"So the poor boy's sufferings are over? In Carthage the child was always clad in purple silk as he rode through the streets in a shell carriage drawn by ostriches."
"Day before yesterday the King brought to the miserable heap of straw where he was lying the fragrant bread he had begged from the enemy. The child devoured it so eagerly that we were obliged to check him. We turned our backs a moment,--I was getting some water with the King for the sick boy,--when a cry of mingled rage and grief summoned us. A Moorish lad, probably attracted by the smell of the bread, had sprung in through the open window and torn it from between the child's teeth. It made a very deep impression on the King. 'This child, too, the guiltless one? O terrible God!' he cried again and again. I closed the boy's dying eyes to-day."
"It cannot last much longer. The people have killed the last horse except Styx."
"Styx shall not be slaughtered," cried Hilda. "He bore you from certain death; he saved you."
"You saved me, with your Valkyria ride," exclaimed Gibamund; and, happy in the midst of all the wretchedness, he pressed his beautiful wife to his heart, kissing her golden hair, her eyes, her noble brow. "Hark! what is that?"
"It is the song which he has composed and is singing to the harp Fara sent him. Well for thee, Teja's stringed instrument, that thou art not compelled to accompany such a dirge," she cried wrathfully, springing up and tossing back her waving locks. "I would rather have shattered my harp on the nearest rocks than lent it for such a song."
"But it works like a spell upon the Moors and Vandals."
"They do not understand it at all; the words are Latin. He has rejected alliteration as pagan, as the magic of runes! He allows no one to mention his last battle-song."
"Of course they scarcely understand it. But when they see the King as, almost in an ecstasy, like a man walking in his sleep, with his burning eyes half closed, his wan, sorrowful face surrounded by tangled locks, his ragged royal mantle thrown around his shoulders, his harp on his arm, he wanders alone over the rocks and snows of this mountain; when they hear the deep, wailing voice, the mournful melody of the dirge, it affects them like a spell, though they understand little of the meaning. Hark! there it rises again."
Nearer and nearer, partly borne away by the wind, came in broken words, sometimes accompanied by the strings, the chant: