公元 408 年秋天，阿尔卑斯山山脉与意大利东北部边界接壤，这些山脉已经被那些通常被称为“意大利”的北方国家的侵略军的足迹在各个方向上留下了沟壑。哥特人。

在某些地方，这些足迹的两侧都有倒下的树木，有时在暴风雨的破坏中一半被抹去时，会出现荒凉且不规则的沼泽地。在其他地方，它们不太明显。在这里，临时道路被汹涌的急流完全遮住了。在那里，偶尔有一些松软的地面可以隐约看到它，或者可以通过废弃的盔甲碎片、马匹和人的骨骼以及曾经用于过河或越过悬崖的简陋桥梁的残余物来部分追踪。

公元五世纪初，在紧邻意大利平原的山脉最顶端的岩石中，有一个小湖，是旅行者的努力或入侵者行进的最后一道屏障。 。三面都是悬崖，狭窄的河岸没有青翠的地方，也没有居住的地方，黑暗而死气沉沉的水域虽然很少有明亮的阳光，但这个孤独的地方总是悲伤的，在秋天的一天呈现出来当我们的故事开始时，一种荒凉的感觉既令人沮丧又令人压抑。

时间已近中午。但天上并没有出现太阳。暗淡的云彩，颜色和形状都单调，隐藏了天空中所有的美丽，给大地投下了沉重的黑暗。浓密、停滞的蒸气附着在山顶上。低垂的树上，枯叶和腐烂的树枝时不时地沉入渗水的土壤中，或者在阴暗的悬崖上旋转。一场小雨持续不断地落在周围的沙漠上，缓慢而不间断。站在军队曾经走过的、军队注定要走的道路上，望着那片孤寂的湖水，一开始你听不到任何声音，只有雨滴有规律地从岩石间滴落到岩石上。除了脚下一动不动的水域和上方阴影笼罩的暗色峭壁之外，你看不到任何其他的景色。然而，当被这个地方神秘的孤独所感动，眼睛变得更加敏锐，耳朵更加专注时，湖周围的悬崖上出现了一个明显的洞穴；在大雨的间隙，隐约可以听到人声。

洞口的一部分被一块大石头遮住了，石头上堆放着一些腐烂的灌木丛，仿佛是为了保护洞里的居民免受外界寒冷的影响。这个奇怪的避难所位于湖的东边，不仅可以看到下面崎岖的小路，还可以看到西边不远的一大片平地，它悬在第二个和更低的山脉上的岩石。在天气晴朗的日子里，从这个地方可以看到山脚下的橄榄树，再往前，一直延伸到遥远的地平线，是命运多舛的意大利平原，现在它的命运是失败和耻辱。加速其黑暗而可怕的成就。

洞穴内部低矮且形状不规则。湿气从崎岖不平的墙壁上渗出，流到腐烂的苔藓地板上。蜥蜴和有毒的动物一直在这片舒适的隐秘处不受干扰，直到我们刚才描述的那段时期，它们的悲惨权利第一次遭到人类入侵者的侵犯。

一个女人蹲在这个地方的入口附近。更里面，地面上最干燥的地方，躺着一个正在睡觉的孩子。其间散落着一些枯枝和腐叶，排成一团火。在许多地方，这些少量的燃料都略微变黑了。但是，由于它被雨水打湿了，所有永久点燃它的努力显然都是徒劳的。

女人的头向前倾着，脸埋在双手里，搁在膝盖上。她时不时地用嘶哑、呻吟的声音自言自语。她的一件单薄衣服被脱掉一部分来盖住孩子。她身上剩下的东西，一部分是兽皮，一部分是粗棉布。这件破烂的裙子的许多地方都沾满了血迹，她那长长的亚麻色头发在凌乱的发绺上也有着同样不祥和令人厌恶的污点。

这孩子看起来还不到四岁，苍白瘦削的脸上显露出哥特血统的所有特征。他的容貌无论是神态还是形状，似乎都曾经美丽过。但一道深深的伤口一直延伸到他的脸颊，使他永远变形了。他在睡梦中瑟瑟发抖，时不时机械地向散落在他面前的枯死的冰冷树枝伸出小手臂。

突然，一块大石头从洞穴远处的岩石上脱落下来，轰然坠落到地上。听到这个声音，他尖叫一声惊醒——站起身来——努力向那个女人走去，却又踉踉跄跄地向后退到了山洞的一侧。腿上的第二处伤口对他的活力造成了破坏，就像第一处伤口对他的美丽造成的破坏一样。他是个瘸子。

他刚醒来，那女人就站了起来。她现在把他从地上扶起来，从怀里取出一些草药，敷在他受伤的脸颊上。由于这个动作，她的衣服变得乱七八糟：顶部僵硬，凝结着血液，显然是从她脖子上的伤口流出来的。

她所有试图安抚孩子的努力都徒劳无功。他可怜兮兮地呻吟着，哭泣着，时不时地咕哝着，断断续续地喊叫着，因为这里的寒冷和他最近受伤的痛苦让他感到不耐烦。这个可怜的女人无语无泪，茫然地低头看着他的脸。从那凝视、心不在焉的目光中，不难看出将哀悼的女人与受苦的男孩联系在一起的纽带的本质。她那双阴郁的眼睛里流露出僵硬而可怕的绝望表情，紧闭的嘴唇变得苍白，她坚定、威严的身躯因痉挛而动摇，无声地以人类情感的神圣雄辩表达了这对孤独的情侣之间的情感。存在着地球上最亲密的关系——母亲和孩子的联系。

有一段时间，女人的神态没有任何变化。最后，仿佛受到了某种突然的怀疑，她站了起来，用一只手臂抱住孩子，用另一只手臂移开避难所入口处的灌木丛，小心翼翼地向前看，西边的雾气留下了可见的一切。景观。短暂地观察了一番后，她退了回去，仿佛对这个地方一尘不染的孤独感到放心，然后转向湖边，俯视着脚下黑色的水面。

“黑夜已经过去了，”她阴沉地嘀咕道，“它没有给我的身体带来任何帮助，也没有给我的心灵带来希望！”我已经走了一英里又一英里，危险还在后面，孤独却永远存在。死亡的阴影笼罩着男孩；痛苦的负担越来越重，超出了我的承受能力。对我来说，朋友被谋杀，捍卫者疏远，财产丢失。基督教牧师的上帝已将我们遗弃在危险之中，并在悲痛中遗弃了我们。我应该为我们双方结束这场斗争。我们最后的避难所就是这里——我们的坟墓也将在这里！

她最后看了一眼寒冷而令人不舒服的天空，然后走到了陡峭的湖岸边。孩子已经被她抱在怀里，她的身体弯曲着，成功地完成了致命的跳跃，这时东方传来一阵微弱的、遥远的、转瞬即逝的声音，传入了她的耳朵。刹那间，她的眼睛亮了起来，胸口起伏，脸颊通红。她用尽了最后的力气，在身后的岩石壁架上占据了一个显着的位置，并在痛苦的期待中等待着那魔法声音的重复。

过了一会儿，她又听到了——因为那个孩子，因为她决心和他一起跳进湖里的动作而惊呆了，现在保持沉默，她可以不受干扰地听着。对于没有练习过的耳朵来说，她如此着迷的声音几乎听不见。即使是经验丰富的旅行者也会认为这只不过是东方远处岩石中落石的回声。但对她来说，这并不是一个不重要的声音，因为它发出了释放和喜悦的欢迎信号。

随着时间的流逝，它越来越近，在嬉戏的回声中翻来覆去，现在清楚地表明，正如她最初猜测的那样，它的起源是哥特式小号的音符。不久，远处的音乐停止了，接着是另一种声音，低沉而隆隆，就像远处发生地震或正在升起的雷雨，不久之后，变成了一种刺耳的混乱噪音，就像一阵强风吹过整个森林的沙沙声。灌木丛。

这一刻，女人完全失去了对自己的控制力。她以前的耐心和谨慎抛弃了她；她不顾危险，把孩子放在她刚才站过的壁架上。尽管四肢颤抖，但他还是成功地爬到了峭壁上，在岩石顶部附近出现了一条裂缝，从那里可以不间断地看到大片不平坦的地面，通向东边的下一个山脉。悬崖和峡谷。

漫长的几分钟一分一秒地过去了，虽然还可以听到很多声音，但什么也看不见。终于，刺耳的号角声再次在沉闷、雾气弥漫的空气中响起，下一瞬间，一支哥特军队的先头部队从远处的树林中出现了。

然后，过了一会儿，大量的主体从树林的每一个出口涌来，在湖边树林和岩石之间的沙漠地面上成群地散开。前排停下来，仿佛是在与后方的人群和行李车中的散兵游勇进行交流，这些人仍然从远处树林的隐蔽处涌出，显然是无穷无尽的大军。先头部队显然是想检查道路，仍然快速行进，直到他们到达了通向悬崖的山脚，女人仍然紧抓着悬崖，她仍然热切地注视着他们的行动。 。

在最危险的情况下，她的力量是她抵御从又高又窄的高处滑落的唯一保护剂。迄今为止，期望带来的道德兴奋赋予了她维持地位所必需的体力。但当护卫首领到达山洞时，她过度劳累的精力突然消失了。她的手松开了。她摇摇欲坠，如果不是包裹在她胸部和腰部的皮肤与她周围的一块锯齿状岩石的尖端缠在一起，她就会向后倒去，立即被毁掉。幸运的是——她无法发出一声叫喊——部队此时停了下来，让马匹喘口气。其中两人立刻察觉到了她的位置并发现了她的国家。他们登上了岩石；当其中一个抓住了孩子时，另一个成功地救出了母亲并将她安全地带到了地上。

马匹的喷鼻声、武器的碰撞声、喧闹、粗暴的声音的混乱，这些声音现在惊动了这片孤寂的湖水原本的寂静，在这个女人精疲力尽的情况下，这些声音会让大多数人感到困惑和不知所措，相反，这些声音似乎相反，安抚她的感情并恢复她的力量。她挣脱了守护者的搀扶，抱着孩子，走向了一名身材魁梧的男子，他身上的厚重铠甲足以表明他在军队中的地位就是统帅。

“我是戈伊斯文莎，”她用坚定、平静的声音说道，“赫尔曼里克的妹妹。”我带着一个孩子从阿奎莱亚人质大屠杀中逃脱。我的兄弟在国王的军队里吗？

这一声明使旁观者发生了明显的变化。他们起初对逃亡者投以冷漠或好奇的目光，现在变成了最生动的惊奇和尊敬的表情。她说话的酋长掀起了头盔的面罩，露出了自己的脸，对她的问题做出了肯定的回答，并命令两名士兵将她带到后方主力部队的临时营地。正当她转身欲走之时，一名老者拄着重重长剑走了过来，如此招呼她——

“我是维西默，他的女儿在阿奎莱亚被罗马人扣为人质。她是被杀者还是逃亡者？

“她的骨头在城墙下腐烂了。”这是答案。 “罗马人把她当作狗的盛宴。”

老战士没有说一句话，也没有流泪。他转向意大利方向。但是，当他向下看向平原时，他的眉毛低了下来，双手机械地握紧了他巨大武器的剑柄。

引导她去军队的两个人也向戈伊斯文塔提出了同样令人沮丧的问题，就像他们年长的战友问过的那样。它得到了同样可怕的答复，同样以同样严厉的镇定态度接受了答复，随后又以同样不祥的目光看向意大利的方向，就像老兵威西默的例子一样。

男人们小心翼翼地牵着载着疲惫不堪的女人的马，但又以惊人的速度，沿着他们刚刚登上的小路，在很短的时间内到达了军队停下来的地方，并向戈伊斯文塔展示了北方武士的庞大军事集结，人山人海，静谧安宁。

他们的盔甲上没有闪烁任何光芒；他们头上没有飘扬的旗帜；他们的队伍中没有响起任何音乐。背靠沉闷的树林，树林里仍然不断地涌出新兵，加入到已经扎营的好战群众中。周围是荒凉的峭壁，在黑暗的雾霭中显得暗淡、狂野、雄伟。乌云密布，一动不动地盘旋在荒芜的山顶上，暴风雨倾盆而下，倾泻在未开垦的平原上——哥特人外表庄严的外表与他们脸上冰冷而哀伤的面容极其和谐。大自然已经假设了。沉默——险恶——黑暗——这支军队看起来恰如其分地体现了其领导人的伟大目标——征服罗马。

她的向导带着戈伊斯文塔快速穿过前面的战士队伍，在一块与树林中的主干道成直角的地面上停下来，要求她下马；并指着占据这个地方的一群人说：“那边是国王阿拉里克，和他一起的是你的兄弟赫尔曼里克。”

无论从什么角度来看，戈伊斯文塔所看到的这些人的聚集本身肯定引起了人们的注意。一群武士斜倚在散落在地上的一堆杂乱的武器旁边，显然是在听三个年迈男子低声嘀咕的谈话，这三个人坐在岩石上，长长的白发粗糙而粗糙。皮衣、瘦弱的摇摇欲坠的身影与身下听众的铁甲巨人形象形成鲜明对比。在老人们的上方，在大路上，停着阿拉里克的一辆马车。笨拙的轮子上堆满的行李被选为未来罗马征服者的安息之地。车顶似乎堆满了生活负担。每个角落都栖息着各个年龄段的妇女和儿童，以及各种武器和牲畜。现在，一个活泼、调皮、好奇的孩子在攻城槌的头顶上向外张望。现在，一只瘦弱、饥饿的羊悲伤地将探询的鼻孔伸向露天，从动作中可以看出，一个枯萎的老妇人的头枕在他毛茸茸的侧腹上。在这里，出现了一个半埋在盾牌中挣扎的年轻女孩。那里，一名瘦弱的营地追随者喘着粗气，差点被毛皮堆窒息。整个场景以大树林为背景，笼罩在烟雨之中，时而对比鲜明，时而庄严和谐，呈现出一种令人震惊或敬畏的巨大物体组合——一种阴郁的结合。具有威胁性和崇高性。

让戈伊斯文塔在马车附近等候，她的一名售票员走过来，示意站在国王附近的一名年轻人让开。当战士起身服从命令时，他展示了他的种族的所有身体优势，以及在他的民族中罕见的动作的轻松和弹性。当他加入到与他搭话的士兵身边时，他的脸被一顶巨大的头盔遮住了，头盔上有一个野猪头，死时被迫张开的嘴张得大大的，仿佛仍在狂暴地寻找猎物。但那人刚说出他的使命，就猛烈地开始了，脱下了战争的可怕附属物，光着头匆匆走到马车旁边，戈伊斯文塔在那里等待着他的到来。

女人一看到他，就赶紧迎了上去。将受伤的孩子抱在怀里，向他打招呼，说道：

“当我们的人民与帝国和平相处时，你的兄弟在罗马军队服役。他的家人和财产，这就是罗马人留下的全部了！

她停了下来，一瞬间，兄妹俩以令人感动和富有表现力的沉默相互对视。虽然，除了乡土的一般特征之外，两人的面容自然也带有更特殊的血缘关系，但此刻他们之间的所有相似之处——表情胜过面容的力量是多么奇妙——都消失得无影无踪了。年轻人（年仅二十岁）的面容和举止流露出深深的悲伤，严肃中透着男子气概，平静中透着男子气概，天真无邪中透着真诚。当他看着孩子时，他那双明亮、锐利、活泼的蓝眼睛变得像女人的眼睛一样柔和。他的嘴唇几乎没有被短胡子遮住，嘴唇紧闭，颤抖着。他的胸膛在其高贵的盔甲下起伏。在这种简单、无言、无泪的忧郁中——这种对胜利的力量对受苦的弱点的精致思考——有一种近乎崇高的东西；与戈伊斯文塔脸上出现的恶意和绝望情绪相反。她睁大、刺眼的眼睛里闪烁着凶猛的光芒，她苍白、张开的嘴唇周围出现了险恶的斑纹，粗大的静脉肿胀，在她高耸的前额上达到了最紧张的程度，所以她的面容扭曲了，以至于哥哥当她们站在一起时，姐姐的表情似乎暂时改变了性别。战士对受难者产生怜悯；母亲对这种罪行表示愤慨。

赫尔曼里克从对孩子的忧郁沉思中醒来，尚未对戈伊斯文塔说一句话，他登上了马车，把他妹妹的最后一个孩子放在了一位衰弱的老妇人的怀里，老妇人坐在一捆草药上沉思。摊开在她的腿上，对她这样说道：

“这些伤口来自罗马人。救活孩子，你将从罗马的战利品中得到回报。”

'哈！哈！哈！'老太婆咯咯笑道； “赫尔曼里克是一位杰出的战士，应该服从。赫尔曼里克很伟大，因为他的手臂可以杀人；但布伦柴尔德比他更伟大，因为她的狡猾可以治愈！”

老妇人似乎急于想在武士眼前证实这一夸言，立即开始从她储存的草药中准备必要的敷料；但赫尔曼里克并没有等待见证她的技艺。他最后看了一眼这个苍白、疲惫的孩子，慢慢地从马车上走下来，走近戈伊斯文塔，把她拉到靠近笨重车辆的一个隐蔽位置。他坐在她身边，准备全神贯注地听她讲述她最近经历的恐怖和痛苦的场景。

“你，”她开始说道，“出生在我们国家和平时期；从战场转移到那些仍然平静的遥远省份；在您的整个童年时期都免受战争的影响；你在年轻时就参军了，只有当你的辛劳已经过去，胜利即将到来时，你才摆脱了我们人民的苦难，分享了他们即将到来的复仇的荣耀。

“自从我与普里尔夫结婚时，你就被赶出了哥特人的定居点，还不到一年。当时与他结盟的小人物种族，尽管他们罗马人傲慢，但在他们的议会中服从他，并在他们的军团中承认他是勇敢的。我高兴地看到自己是一位著名战士的妻子；我自豪地相信，我注定要成为一个英雄种族的母亲；突然传来狄奥多西皇帝去世的消息。随后，这片土地上的人们陷入了无政府状态，他们的盟友哥特人的自由也受到了侵犯。不久之后，我们国家中就响起了武装的呼声。很快，我们的战车就驶过了冰冻的多瑙河。我们的士兵离开了罗马营地；我们的农夫从小屋的墙上取下了武器；我们这些妇女带着孩子准备跟随我们的丈夫去田野；国王阿拉里克作为我们大军的领袖出现了。

“我们向希腊人的领土进军。但我该如何告诉你我们入侵后那些年战争中发生的事件呢？我们胜利的荣耀；我们防御的艰辛；我们撤退时的痛苦；我们战胜了饥饿；我们所忍受的疾病；违背我们国王的意愿，最终批准了可耻的和平！当我想到我刚刚逃离的那场大屠杀时，我该如何讲述这一切——当这些最初的罪恶虽然曾经在痛苦中被铭记，但即使现在，在随之而来的更严重的恐怖中被遗忘了！

'休战已经达成。阿拉里克带着他的残部出发，在埃莫纳扎营，就在他已经入侵、现在准备征服的那片土地的边界上。我们的国王和罗马将军斯提利科之间传递了许多信息，因为两位领导人对最终签订的和平条款存在争议。与此同时，作为哥特信仰的真诚，我们的战士队伍，其中包括普里乌夫，被派往意大利，再次成为罗马军团的盟友，他们带着他们的妻子和孩子，被拘留为全国各城市的人质。

“我和我的孩子们被带到了阿奎莱亚。我们和我们的财产一起住在城内的一处住宅里。那天晚上，我在门口与我的丈夫普里尔夫告别。当他带着军队离开时，我看着他，当黑暗将他从我眼前遮住时，我又回到了城镇。我是我们国家唯一活着逃脱的女性。

当她说出这最后一句话时，戈伊斯文莎一直平静而镇定的态度开始发生变化：她在叙述中突然停顿，她的头低垂在胸前，她的身体颤抖着，仿佛因剧烈的痛苦而抽搐。沉默了一会儿后，当她转向赫尔曼里克再次对他讲话时，她的脸上露出了同样的恶毒表情，就像她向他展示受伤的孩子时一样。她的声音变得破碎、沙哑、毫无女性气息。她紧紧地贴在年轻人身边，用颤抖的手指搭在他的手臂上，仿佛在表明他全神贯注的注意力。

“时间一天天过去，”她继续说道，“但仍然没有传来和平最终实现的消息。我们作为人质，与镇上的人们分开居住。因为即使在那时我们也对彼此怀有敌意。在我被囚禁期间，除了耐心，我没有任何工作；除了希望，没有追求。我习惯于独自和我的孩子们一起眺望大海，望向我们国王的营地。但日复一日，他的战士却没有出现在平原上。普里乌尔夫也没有带着军团返回城门前扎营。于是我在孤独中哀悼；因为我的心渴望我人民的家园；我渴望再次看到我丈夫的脸，再次看到我们战士的队伍，以及他们的阵势的威严。

“但是，当绝望的伟大日子很快临近时，一种痛苦的愤怒正在为我一个人准备。一直注视着我们的人已经换了，新来的守卫中，有一个对我投来了贪婪的目光。夜复一夜，他在我不情愿的耳边倾诉他的恳求。因为，出于他的虚荣和无耻，他相信我，一个哥特人，一个哥特人的妻子，可能会被他的罗马血统所赢得！不久，他从祈祷变成了威胁。一天晚上，他面带微笑地出现在我面前，大声喊道，斯提利科一心想与哥特人讲和，却因为他对我们人民的忠诚而受到了死刑；我们所有人的毁灭时代即将来临，只有他——我所鄙视的——才能保护我免受罗马的愤怒。当他停下来时，他向我走来。但身经百战的我，对战争的前景并不感到恐惧，在场大笑地拒绝了他。

“然后，又过了几个晚上，我的敌人就没有再接近我了。直到有一天晚上，当我带着你所见过的孩子坐在屋前的露台上时，一个头盔顶饰突然落在我的脚下，一个声音从下面的花园里向我喊道：“愿你的丈夫被杀了”在罗马士兵的争吵中！与他一起服役的军团已经在前往城镇的路上了。因为对人质的屠杀是注定的。只要说出来，我就能救你！”

'我看着山顶。这是该死的，而且是他的！一瞬间，当我想到我所爱的战士时，我的心在心里翻滚！然后，当我听到死亡的使者从花园里潜伏的地方咒骂着退出时，我想起现在我的孩子们除了他们的母亲之外没有人来保护他们，而来自他们种族的敌人的危险正在为他们准备着。 。除了我怀里的小宝宝外，我还有两个宝宝在屋里睡觉。当我困惑而绝望地环顾四周，看看我们是否还有逃跑的机会时，喇叭声响彻了夜晚的寂静，下面的街道上可以听到武装人员的脚步声。紧接着，镇上的四面八方突然响起女人的尖叫声和男人的叫喊声。当我冲向孩子们的床时，罗马的恶魔已经登上了楼梯，并在血腥的胜利中挥舞着他们散发着恶臭的剑！我获得了台阶；当我抬起头时，他们把我最小的孩子的尸体扔向我。赫曼里克啊！赫尔曼里克！这是最美丽、最可爱的！牧师们说，上帝对我们来说应该是怎样的，而我的后代中最美丽的一个，对我来说就是这样！当我看到它残缺不全、死掉的时候——就在一个小时前，我还把它放在怀里安息了！——我失去了勇气，当凶手向我逼近时，我踉踉跄跄地摔倒了。我感觉到剑尖刺入了我的脖子；我看到匕首在我怀里的孩子身上闪闪发光；我听到上面最后一个受害者的死亡尖叫声；然后我的感官失去了知觉，我再也听不到声音，也无法动弹了！

“我必须一动不动地躺在那些致命的楼梯脚下很久了；因为当我从恍惚中醒来时，城市里的喧嚣都安静了，月亮从她在天空中的位置柔和地照进了这座废弃的房子。我侧耳倾听，确定只有我和被谋杀的孩子们在一起。屋子里没有任何声音。刺客们已经离开了，他们相信当我倒在他们的剑下时，他们的血腥劳动就结束了。我终于能够安全地爬出去，最后看一眼被罗马人杀害的我的后代。我抱在怀里的孩子还在呼吸。我用衣服的碎片止住了他所受的伤口，然后把他轻轻地放在楼梯旁——在月光下，这样我就可以在他移动时看到他——我在墙的阴影里摸索着寻找我的第一个被谋杀的人。我最后出生的；为了他们在我眼前屠杀的我最年轻、最美丽的后代！当我触摸尸体时，它被血浸湿了；我摸了摸它的脸，我的手底下很冷；我把它的身体抱起来，它的四肢已经僵硬死了！然后我想到了最大的孩子，他死在楼上的房间里。但我的体力很快就耗尽了。我有一个婴儿，也许还能被保存下来；我知道，如果黎明来临，我就永远失去了逃跑的机会。因此，尽管我把孩子的尸体交给罗马人摆布，心里很冷，但我还是把死者和伤者抱在怀里，走进花园，从那里走向城镇的临海区。 。

“我穿过被遗弃的街道。有时我被一个孩子的尸体绊倒，有时月光让我看到我所爱的我国家的某个女人苍白的脸，向上伸展到天空；但我仍然继续前进，直到到达城墙，听到对岸河水流向阿奎莱亚港和大海的声音。

”我环顾四周。我所知道的大门有人看守并关闭。靠墙是唯一的逃生途径。但当我用手摸时，它的顶部很高，侧面很光滑。我绝望又疲惫，把担子放在树荫下，向前走了几步，因为保持静止是一种我无法忍受的折磨。在不远处，我看到一名士兵靠着房子的墙睡觉。他身边有一个靠窗放置的梯子。当我抬起头时，我看到一具尸体的头放在上面。受害者一定是最近被杀的，因为她的血仍然慢慢地滴进士兵伸手可及的空酒壶里。当我看到梯子时，我心中燃起了希望。我把它移到墙上——我爬上去，把我死去的孩子放在墙顶的大石头上——我回来了，把我受伤的孩子放在尸体旁边。我慢慢地、费了很大的力气，把梯子向上拖，直到梯子的一端由于自身的重量落到了另一侧的地面上。正如我上升一样，我也下降了。我在河岸的沙地上挖了一个洞，把婴儿的尸体埋在那里。因为我再也无法承受两个人的重量了。然后我带着受伤的孩子到达了靠近海边的一些洞穴。第二天一整天，我都躲在那里，独自忍受着身体和心灵的痛苦，直到夜幕降临，我才启程前往山区。因为我知道，在埃莫纳，我人民战士的营地里，是我在地球上唯一的避难所。我虚弱而缓慢，白天躲藏，晚上行进，一直赶路，直到到达岩石中的那个湖，在那里，军队的卫士挺身而出，把我从死亡中救了出来。

她停了下来。在她的叙述的后半部分，她的举止一直平静而悲伤。当她沉浸在悲伤的痛苦中，思考与她所承受的丧亲之痛有关的每一个细节时，她的声音变得柔和，变成了那些安静的哀伤的口音，这使最简单的词令人印象深刻，使音乐变得最不稳定的音调。当她在回忆他们的死亡时，似乎那些曾经因后代的吸引力而在她的性格中产生的温柔和仁慈的情感，在记忆的召唤下，在她的举止中复活了。有那么一会儿，她焦急地注视着赫曼里克的脸，赫曼里克半躲着她，高贵的面容上不自然地流露出一种凶猛而报复性的阴郁。然后她转过身去，把脸埋在双手里，不再努力吸引他的注意或煽动他回答。

失去亲人的女人和沉思的男人保持着这种庄严的沉默，只持续了几分钟，这时马车顶部传来一个刺耳、颤抖的声音，时不时地喊道：“赫尔曼里克！”赫尔曼里克！

起初，年轻人对那些不和谐和令人厌恶的语气不为所动。然而，他们如此频繁、如此坚持地重复着他的名字，以至于他很快就注意到了他们。他突然起身，仿佛对打扰感到不耐烦，朝似乎发出神秘召唤的马车一侧走去。

当他抬头看向汽车时，声音停止了，他看到他向他倾诉孩子的老妇人就是几分钟前匆匆打电话给他的人。她摇摇欲坠的身体，穿着熊皮，向前弯着，靠在一块抛光黄铜制成的大三角形盾牌上，她把瘦长、干瘪的手臂靠在盾牌上。她的头颤抖着、麻木了。她干瘪的嘴唇张开，凹陷的眼睛变得明亮起来。险恶、畏缩、令人厌恶；她的脸因支撑她的武器的反射而变得铁青，穿着粗糙的衣服，身材憔悴，她的身材几乎不像人类，她似乎是恶灵为了嘲笑人类的威严而制造的畸形——一种具身的讽刺。一切在体弱时最可悲，在年老时最令人厌恶。

当她认出赫尔曼里克时，她将身体进一步伸展到盾牌上。他指着马车的内部，轻声嘀咕了一个可怕而富有表现力的词——死！

没有等待任何进一步的解释，年轻的哥特人就上了车，走到了老妇人的身边，看到了戈伊斯文塔最后一个孩子的尸体，躺在她收集的草药上——在死亡的崇高和忧郁的寂静中显得美丽。

“赫曼里克生气了吗？”女巫哀嚎着，在年轻人坚定、责备的目光面前瑟瑟发抖。 “当我说布鲁内柴尔德比赫尔曼里克更伟大时，我撒了谎。赫曼里克才是最强大的！看，伤口上敷了敷料；而且，虽然孩子已经死了，但许诺给我的宝藏难道不是我的吗？我已经做了我能做的，但我的狡猾开始抛弃我，因为我老了——老了——老了！我亲眼目睹了我这一代人的逝去！啊哈！我老了，赫尔曼里克，我老了！

当年轻的武士看着孩子时，他发现女巫说的是实话，受害者的死并不是因为她的过错。男孩的脸色苍白而平静，表明他的死亡是多么平静。敷料经过精心配制，小心翼翼地敷在他的伤口上，但苦难和贫困已经消灭了人类在迈向最后一个可怕目标的过程中的软弱抵抗，罗马帝国的背叛再次像往常一样取得了胜利，并且取得了胜利。超过一个孩子！

当赫尔曼里克带着尸体下降时，戈伊斯文萨是他降落在地面上时看到的第一个物体。母亲从他手中接过这个毫无生气的重担，没有一声惊呼，也没有一滴眼泪。在最后一个孩子死亡的信号下，她在结束痛苦的叙述时所产生的那种从她以前的、更仁慈的自我中散发出来的气息，从此在她身上永远消失了！

“他的伤使他瘫痪了。”年轻人阴郁地说。 “他永远不可能和战士们一起战斗！我们的祖先在战斗不再有活力时就自杀了。他最好死了！

'复仇！'戈伊斯文塔喘息着，紧紧贴在他身边。 “我们将为阿奎莱亚的屠杀报仇！”当罗马宫殿里血流成河时，请记住我被谋杀的孩子们，不要赶紧收剑！”

就在这时，仿佛为了进一步唤起年轻哥特人脸上已经显现的凶猛决心，阿拉里克指挥军队前进的声音响起。赫尔曼里克吃了一惊，拉着气喘吁吁的女人跟着他来到了国王的安息之地。在那里，令人畏惧的哥特军队统帅全身武装，凭借其优越的身材，高高地站在周围的人群之上。他的头盔被举起，露出他清澈的蓝眼睛，在周围的人群中闪烁着光芒。他用剑指向意大利的方向。士兵们一排一排地拿起武器，兴高采烈地准备行军，他的嘴唇张开，露出胜利的微笑，在他走过去陪伴他们之前，他这样说道：

“哥特战士们，我们在山间短暂停留；但不要让疲倦的人抱怨，因为等待我们劳动的光荣安息之地就是罗马城！奥丁的诅咒，当我们国家还处于起步阶段时，他就在无数帝国面前退休了，这是我们的荣幸！他所谴责的对罗马的未来毁灭，是由我们来实现的！记住罗马人杀害的你们的人质；罗马人夺取了你的财产；罗马人背叛了你的信任！请记住，我，你们的国王，内心有一种超自然的冲动，这种冲动从不欺骗，并以鼓励的声音呼唤着我——前进，帝国就是你的！集结战士，将世界之城交给征服的哥特人！让我们刻不容缓地继续前行吧！我们的猎物正在等待着我们！我们的胜利已经临近了！我们的复仇就在眼前！

他停了下来;就在这时，号角发出了行军的信号。

'向上！向上！'赫尔曼里克喊道，抓住戈伊斯文塔的手臂，指着已经开始移动的马车。 '准备好旅程吧！我将负责埋葬孩子。再过几天，我们的营地可能就到了阿奎莱亚前面。耐心点，我会在罗马的宫殿里为你报仇！”

庞大的群众动了。人群在贫瘠的土地上伸展开来。即使是现在，军队前面的战士也可以被后方的战士们看到，他们正在爬上意大利平原和哥特人之间最后的隘口。

远离现代意大利游客的常规路线而来到拉文纳市的旅行者，当他踏在寂静而忧郁的街道上，看到葡萄园和沼泽在城与城之间绵延四英里的时候，他会惊讶地记得。亚得里亚海和这座城镇，这个现在半荒废的地方曾经是人口最多的罗马堡垒；现在他眼前出现的田野和树林，曾经是帝国的舰队安全停泊的地方，罗马商人在他的仓库门口卸下了他珍贵的货物。

随着罗马势力的衰落，亚得里亚海因一种奇怪的宿命而开始抛弃它迄今为止所保卫的堡垒。与人民的逐渐堕落同时发生的是，海洋逐渐从城墙上撤退。直到六世纪初，奥古斯都港曾经存在的地方已经出现了一片松树林。

在我们故事的那个时期——尽管海水已经明显退去——城墙周围的沟渠还被填平，运河仍然穿过城市，就像现在与威尼斯相交一样。

在我们即将描述的那个早晨，距离上一章提到的事件已经过去了几天。尽管太阳已经高高挂在东方地平线上，但酷热所带来的焦躁却让拉文纳的一些闲人鼓起勇气，勇敢地冒着闷热的气氛，徒劳地希望在登上临海壁垒时能受到来自亚得里亚海的微风的迎接。镇的。在达到他们注定的高度后，这些乐观的公民将他们的脸转向指南针的每一个点，以徒劳而绝望的勤奋，但没有一丝空气来奖励他们的毅力。没有什么比从他们当时所在的位置从各个方向看到的景色更能彻底地说明炎热的普遍性了。他们身后城市的石头房屋闪烁着鲜艳的光芒，即使是最强大的眼睛也无法抗拒。光幕一动不动地挂在孤独的窗户上。没有阴影改变墙壁的明亮单调，也没有柔化下面喷泉水面上活泼的闪光。宽阔的航道表面没有一丝涟漪，现在它取代了古老的港口。码头上废弃船只的灼热船帆没有一丝风吹开。远处的沼泽上空笼罩着一层热气腾腾的雾气。在城镇附近的葡萄园里，细长的茎上没有一片叶子摇曳。面向大海的一侧，广阔而平坦，是燃烧的沙子的前景。远处，主要的海洋——无波无息、冷漠无情，充满了猛烈的光芒——一直延伸到万里无云的地平线，遮住了阳光明媚的视野。

城内，那些高楼大厦在石板路上投下浓重阴影的街道上，时不时能看到几个奴隶的身影靠着墙睡觉，或者懒洋洋地闲聊着各自领主的过错。有时，人们可能会看到一个老乞丐在自己丰富的身体储备中捕猎南方的活生生的害虫。有时，一个焦躁不安的孩子从门口爬出来，在狗舍的死水中划船；但是，除了这些人类工业的可疑证据之外，出现在街道上的少数最低层人民群体的普遍特征是最无精打采和彻底的懒惰。一天中其他时间给这座城市带来辉煌的一切，在这个时期都被隐藏起来了。优雅的朝臣们斜倚在他们高大的房间里。值班的警卫躲在墙角和门廊的凹处。优雅的女士们睡在黑暗房间里散发着香味的沙发上。镀金的战车被关在马车房里。跃马被关在马厩里。甚至市场上的商品也被禁止在阳光下暴晒。很明显，拉文纳的奢侈居民没有意识到任何足够重要的责任，也没有足够吸引力的乐趣，以至于有必要将他们易受影响的身体暴露在正午的炎热中。

为了让读者了解宫廷里那些懒惰的贵族们是如何闲逛的，同时也为了满足这个故事的情节要求，有必要离开休息室。街上平民的床铺，是皇宫里贵族的卧榻。

穿过巨大的入口大门，穿过皇家住所的宽敞大厅，里面有雕像、大理石和守卫，然后登上高贵的楼梯，这可能是此时吸引观察者的第一个物体，当他通向私人公寓，是走廊尽头的一扇门，雕刻精美，半开着。这个地方聚集了大约十五到二十个人，他们通过手势交谈，并且在他们的所有动作中都保持着最礼貌和完全的沉默。有时，其中一个人会踮着脚尖偷偷走到门口，小心翼翼地往里看，几乎立刻就回来，并通过各种鬼脸向他的下一个邻居表达他对刚刚看到的景象的极大兴趣。偶尔，这个神秘的房间里会传来类似家禽咯咯叫的声音，时不时还会有一种类似小而轻的物质落在硬地板上的声音。每当这声音响起，门外的众人都面面相觑，有的嘲讽，有的得意。这些耐心的等待者中有几个手里拿着一卷羊皮纸。其余的人则拿着珍稀花卉的花束，或者怀里抱着小雕像和马赛克图画。他们中有些是画家和诗人，有些是演说家和哲学家，有些是雕像家和音乐家。在如此杂乱无章的职业组合中，在世界各个时代都因培养其追随者易怒的恶习而引人注目，但像刚才描述的那样安静而有序的行为竟然存在，似乎很奇怪。但值得注意的是，这些天才们在出席宫殿时，至少确保了他们队伍中表面上的一致，因为他们同样做好了一项成就的准备，同样被一个希望所激励：他们等待雇用一位共同代理人——阿谀奉承；达到一个共同的目标——收益。

如此神圣的房间，即使是智力灵感的侵入，虽然装饰华丽，但规模并不显着。其他时候，人们的目光可能会高兴地徘徊在华丽的植物和花卉上，这些植物和花卉大量散落在高贵的露台上，公寓的第二扇门通向露台。但是，此时此刻，这个房间的主人的工作性质是如此的非同寻常，以至于最细心的观察一定会忽略这个地方的所有劣势特征，而立即将注意力集中在它的主人身上。

一大群家禽似乎奇怪地错位在大理石地板上和镀金屋顶下，中间站着一个苍白、消瘦、虚弱的年轻人，他穿着华丽，手里拿着一个装满谷物的银花瓶，里面装满了谷物。他时不时地向脚下咯咯笑的人群分发食物。没有什么比这个年轻人的外表更阴柔得可怜的了。他的眼神沉重而空洞，额头低垂而内敛，脸颊蜡黄，体态弯曲，仿佛未老先衰。他薄而无色的嘴唇张开，露出毫无意义的微笑。当他瞧不起自己最喜欢的奇怪的人时，他偶尔会低声对他们说一些断断续续的爱慕之情，其简单性几乎是婴儿般的。他的整个灵魂似乎全神贯注于分发谷物的劳动，他以一种热切的注意力注视着家禽的不同动作，这种注意力在其可笑的强度上几乎是白痴。如果有人问，为什么像这个孤独的年轻人这样令人鄙视的人要如此小心地介绍，并如此细致地描述，那么必须回答的是，尽管他注定不会在这部作品中扮演重要角色，但他扮演了：从他的立场来看，这是这部伟大戏剧中一个引人注目的角色——因为这个喂鸡的人不亚于罗马皇帝霍诺里乌斯。

在我们现在所写的这个时代，正是这个人的愚蠢，才使他的性格在后人的眼中引起了可怕的兴趣。他本人模仿了那个时代邪恶文明所固有的最卑鄙的恶习，由于他的软弱，他被赋予了解放长期被囚禁的风暴的可怕责任，我们在前一章中试图描述其要素。他的智力足以让他反复无常，他的决心也足以让他恶作剧，他是一个适合每一个能够成功赢得他耳朵的野心勃勃的恶棍利用的工具。为了奉承他幼稚的暴政，宫廷里那些痴情的阴谋家对英勇的斯提利科拯救国家的行为处以死刑，并骗取了阿拉里克他们曾庄严承诺履行的温和让步。为了满足他的虚荣心，他在罗马街头凯旋，庆祝别人已经取得的胜利。为了迎合他的傲慢，通过展示永远托付给他的权力的最卑鄙的特权，毫不犹豫地下令屠杀无助的人质，这些人质是哥特人的荣誉托付给罗马人的背叛的。最后，为了平息他缺乏男子气概的恐惧，在帝国覆灭之前，他肆无忌惮的大臣们最后的行为是授权他在危险时刻抛弃他的人民，粗心大意地在毫无防备的罗马受苦受难，而他却安全无忧。在设防的拉文纳。在这个人的领导下，世界上最强大的建筑注定要摇摇欲坠！这就是注定要为时间和荣耀联合起来神圣和装饰的场景画上句号的人物！在超人的勇气的鼓舞和支持下，这种勇气给不断流血的令人作呕的恐怖赋予了粗鲁和令人震惊的辉煌，这位国家的女主人现在注定要在最卑鄙的失败和最卑鄙的颤抖之下沉没。为此，这个粗暴的古老王国用它有力的手臂将敌人甩掉了！因为它具有共和国令人怀疑的美德和帝国危险的辉煌，使世界感到困惑和震惊！霍诺里乌斯以这样的结论结束了布鲁图斯的庄严野蛮、奥古斯都的光辉灿烂、尼禄的超凡暴行以及图拉真的不朽美德！经过漫长的辛劳岁月，罗马最崇高的心灵被毁坏，最伟大的才智被卖淫，罗马无情地奋力前进，抓住了阴影——荣耀；但徒劳无功。现在，命令已经发出，注定她最终会拥有这种物质——耻辱！

当这位皇帝的小财主耗尽了他储备的粮食并满足了他贪婪的宠臣的渴望后，两名侍从接走了他的银瓶。然后，一群家禽从一扇门被引出，而一群天才则从另一扇门被引入。

让皇帝用他无精打彩的目光注视着他不欣赏的艺术品，并让他不情愿地倾听他无法理解的赞美演说，我们继续向读者介绍位于宫殿对面的一间公寓。宫殿里聚集了宫廷里所有的美丽和优雅。

想象一个长 200 英尺且宽的房间。 它的地板是马赛克的，被打造成最可爱的图案。 它的侧面装饰着巨大的杂色大理石柱子，柱子的凹槽里摆满了雕像，所有的雕像都以各种精致的姿态排列着，似乎在向任何接近它们的人提供稀有的花朵，这是上帝的职责。服务员放在他们的手上。 天花板上绘有壁画，其图案和颜色与马赛克地板上的图案和颜色相协调。 飞檐是银色的，上面装饰着当时爱情诗人的座右铭，其字母是由宝石组成的。 房间中央有一个喷泉，喷出芳香的水流，周围是金色的鸟舍，里面有各种大小和国家的鸟类。 三扇大窗户位于公寓的东端，俯瞰着亚得里亚海，但此时从外面看，被精致的绿色丝绸窗帘覆盖，为每一个物体投射出柔和、奢华的光线，但它们编织得如此之薄，排列得如此巧妙，以至于一丝不经意间移动的空气都会立即到达法院候诊室里慵懒的人们那里。 这些人的数量大约有五十或六十人。 到目前为止，这群人中一半以上是女性。 他们的黑发优雅地编成各种形状，并装饰着鲜花或宝石，与他们大部分穿着的亮白色长袍形成优雅的对比。 他们中的一些人无精打采地注视着鸟舍里的鸟儿的活动；其他人则与恰好坐在他们附近的朝臣进行无精打采的低声交谈。 与女性相比，男性的服饰色彩更加丰富，其职业也更加丰富。 他们的衣服呈最浅的玫瑰色、紫罗兰色或黄色，使他们温柔同伴的单调白色长袍变得更加多样化。 在他们的工作中，最引人注目的是弹琵琶、玩骰子、戏弄他们的哈巴狗以及侮辱他们的寄生虫。 无论他们从事什么职业，他们的注意力和热情都很少。 有些人斜靠在沙发上，闭上眼睛，仿佛炎热使他们无法使用视觉器官；另一些人在谈话中突然留下一句话未说完，显然是因为疲倦而无法表达最简单的想法。 公寓里每一个吸引眼球的景象，每一个入耳的声音，都表达着一种奢华的宁静。 没有明亮的光线破坏弥漫着的柔和气氛；没有强烈的色彩体现了连衣裙的轻盈、空灵的色调；没有突然的噪音打断鲁特琴断断续续、哀伤的音符，也没有鸟舍里鸟儿轻柔的叽叽喳喳的声音，也没有淹没女士们安静、有规律的歌声。 所有物体，无论是有生命的还是无生命的，都是相互和谐的。

在这群美丽而高贵的人中，其中的成员应该受到普遍的关注，而不是特别的观察，然而，有一个人，无论是从他选择的孤独职业还是他在房间里偶然的位置来看，都非常引人注目。在他周围无精打采的贵族中。

他的沙发比房间里其他人的沙发更靠近窗户。他的一些懒惰的邻居——尤其是那些比较温和的性别——偶尔会用钦佩和好奇的眼神看着他。但没有人走近他，或试图与他交谈。他身边放着一块羊皮纸，他时不时地在上面写下几个字，然后又恢复了斜躺的姿势，显然全神贯注于思考，完全不顾帝国的所有居住者，无论男女。公寓。从他的整体外貌来看，还不到二十五岁。他上半张脸的形状完全是知性的——前额高、宽、直；额头高，宽，直；眼睛清澈、有洞察力、深思熟虑；但另一方面，下半部分却无可否认是性感的。嘴唇又厚又厚，与希腊式笔直的精致轮廓形成了令人不快的对比。而下巴的肉质和脸颊的快活又与苍白、高贵的额头和敏捷、聪明的眼睛的表情完全不同。他的身材只有中等身材。但他身体的每一部分都非常匀称，无论以什么姿势，他看起来都比实际身高要高。他衣服的上半部分因炎热而敞开，部分露出了他优美的颈部和胸部。他的耳朵、手和脚都显得娇小而精致，这被认为是出身贵族的标志。在他的举止中，有一种难以形容的谦逊的尊严和不做作的优雅的结合，在各个时代和国家，通过各种风俗习惯的变化，这种举止使少数受宠的拥有者的举止成为了他们社会地位的即时诠释。

当这位贵族仍然忙于他的羊皮纸时，下面的谈话是在他所在位置附近的两位女士之间低声进行的。

“告诉我，卡米拉，”两人中最年长、最庄严的说，“谁是那位如此忙于写作的廷臣？我不知道有多少次努力想要引起他的注意。但这个人只会看他的牛皮纸卷或房间的角落。

“什么，你在意大利真是个陌生人，竟然不认识他！”另一个回答道，她是一个身材娇小、娇小、活泼的女孩，她在沙发上坐立不安，似乎无法对周围的任何物体给予短暂的稳定注意力。 “以我主教叔叔的所有圣徒、烈士和遗物的名义！”

嘘！你不应该发誓！

'不发誓！为什么，我正在制作一套新的誓言，仅供女士使用！我打算亲自开创以他们发誓的时尚！

但请回答我的问题，我恳求你！你永远不会学会一次只谈论一个话题吗？

“你的问题——啊，你的问题！”是关于哥特人的吗？

'不，不！这是关于那个不断写作的人，他不会看任何人。他几乎和卡米拉本人一样挑衅！

「别这么皱眉啊！这个人，正如你们所说的，是参议员维特拉尼奥。

那位女士开始了。显然维特拉尼奥是有名的。

'是的！'活泼的卡米拉继续说道，“那是多才多艺的维特拉尼奥；但他不会受到你的喜爱，因为他有时会发誓——也指着古代诸神发誓，这是被禁止的！

'他很帅气。'

'英俊的！他是美丽的！在意大利，没有一个女人会为他而苦恼！”

“我听说他很聪明。”

谁没有呢？他是当时一些最著名的酱汁的作者。各国厨师都崇拜他，把他视为神谕。然后他写诗、作曲、画画！至于哲学——他比我的主教叔叔说得更好！

“他有钱吗？”

'啊！我的主教叔叔！——我必须告诉你我是如何帮助维特拉尼奥讽刺他的！当我和他一起住在罗马时，我经常看到一个戴着面纱的女人穿过花园来到他的书房。因此，为了让他困惑，我问他她是谁。他皱着眉头，结结巴巴地说，一开始我不尊重人，后来又说我不尊重人。但他后来告诉我，她是阿里乌派信徒，他正在努力让她皈依。所以我想我应该看看这种转变是如何进行的，于是我把自己藏在书架后面。但这是一个深刻的秘密；我秘密地告诉你。

“我不想知道。”告诉我有关维特拉尼奥的事。

‘你的脾气多么恶劣啊！哦！我永远不会忘记当我告诉维特拉尼奥我所看到的事情时我们是如何笑的。他拿起写作材料，立即写下了讽刺诗。第二天，整个罗马都听说了这件事。舅舅气得说不出话来！我相信他怀疑我；但他放弃了皈依阿里乌斯女士，并且——”

“我再问你一次——维特拉尼奥有钱吗？”

“半个西西里岛都是他的了。他在非洲拥有巨大的庄园，在叙利亚拥有橄榄园，在高卢拥有玉米地。我参加了他在西西里岛别墅举办的一场招待会。他根据克利奥帕特拉厨房的家具描述来装配他的一艘船只，并让他的奴隶作为侍从特里顿跟随我们游泳。哦！太棒了！

“我想认识他。”

“你应该看看他的猫！他的别墅里有一支完美的军团。雇用了十二名奴隶来照顾他们。他对猫很着迷，并宣称古埃及人崇拜猫是正确的。他昨天告诉我，当他最大的猫死后，他将不顾基督徒的反对，将她封为圣徒！而且他对他的奴隶真是太好了！他们从来不会受到鞭打或惩罚，除非他们忽视或毁容自己；因为维特拉尼奥不允许任何丑陋或肮脏的东西靠近他。您一定要参观他在罗马的宴会厅。这是完美的！

“但是他为什么在这里？”

“他来到拉文纳，负责传达参议院的一些秘密信息，并向那个愚蠢的人赠送了一种稀有品种的鸡——”

嘘！你可能会被偷听！

“好吧！——献给我们那位英明的皇帝！”啊!自从他来到这里以来，这座宫殿真是太令人愉快了！”

就在这时，上面的对话——我们担心，现代博学的读者会因对话的轻浮而感到轻蔑——被主人公的一个动作打断了，这表明他的职业已经结束了。维特拉尼奥以一个不屑于表现出容易被任何凡人事务匆忙的人的精心考虑，慢慢地折叠起他现在写满了文字的羊皮纸，并将其放在怀里，向发生了什么事的奴隶做了个手势。然后拿着一盘水果从他身边经过。

收到消息后，奴隶退到公寓门口，向站在门外的一名男子招手，示意他靠近维特拉尼奥的沙发。

这个人立即穿过房间，来到窗前，那位优雅的罗马人正在那里等待着他。不需要对他进行任何描述；因为他属于一个现代人和古代人一样熟悉的阶级——这个阶级在国家和风俗习惯的所有变迁中幸存下来——这个阶级随着世界上第一个富人而来，也只会随着最后一个富人而消失。 。一句话，他就是一个寄生虫。

然而，与他的现代继承者相比，他享有一个巨大的优势：在他那个时代，奉承是一种职业，而在我们这个时代，它已经沦为一种追求。

“今晚我将离开拉文纳，”维特拉尼奥说。

寄生者深深鞠了三躬，露出欣喜若狂的笑容。

“您将命令我的旅行装备在日落前一小时到达宫殿门口。”

寄生虫宣称他永远不会忘记委员会的荣誉，然后离开了房间。

活泼的卡米拉无意中听到了维特拉尼奥的命令，寄生虫一转过身，她就从沙发上跳了起来，跑到参议员面前，开始责备他刚刚做出的决定。

“为了满足你去罗马的幻想，你把我留在这座可怕的宫殿里，你没有感到内疚吗？”她说，撅起漂亮的嘴唇，玩弄着维特拉尼奥额头上的一绺深棕色头发。 。

“韦特拉尼奥参议员是否如此不尊重他的朋友，以至于让他们任由哥特人摆布？”另一位女士说道，带着迷人的微笑走到卡米拉身边。

“啊，那些哥特人！”维特拉尼奥转向最后一位发言者喊道。 “告诉我，朱莉娅，有没有报道说野蛮人真的正在进军意大利？”

'每个人都听说过它。皇帝对这个谣言感到非常不安，他禁止在他面前再次提及哥特人的名字。

“就我而言，”维特拉尼奥继续说道，把卡米拉拉向他，开玩笑地拍着她那双带着酒窝的小手，“我对哥特人充满着焦急的期待，因为我设计了一座密涅瓦雕像，但我找不到比这更合适的模型。”作为那个麻烦国家的女人。据我了解，他们的四肢粗大，在钱包的约束下，他们的礼节意识最为顺从。

“如果哥特人为你提供任何东西的模型，”一位在维特拉尼奥讲话时加入该团体的朝臣说道，“那就是你在罗马被烧毁的宫殿的表现，他们会让你在上面画画”你自己的伤口是取之不尽用之不竭的。

说出这最后一句话的人因其过分的丑陋而在他周围的辉煌圈子中引人注目。由于个人处境不利，加上在赌桌上失去了所有财产，他后来扮演了一个角色，在那个轻浮的时代，他所取得的成就以其令人不快的独创性将他从遗忘或蔑视中解救出来。他是一位愤世嫉俗的哲学家。

然而，他的话除了激发听众的欢乐之外，并没有对他们的平静产生任何其他影响。维特拉尼奥笑了，卡米拉笑了，朱莉娅笑了。对于任何人来说，一队野蛮人能够烧毁罗马宫殿的想法都太荒谬了。当这句话在房间的其他地方重复时，尽管他们显得迟钝和疲倦，但整个法庭都笑了。

“我不知道为什么我会被那个男人的胡言乱语逗乐，”卡米拉说，在最迷人的微笑面临危机时突然变得严肃起来，“当我想到维特拉尼奥的离开而如此忧郁时。”他走了之后我会怎样？唉!宫中还剩下谁来为我的美丽作歌，为我的琵琶作曲？谁会把我画成维纳斯，给我讲古埃及人和他们的猫的故事？宴会上谁来指导我选择什么菜，拒绝什么菜？谁？”——可怜的小卡米拉突然停住了，她在列举她即将失去的快乐，她似乎快要哭了，就像她刚才欣喜若狂地大笑一样。

维特拉尼奥很感动——不是因为对他更有智力的恭维，而是因为卡米拉抗议的后半部分承认他在宴会上的欢乐至上。那时的男女和现在一样，都缺乏对美食的热情。因此，让宫廷中最年轻、最可爱的女士皈依科学是一次完美的胜利。

“如果她能请假，”这位心满意足的参议员说，“卡米拉将陪我去罗马，并出席我最近发现南丁格尔酱的第一次庆祝活动。”

卡米拉欣喜若狂。她用红润的小手指抓住维特拉尼奥的脸颊，像孩子亲吻新玩具一样热情地吻着他，然后快活地跑开，准备离开。

“维特拉尼奥会更好地工作，”愤世嫉俗者冷笑道，“为未来的伤口发明新的药膏，而不是为未来的夜莺发明新的酱汁！”他的尸体将被哥特式剑雕刻，作为蠕虫的盛宴，然后他的鸟被罗马串吐口水，作为他的客人的盛宴！现在是砍雕像、打酱油的时候吗？那些沉迷于维特拉尼奥这样的追求的参议员们，该死吧！

“我还有其他的计划，”所有这些道德义愤的对象回答道，带着侮辱性的冷漠看着愤世嫉俗者令人厌恶的面容，“由于它们对世界的巨大重要性，必须得到普遍的认可。我刚刚完成的工作是我思考了一段时间的一系列三个项目之一。首先是对新神职人员的分析；第二个是维纳斯的真实拟人化，无论是绘画还是雕塑；第三，发现了迄今为止尚未发明的东西——夜莺酱。凭借命运那不可思议的智慧，我向自己提出的最后一个目标已经首先实现了。酱汁已经做好了，我刚刚在这张羊皮纸上总结了要在我的餐桌上介绍它的颂歌。分析将是我的下一个工作。它将采取一篇论文的形式，在其中，我将过去几年的经验作为未来预言的基础，我将展示准确数量的额外分歧、争论和争吵，这些争论和争吵将需要使新的神职人员能够他们自己就是自己崇拜的破坏者。我将通过精确的计算来确定这次毁灭将在哪一年完成；我手头有一份关于近百年来罗马基督教分裂和争论的历史总结，作为我的工作材料。至于我的第二个设计，维纳斯的拟人化，其难度是惊人的。它要求对阳光下每个国家的妇女进行调查；比较它们几种魅力的相对优点和特点；以及以一种形式将其最突出的景点的无限多样性中最可爱的一切结合在一起。为了推进这项艰巨的工程的执行，我国内的佃户和国外的奴隶商人接到命令，将所有在帝国出生的最美丽的女人，或者可以从周围国家带来的最美丽的女人送到我在西西里岛的别墅。我要把它们展示在我面前，肤色各异，形状各异！在适当的时候，我将开始我的调查，不畏困难，决心成功。真正的维纳斯还没有被拟人化！如果我完成了任务，我的胜利将是多么美妙啊！我的作品将成为成千上万人献上内心最柔软的情感的祭坛。它将释放年轻人被囚禁的想象力，并刷新老年记忆中褪色的回忆！

维特拉尼奥停了下来。愤世嫉俗者气得哑口无言。一位恰好在场的孤独的教会狂热分子对这一分析皱起了眉头。女士们对着这个拟人化身窃笑起来。美食家们看着夜莺酱咯咯地笑起来。但最初几分钟没有人说话。在这暂时的尴尬之中，维特拉尼奥在茱莉亚耳边低声说了几句话；正当愤世嫉俗者回过神来反驳时，他在那位女士的陪同下离开了房间。

维特拉尼奥的人气从未如此纯粹。他的性格具有适应所有紧急情况的灵活性，他的慷慨解除了敌人的武装，而他的和蔼可亲则结交了朋友。他慷慨而不自以为是，成功但不骄傲，他优雅地履行义务，安全地闪耀。人们喜欢他的热情好客，因为他们知道他的热情是无私的。并钦佩他的学识，因为他们觉得这些学识并不引人注目。有时（如在他与愤世嫉俗者的对话中），一时的突发奇想，或讽刺的刺痛，使他暗示了他的地位，或展示了他的怪癖；但是，由于他总是在不久之后第一个嘲笑自己的爆发，他作为一个贵族的信誉并没有因为他作为一个男人的虚弱而受到影响。他快乐而有吸引力地在他那个时代的社会各个阶层中活动，赢得了各个阶层的社会荣誉，没有遇到对手来争夺他们的所有权，也没有成为敌人来贬低他们的价值。

离开宫廷候诊室后，维特拉尼奥和朱莉娅走下宫殿的楼梯，进入皇帝的花园。这个地方通常被用作晚间休息室，现在无人居住，只有少数服务员在忙着培育花坛和浇灌光滑、阴凉的草坪。维特拉尼奥走进树林中众多避暑别墅中最隐秘的一处，示意他的同伴坐下，然后突然对她说了以下几句话：

“我听说你即将启程前往罗马——是真的吗？”

他低声问这个问题，语气中的严肃与他几分钟前在宫廷贵族中所表现出的不稳定的欢乐气氛奇怪地不同。当朱莉娅给了他肯定的答复时，他的脸上露出了非常满意的表情。他坐在她身边，继续谈话：——

“如果我认为你打算在城里待上一段时间，我就应该冒险向你的友谊提出新的勒索，要求你把你在阿里西亚的小别墅借给我！”

“你应该带着我的管家的命令去罗马，把那里的一切都交给你处置。”

“我慷慨的朱莉娅！您是少数真正懂得如何施予恩惠的天才！换个女人可能会问我为什么想要别墅——你毫无保留地给它。如此微妙的不愿侵犯秘密的感觉提醒我，这个秘密现在应该是你的了！”

为了解释维特拉尼奥和朱莉娅之间存在的轻松信任，有必要告诉读者，这位女士——尽管外表仍然有吸引力——已经到了沉思过去的年龄，而不是沉思未来的征服。她从小就认识这位古怪的同伴，曾经在他的诗句中受宠若惊，现在她的魅力日渐衰退，她很明智，对参议员的友谊感到满意，就像她以前对参议员的友谊感到欣喜一样。年轻人的崇拜。

“你太敏锐了，”维特拉尼奥停顿了一下，继续说道，“你不会怀疑我只是需要你的别墅来帮助我隐藏一个阴谋。我在不同环境中的冒险是如此奇特，以至于利用我的宫殿作为其发展的场景将冒着发现的风险，这可能会立即颠覆我所有的设计。但我担心我的坦白时间会超过你的耐心！

‘你引起了我的好奇心。我可以永远听你的！

“就在我离开罗马前往这个地方之前不久，”维特拉尼奥继续说道，“我经历了一场最非凡的冒险，它以最非凡的毅力困扰着我，我确信，它将带来最非凡的结果。一天晚上，我坐在平西安山宫殿的花园里，全神贯注地用我的鲁特琴尝试一首新的曲子。在这首温柔而哀伤的旋律的一处停顿中，我听到了类似我身后树林中某个悲伤的人的抽泣声。我小心翼翼地环顾四周，发现了一个年轻女孩的身影，被翠绿半掩着，她似乎正在全神贯注地听着音乐。我对这样对我技巧的证明感到受宠若惊，并渴望更近距离地观察我的神秘来访者，我向她的藏身之处走去，在匆忙中忘记了继续弹奏鲁特琴。音乐一停止，她就认出了我，然后就消失了。决心要看看她，我再次拨动琴弦，几分钟后，我在树林中再次看到了她的白袍。我加倍努力。我用最大的表情演奏了旋律中最悲惨的部分。她仿佛受到了魔力的影响，开始向我走来，时而犹豫，时而后退几步，时而半不情愿、半情愿地靠近，直到被最后那首节奏的漫长颤抖的结束彻底征服。在空中，她突然跑到我身边，跪倒在我脚边，举起双手，好像在恳求我的原谅。

“这确实不是对你技艺的普遍赞扬！她跟你说话了吗？

“她什么也没说，”维特拉尼奥继续说道。她那双温柔的大眼睛里闪烁着泪光，可怜兮兮地看着我的脸。她娇嫩的嘴唇颤抖着，似乎想说话，却又不敢。她光滑圆润的手臂非常美丽。尽管她在年龄和情感上看起来像个孩子，但在可爱和身材上她看起来像一个女人。一时之间，我被她突然做出的恳求举动惊呆了，一动也不敢动，也不敢说话。当我回过神来时，我试图抚摸和安慰她，但她却从我的怀抱中退缩，似乎又想从我身边逃脱。直到我再次触碰鲁特琴的琴弦，然后她贴近我，发出一声压抑的喜悦感叹，用一种混合着崇拜和狂喜的奇怪表情看着我的脸，我向你宣布，朱莉娅，我在她面前感到像男孩一样害羞。

‘你害羞了！韦特拉尼奥参议员害羞了！朱莉娅惊呼道，她抬起头来，脸上带着毫不掩饰的怀疑和惊讶的表情。

“鲁特琴，”维特拉尼奥严肃地继续说道，没有理会打扰，“是我与她进行任何交流的唯一手段。如果我不再玩，我们就会像陌生人一样；如果我继续，我们就是朋友。因此，当她用柔和而颤抖的音乐声音对我说话时，我压低了乐器的音符，继续演奏。通过这个计划，我在第一次采访时发现她是一个努梅里亚人的女儿，她即将完成十四岁的学业，她的名字叫安东尼娜。我刚刚才了解到她的故事的大概轮廓，这时，她仿佛受到了某种突然的忧虑，一脸恐惧地从我身边挣脱开来，并恳求我如果我想见她就不要跟着她。她再次迅速消失在树林中。

‘越来越精彩了！而且，以你害羞的新性格，你无疑遵守了她的禁令？

“我做到了，”参议员回答道。但第二天晚上，我又回到了花园，当我弹起琴弦时，她就像变魔术一样再次走近。在第二次采访中，我了解到了她神秘出现和神秘离开的原因。她告诉我，她的父亲是一个新教派的成员，他们想象——其中的原因是无法理解的——他们通过让自己的生活成为一场永恒的身体痛苦和精神痛苦来向他们的神推荐自己。这位暴君并不满足于扭曲自己的感情和才能，他还对这个可怜的孩子实施了疯狂的苦行。他禁止她进入剧院、观看雕塑、读诗、听音乐。他让她学习长时间的祈祷，并参加没完没了的布道。他不允许她有同龄的同伴——甚至包括像她这样的女孩。她能获得的唯一消遣就是在他们居住的房子里开垦一个小花园——尽管她很不情愿，也受到了多次责备，但她还是得到了许可，花园一度与我宫殿周围的小树林相连。在那里，当她忙于她的花时，在我发现她之前的好几个月里，她第一次听到了我的鲁特琴的声音，她习惯于爬上花园的围墙，躲在树丛中聆听每当她父亲因忧虑而出国时，她都会跟着音乐。她是被一位老人发现的，他被任命在主人不在的时候看守她。然而，侍者听了她的坦白后，不仅答应保守她的秘密，而且还允许她继续到我的小树林里来，只要我有机会在那里弹琵琶。现在这件事最神秘的部分是，尽管他对她很严厉，但这个女孩似乎对她怀有一种严厉的感情。因为，当我提出将她从他的监护下解救出来时，她宣称没有什么可以诱使她抛弃他——即使是每天生活在精美的图画和美妙的音乐中的吸引力也不能吸引她。但我发现我让你厌倦了；事实上，从阴影的长度可以明显看出我离开的时刻即将到来。然后让我从对安东尼娜的介绍性采访开始，谈谈当我踏上前往拉文纳的旅程时他们所产生的后果。

“我想我已经可以想象后果了！”朱莉娅恶狠狠地笑着说道。

“那就开始吧，”维特拉尼奥反驳道，“想象一下，这个女孩的奇异处境和她的想法的独创性，使她对我产生了吸引力，而她的个人魅力和年龄又极大地增强了这种吸引力。 她让我作为一个诗人的才能感到高兴，就像她激发了我作为一个男人的感情一样。我决定使用我的聪明才智所能想到的一切手段，将她从她父亲的专制保护下引诱出来。 我首先教她锻炼自己的才能，而这种才能曾在别人身上如此吸引过她。 通过这种职业，双方都变得更加熟悉，我希望能从她那里得到同样多的感情，就像她从我那里得到技能一样。但令我惊讶的是，我仍然发现她对老师的漠不关心，对音乐的温柔，就像我们第一次见面时那样。 如果她拒绝了我的示好，如果我的示好让她感到困惑，我本可以适应她的幽默，我本可以感受到希望的鼓励；但她在接受我的爱抚时表现出的冷漠、漫不经心、不自然、令人费解的轻松态度，让我完全不知所措。 似乎她只能将我视为一座移动的雕像，只是一个模仿者，与我教给她的科学无关。 如果我说话，她几乎看不到我。如果我移动，她几乎不会注意到这个动作。 我不能认为它不喜欢；她似乎温柔地为地球上的任何生灵滋养着这样的感情。 我简直不敢相信这是多么寒冷；如果她只听到几个音乐音符，她就会充满活力，充满激动。 当她触动乐器的琴弦时，她整个人都颤抖起来。 当她看着我时，她的眼睛温和、严肃、深思熟虑，当她听琵琶时，她的眼睛时而因喜悦而明亮，时而因泪水而柔和。 随着她的音乐功底一天天提高，她对我的态度也莫名地变得冷漠起来。 最后，我厌倦了我所经历的不断的失望，并决心通过唤醒她的感激之情，尽最后的努力来打动她的心，我向她赠送了她最初听到的琵琶，现在她已经学会了弹奏这把琵琶。玩。 当这个难以理解的女孩从我手中接过乐器时，我从未见过任何人像她一样欣喜若狂。 她为它时而哭泣，时而大笑，亲吻它，抚摸它，对它说话，仿佛它是一个活物。 但当我走近，想要压制住她对我的礼物所倾注的感激之情时，她却突然把琵琶藏在长袍里，仿佛生怕我夺走它，然后迅速地从我的视线中消失了。 第二天，我在我们惯常见面的地方等她，但她一直没有出现。 我派了一个奴隶到她父亲家里，但她不肯与他联系。 显然，现在她已经达到目的，不再关心看到我了。 在我生气的最初时刻，我决定让她感受到我的力量，如果她鄙视我的善良；但是，根据我对她性格的了解，我深思熟虑，在这种情况下，武力是不明智的，我应该冒着在罗马的声望的风险，让自己卷入一场毫无价值的争吵。

“前往拉文纳！”朱莉娅大笑起来。哦，这次冒险的结局多么美好啊！我承认，维特拉尼奥，这样的后果超出了所有人的想象！

“你笑了，朱莉娅，”参议员有点生气地回答道。但听我讲完，你会发现我还没有屈服于失败。留在这里的几天里，安东尼娜的形象一直困扰着我。我意识到我的倾向以及我的名誉都致力于抑制她忘恩负义的厌恶。我怀疑我对获得她的意愿的渴望如果不消除的话，到目前为止会影响我的性格，从平静的维特拉尼奥，我将变成讽刺的维特拉尼奥。骄傲、荣誉、好奇心和爱都促使我去征服她。准备宴会，是我突然离开此地向朝廷借口；我此行的真正目标是安东尼娜一个人。”

“啊，现在我又认出了我朋友的性格了，”这位女士赞许地说。

“你会问我如何才能再次采访她？”维特拉尼奥继续说道。 “我的回答是，那个女孩的侍从自愿提供自己作为执行我的计划的工具。就在我离开罗马的前一天，他突然在我的花园里出现，并提议将我介绍到努梅里安的家里——首先以一种平等而不是低等的态度询问我是否还在一个古老宗教的秘密追随者，对众神的崇拜，是真实的。我对这个家伙的动机感到怀疑（因为他放弃了所有的报应作为对他背叛的回报），并且对那个女孩最近的忘恩负义感到恼火，我轻蔑地对待他的提议。然而，现在我的不满已经平息，我的焦虑也被激起，我决心不惜一切危险，把自己信任给这个人，让他尽其所能地帮助我。如果我在预期的采访中所做的努力——我不会放过他们——获得成功，那么就有必要为安东尼娜找到一些既不会被怀疑也不会被搜查的庇护所。对于这样一个隐蔽的地方，没有什么比你的阿里西亚别墅更令人钦佩的了。现在你知道了它的用途，你会后悔为了帮助我的设计而慷慨地处置它吗？

“我很高兴能把它送给你，”自由派朱莉娅回答道，握着维特拉尼奥的手。 “你的冒险确实不寻常——我迫不及待地想知道它会如何结束。无论发生什么，你都可以依赖我的保密并依靠我的帮助。但你看，太阳已经快要西斜了；我毫不怀疑，那边你的一位奴隶来通知你，你的装备已经准备好了。跟我一起回王宫，我会给你提供必要的信函，介绍你作为主人来到我的国家住所。

拉文纳的可敬公民聚集在宫殿前的广场上，看着参议员离开，他们已经用尽了诸如盯着守卫、捕捉耳边盘旋的蚊虫、互相争吵等无辜的娱乐方式。 ;现在，他们陷入了一种非常吵闹和一致不耐烦的状态，当维特拉尼奥和卡米拉的旅行车队出现在宫门外时，他们的不满突然得到了最有效的平息。

参议员及其华丽随从的出现引起了一阵喧闹的叫喊声。但当主要奴隶按照主人的命令，每人向较贫穷的观众中撒一把小钱时，他们的钱就增加了一百倍。在这群由流氓、傻瓜和闲人组​​成的异类中，每个人都大声咆哮，跳得最高，向这位慷慨的贵族表示敬意。杰出的旅行者们慢慢地、小心翼翼地穿过周围的人群，来到了城门。维特拉尼奥和他活泼的同伴凯旋而去，前往罗马。

事件发生几天后，公民们再次在同一地点和同一时间聚集——可能是为了见证另一次贵族的离去——这时，他们的耳朵被战斗号召所产生的意想不到的声音所袭击，紧接着就是闭幕式。城门。他们还没来得及问清楚这些不寻常事件的含义，一个农民就惊慌失措地冲进广场，大声喊出哥特人就在眼前的可怕情报！

大臣们闻讯，从丰盛的饭菜开始，急忙跑到宫窗前一睹这不祥的景象。整个晚上，宴会桌都没有客人走近。

这位可怜的皇帝对他的家禽中的这种可怕的情报感到惊讶。他也赶紧跑到窗前，向前望去，看到复仇者大军蔑视地穿过他孤独的堡垒，迅速向毫无防备的罗马前进。黑暗从他的眼前遮住了那庞大的人群很久之后，他仍然无助地凝视着逐渐消失的风景，处于惊讶和恐惧的呆滞之中；自从他拥有它们以来，这是第一次，那天晚上他的鸡群无人看管。

我们担心，仔细阅读这一章的标题，有经验的读者会在心中激起忧虑的情绪，而不是好奇的情绪。他们无疑会想象这是对古代奇迹的长篇狂想的预兆，而对这些古代奇迹的描述早已因不断的迭代而变得绝对令人作呕。他们会预见到凯撒宫殿上空的哀号，罗马斗兽场拱门下的沉思，在这一章的结尾处加载一长串令人厌倦的段落；而且，他们急于将注意力集中在那些令人畏缩的任务上，他们会一致地匆匆穿过传统反思的可怕沙漠，降落在可能出现的第一个绿洲上，无论它是由故事的新部分形成的，或突然出现对话表明。因此，在这些忧虑的驱使下，我们赶紧向他们保证，我们故事中的地点在任何情况下都不会突破陈旧的论坛的界限，也不会登上疲惫不堪的罗马斗兽场的拱门。他们的注意力应该集中在人类身上，而不是古罗马的建筑上。我们希望向他们展示这个时代最深处的情感——注定要灭亡的帝国人民鲜活的、呼吸的行动和激情。古古地形和古典建筑我们留给更有能力的笔，而交给其他读者。

然而，有必要在某种程度上指出我们故事中的人物即将行动的范围，以便于理解他们各自的动作。我们设计复兴的那部分已消失的城市在现代城镇中几乎没有留下任何痕迹。它的地点很传统——它的建筑都是灰尘。教堂在寺庙曾经矗立的地方拔地而起，而现在的酒馆则吸引着路过的闲人，就像浴室邀请了他的祖先一样。

如今，罗马城墙的范围与我们现在所写的那个时期的范围相同。但古代城市与现代城市之间的所有类比到此就结束了。那些曾经不够宽的围墙所容纳的房屋早已消失，它们的现代继承者只占据了曾经分配给帝国首都的空间的三分之一。

昔日城墙外，广阔的郊区一望无际。华丽的别墅、豪华的树林、寺庙、剧院、浴室——散布着属于下层人民的住宅群——包围着这座强大的城市。在这些无数的住所中，几乎没有留下任何痕迹。现代旅行者，当他眺望著名的郊区时，他会看到到处都是一座被毁坏的渡槽，或者一座摇摇欲坠的坟墓，在瘟疫沼泽的表面上摇摇欲坠。

目前罗马的人民门入口与古代弗拉米尼安门位于同一地点。现在，三条大街从这里通向城市的最南端，并与其支流一起构成了现代罗马的主要部分。它们的一侧以平西亚山为界，另一侧以台伯河为界。在这些街道中，最靠近河流的街道占据了著名的战神广场（Campus Martius）的位置。另一边是通往平西亚山上萨卢斯特和卢库卢斯花园的古老道路。

在台伯河对岸（由圣安杰洛桥（Ponte St. Angelo），以前的埃利乌斯桥（Pons Elius）获得），两条街道穿过一个不规则且人口稠密的街区，通向现代的圣彼得教堂。在我们故事发生的时期，城市的这一部分无论是规模还是外观都比现在重要得多，并直接通向古老的圣彼得大教堂，它与现在位于同一地点被现代大厦占据。

即将叙述的事件完全发生在刚刚描述的城市的部分地区。从平西安山，穿过马蒂斯校园，越过埃利乌斯桥，一直到圣彼得大教堂，读者可能经常被邀请陪伴我们，但他将不必深入熟悉的废墟，或哀悼过去的一切。已故爱国者的坟墓。

然而，在我们恢复以前的演员或继续扮演新角色之前，我们试图重建的街道上的人们将是必要的。通过这个过程，我们希望读者能够熟悉五世纪罗马人的风俗习惯，这个故事的影响主要取决于这些，而我们对能够通过关于罗马人的哲学论文来灌输这些知识感到绝望。时代特征。也许，几页插图比大量的历史描述更能达到我们的目的。没有什么比城市的街道更能准确地体现一个民族的性格了。

时间已近傍晚。在战神广场最宽阔的地方，人们聚集在一座宫殿的大门前。他们聚集在一起领取几篮子食物，这些食物是由宅邸主人慷慨施舍的。不耐烦的群众不断的喧闹和骚动，与四面八方的自然和人造物体的庄严宁静形成了奇怪的对比。

它们占据的空间呈长方形，尺寸很大。它的一部分是由绿树成荫的草坪步道构成，一部分是通往宫殿的铺砌道路和位于其附近的公共浴室。这两座建筑以其宏伟的雕像外观装饰以及进入它们的台阶的优雅和数量而引人注目。连同低等建筑、市场和附属花园，它们足够广阔，足以形成眼前视野一侧的边界。在其他时候，它们的白色正面可能会显得单调，但此刻却被门和阳台上延伸的几个色彩鲜艳的遮阳篷打破了。现在，阳光照在他们身上，光芒四射。窗户上的金属装饰品像火宝石一样闪闪发光；即使是形成树林的树木也分享着普遍的光流，但不像它们周围的物体一样，无法为疲倦的眼睛提供提神或休息。

北边，奥古斯都陵墓高耸入云，立刻引起了人们的注意。从它的位置来看，这座高贵建筑的部分区域已经处于阴影之中。在其巨大的画廊的任何部分都看不到一个人——它孤独而崇高，是它所代表的情感的令人印象深刻的体现。

宫殿和浴场对面的一侧是前面提到的草坪步道。茂密的树木和藤蔓交织，为这个地方投下了奢华的阴影。从远处看，在它们的缝隙中，可以看到欢快的服装、一群群休息的人物、摆满水果和鲜花的台子，以及无数白色大理石的农牧神和木仙雕像。从这个美妙的隐居处可以听到喷泉的潺潺声，偶尔会被树叶的沙沙声或罗马长笛的哀伤节奏打断。

南边的两座异教神庙孤独地矗立在众多纪念碑和战利品之间。他们最初的建筑的对称性仍然没有受到影响，白色的大理石柱子在阳光下闪闪发光，一如既往，但现在却呈现出一种奇怪的荒凉，一种不自然的神秘阴暗。尽管法律禁止建造它们的崇拜活动，但改革之手尚未冒险将它们毁灭或使其适应基督教的目的。没有人敢踏上曾经拥挤的柱廊。没有祭司出现在他们的门上传达神谕。他们赤裸的祭坛上没有任何祭品散发出恶臭。在他们的屋顶下，矗立着古罗马的强大偶像，只有从狭窄的入口偷偷溜进来的光线才能看到。人类的情感曾经使他们无所不能，但现在已经让他们变成了石头。 “东方之星”已经使他们身上因流血的奉献而笼罩的可怕光环变得黯淡了。它们被遗弃了，孤独地矗立着，只是人类聪明才智所组织的最伟大错觉的阴暗纪念碑。

可以这么说，我们现在已经展示了电影周围的框架，接下来我们将尝试通过与宫门前的人群混合来将其呈现给读者。

这次集会分为三部分：一部分聚集在宫殿台阶前，一部分在公共浴场附近徘徊，一部分在树林的树荫下休息。第一个在数量上最为重要，在外观上也最为多样。它由来自世界各个角落的最恶劣的流氓组成，可以说，从其数量重要性的一般方面来看，它呈现了非常崇高的退化。这些可敬的公民对他们的共同热情的粗鲁联盟充满信心，他们以一种粗心的公正性向所有物体和各个方向发泄了他们的傲慢，这会让现代暴徒最胜利的努力蒙羞。喧闹的声音非常令人恐惧。醉酒的高卢人的粗俗咒骂，女性化的希腊人的放荡俏皮话，土生土长的罗马人喧闹的满足，易怒的犹太人的喧嚣愤慨——所有这些都在不和谐的噪音中连续不断地合唱。视觉和嗅觉受到这群异常人群的攻击，并不比听觉更令人愉快。少年不谦虚，年老不敬；女人野蛮，男人懦弱；黝黑的埃塞俄比亚人身上涂满了臭油；冷漠的英国人满身污垢——这些以及其他一百种不同的组合，都是想象出来的，而不是表达出来的，引起了各个方向的关注。要描述这种多种污染物的沸腾混合物的热量所散发出的气味，就迫使读者合上书。我们更愿意回到造成这种可耻骚乱的分配方式，其中包括小篮子的烤肉，里面装满了普通的水果和蔬菜，由贵族的仆人交给，或者更确切地说，扔给暴民。举行了盛宴。人们陶醉于如此呈现给他们的丰盛。他们像野兽一样扑向它；他们像猪一样把它吞掉，或者像掠夺者一样把它夺走。与此同时，这场公共宴会的承办者们在自己的显赫地位上坐稳了，他们通过捂住鼻子、堵住耳朵、转过身去以及其他哑剧般的方式表现出崇高和过度的厌恶，以此表达对喧闹的接受者的蔑视。这些行为并没有逃过那些议员们的注意，他们吃饱了，闲着用舌头，对他们恩人的家臣们不断地辱骂。

“看看那些家伙！”一个人哭了； “他们是我们宴会上的侍者，他们当面嘲笑我们！”打倒那些肮脏的厨房窃贼！”

“说得非常好，达弗斯！——但是谁来接近他们呢？距离这么远，它们就臭了！”

“腐烂的恶棍有狗的鼻子和山羊的尸体。”

然后传来齐声的声音——“打倒他们！”打倒他们！就在这期间，一位愤怒的自由民走上前来斥责暴民，结果他的鲁莽得到了如雨般的导弹和连珠炮般的咒骂。随后，一个身材高大、油腻腻的屠夫扛在他同伴的肩膀上，对他这样说道：

“皇上的灵魂，我能靠近你这个流氓吗？我一个手指头就把你切成四半！——一个笑嘻嘻地嘲笑别人的恶棍！”一个肮脏的阿谀奉承者，弄脏了他所走过的土地！以烈士的鲜血为证，如果我把屠宰场的垃圾扔向他，他不知道到哪里去晒干！

“你这个破烂的人，”愤怒的屠夫店的邻居咆哮道，“你对你主人的客人皱眉吗？他们的皮屑比你的整个尸体更有价值！”用跳蚤的头骨制作一个饮水器皿比用你这样一个邪恶的夜行者制作一个诚实的人更容易！

“祝我们高贵的艺人健康繁荣！”当最后一位发言者停下来喘口气时，一部分感激的人群大声喊道。

“所有寄生虫恶棍都去死吧！”另一个人插话道。

“向罗马公民致敬！”第三者带着温和的热情咆哮道。

“把我们的骨头交给那个自由民来挑吧！”人群外围的一个顽童尖叫道。

这个巧妙的建议立即得到了采纳。当这位不幸的自由民被新一轮的导弹齐射吓坏了，带着可耻的远征撤退到他的赞助人大厅的庇护所时，民众发出了胜利的欢呼。

在我们在这里冒险展示的罗马暴民“餐桌谈话”的轻微而纯粹的样本中，读者会感受到奴性和傲慢的非凡混合，这不仅是谈话的特征，也是社会下层阶级行为的特征。在我们写作的时期。一方面，罗马的贫困阶级受到压迫和堕落，达到了当今公众难以想象的痛苦程度，另一方面，罗马的贫困阶级却被赋予了如此程度的道德自由，并允许如此程度的自由。政治特权，满足了他们的虚荣心，蒙蔽了他们的愤慨。他们在奴役的季节里是奴隶，在娱乐的时间里是主人，他们作为一个阶级，呈现出任何国家有史以来最令人惊奇的社会异常现象之一。并以其危险和人为的地位形成了罗马垮台的最重要的内部原因之一。

公共浴场的台阶几乎和邻近大楼前的空间一样拥挤。川流不息的人流涌入或离开，涌过大理石柱廊的宽阔石板。尽管这个广场的某些部分是由与宫殿前聚集的同一阶层的人组成的，但仍表现出一定的体面。随处可见——与大量脏兮兮的束腰外衣的暗淡单调相比——你可能会看到干净长袍的清爽视觉，或者英俊人士的感激之情。一小群人，尽可能远离喧闹的平民，散布在周围，要么正在进行热烈的交谈，要么无精打采地屈服于最近洗过澡引起的疲倦。对这些更活跃的人中的谈话主题的即时关注将有助于我们追求我们的社会启示。

此时此刻，发言者中声音最大的，是一个又高又瘦，面容凶恶的男子，正在对一小群听众滔滔不绝地滔滔不绝，滔滔不绝。

“我告诉你，苏修斯，”他突然转向他的一位同伴说道，“除非制定新的奴隶法，否则我的使命就结束了。我的赞助人的庄园需要源源不断的供应这些可怜虫。我尽我最大的努力来满足这个要求，而我的劳动的唯一结果就是，这些恶棍要么危及我的生命，要么逍遥法外地加入到出没我们树林的强盗团伙中。

“我真的为你感到难过；但是你会对奴隶法做出什么改变呢？

“我将授权法警当场杀死所有他们认为不守秩序的奴隶，作为其他人的榜样！”

“这样的许可对你有什么好处？这些生物是必要的，这样的法律会在几个月内消灭它们。难道你不能用劳动摧毁他们的精神，用锁链束缚他们的力量，用地牢征服他们的顽固吗？

“这一切都是我做的，但他们却死在纪律之下，或者逃出监狱。现在我赞助人的庄园里有三百名奴隶。对于那些出生在我们土地上的人，我没有什么可敦促的。确实，他们中的许多人以哭泣开始新的一天，以死亡结束。但在大多数情况下，由于它们白天有条纹，所以它们相当顺从。我对那些我不得不从战俘和起义城镇的人民手中购买的可怜虫感到非常不满。惩罚对他们不起作用，他们总是懒惰、闷闷不乐、绝望。就在前几天，他们中的十个人在田里干活时服毒身亡，另外五十个人在我转身时放火烧毁了一座农舍，然后逃了出来，加入了他们的同伴团伙，而他们现在已经成了强盗。在树林里。然而，这些人是最后一批犯下此类罪行的人。在我的赞助人的同意下，我采取了一项计划，今后将有效地驯服它们！

“你可以透露一下吗？”

“通过圣彼得的钥匙，我希望我能看到它在这片土地上的每个庄园都得到实践！”事情是这样的：离我的农舍有一段距离的硫磺湖附近有一大片沼泽地，到处都是一座古老屠宰场的废墟。我打算在这个地方挖几个地下洞穴，每个洞穴可以容纳二十个人。我的叛变奴隶们在结束一天的劳动后将睡在这里。入口将用一块大石头关闭到早上，我将在上面刻上这样的铭文：“这些是由贵族萨图尼努斯的执事戈尔迪安发明的宿舍，用于接待难驯服的奴隶。”

“你的计划很巧妙；但我怀疑你们的奴隶（野蛮的牛群对苦难如此麻木不仁）会像在旧宿舍一样漫不经心地睡在新宿舍里。

'睡觉！他们将在那里品尝到一种最原始的宁静！硫磺湖的恶臭会让他们在泥榻上呼吸萨比安的气味！他们的膏油将是爬行动物的粘液！他们的液体香水将是从他们的房间屋顶渗出的停滞物！他们的音乐将是青蛙的呱呱声和蚊虫的嗡嗡声；至于他们的装饰品，哦，他们会戴着缠绕蠕虫的头花环，以及金龟子和蟾蜍的可移动胸针！现在告诉我，最睿智的索修斯，你还认为我的奴隶会睡在如此奢华的环境中吗？

'不;他们会死的。

‘你又错了。他们也许会咒骂、咆哮，但这并不重要。他们将在地面上工作更长时间，以缩短在地下的休息时间。他们会在接到通知的瞬间醒来，在收到信号的瞬间出现。我不担心他们的死！

“你很快就要离开罗马吗？”

“我今天晚上就去，带着一批值得信赖的助手，他们将使我能够毫不拖延地执行我的计划。再见，苏修斯！

“最聪明的法警，我向你告别了！”

当可敬的戈尔迪安带着他的新项目的尊​​严大步走开时，一个人的手势和语气吸引了他的注意，这个人是聚集在他即将退出的门廊偏远地方的一小群人中的一员。好奇心是这个人性格中与残忍一样明显的一个因素。他偷偷地躲到了邻近一根柱子的底座后面。当“哥特人”这个词频繁地重复出现在他耳中时（有关该民族即将入侵的消息此时已传到罗马），他小心翼翼地倾听着说话者的声音。

“哥特人！”那人用严厉而集中的绝望口音喊道。 “我们当中是否有人对他们向罗马进军的报道不是充满希望而不是恐惧？我们是否有机会摆脱上级强加给我们的堕落，直到这个无情的小气人和无耻的懦夫的巢穴从它污染的地球上被扫除！

“你对我们处境的罪恶的看法无疑是最公正的，”一个胖子、自负的人评论道，前面的言论就是针对他说的，“但我不能希望你如此热切地希望进行改革。想想被野蛮人征服的屈辱吧！

“我是祖国特权的流放者。我有什么兴趣维护她的荣誉——如果她真的有荣誉的话！第一位发言者回答道。

‘不！你的表情太严厉了。你太不满了，无法公正。

是我吗！ 听我说一会儿，你就会改变你的看法。 你现在可以从我的举止和外表上看出我比那边的平民更优秀。 你无疑认为我在这个世界上生活得很自在，我不会为未来的身体必需品感到焦虑。 如果我告诉你，如果我今晚想要另一顿饭、今晚的住宿、明天的新袍子，我必须抢劫或奉承某个伟人才能获得这些，你会怎么说？ 但事实确实如此。 我绝望、没有朋友、一贫如洗。 整个帝国没有一个诚实的使命可以让我庇护。 如果我不想在街上挨饿，或者在树林里公然抢劫，我就必须成为一个迎合者或寄生虫——一个雇佣奴隶的暴君，或者一个在贵族之下的特许卑鄙小人！ 这就是我。 现在听听我当时的情况。 我生而自由。 我从父亲那里继承了一座农场，他以牺牲自己的舒适、健康和生命为代价，成功地保卫了这座农场，使其免受富人的侵占。 当我继承他的土地时，我决心在我的时代保护它们，就像他在他的时代保护它们一样。 我不间断地工作：我扩大了我的房子，我改善了我的田地，我增加了我的羊群。 我一次又一次地蔑视威胁并击败了我的贵族邻居的诡计，他们希望拥有我的庄园来扩大他们自己的领土宏伟。 随着时间的推移，我结婚并生了一个孩子。 我相信我是从我的种族中脱颖而出的幸运儿——有一天晚上，我遭到了强盗的袭击：奴隶们因富有主人的残酷行为而陷入绝望。 他们毁坏了我的玉米地，夺走了我的羊群。 当我要求赔偿时，我被告知要把我的土地卖给那些能够保卫它们的人——卖给那些富有的贵族，他们的暴政组织了这群卑鄙的人，他们掠夺了我的财产，政府对他们通过欺诈获得的财宝也很友善。我很高兴能够给予我诚实的宝藏他们所拒绝的保护。 我骄傲地决定我仍然会独立。 我种了新庄稼。 我用仅有的一点钱雇了新仆人，买了更多的羊群。 当我刚刚从第一次灾难中恢复过来时，我就成为了第二次灾难的受害者。 我又被袭击了。 这次我们有武器，我们试图自卫。 我的妻子在我眼前被杀；我的房子被烧毁了；我自己只是逃脱了，伤痕累累；我的孩子不久就因憔悴而死了。 我没有妻子，没有后代，没有房子，没有钱。 我的田地仍然在我周围延伸，但我没有耕种它们。 我的墙在我脚下仍然摇摇欲坠，但我没有人再把它们竖起来，如果它们竖起来了，我也没有人可以居住。 我父亲的土地现在对我来说变成了荒野。 我太骄傲了，不愿意把它们卖给我富有的邻居；在我看到他们成为暴君的猎物之前，我宁愿离开他们，暴君的地位已经战胜了我的工业，而且他现在能够吹嘘自己可以走遍十里多的元老院财产，不受邻近农夫农场的污染。 我无家可归，无家可归，没有朋友，我在苦难中独自来到罗马，在堕落中无助！ 你现在是否怀疑我对祖国的荣誉漠不关心？ 当她值得我为她服务时，我会用我的生命和我的财产来为她服务。但她已经抛弃了我，我不在乎谁征服了她。 我对哥特人——以及数以千计的与我现在经历同样苦难的哥特人——“进入我们的大门！ 将我们的宫殿夷为平地！ 如果你愿意的话，请让我们这些受害者与暴君在一场共同的屠杀中混为一谈！ 你的入侵将为这片土地带来新的领主。 他们不能更多地粉碎它——他们可以更少地压迫它。 我们的子孙后代可以通过牺牲我们国家使之变得毫无价值的生命来获得他们的权利。

他停下来了;因为此时他已经勃然大怒。他的眼睛瞪得大大的，脸颊通红，声音也提高了。那么，他能否看到未来时代为像他这样在整个文明欧洲遭受苦难的种族的后代所预备的命运的最微弱的愿景——他能否想象在以后的岁月里，“中产阶级”如何受到鄙视？在他那个时代，就是要获得特权和权力。将国家繁荣的平衡掌握在正义的手中；镇压压迫、规范统治；飞翔在王权、公国、地位和财富之上，表面上服从，但实际上是威严的；他能预见到这一点吗？绝望！

很难说，他的愤怒可能会让他走向何等的绝境，愤怒的戈尔迪安（他仍然在隐藏的地方听着）可能采取什么行动。因为此时此刻，一辆刚刚从我们在其他地方描述过的宫殿里出来的马车周围爆发出一阵骚动，不幸的地主的抱怨和权威法警的沉思都突然暂停了。

这辆车看上去是一团银色。绣花丝绸窗帘在四周飘扬，金饰镶嵌在光滑的侧面，里面坐着的人不亚于那个用篮子肉宴请人民的贵族。这件事已经被宫门前的乌合之众知道了。这样一个机会可以让他们在受奴役时表现出狂喜，在想象中的独立中表现出真正的奴性，这是不容错过的机会。因此，他们对表演者的外表表达了如此强烈的感激之情，以至于罗马的陌生人会认为这座城市发生了叛乱。他们跳跃，奔跑，围着腾跃的马跳舞，把空篮子抛向空中，并赞许地拍拍自己“圆圆的肚子”。随着马车继续前行，他们从四面八方都招募了新成员，并获得了新的重要性。胆小的人在他们面前逃跑，吵闹的人跟着他们喊叫，勇敢的人则加入到他们的队伍中。他们欢乐的合唱团始终不变的主题是——“祝高贵的庞波尼乌斯健康！”祝罗马参议员们繁荣昌盛，他们用他们的食物招待我们，给我们剧院的自由！荣耀属于庞波尼乌斯！参议员们的荣耀！

命运似乎在这一天很高兴地满足了法警戈尔迪安永不满足的好奇心。远处人群的呼喊声刚刚平息，当他们追随离开的马车时，两个人的声音低沉而私密，从柱子的另一侧传到了他的耳朵里。他小心翼翼地环顾四周，发现他们是牧师。

“庞波尼乌斯真是个永远的小丑啊！”一个声音说道。 “他将获得赦免，他乘坐他的国家战车出行，仿佛他准备庆祝他的胜利，而不是承认他的罪过！”

“那么，他又犯下了新的轻率行为吗？”

唉，是啊！作为一名参议员，他非常需要谨慎！几天后，他一时冲动，向他的一名女奴隶扔了一个酒杯。女孩当场死亡，她的哥哥（也是他的侍从）威胁要立即报仇。为了防止对他的身体造成不良后果，庞波尼乌斯将这个家伙送到了他在埃及的庄园。现在，出于同样的对他灵魂福祉的预防，他去向我们神圣而仁慈的教会请求赦免。

“我担心这些不断的赦免，给予那些太粗心的人，甚至没有对自己的罪行表示悔改，这会让我们和广大人民产生偏见。”

“当我们的统治者站在我们一边时，人民的情绪会产生什么后果呢！”赦免是一种巫术，将罗马的这些浪子束缚在我们的意志之下。我们知道是什么改变了君士坦丁——政治上的奉承和准备好的赦免；人们会告诉你这是十字架的标志。

“这位庞波尼乌斯确实很富有，可能会增加我们的收入，但我仍然担心人民的愤慨。”

“不要害怕：想想他们的旧制度强加给他们多久，然后怀疑，如果可以的话，我们是否可以按照我们的意愿塑造他们。如果用来传播欺骗的工具是一种宗教，那么任何欺骗都会成功地对付暴徒。

声音停止了。戈尔迪安仍然怀有向元老院当局告发逃亡地主的模糊意图，他利用牧师的沉默所给予他的自由来照顾他的目标受害者。令他惊讶的是，他看到这个人已经离开了他之前向自己讲话的听众，并在门廊的另一个地方与一个似乎最近才加入他的人进行了认真的交谈，而这个人的外表是如此引人注目法警向前走了几步，以便能更近距离地观察他，这时他再次被牧师的声音逮捕。

他一时犹豫不决该把自己不择手段的注意力投向哪一方，然后机械地回到了原来的位置。然而，不久之后，他对听到土地所有者和他的朋友之间神秘通讯的渴望超过了他对了解牧师神学秘密的喜悦。他再次转身，但令他惊讶的是，他好奇的东西竟然消失了。他走到门廊外，向四面八方寻找，却不见踪影。脾气暴躁又失望的他回到了他离开祭司的柱子，作为最后的资源，但是在一方之后他在调查中所花费的时间对他与另一方的重聚是致命的。牧师们都走了。

法警的好奇心因失望而受到充分的惩罚，他顽强地朝平西安山走去。如果他转向相反的方向，朝向圣彼得大教堂，他就会发现自己再次来到了土地所有者和他的杰出朋友的附近，并且会熟悉他们谈话的主题，这就是我们想要的读者将在下一章中了解这一点。

公元324年，君士坦丁在传闻中的圣彼得殉难地点和尼禄马戏团的废墟上建立了一座教堂，称为圣彼得大教堂。

十二个世纪以来，这座由一位因谋杀和暴政而臭名昭著的人建造的建筑，在漫长的时期摧毁了城市其他地区的冲击中毫发无伤。在那之后，教皇朱利叶斯二世将其从其神圣而辉煌的时代摇摇欲坠地移走，为现代教堂的基础让路。

我们将读者的注意力引向这座历经一千二百年的建筑，它是由沾满鲜血的双手所建立，却在几个世纪的暴风雨战争中作为和平之星而保存下来的。正如艺术对现代教堂的影响一样，时间对古代教堂也产生了影响。如果说其中一个因其宏伟而令人惊叹，那么另一个则因其年代而在记忆中变得神圣。

正如这座教堂的兴起是为了纪念基督教作为罗马宗教的胜利确立一样，它的进步也反映了牧师的野心、挥霍或轻浮所造成的新崇拜精神的每一次变化。起初，它矗立得可怕而雄伟，各个部分都很美丽，就像它为荣耀而建的宗教一样。巨大的斑岩柱廊装饰着它的通道，并围绕着一个喷泉，喷泉的水从一棵巨大的青铜松树上喷出。它的双排过道均由四十八根珍贵的大理石柱支撑。平坦的天花板上装饰着镀金金属横梁，这些金属横梁是从异教寺庙的污染中拯救出来的。它的墙壁上装饰着宗教主题的巨幅画作，法庭上镶嵌着优雅的马赛克。它就这样升起，简单却又崇高，可怕却又诱人；在这个开始，它被提升为代表崇拜的黎明的一种类型。但当神父们因成功而红光满面，把基督教作为他们走向政治和掌权的道路时，教会的面貌逐渐开始发生变化。当野心勃勃的人慢慢地、不知不觉地把他的神秘、他的教义和他的争论的垃圾堆起来，关于上帝赋予他的结构的原始纯洁性时，同样，华而不实的装饰和华而不实的改变也一一出现，玷污了曾经的建筑。雄伟的大教堂，直到异教徒朱利安的幽灵出现威胁和责备，教会和教士的腐败进程突然受到了令人印象深刻的遏制。

偶像崇拜复兴的短暂时期一过去，神父们对他们收到的警告无动于衷，带着新的活力回来混淆了他们的福音和教会曾经简单的东西。他们日复一日地提出新的论着，引起激烈的争论，又逐渐形成新的教派。他们日复一日地改变着古老大教堂曾经高贵的面貌。他们将令人作呕的遗物挂在其雄伟的墙壁上，他们将细小的锥体贴在其辉煌的柱子上，他们将庸俗的流苏缠绕在其巨大的祭坛周围。他们在这里打磨，在那里刺绣。只要有窗户，他们就用花哨的布遮住。只要有雕像，他们就用人造花装饰它。凡是有庄严休息之处的地方，他们都会用闯入的光线来激怒其宗教阴郁。直到（到达我们所写的那个时期）他们成功地彻底改变了建筑物的外观，使其内部看起来更像是一个巨大的异教玩具店，而不是基督教教堂。确实，到处都有一根柱子或一座祭坛像以前一样毫无阻碍地矗立着，与周围的华而不实的东西显得格格不入，就像当时布道中引用的圣经文本一样。但就大教堂的整体而言，其早期的辉煌似乎已不可挽回地消失和摧毁。

在对这座建筑进行了一番描述之后，读者将不难想象，它所在的广场失去了它曾经拥有的任何高贵特征，其速度甚至比教堂本身还要快。如果大教堂现在看起来像一个巨大的玩具店，那么它的附属柱廊无疑就像一个巨大的集市的摊位。

我们在前一章中已经暗示过这一天的衰落，这一天很快就要结束了，台伯河西岸街道上的居民准备加入他们看到的人群，他们从窗户朝圣彼得大教堂。流行趋势在曾经共同的方向上突然汇合的原因对于所有碰巧在教堂或公共建筑附近的询问者来说是足够明显的，因为在这种情况下出现了一张精心装饰的大羊皮纸，一根高杆子上，有两名武装士兵守卫着，防止与好奇的乌合之众接触。这些奇怪的标语牌上所发布的公告都是相同的性质并指向相同的目的。在每封信中，罗马主教都告诉他的“虔诚而可敬的弟兄们”，即该市的居民，由于接下来的几天是圣路加殉难周年纪念日，因此守夜活动必须在当天晚上举行圣彼得大教堂；考虑到场合的重要性，在仪式开始之前，将展出那些与圣人之死有关的珍贵文物，这些文物已成为教会无价的遗产；其中包括挂着圣路加的橄榄树的一根树枝、套在他脖子上的一段绞索——包括绳结——以及一幅由他自己画的圣母升天图。手。在一些表达对圣人苦难的哀悼的句子之后，没有人读过，也没有必要在这里重述，公告接着指出，守夜期间将进行一次布道，稍后将举行布道。那时，装有两千四百盏灯的巨大枝形吊灯将被点亮，照亮教堂。最后，这位可敬的主教呼吁他的全体教友，考虑到这一天的庄严性，戒除肉欲的享乐，以便他们能够更加虔诚和值得地沉思所看到的神圣物体，并消化这些神圣的事物。为他们的理解提供精神食粮。

从我们已经给出的罗马民众的性格样本来看，或许不必说，这份神学美食清单所呈现的最吸引人的地方就是文物和枝形吊灯。讲坛上的雄辩和守夜的庄严必定早已展现出它们更清醒的诱惑力，然后才能将现在匆忙走向被亵渎的大教堂的庞大人群的五十分之一吸引到街上。事实上，人群很快就聚集在一起，在后面的游客还没有看到柱廊之前，前排的观光客已经把教堂挤得水泄不通了。

无论不成功的部分公民对自己被排除在教堂之外感到多么不满，他们在该场所进行的娱乐活动中发现了强大的反吸引力，其中的居住者似乎完全无视主教关于行为应节制的警告。到了这一天的庄严时刻。教堂前宽敞的石板上举办了各种受欢迎的展览，仿佛完全违背了神职人员所建议的礼仪和秩序。街舞姑娘们在每一个可以利用的地方练习那些“滑行回转”，而这一点受到了具有秩序和历史记忆的阿米亚努斯·马塞利努斯（Ammianus Marcellinus）的雄辩地谴责。摊位上塞满了真伪存疑的遗物，篮子里装满了备受争议的小册子的整洁手稿摘要，异教图像重新生成了圣人肖像，白羊座在诅咒中扭动的图画，以及沐浴在天光光环中的烈士，受到来自各个方向的诱惑，观众们越是虔诚。厨师们背着商店走来走去；敌对的奴隶商人大声呼吁赞助。酒商从酒桶顶部传授酒神的哲学；诗人朗诵出售的作品；诡辩家的论点注定要改变那些摇摆不定的人，让无知的人感到困惑。

不断的运动和不断的喧闹似乎是群众对被教会排除在外的失望所寻求的唯一补偿。如果一个陌生人在阅读了当天的公告后，前往大教堂，饱览被主教称为“他虔诚而可敬的弟兄”的人类杰出集体的沉思，他必须在混合时此时此刻，人们要么怀疑主教称号的真实性，要么相信公民对内在价值的精炼，这种精炼的本质过于崇高，无法影响外在人的性格。

夕阳西下之际，没有什么比远眺这欢乐的景象更美丽的了。离开的发光体发出的深红色光芒，部分来自教堂后面，将光芒投射到广场上的广大群众身上。明亮而迅速的丰富光线在水面上流动，从喷泉中跃向它，呈现出自然而短暂的美丽。沐浴在灿烂的光芒中，光滑的斑岩柱廊倒映出变色龙般的光彩，空灵多变。白色的大理石雕像泛着精致的玫瑰色，淡雅的树木在枝繁叶茂的深处闪闪发光，仿佛沉浸在金色的薄雾中。然而，与周围奇妙的光辉形成奇怪的对比的是，广场中央的巨大青铜松树和大教堂宽阔的正面，在阴沉的阴影中升起，不确定而夸张，像邪恶的灵魂一样降临在欢乐的美丽之上。场景的其余部分，将他们深深的阴影投射到他们鄙视的光的统治之下。从远处看，这种生动的明亮与庄严的阴郁的狂野结合；这些建筑，一处变暗，显得巨大，另一处变亮，显得空灵。这些拥挤的人群，似乎是一个巨大的移动群体，此时在光芒四射的光芒中闪闪发光，而在浓重的阴影中变得模糊，组成了一个整体，如此不协调，但又如此美丽，如此怪诞，但又如此崇高，以至于当时的场景看起来如此，更像是一些有人居住的流星，由于它靠近地球而被遮蔽了一半，而不是凡人和物质的前景。

这种大气效果的美丽太过严肃和崇高，以至于无法引起这个地方的群众的兴趣。在这群人中，只有两个人注视着那绚丽的日落，甚至表现出应有的钦佩和关注。一个是前一章提到的地主，另一个是他的杰出朋友。

这两个人，无论是神态，还是外貌，都形成了鲜明的对比，他们眺望着猩红的天空。地主身材矮小，看上去焦躁不安，本来就棱角分明的面容现在因痛苦和不满的固定表情而扭曲。他敏捷而敏锐的目光不停地从一个地方游移到另一个地方，感知一切事物，但没有停留在任何事物上。在他对眼前场景的关注中，他似乎更多地受到榜样的影响，而不是自己自发的感情。他时不时地不耐烦地环视着他的朋友，好像在等待他说话——但没有任何一句话或动作逃过他深思熟虑的同伴的眼睛。他全神贯注于自己的沉思，似乎对任何普通的外在呼吁完全不敏感。

从年龄和外貌来看，这个人正处于生命的衰退期；他已经六十岁了，头发全白了，脸上布满了深深的皱纹。然而，尽管有这些缺点，他仍然是一个最高意义上的英俊男人。尽管他面容憔悴、消瘦，但他的五官依然大胆而端正。他的表情习惯性地悲伤，神情中透露着一种升华，他那双有些严厉而热切的眼睛里透着智慧，这雄辩地证明了他智力的优越性。此时，他站在那里，目光定定地望着霞光四射的天空，高大瘦弱的身躯半撑在拐杖上，双唇紧闭，眉头微蹙，态度坚决一动不动，即使是最肤浅的观察者也一定会立刻感觉到，看起来不是普通人。他深思熟虑的一生——也许是长期的悲伤——似乎写在他沉思的脸上的每一个线条上。他的举止中有一种自然的尊严，这显然阻止了他那焦躁不安的同伴对他的沉思过程做出任何坚决的打断。

太阳慢慢地、绚丽地在地平线上渐渐西沉，直到现在看不见他了。当最后的光芒沉入远山之后，陌生人从沉思中醒来，走近土地所有者，用他的手杖指向西方天空中快速褪色的亮度。

“普罗布斯，”他用低沉、忧郁的声音说道，“当我看着日落时，我想到了教堂的状况。”

“我在教堂里看不到什么可以思考的地方，在日落中也看不到什么可以观察的地方，”他的同伴回答道。

“多么纯净，多么生动，”另一个人低声说道，几乎没有理会地主的评论，“太阳投射在我们脚下的地球上的光芒是多么纯净，多么生动啊！”一度它的光辉战胜了周围的阴影，这是多么高贵啊！然而，尽管许诺有那光芒，不久之后，它就在与阴暗的冲突中消逝得多么迅速——即使是现在，它也已经彻底地离开了地球，从天上收回了它的荣耀之美！我们周围的阴影已经拉长了，把这个地方的每一个物体都笼罩在黑暗中。但一个小时后，如果没有月亮升起，黑暗的夜色将毫无抵抗力地笼罩罗马！

“你告诉我这些的目的是什么？”

“我们所观察到的，难道没有提醒你我们有权利承认的敬拜过程吗？那第一道美丽的光芒难道不代表着它纯粹而完美的升起吗？光辉与阴暗之间的短暂冲突，以及使徒和教父们对它的成功保存；光芒迅速消退，在后来的岁月里遭到亵渎；现在围绕着我们的阴郁，在我们生活的这个时代所包围的毁灭？——这种毁灭除了回归到纯粹的最初信仰之外没有什么可以避免，这种信仰现在应该成为我们宗教的希望，就像月亮一样夜晚的希望！

‘我们应该如何改革？没有自由的人会关心宗教吗？谁来教他们？

“我已经——我会的。我一生的目的是为他们恢复古代教会的圣洁；拯救他们脱离信仰叛徒的网罗，人们称他们为牧师。他们将从我那里了解到，教会曾经不知道任何装饰，只知道纯洁的存在；牧师最渴望的就是他的圣衣。曾经教导谦卑、现在引起争议的福音，在过去是信仰的法则——足以满足一切需要，有力地克服一切困难。通过我，他们会知道，在过去，它是心灵的守护者；通过我，他们将看到，在当今时代，它是骄傲者的玩物。通过我，他们会担心在将来它可能会成为教会的流放！我已发誓要完成这项任务；为了推翻这种偶像崇拜——它像另一种异教一样，以其图像、遗物、珠宝和黄金在我们中间兴起——我将奉献我的孩子、我的生命、我的精力和我的财产。我决不会放弃这个尝试，决不会因为这个决心而退缩。当我还有一丝生命的气息时，我将坚持不懈地在这座废弃的城市中恢复对至高者的真正崇拜！

他突然停了下来。他的强烈激动似乎突然使他丧失了言语能力。这个严肃、忧郁的男人全身的每一块肌肉都因他内心灵魂的不朽激励而颤抖。他对一种孤独情感的影响普遍敏感，这里面有一种近乎女性化的东西。即使是粗鲁、绝望的地主也会对面前这个人的热情感到敬畏，当他凝视着同伴的脸时，他忘记了自己的错误，尽管它们是可怕的，也忘记了他的痛苦，尽管是令人心酸的。

有几分钟的时间，两个人都没有再说什么。然而，很快，最后一位发言者以一个习惯于压抑自己无法压抑的情绪的人的方式平息了他的激动，并走向土地所有者，悲伤地握住了他的手。

“我明白了，普罗布斯，我让你大吃一惊，”他说。 “但教会是我没有自由裁量权的唯一主题。在所有其他事情上，我已经克服了我早年的鲁莽行为。在这方面，我仍然必须与自己急躁的本性作斗争。当我看到我们周围发生的嘲笑时；当我看到一个神职人员的欺骗者、一个受欺骗的人民、一个被玷污的宗教时，我承认，我的愤慨压倒了我的耐心，我燃烧着毁灭，而我只希望能够改革。

“我知道你的想象力总是很丰富；但当我上次见到你时，你的热情是爱。你妻子-'

'和平！她欺骗了我！

'你的孩子-'

“和我一起住在罗马。”

“我记得她还是个婴儿，十四年后，我成了你在高卢的邻居。在我离开这个省份时，你刚刚从意大利旅行归来，你试图在那里找到你父母的踪迹，或者你常常为他的缺席而哀叹的哥哥的踪迹，但没有成功。告诉我，从那时起，你有发现过你古老家族的成员吗？到目前为止，你一直忙于听我犯下的错误的历史，以至于你几乎没有谈到自从我们上次见面以来你的生活发生的变化。

“普罗布斯，如果我对我自己的事保持沉默，那是因为对我来说，回顾过去没有什么吸引力。虽然我有能力回到童年时抛弃的父母身边，但我并没有想过悔改；现在，我肯定已经失去了它们，我对它们的向往已无济于事。我在幼稚的嫉妒和愤怒的时刻与我的兄弟分开了，我什至放弃了我想要获得他的宽恕和爱，但我从未发现过他的踪迹。为我早年伤害过的人赎罪是我这个年纪的祈祷者所没有的特权。我离开了我的父母和兄弟，心情不好，没有得到他们的宽恕，我觉得我注定要死！我的生活是粗心的、无用的、不敬虔的，从掠夺和暴力转向奢侈和懒惰，并引导我走向了上次见到你时我欣喜若狂的婚姻，但现在我觉得它的动机和结果都是不值得的。但我邪恶的存在的最后一场灾难让我受到了祝福，而且是三次祝福，因为它让我看到了真理——它让我在还活着的时候成为了一名基督徒！

‘基督徒能这样看待他的苦难吗？那么，我希望我是像你一样的基督徒！地主低声而认真地低声说道。

“普罗布斯，正是在最初的那些日子里，”另一个人继续说道，“当我发现自己被抛弃、被羞辱，独自一人成为我无助的孩子的监护人，被永远地从我自己抛弃的家中放逐时，我后悔了。我诚恳地承认自己的罪行，从救恩书里寻求智慧，从教父那里寻求人生准则。正是在那个时候，我决定将我的孩子，像古代的撒母耳一样，奉献给上天，而我自己则致力于改革我们堕落的崇拜。正如我已经告诉过你的，我放弃了我的住所并改变了我的名字（记住，从今以后你必须用“Numerian”来称呼我），我以前的自己可能不会留下任何遗骸，我以前的同伴也不会留下任何遗骸。再次发现并诱惑我。我不断地关心保护我的女儿免受世界的污染。作为守财奴手中的宝石，她在父亲的家里受到监视和保护。当我，她的老师，让这片土地恢复了古老信仰的统治和无懈可击的福音的指导时，她的命运就是抚慰受苦的人，照顾病人，救助孤独的人。我们没有任何感情或希望能够将我们与尘世的事物联系在一起。我们的心都仰望天堂；我们的期望只是来自高处！

“不要把希望过于坚定地寄托在孩子身上。请记住罗马贵族如何摧毁了我曾经拥有的家庭，并为你自己的家庭而颤抖。”

“我不担心我的女儿；在我不在的时候，她由一位发誓要帮助我为教会工作的人照顾。距离我第一次见到乌尔皮乌斯已经快一年了，从那时起他就全身心地为我服务并照顾我的孩子。

“这个乌尔皮乌斯是谁，你竟对他如此信任？”

“他和我一样年纪。我发现他和我一样，因早年的灾难而疲惫不堪，并且像我曾经一样，被异教诸神的妄想所抛弃。他孤独、痛苦、孤独，我对他的痛苦表示同情。我向他证明，他所信奉的崇拜因其罪恶而被从这片土地上驱逐出去。继承它的宗教已经被人类玷污了，如果他想得救，就只剩下一种信仰可供选择——早期教会的信仰。他听了我的话，就皈依了。从那时起，他就耐心地为我服务，乐意帮助我。在我聚集了少数真正信徒的屋檐下，他总是第一个来，也是最后一个留下来。他的嘴里没有说过任何愤怒的话，他的眼里也没有露出不耐烦的神情。虽悲伤，却温柔；尽管受苦，但他很勤奋。我已经用我所拥有的一切信任他，并以我的轻信为荣！乌尔皮乌斯是廉洁的！

“你的女儿呢？——她尊敬乌尔皮乌斯，就像你尊敬他一样吗？”

“她知道她的责任是爱我所爱的人，并避开我避开的人。你能想象一个基督徒处女会有任何违背父亲意愿的感情吗？来我的家;请用你们的眼睛来判断我的女儿和我的同伴。你因不幸而无家可归，如果你愿意的话，可以和我一起找到一个家。那就来和我一起为我的伟大事业而努力吧！你将会把你的思想从对你的苦难的沉思中抽离出来，并通过你的奉献赢得至高者的青睐。

“不，努梅里安，我仍然会独立，即使是我的朋友们！”罗马和意大利都不是我的居所。我将前往另一片土地，与另一片人民生活在一起，直到征服者的武器为整个帝国的勇敢者恢复自由，为诚实的人恢复保护。

“普罗布斯，我恳求你留下来！”

'绝不！我已下定决心，努梅里安——再见！”

努梅里安一动不动地站了几分钟，若有所思地凝视着同伴离开时走的方向。起初，悲伤和怜悯的表情缓和了他休息时脸上惯有的严肃表情，但很快，这些温和、温柔的感觉似乎就像突然出现一样从他心里消失了；他的表情又恢复了一贯的严肃，当他混入向大教堂方向奋力前进的人群时，他自言自语道：“让他毫无遗憾地离开吧；让他离开吧！”他拒绝为他的创造者服务。他不应该再是我的朋友。

从这句话中，可以看出这个人的性格。他的存在就是一场巨大的牺牲，一场勇敢的自焚。虽然，在他向朋友传达的关于他一生中发生的事件的简短暗示中，他夸大了自己错误的程度，但他决没有公正地对待他的悔罪热情——这种悔罪超出了通常的界限。悔改，只是在绝望中开始，以狂热结束。他抛弃了他父亲的家（我们目前无意进入他的动机），以及他随后长期存在的暴力和放荡，使他天生强烈的激情无法受到丝毫抑制。为了服从他们最初的冲动，他在成熟的时候与一个完全不值得她所激发的热烈钦佩的女人缔结了婚姻。当他发现自己被她欺骗和羞辱时，这种痛苦的震撼使他全身颤抖，粉碎了他所有的精力，让他的心灵和思想一下子崩溃了。他年轻时犯下的错误，在他的繁荣时期犯下的道德上不受惩罚的错误，在他的逆境中对他未来的和平产生了致命的影响。他的悔改因沮丧而变得黯淡。他的决心并没有因希望而变得光明。当自杀者绝望地走向刀锋时，他转向了宗教。

努梅里安性格中所有剩余的特征留待以后有机会讨论，我们现在将跟随他穿过人群，到达大教堂的入口——在这里和其他地方继续用他所采用的名字来称呼他。关于他的皈依，以及他在与逃亡土地所有者面谈时坚持要提及的内容。

尽管在他开始向教会进军时，我们的热心人发现自己被置于前进人群中最落后的成员之中，但他很快就设法彻底超越了他那些拖拉和散漫的邻居，以至于毫不拖延地获得了神圣的建筑。和其他许多人一样，他在这里被迫停下来，而那些离大教堂最近的人却挤进了庄严的大门。在这样的情况下，他那非凡的身材自然不能不被注意到，不少围观的人都默默认出了他，有的人用惊讶的目光看着他，有的人则用厌恶的目光看着他。然而，没有人走近他或与他说话。每个人都感到有必要避开这个人，因为他每天大胆地揭露教会的弊端，使他的自由甚至生命不断受到威胁。

然而，在努梅里安周围的旁观者中，有两个人并不满足于粗心地避免与这位勇敢而可疑的改革者进行任何交流。这两个人属于神职人员中最底层的，似乎正忙着小心翼翼地观察着周围人的一举一动，聆听着周围人的谈话。他们一看到努梅里安，就立即移动以躲避他的观察，同时注意占据这样一个位置，使他们能够看到他们明显不信任的对象。

“看，奥修斯，”其中一人说道，“那个人又来了！”

“毫无疑问，他也是出于同样的动机才来到这里的，”另一个人回答道。 “你会看到他会再次进入教堂，听礼拜，然后回到平西亚山附近的小教堂，在那里，在他那群衣衫褴褛的信徒面前，攻击我们弟兄所宣讲的教义，正如我们所知，他昨晚就这么做了，我们怀疑他会继续这样做，直到当局认为适当发出监禁他的信号为止。

“我感到惊奇的是，他竟然被允许在他对教会的抵触过程中坚持这么长时间。难道我们仅凭他的著作就没有足够的证据来证明他是异端吗？主教在这种事情上的粗心大意真是令人费解！

“你应该考虑一下，努梅里安不是牧师，对我们利益的粗心更多的是元老院而不是主教。我们的贵族们最近都在讨论皇帝退居拉文纳后的行为，现在我们将致力于探究有关哥特人的谣言的基础。再说了，即使他们是自由的，元老院又何必关心神学上的争论呢？他们只知道这个努梅里亚人是罗马公民，是一个有一定影响力和财产的人，因此，作为人口中的一员，他是一个具有政治重要性的人。除此之外，我们目前要质疑攻击者提出的学说绝非易事。因为这个人很难用圣经来支持他所说的话。相信我，在这件事上，我们纠正自己的唯一方法就是判定他对教会最高要人的丑闻有罪。

“我们最近收到的跟踪他的行动并听取他的言论的命令让我相信我们的上级也同意你的意见。”

“无论我的信念正确与否，我确信这一点——他的自由日子屈指可数了。就在几个小时前，我见到了主教的管家的首席助理，他告诉我，他从门缝里听到——”

嘘！他移动；他正奋力向前，想要进入教堂。当我们跟随他时，你可以告诉我你要说什么。快的！让我们融入人群吧。

基督教群中的这两位谨慎的牧师总是热衷于履行他们令人厌恶的职责，他们小心翼翼地跟随努梅里安进入神圣建筑的内部。

尽管太阳在西边的天空中留下了一道淡淡的红色，月亮也刚刚升起，但主教在向人民讲话时提到的那盏由两千四百盏灯组成的大吊灯已经点亮了。在其严肃而神圣的美丽时代，教堂的外观可能会因这种人造光辉而受到致命的损害。但现在，大教堂的古老特征完全改变了，现在它从一座庄严的寺庙变成了一座豪华宫殿的样子，它华丽的灯光给它带来了巨大的收获。它并不是宏伟的中殿中的装饰品，而是在从屋顶倾泻而下的耀眼光芒中闪闪发光。镀金的椽子，光滑镶嵌的大理石柱子，华丽的窗幔，祭坛上镶满宝石的烛台，图画、雕像、青铜器、马赛克，无一不闪烁着沉稳奢华的透明度，绝对令人陶醉。眼睛。现在任何物体上都没有出现任何磨损的痕迹，也没有失去光泽的痕迹。中殿的每一部分都显得极其精致，一尘不染，光彩夺目，从来没有被凡人的手触摸过。着迷又困惑，观察漫游在辉煌场景的表面，直到厌倦了前景的不间断装饰，它徘徊在灯光昏暗的过道上休息，并愉快地停留在远处柱子周围盘旋的柔和阴影上，还有那些填充在它们昏暗的凹处或徘徊在高耸的墙壁上的滑翔形式。

当努梅里安进入大教堂的时候，一部分仪式刚刚结束。唱诗班最后的微弱回声仍然悬在香火弥漫的空气中，广大的观众仍然聚集在一起聆听，态度各异，虔诚的改革家眺望着教堂。即便是他，尽管他表情严肃，但也有一瞬间被这难以形容的迷人景象所征服。但不久之后，他似乎对自己不由自主的钦佩情绪感到不满，他的眉头皱了起来，他重重地叹了口气，同时（仍然是细心的间谍跟随他）他在过道中寻找相对僻静的地方。

在礼拜间隙，会众们全神贯注地凝视着圣物，这些圣物被装在一个带有水晶门的银柜里，放置在高坛的顶部。虽然不可能对这些教会宝藏有一个满意的看法，但它们仍然吸引了每个人的注意力，直到讲坛上出现的牧师发出布道开始的信号，并告诫所有有座位的人保护它们不延误。

穿过布道听众的队伍——其中一些人正在数枝形吊灯上的灯光，以确保主教没有从两千四百盏灯中骗走他们一盏；其他人低声交谈，打开小盒子的糖果——我们再次将读者带到教堂外面。

此时，这里的聚集人数已大大减少。高耸的柱廊投射在地面上的阴影变得越来越深、越来越大。在这个地方的许多较偏僻的角落里几乎看不到一个人。在这些尽头的一处，柱子在街道上终止，黑暗最严重，站着一位孤独的老人，小心翼翼地将自己隐藏在黑暗中，焦急地看着眼前的公共道路。

他等了没多久，一辆英俊的战车停在离他潜伏的地方几步远的地方，车上的人大声念出下面的话：

'不！不！继续前进——我们比我想象的要晚。如果我留下来看大教堂的灯光，我将无法及时接待参加今晚宴会的客人。此外，这只古埃及人最崇拜的不可估量的小猫已经感冒了，我绝对不会让这种易受影响的动物暴露在潮湿的夜间空气中。继续前进，好卡里奥，继续前进！

老人还没等这句话说完，就跑到了战车上，立刻就看到了两个脑袋——一个是参议员维特拉尼奥，另一个是一只戴着红宝石项圈的黑光闪闪的小猫，一半包裹在主人宽大的长袍里。惊讶的贵族还没来得及说出一个字，那人就用嘶哑而急促的口音低声说道：“我是乌尔皮乌斯——解散你的仆人——我有重要的事情要说！”

'哈！我可敬的乌尔皮乌斯！你有一种以刺客的方式传递信息的能力，真是令人不快！但考虑到你的勤奋，我必须原谅你的唐突无礼。我优秀的卡里奥，如果你重视我的认可，那就把你的同伴和你自己移到听不见的地方吧！

自由民立即服从了主人的命令。接下来发生了下面的对话，陌生人这样开头：——

“你还记得你的承诺吗？”

'我做。'

“以您的名誉担保，作为一名贵族和参议员，您愿意在必要时遵守它吗？”

'我是。'

“那么，黎明时分，在您宫殿花园的私人大门处与我会面，我将带您前往安东尼娜的卧室。”

“时间适合我。”但为什么是在黎明呢？

“因为基督教老头会守夜直到午夜，而女孩很可能会参加。我本想在您的宫殿里告诉您这件事，但我在那里听说您去了阿里西亚，并将经大教堂返回；所以我派自己来拦截你。

“勤劳的乌尔皮乌斯！”

“记住你的承诺！”

维特拉尼奥倾身向前回答，但乌尔皮乌斯已经走了。

当参议员再次命令他的马车继续前行时，他焦急地环顾四周，仿佛再次期待看到他那奇怪的追随者仍然潜伏在战车附近。然而，他只看到一个他不认识的人，后面跟着另外两个人，快步从他身边走过。他们是努梅里亚人和间谍。

“我的项目终于接近完成了，”维特拉尼奥一边和他的小猫在战车上滚下，一边自言自语道。 “我今天想占有朱莉娅的别墅，这很好，因为我现在肯定想明天使用它。木星！这件事充满了多少危险、矛盾和谜团！当我想到，以我的哲学为荣的我，离开了拉文纳，借了一座私人别墅，与一个未开化的平民结盟，而这一切都是为了一个已经欺骗了我的期望，把我当作音乐的女孩——主人不承认我是情人，我对自己的软弱感到惊讶！但必须承认的是，我最近的冒险经历本身就引起了一些兴趣。在我的设计的众多吸引力中，仅仅了解这个努梅里亚家庭的秘密所带来的乐趣绝不是最不重要的。他是如何对女孩产生影响的？为什么他要对她进行如此严格的隔离？这个自称乌尔皮乌斯、半疯狂、粗鲁的人怪物是谁？拒绝对他的恶行给予任何奖励；热衷于回归古老的众神宗教；并为他向我索取的承诺而欢欣鼓舞，作为一个善良的异教徒，支持罗马可能尝试的首次恢复古代崇拜？他从哪里来？他为什么表面上自称是基督徒？是什么促使他为 Numerian 服务？在金星带附近！与这个女孩有关的一切都和她自己一样难以理解！但是耐心——耐心！再过几个小时，这些谜团就会揭晓。与此同时，让我想想我的宴会，还有主持宴会的神，夜莺酱！”

到过罗马的人谁不曾愉快地记得平西安山 (Pincian Hill) 的景点呢？谁在辛苦地游览了黑暗、忧郁的城市的奇观之后，没有通过参观其阴凉的步道、呼吸其芬芳的微风而恢复活力呢？在衰落的罗马笼罩着庄严的哀伤之中，这种令人愉悦的海拔升起，轻盈、通风、诱人，既给身体带来清爽，又给精神带来安慰。从其平坦的山顶可以看到这座城市最雄伟的一面，以及周围乡村最明亮的一面。罗马的罪行和苦难似乎无法接近它所青睐的土地。它给人们留下的印象是，这是一个经过共同同意而划分出来的地方，供无辜者和欢乐的人居住，是一个休息和娱乐的场所，不受喧嚣和劳作的侵扰，是神圣的。

它的现代面貌是其远古性格的写照。接二连三的战争可能会暂时削弱它的美丽，但和平总是能让它们恢复原始的美丽。古罗马人称其为“花园之山”。尽管经历了帝国的灾难和中世纪的动乱，它仍然享有其古老的称号，并且直到今天仍然胜利地保留着“花园之山”的称号。

五世纪初，平西安山的壮丽达到了顶峰。如果我们的故事的情节是与我们的故事的行为相一致，那就是详细描述它的宫殿、树林、寺庙和剧院的辉煌，那么在自然美景的辅助下，这样一个人工辉煌的光辉前景可能会在读者面前展开，这会让读者付出沉重的负担。轻信，同时又让他感到惊讶。然而，这里没有必要尝试这个任务。我们发现现在有必要引起人们的兴趣和关注，这并不是为了古代奢华和品味的奇迹，而是为了狂热和虔诚的努梅里亚人的住所。

在我们所写的那个时期，在平西安山弗拉米尼安末端的后面，可以直接俯瞰城墙，矗立着一座小而建造优雅的房子，周围有一个自己的小花园，后面受到保护毗邻参议员维特拉尼奥宫殿的高耸树林和附属建筑。这处住所曾经是一种避暑别墅，属于邻近豪宅的前业主。

然而，挥霍的必需品迫使主人放弃了这部分财产，这部分财产是由努梅里安熟悉的一位商人购买的，他在朋友去世时将其作为遗产收到。当他的改革计划占据了他的思想时，他对与罗马高贵的浪荡子有亲缘关系的想法感到厌恶，这位严肃的基督徒决定放弃他的遗产，并将其卖给另一个人。但是，在女儿的一再恳求下，他最终同意改变自己的目的，并牺牲了对奢华邻居的反感，而牺牲了孩子年轻时对自然之美的依恋，这一点在他在平西亚山的遗产中得到了体现。只有在这种情况下，父亲的自然慈爱才战胜了改革者后天的严厉。在这里，他第一次也是最后一次居高临下地对待年轻人的甜蜜琐事。在这里，他不由自主地放纵自己，安顿了自己的小家，并允许女儿唯一的娱乐活动：在花园里照料花朵，欣赏远处的美丽景色。

距离上一章提到的事情已经过去一个小时了。意大利清澈明亮的月光现在弥漫在这座光辉之城的每个地区，平西安山上的树林和宫殿也沐浴在它纯净的光辉之中。从努梅里安的花园里，罗马郊区的不规则建筑、远处起伏的富饶乡村以及远处绵延的山脉，现在都在柔和而奢华的光线下清晰可见。在这个视野附近，第一次检查时看不到任何生物。但经过更勤奋和耐心的观察，你随后能够在努梅里安房子的一扇窗户上发现一个年轻女孩的身影，窗户半被窗帘遮住了。

很快，这个孤独的身影就靠近了眼睛。以前只照在窗户上的月光，现在照亮了其他物体。首先，它们展示出一条白色的小手臂；然后是一件轻便简单的长袍；然后是白皙、优美的脖子；最后是一张明亮、年轻、天真无邪的脸，坚定地指向远山月光般的广阔前景。

女孩在窗前沉思了一会儿。然后她离开了岗位，几乎立刻又出现在通向花园的门口。当她走向面前的草坪时，她的身形轻盈而娇小——她的动作中流露出一种自然的优雅和得体——她把一把镀金的鲁特琴抱在怀里，半被长袍遮住。当她到达与窗户视野相同的草皮岸时，她将乐器放在膝盖上，并以某种克制的方式轻轻地触动和弦。然后，她似乎对自己发出的声音感到震惊，焦急地环顾四周，显然害怕被人偷听。她那双乌黑明亮的大眼睛里流露出忧虑的表情。她娇嫩的嘴唇半张着；当她审视花园的每一个角落时，她柔和的橄榄色肤色突然泛起红晕。完成调查后，她似乎没有发现任何怀疑的理由，她再次专注于她的仪器。她再一次触动了人们的心弦，而且这次她的手更加大胆了。她发出的音符分解成一种狂野、哀伤、不规则的旋律，交替上升和下降，仿佛受到夏日风的变幻无常的影响而摇摆。这些声音很快就被这位年轻吟游诗人的声音和谐地增强了，他的声音平静、平静、柔和，并以精致的独创性适应伴奏音调的每一个任意变化。她选择的歌曲是当今最奇特的颂歌之一。对她来说，它的主要优点在于它与奇怪的东方空气结合在一起，这是她第一次与向她赠送鲁特琴的参议员会面时听到的。用英语解释，这篇作文的单词将是这样的：——

音乐的起源

I.

精神，其统治统治
在音乐的激动人心的旋律中，
你遥远的出生地可能是从哪里来的？
说说是什么吸引你来到地球？

凡人，听着：我出生了
在创世之初，
在清晨的星星中歌唱，
伴随着天体的音乐。

曾经，在太空领域内，
我看着这个凡人星球滚动，
对他们不幸的种族的向往，
不请自来，充满了我的六翼天使灵魂！

天使们见证了我的诞生，
听见我叹息向大地歌唱；
“这是不可原谅的罪行”
忘记我的祖国天堂；
于是他们严厉地叫我走——
被放逐到下面的世界。

二。

流放于此，我无所畏惧；
因为，尽管我周围笼罩着黑暗，
尽管在天地里没有人听见我的声音，
当我唱歌时，地球有听众。

春风徐徐，青春活力
柔软而腼腆地聚集在我身边，
轻盈的木仙在树上嬉戏，
埃科高兴得跳了起来！

深沉的悲痛和翻腾的痛苦
在我温柔的压力下软化了；
欢乐跳跃，脚步飞快，
跑到我脚边依偎；
当爱被激起、喜悦时
从上面轻轻地吻了我！

第三。

从早年开始，
我仍忠于大地歌唱；
飞过每一个遥远的气候，
永远受欢迎，永远年轻！

仍然很高兴，我给予我安慰
最光明的希望都破灭了；
这是我的——甜蜜的礼物！——去迷惑心灵，
尽管所有其他的快乐都消失了！

时间，在身边一切都枯萎了，
无害的过去我喜欢滑翔；
改变，凡人必须服从，
永远不会动摇我的温柔；
仍然是我所有的心都在感动
在爱的永恒里。

当她的声音和琵琶的最后声音在寂静的夜空中轻轻消失时，女孩的脸上出现了一种难以形容的高度。她欣喜若狂地抬头望向远处星光灿烂的天空。她的嘴唇颤抖着，黑色的眼睛里充满了泪水，她的胸膛因音乐和场景所激发的过度情感而起伏。然后，她慢慢地环顾四周，温柔地凝视着她亲手打造的芬芳花圃，带着半恭敬半欣喜的神情，眺望着绵长、平坦、闪亮的平原和寂静、壮丽的山脉。 ，长期以来，这一直是她最珍视的思想的灵感，现在在她眼前闪闪发光，柔软而美丽，就像她在处女沙发上的梦想一样。然后，自然和黑夜的神奇翅膀上飘来的天真想法和纯真的回忆压倒了她，她低下头，靠在鲁特琴上，把她圆圆的、有酒窝的脸颊贴在光滑的框架上，机械地画着手指。毫无保留地沉浸在少女时代和青年时期的遐想中。

这就是她父亲的致命野心，终生将人类艺术中的吸引力和人类智慧中的美丽事物驱逐出去！这就是女儿，她的存在就是对凡人的悲痛的长期熟悉，对凡人快乐的一成不变的拒绝，她的思想只是布道和斋戒，她的行动仅限于包扎陌生人的伤口和擦干陌生人的眼泪；简而言之，她的一生注定是她父亲对古代教会朴素贞女的朴素理想的体现！

失去了母亲，被驱逐出同龄人的陪伴，不允许与任何生灵有任何熟悉，不允许与任何其他人有同情心，受到命令但从不纵容，受到责备但从不鼓掌，她一定已经沉沦在强加给她的严厉之下了。而是因为她在追求鲁特琴为她带来的孤独快乐时犯下的轻微不服从行为。在学习的时间里，她徒劳地阅读了古代教父们为顺从的教会的利益而写下的对爱情、自由、享乐、诗歌、绘画、音乐、金、银和宝石的猛烈咒骂。以前的日子；她徒劳地想象，在漫长的神学教育中，她内心禁忌的渴望被驱逐和摧毁了——她耐心而孩子气的性情完全屈服于她父亲最严格的命令。她对努梅里安的采访一结束，我们内心的本性就受到了刺激，这种本性可能会被扭曲，但永远无法摧毁，引诱她忘记了她所听到的一切，并渴望得到许多被禁止的东西。我们生活在这种存在中，但有某种同情、渴望或追求的陪伴，这些同情、渴望或追求成为我们习惯性的避难所，使我们免受从外部世界继承的磨难。同样的感觉促使安东尼娜在童年时期乞讨一座花园，在少女时代则促使她拥有了一把鲁特琴。

对音乐的热情促使她拜访维特拉尼奥，仅此一点就使她的感情免于因强加于他们的孤独而憔悴，并以我们已经描述的方式占据了她的闲暇时间，这是她与生俱来的。

她的西班牙母亲在她被允许照顾孩子的短暂时间内，在她的摇篮里一小时又一小时地给她唱歌。这样一来，婴儿刚萌芽的能力所受到的印象就永远不会消失。尽管她最早的感知只是看到了她父亲的痛苦；尽管他绝望的忏悔很快就注定了她要过一种隐居的生活，接受训诫的教育，但她对声音旋律的热情依恋，受到她母亲的声音的启发——几乎是从她母亲的怀里吸收的——尽管受到了所有的忽视，但她还是活了下来。经受住了所有的反对。它在幼稚的回忆中、在透过窗子听到的街头吟游诗人的片段中、在冬天的夜风吹过平西安山上的树林中找到了滋养，并在罗马元老的鲁特琴发出的第一声可闻的声音中得到了狂喜的满足。 。她后来如何拥有乐器和演奏技巧，读者已经从维特拉尼奥在拉文纳的叙述中知道了。这位轻浮的参议员是否能够发现，当他教导学生时，他的艺术在他的学生心中激起的真正强烈的情感？他能否想象，在上课期间，她的责任感与她对音乐的热爱是如何不断地斗争——她是多么全神贯注，一会儿沉浸在怀疑和恐惧的痛苦中，一会儿又沉浸在享受和希望的狂喜之中——他会他对她对自己的冷漠感到惊讶，而他在宫廷花园里会见朱莉娅时却热情地表达了这一点。事实上，没有什么比安东尼娜对维特拉尼奥看待她的感情表现得孩子气的无意识更彻底的了。当她出现在他面前时，她残留的所有情感都没有因恐惧而枯萎，而是完全被那把心爱而美丽的鲁特琴所吸引和全神贯注。在接受这件乐器的过程中，她在占有的胜利中几乎忘记了送礼者。或者，如果她真的想到了他，那就是庆幸自己没有受伤，从那个阶层的一个成员手中逃脱了，她父亲反复的警告让她产生了一种模糊的恐惧和不信任感，并确定，现在她已经承认了他的善意并离开了他的领地，任何事情都不应诱使她冒险再次进入那些领地，以免被她父亲发现并给自己带来危险。

她在孤独中天真无邪，在她天生的单纯中几乎是婴儿般的，单一的享受就足以满足她这个年龄的所有激情。父亲、母亲、爱人、伴侣；自由、娱乐、装饰——这一切都在这把简单的琵琶里为她概括了。她的性格调皮、活泼、温柔；她天性的诗意，她内心的情感；青春的快乐绽放，隔离不能全部枯萎，也不能扭曲戒律的污点，现在完全被那不可估量的占有所滋养、扩展和更新——这就是人类情感的创造力。她可以对它说话，对它微笑，抚摸它，并相信，在她喜悦的狂喜中，在她自欺欺人的粗心大意中，它同情她的喜悦。在她漫长的独处期间，父亲不在的时候，父亲派来的那个忧郁、忧郁的陌生人默默地注视着她，这个陌生人就成了比花园更珍贵的伴侣，甚至比构成她最喜欢的景色的平原和山脉还要珍贵。 。当她父亲回来时，她被带到一个黑暗的地方，坐在陌生而沉默的人群中，听着无休无止的演讲，想到这件乐器安全地藏在她的房间里，并思考它，这是一种安慰。她很高兴接下来可以演奏她自己的新音乐。然后，当傍晚到来时，她独自一人留在花园里——然后是月光和歌声的时刻；那一刻的狂喜和旋律将她从自我中拉了出来，让她不知如何地升华，并把她带到了她不知道去向的地方。

但是，当我们因此徘徊于对动机的反思和对性格的审视时，现场另一个人物的出现将我们带回了短暂的兴趣和事件的外部世界。我们把安东尼娜留在花园里思考她的鲁特琴。她仍然保持着冥想的姿势，但现在她不再孤单了。

从她下楼时所走的台阶上，一个男人走进花园，朝她所在的地方走去。他的步态一瘸一拐，身材扭曲，比例扭曲。他宽大、棱角分明的五官与干瘪的脸颊形成鲜明的对比。他干燥、打结的头发被太阳晒成奇怪的黄褐色。他的表情是一种坚定、严肃、悲伤的思想。当他蹑手蹑脚地朝安东尼娜走去时，他自言自语，用他那瘦长的、无形的手指机械地抓住了自己的衣服。灿烂的月光，完全落在他的脸上，给他的面容赋予了一种苍白、神秘、幽灵般的外观：此时此刻，如果是一个陌生人看到他，会觉得很难看。

正是这个人在维特拉尼奥回家的路上拦截了他，现在他匆匆赶回来，以便在他的主人回来之前恢复他原来的职位，因为他就是努梅里安在采访中提到的与他年迈的皈依者乌尔皮乌斯相同的人。与圣彼得大教堂的土地所有者。

乌尔庇乌斯走到距离少女几步之遥的地方时，他停了下来，用沙哑而浑厚的声音说道：

“把你的玩具藏起来——努梅里安就在门口！”

安东尼娜听到那些令人厌恶的口音，猛地一惊。血液冲进了她的脸颊；她连忙用长袍盖住琵琶。顿了顿，似乎要跟那人说话，然后猛地一颤，急忙朝屋里走去。

当她走上台阶时，努梅里安在大厅里遇见了她。现在没有机会把琵琶藏在原来的地方了。

“你在花园里待得太晚了，”父亲说道，尽管他很节俭，但他仍然自豪地看着站在他身边的美丽的女儿。 “但是什么影响了你呢？”他注意到她的困惑，补充道。 '你颤抖；你的颜色来来去去；你的嘴唇颤抖。把你的手给我！'

当安东尼娜听从他的命令时，那件危险的长袍的褶皱滑到了一边，发现了鲁特琴框架的一部分。努梅里安敏锐的目光立即发现了它。他从她无力的手中夺走了乐器。看到这一切，他的惊讶之情无法用语言来形容，一瞬间，他面对着这个可怜的女孩，她苍白的脸因恐惧而僵硬，充满了不祥的、富有表现力的沉默。

“这东西，”他最后说道，“我家里的浪荡子发明的东西——在我女儿的手里！”他把琵琶摔在地板上，摔成了碎片。

有那么一刻，安东尼娜难以置信地看着心爱的同伴的废墟，这是她对未来日子最幸福的期望的中心。然后，当她开始审视自己被剥夺的现实时，她的眼睛失去了所有天赐的光芒，充满了尘世的泪水。

“去你的房间！”努梅里安跪在地上，对着那些不幸的碎片抽搐地抽泣着，她怒吼道。到你的房间去！明天，这个罪恶之谜就会大白于天下！”

她谦卑地起身服从他，因为动摇她温柔而深情本性的情绪中并没有愤怒的成分。当她走向那个从此不再有琵琶的房间时，想到明天以后再也没有琵琶了，她的悲伤几乎压倒了她。她转过身来，恳求地看着父亲，仿佛在恳求他允许她捡起他脚下哪怕是最小的碎片。

“去你的房间！”他严厉地重复道。 “我会当面不服从吗？”

她没有重复任何无声的抗议，立即退了下去。她一消失，乌尔皮乌斯就走上台阶，站在愤怒的父亲面前。

“你看，乌尔皮乌斯，”努梅里安喊道，“我如此精心呵护的女儿，我本想为世界树立榜样，但她却欺骗了我！”

他边说边指着那把不幸的琵琶的废墟。但乌尔皮乌斯没有回答他，他急忙继续说道：

“我不会用我的世俗事务来打扰今晚庄严的办公室，从而玷污它们。明天我会审问我不听话的孩子。与此同时，乌尔皮乌斯，不要想象我会以任何方式将你与这种邪恶且不值得的欺骗联系起来！我对你充满信心，对你的忠诚我充满希望。

他再次停顿，乌尔皮乌斯再次保持沉默。任何一个比他那毫无疑心的主人不那么激动、不那么信任的人，都会注意到他憔悴的脸上浮现出一丝阴险的微笑。但努梅里安的愤怒仍然太强烈，不允许他观察，尽管他努力控制自己，但他再次爆发出抱怨。

“也是在这个夜晚，”他喊道，“当我希望带领她加入我的一小群信徒，加入他们的祈祷，并聆听我的劝告时，在这个夜晚，我注定要发现她是一位异教鲁特琴演奏家，拥有世界上最肆意的虚荣心！愿上帝赐予我耐心，让我今晚能以不迷失的思想来敬拜，因为我的心因我孩子的过犯而烦恼，正如古时的以利因他儿子们的罪孽而烦恼一样！

他正迅速走开，突然间，仿佛突然想起了什么，他突然停了下来，再次对他阴沉的同伴说话。

“今晚我会自己去教堂，”他说。 “你，乌尔皮乌斯，将留下来看守我不听话的孩子。好朋友，对我的房子保持警惕；即使是现在，当我回来时，我仍以为有两个陌生人在追随我的脚步，我预感到某种邪恶正在等待着我，作为对我罪孽的惩罚，甚至比我女儿犯罪的痛苦还要严重。小心点，好乌尔皮乌斯——小心点！”

当他匆匆离去时，这位严厉、严肃的男人对他那阴郁的狂热所遭受的愤怒感到不知所措，就像那个软弱、胆怯的女孩对她无害的鲁特琴所遭受的破坏一样感到不知所措。

努梅里安走后，乌尔皮乌斯的脸上再次露出阴险的笑容。他站了一会儿，陷入了沉思，然后开始慢慢走下他附近的楼梯，楼梯通向一些地下公寓。他还没走多远，楼上走廊的尽头就传来轻微的响动。当他听着声音重复时，他听到了一声抽泣，他小心翼翼地抬起头，发现在月光下，安东尼娜小心翼翼地沿着大厅的大理石路面行走。

她手里拿着一盏小灯；她红润的小脚没有被遮盖。泪水仍然流过她的脸颊。她极其小心地前进（好像害怕被人偷听），直到到达地板上仍然散落着破碎鲁特琴残骸的地方。她跪下，将面前的每一块碎片分别放到唇边。她赶紧将一块藏在怀里，起身快步朝来时的方向走去。

“耐心直到黎明，”她不忠实的监护人低声说道，当她消失时，他从隐藏的地方凝视着她。 “它将为你的鲁特琴带来一位修复者，为乌尔皮乌斯带来一位盟友！”

最后两章中我们的角色在夜间的行动现在已经暂停。维特拉尼奥正在等待参加宴会的客人；努梅里安正在教堂里，准备向朋友们发表演讲。乌尔皮乌斯正在他主人的房子里冥想；安东尼娜躺在沙发上，抚摸着她从鲁特琴废墟中拯救出来的珍贵碎片。目前，我们故事的所有直接推动者都已安息。

我们的目的是利用这段时间的无所事事，将读者的注意力引导到与我们的浪漫故事场景不同的国家，以及过去几年中与努梅里安的早年生活密切相关的历史事件。背信弃义的皈依者。这个人将在我们的故事的未来发展中发挥重要作用。为了理解他的性格，并洞察他已经暗示过的、随后可能出现的目的，必须追溯他存在的漫长历程，直至其根源。

在朱利安统治时期，当异教徒的诸神对基督教的福音取得最后的胜利时，一个衣着得体的男人牵着一个十五岁的英俊男孩走进了亚历山大城的大门，然后急忙前往塞拉皮斯神殿大祭司的住所。

在目的地停留了几个小时后，这名男子匆匆离开了这座城市，就像他进入这座城市一样，此后就再也没有在亚历山大被发现过。男孩一直住在大祭司的住所里，直到第二天，他才庄严地致力于圣殿的服务。

这个男孩就是年轻的埃米利乌斯，后来被称为乌尔皮乌斯。他是大祭司的侄子，他的父亲（一位罗马商人）将他托付给大祭司。

野心是埃米利乌斯父亲的主要激情。它促使他渴望获得国家授予成功者的一切荣誉，但它并没有赋予他在任何情况下将他的愿望转化为成就所必需的权力。他一生都是一个失望的人，有计划但从未付诸实践，眼睁睁地看着他更幸运的兄弟晋升到神职人员的最高地位，却发现自己无可挽回地注定要生活在他的商业追求所带来的富裕的默默无闻中。

当他的兄弟马克里努斯在朱利安登上皇位后，作为塞拉皮斯神庙的大祭司达到了权力和名气的顶峰时，这位不成功的商人失去了在追求荣誉方面与他的亲戚竞争的所有希望。他的贪得无厌的野心被自己抛弃了，现在集中在他的一个尚在襁褓中的儿子身上。他决定他的孩子应该在他失败的地方取得成功。既然他的兄弟已经在圣殿中获得了最高的地位，那么没有什么职业能够比祭司职位为他的家庭成员提供更直接的优势了。他的家族从一开始就是严格的异教徒。其中一位已经获得了他华丽的崇拜中最尊贵的荣誉。他决定让另一个人与他的亲戚竞争，而那个人应该是他的长子。

他坚定了这个决心，立即将他的孩子奉献给了他现在不断关注的伟大计划。他很清楚，异教虽然复兴了，但已不再像以前那样受到普遍的崇拜。它现在受到整个帝国受迫害的基督徒的秘密抵制，并且可能很快就会公开反对；如果年轻一代要成功地保护它免受未来的所有侵犯，并安全地获得其最高荣誉，那么对他们的要求就必须比对古代宗教的简单依恋要求从前的信徒要求的更多。然后，祭司中最重要职位的履行与军事或政治级别的拥有是相容的。现在，未来的众神的仆人应该献身于圣殿，而且只应该献身于圣殿。因此，父亲决定，从儿子很小的时候起，他的所有职业和报酬就应该在某种程度上与他打算从事的职业联系起来。他幼稚的快乐被用来献祭和占卜。他幼稚的玩具和奖品都是神灵的形象。男孩对这项教育计划没有提出反对意见。与弟弟暴躁、不服任何权威的性格不同，他生性温顺。他的想象力比他的年龄还生动，很容易被任何呈现在他面前的非凡物体所俘虏。在这样的鼓励下，他的父亲全神贯注于塑造他未来的生活。他母亲对他的影响受到嫉妒的关注。她的爱、她的悲伤以及即将与他分开的秘密表达，每当被发现时，都会被无情地压抑。他的弟弟被忽视了，几乎被遗忘了，这样父母的注意力就可以完全集中在长子身上。

当埃米利乌斯年满十五岁时，他的父亲高兴地看到，他可以见证他所有计划开始实现的时刻已经到来。男孩被带离家，带到亚历山大，并被他骄傲而胜利的父亲高兴地离开，并受到大祭司马克里努斯的特别监护。

圣殿的酋长非常同情他哥哥对年轻的埃米利乌斯的计划。男孩一开始从事新的工作，就被告知他必须忘记他在罗马留下的一切；他必须视大祭司为他的父亲，并从今以后视圣殿为他的家；他现在的努力和未来的抱负的唯一目标必须是为众神服务。马克里努斯也没有就此止步。他非常渴望代替父母来支持他的学生，并通过各种方式将他从他迄今为止所生活的世界中撤出来来确保他的忠诚，以至于他甚至改变了他的名字，给了他一个他自己的称谓，并将其描述为一种激励他未来努力的荣幸。他从男孩埃米利乌斯永久转变为学生乌尔皮乌斯。

乌尔皮乌斯具有我们已经描述过的自然性格，并且在大祭司的监护下，几乎没有什么危险会辜负人们对他的不寻常期望。他对新职责的关注从未放松过。他对新主人的服从从未动摇过。无论马克里努斯对他提出什么要求，他都一定会执行。无论他多么渴望回家，他都从未发现过。他从不寻求满足他那个时代特有的品味。大祭司和他的同事们对这个男孩如此积极地向他表达自己的意图感到惊讶。如果他们知道他为将来在他父亲家里的工作做了多么精心的准备，他们就不会为这个学生不同寻常的温顺感到惊讶了。尽管他受过训练，但如果他表现出任何反对叔叔意愿的行为，他一定会表现出超出人类的反常性。他的童年没有被允许思考或行动。他天生的早熟被当作了动力，迫使他的才能走向危险和不健康的成熟。当他的新职责需要他注意时，他就会以他的孩子气的同代人对待一项新运动所表现出的同样真诚和热情来对待它们。他逐渐开始了解宗教的奥秘，在他的心中产生了一种奇怪的、令人兴奋的恐惧和兴趣的感觉。他听到神谕，浑身颤抖；他参加了祭祀和占卜，他感到很奇怪。他所热爱的所有大胆而美丽的迷信诗歌都以压倒性的方式流入他年轻的心灵，吸收他新鲜的想象力，不断地将他从外部世界的重要现实带入渴望和思想的阴暗领域。

但他的职责并没有完全占据乌尔皮乌斯的注意力。这个男孩有他独特的乐趣，也有他独特的职业。当他结束一天的工作时，在寺庙门廊的阴凉处轻轻漫步，从他伟大而神秘的显赫位置俯瞰脚下人口稠密、阳光明媚的城市，对他来说是一种奇怪的、超凡脱俗的、生机勃勃的享受。看着尼罗河波光粼粼的水面在耀眼的光芒中闪烁着欢乐的光芒；他抬起眼睛，从下方展现在他面前的田野和树林、宫殿和花园，望向远方和上方注视着他的美丽无云的天空，这唤醒了他新职责中所剩下的所有欢乐，他与母亲难得的不间断的交流，把这种深情的情感植入了他的心里。然后，当日光开始减弱，月亮和星星在天空中的位置变得美丽时，他会走进大厦的地下拱顶，颤抖着他的小蜡烛几乎驱散了沉闷、庄严的阴暗，聆听着屏息凝神地关注那些守护神的声音，传说中的守护神居住在圣地的公寓里。或者，当众人离开去娱乐、回家时，他会偷偷溜进高耸的大厅，在巨大雕像的基座上徘徊，恐惧地呼吸着寺庙里寂静的气氛，看着寒冷、忧郁的月光掠过。穿过屋顶的开口，穿过异教神像的巨大肢体和特征。有时，当塞拉皮斯的服务以及他与皇帝的交流所伴随的忧虑结束时，马克里努斯会带领他的学生进入祭司的花园，并称赞他的温顺，直到他的心因感激和自豪而悸动。有时，他会小心翼翼地把他带到圣地的范围外，并让他看到，在城市的郊区，沉默、苍白、忧郁的人们，可疑地滑行在快乐、拥挤的街道上。他会宣称，那些逃亡者是圣殿及其所包含的一切的敌人。反对皇帝和众神的阴谋家；那些被当作人类的弃儿而被驱逐的不幸者；他的称呼是“基督徒”；如果容忍对他的不虔诚崇拜，他就会失去他所爱的叔叔、他所崇敬的圣殿，以及他毕生渴望获得的祭司尊严和声誉。

就这样，他的监护人教导他履行职责，并独自进行娱乐活动，随着时间的推移，这个男孩逐渐失去了他这个年龄的所有剩余特征。就连对母亲和母爱的记忆，都在他的记忆中变得模糊。他严肃、孤独、深思熟虑，他活着只是为了在圣殿里取得成功。他的努力只是为了效仿大祭司。他所有的感情和才能现在都被一种野心所奴役，这在他现在的年纪来说是不自然的，而且对他未来的生活来说是一种不祥的痛苦。马克里努斯酝酿多年的设计在几个月内就得到了完善。他的父亲几乎不敢对他的成年抱有的希望，在他年轻时就已经实现了。

乌尔皮乌斯在为未来的成功做准备的过程中度过了三年的时光。这段时期结束后，朱利安的去世使异教世界的辉煌前景黯然失色。塞拉皮斯的祭司们刚从皇位空缺的致命消息中恢复过来，震惊和悲痛，新皇帝约维安颁布的宽容法令就传到了亚历山大城，并于寺庙的墙壁。

乌尔皮乌斯一看到这个公告（允许基督徒自由崇拜），就在他高度锻炼的性格中激起了最强烈的愤怒和蔑视情绪。他的性格和年龄的热情，总是引导他崇拜的一个方向，当他发现皇帝粗心地侵犯圣殿的至高无上的时候，他就表现出最疯狂的狂热。在他愤怒的最初时刻，他自愿从墙上撕下法令，领导对胜利的基督徒集会的攻击，或者前往帝国住所并劝告约维安在事情发生之前撤回他危险的宽大行为。为时已晚。他的更为谨慎的同伙费了很大力气才阻止他实施他鲁莽的计划。两天来，他远离了同伴，独自沉思着他所钟爱的迷信所受到的伤害，以及基督教教派影响力的扩大。

但是，一场私人灾难注定会进一步加剧这位年轻狂热分子的绝望，这场灾难的起因既神秘，后果又势不可挡。法令发布两天后，正值青春年华的大祭司马克里努斯突然去世。

讲述发现这一致命事件后寺庙内外的混乱和恐怖；描述牧师和民众的咒骂和骚动，他们立即怀疑受宠且野心勃勃的基督徒用毒药导致了他们的精神统治者的死亡，作为一部时代风俗史可能会很有趣，但与本章的目的无关。我们更愿意追踪乌尔皮乌斯个人和私人的丧亲之痛对他心灵的影响。他失去了他所爱的主人和他有权利尊敬的监护人，这对他来说是无法挽回的。

乌尔皮乌斯患病了几个月，期间他的侍从们为他的生命和理智而颤抖，这足以证明乌尔皮乌斯对失去他的保护者的悲痛是真诚的。在他发作性谵妄期间，监视他床边的牧师从他的胡言乱语中得出了许多明智的结论，即他的癫痫发作及其原因可能对他未来的性格产生的影响；但是，尽管他们的洞察力很强，但他们仍然远远没有充分认识到丧亲之痛给他的性情带来的巨大变化。直到大祭司去世的那一刻，男孩本人从未意识到他对第二个父亲的忠诚之深。尽管他的亲生父母扭曲了这些品质，但作为他天性主要动力的深情品质却从未被完全摧毁。他们把马克里努斯的每一个善意的话语和温柔的举动当作他们自出生以来就一直怨恨的食物。在道德上和智力上，马克里努斯对他来说都是指明道路方向的灯塔，规范他行为的法官，是他寻求灵感的缪斯。而现在，当这个连接着他最珍视和最重要的思想的每一个分支的纽带突然断裂时，一种荒凉的感觉降临在他的心灵上，它的弹性立刻瘫痪了，新鲜感也枯萎了。他回头看了一眼，除了一个家，什么也没有看到，他父亲的野心把他永远地从这个家中驱逐了出来。他展望未来，当他想到自己无论从性格还是教育上来说，都不适合像其他人一样融入这个世界，他看不到指导他未来生活的社会幸福的指路明灯。现在他已经没有任何资源了，只能完全投入到那些使他的家对他来说是一个陌生的地方的追求中，这些追求因与他失去的依恋对象的联系而变得神圣，这将赋予他唯一的幸福。以及他在未来的生活中希望在广阔的世界中获得的荣誉。

除了这种在他的职业中劳动的动机之外，乌尔皮乌斯的心中还存在着一种深刻而坚定的感觉，这种感觉激励着他以不断的热情去追求他所珍视的职业。这一统治原则是对基督教教派的厌恶。在他看来，其他人对大祭司之死的怀疑是肯定的。他拒绝了所有反对他坚定信念的观点，即基督徒的嫉妒促使他们用毒药谋杀了最有权势和最热心的异教牧师。不断地努力，直到他获得了他的亲戚以前享有的影响力和地位，一旦获得了这种影响力和地位，就利用这种影响力和地位为马克里努斯报仇，从地球上扫除基督教信仰的每一个残余，现在是他心中既定的目标。他的决心和深思熟虑的智慧对大多数人来说只是多年经验的结果，他在康复的最初几天谨慎地完善了他的未来计划，并公正地计算了他成功的机会。自我审视完成后，他立即并永远致力于他人生的伟大设计。没有什么让他疲倦，没有什么灰心，没有什么阻碍他。外在的事件在他身边悄然而过；这座城市的苦难和胜利不再触动他的心。年复一年，时间却对他无话可说。异教渐渐没落，基督教不知不觉地兴起，但变化并没有在他眼前展开。整个外部世界对他来说都是空虚的，直到他的计划成功的那一刻到来。他对未来的准备吸收了他本性的每一种能力，而就目前而言，他只是一个机器人，不反映任何原则，也不由任何事件驱动——一台移动的机器，但不感知——一个行动的身体，没有那个想法。

回到外部世界，我们会发现，364年朱维安去世后，新皇帝瓦伦提尼安继续实行前任皇帝所采用的宽容制度。公元 375 年，皇位继承人格拉提安去世后，他在两位前任君主的基础上做出了很大的改进，大胆地站在了新信仰的支持者一边。皇帝并不满足于仅仅通过言传身教来鼓励基督教的发展，他还通过对迅速衰落的古代崇拜的拥护者进行不断的迫害，进一步证明了他对新兴宗教的热情。通过他统治期间的这些行为，他成为他的继任者狄奥多西大帝的先驱，参与了这位杰出的异教反对者注定要实现的宗教革命。

公元 383 年，格拉提安去世，乌尔皮乌斯被列入圣殿的大祭司行列，并被指定为曾经由强大而活跃的马克里努斯担任过的重要职务的下一任继承人。这位有抱负的神父看到自己如此努力地获得了这样的荣誉，终于找到了闲暇来展望过去的事务。从四面八方而来的荒凉使他所看到的前景变得黯淡。在帝国的许多省份，诸神的神庙已经被胜利的基督徒的破坏性热情所摧毁。大批民众已经惊恐万状，担心他们的偶像的命运最终可能是他们自己的，发现自己被解散的牧师抛弃，并被古老信仰的顽敌包围，为了拯救自己的生命，他们放弃了崇拜并保护他们的财产。在广阔的异教徒废墟上，现在矗立着一栋完全完好无损的建筑。塞拉皮斯神庙依然昂首挺胸——未曾动摇、未曾弯曲、未曾受到污染。这里的祭祀活动依然盛行，人们依然鞠躬敬拜。在这座历代宗教辉煌的纪念碑面前，就连正在崛起的基督教霸主也感到沮丧。尽管它曾经众多的会众现在明显地稀疏了，尽管新的教堂里挤满了皈依者，尽管罗马的法令谴责它是地球表面上的一个污点，但它阴暗而孤独的宏伟仍然保留了下来。没有任何不洁的脚踩过它的秘密凹处；尚未有人向其古老而辉煌的城墙举起毁灭之手。

当乌尔皮乌斯审视异教世界的局势时，他的心中充满了愤慨，而不是沮丧。他的决心是经过多年的思考而孕育出来的，并经过不断勤奋的深思熟虑而成熟起来的，这种决心首先是那些影响仓促决定或摧毁动摇意图的冲击。灾难不会失败，它会促使它采取行动，但绝不会压抑它休息。它的存在是保持心灵活力的空气，是推动思想活动的泉水。乌尔皮乌斯从未动摇过对自己伟大设计的热爱，也从未对其最终的执行和成功感到绝望。尽管接下来的每一天都带来了异教徒新的不幸和基督徒新的胜利的消息，但他和他的一些更热心的同志仍然坚持期待着另一个朱利安的到来，以及被拆除的神殿修复的一天。他所侍奉的神灵。虽然塞拉皮斯神殿毫发无伤，以鼓励他的努力并为他受迫害的弟兄提供庇护，但对他来说，成功的热情会激励他付出努力，并激励他抵御任何危险。

现在，令牧师和会众惊讶的是，沉默、深思熟虑、孤独的乌尔皮乌斯突然从长期的休息中醒来，站出来激烈地捍卫他所入侵的崇拜的权利。几天之内，他对仍然参加塞拉皮斯仪式的异教徒的讲话的名气就传遍了整个城市。当基督徒中最勇敢的人经过圣殿的墙壁时，当他们听到受启发的牧师的观众中响起的热烈掌声时，他们不由自主地颤抖起来。这些长篇大论针对各种年龄和性格的人，在他们到达的每个人的心中引起了回响。对于年轻人来说，他们披上了他们所祈求的所有崇拜诗歌。他们居住在维纳斯的祭坛上，基督徒将其毁坏。在树林里，基督徒将驱散他们的树精；关于基督徒将兴起和摧毁的神圣艺术。对于老年人来说，他们唤起对过去通过众神的恩惠而获得的荣耀的回忆。为他们服务而牺牲的祖先；古老的被遗忘的爱情、欢乐和成功，在古老诸神的温柔守护下成长和繁荣——而他们对所有人的结论的不变负担是反复断言，即著名的马克里努斯是作为宽容的受害者而死的。基督教教派。

但乌尔皮乌斯的努力并不仅限于发表演讲。他把闲暇的每一刻都用来秘密前往亚历山大朝圣。这位无畏的狂热分子不顾危险，不顾威胁，闯入了基督徒最私密的聚会场所。从四面八方夺回背弃异教信条的人，并以圣殿城墙的堡垒抵抗半个城市的敌意。日复一日，新的成员到来，壮大了塞拉皮斯崇拜者的队伍。不知疲倦的乌尔皮乌斯的私人使者将来自各省分散的教会中仍然忠于古代崇拜的少数成员聚集在亚历山大。异教徒和基督徒之间已经开始发生骚乱。甚至现在，塞拉皮斯的牧师也准备代表这片土地上的古老宗教向新皇帝提出抗议。此时此刻，一个人为支撑迷信结构而做出的英勇尝试似乎很可能实际上会取得成功，而迷信的根基已被彻底破坏，其城墙也遭到了强盗的袭击。

但时间在流逝；随之而来的是不可阻挡的变化，践踏了人类的反对所设置的小障碍，并胜利地建立了奇怪而短暂的结构取而代之。这位虔诚的牧师竭尽全力来扩充和合并他分散的队伍，但徒劳无功。这座雄伟的神庙徒劳地展示了它古老的威严、华丽的祭祀和神秘的占卜。基督教的精神是为了在地球上取得胜利而出现的——异教的最后命运正在迅速实现。然而又过了几个季节，毫无结果的抵抗过去了，然后亚历山大大主教发布了他的法令，应该摧毁塞拉皮斯神庙。

听到大主教决心的传言，基督教狂热分子从埃及各个角落蜂拥而至，匆匆涌入亚历山大，参与拆除工作。成群结队的修道士从干旱荒凉的沙漠、岩石上的修道院和地下洞穴中飞到城门，与士兵和市民一起列队，等待着进攻。黎明时分，这支驱逐舰就召集起来，当太阳在亚历山大上方升起时，他们就到达了圣殿城墙前。

这座宏伟建筑的大门紧闭。城墙上挤满了异教徒的保卫者。整座大厦笼罩着一种死寂、神秘的寂静。而且，在所有挤满大楼的人中，只有一个人离开了他指定的地点——只有一个人不停地从一个地方徘徊到另一个地方，只要建筑物容易受到攻击。那些距离神殿最近的围攻者们，在这位主持防御准备的天才身上，看到了他们最恶毒的仇恨和最难以抑制的恐惧的对象——祭司乌尔皮乌斯。

大主教一发出进攻信号，一群修道士就带路——他们用刺耳、不和谐的声音尖叫着圣诗的片段，破烂的衣服在空中飘扬，苍白的脸闪烁着凶猛的喜悦——带路，把第一名放在了前面。把梯子靠在墙上，开始进攻。愤怒的围攻者从四面八方攻击圣殿，而坚决的围攻者则成功地从四面八方保卫了它。一次又一次的冲击落在了巨大的大门上，却没有迫使它们退开。一枚又一枚的导弹被投向大楼，但其坚固的表面却没有被击穿。许多人爬上城墙，占领了外部门廊，屠杀了他们的异教徒守军，但在他们能够充分利用自己的优势之前，他们不断地被击退。一次又一次，袭击者似乎即将成功袭击圣殿，但乌尔皮乌斯的身影总是在关键时刻出现在他心灰意冷的追随者中间，就像一个致命的人物，摧毁了最大胆的努力和最伟大的努力的效果。重要的胜利。哪里有危险，哪里有屠杀，哪里有绝望，无畏的牧师就大步走到那里，鼓舞勇敢的人，救助受伤的人，使虚弱的人复活。他没有被任何谋略所蒙蔽，也没有因为任何疲倦而疲倦，他的破坏活动和他面对失败的决心几乎是恶魔般的。围攻者们以他每走一步所遭遇的灾难来标记他绕圣殿的路线。如果被屠杀的基督徒的尸体从墙上扔到他们身上，他们就会感觉到乌尔皮乌斯就在那里。如果最勇敢的士兵在爬上梯子时犹豫不决，那么众所周知，乌尔皮乌斯正在指挥他们上面的战友被击败。如果来自神殿的一次突袭将先头部队击退到后方的预备队，他们就会辩称乌尔皮乌斯正在率领他的异教徒军队作战。成群结队的基督教战士仍然向前进攻。尽管不信者的队伍明显减少，尽管保卫他们的城门最终开始在他们不断遭受攻击的打击面前颤抖，但神圣建筑的每一个庭院仍然由被围困者占据，并且处于被围攻的状态。组织防御的不败将领的处置。

大主教对他的努力失败感到沮丧，并对他的追随者中已经发生的屠杀感到震惊，他突然下令停止敌对行动，并向圣殿的捍卫者提出短暂而有利的休战。经过一段时间的拖延，显然以他们之间的一些不和为代价，异教徒向大主教发出了一份保证，表示他们接受他的条件，即双方都应放弃任何进一步的争夺权力的斗争，直到狄奥多西颁布法令为止。决定寺庙最终命运的应该是申请并获得。

休战一旦达成，这座缓和的大厦前的广阔空间就逐渐被清除。大主教和他的追随者缓慢而悲伤地离开了他们徒劳地攻击其顶峰的古老城墙。当太阳落山时，早上聚集的一大群人中只剩下了几具尸体。在神圣的建筑内，死亡与安息主宰着黑夜，而黎明则在生命与行动上闪闪发光。伤者、疲倦者和寒冷者现在都安静地躺着，被穿过高耸门廊的夜风吹着，或者被笼罩在寂静大厅的昏暗所抚慰。在异教信徒的行列中，只有一个人仍在辛劳和思考。孤独而沉思的乌尔皮乌斯在神庙周围徘徊，像一头在巢穴中受到威胁的野兽一样焦躁不安，像一座陌生坟墓之城中的孤独灵魂一样警惕。对他来说，身体得不到休息，心灵也得不到平静。接下来几天发生的事情，笼罩着一个可怕的机会，无论是痛苦还是幸福，很快就会对他未来的生活产生不可挽回的影响。他带着机械而无用的焦虑，绕着高大的城墙一圈又一圈地注视着。建筑物里的每一块石头都对他孤独的心来说是雄辩的——对他狂野的想象力来说是美丽的。在那些贫瘠的建筑上，为他延伸出他所热爱的、肥沃的家园；那里有一座神殿，为了它的荣耀，他的智力被奴役了，为了它的荣耀，他的青春被牺牲了！他在秘密的隐秘处和神圣的法庭上一圈又一圈地踱步，用温柔而勤奋的手清洗他身旁雕像上的血迹和战争的污秽。悲伤、孤独、深思熟虑，就像他在成为众神的学徒的最初几天一样，现在他在月光下的幽静处徘徊，那里是马克里努斯年轻时教过他的地方。白天的惊涛骇浪激发了他的凶猛，夜晚的静谧则唤醒了他的温柔。早上，他以儿子的身份为父母而战，而现在，他在晚上以守财奴的身份守护着他的财宝，以情人的身份守护着情妇，以母亲的身份守护着她的孩子！

日子一天天过去；最后，令人难忘的早晨到来了，这将决定基督教狂热所幸存的最后一座寺庙的命运。清晨，数量减少的异教徒狂热分子在亚历山大大广场遇到了他们的增援而坚定的对手——双方都手无寸铁。随后，圣旨被公开宣读。它首先向异教徒保证，他们的牧师保护神庙的请求得到了与基督教大主教提出的反对诸神的请愿书相同的考虑，最后宣布皇帝的命令，塞拉皮斯和所有其他人亚历山大的偶像应该立即被摧毁。

当皇帝任命的前卫士兵出现在广场上时，圣旨颁布后，基督徒队伍中仍然响起胜利的欢呼声。被遗弃的异教徒在他们聚集的地方站定了几分钟，茫然地注视着周围的战争准备，充满了困惑和绝望。然后，当他们回想起他们的人数是多么减少，他们对少数人的第一次防御是多么艰难，而对许多人的第二次防御是多么不可能时——从最勇敢的人到最软弱的人，恐慌抓住了他们；他们不顾乌尔皮乌斯，不顾名誉，不顾神明，一致转身逃离了这里。

随着异教徒的逃亡，拆除工作开始了。就连妇女和儿童也急忙加入到肆意破坏的令人欢迎的任务中。这次没有守卫者将圣殿的大门阻挡在基督徒大军面前。无人居住的建筑里崇高的孤独瞬间被激怒和入侵。雕像被打碎，金子被带走，门被碎成碎片；但这里的拆迁进度一时间被耽搁了。那些被委托去破坏外部结构的人并不比那些掠夺其内部结构的邻居更成功。柱子的笨重石头、墙壁的巨大表面，抵挡住了他们微不足道的最有力的努力，并迫使他们满足于毁坏他们无法破坏的东西——撕掉屋顶，污损大理石，拆除柱头。其余的建筑物仍然没有受到损坏，即使现在在荒芜的废墟中，也比以前在完美和坚固的庄严中更加宏伟。

但最重要的成就还没有结束，异教的致命伤还没有被击中——统治了亿万人心、名扬帝国边陲的神像塞拉皮斯，就要被摧毁！基督徒队伍挤满了神殿，陷入了令人窒息的沉默。一种迷信的恐惧，他们迄今为止认为自己更胜一筹，却战胜了他们的心，作为一个士兵，比他的同伴更大胆，通过梯子登上巨大雕像的头部，并用斧头砍向它的脸颊。这一击刚打完，公寓对面的墙上就传来一阵低沉的呻吟声，接着是一阵后退的脚步声，然后一切又归于寂静。这件事让那些准备和他们的同伴一起残害神像的人停住了几分钟。但过了一会儿，他们的犹豫就消失了，他们对雕像进行了一次又一次的打击，随后不再有呻吟声——除了锤子、撬棍和棍棒敲击的狂野回声在高耸的大厅里回响之外，再也听不到任何声音。在极短的时间内，塞拉皮斯的形象就变成了巨大的碎片，散落在大理石地板上。群众抓住神像的四肢，跑出去，胜利地将它们拖过街道。然而几分钟后，废墟已无人居住，神庙一片寂静——异教被摧毁了！

在基督徒对圣殿进行蹂躏的整个过程中，他们以顽强的毅力被追随，同时却没有受到任何惩罚，他的所有弟兄中唯一没有逃走寻求安全的异教徒。这个人熟悉这座神圣建筑中的每一个私人通道和楼梯，因此能够秘密地参与每一次新的拆除行动，无论它发生在建筑物的哪个部分。从一个大厅到另一个大厅，从一个房间到另一个房间，他用无声的脚步和瞪着的眼睛追踪着基督徒暴民的一举一动——时而躲在一根柱子后面，时而进入墙壁上隐蔽的空洞，时而从房间里难以察觉的裂缝中俯视。屋顶;但是，无论他的处境如何，他总是以同样的专注和同样的情感沉默来观察基督教队伍中最卑微的追随者所犯下的最微小的掠夺行为。直到他与胜利的掠夺者一起进入神像塞拉皮斯占据的宽敞公寓时，这个人的脸上才开始显现出他内心翻腾的痛苦。他登上了在房间厚墙的空洞中凿出的私人楼梯，并获得了一条围绕天花板末端的通道，透过隐藏在檐口装饰物中的一种格子进行观察。当他低头一看，士兵手持斧头，向神像的头顶上去时，他的额头上淌下了大滴的汗珠。他炽热、浓重的呼吸从紧闭的牙齿中嘶嘶作响，他的双手用力抓住格子的坚固金属支撑，直到它们在他的抓握下弯曲。当笔触落在图像上时，他闭上了眼睛。当被击碎的碎片落到地板上时，他颤抖的嘴唇发出一声呻吟。他又用一种恐惧的目光瞪着脚下的人群，然后以疯狂的速度走下登上屋顶的陡峭楼梯，逃离了神庙。

当天晚上，一些牧羊人再次看到了这个人，他们在好奇心的驱使下参观了这座被亵渎的建筑，在废弃的门廊里痛哭。当他们走近向他讲话时，他抬起头，做出恳求的动作，示意他们离开这个地方。在他与他们对峙的那几分钟里，月光洒在他的脸上，那些从前参加过圣殿仪式的牧羊人惊讶地发现，那个被他们打扰了冥想的孤独哀悼者正是乌尔皮乌斯神父。

天一亮，这些牧羊人再次有机会经过被掠夺的寺庙的围墙。整个晚上，他们都在回想起他们所看到的无法得到安慰、无法分享的悲伤场景——他们在痛苦中看到了那个心碎、被遗弃的人，他们曾经很高兴地尊敬他最轻松的话语——在痛苦中可怕的孤独——激发了他们对被遗弃的异教徒的怜悯之情，这与他们那个时代的伪基督教很乐意灌输给最卑微的信徒心中的迫害精神大相径庭。这些人一心想要安慰，急于提供帮助，就像古代的撒玛利亚人一样，冒着危险去救助处于苦难中的兄弟。他们搜查了这座空荡荡的大楼的每一个角落，但都没有看到他们同情的对象。他们呼唤着，但没有听到任何回应的声音，只有清晨的风吹过破败的大厅，不久之后，曾经辉煌的牧师的雄辩才回荡在其中。除了几只夜鸟，已经被废弃的建筑所庇护，在曾经的东方世界的神殿里，没有一个活物移动。乌尔皮乌斯走了。

这些事件发生在公元389年。公元390年，整个罗马帝国的法律将异教仪式定为叛国罪。

从那时起，分散的少数仍然坚持古老信仰的人分成了三派：无论是公开还是秘密地反对整个国家的新宗教，每一个都无关紧要。

第一方试图通过以欢乐聚会的形式隐藏他们的宗教仪式来逃避禁止祭祀和占卜的法律，但没有成功。

第二个保留了他们对异教理论的古老尊重，但放弃了再次实现其实践的所有希望和意图。通过如此及时的让步，许多人得以保住——有些人甚至获得——作为国家官员的高薪且有利可图的职位。

第三个人退休回家，自愿流亡各宗教。放弃他们旧有的崇拜习俗是必要的，并且回避基督徒的共融是一种选择。

这就是曾经强大的异教社群最后的残余势力现在已经消退的不重要的分歧。但毁坏和堕落的乌尔皮乌斯却从未对他们有任何依恋。

从禁止异教时代开始，他在疲惫的五年里游历了整个帝国，在每个国家参观了他所遗弃的崇拜的废墟圣地——一个没有朋友、绝望、孤独的人！

他走遍了整个欧洲、整个亚洲和仍然属于罗马的东方，他的路线缓慢而艰苦。他在高卢肥沃的山谷中，在非洲燃烧的沙漠上，穿过西班牙阳光明媚的城市，他旅行着——像一个受到诅咒的人一样没有朋友，像第二个该隐一样孤独。他从未忘记过自己被毁掉的计划，也从未忘记过恢复崇拜的疯狂决心。他在路上遇到的每一个异教遗迹，无论多么微不足道，都为他的剧烈痛苦找到了营养，为他的复仇思想找到了用处。在小村庄里，孩子们经常会因为他在摇摇欲坠的柱子中出现的憔悴而僵硬的身影，或者在异教坟墓的废墟中自言自语而感到害怕，而不敢在废弃的寺庙里玩耍。 。通常，在拥挤的城市里，一群人聚集在一起谈论异教的衰落，发现他在他们身边倾听，当他们不小心后悔自己古老的信仰时，他安慰他们，微笑着低声保证，恢复的时间将会到来。还来吧。无论在什么地方，无论何种观点，他都被认为是一个无害的疯子，他的奇怪的妄想和偏爱不是要对抗的，而是要纵容的。就这样，他在基督教世界里徘徊。无论时间的流逝和气候的变化；活在自己的内心；为他的崇拜的失败而哀悼，作为一种奢侈；忍受错误、侮辱和失望；等待他仍然坚信的机会尚未到来；他怀着不计后果的野心和复仇的毅力，坚守着致命的决心。

乌尔皮乌斯没有留意、没有计算、也没有后悔，这五年就这样过去了。对他来说，生活在过去，希望在未来，空间没有任何障碍——时间就是一种遗忘。岁月如日，时光如片刻，当那些在记忆中标记它们的存在并在心的表盘上区分它们的连续性的不同情感不再存在时，无论是幸福还是悲伤。乌尔皮乌斯在整个流浪期间，失去了所有新鲜的感觉，他的思想被一个唯一的想法所麻木。直到那些被忽视的岁月结束时，当旅行的机会将他的脚步转向亚历山大时，他的才能才从长期压抑的束缚中爆发出来。然后——当他跨过昔日骄傲而雄心勃勃的男孩所踏入的那些大门时，当他无人欢迎地走过他曾经居住过的显赫而受人尊敬的废墟寺庙时——他沉闷、冷酷的思想在他内心升起，强烈而充满活力。他昔日辉煌的景象，可能会唤醒别人的绝望，唤醒他沉睡的激情，释放他内心压抑的能量。他沉思了五年之久的复仇计划和复兴愿景现在浮现在他面前，在周围被亵渎的场景的生动影响下已经实现了。当他站在圣地破碎的门廊下时，脚下没有一块石头碎裂，而是斥责他过去的无所作为，并强化他的勇气、阴谋、复仇，为愤怒的众神服务。他在阴暗的朝圣之旅中参观过的那些被毁坏的寺庙现在在他的想象中复活了，一一在他辛苦的记忆中升起。断断续续的柱子拔地而起；被亵渎的偶像重新占据了空置的基座；他，这位流亡者和哀悼者，再次站出来作为统治者、教师和祭司。恢复原状的时刻已经到来；尽管他的理解并没有为他提供明确的计划，但他的内心却促使他盲目地急于实施他的改革。这一刻已经到来——马克林努斯应该报仇；寺庙最终应该被修复。

他下到城里；他匆匆穿过拥挤的街道，既不受欢迎，也不被认出。他走进了一位昔日曾是他的朋友和同事的人的家中，向他倾诉了自己疯狂的决心和杂乱的计划，恳求他的帮助，并许诺他会取得辉煌的成功。但他的老同伴及时皈依了基督教，在亚历山大成为了一个拥有财产和声誉的人，他带着愤慨和蔑视离开了这个没有朋友的热心人。乌尔庇乌斯虽然拒绝了，但并没有灰心丧气，他开始寻找那些他在繁荣和声望中所认识的人。他们都放弃了古老的崇拜——他们都带着刻意的冷漠或漫不经心的蔑视来接待他。但他仍然坚持着无用的努力。他对他们轻蔑的目光视而不见。他对他们嘲笑的话充耳不闻。他坚持自己的自欺欺人，任命他们为其他国家弟兄的使者，即将在亚历山大开始的阴谋的首领，当令人难忘的革命一旦开始时，他们成为人民面前的演说家。他们拒绝参与他的设计，但徒劳无功。当他们嘴里说出拒绝的表情时，他就离开了他们，匆匆赶往别处，同样勤奋地努力，同样致力于他不受欢迎的使命，仿佛这座城市的一半人口都高兴地发誓要帮助他疯狂的尝试。

就这样，他整天继续在城里那些曾经是他朋友的人中进行徒劳的说服工作。傍晚时分，他疲惫不堪，但并不沮丧，回到了他决心重新获得的人间天堂——回到了他曾经教过的寺庙，他仍然想象着他注定要再次主持的地方。在这里，他对新的法则一无所知，也不关心发现和危险，像过去一样，通过占卜来确定他的伟大计划最终是失败还是成功。

与此同时，乌尔皮乌斯决定勒索的朋友们在这位有抱负的牧师离开后也并没有闲着。他们惊恐地记得，这些法律对那些隐瞒异教阴谋的人的影响与那些实际参与指导异教阴谋的人一样严重。他们对个人安全的担忧压倒了对荣誉或古老友谊的一切考虑，他们以身体的形式向城市长官报告了乌尔皮乌斯的存在，并带着所有的急切的忧虑通知了他在亚历山大，以及他所提出的计划的罪责。

立即开始搜寻这位虔诚的异教徒。当天晚上，他被发现在一座废弃的祭坛前，正在沉思着他刚刚牺牲的动物的内脏。不需要进一步证明他有罪。他被俘虏了；第二天早上，他在那些曾经几乎崇拜他的人们的咒骂声中接受了审判。并于次日被判处死刑。

在指定的时间，民众聚集在一起观看行刑。然而，令他们愤怒和失望的是，当市政府官员出现在监狱前时，只是通知观众，致命仪式的表演已暂停。经过几个星期的神秘拖延后，他们再次被召集起来，不是为了见证行刑，而是为了收到一个非同寻常的通知：罪犯被赦免了，而且他的修改后的刑罚现在判处他在监狱里作为终身奴隶劳动。西班牙的铜矿。

是什么强大的影响力促使长官冒着被人耻辱的危险，将一个像乌尔皮乌斯那样罪名已得到如此令人满意的确定的囚犯释放出来，却从未被披露过。一些人宣称，这位城市长官本质上仍然是异教徒，因此他不愿授权处死一位曾经是古代教义最杰出教授的人。其他人报告说，乌尔皮乌斯通过让法官了解被拆除的塞拉皮斯神庙地基下应该存在的大量宝藏的秘密宝藏之一的位置，从而获得了宽大处理。但这些谣言的真实性永远无法得到令人满意的证实。没有什么比乌尔皮乌斯在夜深人静时被从亚历山大转移到热心当局为他安排的人间折磨的地方更准确的了。当他匆忙前行时，门外的哨兵听到他自言自语，他的占卜已经为他的失败做好了准备，但异教复兴的伟大日子即将到来。

公元 407 年，即上述事件发生十二年后，乌尔皮乌斯进入罗马城。

没走多远，街道上的热闹和混乱就让他彻底迷惑了。他赶紧跑到他能看到的最近的公共花园，避开人们常去的小路，一头栽倒在一棵树下，显然是精疲力尽地昏倒了。

他在他选择的阴凉休息处躺了一段时间，痛苦地喘息着，他的身体时不时地因突然的痉挛而摇晃，他的嘴唇因他徒劳地试图压抑的激动而颤抖。他的外貌发生了如此大的变化，以至于将他带离亚历山大的卫兵们，即使在当时他的外表也很可怜，现在已经不可能认出他是他们以前在西班牙矿井中为奴的那个人了。埋葬了他十二年的铜矿石中散发出的恶臭，不仅让他骨头上的肉枯萎了，而且还让他的表面呈现出青灰色，暗淡得近乎死亡。他的四肢因年老而衰弱，因痛苦而扭曲，在他身下弯曲、颤抖。他的体形曾经是那么雄伟，比例高贵，现在变得如此弯曲和畸形，任何人看到他都只能想象他一定是从出生起就畸形了。前者除了那双严厉而悲伤的眼神外，已没有任何特征。这些人，是不屈不挠的心灵的忠实诠释者，他们的情感似乎是为了表达而创造的，保留着，不因痛苦而改变，不因时间而受损，同样的表情，部分是反思，部分是蔑视，部分是绝望，这在他们身上留下了印记。在过去的日子里，圣殿被毁，异教徒的集会被驱散。

但此时此刻，他疲惫的身体所要求的休息，却被他那不羁、不知疲倦的心灵所拒绝，当他旧日的妄想的声音再次在他内心响起时，这位虔诚的牧师从他孤独的安息之地站了起来。 ，眺望这座伟大的城市，他发誓要推翻它的新崇拜。

“通过多年的耐心观察，”他低声自言自语道，“我终于成功地从矿井中的地牢里逃了出来。”然而，再狡猾一点，再忍耐一点，再警惕一点，我仍然会通过自己的努力，在罗马废弃的神庙中为人们而活。”

说话间，他从树林里走到了街上。欢乐的阳光——他已经陌生了很多年——温暖地照在他的脸上，仿佛在欢迎他来到自由和世界。欢快的笑声在他耳边响起，仿佛要吸引他回到生活中最幸福的享受和舒适之中。但现在，自然的影响和人类的榜样对他孤独的心来说都是沉默的。残酷的野心仍然统治着这片沉闷的废墟，这种野心从他的青年时期放逐了爱情，从他的成年时期放逐了友谊，并注定要通过从他的年龄中消除宁静来结束其毁灭的使命。他狠狠地皱起眉头，环顾四周和头顶，寻找最荒凉、最阴暗的街道。现在，孤独已成为他内心的必需品。他的“巨大的鸿沟”的不共同的愿望早已使他在社会上永远与他的同胞隔绝了。他只为自己思考、劳作、受苦。

描述乌尔皮乌斯为代替他的惩罚而忍受了多年的无报酬的劳动和未减轻的艰辛；回想那一天——无论地上的世界是什么季节——都会带来同样不知疲倦的劳累和疲劳；如果要记录一夜又一夜的历史，前一小时是睡眠不足，后一小时是疲倦的思考，那么，就会从悲惨的单调中产生一幅图画，读者的注意力会因厌恶而退缩。在这里我们足以观察到，同样的迷恋的影响使他鼓起勇气保卫被袭击的神庙，并鼓励他尝试计划不周地恢复异教，使他在苦难中得以保存，在这些苦难中，更强大和更年轻的人人类将会永远沉没；促使他决心摆脱奴隶制，现在把他带到罗马——尽管他已经年老、被遗弃、虚弱——为了他无情地奉献了身体和灵魂的事业，冒着新的危险，遭受新的痛苦。永远的他自己。

因此，在他悲惨的幻想的驱使下，他现在进入了一座连他的名字都无人知晓的城市，忠于自己的疯狂计划，作为一个无助、孤独的人，反对一个帝国的人民和政府。 在他为奴期间，尽管年事已高，他还是安排了一系列的计划，而这些计划的逐步实施则需要长寿和充满活力的生活。 他不再希望像他之前在亚历山大的尝试那样，不惜一切危险来促成他的计划的成功。 他现在已经准备好年复一年地观察、等待、策划和谋划。他甘于满足于最贫穷和最缓慢的进步，并因最终胜利的最小希望而受到鼓舞。 根据这一决心，他开始了他的计划，将他剩余的所有虚弱的精力投入到谨慎地了解罗马所有有影响力的人的私人、政治和宗教情感上，并尽其所能。 凡是有群众集会的地方，他都会参加，以收集当天的丑闻八卦。只要有机会听到私人谈话，他就会设法不被人注意地听。 他像影子一样悄无声息地潜伏在酒馆门口和被解雇的仆人出没的地方，留意着不经意透露的醉酒情况或恶毒奴隶的粗鄙行为。 日复一日地过去了，他仍然全身心地投入到自己的职业中（虽然职业本身是奴性的，但在他看来，职业的崇高目的却使他变得高贵），直到几个月后，他发现自己拥有了一份模糊的职业。以及不准确的信息，他将其作为无价之宝储存在脑海中。 接下来，他发现了罗马每一位贵族的名字和住所，他们甚至被怀疑对这种古老的崇拜形式有最粗心的依恋。 他参加基督教教堂，掌握了不同教派的复杂性，并估计了分裂斗争的重要性。在贫穷、孤独和年龄的综合不利条件下获得这些异质事实的集合；依赖最贫穷的公共慈善机构的支持，依赖最贫困的公共庇护所的庇护。 他从所了解到的一切中得出的每一个结论都带有致命的自欺欺人的乐观特征，这种自欺欺人使他一生都充满痛苦。 他相信，他所看到的教会中激烈的分歧将迅速导致基督教本身的毁灭。当这样一个时期到来时，公众的思想只需要一些高人一等的知识分子的指导就可以恢复到原来的宗教偏好；为了以这种方式实现所期望的革命奠定基础，他有必要——尽管在他目前的堕落状况下似乎不可能——接触罗马心怀不满的贵族，并发现获得这种革命的秘密。对他们的影响力使他能够用他的热情感染他们，并用他的决心激励他们。 其他人已经克服了比这些更大的困难。 在此之前，孤独的个人就发起了革命。 众神会眷顾他；他自己的狡猾会保护他。

正是在这个时期，他在进行调查时第一次听说有一个默默无闻的人突然崛起，对基督教会进行了一场改革，其宣称的目标是把新的崇拜从那种堕落的状态中拯救出来。这使他所有胜利的希望都破灭了。据报道，这个人已经有一段时间致力于他的改革工作，但是他为自己指定的任务所带来的困难迄今为止使他无法获得令人满意地执行他的计划所必需的所有恶名。听到这个谣言后，乌尔皮乌斯立即加入了参加这位新演说家演讲的少数人的行列，他们听到的声音足以让他相信，他听的是罗马城里最坚定的基督教狂热者的讲话。为了赢得这个人的信任，挫败他在新职业中可能做出的一切努力，破坏他在听众中的信誉，并通过向教会中的强大敌人出卖他内心深处的秘密来威胁他的人身安全，我们立即做出了决定异教徒将其作为其信条的紧迫性所要求的职责。从那一刻起，他抓住了一切机会，有利地吸引了新改革家对自己的注意，正如读者已经知道的那样，他最终因其狡猾和毅力而得到了回报，被慈善家和毫无疑心的努梅里亚人接纳为虔诚的家庭成员。皈依早期教会的基督教。

一旦安顿在努梅里安的屋顶下，奸诈的异教徒就在基督徒的女儿身上看到了一个令人钦佩的工具，在他肆无忌惮的手中，他可以用来推进他的疯狂计划，以赢得一个对既定崇拜不满的罗马权力和地位的耳朵。努梅里安的邻居、参议员维特拉尼奥是那些贵族中的一员，他的报告告诉他，他们有反基督教倾向。对于这样一个以奢侈生活而闻名的男人来说，像安东尼娜这样美丽的女孩将是一笔丰厚的贿赂，足以使他能够勒索任何所需的承诺，作为在她父亲的保护下背叛她的报酬。除了从她的毁灭中获得的这一优势之外，还可以肯定的是，她的损失将严重影响努梅里安，使他至少在一段时间内无法继续从事基督教事业。这位冷酷无情的牧师坚定了他可憎的目的，耐心地等待着开始他的阴谋的机会。他也没有白看。受害者天真地落入了他在她第一次听到维特拉尼奥的鲁特琴音乐时为她准备的陷阱，并允许她奸诈的监护人成为向她父亲隐瞒她不服从的朋友。在这致命的第一步之后，乌尔皮乌斯的计划每天都离成功更近了一步。期待已久的对参议员的采访终于得到了。正如我们已经提到过的，一方面迫切要求的参与，另一方面却草率地接受了；背叛者的阴谋得逞、被背叛者名誉扫地的那一天已经被指定了。狂热分子冰冷的心再次因喜悦的触动而温暖起来。他对自己与维特拉尼奥订婚的有效性毫不怀疑。他万万没想到，这位有权有势的元老竟能毫无惩罚地拒绝他所要求的不切实际的援助作为报酬，并将他当作一个无知的疯子赶出宫门。他坚定而真诚地相信，维特拉尼奥对自己愿意迎合自己挥霍无度的计划感到非常满意，并且对这项伟大事业的成功所带来的荣耀前景感到如此眼花缭乱，以至于无论何时，他都会很高兴地履行自己的诺言。这应该是他的要求。与此同时，工作也开始了。努梅里安已经通过他的机构受到了嫉妒且肆无忌惮的教会的间谍的监视。仇恨、分裂、背叛和纷争在基督徒队伍中勇敢地蔓延。所有的事情结合起来，确定了通过他的努力和友好的参议员的帮助，异教的复兴可能会很快到来。

尽管追求的多样性和设计的差异最大，但乌尔皮乌斯和努梅里安的临时职位之间仍然存在着一种奇怪而神秘的类比。一个人准备为圣殿殉道；一个人准备为圣殿殉道。另一个是教会的殉道者。两人都热衷于一项不受欢迎的事业。两人都遭受了比一生中常见的更多的痛苦。两人都已经老了，无可挽回地从地球上逐渐消失的现在，走向了在遥远的未知领域等待着他们的永恒未来。

但到这里——他们的立场——他们之间的比较就结束了。基督徒的行动原则源自他所侍奉的神性，那就是爱。异教徒的仇恨，源于正在摧毁他的迷信。为人类劳作的人；另一个为他自己。因此，努梅里安的愿望，建立在公共利益的基础上，受到仁慈的办公室的滋养，并高尚地指向慷慨的目的，可能会导致他轻率行事，但永远不会使他堕落到犯罪——可能会扰乱他生活的平静，但永远不能剥夺他希望的安慰。相反，乌尔皮乌斯的野心源于复仇，最终走向毁灭，他的内心变得残忍，头脑变得狡诈。并且，作为对他服务的奖励，他一生都在妄想和绝望中交替嘲笑他。

现在是时候继续我们对那个多事之夜的编年史了，这个夜晚标志着安东尼娜的鲁特琴被毁以及针对安东尼娜荣誉的阴谋。

维特拉尼奥宫殿的大门紧闭，宫殿里的喧闹声也寂静无声。宴会结束了，夜莺酱的胜利已经实现，黎明已经在东方的天空中闪烁，这时参议员最宠爱的仆人，自由民卡里奥，拉开了门房小屋的百叶窗，他正在那里打瞌睡宴会结束后，我懒洋洋地望着外面的街道。昏暗、微弱的黎明之光现在在孤独的道路和高耸的房屋的墙壁上慢慢增强。傍晚时分，一群群最低层的游手好闲者聚集在街上，嗅着从维特拉尼奥厨房远处飘来的芳香，但他们一个也没有留下。男人、女人和孩子们早已离开，去任何他们能找到的地方寻求庇护，并用宴会上的粗俗遗迹来充实他们瘦弱的身体。一座大城市黎明时分神秘的孤独和宁静压倒了一切。然而，此时此刻的景象奇特而庄严的吸引力并没有给他留下什么深刻的印象，这位自由人以强烈的厌恶之情省略了吹过他的早晨新鲜的空气，甚至大胆地压低了声音抱怨他主人的不舒服。幻想着在黎明来临之际享用完一顿盛宴后被叫醒。然而，卡里奥非常清楚地意识到必须对他所收到的命令做出最绝对的服从，让自己不再屈服于休息的愉快诱惑，卡里奥打了个哈欠，揉了揉眼睛，又沉迷了一会儿。在奢侈的抱怨中，他认真地沿着通往宫殿内部的走廊走去，立即唤醒维特拉尼奥。

他还没走出几步，挂在他身边墙上的一块蓝色木板上用金字写着的公告吸引了他的注意。这个公告从一开始就延迟了他的进展，其目的是为了特别教育罗马的所有居民，它是这样表达的：

“在这一天，以及接下来的十天里，我们的赞助人的事务迫使他离开罗马。”

公告到此结束，但没有详细说明。它是根据当时的简单时尚提出的，是为了在参议员缺席期间立即答复维特拉尼奥宫殿的所有申请。虽然黑板的颜色、字母的书写和句子的构成都是他自己的聪明才智，但可敬的卡里奥无法说服自己在不重新思考其宏伟之处的情况下通过这项公告。有一段时间，他站在那儿，带着同样的崇高和自满的赞许表情，就像我们在现代所看到的那样，照亮了鉴赏家在他自己的一张旧画前的面容，这些旧画是他以很便宜的价格买来的，或者是在平淡无奇的照片上浮现出来的。当他从人行道上观察早晨商店橱窗的布置时，他看到了亚麻布布商的特征。然而，凡事都有其限度，即使是一个人对自己的努力的认可也是如此。因此，在对公告进行了长时间的审查之后，明智的卡里奥的脑海中重新浮现出一些关于必须立即服从主人命令的模糊想法，并建议他立即转向宫殿卧室的方向。

这位自由民非常想知道是什么新的反复无常促使这位元老考虑在黎明时分离开罗马——因为维特拉尼奥没有向任何人透露他离开的目的——这位自由人小心翼翼地走进了他主人的卧室。他从大理石雕刻的美惠女神和丘比特手中拉开悬挂在睡沙发周围和上方的宽大丝绸窗帘；但雕像周围是一张空床。维特拉尼奥不在那儿。卡里奥接下来走进了浴室。大理石长盆里的芳香水正在冒着热气，柔软的包裹布也已准备好使用。随从的奴隶带着他的沐浴器具，半睡半醒地在他习惯的地方等待着。但这里也没有出现主人存在的迹象。自由民有些困惑地检查了其他几套公寓。他发现客人、舞女、寄生虫、诗人、画家——五花八门的一群人——占据了各种宿舍，所有人都在安静地睡觉，以消除宴会上喝下的酒的影响。但他所寻找的伟大目标仍然像以前一样离他而去。最后，他突然想到，这位参议员怀着过度欢乐的热情和愉快的热情款待，可能会在宴会桌上留下一些受宠的客人。

因此，他在宽敞大厅尽头的几扇半开的雕花门前停下来，推开它们，然后匆匆走进了远处的宴会厅。

柔和、昏暗、奢华的灯光笼罩着这间公寓，一眼望去，它呈现出一种混乱的一面，同时又优雅又风景如画。天花板上挂着各种各样、图案各异的灯，但很少有还亮着的。然而，那些尚未熄灭的灯发出温和的亮度，非常适合显示周围的物体。宴会期间悬挂在客人面前的金色花环和盛有香膏的雪花石膏罐，现在仍然悬挂在彩绘天花板上。巨大的桌子部分由乌木部分由银制成，但在最疯狂的混乱中，却摆放着美味佳肴的碎片、奇形怪状的餐具、花瓶、乐器和水晶骰子。闪闪发光的盘子高高耸立在众人面前，盘子里盛着被宴会者吃掉的夜莺，还有四个金色的丘比特，他们向他们喷出了著名的发明——夜莺酱。桌子周围摆放着紫罗兰色和玫瑰色的沙发，大理石地板上散布着芬芳的色彩缤纷的粉末，几码之外都清晰可见。但除此之外，就没有什么可以明显区分的了。目光沿着华丽房间的两侧扫视，隐隐约约地瞥见华丽的窗帘、拥挤的雕像和大理石柱，但什么也看不清楚，直到到达半开的窗户，停在现在隐约可见的新鲜的、带着露水的绿色上。没有阴凉的花园。在那里，高耸的松树在晨风中摇曳，每一片叶子都充满了纯净而受欢迎的水分，沐浴着新一天美丽而不朽的青春的重现，在疲惫的诱惑面前以责备的方式升起奢华和变态的艺术创作使大厅里的桌子不堪重负。

在对公寓进行了匆忙的勘察之后，这位自由民似乎正要绝望地离开它，这时，一个盘子掉落的声音传入了他的耳朵，随后是几声部分压抑、完全混乱的惊恐惊呼声。他再次走近宴会桌，重新整理了一下挂在他身边的一盏灯，把它拿在手里，走到了骚乱发生的房间一侧。他发现的第一个物体是一个丑陋的小黑人，他用可笑的恐惧盯着一个银烤箱，里面装着半满的面包，面包刚刚落在他身边。离黑人几步远的地方，坐着一个美丽的男孩，头戴藤叶和常春藤，仍然睡在竖琴旁边。再远一点，在丝质沙发上舒舒服服地睡着的，躺着自由民寻找的同一对象——《夜莺酱》的杰出作者。

熟睡的元老上方正上方悬挂着他的肖像，画中谦虚地描绘了他在密涅瓦的帮助下登上帕纳塞斯山的顶峰，九位缪斯站在他周围欣喜若狂。在他的脚边停着一只华丽的白猫，它的头因饱腹感而慵懒地靠在一个金碟子的边缘，碟子里半满是牛奶炖的睡鼠。当晚的放荡行为最不容置疑的证据就出现在维特拉尼奥凌乱的衣着和自由民注视着他时涨红的脸庞上。好几分钟，可敬的卡里奥犹豫着是否要叫醒他的主人，但最终还是决定遵守他收到的命令，并打扰他面前疲倦的享乐者的沉睡。为了达到这个目的，必须请唱歌男孩帮忙。因为，维特拉尼奥以一种奢华的方式禁止他的侍从用除音乐之外的任何其他方法唤醒他。

费了一番功夫，男孩才被充分唤醒，理解了他所需要的服务。有一小会儿，七弦琴的音符空洞地响起。最后，当旋律变得更加响亮、更加武侠时，熟睡的贵族缓缓睁开眼睛，茫然地凝视着四周。

“我尊敬的赞助人，”彬彬有礼的卡里奥用歉意的语气说道，“命令我在黎明时把他叫醒；但我必须在天亮时叫醒他。”天已经亮了。

当自由人停止说话时，维特拉尼奥在沙发上坐起来，要了一盆水，将手指浸入清爽的液体中，心不在焉地在站在他旁边的歌唱男孩柔滑的长卷发上擦干，凝视着他。他再次疑惑地重复了“黎明”这个词，然后轻轻地靠回沙发上。我们很难过地承认这一点——但《南丁格尔酱》的作者当时处于中度醉酒状态。

接下来是短暂的停顿，自由民和歌唱男孩互相困惑地看着对方。最后，一个人又开始道歉，另一个人又继续弹奏竖琴。过了一会儿，维特拉尼奥再次懒洋洋地睁开眼睛，这一次他开始说话了；但他的思绪——如果可以称之为思绪的话——还完全被昨晚宴会上的“餐桌谈话”所占据。

“古埃及人——哦，活泼迷人的卡米拉——是一个智慧的民族！”参议员昏昏欲睡地低声说道。 “我本人是古埃及人的后裔；因此，我对你腿上的那只猫以及除此之外的所有猫都怀有崇高的敬意。希罗多德——一位历史学家，我对他的作品被公开提及为优秀的作品感到一定的满足——告诉我们，当一只猫在古埃及的住宅中死亡时，主人剃掉了它的眉毛以示悲伤，并用防腐剂对这只死去的动物进行了防腐处理。神圣的房子，并把它埋葬在下埃及的一个相当大的城市，叫做“布巴斯提斯”——我发现这个埃及词的意思是“所有猫的坟墓”；由此看来，几乎没有错误的推断——”

这时，说话者的记忆力和表达能力突然失效了，而卡里奥——他已经全神贯注地听了他主人关于猫的演讲——立即利用了现在给他的机会再次说话。

“我的赞助人高兴地命令将他带到阿里西亚的马车，”他说，强调了最后一个词，“现在已经在宫殿花园的私人大门处做好了准备。”

当他听到“阿里西亚”这个词时，参议员的记忆力和感知力似乎突然恢复了。在那些能够饮酒到完美享受的程度，并在完全忘记之前科学地停止饮酒的高级饮酒者中，维特拉尼奥占据了崇高的地位。夜里吞下的酒，虽然扰乱了他的记忆，也稍微扰乱了他的冷静，但并没有剥夺他的理解力。即使在他的放荡中也没有任何平民的成分。他的过激行为中蕴含着一种艺术和一种优雅。

“阿里西亚——阿里西亚！”他对自己重复道：“啊！朱莉娅在拉文纳借给我的别墅！餐桌上的欢乐必定暂时模糊了我往日美丽学生的形象，而现在，随着爱恢复了巴克斯篡夺的统治权，她的形象又在我面前复活了！我优秀的卡里奥，”他继续对自由人说道，“你唤醒了我，做得非常正确；请立即命令我准备洗澡水，否则我的人类怪物乌尔皮乌斯，阴谋家之王和所有神秘事物的大祭司，将徒劳地等待我！而你，格莱科，”当卡里奥离开后，他对歌唱男孩说道，“准备好旅行，和我的马车一起在花园门口等候。我需要你陪我去阿里西亚探险。但首先，哦！才华横溢、受人尊敬的歌唱家，让我奖励你刚刚唤醒我的和谐交响乐。你目前在我的音乐家中属于第几级，Glyco？

“第五个，”男孩回答道。

“你是被买来的，还是在我家里出生的？”韦特拉尼奥问道。

'两者都不;而是根据盖塔的遗嘱遗赠给你的。”满意的格莱科回答道。

“我将让你，”维特拉尼奥继续说道，“享受我的一流音乐家的特权和报酬；我把这枚戒指送给你，作为我持续的恩惠的证明。作为对这些义务的回报，我希望对即将到来的探险活动保密。用你最轻柔的音乐抚慰陪伴我们的年轻女孩的耳朵——如果她害怕，就平息她的恐惧；如果她哭泣，就擦干她的眼泪；最后，不断地锻炼你的声音和鲁特琴，将“安东尼娜”这个名字与你的想象力所能暗示的最甜美的和声结合起来。

维特拉尼奥带着轻松而仁慈的微笑说出了这句话，并得意地环顾四周，看到了他周围奢华的困惑，然后退到了浴室，这是为即将到来的胜利做好准备的。

与此同时，在努梅里安的花园门口，一幅性质截然不同的景象正在上演。这里没有歌童，没有自由民，没有丰富的宝藏——这里只有乌尔皮乌斯孤独而畸形的身影，半隐藏在周围的树林中，等待着他的指定岗位。随着时间的流逝，维特拉尼奥仍然没有出现，异教徒的自制力开始抛弃他。他在柔软的、沾满露水的草地上不安地来回走动，有时低声呼唤他的诸神加快这位放荡贵族迟缓的脚步，他将成为恢复寺庙往日崇拜的工具——有时咒骂参议员鲁莽的拖延，或者对背叛的狂喜，他疯狂地相信他的野心终于要实现了；但无论他的言语或想法如何，他都激起了同样强烈、狂热的热情，这种热情增强了他捍卫亚历山大的偶像的力量，并激励他对抗铜矿奴役中多年的折磨和痛苦。西班牙的矿山。

那些珍贵的时刻不可挽回地加速前进。当他最后一次将目光投向宫殿花园的方向时，他的不耐烦很快变成了愤怒和绝望，现在终于在远处的树林中看到了一件白色的长袍。维特拉尼奥正在迅速接近他。

沐浴后，他恢复了元气，虽然没有受到当晚的庆祝活动的影响，但参议员的兴奋之情仍留在他的脑海里。如果不是他的步态有一点点不确定，笑容里也有一种不同寻常的空虚，这位优雅的美食家现在在最近距离的观察者看来，可能不会受到醉酒影响的影响。他满怀喜悦地前进，准备征服，来到乌尔庇乌斯等待他的地方，正要以罗马贵族与人民交流时流行的讽刺方式向异教徒讲话，这时他想要的目标是乌尔皮乌斯。寒暄严厉地打断了他，语气更像是命令，而不是建议：“安静！”如果你能达到你的目的，就一言不发地跟着我！”

老人说这些话时，他的语气低沉、颤抖、沙哑，但语气却如此凶猛而坚定，这位勇敢、自信的参议员在跟随他严厉的向导走进努梅里安的办公室时，本能地保持了沉默。房子。乌尔皮乌斯避开了通常在凌晨时分必然关闭的入口，引导这位贵族穿过一个小门进入地下公寓，或者更确切地说是外屋，这是他在闲暇时间惯常的隐居处，尽管不舒服，而且基督徒家庭的其他成员几乎从未进入过。

这个地方低矮的拱形砖天花板上挂着一盏陶制灯，它的光线小而颤抖，使公寓的所有角落都处于完全模糊的状态。厚厚的扶壁从墙壁向内突出，因其突出而可见，其表面展示着用粉笔绘制的偶像和寺庙的粗糙图案，并覆盖着奇怪而神秘的象形文字。一块用作桌子的石头上放着一些小雕像的碎片，维特拉尼奥认为这些碎片属于古老的、被认可的异教偶像的代表。桌子的两侧用拉丁字符潦草地写着这两个词：“塞拉皮斯”、“马克里努斯”；它的底座周围放着一些撕破的、脏兮兮的亚麻布，它们在形状、大小和颜色上仍然保留着以前的特征，使维特拉尼奥相信它们曾经是一位异教牧师的法衣。除此之外，参议员的观察并没有对他产生任何影响，因为这个地方近乎恶毒的气氛已经开始对他产生不利的影响。他感觉喉咙里有一股窒息的感觉，头晕目眩。最近洗澡的恢复效果迅速下降。夜里喝下的酒气，远没有像他想象的那样永久消散，反而再次涌上了他的头顶。他不得不靠在石桌上以保持平衡，因为他隐约希望异教徒缩短他们在他悲惨的撤退中的逗留时间。

乌尔庇乌斯根本没有注意到这个请求，就赶紧开始擦除扶壁上的图画和桌子上的铭文。然后他收集了雕像碎片和亚麻布碎片，将它们存放在公寓角落的藏身之处。做完这些，他又回到维特拉尼奥靠着的那块石头上，用坚定、诚恳和敏锐的目光静静地注视着这位参议员几分钟。

当参议员不情愿地接受异教徒目光的锐利审视时，他困惑的大脑中开始升起一种阴暗的怀疑，认为他已经把自己背叛到了一个恶棍的手中，而这个恶棍正在策划一些与他的安全或荣誉有关的残暴计划。然而就在这时，老者枯萎的嘴唇缓缓张开，开口说道。乌尔皮乌斯看着维特拉尼奥不安的表情，注意到他摇摇欲坠的步态，自从他介绍给元老以来，当他想到他们可怕的订婚时，他的心是否第一次感到不安；或者，他的心是否第一次对他产生了疑虑？或者，正如他疯狂地想象的那样，从那时起，维特拉尼奥成为他的助手和盟友的那一刻即将到来，是否如此强烈地影响了他的思想，以至于本能地试图通过自然的语言媒介来发泄它的激动，这是无用的查询。无论他讲话的动机是什么，当他向参议员讲话时，他令人印象深刻的真诚态度证明了他的情感的深度和强度：

“我在一个基督徒的家里受奴役，我遭受了基督徒祈祷的污染，以便在使用它们的时候获得你的权力和地位。现在已经到了履行我的订婚条件的时候了；总有一天，你的责任将被轮流从你身上夺走！你想知道我做了什么以及我将要做什么吗？你是否对一个家庭苦役对罗马贵族如此说话感到惊讶？你是否感到惊讶，我冒着如此大的风险，冒着牺牲现在沉睡在上面的女孩的代价，冒险征召你加入这一事业，其目的是恢复我们祖先的诸神，并在为他们服务的过程中我受苦并变老？听着，你就会听到我的堕落——你就会知道我曾经是什么样子！

“我以我们古代崇拜的所有男神和女神的名义向你祈求，让我在我能呼吸的地方听到你的声音——在花园里，在屋顶上，在除了这个地牢之外的任何地方！”参议员用恳求的口音低声说道。

“我的出生、我的父母、我的教育、我古老的住所——这些我不会透露，”异教徒打断道，他权威地举起一只手臂，仿佛要阻止维特拉尼奥靠近门口。 “我向诸神发誓，直到恢复原状的那一天，我过去生活的这些秘密都不会泄露给陌生人。我不知不觉地进入了罗马，也不知道我将在罗马劳动，直到我为之奋斗的事业取得成功！我向你承认，我曾经寄宿在你刚刚看到的那些圣像的碎片中，这就足够了；你在脚下看到的那些神圣法衣，我曾经穿过。为了获得神职人员的荣耀，我没有什么不放弃的；为了保存它们，我没有什么不做的；为了恢复它们，我没有什么不尝试的！我曾经是显赫的、富裕的、受人爱戴的；我的荣耀、我的幸福、我的声望，都被基督徒夺走了，而我将在他们手中重重地偿还！我有一个从小就爱我的监护人；基督徒谋杀了他！一座寺庙在我的男子气概之下；基督徒毁掉了它！全国人民曾聆听我的声音；基督徒已经驱散了他们！智者、伟人、美人、善人，都曾为我倾心；基督徒让我成为他们门外的陌生人，被他们的感情和思想所抛弃！对于这一切我难道不会报仇吗？难道我不应该密谋重建我被毁的圣殿，并在我这个年纪，赢回我年轻时所获得的荣耀吗？

“当然！——立刻——毫不拖延！”维特拉尼奥结结巴巴地说，用困惑、不安的目光回望异教徒严厉而询问的目光。

“骑在被杀基督徒的尸体上，”老人继续说道，他在参议员耳边低语，阴险的眼睛因预期的胜利而放大，“重建被基督徒推翻的祭坛，是一个野心照亮我一生的痛苦。我曾战斗过，它在大屠杀中支撑着我；我曾流浪过，沙漠里曾是我的家；我失败了，它支持了我；我曾受到死亡的威胁，但它使我免于恐惧；我沦为奴隶，这让我的枷锁减轻了。你现在看到的我，苍老、堕落、孤独——相信我既不渴望妻子、孩子、安宁，也不渴望财产；除了我珍视和崇高的目标之外，我不渴望任何同伴！那么，请记住，在表演的时刻，你已经做出了帮助我实现这一目标的承诺！请记住，您自己就是异教徒！与你的同伴一起盛宴、欢笑、狂欢；仍然是那个轻快的小丑、快乐的伴侣；但永远不要忘记你所发誓的目的——我们神灵的复兴为我们俩带来了荣耀的命运！

他停了下来。尽管他说话时的声音从来没有超过一种嘶哑、单调、半耳语的语调，但他受虐待和侮辱的本性的所有凶猛瞬间都因他重述自己的错误而彻底激发起来。如果此时维特拉尼奥表现出任何犹豫不决的迹象，或者说出任何令人沮丧的话，他就会当场把他杀掉。当异教徒面对着困惑而又专注的听众时，异教徒那张烧焦而铁青的脸上的每一个特征都表达了他心中汹涌澎湃的情感。他的立场坚定而具有威胁性；他的衣服简陋且单薄；他蓬乱的头发；他那扭曲扭曲的身躯；他那严厉、庄重、坚定的目光——与他摇摇晃晃的步态、茫然的表情、华丽的长袍、年轻优雅的体态和精致的容貌形成鲜明对比（在即将熄灭的灯光和渐行渐远的日光的间歇性照明下）他不断沉思的对象，使他的贵族盟友和他自己形成了如此狂野和奇怪的对比，以至于他们看起来几乎不像同一种族的人。没有什么比他们之间的差异更大、更狂野的了。疾病与健康并存。痛苦与快乐面对面；黑暗在光明的一侧呈现出巨大的不和谐。

下一刻——正当这位惊讶的参议员正努力对向他发出的庄严嘱咐提出一个合适的答案时——乌尔皮乌斯抓住了他的手臂，打开了公寓最里面的一扇门，带他上了一段楼梯，引导到房子的内部。

他们经过大厅，地板上还放着折断的琵琶碎片，在黎明柔和的光线下依稀可辨。然后登上另一个楼梯，停在顶部的一扇小门前，乌尔皮乌斯小心翼翼地打开了门，过了一会儿，维特拉尼奥就被允许进入安东尼娜的卧室。

房间面积不大。其简陋的家具是最普通的。墙上没有闪闪发光的装饰品；天花板上没有壁画；然而，它的外观却有一种简单的优雅，最细微的细节又不显眼，这使它既有趣又引人注目。从窗户上的白色窗帘到床边的花瓶，公寓里的所有物品的布置都呈现出同样自然而精致的品味。没有任何声音打破这个地方的深沉的寂静，除了熟睡的主人低沉、轻柔的呼吸声，偶尔会被一声长长的、颤抖的叹息打断。房间里唯一的灯是一盏小灯，它被放置在花瓶两侧花朵的中间，这样就不会在任何物体上投射出长时间或稳定的照明。卧室里所有看得见的东西都有一种得体的感觉。在其柔和的朦胧气氛中；轻柔而音乐般的声音，仅此一点就打破了它神奇的寂静，令人印象深刻，可以想象，在他故意闯入其主人无保护的睡眠之前，足以唤醒最大胆的浪荡子心中的一些犹豫。然而，当维特拉尼奥快速扫视了一下他冒险闯入的公寓时，这种犹豫不决的感觉并没有困扰他。他在宴会上喝下的酒气，在他刚刚离开的地下隐修所的压抑气氛中彻底复活了，以至于没有给他留下任何优雅的本性。他性格中所有的光荣和智慧现在都完全让位于所有卑鄙和动物性的东西。他环顾四周，发现乌尔皮乌斯已经无声无息地离开了他，轻轻地关上了门。然后，他小心翼翼地走到床边，就像喝醉酒的人不由自主地摇摇晃晃一样，他从花瓶里取出半藏着的灯，认真地借着灯光打量着熟睡的女孩的身影。

安东尼娜的头向后仰去，而不是放在枕头上。她的浅色亚麻连衣裙在夜间变得如此凌乱，以至于在那个放荡的罗马人的注视下，她的喉咙和部分胸部都露出了年轻时的美丽。一只手半撑着她的头，几乎完全隐藏在她那一绺长长的黑发中，这些头发从原本用来限制头发的白色束带中逸出，现在流过枕头，与周围的浅色床具形成耀眼的对比。 。另一只手紧紧地抱在怀里，那是她折断的鲁特琴的珍贵碎片。她的姿势所表现出的深沉的平静并没有完全体现在她的脸上。她微微张开的嘴唇时不时地动动、颤抖，时不时地，她的肤色就会出现一种微弱而转瞬即逝、难以察觉的变化，呼吸着柔和的橄榄色，这是它的自然色调，浅玫瑰色的红晕是她的肤色。昨晚的情绪在她睡前留下了深刻的印象。她的姿势，在其性感的疏忽中，似乎正是东方可爱的类型。而她的表情平静而忧伤，却更显出欧洲模特的精致和冷静的优雅。因此，这两种不同的美的特征，在一种形式下共同出现，产生了一个整体，如此多样，但又如此和谐，如此令人印象深刻，但又如此吸引人，以至于参议员，当他俯身在沙发上时，尽管温暖，少女轻柔的呼吸拂过他的脸颊，挥舞着他的香发，简直无法想象眼前的景象只是一场明亮而虚幻的梦境。

当维特拉尼奥还全神贯注地欣赏她的魅力时，安东尼娜的身形微微动了动，仿佛受到了一场梦境的影响而激动不已。她的地位发生了这样的变化，打破了以前的宁静和美丽无意识地抑制了挥霍的罗马人的不神圣的热情。他现在用手臂搂住她温暖、苗条的身躯，轻轻地把她抱起来，直到她的头靠在他的肩上，他坐在床边，一个又一个的吻印在睡眠天真地抛弃给他的纯净嘴唇上。

正如他所预见的，安东尼娜立即醒来，但令他无比惊讶的是，她既没有惊动，也没有尖叫。当她睁开眼睛的那一刻，她认出了维特拉尼奥。那种压倒性的恐惧立刻占据了她的心，这种恐惧使受害者无法使用一切能力，无论是身体还是心灵。她太天真了，无法想象参议员闯入她睡眠的真正动机，因为她的性别中的其他人会预感到耻辱，她害怕死亡。她父亲对罗马贵族暴行的所有含糊谴责瞬间涌入她的脑海，她幼稚的想象描绘了维特拉尼奥带着某种可怕而神秘的报复对她发起的攻击，因为她一开始就避免与他进行任何交流。她已经拥有了她的鲁特琴。她匍匐在恐惧的石化影响下，在他面前一动不动，毫无力量，就像蛇面前的猎物一样，她没有任何移动或说话的努力。但她坚定地抬头看着参议员的脸，她的大眼睛睁得大大的，眼神中充满了压倒性的恐惧。

尽管他喝得酩酊大醉，但这个可怜的女孩苍白而僵硬的脸上的惊恐表情并没有逃过维特拉尼奥的注意。他用自己困惑的大脑寻找如此舒缓和令人安心的表情，以便他能够在提出他的挥霍的建议时有机会被倾听和理解。

'最亲爱的学生！最美丽的罗马少女，”他用醉酒时沙哑、单调的语气开始说道，“放弃你的恐惧吧！我来到这里，带着爱的气息，恢复对别墅的崇拜——我想说的是，把你抱到一栋别墅里——我暂时忘记了它的名字。你不可能忘记，是我教你调制夜莺酱的——或者，不——我宁愿说是弹琵琶。爱、音乐、快乐，一切都在你所依附的维特拉尼奥的怀抱中等待着你。你雄辩的沉默给我的心带来了鼓励。亲爱的安托——”

说到这里，参议员突然停了下来。因为女孩的眼睛一直盯着他，脸上带着一开始的那种茫然沮丧的表情，现在慢慢地移向门的方向。紧接着，维特拉尼奥的耳中传来了轻微的声音，当他把安东尼娜按在自己身边时，安东尼娜剧烈地颤抖起来，他整个人都感觉到了。他慢慢地、不情愿地将目光从那张苍白而可爱的脸上收回，抬起头来。

门开着，主人站在敞开的门边，面色苍白，沉默寡言，一动不动。

由于思想混乱，维特拉尼奥除了自卫的动物本能之外没有任何其他感觉，维特拉尼奥一看到努梅里安的身影就站了起来，从怀里拔出一把小匕首，试图向入侵者前进。然而，他发现自己被安东尼娜束缚住了，安东尼娜跪在他面前，用力抓住他的长袍，力量似乎与她苗条的身材以及她的性别和年龄的虚弱完全不相称。

第一个打破沉默的是努梅里安的声音。他走到参议员身边，脸色因痛苦而惨白，嘴唇因压抑的情绪而颤抖，对他这样说道：

‘拿起你的武器；我来只是想请你帮个忙。

维特拉尼奥机械地服从了他。在这样的时刻，基督徒的严肃冷静、令人恐惧的态度让他不由自主地感到敬畏。

“我要请求的恩惠，”努梅里安用低沉、稳定、苦涩的语气继续说道，“就是你能把你的妓女移到你自己的住处。这里没有歌童，没有宴会厅，没有芳香的沙发。孤独老人的隐居处不适合她这样的人。我恳求你，带她去一个更舒适的家。她非常适合她的行业；她的母亲在她之前就是个妓女！

他轻蔑地笑了笑，一边说话，一边指着那个不幸的女孩的身影，她张开双臂跪在他的脚边。

“父亲，父亲！”她喊道，口音已经失去了原本的柔和和旋律，“你忘了我吗？”

“我知道你不知道！”他回答道，把她从自己身边推开。 ‘回到他的怀抱；你将永远不会再受我的压迫。去他的宫殿；我的房子不再是你的了！你是他的妓女，不是我的女儿！我命令你——走！

当他以凶狠的眼神和威胁的神态向她走来时，她突然站了起来。当她疯狂地认真地从维特拉尼奥看向她的父亲，然后又从她的父亲看向维特拉尼奥时，她的理智似乎被压垮了。一方面，她看到了一个敌人，她不知如何毁掉了她，又不知用什么威胁了她；另一方面，她也看到了敌人。另一方面，一位抛弃了她的父母。有那么一瞬间，她最后看了一眼这个房间，尽管它悲伤而孤独，但它仍然是她的家；然后，她一声不吭，一声叹息，转身，像一只被打垮的狗一样蹲着，逃离了屋子。

在整个场景中，维特拉尼奥一直站在醉酒的无助惊愕中，无法动弹，也无法说出一句话。父子俩短暂而可怕的会面中发生的一切让他完全困惑不解。他一方面没有听到大声、暴力的愤怒，另一方面也没有听到吵闹的请求宽恕的声音。这位被安东尼娜称为父亲的严厉老人，被认为是罗马最严厉的基督徒，他不但没有为侵犯安东尼娜的睡眠进行报复，反而自愿将女儿遗弃在他放荡的意志之下。如此严厉的一个人的愤怒或讽刺会激发这样的行动，或者努梅里安像他的仆人一样，密谋通过利用安东尼娜作为贿赂来从他那里获得一些奇怪的神秘恩惠，这似乎是完全不可能的。参议员面前发生的一切，对他困惑的想象来说，是完全无法理解的。尽管他可能轻浮、轻率、挥霍，但他的本性并不是极其卑鄙，当他所目睹的场景因安东尼娜的逃跑而突然结束时，那个不幸的女孩将疯狂痛苦的目光定格在他身上在她离开的那一刻，他几乎瞬间清醒了，因为他站在现在孤独的父亲面前，茫然地凝视着周围，带着无法控制的困惑和沮丧的情绪。

与此同时，第三个人正在走近，加入被不幸的女主人遗弃的卧室里的两个人的行列。尽管乌尔庇乌斯在离开韦特拉尼奥后退到的地下隐居处，并没有注意到屋主悄无声息地进来，但他透过敞开的门听到了基督徒的声音，尽管声音很低。当他起身，怀疑一切，做好应对各种紧急情况的准备，准备登上卧室时，他看到，当他爬上最底层的楼梯时，一个白衣人影迅速穿过大厅，消失在房子的正门处。他犹豫了一下，看了看它，但那逃亡的身影在清晨不确定的光线下飞快地过去了，他无法辨认出来，他决定查明事情的进展，既然努梅里安一定已经发现了一个至少是针对他的女儿和他自己的阴谋的一部分，立即上升到安东尼娜的公寓，无论他在这个时候的闯入可能会激怒她父亲的后果。

异教徒一出现在他面前，维特拉尼奥就发生了明显的变化。乌尔皮乌斯出现在议事厅里，对元老心神不安的神智来说是一种积极的缓解，因为在这样的时刻，父亲和房子的主人仅仅在场所表达的道德命令就对他产生了神秘的、压倒性的影响。他们。他对乌尔皮乌斯拥有绝对的权利，乌尔皮乌斯是他的眷属。因此，他决定向他所鄙视的仆人逼迫他解释他所畏惧的主人和他开始怀疑的女儿的行为中的奥秘。

“安东尼娜在哪儿？”他喊道，仿佛从恍惚中惊醒，猛烈地向那个奸诈的异教徒逼近。 “她已经离开房间了——她一定是到你那里避难了。”

乌尔皮乌斯用缓慢而敏锐的目光环视着公寓。他的脸色铁青，隐约可见一丝激动，但他没有说话。

参议员的脸色变得又白又红，时而忧虑，时而愤怒。他掐住了异教徒的喉咙，他的眼睛闪闪发光，他的血液沸腾了，甚至在那时他就开始怀疑安东尼娜已经永远失去了他。

“我再问你一次，她在哪儿？”他愤怒地喊道。 “如果今晚的工作让她迷失或受到伤害，我会向你报仇。”这就是你的承诺的兑现吗？你认为我会为此指示你所渴望的恢复远古诸神吗？如果邪恶通过你的背叛降临到安东尼娜身上，那么我宁愿看到你和你那些被诅咒的神灵在基督徒的地狱里一起燃烧，而不是协助你的秘密计划！你这个奴隶，那个女孩在哪里？恶棍，你的警惕性在哪里，让那个男人在我们的第一次采访中给我们带来了惊喜？

说话时他转向努梅里安。麻烦和紧急情况赋予人的能力比凡人的洞察力还要强。他所说的每一句话都在父亲的心里燃烧着。几个小时的叙述并不能比他刚刚听到的几句仓促的言论更彻底地说服他，他被欺骗了有多么致命。他没有说出任何一句话，也没有任何行动暴露出他的痛苦。他站在破坏者面前，瞬间从勇敢的狂热分子变成了软弱、无助、伤心欲绝的人。

尽管当维特拉尼奥威胁乌尔皮乌斯时，他古老的罗马血统的所有凶猛都在他身上被激发起来，但父亲冷酷、沉默、可怕绝望的表情瞬间冻结在他年轻的血管中。他的心依然是少年时那颗易受影响的心；他有生以来第一次感到恐惧和悔恨，他向前迈出一步，试图尽最大努力提供解释和赎罪，这时乌尔皮乌斯的声音暂停了他的意图，让他停下来听。

“她在大厅里从我身边经过，”异教徒固执地嘀咕道。 “我尽了自己的一份力量，将她出卖给了你——是为了让你阻止她逃跑。 “当他让你大吃一惊时，你为什么不把他打倒在地，”他继续说道，嘲讽地微笑着指着努梅里安？你是罗马的富有和贵族；谋杀对你来说不算犯罪！

'退后！'参议员喊道，把他从门口的位置推开。 '她也许已经康复了！整个罗马都要搜查她！

下一瞬，他就消失在房间里，只剩下主仆两人。

公寓里现在一片寂静，被远处城市街道上的喧闹和混乱的声音打破了。这些不祥的噪音是随着黎明而起的，但努梅里安住所的居民们的不同情绪让他们全神贯注，以至于外界的骚乱没有引起所有人的注意。然而，维特拉尼奥一离开，乌尔皮乌斯就注意到了，他走到窗前。他在那里所看到和听到的东西并不那么重要，因为它立刻把他固定在原地，他沉默地站在那里，无法控制的惊讶。

当乌尔皮乌斯在窗前忙着的时候，努梅里安摇摇晃晃地走到床边，他不合时宜的严厉态度让床边空了，也许永远空了。当这个可怜的男人跪下，在内心的痛苦中努力通过祈祷寻求安慰时，行动的力量，亲自去寻找孩子的能力，都完全悬置在失去她的痛苦中。他们各自占据的位置是仆人和主人长期停留的地方——背叛者在窗外观看，背叛者在失去女儿的床上哀悼——两人都沉默，都没有意识到时间的流逝。

最后，努梅里安开口说话了，他一开始显然没有意识到房间里并不只有他一个人。在他低沉、破碎、颤抖的口音中，他的追随者没有一个能认出这位雄辩的传教士的声音——这位对教会罪恶的大胆惩罚者。这个人的整个本质——道德、智力、身体——似乎发生了致命的、彻底的改变。

“她是无辜的，她是无辜的！”他自言自语道。 “即使她有罪，我也应该把她赶出家门吗！”我的职责，就像我的救赎主一样，是教导悔改，并表现出怜悯！当我看到她，如我所想，毫无挣扎或哭泣地屈服于我和她的耻辱时，那傲慢和愤怒是该受诅咒的，它驱走了我心中的正义和耐心！难道我没有想象到她的恐怖，我难道没有记得她的纯洁吗？唉，我亲爱的，如果我自己都被恶人所欺骗，那么你也被出卖了，那是多么奇怪啊！我已经把你从我身边赶走了，你嘴里从来没有说过一句愤怒的话！我已经把你从我的怀里赶了出来，你，你，我这个时代的装饰品！我的死期临近，你却无法原谅我的重罪，闭上我疲惫的双眼，在我孤独的坟墓前哀悼！上帝——哦上帝！如果我就这样孤独地留在地球上，你对我的惩罚就超出了我所能承受的范围！

他停顿了一下——他的情绪一时让他说不出话来。过了一会儿，他低声呻吟着自言自语道：“我称她为妓女！”我纯洁无邪的孩子！我称她为妓女——我称她为妓女！

在一阵绝望中，他猛地站了起来，心不在焉地环顾四周。乌尔皮乌斯依然站在窗前一动不动。一看到残忍的异教徒，他四肢发抖。迄今为止还没有出现的所有这些年老体弱的症状，似乎都在一瞬间压倒了他。他有气无力地走到背叛者身边，对他这样说道：

“我寄宿过你，教导过你，照顾过你；我从来没有侵犯过你的秘密，也没有怀疑过你的话，而这一切，你却用算计我女儿、欺骗我来报答我！如果你的目的是通过损害我孩子的幸福和荣誉来伤害我，那么你就成功了！如果你要把我驱逐出罗马，如果你想让我默默无闻，为了你自己的某种神秘的野心，你可以随心所欲地处置我！我向你背叛的可怕力量屈服！如果你能让我回到我的孩子身边，我将放弃你的任何命令！我无助又痛苦；我没有心也没有力气去寻找她！你，知道一切，敢于面对一切危险，如果你愿意的话，可以让她原谅我并祝福我！请记住，无论你到底是谁，你曾经是无助和孤独的，而且你仍然老了，就像我一样！请记住，我已经答应过你，无论你想要什么，我都会放弃给你！请记住，现在我已经老了，孤独了，没有女人的声音可以让我高兴，没有女人的心能感动我，但是我女儿的！我从你所侍奉的贵族的话中猜出了你所怀有的计划和你所宣称的信仰是什么；我不会背叛一方，也不会攻击对方！我以为我为教会所做的努力对我来说比地球上的任何事情都重要，但现在，由于我的过错，我的女儿被赶出了她父亲的屋顶，我知道她对我来说比我最伟大的计划更珍贵；我必须得到她的原谅；我一定要在死之前赢回她的爱！你很强大，可以救回她！乌尔皮乌斯！乌尔皮乌斯！

当他说话时，基督徒跪在异教徒的脚边。看到一个充满感情和正直的人在一个无情和犯罪的人面前如此卑微，真是太可怕了。

乌尔皮乌斯转过身来看着他，然后一言不发地把他从地上扶起来，把他推到窗前，用闪烁的眼睛指着外面的广阔景色。

太阳已经高高地升起在天空中，在罗马和郊区上空发出耀眼的光芒。一种模糊的、可怕的、神秘的荒凉似乎突然笼罩了墙外的整个住宅区。花园里没有发出任何声音，街道上也没有闲逛的人。另一方面，城墙的每一个可见的地方都挤满了各阶层的人，而城市本身远处的广场和圆形剧场，在眼睛里就像蚁丘一样挤满了在其中挣扎的人群。人群中到处都传来混乱的叫喊声和奇怪的狂野噪音。整个罗马似乎都成为一场大规模普遍反抗的牺牲品。

尽管他当时看到的场景非同寻常且令人恐惧，但它却在这位神志不清的父亲眼前一闪而过。除了女儿的身形，他什么都看不到；除了她的声音，他什么声音都充耳不闻。他茫然地望着眼前的荒野，低声说道：“我的孩子在哪里！——我的孩子在哪里！”

‘你的孩子对我来说算什么？在这样的时刻，男人或女人的感情命运如何？站在努梅里安旁边的异教徒喊道，看到眼前的景象，内心涌起强烈的喜悦和胜利的情绪，他的面容变得可怕地活跃起来。 “多塔德，从这个窗户往外看！听听那些声音！我所侍奉的诸神，你们和你们的崇拜者极力想要摧毁的诸神，终于起来为自己报仇了！看那些郊区，一片荒凉！听听那些呼喊声——它们是从罗马人嘴里发出来的！当你家里的小麻烦已经过去时，这座背道者之城已经注定要灭亡了！今天早上将永远载入世界史册！哥特人已经到了罗马门口！”

促使郊区民众逃往城墙安全的原因绝非虚假谣言。当乌尔皮乌斯站在努梅里安的窗前时，他耳中传来的并不是毫无根据的恐怖呼喊。罗马这个名字确实失去了它原始的恐怖。罗马的城墙，这些城墙在道德上以其声誉保卫了帝国，实际上也以其力量保卫了首都，但最终被剥夺了其古老的不可侵犯性。一支野蛮人的军队确实是为了征服和向世界之城复仇而渗透进来的！迄今为止，六百年来的入侵一直徒劳无功的成就现在已经完成了，而且是由那些他们的祖先在凯撒军团面前像被捕猎的野兽一样逃回他们的本土要塞的人所完成的——“哥特人在罗马之门！

现在，当他的战士们在他周围扎营时，当他看到他所召唤的列队大军聚集在一起，他的力量所带领，在他们的门口威胁着欺骗他的腐败元老院和蔑视他的自夸的民众时，什么阿拉里克心中情绪激荡！当军事命令从他嘴里说出时，当他的眼睛注视着周围群众的一举一动时，这位伟大革命的先驱者的心中，多么崇高的抱负，多么大胆的决心，在心中成长和强化。数百年古代统治的影响、文明、生命和精神席卷了世界四分之一！崇高的思想在他的脑海中迅速聚集；一种大胆的野心在他内心膨胀——这种野心不是野蛮掠夺者的野心，而是前来惩罚的复仇者的野心。不是为了战斗而战斗的战士，而是发誓要征服和摇摆的英雄。从奥丁被罗马人驱逐出他的领土的遥远日子，到阿奎莱亚人质被屠杀所污染的夜晚，对哥特人的错误进行公正而可怕的报应的时刻在疲惫的岁月中被推迟了，以及激烈冲突的警告性抽搐，终于在他的统治下来临了。他看着面前高耸的城墙，这是自汉尼拔以来唯一见过他们的入侵者。他感觉自己的新愿望并没有欺骗他，他的统治梦想正在变成令人骄傲的现实，他的命运与罗马帝国的推翻光荣地联系在一起！

但即使在胜利即将到来的时刻，哥特人的领袖仍然意图狡猾，行动温和。他的战士们不耐烦地等待着一声令下，就开始进攻，掠夺城市，屠杀居民。但他拒绝了。军队刚在罗马城门口停下来，消息就在他们的队伍中传开：阿拉里克为了自己的目的，决定通过封锁来缩小这座城市。

他的部队在行军期间增加了三万名辅助人员，现在被分成多个营，根据需要执行的任务，兵力有所不同。这些师沿着城墙延伸，虽然占据着不同的岗位，执行着不同的职责，但其安排却是能够在任何给定地点、任何数量的信号下联合起来。每个部队都由一位久经考验的老战士指挥，阿拉里克可以对他的忠诚给予最绝对的信任，并且他有责任执行哥特队伍中最严格的军事纪律。在十二个主要大门之前，每一个都建立了一个单独的营地。许多人以不懈的警惕注视着台伯河在各个可能方向的航行。通往罗马的任何一个普通入口，无论表面上多么不重要，都没有被忽视。通过这些手段，这座陷入困境的城市与其周围广阔肥沃的土地之间的所有通讯方式都被有效地阻止了。当人们记得这一精心设计的封锁计划是针对一个至少有 120 万居民的地方实施的，城墙内缺乏食物储备，供应依赖于外部国家的定期捐助，元老院优柔寡断，军队虚弱，被围困的罗马人现在所面临的恐怖就如描述的那样容易想象。

在包围这座注定要失败的城市的军队中，此时最值得读者注意的是被任命守卫平西安门的师：因为被任命为下属指挥的战士之一是年轻的酋长自从我们把他留在意大利阿尔卑斯山的那一刻起，赫尔曼里克就一直陪伴着戈伊斯文塔，经历了行军中的所有辛苦和危险。

警戒已经设置，帐篷已经搭好，防御工事已经在选定的部分地面上升起，以占领所有可能通往平西安门的通道，赫尔曼里克退到戈伊斯文萨身边等待，无论他可能会被委托什么进一步的命令与他在哥特阵营的上级一起。年轻武士的简易帐篷所在的位置，除了战友们选择的位置外，位置稍显突出，在城门以东，可以远眺郊区荒芜的花园和平西安山庄严的宫殿。 。在他临时住所的后面是一片空旷的土地，由于惊恐的居民的逃亡，这里变成了一片肥沃的荒野。双方都展现出一成不变的军事力量和准备情况，将士兵、帐篷和战争机器的生动混乱延伸到视线所及之处。现在已经是晚上了。笼罩在升腾雾气中的罗马城墙，在哥特人眼中显得昏暗而雄伟。被围困的城市里的喧闹声变得柔和、低沉，似乎在秋夜的夜色中变得低沉，而警惕的围城者在各自的岗位上聆听着他们的声音，声音也变得越来越小。哥特营地里，一盏一盏的灯光以不规则的距离疯狂地爆发。信号喇叭的刺耳、断断续续的声音从一排到另一排响起。昏暗、浓重的空气中，不时传来更重要的噪音，重锤的撞击声和军事指挥的喊叫声。凡是封锁的准备工作尚未完成的地方，无论是夜幕降临，还是疲倦的借口，都没有一刻阻碍他们继续前进。阿拉里克不屈不挠的意志克服了自然的一切障碍和人类的一切缺陷。黑暗没有昏暗使他不得不休息，倦怠也没有引诱他拖延的雄辩。

哥特国王的命令在军队中没有任何一个部门能像被任命守卫平西安门的部队那样迅速而明智地执行。因此，在相当长的一段时间内，赫尔曼里克和戈伊斯文塔在这位年轻酋长的帐篷里接受了采访，而营地总部的任何新命令都没有中断。

从外表上看，兄妹两人都发生了明显的变化，即使是在他们一起站在帐篷门口时，火炬发出的不确定的光线照在他们身上，也能看得出来。戈伊斯文塔的容貌——当我们第一次在山湖畔看到她时，尽管她饱受痛苦，但她的容貌仍然保留着许多崇高而雄伟的美丽，而这些在她快乐的日子里是她们的自然特征——现在没有保留任何以前的吸引力的痕迹。她的肤色已经失去了新鲜感，她的体态也失去了丰盈。她的眼睛里始终流露出一种邪恶绝望的阴险表情，她的态度也变得阴沉、令人厌恶和不信任。她外表上的这种变化，不过是她内心的性格发生了更危险的变化的结果。当她的逃亡成功引导她去保护她的人民时，她最后一个孩子的去世对她的影响比她之前遭受的所有损失更为致命。为了拯救自己的子孙免遭屠杀，她所遇到的困难和危险；令人沮丧的是，在她以前所爱的所有对象中，孩子是唯一一个留给她去爱的人；当她想起在这一次她独自的努力挫败了罗马宫廷的野蛮背叛时，她体验到了狂野的胜利感，这激发了她对家里最后一个成员的热爱，这种感情几乎近乎疯狂。现在，她心爱的指控、她无辜的受害者、她未来的战士，在她为保护他所做的一切斗争之后，已经憔悴而死了；现在她确实没有孩子了；现在，尽管她有所有的耐心、所有的勇气、所有的忍耐力，但罗马人的残酷已经结束了。她内心的每一种高贵的感觉都在震惊中沉沦、消失。她的悲伤变成了一种致命的形式，它无可挽回地摧毁了女人身上所有更柔和、更美好的情感；——它变成了不求同情的绝望，变成了不与泪水相通的悲伤。

赫尔曼里克的智力水平较低，性情也较不敏感，现在可以看到，他的表情变得阴郁，举止唐突，这更多是由于他不断地思考戈伊斯文塔的阴郁绝望，而不是由于他自己的性格发生了任何实际的变化。事实上，无论现在兄弟姐妹之间有多少外表相似之处，他们道德立场的不同程度，本身就意味着每个人内心悲伤程度的不同。无论赫尔曼里克可能面临什么样的考验和痛苦，他都拥有年轻时的健康弹性和成年后的军事职业来支持这些考验和痛苦。戈伊斯文塔对这两件事都不能放心。她没有工作，只有苦涩的回忆占据着她的思绪，没有善良的愿望，没有抚慰人心的希望来填满她的心，她无可挽回地被遗弃在无法承受的悲伤和报复性绝望的影响下。

女人和武士一起沉默地站了一会儿。最后，赫尔曼里克的目光没有离开面前昏暗、不规则的人群，整个晚上，这座不幸的城市都清晰可见，赫尔曼里克对戈伊斯文塔这样说道：

“当你看着你的人民世世代代奋战的城墙，像我们现在看到的那样，你没有胜利的话语吗？当一个哥特女人站在罗马城前时，她能保持沉默吗？

“我来这里是为了目睹罗马被掠夺，罗马人被屠杀；罗马对我封锁了什么？戈伊斯文塔恶狠狠地回答道。 “一旦城墙上的颤抖者有足够的勇气渗透哥特式营地，这座城市中的宝藏就会从我们的国王那里购买它的安全。在那些遥远的宫殿中，你向我许诺的复仇在哪里？我是否看到你在罗马的住宅中进行了破坏，就像那边城市的士兵在哥特人的住宅中进行了破坏一样？军队来这里是为了掠夺还是为了荣耀？我以为，在我女人的错觉中，这是为了报仇！”

“耻辱将为你报仇——饥荒将为你报仇——瘟疫将为你报仇！”

“他们将为我的国家报仇；他们不会为我报仇。我看到哥特妇女的鲜血洒在我周围——我看到我孩子们的尸体在我脚下流血！我看不见的饥荒，我看不见的瘟疫，会不会给我报仇呢？看！这是我丈夫和你兄弟的头盔徽章——这个头盔徽章是作为罗马人杀死他的见证人扔给我的！自从阿奎莱亚大屠杀以来，它就从未离开过我的怀抱。我发誓，玷污和变黑它的鲜血将被罗马人民的鲜血洗掉。尽管我会死在那些该诅咒的墙下；尽管你以你那无情的耐心拒绝了我的保护和帮助；我，虽然寡居、虚弱、被遗弃，但仍会履行我的誓言！”

当她停下来时，她把徽章折进斗篷里，然后带着苦涩而毫不掩饰的蔑视突然转身离开赫尔曼里克。她的所有性别特征，无论是思想、表情还是举止，似乎都抛弃了她。她说话的语气很刺耳，没有女人味。

她所说的每一句话，她所做的每一个动作，都深入人心，激起了她所面对的年轻武士最强烈的激情。在哥特历史时代的春日里发现的第一个民族情感是对战争的热爱。但第二是对女性的尊重。后一种感觉——在像古代斯堪的纳维亚人这样凶猛、不易受影响的民族中尤其显着——与那些强烈的依恋关系完全无关，而这种依恋关系是南方国家温暖性情的自然结果。因为在北方武士的冷酷性格中，爱情与卑鄙的激情并列。它是推理和观察的产物，而不是本能的情感和瞬间的冲动。在古老的哥特式迷信的狂野而诗意的密码中，有一条公理，与基督教方案中的一个重要理论非常接近且奇怪地接近——全能的造物主对有限的生物的警惕。在哥特人的崇拜体系中，身体的每一个动作，心灵的每一个冲动，都是他们所崇拜的神灵直接但无形的干扰的直接结果。因此，当他们观察到女性在身体上比她们自己更容易屈服于神秘的自然法则和性情，在思想上更容易受到人类与生俱来的普遍本能的影响，他们就得出了一个不可避免的结论：女性是女性。与男性相比，他们更经常地受到他们所崇拜的神灵的尊重和显着的影响。在这种说服下，他们致力于医学研究、梦的解释，以及在许多情况下，与无形世界沟通的奥秘，以照顾他们的妇女。温柔的性别在他们遇到困难时成为他们的顾问，在他们生病时成为他们的医生——他们的伴侣而不是他们的情妇——他们崇拜的对象而不是他们快乐的提供者。尽管后来哥特人的民族迁徙改变了民族气质，尽管他们的古老神话被对基督的崇拜所取代，但他们作为一个民族最早存在的普遍情感从未完全抛弃他们；但是，通过不同的修改和不同的形式，通过各种方式和习俗的变化，保持了其旧有的至高无上的地位，最终以对妇女普遍礼貌的既定守则的形式在当今欧洲各国中流传下来。 ，这被认为是区分文明和未开化地区居民的社会制度的一个重要标志。

在哥特人中，女性对男性的这种强大而显着的优势，在赫尔曼里克的例子中表现得最为明显。这不仅表现在戈伊斯文莎的持续陪伴对他天生的男子气概的影响日益恶化，而且还表现在她所说的最后一句话中充满愤怒和蔑视的话语对他的思想产生了强烈的影响。当他听着她愤怒的抗议中的那些段落时，他的眼睛里闪烁着愤怒的光芒，他的脸颊因羞愧而涨红，这对他自己来说是最痛苦的。她刚停下来，转身准备退回帐篷，他就制止了她的脚步，用高声指责的语气回答道：

‘你这话冤枉我了！当我在阿尔卑斯山看到你时，我是否拒绝了你的保护？当孩子受伤时，我是否让他独自承受痛苦？当他死后，我是把他扔在地上腐烂，还是让他的母亲为他挖坟墓？当我们接近阿奎莱亚并经过拉文纳时，我是否忘记了我肩上挂着的剑？是我愿意将它留在鞘中，还是我没有进入罗马城镇的大门，而是匆匆经过它们？难道不是国王的命令才拦住我的吗？而我，他的战士，可以不服从吗？我向你发誓，我所许诺的复仇，我渴望实现——但是我可以改变阿拉里克的建议吗？我可以独自攻击他命令我们封锁的城市吗？你想要我什么？

“我想让你记住，”戈伊斯文塔愤怒地反驳道，“罗马人杀了你的兄弟，让我没有孩子！”我希望你记住，长年累月的公开战争，是无法阻止一小时私人复仇的渴望的！我希望你少屈服于将军的智慧，而更多地致力于自己的错误！我希望你——像我一样——渴望叛徒巢穴的第一个居民的鲜血，他们——无论是为了和平还是为了战争——穿过了它的庇护墙的范围！

她突然停下来等待回答，但赫尔曼里克一言不发。戈伊斯文塔含蓄而富有表现力的演讲使这位年轻酋长的勇敢之心因蓄意的暗杀行为而退缩。与他的战友们一起攻克这座城市，在激烈的战斗中战胜阿奎莱亚大屠杀中最可怕的事情，这将是与他狂野的性格和好战的教育相一致的成就；但是，服从戈伊斯文塔的计划是一种牺牲，他的尚武性格使他感到厌恶。当这些情绪在他的脑海中闪过时，他会把这些情绪传达给他的同伴。但自从他在阿尔卑斯山遇见她以来，她的性情发生了某种可怕的、不祥的变化——她对流血和复仇的疯狂、不自然的渴望，这给了她对他的思想、他的思想、他的思想产生了神秘而强大的影响。言语，甚至他的行动。他犹豫了一下，沉默了。

“我没有耐心吗？” “戈伊斯温莎继续说道，她压低了声音，语气诚恳，焦躁不安，这声音在赫尔曼里克的耳朵里刺耳，因为他在想谁是请愿者，请愿的目的是什么，——”在从这里出发的疲惫旅程中，我难道没有耐心吗？阿尔卑斯山？难道我没有在行军中经过那些毫无防御的城市之前等待报应的时刻吗？难道我没有在你的怂恿下控制住自己对复仇的渴望，直到有一天看到你和哥特人的战士一起登上城墙，用火和剑鞭打罗马傲慢的叛徒吗？那一天到来了吗？难道你为了我被害的孩子的尸体而向我许下的诺言，就是通过这次封锁来兑现的吗？还记得我为了保护我家最后一个成员的生命所​​冒的危险吗——你愿意不惜一切代价为他报仇吗？他的坟墓无人看管，而且孤零零的。远离他人民的住所，在他美丽的曙光中迷失，在他刚强之时就被屠杀，躺着的是你兄弟血脉的后代。其余的——两个孩子，他们还是婴儿；作战勇猛、谋略睿智的父亲——他们在哪里？他们的骨头在荒无人烟的平原上变白，或者在海边未被掩埋而腐烂！想想看，如果他们还活着的话，在和平时期，你和他们一起度过的日子该是多么幸福啊！你的兄弟多么乐意和你一起去追捕啊！他的孩子们会多么高兴地依偎在你的膝下，从你的嘴里汲取最初的教训，为他们的战士生涯奠定基础！想想这些享受，然后想想罗马的剑已经剥夺了你的一切！

她的声音颤抖着，停顿了一会儿，悲伤地抬头看着赫曼里克转过头去的脸。年轻酋长脸上的每一个表情都表达了她的话在他内心激起的骚动。他试图回答，但在这艰难的时刻，他的声音却显得无力。他的头低垂在起伏的胸膛上，他重重地叹了口气，没有说话，握住了戈伊斯文塔的手。她所恳求的目的几乎达到了；——他正在诱惑者的广泛劳作之下迅速沉沦！

“你还沉默吗？”她闷闷不乐地继续说道。 “你对这种对复仇的渴望、对罗马血统的渴望感到惊讶吗？我告诉你，在未知世界的声音的推动下，我的欲望在我内心升起。他们敦促我向那些使我丧偶和失去亲人的国家寻求报应——在那边，在他们自夸的城市里，在他们养尊处优的公民那里，在他们珍爱的家园里——在他们可耻的阴谋扎根的地方，他们的无情的背叛正是从那里产生的。该死的源头！在我们老师崇拜的书里，我听到这样写：“血的声音从地里呼啸！”这就是声音——赫曼里克，这就是我听到的声音！我梦见我走在尸体海岸，血海旁——我看到我丈夫和孩子的尸体从血海中升起，身上布满了罗马人的伤口！他们透过周围杀戮的烟雾呼唤我；——‘我们还没报仇吗？赫尔曼里克的剑已经入鞘了吗？一夜又一夜，我看到了这样的景象，听到了那些声音，并希望没有喘息的机会，直到看到军队在罗马城墙下扎营，并升起云梯进行进攻的那一天！现在，经过我的忍耐，那一天是怎么到来的呢？财宝的欲望是该受诅咒的！对战士们和你们来说，这比复仇的正义更重要！”

'听！听！'赫尔曼里克恳求地喊道。

“我不再听了！”戈伊斯文塔打断道。 “我人民的语言在我耳中就像一种陌生的语言；因为它只谈论掠夺、和平、服从、耐心和希望！我不再听；因为我喜欢听的亲人都走了——他们都被罗马人杀害了，除了你——我放弃你！

戈伊斯文塔狂野地揭露了吞噬她的邪恶激情，在他心中激起了强烈的情感，年轻的哥特人失去了所有的思考能力，整个人都在颤抖，但仍然转开脸，用嘶哑、不稳定的口音低声说道。 ：“你想要什么就问我吧。我无话可否认，也无权斥责你——你想问什么就问我吧！

“答应我，”戈伊斯文萨喊道，他抓住了赫尔曼里克的手，用一种强烈的胜利神情注视着他混乱的脸上，“对城市的封锁不会阻碍我的复仇！”答应我，我们正义复仇的第一个受害者将是第一个出现在你面前的人——无论是在战争还是和平时期——罗马居民！

“我保证，”哥特人喊道。而这两个字，就注定了他以后的人生命运。

戈伊斯文萨和赫尔曼里克之间陷入了沉默，当两人都沉浸在深深的冥想中时，他们周围的黑暗前景在柔和、清晰的光线下开始慢慢变亮。月亮，那圆圆的、圆圆的、圆圆的，在染成暗红色的晚雾中升起，现在已经登上了地球最高的高度，在广阔的天空中发出光芒，再次以她那苍白的、惯常的色调装饰着。渐渐地，但可以明显地看到，蒸汽从罗马宫殿的高耸的顶峰一层一层地滚滚而下，这座强大城市的高处开始在柔和、平静、神秘的光芒中显现出来。而城墙的下部部分、荒凉的郊区和哥特式营地的部分地区，仍然沉浸在昏暗的雾气中，与明亮的前景形成巨大而阴暗的对比，明亮的前景几乎似乎在他们周围盘旋。上面和周围。赫尔曼里克帐篷后面的一小片土地开始在凸起和开放的位置上部分可见；现在，在偏僻而遥远的树林中，夜莺的歌声时隐时现，依稀可闻。无论从哪个方向观察，大自然的面貌都预示着万里无云、宁静的夜晚，以及古代意大利的秋季气候。

赫尔曼里克是第一个回归对外部世界的思考的人。月亮升起，驱散了迷雾，他发现帐篷边还燃着的火把已经没用了，他上前把火把灭了。随后他停下来眺望平原，平原在他面前慢慢变亮。他只花了很短的时间，就在他认为自己看到一个人影在距离他不远的一块部分照亮的丘陵地面上缓慢移动时。这个流浪的身影不可能是他自己的人；——他们都聚集在各自的岗位上，他知道他的帐篷就在平西安门前营地的最外围。

他又看了一眼。这个人影仍在前进，但距离太远，让他有机会在周围不确定的光线下发现它的国籍、性别或年龄。当他想起自己对戈伊斯文萨的承诺时，他的心感到不安，并考虑到这可能是某个可怜的奴隶，被早上离开郊区的逃亡者遗弃，现在作为最后的资源前来寻求怜悯和保护。他在营地里的敌人。当这个想法闪过他的脑海时，他转向戈伊斯文莎，发现她仍在沉思。看到这一幕，他确信她还没有看到那个逃亡的身影，他再次将注意力——带着一种他难以解释的过度焦虑——转向他第一次看到它的方向，但它已经不再是了。看到了。它要么已经退到隐蔽处，要么现在仍在穿过山坡上的一丛树林向他的帐篷前进。

他继续默默地、耐心地眺望着前方的风景。但仍然没有看到任何生物。最后，正当他开始怀疑自己的感觉是否欺骗了他时，那个逃亡的身影突然从树林里出现，摇摇晃晃的步态匆匆越过那片仍将他与年轻哥特人隔开的低矮潮湿的地面，到达了他的帐篷。 ，然后伴随着一声微弱的呼喊，无助地倒在他脚下的地上。

那声哭声虽然微弱，却引起了戈伊斯文塔的注意。她瞬间转身，把赫尔曼里克推到一边，将陌生人抱在怀里。轻盈修长的身形，白皙的手和手臂一动不动地垂向地面，一绺深黑的长发带着夜色的湿润，瞬间出卖了游子的性别和年龄。唯一的逃犯是一名年轻女孩。

戈伊斯文萨示意赫尔曼里克点燃附近篝火处熄灭的火把，然后把仍然昏迷不醒的女孩抱进帐篷。当哥特人默默地服从她时，一种模糊而可怕的怀疑掠过他的脑海，他不愿具体化。他的手颤抖得几乎无法点燃火把，尽管他胆大心细，但四肢却在颤抖，慢慢地回到了帐篷里。

当他进入临时住所的内部时，手电筒的光芒照亮了一幅奇怪而令人印象深刻的景象。

戈伊斯文莎坐在一个粗陋的橡木箱上，膝盖支撑着年轻女孩的身形，她苍白、憔悴的脸上流露出最强烈、最迷人的兴趣。迄今为止包裹着逃亡者的破烂长袍已经向后退去，露出了白色连衣裙，这是她唯一穿的另一件衣服。由于暴露在寒冷中，她的脸、喉咙和手臂都变成了大理石般的纯白色。她闭着眼睛，娇小的五官陷入僵硬的静止状态。要不是她那头深黑的头发，衬托出她那张脸的阴森恐怖，当她躺在女人的怀里时，她可能会被误认为是一尊雕刻精美的死亡青年雕像！

当年轻武士的身影，穿着军事装束，站在昏迷的女孩旁边，带着明显的惊奇和焦虑的情绪，被添加到这样产生的群体中时，——当戈伊斯文塔高大而有力的身材，穿着深色衣服，和弯腰看着逃亡者脆弱的身躯和白色的衣服，被火炬的野性、断断续续的强光照亮——当女人的颜色加深、面容疲惫、表情热切时，近距离观察，这里被遮蔽，那里被照亮。与女孩苍白、青春、安详的面容形成鲜明对比，产生了强烈的光线和深色调的组合，给整个场景带来了一种既神秘又崇高的特征。它呈现出各种和谐的庄严色彩，由大自然的精致技巧与宏伟而简单的形式结合在一起。这是一幅出自伦勃朗之手、出自拉斐尔之脑的想象的画作。

戈伊斯文莎突然开始对逃亡者进行长时间而认真的检查，然后开始致力于使她麻木不仁的指控恢复活力。当她如此忙碌的时候，她一直保持着沉默。一种令人窒息的期待，将她所有的感官都吸向一个方向，似乎占据了她的心。她以机械的、坚定不移的精力完成她的任务，这些人的注意力被他们的思想而不是他们的行动所占据。女孩无色的脸颊上慢慢地、不情愿地出现了恢复活力的第一抹微弱的红晕，颜色是最温柔细腻的。渐渐地，轻柔地，她的呼吸变得急促，一绺细发飘落在脸上。又过了一会儿，那双紧闭的、平静的眼睛突然睁开，迅速扫视了帐篷四周，脸上带着一种困惑和恐惧的狂野表情。然后，当戈伊斯文塔站起来，试图把她放在座位上时，她挣脱了她的控制，用恐惧的专注看了她一会儿，然后跪下，用哀伤的声音低声说道：

‘怜悯我吧。我被父亲抛弃了——我不知道为什么。城门已向我关闭。我在罗马的住所永远对我关闭了！

她刚说出这几句话，戈伊斯文塔的脸色就出现了不祥的变化。原本热切好奇的表情，变成了恶毒得意的表情。她的目光注视着女孩仰起的脸，眼神坚定、坚定、出神地沉思着。她幸灾乐祸地看着眼前这个无助的生物，就像野兽幸灾乐祸地看着它所捕获的猎物一样。她的身形变大了，嘴唇上浮现出轻蔑的微笑，脸颊上泛起红晕，时不时地轻声自言自语道：“我就知道她是罗马人！”啊哈！我知道她是罗马人！

在这段时间里，赫尔曼里克保持沉默。他的呼吸急促而粗重，脸色变得苍白，他的目光在女人和女孩身上停留片刻后，缓慢而焦急地扫视着帐篷。角落里放着一把沉重的战斧。他从武器上看了一会儿戈伊斯文塔，脸上带着生动的恐惧表情，然后缓慢地穿过帐篷，用坚定但颤抖的手握住了那只手臂。

当他抬起头时，戈伊斯文塔向他走来。她一手拿着血淋淋的头盔徽章，另一只手指向蹲着的女孩。她的嘴唇仍然张着，带着不自然的微笑，她轻声对哥特人耳语——“记住你的诺言！——记住你的亲人！——记住阿奎莱亚大屠杀！”

年轻的武士没有回答。他快步向前走了几步，连忙示意少女飞过门去。但此时她的恐惧已经剥夺了她所有平常的感知和理解能力。她茫然地抬头看了一眼赫尔曼里克，然后剧烈地颤抖着，爬进了帐篷的一角。在接下来的短暂沉默中，哥特人可以听到她的颤抖和叹息，他站在那里，怀着忧虑的焦虑，注视着戈伊斯文萨变黑的眉毛。

“她是罗马人——她是第一个出现在你面前的城市居民！——记住你的诺言！——记住你的亲属！——记住阿奎莱亚大屠杀！”女人用激烈、快速、专注的语气说道。

“我记得我是一名战士，也是一名哥特人，”赫尔曼里克轻蔑地回答道。 “我已经答应为你报仇，但我的诺言必须在一个人身上实现——一个武装起来的人，他手里可以拿着武器——一个勇敢的坚强的人，我将在你的面前单枪匹马地杀死他。”眼睛！这女孩太年轻，不能死，太弱，不能被攻击！”

他所说的每一个音节都没有被逃亡者忽视，每一个字似乎都恢复了她麻木的能力。当他停下来时，她站了起来，带着恐惧的本能，跑到了年轻哥特人的身边。然后抓住他的手——那只还握着战斧的手——她跪下来亲吻它，一边把它抱在怀里，一边发出急促、断断续续的叫声，但由于她颤抖的声音，她的声音完全听不懂。

“罗马人是否认为我的孩子太小而不能死去，或者太弱而不能被攻击？”戈伊斯文塔喊道。 ‘天道主上帝，因为他们年轻，所以他们更愿意杀人，因为他们弱小，所以他们伤得更厉害！当我看到这个女孩时，我的心在跳动！如果我向无辜者和年轻人报仇，我就受到双重报仇！她的骨头将在罗马平原上腐烂，就像我后代的骨头在阿奎莱亚平原上腐烂一样！让我流她的血！——记住你的承诺！——让我流她的血！”

她伸出双臂，眼睛闪闪发光，向逃亡者走去。她喘着粗气，脸色骤然变得铁青，火光照在她扭曲的面容上，那可怕的时刻让她显得超凡脱俗；但仁慈的神灵现在坚定了这位年轻哥特人应对所有紧急情况的决心。当他遇到面前愤怒的目光时，他明亮而稳定的眼睛没有一刻感到畏缩。他用一只手阻止戈伊斯文塔再向前一步；另一个，他无法摆脱那个女孩，她现在比以前更热切地拥抱和亲吻它。

“你这样做只是为了引诱我生气，”戈伊斯文莎说，她突然改变了态度，明显地狡猾起来，这对逃亡者来说比她迄今为止表现出的愤怒更不祥。 “你嘲笑我，因为我像个孩子一样没有耐心！但你会流她的血——你是光荣的，你会信守你的诺言——你会流她的血！而我，”她继续说道，欣喜若狂，坐在她之前占据的橡木箱子上，把紧握的双手放在膝盖上； “我会等着看它！”

就在这时，帐篷外传来说话声和脚步声。赫尔曼里克立刻将颤抖的女孩从地上扶起，用手臂支撑着她，上前查探骚动的原因。下一瞬间，他就遇到了一位上级老战士，他是阿拉里克的人，后面跟着一小队营地的普通士兵。

赫尔曼里克的妹妹戈伊斯温莎是国王任命的妇女之一，负责照顾今晚行军中的伤病员。如果她在这里，就让她靠近并跟随我；”队长在帐篷门口停了下来，用权威的语气说道。

戈伊斯文塔站了起来。一时间她犹豫不决。在这样的时刻离开赫尔曼里克，是一种让她野蛮的心绞痛的牺牲；——但她记得阿拉里克纪律的严厉，她看到全副武装的人在等着她，在与服从命令的迫切需要进行斗争后，她屈服了。国王的命令。她因压抑的愤怒和痛苦的失望而颤抖，当她经过赫尔曼里克时，她低声对他说：

“就算你愿意，你也救不了她！”你不敢把她交给你的同伴看管，她太年轻，太美丽，不能被抛弃给他们可疑的保护。你不能和她一起逃跑，因为你必须留在岗位上值班。你不会让她独自离开，因为你知道她会在早晨升起之前因寒冷和贫困而死去。当我明天回来时，我会在帐篷里见到她。你无法逃避你的诺言；——你不能忘记它——你必须让她流血！

“国王的命令，”老战士说道，示意他的队伍与戈伊斯文萨一起离开，戈伊斯文萨现在强迫冷静地站着等待他们的指引：“明天将传达给赫尔曼里克酋长。记住，”他轻蔑地指着颤抖的女孩，压低声音继续说。 “你在那边大门前设置值班时所表现出的警惕性，不会成为你的战利品现在可能导致你犯下的任何疏忽的借口！”随心所欲地考虑你年轻时的快乐，但记住你的职责！告别！'

老兵以严肃严肃的语气说完这句话后就离开了。很快，他的护送者最后的脚步声消失了，帐篷里只剩下赫尔曼里克和逃亡者。

在老武士向酋长讲话的过程中，少女默默地脱离了保护者的支持，匆匆退到了帐篷内部。当她看到他们又被留在一起时，她犹豫地走向年轻的哥特人，抬起头，带着无声询问的表情看着他的脸。

“我很痛苦，”沉默了一会儿后，她用轻柔、清晰、忧郁的口音说道。 “如果你现在抛弃我，我就必须死——而我在世上活了这么短的时间，我所知道的幸福和爱是如此之少，所以我不适合死！”但你会保护我的！你善良勇敢，手握武器，力量强大，充满怜悯。你保护了我，并且善意地谈论过我——我爱你，因为你对我表现出了同情心。”

她的语言和动作虽然简单，但对赫尔曼里克来说却是那么陌生，他对她性的体验几乎完全局限于他自己严厉冷漠的国家的妇女，以至于他只能通过简短的保护保证来回应，当恳求者等待着他的答复。人类历史的新一页在他眼前展开，他在惊奇的沉默中扫视着它。

“如果那个女人回来了，”女孩继续说道，用她那双深邃而雄辩的眼睛专注地盯着哥特人的脸，“快点带我去她不能去的地方。”看着她，我的心都凉了！如果她再敢接近我，她一定会杀了我！我父亲的愤怒是非常可怕的，但她的愤怒是可怕的——可怕的——可怕的！嘘！我已经听到她回来了——我们走吧——我会跟着你去任何你想去的地方——但让我们在离开的时候不要拖延！她现在看到我就会毁掉我，而我还不能死！哦，我的保护者，我富有同情心的捍卫者，我还不能死！

“没有人会伤害你——今晚没有人会接近你——你在这个帐篷里不会有任何危险，”哥特人说道，带着毫不掩饰的惊讶和钦佩凝视着她。

“我会告诉你为什么死亡对我来说如此可怕，”她继续说道，说话时声音变得低沉，语气悲伤而庄重，对于一个如此年轻的生物来说，令人印象深刻。 “我孤独地生活了很长时间，除了我的思想、我可以仰望的天空和我可以观看的地球上的事物之外，没有任何同伴。当我看到晴朗的天空和柔软的田野，闻到花香，听到远处鸟儿的歌声时，我想知道为什么创造这一切和创造我的同一位上帝要让悲伤还有痛苦和地狱——我父亲在他的教堂里谈到的可怕的永恒地狱。我从来没有看过阳光，也没有从睡梦中醒来去观看和思考遥远的星星，但我渴望爱一些可以倾听我喜悦的东西。但我的父亲不许我快乐！甚至当他把我的花园送给我时，他也皱起眉头——尽管上帝创造了花朵。他毁掉了我的鲁特琴——尽管上帝创造了音乐。我的一生就是在孤独中渴望朋友的声音！我的心在内心膨胀和颤抖，因为当我走在花园里，看着周围的平原、树林和高耸明亮的山脉时，我知道我独自爱它们！你现在知道我为什么不敢死了吗？因为我必须首先找到上帝为我创造的幸福。因为我必须活着，和其他尽我所能享受这个美好世界的人一起赞美这个美好、美丽的世界！因为我的家一直在叹息者之中，而不是在微笑者之中！就是为了这个我才怕死！在我进入所有人都恐惧的可怕的来世之前，我必须找到在歌唱和幸福中祈祷的同伴。我不敢死！我不敢死！

当她说出最后这句话时，她开始伤心地哭泣。年轻的哥特人在惊讶和同情之间说不出话来。他低头看着她说话时放在他手臂上的那只柔软的小手，发现它在颤抖。他按了一下，感觉很冷。当他的这一举动首先产生怜悯的冲动时，他发现他迄今为止一直在努力争取的讲话的准备是徒劳的。

“你浑身发抖，脸色苍白。”他说。 ‘帐篷门口要生火。我会给你带来温暖的衣服，给你力量的食物；你应该睡觉，我会注意不让任何人伤害你。”

少女连忙抬头望去。她悲伤的脸上浮现出难以言喻的感激之情。她用断断续续的声音呢喃道：“噢，你真仁慈，你真仁慈！”然后，经过明显的自我挣扎，她用手捂住脸，再次泪流满面。

赫尔曼里克越来越尴尬，他机械地忙着从他的随从那里采购封锁期间的必需品，如他所承诺的火种、食物和衣服。她接过毯子，走近熊熊燃烧的燃料，热切地享用年轻战士为她提供的简单茶点。之后，她静静地坐了一段时间，全神贯注地沉思，畏缩在火边，显然没有意识到哥特人仍然对她抱有好奇心。最后，她突然抬起头来，看到他的目光注视着她，便起身示意他到她坐的座位上。

“你知道我是多么被抛弃吗？”她说，“你不会像你一样奇怪，我，一个陌生人，一个罗马人，竟然这样来寻找你。我已经告诉过你我的家是多么孤独；但那个家对我来说是一个避难所和保护，直到过去漫长一天的早晨，我被永远驱逐出家！我突然在床上被惊醒——我父亲愤怒地进来了——他叫我——”

她犹豫了一下，脸红了，然后在叙述的开头就停了下来。尽管她天真无邪，但她的性别本能却以一种神秘而又警告的语气在她心里说话，突然强加给她沉默的动机，她无法理解也无法解释。她用颤抖的双手捂住胸口，仿佛要压抑它的起伏，垂下眼帘，低声继续说道：

“我无法告诉你为什么我父亲把我赶出家门。他一直对我沉默、悲伤；在悲伤的书中给我布置了漫长的任务；他命令我不要离开他的住所，当我有时要求他告诉我我失去的母亲的情况时，他又禁止我和他说话。然而他从未威胁过我或将我从他身边赶走，直到我告诉你的那天早上。他的愤怒非常可怕。他的目光凶狠；他的声音带着威胁！他让我离开，我惊恐地服从了他，因为我以为如果我留下来，他会杀了我！我逃离了房子，不知道自己去了哪里，跑进了我们住所附近的那扇门。当我进入郊区时，我遇到了一大群人，他们都急匆匆地涌向罗马。我对周围的恐惧和混乱感到困惑，但我记得，在城门因哥特人的进攻而关闭之前，他们大声呼唤我飞往城市。当其他人经过时，看到我穿着薄薄的睡衣，我就被赶出了家门，于是他们推搡和嘲笑我！

说到这里，她停了下来，专心地听了一会儿。她听到的每一次意外的噪音仍然唤醒了她对戈伊斯文塔回来的担忧。赫尔曼里克和她自己对帐篷外发生的一切的观察让她放心了，过了一会儿，她继续叙述，现在用更稳定的声音说话。

“当我试图逃离他们时，我以为我的心会在我内心破裂，”她继续说道。一切事物都在我眼前旋转。我无法说话——我无法停止——我无法哭泣。我逃呀逃，不知逃到哪里去，直到精疲力尽地倒在郊区一栋小房子门口。然后我呼救，但没有人听到我的声音。我蹑手蹑脚地——因为我再也站不起来了——走进了房子。里面是空的。我从窗户里望去，寂静的街道上没有人影走过。城墙上仍然传来巨大混乱的轰鸣声，但只剩下我一个人听着。在房子里，我看到地板上散落着一些面包碎片和一件旧衣服。我带着他们两个，然后起身离开。因为这个地方的寂静对我来说太可怕了，我想起了我曾经喜欢看的田野和平原，我想我可能会在那里找到我在罗马被拒绝的避难所！于是我再次出发；当我爬上柔软的草地，坐在成荫的树旁，看到阳光照耀大地时，我的心变得悲伤，一想到自己的孤独，想到父亲的愤怒，我就哭了。

“我在休息处停留不久，就听见远处传来号角声，我向前望去，看见远处有一大群人，他们的手臂在阳光下闪闪发光，正在平原上前进。当我看到他们时，我奋力起身，甚至回到那些令我感到恐惧的郊区。但我的四肢无力了。我看到周围的树林里隐藏着一个小洞。我进去了，整个孤独的一天我都躲在那里。当你的军队在下面的道路上从我身边经过时，我听到了悠长的脚步声；然后，在恐惧的几个小时之后，就是疲惫的孤独时刻！

哦，那些——孤独——孤独——孤独的时光！我一直生活在没有同伴的情况下，但那些时光对我来说比我前世的所有岁月都更可怕！我不敢离开我的藏身之处——我不敢打电话！我独自一人在这个世界上，蹲在避难所里直到太阳落山！然后是雾气、黑暗和寒冷。夜里的凛冽寒风使我浑身颤抖！我周围孤独的黑暗似乎充满了我看不见的幻影，它们触碰着我，在我的皮肤表面沙沙作响！他们让我抓狂了！我起身准备离开；去迎接我愤怒的父亲，或者从我身边经过的军队，或者寒冷、明亮的草地上的孤独——我不在乎哪一个！——当我看到你火炬的光芒，就在它熄灭之前的那一刻。尽管天很黑，我还是找到了你的帐篷。现在我知道我找到了更多——一个同伴和一个朋友！”

当她说出这句话时，她抬头看着年轻的哥特人，脸上的表情和以前一样感激；但这一次，她的眼睛没有因为泪水而变得暗淡。她的性情——尽管现在摆在她面前的幸福前景很渺茫——已经开始回归，以一种近乎婴儿般的改变能力，恢复了明亮情绪的影响。现在短暂的平静已经开始对她发挥出比过去漫长的烦躁更有吸引力的魅力。那颗孩子般的心周围滋长着无数的绝望情绪；羞耻、恐惧和悲伤，尽管它们可能暂时掩盖它，却没有在它明亮、精致的表面上留下任何痕迹。温柔，危险地敏感，她生性出奇地保留着善良，她所注定的孤独赋予了她，尽管她年轻，但她却具有烈士般的对疾病的忍耐力，以及在痛苦下坚忍的耐心。

“现在不要为我哀悼，”她继续说道，温柔地打断了年轻哥特人嘴里流露出的断断续续的同情之情。 “如果你对我仁慈，我就会忘记我所受的一切！”尽管你的国家与我的国家为敌，但只要你仍然是我的朋友，我就什么都不怕！我现在可以看着你的魁梧身躯，重剑，光辉的铠甲，不再颤抖！你们不像罗马的士兵；——你们更高、更强壮、装备更华丽！你就像我曾经偶然看到的希腊战士的雕像！你有征服的神情和指挥的风范！”

她凝视着年轻武士的男子气概和强大的身躯，穿着他好战国家的装备，带着孩子气的兴趣和惊讶的表情，询问他装备的每个部分的名称和用途，因为它吸引了他。她的注意力，并以急切地询问他的名字来结束她的询问。

“赫尔曼里克，”当他回答她时，她重复道，有些困难地发出刺耳的哥特音节——“赫尔曼里克！——这是一个严肃、庄严的名字——一个适合战士和男人的名字！”有了这样的名字，我的听起来毫无价值！这只是安东尼娜！

赫尔曼里克对女孩所说的每一句话都深感兴趣，他再也无法察觉到她的一举一动中都流露出明显的疲惫痕迹。他从帐篷的一角拿出一些毛皮，在火边搭了一张简陋的沙发，在火焰上堆上新鲜的燃料，然后温柔地劝她通过休息来恢复浪费的精力。当他向投靠他的陌生人提出简单的热情好客时，他的态度是如此坦率，他的语气如此真诚，即使是最不信任的女人也会像安东尼娜一样毫不犹豫地接受。 ;他感激地毫不犹豫地躺在他为她铺在她脚边的床上。

当他小心翼翼地给她盖上斗篷，并把她的沙发重新安排在最合适的位置，以确保她能充分享受燃烧燃料的温暖时，赫尔曼里克就退到了火的另一边；他拄着剑，沉浸在女孩的出现自然引起的新的、引人入胜的思考中。

他没有考虑封锁所要求他承担的职责；他不记得自己逃避鲁莽的诺言后的愤怒和残暴的场景；也没有戈伊斯文莎离开他过夜时所表达的强烈决心。新的早晨伴随着忧虑和辛劳，这迫使他将逃亡者暴露在她复仇的敌人的恶毒之下；他们的性别、民族和生活的差异可能会造成数以千计的意外事件，以阻止他向她许诺的永久保护的继续，但他并没有感到任何不祥的预感。安东尼娜，只有安东尼娜，占据了他思想的每一个能力，他内心的每一个感觉。她的名字在他耳边响起，温柔而有旋律！

他早年的生活使他非常熟悉拉丁语，但他从未发现拉丁语天生的流畅声音和优雅的结构，直到他听到安东尼娜说拉丁语。他一字一句地在脑海中回味着她那多姿多彩、自然而愉快的表情。当他如此忙碌时，他回想起那些话所伴随的雄辩的表情、快速的手势、不断变化的语气，并思考这个罗马的年轻女儿和他自己国家的冷漠沉默的妇女之间的差异有多大。她的故事中的神秘色彩，本来会引起更多文明人的怀疑或蔑视，但在他心中，除了惊奇和同情之外，没有激起任何其他情感。他心里对这个女孩没有比这些更低等的感情了。在罗马人和元老的干扰下迷失方向后，她在敌人和野蛮人的保护下安全了。

对于哥特人的简单认知来说，发现如此多的智慧与如此极端的青春相结合，发现如此多的美丽注定如此彻底的孤独，是发现了一个令人眼花缭乱的幽灵，而不是一个让他着迷的女人。他甚至无法触碰这个无助的生物的手，她现在正躺在他的帐篷下，除非她主动将手伸向他。他只能怀着一种远超他自己的喜悦之情想到这个孤独的神秘人物，他来到他这里寻求庇护和帮助；他唤醒了他已经新的感觉来源；在他惊讶的想象中，她似乎突然与他未来生活的命运永远纠缠在一起。

他还在沉思之中，突然被一只手搭在了他的手臂上，吓了一跳。他抬起头，看到他想象中睡在沙发上的安东尼娜站在他身边。

“我睡不着，”女孩低声说道，充满敬畏，“直到我请求你在进入罗马时饶恕我的父亲。”我知道你是来破坏这座城市的；而且，据我所知，你今晚可能会袭击并摧毁它。你能答应在城墙被攻击之前警告我吗？然后我会告诉你我父亲的名字和住所，你会像宽恕我一样宽恕他吗？他拒绝了对我的保护，但他仍然是我的父亲；我记得有一次我违抗了他的命令，当时我拥有了一把鲁特琴！你能答应我放过他吗？我的母亲，我从未见过，因此她一定已经死了，她可能会在另一个世界里爱我，因为我恳求我父亲的生命！

赫尔曼里克三言两语地向她解释了哥特封锁的性质和意图，平息了她的激动，然后她默默地回到了沙发上。过了一会儿，她缓慢而规律的呼吸向站在火边观看的年轻武士宣告，她终于在令人愉快的睡眠中忘记了这一天的不幸。

时间，是哥特封锁第一天的晚上；这个地方，是维特拉尼奥在罗马的宫殿。在他的宅邸的一间私人公寓里，坐着一位功成名就的主人，他在参议院因城市意外被围困而召开的长时间会议中终于被释放。虽然元老官邸在安全时期所表现出的同样严密的纪律、同样优雅的规律性以及同样奢华的盛况，在现在威胁着罗马富人和穷人的迫在眉睫的危险时期仍然占上风，但维特拉尼奥本人却出现了。远离贵族家庭的宁静。当他坐着时，他的态度表现出一种不同寻常的严厉，他的脸色异常不悦，全然不顾周围发生的一切。公寓里的两位女士是他的同伴，用尽所有的甜言蜜语想让他重新欢笑，但徒劳无功。他期待的音乐家的服务没有被征用，他桌上的美味佳肴也没有动过，甚至“古埃及人最崇拜的那只不可估量的小猫”在他脚下嬉戏也没有被注意到，也没有受到喝彩。显然，至少在目前，这位参议员的头脑中惯常的哲学平静已经消失了。

沉默——迄今为止对宫殿公寓来说是陌生的——已经不间断地笼罩着他们一段时间了，当自由民卡里奥驱散了维特拉尼奥的沉思，并用重要的声音宣布庞培亚努斯长官希望驱散与他在一起的女士们时，他们就逃跑了。对参议员韦特拉尼奥的私人采访。

下一瞬间，罗马首席法官走进了公寓。他是一个又矮又胖、没有尊严的人。他的外表和表情明显地表现出懒惰和犹豫。刹那间你发现，他的心就像一只毽子，可能会被别人的努力推动到任何方向，但自己却完全没有意志力。但在他的一生中，有一次庞培省长在没有帮助的情况下做出了一个积极的决定，那就是在主教和将军之间关于两个同等名望的绳索舞者的相对优点的激烈争论中做出了决定。

“我亲爱的朋友，”省长激动地说，“在这个对我们所有人都负有重大责任的时期，我来征求您对参议院今天开会提出的行动计划的意见！”但首先，”他以一位老美食家的准确本能，察觉到维特拉尼奥桌上诱人的茶点没有动过，急忙继续说道，“请允许我去参观一下你们永远奢华的餐桌，以补充一下我疲惫的精力。”唉，我的朋友，当我考虑到目前城里的物资商店严重匮乏，以及这种可恶的封锁预计会持续多久时，我倾向于认为只有诸神知道（我的意思是圣约翰）。彼得）我们还有多少时间可以让我们的消化工作和厨师的工作发挥作用。

“我观察到了，”过了一会儿，知府嘴里塞满了炖孔雀，接着说道。 “我观察到了，哦尊敬的同事！你今天出席我们的审议时的忧郁态度和绝对沉默。您认为我们的决定是错误的吗？这并非不可能！野蛮人的突然出现让我们感到困惑，可能蒙蔽了我们平常的洞察力！如果万一你不同意我们的计划，我恳求你毫无保留地向我表达你的反对意见！

“我不反对任何事情，因为我什么也没听到。”维特拉尼奥阴沉地回答道。 “在出席参议院会议期间，我正忙于一件重要的私人事务，以至于对他们的审议充耳不闻。我知道我们被哥特人围困了——为什么他们没有被赶出城墙呢？

“对我们的审议充耳不闻！”把哥特人赶出城墙！知府轻声重复道。 “在这样的时刻你还能想到什么私人的事情吗？你知道我们的危险吗？你知道吗，我们的朋友们对这场可怕的灾难感到非常惊讶，他们像半梦半醒一样四处走动？你没有看到街上挤满了惊恐和愤怒的人群吗？难道你没有登上城墙，看到无数无情的哥特人从四面八方包围着我们，拦截我们从乡村来的物资供应，并以迅速的饥荒来威胁我们，除非我们希望的援军从拉文纳到达？

“我既没有登上城墙，也没有仔细观察过街上的人群，”维特拉尼奥漫不经心地回答道。

“但是，如果你自己什么也没看见，你一定也听过别人所看见的，”知府坚持说。 “你至少要知道，我们城内的军团，不足以守卫大半圈城墙。”难道没有人告诉你，如果蛮族首领愿意将封锁改为进攻，我们很可能无法成功击退他吗？当你的宫殿明天可能会在你头上被烧毁时，当我们可能被砍死时，当我们可能因被迫缔结和平而注定永远蒙羞时，你是否仍然对我们的商议充耳不闻？当像这次入侵这样难以想象的灾难像霹雳一样落在我们的墙下时，我们对我们的深思熟虑充耳不闻！你让我很惊讶！你压倒我了！你吓坏我了！

令他惊讶万分的是，这位不知所措的知府竟然丢下了他的炖孔雀，手里拿着酒杯走上前来，想更仔细地看看这位镇定自若的主人的面貌。

“如果我们不够强大，无法将哥特人赶出意大利，”维特拉尼奥冷冷地回答道，“你和元老院都知道，我们有足够的钱贿赂他们，让他们离开到帝国最偏远的地区。如果我们没有足够的剑来战斗，我们就有足够的金银来支付。

'你开玩笑吧！记住我们的荣誉和我们仍然希望从拉文纳得到的辅助人员。”省长责备地说。

“荣誉现在已经失去了凯撒时代的意义，”参议员反驳道。 “我们的战斗日子结束了。我们有足够多的英雄来维持我们的声誉。至于你还指望的辅助，你一个也没有！虽然皇帝在拉文纳很安全，但他不会关心罗马人民可能遭受的最严重的痛苦。

“但是你忘记了你的职责，”惊讶的庞培努斯敦促道，他从责备变成了规劝。 ‘你忘记了，现在是一个必须放弃一切私人利益的时代！你忘记了我来这里是为了寻求你的建议，为了在封锁期间成功统治这座城市，我对从四面八方强加给我的一千个项目感到困惑；我希望你，作为一个朋友和一个有名望的人，帮助我从今天参议院提交给我的各种建议中做出选择。

“将每位参议员的建议写在一张单独的牛皮纸上；将所有条带一起放入瓮中摇匀；然后，让你偶然取出的第一个，成为你在城市现状下治理的指南！维特拉尼奥冷笑着说道。

‘哦朋友，朋友！这么跟我开玩笑太残忍了！”省长用悲痛的语气喊道。 “你真的能让我相信你不知道我们的哨兵已经在墙上加倍了吗？”您是否会尝试认真地向我声明，您从未听说过萨图尼努斯的计划，该计划不知不觉地减少了每日的食物津贴？或者艾米利亚努斯的建议，即通过在剧院和赛马场不断提供公共娱乐，人们应该不去思考现在威胁着他们的危险和极端？你真的是说你对我们目前的恐怖状况漠不关心吗？以使徒的灵魂起誓，维特拉尼奥，我开始认为你不相信哥特人！

“我已经告诉过你，目前我的事务主要是私人事务，不涉及公共事务，”维特拉尼奥不耐烦地说。 “根据你的选择进行辩论——批准你想要的项目——我不会干涉你的审议！”

“这，”被击退的知府一边机械地回到茶点桌旁，一边自言自语地说，“这就是所有灾难的终结和高潮！”现在，当我认为建议和帮助比珠宝更珍贵时，我却什么也得不到！我无法从任何人那里得到明智和拯救性的建议，作为这座皇城的首席行政长官，我有权利向所有人要求这些建议。而我最依赖的人，却是最让我失望的人！然而，请听我说，哦维特拉尼奥，再一次，”他继续对参议员讲话，“如果我们墙外的危险没有影响到你，那么在他们内部已经解决了一件重大的事情，这一定会感动你。在您退出元老院后，斯提利科的遗孀瑟琳娜被指控与哥特人进行秘密和叛国通信，就像她的丈夫在她之前受到指控一样。正如她的丈夫一样，她也被判处死刑。我本人没有发现任何可以给她定罪的证据；但民众普遍疯狂地呼喊她有罪，应该处死她。当野蛮人听说他们的秘密追随者受到惩罚时，他们会沮丧地从罗马撤退。这也是一个没有实际意义的争论点，我徒劳地试图对此做出决定。但元老院和人民比我聪明；塞雷娜被判处明天被刽子手勒死。她以前是个有名望的女人，是皇帝的养母。现在，许多人怀疑她的丈夫斯提利科是否曾因与哥特人的通信而被指控犯有罪。就我而言，我非常怀疑塞雷娜是否应该受到我们手中的死刑惩罚。我恳求你，维特拉尼奥，至少让我了解你对这一点的看法！

省长焦急地等待答案，但维特拉尼奥既没有看他，也没有回答。显然参议员没有听他说的话！

对他最后的援助请求的接受，对请愿者产生了影响，这也许是有意传达的——庞培省长绝望地离开了房间。

他离开没多久，卡里奥再次走进公寓，对他的主人这样说道：

“尊敬的赞助人，向您透露这件事对我来说是很悲伤的，但您的奴隶搜索没有成功！”

“将女孩的描述交给他们重新划分，让他们整夜继续努力，不仅在街道上，而且在城市的所有公共娱乐场所。她一定在罗马，而且一定能找到她！参议员阴沉地说。

卡里奥深深地鞠了一躬，正要离开，却在门口被主人的声音拦住了。

“如果一位自称努梅里亚人的老人想要见我，”维特拉尼奥说，“请立即让他进来。”

“当我试图带回她时，她已经离开了房间，但没多久，”参议员自言自语地说。 '然而当我到达露天时，却不见她的踪影！她一定是无意中混入了哥特人赶进城里的人群中，从而躲过了我的观察！那么年轻，那么纯真！一定要找到她！必须找到她！

他停了下来，再次陷入深沉而忧郁的思考中。过了好一会儿，他才从恍惚中被大理石地板上的脚步声惊醒。他抬起头来。在他没有察觉的情况下，门被打开了，一位老人正迈着缓慢而颤抖的步伐走向他的丝质沙发。这是失去亲人、心碎的努梅里亚人。

'她在哪？她找到了吗？父亲问道，焦急地环视着房间，仿佛他早就预料到会在那里见到他的女儿。

“我的奴隶们仍在寻找她，”维特拉尼奥悲伤地说。

啊，祸哉——祸哉——祸哉！我多么冤枉她啊！我多么冤枉她啊！老者喊道，转身就要走。

“走之前听我说，”维特拉尼奥轻轻地拦住了他。 “我对你做了很大的错事，但我会为你找到你的孩子来赎罪！”虽然有些女人会赢得我的钦佩，但我不应该试图剥夺你的女儿！请记住，当你找回她时——你一定会找回她——从我第一次诱骗她听我的琵琶起，到你的叛徒仆人把我带到她的卧室的那天晚上，她在这件不幸的事上一直是无辜的——考虑的问题。我一个人有罪！当你发现她在我怀里时，她几乎没有醒来，而我进入她的房间，就像你一样，她也没有预料到。我被酒气和你突然出现的惊讶弄糊涂了，否则我应该把她从你的愤怒中解救出来，以免为时已晚！今天早上发生的事情虽然令人困惑，但仍然让我相信我误会了你们俩。我现在知道你的孩子太纯洁了，不适合我追求的对象；我相信，像你那样隔离她，无论你看起来多么不明智，你的设计都是诚实的！在我追求快乐的过程中，我从来没有犯过如此致命的错误，就像我走进你家的门一样！

在说出这些话时，维特拉尼奥表达了他们真正受到启发的情感。正如我们之前所观察到的，尽管他因性格的轻率和社会地位的放纵而挥霍无度，但他本质上既不是无情的，也不是犯罪的。父亲们曾大发雷霆，但他的慷慨至今总能安抚他们。女儿们曾哭泣过，但以前曾多次在他的宫殿的辉煌和他的和蔼可亲的性情中找到了安慰。因此，在试图绑架安东尼娜时，尽管他已经做好了应对不寻常障碍的准备，但他并没有预料到他的新征服的结果不会比他过去的英勇行为所带来的后果更糟糕。但是，当他独自一人在家中，完全恢复理智时，他回想起了他的尝试的所有情况，从他偷偷偷偷地偷偷地偷偷地偷偷地偷偷地偷走了女孩的熟睡，一直到她逃离了他的家。房子;当他想起努梅里安严厉而集中的愤怒，以及安东尼娜的痛苦和绝望时；当他想到被欺骗的父亲心碎的悔悟，以及受伤女儿的致命离去时，他觉得自己不仅犯了轻率的罪行，而且犯了罪；他确信自己承担了可怕的责任，破坏了真正善良的父母和真正天真的孩子的幸福。对于一个人来说，他一生的任务就是为自己获得纯正快乐的遗产，他唯一的职责就是通过传播奢侈和觉醒来纵容精致的肉欲，这种生活习惯已经使他的心灵成为物质。无论他走到哪里，他都会微笑着，仅仅因为他闯入努梅里安的住所的失败而引起的精神不安，就其影响而言，就像最痛苦的悔恨一样，可能会折磨一个更有原则的心灵。因此，他现在开始寻找安东尼娜，并向她的父亲表示忏悔，真诚地相信，只有彻底赎罪他所犯的错误，才能使他恢复那种奢侈的平静，这种平静已经失去了，正如他自己所说，这使他对元老院的审议充耳不闻，也无视哥特人的入侵。

“告诉我，”他停顿了一下，继续说道，“乌尔皮乌斯去了哪里？他必须被发现。他可能会告诉我们安东尼娜隐居的地点。他将受到保护并受到讯问。

“他突然离开了我；当我站在窗前，混入街上的人群中时，我看到了他，但我不知道他去了哪里，”努梅里安回答道。当他谈到无情的异教徒时，他浑身颤抖。

又是一阵短暂的沉默。精神崩溃的父亲的悲伤，在谦卑和绝望中，充满了斥责的声音，在这种声音面前，这位粗心大意、挥霍无度的参议员，本能地感到畏缩。有一段时间，他徒劳地试图与这个被他严重冤枉的悲伤之人的出现对他产生的沉默和责备影响作斗争。最后，经过一段时间的休息，他恢复了足够的冷静，向努梅里安进一步表达了一些安慰和希望。但他对着不听的耳朵说话。父亲又陷入了悲伤的恍惚状态。当参议员停下来时，他只是自言自语道：“她迷路了！”唉，她永远迷失了！

“不，她并没有永远迷失，”维特拉尼奥热情地喊道。 “我拥有的财富和权力足以让她被人追寻到天涯海角！”乌尔皮乌斯将被逮捕并受到讯问——如有必要，将被监禁、酷刑。你的女儿一定会康复的。对于罗马参议员来说，没有什么是不可能的！

“我不知道我爱她，直到那天早上我冤枉了她并驱逐了她！”老人继续自言自语。 “我失去了父母和兄弟的所有踪迹——我的妻子与我永远分离了——除了安东尼娜，我一无所有；现在她也走了！即使是我曾经认为自己的一切的野心，也不能安慰我的灵魂；因为我喜欢它——唉！不知不觉地喜欢它——通过我孩子的存在！我毁了她的琵琶——我认为她无耻——我把她赶出了家门！噢，我多么冤枉她啊！——我多么冤枉她啊！

“留在这儿，在一间卧室里休息，直到我的奴隶早上回来。今晚你就会立即听到他们的搜索结果。”维特拉尼奥用友善而富有同情心的语气说道。

“天黑了——黑了！”父亲呻吟着，摇摇晃晃地向门口走去。 '但这算不了什么；现在，日光本身对我来说看起来就是黑暗！我必须走了：我在教堂还有职责要履行。夜晚对你来说是休息，对我来说则是磨难和祈祷！”

说完他就离开了。他慢慢地沿着通向教堂的街道踱步，用敏锐的目光扫视着每一个在途中经过他身边的被围城居民。他历尽千辛万苦才到达目的地。因为罗马仍然挤满了来回奔波的武装人员，以及成群结队的无序公民涌入，只要有足够的空间可以聚集。关于他所遭受的苦难的报道已经在他的听众中传开了，当他进入朴素、灯光昏暗的教堂，慢慢地走上讲坛，通过阅读《圣经》中的章节来开始仪式时，他们焦急地互相窃窃私语。那天晚上指定要细读的《圣经》，恰好是《马可福音》的第五部。他说话时声音颤抖，脸色惨白，双手明显颤抖。但他以低沉、断断续续的语气，带着明显的痛苦和困难继续读下去，直到他读到包含以下这些话的诗句：“我的小女儿濒临死亡。”说到这里，他突然停了下来，徒劳地尝试了几分钟，然后用手捂住脸，倒在讲坛上放声哭泣。悲伤而震惊的观众立即聚集在他周围，把他抱在怀里，准备把他带到自己的住处。然而，当他们走进教堂的大门时，他温柔地希望他们离开他，回去继续他们之间的仪式。他的小集会中的人们一看到老师的痛苦就感动得热泪盈眶，他们一向无条件地服从他最细微的愿望，服从他，默默地退到原来的地方。当他发现只剩下自己一个人时，他就推门进去了。并对自己低声说道：“我必须加入那些寻找她的人行列！”我必须亲自帮助他们寻找！”——他再次混入了拥挤在黑暗街道上的混乱市民。

当乌尔皮乌斯在围攻的那天早上突然离开努梅里安的家时，他并没有明确的意图去任何特定的地方，或者致力于任何直接的工作。为了发泄他的喜悦——发泄现在充满他内心的狂喜——他寻找空旷的街道。他的整个道德被那种压倒性的胜利感所提升，这促使身体本性采取行动。他急忙奔向自由的空气，就像一个孩子在晴朗的日子里在广阔的田野里奔跑一样；他的喜悦太过狂野，无法在屋檐下扩展。他的极度幸福无法抑制地膨胀，超越了所有人为的空间限制。

哥特人就在眼前！再过几个小时，他们的云梯就会靠墙安装起来。在罗马这样一个守卫如此薄弱的城市，他们的袭击几乎必须立即成功。由于渴望掠夺，他们会成群结队地涌向毫无防备的街道。尽管他们是基督徒，但在激烈胜利的时刻，宗教的束缚对于这样一个掠夺者的国家来说是无力抵抗掠夺的诱惑的。教堂将被蹂躏和摧毁；牧师会因为试图保卫他们的教会宝藏而被谋杀；火与剑将彻底摧毁基督教的堡垒，并在死亡和遗忘中压垮最勇敢的基督教信徒！然后，当毁灭和犯罪的飓风席卷这座城市，当新的人民准备好接受另一个政府和另一种宗教时，那就是时候让被放逐的旧罗马诸神重新获得他们以前的统治了；要求受灾群众的幸存者记住他们背弃古老信仰所要求并招致的审判；从人们的记忆中消除对十字架的记忆；并恢复异教在她的祭祀宝座上，在她的黄金屋顶下，从过去的迫害中变得更加强大；她的突然恢复比她古代统治的所有荣耀更普遍！

当异教徒在这座被围困的城市的街道上踱步时，他的辛劳的头脑中闪过这样的想法，没有观察到所有外部事件。他已经看到哥特人的队伍正在为他决心领导的伟大革命的前进做好准备，他们是回归众神的无意识先驱。当他想象着即将展现在他面前的前景时，他过去雄辩的热情，他昔日勇气的光芒，在他的心中激动不已——一座城市被夷为平地，人民陷入恐惧，政府心烦意乱，宗教被摧毁。然后，在这黑暗与废墟中崛起；在这孤独、荒凉和衰败之中，他有荣幸召唤一个不忠的人民回到他们古老爱情的情妇身边。从被拆除的教堂下的跪拜中站起来；并在重新有人居住的寺庙和修复的神社中寻求繁荣！

所有关于最近发生的事情的记忆现在完全从他的脑海中消失了。努梅里安、维特拉尼奥、安东尼娜，他们都在这场令人难忘的哥特人降临中被遗忘了！他在矿井中的奴役经历、他最后一次访问亚历山大、他早年的流浪经历——甚至这些直到围城之日早上还留在他记忆中的事情，现在都已从表面消失了。年老、孤独、虚弱——迄今为止，这些悲伤的感觉向他证明他仍然存在——突然从他的感知中消失了，就像不存在的东西一样；现在他终于忘记了自己是一个被遗弃的人，并得意地想起自己仍然是一名牧师。他被同样的希望所激励，被同样的抱负所鼓舞，就像早年他在圣殿里对摇摆不定的异教徒进行长篇大论，并首次密谋推翻基督教会一样。

这是一个可怕而警告性的证据，证明一个想法可能对一生产生无所不能的影响，看到那个老人在他周围的人群中徘徊，在经历了多年的痛苦、孤独、堕落和犯罪之后，仍然被奴役，同样的统治野心，粉碎了他年轻时的承诺！看到那憔悴而虚弱的躯体，这是思想永恒而神秘的本质的可怕见证。然后观察那无懈可击的心灵如何仍然摇晃着尚未离开的身体残骸——最后耗尽的精力在其猛烈的命令下如何忠实地恢复行动——在其嘲笑的声音下，凹陷的眼睛如何迅速地再次亮起带着一丝希望，苍白的薄唇机械地张开，带着欣喜的微笑！

几个小时过去了，但他仍然继续前行——他不知道也不关心去往何处，也不关心与谁在一起。对于他对庇护他的基督徒所造成的破坏，他的内心并没有感到悔恨。想到他所相信的苦难是为了从城门口的敌人手中夺回这座城市，他的灵魂并没有感到恐惧。他之前所犯下的一系列罪行和痛苦，现在已经被消灭了，而那些使他神圣化的结局刚刚过去，所有的恐怖和即将到来的暴行也都消失了。

哥特人可能是别人的毁灭者，但对他来说却是恩人。因为它们是毁灭的预兆，而毁灭将成为他改革的材料，也是他胜利的源泉。他从来没有想到，作为罗马的居民，他会分担罗马公民即将面临的危险，并在袭击发生的那一刻分享他们的厄运。他只看到了战争和掠夺在他面前展开的新的、绚丽的前景。他只想到在他的新努力开始之前必须经过的时间——他应该在其中不断发出声音的人民的命令——他应该选择修复的寺庙——罗马的四分之一应该首先被选为接受他大胆的改革。

最后他停了下来。他疲惫的精力在强加给他们的努力下屈服了，迫使他考虑恢复和休息。现在已经是中午了。他的漫游过程不知不觉地又回到了他熟悉的老住处。他发现自己来到了平西亚山的后面，与城墙的底部仅隔着一条崎岖不平的木质地面。这个地方非常偏僻。它与上面的街道和豪宅被茂密的树林和广阔的花园隔开，这些花园沿着山丘起伏的斜坡延伸。西边不远的地方是平西安门，但城墙突然转弯，附近长着一些橄榄树，挡住了那个方向的所有物体的视线。另一边，向东，城墙清晰可辨，呈一条直线延伸，有一定长度，直到它们突然向内转成直角，被远处宫殿的围墙和松树遮住，无法进一步观察。一个公共花园。在这个偏僻的地方附近唯一可辨认的活着的人物是一名哨兵，他偶尔会越过上面的城墙，城墙位于两个士兵站之间，一个在平西安门，另一个在城墙形成角度的地方已经描述过——没有人居住，除了守卫在他们的看守范围内。在这里，异教徒短暂地休息了他疲惫的身躯，不知不觉地从令人着迷的冥想中醒来，这些冥想迄今为止一直让他对周围世界的麻烦一面视而不见。

现在，他第一次清楚地听到四面八方传来的混乱的噪音，这些噪音仍然从罗马的各个角落传来。清晨，他耳边响起了同样不断的挣扎声和匆忙的脚步声，现在又吸引了他的注意力。但他们中并没有痛苦的尖叫声、武器的碰撞声、愤怒和反抗的叫喊声。不过，从太阳的位置来看，天色已晚，哥特军队早已来到了城墙脚下。攻击延迟的原因可能是什么？他上方的城墙上有这种不祥的宁静吗？难道哥特人的浮躁一看到罗马就突然消失了吗？侵略者一出现，和平谈判就已经组织起来了吗？他又听了一遍。他的耳中没有听到任何与他刚刚听到的声音不同的声音。尽管被围困，但这座城市显然——出于某种神秘的原因——甚至没有受到攻击的威胁。

突然，他附近的一条小路绕过墙脚，出现了一个女人，前面带着​​一个孩子，当他继续奔跑时，孩子不耐烦地对她喊道：“快点，妈妈，快点！”这里没有人群。那边就是大门。我们将对哥特人有崇高的看法！

即使在那时，孩子对女人的称呼中也有某种东西让乌尔皮乌斯对不久后突然出现的发现产生了怀疑。他站起来跟在他们后面。他们沿着城墙向前走，穿过远处的橄榄树，然后到达平西安门前的空地。这里聚集了一大群人，他们按顺序分队登上城墙，一些士兵守卫着接近他们的台阶。经过短暂的延迟后，乌尔皮乌斯和他周围的人被允许满足他们的好奇心，就像其他人在他们之前所做的那样。他们爬上城墙，看到了在郊区内外的地面上延伸的哥特式线条的广阔圆周。

尽管在正午阳光的灿烂照耀下，这一大群人的前景是可怕的、近乎崇高的，但它还不足以平息根植于罗马人民性情中的喧闹的喧嚣。男人、女人和孩子，都以各种不同的语气，从恐惧的颤抖声到虚张声势的大声喊叫，对眼前的景象做出了喧闹和矛盾的观察。

当他们预期的援军从拉文纳抵达时，一些人夸耀罗马人将取得的成就。其他人则怀着毫不掩饰的恐惧，预感到一场夜色掩护下的袭击。在这里，一群人以低机密的语气滥用了政府与哥特人关系的政策。在那里，一群衣衫褴褛的流浪汉自以为是，自以为是地互相倾诉他们的坚定信念：就在那一刻，只要看到强大的世界之都，野蛮人在他们的营地里一定会颤抖。在一个方向，人们大声猜测哥特人是否会被罗马士兵从城墙上赶走，或者是否会荣幸地收到与他们如此叛逆地冒险入侵的威严帝国缔结和平的邀请。在另一场比赛中，观众中比较清醒和有声望的人大声表达了他们对饥饿、耻辱和失败的担忧，如果城市当局鲁莽地冒险抵抗阿拉里克和他的野蛮人大军的话。尽管公民之间的具体意见存在很大差异，但他们都不可避免地一致认为，罗马已经逃脱了袭击的直接恐怖，如果没有拉文纳军团的帮助，罗马将受到未来苦难的威胁。的封锁。

在周围一片混乱的声音中，异教徒的耳中只有‘封锁’这个词。随之而来的是一股汹涌的情绪淹没了他。他所看到的一切，他所听到的一切，都在不知不觉中与那表情联系在一起。突如其来的黑暗，既无法驱散，也无法逃脱，似乎在一瞬间遮蔽了他的感官。他机械地挣扎着穿过人群，走下城墙的台阶，回到他第一次看到女人和孩子的那个偏僻的地方。

城市被封锁了！哥特人当时一心想要获得和平，而不是征服！城市被封锁了！这并不是无知群众的错误——他亲眼看到了敌人的帐篷和阵地，他听到了墙上的士兵们谈论着阿拉里克军队的令人钦佩的部署，谈论着与敌人取得哪怕最微小的联系的可能性。周围的国家，对台伯河的航行进行了警惕的监视。毫无疑问，蛮族已经决定封锁！

哥特人这一难以想象的政策所产生的结果更加不确定——这座城市将被拯救！罗马在过去的几年里毫不犹豫地将所有敌人从她遥远的省份撤走。现在，她的荣耀中心，她日渐衰落的权力顶峰，正受到突然而意外的毁灭的威胁，她将把整个帝国的宝藏慷慨地赐给哥特人，贿赂他们以求和平，并引诱他们撤退。 。参议院可能会推迟必要的让步，因为援助的希望永远不会实现；但谈判的时刻迟早会到来；北方的贪婪会满足于南方的财富；就在这似乎不可避免的时刻，异教革命的活力源泉——废墟将从罗马教堂转移开来。

罗马这个名字的古老名声是否仍保留了如此多的古老影响力，以至于在勇敢的哥特人如此成功地渗透到帝国并到达其引以为豪的首都的城墙之后，让他们感到畏惧？阿拉里克是否会对这座城市的军队实力抱有如此夸大的想法，以至于对他率领的军队对成功攻占这座城市感到绝望？不可能有别的事！没有其他考虑因素可以促使这位野蛮将军放弃毁灭罗马这样的成就。有了进攻的机会，异教的前景就变得光明了——有了封锁的确定性，他们立即陷入了令人沮丧的阴暗之中！

乌尔皮乌斯满怀这些想法，在他孤独的隐居处来回踱步，完全被兴奋的感觉所抛弃，这种感觉在早上恢复了他的能力，恢复了往日青春期久违的活力。他再一次经历了同龄人的体弱多病。他再一次想起了那些使他的存在成为一场无休止的殉难的痛苦。他再一次感受到了自己内心的野心，就像他注定要接受的审判，就像他生来要珍惜的诅咒。如果说他此刻的感觉就像罪犯在得到缓期执行时听到处决命令时的感觉，那只是隐隐约约地传达了愤怒、悲伤和绝望的强烈情绪，而现在，团结起来撕裂异教徒的心。

他身心俱疲，一头栽倒在头顶墙根上的一些灌木丛的树荫下。当他躺在那里时——他一动不动地陷入了沉重的倦怠之中，生命似乎已经离开了他——一只意大利常见的长绿色蜥蜴爬到了他的肩膀上。他抓住了这只动物——暂时怀疑它是否属于有毒物种——并对其进行了检查。他第一眼就发现它是同族中无害的一类动物，本来他会漫不经心地把它从自己身边扔掉的，但由于它的外表，在他目前任性烦躁的心情中，他感到一种奇怪的、突然的快乐。沉思中。

透过它精致而透明的皮肤，他可以感知到这个生物心脏的活动，看到它正在剧烈地跳动，因为它被囚禁在他手中，给它带来了恐惧的痛苦。当他看着它时，他想到，一个如此胆怯的生物如何不断地在其卑微的焦虑中，在其微小的努力中，在从一块草地到另一块草地的小旅程中，被一百个障碍所阻碍，尽管这些障碍可能微不足道对于高等物种的动物来说，对于与自身构造相似的生物来说却具有致命的重要性，他开始在他自己的命运和这个小造物单位的命运之间找到一个不完美但引人注目的类比。他觉得，就其微不足道的范围而言，他面前这个卑微动物的短暂生命必定是痛苦和失望的牺牲品，对它来说，其严重性就像他在存在时所遭受的更严重和更具破坏性的痛苦一样。受害者;当他看着蜥蜴那颗跳动的小心脏像影子一样的运动时，他感受到了一种残酷的快乐，因为他意识到造物中还有其他生物，甚至是最微不足道的生物，也继承了他的部分痛苦，并遭受了部分绝望。

然而不久之后，他的情绪变得更加严峻和阴暗。看到这只动物，他感到厌倦，他轻蔑地把它扔到一边。它朝着城墙的方向消失了。几乎就在同一时刻，他听到了轻微的声音，像是几块微小的砖块或轻质石头掉落下来的声音，似乎是从他身后的墙上传来的。

如此巨大的建筑竟然发出这样的噪音，这似乎令人无法解释。他站起来，拨开面前的灌木丛，靠近高墙的表面。令他惊讶的是，他发现许多地方的砖砌体已经完全腐烂，他可以轻松地用手指移动它。他听到的轻微噪音的原因现在已经完全解释了：数百只蜥蜴在砖块的裂缝之间安了家；他允许逃脱的动物在其中一个洞里避难，在匆忙的逃跑过程中，它的藏身处周围散落着几块松散的碎片。

然而，他对自己已经取得的发现并不满足，退了一步，坚定地向上看，透过生长在墙脚这个特定地方的一些树木，他看到墙的表面有很多地方被刺穿了。巨大的不规则裂痕，其中一些裂痕几乎延伸至整个高度。除此之外，他还发现该结构在某一特定点的质量明显偏离了垂直方向。他对眼前的景象大吃一惊，从地上拿起一根棍子，把它插进最低最小的一条裂缝中，轻而易举地将它整个塞进了墙里，墙的一部分似乎是空心的，一部分是由最初引起他注意的同样是腐烂的砖墙。

现在很明显，整个建筑，超过几码的宽度，要么是建造得脆弱而粗心，要么是在以前的某个时期遭受过突然而猛烈的震动。他把棍子留在墙上来标记这个地方；正要退去，就听到上方城墙上哨兵的脚步声传来。他突然变得谨慎起来，虽然他当时几乎无法解释出于什么动机，但他仍然躲在树木和灌木丛中，直到警卫继续前进；然后他小心翼翼地离开了这个地方。然后，退到一段距离后，陷入了一系列认真而引人入胜的思考中。

为了向读者解释现在吸引异教徒注意力的现象，有必要简要介绍一下罗马城墙的历史。

由罗穆卢斯建造的城市第一座防御工事的周长为十三英里。然而，这片大片土地的大部分都被田野和花园占据，帝国创始人的目的是为了耕种目的而保留这些田野和花园，以免受外部威胁的不同敌人的入侵。随着罗马面积逐渐扩大，其城墙也被后来的统治者逐步扩建和改造。但直到奥勒良皇帝统治时期（公元270年），这座城市的防御才发生了任何非凡或重要的变化。这位君主开始修建周长二十一英里的城墙，最终在普罗布斯统治时期（公元 276 年）完工，并由贝利撒留（公元 537 年）修复，并且可以在防御工事的独立部分中看到现代城市，直至今日。

在我们故事发生的日期（公元 408 年），城墙仍然保持着奥勒良和普罗布斯统治时期建造的样子。它们大部分是用砖砌成的。在一些地方，可能在普遍的材料中添加了一种软砂岩。这些城墙在其圆周上的一些地方，特别是在平西安山后面的部分，被建造成拱形，形成深深的凹进，有时会布置成双排。它们的建造方法通常是由维特鲁威提到的，它起源于他的时代，称为“opus reticulatum”。

“opus reticulatum”由小砖块（或石头）按角度而不是水平排列在一起组成，使墙壁表面呈现出一种坚固的网络的外观。一些古代建筑师认为这是一种容易腐烂的建筑模式。维特鲁威断言，他曾见过使用这种技术的一些建筑物已经倒塌。从现代留下的不完美的样本来看，很难判断它的优点。它肯定不足以支撑平西亚山（Pincian Mount）河岸的重量，平西亚山（Pincian Mount）的河岸就在它后面，在几页前描述的那个孤独的地方，这一点仍然可以从城市那部分的城墙的外观中看出。现代的遗迹已经偏离垂直方向，有些地方几乎从上到下都出现了裂缝。现在，这个废墟被当今的意大利人所熟知，被赋予了富有表现力的标题“Il Muro Torto”或“弯曲的墙”。

我们可以在这里观察到，在罗马防御工事的这一自然缺口的存在是极不可能被注意到的，或者即使被注意到，也被大多数粗心和懒惰的居民以最轻微的焦虑或关注对待。呈现浪漫。人们认为它早在奥勒良时代就已经可见，但只有六世纪的历史学家普罗科皮乌斯才特别提到，他提到贝利萨留为了加强这座城市以抵御哥特人的围攻，试图修复这座城市。城墙上的弱点，但他的预期工作受到虔诚民众的阻碍，他们声称它受到圣彼得的特殊保护，因此干涉它是不敬虔的。将军毫无异议地服从了居民的决定，事后也没有发现任何理由后悔他的顺从。因为，用上述作者的翻译的话来说，“在围城期间，敌人和罗马人都没有注意到这个地方。”据推测，像这样的非同寻常的事件赋予了这堵墙神圣的特征，这阻止了后来的统治者尝试修复它。这使得它在中世纪的动荡中仍然保持弯曲和撕裂。它仍然保留着它，通过吸引现代旅行者的古物好奇心来证明历史学家的真实性。

现在我们回到乌尔皮乌斯。在生活在一种主导观念的支配下的人们的性格中可以观察到一种奇特之处，即他们本能地扭曲了外部世界中吸引他们注意力的任何事物，使其与他们精神沉思的单一对象或多或少地紧密联系。自从他被逐出圣殿以来，这位异教徒的能力就在不知不觉中完全按照他一生的任务去实现的大胆设计而行动。因此，受到这种道德情感的倾斜，他几乎没有反思一下他刚刚在城墙底部所做的发现，他的思绪就立即回到了早上所占据的雄心勃勃的沉思中；下一刻，第一个大胆而危险的计划的构想开始吸引他不安的思绪。

他思考着面前墙壁的特点和位置。虽然他在其中观察到的最宽、最重要的裂缝距离城墙太近，没有梯子的帮助就无法到达，但根据试验的结果，他知道还有其他低至地面的裂缝。他已经创造了，可以通过最普通的努力和毅力成功地、极大地拓宽。如果根据表面状况来判断，墙的内部不会对渗透尝试提供不可逾越的障碍，因为渗透的范围如此之小，以至于高度和宽度仅限于几英尺。城墙位于两个警卫室之间，不会受到好奇的民众的阻碍。哨兵在其指定的值班范围内碰巧坠落，当夜幕降临时，哨兵将是唯一可能经过该地点的人；在这样的时刻，他的注意力必须集中在城市现在的情况下，放在远处的前景上，而不是放在他下面和身后的地面上。因此，似乎几乎可以肯定的是，一个谨慎的人在夜色的掩护下辛勤工作，可能会在墙脚进行任何他喜欢的调查。

他检查了他现在所站的地面。没有什么比它现在的样子更孤独的了。山上的私人花园隔绝了该地区的所有通讯。只能通过环绕平西安山并沿着城墙底部的小路才能到达。以现在城里的情况来看，不太可能有人会去这个偏僻的地方，那里什么也看不见，什么也听不到，而宁愿混在街上令人心潮澎湃的混乱中。 ，或者从城墙上任何人都容易到达的位置观察哥特式营地。除了这片土地的孤独性为在其上进行的任何工作提供了保密性之外，覆盖其下端的树木和灌木丛还提供了进一步的优势，并且在黑暗中可以有效地屏蔽入侵者。夜晚，来自上方墙壁的最敏锐的观察。

如此思考，他毫不怀疑，一个狡猾而坚定的人可能会在不受惩罚的情况下扩大墙下部的任何一个低级缺口，以形成一个空洞（大到足以容纳一个人形），该空洞应该刺穿它的墙壁。外表面，并提供离开城市并进入哥特式营地的自由，而现在关闭的大门不允许所有居民都享有这种自由。对于像异教徒这样充满抱负的人来说，要发现这种尝试的实用性，不可撤销地决定立即执行。他决定一到夜幕降临，就开始在墙上干活。寻找——如果突破口被修补，并且黑暗有利于他——阿拉里克的帐篷；到达那里后，他向哥特国王通报了城内防御物资的薄弱，以及平西安山下防御工事的破旧状况，并坚持要求野蛮人首领保证，作为他背叛的条件。基督教教堂被毁，基督教财产被掠夺，基督教牧师被屠杀。

他小心翼翼地从这个孤独的地方退出，那里现在已成为他新希望的中心。进入城市的街道后，他开始为自己准备一种工具，以方便他接下来的工作，并提供食物，让他有力量继续他的预期工作，而不受疲劳的阻碍。当他想到他的计划的大胆背叛时，他早上的狂喜又开始回到他身上。在他现在的设计之前，他之前所有组织复兴异教的尝试都突然变得无足轻重。他对塞拉皮斯神庙的保卫，他在亚历山大的阴谋，他与维特拉尼奥的阴谋，都是一个人的努力。但是，通过一个强大的军队的代理，在一个人的独立阴谋的推动下，对牧师、教堂和整个城市的宝藏的破坏，将是一个神的令人眼花缭乱的成就！

时间慢慢地流逝着。太阳在绚丽的天空中渐渐西落，落下，周围是红色和阴暗的云彩。然后是寂静和黑暗。哥特式的篝火在昏暗的空气中一盏一盏地燃烧。不同岗位的警卫人数增加了一倍。民众被赶出了城墙，这座大城市的防御工事现在除了焦躁的哨兵的脚步声和远处高墙长线上点缀着的守卫室发出的武器碰撞声外，再也没有任何声音。

就在那时，乌尔皮乌斯小心翼翼地沿着人迹罕至的街道经过，不知不觉地到达了目的地。浓浓的水汽笼罩着这片荒凉的沼泽地。现在，除了上面宫殿的模糊、不确定的轮廓，以及裂开的防御工事的质量之外，什么也看不见了，这些建筑如此模糊，看起来就像一层黑色的薄雾本身。当异教徒感觉到气氛笼罩而热烈的气氛时，他的脸上掠过一丝欣喜的微笑。他轻轻地摸索着穿过灌木丛，到达了墙根。有一段时间，他沿着这条路慢慢地走着，无论他的手能伸到哪里，都感觉到不同裂缝的宽度。最后，他在一个比其他部分更宽的地方停了下来，从藏在衣服里的一根粗铁棒中抽出一根一端锋利的铁棒，开始在破口处工作。

机遇把他带到了最适合他目的的地方。他所站的地面上只有靠近墙壁的杂草和低矮的灌木丛，主要由潮湿柔软的草皮组成。因此，当他小心翼翼地把砖块拆下来时，它们掉落时发出的噪音并不比砖块突然接触到它们掉落的树枝时发出的轻微沙沙声更大。这声音虽然微不足道，但却引起了警惕的异教徒的担忧。他放下铁棍，把灌木丛拖起来，或者从根部折断，直到在墙根前清理出几英尺的空间。然后，他又回到了繁重的工作中，双手因清除灌木丛时抓住的荆棘造成的伤口流血，继续做砖工。他在工作中完全没有受到任何惩罚。黑暗遮住了他，使他无法观察。没有人接近他的作业现场来打扰他。两名哨兵被安置在靠近他所有努力的中心的城墙部分的地方，其中一个在他哨所的最远的一端一动不动，另一个在城墙上不安地来回踱步，唱着一首狂野的歌。 ，关于战争、女人和酒的漫漫歌曲，无论它给他的感知器官带来什么自由，实际上都阻碍了他听觉能力的警惕性运用。

一块又一块的砖在乌尔皮乌斯的积极而及时的努力下取得了成果。他已经在一个倾斜的方向上挖了一个洞，足够大，可以爬过去，正准备进一步穿透，这时墙内部的一部分腐烂的材料突然在他的偶然压力下成团屈服。铁棒，慢慢地向内沉入一张床，从当时能听到的微弱声音判断，这张床一定是部分是水，部分是沼泽土和腐烂的砖块。乌尔皮乌斯先听了一遍，确定这件事引起的轻微噪音没有传到耳朵里，也没有引起粗心哨兵的怀疑，乌尔皮乌斯爬进了他挖出来的洞里，用酒吧摸索着，直到到达了门口。裂缝的边缘，他无法探测其深度，也无法确定其宽度。

他犹豫不决。他周围的黑暗是无法穿透的。他能感觉到蟾蜍和有毒的动物在他的四肢上爬行。这里潮湿的气氛开始让他浑身颤抖，直达骨髓。由于过去的过度劳累，他的整个身体都在颤抖。没有光，他既不能尝试继续前进，也不能希望发现他部分打开的裂缝的大小和范围。随着夜幕降临，雾气正在迅速消失：必须尽快达成解决方案，以免为时已晚。

他从洞里爬了出来。就在他到达露天的时候，哨兵在异教徒站立的地方停了下来，他的歌声突然停了下来。有片刻的沉默，在此期间，乌尔皮乌斯的内心深处充满了恐惧，就像那只被鄙视的蜥蜴的内心深处的悸动一样，蜥蜴的飞行引导着他在墙上找到了他的发现。然而很快，他就听到那名士兵高兴地向他的哨兵同伴喊道：“同志，你看到月亮了吗？”她站起来为我们的手表喝彩！

什么也没发现！——他还安全！但如果他一直待在洞口，直到月光前的雾气消散，他能保证自己的安全吗？他觉得他不能！

对于他这样的项目来说，多一晚还是少一晚又有什么关系呢？哥特人可能要过几个月才能从城墙上撤退。与其冒险被发现，不如忍受拖延。他决定离开这个地方，并在第二天晚上带着灯笼返回，他会隐藏灯笼的光线，直到他进入洞穴。一旦到达那里，上面的哨兵就无法察觉它——它会引导他穿过一切障碍，保护他度过一切危险。尽管它很大，但他确信墙的内部和外部一样处于毁灭性的状态。谨慎和毅力本身就足以确保他的努力取得最快和最彻底的成功。

他等到哨兵再次到达他值班的最远范围，然后轻轻地捡起周围的灌木丛，用它遮住了外墙的空洞口和砖块的碎片。那东西掉到了下面的草坪上。完成后，他再次倾听，以确保自己没有被注意到。然后，他极其小心地沿着绕过平西安山坡的小路离开了。

“力量——耐心——还有明天晚上！”当异教徒走上街道，再次与罗马公民聚集在一起时，他自言自语道。

那是早上。太阳已经升起，但他的光芒被厚厚的云层遮住了一部分，乌云已经遮住了东方地平线的明亮光芒。新一天的喧嚣和活力逐渐向哥特式营地的各个方向蔓延。唯一一个窗帘仍然拉着的帐篷，周围没有忙碌的人群聚集在一起讨论或劳作，那就是赫尔曼里克的帐篷。年轻的酋长和两名战士站在他的篝火即将熄灭的余烬旁，他似乎正在给他们匆忙的指示。他的脸上流露出焦虑和不满的情绪，虽然当他在同伴们面前时，这种情绪被部分压抑，但当他们让他独自在帐篷前观看时，这种情绪不仅表现在他的面容上，而且表现在他的态度上。

有一段时间，他定期来回走动，焦急地看着营地向西的路线，偶尔低声自言自语，因为怀疑和不耐烦而仓促感叹。随着新的早晨的第一口呼吸，他在夜色中守望篝火时所进行的愉快的冥想开始消退。现在，随着她预计回来的时间逐渐临近，戈伊斯文塔的形象从他的脑海中消失了，他迄今为止一直全神贯注于那些平静而幸福的沉思。他越是思考他对安东尼娜这个国家的致命承诺，对他对军队和他所属人民的责任，他就越怀疑自己是否有机会永久保护这位年轻的罗马人，而不冒着让他沦为哥特人的风险。 ，以及他作为战士的毁灭；戈伊斯文塔临别时的嘲讽，更加严厉、不祥地在他耳中响起——“你必须记住你的诺言，即使你愿意，你也救不了她！”

厌倦了坚持深思熟虑，这只会让他加深忧郁，增加他的疑虑；他一心想暂时忘却那些不祥的预感，这些预感不由自主地征服了他，在他还没有享受到乐趣的时候，他转向他的帐篷，把它拉到一边。厚重的兽皮窗帘封闭了开口，靠近安东尼娜仍在睡觉的简陋沙发。

一缕阳光，断断续续地挣扎着，在这一刻冲破了厚重的云层，偷偷溜进了帐篷的开口，他注视着熟睡的女孩。它沿着她裸露的手和手臂流淌，飞过她的胸部和脖子，沐浴在明亮清新的光芒中，她平静而安详的面容沐浴在明亮的新鲜光芒中。渐渐地，她的四肢开始活动，嘴唇轻轻张开，半微笑着，仿佛在欢迎光明的问候；她的眼睛微微睁开，然后被从抬起的眼睑中流过的光芒弄得眼花缭乱，她又颤抖着闭上了。她终于完全醒了，用手遮住脸，在沙发上坐起来，迎上赫尔曼里克悲伤地审视着她的目光。

“你那明亮的盔甲、你光荣的名字、你仁慈的话语，即使在我睡梦中，也一直伴随着我，”她惊奇地说。现在，当我醒来时，我再次看到你在我面前！被我一生都感到高兴的太阳唤醒，看到您在我的痛苦中为我提供庇护，这是一种幸福！但为什么，”她用一种改变了的询问语气继续说道，“为什么你用怀疑和悲伤的眼神看着我？”

“你睡得又好又安全，”赫尔曼里克闪烁其辞地说，“我把帐篷的开口关上了，以免你受夜间潮湿的影响，但我现在把它升起来了，因为在初升的太阳下，空气正在变暖——”

“你看腻了吗？”她打断了他的话，站了起来，焦急地看着他的脸。但他没有回答。他的头转向了帐篷的门口。他似乎在倾听某种预期的声音。显然他没有听到她的问题。她顺着他目光的方向看去。这座大城市的景象，一半明亮，一半黑暗，无数的建筑反射着阳光，或者保留着云彩的阴影，让她想起昨晚为父亲安全而祈求的事情。她把手放在同伴的手臂上以引起他的注意，然后急忙继续说道：

“你还没忘记我昨晚对你说的话吧？我父亲的名字是努梅里安。他住在平西安山。你会拯救他的，赫尔曼里克——你会拯救他的！你会记住你的承诺的！

年轻武士说话的时候眼睛垂了下来，全身都抑制不住的颤抖起来。安东尼娜对他讲话的最后一部分，是用与过去从其他人嘴里发出的恳求相同的措辞和不同的口音表达的，这仍然留在他的记忆中。同样的要求，“记住你的诺言”，戈伊斯文塔提出来是为了敦促他流血，现在安东尼娜提出来是为了引诱他怜悯。感情请愿书的结论与复仇请愿书的条款相同。当他思考这两件事时，一个人的人性怜悯，另一个人的恶魔般的残忍，在哥特人的心灵中形成了险恶而显着的对比，意识到戈伊斯文萨回来后即将到来的斗争的所有危险，瞬间破灭了他对身边逃犯的最后一丝希望。

“没有命令进攻这座城市——也没有进攻意图。你父亲的生命不会受到哥特人刀剑的伤害，”他阴沉地回答道，这是对安东尼娜最后一句话的回应。

他说话的时候，女孩退后了几步，若有所思地环视着帐篷。赫尔曼里克在昨晚的现场中拿到的战斧仍然躺在地上的一个角落里。看到这一幕，她的脑海里浮现出一连串可怕的回忆。她猛地一惊。她的面容突然发生了变化，当她再次对赫尔曼里克说话时，嘴唇颤抖着，言语几乎含糊不清。

“我现在知道你为什么用这么阴沉的眼神看着我了，”她说。 ‘那个女人回来了！我全神贯注于我的梦想、对父亲和你的思念，以及对未来日子的希望，以至于当我醒来时，我已经忘记了她！但我现在全都记得了！她要回来了——我从你悲伤的眼神中看到了——她要回来谋杀我！当我对人生抱有这样的希望的时候，我就会死去！对我来说没有幸福可言！没有！——没有！”

哥特人的脸色开始阴沉。他多次自言自语：“我怎样才能救她？”几分钟内，一片深深的寂静，只有安东尼娜的抽泣声打破了这片寂静。过了一会儿，他回头看了看她。她双手捂住眼睛。泪水从她张开的手指流淌出来。她的胸膛剧烈起伏，仿佛她的情绪会以某种明显的形式爆发出来。她的四肢颤抖得几乎无法支撑自己。当他看着她时，他无意识地用手臂搂住了她纤细的身躯，轻轻地将她的手从脸上拉开，对她说，虽然他的心与他的话不符，但他说话时却说：“别害怕——相信我！” '

“我怎样才能冷静？”她哭着抬头恳求地看着他。 “昨晚我很高兴，确信你能保护我，对明天充满希望——现在我从你悲伤的表情中看出，从你怀疑的声音中我知道，为了抚慰我的痛苦，你向我许诺的不仅仅是你可以表演！你的伴侣这个女人对我们俩都有一种力量，想想就可怕！她会回来，她会收回你心中所有的怜悯，她会用她恐惧的目光瞪着我，她会杀在你脚下！在经历了所有的痛苦和所有的希望之后，我将死去！哦，赫尔曼里克，趁还有时间让我们逃走吧！你生来就不是为了流血的——你太仁慈了！上帝从来没有让你去毁灭！你不能向往残酷和灾难，因为你帮助和保护了我！让我们逃吧！我会跟随你去任何你想去的地方！我会做任何你要求的事！我会和你一起越过身后那些遥远而明亮的山脉，到任何陌生而遥远的地方；因为美丽无处不在；在这片广阔的大地上，有可以居住的树林，有可以热爱的山谷！

当她停下来时，哥特人悲伤地看着她。但他没有回答她——他心里的阴郁越来越深——他嘴里没有说出虚假的安慰的话。

“想想我们应该享受多少快乐，我们可以看到多少！”女孩用柔和而迷人的语气继续说道。 “我们应该可以自由地去任何我们喜欢的地方；我们永远不应该感到孤独；永远不要悲伤；永远不要疲倦！当你告诉我你的人民出生的国家时，我可以日复一日地听你说话！我可以给你唱我用琵琶学来的甜美歌曲！唉，过着这样的生活，我多么孤独地哭泣啊！我多么渴望这样的自由和快乐也能属于我！我如何想象我将游览的遥远国度，我将发现的幸福国家，我将呼吸的山风，我将休息的阴凉处，我将在其河流中追寻的河流。当然，还有我要种的花，我要采的果！我多么希望有这样的存在啊！我多么渴望有一个可以像我一样享受它的伴侣！你是否从未感受过我为自己想象的这种快乐，你可以自由地漫游到任何你喜欢的地方？让我们离开这个地方吧，如果你还没有离开，我会教你。我会如此耐心，如此听话，如此快乐！我永远不会悲伤；永远不要抱怨——但让我们逃走——哦，赫曼里克，让我们趁还有时间逃走吧！你要把我留在这里让我被杀吗？你能带我独自去这个世界吗？请记住，城门和家门现在都对我关闭了！请记住，我没有母亲，我的父亲也抛弃了我！请记住，我是地球上的一个陌生人，地球是为了让我快乐而创造的！想想那个发誓要杀了我的女人多久就会回来？想想对死亡的恐惧是多么可怕；趁还有时间，我们就出发吧——赫尔曼里克，赫尔曼里克，如果你怜悯我，那就让我们出发吧！

她握紧双手，抬起头，一脸恳求地看着他。赫尔曼里克的态度比他的言语更能表达出她因危险而变得敏锐的感觉，即使他向她承认了压抑他心灵的怀疑和忧虑情绪的原因。没有什么比她试图将自己逃离戈伊斯文塔的愤怒与获得像哥特人这样的同伴结合起来更能证明她性格的纯真和她隐居生活的了。但是，对于这个孤独而深情的女孩来说，当她看到自己——一个对同胞的社会存在法则陌生的人——突然被无依无靠地推入这个不友好的世界时，除了渴望获得伴侣的焦虑之外，她的心还能自然地激发出任何其他的欲望吗？发现保护者之后？她性格天真，对人性、习俗的影响、感情差异对性别差异的适应一无所知，她徒劳地想象她向赫尔曼里克主张的平静的生活足以实现这一目标。她的结局，通过向他呈现同样的诱惑，一个战士和一个哥特人，它所包含的对她来说是一个孤独、深思熟虑、有远见的女孩！然而，她凭借她神奇的存在、她清新的美丽和她新颖的举止，在这位年轻酋长的心上获得了如此奇妙的优势，以至于他本来会拒绝他的。他蔑视任何其他可能向他提出像安东尼娜这样的请愿书的女人，当她停止说话时，他悲伤地低头看着她，有一瞬间犹豫了他的选择。

就在此时，当两人的注意力都集中在对方身上时，第三个人悄悄靠近了帐口，看着他们这样，突然发出一阵苦笑。赫尔曼里克立即抬起眼睛；但那刺耳的、非女性的声音却足以让安东尼娜感觉到。她把脸埋在哥特人的怀里，气喘吁吁地低声说道：“她回来了！”我必须死！我必须死！

她回来了！她认为赫尔曼里克和安东尼娜处于一个有利的位置，毫无疑问，在她不在的时候，在她亲戚的心中，一种比仅仅希望保护她打算复仇的受害者更强烈的感觉出现了。一个小时又一个小时，当她在阿拉里克的伤残士兵的病床上履行自己的职责时，她是否沉思着她的复仇和鲜血计划。无论是疾病还是死亡，她在她周围看到的，都没有对她的顽固凶猛产生足够强大的影响，而现在只有这种凶猛激发了她的本性，引诱它怜悯或敬畏它悔改。在她刚刚进行的静默守夜期间，吞噬她的邪恶激情因拖延而变得更加活跃，因失望而增强，增强了其力量，并激发了其最潜在的能量。前一天晚上，她为了她的国家而憎恨这个女孩。她现在恨她自己。

“你和哥特武士的服饰有什么关系？”她用手里的长猎刀指着赫尔曼里克，用嘲弄的口音喊道。 “你为什么来到哥特式营地？去吧，敲敲罗马的大门，跪下恳求她的守卫允许你加入罗马公民，当他们问你为什么时——让他们看看那里的女孩！告诉他们你爱她，你会娶她，她的人民谋杀了你的兄弟和他的孩子，这对你来说没什么！然后，当你自己生下儿子，感染了罗马血统的哥特私生子时，你自己也要成为一个内心的罗马人，派你的孩子去完成你妻子的人民在阿奎莱亚未完成的事情——谋杀我！

她停了下来，轻蔑地笑了笑。然后她的心情突然一变，向前走了几步，用更大更严厉的语气继续说道：

‘你已经违背了你的信仰；你对我撒了谎；你已经忘记了你的错误和我的错误；但你还没有忘记我昨晚离开你时的临别赠言！我告诉过你，她应该被杀掉，既然你不肯为我报仇，我就兑现诺言，亲手杀了她！如果你要保护她，就必须杀了我。你必须流尽她或我的血！

她向前迈了一步，高耸的身躯被拉伸到了最高的高度，当她将手臂举过头顶时，她裸露的手臂上的肌肉开始活动。一瞬间，她瞪大的眼睛死死地盯着女孩缩小的身躯，下一瞬，她冲了上去，用刀狠狠地砍在了她裸露的脖子上。当武器落下时，赫尔曼里克抓住了她的手腕。她用力挣扎，想要挣脱他的掌控，却徒劳无功。

年轻武士抱着她，脸色变得惨白。有几分钟的时间，他急切地环视着帐篷，心中充满了困惑和绝望的痛苦。他对妹妹的责任和对安东尼娜保护的焦虑之间的利益冲突，让他心烦意乱。他又犹豫了一会儿，在那短暂的耽搁期间，习俗的专制仍然有足够的力量压倒怜悯的冲动。他收回一直支撑着她的手臂，对女孩喊道：“走吧，可怜可怜我吧，走吧！”

但她没有理会他，也没有听到他的声音。她跪在女人脚边，低声呻吟着，结结巴巴地说：

“我到底做了什么值得被杀的事？”我从未谋杀过你的孩子；我还没有见过孩子，但我很喜欢他。如果我看到你的孩子，我会爱他们的！

“如果我把从屠杀中救出来的那个孩子保存到现在，而你又靠近他，”那女人凶狠地回答道，“我就会教他用小手攻击你！”当你跟他说话时，他应该向你吐口水作为回答——即便如此！

尽管她浑身颤抖、精疲力竭、恐惧万分，但当她感受到这种侮辱时，她的罗马血统却涌上了她苍白的脸颊。她转向赫尔曼里克，抬头恳求地看着他，试图说话，然后倒在地上，痛哭起来。

“你为什么哭泣、祈祷并对他说出这样的话？”戈伊斯文莎尖叫着，用她那只空着的手指着赫尔曼里克。 “他既没有勇气保护你，也没有荣誉来帮助我。”你以为我会被你的眼泪和恳求所感动吗？我告诉你，你的人民杀害了我的丈夫和孩子，我因此而恨你。我告诉你，你引诱赫尔曼里克爱上一个罗马人并对我不忠，我会因此杀了你！我告诉你，在这个帝国的广大范围内，没有一个带有你国家的血统、你的民族的名字的生物，如果我有能力，我不会毁灭！如果路上的每一棵树都有感觉，我一定会亲手把树干上的树皮撕下来！如果一只来自你们天空的鸟儿因非常驯服和嬉戏而飞进我的怀里，我会把它踩死在我的脚下！你认为你会逃脱吗？你认为在这之后我不会为我丈夫和孩子的死向你报仇吗？

说话间，她机械地松开了握着的双手。刀掉在了地上。赫尔曼里克立即弯下腰，把它固定住。有那么一会儿，她站在他面前，从他的手中松开，一动不动，一言不发。然后，她仿佛突然想到了什么，朝帐篷的开口走去，用邪恶胜利的语气对他这样说道：

“你还不能救她！”你无愧于你的国家和你的名字！我会把你的懦弱和背叛暴露给你营地里的弟兄们！”她跑到了帐篷外，大声呼唤着不远处路过的一群年轻武士。留下来，留下来！弗里蒂根——阿塔纳里克——科利亚斯——苏瑞德——枯萎——弗拉维塔！快点到这里来吧！赫尔曼里克的帐篷里有一个俘虏——看到他会很高兴的一个俘虏！到此为止！到此为止！

她所讲话的人群中包含了整个哥特军队中一些最暴躁和粗心的人。他们刚刚从昨晚的职责中解脱出来，有闲暇满足戈伊斯文塔的要求。她的演讲刚结束，他们就转身急切地冲向帐篷，在他们前进时向赫尔曼里克大喊，让他们在露天看到他的囚犯。

他们可能原以为会被他们的战友发现的某个罗马奴隶的可笑恐怖所吸引，这些奴隶潜伏在空旷的郊区；因为当他们进入帐篷时，只看到那个不幸的女孩蹲在赫尔曼里克脚边的地上，缩着身子，什么也没有看到，他们不约而同地停了下来，惊讶得说不出话来，互相环顾四周。

“看她！”戈伊斯文塔喊道，打破了短暂的沉默。 “她是你那里的勇士为自己俘获的罗马囚犯！”为了那个颤抖的孩子，他忘记了他的人民的仇恨！她对他来说已经不仅仅是军队、将军或同伴了。你曾在夜间注视着这座城市；但他却一直守护着罗马少女！不要希望他会分担你的辛劳，或者更多地参与你的快乐。阿拉里克和战士们失去了他的服务——他未来的国王畏缩在他的脚下！

她原以为她的演讲会激起那些粗俗听众的愤怒和嫉妒；但事实却是这样。但她恶毒的嘲笑的结果却让她的希望落空了。当时的幽默引起了哥特人的嘲笑，这种做法比威胁或相互指责更不利于安东尼娜与赫尔曼里克的利益。他们从最初的惊讶中回过神来，突然爆发出一阵响亮的大笑。

“火星和金星碰在一起了！但是，圣彼得起誓，我没有看到瓦肯和网络！弗拉维塔喊道，他曾在罗马军队服役，在那里对古代神话和帝国的现代政治有了模糊的了解，他的同伴们认为他是他所在部队的智者。

“我喜欢她的身材，”弗里蒂根咆哮道，他是一个身材魁梧、冷漠的巨人，以冷静的幽默感和高超的饮酒能力而闻名。 “它看起来是如此的软弱，以至于赫尔曼里克可能会把她装进他的轻型行李中，无论走到哪里，都把她扛在肩上！”

“通过这个过程，你会说，老酒袋傻瓜，他将获得双重优势，既总是让她独处，又总是让她温暖，”科利亚斯打断道，他是一个面色红润、鲁莽的十六岁男孩，有幸成为考虑到他的年纪，这是不恰当的。

“她是东正教徒还是阿里乌教徒？”阿塔纳里克严肃地问道，他对自己的神学成就和非凡的虔诚感到非常兴奋。

“她的头发多好啊！”苏里德讽刺地喊道。 “它像匈奴中队的马皮一样黑！”

“让我们看看她的脸！她接下来会去谁的帐篷？威瑟里克大声喊道，带着无礼的笑声。

'矿！'弗里蒂根得意地回答道。 '这首歌的副歌怎么说？

“金钱和美酒让美丽成为我的！”

我比你们任何人都拥有更多。她会来我的帐篷！

在这些蹩脚的笑话接二连三、迅速地讲完的过程中，赫曼里克脸上最初的轻蔑逐渐被无法抑制的愤怒所取代。弗里蒂根说话时，他失去了对自己的所有控制，抓住了他的剑，威胁性地向脾气暴躁的巨人走去，巨人没有试图后退或保护自己，而是安慰地喊道：“耐心，伙计！”耐心！你会因为开玩笑而杀死一个老战友吗？我羡慕你作为朋友而不是敌人的好运气！

赫尔曼里克不得不在一个手无寸铁的人面前放下剑，他正要愤怒地回应弗里蒂根，这时他的声音被帐篷附近传来的喇叭声淹没了。它发出的信号立刻就被围在年轻哥特周围的小丑们所理解。他们转身，立即退了出去。他们的最后一批人刚刚消失，前一天晚上戈伊斯文塔离开时与赫尔曼里克交谈过的同一位老兵就进来了，并对他说道：

“你奉命与正在等待你的师一起驻扎在你当前位置以东的地方，向导将向你展示这一点。立即做好准备——刻不容缓。”

当这句话从老人嘴里说出时，赫尔曼里克转身看着戈伊斯文萨。当哥特人出现在帐篷里时，她坐在那儿听着他们粗暴的嘲笑，压抑着愤怒和无言的蔑视。现在她站了起来，向前走了几步。但她的步态突然出现了一种不寻常的犹豫。她的脸色苍白。她呼吸急促而沉重。 “你现在要在哪里庇护她？”她对赫尔曼里克喊道，并伸出双手威胁女孩。 “把她交给你的同伴，或者交给我；不管怎样，她都迷失了！我会胜利——胜利！”——

这时她的声音变得难以理解的低语。她站在原地摇摇晃晃。很明显，她在昨晚的守望中长期的激情冲突，以及早晨激烈而多变的情绪，突然陷入了危机，就像她听到老战士的致命信息时的狂喜一样，已经陷入了危机。最终甚至超出了她强大的体格的能量负荷。又过了一会儿，她试图向前走去，说话，从赫尔曼里克手中夺走猎刀；但她却没有再犹豫。接下来她就倒在他脚边失去知觉了。

他所经历的接二连三的考验几乎把他逼疯了。戈伊斯文塔想要阻止他的愤怒决心仍然存在于他的脑海中。同伴们的轻蔑话语还在他耳边回响；他不可抗拒的职责要求他毫不保留或拖延地全神贯注；赫尔曼里克最终屈服于处境的困难，绝望地放弃了保存女孩的一切希望。他指着帐篷一角的一些食物和后面的乡村，用断断续续、阴郁的口音对她说：“给自己准备好这些食物，趁戈伊斯文塔还无法追上你，就飞吧。”我再也无法保护你了！

直到这一刻，安东尼娜一直隐藏着自己的脸，依然蹲在地上。一动不动，除了当她听到哥特人大声、粗俗的笑话时，她浑身不寒而栗。她一言不发，只是当戈伊斯文塔毫无知觉地倒在地上时，她发出了一声恐怖的惊呼。但现在，当她听到流放的判决是从前一天晚上向她保证庇护和保护的嘴唇宣布出来时，她立即站起来，向年轻的哥特人投来了一种无言的痛苦和绝望的目光，他感到很惊讶。不由自主地在它面前畏缩；然后，她没有流泪，没有叹息，没有责备的表情，也没有一句恳求的话，在恐惧和悲伤的完全恍惚中，她吓呆了，弯下腰，离开了帐篷。

赫尔曼里克以一个决心通过工作来消除自己思想的人的不计后果的精力加快了行动，他将自己置于部队的最前面，并快速向东行进，穿过了平西安门。他离开后，他的两名随从碰巧进入了帐篷，看到戈伊斯温莎仍然在地上伸展，便将她送往军队妇女占据的营地的一部分；然后，哥特人的住所，在短短几个小时内目睹了如此多的人类苦难和如此激烈的人类争夺战的小庇护天篷，就被留下了，像荒芜的国家一样寂静和孤独。安东尼娜现在注定要寻求庇护和家园。

“这是一个美好的夜晚，巴尔布斯！都是月光，没有雾气！昨晚我被派驻在奥斯蒂安门，被大雾窒息了。”

“如果你昨晚被派驻在奥斯蒂安门，那么你的处境比现在更好。这里的城墙就像外省的废墟一样孤独。我们身后什么也没有，只有平奇安山的背面。我们面前除了空荡荡的郊区什么也没有；我们的两边除了砖块和石头什么都没有；我们的岗位上除了我们自己什么也没有。如果我相信在整个围墙上还有另一个地方拥有如此孤独的沉闷，我愿像圣彼得一样被钉在十字架上！

“如果你住在那边的一座宫殿里，你就是一个会找事抱怨的人。确实，这个地方很偏僻。但它是否乏味取决于我们自己，它最尊贵的居住者。就我个人而言，我决心通过值得称赞的努力来促进它的欢乐，为你，我心怀不满的朋友，提供一系列无穷无尽的这些故事，我可以毫不傲慢地说，我因这些故事的篇幅和广度而受到赞扬。罗马所有的军营。

“你可以讲尽可能多的故事，但不要以为我会成为你的听众之一。”

“无论你是否来参加我的活动，都由你选择。虽然你不听，我还是会通过练习的方式讲述我的故事。如果他们此刻恰巧愤怒地盘旋在城市上空，就像一些未皈依的人想让我们相信的那样，我会向墙壁、空气或古代已不复存在的男神和女神们讲话；或者我们的邻居哥特人，如果他们突然想要退出营地，近距离观察他们不愿攻击的防御工事。或者，这些适合我的听觉材料让我失望了，我会把我的故事讲给所有听众中最专心的人——我自己。

哨兵立即开始讲述他的轶事，语气轻松流畅，就像一个对自己完美的叙述能力充满信心的人一样。他决定让他那阴郁的同事听到他的声音，尽管他不会给予他注意，他提高了说话的声音，在规定的范围内轻快地来回踱步，对他讲的每一个笑话都带着可笑的规律性和自满的笑声。碰巧在他的回报不佳的叙述过程中发生了。当他继续讲述他的故事时，他几乎没有想到故事的开始受到了一位看不见的听众的欢迎，他的情绪与他的手表的不友好同伴的观察结果大不相同。

乌尔皮乌斯按照他的决心，用他为努梅里安服务而积攒的部分工资，从罗马一个偏远地区的一家商店购买了一盏小灯笼；他用一块粗糙的厚布遮住了灯光，沿着那条孤独的小路继续在墙上进行第二晚的劳动。他到达了突破口，在上述对话开始时，高兴地听到了哨兵不由自主地决定要逗乐他的同伴。这个人说话的声音越大、时间越长，异教徒在城墙内部的工作被怀疑或偷听的可能性就越小。

乌尔皮乌斯轻轻地清除了前一天晚上挖的洞口的灌木丛，然后悄悄地爬了进去，直到他当时钻进去为止。然后，怀着期待和忧虑的混合情绪，这种情绪对他产生了如此强烈的影响，以至于他一时几乎无法控制自己的行为，他慢慢地、小心翼翼地打开了他的灯。

他的第一眼直觉地看到了他脚下打开的空洞。他立即发现，无论是大小还是深度，它都没有他想象的那么重要。这个特定地方的泥土已经在墙基下塌陷了，墙基已经下沉，由于自身的重量加深了裂缝，进入了下面的松软土地。一股小泉水（可能是地球下沉的第一个原因）涌入砖砌结构的空间中，一点一点地，年复一年，它逐渐被破坏。它也没有停滞在这个地方。它欢快而安静地向前流淌——一条小溪，从地下的一个监狱中解放出来，只是进入墙上的另一个监狱，没有长满青草的河岸，没有欢快的灯光照亮，没有人的眼睛欣赏，沿着它的小河流过砖块内部的裂缝不是由一只肿胀的蟾蜍或一只孤独的蜥蜴造成的，但它却像它的姐妹们一样快乐地穿过黑暗和废墟，就像它们的姐妹们在草地上晒太阳，或者在新鲜的草丛中跳跃一样。开阔山边的微风。

乌尔皮乌斯从小泉水中抬起眼睛，然后将注意力转向头顶上的前景。

在他头顶上方，墙壁内部的材质呈现出光滑、平坦、坚硬的表面，似乎能够抵抗最猛烈的破坏尝试；但当他环顾四周时，他发现自己的一侧以及更深处，出现了一种黑暗的、模糊的不规则现象，这对他的预期努力来说是令人鼓舞的。他掉进小溪的裂缝中，爬上一堆摇摇欲坠的砖块，在上面找到了一个洞，他立即开始加宽洞，以允许他通过。他一寸一寸地扩大裂痕，爬进去，发现自己站在一个基础拱门的弓形碎片上，虽然部分被毁，但仍然支撑着自己，与上墙的部分隔绝了所有联系。它曾经支撑着它，但现在已经逐渐崩塌到下面的空洞中。

他抬起头来。一道巨大的裂缝在他头顶上翱翔，在不同的点上蜿蜒曲折，延伸到墙壁的每一个立即可见的部分。整个建筑似乎在这个地方受到了突然而巨大的扭力。如果没有两侧坚固工事的支持，它不可能在这次冲击后维持下去。异教徒高高地凝视着头顶上张开的可怕裂缝，带着无法抑制的敬畏。他那微弱的、断断续续的光芒不足以让他看到他们的任何结局。当他看到它们在墙壁空心部分的其余部分上呈黑色浮雕时，它们看上去就像强大的蛇，沿着荒凉的道路蜿蜒向上，直达上面的城墙；而他本人，当他蹲在他的顶峰上，身边有一点点灯光时，他周围那些晦涩、昏暗、奇异的物体所带来的狂野的宏伟、巨大而庄严的阴暗，把他缩小到了侏儒的身材。如果从高高的城墙上看到他，当他在灯笼后面往下看他下面的空洞和不规则的地方时，他闪烁的光芒看起来就像一只被萤火虫牵着的鼹鼠。

他停下来考虑下一步的行动。在静止的位置上，潮湿寒冷的气氛几乎令人难以忍受，但他目前的静止获得了很大的优势：如果他前进，他可以不受脚下碎砖发出的噪音的干扰。

不久，他听到一种细细、蜿蜒、拖长的声音，时而响亮，时而轻柔；时而靠近，时而后退；现在接近尖锐，现在很快又恢复到微弱、温和的汹涌。突然，这奇怪的超凡音乐被一连串悠长、低沉、滚动的声音打断，这些声音在上方的裂缝中宏伟地传播，就像被囚禁的雷电试图逃脱。他完全不知道这些噪音中的第一声是由夜风蜿蜒穿过他身后外墙砖的裂缝引起的；第二个是上方不规则空腔中产生的回声，是头顶哨兵的脚步声——被这个地方的影响和他工作的神秘性所激起，达到了狂热的兴奋程度，而这种兴奋暂时完全不稳定。他的理性——充满了他的设计的疯狂热情，以及构成他崇拜基础的看不见的存在和世界的可怕传说，乌尔皮乌斯在聆听周围和上方的声音时设想，古代的诸神现在就在他的身边。看不见的会众在他周围盘旋，用超凡脱俗的声音和未知的语言呼唤他继续他的大胆事业，并充分保证其即将取得的光荣成功。

“咆哮和低语，让你的飓风音乐在我耳边响起！”异教徒大声喊道，举起枯萎的双手，以野蛮的狂喜向他想象中的神灵讲话。 “你的仆人乌尔皮乌斯在通往你重新安置的神殿的旅途中没有停下来！鲜血、犯罪、危险、痛苦——骄傲与荣誉、欢乐与安息，我已像祭品一样撒在你们的祭坛脚下！时间已从我身边溜走；青春和成年早已埋藏在隐藏的忘川之中，这是生命的一部分；岁月已经笼罩了我的身体力量，但我仍然守护着你的太阳穴，为你伟大的事业服务！你的复仇已经临近了！全世界的君主们，你们的胜利就在眼前！”

他在同一个位置上呆了一段时间，目不转睛地仰望着头顶上无路可走的黑暗，聆听着仍然在他周围飘浮着的、时起时落的声音。灯笼颤抖的光芒落在他铁青的脸上，变得又红又狂野。他蓬乱的头发在吹过的冷风中飘扬。此时此刻，他会从远处出现，就像一个消失在黑暗迷雾中的火影；就像地底深处崇拜的侏儒；就像一个被遗弃的灵魂在孤独的炼狱中，等待着一瞥美丽的出现，或者一丝空气的出现。

最后，他从恍惚中醒来，小心翼翼地修剪好他的指路灯，然后出发去穿透他刚刚进入的大裂缝。

他沿着倾斜的方向继续前进了几英尺，时而爬过地基拱门的顶部，时而绕过被毁坏的砖砌结构中突出物的末端，时而下降到黑暗的、粘糊糊的、充满垃圾的裂缝中，直到裂痕突然消失在所有地方。方向。

他现在所在的地方，气氛更加温暖。他依稀可以辨认出一块块黑色的苔藓，点缀在凹凸不平的墙壁表面上。有一两次，从他头顶上方突出的地方生长出一些又长又平的草叶，被风吹到他脸上，他现在能感觉到风吹过他正准备扩大的狭窄裂缝。显然，此时他已经前进到距离墙壁最外端几英尺的地方了。

“努梅里安在街上追随他的孩子，”异教徒一边嘀咕着，一边把灯笼放在身旁，露出颤抖的手臂，举起了铁棍，“他的邻居元老的奴隶们要来追我了。”我的敌人从四面八方追赶我；但是，在这里发布，我嘲笑他们最严格的搜索！如果他们想追踪我到我的藏身之处，他们就必须穿透罗马的城墙！如果他们想在我的巢穴里追捕我，他们今晚就必须在哥特人的营地里袭击我！傻瓜！让他们自己看看吧！我用从他们毫无防备的城墙上撕下的最后一块砖来封印他们城市的厄运！”

当他大胆地将棒子插入面前的裂缝时，他暗自笑了起来。在一些地方，砖块很容易在他的努力下屈服；而另一些人则只能用他最大的力量来克服他们的抵抗。他坚定不移地继续他的工作。现在他的手被不断扩大的裂缝所呈现的锯齿状表面弄伤了；现在，由于无法控制的疲惫，他的乐器不由自主地掉了下来；但是，他仍然勇敢地前进，不顾一切反对他的障碍，直到他进入了新裂缝的内部。

当他把灯笼拖进自己挖的洞里时，他意识到，除非灯笼立即升到他上方，否则他就无法继续前行，即使是在爬行的位置。他对这种出乎意料的需要更猛烈的努力感到恼火，他不顾一切地决心在那天晚上不顾一切危险地穿过墙壁，不顾一切地用尽全力向上敲击木棍，而不是逐渐地、轻轻地松开墙壁表面的材料。反对他，就像他以前所做的那样。

这项工作刚刚过去不久，相当大的一部分砖块，凝结成一团，闪电般地从上面突然落下。它把他扔到了下面，趴在曾经支撑他的拱门上。他的右肩被压碎并脱臼；把他的灯笼震成了碎片。一声难以抑制的痛苦呻吟从他的嘴里爆发出来。他被留在了无法穿透的黑暗之中。

那块砖块击中了他之后，稍微向一侧滚动了一点。他拼命地用力从它下面挣脱出来——结果却因为这种努力给他带来的新的痛苦而昏倒了。

他在寒冷黑暗的孤独中躺了一会儿，失去了知觉。然后，在第一次震惊之后苏醒过来，他开始体验到所有的严重性，剧烈的痉挛，钝性的啃咬，抽痛的折磨，这就是他所受伤害的悲惨后果。他的手臂一动不动地垂在身侧——他既没有力量也没有决心去移动身体上任何其他健全的肢体。一会儿，他发出低沉、抽泣、窒息的呼吸声，发出可怕的半成形的咒骂声；一会儿，他喘息的呼吸突然在他体内消失；然后他听见血从他的肩膀上缓慢滴落，有规律地滴落，流入他身边已经形成的一个小池子里。

刺耳的微风从他面前的墙壁缝隙中吹过，现在只有他受伤的肢体能感觉到。它们就像无数锋利的薄冰碎片一样触及了它的表面。它们穿透了他的肉体，就像从熔化的铅海中迸发出来的火花一样。在这种痛苦的最初阵痛中，有一些时刻，如果他拥有武器并且有力量使用它，他就会通过剥夺自己的生命来永远牺牲他的野心。

但这种想要结束他的存在所带来的折磨的愿望并没有持续多久。渐渐地，他体内的痛苦在他的心灵中唤醒了一种更狂野、更强烈的瘟疫，然后这两种痛苦，身体上的和精神上的，在他身上激烈地竞争，一起骚乱，剥夺了他所有的想法，除了那些由他们自己创造或创造的想法。激起。

有一段时间，他在痛苦中无助地躺着，时而用压抑的呻吟来发泄伤口未减轻的折磨，时而咒骂着他的事业的失败，而就在它表面上成功的那一刻。终于，袭遍全身的剧痛似乎逐渐不那么频繁了。他现在几乎不知道他们是从他身体的哪一部分开始行动的。不知不觉中，他的思维和感觉能力变得迟钝了。然后，他的身体和心灵都处于一种神秘的、令人提不起精神的休息状态中，待了一会儿。然后，他混乱的感官不受引导、不受约束，成为突然而可怕的幻觉的受害者。

他周围的一片漆黑，过了一会儿，渐渐变成一片暗淡的光，浓浓而迷蒙，就像傍晚时分雷雨交加时云彩的倒影。很快，这种气氛似乎就被白色的、沸腾的蒸汽组成的梦幻般的格子结构所穿越和划过。然后，撞倒他的那块砖块在他身边变得清晰可见，扩大到一个巨大的体积，并赋予了一种自我运动的力量，通过这种力量，它神秘地膨胀和收缩，自行升高和降低，而不需要任何力气。暂时离开了他附近的位置。然后，从它黑暗而辛劳的表面升起一长串昏暗的形状，它们缠绕在上面雾蒙蒙的格子上，呈现出突出的、明显的人类面孔的形状，因年龄的不同而扭曲，并因年龄的不同而扭曲。各种苦难。

那些婴儿般的面孔上长满了蠕虫，这些蠕虫像一绺肮脏的头发一样挂在他们的周围。苍老的面孔，沾满血迹和伤口；年轻的脸庞上布满青色的皱纹，泪水不停地流淌。可爱的面孔扭曲成固定的表情，充满了剧烈的痛苦、狂野的恶意和绝望的阴郁。这些面孔中没有一张是完全相同的。每个人都有其独特的反叛性格。然而，无论他们的其他特征有多么畸形，所有人的眼睛都完好无损。他们无言无身，无数个不断地漂浮到奇妙的格子结构上，格子结构似乎膨胀了其狂野的比例来容纳他们。他们聚集在那里，在他们的妖精圆形剧场里，静静地凝视着异教徒的脸，无一例外！

与此同时，一侧的墙壁开始发出自己的光芒，在中间的鬼脸场景中形成锯齿状的边界。然后，它们表面的裂缝扩大了，吐出了旧时代的祭司和偶像的畸形形象，它们以各种可怕的畸形外观出现，嘲笑着格子上的面孔；而在整个物体的背后和上方，是巨大的黑暗的影子，它们穿着类似哥特人所穿的可怕的云状皮肤的长袍，在颤抖的蒸汽中挥舞着强大而阴影般的战争武器。整个可怕的人群中没有发出丝毫的声音。一片寂静，就像一个死气沉沉、毁灭的世界，到处都是令人震惊的景象。哨兵低沉的脚步声和忧郁的风的微弱挽歌都消失了。伤口上还滴着血，异教徒的耳朵里已经听不到任何声音了。就连他自己的恐惧痛苦也像那些引起恐惧的幻象恶魔一样沉默。当他躺在床上，惊恐地凝视着充满人烟和幽灵般的黑暗的国度时，日子、岁月、世纪似乎就这样过去了。最终，大自然在考验下屈服了。幻影般的前景突然以可怕的速度在他周围旋转，他的感官在一种深深而受欢迎的昏迷中寻求庇护，摆脱自己创造的束缚。

时间疲倦地流逝，呼啸的风多次吹动他干枯的头发，在他的额头上来来回回，仿佛在叫他醒来，站起来，然后他才能再次恢复意识。他再次意识到自己的位置和伤口的感觉，慢慢地用未受伤的手臂站了起来，疯狂地环顾四周，寻找一丝微弱的光芒。但他为引导他穿过墙壁而形成的轨道蜿​​蜒且不平坦，有效地阻止了当时漂浮在他所制造的空洞最外层的月光到达他现在躺着的地方。他周围连任何物体都无法辨认。黑暗从四面八方包围了他，没有光线，一片胜利的黑暗。

他所受的伤所带来的最初的痛苦已经化为一种沉闷、沉重、不变的疼痛感。曾经压倒他感官的幻象现在以一种巨大而阴暗的形式出现在他的记忆中，用可怕的回忆而不是阴郁的形式填充黑暗。如果他在城墙的洞穴里逗留更久的话，他就会产生一种焦躁不安、鲁莽的渴望，想要逃离那座孤独、不神圣的坟墓，那座孤独和死亡的监狱，他自己的致命努力威胁着他。

“我必须从这黑暗走向光明——我必须呼吸天空的空气，否则我就会死在这个穹顶的潮湿里，”他用嘶哑、呻吟的声音喊道，同时他逐渐痛苦地爬了起来。位置;慢慢地转过身来，开始了他的静修。

他的大脑中仍然充满了刚刚淹没他的思绪的情绪。他的右手无助地垂在身侧，像囚徒的锁链一样被拖着，被慢慢拉过的不平坦的地面划破，就像——用左臂支撑着自己，以最快的速度向前爬行了几英寸。时间——他踏上了艰苦的旅程。

在这里，他在黑暗中困惑地停了下来。在那里，他要么通过抽搐的努力阻止自己一头扎进脚下未知的深处，要么在一些意想不到的障碍的指挥下折回他在劳动和痛苦中获得的一点土地。时而痛苦地咬牙切齿，时而绝望地咒骂，时而疲惫不堪，气喘吁吁；但尽管如此，凭借着一种带有英雄气概的固执，他从未放弃过逃跑的强烈决心。

缓慢而痛苦地，随着乌龟的步伐和毅力，绝望但坚定地像一个陌生的海洋中的航海家一样，他在无人引导的航向中不断翻腾，直到他终于收获了长期痛苦的回报，突然发现一缕细细的月光正从他面前昏暗砖墙的缝隙中射进来。当“东方之星”第一次出现在贤士们的眼前时，他们的心几乎没有比乌尔皮乌斯看到那鼓舞人心的、鼓舞人心的那一刻时所激动的那样激动不已了。指路明灯。

然而多一点努力，多一点耐心，多一点痛苦；他再次站在墙外的空洞前，一个可怕而残废的身影。

天快亮了。月亮在暗淡、灰色的天空中发出微弱的光芒。一场小雨从无形的云层中落下。夜幕降临，大地显得凄凉无情，但异教徒的心灵却没有产生任何悲伤或责备的影响。他环顾四周，看看这僻静的潜伏处，在这僻静的角落里没有看到任何人影。他抬头望向城墙，发现哨兵们默默地分开站着，裹着厚重的值班斗篷，靠着可靠的武器支撑着。很明显，他那个痛苦和绝望的夜晚所发生的事情并没有被外界注意到。

他回头看了一眼，他受伤而无助的肢体不禁打了个寒颤。然后他的眼睛固定在墙上。他用认真而挑衅的目光打量了一番之后，慢慢地用脚将草丛移到了草丛外表面的小空洞上。

“日子一天天过去，伤口愈合了，机会也变了。”老人低声说道，迈着缓慢而不确定的步伐离开了他常去的地方。 “在矿井里，我无声地忍受着鞭打——我感觉到我的锁链日复一日地变宽，他们的铁牙首先在我的肉里咬出了溃疡，但我仍然活着，松开了我的脚镣，封闭了我的身体。”疮！这种新的痛苦是否比过去的其他痛苦更能征服我？我什至还会及时返回，克服墙壁的阻力！我的手臂被压断了，但我的目标是完整的！”

回溯几个小时，我们从裂开的城墙转向城墙俯瞰的郊区和乡村。抛开受伤的乌尔皮乌斯的足迹，我们的注意力现在集中在赫尔曼里克的命运和安东尼娜的命运上。

尽管夜幕刚刚结束，哥特人已经为他麾下的战士们分配了不同的驻地，在城市偏僻的郊区过夜。履行完这一职责后，他就被留在了这所废弃的公寓里，这里一直是他的临时住所。

他住的房子是那条宽阔而不规则的街道上的最后一座。它面向平西安山下的围墙，与围墙之间有一个大约半英里宽的公共花园。这个曾经人头攒动的休闲场所现在完全空无一人。昏暗的树林里没有人影，显得格外明亮。华丽的避暑别墅的房间黑暗而荒凉。无人踏足的草坪上，水果和鲜花摊位空空如也。它忧郁而被遗弃，在拥挤的城市的城墙下像一片肥沃的孤独一样伸展开来。

然而，它在孤独的前景中呈现出一种难以形容的庄严和舒缓的魅力，因为它的花坛和树木现在在夜幕降临的阴影中逐渐变得模糊。它现在的精致程度与以前的欢乐程度一样多。它仍然有其自身的简单吸引力，尽管它未能以其惯常的灯光闪闪发光，也未能以和平时期从其中发出的音乐和笑声来悦耳。当他从新住所的露台上眺望风景时，对过去的工作和忙碌时光的记忆抛弃了这位年轻哥特人的记忆，让他的能力自由地迎接夜晚开始不知不觉地唤醒和创造的反思。 。

在这样的资助下，赫曼里克的思绪自然会飘到哪里去呢？

从已经开始在他远处树顶上颤抖的树叶上荡漾的月光，到他现在所站的荒凉露台的柱子上缠绕着精致而阴暗的花朵，他看到的每一个物体都与他生动而生动的作品联系在一起。未经教养的想象力，对他来说，大自然中所有美丽的事物似乎都是雄辩而恰当的类型。他想起了他曾经保护过的安东尼娜；后来他抛弃了安东尼娜；他已经失去了安东尼娜！

想象力强，推理能力弱；道德观念大，道德坚定性小；赫曼里克太容易受到影响，又太难解决，他之所以放弃女孩的兴趣，是因为性格软弱，而不是因为意志坚定。因此，现在，当当天的工作不再吸引他的注意力时；现在，当沉默和孤独使他回想起早上放弃他无助的职责时，那种致命的不耐烦和优柔寡断的行为激发了他最强烈的悲伤和悔恨情绪。如果说在他的照顾下逗留期间，安东尼娜不知不觉地影响了他的心，那么当他回想起他们在离别的场景中所犯的罪孽时，她的形象就充满了他的所有思想，当他想起她被逐出监狱时，他立即感到悲伤和羞愧。他的帐篷的庇护所。

前一天晚上他想起安东尼娜的每一种感觉，现在他想起她时，都更加强烈。他再次想起了她雄辩的话语，想起了她温柔天真的魅力；他再次专注于她美丽的外表。每一个温暖的表情；她向他请求安全和陪伴时所用的每一种不同的语调；她曾经用来融化他的每一个劝说，现在都在他的记忆中复活，并以稳定的影响力和日益增强的力量感动着他的心。她为引诱他而画的所有匆忙而不完美的幸福图画，现在都扩大了，变得明亮了，直到他的头脑开始浮现出那些迄今为止对他的能力来说是未知的景象，除了竞争、动荡和竞争之外，没有其他图像占据了他的能力。冲突。安东尼娜最轻松、最仓促的表情所唤起的场景，现在在他沉思的灵魂面前变得模糊而阴暗。他曾经去过却忘记的地球上可爱的地方现在又回到了他的记忆中，当他想到她时，这些地方变得理想化和精致。她以每一个诱惑的动作出现在他的脑海中，履行着她向他提出的所有义务，享受着所有的快乐。他想象着她幸福健康，在清新的早晨在他身边快乐地旅行，脸颊红润，步伐灵活；他想象着，在夜晚柔和的寂静中，她用她答应的歌曲使他高兴，用她雄辩的话语使他活跃起来。他想象着她睡着了，柔软、温暖、安静，在他保护性的臂弯里——永远快乐、永远温柔。女孩的年纪，女人的能力；既是爱人又是伴侣、老师和学生、追随者和向导！

她可能曾经是这样的！她现在是什么情况？

她是在孤独中沉沦，是在暴露和疲劳中死去，是被残酷所排斥，还是被不假思索的人嘲笑？他让她面临所有这些危险和痛苦。目的是什么？维持一个女人的不确定的恩惠，维持不受欢迎的友谊，甚至被她性别中最常见和最直观的美德所抛弃；他们对复仇的疯狂渴望，将正义与背叛、无辜与罪恶、无助与暴政混为一谈。在他看来，她对国家和关系的主张本应被放弃，因为她在罗马城墙前向他传达了她的所有暴行，并在致命的时刻公开承认了她的恶意。当他想到这一点时，他绝望地呻吟着，这是最不值得的必需品，而被遗弃的女孩却被牺牲了。

然而，很快，他的思绪就从这些思考中回到了他自己的职责和他自己的名声上。在这里，他的悔恨减轻了一些，但他的悲伤依然没有改变。

尽管安东尼娜的出现和安东尼娜的话对哥特人的影响是美妙的，但它们还没有获得足够的力量来完全窒息他的性别和民族的好战本能，或者征服教育和习俗的强烈和敌对的刺激。她赋予了他新的情感，唤醒了他新的思想。她唤醒了他潜伏的温柔，与粗犷的冷漠和鲁莽的精力作斗争，而迄今为止，教导和榜样已经成为他内心的第二天性。她蜿蜒地走进了他的心灵，照亮了他的黑暗之处，扩大了他狭窄的凹处，美化了他未经打磨的宝藏。她在与他短暂的交流中创造了她，她提炼了她，但她并没有完全从他的旧习惯和旧执着中引诱他的性情；她并没有完全改变他的性格。她还没有褪去野蛮人争斗中的虚假光芒，也没有褪去军事声望中的浮夸。她并没有将低等知识分子的内在素质提升到高尚道德才能的高度。他几乎公正地服从了爱情和责任这两个主人交替而冲突的统治，他立刻对安东尼娜感到遗憾，但又机械地坚持他以前对国家和名字的专制要求的服从，正是这些要求导致了她的损失。

他被自己不同的情绪所压抑，缺乏安慰和建议，目前的无所作为显然让他感到沮丧。他不耐烦地站起来，扣紧武器，试图逃离自己的思绪，放弃他们最初被唤醒的场景。他背对城市，迈着随意的脚步，穿过错综复杂的街道迷宫，构成了荒芜的郊区的范围。

当他穿过占领哥特式防线的住所，并到达那些更靠近远处荒凉乡村的住所后，他周围的场景变得令人印象深刻，足以吸引任何没有完全被其他人和更多人占据的人的注意力。重要的沉思对象。

他现在看到的四面八方的孤独，并不是废墟的孤独——他附近的建筑物都完好无损；这并不是瘟疫带来的孤独——街道上人迹罕至的人行道上没有尸体；这并不是隐居的孤独——没有铁栅栏的窗户，也没有几扇紧闭的门；这是人类灭绝的孤独。开放的大厅无人接近。酒肆前的长凳空无一人。街边小摊的柜台上还摆着一些俗气的家居用品，没有人看，也没有人买。面包和肉的碎片（对陷入困境的罗马来说，注定很快就会变得比金银更有价值的宝藏）在这里露天腐烂，就像粪堆上的垃圾一样；儿童玩具、妇女装饰品、钱包、金钱、爱情信物、珍贵的手稿，在公共场所散落各处，被不同的主人丢弃和遗弃，在它们突然的普遍逃亡中。每一条荒废的街道上都充满了令人心爱的项目被绝望地放弃、有价值的劳动被悲惨地遗弃、令人愉悦的享受被无可挽回地失去。这个地方甚至被那些贫富之家神及其家畜所遗弃。它们要么跟随主人进入城市，要么毫无阻碍、无人监视地迷失到远处的乡村。豪宅、浴场、马戏，徒然展现出它们的华丽排场和奢华舒适；在他们空荡荡的大厅附近，连一个流浪的哥特人都看不见。因为，在罗马被征服的前景面前，军队受到了领导人对其崇高任务的热情的感染，并自愿服从他的命令，暂停对郊区的掠夺，蔑视周围相对毫无价值的宝藏，当他们感到罗马本身的丰富金库正在迅速向他们热切的手中开放时，他们随时可以实现这一目标。宇宙中最伟大的城市的远近闻名的郊区，寂静无声，无人居住，未受破坏，同样沉没在自然之夜、财富之夜和荣耀之夜之中！

尽管呈现在这位年轻哥特人眼前的前景令人悲伤和印象深刻，但这并没有削弱他晚上的冥想对他心灵的强大影响。在过去的几个小时里，被遗弃的女孩的形象已经消散了他所履行的职责的记忆，并反对他对尚未履行的命令的沉思，所以现在它拒绝给他的能力留下任何来自于他所履行的职责的印象。孤独的景象在他周围蔓延开来，人们看到过，却没有注意到。然而，当他穿过阴暗的街道时，他的徒劳的悔恨和自责，他的先天喜好和后天的执着，仍然支配着他，在他内心进行着斗争，就像傍晚时分出现的那一刻一样，严厉而不断。 ，在他在废弃房屋的露台上逗留期间。

他现在已经到了郊区建筑的最边缘。他面前呈现出一幅连绵不断的景象：光滑、光亮的田野，还有柔软、朦胧、难以形容的树林。他的一侧是一些葡萄园和农舍花园；另一处是一座孤零零的房子，是他附近所有住所中最外面的一座。尽管这里漆黑而阴沉，他却用一种机械式的注意力观察了它一段时间，就像一个人更多地专注于思考而不是观察——在他的思绪的喜怒无常的抽象中逐渐向它前进，直到他无意识地在不规则的低范围前停了下来。通向大门的台阶。

他突然靠近了他无意中接近的那个物体，这让他从沉思中惊呆了，现在，他第一次真正专注地审视着面前这个孤独的住所。

这所房子没有什么值得注意的地方，除了它的外观极其荒凉，这似乎部分是由于其孤立的位置，部分是由于其外部正面不寻常地缺乏任何装饰。它太宽敞了，不可能是穷人的住所；它又太缺乏排场和装饰，不可能是富人的宅邸。也许，它可能属于某个公民、外国人或中产阶级——某个喜怒无常的北方人、某个孤独的埃及人、某个诡计多端的犹太人。然而，尽管它本身不具备任何非凡或决定性的特征，哥特人却对它的内部产生了一种神秘的、几乎是急切的好奇心。当他慢慢地走上面前的台阶时，他找不到任何原因，也找不到任何借口来解释这一行为。某种看不见、难以理解的磁铁将他吸引到了住处。如果他的回归是阿拉里克本人突然下令的；如果这个偏僻的地方潜藏着不容置疑的背叛证据，那么当他推开那扇没有闩锁的门的那一刻，他觉得自己一定还在继续前进。下一瞬间，他就进了屋子。光线从敞开的入口射入阴暗的大厅。夜风呼啸而过，在石柱之间、在上面隐蔽的缝隙和无人居住的房间里吹着刺耳而沉闷的声音。没有任何生命迹象，听不到脚步声，甚至连一件家用物品也看不见。荒凉的郊区在外面升起，就像一片荒野；这座空房子看上去就像一座坟墓——没有尸体，但却充满了死亡的气息！

哥特人对这座拱顶般的孤零零的大厅有一种莫名的迷恋。他一动不动地站在门口，出神地望着眼前阴暗的景象，直到一阵强风突然将外门推得更远，同时又透进了更大的光流。

这个地方并不空。一直处于黑暗之中的大厅一角，蹲着一个黑影。它被一件深色的衣服包裹着，蜷缩成一个难以形容的陌生形状。上面什么也没有出现，作为人类的标志，只有一只苍白的手，将黑色的帷幔拉在一起，在冰冷的月光下与它形成几乎可怕的对比。

当这位年轻的哥特人第一次发现大厅里幽灵般的主人时，他的国家古代崇拜中可怕的迷信的模糊记忆就匆匆掠过了年轻的哥特人的记忆。当他全神贯注地站在那个一动不动的人物面前时，它很快就开始对他的意志产生同样奇怪的影响，就像那座孤独的房子已经施加的那样。他慢慢地向蹲伏的身影走去。

它从来没有因为他走近的声音而动过。那只苍白的手仍然把斗篷盖在压缩的身躯上，同样僵硬地握着。尽管赫尔曼里克很勇敢，但当他弯下腰去触摸那双毫无血色、冰冷的手指时，他还是不禁打了个寒颤。这一动作，仿佛与生灵接触，瞬间赋予了生机，身影猛然一动。

然后，黑色斗篷的褶皱向后退去，露出一张与周围石柱一样苍白的脸。那个孤独者的声音变得清晰可闻，他用微弱而单调的口音说出这些话：

“他已经忘记并抛弃了我！——如果你愿意的话，就杀了我吧！——我已经准备好去死了！”

尽管声音破碎、不调音，但那声音中却潜藏着一种古老的音乐音调，那双空洞而沉重的眼睛里闪烁着一种与生俱来的温柔。哥特人突然发出一声怜悯和惊讶的感叹，向前走去，将这个浑身颤抖的被遗弃者抱了起来。在离开孤零零的房子的那一刻的冲动下，下一瞬间站在了坚实的大地上，在星空下，再次与他放弃的冲锋结合在一起——与他失去的安东尼娜结合在一起。

他对她说话，爱抚她，请求她的原谅，向她保证他今后会照顾她。但她既没有回答，也没有认出他。她从来没有看他的脸，从来没有在他的怀里动过，也从来没有祈求过他的怜悯。她没有表现出任何生命或存在的迹象，只是她时不时地用可怜的口音呻吟：“他已经忘记并抛弃了我！”仿佛这一个简单的表达本身就包含着她对自己生命的无用性的承认，以及她对即将到来的死亡的挽歌。

哥特人的脸色一直白到嘴唇。他开始担心她的能力会因为考验而衰退。他颤抖着脚步，匆匆和她一起走向开阔的乡村，因为他怀揣着一种梦幻般的、直觉的希望，希望看到她在早上恳求保护时所向他赞美的那些树林、田野和山脉，可能有助于恢复他的生活。如果她现在看着他们，她的意识就会暂停。

他向前跑，直到离开郊区至少半英里，到达一处高处，两边都是高高的草堤和茂密的树林，俯瞰着下面山谷的狭窄而多样的景色。 ，以及远处延伸的肥沃平原。

战士在这里停下来，背负着他的重担。他坐在岸边，再次试图平息女孩持续的困惑和恐惧。他没有想到他已经抛弃的哨兵，而是想到了他离开郊区的事情，这可能会因为营地里的上级突然造访他废弃的住所而被察觉并受到惩罚。影响世界的社会影响力；脆弱的偶像，在它的圣殿前，骄傲学会了低头，而麻木不仁地去感受；屈服的自然和永恒的统治所带来的柔和而感激的影响——女人的影响，同样是美德和罪恶、尘世荣耀和尘世灾难的根源——在这痛苦和期待的时刻，使他内心的每一个责任呼吁都沉默了，推翻一切自私怀疑的障碍。现在他对安东尼娜说话的语气像女人一样迷人，像孩子一样温柔。他像爱人一样温暖地爱抚她，像兄弟一样愉快地爱抚她，像父亲一样慈祥地爱抚着她。他——粗野的北方武士，他接受的教育是武器，他年轻时的抱负被教导指向冲突、流血和荣耀——甚至他现在也被赋予了怜悯和爱的温柔口才——以及不知疲倦、熟练的照顾——冷静、持久的耐心。

他轻柔地、不断地完成着他的安抚任务。很快，令他高兴和胜利的是，他看到自己的努力即将得到回报，女孩的脸和举止逐渐发生了缓慢的变化。她在他的怀里站了起来，抬头凝视着他的脸，茫然地看着他的脸，然后环顾明亮、安静的风景，然后又更加坚定地看着她的同伴；最后，她剧烈地颤抖着，轻轻地多次念叨着年轻哥特人的名字，焦急而忧虑地看了他一眼，仿佛在认出他的同时感到恐惧和怀疑。

“你正在带我去死，”她突然说道。 “你，曾经保护我的人——你，抛弃我的人！——你正在引诱我进入渴望我的鲜血的女人的力量！——哦，太可怕了——太可怕了！”

她停了下来，别过脸去，剧烈地颤抖着，挣脱了他的怀抱。过了一会儿，她继续说道：

“漫长的白天，寒冷的夜晚，我在一个孤独的地方等待着即将到来的死亡！”我毫无怨言地忍受着等待的所有孤独时光。我几乎没有恐惧，也没有悲伤地聆听着我的敌人的逼近，她发誓要让我流血！没有人爱我，在祖国的土地上成为异乡人，我就没有什么活下去的理由了！但在你身上看到我的厄运的实现者，对我来说是一种痛苦；被赫尔曼里克的手从我长期以来努力保护的生命遗产中夺走！

当她说出这些话时，她的声音变得令人印象深刻的低沉和悲伤。它安静、悲伤的口音表达了一种近乎神圣的放弃和悲伤。它们似乎与夜景的忧郁寂静形成了一种神秘而难以捉摸的和谐。当她站着，面色苍白、平静，眼睛温柔、无泪，仰望天空，月光温柔地照耀在她的身上时，圣母看着她的天使使者的到来，几乎没有比这更纯洁和简单的装饰了。比起现在，努梅里安被遗弃的孩子的容貌更加可爱。

不再控制自己的激动；当他看着自己无情的不耐烦的受害者时，心中充满了敬畏、悲伤和绝望。赫尔曼里克跪倒在女孩的脚下，充满激情地表达了真正的悔恨，恳求她的宽恕，并保证给予她保护和爱。读者已经了解到的一切——他晚上的痛苦自责，他晚上悲伤的徘徊，引导他来到那所孤独房子的神秘吸引力，他再次发现他失去的职责的喜悦——所有这些忏悔现在都在他的书中。以简单而有力的口才倾诉出强烈的情感和真正的悔恨。

听着他的话，安东尼娜渐渐从恍惚中清醒过来。就连他的表情和举止的诚恳，从她性别的直觉洞察力来看，也对她的心灵产生了仁慈和治愈的影响。她突然吃了一惊，苍白的脸颊上泛起红晕。她弯下腰，真诚而渴望地看着哥特人的脸。她的嘴唇动了动，但急促的呼吸却让她无法说出自己想说的话。

“是的，”赫尔曼里克继续说道，站了起来，再次把她拉向自己，“你永远不会哀悼，永远不会恐惧，永远不会再哭泣！尽管你失去了你的父亲，你的祖国的人民对你来说就像陌生人一样，尽管你受到威胁和抛弃，你仍然会是美丽的——仍然是幸福的；因为我会监视你，你将永远不会受到伤害；我会为你劳苦，你永远不会缺乏！人、亲人、名誉、义务，我将全部抛弃，为你赎罪！

当年轻的武士停下来时，青春的清新和希望又回到了女孩的心里，就像水回到了久旱的泉水一样。她眼里含着泪水，但她没有叹气，也没有说话。她的身躯因过度的惊讶和喜悦而浑身颤抖，她仍然坚定地看着他，仍然专心地听他继续说道：

“那么，不要再担心你的安全了——你所害怕的戈伊斯文塔已经离我们很远了；她不知道我们在这里；她现在无法追踪我们的脚步，无法威胁或伤害你！不要再记住你所受的苦难和我所犯的罪！想想看，我多么痛苦地悔恨我们早上的分离，多么高兴地欢迎我们今晚的见面！哦，安东尼娜！你美丽，有一种奇妙的可爱，你年轻，有一种完美的青春，你的话语如旧歌般落入我耳中；当我抬头看到你在我身边时，这就像我父亲崇拜的神灵的梦想！

当女孩听着哥特人说话时，她半侧着脸，脸上的表情混合着困惑、喜悦和惊讶。她站起身来，脸上带着难以形容的感激和喜悦的微笑，指着远处的前景，轻声回答道：

“让我们再往前走一点，月光洒满下面的草地。在这个阴暗的地方我的心在爆炸！让我们寻找远方的光明；它看起来像我一样快乐！

他们向前走去；他们走的时候，她又向他讲述了过去一天的悲伤。她孤独而绝望地从他的帐篷走到他在夜间找到她的那所孤零零的房子，在那里她已经放弃了自己的第一个死亡，当时对她来说并没有什么可怕的。在她重新讲述忧郁的故事时，没有任何责备的想法，没有任何抱怨。只是为了让她能够重新享受那些令人愉悦的悔改和奉献的表达，她知道这会从赫尔曼里克的嘴里唤起，她现在想再次向他讲述她的悲伤故事。

当他们继续前行时；当她聆听哥特人粗鲁而热情的语言时；当她看着风景的深沉宁静和夜空的柔和透明时；她的思想在最强烈的情绪冲击下始终保持弹性，随时准备恢复往常的健康和希望，现在又恢复了原来的基调，并重新取得了惯常的平衡。她的记忆再次开始储存自己心爱的回忆，她的心开始为它纯真的渴望和幻想的想法而欢欣鼓舞。尽管她有所有的恐惧和所有的痛苦，但她现在仍然在幸福中行走，她的性格不会让悲伤的阴影长期变暗，也不会忽略任何影响的扭曲；她自己还是那么快乐；即使如此，她仍然忘记了她的过去，对她的未来充满希望，就像我们第一天晚上看到她在她父亲的花园里，用琵琶的音乐唱歌一样。

当他们继续前进时，他们不知不觉地偏离了道路，进入了一条小路，现在站在一扇门前，门通向一座小农舍，周围环绕着花园和葡萄园，就像他们离开的郊区一样，在哥特人逼近时，当地居民抛弃了这里。穿过大门，来到屋前的空地前，他们停下来环顾四周。

入侵军队的掠食者已经把草地上的草和小树的枝条都砍光了，但这里对那点财产的破坏却没有停止。这座房子有着整洁的茅草屋顶和杂色木百叶窗，花园里种着少量的水果，还有精心照料的珍稀花坛，可能是为了给贵族的宴会或烈士的雕像增光添彩而设计的，但并没有表现出任何吸引力。阿拉里克士兵的粗俗品味。门前的草地上没有任何脚步声。常春藤像往常一样茂盛地爬在低矮门廊的柱子周围。当赫尔曼里克和安东尼娜走向花园尽头的鱼塘时，小屋主人放在那里的几只水鸟游向岸边，仿佛在孤独中欢迎人类的出现。形式。

荒废农场的孤独非但没有忧郁，反而有一种舒缓和吸引力。被毁坏的外屋和被掠夺的草地，在白天可能显得荒凉，但在夜晚的气氛中显得如此疏远、柔和和模糊，与周围普遍平坦和繁茂的景观没有形成鲜明的对比。当安东尼娜看到明亮的田野和阴暗的树林，这里交错在一起，那里接连不断，一直向前延伸，一直延伸到远山，那是大自然雄辩的声音，它的听众是人心，​​它的主题是永恒的爱，启发了她的专注感官。她伸出双臂，用坚定而欣喜的目光注视着眼前明亮的景色，仿佛她渴望看到它的美丽分解成一个单一的、活生生的形式——分解成一个足以被触及、足以被看见的人类精神。崇拜。

“美丽的地球！”她轻声自言自语道：“你的山是天使的瞭望塔，你的月光是上帝的影子！”

她的眼睛充满了明亮、幸福的泪水；她转向站着看着她的赫曼里克，继续说道：

“你有没有想过，当夏娃漫步到孤独的世界时，光、空气和花香中可能蕴藏着伊甸园美丽的遗迹？它们为她发光，为她呼吸，她在它们之中生活，美丽！他们彼此结合，就像阳光与它温暖的大地结合一样；基路伯的剑能立刻将他们分开吗？当夏娃出去时，那扇紧闭的大门是否也将空荡荡的天堂关闭，所有曾经附着、生长、照耀在她周围的美丽都被关闭了？难道她的本土之光就没有随她悄悄潜入这荒凉的世界吗？难道她们曾经压过的怀里没有留下她丢失的花朵的印记吗？它不可能是！她的伊甸园财产的一部分肯定是用她生命的一部分留给她的。当她进入大地时，一定是净化了大地的虚空空气，呼吸着芬芳的微风，带着她失去的天堂的逃学阳光的光芒！它们一定已经变得更加强大和明亮，并且现在必须随着凡人岁月的缓慢流逝而变得更加强大和明亮，直到地球本身成为伊甸园的时候，它们将再次与隐藏的完美世界合而为一。他们还没有分开。因此，即使是现在，当我眺望这片风景时，我所看到的光芒中也充满了天堂的光芒，而我所收集的这朵花，散发着曾经偷走我第一任母亲夏娃感官的芬芳气息。 ！'

虽然她在这里停了下来，仿佛在等待答案，但哥特人却始终保持着沉默。无论是出于本性还是地位，他都无法参与隐藏在安东尼娜心中的外部世界的影响所带来的疯狂幻想和雄心勃勃的想法。

他目前的处境之谜；他对自己放弃的职责的记忆模糊；他未来的命运和命运的不确定性；孤独者的存在与他过去的情感和未来的存在如此不可分割地联系在一起，她的性别、她的年龄、她的性格、她的不幸和她的天赋如此奇怪地吸引着她；所有这些都使他的能力感到困惑。戈伊斯文塔、军队、被围困的城市、废弃的郊区，似乎将他包围在一个阴暗而充满威胁的审判圈中；在他们中间站着一位年轻的罗马居民，她有着雄辩的面容和鼓舞人心的话语，准备催促他去往何方，他不知道，并且能够影响他，但他不知道如何影响他。

安东尼娜不自觉地将同伴的沉默解读为想要改变场景和谈话，在花园的景色上停留了片刻后，带路回到了无人居住的房子。他们取下住宅门上的木挂锁，在灿烂的月光引导下，进入了主屋。

小房间里朴素的装饰仍然没有受到干扰，虽然现在已经隐约可辨，但在两个陌生人的眼里，它给人一种简朴舒适的感觉，这可能曾经让它被流放的居住者所喜爱。当赫尔曼里克坐在安东尼娜身边的那张简单的沙发上时，沙发是这个地方的主要家具，他从窗户向外望去，看到的景色与他们在花园里看到的景色一样，此时，场景开始出现神奇的寂静和新奇感。影响他缓慢的感知，因为它们已经影响了这个有思想的女孩更精细、更敏感的能力。新的希望和平静的想法在他年轻的心灵中升起，当他对他沉默的同伴这样说道时，他的表情流露出一种不同寻常的温柔，他的声音也流露出一种不同寻常的柔和：

“有了这样的家，有了这个花园，有了远方的国家，没有战争，没有严厉的老师，没有敌人威胁你；与你所爱的同伴和职业在一起——告诉我，安东尼娜，你的幸福不是圆满的吗？

当他回头看向女孩，想听她回答的时候，却发现她的脸色已经变了。昔日深切悲痛的表情再次出现在她的脸上。她的目光注视着哥特人胸前挂着的那把短匕首，这柄匕首似乎突然在她的心中激起了一连串忧郁和不受欢迎的念头。当她终于开口说话时，声音悲痛而变幻，表情中夹杂着无奈和绝望。

“你必须离开我——我们必须再次分开，”她说。 “看到你们的武器，让我想起了迄今为止我已经忘记的一切，想起了我留在罗马的一切，想起了你们在城墙前遗弃的一切。曾经我以为我们可以一起逃离周围的混乱和危险，但现在我知道你最好离开！唉!为了我的希望和幸福，我必须再次独自一人！”

她停顿了一下，努力保持镇定，然后继续说道：

是的，你必须辞掉我，回到城前的岗位；因为在袭击的日子里，除了你，没有人会关心我的父亲！直到我知道他安全了，直到我能再次见到他，请求他的宽恕，恳求他的爱，我才不敢离开罗马的危险区域！那么，回到你的职责、你的同伴、以及你享有军事声誉的职业吧！当城市遭到攻击时，不要忘记努梅里安，也不要忘记安东尼娜，她会在孤独的平原上思念你！

她从座位上站起来，仿佛要树立离开的榜样。但她的力量和决心都失败了，她再次瘫倒在沙发上，无法再做任何动作，也无法再说一句话。

哥特人的心中掠过强烈而矛盾的情绪。女孩的语言让他想起了一半忘记的职责，并加强了他过去对教育和种族的偏爱的日渐衰落的影响。现在，他的良心和倾向都反对他对她迫切而无私的请求提出异议。有几分钟他陷入了深深的沉思。然后他站起来，认真地看着窗外。然后又回到安东尼娜和他们所住的房间。最后，仿佛突然下定决心，他再次走近他的同伴，对她说道：

‘我应该回来是对的。我将遵照你的吩咐，出发前往营地（但要等到天亮），而你，安东尼娜，则留在安全的隐蔽处。没有人可以来这里打扰你。哥特人不会再重温他们已经剥夺的土地；拥有这处住宅的农夫被囚禁在这座被围困的城市里；远方的农民不敢离侵略军如此之近。而你所畏惧的戈伊斯文塔甚至不知道有这样一个庇护所的存在。在这里，虽然孤独，却是安全的；你可以在这里等待我的归来，接下来的每个夜晚都会给我离开营地的机会。如果这座城市正在遭受攻击，我会提前警告你。虽然孤独，但你不会被抛弃——我们不会分开。我会常常回来看你、听你说话、爱你！你在这里会比在你父亲的愤怒中失去的故乡更快乐，即使是在这个孤独的地方！

'哦！我会心甘情愿地留下来——我会高兴地等待你！女孩叫道，抬起她那双闪闪发亮的眼睛看着赫曼里克的脸。 “我再也不会对你说悲伤的话了；我永远不会再提醒你我所遭受的一切，以及我所失去的一切！当我第一次在你的帐篷里看到你时，你对我是多么仁慈——你在这里对我是多么仁慈啊！当我看到你的身材、力量和重型武器，并知道你很高兴和我在一起时，我感到很自豪；你会帮助我的父亲；你将从你闪闪发光的营地回到这个农舍，我在那里等你！我已经忘记了发生在我身上的一切不幸；我已经比以前的生活更加快乐了！看吧，我不再悲伤哭泣了！如果我的脸颊上还有泪水的话，那是每个人都欢迎的喜悦的泪水——值得歌唱和喜乐的泪水！”

她突然停了下来，仿佛言语无法表达她新的喜悦。刚才压抑在她身上的所有阴郁情绪，现在都完全消失了。年轻、新鲜的心，仍然胜过绝望和痛苦，再次快乐地沐浴在其固有的欢乐气氛中，就像一只鸟儿沐浴在早晨和春天的阳光下。

然后，过了一段时间，他们又恢复了往日的平静，剩下的夜晚的安静时光是多么轻柔地、轻快地流向这孤独房子里的两个守望者！这位高兴的女孩多么高兴地向其他国家的居民和有着不同于她自己的印象的孩子透露了她隐藏的想法，并倾诉了她天真的忏悔！她心中所引起的种种思考，是由她秘密研究的自然物体、由她圣经传说中的强大意象、由她在父亲身边学习和思考的圣徒异象和殉道者苦难的阴暗历史所引起的。 ，现在被从她记忆中的宝藏中提取出来，送到哥特人的耳朵里。当孩子带着第一个玩具的故事飞向护士时；当女孩向姐姐诉说她的初恋时；当诗人带着他的第一部作品的计划匆匆去找朋友时；安东尼娜也是如此，通过她第一次外在的才能和第一次承认她从内心解放出来的情感来寻求赫尔曼里克的注意。

哥特人听她说话的时间越长，她话语的魅力就变得越完美，她的声音半是在诗歌中挣扎，她的声音半是在音乐中滑行。当她低沉、平静、变化多端的音调顺利地传入他的耳中时，他的思绪突然直观地回到了她之前表达的对她丢失的琵琶的回忆，激发他以新的兴趣和活力向她询问她是如何获得这把琴的。她已经向他保证她拥有歌曲知识。

“我学过许多诗人的许多颂歌，”她说，很快又困惑地避免提及维特拉尼奥，这是对赫尔曼里克问题的直接回答，“但我记得没有一个完整，除了那些主题是精神和其他世界，以及我们想到但看不到的无形之美。在我所知道的少数几个中，有一个是我第一次学到并且最喜欢的。我会唱这首歌，这样你就可以放心，我不会在我承诺的艺术上辜负你。

她犹豫了片刻。她在父亲的花园里唱完最后一个音符后，对所发生的事情的悲伤回忆在她心中涌动，让她说不出话来。然而，不久之后，在短暂的沉默之后，她恢复了平静，开始用低沉而颤抖的音调唱歌，这与她所选择的歌词特征和旋律曲调非常协调。

眼泪的使命

I.

天空是它的诞生地——泪水就是孩子
黑暗少女的悲伤，被年轻的欢乐所迷惑；
它在抽搐中诞生；他是在苦难中长大的；
当世界在下面徘徊时，它还很年轻。

二。

没有天使般明亮的守护者注视着它的诞生，
在此之前，它还被迫在地球上漫游；
没有欢乐的精神抚摸它柔软的形状；
叹息声围着它的摇篮哀悼，让它安静地休息。

第三。

尽管乔伊可能会努力用亲吻和诡计，
为了将它吸引到他的微笑之家：
从白天起，他住在里面就感到恐惧，
在夜晚的气候中与悲伤依偎在一起。

四。

当它来到地球时，就是选择职业，
The brightest and best that is left to a TEAR;
To hallow delight, and bestow the relief
Denied by despair to the fulness 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!

六。

Years on years have worn onward, as—watch’d from above—
Speeds that meek spirit yet on its labour 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 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 expression now glowed with a southern warmth; his words assumed a Roman fervour. 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!

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 round 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 spectre 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 flagstones 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 favourite birds of gaudy plumage and melodious note, and followed by children and young girls vainly and piteously entreating that their favourites 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 favourites 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 neighbouring 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 harmonics, 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 dishevelled 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 unauthorised 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 succouring, 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 his 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 canonised 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 neighbouring 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 out-house, the slave deserts his place by the smouldering 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 grey 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 favourite 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 vigour, 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 worshipped 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 carcase of a dog.

‘I lament to confess it, O 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 burden 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 horse-flesh, 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 sepulchre,’ 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 theatres 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 shambles! 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 labours 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 towards him with affrighted looks and undissembled tears. Carrio stared in vacant astonishment on his master’s disordered countenance; and, forgetting his bundle of dogskins, 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 colourless 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 sepulchres 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!’

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 towards 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 towards the city, paced slowly backwards and forwards 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, enclosed on all sides by the firm, ungraduated, irregular edges of the masses of gloomy vapour 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 the 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 fulfilment in Rome had forced the external appearances of the night into harmony with its own woe-boding 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 chequered 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 practised 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 afterwards, 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 ardour 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 towards 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 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 wafting 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 towards 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 it 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 with coagulated blood, and hung paralysed at his 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 shrivelled 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 of 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 the ramparts?’ he demanded, and an expression of ungovernable apprehension shot from his eyes as he spoke.

‘I saw the appearance of a man in the gleam 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 towards 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 fulfilment 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 raindrops 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 centre 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 Goth 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 couching 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 despatch 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, shrivelled, 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 characterised 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 labouring 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 our 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 armour 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 backwards and forwards 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 armour 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 watchfires 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. Citizen 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 honour; 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 shuddering ran through the Pagan’s frame, but he neither wept nor spoke. The unavailing defence 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 labour in the darkness, all the miseries of his second night’s torture under the fallen brickwork, all the woe, 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 hindrances in the long-laboured 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, authorising 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 he strayed, into the streets of the desolate and dispeopled suburbs.

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 unwillingly 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 recognises 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 farm-house 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 neighbourhood 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 onwards for the gentle usurper of the abandoned farm-house. 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 tress, 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 farm-house, 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 tranquility and love—did he seek, night after night, Antonina’s presence. His passion, though it denied him to his warrior duties, wrought not 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 the pursuit of which she had first incurred it. Slowly and doubtfully her vigour 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 farm-house, 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 past, 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 and the increasing loudness of the thunder, to the shrill cries of the distant night-birds hurrying to shelter, emotions of mournfulness and awe possessed themselves of his heart. He now wondered that any events, however startling, however appalling, should have had 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 despatched, would have reached him ere this; unable any longer to combat his anxiety for the safety of Antonina; determined to risk the worst possibilities rather than be absent at such a time of tempest and peril from the farm-house, he made a last visit to the stations of the watchful sentinels, and quitted the camp for the night.

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 neighbours, 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 at 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 favoured 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 woman who succoured 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 whereabouts 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 farm-house 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 farm-house 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 farm-house; 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 dishonoured by a defeat; remembering that the fire of the old ferocity of such ancestors as these still burnt at her heart; remembering all that she had hoped from Hermanric, and had plotted against Antonina; 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 favourite 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 clenched 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 dishonour 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 recognised 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 new-comer 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 and 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 favoured warrior for many nights journeying towards 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 honoured, 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 towards the door; ‘what said the king if he should resist us?’

‘Slay him with your own hands.’

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 farm-house 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 smouldering wood fire. 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 expressions 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 woman-like during her sojourn at the farm-house. 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 colour, 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 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 succoured 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 thus oppresses you,’ said she; ‘but think, as I do, of the 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 colour 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 occupation 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 return 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 farm-house. Then tracing further backwards 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 for ever 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 farm-house. Both the girl’s hands were clasped over Hermanric’s shoulder, and her head rested on them, turned from the door towards 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 the 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 open again—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 dishevelled 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 uttered 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 farm-house nothing was altered to the eye, and little to the ear. Fatal security! The last few minutes had darkly determined their future destinies—in the loved and cherished retreat they were now no longer alone.

They heard no stealthy footsteps pacing round their dwelling, they saw no fierce eyes peering into the interior of the farm-house 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, and 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 farm-house gate, without straying, without hesitating. Regardless of the darkness and the storm, she had prowled about the house, had 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 Antonina; 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 was 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 clenched hand convulsively over her bosom, and leant 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 spent against a stranger and an enemy.

After the 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 the 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 gaily; 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, but 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, or 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 battle-fields 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 learnt 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 for ever—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 towards 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 farm-house 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 hung for a rebel? Will you live to implore the mercy of your enemies, or, dishonoured and defenceless, will you endeavour to escape? You are of the blood of my family, but again I say it to you—die!’

His pale lips trembled; he looked round 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 for ever 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 fight for ever,
Number’d 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 fulfil!”‘

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 honour, 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!’

她继续——

“SIONA, mourn not!—where I go
The warriors feel nor pain nor woe;
They raise aloft the gleaming steel,
Their wounds, though 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 battle-field 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 the 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 inwards, 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 armour 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 thraldom. An expression of triumph and defiance shone over his steady features when he heard the summons of the Hun. For a moment he stooped towards 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 fibres 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 defenceless 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 valour of his disposition, all the gentleness of his heart, all the vigour 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 recognised 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 farm-house 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 battle-field, or the desolate sepulchres of a northern land!

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, dishonoured, 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 for ever!

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 farm-house 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 in the farm-house 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 dare not. At length the temptation of the ruddy firelight 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 dishevelled 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 fibre 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 towards 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 tranquillised 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 for ever lost. Nothing but the remembrance aroused by his first sight of the fragment of the lute lived within 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 ears, 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 farthermost 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 recognise him. Fear and astonishment mingled in her expression with grief and despair as she sunk at his feet, moaning in tones of piercing entreaty—

‘O 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—for ever 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 wall! 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, awe-struck voice, suddenly checking himself, as he was about to step forward. ‘Why did I tear down the strong brick-work 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 endeavoured 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 brick-work!’

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 exclamation, 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 towards 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.

Slowly and mournfully the sentinel at the rifted wall raised his eyes towards 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 grey daybreak from his solitary post.

While he was thus occupied, the gloomy silence of the scene was suddenly broken by the sound of falling brick-work at the inner base of the wall, followed by faint entreaties for mercy and deliverance, which rose on his ear, strangely mingled with disjointed expression 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 a heavy stupor of starvation—selfish, reckless, brutalised. No disasters could depress, no atrocities rouse him. Famine had torn asunder every social tie, had withered every human sympathy among his besieged fellow-citizens, and he was famishing like them.

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 brick-work, 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 hindrance, 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 desolate 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 farm-house 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 father and farther 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 backwards and forwards incessantly, their hollow eyes fixed on vacancy, their wan hands pressed over their mouths; each separate, distrustful, and silent; fierce as imprisoned madmen; restless as spectres 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 heads 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 unsuccoured and unmourned.

In other parts of the place, at the open gates of the theatres and hippodromes, in the unguarded porticoes of the palaces and the baths lay the discoloured 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 jewelled cornices—by obscene picture and statues—by brilliantly framed, gaudily tinted manuscripts of licentious songs, still hanging at their accustomed places on the lofty marble walls. Farther 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 towards 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 people 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, enclosed 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 towards the hard ground, as towards 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 in 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 farther 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 flagstones 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 in situation, far more imposing in structure, than this. It was a building of no remarkable extent 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 for ever; 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 towards the wrathful heaven in frantic triumph, then staggering forwards, 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 now vanished as rapidly as they had arisen, and 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 quickly 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 behold.

After an interval his mood changed. He rose to his feet, his trembling limbs strengthened with a youthful vigour 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.

Woeful thoughts and recollections now moved within her in bewildering confusion. All that she had suffered since Ulpius had dragged her from the farm-house 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 for ever—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 farm-house, 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 rigour 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 preserved 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 Martius. Again she passed the public fountains, still unnaturally devoted to serve as beds for the dying and as sepulchres 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 endeavouring 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 at 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!

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 labour, 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 would 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 only 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, who 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 vigour; they toiled to preserve his life as anxiously as they had laboured 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 defenceless 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 relics of coarse food stood near his hand, but he had no vigilance to discern them. His open eyes looked steadfastly upward, and yet he 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 grey, tranquil light brightened slowly at one spot, out of which he beheld advancing towards 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 round 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 fore-runner of its own fulfilment; 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 fulness of his gratitude and delight.

For some moments Antonina, calming with the resolute heroism of affection her own thronging emotions of awe and affright, endeavoured 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 round 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 woeful remembrances had power to embitter in its bright, sudden birth. She knelt down by the side of the couch, almost crushed 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 vigour 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 towards 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 towards 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 endeavoured 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 an angel’s 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 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 task-books; 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 towards him. His features partially saddened while he gazed, and taking her long hair, still wet and dishevelled 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 endeavouring 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. O father! father! he loved me; he would have reverenced and protected you!’

‘May the merciful God receive him among the blessed angels, and honour 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 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 fulness 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 for ever—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!’ endeavoured 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 forest 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 endeavoured 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 sank 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 clearly 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 traveller, 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. O 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 tomorrow 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, no 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; but now his daughter approached his side, and drawing him gently towards his couch, said in tender and solemn accents: ‘Remember, father, that God sent the ravens to feed Elijah, and replenished 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 despairing, 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! O 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 endeavoured 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 succour 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 backwards and forwards 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 byways 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 learnt 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 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 travelled 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 awakened to a sense of their own aberration. His vague revelations of his past life (which the reader will recognise as resembling his communications on the same subject to the fugitive land-owner, 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 childhood 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 woeful anticipations occupied Antonina’s mind; when, just as her weary head was drooping towards 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 in 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 for ever 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 childlike 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 briars 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 poor 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 cheeks 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 his 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 clamour 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 her 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 in her saintly vigil by the advent of Death.

Time flowed on—the monotonous hours of the day waned again towards 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 the 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 vapours 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!

Of all prophecies, none are, perhaps, so frequently erroneous as those on which we are most apt to venture in endeavouring 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 favourite 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 observed 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 honour of the Roman name, which they had basely dishonoured 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 orgie 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 revellers 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 organisation 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 towards 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 fallen 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 farther 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 over-populated 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 hours 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 was 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 gaily-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 splendour disclosed.

Upwards 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 shrivelled 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 backwards and forwards 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 defences 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 centre 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 orgie 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 labours 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-coloured 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 backwards and forwards 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 of the 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, burnt ten large lamps, corresponding to the number of guests assembled, as the only procurable representatives of the hundreds of revellers who had feasted at Vetranio’s expense during the brilliant nights that were now passed for ever. 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 burnt 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 colours, 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 towards its ceiling.

On every part of the tables not occupied by the vases of wine were laid gold and jewelled 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 my be termed a ‘mash’ of boiled bran and salted horseflesh. Any repulsive odour 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 vapours 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 hump-backed; his gaunt, bony features were repulsively disproportioned 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 favour 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 orgie, little was audible beyond the clash of the wine-cups, the low occasional whispering of the revellers, 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 over 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 colours 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 has 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 VETRANIO, 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 circumstances,
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 die! 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 towards 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! O 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 by 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?

‘Farther onward at the table, drinking largely while I speak, I behold, O 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 advantage 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 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 four 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, his companions, inflamed with the wine they had already drunk, arose cup in hand, and turned towards him. Their voices, discordantly mingled, pronounced the oath together; then, as they resumed their former positions, their eyes all turned towards 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 towards 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 colourless 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,’ it cried, ‘of perfumes wafted from the palace!—foul vapours 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 shrivelled; 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 Timotheus 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, Glyco! 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 god-like 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 towards 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 towards them, and the arms (artificially supported) stretched out as if in denunciation over the banqueting-table. The lamp of yellow glass, which burnt high above the body, threw over it a lurid and flickering light; the eyes were open, the jaw had fallen, the long grey 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 revellers, as they waved their jewelled 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 triumphing 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 towards 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 towards them his clenched 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 him: ‘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 round his eyes, and crouched down by the open window. Beneath him rose the evil and ominous voices from the street; around him spread the pitiless array of his masters; before him appeared the denouncing vision of the corpse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 lustre; 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.

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 endeavoured 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 realisation 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 ambassadors 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 ambassadors 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 entrance 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 rumoured 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 ambassadors 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 ambassadors, 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 ambassadors 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 Pompeianus 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 demeanour 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 ambassadors, 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 ambassadors, 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, O King, will you leave us?” asked our amazed ambassadors. “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 ambassadors; 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, O 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 ambassadors, 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 worshipped—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. An 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 towards 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 authorising a public restoration of Paganism; the citizens, hopeless of succour, 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 laboured resolutely, though in vain, through a long existence of suffering, degradation, and crime, had gratuitously presented itself more tempting and more favourable than even he 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 in moody silence. Each morning the weary guards looked forth from the ramparts, with the fruitless hope of discerning the long-promised legions from 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 spectres 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 succour 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 tranquility 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 apprehension 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 tranquilising 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 bygone 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 had 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 toil that is to come in the hard labour of life.

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 towards 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, ere it was too late. Startled by his words and actions, she vainly endeavoured, 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 ambassadors and their train. With one accord the crowd instantly endeavoured to force their way out after them in a mass; but they now moved in a narrow space, and were opposed by a large reinforcement 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 numbers succeeded in following the ambassadors; 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.

While the second and last embassy from the Senate proceeds towards 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 towards a scene from which it has been long removed. Let us now revisit the farm-house in the suburbs, and look once more on the quiet garden and on Hermanric’s grave.

The tranquility 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 farm-house garden, we look forth upon the prospect within.

There, following the small circular footpath 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 towards 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 high-road, slowly proceeds towards 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 recognisable again. Her formerly powerful and upright frame is bent and lean; her hair waves in wild, white locks about her shrivelled 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 farm-house 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 wither 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 farm-house, 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 favoured 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 his disregard of the enmities of his nation and the wrongs of his kindred, she thought of him only as of one more victim whose dishonour 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 farm-house, and, drawing the knife from its place of concealment in her garments, would pass its point slowly backwards and forwards 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 sword-points of the Huns. Sometimes, when darkness had gathered over the earth, she would stand—a boding and menacing apparition—upon the grave itself, and chaunt, 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 by 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 farm-house 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 farm-house 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 now useless bulwarks of the fallen city she wanders, as she has often wandered before, watching anxiously 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 towards 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 towards 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 towards Rome: she was realising 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. Where 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 colour 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 towards 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 defenceless, 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 nights, a secret minister of death! I will watch for thy young and thy weak once 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 in 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 towards 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 bloodthirsty 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 to see that she was unobserved, entered on 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 colour 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 towards Rome, until she reached a ruined building half-way between the city and the camp. In this concealment she clothed herself in her disguise, drawing the mantle closely round her head and face; 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 high-road 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 ambassadors 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 lead them confidently to battle, though the bodies of their countrymen lie 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 scornful 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! here is one of them!’ he exclaimed, advancing towards 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 towards 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 ambassadors 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 a future dominion amid those unrivalled 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 shrinking ambassadors—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 towards the ambassadors 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 bearskins and our heavy armour, 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 ambassadors 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 close, 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 ambassadors 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 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 ambassadors, 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 were 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 ambassadors was still engrossed by their forebodings of failure in collecting the ransom; the eyes of the people were fixed only on the Pincian Gate; their ears were open to no sounds but their own ejaculations of delight. Not one disguised stranger only, but many, might now have joined them in their tumultuous progress, alike unquestioned and unobserved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Numerian, moving slowly with his daughter through the crowd, felt her hand tighten round his, and saw her features stiffen into sudden rigidity; but the change was only for an instant. Ere he could speak, she caught him by the arm, and drew him forward with convulsive energy. Then, in accents hardly articulate, low, breathless, unlike her wonted voice, he heard 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 produced visions of danger, enemies, and death, so palpable as to make the persons beholding them implore assistance against the hideous creation of their own delirium. Accordingly, most of those to whom the entreaties of Numerian were addressed passed without noticing them. Some few carelessly bid him remember that there were no enemies now; that the days of peace were approaching; and that a meal of good food, which he might soon expect to enjoy, was the only help for a famished man. No one, in that period of horror and suffering, which was now drawing to a close, saw anything extraordinary in the confusion of the father and the terror of the child. So they pursued their feeble flight unprotected, and the footsteps of Goisvintha followed them as they went.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 towards 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 labour 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 favoured 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 worshippers; 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 awe-struck 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 Antonina; 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 she imagined 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 towards the river side of the building.

A low cry of horror burst from her lips as she sank back towards 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 travelled 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 towards the doorway.

The sun still shone gaily 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 towards the street, without uttering a word or moving a muscle. The raving fit was nearly 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 downwards 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 sunlight 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 downwards almost perpendicularly to some lower region which it was impossible to see, for no light shot upwards 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 downwards 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 colours 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 upwards towards 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 backwards, 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 sepulchres 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 madman 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 of 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 cautious step and lowering brow, began to retire again towards 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 for both!

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 worshipped 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 splendour 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 afterwards—though occasionally renewed for particular purposes under some subsequent reigns—wholly abandoned as part of the ceremonies of Paganism during the later periods of the empire.

The sacrifices perpetrated in private were much longer practised. 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 devourer 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 ensure that it should transfix in a vital part the person who descended. The corpse, then dropping by its own weight off the sword, fell through a tunnelled 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 realise 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 of 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 farther on, the exterior was dismantled, in order that its pillars might furnish materials for a church. The vault in the wall was explored by a monk who had been present at the destruction of other Pagan temples, and who volunteered to discover its contents. With a torch in one hand, and an iron bar in the other, he descended into the cavity, sounding the walls and the steps before him as he proceeded. For the first and the last time the sword protruded harmless from the monster’s throat when the monk pressed the fatal stair, before stepping on it, with his iron bar. The same day the machine was destroyed and cast into the Tiber, where its victims had been thrown before it in former years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thick as was the darkness in which the lulling and involuntary memories of the past had enveloped the perceptions of Ulpius, the father’s piercing cry of anguish seemed to have penetrated it with a sudden ray of light. The madman’s half-closed eyes opened instantly and fixed, dreamily at first, on the altar of idols. He waved his hands to and fro before him, as if 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 towards ferocity and crime. When he spoke again, his speech was still inspired by the visions of his early life—but now of his early life in the temple at Alexandria. His expressions were more abrupt, more disjointed than before; yet they continued to display the same evidence of the mysterious, instinctive vividness of recollection, which was the result of the sudden change in the nature of his insanity. His language wandered (still as if the words came from him undesignedly and unconsciously) over the events of his boyish introduction to the service of the gods, and, though confusing them in order, still preserved them in substance, as they have been already related in the history of his ‘apprenticeship to the temple’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 defenceless 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 grey 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 spectre driven on a whirlwind would not have been more terrible to their eyes.

But the priest 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 with 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 who were 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 these, 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 lead!

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 the 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 reinforcement 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 clamour 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 head! Anathema! Maranatha! 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 taskmaster 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 leapt 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 burnt; 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 vapour rose slowly to the stone roof 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 of providing means for entering the temple had not been forgotten while the flames were raging. Proper implements for forcing open the gates were now 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 burnt, the night-wind blew away before it the ashes of Ulpius with the ashes of the deities that Ulpius had served!

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 waggons on the highroads, laden with provisions, and proceeding towards 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 action 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 low, 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, and 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 demeanour 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 orgie at his palace had altered him for the rest of his life. He looked what he was, a man changed for ever 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 paralysing 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 centre of the neck, she must have died when she was struck. But it passed outwards and backwards; the large vessels escaped, and 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, 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 you 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 defenceless 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 rumour 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 for ever 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! Days passed on again; I stood looking out upon the street, and thought of my companions whom 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 for ever; 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 towards 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 backwards and forwards. 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 noises 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 clumbers, his face remained ever turned in the same direction, towards the head of the couch, as if drawn thither by some irresistible attraction, by some powerful ascendancy, felt even amid the deepest repose of sensation, the heaviest fatigue of the overlaboured mind, and 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 rumours 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 round 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 them, 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.

‘O 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 the 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 endeavoured to bend her head towards 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 farm-house 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 his 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 axe 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 breezed 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 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 song, 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, setting 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 towards him entreatingly; his grey 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!’

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 burnt, 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 towards 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 backwards and forwards 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 particularise on his own account, as well as on account of the peculiarity of his accidental situation; for he was the favoured 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 organisation 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 orgie; 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 ensured 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 counselled. It was the latter part of the letter that Carrio perused and re-perused, and then meditated over with unwonted attention and labour 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 favour 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 farm-house 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 had 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 overlooking the few slaves whom I leave at the palace in my absence, and the husbandman and his labourers 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 freedman to return to Rome on a certain day, and to go to the farm-house 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 circumstances of a farm having been purchased to flatter what was doubtless some accidental caprice on the part of the girl, would have little perplexed 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 farm-house, not only punctually, but before the appointed time, and calling the honest husbandman and the labourers 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 he 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 neighbourhood of the farm-house, to await the hour of his patron’s arrival, and to perplex himself afresh by a re-perusal 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, he proceeded through the pine-grove on his way back. We will follow him.

On leaving the grove, a footpath conducted over some fields to the farm-house. Arrived here, Carrio hesitated for a moment; then moved slowly onward to await his master’s approach in the lane that led to the highroad. 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 labourers in the neighbouring 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 defence 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 now looked on the farm-house 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 guardian 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 farther 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 Antonina; 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 farm-house 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 track reposes on a tranquil field; and here let us cease to pursue it!

So the traveller 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.