Now his
thoughts reverted to the minutest circumstances of the confusion and
dismay among the members of his household when the first extremities of
the famine began to be felt in the city; and now, without visible
connection or cause, they turned suddenly to the morning when he had
hurried through the most solitary paths in his grounds to meet the
betrayer Ulpius at Numerian's garden gate. Once more the image of
Antonina--so often present to his imagination since the original was
lost to his eyes--grew palpable before him. He thought of her, as
listening at his knees to the sound of his lute; as awakening,
bewildered and terrified, in his arms; as flying distractedly before her
father's wrath; as now too surely lying dead, in her beauty and her
innocence, amid the thousand victims of the famine and the plague.
These and other reflections, while they crowded in whirlwind rapidity on
his mind, wrought no alteration in the deadly purpose which they
suspended. His delay in lighting the torch was the unconscious delay of
the suicide, secure in his resolution ere he lifts the poison to his
lips--when life rises before him as a thing that is past, and he stands
for one tremendous moment in the dark gap between the present and the
future--no more the pilgrim of Time--not yet the inheritor of Eternity!
So, in the dimly lighted hall, surrounded by the victims whom he had
hurried before him to their doom, stood the lonely master of the great
palace; and so spoke within him the mysterious voices of his last
earthly thoughts.
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