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Antonina; Or, The Fall of Rome

by Wilkie Collins · English · Gutenberg #3606 · 993,880 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Antonina; Or, The Fall of Rome

Author: Wilkie Collins


        
Release date: January 1, 2003 [eBook #3606]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3606

Credits: Produced by Bronwyn Margaret Evans.  HTML version by Al Haines.


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Produced by Bronwyn Margaret Evans.  HTML version by Al Haines.









ANTONINA

OR, THE FALL OF ROME


by

WILKIE COLLINS




PREFACE

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

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

On this plan the recent work has been produced.


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



CONTENTS.


CHAPTER 1.  GOISVINTHA.

CHAPTER 2.  THE COURT.

CHAPTER 3.  ROME.

CHAPTER 4.  THE CHURCH.

CHAPTER 5.  ANTONINA.

CHAPTER 6.  AN APPRENTICESHIP TO THE TEMPLE.

CHAPTER 7.  THE BED-CHAMBER.

CHAPTER 8.  THE GOTHS.

CHAPTER 9.  THE TWO INTERVIEWS.

CHAPTER 10.  THE RIFT IN THE WALL.

CHAPTER 11.  GOISVINTHA'S RETURN.

CHAPTER 12.  THE PASSAGE OF THE WALL.

CHAPTER 13.  THE HOUSE IN THE SUBURBS.

CHAPTER 14.  THE FAMINE.

CHAPTER 15.  THE CITY AND THE GODS.

CHAPTER 16.  LOVE MEETINGS.

CHAPTER 17.  THE HUNS.

CHAPTER 18.  THE FARM-HOUSE.

CHAPTER 19.  THE GUARDIAN RESTORED.

CHAPTER 20.  THE BREACH REPASSED.

CHAPTER 21.  FATHER AND CHILD.

CHAPTER 22.  THE BANQUET OF FAMINE.

CHAPTER 23.  THE LAST EFFORTS OF THE BESIEGED.

CHAPTER 24.  THE GRAVE AND THE CAMP.

CHAPTER 25.  THE TEMPLE AND THE CHURCH.

CHAPTER 26.  RETRIBUTION.

CHAPTER 27.  THE VIGIL OF HOPE.

THE CONCLUSION.  'UBI THESAURUS IBI COR.'



CHAPTER 1.

GOISVINTHA.

The mountains forming the range of Alps which border on the
north-eastern confines of Italy, were, in the autumn of the year 408,
already furrowed in numerous directions by the tracks of the invading
forces of those northern nations generally comprised under the
appellation of Goths.

In some places these tracks were denoted on either side by fallen
trees, and occasionally assumed, when half obliterated by the ravages
of storms, the appearance of desolate and irregular marshes.  In other
places they were less palpable.  Here, the temporary path was entirely
hidden by the incursions of a swollen torrent; there, it was faintly
perceptible in occasional patches of soft ground, or partly traceable
by fragments of abandoned armour, skeletons of horses and men, and
remnants of the rude bridges which had once served for passage across a
river or transit over a precipice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The child seemed scarcely four years of age, and showed on his pale,
thin face all the peculiarities of his Gothic origin.  His features
seemed to have been once beautiful, both in expression and form; but a
deep wound, extending the whole length of his cheek, had now deformed
him for ever.  He shivered and trembled in his sleep, and every now and
then mechanically stretched forth his little arms towards the dead cold
branches that were scattered before him.

Suddenly a large stone became detached from the rock in a distant part
of the cavern, and fell noisily to the ground.  At this sound he woke
with a scream--raised himself--endeavoured to advance towards the
woman, and staggered backward against the side of the cave.  A second
wound in the leg had wreaked that destruction on his vigour which the
first had effected on his beauty.  He was a cripple.

At the instant of his awakening the woman had started up.  She now
raised him from the ground, and taking some herbs from her bosom,
applied them to his wounded cheek.  By this action her dress became
discomposed:  it was stiff at the top with coagulated blood, which had
evidently flowed from a cut in her neck.

All her attempts to compose the child were in vain; he moaned and wept
piteously, muttering at intervals his disjointed exclamations of
impatience at the coldness of the place and the agony of his recent
wounds.  Speechless and tearless the wretched woman looked vacantly
down on his face.  There was little difficulty in discerning from that
fixed, distracted gaze the nature of the tie that bound the mourning
woman to the suffering boy.  The expression of rigid and awful despair
that lowered in her fixed, gloomy eyes, the livid paleness that
discoloured her compressed lips, the spasms that shook her firm,
commanding form, mutely expressing in the divine eloquence of human
emotion that between the solitary pair there existed the most intimate
of earth's relationships--the connection of mother and child.

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

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

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


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

As the hour wore on, it came nearer and nearer, tossed about by the
sportive echoes, and now clearly betraying that its origin was, as she
had at first divined, the note of the Gothic trumpet. Soon the distant
music ceased, and was succeeded by another sound, low and rumbling, as
of an earthquake afar off or a rising thunderstorm, and changing, ere
long, to a harsh confused noise, like the rustling of a mighty wind
through whole forests of brushwood.

At this instant the woman lost all command over herself; her former
patience and caution deserted her; reckless of danger, she placed the
child upon the ledge on which she had been standing; and, though
trembling in every limb, succeeded in mounting so much higher on the
crag as to gain a fissure near the top of the rock, which commanded an
uninterrupted view of the vast tracts of uneven ground leading in an
easterly direction to the next range of precipices and ravines.

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

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

Placed in a situation of the extremest peril, her strength was her only
preservative against the danger of slipping from her high and narrow
elevation.  Hitherto the moral excitement of expectation had given her
the physical power necessary to maintain her position; but just as the
leaders of the guard arrived at the cavern, her over-wrought energies
suddenly deserted her; her hands relaxed their grasp; she tottered, and
would have sunk backwards to instant destruction, had not the skins
wrapped about her bosom and waist become entangled with a point of one
of the jagged rocks immediately around her.  Fortunately--for she could
utter no cry--the troops halted at this instant to enable their horses
to gain breath.  Two among them at once perceived her position and
detected her nation.  They mounted the rocks; and, while one possessed
himself of the child, the other succeeded in rescuing the mother and
bearing her safely to the ground.

The snorting of horses, the clashing of weapons, the confusion of loud,
rough voices, which now startled the native silence of the solitary
lake, and which would have bewildered and overwhelmed most persons in
the woman's exhausted condition, seemed, on the contrary, to reassure
her feelings and reanimate her powers.  She disengaged herself from her
preserver's support, and taking her child in her arms, advanced towards
a man of gigantic stature, whose rich armour sufficiently announced
that his position in the army was one of command.

'I am Goisvintha,' said she, in a firm, calm voice--'sister to
Hermanric.  I have escaped from the massacre of the hostages of
Aquileia with one child.  Is my brother with the army of the king?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

No brightness gleamed from their armour; no banners waved over their
heads; no music sounded among their ranks.  Backed by the dreary woods,
which still disgorged unceasing additions to the warlike multitude
already encamped; surrounded by the desolate crags which showed dim,
wild, and majestic through the darkness of the mist; covered with the
dusky clouds which hovered motionless over the barren mountain tops,
and poured their stormy waters on the uncultivated plains--all that the
appearance of the Goths had of solemnity in itself was in awful harmony
with the cold and mournful aspect that the face of Nature had assumed.
Silent--menacing--dark,--the army looked the fit embodiment of its
leader's tremendous purpose--the subjugation of Rome.

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'The truce was made.  Alaric departed with the remnant of his army, and
encamped at AEmona, on the confines of that land which he had already
invaded, and which he is now prepared to conquer.  Between our king and
Stilicho, the general of the Romans, passed many messages, for the
leaders disputed on the terms of the peace that should be finally
ordained. Meanwhile, as an earnest of the Gothic faith, bands of our
warriors, and among them Priulf, were despatched into Italy to be
allies once more of the legions of Rome, and with them they took their
wives and their children, to be detained as hostages in the cities
throughout the land.

'I and my children were conducted to Aquileia.  In a dwelling within
the city we were lodged with our possessions.  It was night when I took
leave of Priulf, my husband, at the gates.  I watched him as he
departed with the army, and, when the darkness hid him from my eyes, I
re-entered the town; from which I am the only woman of our nation who
has escaped alive.'

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

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


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

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

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

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


'I passed through the forsaken streets.  Sometimes I stumbled against
the body of a child--sometimes the moonlight showed me the death-pale
face of some woman of my nation whom I had loved, stretched upward to
the sky; but I still advanced until I gained the wall of the town, and
heard on the other side the waters of the river running onward to the
Port of Aquileia and the sea.

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

She ceased.  Throughout the latter portion of her narrative her
demeanour had been calm and sad; and as she dwelt, with the painful
industry of grief, over each minute circumstance connected with the
bereavements she had sustained, her voice softened to those accents of
quiet mournfulness, which make impressive the most simple words, and
render musical the most unsteady tones.  It seemed as if those tenderer
and kinder emotions, which the attractions of her offspring had once
generated in her character, had at the bidding of memory become
revivified in her manner while she lingered over the recital of their
deaths.  For a brief space of time she looked fixedly and anxiously
upon the countenance of Hermanric, which was half averted from her, and
expressed a fierce and revengeful gloom that sat unnaturally on it
noble lineaments.  Then turning from him, she buried her face in her
hands, and made no effort more to attract him to attention or incite
him to reply.

This solemn silence kept by the bereaved woman and the brooding man had
lasted but a few minutes, when a harsh, trembling voice was heard from
the top of the waggon, calling at intervals, 'Hermanric!  Hermanric!'

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

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


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

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

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

When the young warrior looked on the child, he saw that the hag had
spoken truth, and that the victim had died from no fault of hers.  Pale
and serene, the countenance of the boy showed how tranquil had been his
death.  The dressings had been skilfully composed and carefully applied
to his wounds, but suffering and privation had annihilated the
feebleness of human resistance in their march toward the last dread
goal, and the treachery of Imperial Rome had once more triumphed as was
its wont, and triumphed over a child!

As Hermanric descended with the corpse Goisvintha was the first object
that met his eyes when he alighted on the ground.  The mother received
from him the lifeless burden without an exclamation or a tear.  That
emanation from her former and kinder self which had been produced by
the closing recital of her sufferings was henceforth, at the signal of
her last child's death, extinguished in her for ever!

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

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

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

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

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


'Up! up!' cried Hermanric, seizing Goisvintha by the arm, and pointing
to the waggon which had already begun to move; 'make ready for the
journey!  I will charge myself with the burial of the child.  Yet a few
days and our encampment may be before Aquileia.  Be patient, and I will
avenge thee in the palaces of Rome!'

The mighty mass moved.  The multitude stretched forth over the barren
ground; and even now the warriors in front of the army might be seen by
those in the rear mounting the last range of passes that lay between
the plains of Italy and the Goths.



CHAPTER 2.

THE COURT.

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

'Hush!  You should not swear!'

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

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

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

'No, no!  It was about that man who is incessantly writing, and will
look at nobody.  He is almost as provoking as Camilla herself!'

'Don't frown so!  That man, as you call him, is the senator Vetranio.'

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

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

'He is handsome.'

'Handsome! he is beautiful!  Not a woman in Italy but is languishing
for him!'

'I have heard that he is clever.'

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

'Is he rich?'

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

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

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

'I ask you again--Is Vetranio rich?'


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

'I should like to know him.'

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

'But why is he here?'

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

'Hush! you may be overheard!'

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

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

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

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

He enjoyed, however, one great superiority over his modern successors:
in his day flattery was a profession--in ours it has sunk to a pursuit.

'I shall leave Ravenna this evening,' said Vetranio.

The parasite made three low bows and smiled ecstatically.

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

'If the Goths supply you with a model for anything,' said a courtier
who had joined the group while Vetranio was speaking, 'it will be with
a representation of the burning of your palace at Rome, which they will
enable you to paint from the inexhaustible reservoir of your own
wounds.'

The individual who uttered this last observation was remarkable among
the brilliant circle around him by his excessive ugliness.  Urged by
his personal disadvantages, and the loss of all his property at the
gaming-table, he had latterly personated a character, the
accomplishments attached to which rescued him, by their disagreeable
originality in that frivolous age, from oblivion or contempt.  He was a
Cynic philosopher.

His remark, however, produced no other effect on his hearers' serenity
than to excite their merriment.  Vetranio laughed, Camilla laughed,
Julia laughed.  The idea of a troop of barbarians ever being able to
burn a palace at Rome was too wildly ridiculous for any one's gravity;
and as the speech was repeated in other parts of the room, in spite of
their dulness and lassitude the whole Court laughed.

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Never was popularity more unalloyed than Vetranio's.  Gifted with a
disposition the pliability of which adapted itself to all emergencies,
his generosity disarmed enemies, while his affability made friends.
Munificent without assumption, successful without pride, he obliged
with grace and shone with safety.  People enjoyed his hospitality, for
they knew that it was disinterested; and admired his acquirements, for
they felt that they were unobtrusive.  Sometimes (as in his dialogue
with the Cynic) the whim of the moment, or the sting of a sarcasm, drew
from him a hint at his station, or a display of his eccentricities;
but, as he was always the first soon afterwards to lead the laugh at
his own outbreak, his credit as a noble suffered nothing by his
infirmity as a man.  Gaily and attractively he moved in all grades of
the society of his age, winning his social laurels in every rank,
without making a rival to dispute their possession, or an enemy to
detract from their value.


On quitting the Court waiting-room, Vetranio and Julia descended the
palace stairs and passed into the emperor's garden.  Used generally as
an evening lounge, this place was now untenanted, save by the few
attendants engaged in cultivating the flower-beds and watering the
smooth, shady lawns.  Entering one of the most retired of the numerous
summer-houses among the trees, Vetranio motioned his companion to take
a seat, and then abruptly addressed her in the following words:--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'You have aroused my curiosity.  I could listen to you for ever!'

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

'Departed for Ravenna!' cried Julia, laughing outright.  'Oh, what a
conclusion to the adventure! I confess it, Vetranio, such consequences
as these are beyond all imagination!'

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

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


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

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

      *      *      *      *      *

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

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

      *      *      *      *      *

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

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


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



CHAPTER 3.

ROME.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

The space they occupy is oblong in shape and of great extent in size.
Part of it is formed by a turf walk shaded with trees, part by the
paved approaches to the palace and the public baths which stand in its
immediate neighbourhood.  These two edifices are remarkable by their
magnificent outward adornments of statues, and the elegance and number
of the flights of steps by which they are respectively entered.  With
the inferior buildings, the market-places and the gardens attached to
them, they are sufficiently extensive to form the boundary of one side
of the immediate view.  The appearance of monotony which might at other
times be remarked in the vastness and regularity of their white fronts,
is at this moment agreeably broken by several gaily-coloured awnings
stretched over their doors and balconies.  The sun is now shining on
them with overpowering brightness; the metallic ornaments on their
windows glitter like gems of fire; even the trees which form their
groves partake of the universal flow of light, and fail, like the
objects around them, to offer to the weary eye either refreshment or
repose.

Towards the north, the Mausoleum of Augustus, towering proudly up into
the brilliant sky, at once attracts the attention.  From its position,
parts of this noble building are already in shade. Not a human being is
visible on any part of its mighty galleries--it stands solitary and
sublime, an impressive embodiment of the emotions which it was raised
to represent.

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


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

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

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

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

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

'The rotten-bodied knaves have the noses of dogs and the carcases of
goats.'

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

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


'Thou rag of a man,' roared a neighbour of the indignant butcher's,
'dost thou frown upon the guests of thy master, the very scrapings of
whose skin are worth more than thy whole carcase! It is easier to make
a drinking-vessel of the skull of a flea than to make an honest man of
such a villainous night-walker as thou art!'

'Health and prosperity to our noble entertainer!' shouted one section
of the grateful crowd as the last speaker paused for breath.

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

'Honour to the citizens of Rome!' roared a third party with modest
enthusiasm.

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

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

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

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

The loudest voice among the speakers at this particular moment
proceeded from a tall, thin, sinister-looking man, who was haranguing a
little group of listeners with great vehemence and fluency.

'I tell you, Socius,' said he, turning suddenly upon one of his
companions, 'that, unless new slave-laws are made, my calling is at an
end.  My patron's estate requires incessant supplies of these wretches.
I do my best to satisfy the demand, and the only result of my labour
is, that the miscreants either endanger my life, or fly with impunity
to join the gangs of robbers infesting our woods.'

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

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

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


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

'Are you at liberty to communicate it?'

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

'Your plan is ingenious; but I suspect your slaves (so insensible to
hardships are the brutal herd) will sleep as unconcernedly in their new
dormitories as in their old.'

'Sleep!  It will be a most original species of repose that they will
taste there!  The stench of the sulphur lake will breathe Sabian odours
for them over a couch of mud!  Their anointing oil will be the slime of
attendant reptiles!  Their liquid perfumes will be the stagnant oozings
from their chamber roof!  Their music will be the croaking of frogs and
the humming of gnats; and as for their adornments, why, they will be
decked forth with head-garlands of twining worms, and movable brooches
of cockchafers and toads!  Tell me now, most sagacious Socius, do you
still think that amidst such luxuries as these my slaves will sleep?'

'No; they will die.'

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

'Do you leave Rome soon?'

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

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

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


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

'Your sentiments on the evils of our condition are undoubtedly most
just,' observed a fat, pompous man, to whom the preceding remarks had
been addressed, 'but I cannot desire the reform you so ardently hope
for.  Think of the degradation of being conquered by barbarians!'

'I am the exile of my country's privileges.  What interest have I in
upholding her honour--if honour she really has!' replied the first
speaker.

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

'Has he committed, then, a fresh imprudence?'

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

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

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

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

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

The voices ceased.  Gordian, who still cherished a vague intention of
denouncing the fugitive landholder to the senatorial authorities,
employed the liberty afforded to his attention by the silence of the
priests in turning to look after his intended victim.  To his surprise
he saw that the man had left the auditors to whom he had before
addressed himself, and was engaged in earnest conversation in another
part of the portico, with an individual who seemed to have recently
joined him, and whose appearance was so remarkable that the bailiff had
moved a few steps forwards to gain a nearer view of him, when he was
once more arrested by the voices of the priests.

Irresolute for an instant to which party to devote his unscrupulous
attention, he returned mechanically to his old position.  Ere long,
however, his anxiety to hear the mysterious communications proceeding
between the landholder and his friend overbalanced his delight in
penetrating the theological secrets of the priests.  He turned once
more, but to his astonishment the objects of his curiosity had
disappeared.  He stepped to the outside of the portico and looked for
them in every direction, but they were nowhere to be seen.  Peevish and
disappointed, he returned as a last resource to the pillar where he had
left the priests, but the time consumed in his investigations after one
party had been fatal to his reunion with the other.  The churchmen were
gone.

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



CHAPTER 4.

THE CHURCH.

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

However dissatisfied the unsuccessful portion of the citizens might
feel at their exclusion from the church, they found a powerful
counter-attraction in the amusements going forward in the Place, the
occupants of which seemed thoroughly regardless of the bishop's
admonitions upon the sobriety of behaviour due to the solemnity of the
day.  As if in utter defiance of the decency and order recommended by
the clergy, popular exhibitions of all sorts were set up on the broad
flagstones of the great space before the church.  Street dancing-girls
exercised at every available spot those 'gliding gyrations' so
eloquently condemned by the worthy Ammianus Marcellinus of orderly and
historical memory. Booths crammed with relics of doubtful authenticity,
baskets filled with neat manuscript abstracts of furiously
controversial pamphlets, pagan images regenerated into portraits of
saints, pictorial representations of Arians writhing in damnation, and
martyrs basking in haloes of celestial light, tempted, in every
direction, the more pious among the spectators.  Cooks perambulated
with their shops on their backs; rival slave-merchants shouted
petitions for patronage; wine-sellers taught Bacchanalian philosophy
from the tops of their casks; poets recited compositions for sale;
sophisters held arguments destined to convert the wavering and perplex
the ignorant.

Incessant motion and incessant noise seemed to be the sole
compensations sought by the multitude for the disappointment of
exclusion from the church.  If a stranger, after reading the
proclamation of the day, had proceeded to the basilica, to feast his
eyes on the contemplation of the illustrious aggregate of humanity,
entitled by the bishop 'his pious and honourable brethren,' he must, on
mixing at this moment with the assemblage, have either doubted the
truth of the episcopal appellation, or have given the citizens credit
for that refinement of intrinsic worth which is of too elevated a
nature to influence the character of the outward man.


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

The beauties of this atmospheric effect were of far too serious and
sublime a nature to interest the multitude in the Place.  Out of the
whole assemblage, but two men watched that glorious sunset with even an
appearance of the admiration and attention which it deserved.  One was
the landholder whose wrongs were related in the preceding chapter--the
other his remarkable friend.

These two men formed a singular contrast to each other, both in
demeanour and appearance, as they gazed forth upon the crimson heaven.
The landholder was an under-sized, restless-looking man, whose
features, naturally sharp, were now distorted by a fixed expression of
misery and discontent.  His quick, penetrating glance wandered
incessantly from place to place, perceiving all things, but resting on
none.  In his attention to the scene before him, he appeared to have
been led more by the influence of example than by his own spontaneous
feelings; for ever and anon he looked impatiently round upon his friend
as if expecting him to speak--but no word or movement escaped his
thoughtful companion. Occupied exclusively in his own contemplations,
he appeared wholly insensible to any ordinary outward appeal.

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

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

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

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

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

'To what purpose do you tell me this?'


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

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

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

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

For some minutes neither of the men said more.  Soon, however, the last
speaker calmed his agitation with the facility of a man accustomed to
stifle the emotions that he cannot crush, and advancing to the
landholder, took him sorrowfully by the hand.

'I see, Probus, that I have amazed you,' said he; 'but the Church is
the only subject on which I have no discretion.  In all other matters I
have conquered the rashness of my early manhood; in this I have to
wrestle with my hastier nature still.  When I look on the mockeries
that are acting around us; when I behold a priesthood deceivers, a
people deluded, a religion defiled, then, I confess it, my indignation
overpowers my patience, and I burn to destroy, where I ought only to
hope to reform.'

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

'Peace!  She deceived me!'

'Your child--'

'Lives with me at Rome.'

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


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

'Is it thus that the Christian can view his afflictions?  I would,
then, that I were a Christian like you!' murmured the landholder, in
low, earnest tones.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

'Probus, I implore you stay!'

'Never!  My determination is taken, Numerian--farewell!'

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

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

Leaving all remaining peculiarities in Numerian's character to be
discussed at a future opportunity, we will now follow him in his
passage through the crowd, to the entrance of the basilica--continuing
to designate him, here and elsewhere, by the name which he had assumed
on his conversion, and by which he had insisted on being addressed
during his interview with the fugitive landholder.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Although the sun still left a faint streak of red in the western sky,
and the moon had as yet scarcely risen, the great chandelier of two
thousand four hundred lamps, mentioned by the bishop in his address to
the people, was already alight.  In the days of its severe and sacred
beauty, the appearance of the church would have suffered fatally by
this blaze of artificial brilliancy; but now that the ancient character
of the basilica was completely changed, now that from a solemn temple
it had been altered to the semblance of a luxurious palace, it gained
immensely by its gaudy illumination.  Not an ornament along the vast
extent of its glorious nave but glittered in vivid distinctness in the
dazzling light that poured downwards from the roof.  The gilded
rafters, the smooth inlaid marble pillars, the rich hangings of the
windows, the jewelled candlesticks on the altars, the pictures, the
statues, the bronzes, the mosaics, each and all glowed with a steady
and luxurious transparency absolutely intoxicating to the eye. Not a
trace of wear, not a vestige of tarnish now appeared on any object.
Each portion of the nave to which the attention was directed appeared
too finely, spotlessly radiant, ever to have been touched by mortal
hands. Entranced and bewildered, the observation roamed over the
surface of the brilliant scene, until, wearied by the unbroken
embellishment of the prospect, it wandered for repose upon the dimly
lighted aisles, and dwelt with delight upon the soft shadows that
hovered about their distant pillars, and the gliding forms that peopled
their dusky recesses, or loitered past their lofty walls.

At the moment when Numerian entered the basilica, a part of the service
had just concluded. The last faint echo from the voices of the choir
still hung upon the incense-laden air, and the vast masses of the
spectators were still grouped in their listening and various attitudes,
as the devoted reformer looked forth upon the church.  Even he, stern
as he was, seemed for a moment subdued by the ineffable enchantment of
the scene; but ere long, as if displeased with his own involuntary
emotions of admiration, his brow contracted, and he sighed heavily, as
(still followed by the attentive spies) he sought the comparative
seclusion of the aisles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

'You remember your promise?'

'I do.'

'Upon your honour, as a nobleman and a senator, you are prepared to
abide by it whenever it is necessary?'

'I am.'

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

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

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

'Industrious Ulpius!'

'Remember your promise!'

Vetranio leaned forward to reply, but Ulpius was gone.

As the senator again commanded his equipage to move on, he looked
anxiously around him, as if once more expecting to see his strange
adherent still lurking near the chariot.  He only perceived, however, a
man whom he did not know, followed by two other, walking rapidly past
him.  They were Numerian and the spies.

'At last, my projects are approaching consummation,' exclaimed Vetranio
to himself, as he and his kitten rolled off in the chariot.  'It is
well that I thought of securing possession of Julia's villa to-day, for
I shall now, assuredly, want to use it to-morrow.  Jupiter!  What a
mass of dangers, contradictions, and mysteries encompass this affair!
When I think that I, who pride myself on my philosophy, have quitted
Ravenna, borrowed a private villa, leagued myself with an uncultivated
plebeian, and all for the sake of a girl who has already deceived my
expectations by gaining me as a music-master without admitting me as a
lover, I am positively astonished at my own weakness!  Still it must be
owned that the complexion my adventure has lately assumed renders it of
some interest in itself.  The mere pleasure of penetrating the secrets
of this Numerian's household is by no means the least among the
numerous attraction of my design.  How has he gained his influence over
the girl? Why does he keep her in such strict seclusion?  Who is this
old half-frantic, unceremonious man-monster calling himself Ulpius;
refusing all reward for his villainy; raving about a return to the old
religion of the gods; and exulting in the promise he has extorted from
me, as a good pagan, to support the first restoration of the ancient
worship that may be attempted in Rome?  Where does he come from?  Why
does he outwardly profess himself a Christian?  What sent him into
Numerian's service?  By the girdle of Venus! everything connected with
the girl is as incomprehensible as herself!  But patience--patience!  A
few hours more, and these mysteries will be revealed.  In the meantime,
let me think of my banquet, and of its presiding deity, the Nightingale
Sauce!'



CHAPTER 5.

ANTONINA.

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

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

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

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

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

      *      *      *      *      *

The night has advanced an hour since the occurrence mentioned in the
preceding chapter. The clear and brilliant moonlight of Italy now
pervades every district of the glorious city, and bathes in its pure
effulgence the groves and palaces on the Pincian Mount.  From the
garden of Numerian the irregular buildings of the great suburbs of
Rome, the rich undulating country beyond, and the long ranges of
mountains in the distance, are now all visible in the soft and
luxurious light.  Near the spot which commands this view, not a living
creature is to be seen on a first examination; but on a more
industrious and patient observation, you are subsequently able to
detect at one of the windows of Numerian's house, half hidden by a
curtain, the figure of a young girl.


Soon this solitary form approaches nearer to the eye.  The moonbeams,
that have hitherto shone only upon the window, now illuminate other
objects.  First they display a small, white arm; then a light, simple
robe; then a fair, graceful neck; and finally a bright, youthful,
innocent face, directed steadfastly towards the wide moon-brightened
prospect of the distant mountains.

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

THE ORIGIN OF MUSIC

I.

    Spirit, whose dominion reigns
    Over Music's thrilling strains,
    Whence may be thy distant birth?
    Say what tempted thee to earth?

    Mortal, listen: I was born
    In Creation's early years,
    Singing, 'mid the stars of morn,
    To the music of the spheres.

    Once as, within the realms of space,
    I view'd this mortal planet roll,
    A yearning towards they hapless race,
    Unbidden, filled my seraph soul!

    Angels, who had watched my birth,
    Heard me sigh to sing to earth;
    'Twas transgression ne'er forgiv'n
    To forget my native Heav'n;
    So they sternly bade me go--
    Banish'd to the world below.


II.

    Exil'd here, I knew no fears;
    For, though darkness round me clung,
    Though none heard me in the spheres,
    Earth had listeners while I sung.

    Young spirits of the Spring sweet breeze
    Came thronging round me, soft and coy,
    Light wood-nymphs sported in the trees,
    And laughing Echo leapt for joy!

    Brooding Woe and writhing Pain
    Soften'd at my gentle strain;
    Bounding Joy, with footstep fleet,
    Ran to nestle at my feet;
    While, aroused, delighted Love
    Softly kiss'd me from above!


III.

    Since those years of early time,
    Faithful still to earth I've sung;
    Flying through each distant clime,
    Ever welcome, ever young!

    Still pleas'd, my solace I impart
    Where brightest hopes are scattered dead;
    'Tis mine--sweet gift!--to charm the heart,
    Though all its other joys have fled!

    Time, that withers all beside,
    Harmless past me loves to glide;
    Change, that mortals must obey,
    Ne'er shall shake my gentle sway;
    Still 'tis mine all hearts to move
    In eternity of love.

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

'This thing,' said he at length, 'this invention of libertines in my
house--in my daughter's possession!' and he dashed the lute into
fragments on the floor.

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

'To your chamber!' thundered Numerian, as she knelt, sobbing
convulsively, over those hapless fragments.  'To your chamber!
Tomorrow shall bring this mystery of iniquity to light!'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER 6.

AN APPRENTICESHIP TO THE TEMPLE.

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

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

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


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

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

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

When his brother Macrinus, on Julian's accession to the imperial
throne, arrived at the pinnacle of power and celebrity as high priest
of the Temple of Serapis, the unsuccessful merchant lost all hope of
rivalling his relative in the pursuit of distinction.  His insatiable
ambition, discarded from himself, now settled on one of his infant
sons.  He determined that his child should be successful where he had
failed.  Now that his brother had secured the highest elevation in the
temple, no calling could offer more direct advantages to a member of
his household that the priesthood.  His family had been from their
earliest origin rigid Pagans.  One of them had already attained to the
most distinguished honours of his gorgeous worship.  He determined that
another should rival his kinsman, and that that other should be his
eldest son.

Firm in this resolution, he at once devoted his child to the great
design which he now held continually in view.  He knew well that
Paganism, revived though it was, was not the universal worship that it
had been; that it was now secretly resisted, and might soon be openly
opposed, by the persecuted Christians throughout the Empire; and that
if the young generation were to guard it successfully from all future
encroachments, and to rise securely to its highest honours, more must
be exacted from them than the easy attachment to the ancient religion
require from the votaries of former days.  Then, the performance of the
most important offices in the priesthood was compatible with the
possession of military or political rank.  Now, it was to the temple,
and to the temple only, that the future servant of the gods should be
devoted.  Resolving thus, the father took care that all the son's
occupations and rewards should, from his earliest years, be in some way
connected with the career for which he was intended.  His childish
pleasures were to be conducted to sacrifices and auguries; his childish
playthings and prizes were images of the deities.  No opposition was
offered on the boy's part to this plan of education.  Far different
from his younger brother, whose turbulent disposition defied all
authority, he was naturally docile; and his imagination, vivid beyond
his years, was easily led captive by any remarkable object presented to
it.  With such encouragement, his father became thoroughly engrossed by
the occupation of forming him for his future existence.  His mother's
influence over him was jealously watched; the secret expression of her
love, of her sorrow, at the prospect of parting with him, was
ruthlessly suppressed whenever it was discovered; and his younger
brother was neglected, almost forgotten, in order that the parental
watchfulness might be entirely and invariably devoted to the eldest son.

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


An illness of some months, during the latter part of which his
attendants trembled for his life and reason, sufficiently attested the
sincerity of the grief of Ulpius for the loss of his protector. During
his paroxysms of delirium the priests who watched round his bed drew
from his ravings many wise conclusions as to the effects that his
seizure and its causes were likely to produce on his future character;
but, in spite of all their penetration, they were still far from
appreciating to a tithe of its extent the revolution that his
bereavement had wrought in his disposition.  The boy himself, until the
moment of the high priest's death, had never been aware of the depth of
his devotion to his second father.  Warped as they had been by his
natural parent, the affectionate qualities that were the mainspring of
his nature had never been entirely destroyed; and they seize

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