FORSAKEN as it appears on an outward view, during the morning of which we now write, the house of Numerian is yet not tenantless. In one of the sleeping apartments, stretched on his couch, with none to watch by its side, lies the master of the little dwelling. We last beheld him on the scene mingled with the famishing congregation in the Basilica of St. John Lateran, still searching for his child amid the confusion of the public distribution of food during the earlier stages of the misfortunes of besieged Rome. Since that time he has toiled and suffered much; and now the day of exhaustion long deferred, the hours of helpless solitude constantly dreaded, have at length arrived.

From the first periods of the siege, while all around him in the city moved gloomily onward through darker and darker changes; while famine rapidly merged into pestilence and death; while human hopes and purposes gradually diminished and declined with each succeeding day, he alone remained ever devoted to the same labor, ever animated by the same object--the only one among all his fellow-citizens whom no outward event could influence for good or evil, for hope or fear.

In every street of Rome, at all hours, among all ranks of people, he was still to be seen constantly pursuing the same hopeless search. When the mob burst furiously into the public granaries to seize the last supplies of corn hoarded for the rich, he was ready at the doors watching them as they came out. When rows of houses were deserted by all but the dead, he was beheld within, passing from window to window, as he sought through each room for the treasure that he had lost. When some few among the populace, in the first days of the pestilence, united in the vain attempt to cast over the lofty walls the corpses that strewed the street, he mingled with them to look on the rigid faces of the dead. In solitary places, where the parent not yet lost to affection strove to carry his dying child from the desert roadway to the shelter of a roof--where the wife, still faithful to her duties, received her husband's last breath in silent despair, he was seen gliding by their sides, and for one brief instant looking on them with attentive and mournful eyes. Wherever he went, whatever he beheld, he asked no sympathy and sought no aid. He went his way, a pilgrim on a solitary path; an unregarded expectant for a boon that no others could care to partake.

When the famine first began to be felt in the city, he seemed unconscious of its approach--he made no effort to procure beforehand the provision of a few days' sustenance; if he attended the first public distributions of food, it was to prosecute his search for his child amid the throng around him. He must have perished with the first feeble victims of starvation, had he not been met, during his solitary wanderings, by some of the members of the congregation whom his piety and eloquence had collected in former days.

By these persons, whose entreaties that he would suspend his hopeless search he always answered with the same firm and patient denial, his course was carefully watched and his wants anxiously provided for. Out of every supply of food which they were enabled to collect, his share was invariably carried to his abode. They remembered their teacher in the hour of his dejection, as they had formerly reverenced him in the; day of his vigor; they toiled to preserve his life as anxiously as they had labored to profit by his instructions; they listened as his disciples once, they served him as his children now.

But over these, as over all other offices of human kindness, the famine was destined gradually and surely to prevail. The provision of food garnered up by the congregation ominously lessened with each succeeding day. When the pestilence began darkly to appear, the numbers of those who sought their afflicted teacher at his abode, or followed him through the dreary streets, fatally decreased.

Then, as the nourishment which had supported and the vigilance which had watched him thus diminished, so did the hard-tasked energies of the unhappy father fail him faster and faster. Each morning as he arose, his steps were more feeble, his heart grew heavier within him, his wanderings through the city were less and less resolute and prolonged. At length his powers totally deserted him; the last-left members of his congregation, as they approached his abode with the last-left provision of food which they possessed, found him prostrate with exhaustion at his garden gate. They bore him to his couch, placed their charitable offering by his side, and leaving one of their number to protect him from the robber and the assassin, they quitted the house in despair.

For some days the guardian remained faithful to his post, until his sufferings from lack of food overpowered his vigilance. Dreading that, in his extremity, he might be tempted to take from the old man's small store of provision what little remained, he fled from the house to seek sustenance, however loathsome, in the public streets; and thenceforth Numerian was left defenseless in his solitary abode.

He was first beheld on the scenes which these pages present a man of austere purpose, of unwearied energy; a valiant reformer who defied all difficulties that beset him in his progress; a triumphant teacher leading at his will whoever listened to his words; a father proudly contemplating the future position which he destined for his child. Far different did he now appear. Lost to his ambition, broken in spirit, helpless in body, separated from his daughter by his own act, he lay on his untended couch in a death-like lethargy. The cold wind blowing through his opened window awakened no sensations in his torpid frame; the cup of water and the small relies of coarse food stood near his hand, but he had no vigilance to discern them. His open eyes looked steadfastly upward, and yet be reposed as one in a deep sleep, or as one already devoted to the tomb, save when, at intervals, his lips moved slowly with a long and painfully-drawn breath, or a fever-flush tinged his hollow cheek with changing and momentary hues.

While thus in outward aspect appearing to linger between life and death, his faculties yet remained feebly vital within him. Aroused by no external influence, and governed by no mental restraint, they now created before him a strange waking vision, palpable as an actual event.

It seemed to him that he was reposing, not in his own chamber, but in some mysterious world, filled with a twilight atmosphere, inexpressibly soothing and gentle to his aching sight. Through this mild radiance he could trace, at long intervals, shadowy representations of the scenes through which he had passed in search of his lost child. The gloomy streets, the lonely houses abandoned to the unburied dead, which he had explored, alternately appeared and vanished before him in solemn succession; and ever and anon, as one vision disappeared ere another rose, he heard afar off a sound as of gentle, womanly voices, murmuring in solemn accents, "The search has been made in penitence, in patience, in prayer, and has not been pursued in vain. The lost shall return--the beloved shall yet be restored!"

Thus, as it had begun, the vision long continued. Now the scenes through which he had wandered passed slowly before his eyes, now the soft voices murmured pityingly in his ear. At length the first disappeared, and the last became silent; then ensued a long vacant interval, and then the gray, tranquil light brightened slowly at one spot, out of which he beheld advancing toward him the form of his lost child.

She came to his side, she bent lovingly over him; he saw her eyes, with their old patient, childlike expression, looking sorrowfully down upon him. His heart revived to a sense of unspeakable awe and contrition, to emotions of yearning love and mournful hope; his speech returned; he whispered tremulously, "Child! child! I repented in bitter woe the wrong that I did to thee; I sought thee, in my loneliness on earth, through the long day and the gloomy night! And now the merciful God has sent thee to pardon me! I loved thee; I wept for thee."

His voice died within him, for now his outward sensations quickened. He felt warm tears falling on his cheeks; he felt embracing arms clasped around him; he heard tenderly repeated, "Father, speak to me as you were wont; love me, father, and forgive me, as you loved and forgave me when I was a little child!"

The sound of that well-remembered voice--which had ever spoken kindly and reverently to him; which had last addressed him in tones of despairing supplication; which he had hardly hoped to hear again on earth--penetrated his whole being, like awakening music in the dead silence of night. His eyes lost their vacant expression; he raised himself suddenly on the couch; he saw that what had begun as a vision had ended as a reality; that his dream had proved the immediate forerunner of its own fulfillment; that his daughter in her bodily presence was indeed restored; and his head drooped forward, and he trembled and wept upon her bosom in the overpowering fullness of his gratitude and delight.

For some moments Antonina, calming with the resolute heroism of affection her own thronging emotions of awe and affright, endeavored to soothe and support her fast-failing parent. Her horror almost overwhelmed her, as she thought that now, when through grief and peril she was at last restored to him, he might expire in her arms; but even yet her resolution did not fail her. The last hope of her brief and bitter life was now the hope of reviving her father; and she clung to it with the tenacity of despair.

She calmed her voice while she spoke to him; she entreated him to remember that his daughter had returned to watch over him, to be his obedient pupil as in days of old. Vain effort! Even while the words passed her lips, his arms, which had been pressed over her, relaxed; his head grew heavier on her bosom. In the despair of the moment, she tore herself from him, and looked around to seek the help that none were near to afford. The cup of water, the last provision of food, attracted her eye. With quick instinct she caught them up. hope, success, salvation, lay in those miserable relics. She pressed the food into his mouth; she moistened his parched lips, his dry brow, with the water. During one moment of horrible suspense she saw him still insensible; then the vital functions revived; his eyes opened again, and fixed famine-struck on the wretched nourishment before him. He devoured it ravenously; he drained the cup of water to its last drop; he sank back again on the couch. But now the torpid blood moved once more in his veins; his heart beat less and less feebly; he was saved. She saw it as she bent over him--saved by the lost child in the hour of her return! It was a sensation of ecstatic triumph and gratitude, which no woful remembrances had power to embitter in its bright, sudden birth! She knelt down by the side of the couch, almost crashed by her own emotions. Over the grave of the young warrior she had raised her heart to Heaven in agony and grief, and now by her father's side she poured forth her whole soul to her Creator in trembling ejaculations of thankfulness and hope!

Thus--the one slowly recovering whatever of life and vigor yet continued in his weakened frame, the other still filled with her all-absorbing emotions of gratitude--the father and daughter long remained. And now, as morning waned toward noon, the storm began to subside. Gradually and solemnly the vast thunder-clouds rolled asunder, and the bright blue heaven beyond appeared through their fantastic rifts. The lessening rain-drops fell light and silvery to the earth, and breeze and sunshine were wafted at fitful intervals over the plague-tainted atmosphere of Rome. As yet, subdued by the shadows of the floating clouds, the dawning sunbeams glittered softly through the windows of Numerian's chamber. They played, warm and reviving, over his worn features, like messengers of resurrection and hope from their native heaven. Life seemed to expand within him under their fresh and gentle ministering. Once more he raised himself and turned toward his child; and now his heart throbbed with a healthful joy, and his arms closed round her, not in the helplessness of infirmity, but in the welcome of love.

His words, when he spoke to her, fell at first almost inarticulately from his lips--they were mingled together in confused phrases of tenderness, contrition, thanksgiving. All the native enthusiasm of his disposition, all the latent love for his child, which had for years been suppressed by his austerity or diverted by his ambition, now at last burst forth.

Trembling and silent in his arms, Antonina vainly endeavored to return his caresses, and to answer his words of welcome. Now for the first time she knew how deep was her father's affection for her; she felt how foreign to his real nature had been his assumed severity in their intercourse of former days; and in the quick flow of new feelings and old recollections produced by the delighting surprise of the discovery, she found herself speechless. She could only listen eagerly, breathlessly, while he spoke. His words, faltering and confused though they were, were words of endearment which she had never heard from him before; they were words which no mother had ever pronounced beside her infant bed; and they sank divinely consoling over her heart, as messages of pardon from angels' lips.

Gradually Numerian s voice grew calmer. He raised his daughter in his arms, and bent wistfully on her face his attentive and pitying eyes. "Returned, returned!" he murmured, while he gazed on her, "never again to depart! Returned, beautiful and patient, kinder and more tender than ever! Love me and pardon me, Antonina. I sought for you in bitter loneliness and despair. Think not of me as what I was, but as what I am! There were days when you were yet an infant, when I had no thought but how to cherish and delight you, and now those days have come again. You shall read no gloomy taskbooks; you shall never be separated from me more; you shall play sweet music on the lute: you shall be all garlanded with flowers which I will provide for you! We will find friends and glad companions; we will bring happiness with us wherever we are seen! God's blessing goes forth from children like you: it has fallen upon me--it has raised me from the dead! My Antonina shall teach me to worship, as I once taught her. She shall pray for me in the morning, and pray for me at night; and when she thinks not of it, when she sleeps, I shall come softly to her bedside, and wait and watch over her, so that when she opens her eyes they shall open on me--they are the eyes of my child who has been restored to me--there is nothing on earth that can speak to me like them of happiness and peace!"

He paused for a moment, and looked rapturously on her face as it was turned toward him. His features partially saddened while he gazed; and taking her long hair--still wet and disheveled from the rain--in his hands, he pressed it over his lips, over his face, over his neck. Then, when he saw that she was endeavoring to speak, when he beheld the tears that were now filling her eyes, he drew her closer to him, and hurriedly continued, in lower tones:

"Hush! hush! No more grief--no more tears! Tell me not whither you have wandered--speak not of what you have suffered; for would not every word be a reproach to me? And you have come to pardon and not to reproach! Let not the recollection that it was I who cast you off be forced on me from your lips! let us remember only that we are restored to each other; let us think that God has accepted my penitence and forgiven me my sin, in suffering my child to return! Or, if we must speak of the days of separation that are past, speak to me of the days that found you tranquil and secure; rejoice me, by telling me that it was not all danger and woe in the bitter destiny which my guilty anger prepared for my own child! Say to me that you met protectors as well as enemies in the hour of your flight--that all were not harsh to you, as I was--that those of whom you asked shelter and safety, looked on your face as on a petition for charity and kindness from friends whom they loved! Tell me only of your protectors, Antonina, for in that there will be consolation; and you have come to console!"

As he waited for her reply, he felt her tremble on his bosom, he saw the shudder that ran over her frame. The despair in her voice, though she only pronounced in answer to him the simple words, "There was one"--and then ceased, unable to proceed--penetrated coldly to his heart. "Is he not at hand?" he hurriedly resumed. "Why is he not here? Let us seek him without delay. I must humble myself before him, in my gratitude. I must show him that I was worthy that my Antonina should be restored."

"He is dead!" she gasped, sinking down in the arms that embraced her, as the recollections of the past night again crowded in all their horror on her memory. "They murdered him by my side.--Oh, father, father! he loved me; he would have reverenced and protected you!"

"May the merciful God receive him among the blessed angels, and honor him among the holy martyrs!" cried the father, raising his tearful eyes in supplication. "May his spirit, if it can still be observant of the things of earth, know that his name shall be written on my heart with the name of my child; that I will think on him as on a beloved companion, and mourn for him as for a son that has been taken from me!"

He ceased, and looked down on Antonina, whose features were still hidden from him. Each felt that a new bond of mutual affection had been created between them by what each had spoken, but both now remained silent.

During this interval, the thoughts of Numerian wandered from the reflections which had hitherto occupied him. The few mournful words which his daughter had spoken had been sufficient to banish its fullness of joy from his heart, and to turn him from the happy contemplation of the present to the dark recollections of the past. Vague doubts and fears now mingled with his gratitude and hope; and involuntarily his thoughts reverted to what he would fain have forgotten forever--to the morning when he had driven Antonina from her home.

Baseless apprehensions of the return of the treacherous pagan and his profligate employer, with the return of their victim--despairing convictions of his own helplessness and infirmity, rose startlingly in his mind. His eyes wandered vacantly round the room, his hands closed trembling over his daughter's form; then, suddenly releasing her, he arose as one panic-stricken, and exclaiming, "The doors must be secured!--Ulpius may be near--the senator may return!" endeavored to cross the room. But his strength was unequal to the effort; he leaned back for support against the wall, and breathlessly repeating: "Secure the doors!--Ulpius, Ulpius!" he motioned to Antonina to descend.

She trembled as she obeyed him. Remembering her passage through the breach in the wall, and her fearful journey through the streets of Rome, she more than shared her father's apprehensions as she descended the stairs.

The door remained half open, as she had left it when she entered the house. Ere she hurriedly closed and barred it, she cast a momentary glance on the street beyond. The gaunt figures of the slaves still moved wearily to and fro amid the mockery of festal preparation in Vetranio's palace, and here and there a few ghastly figures lay on the ground contemplating them in languid amazement. Over all other parts of the street the deadly tranquillity of plague and famine still prevailed.

Hurriedly ascending the steps, Antonina hastened to assure her father that she had obeyed his commands, and that they were now secure from all intrusion from without. But, during her brief absence a new and more ominous prospect of calamity had presented itself before the old man's mind.

As she entered the room, she saw that he had returned to his couch, and that he was holding before him the little wooden bowl which had contained his last supply of food, and which was now empty. He addressed not a word to her when he heard her enter; his features were rigid with horror and despair as he looked down on the empty bowl, he muttered vacantly, "It was the last provision that remained, and it was I that exhausted it! The beasts of the forests carry food to their young, and I have taken the last morsel from my child!"

In an instant the utter desolateness of their situation--forgotten in the first joy of their meeting--forced itself with appalling vividness upon Antonina's mind. She endeavored to speak of comfort and hope to her father; but the fearful realities of the famine in the city now rose palpably before her, and suspended the vain words of solace on her lips. In the midst of still populous Rome, within sight of those surrounding plains where the creative sun ripened hour by hour the vegetation of the teeming earth, where field and granary displayed profusely their abundant stores, the father and daughter now looked on each other, as helpless to replace their exhausted provision of food as if they had been abandoned on the raft of the shipwrecked in an unexplored sea, or banished to a lonely island, whose inland products were withered by infected winds, and around whose arid shores ran such destroying waters as seethe over the "Cities of the Plain."

The silence which had long prevailed in the room, the bitter reflections which still held the despairing father and the patient daughter speechless alike, were at length interrupted by a hollow and melancholy voice from the street, pronouncing, in the form of a public notice, these words:

"I, Publius Dalmatius, messenger of the Roman Senate, proclaim, that in order to clear the streets from the dead, three thousand sestertii will be given by the Prefect for every ten bodies that are cast over the walls. This is the true decree of the Senate."

The voice ceased; but no sound of applause, no murmur of popular tumult was heard in answer. Then, after an interval, it was once more faintly audible as the messenger passed on and repeated the decree in another street; and then the silence again sunk down over all things more awfully pervading than before.

Every word of the proclamation, when repeated in the distance, as when spoken under his window, had reached Numerian's ears. His mind, already sinking in despair, was riveted on what he had heard from the woe-boding voice of the herald, with a fascination as absorbing as that which rivets the eye of the traveler, already giddy on the summit of a precipice, upon the spectacle of the yawning gulfs beneath. When all sound of the proclamation had finally died away, the unhappy father dropped the empty bowl which he had hitherto mechanically continued to hold before him, and glancing affrightedly at his daughter, groaned to himself: "The corpses are to be cast over the walls; the dead are to be flung forth to the winds of heaven!--there is no help for us in the city. Oh, God, God!--she may die!--her body may be cast away like the rest, and I may live to see it!"

He rose suddenly from the couch; his reason seemed for a moment to be shaken as he tottered to the window, crying "Food! food!--I will give my house and all it contains for a morsel of food--I have nothing to support my own child--she will starve before me by to-morrow if I have no food! I am a citizen of Rome--I demand help from the Senate! Food! food!"

In tones declining lower and lower he continued to cry thus from the window, but no voice answered him either in sympathy or derision. Of all the people--now increased in numbers--collected in the street before Vetranio's palace, not one turned even to look on him. For days and days past such fruitless appeals as his had been heard, and heard unconcernedly at every hour and in every street of Rome--now ringing through the heavy air in the shrieks of delirium, now faintly audible in the last faltering murmurs of exhaustion and despair.

Thus vainly entreating help and pity from a populace who had ceased to give the one or to feel the other, Numerian might long have remained; but now his daughter approached his side, and drawing him gently toward his couch, said in tender and solemn accents, "Remember, father, that God sent the ravens to feed Elijah, and replenish the widow's cruse! He will not desert us, for he has restored us to each other; and has sent me hither not to perish in the famine, but to watch over you!"

"God has deserted the city and all that it contains!" he answered, distractedly. "The angel of destruction has gone forth into our streets, and Death walks in his shadow! On this day, when hope and happiness seemed opening before us both, our little household has been doomed! The young and the old, the weary and the watchful, they strew the streets alike--the famine has mastered them all--the famine will master us--there is no help, no escape! I, who would have died patiently for my daughter's safety, must now die despairingly, leaving her friendless in the wide, dreary, perilous world; in the dismal city of anguish, of horror, of death--where the enemy threatens without, and hunger and pestilence waste within! Oh, Antonina! you have returned to me but for a little time; the day of our second separation draws near!"

For a few moments his head drooped and his sobs choked his utterance; then he once more rose painfully to his feet. Heedless of Antonina's entreaties, he again endeavored to cross the room, only again to find his feeble powers unequal to sustain him. As he fell back panting upon a seat, his eyes assumed a wild, unnatural expression--despair of mind and weakness of body had together partially unhinged his faculties. When his daughter affrightedly approached to soothe and succor him, he impatiently waved her back; and began to speak in a dull, hoarse, monotonous voice, pressing his hand firmly over his brow, and directing his eyes backward and forward incessantly, on object after object, in every part of the room.

"Listen, child, listen!" he hastily began; "I tell you there is no food in the house, and no food in Rome!--we are besieged--they have taken from us our granaries in the suburbs and our fields on the plains--there is a great famine in the city--those who still eat, eat strange food which men sicken at when it is named. I would seek even this, but I have no strength to go forth into the by-ways and force it from others at the point of the sword! I am old and feeble, and heart-broken--I shall die first, and leave fatherless my good, kind daughter, whom I sought for so long, and whom I loved as my only child!"

He paused for an instant--not to listen to the words of encouragement and hope which Antonina mechanically addressed to him while he spoke, but to collect his wandering thoughts, to rally his failing strength. His voice acquired a quicker tone, and his features presented a sudden energy and earnestness of expression, as if some new project had flashed across his mind, when, after an interval, he continued thus:

"But though my child shall be bereaved of me, though I shall die in the hour when I most longed to live for her, I must not leave her helpless; I will send her among my congregation who have deserted me, but who will repent when they hear that I am dead, and will receive Antonina among them for my sake. Listen to this--listen, listen! You must tell them to remember all that I once revealed to them of my brother, from whom I parted in my boyhood--my brother, whom I have never seen since: he may yet be alive, he may be found; they must search for him--for to you, he would be father to the fatherless and guardian to the unguarded: he may now be in Rome, he may be rich and powerful--he may have food to spare, and shelter that is good against all enemies and strangers! Attend, child, to my words: in these latter days I have thought of him much; I have seen him in dreams as I saw him for the last time in my father's house; he was happier and more beloved than I was; and in envy and hatred I quitted my parents and parted from him. You have heard nothing of this; but you must hear it now; that when I am dead you may know you have a protector to seek! So I received in anger my brother's farewell, and fled from my home--(those days were well remembered by me once, but all things grow dull on my memory now)--long years of turmoil and change passed on, and I never met him; and men of many nations were my companions, but he was not among them; then much affliction fell upon me, and I repented and learned the fear of God, and went back to my father's house. Since that, years have passed--I know not how many; I could have told them when I spoke of my former life to him; to my friend, when we stood near St. Peter's, ere the city was besieged, looking on the sunset, and speaking of the early days of our companionship; but now my very remembrance fails me; the famine that threatens us with separation and death, casts darkness over my thoughts; yet hear me, hear me patiently--for your sake I must continue!"

"Not now, father--not now! At another time, on a happier day! " murmured Antonina, in tremulous, entreating tones.

"My home, when I arrived to look on it, was gone," pursued the old man, sadly, neither heeding nor hearing her. "Other houses were built where my father's house had stood; no man, could tell me of my parents and my brother; then I returned, and my former companions grew hateful in my eyes; I left them, and they followed me with persecution and scorn. Listen, listen I--I set forth secretly in the night, with you, to escape them; and to make perfect my reformation where they should not be near to hinder it; and we traveled onward many days until we came to Rome, and I made my abode there. But I feared that my companions whom I abhorred might discover and persecute me again; and in the new city of my dwelling I called myself by another name than the name that I bore; thus I knew that all trace of me would be lost, and that I should be kept secure from men whom I thought on only as enemies now. Go, child!--go quickly!--bring your tablets and write down the names that I shall tell you; for so you will discover your protector when I am gone! Say not to him that you are the child of Numerian--he knows not the name; say that you are the daughter of Cleander, his brother, who died longing to be restored to him--write! write carefully, Cleander!--that was the name my father gave to me, that was the name I bore until I fled from my evil companions and changed it, dreading their pursuit! Cleander! write and remember, Cleander! I have seen in visions that my brother shall be discovered: he will not be discovered to me, but he will be discovered to you! Your tablets--your tablets! write his name with mine--it is--"

He stopped abruptly. His mental powers, fluctuating between torpor and animation--shaken, but not overpowered by the trials which had assailed them--suddenly rallied, and resuming somewhat of their accustomed balance, became a wakened to a sense of their own aberration. His vague revelations of his past life (which the reader will recognize as resembling his communications on the same subject to the fugitive landowner, previously related) now appeared before him in all their incongruity and uselessness. His countenance fell--he sighed bitterly to himself: "My reason begins to desert me!--my judgment, which should guide my child--my resolution, which should uphold her, both fail me! How should my brother, since boyhood lost to me, be found by her? Against the famine that threatens us, I offer but vain words!--already her strength declines: her face, that I loved to look on, grows wan before my eyes! God have mercy upon us! God have mercy upon us!"

He returned feebly to his couch, his head declined on his bosom; sometimes a low groan burst from his lips, but he spoke no more.

Deep as was the prostration under which he had now fallen, it was yet less painful to Antonina to behold it than to listen to the incoherent revelations which had fallen from his lips but the moment before, and which, in her astonishment and affright. she had dreaded might be the awful indications of the overthrow of her father's reason. As she again placed herself by his side, she trembled to feel that her own weariness was fast overpowering her; but she still struggled with her rising despair--still strove to think only of capacity for endurance and chances of relief.

The silence in the room was deep and dismal, while they now sat together. The faint breezes, at long intervals, drowsily rose and fell, as they floated through the open window; the fitful sunbeams alternately appeared and vanished, as the clouds rolled upward in airy succession over the face of heaven. Time moved sternly in its destined progress, and Nature varied tranquilly through its appointed limits of change, and still no hopes, no saving projects, nothing but dark recollections and woful anticipations occupied Antonina's mind--when, just as her weary head was drooping toward the ground--just as sensation and fortitude and grief itself seemed declining into a dreamless and deadly sleep--a last thought, void of discernible connection or cause, rose suddenly within her, animating, awakening, inspiring. She started up. "The garden, father--the garden!" she cried, breathlessly. "Remember the food that grows in our garden below! be comforted, we have provision left yet--God has not deserted us!"

He raised his face while she spoke; his features assumed a deeper mournfulness and hopelessness of expression; he looked upon her in ominous silence, and laid his trembling fingers on her arm to detain her, when she hurriedly attempted to quit the room.

"Do not forbid me to depart," she anxiously pleaded. "To me every corner in the garden is known, for it was my possession in our happier days; our last hopes rest on the garden, and I must search through it without delay! Bear with me," she added, in low and melancholy tones, "bear with me, dear father, in all that I would now do! I have suffered, since we parted, a bitter affliction, which clings dark and heavy to all my thoughts; there is no consolation for me but the privilege of caring for your welfare--my only hope of comfort is in the employment of aiding you!"

The old man's hand had pressed heavier on her arm, while she addressed him; but when she ceased, it dropped from her, and he bent his head in speechless submission to her entreaty. For one moment she lingered, looking on him silent as himself; the next, she left the apartment with hasty and uncertain steps.

On reaching the garden, she unconsciously took the path leading to the bank where she had once loved to play secretly upon her lute, and to look on the distant mountains reposing in the warm atmosphere which summer evenings shed over their blue expanse. How eloquent was this little plot of ground of the quiet events now forever gone by--of the joys, the hopes, the happy occupations, which rise with the day that chronicles them, and pass like that day never to return the same--which the memory alone can preserve as they were; and the heart can never resume but in a changed form, divested of the presence of the companion, of the incident of the departed moment, which formed the charm of the past and makes the imperfection of the present!

Tender and thronging were the remembrances which the surrounding prospect called up, as the sad mistress of the garden looked again on her little domain! She saw the bank where she could never more sit to sing with a renewal of the same feelings which had once inspired her music--she saw the drooping flowers that she could never restore with the same child-like enjoyment of the task which had animated her in former hours! Young though she still was, the emotions of the youthful days that were gone could never be revived as they had once existed! As waters they had welled up, and as waters they had flowed forth, never to return to their source! Thoughts of these former years--of the young warrior who lay cold beneath the heavy earth--of the desponding father who mourned hopeless in the room above--gathered thick at her heart, as she turned from her flower-beds--not, as in other days, to pour forth her happiness to the music of her lute, but to search laboriously for the sustenance of life.

At first, as she stooped over those places in the garden where she knew that fruits and vegetables had been planted by her own hand, her tears blinded her; she hastily dashed them away, and looked eagerly around.

Alas, others had reaped the field from which she had hoped abundance! In the early days of the famine, Numerian's congregation had entered the garden, and gathered for him whatever it contained; its choicest and its homeliest products were alike exhausted; withered leaves lay on the barren earth, and naked branches waved over them in the air. She wandered from path to path, searching amid the briers and thistles, which already cast an aspect of ruin over the deserted place; she explored its most hidden corners with the painful perseverance of despair; but the same barrenness spread around her wherever she turned. On this once fertile spot, which she had entered with such joyful faith in its resources, there remained but a few decayed roots, dropped and forgotten amid tangled weeds and faded flowers.

She saw that they were barely sufficient for one scanty meal, as she collected them, and returned slowly to the house. No words escaped her, no tears flowed over her checks, when she reascended the steps--hope, fear, thought, sensation itself, had been stunned within her, from the first moment when she had discovered that, in the garden as in the house, the inexorable famine had anticipated the last chances of relief.

She entered the room, and still holding the withered roots, advanced mechanically to her father's side. During her absence, his mental and bodily faculties had both yielded to wearied nature--he lay in a deep, heavy sleep.

Her mind experienced a faint relief when she saw that the fatal necessity of confessing the futility of the hopes she had herself awakened was spared her for a while. She knelt down by Numerian, and gently smoothed the hair over brow; then she drew the curtain across the window, for she feared even that the breeze blowing through it might arouse him. A strange, secret satisfaction at the idea of devoting to her father every moment of the time and every particle of the strength that might yet be reserved for her--a ready resignation to death, in dying for him--overspread her heart, and took the place of all other aspirations and all other thoughts.

She now moved to and fro through the room, with a cautious tranquillity which nothing could startle; she prepared her decayed roots for food, with a patient attention which nothing could divert. Lost, through the aggravated miseries of her position, to recent grief and present apprehension, she could still instinctively perform the simple offices of the woman and the daughter, as she might have performed them amid a peaceful nation and a prosperous home. Thus do the first-born affections outlast the exhaustion of all the stormy emotions, all the aspiring thoughts of after years, which may occupy, but which cannot absorb, the spirit within us; thus does their friendly and familiar voice, when the clamor of contending passions has died away in its own fury, speak again, serene, and sustaining as in the early time, when the mind moved secure within the limits of its native simplicity, and the heart yet lay happy in the pure tranquillity of its first repose!

The last scanty measure of food was soon prepared; it was bitter and unpalatable when she tasted it--life could barely be preserved, even in the most vigorous, by provision so wretched--but she set it aside as carefully as if it had been the most precious luxury of the most abundant feast.

Nothing had changed during the interval of solitary employment--her father yet slept; the gloomy silence yet prevailed in the street. She placed herself at the window, and partially drew aside the curtain to let the warm breezes from without blow over her cold brow. The same ineffable resignation, the same unnatural quietude, which had sunk down over her faculties since she had entered the room, overspread them still. Surrounding objects failed to impress her attention; recollections and forebodings stagnated in her mind. A marble composure prevailed over her features; sometimes her eyes wandered mechanically from the morsels of food by her side to her sleeping father, as her one vacant idea of watching for his service, till the feeble pulses of life had throbbed their last, alternately revived and declined; but no other evidences of bodily existence or mental activity appeared in her. As she now sat in the half--darkened room, by the couch on which her father reposed--her features pale, calm, and rigid, her form enveloped in cold white drapery--there were moments when she looked like one of the penitential devotees of the primitive Church appointed to watch in the house of mourning, and surprised on her saintly vigil by the advent of death.

Time flowed on--the monotonous hours of the day waned again toward night; and plague and famine told their lapse in the fated highways of Rome. For father and child the sand in the glass was fast running out; and neither marked it as it diminished. The sleeper still reposed, and the guardian by his side still watched; but now her weary gaze was directed on the street, unconsciously attracted by the sound of voices, which at length rose from it at intervals, and by the light of torches and lamps, which appeared in the great palace of the senator Vetranio, as the sun gradually declined in the horizon, and the fiery clouds around were quenched in the vapors of the advancing night. Steadily she looked upon the sight beneath and before her; but, even yet, her limbs never moved; no expression relieved the blank, solemn peacefulness of her features.

Meanwhile, the soft, brief twilight glimmered over the earth, and showed the cold moon, poised solitary in the starless heaven--then the stealthy darkness arose at her pale signal, and closed slowly round the City of Death!

OF all prophecies none are, perhaps, so frequently erroneous as those on which we are most apt to venture, in endeavoring to foretell the effect of outward events on the characters of men. In no form of our anticipations are we more frequently baffled than in such attempts to estimate beforehand the influence of circumstance over conduct, not only in others, but also even in ourselves. Let the event but happen, and men, whom we view by the light of our previous observation of them, act under it as the living contradictions of their own characters. The friend of our daily social intercourse, in the progress of life, and the favorite hero of our historic studies, in the progress of the page, astonish, exceed, or disappoint our expectations alike. We find it as vain to foresee a cause, as to fix a limit, for the arbitrary inconsistencies in the dispositions of mankind.

But though to speculate upon the future conduct of others under impending circumstances be but too often to expose the fallacy of our wisest anticipations, to contemplate the nature of that conduct after it has been displayed is a useful subject of curiosity, and may perhaps be made a fruitful source of instruction. Similar events which succeed each other at different periods are relieved from monotony, and derive new importance, from the ever-varying effects which they produce on the human character. Thus, in the great occurrence which forms the foundation of our narrative, we may find little in the siege of Rome, looking at it as a mere event, to distinguish it remarkably from any former siege of the city--the same desire for glory and vengeance, wealth and dominion, which brought Alaric to her walls, brought other invaders before him. But if we observe the effect of the Gothic descent upon Italy on the inhabitants of her capital, we shall find ample matter for novel contemplation and unbounded surprise.

We shall perceive, as an astonishing instance of the inconsistencies of the human character, the spectacle of a whole people resolutely defying an overwhelming foreign invasion at their very doors, just at the period when they had fallen most irremediably from the highest position of national glory to the lowest depths of national degradation; resisting an all-powerful enemy with inflexible obstinacy, for the honor of the Roman name, which they had basely dishonored or carelessly forgotten for ages past. We shall behold men, who have hitherto laughed at the very name of patriotism, now starving resolutely in their country's cause; who stopped at no villainy to obtain wealth, now hesitating to employ their ill-gotten gains in the purchase of the most important of all gratifications--their own security and peace. Instances of the unimaginable effect produced by the event of the siege of Rome on the characters of her inhabitants might be drawn from all classes, from the lowest to the highest, from patrician to plebeian; but to produce them here would be to admit too long an interruption in the progress of the present narrative. If we are to enter at all into detail on such a subject, it must be only in a case clearly connected with the actual requirements of our story; and such a case may be found, at this juncture, in the conduct of the senator Vetranio, under the influence of the worst calamities attending the blockade of Rome by the Goths.

Who, it may be asked, knowing the previous character of this man, his frivolity of disposition, his voluptuous anxiety for unremitting enjoyment and ease, his horror of the slightest approaches of affliction or pain, would have imagined him capable of rejecting in disdain all the minor chances of present security and future prosperity which his unbounded power and wealth might have procured for him, even in a famine-stricken city, and rising suddenly to the sublime of criminal desperation, in the resolution to abandon life as worthless the moment it had ceased to run in the easy current of all former years? Yet to this determination had he now arrived; and still more extraordinary, in this determination had he found others, of his own patrician order, to join him.

The reader will remember his wild announcement of his intended orgy to the Prefect Pompeianus, during the earlier periods of the siege; that announcement was now to be fulfilled. Vetranio had bidden his guests to the Banquet of Famine. A chosen number of the senators of the great city were to vindicate their daring by dying the revelers that they had lived; by resigning in contempt all prospect of starving, like the common herd, on a lessening daily pittance of loathsome food; by making their triumphant exit from a fettered and ungrateful life, drowned in floods of wine, and lighted by the fires of the wealthiest palace of Rome!

It had been intended to keep this frantic determination a profound secret, to let the mighty catastrophe burst upon the remaining inhabitants of the city like a prodigy from heaven; but the slaves intrusted with the organization of the suicide banquet had been bribed to their tasks with wine, and in the carelessness of intoxication had revealed to others whatever they heard within the palace walls. The news passed from mouth to mouth. There was enough in the prospect of beholding the burning palace and the drunken suicide of its desperate guests, to animate even the stagnant curiosity of a famishing mob.

On the appointed evening the people dragged their weary limbs from all quarters of the city toward the Pincian Hill. Many of them died on the way; many lost their resolution to proceed to the end of their journey, and took shelter sullenly in the empty houses on the road; many found opportunities for plunder and crime as they proceeded, which tempted them from their destination; but many persevered in their purpose, the living dragging the dying along with them, the desperate driving the cowardly before them in malignant sport, until they gained the palace gates. It was by their voices, as they reached her ear from the street, that the fast-sinking faculties of Antonina had been startled, though not revived; and there, on the broad pavement, lay these citizens of a falling city; a congregation of pestilence and crime--a starving and an awful band!

The moon, brightened by the increasing darkness, now clearly illuminated the street, and revealed, in a narrow space, a various and impressive scene.

One side of the roadway in which stood Vetranio's palace was occupied along each extremity, as far as the eye could reach at night, by the groves and outbuildings attached to the senator's mansion. The palace grounds, at the higher and further end of the street--looking from the Pincian Gate--crossed it by a wide archway, and then stretched backward, until they joined the trees of the little garden of Numerian's abode. In a line with this house, but separated from it by a short space, stood a long row of buildings, let out floor by floor to separate occupants, and towering to an unwieldy altitude--for in Ancient Rome, as in Modern London, in consequence of the high price of land in an overpopulated city, builders could only secure space in a dwelling by adding inconveniently to its height. Beyond these habitations rose the trees surrounding another patrician abode, and beyond that the houses took a sudden turn, and nothing more was visible in a straight line but the dusky, indefinite objects of the distant view.

The whole appearance of the street before Vetranio's mansion, had it been unoccupied by the repulsive groups now formed in it, would have been eminently beautiful, at the hour of which we now write. The nobly symmetrical frontage of the palace itself, with its graceful succession of long porticoes and colossal statues, contrasted by the picturesquely irregular appearance of the opposite dwelling of Numerian and the lofty houses by its side; the soft, indistinct masses of foliage, running parallel along the upper ends of the street, terminated and connected by the archway garden across the road, on which planted a group of tall pine-trees, rising in gigantic relief against the transparent sky; the brilliant light streaming across the pavement from Vetranio's gayly-curtained windows, immediately opposed by the tranquil moonlight which lit the more distant view--formed altogether a prospect in which the natural and the artificial were mingled together in the most exquisite proportions--a prospect whose ineffable poetry and beauty might, on any other night, have charmed the most careless eye and exalted the most frivolous mind. But now, overspread as it was by groups of people, gaunt with famine and hideous with disease; startled as it was, at gloomy intervals, by contending cries of supplication, defiance, and despair, its brightest beauties of Nature and Art appeared but to shine with an aspect of bitter mockery around the human misery which their splendor disclosed.

Upward of a hundred people--mostly of the lowest orders--were congregated before the senator's devoted dwelling. Some few among them passed slowly to and fro in the street, their figures gliding shadowy and solemn through the light around them; but the greater number lay on the pavement before the wall of Numerian's dwelling and the doorways of the lofty houses by its side. Illuminated by the full glare of the light from the palace windows, these groups, huddled together in the distorted attitudes of suffering and despair, assumed a fearful and unearthly appearance. Their shriveled faces, their tattered clothing, their wan forms, here prostrate, there half raised, were bathed in a steady red glow. High above them, at the windows of the tall houses, now tenanted in every floor by the dead, appeared a few figures (the mercenary guardians of the dying within) bending forward to look out upon the palace opposite--their haggard faces showing pale in the clear moonlight. Sometimes their voices were heard, calling in mockery to the mass of people below to break down the strong steel gates of the palace, and tear the full wine-cup from its master's lips. Sometimes those beneath replied with execrations, which rose wildly mingled with the wailing of women and children, the moans of the plague-stricken, and the supplications of the famished, to the slaves passing backward and forward behind the palace railings, for charity and help.

In the intervals, when the tumult of weak voices was partially lulled, there was heard a dull, regular, beating sound, produced by those who had found dry bones on their road to the palace, and were pounding them on the pavement, in sheltered places, for food. The wind, which had been refreshing during the day, had changed at sunset, and now swept up slowly over the street, in hot, faint gusts, plague-laden from the east. Particles of the ragged clothing on some prostrate forms lying most exposed in its course, waved slowly to and fro, as it passed, like banners planted by Death on the yielding defenses of the citadel of Life. It wound through the open windows of the palace, hot and mephitic, as if tainted with the breath of the foul and furious words which it bore onward into the banqueting-hall of the senator's reckless guests. Driven over such scenes as now spread beneath it, it derived from them a portentous significance--it seemed to blow like an atmosphere exuded from the furnace depths of center earth, breathing sinister warnings of some deadly convulsion in the whole fabric of Nature over the thronged and dismal street.

Such was the prospect before the palace, and such the spectators assembled in ferocious anxiety to behold the destruction of the senator's abode. Meanwhile, within the walls of the building, the beginning of the fatal orgy was at hand.

It had been covenanted by the slaves (who, during the calamities in the besieged city, had relaxed in their accustomed implicit obedience to their master with perfect impunity), that as soon as the last labors of preparation were completed, they should be free to consult their own safety by quitting the devoted palace. Already some of the weakest and most timid of their numbers might be seen passing out hastily into the gardens by the back gates, like engineers who had fired a train, and were escaping ere the explosion burst forth. Those among the menials who still remained in the palace were for the greater part occupied in drinking from the vases of wine which had been placed before them, to preserve to the last moment their failing strength.

The mockery of festivity had been extended even to their dresses--green liveries girt with cherry-colored girdles arrayed their wasted forms. They drank in utter silence. Not the slightest appearance of revelry or intoxication prevailed among their ranks. Confusedly huddled together, as if for mutual protection, they ever and anon cast quick glances of suspicion and apprehension upon some six or eight of the superior attendants of the palace, who walked backward and forward at the outer extremity of the hall occupied by their comrades, and occasionally advancing along the straight passages before them to the front gates of the building, appeared to be exchanging furtive signals with some of the people in the street. Reports had been vaguely spread of a secret conspiracy between some of the principal slaves and certain chosen ruffians of the populace, to murder all the inmates of the palace, seize on its treasures, and, opening the city gates to the Goths, escape with their booty during the confusion of the pillage of Rome. Nothing had as yet been positively discovered; but the few attendants who kept ominously apart from the rest were unanimously suspected by their fellows, who now watched them over their wine-cups with anxious eyes. Different as was the scene among the slaves still left in the palace from the scene among the people dispersed in the street, the one was nevertheless in its own degree as gloomily suggestive of some great impending calamity as the other.

The grand banqueting-hall of the palace, prepared though it now was for festivity, wore a changed and melancholy aspect.

The massive tables still ran down the whole length of the noble room, surrounded by luxurious couches, as in former days; but not a vestige of food appeared upon their glittering surfaces. Rich vases, flasks, and drinking-cups, all filled with wine, alone occupied the festal board. Above, hanging low from the ceiling, burned ten large lamps, corresponding to the number of guests assembled, as the only procurable representatives of the hundreds of revelers who had feasted at Vetranio's expense, during the brilliant nights that were now passed forever. At the lower end of the room, beyond the grand door of entrance, hung a thick black curtain, apparently intended to conceal, mysteriously, some object behind it. Before the curtain burned a small lamp of yellow glass, raised upon a high gilt pole, and around and beneath it, heaped against the side walls, and over part of the table, lay a various and confused mass of rich objects, all of a nature more or less inflammable, and all besprinkled with scented oils. Hundreds of yards of gorgeously variegated hangings, rolls upon rolls of manuscripts, gaudy dresses of all colors, toys, utensils, innumerable articles of furniture, formed in rare and beautifully inlaid woods, were carelessly flung together against the walls of the apartment, and rose high toward its ceiling.

On every part of the tables not occupied by the vases of wine were laid gold and jeweled ornaments, which dazzled the eye by their brilliancy; while, in extraordinary contrast to the magnificence thus profusely displayed, there appeared in one of the upper corners of the hall an old wooden stand, covered by a coarse cloth, on which were placed one or two common earthenware bowls, containing what may be termed a "mash" of boiled bran and salted horse flesh. Any repulsive odor which might have arisen from this strange compound was overpowered by the various perfumes sprinkled about the room, which, mingling with the hot breezes wafted through the windows from the street, produced an atmosphere as oppressive and debilitating, in spite of its artificial allurements to the sense of smell, as the air of a dungeon or the vapors of a marsh.

Remarkable as was the change in the present appearance of the banqueting-hall, it was but the feeble reflection of the alteration for the worse in the aspect of the host and his guests. Vetranio reclined at the head of the table, dressed in a scarlet mantle. An embroidered towel, with purple tassels and fringes, connected with rings of gold, fell over his breast, and silver and ivory bracelets were clasped round his arms. But of the former man the habiliments were all that remained. His head was bent forward as if with the weakness of age; his emaciated arms seemed barely able to support the weight of the ornaments which glittered on them; his eyes had contracted a wild, unsettled expression; and a deadly paleness overspread the once plump and jovial cheeks which so many mistresses had kissed, in mercenary rapture, in other days. Both in countenance and manner the elegant voluptuary of our former acquaintance at the Court of Ravenna was entirely and fatally changed. Of the other eight patricians who lay on the couches around their altered host--some wild and reckless, some gloomy and imbecile--all had suffered in the ordeal of the siege, the famine, and the pestilence, like him.

Such were the members of the assemblage, represented from the ceiling by nine of the burning lamps. The tenth and last lamp indicated the presence of one more guest, who reclined a little apart from the rest.

This man was humpbacked; his gaunt, bony features were repulsively disproportioned in size to his puny frame, which looked doubly contemptible, enveloped as it was in an ample tawdry robe. Sprung from the lowest ranks of the populace, he had gradually forced himself into the favor of his superiors by his skill in coarse mimicry, and his readiness in ministering to the worst vices of all who would employ him. Having lost the greater part of his patrons during the siege, finding himself abandoned to starvation on all sides, he had now, as a last resource, obtained permission to participate in the Banquet of Famine, to enliven it by a final exhibition of his buffoonery, and to die with his masters, as he had lived with them--the slave, the parasite, and the imitator of the lowest of their vices and the worst of their crimes.

At the commencement of the orgy, little was audible beyond the clash of the wine-cups, the low occasional whispering of the revelers, and the confused voices of the people without, floating through the window from the street. The desperate compact of the guests, now that its execution had actually begun, awed them at first, in spite of themselves. At length, when there was a lull of all sounds--when a temporary calm prevailed ever the noises outside--when the wine-cups were emptied, and left for a moment ere they were filled again--Vetranio feebly rose, and, announcing with a mocking smile that he was about to speak a funeral oration over his friends and himself, pointed to the wall immediately behind him, as to an object fitted to awaken the astonishment or the hilarity of his moody guests.

Against the upper part of the wall were fixed various small statues in bronze and marble, all representing the owner of the palace, and all hung with golden plates. Beneath these appeared the rent-roll of his estates, written in various colors, on white vellum; and beneath that, scratched on the marble in faint, irregular characters, was no less an object than his own epitaph, composed by himself. It may be translated thus:

"Behold"--cried Vetranio, pointing triumphantly to the epitaph--"behold in every line of those eloquent letters at once the seal of my resolute adherence to the engagement that unites us here, and the foundation of my just claim to the reverence of posterity on the most useful of the arts which I exercised for the benefit of my species! Read--friends, brethren, fellow-martyrs of glory--and, as you read, rejoice with me over the hour of our departure from the desecrated arena, no longer worthy the celebration of the Games of Life! Yet, ere the feast proceeds, hear me while I speak--I make my last oration, as the arbiter of our funeral sports, as the host of the Banquet of Famine!

"Who would sink ignobly beneath the slow superiority of starvation, or perish under the quickly-glancing steel of the barbarian conqueror's sword, when such a death as ours is offered to the choice?--when wine flows bright, to drown sensation in oblivion, and a palace and its treasures furnish alike the scene of the revel and the radiant funeral pile? The mighty philosophers of India--the inspired Gymnosophists--died as we shall din! Calanus before Alexander, Zamarus in the presence of Augustus, lit the fires that consumed them! Let us follow their glorious example! No worms will prey upon our bodies, no hired mourners will howl discordant at our funerals! Purified in the radiance of primeval fire, we shall vanish triumphant from enemies and friends--a marvel to the earth, a vision of glory to the gods themselves!

"Is it a day more or a day less of life that is now of importance to us? No; it is only toward the easiest and the noblest death that our aspirations can turn! Among our number, there is now not one whom the care of existence can further occupy!

"Here, at my right hand, reclines my estimable comrade of a thousand former feasts, Furius-Balburius-Placidus, who, when we sailed on the Lucrine Lake, was wont to complain of intolerable hardship if a fly settled on the gilded folds of his umbrella; who languished for a land of Cimmerian darkness if a sunbeam penetrated the silken awnings of his garden terrace; and who now wrangles for a mouthful of horseflesh with the meanest of his slaves, and would exchange the richest of his country villas for a basket of dirty bread! Oh, Furius-Balburius-Placidus, of what further use is life to thee?

"There, at my left, I discern the changed though still expressive countenance of the resolute Thascius--he who chastised a slave with a hundred lashes if his warm water was not brought immediately at his command; he whose serene contempt for every member of the human species but himself once ranked him among the greatest of human philosophers; even he now wanders through his palace unserved, and fawns upon the plebeian who will sell him a measure of wretched bran! Oh, admired friend, oh, rightly-reasoning Thascius, say, is there anything in Rome which should delay thee on thy journey to the Elysian Fields?

"Further onward at the table, drinking largely while I speak, I behold, oh, Marcus-Moecius-Moemmius, thy once plump and jovial form!--thou, in former days accustomed to rejoice in the length of thy name, because it enabled thy friends to drink the more in drinking a cup to each letter of it, tell me what banqueting-hall is now open to thee but this?--and thus desolate in the city of thy social triumphs, what should disincline thee to make of our festal solemnity thy last revel on earth?

"Thou, too, facetious hunchback, prince of parasites, unscrupulous Reburrus, where, but at this Banquet of Famine, will thy buffoonery now procure for thee a draught of reviving wine? Thy masters have abandoned thee to thy native dunghill! No more shalt thou wheedle for them when they borrow, or bully for them when they pay! No more charges of poisoning or magic shalt thou forge to imprison their troublesome creditors! Oh, officious sycophant, thy occupations are no more! Drink while thou canst, and then resign thy carcass to congenial mire!

"And you, my five remaining friends, whom--little desirous of further delay--I will collectively address, think on the days when the suspicion of an infectious malady in any one of your companions was sufficient to separate you from the dearest of them; when the slaves who came to you from their palaces underwent long ceremonies of ablution before they approached your presence; and, remembering this, reflect that most, perhaps all of us, now meet here plague-tainted already; and then say, of what ad vantage is it to languish for a life which is yours no longer?

"No, my friends, my brethren of the banquet; feeling that when life is worthless it is folly to live, you cannot shrink from the lofty resolution by which we are bound, you cannot pause on our joyful journey of departure from the scenes of earth--I wrong you even by a doubt! Let me now, rather, ask your attention for a worthier subject--the enumeration of the festal ceremonies by which the progress of the banquet will be marked. That task concluded, that last ceremony of my last welcome to you in these halls duly performed, I join you once more in your final homage to the deity of our social lives--the god of Wine!

"It is not unknown to you--learned as you are in the jovial antiquities of the table--that it was, among some of the ancients, a custom for a master-spirit of philosophy to preside---the teacher as well as the guest--at their feasts. This usage it has been my care to revive; and, as this our meeting is unparalleled in its heroic design, so it was my ambition to bid to it one unparalleled, either as a teacher or a guest. Fired by an original idea, unobserved of my slaves, aided only by my singing-boy, the faithful Glyco, I have succeeded in placing behind that black curtain such an associate of our revels as you have never feasted with before--whose appearance at the fitting moment must strike you irresistibly with astonishment; and whose discourse--not of human wisdom only--will be inspired by the midnight secrets of the tomb. By my side, on this parchment, lies the formulary of questions to be addressed by Reburrus, when the curtain is withdrawn, to the Oracle of the Mysteries of other Spheres.

"Before you, behold in those vases all that remains of my once well-stocked cellars; and all that is provided for the palates of my guests! We sit at the Banquet of Famine, and no coarser sustenance than inspiring wine finds admittance at the Bacchanalian board. Yet, should any among us, in his last moments, be feeble enough to pollute his lips with nourishment alone worthy of the vermin of the earth, let him seek the wretched and scanty table, type of the wretched and scanty food that covers it, placed yonder, in obscurity, behind me. There will he find (in all, barely sufficient for one man's poorest meal) the last morsels of the vilest nourishment left in the palace. For me, my resolution is fixed--it is only the generous wine-cup that shall now approach my lips!

"Above me are the ten lamps, answering to the number of my friends here assembled. One after another, as the wine overpowers us, those burning images of life will be extinguished in succession by the guests who remain proof against our draughts; and the last of these, lighting this torch at the last lamp, will consummate the banquet, and celebrate its glorious close, by firing the funeral pile of my treasures, heaped yonder against my palace walls! If my powers fail me before yours, swear to me that whoever among you is able to lift the cup to his lips, after it has dropped from the hands of the rest, will fire the pile! Swear it by your lost mistresses, your lost friends, your lost treasures!--by your own lives, devoted to the pleasures of wine and the purification of fire!"

As, with flashing eyes and flushed countenance, Vetranio sank back on his couch, companions, inflamed with the wine they had already drunk, arose, cup in hand, and turned toward him. Their voices, discordantly mingled, pronounced the oath together--then, as they resumed their former positions, their eyes all turned toward the black curtain in ardent expectation.

They had observed the sinister and sarcastic expression of Vetranio's eye, as he spoke of his concealed guest; they knew that the hunchback Reburrus possessed, among his other powers of buffoonery, the art of ventriloquism; and they suspected the presence of some hideous or grotesque image of a heathen god or demon in the hidden recess, which the jugglery of the parasite was to gift with the capacity of speech. Blasphemous comments upon life, death and immortality were eagerly awaited. The general impatience for the withdrawal of the curtain was perceived by Vetranio, who, waving his hand for silence, authoritatively exclaimed: "The hour has not yet arrived--more draughts must be drunk, more libations poured out, ere the mystery of the curtain is revealed! Ho! Glyco!"--he continued, turning toward the singing-boy, who had silently entered the room--"the moment is yours! Tune your lyre, and recite my last ode, which I have addressed to you! Let the charms of poetry preside over the feast of Death!"

The boy advanced trembling: his once ruddy face was colorless and haggard; his eyes were fixed with a look of rigid terror on the black curtain; his features palpably expressed the presence within him of some secret and overwhelming recollection, which had crushed all his other faculties and perceptions. Steadily, almost guiltily, averting his face from his master's countenance, he stood by Vetranio's couch, a frail and fallen being, a mournful spectacle of perverted docility and degraded youth.

Still true, however, to the duties of his vocation, he ran his thin, trembling fingers over the lyre, and mechanically preluded the commencement of the ode. But during the silence of attention which now prevailed, the confused noises from the people in the street penetrated more distinctly into the banqueting-room; and at this moment, high above them all--hoarse, raving, terrible--rose the voice of one man.

"Tell me not," he cried, "of perfumes wafted from the palace--foul vapors flow from it!--see, they sink, suffocating over me!--they bathe sky and earth, and men who move around us, in fierce, green light!"

Then other voices of men and women, shrill and savage, broke forth in interruption together--"Peace, Davus! you awake the dead about you!" "Hide in the darkness; you are plague-struck; your skin is shriveled; your gums are toothless!" "When the palace is fired, you shall be flung into the flames to purify your rotten carcass!"

"Sing!" cried Vetranio, furiously, observing the shudders that ran over the boy's frame and held him speechless. "Strike the lyre, as Timothetis struck it before Alexander! Drown in melody the barking of the curs who wait for our offal in the street!"

Feebly and interruptedly the terrified boy began, the wild continuous noises of the moaning voices from without sounding their awful accompaniment to the infidel philosophy of his song, as he breathed it forth in faint and faltering accents. It ran thus:

TO GLYCO.

Ah, Glycol? why in flow'rs array'd?
Those festive wreaths less quickly fade
Than briefly-blooming joy!
Those high-prized friends who share your mirth
Are counterfeits of brittle earth,
False coin'd in Death's alloy!

The bliss your notes could once inspire,
When lightly o'er the godlike lyre
Your nimble fingers pass'd,
Shall spring the same from others' skill--
When you're forgot, the music still
The player shall outlast!

The sun-touch'd cloud that mounts the sky,
That brightly glows to warm the eye,
Then fades we know not where,
Is image of the little breath
Of life--and then, the doom of Death
That you and I must share!

Helpless to make or mar our birth,
We blindly grope the ways of earth,
And live our paltry hour;
Sure, that when life has ceased to please,
To die at will, in Stoic ease,
Is yielded to our pow'r!

Who, timely wise, would meanly wait
The dull delay of tardy Fate,
When Life's delights are shorn?
No! When its outer gloss has flown,
Let's fling the tarnish'd bauble down
As lightly as 'twas worn!

"A health to Glyco! A deep draught to a singer from heaven come down upon earth!" cried the guests, seizing their wine-cups as the ode was concluded, and draining them to the last drop. But their drunken applause fell noiseless upon the ear to which it was addressed. The boy's voice, as he sang the final stanza of the ode, had suddenly changed to a shrill, almost an unearthly tone, then suddenly sank again as he breathed forth the last few notes; and now, as his dissolute audience turned toward him with approving glances, they saw him standing before them, cold, rigid, and voiceless. The next instant his fixed features were suddenly distorted; his whole frame collapsed, as if torn by an internal spasm--he fell back heavily to the floor. Those around approached him with unsteady feet, and raised him in their arms. His soul had burst the bonds of vice in which others had entangled it; the voice of Death had whispered to the slave of the great despot, Crime--"Be free!"

"We have heard the note of the swan singing its own funeral hymn!" said the patrician Placidus, looking in maudlin pity from the corpse of the boy to the face of Vetranio, which presented, for the moment, an involuntary expression of grief and remorse.

"Our miracle of beauty, and boy-god of melody, has departed before us to the Elysian Fields!" muttered the hunchback, Reburrus, in harsh, sarcastic accents.

Then, during the short silence that ensued, the voices from the street--joined on this occasion to a noise of approaching footsteps on the pavement--became again distinctly audible in the banqueting-hall. "News! news!" cried these fresh auxiliaries of the horde already assembled before the palace. "Keep together, you who still care for your lives! Solitary citizens have been lured by strange men into desolate streets, and never seen again! Jars of newly-salted flesh, which there were no beasts left in the city to supply, have been found in a butcher's shop! Keep together! Keep together!"

"No cannibals among the mob shall pollute the body of my poor boy!" cried Vetranio, rousing himself from his short lethargy of grief. "Ho! Thascius! Marcus! you who can yet stand! let us bear him to the funeral pile! He has died first--his ashes shall be first consumed!"

The two patricians arose as the senator spoke, and aided him in carrying the body to the lower end of the room, where it was laid across the table, beneath the black curtain, and between the heaps of drapery and furniture piled up against each of the walls. Then, as his guests reeled back to their places, Vetranio, remaining by the side of the corpse, and seizing in his unsteady hands a small vase of wine, exclaimed, in tones of fierce exultation: "The hour has come--the banquet of Famine has ended--the banquet of Death has begun! A health to the guest behind the curtain! Fill--drink--behold!"

He drank deeply from the vase as he ceased, and drew aside the black drapery above him. A cry of terror and astonishment burst from the intoxicated guests, as they beheld in the recess now disclosed to view the corpse of an aged woman, clothed in white, and propped up on a high black throne, with the face turned toward them, and the arms (artificially supported) stretched out as if in denunciation over the banqueting-table. The lamp of yellow glass which burned high above the body threw over it a lurid and flickering light--the eyes were open, the jaw had fallen, the long, gray tresses drooped heavily on either side of the white, hollow cheeks.

"Behold!"--cried Vetranio, pointing to the corpse--"behold my secret guest! Who so fit as the dead to preside at the banquet of Death? Compelling the aid of Glyco, shrouded by congenial night, seizing on the first corpse exposed before me in the street, I have set up there, unsuspected by all, the proper idol of our worship, and philosopher at our feast! Another health to the queen of the fatal revels--to the teacher of the mysteries of worlds unseen; rescued from rotting unburied, to perish in the consecrated flames with the senators of Rome! A health!--a health to the mighty mother, ere she begin the mystic revelations! Fill--drink!"

Fired by their host's example, recovered from their momentary awe, already inflamed by the mad recklessness of debauchery, the guests started from their couches, and with Bacchanalian shouts answered Vetranio's challenge. The scene at this moment approached the supernatural. The wild disorder of the richly-laden tables; the wine flowing over the floor from overthrown vases; the great lamps burning bright and steady over the confusion beneath; the fierce gestures, the disordered countenances of the revelers, as they waved their jeweled cups over their heads in frantic triumph; and then the gloomy and terrific prospect at the lower end of the hall--the black curtain, the light burning solitary on its high pole, the dead boy lying across the festal table, the living master standing by his side, and, like an evil spirit, pointing upward in mockery to the white-robed corpse of the woman as it towered above all in its unnatural position, with its skinny arms stretched forth, with its ghastly features appearing to move as the faint and flickering light played over them--produced together such a combination of scarce earthly objects as might be painted, but cannot be described. It was an embodiment of a sorcerer's vision--an apocalypse of sin triumphant over the world's last relics of mortality in the vaults of death.

"To your task, Reburrus!" cried Vetranio, when the tumult was lulled; "to your questions without delay! Behold the teacher with whom you are to hold commune! Peruse carefully the parchment in your hand--question, and question loudly--you speak to the apathetic dead!"

For some time before the disclosure of the corpse, the hunchback had been seated apart at the end of the banqueting-hall opposite the black-curtained recess, conning over the manuscript containing the list of questions and answers which formed the impious dialogue he was to hold, by the aid of his powers of ventriloquism, with the violated dead. When the curtain was withdrawn he had looked up for a moment, and had greeted the appearance of the sight behind it with a laugh of brutal derision, returning immediately to the study of his blasphemous formulary which had been confided to his care. At the moment when Vetranio's commands were addressed to him, he arose, reeled down the apartment toward the corpse, and, opening the dialogue as he approached it, began in loud, jeering tones, "Speak, miserable relict of decrepit mortality!"

He paused as he uttered the last word; and, gaining a point of view from which the light of the lamp fell full upon the solemn and stony features of the corpse, looked up defiantly at it. In an instant a frightful change passed over him, the manuscript dropped from his hand, his deformed frame shrank and tottered, a shrill cry of recognition burst from his lips, more like the yell of a wild beast than the voice of a man.

The next moment--when the guests started up to question or deride him--he turned slowly and faced them. Desperate and drunken as they were, his look awed them into utter silence. His face was deathlike in hue, as the face of the corpse above him--thick drops of perspiration trickled down it like rain--his dry, glaring eyes wandered fiercely over the startled countenances before him; and as he extended toward them his clinched hands, he muttered in a deep, gasping whisper, "Who has done this? MY MOTHER! MY MOTHER!"

As these few words--of awful import, though of simple form--fell upon the ears of those whom he addressed, such of them as were not already sunk in insensibility looked round on each other almost sobered for the moment, and all speechless alike. Not even the clash of the wine-cups was now heard at the banqueting-table--nothing was audible but the sound, still fitfully rising and falling, of the voices of terror, ribaldry, and anguish from the street; and the hoarse, convulsive accents of the hunchback, still uttering at intervals his fearful identification of the dead body above him--"MY MOTHER! MY MOTHER!"

At length Vetranio, who was the first to recover himself, addressed the terrified and degraded wretch before him, in tones which, in spite of himself, betrayed as he began an unwonted tremulousness and restraint. "What, Reburrus!" he cried, "are you already drunken to insanity, that you call the first dead body which by chance I encountered in the street, and by chance brought hither--your mother? Was it to talk of your mother, whom dead or alive we neither know nor care for, that you were admitted here? Son of obscurity and inheritor of rags, what are your plebeian parents to us?" he continued, refilling his cup, and lashing himself into assumed anger as he spoke. "To your dialogue without delay! or you shall be flung from the windows to mingle with your rabble-equals in the street!"

Neither by word nor look did the hunchback answer the senator's menaces. For him, the voice of the living was stifled in the presence of the dead. The retribution that had gone forth against him had struck his moral, as a thunderbolt might have stricken his physical, being. His soul strove in agony within him as he thought on the awful fatality which had set the dead mother in judgment on the degraded son--which had directed the hand of the senator unwittingly to select the corpse of the outraged parent, as the object for the infidel buffoonery of the reckless child, at the very close of his impious career. His past life rose before him, for the first time, like a foul vision--like a nightmare of horror, impurity, and crime. He staggered up the room, groping his way along the wall, as if the darkness of midnight had closed around his eyes, and crouched down by the open window. Beneath him rose the evil and ominous voices from the street; around him spread the pitiless array of his masters; before him appeared the denouncing vision of the corpse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The restless moments moved onward and onward, and still he delayed the consummation of the ruin which the night's debauch had begun. Slowly the tender daylight grew and brightened in its beauty, warmed the cold, prostrate bodies in the silent hall, and dimmed the faint glow of the wasting lamp; no black mist of smoke, no red glare of devouring fire arose to quench its fair luster; no roar of flames interrupted the murmuring morning tranquillity of nature, or startled from their heavy repose the exhausted outcasts stretched upon the pavement of the street. Still the noble palace stood unshaken on its firm foundations; still the adornments of its porticoes and its statues glittered as of old in the rays of the rising sun; and still the hand of the master who had sworn to destroy it, as he had sworn to destroy himself, hung idly near the torch which lay already extinguished in harmless ashes at his feet!

WE return to the street before the palace. The calamities of the siege had fallen fiercely on those who lay there during the night. From the turbulent and ferocious mob of a few hours since not even the sound of a voice was now heard. Some, surprised in a paroxysm of hunger by exhaustion and insensibility, lay with their hands half forced into their mouths, as if in their ravenous madness they had endeavored to prey upon their own flesh. Others now and then wearily opened their languid eyes upon the street, no longer regardful, in the present extremity of their sufferings, of the building whose destruction they had assembled to behold, but watching for a fancied realization of the visions of richly-spread tables and speedy relief called up before them, as if in mockery, by the delirium of starvation and disease.

The sun had as yet but slightly risen above the horizon, when the attention of the few among the populace who still preserved some perception of outward events was suddenly attracted by the appearance of an irregular procession--composed partly of citizens and partly of officers of the Senate, and headed by two men--which slowly approached from the end of the street leading into the interior of the city. This assembly of persons stopped opposite Vetranio's palace; and then, such members of the mob who watched them as were not yet entirely abandoned by hope, heard the inspiring news that the procession they beheld was a procession of peace, and that the two men who headed it were the Spaniard Basilius, a governor of a province, and Johannes, the chief of the imperial notaries--appointed embassadors to conclude a treaty with the Goths.

As this intelligence reached them, men who had before appeared incapable of the slightest movement now rose painfully, yet resolutely, to their feet, and crowded round the two embassadors as round two angels descended to deliver them from bondage and death. Meanwhile, some officers of the Senate, finding the front gates of the palace closed against them, proceeded to the garden entrances at the back of the building, to obtain admission to its owner. The absence of Vetranio and his friends from the deliberations of the Government, had been attributed to their disgust at the obstinate and unavailing resistance offered to the Goths. Now, therefore, when submission had been resolved upon, it had been thought both expedient and easy to recall them peremptorily to their duties. In addition to this motive for seeking the interior of the palace, the servants of the Senate had another errand to perform there. The widely-rumored determination of Vetranio and his associates to destroy themselves by fire, in the frenzy of a last debauch--disbelieved or disregarded while the more imminent perils of the city were under consideration--became a source of some apprehension and anxiety to the acting members of the Roman council, now that their minds were freed from part of the responsibility which had weighed on them, by their resolution to treat for peace.

Accordingly, the persons now sent into the palace were charged with the duty of frustrating its destruction, if such an act had been really contemplated, as well as the duty of recalling its inmates to their appointed places in the senate-house. How far they were enabled, at the time of their entrance into the banqueting-hall, to accomplish their double mission the reader is well able to calculate. They found Vetranio still in the place which he had occupied since Antonina had quitted him. Startled by their approach from the stupor which had hitherto weighed on his faculties, the desperation of his purpose returned; he made an effort to tear from its place the lamp which still feebly burned, and to fire the pile in defiance of all opposition. But his strength, already taxed to the utmost, failed him. Uttering impotent threats of resistance and revenge, he fell swooning and helpless into the arms of the officers of the Senate who held him back. One of them was immediately dismissed, while his companions remained in the palace, to communicate with the leaders of the assembly outside. His report concluded, the two embassadors moved slowly onward, separating themselves from the procession which had accompanied them, and followed only by a few chosen attendants--a mournful and a degraded embassy, sent forth by the people who had once imposed their dominion, their customs, and even their language, on the Eastern and Western worlds, to bargain with the barbarians whom their fathers had enslaved, for the purchase of a disgraceful peace.

On the departure of the embassadors, all the spectators still capable of the effort repaired to the Forum to await their return, and were joined there by members of the populace from other parts of the city. It was known that the first intimation of the result of the embassy would be given from this place; and in the eagerness of their anxiety to hear it, in the painful intensity of their final hopes of deliverance, even death itself seemed for a while to be arrested in its fatal progress through the ranks of the besieged. In silence and apprehension they counted the tardy moments of delay, and watched with sickening gaze the shadows lessening and lessening, as the sun gradually rose in the heavens to the meridian point.

At length, after an absence that appeared of endless duration, the two embassadors re-entered Rome. Neither of them spoke as they hurriedly passed through the ranks of the people; but their looks of terror and despair were all-eloquent to every beholder--their mission had failed.

For some time, no member of the Government appeared to have resolution enough to come forward and harangue the people on the subject of the unsuccessful embassy. After a long interval, however, the Prefect Ponipeianus himself, urged partly by the selfish entreaties of his friends, and partly by the childish love of display which still adhered to him through all his present anxieties and apprehensions, stepped into one of the lower balconies of the senate-house to address the citizens beneath him.

The chief magistrate of Rome was no longer the pompous and portly personage whose intrusion on Vetranio's privacy during the commencement of the siege has been described previously. The little superfluous flesh still remaining on his face hung about it like an ill-fitting garment; his tones had become lachrymose; the oratorical gestures with which he was wont to embellish profusely his former speeches were all abandoned; nothing remained of the original man but the bombast of his language and the impudent complacency of his self-applause, which now appeared in contemptible contrast to his crestfallen demeanor, and his disheartening narrative of degradation and defeat.

"Men of Rome, let each of you exercise in his own person the heroic virtues of a Regulus or a Cato!" the prefect began. "A treaty with the barbarians is out of our power! it is the scourge of the empire, Alaric himself, who commands the invading forces! Vain were the dignified remonstrances of the grave Basilius, futile was the persuasive rhetoric of the astute Johannes, addressed to the slaughtering and vainglorious Goth! On their admission to his presence, the embassadors, anxious to awe him into a capitulation, enlarged, with sagacious and commendable patriotism, on the expertness of the Romans in the use of arms, their readiness for war, and their vast numbers within the city walls. I blush to repeat the barbarian's reply. Laughing immoderately, he answered, 'The thicker the grass, the easier it is to cut!' Still undismayed. the embassadors, changing their tactics, talked indulgently of their willingness to purchase a peace. At this proposal, his insolence burst beyond all bounds of barbarous arrogance. 'I will not relinquish the siege,' he cried, 'until I have delivered to me all the gold and silver in the city, all the household goods in it, and all the slaves from the northern countries. 'What then, oh King, will you leave us?' asked our amazed embassadors. 'YOUR LIVES!' answered the implacable Goth. Hearing this, even the resolute Basilius and the wise Johannes despaired. They asked time to communicate with the Senate, and left the camp of the enemy without further delay. Such was the end of the embassy; such the arrogant ferocity of the barbarian foe!"

Here the prefect paused, from sheer weakness and want of breath. His oration, however, was not concluded. He had disheartened the people by his narrative of what had occurred to the embassadors; he now proceeded to console them by his relation of what had occurred to himself, when, after an interval, he thus resumed:

"But even yet, oh, citizens of Rome, it is not time to despair! There is another chance of deliverance still left to us; and that chance has been discovered by me. It was my lot, during the absence of the embassadors, to meet with certain men of Tuscany, who had entered Rome a few days before the beginning of the siege, and who spoke of a project for relieving the city which they would communicate to the prefect alone. Ever anxious for the public welfare, daring all treachery from strangers for advantage of my office, I accorded to these men a secret interview. They told me of a startling and miraculous event. The town of Neveia, lying, as you well know, in the direct road of the barbarians when they marched upon Rome, was protected from their pillaging bands by a tempest of thunder and lightning terrible to behold. This tempest arose not, as you may suppose, from an accidental convulsion of the elements, but was launched over the heads of the invaders by the express interference of the tutelary deities of the town, invocated by the inhabitants, who returned in their danger to the practice of their ancient manner of worship. So said the men of Tuscany; and such pious resources as those employed by the people of Neveia did they recommend to the people of Rome! For my part, I acknowledge to you that I have faith in their project. The antiquity of our former worship is still venerable in my eyes. The prayers of the priests of our new religion have wrought no miraculous interference in our behalf; let us, therefore, imitate the example of the inhabitants of Neveia, and by the force of our invocations hurl the thunders of Jupiter on the barbarian camp! Let us trust for deliverance to the potent interposition of the gods whom our fathers worshiped--those gods who now, perhaps, avenge themselves for our desertion of their temples by our present calamities. I go without delay to propose to the Bishop Innocentius and to the Senate the public performance of solemn ceremonies of sacrifice at the Capitol! I leave you in the joyful assurance that the gods, appeased by our returning fidelity to our altars, will not refuse the supernatural protection which they accorded to the people of a provincial town, to the citizens of Rome!"

No sounds either of applause or disapprobation followed the prefect's notable proposal for delivering the city from the besiegers by the public apostasy of the besieged. As he disappeared from their eyes, the audience turned away speechless. A universal despair now overpowered in them even the last energies of discord and crime; they resigned themselves to their doom with the gloomy indifference of beings in whom all mortal sensations, all human passions, good or evil, were extinguished. The prefect departed on his ill-omened expedition to propose the practice of Paganism to the bishop of a Christian church; but no profitable effort for relief was even suggested, either by the Government or the people.

And so this day drew in its turn toward a close--more mournful and more disastrous, more fraught with peril, misery and gloom than the days that had preceded it.

The next morning dawned, but no preparations for the ceremonies of the ancient worship appeared at the Capitol. The Senate and the bishop hesitated to incur the responsibility of authorizing a public restoration of Paganism; the citizens, hopeless of succor, heavenly or earthly, remained unheedful as the dead of all that passed around them. There was one man in Rome who might have succeeded in rousing their languid energies to apostasy: but where, and how, employed was he?

Now, when the opportunity for which he had labored resolutely, though in vain, through a long existence of suffering, degradation, and crime, had gratuitously presented itself more tempting and more favorable than even he in his wildest visions of success had ever dared to hope--where was Ulpius? Hidden from men's eyes, like a foul reptile, in his lurking-place in the deserted temple--now raving round his idols in the fury of madness, now prostrate before them in idiot adoration--weaker for the interests of his worship, at the crisis of its fate, than the weakest child crawling famished through the streets--the victim of his own evil machinations at the very moment when they might have led him to triumph--the object of that worst earthly retribution, by which the wicked are at once thwarted, doomed, and punished, here as hereafter, through the agency of their own sins.

Three more days passed. The Senate, their numbers fast diminishing in the pestilence, occupied the time in vain deliberations or moody silence. Each morning the weary guards looked forth from the ramparts, with the fruitless hope of discerning the long-promised legions of Ravenna on their way to Rome; and each morning devastation and death gained ground afresh among the hapless besieged. At length, on the fourth day, the Senate abandoned all hope of further resistance, and determined on submission, whatever might be the result. It was resolved that another embassy composed of the whole acting Senate, and followed by a considerable train, should proceed to Alaric: that one more effort should be made to induce him to abate his ruinous demands on the conquered; and that if this failed, the gates should be thrown open, and the city and the people abandoned to his mercy in despair.

As soon as the procession of this last Roman embassy was formed in the Forum, its numbers were almost immediately swelled, in spite of opposition, by those among the mass of the people who were still able to move their languid and diseased bodies, and who, in the extremity of their misery had determined, at all hazards, to take advantage of the opening of the gates, and fly from the city of pestilence, in which they were immured, careless whether they perished on the swords of the Goths or languished unaided on the open plains. All power of enforcing order had long since been lost; the few soldiers gathered about the senators made one abortive effort to drive the people back, and then resigned any further resistance to their will.

Feebly and silently the spirit-broken assembly now moved along the great highways, so often trodden to the roar of martial music and the shouts of applauding multitudes, by the triumphal processions of victorious Rome; and from every street, as it passed on, the wasted forms of the people stole out like specters to join it. Among these, as the embassy approached the Pincian Gate, were two, hurrying forth to herd with their fellow-sufferers, on whose fortunes in the fallen city our more particular attention has been fixed. To explain their presence on the scene (if such an explanation be required), it is necessary to digress for a moment from the progress of events during the last days of the siege to the morning when Antonina departed from Vetranio's palace to return with her succor of food and wine to her father's house.

The reader is already acquainted, from her own short and simple narrative, with the history of the closing hours of her mournful night-vigil by the side of her sinking parent, and with the motives which prompted her to seek the palace of the senator, and entreat assistance in despair from one whom she only remembered as the profligate destroyer of her tranquillity under her father's roof. It is now, therefore, most fitting to follow her on her way back through the palace gardens. No living creature but herself trod the grassy paths, along which she hastened with faltering steps--those paths which she dimly remembered to have first explored, when in former days she ventured forth to follow the distant sounds of Vetranio's lute. In spite of her vague, heavy sensations of solitude and grief, this recollection remained painfully present to her mind, unaccountably mingled with the dark and dreary apprehensions which filled her heart as she hurried onward, until she once more entered her father's dwelling; and then, as she again approached his couch, every other feeling became absorbed in a faint, overpowering fear, lest after all her perseverance and success in her errand of filial devotion, she might have returned too late.

The old man still lived--his weary eyes opened gladly on her, when she aroused him to partake of the treasured gifts from the senator's banqueting-table. The wretched food which the suicide-guests had disdained, and the simple flask of wine which they would have carelessly quaffed at one draught, were viewed both by parent and child as the saving and invigorating sustenance of many days. After having consumed as much as they dared of their precarious supply, the remainder was carefully husbanded. It was the last sign and promise of life to which they looked--the humble, yet precious store, in which alone they beheld the earnest of their security, for a few days longer, from the pangs of famine and the separation of death.

And now, with their small provision of food and wine set like a beacon of safety before their sight, a deep dream-like serenity--the sleep of the oppressed and wearied faculties--arose over their minds. Under its mysterious and tranquilizing influence, all impressions of the gloom and misery in the city, of the fatal evidences around them of the duration of the siege, faded away before their perceptions as dim, retiring objects which the eye loses in vacancy. Gradually, as the day of the first unsuccessful embassy declined, their thoughts began to flow back gently to the world of by-gone events which had crumbled into oblivion beneath the march of time. Her first recollections of her earliest childhood revived in Antonina's memory, and then mingled strangely with tearful remembrances of the last words and looks of the young warrior who had expired by her side, and with calm, solemn thoughts that the beloved spirit, emancipated from the sphere of shadows, might now be hovering near the quiet garden grave where her bitterest tears of loneliness and affliction had been shed; or moving around her--an invisible and blessed presence--as she sat at her father's feet and mourned their earthly separation!

In the emotions thus awakened there was nothing of bitterness or agony--they calmed and purified the heart through which they moved. She could now speak to the old man, for the first time, of her days of absence from him, of the brief joys and long sorrows of her hours of exile, without failing in her melancholy tale. Sometimes her father listened to her in sorrowful and speechless attention; or spoke, when she paused, of consolation and hope, as she had heard him speak among his congregation, while he was yet strong in his resolution to sacrifice all things for the reformation of the Church. Sometimes, resigning himself to the influence of his thoughts, as they glided back to the times that were gone, he again revealed to her the changing events of his past life--not, as before, with unsteady accents and wandering eyes; but now with a calmness of voice, and a coherence of language which forbade her to doubt the strange and startling narrative that she heard. Once more he spoke of the image of his lost brother (as he had parted from him in his boyhood) still present to his mind; of the country that he had quitted in after years; of the name that he had changed--from Cleander to Numerian--to foil his former associates, if they still pursued him; and of the ardent desire to behold again the companion of his first home, which now, when his daughter was restored to him, when no other earthly aspiration but this was unsatisfied, remained, at the close of his life, the last longing wish of his heart.

Such was the communion in which father and daughter passed the hours of their short reprieve from the judgment of famine pronounced against the city of their sojourn; so did they live, as it were, in a quiet interval of existence, in a tranquil pause between the toil that is over and the life.

toil that is to come in the hard labor of

But the term to these short days of repose after long suffering and grief was fast approaching. The little hoard of provision diminished as rapidly as the stores that had been anxiously collected before it; and, on the morning of the second embassy to Alaric, the flask of wine and the bowl of food were both emptied. The brief dream of security was over and gone: the terrible realities of the struggle for life had begun again!

Where, or to whom, could they now turn for help? The siege still continued; the food just exhausted was the last food that had been left, on the senator's table; to seek the palace again would be to risk refusal, perhaps insult, as the result of a second entreaty for aid, where all power of conferring it might now but too surely be lost. Such were the thoughts of Antonina as she returned the empty bowl to its former place; but she gave them no expression in words. She saw, with horror, that the same expression of despair, almost of frenzy, which had distorted her father's features on the day of her restoration to him, now marked them again. Once more he tottered toward the window, murmuring in his bitter despondency against the delusive security and hope which had held him idle for the interests of his child during the few days that were past. But, as he now looked out on the beleaguered city, he saw the populace hastening along the gloomy street beneath, as rapidly as their wearied limbs would carry them, to join the embassy. He heard them encouraging each other to proceed, to seize the last chance of escaping through the open gates from the horrors of famine and plague; and caught the infection of the recklessness and despair which had seized his fellow-sufferers from one end of Rome to the other.

Turning instantly, he grasped his daughter's hand and drew her from the room, commanding her to come forth with him and join the citizens in their flight, ore it was too late. Startled by his words and actions, she vainly endeavored, as she obeyed, to impress her father with the dread of the Goths which her own bitter experience taught her to feel, now that her only protector among them lay cold in the grave. With Numerian, as with the rest of the people, all apprehension, all doubt, all exercise of reason, was overpowered by the one eager idea of escaping from the fatal precincts of Rome.

So they mingled with the throng, herding affrightedly together in the rear of the embassy, and followed in their ranks as best they might. The sun shone down brightly from the pure blue sky, the wind bore into the city the sharp threatening notes of the trumpets from the Gothic camp, as the Pincian Gate was opened to the embassadors and their train. With one accord the crowd instantly endeavored to force their way out after them in a mass; but they now moved in a narrow space, and were opposed by a large. re-enforcement of the city guard. After a short struggle they were overpowered, and the gates were closed. Some few of the strongest and the foremost of their number succeeded in following the embassadors; the greater part, however, remained on the inner side of the gate, pressing closely up to it in their impatience and despair, like prisoners awaiting their deliverance, or preparing to force their escape.

Among these--feeblest amid the most feeble--were Numerian and Antonina--hemmed in by the surrounding crowd, and shut out either from flight from the city, or a return to home.

WHILE the second and last embassy from the Senate proceeds toward the tent of the Gothic king; while the streets of Rome are deserted by all but the dead, and the living populace crowd together in speechless expectation behind the barrier of the Pincian Gate, an opportunity is at length afforded of turning our attention toward a scene from which it has been long removed. Let us now revisit the farmhouse in the suburbs, and look once more on the quiet garden and on Hermanric's grave.

The tranquillity of the bright warm day is purest around the retired path leading to the little dwelling. Here the fragrance of wild flowers rises pleasantly from the waving grass: the lulling, monotonous hum of insect life pervades the light, steady air; the sunbeams, intercepted here and there by the clustering trees, fall in irregular patches of brightness on the shady ground; and, saving the birds which occasionally pass overhead, singing in their flight, no living creature appears on the quiet scene, until, gaining the wicket-gate which leads into the farmhouse garden, we look forth upon the prospect within. There, following the small circular foot-path which her own persevering steps have day by day already traced, appears the form of a solitary woman, pacing slowly about the mound of grassy earth which marks the grave of the young Goth.

For some time she proceeds on her circumscribed round with as much undeviating, mechanical regularity as if beyond that narrow space rose a barrier which caged her from ever setting foot on the earth beyond. At length she pauses in her course when it brings her nearest to the wicket, advances a few steps toward it, then recedes, and recommences her monotonous progress, and then again breaking off on her round, finally succeeds in withdrawing herself from the confines of the grave, passes through the gate, and following the path to the highroad, slowly proceeds toward the eastern limits of the Gothic camp. The fixed, ghastly, unfeminine expression on her features marks her as the same woman whom we last beheld as the assassin at the farm house; but beyond this she is hardly recognizable again. Her formerly powerful and upright frame is bent and lean; her hair waves in wild, white locks about her shriveled face; all the rude majesty of her form has departed; there is nothing to show that it is still Goisvintha haunting the scene of her crime but the savage expression debasing her countenance and betraying the evil heart within, unsubdued as ever in its yearning for destruction and revenge.

Since the period when we last beheld her, removed in the custody of the Huns from the dead body of her kinsman, the farmhouse had been the constant scene of her pilgrimage from the camp, the chosen refuge where she brooded in solitude over her fierce desires. Scorning to punish a woman whom he regarded as insane, for an absence from the tents of the Goths, which was of no moment either to the army or to himself, Alaric had impatiently dismissed her from his presence when she was brought before him. The soldiers who had returned to bury the body of their chieftain in the garden of the farmhouse, found means to inform her secretly of the charitable act which they had performed at their own peril; but beyond this no further intercourse was held with her by any of her former associates.

All her actions favored their hasty belief that her faculties were disordered; and others shunned her as she shunned them. Her daily allowance of food was left for her to seek at a certain place in the camp, as it might have been left for an animal too savage to be cherished by the hand of man. At certain periods she returned secretly from her wanderings to take it. Her shelter for the night was not the shelter of her people before the walls of Rome; her thoughts were not their thoughts. Widowed, childless, friendless, the assassin of her last kinsman, she moved apart in her own secret world of bereavement, desolation and crime.

Yet there was no madness, no remorse for her share in accomplishing the fate of Hermanric, in the dark and solitary existence which she now led. From the moment when the young warrior had expiated with his death the disregard of the enmities of his nation and the wrongs of his kindred, she thought of him only as of one more victim whose dishonor and ruin she must live to requite on the Romans with Roman blood, and matured her schemes of revenge with a stern resolution which time, and solitude, and bodily infirmity were all powerless to disturb.

She would pace for hours and hours together, in the still night and in the broad noonday, round and round the warrior's grave, nursing her vengeful thoughts within her, until a ferocious anticipation of triumph quickened her steps and brightened her watchful eyes. Then she would enter the farmhouse, and drawing the knife from its place of concealment in her garments, would pass its point slowly backward and forward over the hearth on which she had mutilated Hermanric with her own hand, and from which he had advanced, without a tremor, to meet the swordpoints of the Huns. Sometimes, when darkness had gathered over the earth, she would stand--a boding and menacing apparition--upon the grave itself, and chant, moaning to the moaning wind, fragments of obscure Northern legends, whose hideous burden was ever of anguish and crime, of torture in prison vaults and death on the annihilating sword--mingling with them the gloomy story of the massacre at Aquileia, and her fierce vows of vengeance against the households of Rome. The forager, on his late return past the farmhouse to the camp, heard the harsh, droning accents of her voice, and quickened his onward step. The venturesome peasant from the country beyond, approaching under cover of the night, to look from afar on the Gothic camp, beheld her form, shadowy and threatening, as he neared the garden, and fled affrighted from the place. Neither stranger nor friend intruded on her dread solitude. The foul presence of cruelty and crime violated undisturbed the scenes once sacred to the interests of tenderness and love, once hallowed by the sojourn of youth and beauty!

But now the farmhouse garden is left solitary; the haunting spirit of evil has departed from the grave; the footsteps of Goisvintha have traced to their close the same paths from the suburbs over which the young Goth once eagerly hastened on his night-journey of love; and already the walls of Rome rise--dark, near, and hateful--before her eyes. Along these useless bulwarks of the fallen city she now wanders, as she has often wandered before, watching for the first opening of the long-closed gates. Let us follow her on her way.

Her attention was now fixed only on the broad ramparts, while she passed slowly along the Gothic tents toward the encampment at the Pincian Gate. Arrived there, she was aroused for the first time from her apathy by an unwonted stir and confusion prevailing around her. She looked toward the tent of Alaric, and beheld before it the wasted and crouching forms of the followers of the embassy, awaiting their sentence from the captain of the Northern hosts. In a few moments she gathered enough from the words of the Goths congregated about this part of the camp, to assure her that it was the Pincian Gate which had given egress to the Roman suppliants, and which would, therefore, in all probability, be the entrance again thrown open to admit their return to the city. Remembering this, she began to calculate the numbers of the conquered enemy grouped together before the king's tent, and then mentally added to them those who might be present at the interview proceeding within--mechanically withdrawing herself, while thus occupied, nearer and nearer to the waste ground before the city walls.

Gradually she turned her face toward Rome; she was realizing a daring purpose, a fatal resolution, long cherished during the days and nights of her solitary wanderings. "The ranks of the embassy," she muttered, in a deep, thoughtful tone, "are thickly filled. When there are many there must be confusion and haste; they march together, and know not their own numbers; they mark not one more or one less among them."

She stopped. Strange and dark changes of color and expression passed over her ghastly features. She drew from her bosom the bloody helmet-crest of her husband, which had never quitted her since the day of his death; her face grew livid under an awful expression of rage, ferocity, and despair, as she gazed on it. Suddenly she looked up at the city--fierce, and defiant, as if the great walls before her were mortal enemies against whom she stood at bay in the death-struggle. "The widowed and the childless shall drink of thy blood!" she cried, stretching out her skinny hand toward Rome, "though the armies of her nation barter their wrongs with thy people for bags of silver and gold! I have pondered on it in my solitude, and dreamed of it in my dreams! I have sworn that I would enter Rome, and avenge my slaughtered kindred, alone among thousands! Now, now I will hold to my oath! Thou blood-stained city of the coward and the traitor, the enemy of the defenseless and the murderer of the weak! thou who didst send forth to Aquileia the slayers of my husband and the assassins of my children, I wait no longer before thy walls! This day will I mingle, daring all things, with thy returning citizens, and penetrate, amid Romans, the gates of Rome! Through the day will I lurk, cunning and watchful, in thy solitary haunts, to steal forth on thee at night, a secret minister of death! I will watch for thy young and thy weak ones in unguarded places; I will prey, alone in the thick darkness, upon thy unprotected lives; I will destroy thy children, as their fathers destroyed at Aquileia the children of the Goths! Thy rabble will discover me, and arise against me; they will tear me in pieces, and trample my mangled body on the pavement of the streets; but it will be after I have seen the blood that I have sworn to shed flowing under my knife! My vengeance will be complete, and torments and death will be to me as guests that I welcome, and as deliverers whom I await!"

Again she paused--the wild triumph of the fanatic on the burning pile was flashing on her face--suddenly her eyes fell once more upon the stained helmet-crest; then her expression changed again to despair, and her voice grew low and moaning, when she thus resumed: "I am weary of my life; when the vengeance is done, I shall be delivered from this prison of the earth--in the world of shadows I shall see my husband; and my little ones will gather round my knees again. The living have no part in me; I yearn toward the spirits who wander in the halls of the dead."

For a few minutes more she continued to fix her tearless eyes on the helmet-crest. But soon the influence of the evil spirit revived in all its strength; she raised her head suddenly, remained for an instant absorbed in deep thought, then began to retrace her steps rapidly in the direction by which she had come.

Sometimes she whispered softly, "I must be doing, ere the time fail me; my face must be hidden, and my garments changed. Yonder, among the houses, I must search, and search quickly!" Sometimes she reiterated her denunciations of vengeance, her ejaculations of triumph in her frantic project. At the recapitulation of these, the remembrance of Antonina was aroused; and then a blood-thirsty superstition darkened her thoughts, and threw a vague and dreamy character over her speech.

When she spoke now, it was to murmur to herself that the victim who had twice escaped her might yet be alive; that the supernatural influences which had often guided the old Goths, on the day of retribution, might still guide her; might still direct the stroke of her destroying weapon--the last stroke ere she was discovered and slain--straight to the girl's heart. Thoughts such as these--wandering and obscure--arose in close, quick succession within her; but whether she gave them expression in word and action, or whether she suppressed them in silence, she never wavered or halted in her rapid progress. Her energies were braced to all emergencies; and her strong will suffered them not for an instant to relax.

She gained a retired street in the deserted suburbs; and looking round her to see that she was unobserved, entered one of the houses abandoned by its inhabitants on the approach of the besiegers. Passing quickly through the outer halls, she stopped at length in one of the sleeping-apartments; and here she found, among other possessions left behind in the flight, the store of wearing apparel belonging to the owner of the room.

From this she selected a Roman robe, upper mantle, and sandals--the most common in color and texture that she could find; and folding them up into the smallest compass, hid them under her own garments. Then, avoiding all those whom she met on her way, she returned in the direction of the king's tent; but when she approached it, branched off stealthily toward Rome, until she reached a ruined building halfway between the city and the camp. In this concealment she clothed herself in her disguise, drawing the mantle closely round her head and faces and from this point--calm, vigilant, determined; her hand on the knife beneath her robe; her lips muttering the names of her murdered husband and children--she watched the highroad to the Pincian Gate.

There, for a short time, let us leave her, and enter the tent of Alaric, while the Senate yet plead before the Arbiter of the Empire for mercy and peace.

At the moment of which we write, the embassy had already exhausted its powers of intercession, apparently without moving the leader of the Goths from his first pitiless resolution of fixing the ransom of Rome at the price of every possession of value which the city contained. There was a momentary silence now in the great tent. At one extremity of it, congregated in a close and irregular group, stood the wearied and broken-spirited members of the Senate, supported by such of their attendants as had been permitted to follow them; at the other appeared the stately forms of Alaric and the warriors who surrounded him as his council of war. The vacant space in the middle of the tent was strewn with martial weapons, separating the representatives of the two nations one from the other; and thus accidentally, yet palpably, typifying the fierce hostility which had sundered in years past, and was still to sunder for years to come, the people of the North and the people of the South.

The Gothic king stood a little in advance of his warriors, leaning on his huge, heavy sword. His steady eye wandered from man to man among the broken-spirited senators, contemplating, with cold and cruel penetration, all that suffering and despair had altered for the worse in their outward appearance. Their soiled robes, their wan cheeks, their trembling limbs, were each marked in turn by the cool, sarcastic examination of the conqueror's gaze. Debased and humiliated as they were, there were some among the embassadors who felt the insult thus silently and deliberately inflicted on them the more keenly for their very helplessness. They moved uneasily in their places, and whispered among each other in low and bitter accents. At length one of their number raised his downcast eyes and broke the silence. The old Roman spirit, which long years of voluntary frivolity and degradation had not yet entirely depraved, flushed his pale, wasted face, as he spoke thus:

"We have entreated, we have offered, we have promised--men can do no more! Deserted by our emperor and crushed by pestilence and famine, nothing is now left to us but to perish in unavailing resistance beneath the walls of Rome! It was in the power of Alaric to win everlasting renown by moderation to the unfortunate of an illustrious nation; but he has preferred to attempt the spoiling of a glorious city and the subjugation of a suffering people! Yet let him remember, though destruction may sate his vengeance and pillage enrich his hoards, the day of retribution will yet come. There are still soldiers in the empire, and heroes who will lend them confidently to battle, though the bodies of their countrymen he slaughtered around them in the streets of pillaged Rome!"

A momentary expression of wrath and indignation appeared on Alaric's features as he listened to this bold speech, but it was almost immediately replaced by a smile of derision. "What! ye have still soldiers before whom the barbarian must tremble for his conquests!" he cried. "Where are they? Are they on their march, or in ambush, or hiding behind strong walls, or have they lost their way on the road to the Gothic camp? Ha! hero is one of them!" he exclaimed, advancing toward an enfeebled and disarmed guard of the Senate, who quailed beneath his fierce glance. "Fight, man!" he loudly continued--"fight, while there is yet time, for Imperial Rome! Thy sword is gone --take mine, and be a hero again?"

With a rough laugh, echoed by the warriors behind him, he flung his ponderous weapon, as he spoke, toward the wretched object of his sarcasm. The hilt struck heavily against the man's breast--he staggered and fell helpless to the ground. The laugh was redoubled among the Goths; but now their leader did not join in it. His eye glowed in triumphant scorn, as he pointed to the prostrate Roman, exclaiming, "So does the South fall beneath the sword of the North! So shall the Empire bow before the rule of the Goth! Say, as ye look on these Romans before us, are we not avenged of our wrongs? They die not fighting on our swords; they live to entreat our pity, as children that are in terror of the whip!"

He paused. His massive and noble countenance gradually assumed a thoughtful expression. The embassadors moved forward a few steps--perhaps to make a final entreaty, perhaps to depart in despair; but he signed with his hand, in command to them, to be silent, and remain where they stood. The marauder's thirst for present plunder, and the conqueror's lofty ambition of future glory, now stirred in strong conflict within him. He walked to the opening of the tent, and, thrusting aside its curtain of skins, looked out upon Rome in silence. The dazzling majesty of the temples and palaces of the mighty city as they towered before him, gleaming in the rays of the unclouded sunlight, fixed him long in contemplation. Gradually, dreams of future dominion amid those unrivaled structures, which now waited but his word to be pillaged and destroyed, filled his aspiring soul, and saved the city from his wrath. He turned again toward the embassadors--in a voice and look superior to them as a being of a higher sphere--and spoke thus:

"When the Gothic conqueror reigns in Italy, the palaces of her rulers shall be found standing for the places of his sojourn. I will ordain a lower ransom; I will spare Rome."

A murmur arose among the warriors behind him. The rapine and destruction which they had eagerly anticipated was denied them for the first time by their chief. As their muttered remonstrances caught his ear, Alaric instantly and sternly fixed his eyes upon them; and, repeating in accents of deliberate command, "I will ordain a lower ransom; I will spare Rome," steadily scanned the countenances of his ferocious followers. Not a word of dissent fell from their lips, not a gesture of impatience appeared in their ranks; they preserved perfect silence, as the king again advanced toward the embassadors, and continued:

"I fix the ransom of the city at five thousand pounds of gold; at thirty thousand pounds of silver--" Here he suddenly ceased, as if pondering further on the terms he should exact. The hearts of the Senate, lightened for a moment by Alaric's unexpected announcement that he would moderate his demands, sank within them again, as they thought on the tribute required of them, and remembered their exhausted treasury. But it was no time now to remonstrate or to delay; and they answered with one accord, ignorant though they were of the means of performing their promise, "The ransom shall be paid!"

The king looked at them when they spoke, as if in astonishment that men whom he had deprived of all freedom of choice, ventured still to assert it, by intimating their acceptance of terms which they dared not decline. The mocking spirit revived within him while he thus gazed on the helpless and humiliated embassy; and he laughed once more as he resumed, partly addressing himself to the silent array of the warriors behind him:

"The gold and silver are but the first dues of the tribute--my army shall be rewarded with more than the wealth of the enemy. You men of Rome have laughed at our rough bear-skins and our heavy armor; you shall clothe us with your robes of festivity! I will add to the gold and silver of your ransom, four thousand garments of silk and three thousand pieces of scarlet cloth. My barbarians shall be barbarians no longer! I will make patricians, epicures, Romans of them!"

The members of the ill-fated embassy looked up as he paused, in mute appeal to the mercy of the triumphant conqueror; but they were not yet to be released from the crushing infliction of his rapacity and scorn.

"Hold!" he cried, "I will have more--more still! You are a nation of feasters; we will rival you in your banquets, when we have stripped you of your banqueting-robes! To the gold, the silver, the silk, and the cloth I will add yet more--three thousand pounds' weight of pepper, your precious merchandise, bought from far countries with your lavish wealth!--see that you bring it hither, with the rest of the ransom, to the last grain! The flesh of our beasts shall be seasoned for us like the flesh of yours!"

He turned abruptly from the senators, as he pronounced the last words, and began to speak in jesting tones and in the Gothic language to the council of warriors around him. Some of the embassadors bowed their heads in silent resignation; others, with the utter thoughtlessness of men bewildered by all that they had seen and heard during the interview that was now closed, unhappily revived the recollection of the broken treaties of former days, by mechanically inquiring, in the terms of past formularies, what security the besiegers would require for the payment of their demands.

"Security!" cried Alaric, fiercely, instantly relapsing as they spoke into his sterner mood. "Behold yonder the future security of the Goths for the faith of Rome!" and flinging aside the curtain of the tent, he pointed proudly to the long lines of his camp, stretching round all that was visible of the walls of the fallen city.

The embassadors remembered the massacre of the hostages of Aquileia, and the evasion of the payment of tribute-money promised in former days, and were silent as they looked through the opening of the tent.

"Remember the conditions of the ransom," pursued Alaric, in warning tones, "remember my security that the ransom shall be quickly paid! So shall you live for a brief space in security; and feast and be merry again, while your territories yet remain to you. Go--I have spoken--it is enough!"

He withdrew abruptly from the senators; and the curtain of the tent fell behind them as they passed out. The ordeal of the judgment was over; the final sentence had been pronounced; the time had already arrived to go forth and obey it.

The news that terms of peace had been at last settled filled the Romans who were waiting before the tent with emotions of delight, equally unalloyed by the reflections on the past or forebodings for the future. Barred from their reckless project of flying to the open country by the Goths surrounding them in the camp; shut out from retreating to Rome by the gates through which they had rashly forced their way; exposed in their helplessness to the brutal jeers of the enemy, while they waited in a long agony of suspense for the close of the perilous interview between Alaric and the Senate, they had undergone every extremity of suffering, and had yielded unanimously to despair, when the intelligence of the concluded treaty sounded like a promise of salvation in their ears.

None of the apprehensions aroused in the minds of their superiors by the vastness of the exacted tribute, now mingled with the unreflecting ecstasy of their joy at the prospect of the removal of the blockade. They arose to return to the city from which they had fled in dismay, with cries of impatience and delight. They fawned like dogs upon the embassadors, and even upon the ferocious Goths. On their departure from Rome they had mechanically preserved some regularity in their progress; but now they hurried onward without distinction of place or discipline of march--senators, guards, plebeians, all huddled together in the disorderly equality of a mob.

Not one of them, in their new-born security, marked the ruined building on the high-road; not one of them observed the closely-robed figure that stole out from it to join them in their rear, and then, with stealthy footstep and shrouded face, soon mingled in the thickest of their ranks. The attention of the embassadors was still engrossed by their forebodings of failure in collecting the ransom; the eyes of the people were fixed only on the Pincian Gate; their ears were open to no sounds but their own ejaculations of delight. Not one disguised stranger only, but many might now have joined them in their tumultuous progress, unquestioned and unobserved.

So they hastily reentered the city; where thousands of heavy eyes were strained to look on them, and thousands of attentive ears drank in their joyful news from the Gothic camp. Then were heard in all directions the sounds of hysterical weeping and idiotic laughter; the low groans of the weak who died, victims of their sudden transport, and the confused outbursts of the strong who had survived all extremities, and at last beheld their deliverance in view. Still silent and serious, the embassadors now slowly penetrated the throng on their way back to the Forum; and, as they proceeded, the crowd gradually dispersed on either side of them. Enemies, friends and strangers--all whom the ruthless famine had hitherto separated in interests and sympathies--were now united together as one family by the expectation of speedy relief.

But there was one among the assembly that was now separating who stood alone in her unrevealed emotions amid the rejoicing thousands around her. The women and children in the throng, as preoccupied by their own feelings, they unheedfully passed her by, saw not the eager, ferocious attention in her eyes, as she watched them steadily till they were out of sight. Within their gates the stranger and the enemy waited for the treacherous darkness of night; and waited unobserved. Where she had first stood when the thick crowd hemmed her in, there she still continued to stand after they slowly moved past her, and space grew free. Yet beneath this outward calm and silence lurked the wildest passions that ever raged against the weak restraint of human will--even the firm self-possession of Goisvintha was shaken, when she found herself within the walls of Rome.

No glance of suspicion had been cast upon her; not one of the crowd had approached to thrust her back when she passed through the gates with the heedless citizens around her. Shielded from detection, as much by the careless security of her enemies as by the stratagem of her disguise, she stood on the pavement of Rome, as she had vowed to stand, afar from the armies of her people; alone as an avenger of blood.

It was no dream; no fleeting, deceitful vision. The knife was under her hand; the streets stretched before her; the living beings who thronged them were Romans; the hours of the day were already on the wane; the approach of her vengeance was as sure as the approach of darkness that was to let it loose. A wild exultation quickened in her the pulses of life, while she thought on the dread projects of secret assassination and revenge which now opposed her, a solitary woman, in deadly enmity against the defenseless population of a whole city. As her eyes traveled slowly from side to side over the moving throng; as she thought on the time that might still elapse ere the discovery and death--the martyrdom in the cause of blood--which she expected and defied, would overtake her, her hands trembled beneath her robe; and she reiterated in whispers to herself, "Husband, children, brother--there are five deaths to avenge! Remember Aquileia! Remember Aquileia!"

Suddenly, as she looked from group to group among the departing people, her eyes became arrested by one object; she instantly stepped forward; then abruptly restrained herself and moved back where the crowd was still thick; gazing fixedly ever in the same direction. She saw the victim twice snatched from her hands--at the camp and in the farmhouse--a third time offered to her grasp in the streets of Rome. The chance of vengeance last expected was the chance that had first arrived. A vague, oppressing sensation of awe mingled with the triumph at her heart--a supernatural guidance seemed to be directing her with fell rapidity, through every mortal obstacle, to the climax of her revenge!

She screened herself behind the people; she watched the girl from the most distant point; but concealment was now vain--their eyes had met. The robe had slipped aside when she suddenly stepped forward, and in that moment Antonina had seen her.

Numerian, moving slowly with his daughter through the crowd, felt her hand tighten round his, and saw her features stiffen into sudden rigidity; but the change was only for an instant. Ere he could speak, she caught him by the arm and drew him forward with convulsive energy. Then, in accents hardly articulate, low, breathless, unlike her wonted voice, he heard her exclaim, as she struggled on with him, "She is there--there behind us! to kill me, as she killed him! Home! home!"

Exhausted already, through long weakness and natural infirmity, by the rough contact of the crowd, bewildered by Antonina's looks and actions, and by the startling intimation of unknown peril conveyed to him in her broken exclamations of affright, Numerian's first impulse, as he hurried onward by her side, led him to entreat protection and help from the surrounding populace. But, even could he have pointed out to them the object of his dread amid that motley throng of all nations, the appeal he now made would have remained unanswered. Of all the results of the frightful severity of privation suffered by the besieged, none were more common than those mental aberrations which produce visions of danger, enemies, and death, so palpable as to make the persons beholding them implore assistance against the hideous creation of their own delirium. Accordingly, most of those to whom the entreaties of Numerian were addressed passed without noticing them. Some few carelessly bid him remember that there were no enemies now, that the days of peace were approaching, and that a meal of good food, which he might soon expect to enjoy, was the only help for a famished man. No one, in that period of horror and suffering, which was now drawing to a close, saw anything extraordinary in the confusion of the father and the terror of the child. So they paused their feeble flight unprotected, and the footsteps of Goisvintha followed them as they went.

They had already commenced the ascent of the Pincian Hill, when Antonina stopped abruptly and turned to look behind her. Many people yet thronged the street below; but her eyes penetrated among them, sharpened by peril, and instantly discerned the ample robe and the tall form, still at the same distance from them, and pausing as they had paused. For one moment the girl's eyes fixed in the wild, helpless stare of terror on her father's face; but the next, that mysterious instinct of preservation which is coexistent with the instinct of fear--which gifts the weakest animal with cunning to improve its flight, and takes the place of reason, reflection, and resolve, when all are banished from the mind--warned her against the fatal error of permitting the pursuer to track her to her home. "Not there! not there!" she gasped, faintly, as Numerian endeavored to lead her up the ascent. "She will see us as we enter the doors!--through the streets! Oh, father, if you would save me, we may lose her in the streets!--the guards, the people are there! Back! back!"

Numerian trembled as he marked the terror in her looks and gestures; but it was vain to question or oppose her. Nothing short of force could restrain her--no commands or entreaties could draw from her more than the same breathless exclamation: "Onward, father!--onward, if you would save me!" She was insensible to every sensation but fear, incapable of any other exertion than flight.

Turning and winding, hurrying forward ever at the same rapid pace, they passed unconsciously along the intricate streets that led to the river side; and still the avenger tracked the victim, constant as the shadow to the substance; steady, vigilant, unwearied, as a blood-hound on a hot scent.

And now, even the sound of the father's voice ceased to be audible in the daughter's ears; she no longer felt the pressure of his hand, no longer perceived his very presence at her side. At length, frail and shrinking, she again paused, and looked back. The street they had reached was very tranquil and desolate: two slaves were walking at its further extremity. While they were in sight, no living creature appeared in the roadway behind; but, as soon as they had passed away, a shadow stole slowly forward over the pavement of a portico in the distance, and the next moment Goisvintha appeared in the street.

The sun glared down fiercely over her dark figure as she stopped, and for an instant looked stealthily around her. She moved to advance, and Antonina saw no more. Again she turned to renew her hopeless flight; and again her father--perceiving only as the mysterious cause of her dread a solitary woman, who, though she followed, attempted not to' arrest or even to address them--prepared to accompany her to the last, in despair of all other chances of securing her safety. More and more completely did her terror now enchain her faculties, as she still unconsciously traced her rapid way through the streets that led to the Tiber. It was not Numerian, not Rome, not daylight in a great city, that was before her eyes; it was the storm, the assassination, the night at the farmhouse, that she now lived through over again.

Still the quick flight and the ceaseless pursuit were continued, as if neither were ever to have an end; but the close of the scene was, nevertheless, already at hand. During the interval of the passage through the streets Numerian's mind had gradually recovered from its first astonishment and alarm; at length he perceived the necessity of instant and decisive action, while there was yet time to save Antonina from sinking under the excess of her own fears. Though a vague, awful foreboding of disaster and death filled his heart, his resolution to penetrate at once, at all hazards, the dark mystery of impending danger indicated by his daughter's words and actions did not fail him; for it was aroused by the only motive powerful enough to revive all that suffering and infirmity had not yet destroyed of the energy of his former days--the preservation of his child. There was something of the old firmness and vigor of the intrepid reformer of the Church in his dim eyes, as he now stopped, and, inclosing Antonina in his arms, arrested her instantly in her flight.

She struggled to escape; but it was faintly, and only for a moment. Her strength and consciousness were beginning to abandon her. She never attempted to look back; she felt in her heart that Goisvintha was still behind, and dared not to verify the frightful conviction with her eyes. Her lips moved; but they expressed an altered and a vain petition: "Hermanric! oh Hermanric!" was all they murmured now.

They had arrived at the long street than ran by the banks of the Tiber. The people had either retired to their homes or repaired to the Forum to be informed of the period when the ransom would be paid. No one but Goisvintha was in sight as Numerian looked around him; and she, after having carefully viewed the empty street, was advancing toward them at a quickened pace.

For an instant the father looked on her steadily as she approached, and in that instant his determination was formed. A flight of steps at his feet led to the narrow doorway of a small temple, the nearest building to him. Ignorant whether Goisvintha might not be secretly supported by companions in her ceaseless pursuit, he resolved to secure this place for Antonina, as a temporary refuge at least; while standing before it, he should oblige the woman to declare her purpose, if she followed them even there. In a moment he had begun the ascent of the steps, with the exhausted girl by his side. Arrived at the summit, he guided her before him into the doorway, and stopped on the threshold to look round again. Goisvintha was nowhere to be seen.

Not duped by the woman's sudden disappearance into the belief that she had departed from the street---persisting in his resolution to lead his daughter to a place of repose, where she might almost immediately feel herself secure, and might therefore most readily recover her self- possession--Numerian drew Antonina with him into the temple. He lingered there for a moment, ere he departed to watch the street from the portico outside.

The light in the building was dim--it was admitted only from a small aperture in the roof, and through the narrow doorway, where it was intercepted by the overhanging bulk of the outer portico. A crooked pile of dark, heavy-looking substances on the floor rose high toward the ceiling, in the obscure interior. Irregular in form, flung together one over the other in strange disorder, for the most part dusky in hue, yet here and there gleaming at points with metallic brightness, these objects presented a mysterious, indefinite, and startling appearance. It was impossible, on a first view of their confused arrangement, to discover what they were, or to guess for what purpose they could have been piled together on the floor of a deserted temple. From the moment when they had first attracted Numerian's observation his attention was fixed on them, and as he looked, a faint thrill of suspicion--vague, inexplicable, without apparent cause or object--struck chill to his heart.

He had moved a step forward to examine the hidden space at the back of the pile, when his further advance was instantly stopped by the appearance of a man who walked forth from it, dressed in the floating, purple-edged robe and white fillet of the pagan priests. Before either father or daughter could speak, even before they could move to depart, he stepped up to them, and placing his hand on the shoulder of each, confronted them in silence.

At the moment when the stranger approached, Numerian raised his hand to thrust him back, and in so doing fixed his eyes on the man's countenance, as a ray of light from the doorway floated over it. Instantly his arm remained outstretched and rigid, then it dropped to his side, and the expression of horror on the face of the child became reflected, as it were, on the face of the parent. Neither moved under the hand of the dweller in the temple when he laid it heavily on each, and both stood before him speechless as himself.

IT was Ulpius. The pagan was changed in bearing and countenance as well as in apparel. He stood more firm and upright; a dull, tawny hue overspread his face; his eyes, so sunken and lusterless in other days, were now distended, and bright with the glare of insanity. It seemed as if his bodily powers had renewed their vigor, while his mental faculties had declined toward their ruin.

No human eye had ever beheld by what foul and secret means he had survived through the famine; on what unnatural sustenance he had satisfied the cravings of inexorable hunger; but there, in his gloomy shelter, the madman and the outcast had lived, and moved, and suddenly and strangely strengthened, after the people of the city had exhausted all their united resources, lavished in vain all their united wealth, and drooped and died by thousands around him!

His grasp still lay heavy on the father and daughter, and still both confronted him--silent, as if death-struck by his gaze; motionless, as if frozen at his touch. His presence was exerting over them a fatal fascination. The power of action, suspended in Antonina as she entered their ill-chosen refuge, was now arrested in Numerian also; but with him no thought of the enemy in the street had part, at this moment, in the resistless influence which held him helpless before the enemy in the temple. It was a feeling of deeper awe and darker horror. For now, as he looked upon the hideous features of Ulpius, as he saw the forbidden robe of priesthood in which the pagan was arrayed, he beheld not only the traitor who had successfully plotted against the prosperity of his household, but the madman as well--the moral leper of the whole human family--the living Body, and the dead Soul--the Disinherited of that Divine Light of Life which it is the awful privilege of mortal man to share with the angels of God.

He still clasped Antonina to his side, but it was unconsciously. To all outward appearance he was helpless as his helpless child, when Ulpius slowly removed his grasp from their shoulders, separated them, and locking the hand of each in his cold, bony fingers, began to speak.

His voice was deep and solemn, but his accents, in their hard, unvarying tone, seemed to express no human emotion. His eyes, far from brightening as he spoke, relapsed into a dull, vacant insensibility. The connection between the action of speech and the accompanying and explaining action of look which is observable in all men, seemed lost in him. It was fearful to behold the death-like face, and to listen at the same moment to the living voice.

"Lo! the votaries come to the Temple!" murmured the pagan. "The good servants of the mighty worship gather at the voice of the priest! In the far provinces, where the enemies of the gods approach to profane the sacred groves, behold the scattered people congregating by night, to journey to the shrine of Serapis! Adoring thousands kneel beneath the lofty porticoes, while within, in the secret hall where the light is dim, where the air quivers round the breathing deities on their pedestals of gold, the highpriest Ulpius reads the destinies of the Future, that are unrolled before his eyes like a book!"

As he ceased, and, still holding the hands of his captives, looked on them fixedly as ever, his eyes brightened and dilated again; but they expressed not the slightest recognition either of father or daughter. The delirium of his imagination had transported him to the temple at Alexandria; the days were revived when his glory had risen to its culminating point, when the Christians trembled before him as their fiercest enemy, and the pagans surrounded him as their last hope. The victims of his former and forgotten treachery were but as two among the throng of votaries allured by the fame of his eloquence; by the triumphant notoriety of his power to protect the adherents of the ancient creed. But it was not always thus that his madness declared itself: there were moments when it rose to appalling frenzy. Then he imagined himself to be again hurling the Christian assailants from the topmost walls of the besieged temple--in that past time, when the image of Serapis was doomed by the Bishop of Alexandria to be destroyed. His yells of fury, his frantic execrations of defiance, were heard afar, in the solemn silence of pestilence-stricken Rome. Those who, during the most fatal days of the Gothic blockade, dropped famished on the pavement before the little temple, as they endeavored to pass it on their onward way, presented a dread reality of death, to embody the madman's visions of battle and slaughter. As these victims of famine lay expiring in the street, they heard above them his raving voice cursing them for Christians; triumphing over them as defeated enemies destroyed by his hand; exhorting his imaginary adherents to fling the slain above on the dead below, until the bodies of the besiegers of the temple were piled, as barriers against their living comrades, round its walls. Sometimes his frenzy gloried in the fancied revival of the foul and sanguinary ceremonies of pagan superstition. Then he bared his arms, and shouted aloud for the sacrifice; he committed dark and nameless atrocities--for now again the dead and the dying lay before him, to give substance to the shadow of his evil thoughts; and Plague and Hunger were as creatures of his will, and slew the victim for the altar ready to his hands.

At other times, when the raving fit had passed away, and he lay panting in the darkest corner of the interior of the temple, his insanity assumed another and a mournful form. His voice grew low and moaning; the wreck of his memory--wandering and uncontrollable--floated back, far back, on the dark waters of the past; and his tongue uttered fragments of words and phrases that he had murmured at his father's knees--farewell, childish wishes that he had breathed in his mother's ear--innocent, anxious questions which he had addressed to Macrinus, the highpriest, when he first entered the service of the gods at Alexandria. His boyish reveries--the gentleness of speech and poetry of thought of his first youthful days, were now, by the unsearchable and arbitrary influences of his disease, revived in his broken words; renewed in his desolate old age of madness and crime, breathed out in unconscious mockery by his lips, while the foam still gathered about them, and the last flashes of frenzy yet lightened in his eyes.

This unnatural calmness of language and vividness of memory; this treacherous appearance of thoughtful, melancholy self-possession, would often continue through long periods, uninterrupted; but, sooner or later, the sudden change came; the deceitful chain of thought snapped asunder in an instant; the word was left half uttered; the wearied limbs started convulsively into renewed action; and as the dream of violence returned arid the dream of peace vanished, the madman rioted afresh in his fury; and journeyed, as his visions led him, round and round his temple sanctuary, and hither and thither, when the night was dark and death was busiest in Rome, among the expiring in deserted houses, and the lifeless in the silent streets.

But there were other later events in his existence that never revived within him. The old, familiar image of the idol Serapis, which had drawn him into the temple when he re-entered Rome, absorbed in itself and in its associated remembrances all that remained active of his paralyzed faculties. His betrayal of his trust in the house of Numerian, his passage through the rifted wall, his crushing repulse in the tent of Alaric, never for a moment occupied his wandering thoughts. The clouds that hung over his mind might open to him parting glimpses of the toils and triumphs of his early career, but they descended in impenetrable darkness on all the after-days of his dreary life.

Such was the being to whose will, by a mysterious fatality, the father and child were now submitted--such the existence-solitary, hopeless, loathsome--of their stern and wily betrayer of other days!

Since he had ceased speaking, the cold, deathlike grasp of his hand had gradually strengthened; and he had begun to look slowly and inquiringly round him from side to side. Had this change marked the approaching return of his raving paroxysm, the lives of Numerian and Antonina would have been sacrificed the next moment; but all that it now denoted was the quickening of the lofty and obscure ideas of celebrity and success; of priestly honor and influence; of the splendor and glory of the gods, which had prompted his last words. He moved suddenly, and drew the victims of his dangerous caprice a few steps further into the interior of the temple; then led them close up to the lofty pile of objects which had first attracted Numerian's eyes on entering the building. "Kneel and adore!" cried the madman, fiercely, replacing his hands on their shoulders and pressing them to the ground. "You stand before the gods, in the presence of their high-priest!"

The girl's head sunk forward, and she hid her face in her hands; but her father looked up tremblingly at the pile. His eyes had insensibly become more accustomed to the dim light of the temple, and he now saw more distinctly the objects composing the mass that rose above him. Hundreds of images of the gods, in gold, silver and wood--many in the latter material being larger than life; canopies, vestments, furniture, utensils, all of ancient pagan form, were heaped together, without order or arrangement on the floor, to a height of full fifteen feet. There was something at once hideous and grotesque in the appearance of the pile. The monstrous figures of the idols, with their rude carved draperies and symbolic weapons, lay in every wild variety of position, and presented every startling eccentricity of line, more especially toward the higher portions of the mass, where they had evidently been flung up from the ground by the hand that had raised the structure. The draperies mixed among the images and the furniture were here coiled serpent-like around them, and there hung down toward the ground, waving slow and solemn in the breezes that wound through the temple doorway. The smaller objects of gold and silver, scattered irregularly over the mass, shone out from it like gleaming eyes; while the pile itself, seen in such a place under a dusky light, looked like some vast, misshapen monster--the gloomy embodiment of the bloodiest superstitions of Paganism, the growth of damp airs and teeming ruin, of shadow and darkness, of accursed and infected solitude!

Even in its position, as well as in the objects of which it was composed, the pile wore an ominous and startling aspect; its crooked outline, expanding toward the top, was bent over fearfully in the direction of the doorway; it seemed as if a single hand might sway it in its uncertain balance, and hurl it instantly in one solid mass to the floor.

Many toilsome hours had passed away, long, secret labor had been expended in the erection of. this weird and tottering structure; but it was all the work of one hand. Night after night had the pagan entered the deserted temples in the surrounding streets, and pillaged them of their contents to enrich his favored shrine; the removal of the idols from their appointed places, which would have been sacrilege in any meaner man, was in his eyes the dread privilege of the high-priest alone. He had borne heavy burdens, and torn asunder strong fastenings, and journeyed and journeyed again for hours together over the same gloomy streets, without loitering in his task; he had raised treasures and images one above another; he had strengthened the base and heightened the summit of this precious and sacred heap; he had repaired and rebuilt, whenever it crumbled and fell, this new Babel that he longed to rear to the Olympus of the temple roof, with a resolute patience and perseverance that no failure or fatigue could overcome. It was the dearest purpose of his dreamy superstition to surround himself with innumerable deities, as well as to assemble innumerable worshipers; to make the sacred place of his habitation a mighty Pantheon, as well as a point of juncture for the scattered congregations of the pagan world. This was the ambition in which his madness expanded to the fiercest fanaticism; and as he now stood erect with his captives beneath him, his glaring eyes looked awestruck when he fixed them on his idols; he uplifted his arms in solemn, ecstatic triumph, and in low, tones poured forth his invocations, wild, intermingled, and fragmentary, as the barbarous altar which his solitary exertions had reared.

Whatever was the effect on Numerian of his savage and confused ejaculations, they were unnoticed, even unheard by Antonina; for now, while the madman's voice softened to an undertone, and while she hid all surrounding objects from her eyes, her senses were awakened to sounds in the temple which she had never remarked before.

The rapid current of the Tiber washed the foundation walls of one side of the building, within which the clear, lulling bubble of the water was audible with singular distinctness. But besides this another and a shriller sound caught the ear. On the summit of the temple roof still remained several rows of little gilt bells, originally placed there, partly with the intention of ornamenting this portion of the outer structure, partly in order that the noise they produced, when agitated by the wind, might scare birds from settling in their flight on the consecrated edifice. The sounds produced by these bells were silvery and high-pitched; now, when the breeze was strong, they rang together merrily and continuously; now, when it fell, their notes were faint, separate and irregular--almost plaintive in their pure metallic softness. But however their tone might vary under the capricious influences of the wind, it seemed always wonderfully mingled, within the temple, with the low, eternal bubbling of the river, which filled up the slightest pauses in the pleasant chiming of the bells, and ever preserved its gentle and monotonous harmony just audible beneath them.

There was something in this quaint, unwonted combination of sounds, as they were heard in the vaulted interior of the little building, strangely simple, attractive, and spiritual; the longer they were listened to, the more completely did the mind lose the recollection of their real origin, and gradually shape out of them wilder and wilder fancies, until the bells, as they rang their small peal, seemed like happy voices of a heavenly stream, borne lightly onward on its airy bubbles, and ever rejoicing over the gliding current that murmured to them as it ran.

Spite of the peril of her position, and of the terror which still fixed her speechless and crouching on the ground, the effect on Antonina of the strange mingled music of the running water and the bells was powerful enough, when she first heard it, to suspend all her other emotions in a momentary wonder and doubt. She withdrew her hands from her face, and glanced round mechanically to the doorway, as if imagining that the sounds proceeded from the street.

When she looked, the declining sun, gliding between two of the outer pillars which surrounded the temple, covered with a bright glow the smooth pavement before the entrance. A swarm of insects flew drowsily round and round in the warm, mellow light--their faint monotonous humming deepened, rather than interrupted, the perfect silence prevailing over all things without. But a change was soon destined to appear in the repose of the quiet, vacant scene; hardly a minute had elapsed while Antonina still looked on it, before she saw stealing over the sunny pavement a dark shadow, the same shadow that she had last beheld when she stopped in her flight to look behind her in the empty street. At first it slowly grew and lengthened, then it remained stationary, then it receded, and vanished as gradually as it had advanced, and then the girl heard, or fancied that she heard, a faint sound of footsteps retiring along the lateral colonnades toward the river side of the building.

A low cry of horror burst from her lips as she sank back toward her father; but it was unheeded. The voice of Ulpius had resumed in the interval its hollow loudness of tone; he had raised Numerian from the ground; his strong, cold grasp, which seemed to penetrate to the old man's heart, which held him motionless and helpless as if by a fatal spell, was on his arm. "Hear it! hear it!" cried the pagan, waving his disengaged hand, as if he were addressing a vast concourse of people; "I advance this man to be one of the servants of the high-priest! He has traveled from a far country to the sacred shrine; he is docile and obedient before the altar of the gods; the lot is cast for his future life; his dwelling shall be in the temple to the day of his death! He shall minister before me in white robes, and swing the smoking censer, and slay the sacrifice at my feet!"

He stopped. A dark and sinister expression appeared in his eyes as the word "sacrifice" passed his lips; he muttered doubtingly to himself, "The sacrifice!--is it yet the hour of the sacrifice?"--and looked round toward the doorway. The sun still shone gayly on the outer pavement; the insects still circled slowly in the mellow light; no shadow was now visible, no distant footsteps were heard; there was nothing audible but the happy music of the bubbling water, and the chiming, silvery bells. For a few moments the madman looked out anxiously toward the street, without uttering a word or moving a muscle. The raving fit was near possessing him again, as the thought of the sacrifice flashed over his darkened mind; but once more its approach was delayed. He slowly turned his head in the direction of the interior of the temple. "The sun is still bright in the outer courts," he murmured, in an undertone, "the hour of the sacrifice is not yet! Come!" he continued, in a louder voice, shaking Numerian by the arm, "it is time that the servant of the temple should behold the place. of the sacrifice, and sharpen the knife for the victim before sunset! Arouse thee, bondman, and follow me!"

As yet, Numerian had neither spoken nor attempted to escape. The preceding events, though some space has been occupied in describing them, passed in so short a period of time, that he had not hitherto recovered from the first overwhelming shock of the meeting with Ulpius. But now, awed though he still was, he felt that the moment of the struggle for freedom had arrived.

"Leave me, and let us depart!--there can be no fellowship between us again!" he exclaimed, with the reckless courage of despair, taking the hand of Antonina, and striving to free himself from the madman's grasp. But the effort was vain; Ulpius tightened his hold, and laughed in triumph. "What! the servant of the temple is in terror of the high-priest, and shrinks from walking in the place of the sacrifice!" he cried. "Fear not, bondman! The mighty one, who rules over life and death, and time and futurity, deals kindly with the servant of his choice! Onward, onward! to the place of darkness and doom, where I alone am omnipotent, and all others are creatures who tremble and obey! To thy lesson, learner! by sunset the victim must be crowned!"

He looked round on Numerian for an instant, as he prepared to drag him forward, and their eyes met. In the fierce command of his action, and the savage exultation of his glance, the father saw repeated in a wilder form the very attitude and expression which he had beheld in the pagan on the morning of the loss of his child. All the circumstances of that miserable hour--the vacant bed-chamber--the banished daughter--the triumph of the betrayer--the anguish of the betrayed--rushed over his mind, and rose up before it vivid as a pictured scene before his eyes. He struggled no more; the powers of resistance in mind and body were crushed alike. He made an effort to remove Antonina from his side, as if, in forgetfulness of the hidden enemy without, he designed to urge her flight through the open door, while the madman's attention was yet distracted from her. But, beyond this last exertion of the strong instinct of paternal love, every other active emotion seemed dead within him.

Vainly had he striven to disentangle the child from the fate that might be in store for the parent. To her the dread of the dark shadow on the pavement was superior to all other apprehensions. She now clung more closely to her father, and tightened her clasp round his hand. So, when the pagan advanced into the interior of the temple, it was not Numerian alone who followed him to the place of sacrifice, but Antonina as well.

They moved to the back of the pile of idols. Behind it appeared a high partition of gilt and inlaid wood reaching to the ceiling, and separating the outer from the inner part of the temple. A low archway passage, protected by carved gates similar to those at the front of the building, had been formed in the partition and through this Ulpius and his prisoners now passed into the recess beyond.

This apartment was considerably smaller than the first hall of the temple which they had just left. The ceiling and the floor both sloped downward together and here the rippling of the waters of the Tiber was more distinctly audible to them than in the outer division of the building. At the moment when they entered it, the place was very dark; the pile of idols intercepted even the little light that could have been admitted through its narrow entrance; but the dense obscurity was soon dissipated. Dragging Numerian after him to the left side of the recess, Ulpius drew back a sort of wooden shutter, and a vivid ray of light immediately streamed in through a small circular opening pierced in this part of the temple.

Then there became apparent, at the lower end of. the apartment, a vast yawning cavity in the wall, high enough to admit a man without stooping, but running downward almost perpendicularly to some lower region, which it was impossible to see, for no light shot upward from this precipitous artificial abyss, in the darkness of which the eye was lost after it had penetrated to the distance of a few feet only from the opening. At the base of the confined space thus visible appeared the commencement of a flight of steps, evidently leading far downward into the cavity. On the abruptly sloping walls which bounded it on all sides were painted, in the brilliant hues of ancient fresco, representations of the deities of the mythology--all in the attitude of descending into the vault and all followed by figures of nymphs bearing wreaths of flowers, beautiful birds, and other similar adjuncts of the votive ceremonies of Paganism. The repulsive contrast between the bright colors and graceful forms presented by the frescoes, and the perilous and gloomy appearance of the cavity which they decorated, increased remarkably the startling significance in the character of the whole structure. Its past evil uses seemed ineradicably written over every part of it, as past crime and torment remain ineradicably written on the human face; the mind imbibed from it terrifying ideas of deadly treachery of secret atrocities, of frightful refinements of torture, which no uninitiated eye had ever beheld and no human resolution had ever been powerful enough to resist.

But the impressions thus received were not produced only by what was seen in and around this strange vault, but by what was heard there besides. The wind penetrated the cavity at some distance, and through some opening that could not be beheld, and was apparently intercepted in its passage, for it whistled upward toward the entrance in shrill, winding notes, sometimes producing another and nearer sound, resembling the clashing of many small metallic substances violently shaken together. The noise of the wind, as well as the bubbling of the current of the Tiber, seemed to proceed from a greater distance than appeared compatible with the narrow extent of the back part of the temple, and the proximity of the river to its low foundation walls. It was evident that the vault only reached its outlet after it had wound backward, underneath the building, in some strange complication of passages or labyrinth of artificial caverns, which might have been built long since as dungeons for the living, or as sepulchers for the dead.

"The place of the sacrifice--aha! the place of the sacrifice!" cried the pagan exultingly, as he drew Numerian to the entrance of the cavity, and solemnly pointed into the darkness beneath.

The father gazed steadily into the chasm, never turning now to look on Antonina, never moving to renew the struggle for freedom. Earthly loves and earthly hopes began to fade away from his heart--he was praying. The solemn words of Christian supplication fell in low murmuring sounds from his lips, in the place of idolatry and bloodshed, and mingled with the incoherent ejaculations of the madman who kept him captive and who now bent his glaring eyes on the darkness of the vault, half forgetful, in the gloomy fascination which it exercised even over him, of the prisoners whom he held at its mouth.

The single ray of light, admitted from the circular aperture in the wall, fell wild and fantastic over the widely--differing figures of the three, as they stood so strangely united together before the abyss that opened beneath them. The shadows were above and the shadows were around: there was no light in the ill-omened place but the one vivid ray that streamed over the gaunt figure of Ulpius, as he still pointed into the darkness; over the rigid features of Numerian, praying in the bitterness of expected death; and over the frail, youthful form of Antonina, as she nestled trembling at her father's side. It was an unearthly and a solemn scene!

Meanwhile the shadow which the girl had observed on the pavement before the doorway of the temple now appeared there again, but not to retire as before; for, the instant after, Goisvintha stealthily entered the outer apartment of the building left vacant by its first occupants. She passed softly around the pile of idols, looked into the inner recess of the temple, and saw the three figures standing together in the ray of light, gloomy and motionless, before the mouth of the cavity. Her first glance fixed on the pagan--whom she instinctively doubted and dreaded; whose purpose in keeping captive the father and daughter she could not divine; her next was directed on Antonina.

The girl's position was a guarded one; still holding her father's hand, she was partly protected by his body; and stood unconsciously beneath the arm of Ulpius, as it was raised while he grasped Numerian's shoulder. Marking this, and remembering that Antonina had twice escaped her already, Goisvintha hesitated for a moment, and then, with cautions step and lowering brow, began to retire again toward the doorway of the building, "Not yet--not yet the time!" she muttered, as she resumed her former lurking-place; "they stand where the light is over them--the girl is watched and shielded--the two men are still on either side of her! Not yet the moment of the blow; the stroke of the knife must be sure and safe! Sure, for this time she must die by my hand! Safe, for I have other vengeance to wreak besides the vengeance on her! I, who have been patient and cunning since the night when I escaped from Aquileia, will be patient and cunning still! If she passes the door, I slay her as she goes out; if she remains in the temple--"

At the last word, Goisvintha paused and gazed upward; the setting sun threw its fiery glow over her haggard face; her eye brightened fiercely in the full light as she looked. "The darkness is at hand!" she continued; "the night will be thick and black in the dim halls of the temple; I shall see her when she shall not see me!--the darkness is coming; the vengeance is sure!"

She closed her lips, and with fatal perseverance continued to watch and wait, as she had resolutely watched and waited already. The Roman and the Goth; the opposite in sex, nation and fate; the madman who dreamed of the sanguinary superstitions of Paganism before the temple altar, and the assassin who brooded over the chances of bloodshed beneath the temple portico, were now united in a mysterious identity of expectation, uncommunicated and unsuspected by either--the hour when the sun vanished from the heaven was the. hour of the sacrifice.

There is now a momentary pause in the progress of events. Occurrences to be hereafter related render it necessary to take advantage of this interval to inform the reader of the real nature and use of the vault in the temple wall, the external appearance of which we have already described.

The marking peculiarity in the construction of the pagan religion may be most aptly compared to the marking peculiarity in the construction of the pagan temples. Both were designed to attract the general eye by the outward effect only, which was in both the false, delusive reflection of the inward substance. In the temple, the people, as they worshiped beneath the long colonnades, or beheld the lofty porticoes from the street, were left to imagine the corresponding majesty and symmetry of the interior of the structure, and were not admitted to discover how grievously it disappointed the brilliant expectations which the exterior was so well calculated to inspire; how little the dark, narrow halls of the idols, the secret vaults and gloomy recesses within, fulfilled the promise of the long flights of steps, the broad extent of pavement, the massive sun-brightened pillars without. So in the religion, the votary was allured by the splendor of processions; by the pomp of auguries; by the poetry of the superstition which peopled his native woods with the sportive Dryads, and the fountains from which he drank with their guardian Naiads; which gave to mountain and lake, to sun and moon and stars, to all things around and above him, their fantastic allegory, or their gracious legend of beauty and love: but beyond this his first acquaintance with his worship was not permitted to extend, here his initiation concluded. He was kept in ignorance of the dark and dangerous depths which lurked beneath this smooth and attractive surface; he was left to imagine that what was displayed was but the prelude to the future discovery of what was hidden of beauty in the rites of Paganism; he was not admitted to behold the wretched impostures, the loathsome orgies, the hideous incantations, the bloody human sacrifices perpetrated in secret, which made the foul real substance of the fair exterior form. His first sight of the temple was not less successful in deceiving his eye, than his first impression of the religion in deluding his mind.

With these hidden and guilty mysteries of the pagan worship the vault before which Ulpius now stood with his captives was intimately connected.

The human sacrifices offered among the Romans were of two kinds--those publicly and those privately performed. The first were of annual recurrence in the early years of the Republic; were prohibited at a later date; were revived by Augustus, who sacrificed his prisoners of war at the altar of Julius Cæsar; and were afterward--though occasionally renewed for particular purposes under some subsequent reigns--wholly abandoned as part of the ceremonies of Paganism during the latter periods of the empire.

The sacrifices perpetrated in private were much longer practiced. They were connected with the most secret mysteries of the mythology; were concealed from the supervision of government; and lasted probably until the general extinction of heathen superstition in Italy and the provinces. Many and various were the receptacles constructed for the private immolation of human victims in different parts of the empire--in its crowded cities as well as in its solitary woods--and among all, one of the most remarkable and the longest preserved was the great cavity pierced in the wall of the temple which Ulpius had chosen for his solitary lurking-place in Rome.

It was not merely as a place of concealment for the act of immolation, and for the corpse of the victim, that the vault had been built. A sanguinary artifice had complicated the manner of its construction, by placing in the cavity itself the instrument of the sacrifice; by making it, as it were, not merely the receptacle, but the devoured also, of its human prey. At the bottom of the flight of steps leading down into it (the top of which, as we have already observed, was alone visible from the entrance in the temple recess) was fixed the image of a dragon formed in brass.

The body of the monster, protruding opposite the steps almost at a right angle from the wall, was moved in all directions by steel springs, which communicated with one of the lower stairs, and also with a sword placed in the throat of the image to represent the dragon's tongue. The walls around the steps narrowed, so as barely to admit the passage of the human body when they approached the dragon. At the slightest pressure on the stair with which the spring communicated, the body of the monster bent forward, and the sword instantly protruded from its throat at such a height from the steps as insured that it should transfix in a vital part the person who descended. The corpse, then drop ping by its own weight off the sword, fell through a tunneled opening beneath the dragon, running downward in an opposite direction to that taken by the steps above; and was deposited on an iron grating washed by the waters of the Tiber, which ran under the arched foundations of the temple. The grating was approached by a secret subterranean passage, leading from the front of the building, by which the sacrificing priests were enabled to reach the dead body; to fasten weights to it; and, opening the grating, to drop it into the river, never to be beheld again by mortal eyes.

In the days when this engine of destruction was permitted to serve the purpose for which the horrible ingenuity of its inventors had constructed it, its principal victims were young girls. Crowned with flowers and clad in white garments, they were lured into immolating themselves, by being furnished with rich offerings, and told that the sole object of their fatal expedition down the steps of the vault was to realize the pictures adorning its walls (which we have described a few pages back), by presenting their gifts at the shrine of the idol below.

At the period of which we write, the dragon had for many years--since the first prohibitions of Paganism--ceased to be fed with its wonted prey. The scales forming its body grew gradually corroded and loosened by the damp; and when moved by the wind which penetrated to them from beneath, whistling up in its tortuous course through the tunnel that ran in one direction below, and the vault of the steps that ascended in another above, produced the clashing sound which has been mentioned as audible at intervals from the mouth of the cavity. But the springs which moved the deadly apparatus of the whole machine being placed within it under cover, continued to resist the slow progress of time and neglect, and still remained as completely fitted as ever to execute the fatal purpose for which they had been designed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ere long the laughter of Ulpius, while he moved slowly hither and thither in the darkness of the temple, was overpowered by the sound of her voice--deep, groaning, but yet steady--as she uttered her last words--words, poured forth like the wild dirges, the fierce death-songs of the old Goths, when they died deserted on the bloody battlefield; or were cast bound into deep dungeons, a prey to the viper and the asp. Thus she spoke:

"I swore to be avenged! while I went forth from Aquileia with the child that was killed and the child that was wounded; while I climbed the high wall in the night-time, and heard the tumult of the beating waves near the bank where I buried the dead; while I wandered in the darkness over the naked heath and through the lonely forest; while I climbed the pathless sides of the mountains, and made my refuge in the cavern by the waters of the dark lake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The priest and the soldier, calling to their companions behind to hurry on, had now arrived opposite the temple steps; and saw confronting them in the pale moonlight, from the eminence on which he stood, the weird and solitary figure of Ulpius--the apparition of a pagan in the gorgeous robes of his priesthood, bidden back from the tombs to stay the hand of the spoiler before the shrine of his gods.

The soldier dropped his weapon to the ground; and, trembling in every limb, refused to proceed. But the priest, a tall, stern, emaciated man, went on defenseless and undaunted. He signed himself solemnly with the cross as he slowly ascended the steps; fixed his unflinching eyes on the madman, who glared back on him in return; and called aloud in a harsh, steady voice: "Man, or demon! in the name of Christ, whom thou deniest, stand back!"

For an instant, as the priest approached him, the pagan averted his eyes and looked on the concourse of people and the armed soldiers rapidly advancing. His fingers closed round the hilt of Goisvintha's knife, which he had hitherto held loosely in his hand, as he exclaimed in low, concentrated tones: "Aha! the siege--the siege of Serapis!" The priest, now standing on the same step with him, stretched out his arm to thrust him back, and at that moment received the stroke of the knife. He staggered, lifted his hand again to sign his forehead with the cross; and, as he raised it, rolled back dead on the pavement of the street.

The soldier, standing motionless with superstitious terror a few feet from the corpse, called to his companions for help. Hurling his bloody weapon at them in defiance, as they ran in confusion to the base of the temple steps, Ulpius entered the building, and locked and chained the gates.

Then the assembled people thronging round the corpse of the priest, heard the madman shouting in his frenzy, as if to a great body of adherents round him, to pour down the molten lead and the scorching sand; to hurl back every scaling-ladder planted against the walls; to massacre each prisoner who was seized mounting the ramparts to the assault; and as they looked up to the building from the street, they saw at intervals through the bars of the closed gates the figure of Ulpius passing swift and shadowy--his arms extended, his long gray hair and white robes streaming behind him, as he rushed round and round the temple reiterating his wild pagan war cries as he went. The enfeebled, superstitious populace trembled while they gazed--a specter driven on a whirlwind would not have been more terrible to their eyes.

But the priests among the crowd, roused to fury by the murder of one of their own body, revived the courage of those around them. Even the shouts of Ulpius were now overpowered by the sound of their voices, raised to the highest pitch, promising heavenly and earthly rewards--salvation, money, absolution, promotion--to all who would follow them up the steps and burst their way into the temple Animated by the words of the priests, and growing gradually confident in their own numbers, the boldest in the throng seized a piece of timber lying by the river side, and using it as a battering-ram, assailed the gate. But they were weakened by famine; they could gain little impetus, from the necessity of ascending the temple steps to the attack: the iron quivered as they struck it; but hinge and lock remained firm alike. They were preparing to renew the attempt, when a tremendous shock--a crash as if the whole heavy roof of the building had fallen in--drove them back in terror to the street.

Recalled by the sight of the armed men, the priests, and the attendant crowd of people advancing to invade his sanctuary, to the days when he had defended the great Temple of Serapis at Alexandria, against enemies similar in appearance, though far superior in numbers; persuaded in the revival of those, the most sanguinary visions of his insanity, that he was still resisting the Christian fanatics; supported by his adherents in his sacred fortress of former years, the pagan displayed none of his accustomed cunning and care in moving through the darkness around him. He hurried hither and thither, encouraging his imaginary followers, and glorying in his dreams of slaughter and success, forgetful in his frenzy of all that the temple contained.

As he pursued his wild course round and round the altar of idols, his robe became entangled, and was torn by the projecting substances at one corner of it. The whole overhanging mass tottered at the moment, but did not yet fall. A few of the smaller idols, however, at the outside dropped to the ground; and with them an image of Serapis, which they happened partially to support--a heavy, monstrous figure, carved life-size in wood, and studded with gold, silver and precious stones--fell at the pagan's feet. But this was all--the outer materials of the perilous structure had been detached only at one point; the pile itself still remained in its place.

The madman seized the image of Serapis in his arms, and passed blindly onward with it through the passage in the partition into the recess beyond. At that instant the shock of the first attack on the gates resounded through the building. Shouting as he heard it, "A sally! a sally! men of the Temple, the gods and the high-priest lead you on!" and still holding the idol before him, he rushed straight forward to the entrance, and struck in violent collision against the backward part of the pile.

The ill-balanced, top-heavy mass of images and furniture of many temples swayed, parted, and fell over against the gates and the wall on either side of them. Maimed and bleeding, struck down by the lower part of the pile, as it was forced back against the partition when the upper part fell, the fury of Ulpius was but increased by the crashing ruin around him. He struggled up again into an erect position; mounted on the top of the fallen mass--now spread out at the sides over the floor of the building, but confined at one end by the partition, and at the other by the opposite wall and the gates--and still clasping the image of Serapis in his arms, called louder and louder to "the men of the Temple," to mount with him the highest ramparts, and pour down on the besiegers the molten head!

The priests were again the first men to approach the gates of the building after the shock that had been heard within it. The struggle for the possession of the temple had assumed to them the character of a holy warfare against Heathenism and magic--a sacred conflict to be sustained by the Church, for the sake of her servant who had fallen a martyr at the outset of the strife. Strong in their fanatical boldness, they advanced with one accord close to the gates. Some of the smaller images of the fallen pile had been forced through the bars, behind which appeared the great idols, the broken masses of furniture, the long robes and costly hangings, all locked together in every wild variety of position--a chaos of distorted objects heaped up by an earthquake! Above and further inward, the lower part of the pagan's robe was faintly discernible through the upper interstices in I he gate, as he stood, commanding, on the summit of his prostrate altar, with his idol in his arms.

The priests felt an instant conviction of certain triumph when they discerned the cause of the shock that had been heard within the temple. One of their number snatched up a small image that had fallen through to the pavement where he stood, and holding it before the people below, exclaimed, exultingly:

"Children of the Church, the mystery is revealed. Idols more precious than this lie by hundreds on the floor of the temple. It is no demon, but a man, one man, who still defies us within!--a robber who would defraud the Romans of the ransom of their lives!--the pillage of many temples is around him; remember now, that the nearer we came to this place the fewer were the spoils of idolatry that we gathered in; the treasure which is yours, the treasure which is to free you from the famine, has been seized by the assassin of our holy brother; it is there scattered at his feet! To the gates! To the gates again! Absolution for all their sins to the men who burst in the gates!"

Again the mass of timber was taken up; again the gates were assailed; and again they stood firm--they were now strengthened; barricaded by the fallen pile, it seemed hopeless to attempt to break them down without a re-enforcement of men, without employing against them the heaviest missiles, the strongest engines of war.

The people gave vent to a cry of fury, as they heard from the temple the hollow laughter of the madman triumphing in their defeat. The words of the priest, in allaying their superstitious fears, had aroused the deadly passions that superstition brings forth. A few among the throng hurried to the nearest guard-house for assistance, but the greater part pressed closely round the temple; some pouring forth impotent execrations against the robber of the public spoil; some joining the priests in calling on him to yield. But the clamor lasted not long: it was suddenly and strangely stilled by the voice of one man in the crowd, calling loudly to the rest to fire the temple!

The words were hardly spoken ere they were repeated triumphantly on all sides. "Fire the temple!" cried the people, ferociously. "Burn it over the robber's head! A furnace--a furnace! to melt down the gold and silver ready to our hands! Fire the temple! Fire the temple!"

Those who were most active among the crowd (which was now greatly increased by stragglers from all parts of the city) entered the houses behind them, and returned in a few minutes with every inflammable substance that they could collect in their hands. A heap of fuel, two or three feet in height, was raised against the gates immediately, and soldiers and people pressed forward with torches to light it. But the priest who had before spoken waved them back. "Wait!" he cried; "the fate of his body is with the people, but the fate of his soul is with the Church!"

Then, turning to the temple, he called solemnly and sternly to the madman. "Thy hour is come! repent, confess, and save thy soul!"

"Slay on! Slay on!" answered the raving voice from within. "Slay, till not a Christian is left! Victory! Serapis! See, they drop from our walls! they writhe bleeding on the earth beneath us! There is no worship but the worship of the gods! Slay! Slay on!"

"Light!" cried the priest. "His damnation be on his own hand! Anathema! Anathema! Let him die accursed!"

The dry fuel was fired at once at all points: it was an anticipation of an auto-da-fe--a burning of a heretic, in the fifth century. As the flames rose, the people fell back and watched their rapid progress. The priests standing before them in a line, stretched out their hands in denunciation against the temple, and repeated together the awful excommunication service of the Roman Church.

The fire at the gates had communicated with the idols inside. It was no longer on his prostrate altar, but on his funeral pile that Ulpius now stood; and the image that he clasped was the stake to which he was bound. A red glare, dull at first, was now brightening and brightening below him; flames, quick and noiseless, rose and fell, and rose again at different points, illuminating the interior of the temple with fitful and changing light. The grim, swarthy forms of the idols seemed to sway and writhe like living things in torment, as fire and smoke alternately displayed and concealed them. A deadly stillness now overspread the face and form of the pagan, as he looked down steadfastly on the deities of his worship engendering his destruction beneath him. His cheek--the cheek which had rested in boyhood on his mother's bosom--was pressed against the gilded breast of the god Serapis, his task-master in life--his pillow in death!

"I rise! I rise to the world of light, with my deities whom I have served!" he murmured; "the brightness of their presence is like a flaming fire; the smoke of their breath pours forth around me like the smoke of incense! I minister in the Temples of the Clouds; and the glory of eternal sunlight shines round me while I adore! I rise! I rise!"

The smoke whirled in black volumes over his head; the fierce voice of the fast-spreading fire roared on him; the flames leaped up at his feet--his robes kindled, burst into radiant light, as the pile yawned and opened under him.

Time had passed. The strife between the Temple and the Church was ended. The priests and the people had formed a wider circle round the devoted building; all that was inflammable in it had been burned; smoke and flame now burst only at intervals through the gates, and gradually both ceased to appear. Then the crowd approached nearer to the temple, and felt the heat of the furnace they had kindled, as they looked in.

The iron gates were red hot--from the great mass behind (still glowing bright in some places, and heaving and quivering with its own heat), a thin, transparent vapor rose slowly to the stone root of the building, now blackened with smoke. The priests looked eagerly for the corpse of the pagan; they saw two dark, charred objects closely united together, lying in a chasm of ashes near the gate, at a spot where the fire had already exhausted itself, but it was impossible to discern which was the man and which was the idol.

The necessity for providing means for entering the temple had not been forgotten while the flames were raging. Proper implements for forcing open the gates were new at hand, and already the mob began to dip their buckets in the Tiber, and pour water wherever any traces of the fire remained. Soon all obstacles were removed; the soldiers crowded into the building with spades in their hands, trampled on the black, watery mire of cinders which covered what had once been the altar of idols, and throwing out into the street the refuse ashes and the stone images which had remained unconsumed, dug in what was left, as in a new mine, for the gold and silver which the fire could not destroy.

The pagan had lived with his idols, had perished with his idols!--and now where they were cast away, there he was cast away with them. The soldiers, as they dug into fragments the black ruins of his altar, mingled him in fragments with it! The people, as they cast the refuse thrown out to them into the river, cast what remained of him with what remained of his gods! And when the temple was deserted, when the citizens had borne off all the treasure they could collect, when nothing but a few heaps of dust was left of all that had been burned, the nightwind blew away before it the ashes of Ulpius with the ashes of the deities that Ulpius had served!

A NEW prospect now opens before us. The rough paths through which we have hitherto threaded our way grow smoother as we approach their close. Rome, so long dark and gloomy to our view, brightens at length like a landscape when the rain is past, and the first rays of returning sunlight stream through the parting clouds. Some days have elapsed, and in those days the temples have yielded all their wealth; the conquered Romans have bribed the triumphant barbarians to mercy; the ransom of the fallen city has been paid.

The Gothic army is still encamped round the walls, but the gates are opened, markets for food are established in the suburbs, boats appear on the river and wagons on the highroads, laden with provisions, and proceeding toward Rome. All the hidden treasure kept back by the citizens is now bartered for food; the merchants who hold the market reap a rich harvest of spoil; but the hungry are filled, the weak are revived, every one is content.

It is the end of the second day since the free sale of provisions and the liberty of egress from the city have been permitted by the Goths. The gates are closed for the night, and the people are quietly returning, laden with their supplies of food, to their homes. Their eyes no longer encounter the terrible traces of the march of pestilence and famine through every street; the corpses have been removed, and the sick are watched and sheltered. Rome is cleansed from her pollutions, and the virtues of household life begin to revive wherever they once existed. Death has thinned every family, but the survivors again assemble together in the social hall. Even the veriest criminals, the lowest outcasts of the population, are united harmlessly for a while in the general participation of the first benefits of peace.

To follow the citizens to their homes; to trace in their thoughts, words, and actions, the effect on them of their deliverance from the horrors of the blockade; to contemplate in the people of a whole city, now recovering, as it were, from a deep swoon, the varying forms of the first reviving symptoms in all classes--in good and bad, rich and poor--would afford matter enough in itself for a romance of searching human interest, for a drama of the passions, moving absorbingly through strange, intricate, and contrasted scenes. But another employment than this now claims our care. it is to an individual, and not to a divided source of interest, that our attention turns; we relinquish all observations on the general mass of the populace, to revert to Numerian and Antonina alone--to penetrate once more into the little dwelling on the Pincian Hill.

The apartment where the father and daughter had suffered the pangs of famine together during the period of the blockade, presented an appearance far different from that which it had displayed on the occasion when they had last occupied it. The formerly bare walls were now covered with rich, thick hangings; and the simple couch and scanty table of other days had been exchanged for whatever was most luxurious and complete in the household furniture of the age. At one end of the room three women, attended by a little girl, were engaged in preparing some dishes of fruit and vegetables; at the other, two men were occupied in how, earnest conversation, occasionally looking round anxiously to a couch placed against the third side of the apartment, on which Antonina lay extended, while Numerian watched by her in silence. The point of Goisvintha's knife had struck deep, but, as yet, the fatal purpose of the assassination had failed.

The girl's eyes were closed; her lips were parted in the languor of suffering; one of her hands lay listless on her father's knee. A slight expression of pain, melancholy in its very slightness, appeared on her pale face, and occasionally a long-drawn, quivering breath escaped her--nature's last touching utterance of its own feebleness! The old man, as he sat by her side, fixed on her a wistful, inquiring glance. Sometimes he raised his hand and gently and mechanically moved to and fro the long locks of her hair, as they spread over the head of the couch; but he never turned to communicate with the other persons in the room--he sat as if he saw nothing save his daughter's figure stretched before him, amid heard nothing save the faint, fluttering sound of her breathing, close at his ear.

it was now dark, and one lamp, hanging from the ceiling, threw a soft equal light over the room. The different persons occupying it presented but little evidence of health and strength in their countenances, to contrast them in appearance with the wounded girl; all had undergone the wasting visitation of the famine, and all were pale and languid, like her. A strange, indescribable harmony prevailed over the scene. Even the calmness of absorbing expectation and trembling hope, expressed in the demeanor of Numerian, seemed reflected in the actions of those around him, in the quietness with which the women pursued their employment, in the lower and lower whispers in which the men continued their conversation. There was something pervading the air of the whole apartment that conveyed a sense of the solemn, unworldly stillness which we attach to the abstract idea of religion.

Of the two men cautiously talking together, one was the patrician Vetranio; the other, a celebrated physician of Rome.

Both the countenance and manner of the senator gave melancholy proof that the orgy at his palace had altered him for the rest of his life. He looked what he was, a man changed forever in constitution and character. A fixed expression of anxiety and gloom appeared in his eyes; his emaciated face was occasionally distorted by a nervous, involuntary contraction of the muscles; it was evident that the paralyzing effect of the debauch which had destroyed his companions would remain with him to the end of his existence. No remnant of his careless self-possession, his easy, patrician affability, appeared in his manner, as he now listened to his companion's conversation; years seemed to have been added to his life since he had headed the table at "The Banquet of Famine."

"Yes," said the physician, a cold, calm man, who spoke much, but pronounced all his words with emphatic deliberation.--"yes, as I have already told you, the wound, in itself, was not mortal. If the blade of the knife had entered near the center of the neck, she must have died when she was struck. But it passed outward and backward: the large vessels escaped; no vital part has been touched."

"And yet you persist in declaring that you doubt her recovery!" exclaimed Vetranio, in low, mournful tones.

"I do," pursued the physician. "She must have been exhausted in mind and body when she received the blow--I have watched her carefully; I know it! There is nothing of the natural health and strength of youth to oppose the effects of the wound. I have seen the old die from injuries that the young recover from, because life, in them, was losing its powers of resistance: she is in the position of the old!"

"They have died before me, and she will die before me! I shall lose all--all!" sighed Vetranio bitterly to himself.

"The resources of our art are exhausted," continued the other; "nothing remains but to watch carefully and wait patiently; the chances of life or death will be decided in a few hours: they are equally balanced now."

"I shall lose all!--all!" repeated the senator, mournfully, as if he heeded not the last words.

"If she dies," said the physician, speaking in warmer tones, for he was struck with pity, in spite of himself, at the spectacle of Vetranio's utter dejection--"if she dies, you can at least remember that all that could be done to secure her life has been done by you. Her father, helpless in his lethargy and his age, was fitted only to sit and watch her, as he has sat and watched her day after day; but you have spared nothing, forgotten nothing. Whatever I have asked for, that you have provided; the hangings round the room, and the couch that she lies on, are yours; the first fresh supplies of nourishment from the newly-opened markets were brought here from you. I told yen that she was thinking incessantly of what she had suffered; that it was necessary to preserve her against her own recollections; that the presence of women about her might do good; that a child appearing sometimes in the room might soothe her fancy, might make her look at what was passing, instead of thinking of what had passed; you found them, and sent them! I have seen parents less anxious for their children, lovers for their mistresses, than you for this girl."

"My destiny is with her," interrupted Vetranio, looking round superstitiously to the frail form on the couch. "I know nothing of the mysteries that the Christians call their 'Faith'; but I believe now in the soul. I believe that one soul contains the fate of another, and that her soul contains the fate of mine!"

The physician shook his head derisively. His calling had determined his philosophy--he was as ardent a materialist as Epicurus himself.

"Listen," said Vetranio; "since I first saw her, a change came over my whole being; it was as if her life was mingled with mine! I had no influence over her, save an influence for ill: I loved her, and she was driven defenseless from her home! I sent my slaves to search Rome night and day; I exerted all my power, I lavished my wealth to discover her; and, for the first time, in this one effort, I failed in what I had undertaken. I felt that through me she was lost--dead! Days passed on; life weighed weary on me; the famine came. You know in what way I determined that my career should close; the rumor of the Banquet of Famine reached you as it reached others!"

"It did," replied the physician. "And I see before me, in your face," he added, after a momentary pause, "the havoc which that ill-omened banquet has worked. My friend, be advised!--abandon forever the turmoil of your Roman palace, and breathe in tranquillity the air of a country home. The strength you once had is gone never to return--if you would yet live, husband what is still left."

"Hear me," pursued Vetranio, in low, gloomy tones: "I stood alone in my doomed palace; the friends whom I had tempted to their destruction lay lifeless around me; the torch was in my hand that was to light our funeral pile, to set us free from the loathsome world! I approached triumphantly to kindle the annihilating flames, when she stood before me--she, whom I had sought as lost, and mourned as dead! A strong hand seemed to wrench the torch from me; it dropped to the ground! She departed again; but I was powerless to take it up: her look was still before me; her face, her figure--she, herself, appeared ever watching between the torch and me!"

"Lower!--speak lower!" interrupted the physician, looking on the senator's agitated features with unconcealed astonishment and pity. "You retard your own recovery--you disturb the girl's repose, by discourse such as this."

"The officers of the senate," continued Vetranio, sadly resuming his gentler tones, "when they entered the palace, found me still standing on the place where we had met! Day passed on again: I stood looking out upon the street, and thought of my companions which I had lured to their death, and of my oath to partake their fate, which I had never fulfilled. I would have driven my dagger to my heart; but her face was yet before me, my hands were bound! In that hour I saw her for the second time; saw her carried past me--wounded, assassinated! She had saved me once; she had saved me twice! I knew that now the chance was offered me, after having wrought her ill, to work her good; after failing to discover her when she was lost, to succeed in saving her when she was dying; after having survived the deaths of my friends at my own table, to survive to see life restored under my influence, as well as destroyed! These were my thoughts; these are my thoughts still--thoughts felt only since I saw her! Do you know now why I believe that her soul contains the fate of mine? Do you see me, weakened, shattered, old before my time; my friends lost, my fresh feelings of youth gone forever; and can you not now comprehend that her life is my life?--that if she dies, the one good purpose of my existence is blighted?--that I lose all I have henceforth to live for?--all, all!"

As he pronounced the concluding words, the girl's eyes half unclosed and turned languidly toward her father. She made an effort to lift her hand caressingly from his knee to his neck; but her strength was unequal even to this slight action. The hand was raised only a few inches ere it sank back again to its old position; a tear rolled slowly over her cheek as she closed her eyes again, but she never spoke.

"See," said the physician, pointing to her, "the current of life is at its lowest ebb! If it flows again, it must flow to-night."

Vetranio made no answer: he dropped down on the seat near him, and covered his face with his robe.

The physician, beholding the senator's situation, and reflecting on the strange, hurriedly-uttered confession which had just been addressed to him, began to doubt whether the scenes through which his patron had lately passed had not affected his brain. Philosopher though he was, the man of science had never observed the outward symptoms of the first working of good and pure influences in elevating a degraded mind; he had never watched the denoting signs of speech and action which mark the progress of mental revolution while the old nature is changing for the new; such objects of contemplation existed not for him. He gently touched Vetranio on the shoulder. "Rise," said he, "and let us depart. Those are around her who can watch her best. Nothing remains for us but to wait and hope. With the earliest morning we will return."

He delivered a few farewell directions to one of the women in attendance, and then, accompanied by the senator, who, without speaking again, mechanically rose to follow him, quitted the room.

After this, the silence was only interrupted by the sound of an occasional whisper, and of quick, light footsteps passing backward and forward. Then the cooling, reviving draughts which had been prepared for the night were poured ready into the cups; and the women approached Numerian, as if to address him, but he waved his hand impatiently when he saw them; and then they, too, in their turn, departed, to wait in an adjoining apartment until they should be summoned again.

Nothing changed in the manner of the father when he was left alone in the chamber of sickness, which the lapse of a few hours might convert into the chamber of death. He sat watching Antonina, and touching the outspread locks of her hair from time to time, as had been his wont. It was a fair, starry night: the fresh air of the soft winter climate of the South blew gently over the earth; the great city was sinking fast into tranquillity; calling voices were sometimes heard faintly from the principal streets; and the distant notes of martial music sounded cheerily from the Gothic camp as the sentinels were posted along the line of watch.

But soon these noises ceased, and the stillness of Rome was as the stillness round the couch of the wounded girl.

Day after day, and night after night, since the assassination in the temple, Numerian had kept the same place by his daughter's side. Each hour as it passed, found him still absorbed in his long vigil of hope: his life seemed suspended in its onward course by the one influence that now enthralled it. At the brief intervals when his bodily weariness overpowered him on his melancholy watch, it was observed by those around him that, even in his short dreaming slumbers, his face remained ever turned in the same direction, toward the head of the couch, as if drawn thither by some irresistible attraction, by some powerful ascendency felt even amid the deepest repose of sensation, the heaviest fatigue of the overlabored mind, and the worn, sinking heart. He held no communication, save by signs, with the friends about him; he seemed neither to hope, to doubt, nor to despair with them; all his faculties were strung up to vibrate at one point only, and were dull and unimpressible in every other direction.

But twice had he been heard to speak more than the fewest, simplest words. The first time, when Antonina uttered the name of Goisvintha, on the recovery of her senses after her wound, he answered eagerly, by reiterated declarations, that there was nothing henceforth to fear; for he had seen the assassin dead under the pagan's foot, on leaving the temple. The second time, when mention was incautiously made before him of rumors circulated through Rome of the burning of an unknown pagan priest, hidden in the Temple of Serapis, with vast treasures around him, the old man was seen to start and shudder, and heard to pray for the soul that was now waiting before the dread Judgment-seat; to murmur about a vain restoration, and a discovery made too late; to mourn over horror that thickened around him, over hope fruitlessly awakened, and bereavement more terrible than mortal had ever suffered before; to entreat that the child, the last left of all, might be spared--with many words more, which ran on themes like these, and which were counted by all who listened to them but as the wanderings of a mind whose higher powers were fatally prostrated by feebleness and grief.

One long hour of the night had already passed away since parent and child had been left together, and neither word nor movement had been audible in the melancholy room. But, as the second hour began, the girl's eyes unclosed again, and she moved painfully on the couch. Accustomed to interpret the significance of her slightest actions, Numerian rose and brought her one of the reviving draughts that had been left ready for use. After she had drunk, when her eyes met her father's, fixed on her in mute and mournful inquiry, her lips closed and formed themselves into an expression which he remembered they had always assumed, when, as a little child, she used silently to hold up her face to him to be kissed. The miserable contrast between what she was now and what she had been then was beyond the passive endurance, the patient resignation of the spirit-broken old man: the empty cup dropped from his hands, he knelt down by the side of the couch, and groaned aloud.

"Oh, father! father!" cried the weak, plaintive voice above him, "I am dying! Let us remember that our time to be together here grows shorter and shorter; and let us pass it as happily as we can!"

He raised his head, and looked up at her, vacant and wistful, forlorn already, as if the death-parting was over.

"I have tried to live humbly and gratefully," she sighed, faintly. "I have longed to do more good on the earth than I have done. Yet you will forgive me now, father, as you have always forgiven me! You have been patient with me all my life; more patient than I have ever deserved! But I had no mother to teach me to love you as I ought, to teach me what I know now, when my death is near, and time and opportunity are mine no longer!"

"Hush! hush!" whispered the old man, affrightedly, "you will live! God is good, and knows that we have suffered enough. The curse of the last separation is not pronounced against us! Live--live!"

"Father!" said the girl, tenderly, "we have that within us which not death itself can separate. In another world I shall still think of you, when you think of me! I shall see you even when I am no more here, when you long to see me! When you go out alone, and sit under the trees on the garden bank where I used to sit; when you look forth on the far plains and mountains that I used to look on; when you read at night in the Bible that we have read in together, and remember Antonina as you lie down sorrowful to rest; then I shall see you; then you will feel that I am looking on you! You will be calm and consoled, even by the side of my grave; for you will think, not of the body that is beneath, but of the spirit that is waiting for you, as I have often waited for you here when you were away, and I knew that the approach of evening would bring you home again!"

"Hush! you will live!--you will live!" repeated Numerian, in the same low, vacant tones. The strength that still upheld him was in those few simple words: they were the food of a hope that was born in agony and cradled in despair.

"Oh, if I might live!" said the girl, softly--"if I might live but for a few days, yet how much I have to live for!" She endeavored to bend her head toward her father as she spoke; for the words were beginning to fall faintly and more faintly from her lips--exhaustion was mastering her once again. She dwelt for a moment now on the name of Hermanric, on the grave in the farmhouse garden; then reverted again to her father. The last feeble sounds she uttered were addressed to him; and their burden was still of consolation and of love.

Soon the old man, as he stooped over her, saw her eyes close again--those innocent, gentle eyes, which even yet preserved their old expression while the face grew wan and pale around them--and darkness and night sank down over her soul while he looked. "She sleeps," he murmured in a voice of awe, as he resumed his watching position by the side of the couch. "They call death a sleep; but on her face there is no death!"

The night grew on. The women who were in attendance entered the room about midnight, wondering that their assistance had not yet been required. They beheld the solemn, unruffled composure on the girl's wasted face; the rapt attention of Numerian, as he ever preserved the same attitude by her side; and went out again softly without uttering a word, even in a whisper. There was something dread and impressive in the very appearance of this room; where Death, that destroys, was in mortal conflict with Youth and Beauty, that adorn, while the eyes of one old man watched in loneliness the awful progress of the strife.

Morning came and still there was no change. Once, when the lamp that lit the room was fading out as the dawn appeared, Numerian had risen and looked close on his daughter's face--he thought at that moment that her features moved; but he saw that the flickering of the dying light on them had deceived him; the same stillness was over her. He placed his ear close to her lips for an instant, and then resumed his place, not stirring from it again. The slow current of his blood seemed to have come to a pause: he was waiting as a man waits with his head on the block, ere the ax descends--as a mother waits to hear that the breath of life has entered her new-born child.

The sun rose bright in a cloudless sky. As the fresh, sharp air of the early dawn warmed under its spreading rays, the women entered the apartment again, and partly drew aside the curtain and shutter from the window. The beams of the new light fell fair and glorifying on the girl's face; the faint, calm breeze ruffled the lighter locks of her hair. Once this would have awakened her; but it did not disturb her now.

Soon after, the voice of the child who sojourned with the women in the house was heard beneath, in the hall, through the half-opened door of the room. The little creature was slowly ascending the stairs, singing her faltering morning song to herself. She was preceded on her approach by a tame dove, bought at the provision market outside the walls, but preserved for the child as a pet and plaything by its mother. The bird fluttered, cooing, into the room, perched upon the head of the couch, and began dressing its feathers there. The women had caught the infection of the old man's enthralling suspense, and moved not, to bid the child retire, or to take away the dove from its place: they watched like him. But the soft, lulling notes of the bird were powerless over the girl's ear, as the light sunbeam over her face---still she never woke.

The child entered, and pausing in her song, climbed on to the side of the couch. She held out one little hand for the dove to perch upon, placed the other lightly on Antonina's shoulder, and pressed her fresh rosy lips to the girl's faded cheek. "I and my bird have come to make Antonina well this morning," she said, gravely.

The still, heavily-closed eyelids moved!--they quivered, opened, closed, then opened again. The eyes had a faint, dreaming, unconscious look; but Antonina lived! Antonina was awakened at last to another day on earth!

Her father's rigid, straining gaze still remained fixed upon her as at first; but on his countenance there was a blank, an absence of all appearance of sensation and life. The women, as they looked on Antonina and looked on him, began to weep; the child resumed very softly its morning sons, now addressing it to the wounded girl and now to the dove.

At this moment Vetranio and the physician appeared on the scene. The latter advanced to the couch, removed the child from it, and examined Antonina intently. At length, partly addressing Numerian, partly speaking to himself, he said, "She has slept long, deeply, without moving, almost without breathing--a sleep like death to all who looked on it."

The old man spoke not in reply, but the women answered eagerly in the affirmative.

"She is saved," pursued the physician, leisurely quitting the side of the couch, and smiling on Vetranio; "be careful of her for days and days to come."

"Saved! saved!" echoed the child joyfully, the dove free in the room, and running to Numerian to climb on his knees. The father glanced down, when the clear, young voice sounded in his ear. The springs of joy, so long dried up in his heart, welled forth again, as he saw the little hands raised toward him entreatingly; his gray head drooped--he wept.

At a sign from the physician the child was led from the room. The silence of deep and solemn emotion was preserved by all who remained; nothing was heard but the suppressed sobs of the old man, and the faint, retiring notes of the infant voice, still singing its morning song. And now one word, joyfully reiterated again and again, made all the burden of the music

"SAVED! SAVED!"

SHORTLY after the opening of the provision markets outside the gates of Rome, the Goths broke up their camp before the city and retired to winter quarters in Tuscany. The negotiations which ensued between Alaric and the Court and Government at Ravenna were conducted with cunning moderation by the conqueror, and with infatuated audacity by the conquered, and ultimately terminated in a resumption of hostilities. Rome was besieged a second and a third time by "the barbarians." On the latter occasion the city was sacked; its palaces were burned; its treasures were seized; the monuments of the Christian religion were alone respected.

But it is no longer with the Goths that our narrative is concerned; the connection with them which it has hitherto maintained closes with the end of the first siege of Rome. We can claim the reader's attention for historical events no more--the march of our little pageant, arrayed for his pleasure, is over, if, however, he has felt, and still retains, some interest in Antonina, he will not refuse to follow us and look on her again ere we part.

More than a month had passed since the besieging army had retired to their winter quarters, when several of the citizens of Rome assembled themselves on the plains beyond the walls, to enjoy one of those rustic festivals of ancient times, which are still celebrated, under different usages, but with the same spirit, by the Italians of modern days.

The place was a level plot of ground beyond the Pincian Gate, backed by a thick grove of pine-trees, and looking toward the north over the smooth extent of the country round Rome. The persons congregated were mostly of the lower class. Their amusements were dancing, music, games of strength, and games of chance; and above all, to people who had lately suffered the extremities of famine, abundant eating and drinking--long, serious, ecstatic enjoyment of the powers of mastication and the faculties of taste.

Among the assembly were some individuals whose dress and manner raised them, outwardly at least, above the general mass. These persons walked backward and forward together on different parts of the ground, as observers, not as partakers in the sports. One of their number, however, in whatever direction he turned, preserved an isolated position. He held an open letter in his hand, which he looked at from time to time, and appeared to be wholly absorbed in his own thoughts. This man we may advantageously particularize on his own account, as well as on account of the peculiarity of his accidental situation; for he was the favored minister of Vetranio's former pleasures--"the industrious Carrio."

The freedman (who was last introduced to the reader in Chapter XIV., as exhibiting to Vetranio the store of offal which he had collected during the famine, for the consumption of the palace) had contrived of late greatly to increase his master's confidence in him. On the organization of the Banquet of Famine, he had discreetly refrained from testifying the smallest desire to save himself from the catastrophe in which the senator and his friends had determined to involve themselves. Securing himself in a place of safety, he awaited the end of the orgy; and when he found that its unexpected termination left his master still living to employ him, appeared again as a faithful servant, ready to resume his customary occupation with undiminished zeal.

After the dispersion of his household during the famine, and amid the general confusion of the social system in Rome, on the raising of the blockade, Vetranio found no one near him that he could trust but Carrio--and he trusted him. Nor was the confidence misplaced: the man was selfish and sordid enough; but these very qualities insured his fidelity to his master, as long as. that master retained the power to punish and the capacity to reward. The letter which Carrio held in his hand was addressed to him at a villa--from which he had just returned--belonging to Vetranio, on the shores of the Bay of Naples, and was written by the senator, from Rome. The introductory portions of this communication seemed to interest the freedman but little: they contained praises of his diligence in preparing the country-house for the immediate habitation of its owner, and expressed his master's anxiety to quit Rome as speedily as possible, for the sake of living in perfect tranquillity, and breathing the reviving air of the sea, as the physicians had counseled. It was the latter part of the letter that Carrio perused and reperused, and then meditated over with unwonted attention and labor of mind. It ran thus:

"I have now to repose in you a trust, which you will execute with perfect fidelity as you value my favor, or respect the wealth from which you may obtain your reward. When you left Rome, you left the daughter of Numerian lying in danger of death: she has since revived. Questions that I have addressed to her during her recovery, have informed me of much in her history that I knew not before; and have induced me to purchase, for reasons of my own, a farmhouse and its lands beyond the suburbs. (The extent of the place and its situation are written on the vellum that is within this.) The husbandman who cultivated the property has survived the famine, and will continue to cultivate it for me. But, it is my desire that the garden, and all that it contains, shall remain entirely at the disposal of Numerian and his daughter, who may often repair to it; and who must henceforth be regarded there as occupying my place and having my authority. You will divide your time between over-looking the few slaves whom I leave at the palace in my absence, and the husbandman and his laborers whom I have installed at the farm; and you will answer to me for the due performance of your own duties, and the duties of those under you; being assured that by well filling this office, you will serve your own interests in these, and in all things besides."

The letter concluded by directing the freed man to return to Rome on a certain day, and to go to the farmhouse at an appointed hour, there to meet his master, who had further directions to give him, and who would visit the newly-acquired property before he proceeded on his journey to Naples.

Nothing could exceed the perplexity of Carrio, as he read the passage in his patron's letter which we have quoted above. Remembering the incidents attending Vetranio's early connection with Antonina and her father, the mere circumstance of a farm having been purchased to flatter what was doubtless some accidental caprice on the part of the girl, would have little astonished him. But that this act should be followed by the senator's immediate separation of himself from the society of Numerian's daughter; that she was to gain nothing, after all, from these lands which had evidently been bought at her instigation, but the authority over a little strip of garden; and yet the inviolability of this valueless privilege should be insisted on in such serious terms, and with such an imperative tone of command as the senator had never been known to use before--these were inconsistencies which all Carrio's ingenuity failed to reconcile. The man had been born and reared in vice; vice had fed him, clothed him, freed him, given him character, reputation, power in his own small way--he lived in it, as in the atmosphere that he breathed; to show him an action referable only to a principle of pure integrity, was to set him a problem which it was hopeless to solve. And yet it is impossible, in one point of view, to pronounce him utterly worthless. Ignorant of all distinctions between good and bad, he thought wrong from sheer inability to see right.

However his instructions might perplex him, he followed them now--and continued in after days to follow them--to the letter. If to serve one's own interests be an art, of that art Carrio deserved to be head professor. He arrived at the farmhouse, not only punctually, but before the appointed time; and, calling the honest husbandman and the laborers about him, explained to them every particular of the authority that his patron had vested in him, with a flowing and peremptory solemnity of speech which equally puzzled and impressed his simple audience. He found Numerian and Antonina in the garden when he entered it. The girl had been carried there daily, in a litter, since her recovery; and her father had followed. They were never separated now; the old man, when his first absorbing anxiety for her was calmed, remembered again more distinctly the terrible disclosure in the temple, and the yet more terrible catastrophe that followed it; and sought constant refuge from the horror of the recollection in the presence of his child.

The freedman, during his interview with the father and daughter, observed, for once, an involuntary and unfeigned respect; but he spoke briefly, and left them together again almost immediately. Humble and helpless as they were, they awed him: they looked, thought, and spoke like beings of another nature than his; they were connected, he knew not how, with the mystery of the grave in the garden: he would have been self-possessed in the presence of the emperor himself, but he was uneasy in theirs. So he retired to the more congenial scene of the public festival which was in the immediate neighborhood of the farmhouse, to await the hour of his patron's arrival, and to perplex himself afresh by a reperusal of Vetranio's letter.

The time was now near at hand when it was necessary for the freedman to return to his appointed post. He carefully rolled up his note of instructions; stood for a few minutes vacantly regarding the amusements which had hitherto engaged so little of his attention; and then turning, proceeded through the pine grove on his way back. We will follow him.

On leaving the grove, a foot-path conducted over some fields to the farmhouse. Arrived there, Carrio hesitated for a moment, then moved slowly onward to await his master's approach in the lane that led to the high-road. At this point we will part company with him, to enter the garden by the wicket-gate.

The trees, the flower-beds, and the patches of grass all remained in their former positions; nothing had been added or taken away since the melancholy days that were past; but a change was visible in Hermanric's grave. The turf above it had been renewed, and a border of small evergreen shrubs was planted over the track which Goisvintha's footsteps had traced. A white marble cross was raised at one end of the mound; the short Latin inscription on it signified, "PRAY FOR THE DEAD."

The sunlight was shining calmly over the grave, and over Numerian and Antonina, as they sat by it. Sometimes, when the mirth grew louder at the rustic festival, it reached them in faint, subdued notes; sometimes they heard the voices of the laborers in the neighboring fields talking to each other at their work; but, besides these, no other sounds were loud enough to be distinguished. There was still an expression of the melancholy and feebleness that grief and suffering leave behind them, on the countenances of the father and daughter; but resignation and peace appeared there as well--resignation that was perfected by the hard teaching of woe, and peace that was purer for being imparted from the one to the other, like the strong and deathless love from which it grew.

There was something now in the look and attitude of the girl, as she sat thinking of the young warrior who had died in her defense and for her love, and training the shrubs to grow closer round the grave, which, changed though she was, recalled in a different form the old poetry and tranquillity of her existence when we first saw her singing to the music of her lute in the garden on the Pincian Hill. No thoughts of horror and despair were suggested to her as she looked on the farmhouse scene. Hers was not the grief which shrinks selfishly from all that revives the remembrance of the dead: to her, their influence over the memory was a grateful and a guarding influence, that gave a better purpose to the holiest life, and a nobler nature to the purest thoughts.

Thus they were sitting by the grave--sad, yet content: footsore already on the pilgrimage of life, yet patient to journey further if they might, when an unusual tumult, a noise of rolling wheels mingled with a confused sound of voices, was heard in the lane behind them. They looked round, and saw that Vetranio was approaching them alone through the wicket-gate.

He came forward slowly; the stealthy poison instilled by the Banquet of Famine palpably displayed its presence within him, as the clear sunlight fell on his pale, wasted face. He smiled kindly as he addressed Antonina; but the bodily pain and mental agitation which that smile was intended to conceal, betrayed themselves in his troubled voice as he spoke.

"This is our last meeting for years--it may be our last meeting for life," he said. "I linger at the outset of my journey, but to behold you as guardian of the one spot of ground that is most precious to you on earth--as mistress, indeed, of the little that I give you here!"--He paused a moment and pointed to the grave; then continued: "All the atonement that I owe to you, you can never know; I can never tell!--think only that I bear away with me a companion in the solitude to which I go, in the remembrance of you. Be calm, good, happy still, for my sake; and while you forgive the senator of former days, forget not the friend who now parts from you in some sickness and sorrow, but also in much patience and hope! Farewell!"

His hand trembled as he held it out; a flush overspread the girl's cheek while she murmured a few inarticulate words of gratitude; and, bending over it, pressed it to her lips. Vetranio's heart beat quick; the action revived an emotion that he dared not cherish; but he looked at the wan, downcast face before him, at the grave that rose mournful by his side, and quelled it again. Yet an instant he lingered to exchange a farewell with the old man, then turned quickly, passed through the gate, and they saw him no more.

Antonina's tears fell fast on the grass beneath, as she resumed her place. When she raised her head again, and saw that her father was looking at her, she nestled close to him and laid one of her arms round his neck: the other gradually dropped to her side, until her hand reached the topmost leaves of the shrubs that grew round the grave.

Shall we longer delay in the farmhouse garden? No! For us, as for Vetranio, it is now time to depart! While peace still watches round the walls of Rome; while the hearts of the father and daughter still repose together in security after the trials that have wrung them, let us quit the scene! Here, at last, the narrative that we have followed over a dark and stormy tract, reposes on a tranquil field; and here let us cease to pursue it!

So the traveler who traces the course of a river, wanders through the day among the rocks and precipices that lead onward from its troubled source; and, when the evening is at hand, pauses and rests where the banks are grassy and the stream is smooth.