisvintha's wild revelations of the evil passion that consumed her, the young
Goth, shuddering throughout his whole frame, and still averting his face, murmured in
hoarse, unsteady accents: "Ask of me what you will! I have no words to deny, no power to
rebuke you--ask of me what you will!"
"Promise me," cried Goisvintha, seizing the hand of Hermanric, and gazing with a look of
fierce triumph on his disordered countenance, "that this blockade of the city shall not hinder
my vengeance! Promise me that the first victim of our righteous revenge shall be the first
one that appears before you--whether in war or peace--of the inhabitants of Rome!"

"I promise," cried the Goth. And those two words sealed the destiny of his future life.

During the silence that now ensued between Goisvintha and Hermanric, and while each
stood absorbed in deep meditation, the dark prospect spread around them began to brighten
slowly under a soft, clear light. The moon, whose dull broad disk had risen among the
evening mists arrayed in gloomy red, had now topped the highest of the exhalations of earth,
and beamed in the wide heaven, adorned once more in her pale, accustomed hue. Gradually,
yet perceptibly, the vapor rolled, layer by layer, from the lofty summits of the palaces of
Rome, and the high places of the mighty city began to dawn, as it were, in the soft, peaceful,
mysterious light; while the lower divisions of the walls, the desolate suburbs, and parts of
the Gothic camp lay still plunged in the dusky obscurity of the mist, in grand and gloomy
contrast to the prospect of glowing brightness that almost appeared to hover about them
from above and around. Patches of ground behind the tent of Hermanric began to grow
partially visible in raised and open positions, and the song of the nightingale was now
faintly audible at intervals among the solitary and distant trees. In whatever direction it was
observed, the aspect of nature gave promise of the cloudless, tranquil night of the autumnal
climate of ancient Italy.

Hermanric was the first to return to the contemplation of the outward world. Perceiving that
the torch which still burned by the side of his tent had become useless, now that the moon
had arisen and dispelled the mists, he advanced and extinguished it; pausing afterward to
look forth over the plains, as they brightened slowly before him. He had been thus occupied
but a short time, when he thought he discerned a human figure moving slowly over a spot of
partially lighted and hilly ground, at a short distance from him. It was impossible that this
wandering form could be one of his own people; they were all collected at their respective
posts, and his tent, he knew, was on the outermost boundary of the encampment before the
Pincian Gate.

He looked again. The figure still advanced, but at too great a distance to allow him a chance
of discovering, in the uncertain light around him, either its nation, its sex, or its age. His
heart misgave him as he remembered his promise to Goisvintha, and contemplated the
possibility that it was some miserable slave, abandoned by the fugitives who had quitted the
suburbs in the morning, who now approached, as a last resource, to ask mercy and
protection from his enemies in the camp. He turned toward Goisvintha as the idea crossed
his mind, and observed that she was still occupied in meditation. Assured by the sight that
she had not yet observed the fugitive figure, he again directed his attention--with an excess
of anxiety which he could hardly account for--in the direction where he had first beheld it;
but it was no more to be seen. it had either retired to concealment, or was now still
advancing toward his tent through a clump of trees that clothed the descent of the hill.

Silently and patiently he continued to look forth over the landscape; and still no living thing
was to be seen. At length, just as he began to doubt whether his senses had not deceived
him, the fugitive figure suddenly appeared from the trees, hurried with wavering gait over
the patch of low, damp ground that still separated it from the young Goth, gained his tent,
and then with a feeble cry fell helplessly upon the earth at his feet.

That cry, faint as it was, attracted Goisvintha's attention. She turned in an instant, thrust
Hermanric aside, and raised the stranger in her arms. The light, slender form, the fair hand
and arm hanging motionless toward the ground, the long locks of deep black hair, heavy
with the moisture of the night atmosphere, betrayed the wanderer's sex and age in an instant.
The solitary fugitive was a young girl.

Signing to Hermanric to kindle the extinguished torch at a neighboring watch-fire,

Goisvintha carried the still insensible girl into the tent. As the Goth silently proceeded to
obey her, a vague, horrid suspicion that he shrunk from embodying, passed across his mind.
His hand shook so that he could hardly light the torch, and bold and vigorous as he was, his
limbs trembled beneath him as he slowly returned to the tent.

When he had gained the interior of his temporary abode, the light of his torch illuminated a
strange and impressive scene.

Goisvintha was seated on a rude oaken chest, supporting on her knees the form of the young
girl, and gazing with an expression of the most intense and enthralling interest upon her
pale, wasted countenance. The tattered robe that had hitherto enveloped the fugitive had
fallen back, and disclosed the white dress, which was the only other garment she wore. Her
face, throat, and arms had been turned, by exposure to the cold, to the pure whiteness of
marble. Her eyes were closed and her small, delicate features were locked in a rigid repose.
But for her deep black hair, which heightened the ghastly aspect of her face, she might have
been mistaken, as she lay in the woman's arms, for an exquisitely chiseled statue of youth in
death.

When the figure of the young warrior, arrayed in his martial habiliments, and standing near
the insensible girl with evident emotions of wonder and anxiety, was added to tile group
thus produced--when Goisvintha's tall, powerful frame, clothed in dark garments, and bent
over the fragile form and white dress of the fugitive, was illuminated by the wild, fitful glare
of the torch--when the heightened color, worn features, and eager expression of the woman
were beheld, here shadowed, there brightened, in close opposition to the pale, youthful,
reposing countenance of the girl, such an assemblage of violent lights and deep shades was
produced as gave the whole scene a character at once mysterious and sublime. It presented a
harmonious variety of solemn colors, united by the exquisite artifice of Nature to a grand
yet simple disposition of form. It was a picture executed by the hand of Rembrandt, and
imagined by the mind of Raphael.

Starting abruptly from her long, earnest examination of the fugitive, Goisvintha proceeded
to employ herself in restoring animation to her insensible charge. While thus occupied she
preserved unbroken silence. A breathless expectation, that absorbed all her senses in one
direction, seemed to have possessed itself of her heart. She labored at her task with the
mechanical, unwavering energy of those whose attention is occupied by their thoughts
rather than their actions. Slowly and unwillingly the first faint flush of returning animation
dawned, in the tenderest delicacy of hue, upon the girl's colorless cheek. Gradually and
softly, her quickening respiration fluttered a thin lock of hair that had fallen over her face. A
little interval more, and then the closed, peaceful eyes suddenly opened, and glanced
quickly round the tent with a wild expression of bewilderment and terror. Then, as
Goisvintha rose and attempted to place her on a seat, she tore herself from her grasp, looked
on her for a moment with fearful intentness, and then, falling on her knees, murmured, in a
plaintive voice:

"Have mercy upon me. I am forsaken by my father--I know not why. The gates of the city
are shut against me. My habitation in Rome is closed to me forever!"

She had scarcely spoken these few words before an ominous change appeared in
Goisvintha's countenance. Its former expression of ardent curiosity changed to a look of
malignant triumph. Her eyes fixed themselves on the girl's upturned face in glaring, steady,
spellbound contemplation. She gloated over the helpless creature before her, as the wild
beast gloats over the prey that it has secured. Her form dilated, a scornful smile appeared on
her lips, a hot flush rose on her cheeks, and ever and anon she whispered softly to herself: "I
knew she was Roman! Aha! I knew she was Roman!"

During this space of time Hermanric was silent. His breath came short and thick, his face
grew pale, and his glance, after resting for an instant on the woman and the girl, traveled
slowly and anxiously round the tent. In one corner of it lay a heavy battle-ax He looked for a
moment from the weapon to Goisvintha with a vivid expression of horror, and then moving
slowly across the tent, with a firm yet trembling grasp he possessed himself of the arm. As
he looked up, Goisvintha approached him. In one hand she held the bloody helmet-crest,
while she pointed with the other to the crouching figure of the girl. Her lips were still parted
with their unnatural smile, and she whispered softly to the Goth: "Remember your promise!
remember your kindred! remember the massacre of Aquileia!"

The young warrior made no answer. He moved rapidly forward a few steps, and signed
hurriedly to the young girl to fly by the door; but her terror had by this time divested her of
all her ordinary powers of perception and comprehension. She looked up vacantly at
Hermanric, and then, shuddering violently, crept into a corner of the tent. During the short
silence that now ensued the Goth could hear her shiver and sigh, as he stood watching, with
all the anxiety of apprehension, Goisvintha's darkening brow.

"She is Roman--she is the first dweller in the city who has appeared before you! Remember
your promise! remember your kindred! remember the massacre of Aquileia!" said the
woman, in fierce, quick, concentrated tones.

"I remember that I am a warrior and a Goth," replied Hermanric, disdainfully. "I have
promised to avenge you, hut it must be on a man that my promise must be fulfilled--an
armed man, who can come forth with weapons in his hand--a strong man of courage whom I
will slay in single combat before your eyes! The girl is too young to die, too weak to be
assailed!"

Not a syllable that he had spoken had passed unheeded by the fugitive; every word seemed
to revive her torpid faculties. As he ceased she arose, and, with the quick instinct of terror,
ran up to the side of the young Goth. Then, seizing his hand--the hand that still grasped the
battle-ax--she knelt down and kissed it, uttering hurried, broken ejaculations, as she clasped
it to her bosom, which the tremulousness of her voice rendered completely unintelligible.

"Did the Romans think my children too young to die, or too weak to be assailed?" cried
Goisvintha. "By the Lord God of Heaven, they murdered them the more willingly because
they were young, and wounded them the more fiercely because they were weak! My heart
leaps within me as I look on the girl! I am doubly avenged, if I am avenged on the innocent
and the youthful! Her bones shall rot on the plains of Rome, as the bones of my offspring rot
on the plains of Aquileia! Shed me her blood! Remember your premise! Shed me her
blood!"

She advanced with extended arms and gleaming eyes toward the fugitive. She gasped for
breath, her face turned suddenly to a livid paleness, the torchlight fell upon her distorted
features, she looked unearthly at that fearful moment; but the divinity of mercy had now
braced the determination of the young Goth to meet all emergencies. His bright, steady eye
quailed not for an instant, as he encountered the frantic glance of the fury before him. With
one hand he barred Goisvintha from advancing another step; the other he could not
disengage from the girl, who now clasped and kissed it more eagerly than before.

"You do this but to tempt me to anger," said Goisvintha, altering her manner with sudden
and palpable cunning, more ominous of peril to the fugitive than the fury she had hitherto
displayed. "You jest at me, because I have failed in patience, like a child! But you will shed
her blood--you are honorable and will hold to your promise--you will shed her blood! And
I," she continued, exultingly, seating herself on the oaken chest that she had previously
occupied, and resting her clinched hands on her knees, "I will wait to see it!"

At this moment voices and steps were heard outside the tent. Hermanric instantly raised the
trembling girl from the ground, and, supporting her by his arm, advanced to ascertain the
cause of the disturbance. He was confronted the next instant by an old warrior of superior
rank, attached to the person of Alaric, who was followed by a small party of the ordinary
soldiery of the camp.

"Among the women appointed by the king to the office of tending, for this night, those sick
and wounded on the march is Goisvintha, sister of Hermanric. If she is here, let her
approach and follow me," said the chief of the party in authoritative tones, pausing at the
door of the tent.

Goisvintha rose. For an instant she stood irresolute. To quit Hermanric at such a time as this
was a sacrifice that wrung her savage heart; but she remembered the severity of Alaric's
discipline, she saw the armed men awaiting her, and yielded after a struggle to the imperious
necessity of obedience to the king's commands. Trembling with suppressed anger and bitter
disappointment, she whispered to Hermanric as she passed him:

"You cannot save her if you would! You dare not commit her to the charge of your
companions; she is too young and too fair to be abandoned to their doubtful protection. You
cannot escape with her, for you must remain here on the watch at your post. You will not let
her depart by herself, for you know that she would perish with cold and privation before the
morning rises. When I return on the morrow I shall see her in the tent. You cannot escape
from your promise--you cannot forget it--you must shed her blood!"

"The commands of the king," said the old warrior, signing to his party to depart with
Goisvintha, who now stood with forced calmness awaiting their guidance, "will be
communicated to the chieftain Hermanric on the morrow. Remember," he continued, in a
lower tone, pointing contemptuously to the trembling girl, "that the vigilance you have
shown in setting the watch before yonder gate will not excuse any negligence your prize
there may now cause you to commit. Consult your youthful pleasures as you please, but
remember your duties. Farewell!"

Uttering these words in a stern, serious tone, the veteran departed. Soon the last sound of the
footsteps of his escort died away, and Hermanric and the fugitive were left alone in the tent.

During the address of the old warrior to the chieftain, the girl had silently detached herself
from her protector's support and retired hastily to the interior of the tent. When she saw that
they were left together again, she advanced hesitatingly toward the young Goth, and looked
up with an expression of mute inquiry into his face.
"I am very miserable," said she, after an interval of silence, in soft, clear, melancholy
accents. "If you forsake me now, I must die--and I have lived so short a time on the earth, I
have known so little happiness and so little love, that I am not fit to die! But you will protect
me! You are good and brave, strong, with weapons in your hands, and full of pity. You have
defended me, and spoken kindly of me--I love you for the compassion you have show me."

Her language and actions, simple as they were, were yet so new to Hermanric, whose
experience of her sex had been almost entirely limited to the women of his own stern,
impassive nation, that he could only reply by a brief assurance of protection when the
supplicant awaited his answer. A new page in the history of humanity was opening before
his eyes, and he scanned it in wondering silence.

"If that woman should return," pursued the girl, fixing her dark, eloquent eyes intently upon
the Goth's countenance, "take me quickly where she cannot come. My heart grows cold as I
look on her! She will kill me if she can approach me again! My father's anger is very fearful,
but hers is horrible--horrible--horrible! Hush! already I hear her coming back; let us go--I
will follow you wherever you please--but let us not delay while there is time to depart! She
will destroy me if she sees me now, and I cannot die yet! Oh, my preserver, my
compassionate defender, I cannot die yet!"

"No one shall harm you--no one shall approach you to-night--you are secure from all
dangers in this tent," said the Goth, gazing on her with undissembled astonishment and
admiration.

"I will tell you why death is so dreadful to me," she continued, and her voice deepened as
she spoke to tones of mournful solemnity, strangely impressive in a creature so young: "I
have lived much alone, and have had no companions but my thoughts, and the sky that I
could look up to, and the things on the earth that I could watch. As I have seen the clear
heaven and the soft fields, and smelled the perfume of flowers, and heard the voices of
singing-birds afar off, I have wondered why the same God who made all this, and made me,
should have made grief and pain and hell--the dread eternal hell that my father speaks of in
his church. I never looked at the sunlight, or woke from my sleep to look on and to think of
the distant stars, but I longed to love something that might listen to my joy. But my father
forbade me to be happy! He frowned even when he gave me my flower-garden--though God
made flowers. He destroyed my lute--though God made music. My life has been a longing
in loneliness for the voices of friends! My heart has swelled and trembled within me,
because when I walked in the garden and looked on the plains and woods and high, bright
mountains that were round me, I knew that I loved them alone! Do you know now why I
dare not die? It is because I must find first the happiness which I feel God has made for me.
It is because I must live to praise this wonderful, beautiful world with others who, enjoy it
as I could! It is because my home has been among those who sigh, and never among those
who smile! It is for this that I fear to die! I must find companions whose prayers are in
singing and in happiness, before I go to the terrible hereafter that all dread. I dare not die! I
dare not die!"

As she uttered these last words she began to weep bitterly. Between amazement and
compassion the young Goth was speechless. He looked down upon the small, soft hand that
she had placed on his arm while she spoke, and saw that it trembled; he pressed it, and felt
that it was cold; and in the first impulse of pity produced by the action he found the
readiness of speech which he had hitherto striven for in vain.

"You shiver and look pale," said he; "a fire shall be kindled at the door of the tent. I will
bring you garments that will warm you, and food that will give you strength; you shall
sleep, and I will watch that no one harms you."

The girl hastily looked up. An expression of ineffable gratitude overspread her sorrowful
countenance. She murmured in a broken voice: "Oh, how merciful, how merciful you are!"
And then, after an evident struggle with herself, she covered her face with her hands, and
again burst into tears.

More and more embarrassed, Hermanric mechanically busied himself in procuring from
such of his attendants as the necessities of the blockade left free, the supplies of fire, food
and raiment which he had promised. She received the coverings, approached the blazing
fuel, and partook of the simple refreshment which the young warrior offered her, with
eagerness. After that she sat for some time silent, absorbed in deep meditation, and
cowering over the fire, apparently unconscious of the curiosity with which she was still
regarded by the Goth. At length she suddenly looked up, and observing his eyes fired on
her, arose and beckoned him to the seat that she occupied.

"Did you know how utterly forsaken I am," said she, "you would not wonder as you do, that
I, a stranger and a Roman, have sought you thus. I have told you how lonely was my home;
but yet that home was a refuge and a protection to me until the morning of this long day that
is past, when I was expelled from it forever! I was suddenly awakened in my bed by--my
father entered in anger--he called me--"

She hesitated, blushed, and then paused at the very outset of her narrative. Innocent as she
was, the natural instincts of her sex spoke, though in a mysterious yet in a warning tone,
within her heart, abruptly imposing on her motives for silence that she could neither
penetrate nor explain. She clasped her trembling hands over her bosom as if to repress its
heaving, and casting down her eyes, continued in a lower tone:

"I cannot tell you why my father drove me from his doors. He has always been silent and
sorrowful tome; setting me long tasks in mournful books; commanding that I should not quit
the precincts of his abode, and forbidding me to speak to him when I have sometimes asked
him to tell me of my mother whom I have lost. Yet he never threatened me or drove me
from his side, until the morning of which I have told you. Then his wrath was terrible; his
eyes were fierce; his voice was threatening! He bade me begone, and I obeyed him in
affright, for I thought he would have slain me if I stayed! I fled from the house, knowing not
where I went, and ran through yonder gate, which is hard by our abode. As I entered the
suburbs, I met great crowds, all hurrying into Rome. I was bewildered by my fears and the
confusion all around, yet I remember that they called loudly to me to fly to the city ere the
gates were closed against the assault of the Goths. And others jostled and scoffed at me, as
they passed by and saw me in the thin night garments in which I was banished from my
home."

Here she paused and listened intently for a few moments. Every accidental noise that she
heard still awakened in her the apprehension of Goisvintha's return. Reassured by
Hermanric and by her own observation of all that was passing outside the tent, she resumed
her narrative after an interval, speaking now in a steadier voice.

"I thought my heart would burst within me," she continued, "as I tried to escape them. All
things whirled before my eyes. I could not speak --I could not stop--I could not weep. I fled
and fled I knew not whither, until I sank down exhausted at the door of a small house on the
outskirts of the suburbs. Then I called for aid, but no one was by to hear me. I crept--for I
could stand no longer--into the house. It was empty. I looked from the windows: no human
figure passed through the silent streets. The roar of a mighty confusion still rose from the
walls of the city, but I was left to listen to it alone. In the house I saw scattered on the floor
some fragments of bread and an old garment. I took them both, and then rose and departed;
for the silence of the place was horrible to me, and I remembered the fields and the plains
that I had once loved to look on, and I thought that I might find there the refuge that had
been denied to me at Rome! So I set forth once more; and when I gained the soft grass, and
sat down beside the shady trees, and saw the sunlight brightening over the earth, my heart
grew sad, and I wept as I thought on my loneliness and remembered my father's anger.

"I had not long remained in my resting-place when I heard a sound of trumpets in the
distance, and looking forth I saw, far off, advancing over the plains, a mighty multitude with
arms that glittered in the sun. I strove, as I beheld them, to arise and return even to those
suburbs whose solitude had affrighted me. But my limbs failed me. I saw a little hollow
hidden among the trees around. I entered it, and there throughout the lonely day I lay
concealed. I heard the long tramp of footsteps as your army passed me on the roads beneath;
and then, after those hours of fear came the weary hours of solitude.

"Oh, those lonely--lonely--lonely hours! I have lived without companions, but those hours
were more terrible to me than all the years of my former life! I dared not venture to leave
my hiding-place--I dared not call! Alone in the world, I crouched in my refuge till the sun
went down! Then came the mist, and the darkness, and the cold. The bitter winds of night
thrilled through and through me! The lonely obscurity around me seemed filled with
phantoms whom I could not behold, who touched me and rustled over the surface of my
skin. They half maddened me! I rose to depart; to meet my wrathful father, or the army that
had passed me, or solitude in the cold, bright meadows--I cared not which!--when I
discerned the light of your torch, the moment ere it was extinguished. Dark though it then
was, I found your tent. And now I know that I have found yet more--a companion and a
friend!"

She looked up at the young Goth as she pronounced these words, with the same grateful
expression that had appeared on her countenance before; but this time her eyes were not
dimmed by tears. Already her disposition--poor as was the prospect of happiness which now
lay before it--had begun to return, with an almost infantine facility of change, to the
restoring influences of the brighter emotions. Already the short tranquillities of the present
began to exert for her their effacing charm over the long agitations of the past. Despair was
unnumbered among the emotions that grew round that childlike heart; shame, fear, and
grief, however they might overshadow it for a time, left no taint of their presence on its
bright, fine surface. Tender, perilously alive to sensation, strangely retentive of kindness as
she was by nature, the very solitude to which she had been condemned had gifted her,
young as she was, with a martyr's endurance of ill, and with a stoic's patience under pain.

"Do not mourn for me now," she pursued, gently interrupting some broken expressions of
compassion which fell from the lips of the young Goth. "If you are merciful to me, I shall
forget all that I have suffered! Though your nation is at enmity with mine, while you remain
my friend, I fear nothing! I can look on your great stature, and heavy sword, and bright
armor now without trembling! You are not like the soldiers of Rome--you are taller,
stronger, more gloriously arrayed! You are like a statue I once saw by chance of a warrior of
the Greeks. You have a look of conquest and a presence of command!"

She gazed on the manly and powerful frame of the young warrior, clothed as it was in the
accouterments of his warlike nation, with an expression of childish interest and
astonishment, asking him the appellation and use of each part of his equipment, as it
attracted her attention, and ending her inquiries by eagerly demanding his name.

"Hermanric," she repeated, as he answered her, pronouncing with some difficulty the harsh
Gothic syllables--"Hermanric!--that is a stern, solemn name--a name fit for a warrior and a
man. Mine sounds worthless, after such a name as that. It is only Antonina!"

Deeply as he was interested in every word uttered by the girl, Hermanric could no longer
fail to perceive the evident traces of exhaustion that now appeared in the slightest of her
actions. Producing some furs from a corner of the tent, he made a sort of rude couch by the
side of the fire, heaped fresh fuel on the flames, and then gently counseled her to recruit her
wasted energies by repose. There was something so candid in his manner, so sincere in the
tones of his voice, as he made his simple offer of hospitality to the stranger who had taken
refuge with him, that the most distrustful woman would have accepted it with as little
hesitation as who, gratefully and unhesitatingly, laid down on the bed that he had been
spreading for her at her feet.

As soon as he had carefully covered her with a cloak, and rearranged her couch in the
position best calculated to insure her all the warmth of the burning fuel, Hermanric retired to
the other side of the fire; and, leaning on his sword, abandoned himself to the new and
absorbing reflections which the presence of the girl naturally aroused.

He thought not on the duties demanded of him by the blockade; he remembered neither the
scene of rage and ferocity that had followed his evasion of his reckless promise, nor the
fierce determination that Goisvintha had expressed as she quitted him for the night. The
cares and toils to come with the new morning, which would oblige him to expose the
fugitive to the malignity of her revengeful enemy; the thousand contingencies that the
difference of their sexes, their nations, and their lives, might create to oppose the
continuance of the permanent protection that he had promised to her, caused him no
forebodings. Antonina, and Antonina alone, occupied every faculty of his mind and every
feeling of his heart. There was a softness and a melody to his ear in her very name!

His early life had made him well acquainted with the Latin tongue, but he had never
discovered all its native smoothness of sound, and elegance of structure, until he had heard
it spoken by Antonina. Word by word he passed over in his mind her varied, natural, and
happy turns of expression; recalling, as he was thus employed, the eloquent looks, the rapid
gesticulations, the changing tones which had accompanied those words, and thinking how
wide was the difference between this young daughter of Rome and the cold and taciturn
women of his own nation. The very mystery enveloping her story, which would have
excited the suspicion or contempt of more civilized men, aroused in him no other emotions
than those of wonder and compassion. No feelings of a lower nature than these entered his
heart toward the girl. She was safe under the protection of the enemy and the barbarian,
after having been lost through the interference of the Roman and the senator. To the simple
perceptions of the Goth, the discovery of so much intelligence united to such extreme youth,
of so much beauty doomed to such utter loneliness, was the discovery of an apparition that
dazzled, and not of a woman who charmed him. He could not even have touched the hand of
the helpless creature who now reposed under his tent, unless she had extended it to him of
her own accord. He could only think--with a delight whose excess he was far from
estimating himself--on this solitary, mysterious being who had come to him for shelter and
for aid; who had awakened in him already new sources of sensation; and who seemed to his
 startled imagination to have suddenly twined herself forever about the destinies of his future
life.

He was still deep in meditation, when he was startled by a hand suddenly laid on his arm.
He looked up and saw that Antonina, whom he had imagined to be slumbering on her
couch, was standing by his side.

"I cannot sleep," said the girl, in a low, awestruck voice, until I have asked you to spare my
father when you enter Rome. I know that you are here to ravage the city; and, for aught I
can tell, you may assault and destroy it to-night. Will you promise to warn me before the
walls are assailed? I will then tell you my father's name and abode, and you will spare him
as you have mercifully spared me? He has denied me his protection, but he is my father still;
and I remember that I disobeyed him once, when I possessed myself of a lute! Will you
promise me to spare him? My mother, whom I have never seen, and who must, therefore, be
dead, may love me in another world for pleading for my father's life!"

In a few words Hermanric quieted her agitation by explaining to her the nature and intention
of the Gothic blockade, and she silently returned to the couch. After a short interval, her
slow, regular breathing announced to the young warrior, as he watched by the side of the
fire, that she had at length forgotten the day's heritage of misfortune in the welcome
oblivion of sleep. [next part of Antonina] [Return to Front Page]

Chapter IX.
The Two Interviews.

THE time, is the evening of the first day of the Gothic blockade; the place, is Vetranio's
palace at Rome. In one of the private apartments of his mansion is seated its all-
accomplished owner, released at length from the long sitting convened by the Senate on the
occasion of the unexpected siege of the city. Although the same complete discipline, the
same elegant regularity, and the same luxurious pomp which distinguished the senator's
abode in times of security still prevail over it in the time of imminent danger which now
threatens rich and poor alike in Rome, Vetranio himself appears far from partaking the
tranquillity of his patrician household. His manner displays an unusual sternness, and his
face an unwonted displeasure, as he sits occupied by his silent reflections and thoroughly
unregardful of whatever occurs around him. Two ladies who are his companions in the
apartment exert all their blandishments to win him back to hilarity, but in vain. The services
of his expectant musicians are not put into requisition, the delicacies on his table remain
untouched, and even "the inestimable kitten of the breed most worshiped by the ancient
Egyptians" gambols unnoticed and unapplauded at his feet. All its wonted philosophical
equanimity has evidently departed, for the time at least, from the senator's mind.

Silence--hitherto a stranger to the palace apartments--had reigned uninterruptedly over them

for some time, when the freedman Carrio dissipated Vetranio's meditations, and put the
ladies who were with him to flight, by announcing in an important voice that the Prefect
Pompeianus desired a private interview with the Senator Vetranio.

The next instant the chief magistrate of Rome entered the apartment. He was a short, fat,
undignified man. Indolence and vacillation were legibly impressed on his appearance and
expression. You saw, in a moment, that his mind, like a shuttlecock, might be urged in any
direction by the effort of others, but was utterly incapable of volition by itself. But once in
his life had the Prefect Pompeianus been known to arrive unaided at a positive
determination, and that was in deciding a fierce argument between a bishop and a general,
regarding the relatives merits of two rival rope-dancers of equal renown.

"I have come, my beloved friend," said the prefect, in agitated tones, "to ask your opinion, at
this period of awful responsibility for us all, on the plan of operations proposed by the
Senate at the sitting of to-day! But first," he hastily continued, perceiving, with the unerring
instinct of an old gastronome, that the inviting refreshments on Vetranio's table had
remained untouched, "permit me to fortify my exhausted energies by a visit to your ever-
luxurious board. Alas, my friend, when I consider the present fearful scarcity of our
provision stores in the city, and the length of time that this accursed blockade may be
expected to last, I am inclined to that the gods alone know--I mean St. Peter--how much
longer we may be enabled to give occupation to our digestions and employment to our
cooks.

"I have observed," pursued the prefect, after an interval, speaking with his mouth full
stewed peacock; "I have observed, oh esteem colleague! the melancholy of your manner
your absolute silence during your attendance to-day at our deliberations. Have we, in your
opinion, decided erroneously? It is not impossible! Our confusion at this unexpected
appearance of the barbarians may have blinded our usual penetration! If by any chance you
dissent from our plans, I beseech you communicate your objections to me without reserve!"

"I dissent from nothing, because I have heard nothing," replied Vetranio, sullenly. "I was so
occupied by a private matter of importance during my attendance at the sitting of the Senate
that I was deaf to their deliberations. I know that we are besieged by the Goths--why are
they not driven from before the walls?"

"Deaf to our deliberations! Drive the Goths from the walls!" repeated the prefect, faintly.
"Can you think of any private matter at such a moment as this? Do you know our danger?
Do you know that our friends are so astonished at this frightful calamity that they move
about like men half awakened from a dream? Have you not seen the streets filled with
terrified and indignant crowds? Have you not mounted the ramparts and beheld the
innumerable multitudes of pitiless Goths surrounding us on all sides, intercepting our
supplies of provisions from the country, and menacing us with a speedy famine, unless our
hoped-for auxiliaries arrive from Ravenna?"

"I have neither mounted the ramparts, nor viewed with any attention the crowds in the
streets," replied Vetranio, carelessly.

"But if you have seen nothing yourself, you must have heard what others saw," persisted the
prefect; "you must know at least that the legions we have in the city are not sufficient to
guard more than half the circuit of the walls. Has no one informed you that if it should
please the leader of the barbarians to change his blockade into an assault, it is more than
probable that we should be unable to repulse him successfully? Are you still deaf to our
deliberations, when your palace may to-morrow be burned over your head, when we may be
starved to death, when we may be doomed to eternal dishonor by being driven to conclude a
peace? Deaf to our deliberations, when such an unimaginable calamity as this invasion has
fallen like a thunder-bolt under our very walls! You amaze me! You overwhelm me! You
horrify me!"

And in the excess of his astonishment the bewildered prefect actually abandoned his stewed
peacock, and advanced, wine-cup in hand, to obtain a nearer view of the features of his
imperturbable host.

"If we are not strong enough to drive the Goths out of Italy," rejoined Vetranio, coolly, "you
and the senate know that we are rich enough to bribe them to depart to the remotest confines
of the empire. If we have not swords enough to fight, we have gold and silver enough to
pay."

"You are jesting! Remember our honor and the auxiliaries we still hope for from Ravenna,"
said the prefect, reprovingly.

"Honor has lost the signification now that it had in the time of the Caesars," retorted the
senator. "Our fighting days are over. We have had heroes enough for our reputation. As for
the auxiliaries you still hope for, you will have none! While the emperor is safe in Ravenna,
he will care nothing for the worst extremities that can be suffered by the people of Rome."

"But you forget your duties," urged the astonished Pompeianus, turning from rebuke to
expostulation. "You forget that it is a time when all private interests must be abandoned!
You forget that I have come here to ask your advice; that I am bewildered by a thousand
projects, forced on me from all sides, for ruling the city successfully during the blockade;
that I look to you, as a friend and a man of reputation, to aid me in deciding on a choice out
of the varied counsels submitted to me in the senate to-day."

"Write down the advice of each senator on a separate strip of vellum; shake all the strips
together in an urn; and then, let the first you take out by chance be your guide to govern by
in the present condition of the city!" said Vetranio, with a sneer.

"Oh friend, friend, it is cruel to jest with me thus!" cried the prefect, in tones of lament.
"Would you really persuade me you are ignorant that what sentinels we have are doubled
already on the walls? Would you attempt to declare seriously to me that you never heard the
project of Saturninus for reducing imperceptibly the diurnal allowance of provisions? Or the
recommendation of Emilianus, that the people should be kept from thinking on the dangers
and extremities which now threaten them, by being provided incessantly with public
amusements at the theaters and hippodromes? Do you really mean that you are indifferent to
the horrors of our present situation? By the souls of the apostles, Vetranio, I begin to think
that you do not believe in the Goths!"

"I have already told you that private affairs occupy me at present, to the exclusion of
public," said Vetranio, impatiently. "Debate as you choose--approve what projects you will-
-I withdraw myself from interference in your deliberations!"

"This," murmured the repulsed prefect in soliloquy, as he mechanically resumed his place at
the refreshment-table, "this is the very end and climax of all calamities! Now, when advice
and assistance are more precious than jewels in my estimation, I receive neither! I gain from
none the wise and saving counsels which, as chief magistrate of this imperial city, it is my
right to demand from all; and the man on whom I most depended is the man who fails me
most! Yet hear me, oh Vetranio, once again," he continued, addressing the senator; "if our
perils beyond the walls affect you not, there is a weighty matter that has been settled within
them, which must move you. After you had quitted the senate, Serena, the widow of
Stilicho, was accused, as her husband was accused before her, of secret and treasonable
correspondence with the Goths; and has been condemned, as her husband was condemned,
to suffer the penalty of death. I myself discerned no evidence to convict her; hut the
populace cried out, in universal frenzy, that she was guilty, that she should die; and that the
barbarians, when they heard of the punishment inflicted on their secret adherent, would
retire in dismay from Rome. This also was a moot-point of argument, on which I vainly
endeavored to decide; but the senate and the people were wiser than I; and Serena was
condemned to be strangled to-morrow by the public executioner. She was a woman of good
report before this time, and is the adopted mother of the emperor. It is now doubted by many
whether Stilicho, her husband, was ever guilty of the correspondence with the Goths of
which he was accused; and I, on my part, doubt much that Serena has deserved the
punishment of death at our hands. I beseech you, Vetranio, let me be enlightened by your
opinion on this one point at least!"

The prefect waited anxiously for an answer, but Vetranio neither looked at him nor replied.
It was evident that the senator had not listened to a word that he had said.

This reception of his final appeal for assistance produced the effect on the petitioner which
it was perhaps designed to convey--the Prefect Pompeianus quitted the room in despair.

He had not long departed, when Carrio again entered the apartment, and addressed his
master thus:

"It is grievous for me, revered patron, to disclose it to you, but your slaves have returned
unsuccessful from the search!"

"Give the description of the girl to a fresh division of them, and let them continue their
efforts throughout the night, not only in the streets, but in all the houses of public
entertainment in the city. She must be in Rome, and she must be found!" said the senator,
gloomily.

Carrio bowed profoundly, and was about to depart, when he was arrested at the door by his
master's voice

"If an old man, calling himself Numerian, should desire to see me," said Vetranio, "admit
him instantly."

"She had quitted the room but a short time when I attempted to reclaim her," pursued the
senator, speaking to himself; "and yet when I gained the open air she was nowhere to be
seen! She must have mingled unintentionally with the crowds whom the Goths drove into
the city, and thus have eluded my observation. So young and so innocent! She must be
found! She must be found!"

He paused, once more engrossed in deep and melancholy thought. After a long interval, he
was roused from his abstraction by the sound of footsteps on the marble floor. He looked
up. The door had been opened without his perceiving it, and an old man was advancing with
slow and trembling steps toward his silken couch. It was the bereaved and broken-hearted
Numerian.

"Where is she? Is she found?" asked the father, gazing anxiously round the room, as if he
had expected to see his daughter there.

"My slaves still search for her," said Vetranio, mournfully.

"Ah, woe--woe--woe! How I wronged her! How I wronged her!" cried the old man, turning
to depart.

"Listen to me ere you go," said Vetranio, gently detaining him. "I have done you a great
wrong, but I will yet atone for it by finding for you your child! While there were women
who would have triumphed in my admiration, I should not have attempted to deprive you of
your daughter! Remember, when you recover her--and you shall recover her--that from the
time when I first decoyed her into listening to my lute, to the night when your traitorous
servant led me to her bed-chamber, she has been innocent in this ill-considered matter. I
alone have been guilty! She was scarcely awakened when you discovered her in my arms,
and my entry into her chamber was as little expected by her as it was by you. I was
bewildered by the fumes of wine and the astonishment of your sudden appearance, or I
should have rescued her from your anger ere it was too late! The events which have passed
this morning, confused though they were, have yet convinced me that I had mistaken you
both. I now know that your child was too pure to be an object fitted for my pursuit; and I
believe that in secluding her as you did, however ill-advised you might appear, you were
honest in your design. Never in my pursuit of pleasure did I commit so fatal an error, as
when I entered the doors of your house!"

In pronouncing these words, Vetranio but gave expression to the sentiments by which they
were really inspired. As we have before observed, profligate as he was by thoughtlessness
of character and license of social position, he was neither heartless nor criminal by nature.
Fathers had stormed, but his generosity had hitherto invariably pacified them. Daughters
had wept, but had found consolation on all previous occasions in the splendor of his palace
and the amiability of his disposition. In attempting, therefore, the abduction of Antonina,
though he had prepared for unusual obstacles, he had expected no worse results of his new
conquest than those that had followed, as yet, his gallantries that were past. But when, in the
solitude of his own home, and in the complete possession of his faculties, he recalled all the
circumstances of his attempt, from the time when he had stolen on the girl's slumbers to the
moment when she had fled from the house; when he remembered the stern concentrated
anger of Numerian, and the agony and despair of when he thought on the spirit-broken
repentance of the deceived father, and the fatal departure of the injured daughter, he felt as a
man who had not merely committed an indiscretion, but had been guilty of a crime; he
became convinced that he had incurred the fearful responsibility of destroying the happiness
of a parent who was really virtuous, and a child who was truly innocent. To a man, the
business of whose whole life was to procure for himself a heritage of unalloyed pleasure,
whose sole occupation was to pamper that refined sensuality which the habits of a life had
made the very material of his heart, by diffusing luxury and awakening smiles wherever he
turned his steps, the mere mental disquietude attending the ill success of his intrusion into
Numerian's dwelling was as painful in its influence as the bitterest remorse that could have
afflicted a more highly-principled mind. He now, therefore, instituted the search after
Antonina, and expressed his contrition to her father, from a genuine persuasion that nothing
but the completest atonement for the error he had committed could restore to him that
luxurious tranquillity, the loss of which had, as he had himself expressed it, rendered him
deaf to the deliberations of the senate, and regardless of the invasion of the Goths.

"Tell me," he continued, after a pause, "whither has Ulpius betaken himself? It is necessary
that he should be discovered. He may enlighten us upon the place of Antonina's retreat. He
shall be secured and questioned."

"He left me suddenly: I saw him, as I stood the window, mix with the multitude in the street,
but I know not whither he is gone," replied Numerian; and a tremor passed over his whole
frame as he spoke of the remorseless pagan.

Again there was a short silence. The grief of the broken-spirited father possessed, in its
humility and despair, a voice of rebuke before which the senator, careless and profligate as
he was, instinctively quailed. For some time he endeavored in vain to combat the silencing
and reproving influence exerted over him by the very presence of the sorrowing man whom
he had so fatally wronged. At length, after an interval, he recovered self-possession enough
to address to Numerian some further expressions of consolation and hope; but he spoke to
ears that listened not. The father had relapsed into his mournful abstraction; and when the
senator paused, he merely uttered to himself, "She is lost! Alas! she is lost forever!"

"No, she is not lost forever," cried Vetranio, warmly. "I have wealth and power enough to
her to be sought for to the ends of the earth! Ulpius shall be secured and questioned--
imprisoned, tortured, if it is necessary. Your daughter shall be recovered. Nothing is
impossible to a senator of Rome!"

"I knew not that I loved her, until the morning when I wronged and banished her!"
continued the old man, still speaking to himself. "I have lost all traces of my parents and my
brother--my wife is parted from me forever--I have nothing left but and now, too, she is
gone! Even my ambition, that I once thought my all in all, is no comfort to my soul; for I
loved it--alas! unconsciously loved it--through the being of my child! I destroyed her lute--I
thought her shameless--I drove her from my doors! Oh, how I wronged her!--how I wronged
her!"

"Remain here, and repose yourself in one of the sleeping apartments, until my slaves return
in the morning. You will then hear without delay of the result of their search to-night," said
Vetranio, in kindly and compassionate tones.

"It grows dark--dark!" groaned the father, tottering toward the door; "but that is nothing;
daylight itself now looks darkness to me! I must go; I have duties at the chapel to perform.
Night is repose for you--for me, it is tribulation and prayer!"
 He departed as he spoke. Slowly he paced along the streets that led to his chapel, glancing
with penetrating eye at each inhabitant of the besieged city who passed him on his way.
With some difficulty he arrived at his destination; for Rome was still thronged with armed
men hurrying backward and forward, and with crowds of disorderly citizens pouring forth
wherever there was space enough for them to assemble. The report of the affliction that had
befallen him had already gone abroad among his hearers, and they whispered anxiously to
each other as he entered the plain, dimly-lighted chapel, and slowly mounted the pulpit to
open the service by reading the chapter in the Bible which had been appointed for perusal
that night, and which happened to be the fifth of the Gospel of St. Mark. His voice trembled,
his face was ghastly pale, his hands shook perceptibly as he began; but he read on, in low,
broken tones, and with evident pain and difficulty, until he came to the verse containing
these words: "My little daughter lieth at the point of death." Here he stopped suddenly,
endeavored vainly for a few minutes to proceed, and then, covering his face with his hands,
sank down in the pulpit and sobbed aloud. His sorrowing and startled audience immediately
gathered round him, raised him in their arms, and prepared to conduct him to his own abode.
When, however, they had gained the door of the chapel, he desired them gently to leave him
and return to the performance of the service among themselves. Ever implicitly obedient to
his slightest wishes, the persons of his little assembly, moved to tears by the sight of their
teacher's suffering, obeyed him, by retiring silently to their former places. As soon as he
found that he was alone, he passed the door; and whispering to himself, "I must join those
who seek her! I must aid them myself in the search!" he mingled once more with the
disorderly citizens who thronged the darkened streets.

Chapter X.
The Rift In The Wall.

WHEN Ulpius suddenly departed from Numerian's house on the morning of the siege, it
was with no distinct intention of betaking himself to any particular place, or devoting
himself to any immediate employment. It was to give vent to his joy--to the ecstasy that now
filled his heart to bursting--that he sought the open streets. His whole moral being was
exalted by that overwhelming sense of triumph, which urges the physical nature into action.
He hurried into the free air, as a child runs on a bright day in the wide fields; his delight was
too wild to expand under a roof; his excess of bliss swelled irrepressibly beyond all artificial
limits of space.

The Goths were in sight! A few hours more and their scaling-ladders would be planted
against the walls. On a city so weakly guarded as Rome, their assault must be almost
instantaneously successful. Thirsting for plunder, they would descend in infuriated
multitudes on the defenseless streets. Christians though they were, the restraints of religion
would, in that moment of fierce triumph, be powerless with such a nation of marauders
against the temptations to pillage. Churches would be ravaged and destroyed; priests would
be murdered in attempting the defense of their ecclesiastical treasures; fire and sword would
waste to its remotest confines the stronghold of Christianity, and overwhelm in death and
oblivion the boldest of Christianity's devotees! Then, when the hurricane of ruin and crime
had passed over the city--when a new people were ripe for another government and another
religion--then would be the time to invest the banished gods of old Rome with their former
rule; to bid the survivors of the stricken multitude remember the judgment that their
apostasy to their ancient faith had demanded and incurred; to strike the very remembrance
of the Cross out of the memory of man; and to reinstate Paganism on her throne of
sacrifices, and under her roof of gold, more powerful from her past persecutions, more
universal in her sudden restoration, than in all the glories of her ancient rule!

Such thoughts as these passed through the pagan's toiling mind as, unobservant of all
outward events, he paced through the streets of the beleaguered city. Already he beheld the
army of the Goths preparing the way, as the unconscious pioneers of the returning gods, for
the march of that mighty revolution which he was determined to lead. The warmth of his
past eloquence, the glow of his old courage, thrilled through his heart, as he figured to
himself the prospect that would soon stretch before him--a city laid waste, a people terrified,
a government distracted, a religion destroyed. Then, arising amid this darkness and ruin--
amid this solitude, desolation, and decay, it would be his glorious privilege to summon an
unfaithful people to return to the mistress of their ancient love, to rise from prostration
beneath a dismantled Church, and to seek prosperity in temples repeopled and at shrines
restored!

All remembrance of late events now entirely vanished from his mind. Numerian, Vetranio,
Antonina, they were all forgotten in this memorable advent of the Goths! His slavery in the
mines, his last visit to Alexandria, his earlier wanderings--even these, so present to his
memory until the morning of the siege, were swept from its very surface now. Age, solitude,
infirmity--hitherto the mournful sensations which were proofs to him that he still continued
to exist--suddenly vanished from his perceptions as things that were not; and now at length
he forgot that he was an outcast, and remembered triumphantly that he was still a priest. He
felt animated by the same hopes, elevated by the same aspirations, as in those early days
when he had harangued the wavering pagans in the temple, and first plotted the overthrow
of the Christian Church.

It was a terrible and warning proof of the omnipotent influence that a single idea may
exercise over a whole life, to see that old man wandering among the crowds around him,
still enslaved, after years of suffering and solitude, degradation and crime, by the same
ruling ambition which had crushed the promise of his early youth! It was an awful testimony
to the eternal and mysterious nature of thought, to behold that wasted and weakened frame;
and then to observe how the unassailable mind within still swayed the wreck of body yet left
to it--how faithfully the last exhausted resources of failing vigor rallied into action at its
fierce command--how quickly, at its mocking voice, the sunken eye lightened again with a
gleam of hope, and the pale, thin lips parted mechanically with an exulting smile! The hours
passed, but he still walked on--whither or among whom he neither knew nor cared. No
remorse touched his heart for the destruction that he had wreaked on the Christian who had
sheltered him; no terror appalled his soul at the contemplation of the miseries that he
believed to be in preparation for the city from the enemy at its gates. The end that had
hallowed to him the long series of his former offenses and former sufferings, now
obliterated iniquities just passed and stripped of all their horrors atrocities immediately to
come.

The Goths might be destroyers to others, but they were benefactors to him; for they were
harbingers of the ruin which would be the material of his reform and the source of his
triumph. It never entered his imagination that, as an inhabitant of Rome, he shared the
approaching perils of the citizens, and in the moment of the assault might share their doom.
He beheld only the new and gorgeous prospect that war and rapine were opening before
him. He thought only of the time that must elapse ere his new efforts could be commenced--
of the orders of the people among whom he should successively make his voice heard--of
the temples which he should select for restoration--of the quarter of Rome which should
first be chosen for the reception of his daring reform.

At length he paused; his exhausted energies yielded under the exertions imposed on them,
and obliged him to bethink himself of refreshment and repose. It was now noon. The course
of his wanderings had insensibly conducted him again to the precincts of his old familiar
dwelling-place; he found himself at the back of the Pincian Mount, and only separated by a
strip of uneven woody ground from the base of the city wall. The place was very solitary. It
was divided from the streets and mansions above by thick groves and extensive gardens,
which stretched along the undulating descent of the hill. A short distance to the westward
lay the Pincian Gate, but an abrupt turn in the wall, and some olive-trees which grew near it,
shut out all view of objects in that direction. On the other side, toward the eastward, the
ramparts were discernible, running in a straight line of some length until they suddenly
turned inward at a right angle, and were concealed from further observation by the walls of
a distant palace and the pine-trees of a public garden. The only living figure discernible near
this lonely spot was that of a sentinel, who occasionally passed over the ramparts above,
which--situated as they were between two stations of soldiery, one at the Pincian Gate and
the other where the wall made the angle already described--were untenanted, save by the
guard within the limits of whose watch they happened to be placed. Here, for a short space
of time, the pagan rested his weary frame, and aroused himself insensibly from the
enthralling meditations which had hitherto blinded him to the troubled aspect of the world
around him.
He now for the first time heard on all sides distinctly the confused noises which still rose
from every quarter of Rome. The same incessant strife of struggling voices and hurrying
footsteps which had caught his ear in the early morning, attracted his attention now; but no
shrieks of distress, no clash of weapons, no shouts of fury and defiance, were mingled with
them; although, as he perceived by the position of the sun, the day had sufficiently advanced
to have brought the Gothic army long since to the foot of the walls. What could be the cause
of this delay in the assault--of this ominous tranquillity on the ramparts above him? Had the
impetuosity of the Goths suddenly vanished at the sight of Rome? Had negotiations for
peace been organized with the first appearance of the invaders? He listened again. No
sounds caught his ear differing in character from those he had just heard. Though besieged,
the city was evidently--from some mysterious cause--not even threatened by an assault.

Suddenly there appeared from a little pathway near him, which led round the base of the
wall, a woman, preceded by a child, who called to her impatiently, as he ran on: "Hasten,
mother, hasten! There is no crowd here. Yonder is the Gate. We shall have a noble view of
the Goths!"

There was something in the address of the child to the woman that gave Ulpius a suspicion,
even then, of the discovery that flashed upon him soon -after. He rose and followed them.
They passed onward by the wall, through the olive-trees beyond, and then gained the open
space before the Pincian Gate. Here a great concourse of people had assembled, and were
suffered, in their proper turn, to ascend the ramparts in divisions, by some soldiers who
guarded the steps by which they were approached. After a short delay, Ulpius and those
around him were permitted to gratify their curiosity, as others had done before them. They
mounted the walls, and beheld, stretched over the ground within and beyond the suburbs,
the vast circumference of the Gothic lines.

Terrible and almost sublime as was the prospect of that immense multitude, seen under the
brilliant illumination of the noontide sun, it was not impressive enough to silence the
turbulent loquacity rooted in the dispositions of the people of Rome. Men, women and
children all made their noisy and conflicting observations on the sight before them, in every
variety of tone, from the tremulous accents of terror to the loud vociferations of bravado.

Some spoke boastfully of the achievements that would be performed by the Romans, when
their expected auxiliaries arrived from Ravenna. Others foreboded, in undissembled terror,
an assault under cover of the night. Here, a group abused, in low, confidential tones, the
policy of the Government in its past relations with the Goths. There, a company of ragged
vagabonds amused themselves by pompously confiding to each other their positive
conviction that at that very moment the barbarians must be trembling in their camp at the
mere sight of the all-powerful Capital of the World. In one direction, people were heard
noisily speculating whether the Goths would be driven from the walls by the soldiers of
Rome, or be honored by an invitation to conclude a peace with the august empire which
they had so treasonably ventured to invade. In another, the more sober and reputable among
the spectators audibly expressed their apprehensions of starvation, dishonor and defeat,
should the authorities of the city be foolhardy enough to venture a resistance to Alaric and
his barbarian hosts. But wide as was the difference of the particular opinions hazarded
among the citizens, they all agreed in one unavoidable conviction, that Rome had escaped
the immediate horrors of an assault, to be threatened--if unaided by the legions at Ravenna--
by the prospective miseries of a blockade.

Amid the confusion of voices around him, that word "blockade" alone reached the pagan's
ear. It brought with it a flood of emotions that overwhelmed him. All that he saw, all that he
heard, connected itself imperceptibly with that expression. A sudden darkness, neither to be
dissipated nor escaped, seemed to obscure his faculties in an instant. He struggled
mechanically through the crowd, descended the steps of the ramparts, and returned to the
solitary spot where he had first beheld the woman and the child.

The city was blockaded! The Goths were bent, then, on obtaining a peace, and not on
achieving a conquest! The city was blockaded! It was no error of the ignorant multitude--he
had seen with his own eyes the tents and positions of the enemy--he had heard the soldiers
on the wall discoursing on the admirable disposition of Alaric's forces, on the impossibility
of obtaining the smallest communication with the surrounding country, on the vigilant
watch that had been set over the navigation of the Tiber. There was no doubt on the matter--
the barbarians had determined on a blockade!

There was even less uncertainty upon the results which would be produced by this
unimaginable policy of the Goths--the city would be saved! Rome had not scrupled in
former years to purchase the withdrawal of all enemies from her distant provinces; and, now
that the very center of her glory, the very pinnacle of her declining power, was threatened
with sudden and unexpected ruin, she would lavish on the Goths the treasures of the whole
empire, to bribe them to peace and to tempt them to retreat. The senate might possibly delay
the necessary concessions, from hopes of assistance that would never be realized; but sooner
or later the hour of negotiation would arrive; northern rapacity would be satisfied with
southern wealth; and in the very moment when it seemed inevitable, the ruin from which the
pagan revolution was to derive its vigorous source would be diverted from churches of
Rome.

Could the old renown of the Roman name have retained so much of its ancient influence as
to daunt the hardy Goths, after they had so successfully penetrated the empire as to have
reached the walls of its vaunted capital? Could Alaric have conceived so exaggerated an
idea of the strength of the forces in the city as to despair, with all his multitudes, of storming
it with success? It could not be otherwise. No other consideration could have induced the
barbarian general to abandon such an achievement as the destruction of Rome. With the
chance of an assault, the prospects of Paganism had brightened--with the certainty of a
blockade, they sunk immediately into disheartening gloom!

Filled with these thoughts, Ulpius paced backward and forward in his solitary retreat, utterly
abandoned by the exaltation of feeling which had restored to his faculties in the morning the
long-lost vigor of their former youth. Once more he experienced the infirmities of his age;
once more he remembered the miseries that had made his existence one unending
martyrdom; once more he felt the presence of his ambition within him, like a judgment that
he was doomed to welcome, like a curse that he was created to cherish. To say that his
sensations at this moment were those of the culprit who hears the order for his execution
when he had been assured of a reprieve, is to convey but a faint idea of the fierce emotions
of rage, grief, and despair that now united to rend the pagan's heart.

Overpowered with weariness both of body and mind, he flung himself down under the shade
of some bushes that clothed the base of the wall above him. As he lay there--so still in his
heavy lassitude that life itself seemed to have left him one of the long green lizards,
common to Italy, crawled over his shoulder. He seized the animal--doubtful for the moment
whether it might not be of the poisonous species--and examined it. At the first glance he
discovered that it was of the harmless order of its race, and would have flung it carelessly
from him, but for something in its appearance which, in the wayward irritability of his
present mood, he felt a strange and sudden pleasure in contemplating.

Through its exquisitely marked and transparent skin he could perceive the action of the
creature's heart, and saw that it was beating violently, in the agony of fear caused to the
animal by its imprisonment in his hand. As he looked on it, and thought how continually a
being so timid must be thwarted in its humble anxieties, in its small efforts, in its little
journeys from one patch of grass to another, by a hundred obstacles, which, trifles though
they might be to animals of a higher species, were yet of, fatal importance to creatures
constituted like itself, he began to find an imperfect yet remarkable analogy between his
own destiny and that of this small unit of creation. He felt that, in its petty sphere, the short
life of the humble animal before him must have been the prey of crosses and
disappointments as serious to it as the more severe and destructive afflictions of which he,
in his existence, had been the victim, and as he watched the shadow-like movement of the
little fluttering heart of the lizard, he experienced a cruel pleasure in perceiving that there
were other beings in the creation, even down to the most insignificant, who inherited a part
of his misery, and suffered a portion of his despair.

Ere long, however, his emotions took a sterner and darker hue. The sight of the animal
wearied him, and he flung it contemptuously aside. It disappeared in the direction of the
ramparts; and almost at the same moment he heard a slight sound, resembling the falling of
several minute particles of brick or light stone, which seemed to come from the wall behind
him.

That such a noise should proceed from so massive a structure appeared unaccountable. He
rose, and parting the bushes before him, advanced close to the surface of the lofty wall. To
his astonishment, he found that the brickwork had in many places so completely mouldered
away that he could move it easily with his fingers. The cause of the trifling noise that he had
heard was now fully explained: hundreds of lizards had made their homes between the
fissures of the bricks; the animal that he had permitted to escape had taken refuge in one of
these cavities, and in the hurry of its flight had detached several of the loose crumbling
fragments that surrounded its hiding-place.

Not content, however, with the discovery he had already made, he retired a little, and,
looking steadfastly up through some trees which in this particular place grew at the foot of
the wall, he saw that its surface was pierced in many places by great irregular rifts, some of
which extended nearly to its whole height. In addition to this, he perceived that the mass of
the structure at one particular point leaned considerably out of the perpendicular. Astounded
at what he beheld, he took a stick from the ground, and inserting it in one of the lowest and
smallest of the cracks, easily succeeded in forcing it entirely into the wall, part of which
seemed to be hollow, and part composed of the same rotten brickwork which had at first
attracted his attention.

It was now evident that the whole structure, over a breadth of several yards, had been either
weakly and carelessly built, or had at some former period suffered a sudden and violent
shock. He left the stick in the wall to mark the place, and was about to retire, when he heard
the footstep of the sentinel on the rampart immediately above. Suddenly cautious, though
from what motive he would have been at that moment hardly able to explain, he remained in
the concealment of the trees and bushes until the guard had passed onward; then he
cautiously emerged from the place, and, retiring to some distance, fell into a train of earnest
and absorbing thought.

To account to the reader for the phenomenon which now engrossed the pagan's attention, it
will be necessary to make a brief digression to the history of the walls of Rome.

The circumference of the first fortifications of the city, built by Romulus, was thirteen
miles. The greater part, however, of this large area was occupied by fields and gardens,
which it was the object of the founder of the empire to preserve, for arable purposes, from
the incursions of the different enemies by whom he was threatened from without. As Rome
gradually increased in size, its walls were progressively enlarged and altered by subsequent
rulers. But it was not until the reign of the Emperor Aurelian (A. D. 270) that any
extraordinary or important change was effected in the defenses of the city. That potentate
commenced the erection of walls, twenty-one miles in circumference, which were finally
completed in the reign of Probus (A. D. 276), were restored by Belisarius (A. D. 537), and
are to be seen in detached portions in the fortifications of the modern city to the present day.

At the date of our story, then (A. D. 408), the walls remained precisely as they had been
constructed in the reigns of Aurelian and Probus. They were for the most part made of brick;
and in a few places, probably, a sort of soft sandstone might have been added to the
pervading material. At several points in their circumference, and particularly in the part
behind the Pincian Hill, these walls were built in arches, forming deep recesses, and
occasionally disposed in double rows. The method of building employed in their erection
was generally that mentioned by Vitruvius, in whose time it originated as "opus
reticulatum."

The "opus reticulatum" was composed of small bricks (or stones) set together on their
angles, instead of horizontally, and giving the surface of a wall the appearance of a sort of
solid network. This was considered by some architects of antiquity a perishable mode of
construction; and Vitruvins asserts that some buildings where he had seen it used had fallen
down. From the imperfect specimens of it which remain in modern times, it would be
difficult to decide upon its merits. That it was assuredly insufficient to support the weight of
the bank of the Pincian Mount which rose immediately behind it, in the solitary spot
described some pages back, is still made evident by the appearance of the wall at that part of
the city, which remains in modern times bent out of the perpendicular, and cracked in some
places almost from top to bottom. This ruin is now known to the present race of Italians
under the expressive title of "Il Muro Torte," or, The Crooked Wall.

We may here observe that it is extremely improbable that the existence of this natural
breach in the fortifications of Rome was noticed, or if noticed, regarded with the slightest
anxiety or attention by the majority of the careless and indolent inhabitants, at the period of
the present romance. It is supposed to have been visible as early as the time of Aurelian, but
is only particularly mentioned by Procopius, a historian of the sixth century, who relates that
Belisarius, in strengthening the city against a siege of the Goths, attempted to repair this
weak point in the wall, but was hindered in his intended labor by the devout populace, who
declared that it was under the peculiar protection of St. Peter, and that it would be
consequently impious to meddle with it. The general submitted without remonstrance to the
decision of the inhabitants, and found no cause afterward to repent of his facility of
compliance; for, to use the translated words of the writer above mentioned, "During the
siege neither the enemy nor the Romans regarded this place." It is to be supposed that so
extraordinary an event as this gave the wall that sacred character which deterred subsequent
rulers from attempting its repair; which permitted it to remain crooked and rent through the
convulsions of the Middle Ages; and which still preserves it, to attest the veracity of
historians, by appealing to the antiquarian curiosity of the traveler of modern times.
We now return to Ulpius. It is a peculiarity observable in the characters of men living under
the ascendency of one ruling idea, that they intuitively distort whatever attracts their
attention in the outer world into a connection more or less intimate with the single object of
their mental contemplation. Since the time when he had been exiled from the Temple, the
pagan's faculties had, unconsciously to himself, acted solely in reference to the daring
design which it was the business of his whole existence to entertain. Influenced, therefore,
by this obliquity of moral feeling, he had scarcely reflected on the discovery that he had just
made at the base of the city wall, ere his mind instantly reverted to the ambitious
meditations which had occupied it in the morning; and the next moment, the first dawning
conception of a bold and perilous project began to absorb his restless thoughts.

He reflected on the peculiarities and position of the wall before him. Although the widest
and most important of the rents which he had observed in it existed too near the rampart to
be reached without the assistance of a ladder, there were others as low as the ground, which
he knew, by the result of the trial he had already made, might be successfully and
immensely widened by the most ordinary exertion and perseverance. The interior of the
wall, if judged by the condition of the surface, could offer no insuperable obstacles to an
attempt at penetration so partial as to be limited to a height and width of a few feet. The
ramparts, from their position between two guard-houses, would be unincumbered by an
inquisitive populace. The sentinel, within the limits of whose allotted watch it happened to
fall, would, when night came on, be the only human being likely to pass the spot; and at
such an hour his attention must necessarily be fixed--in the circumstances under which the
city was now placed--on the prospect beyond, rather than on the ground below and behind
him. It seemed, therefore, almost a matter of certainty that a cautious man laboring under
cover of the night, might pursue whatever investigations he pleased at the base of the wall.

He examined the ground where he now stood. Nothing could be more lonely than its present
appearance. The private gardens on the hill above it shut out all communication from that
quarter. It could only be approached by the foot-path that ran round the Pincian Mount and
along the base of the walls. In the state of affairs now existing in the city, it was not
probable that any one would seek this solitary place, whence nothing could be seen, and
where little could ,be heard, in preference to mixing with the spirit-stirring confusion in the
streets, or observing the Gothic encampment from such positions on the ramparts as were
easily attainable to all. In addition to the secrecy offered by the loneliness of this patch of
ground to whatever employments were undertaken on it, was the further advantage afforded
by the trees and thickets which covered its lower end, and which would effectually screen
an intruder, during the darkness of night, from the most penetrating observation directed
from the wall above.

Reflecting thus, he doubted not that a cunning and determined man might with impunity so
far widen any one of the inferior breaches in the lower part of the wall as to make a cavity
large enough to admit a human figure, that should pierce to its outer surface, and afford that
liberty of departing from the city and penetrating the Gothic camp which the closed gates
now denied to all the inhabitants alike. To discover the practicability of such an attempt as
this was, to a mind filled with such aspirations as the pagan's, to determine irrevocably on
its immediate execution. He resolved as soon as night approached to begin his labors on the
wall; to seek--if the breach were made good, and the darkness favored him--the tent of
Alaric; and once arrived there, to acquaint the Gothic king with the weakness of the
materials for defense within the city, and the dilapidated condition of the fortifications
below the Pincian Mount, insisting, as the condition of his treachery, on an assurance from
the barbarian leader (which he doubted not would be gladly and instantly accorded) of the
destruction of the Christian churches, the pillage of the Christian possessions, and the
massacre of the Christian priests.

He retired cautiously from the lonely place that had now become the center of his new
hopes, and, entering the streets of the city, proceeded to provide himself with an instrument
that would facilitate his approaching labors, and food that would give him strength to
prosecute his intended efforts, unthreatened by the hinderance of fatigue. As he thought on
the daring treachery of his project, his morning's exultation began to return to him again. All
his previous attempts to organize the restoration of Paganism sunk into sudden
insignificance before his present design. His defense of the Temple of Serapis, his
conspiracy at Alexandria, his intrigue with Vetranio, were the efforts of a man; but this
projected destruction of the priests, the churches, and the treasures of a whole city, through
the agency of a mighty army, moved by the unaided machinations of a single individual,
would be the dazzling achievement of a god!

The hours loitered slowly onward. The sun waned in the gorgeous heaven, and set,
surrounded by red and murky clouds. Then came silence and darkness. The Gothic watch-
fires flamed one by one into the dusky air. The guards were doubled at the different posts.
The populace were driven from the ramparts, and the fortifications of the great city echoed
to no sound now, but the tramp of the restless sentinel, or the clash of arms from the distant
guard-houses that dotted the long line of the lofty walls.

It was then that Ulpius, passing cautiously the least frequented streets, gained unnoticed the
place of his destination. A thick vapor lay over the lonely and marshy spot. Nothing was
now visible from it but the dim, uncertain outline of the palaces above, and the mass, so
sunk in obscurity that it looked like a dark layer of mist itself, of the rifted fortifications. A
smile exultation passed over the pagan's countenance, as he perceived the shrouding and
welcome thickness of the atmosphere. Groping his way softly through the thickets, he
arrived at the base of the wall. For some time he passed slowly along it, feeling the width of
the different rents wherever he could stretch his hand. At length he paused at one more
extensive than the rest, drew from its concealment in his garments a thick bar of iron
sharpened at one end, and began to labor at the breach.

Chance had led him to the place best adapted to his purpose. The ground he stood on was
only encumbered close to the wall by rank weeds and low thickets, and was principally
composed of damp, soft turf. The bricks, therefore, as he carefully detached them, made no
greater noise in falling than the slight rustling caused by their sudden contact with the
boughs through which they descended. Insignificant as this sound was, it aroused the
apprehension of the wary pagan. He laid down his iron bar, and removed the thickets, by
dragging them up or breaking them at the roots, until he had cleared a space of some feet in
extent before the base of the wall. He then returned to his toilsome task, and with hands
bleeding from the wounds inflicted by the thorns he had grasped in removing the thickets,
continued his labor at the brickwork. He pursued his employment with perfect impunity; the
darkness covered him from observation; no one disturbed him by approaching the solitary
scene of his operations; and of the two sentinels who were placed near the part of the wall
which was the center of all his exertions, one remained motionless at the most distant
extremity of his post, and the other paced restlessly backward and forward on the rampart,
singing a wild, rambling song about war, and women, and wine, which, whatever liberty it
might allow to his organs of perception, effectually hindered the vigilant exercise of his
faculties of hearing.

Brick after brick yielded to the vigorous and well-timed efforts of Ulpius. He had already
made a cavity, in an oblique direction, large enough to creep through, and was preparing to
penetrate still further, when a portion of the rotten material of the interior of the wall
suddenly yielded in a mass to a chance pressure of his iron bar, and slowly sunk down
inward into a bed which, judging by such faint sounds as were audible at the moment, must
have been partly water, and partly marshy earth and rotten brickwork. After having first
listened, to be sure that the slight noise caused by this event had not reached the ears or
excited the suspicions of the careless sentinels, Ulpius crept into the cavity he had made,
groping his way with his bar, until he reached the brink of a chasm, the depth of which he
could not probe, and the breadth of which he could not ascertain.

He lingered irresolute; the darkness around him was impenetrable; he could feel toads and
noisome animals crawling over his limbs. The damp atmosphere of the place began to thrill
through him to his very bones; his whole frame trembled under the excess of his past
exertions. Without light, he could neither attempt to proceed, nor hope to discover the size
and extent of the chasm which he had partially laid open. The mist was fast vanishing as the
night advanced; it was necessary to arrive at a resolution ere it would be too late. He crept
out of the cavity. Just as he had gained the open air, the sentinel halted over the very spot
where the pagan stood, and paused suddenly in his song. There was an instant's interval of
silence, during which the inmost soul of Ulpius quailed beneath an apprehension as vivid as
 that which had throbbed in the heart of the despised lizard, whose flight had guided him to
his discovery at the wall. Soon, however, he heard the voice of the soldier calling cheerfully
to his fellow-sentinel, "Comrade, do you see the moon? She is rising to cheer our watch"

Nothing had been discovered!--he was still safe! But if he stayed at the cavity till the mists
faded before the moonlight, could he be certain of preserving his security? He felt that he
could not!

What mattered a night more or a night less, to such a project as his? Months might elapse
before the Goths retired from the walls. It was better to suffer delay than to risk discovery.
He determined to leave the place, and to return on the following night provided with a
lantern, the light of which he would conceal until he entered the cavity. Once there, it could
not be perceived by the sentinels above--it would guide him through all obstacles, preserve
him through all dangers. Massive as it was, he felt convinced that the interior of the wall
was in as ruinous a condition as the outside. Caution and perseverance were sufficient of
themselves to insure to his efforts the speediest and completest success.

He waited until the sentinel had again betaken himself to the furthest limits of his watch,
and then softly gathering up the brushwood that lay round him, he concealed with it the
mouth of the cavity in the outer wall, and the fragments of brickwork that had fallen on the
turf beneath. This done, he again listened, to assure himself that he had been unobserved;
then, stepping with the utmost caution, he departed by the path that led round the slope of
the Pincian Hill.

"Strength--patience--and to-morrow night!" muttered the pagan to himself, as he entered the

streets, and congregated once more with the citizens of Rome.

Chapter XI.
Goisvintha' S Return.

IT was morning. The sun had risen, but his beams were partially obscured by thick heavy
clouds, which scowled already over the struggling brightness of the eastern horizon. The
bustle and animation of the new day gradually overspread the Gothic encampment in all
directions. The only tent whose curtain remained still closed, and round which no busy
crowds congregated in discussion or mingled in labor, was that of Hermanric. By the dying
embers of his watch-fire stood the young chieftain, with two warriors, to whom he appeared
to be giving some hurried directions. His countenance expressed emotions of anxiety and
discontent, which, though partially repressed while he was in the presence of his
companions, became thoroughly visible, not only in his features, but in his manner, when
they left him to watch alone before his tent.

For some time he walked regularly backward and forward, looking anxiously down the
westward lines of the encampment, and occasionally whispering to himself a hasty
exclamation of doubt and impatience. With the first breath of the new morning, the
delighting meditations which had occupied him by his watch-fire during the darkness of the
night had begun to subside. And now, as the hour of her expected return gradually
approached, the image of Goisvintha banished from his mind whatever remained of those
peaceful and happy contemplations in which he had hitherto been absorbed. The more he
thought on his fatal promise--on the nation of Antonina--on his duties to the army and the
people to whom he belonged, the more doubtful appeared to him his chance of permanently
protecting the young Roman without risking his degradation as a Goth and his ruin as a
warrior; and the more sternly and ominously rang in his ears the unassailable truth of
Goisvintha's parting taunt--"You must remember your promise; you cannot save her if you
would!"

Wearied of persisting in deliberations which only deepened his melancholy and increased
his doubts; bent on sinking in a temporary and delusive oblivion the boding reflections that
overcame him in spite of himself, by seeking--while its enjoyment was yet left to him--the
society of his ill-fated charge, he turned toward his tent, drew aside the thick, heavy curtains
of skins which closed its opening, and approached the rude couch on which Antonina was
still sleeping.

A ray of sunlight, fitful and struggling, burst at this moment through the heavy clouds, and
stole into the opening of the tent as he contemplated the slumbering girl. It ran its flowing
course up her uncovered hand and arm, flew over her bosom and neck, and bathed in a
bright, fresh glow her still and reposing features. Gradually her limbs began to move, her
lips parted gently and half smiled, as if in welcome to the greeting of the light; her eyes
slightly opened, then, dazzled by the brightness that flowed through their raised lids,
tremblingly closed again. At length, thoroughly awakened, she shaded her face with her
hands, and sitting up on the couch, met the gaze of Hermanric fixed on her in sorrowful
examination.

"Your bright armor, and your glorious name, and your merciful words have remained with
me even in my sleep," said she, wonderingly; "and now, when I awake, I see you before me
again! It is a happiness to be aroused by the sun which has gladdened me all my life, to look
upon you who have given me shelter in my distress! But why," she continued, in altered and
inquiring tones, "why do you gaze upon me with doubting and mournful eyes?"
"You have slept well and safely," said Hermanric, evasively. "I closed the opening of the
tent to preserve you from the night-damps, but I have raised it now, for the air is warming
under the rising sun--"

"Are you wearied with watching?" she interrupted, rising to her feet and looking anxiously
into his face. But he spoke not in reply. His head was turned toward the door of the tent. He
seemed to be listening for some expected sound. It was evident that he had not heard her
question. She followed the direction of his eyes. The sight of the great city, half brightened,
half darkened, as its myriad buildings reflected the light of the sun, or retained the shadows
of the clouds, brought back to her remembrance her last night's petition for her father's
safety. She laid her hand upon her companion's arm to awaken his attention, and hastily
resumed:

"You have not forgotten what I said to you last night? My father's name is Numerian. He
lives on the Pincian Mount. You will save him, Hermanric--you will save him! You will
remember your promise!"

The young warrior's eyes fell as she spoke, and an irrepressible shudder shook his whole
frame. The last part of Antonina's address to him was expressed in the same terms as a past
appeal from other lips and in other accents which still clung to his memory. The same
demand, "Remember your promise," which had been advanced to urge him to bloodshed, by
Goisvintha, was now proffered by Antonina to lure him to pity. The petition of affection
was concluded in the same terms as the petition of revenge. As he thought on both, the
human pity of the one and the fiend-like cruelty of the other rose in sinister and significant
contrast on the mind of the Goth, realizing in all its perils the struggle that was to come
when Goisvintha returned, and dispelling instantaneously the last hopes that he had yet
ventured to cherish for the fugitive at his side.

"No assault of the city is commanded--no assault is intended. Your father's life is safe from
the swords of the Goths," he gloomily replied, in answer to Antonina's last words.

The girl moved back from him a few steps as he spoke, and looked thoughtfully round the
tent. The battle-ax that Hermanric had secured during the scene of the past evening still lay
on the ground in a corner. The sight of it brought back a flood of terrible recollections to her
mind. She started violently; a sudden change overspread her features, and when she again
addressed Hermanric it was with quivering lips and in almost inarticulate words.

"I know now why you look on me so gloomily," said she; "that woman is coming back! I
was so occupied by my dreams and my thoughts of my father and of you, and my hopes for
days to come, that I had forgotten her when I awoke. But I remember all now! She is
coming back--I see it in your sorrowful eyes--she is coming back to murder me! I shall die
at the moment when I had such hope in my life! There is no happiness for me! None!--
none!"

The Goth's countenance began to darken. He whispered to himself several times: "How can
I save her?" For a few minutes there was a deep silence, broken only by the sobs of
Antonina. He looked round at her after an interval. She held her hands clasped over her
eyes; the tears were streaming through her parted fingers, her bosom heaved as if her
emotions would burst their way through it in some palpable form, and her limbs trembled so
that she could scarcely support herself. Unconsciously, as he looked on her, he passed his
arm round her slender form, drew her hands gently from her face, and said to her, through
his heart belied his words as he spoke: "Do not be afraid--trust in me!"

"How can I be calm?" she cried, looking up at him entreatingly; "I was so happy last night,
so sure that you could preserve me, so hopeful about to-morrow! and now I see by your
mournful looks, I know by your doubting voice, that to soothe my anguish you have
promised me more than you can perform! The woman who is your companion has a power
over us both that it is terrible even to think of! She will return, she will withdraw all mercy
from your heart, she will glare upon me with her fearful eyes, she will kill me at your feet! I
shall die after all I have suffered and all I have hoped! Oh, Hermanric, while there is yet
time let us escape! You were not made to shed blood--you are too merciful! God never
made you to destroy! You cannot yearn toward cruelty and woe, for you have aided and
protected me! Let us escape! I will follow you wherever you wish! I will do whatever you
ask! I will go with you beyond those far, bright mountains behind us, to any strange and
distant land; for there is beauty everywhere; there are woods that may be dwelt in, and
valleys that may be loved, on all the surface of this wide, great earth!"

The Goth looked sadly on her as she paused; but he gave her no answer--the gloom was
deepening over his heart--the false words of consolation were silenced on his lips.

"Think how many pleasures we should enjoy, how much we might see!" continued the girl,
in soft, appealing tones. "We should be free to wander wherever we pleased; we should
never be lonely; never be mournful; never be weary! I could listen to you day after day,
while you told me of the country where your people were born! I could sing you sweet
songs that I have learned upon the lute! Oh, how I have wept in my loneliness to lead such a
life as this! How I have longed that such freedom and joy might be mine! How I have
thought of the distant lands that I would visit, of the happy nations that I would discover, of
the mountain breezes that I would breathe, of the shady places that I would repose in, of the
rivers that I would follow in their course, of the flowers I would plant, and the fruits I would
gather! How I have hoped for such an existence as this! How I have longed for a companion
who might enjoy it as I should! Have you never felt this joy that I have imagined to myself,
you who have been free to wander wherever you pleased? Let us leave this place and I will
teach it to you if you have not. I will be so patient, so obedient, so happy! I will never be
sorrowful, never repining; but let us escape--oh, Hermanric, let us escape while there is yet
time! Will you keep me here to be slain? Can you drive me forth into the world alone?
Remember that the gates of the city and the -doors of my home are now closed to me!
Remember that I have no mother, and that my father has forsaken me! Remember that I am
a stranger on the earth which was made for me to be joyful in! Think how soon the woman
who has vowed that she will murder me will return; think how terrible it is to be in the fear
of death; and while there is time let us depart--Hermanric, Hermanric, if you have pity for
me, let us depart."

She clasped her hands, and looked up in his face imploringly. The manner of Hermanric had
expressed more to her senses, sharpened as they were by peril, than his words could have
conveyed, even had he confessed to her the cause of the emotions of doubt and
apprehension that oppressed his mind. Nothing could more strikingly testify to the
innocence of her character and the seclusion of her life, than her attempt to combine with
her escape from Goisvintha's fury the acquisition of such a companion as the Goth. But to
the forlorn and affectionate girl who saw herself--a stranger to the laws of the social
existence of her fellow-creatures--suddenly thrust forth friendless into the unfriendly world,
could the heart have naturally prompted any other desire than anxiety to secure the
companion after having discovered the protector? In the guilelessness of her character, in
her absolute ignorance of humanity, of the influence of custom, of the adaptation of
difference of feeling to difference of sex, she vainly imagined that the tranquil existence she
had urged on Hermanric would suffice for the attainment of her end, by presenting the same
allurements to him--a warrior and a Goth, that it contained for her--a lonely, thoughtful,
visionary girl! And yet, so wonderful was the ascendency that she had acquired by the
magic of her presence, the freshness of her beauty, and the novelty of her manner, over the
heart of the young chieftain, that he, who would have spurned from him with contempt any
other woman who might have addressed to him such a petition as Antonina's, looked down
sorrowfully at the girl as she ceased speaking, and for an instant hesitated in his choice.

At that moment, when the attention of each was fixed on the other, a third person stealthily
approached the opening of the tent, and beholding them together thus, burst into a bitter,
taunting laugh. Hermanric raised his eyes instantly; but the sound of that harsh, unwomanly
voice was all-eloquent to Antonina's senses. She hid her face against the Goth's breast, and
murmured, breathlessly, "She has returned! I must die! I must die!"

She had returned! She perceived Hermanric and Antonina in a position which left no doubt
that a stronger feeling than the mere wish to protect the victim of her intended revenge had
arisen, during her absence, in the heart of her kinsman. Hour after hour, while she had
fulfilled her duties by the beds of Alaric's invalided soldiery, had she brooded over her
projects of vengeance and blood. Neither the sickness nor the death which she had beheld
around her had possessed an influence powerful enough over the stubborn ferocity which
now alone animated her nature, to lure it to mercy or awe it to repentance. Invigorated by
delay, and enlarged by disappointment, the evil passion that consumed her had strengthened
its power, and aroused the most latent of its energies, during the silent vigil that she had just
held. She had detested the girl on the evening before for her nation; she now hated her for
herself.

"What have you to do with the trappings of a Gothic warrior?" she cried, in mocking
accents, pointing at Hermanric with a long hunting-knife which she held in her hand. "Why
are you here in a Gothic encampment? Go, kneel at the gates of Rome, implore her guards
on your knees to admit you among the citizens, a when they ask you why--show them the
girl there! Tell them that you love her, that yet would wed her, that it is nothing to you that
her people have murdered your brother and his children! And then, when you yourself have
begotten sons, Gothic bastards infected with Roman blood, be a Roman at heart yourself,
send your children forth to complete what your wife's people left undone at Aquileia--by
murdering me!"

She paused, and laughed scornfully. Then her humor suddenly changed, she advanced a few
steps, and continued in a louder and sterner tone:

"You have broken your faith; you have lied to me; you have forgotten your wrongs and
mine; but you have not yet forgotten my parting words when I left you last night! I told you
that she should be slain, and now that you have refused to avenge me, I will make good my
words by killing her with my own hand! If you would defend her, you must murder me. You
must shed her blood or mine!"

She stepped forward, her towering form was stretched to its highest stature, the muscles
started into action on her bare arms as she raised them above her head. For one instant she
fixed her glaring eyes steadily on the girl's shrinking form--the next, she rushed up and
struck furiously with the knife at her bare neck. As the weapon descended, Hermanric
caught her wrist. She struggled violently to disengage herself from his grasp, but in vain.

The countenance of the young warrior grew deadly pale, as he held her. For a few minutes
he glanced eagerly round the tent, in an agony of bewilderment and despair. The conflicting
interests of his duty toward his sister, and his anxiety for Antonina's preservation, filled his
heart to distraction. A moment more he hesitated, and during that short delay the despotism
of custom had yet power enough to prevail over the promptings of pity. He called to the
girl--withdrawing his arm which had hitherto been her support--"Go! have mercy on me;
go!"

But she neither heeded nor heard him. She fell on her knees at the woman's feet, and in a
low moaning voice, faltered out:
"What have I done that I deserve to be slain? I never murdered your children; I never yet
saw a child but I loved it; if I had seen your children, I should have loved them!"

"If I had preserved to this time the child that I saved from the massacre, and you had
approached him," returned the woman, fiercely, "I would have taught him to strike at you
with his little hands! When you spoke to him, he should have spat upon you for answer--
even thus!"

Trembling, exhausted, terrified as she was, the girl's Roman blood rushed over her pale
cheeks as she felt the insult. She turned toward Hermanric, looked up at him appealingly,
attempted to speak, and then, sinking lower upon the ground, wept bitterly.

"Why do you weep and pray and mouth at him?" shrieked Goisvintha, pointing to
Hermanric with her disengaged hand. "He has neither courage to protect you, nor honor to
aid me. Do you think that I am to be moved by your tears and entreaties? I tell you that your
people have slain my husband and my children, and that I hate you for that. I tell you that
you have lured Hermanric into love for a Roman and unfaithfulness to me, and I will slay
you for doing it! I tell you that there is not a living thing of the blood of your country, or the
name of your nation, throughout the length and breadth of this empire, that I would not
destroy if I had the power! If the very trees on the road hither could have had feeling, I
would have torn the bark from their stems with my own hands! If a bird, native of your
skies, had flown into my bosom from very tameness and sport, I would have crushed it dead
at my feet! And do you think that you shall escape? Do you think that I will not avenge the
deaths of my husband and my children upon you, after this?"

As she spoke, she mechanically unclinched her hands. The knife dropped to the ground.
Hermanric instantly stooped and secured it. For a moment she stood before him released
from his grasp, motionless and speechless. Then, starting as if struck by a sudden idea, she
moved toward the opening of the tent, and, in tones of malignant triumph, addressed him
thus:

"You shall not save her yet! You are unworthy of your nation and your name! I will betray
your cowardice and treachery to your brethren in the camp!" And she ran to the outside of
the tent, calling in a loud voice to a group of young warriors who happened to be passing at
a short distance: "Stay! stay! Fritigern--Athanaric--Colias--Suerid--Witheric--Fravitta!
Hasten hitherward! Hermanric has a captive in his tent--a prisoner whom it will rejoice you
to see! Hitherward! hitherward!"

The group she addressed contained some of the most turbulent and careless spirits of the
whole Gothic army. They had just been released from their duties of the past night, and
were at leisure to comply with Goisvintha's request. She had scarcely concluded her address
before they turned and hurried eagerly up to the tent, shouting to Hermanric, as they
advanced, to make his prisoner visible to them in the open air.

They had probably expected to be regaled by the ludicrous terror of some Roman slave
whom their comrade had discovered lurking in the empty suburbs; for when they entered the
tent, and saw nothing but the shrinking figure of the unhappy girl, as she crouched on the
earth at Hermanric's feet, they all paused with one accord, and looked round on each other
in speechless astonishment.

"Behold her!" cried Goisvintha, breaking the momentary silence. "She is the Roman
prisoner that your man of valor there has secured for himself! For that trembling child he
has forgotten the enmities of his people! She is more to him already than army, general, or
companions. You have watched before the city during the night; but he has stood sentinel by
the maiden of Rome! Hope not that he will share in your toils or mix in your pleasures
more. Alaric and the warriors have lost his services--his future king cringes there at his
feet!"

She had expected to arouse the anger and excite the jealousy of the rough audience she
addressed; but the result of her envenomed jeers disappointed her hopes. The humor of the
moment prompted the Goths to ridicule, a course infinitely more inimical to Antonina's
interests with Hermanric than menaces or recrimination. Recovered from their first
astonishment, they burst into a loud and universal laugh.

"Mars and Venus caught together! But, by St. Peter, I see not Vulcan and the net!" cried
Fravitta, who having served in the armies of Rome, and acquired a vague knowledge there
of the ancient mythology, and the modern politics of the empire, was considered by his
companions as the wit of the battalion to which he was attached.

"I like her figure," growled Fritigern, a heavy, phlegmatic giant, renowned for his
imperturbable good-humor and his prowess in drinking. "What little there is of it looks so
limp that Hermanric might pack her into his light baggage and carry her about with him on
his shoulders wherever he goes!"

"By which process you would say, old sucker of wine-skins, that he will attain the double
advantage of always keeping her to himself, and always keeping her warm," interrupted
Colias, a ruddy, reckless boy of sixteen, privileged to be impertinent in consideration of his
years.

"Is she orthodox or Arian?" gravely demanded Athanaric, who piqued himself on his
theological accomplishments and his extraordinary piety.
"What hair she has!" exclaimed Suerid, sarcastically. "It is as black as the horse-hides of a
squadron of Huns!"

"Show us her face! Whose tent will she visit next?" cried Witheric, with an insolent laugh.

"Mine!" replied Fritigern, complacently. "What says the chorus of the song--

'Money and wine Make beauty mine!'

I have more of both than any of you. She will come to my tent!"

During the delivery of these clumsy jests, which followed one upon another with
instantaneous rapidity, the scorn at first expressed in Hermanric's countenance became
gradually replaced by a look of irrepressible anger. As Fritigern spoke, he lost all command
over himself, and seizing his sword, advanced threateningly toward the easy-tempered giant,
who made no attempt to recede or defend himself, but called out soothingly, "Patience,
man! patience! Would you kill an old comrade for jesting? I envy you your good luck as a
friend, not as an enemy!"

Yielding to the necessity of lowering his sword before a defenseless man, Hermanric was
about to reply angrily to Fritigern, when his voice was drowned in the blast of a trumpet,
sounding close by the tent. The signal that it gave was understood at once by the group of
jesters still surrounding the young Goth. They turned and retired without an instant's delay.
The last of their number had scarcely disappeared when the same veteran who had spoken
with Hermanric, on the departure of Goisvintha the evening before, entered and thus
addressed him:

"You are commanded to post yourself, with the division that now awaits you, at a place
eastward of your present position, which will be shown you by a guide. Make ready at once-
-you have not an instant to delay."

As the words passed the old man's lips, Hermanric turned and looked on Goisvintha. During
the presence of the Goths in the tent, she had sat listening to their rough jeers in suppressed
wrath and speechless disdain; now she rose and advanced a few steps. But there suddenly
appeared an unwonted hesitation in her gait; her face was pale; she breathed fast and
heavily.

"Where will you shelter her now?" she cried, addressing Hermanric, and threatening the girl
with her outstretched hands. "Abandon her to your companions, or leave her to me; she is
lost either way! I shall triumph--triumph!"
 At this moment her voice sank to an unintelligible murmur; she tottered where she stood. It
was evident that the long strife of passions during her past night of watching, and the fierce
and varying emotions of the morning, suddenly brought to a crisis, as they had been, by her
exultation when she heard the old warrior's fatal message, had at length overtasked the
energies even of her powerful frame. Yet one moment more she endeavored to advance, to
speak, to snatch the hunting-knife from Hermanric's hand; the next, she fell insensible at his
feet.

Goaded almost to madness by the successive trials that he had undergone--Goisvintha's

furious determination to thwart him still present to his mind; the scornful words of his
companions yet ringing in his ears; his inexorable duties demanding his attention without
reserve or delay--Hermanric succumbed at last under the difficulties of his position, and
despairingly abandoned all further hope of effecting the girl's preservation. Pointing to some
food that lay in a corner of the tent, and to the country behind, he said to her in broken and
gloomy accents, "Furnish yourself with those provisions, and fly, while Goisvintha is yet
unable to pursue you. I can protect you no longer!"

Until this moment, Antonina had kept her face hidden, and had remained still crouching on
the ground; motionless, save when a shudder ran through her frame as she listened to the
loud, coarse jesting of the Goths; and speechless, except that when Goisvintha sank
senseless to the earth she uttered an exclamation of terror. But now, when she heard the
sentence of her banishment proclaimed by the very lips which but the evening before had
assured her of shelter and protection, she rose up instantly, cast on the young Goth a glance
of such speechless misery and despair that he involuntarily quailed before it; and then,
without a tear or a sigh, without a look of reproach or a word of entreaty, petrified and
bowed down beneath a perfect trance of terror and grief, she left the tent.

Hurrying his actions with the reckless energy of a man determined on banishing his
thoughts by his employments, Hermanric placed himself at the head of his troop, and
marched quickly onward in an eastward direction past the Pincian Gate. Two of his
attendants who happened to enter the tent after his departure, observing Goisvintha still
extended on the earth, proceeded to transport her to part of the camp occupied by the
women who were attached to the army; and then the little sheltering canopy which made the
abode of the Goth, and which had witnessed so large a share of human misery and so fierce
a war of human contention in so few hours, was left as silent and lonely as the deserted
country in which Antonina was now fated to seek a refuge and a home.

Chapter XII.
The Passage Of The Wall.
"A FAIR night this, Balbus! All moonlight and no mist! I was posted last evening at the
Ostian Gate, and was half choked by the fog."

"If you were posted last night at the Ostian Gate, you were better placed than you are now.
The ramparts here are as lonely as a ruin in the provinces. Nothing behind us but the back of
the Pincian Mount; nothing before us but the empty suburbs; nothing at each side of us but
brick and stone; nothing at our posts but ourselves. May I be crucified like St. Peter, if I
believe that there is another place on the whole round of the walls possessed of such solitary
dullness as this!"

"You are a man to find something to complain of, if you were lodged in one of the palaces
yonder. The place is solitary enough, it is true; but whether it is dull or not depends on
ourselves, its most honorable occupants. I, for one, am determined to promote its joviality
by the very praiseworthy exertion of obliging you, my discontented friend, with an
inexhaustible series of those stories for which, I may say without arrogance, I am celebrated
throughout the length and breadth of all the barracks of Rome."

"You may tell as many stories as you please, but do not imagine that I will make one of your
audience."

"You are welcome to attend me or not, as you choose. Though you do not listen, I shall still
relate my stories by way of practice. I will address them to the walls, or to the air, or to the
defunct gods and goddesses of antiquity, should they happen at this moment to be hovering
over the city in a rage, as some of the unconverted would have us believe; or to our
neighbors the Goths, if they are seized with a sudden desire to quit their encampments, and
obtain a near view of the fortifications that they are so discreetly unwilling to assault. Or,
these materials for a fit and decent auditory failing me, I will tell my stories to the most
attentive of all listeners--myself.

And the sentinel, without further delay, opened his budget of anecdotes, with the easy
fluency of a man who possessed a well-placed confidence in the perfection of his capacities
for narration, Determined that his saturnine comrade should hear him, though he would not
give him his attention, he talked in a raised voice, pacing briskly backward and forward over
the space of his allotted limits, and laughing with ludicrous regularity and complacency at
every jest that he happened to make in the course of his ill-rewarded narrative. He little
thought, as he continued to proceed in his tale, that its commencement had been welcomed
by an unseen hearer, with emotions widely different from those which had dictated the
observations of the unfriendly companion of his watch.

True to his determination, Ulpius, with part of the wages which he had hoarded in
Numerian's service, had procured a small lantern from a shop in one of the distant quarters
of Rome; and veiling its light in a piece of coarse, thick cloth, had proceeded by the solitary
pathway to his second night's labor at the wall. He arrived at the breach at the
commencement of the dialogue above related, and heard with delight the sentinel's noisy
resolution to amuse his companion in spite of himself. The louder and the longer the man
talked, the less probable was the chance that the pagan's labors in the interior of the wall
would be suspected or overheard.

Softly clearing away the brushwood at the entrance of the hole that he had made the night
before, Ulpius crept in as far as he had penetrated on that occasion; and then, with mingled
emotions of expectation and apprehension which affected him so powerfully that he was for
the moment hardly master of his actions, he slowly and cautiously uncovered his light.

His first glance was intuitively directed to the cavity that opened beneath him. He saw
immediately that it was less important both in size and depth than he had imagined it to be.
The earth at this particular place had given way beneath the foundations of the wall, which
had sunk down, deepening the chasm by their weight, into the yielding ground beneath
them. A small spring of water (probably the first cause of the sinking in the earth) had
bubbled up into the space in the brickwork, which, bit by bit, and, year by year, it had
gradually undermined. Nor did it remain stagnant at this place. It trickled merrily and
quietly onward--a tiny rivulet, emancipated from one prison in the ground only to enter
another in the wall, bounded by no grassy banks, brightened by no cheerful light, admired
by no human eye, followed in its small course through the inner fissures in the brick by no
living thing hut a bloated toad or a solitary lizard; yet wending as happily on its way through
darkness and ruin as its sisters who were basking in the sunlight of the meadow, or leaping
in the fresh breezes of the open mountain side.

Raising his eyes from the little spring, Ulpius next directed his attention to the prospect
above him.

Immediately over his head, the material of the interior of the wall presented a smooth, flat,
hard surface, which seemed capable of resisting the most vigorous attempts at its
destruction; but on looking round, he perceived at one side of him and further inward, an
appearance of dark, dimly-defined irregularity, which promised encouragingly for his
intended efforts. He descended into the chasm of the rivulet, crawled up on a heap of
crumbling brickwork, and gained a hole above it, which he immediately began to widen, to
admit of his passage through. Inch by inch he enlarged the rift, crept into it, and found
himself on a fragment of the bow of one of the foundation arches, which, though partly
destroyed, still supported itself, isolated from all connection with the part of the upper wall
which it had once sustained, and which had gradually crumbled away into the cavities
below.

He looked up. An immense rift soared above him, stretching its tortuous ramifications, at
different points, into every part of the wall that was immediately visible. The whole
structure seemed, at this place, to have received a sudden and tremendous wrench. But for
the support of the sounder fortifications at each side of it, it could not have sustained itself
after the shock. The pagan gazed aloft, into the fearful breaches which yawned above him,
with ungovernable awe. His small, fitful light was not sufficient to show him any of their
terminations. They looked, as he beheld them in dark relief against the rest of the hollow
part of the wall, like mighty serpents twining their desolating path right upward to the
ramparts above; and he himself, as he crouched on his pinnacle with his little light by his
side, was reduced by the wild grandeur, the vast, solemn gloom of the obscure, dusky, and
fantastic objects around him, to the stature of a pigmy. Could he have been seen from the
ramparts high overhead, as he now peered down behind his lantern into the cavities and
irregularities below him, he would have looked, with his flickering light, like a mole led by
a glow-worm.

He paused to consider his next movements. In a stationary position, the damp coldness of
the atmosphere was almost insupportable, but he attained a great advantage by his present
stillness: he could listen undisturbed by the noises made by the bricks which crumbled from
under him, if he advanced.

Ere long, he heard a thin, winding, long-drawn sound, now louder, now softer; now
approaching, now retreating; now verging toward shrillness, now quickly returning to a
faint, gentle swell. Suddenly this strange unearthly music was interrupted by a succession of
long, deep, rolling sounds, which traveled grandly about the fissures above like prisoned
thunderbolts striving to escape. Utterly ignorant that the first of these noises was occasioned
by the night wind winding through the rents in the brick of the outer wall beyond him; and
the second, by the echoes produced in the irregular cavities above by the footfall of the
sentries overhead--roused by the influence of the place, and the mystery of his employment,
to a pitch of fanatic exaltation, which for the moment absolutely unsteadied his reason--
filled with the frantic enthusiasm of his designs, and the fearful legends of invisible beings
and worlds which made the foundation of his worship, Ulpius conceived, as he listened to
the sounds around and above, that the gods of antiquity were now in viewless congregation
hovering about him, and calling to him in unearthly voices and in an unknown tongue to
proceed upon his daring enterprise, in the full assurance of its near and glorious success.

"Roar and mutter, and make your hurricane music in my ears!" exclaimed the pagan, raising
his withered hands, and addressing in a savage ecstasy his imagined deities. "Your servant
Ulpius stops not on the journey that leads him to your repeopled shrines! Blood, crime,
danger, pain--pride and honor, joy and rest, have I strewn like sacrifices at your altars' feet!
Time has whirled past me; youth and manhood have lain long since buried in the hidden
Lethe which is the portion of life; age has wreathed his coils over my body's strength, but
still I watch by your temples and serve your mighty cause! Your vengeance is near!
Monarchs of the world, your triumph is at hand!"
He remained for some time in the same position, looking fixedly up into the trackless
darkness above him, drinking in the sounds which--alternately rising and sinking--still
floated round him. The trembling gleam of his lantern fell red and wild upon his livid
countenance. His shaggy hair floated in the cold breezes that blew by him. At this moment
he would have appeared from a distance like a phantom of fire perishing in a mist of
darkness; like a gnome in adoration in the bowels of the earth; like a forsaken spirit in a
solitary purgatory, watching for the advent of a glimpse of beauty or a breath of air.

At length he aroused himself from his trance, trimmed with careful hand his guiding lantern,
and set forward to penetrate the breadth of the great rift he had just entered.

He moved on in an oblique direction several feet, now creeping over the tops of the
foundation arches, now skirting the extremities of protrusions in the ruined brickwork, now
descending into dark slimy rubbish-choked chasms, until the rift suddenly diminished in all
directions.

The atmosphere was warmer in the place he now occupied; he could faintly distinguish
patches of dark moss, dotted here and there over the uneven surface of the wall; and once or
twice, some blades of long flat grass, that grew from a prominence immediately above his
head, were waved in his face by the wind, which he could now feel blowing through the
narrow fissure that he was preparing to enlarge. It was evident that he had by this time
advanced to within a few feet of the outer extremity of the wall.

"Numerian wanders after his child through the streets," muttered the pagan, as he deposited
his lantern by his side, bared his trembling arms, and raised his iron bar--"the slaves of his
neighbor the senator are forth to pursue me. On all sides my enemies are out after me; but,
posted here, I mock their strictest search! If they would track me to my hiding-place, they
must penetrate the wails of Rome! If they would hunt me down in my lair, they must assail
me to-night in the camp of the Goths! Fools! let them look to themselves! I seal the doom of
their city with the last brick that I tear from their defenseless walls!"

He laughed to himself as he thrust his bar boldly into the crevice before him. In some places
the bricks yielded easily to his efforts; in others, their resistance was only to be overcome by
the exertion of his utmost strength. Resolutely and unceasingly he continued his labors; now
wounding his hands against the jagged surfaces presented by the widening fissure, now
involuntarily dropping his instrument from ungovernable exhaustion; but still working
bravely on, in defiance of every hinderance that opposed him, until he gained the interior of
the new rift.

As he drew his lantern after him into the cavity that he had made, he perceived that unless it
was heightened immediately over him he could proceed no further, even in a creeping
position. Irritated at this unexpected necessity for more violent exertion, desperate in his
determination to get through the wall at all hazards on that very night, he recklessly struck
his bar upward with all his strength, instead of gradually and softly loosening the material of
the surface that opposed him, as he had done before.

A few moments of this labor had scarcely elapsed, when a considerable portion of the
brickwork, consolidated into one firm mass, fell with lightning suddenness from above. it
hurled him under it, prostrate on the foundation arch which had been his support, crushed
and dislocated his right shoulder, and shivered his lantern into fragments. A groan of
irrepressible anguish burst from his lips. He was left in impenetrable darkness.

The mass of brickwork, after it had struck him, rolled a little to one side. By a desperate
exertion he extricated himself from under it, only to swoon from the fresh anguish caused to
him by the effort.

For a short time he lay insensible in his cold, dark solitude. Then, reviving after this first
shock, he began to experience in all their severity the fierce spasms, the dull gnawings, the
throbbing torments, that were the miserable consequences of the injury he had received. His
arm lay motionless by his side--he had neither strength nor resolution to move any one of
the other sound limbs in his body. At one moment, his deep, sobbing, stifled respirations
syllabled horrible and half-formed curses; at another, his panting breaths suddenly died
away within him, and then he could hear the blood dripping slowly from his shoulder, with
dismal regularity, into a little pool that it had formed already by his side.

The shrill breezes which wound through the crevices in the wall before him were now felt
only on his wounded limb. They touched its surface like innumerable splinters of thin, sharp
ice; they penetrated his flesh like rushing sparks struck out of a sea of molten lead. There
were moments, during the first pangs of this agony, when, if he had been possessed of a
weapon and of the strength to use it, he would have sacrificed his ambition forever by
depriving himself of life.

But this desire to end his torments with his existence lasted not long. Gradually the anguish
in his body awakened a wilder and stronger distemper in his mind, and then the two agonies,
physical and mental, rioted over him together in fierce rivalry, divesting him of all thoughts
but such as were by their own agency created or aroused.

For some time he lay helpless in his misery, alternately venting by stifled groans the
unalleviated torment of his wounds, and lamenting with curses the failure of his enterprise at
the very moment of its apparent success. At length the pangs that struck through him
seemed to grow gradually less frequent; he hardly knew now from what part of his frame
they more immediately proceeded. Insensibly his faculties of thinking and feeling grew
blunted; then he remained a little while in a mysterious, unrefreshing repose of body and
mind; and then his disordered senses, left unguided and unrestrained, became the victims of
a sudden and terrible delusion.

The blank darkness around him appeared, after an interval, to be gradually dawning into a
dull light, thick and misty, like the reflections on clouds which threatened a thunderstorm at
the close of evening. Soon this atmosphere seemed to be crossed and streaked with a
fantastic trellis-work of white, seething vapor. Then the mass of brickwork which had struck
him down grew visible at his side, enlarged to an enormous bulk, and endued with a power
of self-motion, by which it mysteriously swelled and shrank, and raised and depressed itself,
without quitting for a moment its position near him. And then, from its dark and toiling
surface there rose a long stream of dusky shapes, which twined themselves about the misty
trellis-work above, and took the prominent and palpable form of human countenances,
marked by every difference of age and distorted by every variety of suffering.

There were infantine faces, wreathed about with grave worms that hung round them like
locks of filthy hair; aged faces, dabbled with gore and slashed with wounds; youthful faces,
seamed with livid channels, along which ran unceasing tears; lovely faces, distorted into
fixed expressions of raging pain, wild malignity, and despairing gloom. Not one of these
countenances exactly resembled the other. Each was distinguished by a revolting character
of its own. Yet, however deformed might be their other features, the eyes of all were
preserved unimpaired. Speechless and bodiless, they floated in unceasing myriads up to the
fantastic trellis-work, which seemed to swell its wild proportions to receive them. There
they clustered, in their goblin amphitheater, and fixedly and silently they all glared down,
without one exception, on the pagan's face!

Meanwhile the walls at the side began to gleam out with a light of their own, making jagged
boundaries to the midway scene of phantom faces. Then the rifts in their surfaces widened,
and disgorged misshapen figures of priests and idols of the old time, which came forth in
every hideous deformity of aspect, mocking at the faces on the trellis-work; while behind
and over the whole soared shapes of gigantic darkness, robed in grim cloudy resemblances
of skins such as were worn by the Goths, and wielding through the quivering vapor mighty
and shadow-like weapons of war. From the whole of this ghastly assemblage there rose not
the slightest sound. A stillness, as of a dead and ruined world, possessed in all its quarters
the appalling scene. The deep echoes of the sentries' footsteps and the faint dirging of the
melancholy winds were no more. The blood that had as yet dripped from his wound made
no sound now in the pagan's ear; even his own agony of terror was as silent as were the
visionary demons who had aroused it. Days, years, centuries seemed to pass, as he lay
gazing up, in a trance of horror, into his realm of peopled and ghostly darkness. At last
Nature yielded under the trial; the phantom prospect suddenly whirled round him with
fearful velocity, and his senses sought refuge from the thraldom of their own creation in a
deep and welcome swoon.
Time had moved wearily onward, the chiding winds had many times waved the dry locks of
his hair to and fro about his brow, as if to bid him awaken and arise, ere he again recovered
his consciousness. Once more aroused to the knowledge of his position and the sensation of
his wound, he slowly raised himself upon his uninjured arm, and looked wildly around for
the faintest appearance of a gleam of light. But the winding and uneven nature of the track
which he had formed to lead him through the wall effectually prevented the moonbeams,
then floating into the outermost of the cavities that he had made, from reaching the place
where he now lay. Not a single object was even faintly distinguishable around him.
Darkness hemmed him in, in rayless and triumphant obscurity, on every side.

The first agonies of the injury he had received had resolved themselves into one dull, heavy,
unchanging sensation of pain. The vision that had overwhelmed his senses was now, in a
vast and shadowy form, present only to his memory, filling the darkness with fearful
recollections, and not with dismal forms; and urging on him a restless, headlong yearning to
effect his escape from the lonely and unhallowed sepulcher, the prison of solitude and death,
that his own fatal exertions threatened him with, should he linger much longer in the
caverns of the wall.

"I must pass from this darkness into light--I must breathe the air of the sky, or I shall perish
in the damps of this vault," he exclaimed in a hoarse, moaning voice, as he raised himself
gradually and painfully into a creeping position, and, turning round slowly, commenced his
meditated retreat.

His brain still whirled with the emotions that had so lately overwhelmed his mind; his right
hand hung helplessly by his side, dragged after him like a prisoner's chain, and lacerated by
the uneven surfaces of the ground over which it was slowly drawn, as, supporting himself
on his left arm, and creeping forward a few inches at a time, he set forth on his toilsome
journey.

Here he paused bewildered in the darkness; there he either checked himself by a convulsive
effort from falling headlong into the unknown deeps beneath him, or lost the little ground he
had gained in labor and agony, by retracing his way at the bidding of some unexpected
obstacle. Now he gnashed his teeth in anguish, now he cursed in despair, now he was
breathless with exhaustion; but still, with an obstinacy that had in it something of the heroic,
be never failed in his fierce resolution to effect his escape.

Slowly and painfully, moving with the pace and the perseverance of the tortoise, hopeless
yet determined as a navigator in a strange sea, he writhed onward and onward upon his
unguided course, until he reaped at length the reward of his long suffering, by the sudden
discovery of a thin ray of moonlight toiling through a crevice in the murky brickwork before
him. Hardly did the hearts of the Magi, when the vision of "the Star in the East" first
 dawned on their eyes, leap within them with a more vivid transport than that which
animated the heart of Ulpius at the moment when he beheld the inspiring and guiding light.

Yet a little more exertion, a little more patience, a little more anguish, and he stood once
again, a ghastly and crippled figure, before the outer cavity of the wall.

It was near daybreak; the moon shone faintly in the dull gray heaven; a small, vaporous rain
was sinking from the shapeless clouds; the waning night showed bleak and cheerless to the
earth, but cast no mournful or reproving influence over the pagan's mind. He looked round
on his solitary lurking-place and beheld no human figure in its lonely recesses. He looked
up at the ramparts, and saw that the sentinels stood silent and apart, wrapped in their heavy
watch-cloaks, and supported on their trusty weapons. It was perfectly apparent that the
events of his night of suffering and despair had passed unheeded by the outer world.

He glanced back with a shudder upon his wounded and helpless limb; then his eyes fixed
themselves upon the wall. After surveying it with an earnest and defiant gaze, he slowly
moved the brushwood with his foot against the small cavity in its outer surface. "Days pass,
wounds heal, chances change," muttered the old man, departing from his haunt with slow
and uncertain steps. "In the mines I have borne lashes without a murmur--I have felt my
chains widening with each succeeding day, the ulcers that their teeth of iron first gnawed in
my flesh, and have yet lived to loosen my fetters and to close my sores! Shall this new
agony have a power to conquer me greater than the others that are past? I will even yet
return in time to overcome the resistance of the wall! My arm is crushed, but my purpose is
whole!"

Chapter XIII.
The House In The Suburbs.

RETRACING some hours, we turn from the rifted wall to the suburbs and the country
which its ramparts overlook; abandoning the footsteps of the maimed and darkly-plotting
Ulpius, our attention now fixes itself on the fortunes of Hermanric and the fate of Antonina.

Although the evening had as yet scarcely closed, the Goth had allotted to the warriors under
his command their different stations for the night in the lonely suburbs of the city. This duty
performed, he was left to the unbroken solitude of the deserted tenement which now served
him as a temporary abode.

The house he occupied was the last of the wide and irregular street in which it stood; it
looked toward the wall beneath the Pincian Mount, from which it was separated by a public
garden about half a mile in extent. This once well-thronged place of recreation was now
totally unoccupied. Its dull groves were brightened by no human forms; the chambers of its
gay summer-houses were dark and desolate- the booths of its fruit and flower-sellers stood
vacant on its untrodden lawns. Melancholy and forsaken, it stretched forth as a fertile
solitude under the very walls of a crowded city.

And yet there was a charm inexpressibly solemn and soothing in the prospect of loneliness
that it presented, as its flower-beds and trees were now gradually obscured to the eye in the
shadows of the advancing night. It gained in its present refinement as much as it had lost of
its former gayety; it had its own simple attraction still, though it failed to sparkle to the eye
with its accustomed illuminations, or to please the ear by the music and laughter which rose
from it in times of peace. As he looked forth over the view from the terrace of his new
abode, the remembrance of the employments of his past and busy hours deserted the
memory of the young Goth, leaving his faculties free to welcome the reflections which night
began insensibly to awaken and create.

Employed under such auspices, whither would the thoughts of Hermanric naturally stray?

From the moonlight that already began to ripple over the topmost trembling leaves of the
trees beyond him, to the delicate and shadowy flowers that twined up the pillars of the
deserted terrace where he now stood, every object he beheld connected itself, to his vivid
and uncultured imagination, with the one being of whom all that was beautiful in Nature
seemed to him the eloquent and befitting type. He thought of Antonina whom he had once
protected; of Antonina whom he had afterward abandoned; of Antonina whom he had now
lost!

Strong in the imaginative and weak in the reasoning faculties; gifted with large moral
perception and little moral firmness; too easy to be influenced and too difficult to be
resolved, Hermanric had deserted the girl's interests from an infirmity of disposition, rather
than from a determination of will. Now, therefore, when the employments of the day had
ceased to absorb his attention; now, when silence and solitude led his memory back to his
morning's abandonment of his helpless charge, that act of fatal impatience and irresolution
inspired him with the strongest emotions of sorrow and remorse. If, during her sojourn
under his care, Antonina had insensibly influenced his heart, her image, now that he
reflected on his guilty share in their parting scene, filled all his thoughts, at once saddening
and shaming him, as he remembered her banishment from the shelter of his tent.

Every feeling which had animated his reflections on Antonina on the previous night, was
doubled in intensity as he thought on her now. Again he recalled her eloquent words, and
remembered the charm of her gentle and innocent manner; again he dwelt on the beauties of
her outward form. Each warm expression; each varying intonation of voice that had
accompanied her petition to him for safety and companionship; every persuasion that she
had used to melt him, now revived in his memory and moved in his heart with steady
influence and increasing power. All the hurried and imperfect pictures of happiness which
she had drawn to allure him, now expanded and brightened, until his mind began to figure to
him visions that had been hitherto unknown to faculties occupied by no other images than
those of rivalry, turbulence and strife. Scenes called into being by Antonina's lightest and
hastiest expressions now rose vague and shadowy before his brooding spirit. Lovely places
of earth that he had visited and forgotten, now returned to his recollection, idealized and
refined as he thought of her. She appeared to his mind in every allurement of action,
fulfilling all the duties and enjoying all the pleasures that she had proposed to him. He
imagined her happy and healthful, journeying gayly by his side in the fresh morning, with
rosy check and elastic step; he imagined her delighting him by her promised songs,
enlivening him by her eloquent words, in the mellow stillness of evening; he imagined her
sleeping, soft and warm and still, in his protecting arms--ever happy and gentle; girl in years
and woman in capacities; at once lover and companion, teacher and pupil, follower and
guide!

Such she might have been once! What was she now?

Was she sinking under her loneliness, perishing from exposure and fatigue, repulsed by the
cruel, or mocked by the unthinking? To all these perils and miseries had he exposed her; and
to what end? To maintain the uncertain favor, to preserve the unwelcome friendship of a
woman abandoned even by the most common and intuitive virtues of her sex; whose frantic
craving for revenge confounded justice with treachery, innocence with guilt, helplessness
with tyranny; whose claims of nation and relationship should have been forfeited in his
estimation by the openly-confessed malignity of her designs, at the fatal moment when she
had communicated them to him in all their atrocity, before the walls of Rome. He groaned
in despair as he thought on this, the most unworthy of the necessities to which the forsaken
girl had been sacrificed.

Soon, however, his mind reverted from such reflections as these to his own duties and his
renown; and here his remorse became partially lightened, though his sorrow remained
unchanged.

Wonderful as had been the influence of Antonina's presence and Antonina's words over the
Goth, they had not yet acquired power enough to smother in him entirely the warlike
instincts of his sex and nation, or to vanquish the strong and hostile promptings of education
and custom. She had gifted him with new emotions, and awakened him to new thoughts; she
had aroused all the dormant gentleness of his disposition to war against the rugged
indifference, the reckless energy, that teaching and example had hitherto made a second
nature to his heart. She had wound her way into his mind, brightening its dark places,
enlarging its narrow recesses, beautifying its unpolished treasures. She had created, she had
refined, during her short hours of communication with him, but she had not lured his
disposition entirely from its old habits and its old attachments; she had not yet stripped off
the false glitter from barbarian strife, or the pomp from martial renown; she had not elevated
the inferior intellectual to the height of the superior moral faculties, in his inward
composition. Submitted almost impartially to the alternate and conflicting dominion of the
two masters, Love and Duty, he at once regretted Antonina, and yet clung mechanically to
his old obedience to those tyrannic requirements of nation and name which had occasioned
her loss.

Oppressed by his varying emotions, destitute alike of consolation and advice, the very
inaction of his present position sensibly depressed him. He rose impatiently, and, buckling
on his weapons, sought to escape from his thoughts by abandoning the scene under the
influence of which. they had been first aroused. Turning his back upon the city, he directed
his steps at random through the complicated labyrinth of streets composing the extent of the
deserted suburbs.

After he had passed through the dwellings comprised in the occupation of the Gothic lines,
and had gained those situated nearer to the desolate country beyond, the scene around him
became impressive enough to have absorbed the attention of any man not wholly occupied
by other and more important objects of contemplation.

The loneliness he now beheld on all sides was not the loneliness of ruin--the buildings near
him were in perfect repair; it was not the loneliness of pestilence--there were no corpses
strewn over the untrodden pavements of the streets; it was not the loneliness of seclusion--
there were no barred windows, and few closed doors; it was a solitude of human
annihilation. The open halls of the theaters were untenanted; the porticoes of the churches
were unapproached; the benches before the wine-shops were unoccupied; remains of gaudy
household wares still stood on the counters of the street booths, watched by none, bought by
none; particles of bread and meat (treasures fated to become soon of greater value than
silver and gold to beleaguered Rome) rotted here in the open air, like garbage upon
dunghills; children's toys, women a ornaments, purses, money, love-tokens, precious
manuscripts, lay scattered hither and thither in the public ways, dropped and abandoned by
their different owners in the hurry of their sudden and universal flight. Every deserted street
was eloquent of darling projects desperately resigned, of valued labors miserably deserted,
of delighting enjoyments irretrievably lost. The place was forsaken even by those household
gods of rich and poor, its domestic animals. They had either followed their owners into the
city, or strayed, unhindered and unwatched, into the country beyond. Mansion, bath, and
circus displayed their gaudy pomp and luxurious comfort in vain; not even a wandering
Goth was to be seen near their empty halls. For, with such a prospect before them as the
subjugation of Rome, the army had caught the infection of its leader's enthusiasm for his
exalted task, and willingly obeyed his commands for suspending the pillage of the suburbs,
disdaining the comparatively worthless treasures around them, attainable at any time, when
they fell that the rich coffers of Rome herself were now fast opening to their eager hands.
Voiceless and noiseless, unpeopled and unravaged, lay the far-famed suburbs of the greatest
city of the universe, sunk alike in the night of Nature, the night of Fortune, and the night of
Glory!

Saddening and impressive as was the prospect thus presented to the eyes of the young Goth,
it failed to weaken the powerful influence that his evening's meditations yet held over his
mind. As, during the hours that were passed, the image of the forsaken girl had dissipated
the remembrance of the duties he had performed, and opposed the contemplation of the
commands he was yet to fulfill, so it now denied to his faculties any impressions from the
lonely scene, beheld yet unnoticed, which spread around him. Still, as he passed through the
gloomy streets, his vain regrets and self-accusations--his natural predilections and acquired
attachments, ruled over him, and contended within him, as sternly and as unceasingly as in
the first moments when they had arisen with the evening during his sojourn in the terrace of
the deserted house.

He had now arrived at the extremest boundary of the buildings in the suburbs. Before him
lay an uninterrupted prospect of smooth, shining fields, and soft, hazy, indefinable woods.
At one side of him were some vineyards and cottage gardens; at the other was a solitary
house, the outermost of all the abodes in his immediate vicinity. Dark and cheerless as it
was, he regarded it for some time with the mechanical attention of a man more occupied in
thought than observation, gradually advancing toward it in the moody abstraction of his
reflections, until he unconsciously paused before the low range of irregular steps which led
to its entrance door.

Startled from his meditations by his sudden propinquity to the object that he had unwittingly
approached, be now, for the first time, examined the lonely abode before him with real
attention.

There was nothing remarkable about the house, save the extreme desolateness of its
appearance, which seemed to arise partly from its isolated position, and partly from the
unusual absence of decoration on its external front. It was too extensive to have been the
dwelling of a poor man, too void of pomp and ornament to have been a mansion of the rich.
It might, perhaps, have belonged to some citizen or foreigner of the middle class--some
moody Northman, some solitary Egyptian, some scheming Jew. Yet, though it was not
possessed in itself of any remarkable or decided character, the Goth experienced a
mysterious, almost an eager curiosity to examine its interior. He could assign no cause,
discover no excuse for the act, as he slowly mounted the steps before him. Some invisible
and incomprehensible magnet attracted him to the dwelling. If his return had been suddenly
commanded by Alaric himself--if evidences of indubitable treachery had lurked about the
solitary place, at the moment when he thrust open its unbarred door, he felt that he must still
have proceeded upon his onward course.

The next instant he entered the house. The light streamed through the open entrance into the
gloomy hall; the night wind, rushing upon its track, blew shrill and dreary among the stone
pillars and in the hidden crevices and untenanted chambers above. Not a sign of life
appeared, not a sound of a footstep was audible, not even an article of household use was to
be seen. The deserted suburbs rose, without, like a wilderness; and this empty house looked,
within, like a sepulcher void of corpses, and yet eloquent of death!

There was an inexplicable fascination to eyes of the Goth about this vault-like, solitary hall.
He stood motionless at its entrance, gazing dreamily at the gloomy prospect before him,
until a strong gust of wind suddenly forced the outer door further backward, and at the same
moment admitted a larger stream of light.

The place was not empty. In a corner of the hall, hitherto sunk in darkness, crouched a
shadowy form. It was enveloped in a dark garment, and huddled up into an indefinable and
unfamiliar shape. Nothing appeared on it, as a denoting sign of humanity, but one pale hand,
holding the black drapery together. and relieved against it in almost ghastly contrast under
the cold light of the moon.

Vague remembrances of the awful superstitions of his nation's ancient worship hurried over
the memory of the young Goth, at the first moment of his discovery of the ghost-like
occupant of the hall. As he stood in fixed attention before the motionless figure, it soon
began to be endowed with the same strange influence over his will that the lonely house had
already exerted. He advanced slowly toward the crouching form.

It never stirred at the noise of his approach. The pale hand still held the mantle over the
compressed figure, with the same rigid immobility of grasp. Brave as he was, Hermanric
shuddered as he bent down and touched the bloodless, icy fingers. At that action, as if
endowed with instant vitality from contact with a living being, the figure suddenly started
up.

Then the folds of the dark mantle fell back, disclosing a face as pale in hue as the stone
pillars around it; and the voice of the solitary being, became audible, uttering in faint,
monotonous accents, these words:

"He has forgotten and abandoned me! Slay me if you will--I am ready to die!"

Broken, untuned as it was, there yet lurked in that voice a tone of its old music, there
beamed in that vacant and heavy eye a ray of its native gentleness. With a sudden
exclamation of compassion and surprise, the Goth stepped forward, raised the trembling
outcast in his arms, and, in the impulse of the moment quitting the solitary house, stood the
next instant on the firm earth and under the starry sky, once more united to the charge that
he had abandoned--to Antonina whom he had lost.

He spoke to her, caressed her, entreated her pardon, assured her of his future care; but she
neither answered nor recognized him. She never looked in his face, never moved in his
arms, never petitioned for mercy. She gave no sign of life or being, saving that she moaned
at regular intervals in piteous accents: "He has forgotten and abandoned me!" as if that one
simple expression comprised in itself her acknowledgment of the uselessness of her life and
her dirge for her expected death.

The Goth's countenance whitened to his very lips. He began to fear that her faculties had
sunk under her trials. He hurried on with her with trembling steps toward the open country,
for he nourished a dreamy, intuitive hope that the sight of those woods and fields and
mountains which she had extolled to him, in her morning's entreaty for protection, might aid
in restoring her suspended consciousness if she now looked on them.

He ran forward until he had left the suburbs at least half a mile behind him, and had reached
an eminence bounded on each side by high grass banks and clustering woods, and
commanding a narrow yet various prospect of the valley ground beneath, and the fertile
plains that extended beyond.

Here the warrior paused with his burden; and, seating himself on the bank, once more
attempted to calm the girl's continued bewilderment and terror. He thought not on his
sentinels, whom he had abandoned--on his absence from the suburbs, which might be
perceived and punished by an unexpected visit, at his deserted quarters, from his superiors
in the camp. The social influence that sways the world; the fragile idol at whose shrine pride
learns to bow, and insensibility to feel; the soft, grateful influence of yielding nature yet
eternal rule--the influence of woman, source alike of virtues and crimes, of earthly glories
and earthly disasters--had, in this moment of anguish and expectation, silenced in him every
appeal of duty, and overthrown every obstacle of selfish doubt. He now spoke to Antonina
as alluringly as a woman, as gently as a child. He caressed her as warmly as a lover, as
cheerfully as a brother, as kindly as a father. He, the rough northern warrior, whose
education had been of arms, and whose youthful aspirations had been taught to point toward
strife and bloodshed and glory--even he was now endowed with the tender eloquence of pity
and love--with untiring, skillful care--with calm, enduring patience.

Gently and unceasingly he plied his soothing task; and soon, to his joy and triumph, he
beheld the approaching reward of his efforts in the slow changes that became gradually
perceptible in the girl's face and manner. She raised herself in his arms, looked up fixedly
and vacantly into his face, then round upon the bright, quiet landscape, then back again
more steadfastly upon her companion; and at length, trembling violently, she whispered
softly and several times the young Goth's name, glancing at him anxiously and
apprehensively, as if she feared and doubted while she recognized him.

"You are bearing me to my death," said she suddenly. "You, who once protected me--you,
who forsook me! You are luring me into the power of the woman who thirsts for my blood
Oh, it is horrible--horrible!"

She paused, averted her face, and shuddering violently, disengaged herself from his arms.
After an interval, she continued:

"Through the long day, and in the beginning of the cold night, I have waited in one solitary
place for the death that is in store for me! I have suffered all the loneliness of my hours of
expectation without complaint; I have listened with little dread, and no grief, for the
approach of my enemy who has sworn that she will shed my blood! Having none to love
me, and being a stranger in the land of my own nation, I have nothing to live for! But it is a
bitter misery to me to behold in you the fulfiller of my doom--to be snatched by the hand of
Hermanric from the heritage of life that I have so long struggled to preserve!"

Her voice had altered, as she pronounced these words, to an impressive lowness and
mournfulness of tone. Its quiet, saddened accents were expressive of an almost divine
resignation and sorrow; they seemed to be attuned to a mysterious and untraceable harmony
with the melancholy stillness of the night landscape. As she now stood looking up with pale,
calm countenance, and gentle, tearless eyes, into the sky whose .moonlight brightness shone
softly over form, the Virgin watching the approach of her angel messenger could hardly
have been adorned with a more pure and simple loveliness than now dwelt over the features
of Numerian's forsaken child.

No longer master of his agitation--filled with awe, grief, and despair, as he looked on the
victim of his heartless impatience, Hermanric bowed himself at the girl's feet, and in the
passionate utterance of real remorse, offered up his supplications for pardon and his
assurances of protection and love. All that the reader has already learned--the bitter self-
upbraidings of his evening, the sorrowful wanderings of his night, the mysterious attraction
that led him to the solitary house, his joy at once more discovering his lost charge--all these
confessions he now poured forth in the simple yet powerful eloquence of strong emotion
and true regret.

Gradually and amazedly, as she listened to his words, Antonina awoke from her abstraction.
Even the expression of his countenance and the earnestness of his manner, viewed by the
intuitive penetration of her sex, wrought with kind and healing influence on her mind. She
started suddenly, a bright flush flew over her colorless cheeks; she bent down, and looked
earnestly and wistfully into the Goth's face. Her lips moved, but her quick convulsive
breathing stifled the. words that she vainly endeavored to form.
"Yes," continued Hermanric, rising and drawing her toward him again, "you shall never
mourn, never fear, never weep more! Though you have lost your father, and the people of
your nation are as strangers to you--though you have been threatened and forsaken, you
shall still be beautiful, still be happy; for I will watch you, and you shall never be harmed; I
will labor for you, and you shall never want! People and kindred, fame and duty--I will
abandon them all to make atonement to you!"

Its youthful freshness and hope returned to the girl's heart, as water to the long-parched
spring, when the young warrior ceased. The tears stood in her eyes, but she neither sighed
nor spoke. Her frame trembled all over with the excess of her astonishment and delight, as
she still steadfastly looked on him and still listened intently as he proceeded:

"Fear, then, no longer for your safety--Goisvintha, whom you dread, is far from us; she
knows not that we are here; she cannot track our footsteps now, to threaten or to harm you!
Remember no more how you have suffered and I have sinned! Think only how bitterly I
have repented our morning's separation, and how gladly I welcome our meeting of to-night.
Oh, Antonina! you are beautiful with a wondrous loveliness; you are young with a perfected
and unchildlike youth; your words fall upon my ear with the music of a song of the olden
time; it is like a dream of the spirits that my fathers worshiped, when I look up and behold
you at my side!"

An expression of mingled confusion, pleasure, and surprise flushed the girl's half-averted
countenance as she listened to the Goth. She rose with a smile of ineffable gratitude and
delight, and pointed to the prospect beyond, as she softly rejoined:

"Let us go a little further onward, where the moonlight shines over the meadow below. My
heart is bursting in this shadowy place! Let us seek the light that is yonder; it seems happy
like me!"

They walked forward: and, as they went, she told him again of the sorrows of her past day;
of her lonely and despairing progress from his tent to the solitary house where he had found
her in the night, and where she had resigned herself from the first to meet a death that had
little horror for her then. There was no thought of reproach, no utterance of complaint, in
this renewal of her melancholy narration. It was solely that she might luxuriate afresh in
those delighting expressions of repentance and devotion, which she knew that it would call
forth from the lips of Hermanric, that she now thought of addressing him once more with
the tale of her grief.

As they still went onward; as she listened to the rude, fervent eloquence of the language of
the Goth; as she looked on the deep repose of the landscape, and the soft transparency of the
night sky; her mind, ever elastic under the shock of the most violent emotions, ever ready to
regain its wonted healthfulness and hope, now recovered its old tone and reassumed its
accustomed balance. Again her memory began to store itself with its beloved
remembrances, and her heart to rejoice in its artless longings and visionary thoughts. In
spite of all her fears and all her sufferings, she now walked on blessed in a disposition that
woe had no shadow to darken long, and neglect no influence to warp; still as happy in
herself; even yet as forgetful of her past, as hopeful for her future, as on that first evening
when we beheld her in her father's garden, singing to the music of her lute.

Insensibly as they proceeded, they had diverged from the road, had entered a by-path, and
now stood before a gate which led to a small farmhouse, surrounded by its gardens and
vineyards, and, like the suburbs that they had quitted, deserted by its inhabitants on the
approach of the Goths. They passed through the gate, and arriving at the plot of ground in
front of the house, paused for a moment to look around them.

The meadows had been already stripped of their grass and the young trees of their branches,
by the foragers of the invading army, but here the destruction of the little property had been
stayed. The house, with its neat thatched roof and shutters of variegated wood--the garden,
with its small stock of fruit and its carefully tended beds of rare flowers, designed probably
to grace the feast of a nobleman or the statue of a martyr, had presented no allurements to
the rough tastes of Alaric's soldiery. Not a mark of a footstep appeared on the turf before the
house door; the ivy crept in its wonted luxuriance about the pillars of the lowly porch; and
as Hermanric and Antonina walked toward the fishpond at the extremity of the garden, the
few water-fowl placed there by the owners of the cottage came swimming toward the bank,
as if to welcome in their solitude the appearance of a human form.

Far from being melancholy, there was something soothing and attractive about the
loneliness of the deserted farm. Its ravaged out-houses and plundered meadows, which
might have appeared desolate by day, were so distanced, softened, and obscured by the
atmosphere of night, that they presented no harsh contrast to the prevailing smoothness and
luxuriance of the landscape around. As Antonina beheld the brightened fields and the
shadowed woods, here mingled, there succeeding each other, stretched far onward and
onward until they joined the distant mountains, that eloquent voice of nature, whose
audience is the human heart and whose theme is eternal love, spoke inspiringly to her
attentive senses. She stretched out her arms as she looked with steady and enraptured gaze
upon the bright view before her, as if she longed to see its beauties resolved into a single
and living form--into a spirit human enough to be addressed and visible enough to be
adored.

"Beautiful earth!" she murmured softly to herself, "thy mountains are the watch-towers of
angels, thy moonlight is the shadow of God!"

Her eyes filled with bright, happy tears; she turned to Hermanric, who stood watching her,
and continued:
"Have you never thought that light and air, and the perfume of flowers might contain some
relics of the beauties of Eden that escaped with Eve, when she wandered into the lonely
world? They glowed and breathed for her, and she lived and was beautiful in them. They
were united to one another as the sunbeam is united to the earth that it warms; and could the
sword of the cherubim have sundered them at once? When Eve went forth, did the closed
gates shut back in the empty Paradise all the beauty that had clung and grown and shone
round her? Did no ray of her native light steal forth after her into the desolateness of the
world? Did no print of her lost flowers remain on the bosom they must once have pressed?
It cannot be! A part of her possessions of Eden must have been spared to her with a part of
her life She must have refined the void air of the earth, when she entered it, with a breath of
the fragrant breezes and a gleam of the truant sunshine of her lost Paradise! They must have
strengthened and brightened, and must now be strengthening and brightening with the slow
lapse of mortal years, until, in the time when earth itself will be an Eden, they shall be made
one again with the hidden world of perfection, from which they are yet separated. So that,
even now, as I look forth over the landscape, the light that I behold has in it a glow of
Paradise, and this flower that I gather, a breath of the fragrance that once stole over the
senses of my first mother, Eve!"

Though she paused here, as if in expectation of an answer, the Goth preserved an unbroken
silence. Neither by nature nor position was he capable of partaking the wild fancies and
aspiring thoughts drawn by the influences of the external world from their concealment in
Antonina's heart.

The mystery of his present situation; his vague remembrances of the duties he had
abandoned; the uncertainty of his future fortunes and future fate; the presence of the lonely
being so inseparably connected with his past emotions and his existence to come, so
strangely attractive by her sex, her age, her person, her misfortunes, and her endowments;
all contributed to bewilder his faculties. Goisvintha, the army, the besieged city, the
abandoned suburbs, seemed to hem him in like a circle of shadowy and threatening
judgments; and in the midst of them stood the young denizen of Rome, with her eloquent
countenance and her inspiring words, ready to hurry him, he knew not whither, and able to
influence him, he felt not how.

Unconsciously interpreting her companion a silence into a wish to change the scene and the
discourse, Antonina, after lingering over the view from the garden for a moment longer, led
the way back toward the untenanted house. They removed the wooden padlock from the
door of the dwelling, and guided by the brilliant moonlight, entered its principal apartment.

The homely adornments of the little room had remained undisturbed, and, dimly
distinguishable though they now were, gave it to the eyes of the two strangers the same
aspect of humble comfort which had probably once endeared it to its exiled occupants. As
Hermanric seated himself by Antonina's side on the simple couch which made the principal
piece of furniture in the place, and looked forth from the window over the same view that
they had beheld in the garden, the magic stillness and novelty of the scene now began to
affect his slow perceptions, as they had already influenced the finer and more sensitive
faculties of the thoughtful girl. New hopes and tranquil ideas arose in his young mind, and
communicated an unusual gentleness to his expression, an unusual softness to his voice, as
he thus addressed his silent companion:

"With such a home as this--with this garden, with .that country beyond, with no warfare, no
stern teachers, no enemy to threaten you, with companions and occupations that you loved--
tell me, Antonina, would not your happiness be complete?"

As he looked round at the girl to listen to her reply, he saw that her countenance had
changed. Their past expression of deep grief had again returned to her features. Her eyes
were fixed on the short dagger that hung over the Goth's breast, which seemed to have
suddenly aroused in her a train of melancholy and unwelcome thoughts. When she at length
spoke, it was in a mournful and altered voice, and with a mingled expression of resignation
and despair.

"You must leave me--we must be parted again," said she; "the sight of your weapons has
reminded me of all that until now I had forgotten, of all that I have left in Rome, of all that
you have abandoned before the city walls. Once I thought we might have escaped together
from the turmoil and the danger around us, but now I know that it is better that you should
depart! Alas! for my hopes and my happiness, I must be left alone once more!"

She paused for an instant, struggling to retain her self-possession, and then continued:

"Yes, you must quit me, and return to your post before the city; for in the day of assault
there will be none to care for my father but you! Until I know that he is safe, until I can see
him once more, and ask him for pardon, and entreat him for love, I dare not remove from
the perilous precincts of Rome! Return, then, to your duties, and your companions, and your
occupations of martial renown; and do not forget Numerian when the city is assailed, nor
Antonina, who is left to think on you in the solitary plains!"

She rose from her place, as if to set the example of departing; but her strength and resolution
both failed her, and she sank down again on the couch, incapable of making another
movement or uttering another word.

Strong and conflicting emotions passed over the heart of the Goth. The language of the girl
had quickened the remembrance of his half-forgotten duties, and strengthened the failing
influence of his old predilections of education and race. Both conscience and inclination
now opposed his disputing her urgent and unselfish request. For a few minutes he remained
in deep reflection; then he rose and looked earnestly from the window; then back again upon
Antonina and the room they occupied. At length, as if animated by a sudden determination,
he again approached his companion, and thus addressed her:

"It is right that I should return. I will do your bidding, and depart for the camp (but not till
the break of day), while you, Antonina, remain in concealment and in safety here. None can
come hither to disturb you. The Goths will not revisit the fields they have already stripped;
the husbandman who owns this dwelling is imprisoned in the beleaguered city; the peasants
from the country beyond dare not approach so near to the invading hosts; and Goisvintha,
whom you dread, knows not even of the existence of such a refuge as this. Here, though
lonely, you will be secure; here you can await my return, when each succeeding night gives
me the opportunity of departing from the camp; and here I will warn you beforehand, if the
city is devoted to an assault. Though solitary, you will not be abandoned--we shall not be
parted one from the other. Often and often I shall return to look on you, and to listen to you,
and to love you! You will be happier here, even in this lonely place, than in the former
home that you lost through your father's wrath!"

"Oh! I will willingly remain--I will joyfully await you!" cried the girl, raising her beaming
eyes to Hermanric's face. "I will never speak mournfully to you again; I will never remind
you more of all that I have suffered, and all that I have lost! How merciful you were to me,
when I first saw you in your tent--how doubly merciful you are to me here! I am proud
when I look on your stature, and your strength, and your heavy weapons, and know that you
are happy in remaining with me; that you will succor my father; that you will return from
your glittering encampments to this farmhouse, where I am left to await you. Already I have
forgotten all that has happened to me of woe; already I am more joyful than ever I was in
my life before! See, I am no longer weeping in sorrow! If there are any tears still on my
cheeks, they are the tears of gladness that every one web comes--tears to sing and rejoice
in!"

She ceased abruptly, as if words failed to give expression to her new delight. All the gloomy
emotions that had oppressed her but a short time before had now completely vanished; and
the young, fresh heart, superior still to despair and woe, basked as happily again in its native
atmosphere of joy as a bird in the sunlight of morning and spring.

Then, when after an interval of delay their former tranquillity had returned to them, how.
softly and lightly the quiet hours of the remaining night flowed onward to the two watchers
the lonely house! How gladly the delighted disclosed her hidden thoughts, and poured forth
her innocent confessions, to the dweller among other nations and the child of other
impressions than her own! All the various reflections aroused in her mind by the natural
objects she had secretly studied, by the mighty imagery of her Bible lore, by the gloomy
histories of saints' visions and martyrs' sufferings, which she had learned and pondered over
by her father's side, were now drawn from their treasured places in her memory and
addressed to the ear of the Goth. As the child flies to the nurse with the story of its first toy;
as the girl resorts to the sister with the confession of her first love; as the poet hurries to the
friend with the plan of his first composition; so did Antonina seek the attention of
Hermanric with the first outward revealings enjoyed by her faculties and the first
acknowledgment of her emotions liberated from her heart.

The longer the Goth listened to her, the more perfect became the enchantment of her words
half struggling into poetry, and her voice half gliding into music. As her low, still varying
tones wound smoothly into his ear, his thoughts suddenly and intuitively reverted to her
formerly expressed remembrances of her lost lute, inciting him to ask her with new interest
and animation, of the manner of her acquisition of that knowledge of song which she had
already assured him that she possessed.

"I have learned many odes of many poets," said she, quickly and confusedly, avoiding the
mention of Vetranio, which a direct answer to Hermanric's question must have produced,
"but I remember none perfectly, save those whose theme is of spirits and of other worlds,
and of the invisible beauty that we think of but cannot see. Of the few that I know of these,
there is one that I first learned and loved most. I will sing it, that you may be assured I will
not fail to you in my promised art."

She hesitated for a moment. Sorrowful rembrances of the events that had followed the
utterance of the last notes she sang in her father's garden swelled within her and held her
speechless. Soon, however, after a short interval of silence, she recovered her self-
possession, and began to sing, in low, tremulous tones, that harmonized well with the
character of the words and the strain of the melody which she had chosen.

The Mission Of The Tear.

I.

The skies were its birthplace--the Tear was the child

Of the dark maiden SORROW, by young Joy beguil'd
It was born in convulsion; 'twas nurtured in woe;
And the world was yet young when it wander'd below.
II.

No angel-bright guardians watch'd over its birth,

Ere yet it was suffer'd to roam upon earth;
No spirits of gladness its soft form caress'd;
SIGHS mourn'd round its cradle, and hush'd it to rest.
III.

Though JOY might endeavor, with kisses and wiles,

 To lure it away to his household of smiles;
From the daylight he liv'd in, it turn'd in affright,
To nestle with SORROW in climates of night.
IV.

When it came upon earth, 'twas to choose a career,

The brightest and best that is left to a TEAR:
To hallow delight, and bestow the relief
Denied by despair to the fullness of grief.
V.

Few repell'd it--some bless'd it--wherever it came,

Whether soft'ning their sorrow, or soothing their shame
And the joyful themselves, though its name they might fear,
Oft welcom'd the calming approach of the TEAR.
VI.

Years on years have worn onward, as--watch'd from above--

Speeds that meek spirit yet on its labor of love:
Still the exile of heav'n, it ne'er shall away,
Every heart has a home for it, roam where it may!

For the first few minutes after she had concluded the ode, Hermanric was hardly conscious
that she had ceased; and when at length she looked up at him, her mute petition for approval
had an eloquence which would have been marred to the Goth at that moment by the
utterance of a single word. A rapture, an inspiration, a new life moved within him. The hour
and the scene completed what the magic of the song had begun. His expressions now
glowed with a southern warmth; his words assumed a Roman fervor. Gradually, as they
discoursed, the voice of the girl was less frequently audible. A change was passing over her
spirit: from the teacher, she was now becoming the pupil.

As she still listened to the Goth, as she felt the birth of new feelings within her while he
spoke, her cheeks glowed, her features lightened up, her very form seemed to freshen and
expand. No intruding thought or awakening remembrance disturbed her rapt attention. No
cold doubt, no gloomy hesitation, appeared in her companion's words. The one listened, the
other spoke, with the whole heart, the undivided soul. While a world-wide revolution was
concentrating its hurricane forces around them; while the city of an empire tottered already
to its tremendous fall; while Goisvintha plotted new revenge; while Ulpius toiled for his
revolution of bloodshed and ruin; while all these dark materials of public misery and private
strife seethed and strengthened around them, they could as completely forget the stormy
outward world, in themselves; they could think as serenely of tranquil love; the kiss could
be given as passionately and returned as tenderly, as if the lot of their existence had been
cast in the pastoral days of the shepherd poets, and the future of their duties and enjoyments
was securely awaiting them in a land of eternal peace!
Chapter XIV.
The Famine.

THE end of November is approaching. Nearly a month has elapsed since the occurrence of
the events mentioned in the last chapter, yet still the Gothic lines stretch around the city
walls. Rome, that we left haughty and luxurious even while ruin threatened her at her gates,
has now suffered a terrible and warning change. As we approach her again, woe, horror, and
desolation have already gone forth to shadow her lofty palaces and to darken her brilliant
streets.

Over Pomp that spurned it, over Pleasure that defied it, over Plenty that scared it in its secret
rounds, the specter Hunger has now risen triumphant at last. Day by day has the city's
insufficient allowance of food been more and more sparingly doled out; higher and higher
has risen the value of the coarsest and simplest provision; the hoarded supplies that pity and
charity have already bestowed to cheer the sinking people have reached their utmost limits.
For the rich there is still corn in the city--treasure of food to be bartered for treasure of gold.
For the poor, man's natural nourishment exists no more; the season of famine's loathsome
feasts, the first days of the sacrifice of choice to necessity, have darkly and irretrievably
begun.

It is morning. A sad and noiseless throng is advancing over the cold flag-stones of the Great
Square, before the Basilica of St. John Lateran. The members of the assembly speak in
whispers. The weak are tearful--the strong are gloomy--they all move with slow and languid
gait, and hold in their arms their dogs or other domestic animals. On the outskirts of the
crowd march the enfeebled guards of the city, grasping in their rough hands rare, favorite
birds of gaudy plumage and melodious note, and followed by children and young girls
vainly and piteously entreating that their favorites may be restored.

This strange procession pauses, at length, before a mighty caldron slung over a great fire in
the middle of the square, round which stand the city butchers with bare knives, and the
trustiest men of the Roman legions with threatening weapons. A proclamation is then
repeated, commanding the populace who have no money left to purchase food, to bring up
their domestic animals to be boiled together over the public furnace, for the sake of
contributing to the public support.

The next minute, in pursuance of this edict, the dumb favorites of the crowd passed from the
owner's caressing hand into the butcher's ready grasp. The faint cries of the animals, starved
like their masters, mingled for a few moments with the sobs and lamentations of the women
and children to whom the greater part of them belonged. For in this, the first stage of their
calamities, that severity of hunger which extinguishes pity and estranges grief was unknown
to the populace; and though fast losing spirit, they had not yet sunk to the depths of
ferocious despair which even now were invisibly opening between them. A thousand pangs
were felt, a thousand humble tragedies were acted in the brief moments of separation
between guardian and charge. The child snatched its last kiss of the bird that had sung over
its bed; the dog looked its last entreaty for protection from the mistress who had once never
met it without a caress. Then came the short interval of agony and death, then the steam rose
fiercely from the greedy caldron, and then the people for a time dispersed; the sorrowful to
linger near the confines of the fire, and the hungry to calm their impatience by a visit to the
neighboring church.

The marble aisles of the noble Basilica held a gloomy congregation. Three small candles
were alone lighted on the high altar. No sweet voices sang melodious anthems or exulting
hymns. The monks, in hoarse tones and monotonous harmonies, chanted the penitential
psalms. Here and there knelt a figure clothed in mourning robes and absorbed in secret
prayer, but over the majority of the assembly either blank despondency or sullen inattention
universally prevailed.

As the last dull notes of the last psalm died away among the lofty recesses of the church, a
procession of pious Christians appeared at the door and advanced slowly to the altar. It was
composed both of men and women barefooted, clothed in black garments, and with ashes
scattered over their disheveled hair. Tears flowed from their eyes, and they beat their breasts
as they bowed their foreheads on the marble pavement of the altar steps.

This humble public expression of penitence under the calamity that had now fallen on the
city was, however, confined only to its few really religious inhabitants, and commanded
neither sympathy nor attention from the heartless and obstinate population of Rome. Some
still cherished the delusive hope of assistance from the Court at Ravenna; others believed
that the Goths would ere long impatiently abandon their protracted blockade, to stretch their
ravages over the rich and unprotected fields of Southern Italy. But the same blind
confidence in the lost terrors of the Roman name, the same fierce and reckless determination
to defy the Goths to the very last, sustained the sinking courage and suppressed the
despondent emotions of the great mass of the suffering people, from the beggar who
prowled for garbage, to the patrician who sighed over his new and unwelcome nourishment
of simple bread.

While the. penitents who formed the procession above described were yet engaged in the
performance of their unnoticed and unshared duties of penance and prayer, a priest ascended
the great pulpit of the Basilica, to attempt the ungrateful task of preaching patience and
piety to the hungry multitude at his feet.
He began his sermon by retracing the principal occurrences in Rome since the beginning of
the Gothic blockade. He touched cautiously upon the first event that stained the annals of
the besieged city--the execution of the widow of the Roman general, Stilicho, on the
unauthorized suspicion that she had held treasonable communication with Alaric and the
invading army; he noticed lengthily the promises of assistance transmitted from Ravenna,
after the perpetration of that ill-omened act. He spoke admiringly of the skill displayed by
the Government in making the necessary and immediate reductions in the daily supplies of
food; he lamented the terrible scarcity which followed, too inevitably, those seasonable
reductions. He pronounced an eloquent eulogium on the noble charity of Laeta, the widow
of the Emperor Gratian, who, with her mother, devoted the store of provisions obtained by
their imperial revenues to succoring, at that important juncture, the starving and desponding
poor. He admitted the new scarcity consequent on the dissipation of Laeta's stores; deplored
the present necessity of sacrificing the domestic animals of the citizens; condemned the
enormous prices now demanded for the last remnants of wholesome food that were garnered
up; announced it as the firm persuasion of every one that a few days more would bring help
from Ravenna; and ended his address by informing auditory that, as they had suffered so
much already, they could patiently suffer a little more; and that if after this they were so ill-
fated as to sink under their calamities, they would feel it a noble consolation to die in the
cause of Catholic and Apostolic Rome, and would assuredly be canonized as saints and
martyrs by the next generation of the pious in the first interval of fertile and restoring peace.

Flowing as was the eloquence of this oration, it yet possessed not the power of inducing one
among those whom it addressed to forget the sensation of his present suffering, and to fix
his attention on the vision of future advantage spread before all listeners by the fluent priest.
With the same murmurs of querulous complaint, and the same expressions of impotent
hatred and defiance of the Goths, which had fallen from them as they entered the church, the
populace now departed from it, to receive from the city officers the stinted allowance of
repugnant food prepared for their hunger from the caldron in the public square.

And see, already from other haunts in the neighboring quarter of Rome their fellow-citizens
press onward at the given signal, to meet them round the caldron's sides! The languid
sentinel, released from duty, turns his gaze from the sickening prospect of the Gothic camp,
and hastens to share the public meal; the baker starts from sleeping on his empty counter,
the beggar rises from his kennel in the butcher's vacant outhouse, the slave deserts his place
by the smoldering kitchen fire--all hurry to swell the numbers of the guests that are bidden
to the wretched feast. Rapidly and confusedly the congregation in the Basilica pours through
its lofty gates; the priests and penitents retire from the altar's foot; and in the great church,
so crowded but a few moments before, there now only remains the figure of a solitary man.

Since the commencement of the service, neither addressed nor observed, this lonely being
has faltered round the circle of the congregation, gazing long and wistfully over the faces
that met his view. Now that the sermon is ended and the last lingerer has quitted the church,
he turns from the spot whence he has anxiously watched the different members of the
departing throng, and feebly crouches down on his knees at the base of a pillar that is near
him. His eyes are hollow and his cheeks are wan; his thin gray hairs are few and fading on
his aged head. He makes no effort to follow the crowd and partake their sustenance; no one
is left behind to urge, no one returns to lead him to the public meal Though weak and old, he
is perfectly forsaken in his loneliness, perfectly unsolaced in his grief; his friends have lost
all trace of him; his enemies have ceased to fear or to hate him now. As he crouches by the
pillar alone, he covers his forehead with his pale, palsied hands, his dim eyes fill with bitter
tears, and such expressions as these are ever and anon faintly audible in the intervals of his
heavy sighs: "Day after day! Day after day! And my lost one is not found! my loved and
wronged one is not restored! Antonina! Antonina!"

Some days after the public distribution of food in the square of St. John Lateran, Vetranio's
favorite freedman might have been observed pursuing his way homeward, sadly and slowly,
to his master's palace.

It was not without cause that the pace of the intelligent Carrio was funereal and his
expression disconsolate. Even during the short period that had elapsed since the scene in the
Basilica already described, the condition of the city had altered fearfully for the worse. The
famine advanced with giant strides; every succeeding hour endued it with new vigor, every
effort to repel it served but to increase its spreading and overwhelming influence. One after
another the pleasures and pursuits of the city declined beneath the dismal oppression of the
universal ill, until the public spirit in Rome became moved alike in all classes by one
gloomy inspiration--a despairing defiance of the famine and the Goths.

The freedman entered his master's palace, neither saluted nor welcomed by the once
obsequious slaves in the outer lodge. Neither harps nor singing-boys, neither woman's
ringing laughter nor man's bacchanalian glee, now woke the echoes in the lonely halls. The
pulse of pleasure seemed to have throbbed its last in the joyless being of Vetranio's altered
household.

Hastening his steps as he entered the mansion, Carrio passed into the chamber where the
senator awaited him.

On two couches, separated by a small table, reclined the lord of the palace, and his pupil and
companion at Ravenna, the once sprightly Camilla. Vetranio's open brow had contracted a
clouded and severe expression; and he neither regarded nor addressed his visitor, who, on
her part, remained as silent and as melancholy as himself. Every trace of the former
characteristics of the gay, elegant voluptuary and the lively, prattling girl seemed to have
completely vanished. On the table between them stood a large bottle containing Falernian
wine, and a vase filled with a little watery soup, in the middle of which floated a small
dough cake, sparingly sprinkled with common herbs. As for the usual accompaniments of
Vetranio's luxurious privacy, they were nowhere to be seen. Poems, pictures, trinkets, lutes,
all were absent. Even the "inestimable kitten of the breed most worshiped by the ancient
Egyptians" appeared no more. It had been stolen, cooked, and eaten by a runaway slave,
who had already bartered its ruby collar for a lean parrot and the unroasted half of the
carcass of a dog.

"I lament to confess it, oh estimable patron, but my mission has failed," observed Carrio,
producing from his cloak several bags of money and boxes of jewels, which he carefully
deposited on the table. "The prefect has himself assisted in searching the public and private
granaries, and has arrived at the conclusion that not a handful of corn is left in the city. I
offered publicly in the market-place five thousand sestertii for a living cock and hen, but
was told that the race had long since been exterminated, and that, as money would no longer
buy food, money was no longer desired by the poorest beggar in Rome. There is no more
even of the hay I yesterday purchased to be obtained for the most extravagant bribes. Those
still possessing the smallest supplies of provision guard and hide them with the most jealous
care. I have done nothing but obtain for the consumption of the few slaves who yet remain
faithful in the house this small store of dogs' hides, reserved from the public distribution of
some days since in the square of the Basilica of St. John."

And the freedman, with an air of mingled triumph and disgust, produced as he spoke his
provision of dirty skins.

"What supplies have we still left in our possession?" demanded Vetranio, after drinking a
deep draught of the Falernian, and motioning his servant to place his treasured burdens out
of sight.

"I have hidden in a secure receptacle--for I know not how soon hunger may drive the slaves
to disobedience," rejoined Carrio, "seven bags of hay, three baskets stocked with salted
horseflesh, a sweetmeat-box filled with oats, and another with dried parsley; the rare Indian
singing-birds are still preserved inviolate in their aviary, there is a great store of spices, and
some bottles of the Nightingale Sauce yet remain."

"What is the present aspect of the city?" interrupted Vetranio, impatiently.

"Rome is as gloomy as a subterranean sepulcher," replied Carrio, with a shudder. "The

people congregate in speechless and hungry mobs at the doors of their houses and the
corners of the streets; the sentinels at the ramparts totter on their posts; women and children
are sleeping exhausted on the very pavements of the churches; the theaters are emptied of
actors and audience alike; the baths resound with cries for food and curses on the Goths;
thefts are already committed in the open and unguarded shops; and the barbarians remain
fixed in their encampments, unapproached by our promised legions from Ravenna, neither
assaulting us in our weakness nor preparing to raise the blockade! Our situation grows more
and more perilous--I have great hopes in our store of provisions; but--"

"Cast your hopes to the Court at Ravenna, and your beasts' provender to the howling mob!"
cried Vetranio, with sudden energy. "It is now too late to yield; if the next few days bring us
no assistance, the city will be a human shamble! And think you that I, who have already lost
in this public suspension of social joys my pleasures, my employments, and my
companions, will wait serenely for the lingering and ignoble death that must then threaten us
all? No! it shall never be said that I died starving with the herd, like a slave that his master
deserts! Though the plates in my banqueting-hall must now be empty, my vases and wine-
cups shall yet sparkle for my guests! There is still wine in the cellar, and spices and
perfumes remain in the larder stores. I will invite my friends to a last feast; a saturnalia in a
city of famine; a banquet of death, spread by the jovial labors of Silenus and his fauns!
Though the Parcae have woven for me the destiny of a dog, it is the hand of Bacchus that
shall sever the fatal thread!"

His cheeks were flushed, his eyes sparkled, all the mad energy of his determination
appeared in his face as he spoke. He was no longer the light, amiable, smooth-tongued
trifler, but a moody, reckless, desperate man, careless of every obligation and pursuit which
had hitherto influenced the easy surface of his patrician life. The startled Camilla, who had
as yet preserved a melancholy silence, ran toward him with affrighted looks and
undissembled tears. Carrio stared in vacant astonishment on his master's disordered
countenance, and forgetting his bundle of dog-skins, suffered them to drop unheeded on the
floor. A momentary silence followed, which was suddenly interrupted by the abrupt
entrance of a fourth person, pale, trembling, and breathless, who was no other than
Vetranio's former visitor, the Prefect Pompeianus.

"I bid you welcome to my approaching feast of brimming wine-cups and empty dishes!"
cried Vetranio, pouring the sparkling Falernian into his empty glass. "The last banquet given
in Rome ere the city is annihilated, will be mine! The Goths and the famine shall have no
part in my death! Pleasure shall preside at my last moments, as it has presided at my whole
life! I will die like Sardanapalus, with my loves and my treasures around me; and the last of
my guests who remains proof against our festivity shall set fire to my palace, as the kingly
Assyrian set fire to his!"

"This is no season for jesting," exclaimed the prefect, staring round him with bewildered
eyes and colorless cheeks. "Our miseries are but dawning as yet! In the next street lies the
corpse of a woman, and--horrible omen!--a coil of serpents is wreathed about her neck! We
have no burial-place to receive her, and the thousands who may die like her ere assistance
arrives! The city sepulchers outside the walls are in the hands of the Goths. The people
stand round the body in a trance of horror, for they have now discovered a fatal truth, we
 would fain have concealed from them--" Here the prefect paused, looked round affrightedly
on his listeners, and then added in low, trembling tones:

"The citizens are lying dead from famine in the streets of Rome!"

Chapter XV.
The City And The Gods.

WE return once more to the Gothic encampment, in the suburbs eastward of the Pincian
Gate, and to Hermanric and the warriors under his command, who are still posted at that
particular position on the great circle of the blockade.

The movements of the young chieftain from place to place, expressed, in their variety and
rapidity, the restlessness that was agitating his mind. He glanced back frequently from the
warriors around him to the remote and opposite quarter of the suburbs, occasionally
directing his eyes toward the western horizon, as if anxiously awaiting the approach of some
particular hour of the coming night. Weary at length of pursuing occupations which
evidently irritated rather than soothed his impatience, he turned abruptly from his
companions, and advancing toward the city, paced slowly backward and forward over the
waste ground between the suburbs and the walls of Rome.

At intervals he still continued to examine the scene around him. A more dreary prospect
than now met his view, whether in earth or sky, can hardly be conceived.

The dull sunless day was fast closing, and the portentous heaven gave promise of a stormy
night. Thick, black layers of shapeless cloud hung over the whole firmament, save at the
western point; and here lay a streak of pale, yellow light, inclosed on all sides by the firm,
ungraduated, irregular edges of the masses of gloomy vapor around it. A deep silence hung
over the whole atmosphere. The wind was voiceless among the steady trees. The stir and
action in the being of nature and the life of man seemed enthralled, suspended, stifled. The
air was laden with a burdensome heat; and all things on earth, animate and inanimate, felt
the oppression that weighed on them from the higher elements. The people, who lay gasping
for breath in the famine-stricken city, and the blades of grass that drooped languidly on the
dry sward beyond the walls, owned its enfeebling influence alike.

As the hours wore on, and night stealthily and gradually advanced, a monotonous darkness
overspread, one after another, the objects discernible to Hermanric from the solitary ground
he still occupied. Soon the great city faded into one vast impenetrable shadow, while the
suburbs and the low country around them vanished in the thick darkness that gathered
almost perceptibly over the earth. And now the sole object distinctly visible was the figure
of a weary sentinel, who stood on the frowning rampart immediately above the rifted wall,
and whose drooping figure, propped upon his weapon, was indicated in hard relief against
the thin, solitary streak of light still shining in the cold and cloudy wastes of the western
sky.

But as the night still deepened, this one space of light faded, contracted, vanished, and with
it disappeared the sentinel and the line of rampart on which he was posted. The rule of the
darkness now became universal. Densely and rapidly it overspread the whole city with
startling suddenness; as if the fearful destiny now working its fulfillment in Rome had
forced the external appearances of the night into harmony with its own woeboding nature.

Then, as the young Goth still lingered at his post of observation, the long, low, tremulous,
absorbing roll of thunder afar off became grandly audible. It seemed to proceed from a
distance almost incalculable; to be sounding from its cradle in the frozen north; to be
journeying about its ice-girdled chambers in the lonely poles. It deepened rather than
interrupted the dreary, mysterious stillness of the atmosphere. The lightning, too, had a
summer softness in its noiseless and frequent gleam. It was not the fierce lightning of
winter, but a warm, fitful brightness, almost fascinating in its light, rapid recurrence, tinged
with the glow of heaven, and not with the glare of hell.

There was no wind--no rain; and the air was as hushed as if it slept over chaos in the infancy
of a new creation.

Among the various objects displayed, instant by instant, by the rapid lightning to the eyes of
Hermanric, the most easily and most distinctly visible was the broad surface of the rifted
wall. The large, loose stones scattered here and there at its base, and the overhanging lid of
its broad rampart, became plainly though fitfully apparent in the brief moments of their
illumination. The lightning had played for some time over that structure of the fortifications,
and the bare ground that stretched immediately beyond them, when the smooth prospect
which it thus gave by glimpses to view was suddenly checkered by a flight of birds
appearing from one of the lower divisions of the wall, and flitting uneasily to and fro at one
spot before its surface.

As moment after moment the lightning continued to gleam, so the black forms of the birds
were visible to the practiced eye of the Goth--perceptible, yet evanescent, as sparks of fire
or flakes of snow--whirling confusedly and continually about the spot whence they had
evidently been startled by some unimaginable interruption. At length, after a lapse of some
time, they vanished as suddenly as they had appeared, with shrill notes of affright which
were audible even above the continuous rolling of the thunder; and immediately afterward,
when the lightning alternated with the darkness, there appeared to Hermanric in the part of
the wall where the birds had been first disturbed a small red gleam, like a spark of fire
lodged in the surface of the structure. Then this was lost: a longer obscurity than usual
prevailed in the atmosphere; and when the Goth gazed eagerly through the next succession
of flashes, they showed him the momentary and doubtful semblance of a human figure
standing erect on the stones at the base of the wall.

Hermanric started with astonishment. Again the lightning ceased. In the ardor of his anxiety
to behold more, he strained his eyes with the vain hope of penetrating the obscurity around
him. The darkness seemed interminable. Once again the lightning flashed brilliantly out. He
looked eagerly toward the wall--the figure was still there.

His heart throbbed quickly within him, as he stood irresolute on the spot he had occupied
since the first peal of thunder had struck upon his ear. Were the light and the man--one seen
but for an instant, the other, still perceptible--mere phantoms of his erring sight, dazzled by
the quick recurrence of atmospheric changes through which it had acted? Or did he
indubitably behold a human form, and had he really observed a material light? Some strange
treachery, some dangerous mystery, might be engendering in the besieged city, which it
would be his duty to observe and unmask. He drew his sword; and at the risk of being
observed through the lightning and heard during the pauses in the thunder by the sentinel on
the wall, resolutely advanced to the very foot of the fortifications of hostile Rome.

He heard no sound, perceived no light, observed no figure, as, after several unsuccessful
attempts to reach the place where they stood, he at length paused at the loose stones which
he knew were heaped at the base of the wall. The next moment he was so close to it that he
could pass his sword-point over parts of its rugged surface. He had scarcely examined thus a
space of more than ten yards, before his weapon encountered a sharp, jagged edge; and a
sudden presentiment assured him instantly that he had found the spot where he had beheld
the momentary light, and that he stood on the same stone which had been afterward
occupied by the figure of the man.

After an instant's hesitation, he was about to mount higher on the loose stones, and examine
more closely the irregularity he had just discovered in the wall, when a vivid flash of
lightning, unusually prolonged, showed him, obstructing at scarcely a yard's distance his
onward path, the figure he had already distantly beheld from the plain behind.

There was something inexpressibly fearful in his viewless vicinity, during the next moment
of darkness, to this silent mysterious form, so imperfectly shown by the lightning that
quivered over its half-revealed proportions. Every pulse in the body of the Goth seemed to
pause as he stood, with ready weapon, looking into the gloomy darkness and waiting for the
next flash. It came, and displayed to him the man's fierce eyes glaring steadily down upon
his face; another gleam, and he beheld his haggard finger placed upon his lip in token of
silence; a third,' and he saw the arm of the figure pointing toward the plain behind him; and
then, in the darkness that followed, a hot breath played upon his ear, and a voice whispered
to him, through a pause in the rolling of the thunder: "Follow me."

The next instant Hermanric felt the momentary contact of the man's body, as with noiseless
steps he passed him on the stones. it was no time to deliberate or to doubt. He followed
close upon the stranger's footsteps, gaining glimpses of his dark form moving onward
before, whenever the lightning briefly illuminated the scene, until they arrived at a clump of
trees, not far distant from the houses in the suburbs that were occupied by the Goths under
his own command.

Here the stranger paused before the trunk of a tree which stood between the city wall and
himself, and drew from beneath his ragged cloak a small lantern, carefully covered with a
piece of cloth, which he now removed, and holding the light high above his head, regarded
the Goth with a steady and anxious scrutiny.

Hermanric attempted to address him first, but the appearance of the man, barely visible
though was by the feeble light of his lantern, was so startling and repulsive that the half-
formed words died away on his lips. The face of the stranger was of a ghastly paleness; his
hollow cheeks were seamed with deep wrinkles, and his eyes glared with an expression of
ferocious suspicion. One of his arms was covered with old bandages, stiff coagulated blood,
and hung paralyzed at side. The hand that held the light trembled so that the lantern
containing it vibrated continuously in his unsteady grasp. His limbs were lank and shriveled
almost to deformity, and it was with evident difficulty that he stood upright on his feet.
Every member of his body seemed to be wasting with a gradual death, while his expression,
ardent and forbidding, was stamped with all the energy of manhood and all the daring of
youth.

It was Ulpius! The wall was passed! The breach was made good!

After a protracted examination of Hermanric's countenance and attire, the man, with an
imperious expression strangely at variance with his faltering voice, thus addressed him:

"You are a Goth?"

"I am," rejoined the young chief; "and you are--"

"A friend to the Goths," was the quick answer.

An instant of silence followed. The dialogue was then again begun by the stranger.

"What brought you alone to the base of ramparts?" he demanded, and an expression
ungovernable apprehension shot from his eyes he spoke.
"I saw the appearance of a man in the glean of the lightning," answered Hermanric. "I
approached it to assure myself that my eyes had not deluded me, to discover--"

"There is but one man of your nation who shall discover whence I came, and what I would
obtain," interrupted the stranger, fiercely; "that man is Alaric, your king."

Surprise, indignation and contempt appeared in the features of the Goth as he listened to
such a declaration from the helpless outcast before him. The man perceived it, and
motioning him to be silent, again addressed him.

"Listen!" cried he. "I have that to reveal to the leader of your forces which will stir the heart
of every man in your encampment, if you are trusted with the secret after your king has
heard it from my lips! Do you still refuse to guide me to his tent?"

Hermanric laughed scornfully.

"Look on me," pursued the man, bending forward, and fixing his eyes with savage
earnestness upon his listener's face. "I am alone, old, wounded, weak--a stranger to your
nation--a famished and a helpless man. Should I venture into your camp--should I risk being
slain for a Roman by your comrades--should I dare the wrath of your imperious ruler,
without a cause?"

He paused; and then, still keeping his eyes on the Goth, continued in lower and more
agitated tones:

"Deny me your help, I will wander through your camp till I find your king! Imprison me,
your violence will not open my lips! Slay me, you will gain nothing by my death! But aid
me, and to the latest moment of your life you will rejoice in the deed! I have words of
terrible import for Alaric's ear--a secret, in the gaining of which I have paid the penalty
thus!"

He pointed to his wounded arm. The solemnity of his voice; the rough energy of his words;
the stern determination of his aspect; the darkness of the night that was round them; the
rolling thunder that seemed to join itself to their discourse; the impressive mystery of their
meeting under the city walls--all began to exert their powerful and different influences over
the mind of the Goth, changing insensibly the sentiments at first inspired in him by the
man's communications. He hesitated, and looked round doubtfully toward the lines of the
camp.

There was a long silence, which was again interrupted by the stranger.
"Guard me, chain me, mock at me, if you will!" he cried, with raised voice and flashing
eyes, "but lead me to Alaric's tent! I swear to you, by the thunder pealing over our heads,
that the words I would speak to him will be more precious in his eyes than the brightest
jewel he could ravish from the coffers of Rome."

Though visibly troubled and impressed, Hermanric still hesitated.

"Do you yet delay?" exclaimed the man, with contemptuous impatience. "Stand back! I will
pass on by myself into the very heart of your camp! I entered on my project alone--I will
work its fulfillment without help! Stand back!"

And he moved past Hermanric in the direction of the suburbs, with the same look of fierce
energy on his withered features which had marked them so strikingly at the outset of his
extraordinary interview with the young chieftain.

The daring devotion to his purpose, the reckless toiling after a dangerous and doubtful
success, manifested in the words and actions of one so feeble and unaided as the stranger,
aroused in the Goth that sentiment of irrepressible admiration which the union of moral and
physical courage inevitably awakens. In addition to the incentive to aid the man thus
created, an ardent curiosity to discover his secret filled the mind of Hermanric, and further
powerfully inclined him to conduct his determined companion into Alaric's presence; for by
such proceeding only could he hope, after the man's firm declaration that he would
communicate in the first instance to no one but the king, to penetrate ultimately the object of
his mysterious errand. Animated, therefore, by such motives as these, he called to the
stranger to stop, and briefly communicated to him his willingness to conduct him instantly
to the presence of the leader of the Goths.

The man intimated by a sign his readiness to accept the offer. His physical powers were now
evidently fast failing; but he still tottered painfully onward as they moved to the
headquarters of the camp, muttering and gesticulating to himself almost incessantly. Once
only did he address his conductor during their progress; and then, with a startling abruptness
of manner and in tones of vehement anxiety and suspicion, he demanded of the young Goth
if he had ever examined the surface of the city wall before that night. Hermanric replied in
the negative, and they then proceeded in perfect silence.

Their way lay through the line of encampment to the westward, and was imperfectly lighted
by the flame of an occasional torch or the glow of a distant watch-fire. The thunder had
diminished in frequency but had increased in volume; faint breaths of wind soared up
fitfully from the west, and already a few rain-drops fell slowly to the thirsty earth. The
warriors not actually on duty at the different posts of observation had retired to the shelter of
their tents; none of the thousand idlers and attendants attached to the great army appeared at
their usual haunts; even the few voices that were audible sounded distant and low. The
night-scene here, among the ranks of the invaders of Italy, was as gloomy and repelling as
on the solitary plains before the walls of Rome.

Ere long the stranger perceived that they had reached a part of the camp more thickly
peopled, more carefully illuminated, more strongly fortified, than that through which they
had already passed; and the liquid, rushing sound of the waters of the rapid Tiber now
caught his suspicious and attentive ear. They still moved onward a few yards; and then
paused suddenly before a tent, immediately surrounded by many others, and occupied at all
its approaches by groups of richly-armed warriors. Here Hermanric stopped an instant to
parley with the sentinel, who, after a short delay, raised the outer covering of the entrance to
the tent, and the moment after the Roman adventurer beheld himself standing by his
conductor's side in the presence of the Gothic king.

The interior of Alaric's tent was lined with skins, and illuminated by one small lamp,
fastened to the center-pole that supported its roof. The only articles of furniture in the place
were some bundles of furs flung down loosely on the ground, and a large, rudely-carved
wooden chest, on which stood a polished human skull, hollowed into a sort of clumsy wine-
cup. A thoroughly Gothic ruggedness of aspect, a stately northern simplicity prevailed over
the spacious tent, and was indicated not merely in its thick shadows, its calm lights, and its
freedom from pomp and glitter, but even in the appearance and employment of its
remarkable occupant.

Alaric was seated alone on the wooden chest already described, contemplating with bent
brow and abstracted gaze some old Runic characters traced upon the carved surface of a
brass and silver shield, full five feet high, which rested against the side of the tent. The light
of the lamp falling upon the polished surface of the weapon--rendered doubly bright by the
dark skins behind it--was reflected back upon the figure of the Gothic chief. It glowed upon
his ample cuirass; it revealed his firm lips, slightly curled by an expression of scornful
triumph; it displayed the grand, muscular formation of his arm, which rested, clothed in
tightly-fitting leather, upon his knee; it partly brightened over his short light hair, and
glittered steadily in his fixed, thoughtful, manly eyes, which were just perceptible beneath
the partial shadow of his contracted brow; while it left the lower part of his body and his
right hand, which was supported on the head of a huge shaggy dog, crouching at his side,
shadowed almost completely by the thick skins heaped confusedly against the sides of the
wooden chest. He was so completely absorbed in the contemplation of the Runic characters
traced among the carved figures on his immense shield, that he did not notice the entry of
Hermanric and the stranger until the growl of the watchful dog suddenly disturbed him in
his occupation. He looked up instantly; his quick, penetrating glance dwelling for a moment
on the young chieftain, and then resting steadily and inquiringly on his companion's feeble
and mutilated form.
Accustomed to the military brevity and promptitude exacted by his commander in all
communications addressed to him by his inferiors, Hermanric, without waiting to be
interrogated or attempting to preface or excuse his narrative, shortly related the conversation
that had taken place between the stranger and himself on the plain near the Pincian Gate;
and then waited respectfully to receive the commendation or incur the rebuke of the king, as
the chance of the moment might happen to decide.

After again fixing his eyes in severe scrutiny on the person of the Roman, Alaric spoke to
the young warrior in the Gothic language, thus:

"Leave the man with me--return to your post; and there await whatever commands it may be
necessary that I should dispatch to you to-night."

Hermanric immediately departed. Then, addressing the stranger for the first time, and
speaking in the Latin language, the Gothic leader briefly and significantly intimated to his
unknown visitant that they were now alone.

The man's parched lips moved, opened, quivered; his wild, hollow eyes brightened till they
absolutely gleamed, but he seemed incapable of uttering a word; his features became
horribly convulsed, the foam gathered about his lips, he staggered forward and would have
fallen to the ground, had not the king instantly caught him in his strong grasp, and placed
him on the wooden chest that he had hitherto occupied himself.

"Can a starving Roman have escaped from the beleaguered city?" muttered Alaric, as he
took the skull cup, and poured some of the wine it contained down the stranger's throat.

The liquor was immediately successful in restoring composure to the man's features and
consciousness to his mind. He raised himself from the seat, dashed off the cold perspiration
that overspread his forehead, and stood upright before the king--the solitary, powerless old
man before the vigorous lord of thousands in the midst of his warriors--without a tremor in
his steady eye, or a prayer for protection on his haughty lip.

"I, a Roman," he began, "come from Rome, against which the invader wars with the weapon
of' famine, to deliver the city, her people, her palaces, and her treasures into the hands of
Alaric the Goth."

The king started, looked on the speaker for a moment, and then turned from him in
impatience and contempt.

"I lie not," pursued the enthusiast, with a calm dignity that affected even the hardy
sensibilities of the Gothic hero. "Eye me again! Could I come starved, shriveled, withered
thus from any place but Rome? Since I quitted the city an hour has hardly passed, and by the
way that I left it the forces of the Goths may enter it to-night."

"The proof of the harvest is in the quantity of the grain, not in the tongue of the
husbandman. Show me your open gates, and I will believe that you have spoken truth,"
retorted the king, with a rough laugh.

"I betray the city," resumed the man, sternly, "but on one condition; grant it me, and--"

"I will grant you your life," interrupted Alaric, haughtily.

"My life!" cried the Roman, and his shrunken form seemed to expand, and his tremulous
voice to grow firm and steady in the very bitterness of his contempt, as he spoke. "My life! I
ask it not of your power! The wreck of my body is scarce strong enough to preserve it to me
a single day! I have no home, no loves, no friends, no possessions! I live in Rome a solitary
in the midst of the multitude, a pagan in a city of apostates! What is my life to me! I cherish
it but for the service of the gods, whose instruments of vengeance against the nation that has
denied them I would make you and your hosts. If you slay me, it is a sign to me from them
that I am worthless in their cause. I shall die content."

He ceased. The king's manner, as he listened to him, gradually lost the bluntness and
carelessness that had hitherto characterized it, and assumed an attention and a seriousness
more in accordance with his high station and important responsibilities. He began to regard
the stranger as no common renegade, no ordinary spy, no shallow impostor, who might be
driven from his tent with disdain; but as a man important enough to be heard, and ambitious
enough to be distrusted. Accordingly, he resumed the seat from which he had risen during
the interview, and calmly desired his new ally to explain the condition, on the granting of
which depended the promised betrayal of the city of Rome.

The pain-worn and despondent features of Ulpius became animated by a glow of triumph, as
he heard the sudden mildness and moderation of the king's demand; he raised his head
proudly, and advanced a few steps, as he thus loudly and abruptly resumed:

"Assure to me the overthrow of the Christian churches, the extermination of the Christian
priests, and the universal revival of the worship of the gods, and this night shall make you
master of the chief city of the empire you are laboring to subvert!"

The boldness, the comprehensiveness, the insanity of wickedness displayed in such a

proposition, and emanating from such a source, so astounded the mind of Alaric as to
deprive him for the moment of speech. The stranger, perceiving his temporary inability to
answer him, broke the silence which ensued, and continued:
"Is my condition a hard one? A conqueror is all-powerful; he can overthrow the worship, as
he can overthrow the government of a nation. What matters it to you, while empire, renown,
and treasure are yours, what deities the people adore? Is it a great price to pay for an easy
conquest, to make a change which threatens neither your power, your fame, nor your
wealth? Do you marvel that I desire from you such a revolution as this? I was born for the
gods; in their service I inherited rank and renown, for their cause I have suffered
degradation and woe, for their restoration I will plot, combat, die! Assure me then, by oath,
that with a new rule you will erect an ancient worship, and through my secret inlet to the
city I will introduce men enough of the Goths to murder with security the sentinels at the
guard houses, and open the gates of Rome to the numbers of your whole invading forces.
Think not to despise the aid of a man unprotected and unknown; the citizens will never yield
to your blockade; you shrink from risking the dangers of an assault; the legions of Ravenna
are reported on their way hitherward. Outcast as I am, I tell it to you here, in the midst of
your camp--your speediest assurance of success rests on my discovery and on me!"

The king started suddenly from his seat. "What fool or madman," he cried, fixing his eyes in
furious scorn and indignation on the stranger's face, "prates to me about the legions of
Ravenna and the dangers of an assault? Think you, renegade, that your city could have
resisted me, had I chosen to storm it on the first day when I encamped before its walls?
Know you that your effeminate soldiery have laid aside the armor of their ancestors because
their puny bodies are too feeble to bear its weight, and that the half of my army here trebles
the whole number of the guards of Rome? Now, while you stand before me, I have but to
command, and the city shall be annihilated with fire and sword, without the aid of one of the
herd of traitors cowering beneath the shelter of its ill-defended walls!"

As Alaric spoke thus, some invisible agency seemed to crush, body and mind, the lost
wretch whom he addressed. The shock of such an answer as he now heard seemed to strike
him idiotic, as a flash of lightning strikes with blindness. He regarded the king with a
bewildered stare, waving his hand tremulously backward and forward before his face, as if
to clear some imaginary darkness off his eyes; then his arm fell helpless by his side, his
head drooped upon his breast, and he moaned out in low, vacant tones, "The restoration of
the gods--that is the condition of conquest--the restoration of the gods!"

"I come not hither to be the tool of a frantic and forgotten priesthood," cried Alaric,
disdainfully. "Wherever I meet with your accursed idols I will melt them down into armor
for my warriors and shoes for my horses; I will turn your temples into granaries, and cut
your images of wood into billets for the watch-fires of my hosts!"

"Slay me, and be silent!" groaned the man, staggering back against the side of the tent, and
shrinking under the merciless words of the Goth, like a slave under the lash.
"I leave the shedding of such blood as yours to your fellow-Romans," answered the king;
"they alone are worthy of the deed!"

No syllable of reply now escaped the stranger's lips, and after an interval of silence Alaric
resumed, in tones divested of their former fiery irritation, and marked by a solemn
earnestness that conferred irresistible dignity and force on every word that he uttered.

"Behold the characters engraven there!" said he, pointing to the shield; "they trace the curse
denounced by Odin against the great oppressor, Rome! Once these words made part of the
worship of our fathers; the worship has long since vanished, but the words remain; they seal
the eternal hatred of the people of the north to the people of the south; they contain the spirit
of the great destiny that has brought me to the walls of Rome. Citizens of a fallen empire,
the measure of your crimes is full! The voice of a new nation calls through me for the
freedom of the earth, which was made for man, and not for Romans! The rule that your
ancestors won by strength, their posterity shall no longer keep by fraud. For two hundred
years, hollow and unlasting truces have alternated with long and bloody wars between your
people and mine. Remembering this, remembering the wrongs of the Goths in their
settlements in Thrace, the murder of the Gothic youths in the towns of Asia, the massacre of
the Gothic hostages in Aquileia, I come--chosen by the supernatural decrees of Heaven--to
assure the freedom and satisfy the wrath of my nation, by humbling at its feet the power of
tyrannic Rome! It is not for battle and bloodshed that I am encamped before yonder walls. It
is to crush to the earth, by famine and woe, the pride of your people and the spirit of your
rulers; to tear from you your hidden wealth, and to strip you of your boasted honor; to
overthrow by oppression the oppressors of the world; to deny you the glories of a resistance,
and to impose on you the shame of a submission. It is for this that I now abstain from
storming your city, to encircle it with an immovable blockade!"

As the declaration of his great mission burst thus from the lips of the Gothic king, the spirit
of his lofty ambition seemed to diffuse itself over his outward form. his noble stature, his
fine proportions, his commanding features, became invested with a simple, primeval
grandeur. Contrasted as he now was with the shrunken figure of the spirit-broken stranger,
he looked almost sublime.

A succession of protracted shudderings ran through the pagan's frame, but he neither wept
nor spoke. The unavailing defense of the Temple of Serapis, the defeated revolution at
Alexandria, and the abortive intrigue with Vetranio, were now rising on his memory, to
heighten the horror of his present and worst overthrow. Every circumstance connected with
his desperate passage through the rifted wall revived, fearfully vivid on his mind. He
remembered all the emotions of his first night's labor in the darkness, all the miseries of his
second night's torture under the fallen brickwork, all the wee, danger, and despondency that
accompanied his subsequent toil--persevered in under the obstructions of a famine-
 weakened body and a helpless arm--until he passed, in delusive triumph, the last of the
hinderances in the long-labored breach. One after another these banished recollections
returned to his memory, as he listened to Alaric's rebuking words, reviving past infirmities,
opening old wounds, inflicting new lacerations. But, saving the shudderings that still shook
his body, no outward witness betrayed the inward torment that assailed him. It was too
strong for human words, too terrible for human sympathy--he suffered it in brute silence.
Monstrous as was his plot, the moral punishment of its attempted consummation was severe
enough to be worthy of the projected crime.

After watching the man for a few minutes more, with a glance of pitiless disdain, Alaric
summoned one of the warriors in attendance; and, having previously commanded him to
pass the word to the sentinels authorizing the stranger s free passage through the
encampment, he then turned, and, for the last time, addressed him as follows:

"Return to Rome, through the hole whence, reptile-like, you emerged, and feed your
starving citizens with the words you have heard in the barbarian's tent!"

The guard approached, led him from the presence of the king, issued the necessary
directions to the sentinels, and left him to himself. Once he raised his eyes in despairing
appeal to the heaven that frowned over his head, but still no word, or tear, or groan escaped
him. He moved slowly on through the thick darkness; and turning his back on the city,
passed, careless whither strayed, into the streets of the desolate and dispeopled suburbs.

Chapter XVI.
Love Meetings.

WHO that has looked on a threatening and tempestuous sky has not felt the pleasure of
discovering unexpectedly a small spot of serene blue still shining among the stormy clouds?
The more unwilling the eye has wandered over the gloomy expanse of the rest of the
firmament, the more gladly does it finally rest on the little oasis of light which meets at
length its weary gaze, and which, when it was dispersed over the whole heaven, was
perhaps only briefly regarded with a careless glance. Contrasted with the dark and mournful
hues around it, even that small spot of blue gradually acquires the power of investing the
wider and sadder prospect with a certain interest and animation that it did not before
possess, until the mind recognizes in the surrounding atmosphere of storm an object adding
variety to the view--a spectacle whose mournfulness may interest as well as repel.

Was it with sensations resembling these (applied, however, rather to the mind than to the
eye) that the reader perused those pages devoted to Hermanric and Antonina? Does the
happiness there described now appear to him to beam through the stormy progress of the
narrative, as the spot of blue beams through the gathering clouds? Did that small prospect of
brightness present itself, at the time, like a garden of repose amid the waste of fierce
emotions which encompassed it? Did it encourage him, when contrasted with what had gone
before, to enter on the field of gloomier interest which was to follow? If, indeed, it has thus
affected him, if he can still remember the scene at the farmhouse beyond the suburbs, with
emotions such as these, he will not now be unwilling to turn again for a moment from the
gathering clouds to the spot of blue--he will not deny us an instant's digression from Ulpius
and the city of famine, to Antonina and the lonely plains.

During the period that has elapsed since we left her, Antonina has remained secure in her
solitude; happy in her well-chosen concealment. The few straggling Goths who at rare
intervals appeared in the neighborhood of her sanctuary never intruded on its peaceful
limits. The sight of the ravaged fields and emptied granaries of the deserted little property
sufficed invariably to turn their marauding steps in other directions. Day by day ran
smoothly and swiftly onward for the gentle usurper of the abandoned farmhouse. In the
narrow round of its gardens and protecting woods was comprised for her the whole circle of
the pleasures and occupations of her new life.

The simple stores left in the house, the fruits and vegetables to be gathered in the garden,
sufficed amply for her support. The pastoral solitude of the place had in it a quiet, dreamy
fascination, a novelty, an unwearying charm, after the austere loneliness to which her
former existence had been subjected in Rome. And when evening came, and the sun began
to burnish the tops of the western trees, then, after the calm emotions of the solitary day,
came the hour of absorbing cares and happy expectations--ever the same, yet ever delighting
and ever new. Then the rude shutters were carefully closed; the open door was shut and
barred; the small light--now invisible to the world without--was joyfully kindled; and then
the mistress and author of these preparations, resigned herself to await, with pleased
anxiety, the approach of the guest for whose welcome they were designed.

And never did she expect the arrival of that treasured companion in vain. Hermanric
remembered his promise to repair constantly to the farmhouse, and performed it with all the
constancy of love and all the enthusiasm of youth. When the sentinels under his command
were arranged in their order of watching for the night, and the trust reposed in him by his
superiors exempted his actions from superintendence during the hours of darkness that
followed, he left the camp, passed through the desolate suburbs, and gained the dwelling
where the young Roman awaited him--returning before daybreak to receive the
communications regularly addressed to him, at that hour, by his inferior in the command.

Thus, false to his nation, yet true to the new Egeria of his thoughts and actions--traitor to the
requirements of vengeance and war, yet faithful to the interests of tranquillity and love--did
he seek, night after night, Antonina's presence. His passion, though it denied him to his
warrior. duties, wrought no deteriorating change in his disposition. All that it altered in him
it altered nobly. It varied and exalted his rude emotions; for it was inspired, not alone by the
beauty and youth that he saw, but by the pure thoughts, the artless eloquence that he heard.
And she--the forsaken daughter, the source whence the northern warrior derived those new
and higher sensations that had never animated him until now regarded her protector, her first
friend and companion as her first love, with a devotion which, in its mingled and exalted
nature, may be imagined by the mind, but can be but imperfectly depicted by the pen. It was
a devotion created of innocence and gratitude, of joy and sorrow, of apprehension and hope.
It was too fresh, too unworldly, to own any upbraidings of artificial shame, any self-
reproaches of artificial propriety. It resembled in its essence, though not in its application,
the devotion of the first daughters of the Fall to their brother-lords.

But it is now time that we return to the course of our narrative; although, ere we again enter
on the stirring and rapid present, it will be necessary for a moment more to look back in
another direction, to the eventful past.

But it is not on peace, beauty, and pleasure that our observation now fixes itself. It is to
anger, disease, and crime--to the unappeasable and unwomanly Goisvintha, that we now
revert. Since the day when the violence of her conflicting emotions had deprived her of
consciousness, at the moment of her decisive triumph over the scruples of Hermanric and
the destiny of Antonina, a raging fever had visited on her some part of those bitter sufferings
that she would fain have inflicted on others. Part of the time she lay in a raving delirium;
part of the time in helpless exhaustion; but she never forgot, whatever the form assumed by
her disease, the desperate purpose in pursuit of which she had first incurred it. Slowly and
doubtfully her vigor at length returned to her, and with it strengthened and increased the
fierce ambition of vengeance that absorbed her lightest thoughts and governed her most
careless actions.

Report informed her of the new position on the line of blockade on which Hermanric was
posted, and only enumerated as the companions of his sojourn the warriors sent thither
under his command. But, though thus persuaded of the separation of Antonina and the Goth,
her ignorance of the girl's fate rankled unintermittingly in her savage heart. Doubtful
whether she had permanently reclaimed Hermanric to the interests of vengeance and
bloodshed; vaguely suspecting that he might have informed himself in her absence of
Antonina's place of refuge or direction of flight; still resolutely bent on securing the death of
her victim, wherever she might have strayed, she awaited with trembling eagerness that day
of restoration to available activity and strength, which would enable her to resume her
influence over the Goth and her machinations against the safety of the fugitive girl. The
time of her final and long-expected recovery was the very day preceding the stormy night
we have already described, and her first employment of her renewed energy was to send
word to the young Goth of her intention of seeking him at his encampment ere the evening
closed.

It was this intimation which caused the inquietude mentioned as characteristic of the manner
of Hermanric, at the commencement of the preceding chapter. The evening there described
was the first that saw him deprived, through the threatened visit of Goisvintha, of the
anticipation of repairing to Antonina, as had been his wont, under cover of the night; for to
slight his kinswoman's ominous message was to risk the most fatal of discoveries. Trusting
to the delusive security of her sickness, he had hitherto banished the unwelcome
remembrance of her existence from his thoughts. But, now that she was once more capable
of exertion and of crime, he felt that if he would preserve the secret of Antonina's hiding-
place and the security of Antonina's life, he must remain to oppose force to force, and
stratagem to stratagem, when Goisvintha sought him at his post, even at the risk of
inflicting, by his absence from the farmhouse, all the pangs of anxiety and apprehension on
the lonely girl.

Absorbed in such reflections as these; longing to depart, yet determined to remain, he

impatiently awaited Goisvintha's approach, until the rising of the storm, with its mysterious
and all-engrossing train of events, forced his thoughts and actions into a new channel.
When, however, his interviews with the stranger and the Gothic king were passed, and he
had returned as he had been bidden to his appointed sojourn in the camp, his old anxieties,
displaced but not destroyed, resumed their influence over him. He demanded eagerly of his
comrades if Goisvintha had arrived in his absence, and received the same answer in the
negative from each.

As he now listened to the melancholy rising of the wind; to the increasing loudness of the
thunder; to the shrill cries of the distant nightbirds hurrying t shelter, emotions of
mournfulness and awe possessed themselves of his heart. He now wondered that any events,
however startling, however appalling, should have bad the power to turn his mind for a
moment from the dreary contemplations that had engaged it at the close of day. He thought
of Antonina, solitary and helpless, listening to the tempest in affright, and watching vainly
for his long-delayed approach. His fancy arrayed before him dangers, plots, and crimes,
robed in all the horrible exaggerations of a dream. Even the quick monotonous dripping of
the rain-drops outside aroused within him dark and indefinable forebodings of ill. The
passion that had hitherto created for him new pleasures, was now fulfilling the other half of
its earthly mission, and causing him new pains.

As the storm strengthened, as the darkness lowered deeper and deeper, so did his inquietude
increase, until at length it mastered the last feeble resistance of his wavering firmness.
Persuading himself that after having delayed so long, Goisvintha would now refrain from
seeking him until the morrow; and that all communications from Alaric, had they been
 dispatched, would have reached him ere this; unable any longer to combat his anxiety for
the safety of determined to risk the worst possibilities, rather than be absent at such a time
of tempest and peril from the farmhouse, he made a last visit to the stations of the watchful
sentinels, and quitted the camp for the night.

Chapter XVII.
The Huns.

MORE than an hour after Hermanric had left the encampment, a man hurriedly entered the
house set apart for the young chieftain's occupation. He made no attempt to kindle either
light or fire, but sat down in the principal apartment, occasionally whispering to himself in a
strange and barbarous tongue.

He had remained but a short time in possession of his comfortless solitude, when he was
intruded on by a camp follower bearing a small lamp, and followed closely by a woman,
who, as he started up and confronted her, announced herself as Hermanric's kinswoman, and
eagerly demanded an interview with the Goth.

Haggard and ghastly though it was from recent suffering and long agitation, the
countenance of Goisvintha (for it was she) appeared absolutely attractive, as it was now
opposed by the lamp-light to the face and figure of the individual she addressed. A flat nose,
a swarthy complexion, long, coarse, tangled locks of deep black hair, a beardless, retreating
chin, and small, savage, sunken eyes, gave a character almost bestial to this man's
physiognomy. His broad, brawny shoulders overhung a form that was as low in stature as it
was athletic in build; you looked on him and saw the sinews of a giant strung in the body of
a dwarf. And yet this deformed Hercules was no solitary error of Nature--no extraordinary
exception to his fellow-beings; but the actual type of a whole race, stunted and repulsive as
himself. He was a Hun.

This savage people, the terror even of their barbarous neighbors, living without government,
laws, or religion, possessed but one feeling in common with the human race--the instinct of
war. Their historical career may be said to have begun with their early conquests in China,
and to have proceeded in their first victories over the Goths, who regarded them as demons,
and fled their approach. The hostilities thus commenced between the two nations were at
length suspended by the temporary alliance of the conquered people with the empire, and
subsequently ceased in the gradual fusion of the interests of each in one animating spirit--
detestation of Rome.
By this bond of brotherhood the Goths and the Huns became publicly united, though still
privately at enmity--for the one nation remembered its former defeats, as vividly as the other
remembered its former victories. With various disasters, dissensions, and successes, they ran
their career of battle and rapine--sometimes separate, sometimes together, until the period of
our romance, when Alaric's besieging forces numbered among the ranks of their barbarian
auxiliaries a body of Huns, who, unwillingly admitted to the title of Gothic allies, were
dispersed about the army in subordinate stations, and of whom the individual above
described was one of those contemptuously favored by promotion to an inferior command,
under Hermanric, as a Gothic chief.

An expression of aversion, but not of terror, passed over Goisvintha's worn features as she
approached the barbarian, and repeated her desire to be conducted to Hermanric's presence.
For the second time, however, the man gave her no answer. He burst into a shrill, short
laugh, and shook his huge shoulders in clumsy derision.

The woman's cheek reddened for an instant and then turned again to livid paleness, as she
thus resumed:

"I came not hither to be mocked by a barbarian, but to be welcomed by a Goth! Again I ask
you, where is my kinsman, Hermanric?"

"Gone!" cried the Hun. And his laughter grew more wild and discordant as he spoke.

A sudden tremor ran through Goisvintha's frame, as she marked the manner of the barbarian
and heard his reply. Repressing with difficulty her anger and agitation, she continued, with
apprehension in her eyes and entreaty in her tones:

"Whither has he gone? Wherefore has he departed? I know that the hour I appointed for our
meeting here has long passed; but I have suffered a sickness of many weeks; and when, at
evening, I prepared to set forth, my banished infirmities seemed suddenly to return to me
again. I was borne to my bed. But, though the women who succored me bid me remain and
repose, I found strength in the night to escape them, and through storm and darkness to
come hither alone; for I was determined, though I should perish for it, to seek the presence
of Hermanric, as I had promised by my messengers. You, that are the companion of his
watch, must know whither he is gone. Go to him and tell him what I have spoken. I will
await his return!"

"His business is secret," sneered the Hun. "He has departed, but without telling me whither.
How should I, that am a barbarian, know the whereabout of an illustrious Goth? It is not for
me to know his actions, but to obey his words!"
"Jeer not about your obedience," returned Goisvintha, with breathless eagerness; "I say to
you again, you know whither he is gone, and you must tell me for what he has departed.
You obey him--there is money to make you obey me!"

"When I said his business was secret, I lied not," said the Hun, picking up with avidity the
coins she flung to him; "but he has not kept it secret from me! The Huns are cunning! Aha,
ugly and cunning!"

Suspicion, the only refined emotion in a criminal heart, half discovered to Goisvintha, at this
moment, the intelligence that was yet to be communicated. No word, however, escaped her,
while she signed the barbarian to proceed.

"He has gone to a farmhouse on the plains beyond the suburbs behind us. He will not return
till daybreak," continued the Hun, tossing his money carelessly in his great, horny hands.

"Did you see him go?" gasped the woman.

"I tracked him to the house," returned the barbarian. "For many nights I watched and
suspected him--to-night I saw him depart. It is but a short time since I returned from
following him. The darkness did not delude me; the place is on the high-road from the
suburbs--the first by-path to the westward leads to its garden gate. I know it! I have
discovered his secret! I am more cunning than he!"

"For what did he seek the farmhouse at night?" demanded Goisvintha after an interval,
during which she appeared to be silently fixing the man's last speech in her memory. "Are
you cunning enough to tell me that?"

"For what do men venture their safety and their lives; their money and their renown?"
laughed the barbarian. "They venture them for women! There is a girl at the farmhouse; I
saw her at the door when the chief went in!"

He paused, but Goisvintha made no answer. Remembering that she was descended from a
race of women who slew their wounded husbands, brothers and sons with their own hands,
when they sought them after battle, dishonored by a defeat; remembering that the fire of the
old ferocity of such ancestors as these still burned at her heart; remembering all that she had
hoped from Hermanric and had plotted against estimating in all its importance the shock of
the intelligence she now received, we are alike unwilling and unable to describe her
emotions at this moment. For some time the stillness in the room was interrupted by no
sounds but the rolling of the thunder without, the quick, convulsive respiration of
Goisvintha, and the clinking of the money which the Hun still continued to toss
mechanically from hand to hand.
"I shall reap good harvest of gold and silver after to-night's work," pursued the barbarian,
suddenly breaking the silence. "You have given me money to speak--when the chief returns
and hears that I have discovered him, he will give me money to be silent. I shall drink to-
morrow with the best men in the army, Hun though I am!"

He returned to his seat as he ceased, and began beating in monotonous measure, with one of
his pieces of money on the blade of his sword, some chorus of a favorite drinking song;
while Goisvintha, standing pale and breathless near the door of the chamber, looked down
on him with fixed, vacant eyes. At length a deep sigh broke from her; her hands
involuntarily clinched themselves at her side; her lips moved with a bitter smile; then,
without addressing another word to the Hun, she turned, and softly and stealthily quitted the
room.

The instant she was gone a sudden change arose in the barbarian's manner. He started from
his seat, a scowl of savage hatred and triumph appeared on his shaggy brows, and he paced
to and fro through the chamber like a wild beast in his cage. "I shall tear him from the
pinnacle of his power at last!" he whispered fiercely to himself. "For what I have told her
this night, his kinswoman will hate him--I knew it while she spoke! For his desertion of his
post, Alaric may dishonor him, may banish him, may hang him! His fate is at my mercy; I
shall rid myself nobly of him and his command! More than all the rest of his nation I loathe
this Goth! I will be by when they drag him to the tree, and taunt him with his shame as he
has taunted me with my deformity." Here he paused to laugh in complacent approval of his
project, quickening his steps and hugging himself joyfully in the barbarous exhilaration of
his triumph.

His secret meditations had thus occupied him for some time longer, when the sound of a
footstep was audible outside the door. He recognized it instantly, and called softly to the
person without to approach. At the signal of his voice a man entered--less athletic in build,
but in deformity the very counterpart of himself. The following discourse was then
immediately held between the two Huns, the newcomer beginning it thus:

"Have you tracked him to the door?"

"To the very threshold."

"Then his downfall is assured! I have seen Alaric."

"We shall trample him under our feet--this boy, who has been set over us that are his elders,
because he is a Goth and we are Huns! But what of Alaric? How did you gain his ear?"

"The Goths round his tent scoffed at me as a savage, and swore that I was begotten between
a demon and a witch. But I remembered the time when these boasters fled from their
 settlements; when our tribes mounted their black steeds and hunted them like beasts! Aha!
their very lips were pale with fear in those days."

"Speak of Alaric--our time is short," interrupted the other fiercely.

"I answered not a word to their taunts," resumed his companion, "but I called out loudly that
I was a Gothic ally; that I brought messages to Alaric; and that I had the privilege of
audience like the rest. My voice reached the ears of the king; he looked forth from his tent
and beckoned me in. I saw his hatred of my nation lowering in his eye as we looked on one
another, but I spoke with submission amid in a soft voice. I told him how his chieftain
whom he had set over us secretly deserted his post; I told him how we had seen his favored
warrior for many nights, journeying toward the suburbs; how on this night, as on others
before, he had stolen from the encampment, and how you had gone forth to track him to his
lurking-place."

"Was the tyrant angered?"

"His cheeks reddened, and his eyes flashed, and his fingers trembled round the hilt of his
sword while I spoke! When I ceased, he answered me that I lied. He cursed me for an infidel
Hun, who had slandered a Christian chieftain. He threatened me with hanging! I cried to
him to send messengers to our quarters to prove the truth, ere he slew me. He commanded a
warrior to return hither with me. When we arrived, the most Christian chieftain was
nowhere to be beheld--none knew whither he had gone! We turned back again to the tent of
the king; his warrior whom he honored spoke the same words to him as the Hun whom he
despised. Then the wrath of Alaric rose. 'This very night,' he cried, 'did I with my own lips
direct him to await my commands with vigilance at his appointed post! I would visit such
disobedience with punishment on my own son! Go, take with you others of your troop--your
comrade who has tracked him will guide you to his hiding-place--bring him prisoner into
my tent!' Such were his words. Our companions wait us without--lest he should escape let
us depart without delay."

"And if he should resist us," cried the other, leading the way eagerly toward the door--"what
said the king, if he should resist us?"

"Slay him with your own hands."

Chapter XVIII.
The Farmhouse.
AS the night still advanced, so did the storm increase. On the plains in the open country its
violence was most apparent. Here no living voices jarred with the dreary music of the
elements; no flaming torches opposed the murky darkness, or imitated the glaring lightning.
The thunder pursued uninterruptedly its tempest symphony, and the fierce wind joined it,
swelling into wild harmony, when it rushed through the trees, as if in their waving branches
it struck the chords of a mighty harp.

In the small chamber of the farmhouse sat together Hermanric and Antonina, listening in
speechless attention to the increasing tumult of the storm.

The room and its occupants were imperfectly illuminated by the flame of a smoldering
woodfire. The little earthenware lamp hung from its usual place in the ceiling, but its oil was
exhausted and its light was extinct. An alabaster vase of fruit lay broken by the side of the
table, from which it had fallen unnoticed to the floor. No other articles of ornament
appeared in the apartment. Hermanric's downcast eyes and melancholy, unchanging
expression betrayed the gloomy abstraction in which he was absorbed. With one hand
clasped in his, and the other resting with her head on his shoulder, Antonina listened
attentively to the alternate rising and falling of the wind. Her beauty had grown fresher and
more womanlike during her sojourn at the farmhouse. Cheerfulness and hope seemed to
have gained, at length, all the share in her being assigned to them by nature at her birth.
Even at this moment of tempest and darkness, there was more of wonder and awe than of
agitation and affright in her expression, as she sat hearkening, with flushed cheek and
brightened eye, to the progress of the nocturnal storm.

Thus engrossed by their thoughts, Hermanric and Antonina remained silent in their little
retreat, until the reveries of both were suddenly interrupted by the snapping asunder of the
bar of wood which secured the door of the room, the stress of which, as it bent under the
repeated shocks of the wind, the rotten spar was too weak to sustain any longer. There was
something inexpressibly desolate in the flood of rain, wind, and darkness that seemed
instantly to pour into the chamber through the open door, as it flew back violently on its
frail hinges. Antonina changed color and shuddered involuntarily, as Hermanric hastily rose
and closed the door again, by detaching its rude latch from the sling which held it when not
wanted for use. He looked round the room, as he did so, for some substitute for the broken
bar, but nothing that was fit for the purpose immediately met his eye, and he muttered to
himself, as he returned impatiently to his seat, "While we are here to watch it, the latch is
enough; it is new and strong."

He seemed on the point of again relapsing into his former gloom, when the voice of
Antonina arrested his attention, and aroused him for the moment from his thoughts.

"Is it in the power of the tempest to make you, a warrior of a race of heroes, thus sorrowful
and sad?" she asked, in accents of gentle reproach. "Even I, as I look on these walls that are
so eloquent of my happiness, and sit by you whose presence makes that happiness, can
listen to the raging storm, and feel no heaviness over my heart! What is there to either of us
in the tempest that should oppress us with gloom? Does not the thunder of the winter night
come from the same heaven as the sunshine of the summer day? You are so young, so
generous, so brave--you have loved, and pitied, and succored me--why should the night
language of the sky cast such sorrow and such silence over you?"

"It is not from sorrow that I am silent," replied Hermanric, with a constrained smile, "but
from weariness with much toil in the camp."

He stifled a sigh as he spoke. His head returned to its old downcast position. The struggle
between his assumed carelessness and his real inquietude was evidently unequal. As she
looked fixedly on him, with the vigilant eye of affection, the girl's countenance saddened
with his. She nestled closer to his side, and resumed the discourse in anxious and entreating
tones.

"It is haply the strife between our two nations which has separated us already, and may
separate us again, that thins oppresses you;" said she, "but think, as I do, of time peace that
must come, and not of the warfare that now is. Think of the pleasures of our past days, and
of the happiness of our present moments--thus united, thus living, loving, hoping for each
other; and, like me, you will doubt not of the future that is in preparation for us both! The
season of tranquillity may return with the season of spring. The serene heaven will then be
reflected on a serene country and a happy people; and in those days of sunshine and peace,
will any hearts among all the glad population be more joyful than ours?"

She paused a moment. Some sudden thought or recollection heightened her color and
caused her to hesitate ere she proceeded. She was about at length to continue, when a peal of
thunder, louder than any which had preceded it, burst threateningly over the house and
drowned the first accents of her voice. The wind moaned loudly; the rain splashed against
the door; the latch rattled long and sharply in its socket. Once more Hermanric rose from his
seat, and approaching the fire, placed a fresh log of wood upon the dying embers. His
dejection seemed now to communicate itself to Antonina, and as he reseated himself by her
side she did not address him again.

Thoughts dreary and appalling beyond any that had occupied it before were rising in the
mind of the Goth. His inquietude at the encampment in the suburbs was tranquillity itself
compared to the gloom which now oppressed him. All the evaded dues of his nation, his
family, and his calling; all the suppressed recollections of the martial occupations he had
slighted, and the martial enmities he had disowned, now revived avengingly in his memory.
Yet, vivid as these remembrances were, they weakened none of those feelings of passionate
devotion to Antonina, by which their influence within him had hitherto been overcome.
They existed with them--the old recollections with the new emotions--the stern rebukings of
the warrior's nature with the anxious forebodings of the lover's heart. And now, his
mysterious meeting with Ulpius; Goisvintha's unexpected restoration to health; the dreary
rising and furious progress of the night tempest, began to impress his superstitious mind as a
train of unwonted and meaning incidents, destined to mark the fatal return of his
kinswoman's influence over his own actions and Antonina's fate.

One by one, his memory revived with laborious minuteness every incident that had attended
his different interviews with the Roman girl, from the first night when she had strayed into
his tent to the last happy evening that he had spent with her at the deserted farmhouse. Then
tracing further backward the course of his existence, he figured to himself his meeting with
Goisvintha among the Italian Alps; his presence at the death of her last child, and his solemn
engagement, on hearing her recital of the massacre at Aquileia, to avenge her on the
Romans with his own hands. Roused by these opposite pictures of the past, his imagination
peopled the future with images of Antonina again endangered, afflicted, and forsaken; with
visions of the impatient army, spurred at length into ferocious action, making universal
havoc among the people of Rome, and forcing him back forever into their avenging ranks.
No decision for resistance or resignation to flight presented itself to his judgment. Doubt,
despair, and apprehension held unimpeded sway over his impressible but inactive faculties.
The night itself, as he looked forth on it, was not more dark; the wild thunder. as he listened
to it, not more gloomy; the name of Goisvintha, as he thought on it, not more ominous of
evil, than the sinister visions that now startled his imagination and oppressed his weary
mind.

There was something indescribably simple, touching, and eloquent in the very positions of
Hermanric and Antonina as they now sat together--the only members of their respective
nations who were united in affection and peace, in the lonely farmhouse. Both the girl's
hands were clasped over Hermanric's shoulder, and her head rested on them, turned from the
door toward the interior of the room, and so displaying her rich black hair in all its
luxuriance. The head of the Goth was still sunk on his breast, as though he were wrapped in
a deep sleep, and his hands hung listlessly side by side over the scabbard of his sheathed
sword, which lay across his knees. The fire flamed only at intervals, the fresh log that had
been placed on it not having been thoroughly kindled as yet. Sometimes the light played on
the white folds of Antonina's dress; sometimes over the bright surface of Hermanric' s
cuirass, which he had removed and laid by his side on the ground; sometimes over his
sword, and his hands, as they rested on it; but it was not sufficiently powerful or lasting to
illuminate the room, the walls and corners of which it left in almost complete darkness

The thunder still pealed from without, but the rain and wind had partially lulled. The night
hours had moved on more swiftly than our narrative of the events that marked them. It was
now midnight.
No sound within the room reached Antonina's ear but the quick rattling of the door-latch,
shaken in its socket by the wind. As one by one the moments journeyed slowly onward, it
made its harsh music with as monotonous a regularity as though it were moved by their
progress, and kept pace with their eternal march. Gradually the girl found herself listening
to this sharp, discordant sound, with all the attention she could have bestowed at other times
on the ripple of a distant rivulet or the soothing harmony of a lute, when, just as it seemed
adapting itself most easily to her senses, it suddenly ceased, and the next instant a gust of
wind, like that which had rushed through the open door on the breaking of its rotten bar,
waved her hair about her face, and fluttered the folds of her light, loose dress. She raised her
head and whispered tremulously to Hermanric:

"The door is again open--the latch has given way!"

The Goth started from his reverie, and looked up hastily. At that instant the rattling of the
latch recommenced as suddenly as it had ceased, and the air of the room recovered its
former tranquillity.

"Calm yourself, beloved one," said Hermanric, gently; "your fancy has misled you--the door
is safe."

He parted back her disheveled hair caressingly as he spoke. Incapable of doubting the
lightest word that fell from his lips, and hearing no suspicious or unwonted sound in the
room, she never attempted to justify her suspicions. As she again rested her head on his
shoulder, a vague misgiving oppressed her heart, and drew from her an irrepressible sigh;
but she gave her apprehensions no expression in words. After listening for a moment more
to assure himself of the security of the latch, the Goth resumed insensibly the
contemplations from which he had been disturbed; once more his head drooped, and again
his hands returned mechanically to their old listless position, side by side, on the scabbard of
his sword.

The faint, fickle flames still rose and fell, gleaming here and sinking there; the latch
sounded sharply in its socket; the thunder yet tittered its surly peal, but the wind was now
subsiding into fainter moans, and the rain began to splash faintly and more faintly against
the shutters without. To the watchers in the farmhouse nothing was altered to the eye, and
little to the ear. Fatal security! The last few minutes had darkly determined their future
destinies--in their loved and cherished retreat they were now no longer alone.

They heard no stealthy footstep pacing round their dwelling; they saw no fierce eyes peering
into the interior of the farmhouse through a chink in the shutters; they marked no dusky
figure passing through the softly and quickly opened door, and gliding into the darkest
corner, of the room. Yet, now as they sat together, communing in silence with their young,
sad hearts, the threatening figure of Goisvintha stood, shrouded in congenial darkness, under
their protecting roof, and in their beloved chamber, rising still and silent almost at their very
sides.

Though the fire of her past fever had raged again through her veins, though startling visions
of the murders at Aquileia had flashed before her mind as the wild lightning before her eyes,
she had traced her way through the suburbs and along the high-road, and down the little path
to the farmhouse gate, without straying, without hesitating. Regardless of the darkness and
the storm, she had prowled about the house,. bad raised the latch, had waited for a loud peal
of thunder ere she passed the door, and had stolen shadow-like into the darkest corner of the
room, with a patience and a determination that nothing could disturb. And now, when she
stood at the goal of her worst wishes--even now, when she looked down upon the two
beings by whom she had been thwarted and deceived, her fierce self-possession did not
desert her; her lips quivered over her locked teeth, her bosom heaved beneath her drenched
garments, but neither sighs nor curses, not even a smile of triumph or a movement of anger
escaped her.

She never looked at her eyes wandered not for a moment from Hermanric's form. The
quickest, faintest gleam of firelight that gleamed over it was followed through its fitful
course by her eager, glance, rapid and momentary as itself. Soon her attention fixed wholly
upon his hands, as they lay over the scabbard of his sword; and then, slowly and obscurely,
a new and fatal resolution sprung up within her. The various emotions pictured in her face
became resolved into one sinister expression, and, without removing her eyes from the
Goth, she slowly drew from the bosom folds of her garment a long, sharp knife.

The flames alternately trembled into light and subsided into darkness as at first; Hermanric
and Antonina yet continued in their old positions, absorbed in their thoughts and in
themselves and still Goisvintha remained unmoved as ever, knife in hand, watchful, steady,
silent as before.

But beneath the concealment of her outward tranquillity raged a contention under which her
mind darkened and her heart writhed. Twice she returned the knife to its former hiding-
place, and twice she drew it forth again; her cheeks grew paler and paler, she pressed her
clinched hand convulsively over her bosom, and leaned back languidly against the wall
behind her. No thought of Antonina had part in this great strife of secret emotions; her wrath
had too much of anguish in it to be wrath against a stranger and an enemy.

After a lapse of a few moments more, her strength returned--her firmness was aroused. The
last traces of grief and despair that had hitherto appeared in her eyes vanished from them in
an instant. Rage, vengeance, ferocity, lowered over them as she crept stealthily forward to
the very side of the Goth; and. when the next gleam of fire played upon him, drew the knife
fiercely across the back of his hands. The cut was true, strong, and rapid--it divided the
tendons from first to last--he was crippled for life.
At that instant the fire touched the very heart of the log that had been laid on it. It crackled
gayly; it blazed out brilliantly. The whole room was as brightly illuminated as if a Christmas
festival of ancient England had been preparing within its walls!

The warm, cheerful light showed the Goth the figure of his assassin ere the first cry of
anguish had died away on his lips, or the first start of irrepressible horror ceased to vibrate
through his frame. The cries of his hapless companion, as the whole scene of vengeance,
treachery, and mutilation flashed in one terrible instant before her eyes, seemed not even to
reach his ears. Once he looked down upon his helpless hands, when the sword rolled heavily
from them to the floor. Then his gaze directed itself immovably upon Goisvintha, as she
stood at a little distance from him, with her blood-stained knife, silent as himself.

There was no fury--no defiance--not even the passing distortion of physical suffering in his
features, as he now looked on her. Blank, rigid horror--tearless, voiceless, helpless despair,
seemed to have petrified the expression of his face into an everlasting form, unyouthful and
unhopeful--as if he had been imprisoned from his childhood, and a voice was now taunting
him with the pleasures of liberty from a grating in his dungeon walls. Not even when
Antonina, recovering from her first agony of terror, pressed her convulsive kisses on his
cold cheek, entreating him to look on her, did he turn his head, or remove his eyes from
Goisvintha's form.

At length the deep, steady accents of the woman 's voice were heard through the desolate
silence.

"Traitor in word and thought you may be yet, traitor in deed you never more shall be!" she
began, pointing to his hands with her knife. "Those hands that have protected a Roman life
shall never grasp a Roman sword, shall never pollute again by their touch a Gothic weapon!
I remembered, as I watched you in the darkness, how the women of my race once punished
their recreant warriors when they fled to them from a defeat. So have I punished you! The
arm that served not the cause of sister and sister's children--of king and king's nation--shall
serve no other! I am half avenged of the murders at Aquileia, now that I am avenged on
you! Go, fly with the Roman you have chosen, to the city of her people! Your life as a
warrior is at an end!"

He made her no answer. There are emotions--the last of a life--which tear back from nature
the strongest barriers that custom raises to repress her, which betray the lurking existence of
the first rude social feeling of the primeval days of a great nation in the breasts of their most
distant descendants, however widely their acquirements, their prosperities, and their changes
may seem to have morally separated them from their ancestors of old. Such were the
emotions now awakened in the heart of the Goth. His Christianity, his love, his knowledge
of high aims, and his experience of new ideas, sank and deserted him, as though he had
never known them. He thought on his mutilated hands, and no other spirit moved within him
but the ancient Gothic spirit of centuries back; the inspiration of his nation's early northern
songs, and early northern achievements--the renown of courage, and the supremacy of
strength.

Vainly did Antonina, in the midst of the despair that still possessed her, yearn for a word
from his lips, or a glance from his eyes; vainly did her trembling fingers--tearing the
bandages from her robe--stanch the blood on his wounded hands; vainly did her voice call
on him to fly and summon help from his companions in the camp! His mind was far away,
brooding over the legends of the battlefields of his ancestors, remembering how, even in the
day of victory, they slew themselves if they were crippled in the fray, how they scorned to
exist for other interests than the interests of strife, how they mutilated traitors as Goisvintha
had mutilated him! Such were the objects that enchained his inward faculties, while his
outward senses were still enthralled by the horrible fascination that existed for him, in the
presence of the assassin by his side. His very consciousness of his existence, though he
moved and breathed, seemed to have ceased.

"You thought to deceive me in my sickness, you hoped to profit by my death," resumed

Goisvintha, returning contemptuously her victim's glance. "You trusted in the night, and the
darkness, and the storm--you were secure in your boldness, in your strength, in the secrecy
of this lurking-place that you have chosen for your treachery; but your stratagems and your
expectations have failed you! At Aquileia I learned to be wily and watchful as you! I
discovered your desertion of the warriors and the camp; I penetrated the paths to your
hiding-place; I entered it as softly as I once departed from the dwelling where my children
were slain! In my just vengeance I have treated you as treacherously as you would have
treated me! Remember your murdered brother; remember the child I put into your arms
wounded, and received from them dead; remember your broken oaths and forgotten
promises, and make to your nation, to your duties, and to me, the atonement--the last and
the only one--that in my mercy I have left in your power--the atonement of death!"

Again she paused, and again no reply awaited her. Still the Goth neither moved nor spoke,
and still Antonina--kneeling unconsciously upon the sword, now useless to him forever--
continued to stanch the blood on his hands with a mechanical earnestness that seemed to
shut out the contemplation of every other object from her eyes. The tears streamed
incessantly down her cheeks, but she never turned toward Goisvintha, never suspended her
occupation.

Meanwhile the fire still blazed noisily on the cheerful hearth; but the storm, as if disdaining
the office of heightening the human horror of the farmhouse scene, was rapidly subsiding.
The thunder pealed less frequently and less loudly, the wind fell into intervals of noiseless
calm, and occasionally the moonlight streamed in momentary brightness through the ragged
edges of the fast-breaking clouds. The breath of the still morning was already moving upon
the firmament of the stormy night.

"Has life its old magic for you yet?" continued Goisvintha, in tones of pitiless reproach.
"Have you forgotten, with the spirit of your people, the end for which your ancestors lived?
Is not your sword at your feet? Is not the knife in my hand? Do not the waters of the Tiber,
rolling yonder to the sea, offer to you the grave of oblivion that all may seek? Die, then! In
your last hour be a Goth; even to the Romans you are worthless now! Already your
comrades have discovered your desertion; will you wait till you are hanged for a rebel? Will
you live to implore the mercy of your enemies, or, dishonored and defenseless, will you
endeavor to escape? You are of the blood of my family, but again I say it to you--die!"

His pale lips trembled; he looked for the first time at Antonina, but his utterance struggled
ineffectually, even yet, against unyielding despair. He was still silent.

Goisvintha turned from him disdainfully and approaching the fire sat down before it,
bending her haggard features over the brilliant flames.' For a few minutes she remained
absorbed in her evil thoughts, but no articulate word escaped her; and when at length she
again abruptly broke the silence, it was not to address the Goth, or to fix her eyes on him, as
before.

Still cowering over the fire, apparently as regardless of the presence of the two beings
whose happiness she had just crushed forever, as if they had never existed, she began to
recite, in solemn, measured, chanting tones, a legend of the darkest and earliest age of
Gothic history, keeping time to herself with the knife that she still held in her hand. The
malignity in her expression, as she pursued her employment, betrayed the heartless motive
that animated it, almost as palpably as the words of the composition she was repeating. Thus
she now spoke:

"The tempest god's pinions o'ershadow the sky: The waves leap to welcome the storm that is
nigh: Through the hall of old Odin re-echo the shocks That the fierce ocean hurls at his
rampart of rocks. As, alone on the crags that soar up from the sands, With his virgin Siona
the young Agnar stands; Tears sprinkle their dew on the sad maiden's cheeks, And the voice
of the chieftain sinks low while he speaks:

'Crippled in the flight forever;

Numbered with the worse than slain;
Weak deform'd, disabled!--never
Can I join the hosts again!
With the battle that is won
AGNAR'S earthly course is run!
'When thy shatter'd frame must yield,
If thou seek'st a future field:
 When thy arm that sway'd the strife,
Fails to shield thy worthless life;
When thy hands no more afford
Full employment to the sword;
Then, preserve--respect thy name;
Meet thy death--to live is shame!
Such is Odin's mighty will:
Such commands I now fulfill!

At this point in the legend she paused, and turned suddenly to observe its effect on
Hermanric. All its horrible application to himself thrilled through his heart. His head
drooped, and a low groan burst from his lips. But even this evidence of the suffering she
was inflicting failed to melt the iron malignity of Goisvintha's determination.

"Do you remember the death of Agnar?" she cried. "When you were a child, I sung it to you
ere you slept, and you vowed, as you heard it, that when you were a man, if you suffered his
wounds you would die his death! He was crippled in a victory, yet he slew himself on the
day of his triumph; you are crippled in your treachery, and have forgotten your boy's honor,
and will live in the darkness of your shame! Have you lost remembrance of that ancient
song? You heard it from me in the morning of your years; listen, and you shall hear it to the
end: it is the dirge for your approaching death!"

She continued:

" 'SIONA, mourn not!--where I go

The warriors feel nor pain nor woe;
They raise aloft the gleaming steel,
Their wounds yet warm, untended heal;
Their arrows bellow through the air
In showers, as they battle there:
In mighty cups their wine is pour'd,
Bright virgins throng their midnight board!

'Yet think not that I die unmov'd;

I mourn the doom that sets me free,
As I think, betroth'd--belov'd,
On all the joys I lose in thee!
To form my boys to meet the fray,
Where'er the Gothic banner streams;
To guard thy night, to glad thy day,
Made all the bliss of AGNAR'S dreams--
Dreams that must now be all forgot,
Earth's joys have passed from AGNAR'S lot!

'See, athwart the face of light

 Float the clouds of sullen Night!
Odin's warriors watch for me
By the earth-encircling sea!
The water's dirges howl my knell"
'Tis time I die--Farewell--Farewell!'

"He rose with a smile to prepare for the spring,

He flew from the rock like a bird on the wing
The sea met her prey with a leap and a roar,
And the maid stood alone by the wave-riven shore!
The winds mutter'd deep with a woe-boding sound,
As she wept o'er the footsteps he'd left on the ground;
And the wild vultures shriek'd, for the chieftain who spread
Their battlefield banquets was laid with the dead."

As, with a slow and measured emphasis, Goisvintha pronounced the last lines of the poem,
she again approached Hermanric. But the eyes of the Goth sought her no longer. She had
calmed the emotions that she had hoped to irritate. Of the latter divisions of her legend,
those only which were pathetic had arrested the lost chieftain's attention, and the blunted
faculties of his heart recovered their old refinement as he listened to them. A solemn
composure of love, grief, and pity appeared in the glance of affection that he now directed
on the girl's despairing countenance. Years of good thoughts, an existence of tender cares,
an eternity of youthful devotion, spoke in that rapt, momentary, eloquent gaze, and
imprinted on his expression a character ineffably beautiful and calm--a nobleness above the
human, and approaching the angelic and divine.

Intuitively Goisvintha followed the direction of his eyes, and looked, like him, on the
Roman girl's face. A lowering expression of hatred replaced the scorn that had hitherto
distorted her passionate features. Mechanically her hand again half raised the knife, and the
accents of her wrathful voice once more disturbed the sacred silence of affection and grief.

"Is it for the girl there that you would still live?" she cried, sternly. "I foreboded it, coward,
when I first looked on you! I prepared for it, when I wounded you! I made sure that when
my anger again threatened this new ruler of your thoughts and mover of your actions, you
should have lost the power to divert it from her again! Think you that, because my disdain
has delayed it, my vengeance on her is abandoned? Long since I swore to you that she
should die, and I will hold to my purpose! I have punished you, I will slay her! Can you
shield her from the blow to-night, as you shielded her in your tent? You are weaker before
me than a child!"

She ceased abruptly, for at this moment a noise of hurrying footsteps and contending voices
became suddenly audible from without. As she heard it, a ghastly paleness chased the flush
of anger from her cheeks. With the promptitude of apprehension she snatched the sword of
Hermanric from under Antonina, and ran it through staples intended to hold the rude bar of
the door. The next instant the footsteps sounded on the garden path, and the next the door
was assailed.

The good sword held firm, but the frail barrier that it sustained yielded at the second shock,
and fell inward, shattered, to the floor. Instantly the gap was darkened by human forms, and
the firelight glowed over the repulsive countenances of two Huns who headed the intruders,
habited in complete armor and furnished with naked swords.

"Yield yourself prisoner by Alaric's command!" cried one of the barbarians; "or you shall be
slain as a deserter where you now stand!"

The Goth had risen to his feet as the door was burst in. The arrival of his pursuers seemed to
restore his lost energies, to deliver him at once from an all-powerful thralldom. An
expression of triumph and defiance shone over his steady features, when he heard the
summons of the Hun. For a moment he stooped toward Antonina, as she clung fainting
round him. His mouth quivered and his eye glistened, as he kissed her cold cheek. In that
moment all the hopelessness of his position, all the worthlessness of his marred existence,
all the ignominy preparing for him when he returned to the camp, rushed over his mind. In
that moment the worst horrors of departure and death, the fiercest rackings of love and
despair, assailed but did not overcome him, in that moment he paid his final tribute to the
dues of affection, and braced for the last time the fibers of manly dauntlessness and Spartan
resolve!

The next instant he tore himself from the girl's arms; the old hero-spirit of his conquering
nation possessed every nerve in his frame; his eye brightened again gloriously with its lost
warrior-light, his limbs grew firm, his face was calm, he confronted the Huns with a mien of
authority and a smile of disdain, and, as he presented to them his defenseless breast, not the
faintest tremor was audible in his voice, while he cried, in accents of steady command:

"Strike! I yield not!"

The Huns rushed forward with fierce cries, and buried their swords in his body. His warm
young blood gushed out upon the floor of the dwelling which had been the love-shrine of
the heart that shed it. Without a sigh from his lips, or a convulsion on his features, he fell
dead at the feet of his enemies; all the valor of his disposition, all the gentleness of his heart,
all the vigor of his form, resolved in one humble instant into a senseless and burdensome
mass!

Antonina beheld the assassination, but was spared the sight of the death that followed it. She
fell insensible by the side of her young warrior--her dress was spotted with his blood, her
form was motionless as his own.
"Leave him there to rot! His pride in his superiority will not serve him now--even to a
grave!" cried the Hun leader to his companions, as he dried on the garments of the corpse
his reeking sword.

"And this woman," demanded one of his comrades, "is she to be liberated or secured?"

He pointed as he spoke to Goisvintha. During the brief scene of the assassination the very
exercise of her faculties seemed to have been suspended. She had never stirred a limb, or
uttered a word.

The Hun recognized her as the woman who had questioned and bribed him at the camp.
"She is the traitor's kinswoman, and is absent from the tents without leave," he answered.
"Take her prisoner to Alaric; she will bear us witness that we have done as he commanded
us. As for the girl," he continued, glancing at the blood on Antonina's dress, and stirring her
figure carelessly with his foot, "she may be dead too, for she neither moves nor speaks, and
may be left, like her protector, to lie graveless where she is. For us, it is time that we depart-
-the king is impatient of delay."

As they led her roughly from the house Goisvintha shuddered, and attempted to pause for a
moment when she passed the corpse of the Goth. Death, that can extinguish enmities as well
as sunder loves, rose awful and appealing, as she looked her last at her murdered brother,
and remembered her murdered husband. No tears flowed from her eyes, no groans broke
from her bosom; but there was a pang, a last momentary pang, of grief and pity at her heart,
as she murmured, while they forced her away, "Aquileia! Aquileia! have I outlived thee for
this!"

The troops retired. For a few minutes silence ruled uninterruptedly over the room where the
senseless girl still lay by the side of all that was left to her of the object of her first youthful
love. But ere long footsteps again approached the farmhouse door, and two Goths, who had
formed part of the escort allotted to the Hun, approached the young chieftain's corpse.
Quickly and silently they raised it in their arms and bore it into the garden. There they
scooped a shallow hole with their swords in the fresh, flower-laden turf; and having laid the
body there, they hastily covered it, and rapidly departed without returning to the house.

These men had served among the warriors committed to Hermanric's command. By many
acts of frank generosity and encouragement the young chieftain had won their rough
attachment. They mourned his fate, but dared not obstruct the sentence, or oppose the act
that determined it. At their own risk they had secretly quitted the advancing ranks of their
comrades, to use the last privilege and obey the last dictate of human kindness; and they
thought not of the lonely girl, as they now left her desolate, and hurried away to reassume
their appointed stations ere it was too late.
 The turf lay caressingly round the young warrior's form; its crushed flowers pressed softly
against his cold cheek; the fragrance of the new morning wafted its pure incense gently
about his simple grave! Around him flowered the delicate plants that the hand of Antonina
had raised to please his eye. Near him stood the dwelling sacred to the first and last kiss that
he had impressed upon her lips; and about him, on all sides, rose the plains and woodlands
that had engrossed with her image the devotion of all her dearest thoughts. He lay, in his
death, in the midst of the magic circle of the best joys of his life! It was a fitter burial-place
for the earthly relics of that bright and generous spirit, than the pit in the carnage-laden
battlefield, or the desolate sepulchers of a northern land!

Chapter XIX.
The Guardian Restored.

NOT long is the new-made grave left unwatched to the solemn guardianship of Solitude and
Night. More than a few minutes have scarcely elapsed since it was dug, yet already human
footsteps press its yielding surface, and a human glance scans attentively its small and
homely mound.

But it is not Antonina whom he loved; it is not Goisvintha, through whose vengeance he
was lost, who now looks upon the earth above the young warrior's corpse. It is a stranger, an
outcast; a man lost, dishonored, abandoned--it is the solitary and ruined Ulpius who now
gazes with indifferent eyes upon the peaceful garden and the eloquent grave.

In the destinies of woe committed to the keeping of the night, the pagan had been fatally
included. The destruction that had gone forth against the body of the young man who lay
beneath the earth had overtaken the mind of the old man who stood over his simple grave.
The frame of Ulpius, with all its infirmities, was still. there- but the soul of ferocious
patience and unconquerable daring that had lighted it grandly. in its ruin, was gone. Over
the long anguish of that woeful life the veil of self-oblivion had closed forever!

He had been dismissed by Alaric, but he had not returned to the city whither he was bidden.
Throughout the night he had wandered about the lonely suburbs, striving in secret and
horrible suffering for the mastery of his mind. There did the overthrow of all his hopes from
the Goths expand rapidly into the overthrow of the whole intellect that had created his
aspirations. There had reason burst the bonds that had so long chained, perverted, degraded
it! At length, wandering hither and thither, he had dragged the helpless body, possessed no
longer by the perilous mind, to the farmhouse garden in which he now stood, gazing
alternately at the upturned sods of the chieftain's grave, and the red gleam of the fire as it
glowed from the dreary room, through the gap of the shattered door.
His faculties were fatally disordered, rather than utterly destroyed. His penetration, his
firmness, and his cunning were gone; but a wreck of memory, useless and unmanageable--a
certain capacity for momentary observation, still remained to him. The shameful
miscarriage in the tent of Alaric, which had overthrown his faculties, had passed from him
as an event that never happened; but he remembered fragments of his past existence; he still
retained a vague consciousness of the ruling purpose of his whole life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why did I make my passage through the wall?" muttered the pagan, in a low, awestruck
voice, suddenly checking himself, as he was about to step forward. "Why did I tear down
the strong brickwork, and go forth into the dark suburbs?"

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

"Leave me!" she shrieked, as he passed onward into the pathway that led to the high-road.
"Oh, be merciful, and leave me to die where he has died!"
 "Peace! or I will rend you limb by limb, as I rent the stones from the wall when I passed
through it!" he whispered to her in fierce accents, as she struggled to escape him. "You shall
return with me to Rome! You shall walk in the track that I have made in the rifted
brickwork!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, as the girl's entreaties for protection now grew fainter and fainter on his ear, he made no
effort to move his languid limbs; he watched her with a dull, mechanical gaze, as she was
dragged away, until a turn in the pathway at the foot of the Pincian Hill hid her from sight;
then his eyes slowly reverted to the cloudy heaven which had been the object of their former
contemplation, and his mind resumed its old painful, purposeless abstraction, as if no event
had happened to challenge its failing faculties but the instant before.

At the moment when the dawn had first appeared, could he have looked down by some
mysterious agency to the interior foundations of the wall, from the rampart on which he kept
his weary watch, such a sight must then have presented itself as would have aroused even
his sluggish observation to rigid attention and involuntary surprise.

Winding upward and downward among jagged masses of ruined brickwork, now lost amid
the shadows of dreary chasms, now prominent over the elevations of rising arches, the dark
irregular passages broken by Ulpius in the rotten wall would then have presented themselves
to his eyes--not stretching forth in dismal solitude, not peopled only by the reptiles native to
the place, but traced in all their mazes by human forms. Then he would have perceived the
fierce, resolute pagan, moving through darkness and obstacles with a sure, solemn progress,
drawing after him, like a dog devoted to his will, the young girl whose hapless fate had
doomed her to fall into his power. Her half-fainting figure might have been seen, sometimes
prostrate on the higher places of the breach, while her fearful guide descended before her
into a chasm beyond, and then turned to drag her after him to a darker and a lower depth
yet--sometimes bent in supplication, when her lips moved once more with a last despairing
entreaty, and her limbs trembled with a final effort to escape from her captor's relentless
grasp. While still, through all that opposed him, the same fierce tenacity of purpose would
have been invariably visible in every action of Ulpius, constantly confirming him in his mad
resolution to make his victim the follower of his progress through the wall, ever guiding him
with a strange instinct through every hinderance and preserving him from every danger in
his path, until it brought him forth triumphant, with his prisoner still in his power, again free
to tread the desolated streets and mingle with the famine-stricken citizens of Rome.

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

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

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

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

In other parts of the place, at the open gates of the theaters and hippodromes, in the
unguarded porticoes of the palaces and the baths, lay the discolored bodies of those who had
died ere they could reach the fountains--of women and children especially--surrounded, in
frightful contrast, by the abandoned furniture of luxury and the discarded inventions of vice-
-by gilded couches--by inlaid tables--by jeweled cornices--by obscene pictures and statues--
by brilliantly-framed, gaudily-tinted manuscripts of licentious songs, still hanging at their
accustomed places on the lofty marble walls. Further on, in the by-streets and the retired
courts, where the corpse of the tradesman was stretched on his empty counter; where the
soldier of the city guard dropped down overpowered ere he reached the limit of his rounds;
where the wealthy merchant lay pestilence stricken upon the last hoards of repulsive food
which his gold had procured; the assassin and the robber might be seen--now greedily
devouring the offal that lay around them, now falling dead upon the bodies which they had
rifled but the moment before.

Over the whole prospect, far and near, wherever it might extend, whatever the horrors by
which it might be occupied, was spread a blank, supernatural stillness. Not a sound arose;
the living were as silent as the dead; crime, suffering, despair, were all voiceless alike; the
trumpet was unheard in the guard-house; the bell never rang from the church--even the
thick, misty rain, that now descended from the black and unmoving clouds, and obscured in
cold shadows the outlines of distant buildings and the pinnacle-tops of mighty palaces, fell
noiseless to the ground. The sky had no wind, the earth no echoes; the pervading desolation
appalled the eye; the vast stillness weighed dull on the ear: it was a scene as of the last-left
city of an exhausted world decaying noiselessly into primeval chaos.
Through this atmosphere of darkness and death; along these paths of pestilence and famine;
unregarding and unregarded, the pagan and his prisoner passed slowly onward toward the
quarter of the city opposite the Pincian Mount. No ray of thought, even yet, brightened the
dull faculties of Ulpius; still he walked forward vacantly and still he was followed wearily
by the fast-failing girl.

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

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

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

At this moment one of the bands of marauders--the desperate criminals of famine and
plague--who still prowled through the city appeared the street. Their trembling hands sought
their weapons, and their haggard faces brightened when they first discerned the pagan and
the girl; but as they approached nearer they saw enough in the figures of the two, at a
glance, to destroy their hopes of seizing on them either plunder or food. For an instant they
stood by their intended victims, as if debating whether to murder them only for murder's
sake, when the appearance of two women, stealthily quitting a house further on in the street,
carrying a basket covered by some tattered garments, attracted their attention. They turned
instantly to follow the bearers of the basket, and again Ulpius and Antonina were left alone
on the river's bank.

The appearance of the assassins had been powerless, as every other sight or event in the
city, in arousing the faculties of Ulpius. He had neither looked on them nor fled from them
when they surrounded him; but now when they were gone, he slowly turned his head in the
direction by which they had departed. His gaze wandered over the wet flag-stones of the
street, over two corpses stretched on them at a little distance, over the figure of a female
slave, who lay forsaken near the wall of one of the houses, exerting her last energies to drink
from the turbid rain-water which ran down the kennel by her side; and still his eyes
remained unregardful of all that they encountered. The next object which by chance
attracted his vacant attention was a deserted temple. This solitary building fixed him
immediately in contemplation--it was destined to open a new and a warning scene in the
dark tragedy of his closing life.

In his course through the city he had passed unheeded many temples far more prominent
situation, far more imposing in structure than this. It was a building of no remarkable tent or
extraordinary beauty. Its narrow porticoes and dark doorway were more fitted to repel than
to invite the eye; but it had one attraction, powerful above all glories of architecture and all
grandeur of situation, to arrest in him those wandering faculties, whose sterner and loftier
aims were now suspended forever: it was dedicated to Serapis--to the idol which had been
the deity of his first worship, and the inspiration of his last struggle for the restoration of his
faith. The image of the god, with the three-headed monster encircled by a serpent, obedient
beneath his hand, was carved over the portico.

What flood of emotions rushed into the vacant mind of Ulpius, at the instant when he
discerned the long-loved, well-known image of the Egyptian god, there was nothing, for
some moments, outwardly visible in him to betray. His moral insensibility appeared but to
be deepened as his gaze was now fixed with rigid intensity on the temple portico. Thus he
continued to remain motionless, as if what he saw had petrified him where he stood, when
the clouds, which had been closing in deeper and deeper blackness as the morning
advanced, and which, still charged with electricity, were gathering to revive the storm of the
past night, burst abruptly into a loud peal of thunder over his head.

At that warning sound, as if it had been the supernatural signal awaited to arouse him--as if
in one brief moment it awakened every recollection of all that he had resolutely attempted
during the night of thunder that was past--he started into instant animation. His countenance
brightened, his form expanded; he dropped the hand of Antonina, raised his arm aloft
toward the wrathful heaven in frantic triumph, then, staggering forward, fell on his knees at
the base of the temple steps.

Whatever the remembrances of his passage through the wall at the Pincian Hill, and of the
toil and peril succeeding it, which had revived when the thunder first sounded in his ear,
they had now vanished as rapidly as they had arisen, and had left his wandering memory
free to revert to the scenes which the image of Serapis was most fitted to recall.
Recollections of his boyish enjoyments in the Temple at Alexandria, of his youth's
enthusiasm, of the triumphs of his early manhood--all disjointed and wayward, yet all
bright, glorious, intoxicating--flashed before his shattered mind. Tears, the first that he had
shed since his happy youth, flowed quick down his withered cheeks. He pressed his hot
forehead, he beat his parched hand in ecstasy on the cold, wet steps beneath him. He
muttered breathless ejaculations, he breathed strange murmurs of endearment, he humbled
himself in his rapturous delight beneath the walls of the temple, like a dog that has
discovered his lost master and fawns affectionately at his feet. Criminal .as he was, his joy
in his abasement, his glory in his miserable isolation from humanity, was a doom of
degradation pitiable to be beheld.

After an interval his mood changed. He rose to his feet; his trembling limbs strengthened
with a youthful vigor, as he ascended the temple steps and gained its doorway. He turned for
a moment and looked forth over the street, ere he entered the hallowed domain of his
distempered imagination. To him the cloudy sky above was now shining with the radiance
of the sun-bright East. The death-laden highways of Rome, as they stretched before him,
were beautiful with lofty trees and populous with happy figures; and along the dark
flagstones beneath, where still lay the corpses which he had no eye to see, he beheld already
the priests of Serapis, with his revered guardian, his beloved Macrinus of former days, at
their head, advancing to meet and welcome him in the hall of the Egyptian god. Visions
such as these passed gloriously before the pagan's eyes, as he stood triumphant on the steps
of the temple, and brightened to him with a noonday light its dusky recesses, when, after his
brief delay, he turned from the street and disappeared through the doorway of the sacred
place.

The rain poured down more thickly than before; the thunder, once aroused, now sounded in
deep and frequent peals, as Antonina raised herself from the ground, and looked around her,
in momentary expectation that the dreaded form of Ulpius must meet her eyes. No living
creature was visible in the street. The forsaken slave still reclined near the wall of the house
where she had first appeared when the pagan gained the approaches to the temple; but she
now lay there dead. No fresh bands of robbers appeared in sight. An uninterrupted solitude
prevailed in all directions, as far as the eye could reach.
At the moment when Ulpius had relinquished his grasp of her hand, Antonina had sunk to
the ground, helpless and resigned, but not exhausted beyond all power of sensation or all
capacity for thought. While she lay on the cold pavement of the street, her mind still
pursued its visions of a speedy death, and a tranquil life in death to succeed it in a future
state. But, as minute after minute elapsed, and no harsh voice sounded in her ear, no pitiless
hand dragged her from the ground, no ominous footsteps were audible around her, a change
passed gradually over her thoughts; the instinct of self-preservation slowly revived within
her; and, as she raised herself to look forth on the gloomy prospect, the chances of
uninterrupted flight and present safety presented by the solitude of the street, aroused her
like a voice of encouragement, like an unexpected promise of help.

Her perception of outer influences returned: she felt the rain that drenched her garments, she
shuddered at the thunder sounding over her head, she marked with horror the dead bodies
lying before her on the stones. An overpowering desire animated her to fly from the place,
to escape from the desolate scene around, even though she should sink exhausted by the
effort in the next street. Slowly she arose; her limbs trembled with a premature infirmity, but
she gained her feet. She tottered onward, turning her back on the river, passed bewildered
between long rows of deserted houses, and arrived opposite a public garden, surrounding a
little summer-house, whose deserted portico offered both concealment and shelter. Here,
therefore, she took refuge, crouching in the darkest corner of the building, and hiding her
face in her hands, as if to shut out all view of the dreary though altered scenes which spread
before her eyes.

Woful thoughts and recollections now moved within her in bewildering confusion. All that
she had suffered since Ulpius had dragged her from the farmhouse in the suburbs--the night
pilgrimage over the plain--the fearful passage through the wall--revived in her memory,
mingled with vague ideas, now for the first time aroused, of the plague and famine that were
desolating the city, and with sudden apprehensions that Goisvintha might still be following
her, knife in hand, through the lonely streets; while passively prominent over all these
varying sources of anguish and dread, the scene of the young chieftain's death lay like a cold
weight on her heavy heart. The damp turf of his grave seemed still to press against her
breast; his last kiss yet trembled on her lips; she knew, though she dared not look down on
them, that the spots of his blood yet stained her garments.

Whether she strove to rise and continue her flight; whether she crouched down again under
the portico, resigned for one bitter moment to perish by the knife of Goisvintha, if
Goisvintha were near; to fall once more into the hands of Ulpius, if Ulpius were tracking her
to her retreat; the crushing sense that she was utterly bereaved of her beloved protector--that
the friend of her brief days of happiness was lost to her forever--that Hermanric, who had
preserved her from death, had been murdered in his youth and his strength by her side,
never deserted her. Since the assassination in the farmhouse, she was now for the first time
alone; and now for the first time she felt the full severity of her affliction, and knew how
dark was the blank which was spread before every aspiration of her future life.

Enduring, almost eternal as the burden of her desolation seemed now to have become, it was
yet to be removed, ere long, by feelings of a tenderer mournfulness, and a more resigned
woe. The innate and innocent fortitude of disposition which had made her patient under the
rigor of her youthful education, and hopeful under the trials that assailed her on her
banishment from her father's house--which had never deserted her until the awful scenes of
the past night of assassination and death rose in triumphant horror before her eyes, and
which, even then, had been suspended but not destroyed, was now destined to regain its
healing influence over her heart. As she still cowered in her lonely refuge, the final hope,
the yearning dependence on a restoration to her father's presence and her father's love, that
had moved her over the young chieftain's grave, and had prompted her last effort for
freedom when Ulpius had dragged her through the passage in the rifted wall, suddenly
revived.

Once more she arose, and looked forth on the desolate city and the stormy sky, but now with
mild and unshrinking eyes. Her recollections of the past grew tender in their youthful grief;
her thoughts for the future became patient, solemn, and serene. Images of her first and her
last-left protector, of her old familiar home, of her garden solitude on the Pincian Mount,
spread beautiful before her imagination, as resting-places to her weary heart. She descended
the steps of the summer-house with no apprehension of her enemies, no doubt of her
resolution; for she knew the beacon that was now to direct her onward course. The tears
gathered full in her eyes, as she passed into the garden; but her step never faltered, her
features never lost their combined expression of tranquil sorrow and subdued hope. So she
once more entered the perilous streets; and murmuring to herself, "My father! my father!" as
if in those simple words lay the hand that was to guide and the providence that was to
preserve her, she began to trace her solitary way in the direction of the Pincian Mount.

It was a spectacle--touching, beautiful, even sublime--to see this young girl, but a few hours
freed, by perilous paths and by criminal hands, from scenes which had begun in treachery,
only to end in death, now passing, resolute and alone, through the streets of a mighty city,
overwhelmed by all that is poignant in human anguish and hideous in human crime. It was a
noble evidence of the strong power over the world and the world's perils, with which the
simplest affection may arm the frailest being, to behold her thus pursuing her way, superior
to every horror of desolation and death that clogged her path, unconsciously discovering in
the softly-murmured name of "father," which still fell at intervals from her lips, the pure
purpose that sustained her--the steady heroism that ever held her in her doubtful course. The
storms of heaven poured over her head--the crimes and sufferings of Rome darkened the
paths of her pilgrimage; but she passed firmly onward through all, like a ministering spirit
journeying along earthly shores in the bright inviolability of its merciful mission and its
holy thoughts--like a ray of light living in the strength of its own beauty, amid the tempest
and obscurity of a stranger sphere.

Once more she entered the Campus Martins. Again she passed the public fountains, still
unnaturally devoted to serve as beds for the dying and as sepulchers for the dead; again she
trod the dreary highways, where the stronger among the famished populace yet paced hither
and thither in ferocious silence and unsocial separation. No word was addressed, hardly a
look was directed to her, as she pursued her solitary course. She was desolate among the
desolate; forsaken among others abandoned like herself.

The robber, when he passed her by, saw that she was worthless for the interests of plunder
as the poorest of the dying citizens around him. The patrician, loitering feebly onward to the
shelter of his palace halls, avoided her as a new suppliant among the people for the charity
which he had not to bestow, and quickened his pace as she approached him in the street.
Unprotected, yet unmolested, hurrying from her loneliness and her bitter recollections to the
refuge of her father's love, as she would have hurried when a child from her first
apprehension of ill to the refuge of her father's arms, she gained at length the foot of the
Pincian Hill--at length ascended the streets so often trodden in the tranquil days of old!

The portals and outer buildings of Vetranio's palace, as she passed them, presented a
striking and ominous spectacle. Within the lofty steel railings which protected the building,
the famine-wasted slaves of the senator appeared reeling and tottering beneath full vases of
wine, which they were feebly endeavoring to carry into the interior apartments. Gaudy
hangings drooped from the balconies, garlands of ivy were wreathed round the statues of the
marble front. In the midst of the besieged city, and in impious mockery of the famine and
pestilence which were wasting it--hut and palace--to its remotest confines, were proceeding
in this devoted dwelling the preparations for a triumphant feast!

Unheedful of the startling prospect presented by Vetranio's abode, her eyes bent but in one
absorbing direction, her steps hurrying faster and faster with each succeeding instant,
Antonina approached the home from which she had been exiled in fear, and to which she
was returning in woe. Yet a moment more of strong exertion, of overpowering anticipation,
and she reached the garden gate!

She dashed back the heavy hair, matted over her brows by the rain; she glanced rapidly
around her; she beheld the window of her bed-chamber with the old simple curtain still
hanging in its accustomed place; she saw the well-remembered trees, the carefully-tended
flower-beds, now drooping mournfully beneath the gloomy sky. Her heart swelled within
her, her breath seemed suddenly arrested in her bosom, as she trod the garden path and
ascended the steps beyond. The door at the top was ajar. With a last effort she thrust it open,
and stood once more--unaided and unwelcomed, yet hopeful of consolation, of pardon, of
love--within her first and last sanctuary, the walls of her home!
Chapter XXI.
Father And Child.

FORSAKEN as it appears on an outward view, during the morning of which we now write,
the house of Numerian is yet not tenantless. In one of the sleeping apartments, stretched on
his couch, with none to watch by its side, lies the master of the little dwelling. We last
beheld him on the scene mingled with the famishing congregation in the Basilica of St. John
Lateran, still searching for his child amid the confusion of the public distribution of food
during the earlier stages of the misfortunes of besieged Rome. Since that time he has toiled
and suffered much; and now the day of exhaustion long deferred, the hours of helpless
solitude constantly dreaded, have at length arrived.

From the first periods of the siege, while all around him in the city moved gloomily onward
through darker and darker changes; while famine rapidly merged into pestilence and death;
while human hopes and purposes gradually diminished and declined with each succeeding
day, he alone remained ever devoted to the same labor, ever animated by the same object--
the only one among all his fellow-citizens whom no outward event could influence for good
or evil, for hope or fear.

In every street of Rome, at all hours, among all ranks of people, he was still to be seen
constantly pursuing the same hopeless search. When the mob burst furiously into the public
granaries to seize the last supplies of corn hoarded for the rich, he was ready at the doors
watching them as they came out. When rows of houses were deserted by all but the dead, he
was beheld within, passing from window to window, as he sought through each room for the
treasure that he had lost. When some few among the populace, in the first days of the
pestilence, united in the vain attempt to cast over the lofty walls the corpses that strewed the
street, he mingled with them to look on the rigid faces of the dead. In solitary places, where
the parent not yet lost to affection strove to carry his dying child from the desert roadway to
the shelter of a roof--where the wife, still faithful to her duties, received her husband's last
breath in silent despair, he was seen gliding by their sides, and for one brief instant looking
on them with attentive and mournful eyes. Wherever he went, whatever he beheld, he asked
no sympathy and sought no aid. He went his way, a pilgrim on a solitary path; an
unregarded expectant for a boon that no others could care to partake.

When the famine first began to be felt in the city, he seemed unconscious of its approach--
he made no effort to procure beforehand the provision of a few days' sustenance; if he
attended the first public distributions of food, it was to prosecute his search for his child
amid the throng around him. He must have perished with the first feeble victims of
starvation, had he not been met, during his solitary wanderings, by some of the members of
the congregation whom his piety and eloquence had collected in former days.

By these persons, whose entreaties that he would suspend his hopeless search he always
answered with the same firm and patient denial, his course was carefully watched and his
wants anxiously provided for. Out of every supply of food which they were enabled to
collect, his share was invariably carried to his abode. They remembered their teacher in the
hour of his dejection, as they had formerly reverenced him in the; day of his vigor; they
toiled to preserve his life as anxiously as they had labored to profit by his instructions; they
listened as his disciples once, they served him as his children now.

But over these, as over all other offices of human kindness, the famine was destined
gradually and surely to prevail. The provision of food garnered up by the congregation
ominously lessened with each succeeding day. When the pestilence began darkly to appear,
the numbers of those who sought their afflicted teacher at his abode, or followed him
through the dreary streets, fatally decreased.

Then, as the nourishment which had supported and the vigilance which had watched him
thus diminished, so did the hard-tasked energies of the unhappy father fail him faster and
faster. Each morning as he arose, his steps were more feeble, his heart grew heavier within
him, his wanderings through the city were less and less resolute and prolonged. At length
his powers totally deserted him; the last-left members of his congregation, as they
approached his abode with the last-left provision of food which they possessed, found him
prostrate with exhaustion at his garden gate. They bore him to his couch, placed their
charitable offering by his side, and leaving one of their number to protect him from the
robber and the assassin, they quitted the house in despair.

For some days the guardian remained faithful to his post, until his sufferings from lack of
food overpowered his vigilance. Dreading that, in his extremity, he might be tempted to take
from the old man's small store of provision what little remained, he fled from the house to
seek sustenance, however loathsome, in the public streets; and thenceforth Numerian was
left defenseless in his solitary abode.

He was first beheld on the scenes which these pages present a man of austere purpose, of
unwearied energy; a valiant reformer who defied all difficulties that beset him in his
progress; a triumphant teacher leading at his will whoever listened to his words; a father
proudly contemplating the future position which he destined for his child. Far different did
he now appear. Lost to his ambition, broken in spirit, helpless in body, separated from his
daughter by his own act, he lay on his untended couch in a death-like lethargy. The cold
wind blowing through his opened window awakened no sensations in his torpid frame; the
cup of water and the small relies of coarse food stood near his hand, but he bad no vigilance
to discern them. His open eyes looked steadfastly upward, and yet be reposed as one in a
deep sleep, or as one already devoted to the tomb, save when, at intervals, his lips moved
slowly with a long and painfully-drawn breath, or a fever-flush tinged his hollow cheek with
changing and momentary hues.

While thus in outward aspect appearing to linger between life and death, his faculties yet
remained feebly vital within him. Aroused by no external influence, and governed by no
mental restraint, they now created before him a strange waking vision, palpable as an actual
event.

It seemed to him that he was reposing, not in his own chamber, but in some mysterious
world, filled with a twilight atmosphere, inexpressibly soothing and gentle to his aching
sight. Through this mild radiance he could trace, at long intervals, shadowy representations
of the scenes through which he had passed in search of his lost child. The gloomy streets,
the lonely houses abandoned to the unburied dead, which he had explored, alternately
appeared and vanished before him in solemn succession; and ever and anon, as one vision
disappeared ere another rose, he heard afar off a sound as of gentle, womanly voices,
murmuring in solemn accents, "The search has been made in penitence, in patience, in
prayer, and has not been pursued in vain. The lost shall return--the beloved shall yet be
restored!"

Thus, as it had begun, the vision long continued. Now the scenes through which he had
wandered passed slowly before his eyes, now the soft voices murmured pityingly in his ear.
At length the first disappeared, and the last became silent; then ensued a long vacant
interval, and then the gray, tranquil light brightened slowly at one spot, out of which he
beheld advancing toward him the form of his lost child.

She came to his side, she bent lovingly over him; he saw her eyes, with their old patient,
childlike expression, looking sorrowfully down upon him. His heart revived to a sense of
unspeakable awe and contrition, to emotions of yearning love and mournful hope; his
speech returned; he whispered tremulously, "Child! child! I repented in bitter woe the wrong
that I did to thee; I sought thee, in my loneliness on earth, through the long day and the
gloomy night! And now the merciful God has sent thee to pardon me! I loved thee; I wept
for thee."

His voice died within him, for now his outward sensations quickened. He felt warm tears
falling on his cheeks; he felt embracing arms clasped around him; he heard tenderly
repeated, "Father, speak to me as you were wont; love me, father, and forgive me, as you
loved and forgave me when I was a little child!"

The sound of that well-remembered voice--which had ever spoken kindly and reverently to
him; which had last addressed him in tones of despairing supplication; which he had hardly
hoped to hear again on earth--penetrated his whole being, like awakening music in the dead
silence of night. His eyes lost their vacant expression; he raised himself suddenly on the
couch; he saw that what had begun as a vision had ended as a reality; that his dream had
proved the immediate forerunner of its own fulfillment; that his daughter in her bodily
presence was indeed restored; and his head drooped forward, and he trembled and wept
upon her bosom in the overpowering fullness of his gratitude and delight.

For some moments Antonina, calming with the resolute heroism of affection her own
thronging emotions of awe and affright, endeavored to soothe and support her fast-failing
parent. Her horror almost overwhelmed her, as she thought that now, when through grief
and peril she was at last restored to him, he might expire in her arms; but even yet her
resolution did not fail her. The last hope of her brief and bitter life was now the hope of
reviving her father; and she clung to it with the tenacity of despair.

She calmed her voice while she spoke to him; she entreated him to remember that his
daughter had returned to watch over him, to be his obedient pupil as in days of old. Vain
effort! Even while the words passed her lips, his arms, which had been pressed over her,
relaxed; his head grew heavier on her bosom. In the despair of the moment, she tore herself
from him, and looked around to seek the help that none were near to afford. The cup of
water, the last provision of food, attracted her eye. With quick instinct she caught them up.
hope, success, salvation, lay in those miserable relics. She pressed the food into his mouth;
she moistened his parched lips, his dry brow, with the water. During one moment of horrible
suspense she saw him still insensible; then the vital functions revived; his eyes opened
again, and fixed famine-struck on the wretched nourishment before him. He devoured it
ravenously; he drained the cup of water to its last drop; he sank back again on the couch.
But now the torpid blood moved once more in his veins; his heart beat less and less feebly;
he was saved. She saw it as she bent over him--saved by the lost child in the hour of her
return! It was a sensation of ecstatic triumph and gratitude, which no woful remembrances
had power to embitter in its bright, sudden birth! She knelt down by the side of the couch,
almost crashed by her own emotions. Over the grave of the young warrior she had raised her
heart to Heaven in agony and grief, and now by her father's side she poured forth her whole
soul to her Creator in trembling ejaculations of thankfulness and hope!

Thus--the one slowly recovering whatever of life and vigor yet continued in his weakened
frame, the other still filled with her all-absorbing emotions of gratitude--the father and
daughter long remained. And now, as morning waned toward noon, the storm began to
subside. Gradually and solemnly the vast thunder-clouds rolled asunder, and the bright blue
heaven beyond appeared through their fantastic rifts. The lessening rain-drops fell light and
silvery to the earth, and breeze and sunshine were wafted at fitful intervals over the plague-
tainted atmosphere of Rome. As yet, subdued by the shadows of the floating clouds, the
dawning sunbeams glittered softly through the windows of Numerian's chamber. They
played, warm and reviving, over his worn features, like messengers of resurrection and hope
from their native heaven. Life seemed to expand within him under their fresh and gentle
ministering. Once more he raised himself and turned toward his child; and now his heart
throbbed with a healthful joy, and his arms closed round her, not in the helplessness of
infirmity, but in the welcome of love.

His words, when he spoke to her, fell at first almost inarticulately from his lips--they were
mingled together in confused phrases of tenderness, contrition, thanksgiving. All the native
enthusiasm of his disposition, all the latent love for his child, which had for years been
suppressed by his austerity or diverted by his ambition, now at last burst forth.

Trembling and silent in his arms, Antonina vainly endeavored to return his caresses, and to
answer his words of welcome. Now for the first time she knew how deep was her father's
affection for her; she felt how foreign to his real nature had been his assumed severity in
their intercourse of former days; and in the quick flow of new feelings and old recollections
produced by the delighting surprise of the discovery, she found herself speechless. She
could only listen eagerly, breathlessly, while he spoke. His words, faltering and confused
though they were, were words of endearment which she had never heard from him before;
they were words which no mother had ever pronounced beside her infant bed; and they sank
divinely consoling over her heart, as messages of pardon from angels' lips.

Gradually Numerian s voice grew calmer. He raised his daughter in his arms, and bent
wistfully on her face his attentive and pitying eyes. "Returned, returned!" he murmured,
while he gazed on her, "never again to depart! Returned, beautiful and patient, kinder and
more tender than ever! Love me and pardon me, Antonina. I sought for you in bitter
loneliness and despair. Think not of me as what I was, but as what I am! There were days
when you were yet an infant, when I had no thought but how to cherish and delight you, and
now those days have come again. You shall read no gloomy taskbooks; you shall never be
separated from me more; you shall play sweet music on the lute: you shall be all garlanded
with flowers which I will provide for you! We will find friends and glad companions; we
will bring happiness with us wherever we are seen! God's blessing goes forth from children
like you: it has fallen upon me--it has raised me from the dead! My Antonina shall teach me
to worship, as I once taught her. She shall pray for me in the morning, and pray for me at
night; and when she thinks not of it, when she sleeps, I shall come softly to her bedside, and
wait and watch over her, so that when she opens her eyes they shall open on me--they are
the eyes of my child who has been restored to me--there is nothing on earth that can speak
to me like them of happiness and peace!"

He paused for a moment, and looked rapturously on her face as it was turned toward him.
His features partially saddened while he gazed; and taking her long hair--still wet and
disheveled from the rain--in his hands, he pressed it over his lips, over his face, over his
neck. Then, when he saw that she was endeavoring to speak, when he beheld the tears that
were now filling her eyes, he drew her closer to him, and hurriedly continued, in lower
tones:

"Hush! hush! No more grief--no more tears! Tell me not whither you have wandered--speak
not of what you have suffered; for would not every word be a reproach to me? And you
have come to pardon and not to reproach! Let not the recollection that it was I who cast you
off be forced on me from your lips! let us remember only that we are restored to each other;
let us think that God has accepted my penitence and forgiven me my sin, in suffering my
child to return! Or, if we must speak of the days of separation that are past, speak to me of
the days that found you tranquil and secure; rejoice me, by telling me that it was not all
danger and woe in the bitter destiny which my guilty anger prepared for my own child! Say
to me that you met protectors as well as enemies in the hour of your flight--that all were not
harsh to you, as I was--that those of whom you asked shelter and safety, looked on your face
as on a petition for charity and kindness from friends whom they loved! Tell me only of
your protectors, Antonina, for in that there will be consolation; and you have come to
console!"

As he waited for her reply, he felt her tremble on his bosom, he saw the shudder that ran
over her frame. The despair in her voice, though she only pronounced in answer to him the
simple words, "There was one"--and then ceased, unable to proceed--penetrated coldly to
his heart. "Is he not at hand?" he hurriedly resumed. "Why is he not here? Let us seek him
without delay. I must humble myself before him, in my gratitude. I must show him that I
was worthy that my Antonina should be restored."

"He is dead!" she gasped, sinking down in the arms that embraced her, as the recollections
of the past night again crowded in all their horror on her memory. "They murdered him by
my side.--Oh, father, father! he loved me; he would have reverenced and protected you!"

"May the merciful God receive him among the blessed angels, and honor him among the
holy martyrs!" cried the father, raising his tearful eyes in supplication. "May his spirit, if it
can still be observant of the things of earth, know that his name shall be written on my heart
with the name of my child; that I will think on him as on a beloved companion, and mourn
for him as for a son that has been taken from me!"

He ceased, and looked down on Antonina, whose features were still hidden from him. Each
felt that a new bond of mutual affection had been created between them by what each had
spoken, but both now remained silent.

During this interval, the thoughts of Numerian wandered from the reflections which had
hitherto occupied him. The few mournful words which his daughter had spoken had been
sufficient to banish its fullness of joy from his heart, and to turn him from the happy
contemplation of the present to the dark recollections of the past. Vague doubts and fears
now mingled with his gratitude and hope; and involuntarily his thoughts reverted to what he
would fain have forgotten forever--to the morning when he had driven Antonina from her
home.

Baseless apprehensions of the return of the treacherous pagan and his profligate employer,
with the return of their victim--despairing convictions of his own helplessness and infirmity,
rose startlingly in his mind. His eyes wandered vacantly round the room, his hands closed
trembling over his daughter's form; then, suddenly releasing her, he arose as one panic-
stricken, and exclaiming, "The doors must be secured!--Ulpius may be near--the senator
may return!" endeavored to cross the room. But his strength was unequal to the effort; he
leaned back for support against the wall, and breathlessly repeating: "Secure the doors!--
Ulpius, Ulpius!" he motioned to Antonina to descend.

She trembled as she obeyed him. Remembering her passage through the breach in the wall,
and her fearful journey through the streets of Rome, she more than shared her father's
apprehensions as she descended the stairs.

The door remained half open, as she had left it when she entered the house. Ere she
hurriedly closed and barred it, she cast a momentary glance on the street beyond. The gaunt
figures of the slaves still moved wearily to and fro amid the mockery of festal preparation in
Vetranio's palace, and here and there a few ghastly figures lay on the ground contemplating
them in languid amazement. Over all other parts of the street the deadly tranquillity of
plague and famine still prevailed.

Hurriedly ascending the steps, Antonina hastened to assure her father that she had obeyed
his commands, and that they were now secure from all intrusion from without. But, during
her brief absence a new and more ominous prospect of calamity had presented itself before
the old man's mind.

As she entered the room, she saw that he had returned to his couch, and that he was holding
before him the little wooden bowl which had contained his last supply of food, and which
was now empty. He addressed not a word to her when he heard her enter; his features were
rigid with horror and despair as he looked down on the empty bowl, he muttered vacantly,
"It was the last provision that remained, and it was I that exhausted it! The beasts of the
forests carry food to their young, and I have taken the last morsel from my child!"

In an instant the utter desolateness of their situation--forgotten in the first joy of their
meeting--forced itself with appalling vividness upon Antonina's mind. She endeavored to
speak of comfort and hope to her father; but the fearful realities of the famine in the city
now rose palpably before her, and suspended the vain words of solace on her lips. In the
midst of still populous Rome, within sight of those surrounding plains where the creative
sun ripened hour by hour the vegetation of the teeming earth, where field and granary
displayed profusely their abundant stores, the father and daughter now looked on each other,
as helpless to replace their exhausted provision of food as if they had been abandoned on the
raft of the shipwrecked in an unexplored sea, or banished to a lonely island, whose inland
products were withered by infected winds, and around whose arid shores ran such
destroying waters as seethe over the "Cities of the Plain."

The silence which had long prevailed in the room, the bitter reflections which still held the
despairing father and the patient daughter speechless alike, were at length interrupted by a
hollow and melancholy voice from the street, pronouncing, in the form of a public notice,
these words:

"I, Publius Dalmatius, messenger of the Roman Senate, proclaim, that in order to clear the
streets from the dead, three thousand sestertii will be given by the Prefect for every ten
bodies that are cast over the walls. This is the true decree of the Senate."

The voice ceased; but no sound of applause, no murmur of popular tumult was heard in
answer. Then, after an interval, it was once more faintly audible as the messenger passed on
and repeated the decree in another street; and then the silence again sunk down over all
things more awfully pervading than before.

Every word of the proclamation, when repeated in the distance, as when spoken under his
window, had reached Numerian's ears. His mind, already sinking in despair, was riveted on
what he had heard from the woe-boding voice of the herald, with a fascination as absorbing
as that which rivets the eye of the traveler, already giddy on the summit of a precipice, upon
the spectacle of the yawning gulfs beneath. When all sound of the proclamation had finally
died away, the unhappy father dropped the empty bowl which he had hitherto mechanically
continued to hold before him, and glancing affrightedly at his daughter, groaned to himself:
"The corpses are to be cast over the walls; the dead are to be flung forth to the winds of
heaven!--there is no help for us in the city. Oh, God, God!--she may die!--her body may be
cast away like the rest, and I may live to see it!"

He rose suddenly from the couch; his reason seemed for a moment to be shaken as he
tottered to the window, crying "Food! food!--I will give my house and all it contains for a
morsel of food--I have nothing to support my own child--she will starve before me by to-
morrow if I have no food! I am a citizen of Rome--I demand help from the Senate! Food!
food!"

In tones declining lower and lower he continued to cry thus from the window, but no voice
answered him either in sympathy or derision. Of all the people--now increased in numbers--
collected in the street before Vetranio's palace, not one turned even to look on him. For days
and days past such fruitless appeals as his had been heard, and heard unconcernedly at every
hour and in every street of Rome--now ringing through the heavy air in the shrieks of
delirium, now faintly audible in the last faltering murmurs of exhaustion and despair.

Thus vainly entreating help and pity from a populace who had ceased to give the one or to
feel the other, Numerian might long have remained; hut now his daughter approached his
side, and drawing him gently toward his couch, said in tender and solemn accents,
"Remember, father, that God sent the ravens to feed Elijah, and replenish the widow's cruse!
He will not desert us, for he has restored us to each other; and has sent me hither not to
perish in the famine, but to watch over you!"

"God has deserted the city and all that it contains!" he answered, distractedly. "The angel of
destruction has gone forth into our streets, and Death walks in his shadow! On this day,
when hope and happiness seemed opening before us both, our little household has been
doomed! The young and the old, the weary and the watchful, they strew the streets alike--
the famine has mastered them all--the famine will master us--there is no help, no escape! I,
who would have died patiently for my daughter's safety, must now die despairingly, leaving
her friendless in the wide, dreary, perilous world; in the dismal city of anguish, of horror, of
death--where the enemy threatens without, and hunger and pestilence waste within! Oh,
Antonina! you have returned to me but for a little time; the day of our second separation
draws near!"

For a few moments his head drooped and his sobs choked his utterance; then he once more
rose painfully to his feet. Heedless of Antonina's entreaties, he again endeavored to cross the
room, only again to find his feeble powers unequal to sustain him. As he fell back panting
upon a seat, his eyes assumed a wild, unnatural expression--despair of mind and weakness
of body had together partially unhinged his faculties. When his daughter affrightedly
approached to soothe and succor him, he impatiently waved her back; and began to speak in
a dull, hoarse, monotonous voice, pressing his hand firmly over his brow, and directing his
eyes backward and forward incessantly, on object after object, in every part of the room.

"Listen, child, listen!" he hastily began; "I tell you there is no food in the house, and no food
in Rome!--we are besieged--they have taken from us our granaries in the suburbs and our
fields on the plains--there is a great famine in the city--those who still eat, eat strange food
which men sicken at when it is named. I would seek even this, but I have no strength to go
forth into the by-ways and force it from others at the point of the sword! I am old and
feeble, and heart-broken--I shall die first, and leave fatherless my good, kind daughter,
whom I sought for so long, and whom I loved as my only child!"

He paused for an instant--not to listen to the words of encouragement and hope which
Antonina mechanically addressed to him while he spoke, but to collect his wandering
thoughts, to rally his failing strength. His voice acquired a quicker tone, and his features
presented a sudden energy and earnestness of expression, as if some new project had flashed
across his mind, when, after an interval, he continued thus:

"But though my child shall be bereaved of me, though I shall die in the hour when I most
longed to live for her, I must not leave her helpless; I will send her among my congregation
who have deserted me, but who will repent when they hear that I am dead, and will receive
Antonina among them for my sake. Listen to this--listen, listen! You must tell them to
remember all that I once revealed to them of my brother, from whom I parted in my
boyhood--my brother, whom I have never seen since: he may yet be alive, he may be found;
they must search for him--for to you, he would be father to the fatherless and guardian to the
unguarded: he may now be in Rome, he may be rich and powerful--he may have food to
spare, and shelter that is good against all enemies and strangers! Attend, child, to my words:
in these latter days I have thought of him much; I have seen him in dreams as I saw him for
the last time in my father's house; he was happier and more beloved than I was; and in envy
and hatred I quitted my parents and parted from him. You have heard nothing of this; but
you must hear it now; that when I am dead you may know you have a protector to seek! So I
received in anger my brother's farewell, and fled from my home--(those days were well
remembered by me once, but all things grow dull on my memory now)--long years of
turmoil and change passed on, and I never met him; and men of many nations were my
companions, but he was not among them; then much affliction fell upon me, and I repented
and learned the fear of God, and went back to my father's house. Since that, years have
passed--I know not how many; I could have told them when I spoke of my former life to
him; to my friend, when we stood near St. Peter's, ere the city was besieged, looking on the
sunset, and speaking of the early days of our companionship; but now my very
remembrance fails me; the famine that threatens us with separation and death, casts
darkness over my thoughts; yet hear me, hear me patiently--for your sake I must continue!"

"Not now, father--not now! At another time, on a happier day! " murmured Antonina, in
tremulous, entreating tones.

"My home, when I arrived to look on it, was gone," pursued the old man, sadly, neither
heeding nor hearing her. "Other houses were built where my father's house had stood; no
man, could tell me of my parents and my brother; then I returned, and my former
companions grew hateful in my eyes; I left them, and they followed me with persecution
and scorn. Listen, listen I--I set forth secretly in the night, with you, to escape them; and to
make perfect my reformation where they should not be near to hinder it; and we traveled
onward many days until we came to Rome, and I made my abode there. But I feared that my
companions whom I abhorred might discover and persecute me again; and in the new city of
my dwelling I called myself by another name than the name that I bore; thus I knew that all
trace of me would be lost, and that I should be kept secure from men whom I thought on
only as enemies now. Go, child!--go quickly!--bring your tablets and write down the names
that I shall tell you; for so you will discover your protector when I am gone! Say not to him
that you are the child of Numerian--he knows not the name; say that you are the daughter of
Cleander, his brother, who died longing to be restored to him--write! write carefully,
Cleander!--that was the name my father gave to me, that was the name I bore until I fled
from my evil companions and changed it, dreading their pursuit! Cleander! write and
remember, Cleander! I have seen in visions that my brother shall be discovered: he will not
be discovered to me, but he will be discovered to you! Your tablets--your tablets! write his
name with mine--it is--"

He stopped abruptly. His mental powers, fluctuating between torpor and animation--shaken,
but not overpowered by the trials which had assailed them--suddenly rallied, and resuming
somewhat of their accustomed balance, became a wakened to a sense of their own
aberration. His vague revelations of his past life (which the reader will recognize as
resembling his communications on the same subject to the fugitive landowner, previously
related) now appeared before him in all their incongruity and uselessness. His countenance
fell--he sighed bitterly to himself: "My reason begins to desert me!--my judgment, which
should guide my child--my resolution, which should uphold her, both fail me! How should
my brother, since boyhood lost to me, be found by her? Against the famine that threatens us,
I offer but vain words!--already her strength declines: her face, that I loved to look on,
grows wan before my eyes! God have mercy upon us! God have mercy upon us!"

He returned feebly to his couch, his head declined on his bosom; sometimes a low groan
burst from his lips, but he spoke no more.

Deep as was the prostration under which he had now fallen, it was yet less painful to
Antonina to behold it than to listen to the incoherent revelations which had fallen from his
lips but the moment before, and which, in her astonishment and affright. she had dreaded
might be the awful indications of the overthrow of her father's reason. As she again placed
herself by his side, she trembled to feel that her own weariness was fast overpowering her;
but she still struggled with her rising despair--still strove to think only of capacity for
endurance and chances of relief.

The silence in the room was deep and dismal, while they now sat together. The faint
breezes, at long intervals, drowsily rose and fell, as they floated through the open window;
the fitful sunbeams alternately appeared and vanished, as the clouds rolled upward in airy
succession over the face of heaven. Time moved sternly in its destined progress, and Nature
varied tranquilly through its appointed limits of change, and still no hopes, no saving
projects, nothing but dark recollections and woful anticipations occupied Antonina's mind--
when, just as her weary head was drooping toward the ground--just as sensation and
fortitude and grief itself seemed declining into a dreamless and deadly sleep--a last thought,
void of discernible connection or cause, rose suddenly within her, animating, awakening,
inspiring. She started up. "The garden, father--the garden!" she cried, breathlessly.
"Remember the food that grows in our garden below! be comforted, we have provision left
yet--God has not deserted us!"

He raised his face while she spoke; his features assumed a deeper mournfulness and
hopelessness of expression; he looked upon her in ominous silence, and laid his trembling
fingers on her arm to detain her, when she hurriedly attempted to quit the room.

"Do not forbid me to depart," she anxiously pleaded. "To me every corner in the garden is
known, for it was my possession in our happier days; our last hopes rest on the garden, and I
must search through it without delay! Bear with me," she added, in low and melancholy
tones, "bear with me, dear father, in all that I would now do! I have suffered, since we
parted, a bitter affliction, which clings dark and heavy to all my thoughts; there is no
consolation for me but the privilege of caring for your welfare--my only hope of comfort is
in the employment of aiding you!"

The old man's hand had pressed heavier on her arm, while she addressed him; but when she
ceased, it dropped from her, and he bent his head in speechless submission to her entreaty.
For one moment she lingered, looking on him silent as himself; the next, she left the
apartment with hasty and uncertain steps.

On reaching the garden, she unconsciously took the path leading to the bank where she had
once loved to play secretly upon her lute, and to look on the distant mountains reposing in
the warm atmosphere which summer evenings shed over their blue expanse. How eloquent
was this little plot of ground of the quiet events now forever gone by--of the joys, the hopes,
the happy occupations, which rise with the day that chronicles them, and pass like that day
never to return the same--which the memory alone can preserve as they were; and the heart
can never resume but in a changed form, divested of the presence of the companion, of the
incident of the departed moment, which formed the charm of the past and makes the
imperfection of the present!

Tender and thronging were the remembrances which the surrounding prospect called up, as
the sad mistress of the garden looked again on her little domain! She saw the bank where
she could never more sit to sing with a renewal of the same feelings which had once
inspired her music--she saw the drooping flowers that she could never restore with the same
child-like enjoyment of the task which had animated her in former hours! Young though she
still was, the emotions of the youthful days that were gone could never be revived as they
had once existed! As waters they had welled up, and as waters they had flowed forth, never
to return to their source! Thoughts of these former years--of the young warrior who lay cold
beneath the heavy earth--of the desponding father who mourned hopeless in the room
above--gathered thick at her heart, as she turned from her flower-beds--not, as in other days,
to pour forth her happiness to the music of her lute, but to search laboriously for the
sustenance of life.

At first, as she stooped over those places in the garden where she knew that fruits and
vegetables had been planted by her own hand, her tears blinded her; she hastily dashed them
away, and looked eagerly around.

Alas, others had reaped the field from which she had hoped abundance! In the early days of
the famine, Numerian's congregation had entered the garden, and gathered for him whatever
it contained; its choicest and its homeliest products were alike exhausted; withered leaves
lay on the barren earth, and naked branches waved over them in the air. She wandered from
path to path, searching amid the briers and thistles, which already cast an aspect of ruin over
the deserted place; she explored its most hidden corners with the painful perseverance of
despair; but the same barrenness spread around her wherever she turned. On this once fertile
spot, which she had entered with such joyful faith in its resources, there remained but a few
decayed roots, dropped and forgotten amid tangled weeds and faded flowers.

She saw that they were barely sufficient for one scanty meal, as she collected them, and
returned slowly to the house. No words escaped her, no tears flowed over her checks, when
she reascended the steps--hope, fear, thought, sensation itself, had been stunned within her,
from the first moment when she had discovered that, in the garden as in the house, the
inexorable famine had anticipated the last chances of relief.

She entered the room, and still holding the withered roots, advanced mechanically to her
father's side. During her absence, his mental and bodily faculties had both yielded to
wearied nature--he lay in a deep, heavy sleep.

Her mind experienced a faint relief when she saw that the fatal necessity of confessing the
futility of the hopes she had herself awakened was spared her for a while. She knelt down
by Numerian, and gently smoothed the hair over brow; then she drew the curtain across the
window, for she feared even that the breeze blowing through it might arouse him. A strange,
secret satisfaction at the idea of devoting to her father every moment of the time and every
particle of the strength that might yet be reserved for her--a ready resignation to death, in
dying for him--overspread her heart, and took the place of all other aspirations and all other
thoughts.

She now moved to and fro through the room, with a cautious tranquillity which nothing
could startle; she prepared her decayed roots for food, with a patient attention which nothing
could divert. Lost, through the aggravated miseries of her position, to recent grief and
present apprehension, she could still instinctively perform the simple offices of the woman
and the daughter, as she might have performed them amid a peaceful nation and a
prosperous home. Thus do the first-born affections outlast the exhaustion of all the stormy
emotions, all the aspiring thoughts of after years, which may occupy, but which cannot
absorb, the spirit within us; thus does their friendly and familiar voice, when the clamor of
contending passions has died away in its own fury, speak again, serene, and sustaining as in
the early time, when the mind moved secure within the limits of its native simplicity, and
the heart yet lay happy in the pure tranquillity of its first repose!

The last scanty measure of food was soon prepared; it was bitter and unpalatable when she
tasted it--life could barely be preserved, even in the most vigorous, by provision so
wretched--but she set it aside as carefully as if it had been the most precious luxury of the
most abundant feast.

Nothing had changed during the interval of solitary employment--her father yet slept; the
gloomy silence yet prevailed in the street. She placed herself at the window, and partially
drew aside the curtain to let the warm breezes from without blow over her cold brow. The
same ineffable resignation, the same unnatural quietude, which had sunk down over her
faculties since she had entered the room, overspread them still. Surrounding objects failed to
impress her attention; recollections and forebodings stagnated in her mind. A marble
composure prevailed over her features; sometimes her eyes wandered mechanically from the
morsels of food by her side to her sleeping father, as her one vacant idea of watching for his
service, till the feeble pulses of life had throbbed their last, alternately revived and declined;
but no other evidences of bodily existence or mental activity appeared in her. As she now
sat in the half--darkened room, by the couch on which her father reposed--her features pale,
calm, and rigid, her form enveloped in cold white drapery--there were moments when she
looked like one of the penitential devotees of the primitive Church appointed to watch in the
house of mourning, and surprised on her saintly vigil by the advent of death.

Time flowed on--the monotonous hours of the day waned again toward night; and plague
and famine told their lapse in the fated highways of Rome. For father and child the sand in
the glass was fast running out; and neither marked it as it diminished. The sleeper still
reposed, and the guardian by his side still watched; but now her weary gaze was directed on
the street, unconsciously attracted by the sound of voices, which at length rose from it at
intervals, and by the light of torches and lamps, which appeared in the great palace of the
senator Vetranio, as the sun gradually declined in the horizon, and the fiery clouds around
were quenched in the vapors of the advancing night. Steadily she looked upon the sight
beneath and before her; but, even yet, her limbs never moved; no expression relieved the
blank, solemn peacefulness of her features.

Meanwhile, the soft, brief twilight glimmered over the earth, and showed the cold moon,
poised solitary in the starless heaven--then the stealthy darkness arose at her pale signal, and
closed slowly round the City of Death!
Chapter XXII.
The Banquet Of Famine.

OF all prophecies none are, perhaps, so frequently erroneous as those on which we are most
apt to venture, in endeavoring to foretell the effect of outward events on the characters of
men. In no form of our anticipations are we more frequently baffled than in such attempts to
estimate beforehand the influence of circumstance over conduct, not only in others, but also
even in ourselves. Let the event but happen, and men, whom we view by the light of our
previous observation of them, act under it as the living contradictions of their own
characters. The friend of our daily social intercourse, in the progress of life, and the favorite
hero of our historic studies, in the progress of the page, astonish, exceed, or disappoint our
expectations alike. We find it as vain to foresee a cause, as to fix a limit, for the arbitrary
inconsistencies in the dispositions of mankind.

But though to speculate upon the future conduct of others under impending circumstances
be but too often to expose the fallacy of our wisest anticipations, to contemplate the nature
of that conduct after it has been displayed is a useful subject of curiosity, and may perhaps
be made a fruitful source of instruction. Similar events which succeed each other at different
periods are relieved from monotony, and derive new importance, from the ever-varying
effects which they produce on the human character. Thus, in the great occurrence which
forms the foundation of our narrative, we may find little in the siege of Rome, looking at it
as a mere event, to distinguish it remarkably from any former siege of the city--the same
desire for glory and vengeance, wealth and dominion, which brought Alaric to her walls,
brought other invaders before him. But if we observe the effect of the Gothic descent upon
Italy on the inhabitants of her capital, we shall find ample matter for novel contemplation
and unbounded surprise.

We shall perceive, as an astonishing instance of the inconsistencies of the human character,

the spectacle of a whole people resolutely defying an overwhelming foreign invasion at their
very doors, just at the period when they had fallen most irremediably from the highest
position of national glory to the lowest depths of national degradation; resisting an all-
powerful enemy with inflexible obstinacy, for the honor of the Roman name, which they
had basely dishonored or carelessly forgotten for ages past. We shall behold men, who have
hitherto laughed at the very name of patriotism, now starving resolutely in their country's
cause; who stopped at no villainy to obtain wealth, now hesitating to employ their ill-gotten
gains in the purchase of the most important of all gratifications--their own security and
peace. Instances of the unimaginable effect produced by the event of the siege of Rome on
the characters of her inhabitants might be drawn from all classes, from the lowest to the
highest, from patrician to plebeian; but to produce them here would be to admit too long an
interruption in the progress of the present narrative. If we are to enter at all into detail on
such a subject, it must be only in a case clearly connected with the actual requirements of
our story; and such a case may be found, at this juncture, in the conduct of the senator
Vetranio, under the influence of the worst calamities attending the blockade of Rome by the
Goths.

Who, it may be asked, knowing the previous character of this man, his frivolity of
disposition, his voluptuous anxiety for unremitting enjoyment and ease, his horror of the
slightest approaches of affliction or pain, would have imagined him capable of rejecting in
disdain all the minor chances of present security and future prosperity which his unbounded
power and wealth might have procured for him, even in a famine-stricken city, and rising
suddenly to the sublime of criminal desperation, in the resolution to abandon life as
worthless the moment it had ceased to run in the easy current of all former years? Yet to this
determination had he now arrived; and still more extraordinary, in this determination had he
found others, of his own patrician order, to join him.

The reader will remember his wild announcement of his intended orgy to the Prefect
Pompeianus, during the earlier periods of the siege; that announcement was now to be
fulfilled. Vetranio had bidden his guests to the Banquet of Famine. A chosen number of the
senators of the great city were to vindicate their daring by dying the revelers that they had
lived; by resigning in contempt all prospect of starving, like the common herd, on a
lessening daily pittance of loathsome food; by making their triumphant exit from a fettered
and ungrateful life, drowned in floods of wine, and lighted by the fires of the wealthiest
palace of Rome!

It had been intended to keep this frantic determination a profound secret, to let the mighty
catastrophe burst upon the remaining inhabitants of the city like a prodigy from heaven; but
the slaves intrusted with the organization of the suicide banquet had been bribed to their
tasks with wine, and in the carelessness of intoxication had revealed to others whatever they
heard within the palace walls. The news passed from mouth to mouth. There was enough in
the prospect of beholding the burning palace and the drunken suicide of its desperate guests,
to animate even the stagnant curiosity of a famishing mob.

On the appointed evening the people dragged their weary limbs from all quarters of the city
toward the Pincian Hill. Many of them died on the way; many lost their resolution to
proceed to the end of their journey, and took shelter sullenly in the empty houses on the
road; many found opportunities for plunder and crime as they proceeded, which tempted
them from their destination; but many persevered in their purpose, the living dragging the
dying along with them, the desperate driving the cowardly before them in malignant sport,
until they gained the palace gates. It was by their voices, as they reached her ear from the
street, that the fast-sinking faculties of Antonina had been startled, though not revived; and
there, on the broad pavement, lay these citizens of a falling city; a congregation of
pestilence and crime--a starving and an awful band!

The moon, brightened by the increasing darkness, now clearly illuminated the street, and
revealed, in a narrow space, a various and impressive scene.

One side of the roadway in which stood Vetranio's palace was occupied along each
extremity, as far as the eye could reach at night, by the groves and outbuildings attached to
the senator's mansion. The palace grounds, at the higher and further end of the street--
looking from the Pincian Gate--crossed it by a wide archway, and then stretched backward,
until they joined the trees of the little garden of Numerian's abode. In a line with this house,
but separated from it by a short space, stood a long row of buildings, let out floor by floor to
separate occupants, and towering to an unwieldy altitude--for in Ancient Rome, as in
Modern London, in consequence of the high price of land in an overpopulated city, builders
could only secure space in a dwelling by adding inconveniently to its height. Beyond these
habitations rose the trees surrounding another patrician abode, and beyond that the houses
took a sudden turn, and nothing more was visible in a straight line but the dusky, indefinite
objects of the distant view.

The whole appearance of the street before Vetranio's mansion, had it been unoccupied by
the repulsive groups now formed in it, would have been eminently beautiful, at the hour of
which we now write. The nobly symmetrical frontage of the palace itself, with its graceful
succession of long porticoes and colossal statues, contrasted by the picturesquely irregular
appearance of the opposite dwelling of Numerian and the lofty houses by its side; the soft,
indistinct masses of foliage, running parallel along the upper ends of the street, terminated
and connected by the archway garden across the road, on which planted a group of tall pine-
trees, rising in gigantic relief against the transparent sky; the brilliant light streaming across
the pavement from Vetranio's gayly-curtained windows, immediately opposed by the
tranquil moonlight which lit the more distant view--formed altogether a prospect in which
the natural and the artificial were mingled together in the most exquisite proportions--a
prospect whose ineffable poetry and beauty might, on any other night, have charmed the
most careless eye and exalted the most frivolous mind. But now, overspread as it was by
groups of people, gaunt with famine and hideous with disease; startled as it was, at gloomy
intervals, by contending cries of supplication, defiance, and despair, its brightest beauties of
Nature and Art appeared but to shine with an aspect of bitter mockery around the human
misery which their splendor disclosed.

Upward of a hundred people--mostly of the lowest orders--were congregated before the

senator's devoted dwelling. Some few among them passed slowly to and fro in the street,
their figures gliding shadowy and solemn through the light around them; but the greater
number lay on the pavement before the wall of Numerian's dwelling and the doorways of
the lofty houses by its side. Illuminated by the full glare of the light from the palace
windows, these groups, huddled together in the distorted attitudes of suffering and despair,
assumed a fearful and unearthly appearance. Their shriveled faces, their tattered clothing,
their wan forms, here prostrate, there half raised, were bathed in a steady red glow. High
above them, at the windows of the tall houses, now tenanted in every floor by the dead,
appeared a few figures (the mercenary guardians of the dying within) bending forward to
look out upon the palace opposite--their haggard faces showing pale in the clear moonlight.
Sometimes their voices were heard, calling in mockery to the mass of people below to break
down the strong steel gates of the palace, and tear the full wine-cup from its master's lips.
Sometimes those beneath replied with execrations, which rose wildly mingled with the
wailing of women and children, the moans of the plague-stricken, and the supplications of
the famished, to the slaves passing backward and forward behind the palace railings, for
charity and help.

In the intervals, when the tumult of weak voices was partially lulled, there was heard a dull,
regular, beating sound, produced by those who had found dry bones on their road to the
palace, and were pounding them on the pavement, in sheltered places, for food. The wind,
which had been refreshing during the day, had changed at sunset, and now swept up slowly
over the street, in hot, faint gusts, plague-laden from the east. Particles of the ragged
clothing on some prostrate forms lying most exposed in its course, waved slowly to and fro,
as it passed, like banners planted by Death on the yielding defenses of the citadel of Life. It
wound through the open windows of the palace, hot and mephitic, as if tainted with the
breath of the foul and furious words which it bore onward into the banqueting-hall of the
senator's reckless guests. Driven over such scenes as now spread beneath it, it derived from
them a portentous significance--it seemed to blow like an atmosphere exuded from the
furnace depths of center earth, breathing sinister warnings of some deadly convulsion in the
whole fabric of Nature over the thronged and dismal street.

Such was the prospect before the palace, and such the spectators assembled in ferocious
anxiety to behold the destruction of the senator's abode. Meanwhile, within the walls of the
building, the beginning of the fatal orgy was at hand.

It had been covenanted by the slaves (who, during the calamities in the besieged city, had
relaxed in their accustomed implicit obedience to their master with perfect impunity), that as
soon as the last labors of preparation were completed, they should be free to consult their
own safety by quitting the devoted palace. Already some of the weakest and most timid of
their numbers might be seen passing out hastily into the gardens by the back gates, like
engineers who had fired a train, and were escaping ere the explosion burst forth. Those
among the menials who still remained in the palace were for the greater part occupied in
drinking from the vases of wine which had been placed before them, to preserve to the last
moment their failing strength.
The mockery of festivity had been extended even to their dresses--green liveries girt with
cherry-colored girdles arrayed their wasted forms. They drank in utter silence. Not the
slightest appearance of revelry or intoxication prevailed among their ranks. Confusedly
huddled together, as if for mutual protection, they ever and anon cast quick glances of
suspicion and apprehension upon some six or eight of the superior attendants of the palace,
who walked backward and forward at the outer extremity of the hall occupied by their
comrades, and occasionally advancing along the straight passages before them to the front
gates of the building, appeared to be exchanging furtive signals with some of the people in
the street. Reports had been vaguely spread of a secret conspiracy between some of the
principal slaves and certain chosen ruffians of the populace, to murder all the inmates of the
palace, seize on its treasures, and, opening the city gates to the Goths, escape with their
booty during the confusion of the pillage of Rome. Nothing had as yet been positively
discovered; but the few attendants who kept ominously apart from the rest were
unanimously suspected by their fellows, who now watched them over their wine-cups with
anxious eyes. Different as was the scene among the slaves still left in the palace from the
scene among the people dispersed in the street, the one was nevertheless in its own degree
as gloomily suggestive of some great impending calamity as the other.

The grand banqueting-hall of the palace, prepared though it now was for festivity, wore a
changed and melancholy aspect.

The massive tables still ran down the whole length of the noble room, surrounded by
luxurious couches, as in former days; but not a vestige of food appeared upon their glittering
surfaces. Rich vases, flasks, and drinking-cups, all filled with wine, alone occupied the
festal board. Above, hanging low from the ceiling, burned ten large lamps, corresponding to
the number of guests assembled, as the only procurable representatives of the hundreds of
revelers who had feasted at Vetranio's expense, during the brilliant nights that were now
passed forever. At the lower end of the room, beyond the grand door of entrance, hung a
thick black curtain, apparently intended to conceal, mysteriously, some object behind it.
Before the curtain burned a small lamp of yellow glass, raised upon a high gilt pole, and
around and beneath it, heaped against the side walls, and over part of the table, lay a various
and confused mass of rich objects, all of a nature more or less inflammable, and all
besprinkled with scented oils. Hundreds of yards of gorgeously variegated hangings, rolls
upon rolls of manuscripts, gaudy dresses of all colors, toys, utensils, innumerable articles of
furniture, formed in rare and beautifully inlaid woods, were carelessly flung together against
the walls of the apartment, and rose high toward its ceiling.

On every part of the tables not occupied by the vases of wine were laid gold and jeweled
ornaments, which dazzled the eye by their brilliancy; while, in extraordinary contrast to the
magnificence thus profusely displayed, there appeared in one of the upper corners of the hall
an old wooden stand, covered by a coarse cloth, on which were placed one or two common
earthenware bowls, containing what may be termed a "mash" of boiled bran and salted horse
flesh. Any repulsive odor which might have arisen from this strange compound was
overpowered by the various perfumes sprinkled about the room, which, mingling with the
hot breezes wafted through the windows from the street, produced an atmosphere as
oppressive and debilitating, in spite of its artificial allurements to the sense of smell, as the
air of a dungeon or the vapors of a marsh.

Remarkable as was the change in the present appearance of the banqueting-hall, it was but
the feeble reflection of the alteration for the worse in the aspect of the host and his guests.
Vetranio reclined at the head of the table, dressed in a scarlet mantle. An embroidered
towel, with purple tassels and fringes, connected with rings of gold, fell over his breast, and
silver and ivory bracelets were clasped round his arms. But of the former man the
habiliments were all that remained. His head was bent forward as if with the weakness of
age; his emaciated arms seemed barely able to support the weight of the ornaments which
glittered on them; his eyes had contracted a wild, unsettled expression; and a deadly
paleness overspread the once plump and jovial cheeks which so many mistresses had kissed,
in mercenary rapture, in other days. Both in countenance and manner the elegant voluptuary
of our former acquaintance at the Court of Ravenna was entirely and fatally changed. Of the
other eight patricians who lay on the couches around their altered host--some wild and
reckless, some gloomy and imbecile--all had suffered in the ordeal of the siege, the famine,
and the pestilence, like him.

Such were the members of the assemblage, represented from the ceiling by nine of the
burning lamps. The tenth and last lamp indicated the presence of one more guest, who
reclined a little apart from the rest.

This man was humpbacked; his gaunt, bony features were repulsively disproportioned in
size to his puny frame, which looked doubly contemptible, enveloped as it was in an ample
tawdry robe. Sprung from the lowest ranks of the populace, he had gradually forced himself
into the favor of his superiors by his skill in coarse mimicry, and his readiness in ministering
to the worst vices of all who would employ him. Having lost the greater part of his patrons
during the siege, finding himself abandoned to starvation on all sides, he had now, as a last
resource, obtained permission to participate in the Banquet of Famine, to enliven it by a
final exhibition of his buffoonery, and to die with his masters, as he had lived with them--
the slave, the parasite, and the imitator of the lowest of their vices and the worst of their
crimes.

At the commencement of the orgy, little was audible beyond the clash of the wine-cups, the
low occasional whispering of the revelers, and the confused voices of the people without,
floating through the window from the street. The desperate compact of the guests, now that
its execution had actually begun, awed them at first, in spite of themselves. At length, when
 there was a lull of all sounds--when a temporary calm prevailed ever the noises outside--
when the wine-cups were emptied, and left for a moment ere they were filled again--
Vetranio feebly rose, and, announcing with a mocking smile that he was about to speak a
funeral oration over his friends and himself, pointed to the wall immediately behind him, as
to an object fitted to awaken the astonishment or the hilarity of his moody guests.

Against the upper part of the wall were fixed various small statues in bronze and marble, all
representing the owner of the palace, and all hung with golden plates. Beneath these
appeared the rent-roll of his estates, written in various colors, on white vellum; and beneath
that, scratched on the marble in faint, irregular characters, was no less an object than his
own epitaph, composed by himself. It may be translated thus:

Stop, Spectator!
If thou hast reverently cultivated the pleasures of the taste, pause amid
these illustrious ruins of what was once a palace;
and peruse with respect, on this stone, the epitaph of
VETRANTO, a senator.
He was the first man who invented a successful Nightingale Sauce;
his bold and creative genius added much, and would have added more, to
THE ART OF COOKERY;
but, alas for the interests of science! he lived in the days when the Gothic
barbarians besieged
THE IMPERIAL CITY;
famine left him no matter for gustatory experiment;
and pestilence deprived him of cooks to enlighten!
Opposed at all points by the force of adverse circum- stances, finding his
life of no further use to the culinary interests of Rome,
he called his chosen friends together to assist him,
conscientiously drank up every drop of wine remaining in his cellars,
lit the funeral pile of himself and his guests in the banqueting-hall of his
own palace and died, as he had lived,
the patriotic CATO of his country's gastronomy!

"Behold"--cried Vetranio, pointing triumphantly to the epitaph--"behold in every line of

those eloquent letters at once the seal of my resolute adherence to the engagement that
unites us here, and the foundation of my just claim to the reverence of posterity on the most
useful of the arts which I exercised for the benefit of my species! Read--friends, brethren,
fellow-martyrs of glory--and, as you read, rejoice with me over the hour of our departure
from the desecrated arena, no longer worthy the celebration of the Games of Life! Yet, ere
the feast proceeds, hear me while I speak--I make my last oration, as the arbiter of our
funeral sports, as the host of the Banquet of Famine!

"Who would sink ignobly beneath the slow superiority of starvation, or perish under the
quickly-glancing steel of the barbarian conqueror's sword, when such a death as ours is
offered to the choice?--when wine flows bright, to drown sensation in oblivion, and a palace
and its treasures furnish alike the scene of the revel and the radiant funeral pile? The mighty
philosophers of India--the inspired Gymnosophists--died as we shall din! Calanus before
Alexander, Zamarus in the presence of Augustus, lit the fires that consumed them! Let us
follow their glorious example! No worms will prey upon our bodies, no hired mourners will
howl discordant at our funerals! Purified in the radiance of primeval fire, we shall vanish
triumphant from enemies and friends--a marvel to the earth, a vision of glory to the gods
themselves!

"Is it a day more or a day less of life that is now of importance to us? No; it is only toward
the easiest and the noblest death that our aspirations can turn! Among our number, there is
now not one whom the care of existence can further occupy!

"Here, at my right hand, reclines my estimable comrade of a thousand former feasts, Furius-
Balburius-Placidus, who, when we sailed on the Lucrine Lake, was wont to complain of
intolerable hardship if a fly settled on the gilded folds of his umbrella; who languished for a
land of Cimmerian darkness if a sunbeam penetrated the silken awnings of his garden
terrace; and who now wrangles for a mouthful of horseflesh with the meanest of his slaves,
and would exchange the richest of his country villas for a basket of dirty bread! Oh, Furius-
Balburius-Placidus, of what further use is life to thee?

"There, at my left, I discern the changed though still expressive countenance of the resolute
Thascius--he who chastised a slave with a hundred lashes if his warm water was not brought
immediately at his command; he whose serene contempt for every member of the human
species but himself once ranked him among the greatest of human philosophers; even he
now wanders through his palace unserved, and fawns upon the plebeian who will sell him a
measure of wretched bran! Oh, admired friend, oh, rightly-reasoning Thascius, say, is there
anything in Rome which should delay thee on thy journey to the Elysian Fields?

"Further onward at the table, drinking largely while I speak, I behold, oh, Marcus-Moecius-
Moemmius, thy once plump and jovial form!--thou, in former days accustomed to rejoice in
the length of thy name, because it enabled thy friends to drink the more in drinking a cup to
each letter of it, tell me what banqueting-hall is now open to thee but this?--and thus
desolate in the city of thy social triumphs, what should disincline thee to make of our festal
solemnity thy last revel on earth?
"Thou, too, facetious hunchback, prince of parasites, unscrupulous Reburrus, where, but at
this Banquet of Famine, will thy buffoonery now procure for thee a draught of reviving
wine? Thy masters have abandoned thee to thy native dunghill! No more shalt thou wheedle
for them when they borrow, or bully for them when they pay! No more charges of poisoning
or magic shalt thou forge to imprison their troublesome creditors! Oh, officious sycophant,
thy occupations are no more! Drink while thou canst, and then resign thy carcass to
congenial mire!

"And you, my five remaining friends, whom--little desirous of further delay--I will
collectively address, think on the days when the suspicion of an infectious malady in any
one of your companions was sufficient to separate you from the dearest of them; when the
slaves who came to you from their palaces underwent long ceremonies of ablution before
they approached your presence; and, remembering this, reflect that most, perhaps all of us,
now meet here plague-tainted already; and then say, of what ad vantage is it to languish for
a life which is yours no longer?

"No, my friends, my brethren of the banquet; feeling that when life is worthless it is folly to
live, you cannot shrink from the lofty resolution by which we are bound, you cannot pause
on our joyful journey of departure from the scenes of earth--I wrong you even by a doubt!
Let me now, rather, ask your attention for a worthier subject--the enumeration of the festal
ceremonies by which the progress of the banquet will be marked. That task concluded, that
last ceremony of my last welcome to you in these halls duly performed, I join you once
more in your final homage to the deity of our social lives--the god of Wine!

"It is not unknown to you--learned as you are in the jovial antiquities of the table--that it
was, among some of the ancients, a custom for a master-spirit of philosophy to preside---the
teacher as well as the guest--at their feasts. This usage it has been my care to revive; and, as
this our meeting is unparalleled in its heroic design, so it was my ambition to bid to it one
unparalleled, either as a teacher or a guest. Fired by an original idea, unobserved of my
slaves, aided only by my singing-boy, the faithful Glyco, I have succeeded in placing behind
that black curtain such an associate of our revels as you have never feasted with before--
whose appearance at the fitting moment must strike you irresistibly with astonishment; and
whose discourse--not of human wisdom only--will be inspired by the midnight secrets of the
tomb. By my side, on this parchment, lies the formulary of questions to be addressed by
Reburrus, when the curtain is withdrawn, to the Oracle of the Mysteries of other Spheres.

"Before you, behold in those vases all that remains of my once well-stocked cellars; and all
that is provided for the palates of my guests! We sit at the Banquet of Famine, and no
coarser sustenance than inspiring wine finds admittance at the Bacchanalian board. Yet,
should any among us, in his last moments, be feeble enough to pollute his lips with
nourishment alone worthy of the vermin of the earth, let him seek the wretched and scanty
table, type of the wretched and scanty food that covers it, placed yonder, in obscurity,
behind me. There will he find (in all, barely sufficient for one man's poorest meal) the last
morsels of the vilest nourishment left in the palace. For me, my resolution is fixed--it is only
the generous wine-cup that shall now approach my lips!

"Above me are the ten lamps, answering to the number of my friends here assembled. One
after another, as the wine overpowers us, those burning images of life will be extinguished
in succession by the guests who remain proof against our draughts; and the last of these,
lighting this torch at the last lamp, will consummate the banquet, and celebrate its glorious
close, by firing the funeral pile of my treasures, heaped yonder against my palace walls! If
my powers fail me before yours, swear to me that whoever among you is able to lift the cup
to his lips, after it has dropped from the hands of the rest, will fire the pile! Swear it by your
lost mistresses, your lost friends, your lost treasures!--by your own lives, devoted to the
pleasures of wine and the purification of fire!"

As, with flashing eyes and flushed countenance, Vetranio sank back on his couch,
companions, inflamed with the wine they had already drunk, arose, cup in hand, and turned
toward him. Their voices, discordantly mingled, pronounced the oath together--then, as they
resumed their former positions, their eyes all turned toward the black curtain in ardent
expectation.

They had observed the sinister and sarcastic expression of Vetranio's eye, as he spoke of his
concealed guest; they knew that the hunchback Reburrus possessed, among his other powers
of buffoonery, the art of ventriloquism; and they suspected the presence of some hideous or
grotesque image of a heathen god or demon in the hidden recess, which the jugglery of the
parasite was to gift with the capacity of speech. Blasphemous comments upon life, death
and immortality were eagerly awaited. The general impatience for the withdrawal of the
curtain was perceived by Vetranio, who, waving his hand for silence, authoritatively
exclaimed: "The hour has not yet arrived--more draughts must be drunk, more libations
poured out, ere the mystery of the curtain is revealed! Ho! Glyco!"--he continued, turning
toward the singing-boy, who had silently entered the room--"the moment is yours! Tune
your lyre, and recite my last ode, which I have addressed to you! Let the charms of poetry
preside over the feast of Death!"

The boy advanced trembling: his once ruddy face was colorless and haggard; his eyes were
fixed with a look of rigid terror on the black curtain; his features palpably expressed the
presence within him of some secret and overwhelming recollection, which had crushed all
his other faculties and perceptions. Steadily, almost guiltily, averting his face from his
master's countenance, he stood by Vetranio's couch, a frail and fallen being, a mournful
spectacle of perverted docility and degraded youth.
Still true, however, to the duties of his vocation, he ran his thin, trembling fingers over the
lyre, and mechanically preluded the commencement of the ode. But during the silence of
attention which now prevailed, the confused noises from the people in the street penetrated
more distinctly into the banqueting-room; and at this moment, high above them all--hoarse,
raving, terrible--rose the voice of one man.

"Tell me not," he cried, "of perfumes wafted from the palace--foul vapors flow from it!--see,
they sink, suffocating over me!--they bathe sky and earth, and men who move around us, in
fierce, green light!"

Then other voices of men and women, shrill and savage, broke forth in interruption
together--"Peace, Davus! you awake the dead about you!" "Hide in the darkness; you are
plague-struck; your skin is shriveled; your gums are toothless!" "When the palace is fired,
you shall be flung into the flames to purify your rotten carcass!"

"Sing!" cried Vetranio, furiously, observing the shudders that ran over the boy's frame and
held him speechless. "Strike the lyre, as Timothetis struck it before Alexander! Drown in
melody the barking of the curs who wait for our offal in the street!"

Feebly and interruptedly the terrified boy began, the wild continuous noises of the moaning
voices from without sounding their awful accompaniment to the infidel philosophy of his
song, as he breathed it forth in faint and faltering accents. It ran thus:

To Glyco.
Ah, Glycol? why in flow'rs array'd?
Those festive wreaths less quickly fade
Than briefly-blooming joy!
Those high-prized friends who share your mirth
Are counterfeits of brittle earth,
False coin'd in Death's alloy!
The bliss your notes could once inspire,
When lightly o'er the godlike lyre
Your nimble fingers pass'd,
Shall spring the same from others' skill--
When you're forgot, the music still
The player shall outlast!
The sun-touch'd cloud that mounts the sky,
That brightly glows to warm the eye,
Then fades we know not where,
Is image of the little breath
Of life--and then, the doom of Death
That you and I must share!
Helpless to make or mar our birth,
We blindly grope the ways of earth,
 And live our paltry hour;
Sure, that when life has ceased to please,
To die at will, in Stoic ease,
Is yielded to our pow'r!
Who, timely wise, would meanly wait
The dull delay of tardy Fate,
When Life's delights are shorn?
No! When its outer gloss has flown,
Let's fling the tarnish'd bauble down
As lightly as 'twas worn!

"A health to Glyco! A deep draught to a singer from heaven come down upon earth!" cried
the guests, seizing their wine-cups as the ode was concluded, and draining them to the last
drop. But their drunken applause fell noiseless upon the ear to which it was addressed. The
boy's voice, as he sang the final stanza of the ode, had suddenly changed to a shrill, almost
an unearthly tone, then suddenly sank again as he breathed forth the last few notes; and
now, as his dissolute audience turned toward him with approving glances, they saw him
standing before them, cold, rigid, and voiceless. The next instant his fixed features were
suddenly distorted; his whole frame collapsed, as if torn by an internal spasm--he fell back
heavily to the floor. Those around approached him with unsteady feet, and raised him in
their arms. His soul had burst the bonds of vice in which others had entangled it; the voice
of Death had whispered to the slave of the great despot, Crime--"Be free!"

"We have heard the note of the swan singing its own funeral hymn!" said the patrician
Placidus, looking in maudlin pity from the corpse of the boy to the face of Vetranio, which
presented, for the moment, an involuntary expression of grief and remorse.

"Our miracle of beauty, and boy-god of melody, has departed before us to the Elysian
Fields!" muttered the hunchback, Reburrus, in harsh, sarcastic accents.

Then, during the short silence that ensued, the voices from the street--joined on this
occasion to a noise of approaching footsteps on the pavement--became again distinctly
audible in the banqueting-hall. "News! news!" cried these fresh auxiliaries of the horde
already assembled before the palace. "Keep together, you who still care for your lives!
Solitary citizens have been lured by strange men into desolate streets, and never seen again!
Jars of newly-salted flesh, which there were no beasts left in the city to supply, have been
found in a butcher's shop! Keep together! Keep together!"

"No cannibals among the mob shall pollute the body of my poor boy!" cried Vetranio,
rousing himself from his short lethargy of grief. "Ho! Thascius! Marcus! you who can yet
stand! let us bear him to the funeral pile! He has died first--his ashes shall be first
consumed!"
The two patricians arose as the senator spoke, and aided him in carrying the body to the
lower end of the room, where it was laid across the table, beneath the black curtain, and
between the heaps of drapery and furniture piled up against each of the walls. Then, as his
guests reeled back to their places, Vetranio, remaining by the side of the corpse, and seizing
in his unsteady hands a small vase of wine, exclaimed, in tones of fierce exultation: "The
hour has come--the banquet of Famine has ended--the banquet of Death has begun! A health
to the guest behind the curtain! Fill--drink--behold!"

He drank deeply from the vase as he ceased, and drew aside the black drapery above him. A
cry of terror and astonishment burst from the intoxicated guests, as they beheld in the recess
now disclosed to view the corpse of an aged woman, clothed in white, and propped up on a
high black throne, with the face turned toward them, and the arms (artificially supported)
stretched out as if in denunciation over the banqueting-table. The lamp of yellow glass
which burned high above the body threw over it a lurid and flickering light--the eyes were
open, the jaw had fallen, the long, gray tresses drooped heavily on either side of the white,
hollow cheeks.

"Behold!"--cried Vetranio, pointing to the corpse--"behold my secret guest! Who so fit as

the dead to preside at the banquet of Death? Compelling the aid of Glyco, shrouded by
congenial night, seizing on the first corpse exposed before me in the street, I have set up
there, unsuspected by all, the proper idol of our worship, and philosopher at our feast!
Another health to the queen of the fatal revels--to the teacher of the mysteries of worlds
unseen; rescued from rotting unburied, to perish in the consecrated flames with the senators
of Rome! A health!--a health to the mighty mother, ere she begin the mystic revelations!
Fill--drink!"

Fired by their host's example, recovered from their momentary awe, already inflamed by the
mad recklessness of debauchery, the guests started from their couches, and with
Bacchanalian shouts answered Vetranio's challenge. The scene at this moment approached
the supernatural. The wild disorder of the richly-laden tables; the wine flowing over the
floor from overthrown vases; the great lamps burning bright and steady over the confusion
beneath; the fierce gestures, the disordered countenances of the revelers, as they waved their
jeweled cups over their heads in frantic triumph; and then the gloomy and terrific prospect
at the lower end of the hall--the black curtain, the light burning solitary on its high pole, the
dead boy lying across the festal table, the living master standing by his side, and, like an evil
spirit, pointing upward in mockery to the white-robed corpse of the woman as it towered
above all in its unnatural position, with its skinny arms stretched forth, with its ghastly
features appearing to move as the faint and flickering light played over them--produced
together such a combination of scarce earthly objects as might be painted, but cannot be
described. It was an embodiment of a sorcerer's vision--an apocalypse of sin triumphant
over the world's last relics of mortality in the vaults of death.
"To your task, Reburrus!" cried Vetranio, when the tumult was lulled; "to your questions
without delay! Behold the teacher with whom you are to hold commune! Peruse carefully
the parchment in your hand--question, and question loudly--you speak to the apathetic
dead!"

For some time before the disclosure of the corpse, the hunchback had been seated apart at
the end of the banqueting-hall opposite the black-curtained recess, conning over the
manuscript containing the list of questions and answers which formed the impious dialogue
he was to hold, by the aid of his powers of ventriloquism, with the violated dead. When the
curtain was withdrawn he had looked up for a moment, and had greeted the appearance of
the sight behind it with a laugh of brutal derision, returning immediately to the study of his
blasphemous formulary which had been confided to his care. At the moment when
Vetranio's commands were addressed to him, he arose, reeled down the apartment toward
the corpse, and, opening the dialogue as he approached it, began in loud, jeering tones,
"Speak, miserable relict of decrepit mortality!"

He paused as he uttered the last word; and, gaining a point of view from which the light of
the lamp fell full upon the solemn and stony features of the corpse, looked up defiantly at it.
In an instant a frightful change passed over him, the manuscript dropped from his hand, his
deformed frame shrank and tottered, a shrill cry of recognition burst from his lips, more like
the yell of a wild beast than the voice of a man.

The next moment--when the guests started up to question or deride him--he turned slowly
and faced them. Desperate and drunken as they were, his look awed them into utter silence.
His face was deathlike in hue, as the face of the corpse above him--thick drops of
perspiration trickled down it like rain--his dry, glaring eyes wandered fiercely over the
startled countenances before him; and as he extended toward them his clinched hands, he
muttered in a deep, gasping whisper, "Who has done this? My Mother! My Mother!"

As these few words--of awful import, though of simple form--fell upon the ears of those
whom he addressed, such of them as were not already sunk in insensibility looked round on
each other almost sobered for the moment, and all speechless alike. Not even the clash of
the wine-cups was now heard at the banqueting-table--nothing was audible but the sound,
still fitfully rising and falling, of the voices of terror, ribaldry, and anguish from the street;
and the hoarse, convulsive accents of the hunchback, still uttering at intervals his fearful
identification of the dead body above hi

--"My Mother! My Mother!"

At length Vetranio, who was the first to recover himself, addressed the terrified and
degraded wretch before him, in tones which, in spite of himself, betrayed as he began an
unwonted tremulousness and restraint. "What, Reburrus!" he cried, "are you already
drunken to insanity, that you call the first dead body which by chance I encountered in the
street, and by chance brought hither--your mother? Was it to talk of your mother, whom
dead or alive we neither know nor care for, that you were admitted here? Son of obscurity
and inheritor of rags, what are your plebeian parents to us?" he continued, refilling his cup,
and lashing himself into assumed anger as he spoke. "To your dialogue without delay! or
you shall be flung from the windows to mingle with your rabble-equals in the street!"

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 around 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 revelers 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 expressions 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 winecup,
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 brutalized 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 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, groveling 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 longer! 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 foot-steps 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
organized 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 toward 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 toward them, its bare arms were still stretched forth as they
had been extended over the banqueting-table, its gray 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 toward 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 tramp 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, hut 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, oh
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 bad 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 revelers, 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 burned 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 colorless. 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 lighted 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 toward 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 smoldered 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 mold 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, hike 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 endeavored 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
passed; 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
besides! 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
hand. 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 succoring 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 toward 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 burned, 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 smoldered 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 ardor 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 clamor 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.

The restless moments moved onward and onward, and still he delayed the consummation of
the ruin which the night's debauch had begun. Slowly the tender daylight grew and
brightened in its beauty, warmed the cold, prostrate bodies in the silent hall, and dimmed the
faint glow of the wasting lamp; no black mist of smoke, no red glare of devouring fire arose
to quench its fair luster; no roar of flames interrupted the murmuring morning tranquillity of
nature, or startled from their heavy repose the exhausted outcasts stretched upon the
pavement of the street. Still the noble palace stood unshaken on its firm foundations; still
the adornments of its porticoes and its statues glittered as of old in the rays of the rising sun;
and still the hand of the master who had sworn to destroy it, as he had sworn to destroy
himself, hung idly near the torch which lay already extinguished in harmless ashes at his
feet!

Chapter XXIII.
The Last Efforts Of The Besieged.

WE return to the street before the palace. The calamities of the siege had fallen fiercely on
those who lay there during the night. From the turbulent and ferocious mob of a few hours
since not even the sound of a voice was now heard. Some, surprised in a paroxysm of
hunger by exhaustion and insensibility, lay with their hands half forced into their mouths, as
if in their ravenous madness they had endeavored to prey upon their own flesh. Others now
and then wearily opened their languid eyes upon the street, no longer regardful, in the
present extremity of their sufferings, of the building whose destruction they had assembled
to behold, but watching for a fancied realization of the visions of richly-spread tables and
speedy relief called up before them, as if in mockery, by the delirium of starvation and
disease.

The sun had as yet but slightly risen above the horizon, when the attention of the few among
the populace who still preserved some perception of outward events was suddenly attracted
by the appearance of an irregular procession--composed partly of citizens and partly of
officers of the Senate, and headed by two men--which slowly approached from the end of
the street leading into the interior of the city. This assembly of persons stopped opposite
Vetranio's palace; and then, such members of the mob who watched them as were not yet
entirely abandoned by hope, heard the inspiring news that the procession they beheld was a
procession of peace, and that the two men who headed it were the Spaniard Basilius, a
governor of a province, and Johannes, the chief of the imperial notaries--appointed
embassadors to conclude a treaty with the Goths.

As this intelligence reached them, men who had before appeared incapable of the slightest
movement now rose painfully, yet resolutely, to their feet, and crowded round the two
embassadors as round two angels descended to deliver them from bondage and death.
Meanwhile, some officers of the Senate, finding the front gates of the palace closed against
them, proceeded to the garden entrances at the back of the building, to obtain admission to
its owner. The absence of Vetranio and his friends from the deliberations of the
Government, had been attributed to their disgust at the obstinate and unavailing resistance
offered to the Goths. Now, therefore, when submission had been resolved upon, it had been
thought both expedient and easy to recall them peremptorily to their duties. In addition to
this motive for seeking the interior of the palace, the servants of the Senate had another
errand to perform there. The widely-rumored determination of Vetranio and his associates to
destroy themselves by fire, in the frenzy of a last debauch--disbelieved or disregarded while
the more imminent perils of the city were under consideration--became a source of some
apprehension and anxiety to the acting members of the Roman council, now that their minds
were freed from part of the responsibility which had weighed on them, by their resolution to
treat for peace.

Accordingly, the persons now sent into the palace were charged with the duty of frustrating
its destruction, if such an act had been really contemplated, as well as the duty of recalling
its inmates to their appointed places in the senate-house. How far they were enabled, at the
time of their entrance into the banqueting-hall, to accomplish their double mission the
reader is well able to calculate. They found Vetranio still in the place which he had occupied
since Antonina had quitted him. Startled by their approach from the stupor which had
hitherto weighed on his faculties, the desperation of his purpose returned; he made an effort
to tear from its place the lamp which still feebly burned, and to fire the pile in defiance of all
opposition. But his strength, already taxed to the utmost, failed him. Uttering impotent
threats of resistance and revenge, he fell swooning and helpless into the arms of the officers
of the Senate who held him back. One of them was immediately dismissed, while his
companions remained in the palace, to communicate with the leaders of the assembly
outside. His report concluded, the two embassadors moved slowly onward, separating
themselves from the procession which had accompanied them, and followed only by a few
chosen attendants--a mournful and a degraded embassy, sent forth by the people who had
once imposed their dominion, their customs, and even their language, on the Eastern and
Western worlds, to bargain with the barbarians whom their fathers had enslaved, for the
purchase of a disgraceful peace.

On the departure of the embassadors, all the spectators still capable of the effort repaired to
the Forum to await their return, and were joined there by members of the populace from
other parts of the city. It was known that the first intimation of the result of the embassy
would be given from this place; and in the eagerness of their anxiety to hear it, in the painful
intensity of their final hopes of deliverance, even death itself seemed for a while to be
arrested in its fatal progress through the ranks of the besieged. In silence and apprehension
they counted the tardy moments of delay, and watched with sickening gaze the shadows
lessening and lessening, as the sun gradually rose in the heavens to the meridian point.

At length, after an absence that appeared of endless duration, the two embassadors re-
entered Rome. Neither of them spoke as they hurriedly passed through the ranks of the
people; but their looks of terror and despair were all-eloquent to every beholder--their
mission had failed.

For some time, no member of the Government appeared to have resolution enough to come
forward and harangue the people on the subject of the unsuccessful embassy. After a long
interval, however, the Prefect Ponipeianus himself, urged partly by the selfish entreaties of
his friends, and partly by the childish love of display which still adhered to him through all
his present anxieties and apprehensions, stepped into one of the lower balconies of the
senate-house to address the citizens beneath him.

The chief magistrate of Rome was no longer the pompous and portly personage whose
intrusion on Vetranio's privacy during the commencement of the siege has been described
previously. The little superfluous flesh still remaining on his face hung about it like an ill-
fitting garment; his tones had become lachrymose; the oratorical gestures with which he was
wont to embellish profusely his former speeches were all abandoned; nothing remained of
the original man but the bombast of his language and the impudent complacency of his self-
applause, which now appeared in contemptible contrast to his crestfallen demeanor, and his
disheartening narrative of degradation and defeat.

"Men of Rome, let each of you exercise in his own person the heroic virtues of a Regulus or
a Cato!" the prefect began. "A treaty with the barbarians is out of our power! it is the
scourge of the empire, Alaric himself, who commands the invading forces! Vain were the
dignified remonstrances of the grave Basilius, futile was the persuasive rhetoric of the astute
Johannes, addressed to the slaughtering and vainglorious Goth! On their admission to his
presence, the embassadors, anxious to awe him into a capitulation, enlarged, with sagacious
and commendable patriotism, on the expertness of the Romans in the use of arms, their
readiness for war, and their vast numbers within the city walls. I blush to repeat the
barbarian's reply. Laughing immoderately, he answered, 'The thicker the grass, the easier it
is to cut!' Still undismayed. the embassadors, changing their tactics, talked indulgently of
their willingness to purchase a peace. At this proposal, his insolence burst beyond all
bounds of barbarous arrogance. 'I will not relinquish the siege,' he cried, 'until I have
delivered to me all the gold and silver in the city, all the household goods in it, and all the
slaves from the northern countries. 'What then, oh King, will you leave us?' asked our
amazed embassadors. 'YOUR LIVES!' answered the implacable Goth. Hearing this, even
the resolute Basilius and the wise Johannes despaired. They asked time to communicate
with the Senate, and left the camp of the enemy without further delay. Such was the end of
the embassy; such the arrogant ferocity of the barbarian foe!"

Here the prefect paused, from sheer weakness and want of breath. His oration, however, was
not concluded. He had disheartened the people by his narrative of what had occurred to the
embassadors; he now proceeded to console them by his relation of what had occurred to
himself, when, after an interval, he thus resumed:

"But even yet, oh, citizens of Rome, it is not time to despair! There is another chance of
deliverance still left to us; and that chance has been discovered by me. It was my lot, during
the absence of the embassadors, to meet with certain men of Tuscany, who had entered
Rome a few days before the beginning of the siege, and who spoke of a project for relieving
the city which they would communicate to the prefect alone. Ever anxious for the public
welfare, daring all treachery from strangers for advantage of my office, I accorded to these
men a secret interview. They told me of a startling and miraculous event. The town of
Neveia, lying, as you well know, in the direct road of the barbarians when they marched
upon Rome, was protected from their pillaging bands by a tempest of thunder and lightning
terrible to behold. This tempest arose not, as you may suppose, from an accidental
convulsion of the elements, but was launched over the heads of the invaders by the express
interference of the tutelary deities of the town, invocated by the inhabitants, who returned in
their danger to the practice of their ancient manner of worship. So said the men of Tuscany;
and such pious resources as those employed by the people of Neveia did they recommend to
the people of Rome! For my part, I acknowledge to you that I have faith in their project. The
antiquity of our former worship is still venerable in my eyes. The prayers of the priests of
our new religion have wrought no miraculous interference in our behalf; let us, therefore,
imitate the example of the inhabitants of Neveia, and by the force of our invocations hurl the
thunders of Jupiter on the barbarian camp! Let us trust for deliverance to the potent
interposition of the gods whom our fathers worshiped--those gods who now, perhaps,
avenge themselves for our desertion of their temples by our present calamities. I go without
delay to propose to the Bishop Innocentius and to the Senate the public performance of
solemn ceremonies of sacrifice at the Capitol! I leave you in the joyful assurance that the
gods, appeased by our returning fidelity to our altars, will not refuse the supernatural
protection which they accorded to the people of a provincial town, to the citizens of Rome!"

No sounds either of applause or disapprobation followed the prefect's notable proposal for
delivering the city from the besiegers by the public apostasy of the besieged. As he
disappeared from their eyes, the audience turned away speechless. A universal despair now
overpowered in them even the last energies of discord and crime; they resigned themselves
to their doom with the gloomy indifference of beings in whom all mortal sensations, all
human passions, good or evil, were extinguished. The prefect departed on his ill-omened
expedition to propose the practice of Paganism to the bishop of a Christian church; but no
profitable effort for relief was even suggested, either by the Government or the people.

And so this day drew in its turn toward a close--more mournful and more disastrous, more
fraught with peril, misery and gloom than the days that had preceded it.

The next morning dawned, but no preparations for the ceremonies of the ancient worship
appeared at the Capitol. The Senate and the bishop hesitated to incur the responsibility of
authorizing a public restoration of Paganism; the citizens, hopeless of succor, heavenly or
earthly, remained unheedful as the dead of all that passed around them. There was one man
in Rome who might have succeeded in rousing their languid energies to apostasy: but
where, and how, employed was he?

Now, when the opportunity for which he had labored resolutely, though in vain, through a
long existence of suffering, degradation, and crime, had gratuitously presented itself more
tempting and more favorable than even lie in his wildest visions of success had ever dared
to hope--where was Ulpius? Hidden from men's eyes, like a foul reptile, in his lurking-place
in the deserted temple--now raving round his idols in the fury of madness, now prostrate
before them in idiot adoration--weaker for the interests of his worship, at the crisis of its
fate, than the weakest child crawling famished through the streets--the victim of his own
evil machinations at the very moment when they might have led him to triumph--the object
of that worst earthly retribution, by which the wicked are at once thwarted, doomed, and
punished, here as hereafter, through the agency of their own sins.

Three more days passed. The Senate, their numbers fast diminishing in the pestilence,
occupied the time in vain deliberations or moody silence. Each morning the weary guards
looked forth from the ramparts, with the fruitless hope of discerning the long-promised
legions of Ravenna on their way to Rome; and each morning devastation and death gained
ground afresh among the hapless besieged. At length, on the fourth day, the Senate
abandoned all hope of further resistance, and determined on submission, whatever might be
the result. It was resolved that another embassy composed of the whole acting Senate, and
followed by a considerable train, should proceed to Alaric: that one more effort should be
made to induce him to abate his ruinous demands on the conquered; and that if this failed,
the gates should be thrown open, and the city and the people abandoned to his mercy in
despair.

As soon as the procession of this last Roman embassy was formed in the Forum, its numbers
were almost immediately swelled, in spite of opposition, by those among the mass of the
people who were still able to move their languid and diseased bodies, and who, in the
extremity of their misery had determined, at all hazards, to take advantage of the opening of
the gates, and fly from the city of pestilence, in which they were immured, careless whether
they perished on the swords of the Goths or languished unaided on the open plains. All
power of enforcing order had long since been lost; the few soldiers gathered about the
senators made one abortive effort to drive the people back, and then resigned any further
resistance to their will.

Feebly and silently the spirit-broken assembly now moved along the great highways, so
often trodden to the roar of martial music and the shouts of applauding multitudes, by the
triumphal processions of victorious Rome; and from every street, as it passed on, the wasted
forms of the people stole out like specters to join it. Among these, as the embassy
approached the Pincian Gate, were two, hurrying forth to herd with their fellow-sufferers,
on whose fortunes in the fallen city our more particular attention has been fixed. To explain
their presence on the scene (if such an explanation be required), it is necessary to digress for
a moment from the progress of events during the last days of the siege to the morning when
Antonina departed from Vetranio's palace to return with her succor of food and wine to her
father's house.

The reader is already acquainted, from her own short and simple narrative, with the history
of the closing hours of her mournful night-vigil by the side of her sinking parent, and with
the motives which prompted her to seek the palace of the senator, and entreat assistance in
despair from one whom she only remembered as the profligate destroyer of her tranquillity
under her father's roof. It is now, therefore, most fitting to follow her on her way back
through the palace gardens. No living creature but herself trod the grassy paths, along which
she hastened with faltering steps--those paths which she dimly remembered to have first
explored, when in former days she ventured forth to follow the distant sounds of Vetranio's
lute. In spite of her vague, heavy sensations of solitude and grief, this recollection remained
painfully present to her mind, unaccountably mingled with the dark and dreary
apprehensions which filled her heart as she hurried onward, until she once more entered her
father's dwelling; and then, as she again approached his couch, every other feeling became
absorbed in a faint, overpowering fear, lest after all her perseverance and success in her
errand of filial devotion, she might have returned too late.
The old man still lived--his weary eyes opened gladly on her, when she aroused him to
partake of the treasured gifts from the senator's banqueting-table. The wretched food which
the suicide-guests had disdained, and the simple flask of wine which they would have
carelessly quaffed at one draught, were viewed both by parent and child as the saving and
invigorating sustenance of many days. After having consumed as much as they dared of
their precarious supply, the remainder was carefully husbanded. It was the last sign and
promise of life to which they looked--the humble, yet precious store, in which alone they
beheld the earnest of their security, for a few days longer, from the pangs of famine and the
separation of death.

And now, with their small provision of food and wine set like a beacon of safety before their
sight, a deep dream-like serenity--the sleep of the oppressed and wearied faculties--arose
over their minds. Under its mysterious and tranquilizing influence, all impressions of the
gloom and misery in the city, of the fatal evidences around them of the duration of the siege,
faded away before their perceptions as dim, retiring objects which the eye loses in vacancy.
Gradually, as the day of the first unsuccessful embassy declined, their thoughts began to
flow back gently to the world of by-gone events which had crumbled into oblivion beneath
the march of time. Her first recollections of her earliest childhood revived in Antonina's
memory, and then mingled strangely with tearful remembrances of the last words and looks
of the young warrior who bad expired by her side, and with calm, solemn thoughts that the
beloved spirit, emancipated from the sphere of shadows, might now be hovering near the
quiet garden grave where her bitterest tears of loneliness and affliction had been shed; or
moving around her--an invisible and blessed presence--as she sat at her father's feet and
mourned their earthly separation!

In the emotions thus awakened there was nothing of bitterness or agony--they calmed and
purified the heart through which they moved. She could now speak to the old man, for the
first time, of her days of absence from him, of the brief joys and long sorrows of her hours
of exile, without failing in her melancholy tale. Sometimes her father listened to her in
sorrowful and speechless attention; or spoke, when she paused, of consolation and hope, as
she had heard him speak among his congregation, while he was yet strong in his resolution
to sacrifice all things for the reformation of the Church. Sometimes, resigning himself to the
influence of his thoughts, as they glided back to the times that were gone, he again revealed
to her the changing events of his past life--not, as before, with unsteady accents and
wandering eyes; but now with a calmness of voice, and a coherence of language which
forbade her to doubt the strange and startling narrative that she heard. Once more he spoke
of the image of his lost brother (as he had parted from him in his boyhood) still present to
his mind; of the country that he had quitted in after years; of the name that he had changed--
from Cleander to Numerian--to foil his former associates, if they still pursued him; and of
the ardent desire to behold again the companion of his first home, which now, when his
daughter was restored to him, when no other earthly aspiration but this was unsatisfied,
remained, at the close of his life, the last longing wish of his heart.

Such was the communion in which father and daughter passed the hours of their short
reprieve from the judgment of famine pronounced against the city of their sojourn; so did
they live, as it were, in a quiet interval of existence, in a tranquil pause between the toil that
is over and the life.

toil that is to come in the hard labor of

But the term to these short days of repose after long suffering and grief was fast
approaching. The little hoard of provision diminished as rapidly as the stores that had been
anxiously collected before it; and, on the morning of the second embassy to Alaric, the flask
of wine and the bowl of food were both emptied. The brief dream of security was over and
gone: the terrible realities of the struggle for life had begun again!

Where, or to whom, could they now turn for help? The siege still continued; the food just
exhausted was the last food that had been left, on the senator's table; to seek the palace again
would be to risk refusal, perhaps insult, as the result of a second entreaty for aid, where all
power of conferring it might now but too surely be lost. Such were the thoughts of Antonina
as she returned the empty bowl to its former place; but she gave them no expression in
words. She saw, with horror, that the same expression of despair, almost of frenzy, which
had distorted her father's features on the day of her restoration to him, now marked them
again. Once more he tottered toward the window, murmuring in his bitter despondency
against the delusive security and hope which had held him idle for the interests of his child
during the few days that were past. But, as he now looked out on the beleaguered city, he
saw the populace hastening along the gloomy street beneath, as rapidly as their wearied
limbs would carry them, to join the embassy. He heard them encouraging each other to
proceed, to seize the last chance of escaping through the open gates from the horrors of
famine and plague; and caught the infection of the recklessness and despair which had
seized his fellow-sufferers from one end of Rome to the other.

Turning instantly, he grasped his daughter's hand and drew her from the room, commanding
her to come forth with him and join the citizens in their flight, ore it was too late. Startled by
his words and actions, she vainly endeavored, as she obeyed, to impress her father with the
dread of the Goths which her own bitter experience taught her to feel, now that her only
protector among them lay cold in the grave. With Numerian, as with the rest of the people,
all apprehension, all doubt, all exercise of reason, was overpowered by the one eager idea of
escaping from the fatal precincts of Rome.

So they mingled with the throng, herding affrightedly together in the rear of the embassy,
and followed in their ranks as best they might. The sun shone down brightly from the pure
 blue sky, the wind bore into the city the sharp threatening notes of the trumpets from the
Gothic camp, as the Pincian Gate was opened to the embassadors and their train. With one
accord the crowd instantly endeavored to force their way out after them in a mass; but they
now moved in a narrow space, and were opposed by a large. re-enforcement of the city
guard. After a short struggle they were overpowered, and the gates were closed. Some few
of the strongest and the foremost of their number succeeded in following the embassadors;
the greater part, however, remained on the inner side of the gate, pressing closely up to it in
their impatience and despair, like prisoners awaiting their deliverance, or preparing to force
their escape.

Among these--feeblest amid the most feeble--were Numerian and Antonina--hemmed in by

the surrounding crowd, and shut out either from flight from the city, or a return to home.

Chapter XXIV.
The Grave And The Camp.

WHILE the second and last embassy from the Senate proceeds toward the tent of the
Gothic king; while the streets of Rome are deserted by all but the dead, and the living
populace crowd together in speechless expectation behind the barrier of the Pincian Gate, an
opportunity is at length afforded of turning our attention toward a scene from which it has
been long removed. Let us now revisit the farmhouse in the suburbs, and look once more on
the quiet garden and on Hermanric's grave.

The tranquillity of the bright warm day is purest around the retired path leading to the little
dwelling. Here the fragrance of wild flowers rises pleasantly from the waving grass: the
lulling, monotonous hum of insect life pervades the light, steady air; the sunbeams,
intercepted here and there by the clustering trees, fall in irregular patches of brightness on
the shady ground; and, saving the birds which occasionally pass overhead, singing in their
flight, no living creature appears on the quiet scene, until, gaining the wicket-gate which
leads into the farmhouse garden, we look forth upon the prospect within. There, following
the small circular foot-path which her own persevering steps have day by day already
traced, appears the form of a solitary woman, pacing slowly about the mound of grassy earth
which marks the grave of the young Goth.

For some time she proceeds on her circumscribed round with as much undeviating,
mechanical regularity as if beyond that narrow space rose a barrier which caged her from
ever setting foot on the earth beyond. At length she pauses in her course when it brings her
nearest to the wicket, advances a few steps toward it, then recedes, and recommences her
monotonous progress, and then again breaking off on her round, finally succeeds in
withdrawing herself from the confines of the grave, passes through the gate, and following
the path to the highroad, slowly proceeds toward the eastern limits of the Gothic camp. The
fixed, ghastly, unfeminine expression on her features marks her as the same woman whom
we last beheld as the assassin at the farm house; but beyond this she is hardly recognizable
again. Her formerly powerful and upright frame is bent and lean; her hair waves in wild,
white locks about her shriveled face; all the rude majesty of her form has departed; there is
nothing to show that it is still Goisvintha haunting the scene of her crime but the savage
expression debasing her countenance and betraying the evil heart within, unsubdued as ever
in its yearning for destruction and revenge.

Since the period when we last beheld her, removed in the custody of the Huns from the dead
body of her kinsman, the farmhouse had been the constant scene of her pilgrimage from the
camp, the chosen refuge where she brooded in solitude over her fierce desires. Scorning to
punish a woman whom he regarded as insane, for an absence from the tents of the Goths,
which was of no moment either to the army or to himself, Alaric had impatiently dismissed
her from his presence when she was brought before him. The soldiers who had returned to
bury the body of their chieftain in the garden of the farmhouse, found means to inform her
secretly of the charitable act which they had performed at their own peril; but beyond this
no further intercourse was held with her by any of her former associates.

All her actions favored their hasty belief that her faculties were disordered; and others
shunned her as she shunned them. Her daily allowance of food was left for her to seek at a
certain place in the camp, as it might have been left for an animal too savage to be cherished
by the hand of man. At certain periods she returned secretly from her wanderings to take it.
Her shelter for the night was not the shelter of her people before the walls of Rome; her
thoughts were not their thoughts. Widowed, childless, friendless, the assassin of her last
kinsman, she moved apart in her own secret world of bereavement, desolation and crime.

Yet there was no madness, no remorse for her share in accomplishing the fate of Hermanric,
in the dark and solitary existence which she now led. From the moment when the young
warrior had expiated with his death the disregard of the enmities of his nation and the
wrongs of his kindred, she thought of him only as of one more victim whose dishonor and
ruin she must live to requite on the Romans with Roman blood, and matured her schemes of
revenge with a stern resolution which time, and solitude, and bodily infirmity were all
powerless to disturb.

She would pace for hours and hours together, in the still night and in the broad noonday,
round and round the warrior's grave, nursing her vengeful thoughts within her, until a
ferocious anticipation of triumph quickened her steps and brightened her watchful eyes.
Then she would enter the farmhouse, and drawing the knife from its place of concealment in
her garments, would pass its point slowly backward and forward over the hearth on which
she had mutilated Hermanric with her own hand, and from which he had advanced, without
a tremor, to meet the swordpoints of the Huns. Sometimes, when darkness had gathered
over the earth, she would stand--a boding and menacing apparition--upon the grave itself,
and chant, moaning to the moaning wind, fragments of obscure Northern legends, whose
hideous burden was ever of anguish and crime, of torture in prison vaults and death on the
annihilating sword--mingling with them the gloomy story of the massacre at Aquileia, and
her fierce vows of vengeance against the households of Rome. The forager, on his late
return past the farmhouse to the camp, heard the harsh, droning accents of her voice, and
quickened his onward step. The venturesome peasant from the country beyond, approaching
under cover of the night, to look from afar on the Gothic camp, beheld her form, shadowy
and threatening, as he neared the garden, and fled affrighted from the place. Neither stranger
nor friend intruded on her dread solitude. The foul presence of cruelty and crime violated
undisturbed the scenes once sacred to the interests of tenderness and love, once hallowed by
the sojourn of youth and beauty!

But now the farmhouse garden is left solitary; the haunting spirit of evil has departed from
the grave; the footsteps of Goisvintha have traced to their close the same paths from the
suburbs over which the young Goth once eagerly hastened on his night-journey of love; and
already the walls of Rome rise--dark, near, and hateful--before her eyes. Along these useless
bulwarks of the fallen city she now wanders, as she has often wandered before, watching for
the first opening of the long-closed gates. Let us follow her on her way.

Her attention was now fixed only on the broad ramparts, while she passed slowly along the
Gothic tents toward the encampment at the Pincian Gate. Arrived there, she was aroused for
the first time from her apathy by an unwonted stir and confusion prevailing around her. She
looked toward the tent of Alaric, and beheld before it the wasted and crouching forms of the
followers of the embassy, awaiting their sentence from the captain of the Northern hosts. In
a few moments she gathered enough from the words of the Goths congregated about this
part of the camp, to assure her that it was the Pincian Gate which had given egress to the
Roman suppliants, and which would, therefore, in all probability, be the entrance again
thrown open to admit their return to the city. Remembering this, she began to calculate the
numbers of the conquered enemy grouped together before the king's tent, and then mentally
added to them those who might be present at the interview proceeding within--mechanically
withdrawing herself, while thus occupied, nearer and nearer to the waste ground before the
city walls.

Gradually she turned her face toward Rome; she was realizing a daring purpose, a fatal
resolution, long cherished during the days and nights of her solitary wanderings. "The ranks
of the embassy," she muttered, in a deep, thoughtful tone, "are thickly filled. When there are
many there must be confusion and haste; they march together, and know not their own
numbers; they mark not one more or one less among them."
She stopped. Strange and dark changes of color and expression passed over her ghastly
features. She drew from her bosom the bloody helmet-crest of her husband, which had never
quitted her since the day of his death; her face grew livid under an awful expression of rage,
ferocity, and despair, as she gazed on it. Suddenly she looked up at the city--fierce, and
defiant, as if the great walls before her were mortal enemies against whom she stood at bay
in the death-struggle. "The widowed and the childless shall drink of thy blood!" she cried,
stretching out her skinny hand toward Rome, "though the armies of her nation barter their
wrongs with thy people for bags of silver and gold! I have pondered on it in my solitude,
and dreamed of it in my dreams! I have sworn that I would enter Rome, and avenge my
slaughtered kindred, alone among thousands! Now, now I will hold to my oath! Thou blood-
stained city of the coward and the traitor, the enemy of the defenseless and the murderer of
the weak! thou who didst send forth to Aquileia the slayers of my husband and the assassins
of my children, I wait no longer before thy walls! This day will I mingle, daring all things,
with thy returning citizens, and penetrate, amid Romans, the gates of Rome! Through the
day will I lurk, cunning and watchful, in thy solitary haunts, to steal forth on thee at night, a
secret minister of death! I will watch for thy young and thy weak ones in unguarded places;
I will prey, alone in the thick darkness, upon thy unprotected lives; I will destroy thy
children, as their fathers destroyed at Aquileia the children of the Goths! Thy rabble will
discover me, and arise against me; they will tear me in pieces, and trample my mangled
body on the pavement of the streets; but it will be after I have seen the blood that I have
sworn to shed flowing under my knife! My vengeance will be complete, and torments and
death will be to me as guests that I welcome, and as deliverers whom I await!"

Again she paused--the wild triumph of the fanatic on the burning pile was flashing on her
face--suddenly her eyes fell once more upon the stained helmet-crest; then her expression
changed again to despair, and her voice grew low and moaning, when she thus resumed: "I
am weary of my life; when the vengeance is done, I shall be delivered from this prison of
the earth--in the world of shadows I shall see my husband; and my little ones will gather
round my knees again. The living have no part in me; I yearn toward the spirits who wander
in the halls of the dead."

For a few minutes more she continued to fix her tearless eyes on the helmet-crest. But soon
the influence of the evil spirit revived in all its strength; she raised her head suddenly,
remained for an instant absorbed in deep thought, then began to retrace her steps rapidly in
the direction by which she had come.

Sometimes she whispered softly, "I must be doing, ere the time fail me; my face must be
hidden, and my garments changed. Yonder, among the houses, I must search, and search
quickly!" Sometimes she reiterated her denunciations of vengeance, her ejaculations of
triumph in her frantic project. At the recapitulation of these, the remembrance of Antonina
was aroused; and then a blood-thirsty superstition darkened her thoughts, and threw a vague
and dreamy character over her speech.

When she spoke now, it was to murmur to herself that the victim who had twice escaped her
might yet be alive; that the supernatural influences which had often guided the old Goths, on
the day of retribution, might still guide her; might still direct the stroke of her destroying
weapon--the last stroke ere she was discovered and slain--straight to the girl's heart.
Thoughts such as these--wandering and obscure--arose in close, quick succession within
her; but whether she gave them expression in word and action, or whether she suppressed
them in silence, she never wavered or halted in her rapid progress. Her energies were braced
to all emergencies; and her strong will suffered them not for an instant to relax.

She gained a retired street in the deserted suburbs; and looking round her to see that she was
unobserved, entered one of the houses abandoned by its inhabitants on the approach of the
besiegers. Passing quickly through the outer halls, she stopped at length in one of the
sleeping-apartments; and here she found, among other possessions left behind in the flight,
the store of wearing apparel belonging to the owner of the room.

From this she selected a Roman robe, upper mantle, and sandals--the most common in color
and texture that she could find; and folding them up into the smallest compass, hid them
under her own garments. Then, avoiding all those whom she met on her way, she returned in
the direction of the king's tent; but when she approached it, branched off stealthily toward
Rome, until she reached a ruined building halfway between the city and the camp. In this
concealment she clothed herself in her disguise, drawing the mantle closely round her head
and faces and from this point--calm, vigilant, determined; her hand on the knife beneath her
robe; her lips muttering the names of her murdered husband and children--she watched the
highroad to the Pincian Gate.

There, for a short time, let us leave her, and enter the tent of Alaric, while the Senate yet
plead before the Arbiter of the Empire for mercy and peace.

At the moment of which we write, the embassy had already exhausted its powers of
intercession, apparently without moving the leader of the Goths from his first pitiless
resolution of fixing the ransom of Rome at the price of every possession of value which the
city contained. There was a momentary silence now in the great tent. At one extremity of it,
congregated in a close and irregular group, stood the wearied and broken-spirited members
of the Senate, supported by such of their attendants as had been permitted to follow them; at
the other appeared the stately forms of Alaric and the warriors who surrounded him as his
council of war. The vacant space in the middle of the tent was strewn with martial weapons,
separating the representatives of the two nations one from the other; and thus accidentally,
yet palpably, typifying the fierce hostility which had sundered in years past, and was still to
sunder for years to come, the people of the North and the people of the South.
The Gothic king stood a little in advance of his warriors, leaning on his huge, heavy sword.
His steady eye wandered from man to man among the broken-spirited senators,
contemplating, with cold and cruel penetration, all that suffering and despair had altered for
the worse in their outward appearance. Their soiled robes, their wan cheeks, their trembling
limbs, were each marked in turn by the cool, sarcastic examination of the conqueror's gaze.
Debased and humiliated as they were, there were some among the embassadors who felt the
insult thus silently and deliberately inflicted on them the more keenly for their very
helplessness. They moved uneasily in their places, and whispered among each other in low
and bitter accents. At length one of their number raised his downcast eyes and broke the
silence. The old Roman spirit, which long years of voluntary frivolity and degradation had
not yet entirely depraved, flushed his pale, wasted face, as he spoke thus:

"We have entreated, we have offered, we have promised--men can do no more! Deserted by
our emperor and crushed by pestilence and famine, nothing is now left to us but to perish in
unavailing resistance beneath the walls of Rome! It was in the power of Alaric to win
everlasting renown by moderation to the unfortunate of an illustrious nation; but he has
preferred to attempt the spoiling of a glorious city and the subjugation of a suffering people!
Yet let him remember, though destruction may sate his vengeance and pillage enrich his
hoards, the day of retribution will yet come. There are still soldiers in the empire, and heroes
who will lend them confidently to battle, though the bodies of their countrymen he
slaughtered around them in the streets of pillaged Rome!"

A momentary expression of wrath and indignation appeared on Alaric's features as he

listened to this bold speech, but it was almost immediately replaced by a smile of derision.
"What! ye have still soldiers before whom the barbarian must tremble for his conquests!" he
cried. "Where are they? Are they on their march, or in ambush, or hiding behind strong
walls, or have they lost their way on the road to the Gothic camp? Ha! hero is one of them!"
he exclaimed, advancing toward an enfeebled and disarmed guard of the Senate, who
quailed beneath his fierce glance. "Fight, man!" he loudly continued--"fight, while there is
yet time, for Imperial Rome! Thy sword is gone --take mine, and be a hero again?"

With a rough laugh, echoed by the warriors behind him, he flung his ponderous weapon, as
he spoke, toward the wretched object of his sarcasm. The hilt struck heavily against the
man's breast--he staggered and fell helpless to the ground. The laugh was redoubled among
the Goths; but now their leader did not join in it. His eye glowed in triumphant scorn, as he
pointed to the prostrate Roman, exclaiming, "So does the South fall beneath the sword of
the North! So shall the Empire bow before the rule of the Goth! Say, as ye look on these
Romans before us, are we not avenged of our wrongs? They die not fighting on our swords;
they live to entreat our pity, as children that are in terror of the whip!"
He paused. His massive and noble countenance gradually assumed a thoughtful expression.
The embassadors moved forward a few steps--perhaps to make a final entreaty, perhaps to
depart in despair; but he signed with his hand, in command to them, to be silent, and remain
where they stood. The marauder's thirst for present plunder, and the conqueror's lofty
ambition of future glory, now stirred in strong conflict within him. He walked to the
opening of the tent, and, thrusting aside its curtain of skins, looked out upon Rome in
silence. The dazzling majesty of the temples and palaces of the mighty city as they towered
before him, gleaming in the rays of the unclouded sunlight, fixed him long in contemplation.
Gradually, dreams of future dominion amid those unrivaled structures, which now waited
but his word to be pillaged and destroyed, filled his aspiring soul, and saved the city from
his wrath. He turned again toward the embassadors--in a voice and look superior to them as
a being of a higher sphere--and spoke thus:

"When the Gothic conqueror reigns in Italy, the palaces of her rulers shall be found standing
for the places of his sojourn. I will ordain a lower ransom; I will spare Rome."

A murmur arose among the warriors behind him. The rapine and destruction which they had
eagerly anticipated was denied them for the first time by their chief. As their muttered
remonstrances caught his ear, Alaric instantly and sternly fixed his eyes upon them; and,
repeating in accents of deliberate command, "I will ordain a lower ransom; I will spare
Rome," steadily scanned the countenances of his ferocious followers. Not a word of dissent
fell from their lips, not a gesture of impatience appeared in their ranks; they preserved
perfect silence, as the king again advanced toward the embassadors, and continued:

"I fix the ransom of the city at five thousand pounds of gold; at thirty thousand pounds of
silver--" Here he suddenly ceased, as if pondering further on the terms he should exact. The
hearts of the Senate, lightened for a moment by Alaric's unexpected announcement that he
would moderate his demands, sank within them again, as they thought on the tribute
required of them, and remembered their exhausted treasury. But it was no time now to
remonstrate or to delay; and they answered with one accord, ignorant though they were of
the means of performing their promise, "The ransom shall be paid!"

The king looked at them when they spoke, as if in astonishment that men whom he had
deprived of all freedom of choice, ventured still to assert it, by intimating their acceptance
of terms which they dared not decline. The mocking spirit revived within him while he thus
gazed on the helpless and humiliated embassy; and he laughed once more as he resumed,
partly addressing himself to the silent array of the warriors behind him:

"The gold and silver are but the first dues of the tribute--my army shall be rewarded with
more than the wealth of the enemy. You men of Rome have laughed at our rough bear-skins
and our heavy armor; you shall clothe us with your robes of festivity! I will add to the gold
and silver of your ransom, four thousand garments of silk and three thousand pieces of
scarlet cloth. My barbarians shall be barbarians no longer! I will make patricians, epicures,
Romans of them!"

The members of the ill-fated embassy looked up as he paused, in mute appeal to the mercy
of the triumphant conqueror; but they were not yet to be released from the crushing
infliction of his rapacity and scorn.

"Hold!" he cried, "I will have more--more still! You are a nation of feasters; we will rival
you in your banquets, when we have stripped you of your banqueting-robes! To the gold,
the silver, the silk, and the cloth I will add yet more--three thousand pounds' weight of
pepper, your precious merchandise, bought from far countries with your lavish wealth!--see
that you bring it hither, with the rest of the ransom, to the last grain! The flesh of our beasts
shall be seasoned for us like the flesh of yours!"

He turned abruptly from the senators, as he pronounced the last words, and began to speak
in jesting tones and in the Gothic language to the council of warriors around him. Some of
the embassadors bowed their heads in silent resignation; others, with the utter
thoughtlessness of men bewildered by all that they had seen and heard during the interview
that was now closed, unhappily revived the recollection of the broken treaties of former
days, by mechanically inquiring, in the terms of past formularies, what security the
besiegers would require for the payment of their demands.

"Security!" cried Alaric, fiercely, instantly relapsing as they spoke into his sterner mood.
"Behold yonder the future security of the Goths for the faith of Rome!" and flinging aside
the curtain of the tent, he pointed proudly to the long lines of his camp, stretching round all
that was visible of the walls of the fallen city.

The embassadors remembered the massacre of the hostages of Aquileia, and the evasion of
the payment of tribute-money promised in former days, and were silent as they looked
through the opening of the tent.

"Remember the conditions of the ransom," pursued Alaric, in warning tones, "remember my
security that the ransom shall be quickly paid! So shall you live for a brief space in security;
and feast and be merry again, while your territories yet remain to you. Go--I have spoken--it
is enough!"

He withdrew abruptly from the senators; and the curtain of the tent fell behind them as they
passed out. The ordeal of the judgment was over; the final sentence had been pronounced;
the time had already arrived to go forth and obey it.

The news that terms of peace had been at last settled filled the Romans who were waiting
before the tent with emotions of delight, equally unalloyed by the reflections on the past or
forebodings for the future. Barred from their reckless project of flying to the open country
by the Goths surrounding them in the camp; shut out from retreating to Rome by the gates
through which they had rashly forced their way; exposed in their helplessness to the brutal
jeers of the enemy, while they waited in a long agony of suspense for the close of the
perilous interview between Alaric and the Senate, they had undergone every extremity of
suffering, and had yielded unanimously to despair, when the intelligence of the concluded
treaty sounded like a promise of salvation in their ears.

None of the apprehensions aroused in the minds of their superiors by the vastness of the
exacted tribute, now mingled with the unreflecting ecstasy of their joy at the prospect of the
removal of the blockade. They arose to return to the city from which they had fled in
dismay, with cries of impatience and delight. They fawned like dogs upon the embassadors,
and even upon the ferocious Goths. On their departure from Rome they had mechanically
preserved some regularity in their progress; but now they hurried onward without distinction
of place or discipline of march--senators, guards, plebeians, all huddled together in the
disorderly equality of a mob.

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 embassadors 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, unquestioned and
unobserved.

So they hastily reentered 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 embassadors 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 feelings, 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 defenseless population of a whole city.
As her eyes traveled 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 forward; 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 farmhouse--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
her 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 produce 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 paused 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 coexistent 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 endeavored 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
blood-hound 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 farmhouse, 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 vigor of the intrepid reformer of the Church in his dim eyes, as he now
stopped, and, inclosing 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! oh Hermanric!" was all they murmured now.
They had arrived at the long street than 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 toward 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 almost 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
toward 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 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 piled 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 XXV.
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 lusterless in other days, were now distended, and bright with the glare of insanity. It
seemed as if his bodily powers had renewed their vigor, while his mental faculties had
declined toward 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 resources, 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 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 highpriest 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 endeavored 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 highpriest, 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 arid 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
paralyzed 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, deathlike 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 honor and influence; of the splendor 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
further 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 sunk 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 toward 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
toward 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!

Even in its position, as well as in the objects of which it was composed, the pile wore an
ominous and startling aspect; its crooked outline, expanding toward the top, was bent over
fearfully in the direction of the doorway; it seemed as if a single hand might sway it in its
uncertain balance, and hurl it instantly in one solid mass to the floor.

Many toilsome hours had passed away, long, secret labor had been expended in the erection
of. this weird and tottering structure; but it was all the work of one hand. Night after night
had the pagan entered the deserted temples in the surrounding streets, and pillaged them of
their contents to enrich his favored shrine; the removal of the idols from their appointed
places, which would have been sacrilege in any meaner man, was in his eyes the dread
privilege of the high-priest alone. He had borne heavy burdens, and torn asunder strong
fastenings, and journeyed and journeyed again for hours together over the same gloomy
streets, without loitering in his task; he had raised treasures and images one above another;
he had strengthened the base and heightened the summit of this precious and sacred heap; he
had repaired and rebuilt, whenever it crumbled and fell, this new Babel that he longed to
rear to the Olympus of the temple roof, with a resolute patience and perseverance that no
failure or fatigue could overcome. It was the dearest purpose of his dreamy superstition to
surround himself with innumerable deities, as well as to assemble innumerable worshipers;
to make the sacred place of his habitation a mighty Pantheon, as well as a point of juncture
for the scattered congregations of the pagan world. This was the ambition in which his
madness expanded to the fiercest fanaticism; and as he now stood erect with his captives
beneath him, his glaring eyes looked awestruck when he fixed them on his idols; he uplifted
his arms in solemn, ecstatic triumph, and in low, tones poured forth his invocations, wild,
intermingled, and fragmentary, as the barbarous altar which his solitary exertions had
reared.

Whatever was the effect on Numerian of his savage and confused ejaculations, they were
unnoticed, even unheard by for now, while the madman's voice softened to an undertone,
and while she hid all surrounding objects from her eyes, her senses were awakened to
sounds in the temple which she had never remarked before.

The rapid current of the Tiber washed the foundation walls of one side of the building,
within which the clear, lulling bubble of the water was audible with singular distinctness.
But besides this another and a shriller sound caught the ear. On the summit of the temple
roof still remained several rows of little gilt bells, originally placed there, partly with the
intention of ornamenting this portion of the outer structure, partly in order that the noise
they produced, when agitated by the wind, might scare birds from settling in their flight on
the consecrated edifice. The sounds produced by these bells were silvery and high-pitched;
now, when the breeze was strong, they rang together merrily and continuously; now, when it
fell, their notes were faint, separate and irregular--almost plaintive in their pure metallic
softness. But however their tone might vary under the capricious influences of the wind, it
seemed always wonderfully mingled, within the temple, with the low, eternal bubbling of
the river, which filled up the slightest pauses in the pleasant chiming of the bells, and ever
preserved its gentle and monotonous harmony just audible beneath them.

There was something in this quaint, unwonted combination of sounds, as they were heard in
the vaulted interior of the little building, strangely simple, attractive, and spiritual; the
longer they were listened to, the more completely did the mind lose the recollection of their
real origin, and gradually shape out of them wilder and wilder fancies, until the bells, as
they rang their small peal, seemed like happy voices of a heavenly stream, borne lightly
onward on its airy bubbles, and ever rejoicing over the gliding current that murmured to
them as it ran.

Spite of the peril of her position, and of the terror which still fixed her speechless and
crouching on the ground, the effect on Antonina of the strange mingled music of the running
water and the bells was powerful enough, when she first heard it, to suspend all her other
emotions in a momentary wonder and doubt. She withdrew her hands from her face, and
glanced round mechanically to the doorway, as if imagining that the sounds proceeded from
the street.

When she looked, the declining sun, gliding between two of the outer pillars which
surrounded the temple, covered with a bright glow the smooth pavement before the
entrance. A swarm of insects flew drowsily round and round in the warm, mellow light--
their faint monotonous humming deepened, rather than interrupted, the perfect silence
prevailing over all things without. But a change was soon destined to appear in the repose of
the quiet, vacant scene; hardly a minute had elapsed while Antonina still looked on it, before
she saw stealing over the sunny pavement a dark shadow, the same shadow that she had last
beheld when she stopped in her flight to look behind her in the empty street. At first it
slowly grew and lengthened, then it remained stationary, then it receded, and vanished as
gradually as it had advanced, and then the girl heard, or fancied that she heard, a faint sound
of footsteps retiring along the lateral colonnades toward the river side of the building.

A low cry of horror burst from her lips as she sank back toward her father; but it was
unheeded. The voice of Ulpius had resumed in the interval its hollow loudness of tone; he
had raised Numerian from the ground; his strong, cold grasp, which seemed to penetrate to
the old man's heart, which held him motionless and helpless as if by a fatal spell, was on his
arm. "Hear it! hear it!" cried the pagan, waving his disengaged hand, as if he were
addressing a vast concourse of people; "I advance this man to be one of the servants of the
high-priest! He has traveled from a far country to the sacred shrine; he is docile and
obedient before the altar of the gods; the lot is cast for his future life; his dwelling shall be in
the temple to the day of his death! He shall minister before me in white robes, and swing the
smoking censer, and slay the sacrifice at my feet!"

He stopped. A dark and sinister expression appeared in his eyes as the word "sacrifice"
passed his lips; he muttered doubtingly to himself, "The sacrifice!--is it yet the hour of the
sacrifice?"--and looked round toward the doorway. The sun still shone gayly on the outer
pavement; the insects still circled slowly in the mellow light; no shadow was now visible,
no distant footsteps were heard; there was nothing audible but the happy music of the
bubbling water, and the chiming, silvery bells. For a few moments the madman looked out
anxiously toward the street, without uttering a word or moving a muscle. The raving fit was
near possessing him again, as the thought of the sacrifice flashed over his darkened mind;
but once more its approach was delayed. He slowly turned his head in the direction of the
interior of the temple. "The sun is still bright in the outer courts," he murmured, in an
undertone, "the hour of the sacrifice is not yet! Come!" he continued, in a louder voice,
shaking Numerian by the arm, "it is time that the servant of the temple should behold the
place. of the sacrifice, and sharpen the knife for the victim before sunset! Arouse thee,
bondman, and follow me!"
As yet, Numerian had neither spoken nor attempted to escape. The preceding events, though
some space has been occupied in describing them, passed in so short a period of time, that
he had not hitherto recovered from the first overwhelming shock of the meeting with Ulpius.
But now, awed though he still was, he felt that the moment of the struggle for freedom had
arrived.

"Leave me, and let us depart!--there can be no fellowship between us again!" he exclaimed,
with the reckless courage of despair, taking the hand of Antonina, and striving to free
himself from the madman's grasp. But the effort was vain; Ulpius tightened his hold, and
laughed in triumph. "What! the servant of the temple is in terror of the high-priest, and
shrinks from walking in the place of the sacrifice!" he cried. "Fear not, bondman! The
mighty one, who rules over life and death, and time and futurity, deals kindly with the
servant of his choice! Onward, onward! to the place of darkness and doom, where I alone
am omnipotent, and all others are creatures who tremble and obey! To thy lesson, learner!
by sunset the victim must be crowned!"

He looked round on Numerian for an instant, as he prepared to drag him forward, and their
eyes met. In the fierce command of his action, and the savage exultation of his glance, the
father saw repeated in a wilder form the very attitude and expression which he had beheld in
the pagan on the morning of the loss of his child. All the circumstances of that miserable
hour--the vacant bed-chamber--the banished daughter--the triumph of the betrayer--the
anguish of the betrayed--rushed over his mind, and rose up before it vivid as a pictured
scene before his eyes. He struggled no more; the powers of resistance in mind and body
were crushed alike. He made an effort to remove Antonina from his side, as if, in
forgetfulness of the hidden enemy without, he designed to urge her flight through the open
door, while the madman's attention was yet distracted from her. But, beyond this last
exertion of the strong instinct of paternal love, every other active emotion seemed dead
within him.

Vainly had he striven to disentangle the child from the fate that might be in store for the
parent. To her the dread of the dark shadow on the pavement was superior to all other
apprehensions. She now clung more closely to her father, and tightened her clasp round his
hand. So, when the pagan advanced into the interior of the temple, it was not Numerian
alone who followed him to the place of sacrifice, but Antonina as well.

They moved to the back of the pile of idols. Behind it appeared a high partition of gilt and
inlaid wood reaching to the ceiling, and separating the outer from the inner part of the
temple. A low archway passage, protected by carved gates similar to those at the front of the
building, had been formed in the partition and through this Ulpius and his prisoners now
passed into the recess beyond.
This apartment was considerably smaller than the first hall of the temple which they had just
left. The ceiling and the floor both sloped downward together and here the rippling of the
waters of the Tiber was more distinctly audible to them than in the outer division of the
building. At the moment when they entered it, the place was very dark; the pile of idols
intercepted even the little light that could have been admitted through its narrow entrance;
but the dense obscurity was soon dissipated. Dragging Numerian after him to the left side of
the recess, Ulpius drew back a sort of wooden shutter, and a vivid ray of light immediately
streamed in through a small circular opening pierced in this part of the temple.

Then there became apparent, at the lower end of. the apartment, a vast yawning cavity in the
wall, high enough to admit a man without stooping, but running downward almost
perpendicularly to some lower region, which it was impossible to see, for no light shot
upward from this precipitous artificial abyss, in the darkness of which the eye was lost after
it had penetrated to the distance of a few feet only from the opening. At the base of the
confined space thus visible appeared the commencement of a flight of steps, evidently
leading far downward into the cavity. On the abruptly sloping walls which bounded it on all
sides were painted, in the brilliant hues of ancient fresco, representations of the deities of the
mythology--all in the attitude of descending into the vault and all followed by figures of
nymphs bearing wreaths of flowers, beautiful birds, and other similar adjuncts of the votive
ceremonies of Paganism. The repulsive contrast between the bright colors and graceful
forms presented by the frescoes, and the perilous and gloomy appearance of the cavity
which they decorated, increased remarkably the startling significance in the character of the
whole structure. Its past evil uses seemed ineradicably written over every part of it, as past
crime and torment remain ineradicably written on the human face; the mind imbibed from it
terrifying ideas of deadly treachery of secret atrocities, of frightful refinements of torture,
which no uninitiated eye had ever beheld and no human resolution had ever been powerful
enough to resist.

But the impressions thus received were not produced only by what was seen in and around
this strange vault, but by what was heard there besides. The wind penetrated the cavity at
some distance, and through some opening that could not be beheld, and was apparently
intercepted in its passage, for it whistled upward toward the entrance in shrill, winding
notes, sometimes producing another and nearer sound, resembling the clashing of many
small metallic substances violently shaken together. The noise of the wind, as well as the
bubbling of the current of the Tiber, seemed to proceed from a greater distance than
appeared compatible with the narrow extent of the back part of the temple, and the
proximity of the river to its low foundation walls. It was evident that the vault only reached
its outlet after it had wound backward, underneath the building, in some strange
complication of passages or labyrinth of artificial caverns, which might have been built long
since as dungeons for the living, or as sepulchers for the dead.
"The place of the sacrifice--aha! the place of the sacrifice!" cried the pagan exultingly, as he
drew Numerian to the entrance of the cavity, and solemnly pointed into the darkness
beneath.

The father gazed steadily into the chasm, never turning now to look on Antonina, never
moving to renew the struggle for freedom. Earthly loves and earthly hopes began to fade
away from his heart--he was praying. The solemn words of Christian supplication fell in low
murmuring sounds from his lips, in the place of idolatry and bloodshed, and mingled with
the incoherent ejaculations of the mailman who kept him captive and who now bent his
glaring eyes on the darkness of the vault, half forgetful, in the gloomy fascination which it
exercised even over him, of the prisoners whom he held at its mouth.

The single ray of light, admitted from the circular aperture in the wall, fell wild and fantastic
over the widely--differing figures of the three, as they stood so strangely united together
before the abyss that opened beneath them. The shadows were above and the shadows were
around: there was no light in the ill-omened place but the one vivid ray that streamed over
the gaunt figure of Ulpius, as he still pointed into the darkness; over the rigid features of
Numerian, praying in the bitterness of expected death; and over the frail, youthful form of
Antonina, as she nestled trembling at her father's side. It was an unearthly and a solemn
scene!

Meanwhile the shadow which the girl had observed on the pavement before the doorway of
the temple now appeared there again, but not to retire as before; for, the instant after,
Goisvintha stealthily entered the outer apartment of the building left vacant by its first
occupants. She passed softly around the pile of idols, looked into the inner recess of the
temple, and saw the three figures standing together in the ray of light, gloomy and
motionless, before the mouth of the cavity. Her first glance fixed on the pagan--whom she
instinctively doubted and dreaded; whose purpose in keeping captive the father and
daughter she could not divine; her next was directed on Antonina.

The girl's position was a guarded one; still holding her father's hand, she was partly
protected by his body; and stood unconsciously beneath the arm of Ulpius, as it was raised
while he grasped Numerian's shoulder. Marking this, and remembering that Antonina had
twice escaped her already, Goisvintha hesitated for a moment, and then, with cautions step
and lowering brow, began to retire again toward the doorway of the building, "Not yet--not
yet the time!" she muttered, as she resumed her former lurking-place; "they stand where the
light is over them--the girl is watched and shielded--the two men are still on either side of
her! Not yet the moment of the blow; the stroke of the knife must be sure and safe! Sure, for
this time she must die by my hand! Safe, for I have other vengeance to wreak besides the
vengeance on her! I, who have been patient and cunning since the night when I escaped
from Aquileia, will be patient and cunning still! If she passes the door, I slay her as she goes
out; if she remains in the temple--"

At the last word, Goisvintha paused and gazed upward; the setting sun threw its fiery glow
over her haggard face; her eye brightened fiercely in the full light as she looked. "The
darkness is at hand!" she continued; "the night will be thick and black in the dim halls of the
temple; I shall see her when she shall not see me!--the darkness is coming; the vengeance is
sure!"

She closed her lips, and with fatal perseverance continued to watch and wait, as she had
resolutely watched and waited already. The Roman and the Goth; the opposite in sex, nation
and fate; the madman who dreamed of the sanguinary superstitions of Paganism before the
temple altar, and the assassin who brooded over the chances of bloodshed beneath the
temple portico, were now united in a mysterious identity of expectation, uncommunicated
and unsuspected by either--the hour when the sun vanished from the heaven was the. hour
of the sacrifice.

There is now a momentary pause in the progress of events. Occurrences to be hereafter

related render it necessary to take advantage of this interval to inform the reader of the real
nature and use of the vault in the temple wall, the external appearance of which we have
already described.

The marking peculiarity in the construction of the pagan religion may be most aptly
compared to the marking peculiarity in the construction of the pagan temples. Both were
designed to attract the general eye by the outward effect only, which was in both the false,
delusive reflection of the inward substance. In the temple, the people, as they worshiped
beneath the long colonnades, or beheld the lofty porticoes from the street, were left to
imagine the corresponding majesty and symmetry of the interior of the structure, and were
not admitted to discover how grievously it disappointed the brilliant expectations which the
exterior was so well calculated to inspire; how little the dark, narrow halls of the idols, the
secret vaults and gloomy recesses within, fulfilled the promise of the long flights of steps,
the broad extent of pavement, the massive sun-brightened pillars without. So in the religion,
the votary was allured by the splendor of processions; by the pomp of auguries; by the
poetry of the superstition which peopled his native woods with the sportive Dryads, and the
fountains from which he drank with their guardian Naiads; which gave to mountain and
lake, to sun and moon and stars, to all things around and above him, their fantastic allegory,
or their gracious legend of beauty and love: but beyond this his first acquaintance with his
worship was not permitted to extend, here his initiation concluded. He was kept in
ignorance of the dark and dangerous depths which lurked beneath this smooth and attractive
surface; he was left to imagine that what was displayed was but the prelude to the future
discovery of what was hidden of beauty in the rites of Paganism; he was not admitted to
behold the wretched impostures, the loathsome orgies, the hideous incantations, the bloody
human sacrifices perpetrated in secret, which made the foul real substance of the fair
exterior form. His first sight of the temple was not less successful in deceiving his eye, than
his first impression of the religion in deluding his mind.

With these hidden and guilty mysteries of the pagan worship the vault before which Ulpius
now stood with his captives was intimately connected.

The human sacrifices offered among the Romans were of two kinds--those publicly and
those privately performed. The first were of annual recurrence in the early years of the
Republic; were prohibited at a later date; were revived by Augustus, who sacrificed his
prisoners of war at the altar of Julius Caesar; and were afterward--though occasionally
renewed for particular purposes under some subsequent reigns--wholly abandoned as part of
the ceremonies of Paganism during the latter periods of the empire.

The sacrifices perpetrated in private were much longer practiced. They were connected with
the most secret mysteries of the mythology; were concealed from the supervision of
government; and lasted probably until the general extinction of heathen superstition in Italy
and the provinces. Many and various were the receptacles constructed for the private
immolation of human victims in different parts of the empire--in its crowded cities as well
as in its solitary woods--and among all, one of the most remarkable and the longest
preserved was the great cavity pierced in the wall of the temple which Ulpius had chosen for
his solitary lurking-place in Rome.

It was not merely as a place of concealment for the act of immolation, and for the corpse of
the victim, that the vault had been built. A sanguinary artifice had complicated the manner
of its construction, by placing in the cavity itself the instrument of the sacrifice; by making
it, as it were, not merely the receptacle, but the devoured also, of its human prey. At the
bottom of the flight of steps leading down into it (the top of which, as we have already
observed, was alone visible from the entrance in the temple recess) was fixed the image of a
dragon formed in brass.

The body of the monster, protruding opposite the steps almost at a right angle from the wall,
was moved in all directions by steel springs, which communicated with one of the lower
stairs, and also with a sword placed in the throat of the image to represent the dragon's
tongue. The walls around the steps narrowed, so as barely to admit the passage of the human
body when they approached the dragon. At the slightest pressure on the stair with which the
spring communicated, the body of the monster bent forward, and the sword instantly
protruded from its throat at such a height from the steps as insured that it should transfix in a
vital part the person who descended. The corpse, then drop ping by its own weight off the
sword, fell through a tunneled opening beneath the dragon, running downward in an
opposite direction to that taken by the steps above; and was deposited on an iron grating
washed by the waters of the Tiber, which ran under the arched foundations of the temple.
The grating was approached by a secret subterranean passage, leading from the front of the
building, by which the sacrificing priests were enabled to reach the dead body; to fasten
weights to it; and, opening the grating, to drop it into the river, never to be beheld again by
mortal eyes.

In the days when this engine of destruction was permitted to serve the purpose for which the
horrible ingenuity of its inventors had constructed it, its principal victims were young girls.
Crowned with flowers and clad in white garments, they were lured into immolating
themselves, by being furnished with rich offerings, and told that the sole object of their fatal
expedition down the steps of the vault was to realize the pictures adorning its walls (which
we have described a few pages back), by presenting their gifts at the shrine of the idol
below.

At the period of which we write, the dragon had for many years--since the first prohibitions
of Paganism--ceased to be fed with its wonted prey. The scales forming its body grew
gradually corroded and loosened by the damp; and when moved by the wind which
penetrated to them from beneath, whistling up in its tortuous course through the tunnel that
ran in one direction below, and the vault of the steps that ascended in another above,
produced the clashing sound which has been mentioned as audible at intervals from the
mouth of the cavity. But the springs which moved the deadly apparatus of the whole
machine being placed within it under cover, continued to resist the slow progress of time
and neglect, and still remained as completely fitted as ever to execute the fatal purpose for
which they had been designed.

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 further 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 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 in 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 burned 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 high
ways, 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; hut 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, halfway toward the doorway of the temple, when
Numerian, who had watched with searching eyes the abrupt change in his demeanor,
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 a 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 farmhouse in the suburbs. She kept her head turned toward 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 death-like as at first; he leaned back
against the wall, as still as if life and action had forever 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, 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 amid 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 forever 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 lire 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 will 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 forever. His eyes,
directed full on the face of the madman, were dilated with horror; 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 present 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 labored together in the garden, as we labor 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 favored 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 hour when the good Christian succored the 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, as with a sudden ray of light. The madman's half-closed eyes opened instantly,
and fixedly, dreamily at first, on the altar of idols. He waved his hands to and fro before
him, as if he 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 toward 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
highpriest. 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
endeavored 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 endeavored to revive the events connected with the change
in his name 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 t 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 fit 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 its ascendency 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 upward; 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!"

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, wrapped 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 Night 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 demigod 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 toward 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 backward 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 paralyzed 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 her 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 toward 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 toward 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
recognized 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 endeavor, 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 XXVI.
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 still 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 a while 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 farmhouse beyond the suburbs.

The minute after, she felt herself dragged along the ground, further 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 battlefield; 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 armor 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 farmhouse, 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, 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
where 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 paralyzing,
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 mouth 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 ingulfed 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 far different from these--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 toward 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, crow-bars, and other similar tools, or bending under the weight of large chests
secured with iron fastenings, chose 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 a 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
defense, 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 legalized pillage the treasures
in the temples of Rome!

Rulers of a people impoverished by former exactions, and controllers 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 jeweled 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 labor 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 authorized, 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.

The priest and the soldier, calling to their companions behind to hurry on, had now arrived
opposite the temple steps; and saw confronting them in the pale moonlight, from the
eminence on which he stood, the weird and solitary figure of Ulpius--the apparition of a
pagan in the gorgeous robes of his priesthood, bidden back from the tombs to stay the hand
of the spoiler before the shrine of his gods.

The soldier dropped his weapon to the ground; and, trembling in every limb, refused to
proceed. But the priest, a tall, stern, emaciated man, went on defenseless and undaunted. He
signed himself solemnly with the cross as he slowly ascended the steps; fixed his
unflinching eyes on the madman, who glared back on him in return; and called aloud in a
harsh, steady voice: "Man, or demon! in the name of Christ, whom thou deniest, stand
back!"

For an instant, as the priest approached him, the pagan averted his eyes and looked on the
concourse of people and the armed soldiers rapidly advancing. His fingers closed round the
hilt of Goisvintha's knife, which he had hitherto held loosely in his hand, as he exclaimed in
low, concentrated tones: "Aha! the siege--the siege of Serapis!" The priest, now standing on
the same step with him, stretched out his arm to thrust him back, and at that moment
received the stroke of the knife. He staggered, lifted his hand again to sign his forehead with
the cross; and, as he raised it, rolled back dead on the pavement of the street.

The soldier, standing motionless with superstitious terror a few feet from the corpse, called
to his companions for help. Hurling his bloody weapon at them in defiance, as they ran in
confusion to the base of the temple steps, Ulpius entered the building, and locked and
chained the gates.

Then the assembled people thronging round the corpse of the priest, heard the madman
shouting in his frenzy, as if to a great body of adherents round him, to pour down the molten
lead and the scorching sand; to hurl back every scaling-ladder planted against the walls; to
massacre each prisoner who was seized mounting the ramparts to the assault; and as they
looked up to the building from the street, they saw at intervals through the bars of the closed
gates the figure of Ulpius passing swift and shadowy--his arms extended, his long gray hair
and white robes streaming behind him, as he rushed round and round the temple reiterating
his wild pagan war cries as he went. The enfeebled, superstitious populace trembled while
they gazed--a specter driven on a whirlwind would not have been more terrible to their eyes.

But the priests among the crowd, roused to fury by the murder of one of their own body,
revived the courage of those around them. Even the shouts of Ulpius were now overpowered
by the sound of their voices, raised to the highest pitch, promising heavenly and earthly
rewards--salvation, money, absolution, promotion--to all who would follow them up the
steps and burst their way into the temple Animated by the words of the priests, and growing
gradually confident in their own numbers, the boldest in the throng seized a piece of timber
lying by the river side, and using it as a battering-ram, assailed the gate. But they were
weakened by famine; they could gain little impetus, from the necessity of ascending the
temple steps to the attack: the iron quivered as they struck it; but hinge and lock remained
firm alike. They were preparing to renew the attempt, when a tremendous shock--a crash as
if the whole heavy roof of the building had fallen in--drove them back in terror to the street.

Recalled by the sight of the armed men, the priests, and the attendant crowd of people
advancing to invade his sanctuary, to the days when he had defended the great Temple of
Serapis at Alexandria, against enemies similar in appearance, though far superior in
numbers; persuaded in the revival of those, the most sanguinary visions of his insanity, that
he was still resisting the Christian fanatics; supported by his adherents in his sacred fortress
of former years, the pagan displayed none of his accustomed cunning and care in moving
through the darkness around him. He hurried hither and thither, encouraging his imaginary
followers, and glorying in his dreams of slaughter and success, forgetful in his frenzy of all
that the temple contained.

As he pursued his wild course round and round the altar of idols, his robe became entangled,
and was torn by the projecting substances at one corner of it. The whole overhanging mass
tottered at the moment, but did not yet fall. A few of the smaller idols, however, at the
outside dropped to the ground; and with them an image of Serapis, which they happened
partially to support--a heavy, monstrous figure, carved life-size in wood, and studded with
gold, silver and precious stones--fell at the pagan's feet. But this was all--the outer materials
of the perilous structure had been detached only at one point; the pile itself still remained in
its place.

The madman seized the image of Serapis in his arms, and passed blindly onward with it
through the passage in the partition into the recess beyond. At that instant the shock of the
first attack on the gates resounded through the building. Shouting as he heard it, "A sally! a
sally! men of the Temple, the gods and the high-priest lead you on!" and still holding the
idol before him, he rushed straight forward to the entrance, and struck in violent collision
against the backward part of the pile.

The ill-balanced, top-heavy mass of images and furniture of many temples swayed, parted,
and fell over against the gates and the wall on either side of them. Maimed and bleeding,
struck down by the lower part of the pile, as it was forced back against the partition when
the upper part fell, the fury of Ulpius was but increased by the crashing ruin around him. He
struggled up again into an erect position; mounted on the top of the fallen mass--now spread
out at the sides over the floor of the building, but confined at one end by the partition, and at
the other by the opposite wall and the gates--and still clasping the image of Serapis in his
arms, called louder and louder to "the men of the Temple," to mount with him the highest
ramparts, and pour down on the besiegers the molten head!

The priests were again the first men to approach the gates of the building after the shock that
had been heard within it. The struggle for the possession of the temple had assumed to them
the character of a holy warfare against Heathenism and magic--a sacred conflict to be
sustained by the Church, for the sake of her servant who had fallen a martyr at the outset of
the strife. Strong in their fanatical boldness, they advanced with one accord close to the
gates. Some of the smaller images of the fallen pile had been forced through the bars,
behind which appeared the great idols, the broken masses of furniture, the long robes and
costly hangings, all locked together in every wild variety of position--a chaos of distorted
objects heaped up by an earthquake! Above and further inward, the lower part of the pagan's
robe was faintly discernible through the upper interstices in I he gate, as he stood,
commanding, on the summit of his prostrate altar, with his idol in his arms.

The priests felt an instant conviction of certain triumph when they discerned the cause of the
shock that had been heard within the temple. One of their number snatched up a small image
that had fallen through to the pavement where he stood, and holding it before the people
below, exclaimed, exultingly:
"Children of the Church, the mystery is revealed. Idols more precious than this lie by
hundreds on the floor of the temple. It is no demon, but a man, one man, who still defies us
within!--a robber who would defraud the Romans of the ransom of their lives!--the pillage
of many temples is around him; remember now, that the nearer we came to this place the
fewer were the spoils of idolatry that we gathered in; the treasure which is yours, the
treasure which is to free you from the famine, has been seized by the assassin of our holy
brother; it is there scattered at his feet! To the gates! To the gates again! Absolution for all
their sins to the men who burst in the gates!"

Again the mass of timber was taken up; again the gates were assailed; and again they stood
firm--they were now strengthened; barricaded by the fallen pile, it seemed hopeless to
attempt to break them down without a re-enforcement of men, without employing against
them the heaviest missiles, the strongest engines of war.

The people gave vent to a cry of fury, as they heard from the temple the hollow laughter of
the madman triumphing in their defeat. The words of the priest, in allaying their
superstitious fears, had aroused the deadly passions that superstition brings forth. A few
among the throng hurried to the nearest guard-house for assistance, but the greater part
pressed closely round the temple; some pouring forth impotent execrations against the
robber of the public spoil; some joining the priests in calling on him to yield. But the clamor
lasted not long: it was suddenly and strangely stilled by the voice of one man in the crowd,
calling loudly to the rest to fire the temple!

The words were hardly spoken ere they were repeated triumphantly on all sides. "Fire the
temple!" cried the people, ferociously. "Burn it over the robber's head! A furnace--a
furnace! to melt down the gold and silver ready to our hands! Fire the temple! Fire the
temple!"

Those who were most active among the crowd (which was now greatly increased by
stragglers from all parts of the city) entered the houses behind them, and returned in a few
minutes with every inflammable substance that they could collect in their hands. A heap of
fuel, two or three feet in height, was raised against the gates immediately, and soldiers and
people pressed forward with torches to light it. But the priest who had before spoken waved
them back. "Wait!" he cried; "the fate of his body is with the people, but the fate of his soul
is with the Church!"

Then, turning to the temple, he called solemnly and sternly to the madman. "Thy hour is
come! repent, confess, and save thy soul!"

"Slay on! Slay on!" answered the raving voice from within. "Slay, till not a Christian is left!
Victory! Serapis! See, they drop from our walls! they writhe bleeding on the earth beneath
us! There is no worship but the worship of the gods! Slay! Slay on!"
"Light!" cried the priest. "His damnation be on his own hand! Anathema! Anathema! Let
him die accursed!"

The dry fuel was fired at once at all points: it was an anticipation of an auto-da-fe--a burning
of a heretic, in the fifth century. As the flames rose, the people fell back and watched their
rapid progress. The priests standing before them in a line, stretched out their hands in
denunciation against the temple, and repeated together the awful excommunication service
of the Roman Church.

The fire at the gates had communicated with the idols inside. It was no longer on his
prostrate altar, but on his funeral pile that Ulpius now stood; and the image that he clasped
was the stake to which he was bound. A red glare, dull at first, was now brightening and
brightening below him; flames, quick and noiseless, rose and fell, and rose again at different
points, illuminating the interior of the temple with fitful and changing light. The grim,
swarthy forms of the idols seemed to sway and writhe like living things in torment, as fire
and smoke alternately displayed and concealed them. A deadly stillness now overspread the
face and form of the pagan, as he looked down steadfastly on the deities of his worship
engendering his destruction beneath him. His cheek--the cheek which had rested in boyhood
on his mother's bosom--was pressed against the gilded breast of the god Serapis, his task-
master in life--his pillow in death!

"I rise! I rise to the world of light, with my deities whom I have served!" he murmured; "the
brightness of their presence is like a flaming fire; the smoke of their breath pours forth
around me like the smoke of incense! I minister in the Temples of the Clouds; and the glory
of eternal sunlight shines round me while I adore! I rise! I rise!"

The smoke whirled in black volumes over his head; the fierce voice of the fast-spreading
fire roared on him; the flames leaped up at his feet--his robes kindled, burst into radiant
light, as the pile yawned and opened under him.

Time had passed. The strife between the Temple and the Church was ended. The priests and
the people had formed a wider circle round the devoted building; all that was inflammable
in it had been burned; smoke and flame now burst only at intervals through the gates, and
gradually both ceased to appear. Then the crowd approached nearer to the temple, and felt
the heat of the furnace they had kindled, as they looked in.

The iron gates were red hot--from the great mass behind (still glowing bright in some
places, and heaving and quivering with its own heat), a thin, transparent vapor rose slowly
to the stone root of the building, now blackened with smoke. The priests looked eagerly for
the corpse of the pagan; they saw two dark, charred objects closely united together, lying in
a chasm of ashes near the gate, at a spot where the fire had already exhausted itself, but it
was impossible to discern which was the man and which was the idol.
 The necessity for providing means for entering the temple had not been forgotten while the
flames were raging. Proper implements for forcing open the gates were new at hand, and
already the mob began to dip their buckets in the Tiber, and pour water wherever any traces
of the fire remained. Soon all obstacles were removed; the soldiers crowded into the
building with spades in their hands, trampled on the black, watery mire of cinders which
covered what had once been the altar of idols, and throwing out into the street the refuse
ashes and the stone images which had remained unconsumed, dug in what was left, as in a
new mine, for the gold and silver which the fire could not destroy.

The pagan had lived with his idols, had perished with his idols!--and now where they were
cast away, there he was cast away with them. The soldiers, as they dug into fragments the
black ruins of his altar, mingled him in fragments with it! The people, as they cast the refuse
thrown out to them into the river, cast what remained of him with what remained of his
gods! And when the temple was deserted, when the citizens had borne off all the treasure
they could collect, when nothing but a few heaps of dust was left of all that had been
burned, the nightwind blew away before it the ashes of Ulpius with the ashes of the deities
that Ulpius had served!

Chapter XXVII.
The Vigil Of Hope.

A NEW prospect now opens before us. The rough paths through which we have hitherto
threaded our way grow smoother as we approach their close. Rome, so long dark and
gloomy to our view, brightens at length like a landscape when the rain is past, and the first
rays of returning sunlight stream through the parting clouds. Some days have elapsed, and in
those days the temples have yielded all their wealth; the conquered Romans have bribed the
triumphant barbarians to mercy; the ransom of the fallen city has been paid.

The Gothic army is still encamped round the walls, but the gates are opened, markets for
food are established in the suburbs, boats appear on the river and wagons on the highroads,
laden with provisions, and proceeding toward Rome. All the hidden treasure kept back by
the citizens is now bartered for food; the merchants who hold the market reap a rich harvest
of spoil; but the hungry are filled, the weak are revived, every one is content.

It is the end of the second day since the free sale of provisions and the liberty of egress from
the city have been permitted by the Goths. The gates are closed for the night, and the people
are quietly returning, laden with their supplies of food, to their homes. Their eyes no longer
encounter the terrible traces of the march of pestilence and famine through every street; the
corpses have been removed, and the sick are watched and sheltered. Rome is cleansed from
her pollutions, and the virtues of household life begin to revive wherever they once existed.
Death has thinned every family, but the survivors again assemble together in the social hall.
Even the veriest criminals, the lowest outcasts of the population, are united harmlessly for a
while in the general participation of the first benefits of peace.

To follow the citizens to their homes; to trace in their thoughts, words, and actions, the
effect on them of their deliverance from the horrors of the blockade; to contemplate in the
people of a whole city, now recovering, as it were, from a deep swoon, the varying forms of
the first reviving symptoms in all classes--in good and bad, rich and poor--would afford
matter enough in itself for a romance of searching human interest, for a drama of the
passions, moving absorbingly through strange, intricate, and contrasted scenes. But another
employment than this now claims our care. it is to an individual, and not to a divided source
of interest, that our attention turns; we relinquish all observations on the general mass of the
populace, to revert to Numerian and Antonina alone--to penetrate once more into the little
dwelling on the Pincian Hill.

The apartment where the father and daughter had suffered the pangs of famine together
during the period of the blockade, presented an appearance far different from that which it
had displayed on the occasion when they had last occupied it. The formerly bare walls were
now covered with rich, thick hangings; and the simple couch and scanty table of other days
had been exchanged for whatever was most luxurious and complete in the household
furniture of the age. At one end of the room three women, attended by a little girl, were
engaged in preparing some dishes of fruit and vegetables; at the other, two men were
occupied in how, earnest conversation, occasionally looking round anxiously to a couch
placed against the third side of the apartment, on which Antonina lay extended, while
Numerian watched by her in silence. The point of Goisvintha's knife had struck deep, but, as
yet, the fatal purpose of the assassination had failed.

The girl's eyes were closed; her lips were parted in the languor of suffering; one of her
hands lay listless on her father's knee. A slight expression of pain, melancholy in its very
slightness, appeared on her pale face, and occasionally a long-drawn, quivering breath
escaped her--nature's last touching utterance of its own feebleness! The old man, as he sat
by her side, fixed on her a wistful, inquiring glance. Sometimes he raised his hand and
gently and mechanically moved to and fro the long locks of her hair, as they spread over the
head of the couch; but he never turned to communicate with the other persons in the room--
he sat as if he saw nothing save his daughter's figure stretched before him, amid heard
nothing save the faint, fluttering sound of her breathing, close at his ear.

it was now dark, and one lamp, hanging from the ceiling, threw a soft equal light over the
room. The different persons occupying it presented but little evidence of health and strength
in their countenances, to contrast them in appearance with the wounded girl; all had
undergone the wasting visitation of the famine, and all were pale and languid, like her. A
strange, indescribable harmony prevailed over the scene. Even the calmness of absorbing
expectation and trembling hope, expressed in the demeanor of Numerian, seemed reflected
in the actions of those around him, in the quietness with which the women pursued their
employment, in the lower and lower whispers in which the men continued their
conversation. There was something pervading the air of the whole apartment that conveyed
a sense of the solemn, unworldly stillness which we attach to the abstract idea of religion.

Of the two men cautiously talking together, one was the patrician Vetranio; the other, a
celebrated physician of Rome.

Both the countenance and manner of the senator gave melancholy proof that the orgy at his
palace had altered him for the rest of his life. He looked what he was, a man changed
forever in constitution and character. A fixed expression of anxiety and gloom appeared in
his eyes; his emaciated face was occasionally distorted by a nervous, involuntary
contraction of the muscles; it was evident that the paralyzing effect of the debauch which
had destroyed his companions would remain with him to the end of his existence. No
remnant of his careless self-possession, his easy, patrician affability, appeared in his
manner, as he now listened to his companion's conversation; years seemed to have been
added to his life since he had headed the table at "The Banquet of Famine."

"Yes," said the physician, a cold, calm man, who spoke much, but pronounced all his words
with emphatic deliberation.--"yes, as I have already told you, the wound, in itself, was not
mortal. If the blade of the knife had entered near the center of the neck, she must have died
when she was struck. But it passed outward and backward: the large vessels escaped; no
vital part has been touched."

"And yet you persist in declaring that you doubt her recovery!" exclaimed Vetranio, in low,
mournful tones.

"I do," pursued the physician. "She must have been exhausted in mind and body when she
received the blow--I have watched her carefully; I know it! There is nothing of the natural
health and strength of youth to oppose the effects of the wound. I have seen the old die from
injuries that the young recover from, because life, in them, was losing its powers of
resistance: she is in the position of the old!"

"They have died before me, and she will die before me! I shall lose all--all!" sighed
Vetranio bitterly to himself.

"The resources of our art are exhausted," continued the other; "nothing remains but to watch
carefully and wait patiently; the chances of life or death will be decided in a few hours: they
are equally balanced now."
"I shall lose all!--all!" repeated the senator, mournfully, as if he heeded not the last words.

"If she dies," said the physician, speaking in warmer tones, for he was struck with pity, in
spite of himself, at the spectacle of Vetranio's utter dejection--"if she dies, you can at least
remember that all that could be done to secure her life has been done by you. Her father,
helpless in his lethargy and his age, was fitted only to sit and watch her, as he has sat and
watched her day after day; but you have spared nothing, forgotten nothing. Whatever I have
asked for, that you have provided; the hangings round the room, and the couch that she lies
on, are yours; the first fresh supplies of nourishment from the newly-opened markets were
brought here from you. I told yen that she was thinking incessantly of what she had
suffered; that it was necessary to preserve her against her own recollections; that the
presence of women about her might do good; that a child appearing sometimes in the room
might soothe her fancy, might make her look at what was passing, instead of thinking of
what had passed; you found them, and sent them! I have seen parents less anxious for their
children, lovers for their mistresses, than you for this girl."

"My destiny is with her," interrupted Vetranio, looking round superstitiously to the frail
form on the couch. "I know nothing of the mysteries that the Christians call their 'Faith'; but
I believe now in the soul. I believe that one soul contains the fate of another, and that her
soul contains the fate of mine!"

The physician shook his head derisively. His calling had determined his philosophy--he was
as ardent a materialist as Epicurus himself.

"Listen," said Vetranio; "since I first saw her, a change came over my whole being; it was as
if her life was mingled with mine! I had no influence over her, save an influence for ill: I
loved her, and she was driven defenseless from her home! I sent my slaves to search Rome
night and day; I exerted all my power, I lavished my wealth to discover her; and, for the first
time, in this one effort, I failed in what I had undertaken. I felt that through me she was lost-
-dead! Days passed on; life weighed weary on me; the famine came. You know in what way
I determined that my career should close; the rumor of the Banquet of Famine reached you
as it reached others!"

"It did," replied the physician. "And I see before me, in your face," he added, after a
momentary pause, "the havoc which that ill-omened banquet has worked. My friend, be
advised!--abandon forever the turmoil of your Roman palace, and breathe in tranquillity the
air of a country home. The strength you once had is gone never to return--if you would yet
live, husband what is still left."

"Hear me," pursued Vetranio, in low, gloomy tones: "I stood alone in my doomed palace;
the friends whom I had tempted to their destruction lay lifeless around me; the torch was in
my hand that was to light our funeral pile, to set us free from the loathsome world! I
approached triumphantly to kindle the annihilating flames, when she stood before me--she,
whom I had sought as lost, and mourned as dead! A strong hand seemed to wrench the torch
from me; it dropped to the ground! She departed again; but I was powerless to take it up: her
look was still before me; her face, her figure--she, herself, appeared ever watching between
the torch and me!"

"Lower!--speak lower!" interrupted the physician, looking on the senator's agitated features
with unconcealed astonishment and pity. "You retard your own recovery--you disturb the
girl's repose, by discourse such as this."

"The officers of the senate," continued Vetranio, sadly resuming his gentler tones, "when
they entered the palace, found me still standing on the place where we had met! Day passed
on again: I stood looking out upon the street, and thought of my companions which I had
lured to their death, and of my oath to partake their fate, which I had never fulfilled. I would
have driven my dagger to my heart; but her face was yet before me, my hands were bound!
In that hour I saw her for the second time; saw her carried past me--wounded, assassinated!
She had saved me once; she had saved me twice! I knew that now the chance was offered
me, after having wrought her ill, to work her good; after failing to discover her when she
was lost, to succeed in saving her when she was dying; after having survived the deaths of
my friends at my own table, to survive to see life restored under my influence, as well as
destroyed! These were my thoughts; these are my thoughts still--thoughts felt only since I
saw her! Do you know now why I believe that her soul contains the fate of mine? Do you
see me, weakened, shattered, old before my time; my friends lost, my fresh feelings of youth
gone forever; and can you not now comprehend that her life is my life?--that if she dies, the
one good purpose of my existence is blighted?--that I lose all I have henceforth to live for?--
all, all!"

As he pronounced the concluding words, the girl's eyes half unclosed and turned languidly
toward her father. She made an effort to lift her hand caressingly from his knee to his neck;
but her strength was unequal even to this slight action. The hand was raised only a few
inches ere it sank back again to its old position; a tear rolled slowly over her cheek as she
closed her eyes again, but she never spoke.

"See," said the physician, pointing to her, "the current of life is at its lowest ebb! If it flows
again, it must flow to-night."

Vetranio made no answer: he dropped down on the seat near him, and covered his face with
his robe.

The physician, beholding the senator's situation, and reflecting on the strange, hurriedly-
uttered confession which had just been addressed to him, began to doubt whether the scenes
through which his patron had lately passed had not affected his brain. Philosopher though he
was, the man of science had never observed the outward symptoms of the first working of
good and pure influences in elevating a degraded mind; he had never watched the denoting
signs of speech and action which mark the progress of mental revolution while the old
nature is changing for the new; such objects of contemplation existed not for him. He gently
touched Vetranio on the shoulder. "Rise," said he, "and let us depart. Those are around her
who can watch her best. Nothing remains for us but to wait and hope. With the earliest
morning we will return."

He delivered a few farewell directions to one of the women in attendance, and then,
accompanied by the senator, who, without speaking again, mechanically rose to follow him,
quitted the room.

After this, the silence was only interrupted by the sound of an occasional whisper, and of
quick, light footsteps passing backward and forward. Then the cooling, reviving draughts
which had been prepared for the night were poured ready into the cups; and the women
approached Numerian, as if to address him, but he waved his hand impatiently when he saw
them; and then they, too, in their turn, departed, to wait in an adjoining apartment until they
should be summoned again.

Nothing changed in the manner of the father when he was left alone in the chamber of
sickness, which the lapse of a few hours might convert into the chamber of death. He sat
watching Antonina, and touching the outspread locks of her hair from time to time, as had
been his wont. It was a fair, starry night: the fresh air of the soft winter climate of the South
blew gently over the earth; the great city was sinking fast into tranquillity; calling voices
were sometimes heard faintly from the principal streets; and the distant notes of martial
music sounded cheerily from the Gothic camp as the sentinels were posted along the line of
watch.

But soon these noises ceased, and the stillness of Rome was as the stillness round the couch
of the wounded girl.

Day after day, and night after night, since the assassination in the temple, Numerian had
kept the same place by his daughter's side. Each hour as it passed, found him still absorbed
in his long vigil of hope: his life seemed suspended in its onward course by the one
influence that now enthralled it. At the brief intervals when his bodily weariness
overpowered him on his melancholy watch, it was observed by those around him that, even
in his short dreaming slumbers, his face remained ever turned in the same direction, toward
the head of the couch, as if drawn thither by some irresistible attraction, by some powerful
ascendency felt even amid the deepest repose of sensation, the heaviest fatigue of the
overlabored mind, and the worn, sinking heart. He held no communication, save by signs,
with the friends about him; he seemed neither to hope, to doubt, nor to despair with them;
all his faculties were strung up to vibrate at one point only, and were dull and unimpressible
in every other direction.

But twice had he been heard to speak more than the fewest, simplest words. The first time,
when Antonina uttered the name of Goisvintha, on the recovery of her senses after her
wound, he answered eagerly, by reiterated declarations, that there was nothing henceforth to
fear; for he had seen the assassin dead under the pagan's foot, on leaving the temple. The
second time, when mention was incautiously made before him of rumors circulated through
Rome of the burning of an unknown pagan priest, hidden in the Temple of Serapis, with
vast treasures around him, the old man was seen to start and shudder, and heard to pray for
the soul that was now waiting before the dread Judgment-seat; to murmur about a vain
restoration, and a discovery made too late; to mourn over horror that thickened around him,
over hope fruitlessly awakened, and bereavement more terrible than mortal had ever
suffered before; to entreat that the child, the last left of all, might be spared--with many
words more, which ran on themes like these, and which were counted by all who listened to
them but as the wanderings of a mind whose higher powers were fatally prostrated by
feebleness and grief.

One long hour of the night had already passed away since parent and child had been left
together, and neither word nor movement had been audible in the melancholy room. But, as
the second hour began, the girl's eyes unclosed again, and she moved painfully on the
couch. Accustomed to interpret the significance of her slightest actions, Numerian rose and
brought her one of the reviving draughts that had been left ready for use. After she had
drunk, when her eyes met her father's, fixed on her in mute and mournful inquiry, her lips
closed and formed themselves into an expression which he remembered they had always
assumed, when, as a little child, she used silently to hold up her face to him to be kissed.
The miserable contrast between what she was now and what she had been then was beyond
the passive endurance, the patient resignation of the spirit-broken old man: the empty cup
dropped from his hands, he knelt down by the side of the couch, and groaned aloud.

"Oh, father! father!" cried the weak, plaintive voice above him, "I am dying! Let us
remember that our time to be together here grows shorter and shorter; and let us pass it as
happily as we can!"

He raised his head, and looked up at her, vacant and wistful, forlorn already, as if the death-
parting was over.

"I have tried to live humbly and gratefully," she sighed, faintly. "I have longed to do more
good on the earth than I have done. Yet you will forgive me now, father, as you have always
forgiven me! You have been patient with me all my life; more patient than I have ever
deserved! But I had no mother to teach me to love you as I ought, to teach me what I know
now, when my death is near, and time and opportunity are mine no longer!"
"Hush! hush!" whispered the old man, affrightedly, "you will live! God is good, and knows
that we have suffered enough. The curse of the last separation is not pronounced against us!
Live--live!"

"Father!" said the girl, tenderly, "we have that within us which not death itself can separate.
In another world I shall still think of you, when you think of me! I shall see you even when I
am no more here, when you long to see me! When you go out alone, and sit under the trees
on the garden bank where I used to sit; when you look forth on the far plains and mountains
that I used to look on; when you read at night in the Bible that we have read in together, and
remember Antonina as you lie down sorrowful to rest; then I shall see you; then you will
feel that I am looking on you! You will be calm and consoled, even by the side of my grave;
for you will think, not of the body that is beneath, but of the spirit that is waiting for you, as
I have often waited for you here when you were away, and I knew that the approach of
evening would bring you home again!"

"Hush! you will live!--you will live!" repeated Numerian, in the same low, vacant tones.
The strength that still upheld him was in those few simple words: they were the food of a
hope that was born in agony and cradled in despair.

"Oh, if I might live!" said the girl, softly--"if I might live but for a few days, yet how much I
have to live for!" She endeavored to bend her head toward her father as she spoke; for the
words were beginning to fall faintly and more faintly from her lips--exhaustion was
mastering her once again. She dwelt for a moment now on the name of Hermanric, on the
grave in the farmhouse garden; then reverted again to her father. The last feeble sounds she
uttered were addressed to him; and their burden was still of consolation and of love.

Soon the old man, as he stooped over her, saw her eyes close again--those innocent, gentle
eyes, which even yet preserved their old expression while the face grew wan and pale
around them--and darkness and night sank down over her soul while he looked. "She
sleeps," he murmured in a voice of awe, as he resumed his watching position by the side of
the couch. "They call death a sleep; but on her face there is no death!"

The night grew on. The women who were in attendance entered the room about midnight,
wondering that their assistance had not yet been required. They beheld the solemn, unruffled
composure on the girl's wasted face; the rapt attention of Numerian, as he ever preserved the
same attitude by her side; and went out again softly without uttering a word, even in a
whisper. There was something dread and impressive in the very appearance of this room;
where Death, that destroys, was in mortal conflict with Youth and Beauty, that adorn, while
the eyes of one old man watched in loneliness the awful progress of the strife.

Morning came and still there was no change. Once, when the lamp that lit the room was
fading out as the dawn appeared, Numerian had risen and looked close on his daughter's
face--he thought at that moment that her features moved; but he saw that the flickering of
the dying light on them had deceived him; the same stillness was over her. He placed his ear
close to her lips for an instant, and then resumed his place, not stirring from it again. The
slow current of his blood seemed to have come to a pause: he was waiting as a man waits
with his head on the block, ere the ax descends--as a mother waits to hear that the breath of
life has entered her new-born child.

The sun rose bright in a cloudless sky. As the fresh, sharp air of the early dawn warmed
under its spreading rays, the women entered the apartment again, and partly drew aside the
curtain and shutter from the window. The beams of the new light fell fair and glorifying on
the girl's face; the faint, calm breeze ruffled the lighter locks of her hair. Once this would
have awakened her; but it did not disturb her now.

Soon after, the voice of the child who sojourned with the women in the house was heard
beneath, in the hall, through the half-opened door of the room. The little creature was slowly
ascending the stairs, singing her faltering morning song to herself. She was preceded on her
approach by a tame dove, bought at the provision market outside the walls, but preserved for
the child as a pet and plaything by its mother. The bird fluttered, cooing, into the room,
perched upon the head of the couch, and began dressing its feathers there. The women had
caught the infection of the old man's enthralling suspense, and moved not, to bid the child
retire, or to take away the dove from its place: they watched like him. But the soft, lulling
notes of the bird were powerless over the girl's ear, as the light sunbeam over her face---still
she never woke.

The child entered, and pausing in her song, climbed on to the side of the couch. She held out
one little hand for the dove to perch upon, placed the other lightly on Antonina's shoulder,
and pressed her fresh rosy lips to the girl's faded cheek. "I and my bird have come to make
Antonina well this morning," she said, gravely.

The still, heavily-closed eyelids moved!--they quivered, opened, closed, then opened again.
The eyes had a faint, dreaming, unconscious look; but Antonina lived! Antonina was
awakened at last to another day on earth!

Her father's rigid, straining gaze still remained fixed upon her as at first; but on his
countenance there was a blank, an absence of all appearance of sensation and life. The
women, as they looked on Antonina and looked on him, began to weep; the child resumed
very softly its morning sons, now addressing it to the wounded girl and now to the dove.

At this moment Vetranio and the physician appeared on the scene. The latter advanced to
the couch, removed the child from it, and examined Antonina intently. At length, partly
addressing Numerian, partly speaking to himself, he said, "She has slept long, deeply,
without moving, almost without breathing--a sleep like death to all who looked on it."
 The old man spoke not in reply, but the women answered eagerly in the affirmative.

"She is saved," pursued the physician, leisurely quitting the side of the couch, and smiling
on Vetranio; "be careful of her for days and days to come."

"Saved! saved!" echoed the child joyfully, the dove free in the room, and running to
Numerian to climb on his knees. The father glanced down, when the clear, young voice
sounded in his ear. The springs of joy, so long dried up in his heart, welled forth again, as he
saw the little hands raised toward him entreatingly; his gray head drooped--he wept.

At a sign from the physician the child was led from the room. The silence of deep and
solemn emotion was preserved by all who remained; nothing was heard but the suppressed
sobs of the old man, and the faint, retiring notes of the infant voice, still singing its morning
song. And now one word, joyfully reiterated again and again, made all the burden of the
music

"Saved! Saved!"

The Conclusion.
"Ubi Thesaurus Ibi Cor."

SHORTLY after the opening of the provision markets outside the gates of Rome, the Goths
broke up their camp before the city and retired to winter quarters in Tuscany. The
negotiations which ensued between Alaric and the Court and Government at Ravenna were
conducted with cunning moderation by the conqueror, and with infatuated audacity by the
conquered, and ultimately terminated in a resumption of hostilities. Rome was besieged a
second and a third time by "the barbarians." On the latter occasion the city was sacked; its
palaces were burned; its treasures were seized; the monuments of the Christian religion were
alone respected.

But it is no longer with the Goths that our narrative is concerned; the connection with them
which it has hitherto maintained closes with the end of the first siege of Rome. We can
claim the reader's attention for historical events no more--the march of our little pageant,
arrayed for his pleasure, is over, if, however, he has felt, and still retains, some interest in
Antonina, he will not refuse to follow us and look on her again ere we part.

More than a month had passed since the besieging army had retired to their winter quarters,
when several of the citizens of Rome assembled themselves on the plains beyond the walls,
to enjoy one of those rustic festivals of ancient times, which are still celebrated, under
different usages, but with the same spirit, by the Italians of modern days.
The place was a level plot of ground beyond the Pincian Gate, backed by a thick grove of
pine-trees, and looking toward the north over the smooth extent of the country round Rome.
The persons congregated were mostly of the lower class. Their amusements were dancing,
music, games of strength, and games of chance; and above all, to people who had lately
suffered the extremities of famine, abundant eating and drinking--long, serious, ecstatic
enjoyment of the powers of mastication and the faculties of taste.

Among the assembly were some individuals whose dress and manner raised them,
outwardly at least, above the general mass. These persons walked backward and forward
together on different parts of the ground, as observers, not as partakers in the sports. One of
their number, however, in whatever direction he turned, preserved an isolated position. He
held an open letter in his hand, which he looked at from time to time, and appeared to be
wholly absorbed in his own thoughts. This man we may advantageously particularize on his
own account, as well as on account of the peculiarity of his accidental situation; for he was
the favored minister of Vetranio's former pleasures--"the industrious Carrio."

The freedman (who was last introduced to the reader in Chapter XIV., as exhibiting to
Vetranio the store of offal which he had collected during the famine, for the consumption of
the palace) had contrived of late greatly to increase his master's confidence in him. On the
organization of the Banquet of Famine, he had discreetly refrained from testifying the
smallest desire to save himself from the catastrophe in which the senator and his friends had
determined to involve themselves. Securing himself in a place of safety, he awaited the end
of the orgy; and when he found that its unexpected termination left his master still living to
employ him, appeared again as a faithful servant, ready to resume his customary occupation
with undiminished zeal.

After the dispersion of his household during the famine, and amid the general confusion of
the social system in Rome, on the raising of the blockade, Vetranio found no one near him
that he could trust but Carrio--and he trusted him. Nor was the confidence misplaced: the
man was selfish and sordid enough; but these very qualities insured his fidelity to his
master, as long as. that master retained the power to punish and the capacity to reward. The
letter which Carrio held in his hand was addressed to him at a villa--from which he had just
returned--belonging to Vetranio, on the shores of the Bay of Naples, and was written by the
senator, from Rome. The introductory portions of this communication seemed to interest the
freedman but little: they contained praises of his diligence in preparing the country-house
for the immediate habitation of its owner, and expressed his master's anxiety to quit Rome
as speedily as possible, for the sake of living in perfect tranquillity, and breathing the
reviving air of the sea, as the physicians had counseled. It was the latter part of the letter that
Carrio perused and reperused, and then meditated over with unwonted attention and labor of
mind. It ran thus:
"I have now to repose in you a trust, which you will execute with perfect fidelity as you
value my favor, or respect the wealth from which you may obtain your reward. When you
left Rome, you left the daughter of Numerian lying in danger of death: she has since
revived. Questions that I have addressed to her during her recovery, have informed me of
much in her history that I knew not before; and have induced me to purchase, for reasons of
my own, a farmhouse and its lands beyond the suburbs. (The extent of the place and its
situation are written on the vellum that is within this.) The husbandman who cultivated the
property has survived the famine, and will continue to cultivate it for me. But, it is my
desire that the garden, and all that it contains, shall remain entirely at the disposal of
Numerian and his daughter, who may often repair to it; and who must henceforth be
regarded there as occupying my place and having my authority. You will divide your time
between over-looking the few slaves whom I leave at the palace in my absence, and the
husbandman and his laborers whom I have installed at the farm; and you will answer to me
for the due performance of your own duties, and the duties of those under you; being
assured that by well filling this office, you will serve your own interests in these, and in all
things besides."

The letter concluded by directing the freed man to return to Rome on a certain day, and to
go to the farmhouse at an appointed hour, there to meet his master, who had further
directions to give him, and who would visit the newly-acquired property before he
proceeded on his journey to Naples.

Nothing could exceed the perplexity of Carrio, as he read the passage in his patron's letter
which we have quoted above. Remembering the incidents attending Vetranio's early
connection with Antonina and her father, the mere circumstance of a farm having been
purchased to flatter what was doubtless some accidental caprice on the part of the girl,
would have little astonished him. But that this act should be followed by the senator's
immediate separation of himself from the society of Numerian's daughter; that she was to
gain nothing, after all, from these lands which had evidently been bought at her instigation,
but the authority over a little strip of garden; and yet the inviolability of this valueless
privilege should be insisted on in such serious terms, and with such an imperative tone of
command as the senator had never been known to use before--these were inconsistencies
which all Carrio's ingenuity failed to reconcile. The man had been born and reared in vice;
vice had fed him, clothed him, freed him, given him character, reputation, power in his own
small way--he lived in it, as in the atmosphere that he breathed; to show him an action
referable only to a principle of pure integrity, was to set him a problem which it was
hopeless to solve. And yet it is impossible, in one point of view, to pronounce him utterly
worthless. Ignorant of all distinctions between good and bad, he thought wrong from sheer
inability to see right.
However his instructions might perplex him, he followed them now--and continued in after
days to follow them--to the letter. If to serve one's own interests be an art, of that art Carrio
deserved to be head professor. He arrived at the farmhouse, not only punctually, but before
the appointed time; and, calling the honest husbandman and the laborers about him,
explained to them every particular of the authority that his patron had vested in him, with a
flowing and peremptory solemnity of speech which equally puzzled and impressed his
simple audience. He found Numerian and Antonina in the garden when he entered it. The
girl had been carried there daily, in a litter, since her recovery; and her father had followed.
They were never separated now; the old man, when his first absorbing anxiety for her was
calmed, remembered again more distinctly the terrible disclosure in the temple, and the yet
more terrible catastrophe that followed it; and sought constant refuge from the horror of the
recollection in the presence of his child.

The freedman, during his interview with the father and daughter, observed, for once, an
involuntary and unfeigned respect; but he spoke briefly, and left them together again almost
immediately. Humble and helpless as they were, they awed him: they looked, thought, and
spoke like beings of another nature than his; they were connected, he knew not how, with
the mystery of the grave in the garden: he would have been self-possessed in the presence of
the emperor himself, but he was uneasy in theirs. So he retired to the more congenial scene
of the public festival which was in the immediate neighborhood of the farmhouse, to await
the hour of his patron's arrival, and to perplex himself afresh by a reperusal of Vetranio's
letter.

The time was now near at hand when it was necessary for the freedman to return to his
appointed post. He carefully rolled up his note of instructions; stood for a few minutes
vacantly regarding the amusements which had hitherto engaged so little of his attention; and
then turning, proceeded through the pine grove on his way back. We will follow him.

On leaving the grove, a foot-path conducted over some fields to the farmhouse. Arrived
there, Carrio hesitated for a moment, then moved slowly onward to await his master's
approach in the lane that led to the high-road. At this point we will part company with him,
to enter the garden by the wicket-gate.

The trees, the flower-beds, and the patches of grass all remained in their former positions;
nothing had been added or taken away since the melancholy days that were past; but a
change was visible in Hermanric's grave. The turf above it had been renewed, and a border
of small evergreen shrubs was planted over the track which Goisvintha's footsteps had
traced. A white marble cross was raised at one end of the mound; the short Latin inscription
on it signified, "Pray For The Dead."

The sunlight was shining calmly over the grave, and over Numerian and Antonina, as they
sat by it. Sometimes, when the mirth grew louder at the rustic festival, it reached them in
faint, subdued notes; sometimes they heard the voices of the laborers in the neighboring
fields talking to each other at their work; but, besides these, no other sounds were loud
enough to be distinguished. There was still an expression of the melancholy and feebleness
that grief and suffering leave behind them, on the countenances of the father and daughter;
but resignation and peace appeared there as well--resignation that was perfected by the hard
teaching of woe, and peace that was purer for being imparted from the one to the other, like
the strong and deathless love from which it grew.

There was something now in the look and attitude of the girl, as she sat thinking of the
young warrior who had died in her defense and for her love, and training the shrubs to grow
closer round the grave, which, changed though she was, recalled in a different form the old
poetry and tranquillity of her existence when we first saw her singing to the music of her
lute in the garden on the Pincian Hill. No thoughts of horror and despair were suggested to
her as she looked on the farmhouse scene. Hers was not the grief which shrinks selfishly
from all that revives the remembrance of the dead: to her, their influence over the memory
was a grateful and a guarding influence, that gave a better purpose to the holiest life, and a
nobler nature to the purest thoughts.

Thus they were sitting by the grave--sad, yet content: footsore already on the pilgrimage of
life, yet patient to journey further if they might, when an unusual tumult, a noise of rolling
wheels mingled with a confused sound of voices, was heard in the lane behind them. They
looked round, and saw that Vetranio was approaching them alone through the wicket-gate.

He came forward slowly; the stealthy poison instilled by the Banquet of Famine palpably
displayed its presence within him, as the clear sunlight fell on his pale, wasted face. He
smiled kindly as he addressed but the bodily pain and mental agitation which that smile was
intended to conceal, betrayed themselves in his troubled voice as he spoke.

"This is our last meeting for years--it may be our last meeting for life," he said. "I linger at
the outset of my journey, but to behold you as guardian of the one spot of ground that is
most precious to you on earth--as mistress, indeed, of the little that I give you here!"--He
paused a moment and pointed to the grave; then continued: "All the atonement that I owe to
you, you can never know; I can never tell!--think only that I bear away with me a
companion in the solitude to which I go, in the remembrance of you. Be calm, good, happy
still, for my sake; and while you forgive the senator of former days, forget not the friend
who now parts from you in some sickness and sorrow, but also in much patience and hope!
Farewell!"

His hand trembled as he held it out; a flush overspread the girl's cheek while she murmured
a few inarticulate words of gratitude; and, bending over it, pressed it to her lips. Vetranio's
heart beat quick; the action revived an emotion that he dared not cherish; but he looked at
the wan, downcast face before him, at the grave that rose mournful by his side, and quelled
it again. Yet an instant he lingered to exchange a farewell with the old man, then turned
quickly, passed through the gate, and they saw him no more.

Antonina's tears fell fast on the grass beneath, as she resumed her place. When she raised
her head again, and saw that her father was looking at her, she nestled close to him and laid
one of her arms round his neck: the other gradually dropped to her side, until her hand
reached the topmost leaves of the shrubs that grew round the grave.

Shall we longer delay in the farmhouse garden? No! For us, as for Vetranio, it is now time
to depart! While peace still watches round the walls of Rome; while the hearts of the father
and daughter still repose together in security after the trials that have wrung them, let us quit
the scene! Here, at last, the narrative that we have followed over a dark and stormy tract,
reposes on a tranquil field; and here let us cease to pursue it!

So the traveler who traces the course of a river, wanders through the day among the rocks
and precipices that lead onward from its troubled source; and, when the evening is at hand,
pauses and rests where the banks are grassy and the stream is smooth.

-- End --