Ch. 13 - The House in the Suburbs

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strong in the imaginative and weak in the reasoning faculties; gifted
with large moral perception and little moral firmness; too easy to be
influenced and too