But there were other later events in his existence that never revived
within him. The old familiar image of the idol Serapis, which had drawn
him into the temple when he re-entered Rome, absorbed in itself and in
its associated remembrances all that remained active of his paralysed
faculties. His betrayal of his trust in the house of Numerian, his
passage through the rifted wall, his crushing repulse in the tent of
Alaric, never for a moment occupied his wandering thoughts. The clouds
that hung over his mind might open to him parting glimpses of the toils
and triumphs of his early career; but they descended in impenetrable
darkness on all the after-days of his dreary life.
Such was the being to whose will, by a mysterious fatality, the father
and child were now submitted; such the existence--solitary, hopeless,
loathsome--of their stern and wily betrayer of other days!
Since he had ceased speaking, the cold, death-like grasp of his hand had
gradually strengthened, and he had begun to look slowly and inquiringly
round him from side to side.
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