Реклама. ООО «ЛитРес», ИНН: 7719571260.
Contents
Preface
One. Goisvintha
Two. The Court
Three. Rome
Four. The Church
Five. Antonina
Six. An Apprenticeship to the Temple
Seven. The Bed-Chamber
Eight. The Goths
Nine. The Two Interviews
Ten. The Rift In the Wall
Eleven. Goisvintha’s Return
Twelve. The Passage of the Wall
Thirteen. The House In the Suburbs
Fourteen. The Famine
Fifteen. The City and the Gods
Sixteen. Love Meetings
Seventeen. The Huns
Eighteen. The Farm-House
Nineteen. The Guardian Restored
Twenty. The Breach Repassed
Twenty One. Father and Child
Twenty Two. The Banquet of Famine
Twenty Three. The Last Efforts of the Besieged
Twenty Four. The Grave and the Camp
Twenty Five. The Temple and the Church
Twenty Six. Retribution
Twenty Seven. The Vigil of Hope
The Conclusion
About the Author
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Wilkie Collins
Influenced, therefore, by these considerations, he thought that by forming all his principal characters from imagination, he should be able to mould them as he pleased to the main necessities of the story; to display them, without any impropriety, as influenced in whatever manner appeared most strikingly interesting by its minor incidents; and further, to make them, on all occasions, without trammel or hindrance, the practical exponents of the spirit of the age, of all the various historical illustrations of the period, which the Author’s researches among conflicting but equally important authorities had enabled him to garner up, while, at the same time, the appearance of verisimilitude necessary to an historical romance might, he imagined, be successfully preserved by the occasional introduction of the living characters of the era, in those portions of the plot comprising events with which they had been remarkably connected.
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‘Then, for a few nights more, my enemy approached me not again. Until one evening, as I sat on the terrace before the house, with the child that you have beheld, a helmet-crest suddenly fell at my feet, and a voice cried to me from the garden beneath: ‘Priulf thy husband has been slain in a quarrel by the soldiers of Rome! Already the legions with whom he served are on their way to the town; for a massacre of the hostages is ordained. Speak but the word, and I can save thee even yet!’
‘I looked on the crest. It was bloody, and it was his! For an instant my heart writhed within me as I thought on my warrior whom I had loved! Then, as I heard the messenger of death retire, cursing, from his lurking-place in the garden, I recollected that now my children had none but their mother to defend them, and that peril was preparing for them from the enemies of their race. Besides the little one in my arms, I had two that were sleeping in the house. As I looked round, bewildered and in despair, to see if a chance were left us to escape, there rang through the evening stillness the sound of a trumpet, and the tramp of armed men was audible in the street beneath. Then, from all quarters of the town rose, as one sudden sound, the shrieks of women and the yells of men. Already, as I rushed towards my children’s beds, the fiends of Rome had mounted the stairs, and waved in bloody triumph their reeking swords! I gained the steps; and, as I looked up, they flung down at me the body of my youngest child. O Hermanric! Hermanric! it was the most beautiful and the most beloved! What the priests say that God should be to us, that, the fairest one of my offspring, was to me! As I saw it mutilated and dead—I, who but an hour before had hushed it on my bosom to rest!—my courage forsook me, and when the murderers advanced on me I staggered and fell. I felt the sword-point enter my neck; I saw the dagger gleam over the child in my arms; I heard the death-shriek of the last victim above; and then my senses failed me, and I could listen and move no more!
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