Ch. 20 - The Breach Repassed - Page 2

native to the place, but traced in all their mazes by human
forms. Then he would have perceived the fierce, resolute Pagan, moving
through darkness and obstacles with a sure, solemn progress, drawing
after him, like a dog devoted to his will, the young girl whose hapless
fate had doomed her to fall into his power. Her half-fainting figure
might have been seen, sometimes prostrate on the higher places of the
breach, while her fearful guide descended before her into a chasm
beyond, and then turned to drag her after him to a darker and a lower
depth yet; sometimes bent in supplication, when her lips moved once more
with a last despairing entreaty, and her limbs trembled with a final
effort to escape from her captor's relentless grasp. While still,
through all that opposed him, the same fierce tenacity of purpose would
have been invariably visible in every action of Ulpius, constantly
confirming him in his mad resolution to make his victim the follower of
his progress through the wall, ever guiding him with a strange instinct
through every hindrance, and preserving him from every danger in his
path, until it brought him forth triumphant, with his prisoner still in
his power, again free to tread the desolate streets and mingle with the
famine-stricken citizens of Rome.

And now when, after peril and anguish, she once more stood within the
city of her home, what hope remained to Antonina of obtaining her last
refuge under her father's roof, and deriving her solitary consolation
from the effort to regain her father's love? With the termination of
his passage through the breach in the wall had ended ever recollection
associated with it in the Pagan's shattered memory. A new blank now
pervaded his lost faculties, desolate as that which had overwhelmed them
in the night when he first stood in the farm-house garden by the young
chieftain's grave. He moved onward, unobservant, unthinking, without
aim or hope, driven by a mysterious restlessness, forgetting the very
presence of Antonina as she followed him, but still mechanically
grasping her hand, and dragging her after him he knew not whither.

And she, on her part, made no effort more for deliverance. She had seen
the sentinel unmoved by her entreaties, she had seen the walls of her
father's house receding from her longing eyes, as Ulpius pitilessly
hurried her father and farther from its distant door; and she lost the
last faint hope of restoration, the last lingering desire of life, as
the sense of her helplessness now weighed heaviest on her mind. Her
heart was full of her young warrior, who had been slain, and of her
father, from whom she had parted in the hour of his wrath, as she now
feebly followed the Pagan's steps, and resigned herself to a speedy