Ch. 19 - The Guardian Restored - Page 2

viewing it with as vacant a
curiosity as if it were the visionary spectacle of another man's
struggles and misfortunes and hopes, acting under it as under a
mysterious influence, neither the end nor the reason of which he cared
to discover. For the future, it was to his thoughts a perfect blank;
for the present, it was a jarring combination of bodily weariness and
mental repose.

He shuddered as he stood shelterless under the open heaven. The cold,
that he had defied in the vaults of the rifted wall, pierced in the
farm-house garden; his limbs, which had resisted repose on the hard
journey from Rome to the camp of the Goths, now trembled so that he was
fain to rest them on the ground. For a short time he sat glaring with
vacant and affrighted eyes upon the open dwelling before him, as though
he longed to enter it but dare not. At length the temptation of the
ruddy firelight seemed to vanquish his irresolution; he rose with
difficulty, and slowly and hesitatingly entered the house.

He had advanced, thief-like, but a few steps, he had felt but for a
moment the welcome warmth of the fire, when the figure of Antonina,
still extended insensible upon the floor, caught his eye; he approached
it with eager curiosity, and, raising the girl on his arm, looked at her
with a long and rigid scrutiny.

For some moments no expression of recognition passed his lips or
appeared on his countenance, as, with a mechanical, doting gesture of
fondness, he smoothed her dishevelled hair over her forehead. While he
was thus engaged, while the remains of the gentleness of his childhood
were thus awfully revived in the insanity of his age, a musical string
wound round a small piece of gilt wood fell from its concealment in her
bosom; he snatched it from the ground--it was the fragment of her broken
lute, which had never quitted her since the night when, in her innocent
grief, she had wept over it in her maiden bed-chamber.

Small, obscure, insignificant as it was, this little token touched the
fibre in the Pagan's shattered mind which the all-eloquent form and
presence of its hapless mistress had failed to reach; his memory flew
back instantly to the garden on the Pincian Mount, and to his past
duties in Numerian's household, but spoke not to him of the calamities
he had wreaked since that period on his confiding master. His
imagination presented to him at this moment but one image--his servitude
in the Christian's abode; and as he now looked on the girl he could
regard himself but in one light--as 'the guardian restored'.

'What does she with her music here?' he whispered apprehensively. 'This
is not her father's house, and the garden yonder looks not from the
summit of the hill!'

As he curiously