Ch. 16 - Love Meetings

Who that has looked on a threatening and tempestuous sky, has not felt
the pleasure of discovering unexpectedly a small spot of serene blue,
still shining among the stormy clouds? The more unwillingly the eye has
wandered over the gloomy expanse of the rest of the firmament, the more
gladly does it finally rest on the little oasis of light which meets at
length its weary gaze, and which, when it was dispersed over the whole
heaven, was perhaps only briefly regarded with a careless glance.
Contrasted with the dark and mournful hues around it, even that small
spot of blue gradually acquires the power of investing the wider and
sadder prospect with a certain interest and animation that it did not
before possess--until the mind recognises in the surrounding atmosphere
of storm an object adding variety to the view--a spectacle whose
mournfulness may interest as well as repel.

Was it with sensations resembling these (applied, however, rather to the
mind than to the eye) that the reader perused those pages devoted to
Hermanric and Antonina? Does the happiness there described now appear
to him to beam through the stormy progress of the narrative as the spot
of blue beams through the gathering clouds? Did that small prospect of
brightness present itself, at the time, like a garden of repose amid the
waste of fierce emotions which encompassed it? Did it encourage him,
when contrasted with what had gone before, to enter on the field of
gloomier interest which was to follow? If, indeed, it has thus affected
him, if he can still remember the scene at the farm-house beyond the
suburbs with emotions such as these, he will not now be unwilling to
turn again for a moment from the gathering clouds to the spot of blue,--
he will not deny us an instant's digression from Ulpius and the city of
famine to Antonina and the lonely plains.

During the period that has elapsed since we left her, Antonina has
remained secure in her solitude, happy in her well-chosen concealment.
The few straggling Goths who at rare intervals appeared in the
neighbourhood of her sanctuary never intruded on its peaceful limits.
The sight of the ravaged fields and emptied granaries of the deserted
little property sufficed invariably to turn their marauding steps in
other directions. Day by day ran smoothly and swiftly onwards for the
gentle usurper of the abandoned farm-house. In the narrow round of its
gardens and protecting woods was comprised for her the whole circle of
the pleasures and occupations of her new life.

The simple stores left in the house, the fruits and vegetables to be
gathered in the garden, sufficed amply for her support. The pastoral
solitude of the place had in it a quiet, dreamy fascination, a novelty,
an unwearying