'True—true; but the dread of losing you renders me desperate, and blind to everything.'
'Enough, dear Arthur—let us talk of this no more.'
'Yet, Nicola, for you I would risk any danger; for I love you, as I have never loved any woman, since I buried my poor mother, who sleeps far away from me, in the old churchyard at Glenkens.'
As if she dreaded her own resolution, Nicola whipped up her horse, and muffling her face, and, as I thought, her sobs, in her hood, rode on. I followed, and thus we sorrowfully left the gates and ramparts of St. Michel behind us. I informed her of the risk we ran—I at least—as Nanci was full of the troops of Duke Charles, and of Wolfgang Pappenheim, his intended son-in-law.
She expressed joy to hear that the brave old Duke was in possession of his hereditary home, which, as she was a Lorrainer, was only natural and proper; but she shuddered at the name of young Pappenheim, who, to all his father's brilliant courage, united the cunning of the fox with the pitiless ferocity of the tiger.
CHAPTER XLII.
VAUDEMONT.
As we proceeded, we hourly heard of the terrors and ravages committed by the Count de Bitche, colonel of the petardiers of Lorraine, a man steeped to the lips in crime and sin; and by Wolfgang and his imperial corps, a Croatian regiment, upon those Lorrainers who had made terms with Cardinal de Lavalette, with Hepburn, or La Force; and more especially upon those who had supplied the troops of those leaders with forage, food, or money. Some were broken alive on the wheel, others shot or hung, according to the whim of their captors; and rumour affirmed that the young Prince of Vaudemont went hand in hand with his future brother-in-law in the committal of these atrocities, especially in Alsace, the duke of which was a mere child of nine or ten years old. From her recent residence in Paris, Nicola believed that she had everything to fear from the terrible Croats, and grew paler than a lily, when, near Commercy, a town on the left bank of the Meuse, we passed a row of men hanging by the neck upon trees by the wayside, with their visages black, swollen, and frightful, exposed to our gaze, and to the ravages of a flight of bloated ravens that were wheeling round them.
At Commercy, which is celebrated only for the manufacture of those little cakes called Madeleines, we saw the noble château of the Princes of Vaudemont, an open, black, and roofless ruin, just as it had been left by Lieutenant Frank Ruthven, of Ramsay's musketeers, who had crossed the Meuse one dark night at the head of eighty Scots, stormed the gates, and burned the seat of the heirs-apparent of Lorraine.*
* It is now a French cavalry barrack.