The soldiers, unable to take in the meaning of these gestures, looked at one another questioningly. Then Margarid, after another hasty glance at the redoubt, exchanged a few words with the girls round about her, seized a dagger, and, in quick succession struck three of the maidens, who had nobly bared their chaste bosoms to the knife. Meanwhile the other young women dispatched one another with steady hands. They had just fallen when Martha reappeared from the enclosure where the children had been hidden during the battle. Proud and serene, she held her two little daughters in her arms. A spare wagon-pole stood in front of her, the upper extremity of which was at a considerable elevation from the ground. She leaped on the edge of the car; a cord was around her neck. She passed the end of the cord through the ring at the extremity of the pole. Margarid steadied it in both hands. Martha leaped into the air with outspread arms, and hung there, strangled. Her two little children, instead of falling to the ground, remained suspended on either side of her breast, for she had passed the noose around their necks also.
All this occurred so rapidly, that the Romans, at first struck dumb with astonishment and fear, had no time to prevent the heroic deaths. They had barely recovered from their amazement when Margarid, seeing all her family either dying or dead at her feet, raised to heaven her blood-stained knife, and exclaimed in a calm and steady voice:
"Our daughters shall not be outraged; our children shall not be enslaved; all of us, of the family of Joel the brenn of the tribe of Karnak, dead, like our husbands and brothers, for the liberty of Gaul, are on our way to rejoin them above. Perhaps, O Hesus, all this spilled blood will appease you;" and with a hand which did not waver, she plunged the dagger into her own heart.
All these terrible events which happened around the Chariot of Death I was compelled to behold, as I lay nearby, pinned to the ground. My wife Henory not having emerged from the enclosure, I concluded that she had put an end to herself there, first putting to death my little ones Sylvest and Syomara. My brain began to reel, my eyes closed; I felt that I was dying, and thanked Hesus for not leaving me behind alone when all my dear ones were to enter together upon the other life in the unknown world.
But, no, it was here below, on earth, that I was to return to life—to face new torments after those I had just undergone.
CHAPTER VIII.
AFTER THE BATTLE.
After I had beheld my mother and all the other women of the tribe die to escape the shame and outrages of slavery, the blood which I had lost caused me to swoon away. A long time passed in which I was bereft of reason. When my senses returned, I found myself lying on straw, along with a great number of other men, in a vast shed. At my first motion I found myself chained by the leg to a stake driven into the ground. I was half clad; they had left me my shirt and breeches, in a secret pocket of which I had hidden the writings of my father and of my brother Albinik, together with the little gold sickle, the gift of my sister Hena. A dressing had been put on my wounds, which no longer occasioned me much pain. I experienced only a great weakness and dizziness which made my last memories a confused mass. I looked about me. I was one of perhaps fifty wounded prisoners, all chained to their litters. At the further end of the shed were several armed men, who did not bear the appearance of regular Roman troops. They were seated round a table, drinking and singing. Some among them, who carried short-handled scourges twisted of several thongs and terminating in bits of lead, detached themselves from time to time from the group, and walked here and there with the uncertain gait of drunken men, casting jeering looks on the prisoners. Next to me lay an aged man with white hair and beard, very pale and thin. A bloody band half hid his forehead. He was sitting up, his elbows on his knees, and his face between his hands. Seeing him wounded and a prisoner, I concluded he was a Gaul. I did not err.
"Good father," I said to him, laying my hand lightly upon the old man's arm, "where are we?"
Slowly raising his sad and mournful visage, the old prisoner answered compassionately: