'Not now, father—not now! At another time, on a happier day!' murmured Antonina, in tremulous, entreating tones.
'My home, when I arrived to look on it, was gone,' pursued the old man sadly, neither heeding nor hearing her. 'Other houses were built where my father's house had stood; no man could tell me of my parents and my brother; then I returned, and my former companions grew hateful in my eyes; I left them, and they followed me with persecution and scorn.—Listen, listen!—I set forth secretly in the night, with you, to escape them, and to make perfect my reformation where they should not be near to hinder it; and we travelled onward many days until we came to Rome, and I made my abode there. But I feared that my companions whom I abhorred might discover and persecute me again, and in the new city of my dwelling I called myself by another name than the name that I bore; thus I knew that all trace of me would be lost, and that I should be kept secure from men whom I thought on only as enemies now. Go, child! go quickly!—bring your tablets and write down the names that I shall tell you; for so you will discover your protector when I am gone! Say not to him that you are the child of Numerian—he knows not the name; say that you are the daughter of Cleander, his brother, who died longing to be restored to him. Write—write carefully, Cleander!—that was the name my father gave to me; that was the name I bore until I fled from my evil companions and changed it, dreading their pursuit! Cleander! write and remember, Cleander! I have seen in visions that my brother shall be discovered: he will not be discovered to me, but he will be discovered to you! Your tablets—your tablets!—write his name with mine—it is—'
He stopped abruptly. His mental powers, fluctuating between torpor and animation—shaken, but not overpowered by the trials which had assailed them—suddenly rallied, and resuming somewhat of their accustomed balance, became awakened to a sense of their own aberration. His vague revelations of his past life (which the reader will recognise as resembling his communications on the same subject to the fugitive land-owner, previously related) now appeared before him in all their incongruity and uselessness. His countenance fell—he sighed bitterly to himself: 'My reason begins to desert me!—my judgment, which should guide my child—my resolution, which should uphold her, both fail me! How should my brother, since childhood lost to me, be found by her? Against the famine that threatens us I offer but vain words! Already her strength declines; her face, that I loved to look on grows wan before my eyes! God have mercy upon us!—God have mercy upon us!'
He returned feebly to his couch; his head declined on his bosom; sometimes a low groan burst from his lips, but he spoke no more.
Deep as was the prostration under which he had now fallen, it was yet less painful to Antonina to behold it than to listen to the incoherent revelations which had fallen from his lips but the moment before, and which, in her astonishment and affright, she had dreaded might be the awful indications of the overthrow of her father's reason. As she again placed herself by his side, she trembled to feel that her own weariness was fast overpowering her; but she still struggled with her rising despair—still strove to think only of capacity for endurance and chances of relief.
The silence in the room was deep and dismal while they now sat together. The faint breezes, at long intervals, drowsily rose and fell as they floated through the open window; the fitful sunbeams alternately appeared and vanished as the clouds rolled upward in airy succession over the face of heaven. Time moved sternly in its destined progress, and Nature varied tranquilly through its appointed limits of change, and still no hopes, no saving projects, nothing but dark recollections and woeful anticipations occupied Antonina's mind; when, just as her weary head was drooping towards the ground, just as sensation and fortitude and grief itself seemed declining into a dreamless and deadly sleep, a last thought, void of discernible connection or cause, rose suddenly within her—animating, awakening, inspiring. She started up. 'The garden, father—the garden!' she cried breathlessly. 'Remember the food that grows in our garden below! Be comforted, we have provision left yet—God has not deserted us!'
He raised his face while she spoke; his features assumed a deeper mournfulness and hopelessness of expression; he looked upon her in ominous silence, and laid his trembling fingers on her arm to detain her, when she hurriedly attempted to quit the room.
'Do not forbid me to depart,' she anxiously pleaded. 'To me every corner in the garden is known; for it was my possession in our happier days—our last hopes rest in the garden, and I must search through it without delay! Bear with me,' she added, in low and melancholy tones—'bear with me, dear father, in all that I would now do! I have suffered, since we parted, a bitter affliction, which clings dark and heavy to all my thoughts—there is no consolation for me but the privilege of caring for your welfare—my only hope of comfort is in the employment of aiding you!'
The old man's hand had pressed heavier on her arm while she addressed him; but when she ceased it dropped from her, and he bent his head in speechless submission to her entreaty.
For one moment she lingered, looking on him silent as himself; the next, she left the apartment with hasty and uncertain steps.
On reaching the garden, she unconsciously took the path leading to the bank where she had once loved to play secretly upon her lute and to look on the distant mountains reposing in the warm atmosphere which summer evenings shed over their blue expanse. How eloquent was this little plot of ground of the quiet events now for ever gone by!—of the joys, the hopes, the happy occupations, which rise with the day that chronicles them, and pass like that day, never to return the same!—which the memory alone can preserve as they were, and the heart can never resume but in a changed form, divested of the presence of the companion of the incident of the departed moment, which formed the charm of the past and makes the imperfection of the present.
Tender and thronging were the remembrances which the surrounding prospect called up, as the sad mistress of the garden looked again on her little domain! She saw the bank where she could never more sit to sing with a renewal of the same feelings which had once inspired her music; she saw the drooping flowers that she could never restore with the same childlike enjoyment of the task which had animated her in former hours! Young though she still was, the emotions of the youthful days that were gone could never be revived as they had once existed! As waters they had welled up, and as waters they had flowed forth, never to return to their source! Thoughts of these former years—of the young warrior who lay cold beneath the heavy earth—of the desponding father who mourned hopeless in the room above—gathered thick at her heart as she turned from her flower-beds—not, as in other days, to pour forth her happiness to the music of her lute, but to search laboriously for the sustenance of life.
At first, as she stooped over those places in the garden where she knew that fruits and vegetables had been planted by her own hand, her tears blinded her. She hastily dashed them away, and looked eagerly around.
Alas! others had reaped the field from which she had hoped abundance! In the early days of the famine Numerian's congregation had entered the garden, and gathered for him whatever it contained; its choicest and its homeliest products were alike exhausted; withered leaves lay on the barren earth, and naked branches waved over them in the air. She wandered from path to path, searching amid the briars and thistles, which already cast an aspect of ruin over the deserted place; she explored its most hidden corners with the painful perseverance of despair; but the same barrenness spread around her wherever she turned. On this once fertile spot, which she had entered with such joyful faith in its resources, there remained but a few poor decayed roots, dropped and forgotten amid tangled weeds and faded flowers.