Ch. 24 - The Grave and the Camp - Page 2

from the camp, the chosen refuge where
she brooded in solitude over her fierce desires. Scorning to punish a
woman whom he regarded as insane for an absence from the tents of the
Goths which was of no moment wither to the army or to himself, Alaric
had impatiently dismissed her from his presence when she was brought
before him. The soldiers who had returned to bury the body of their
chieftain in the garden of the farm-house, found means to inform her
secretly of the charitable act which they had performed at their own
peril, but beyond this no further intercourse was held with her by any
of her former associates.

All her actions favoured their hasty belief that her faculties were
disordered, and others shunned her as she shunned them. Her daily
allowance of food was left for her to seek at a certain place in the
camp, as it might have been left for an animal too savage to be
cherished by the hand of man. At certain periods she returned secretly
from her wanderings to take it. Her shelter for the night was not the
shelter of her people before the walls of Rome; her thoughts were not
their thoughts. Widowed, childless, friendless, the assassin of her
last kinsman, she moved apart in her own secret world of bereavement,
desolation, and crime.

Yet there was no madness, no remorse for her share in accomplishing the
fate of Hermanric, in the dark and solitary existence which she now led.
From the moment when the young warrior had expiated with his death his
disregard of the enmities of his nation and the wrongs of his kindred,
she thought of him only as of one more victim whose dishonour and ruin
she must live to requite on the Romans with Roman blood, and matured her
schemes of revenge with a stern resolution which time, and solitude, and
bodily infirmity were all powerless to disturb.

She would pace for hours and hours together, in the still night and in
the broad noonday, round and round the warrior's grave, nursing her
vengeful thoughts within her, until a ferocious anticipation of triumph
quickened her steps and brightened her watchful eyes. Then she would
enter the farm-house, and, drawing the knife from its place of
concealment in her garments, would pass its point slowly backwards and
forwards over the hearth on which she had mutilated Hermanric with her
own hand, and from which he had advanced, without a tremor, to meet the
sword-points of the Huns. Sometimes, when darkness had gathered over the
earth, she would stand--a boding and menacing apparition--upon the grave
itself, and chaunt, moaning to the moaning wind, fragments of obscure
Northern legends, whose hideous burden was ever of anguish and crime, of
torture in prison vaults, and death by the annihilating sword--mingling
with them