Ch. 19 - The Guardian Restored

Not long is the new-made grave left unwatched to the solemn guardianship
of Solitude and Night. More than a few minutes have scarcely elapsed
since it was dug, yet already human footsteps press its yielding
surface, and a human glance scans attentively its small and homely
mound.

But it is not Antonina, whom he loved; it is not Goisvintha, through
whose vengeance he was lost, who now looks upon the earth above the
young warrior's corpse. It is a stranger, an outcast; a man lost,
dishonoured, abandoned--it is the solitary and ruined Ulpius who now
gazes with indifferent eyes upon the peaceful garden and the eloquent
grave.

In the destinies of woe committed to the keeping of the night, the pagan
had been fatally included. The destruction that had gone forth against
the body of the young man who lay beneath the earth had overtaken the
mind of the old man who stood over his simple grave. The frame of
Ulpius, with all its infirmities, was still there, but the soul of
ferocious patience and unconquerable daring that had lighted it grandly
in its ruin was gone. Over the long anguish of that woeful life the
veil of self-oblivion had closed for ever!

He had been dismissed by Alaric, but he had not returned to the city
whither he was bidden. Throughout the night he had wandered about the
lonely suburbs, striving in secret and horrible suffering for the
mastery of his mind. There did the overthrow of all his hopes from the
Goths expand rapidly into the overthrow of the whole intellect that had
created his aspirations. There had reason burst the bonds that had so
long chained, perverted, degraded it! At length, wandering hither and
thither, he had dragged the helpless body, possessed no longer by the
perilous mind, to the farm-house garden in which he now stood, gazing
alternately at the upturned sods of the chieftain's grave and the red
gleam of the fire as it glowed from the dreary room through the gap of
the shattered door.

His faculties were fatally disordered rather than utterly destroyed.
His penetration, his firmness, and his cunning were gone; but a wreck of
memory, useless and unmanageable--a certain capacity for momentary
observation still remained to him. The shameful miscarriage in the tent
of Alaric, which had overthrown his faculties, had passed from him as an
event that never happened, but he remembered fragments of his past
existence--he still retained a vague consciousness of the ruling purpose
of his whole life.

These embryo reflections, disconnected and unsustained, flitted to and
fro over his dark mind as luminous exhalations over a marsh--rising and
sinking, harmless and delusive, fitful and irregular. What he remembered
of the past he remembered carelessly,