'The treasures
within that city will buy its safety from our King, as soon as the
tremblers on the ramparts gain heart enough to penetrate a Gothic camp.
Where is the vengeance that you promised me among those distant palaces?
Do I behold you carrying that destruction through the dwellings of Rome,
which the soldiers of yonder city carried through the dwellings of the
Goths? Is it for plunder or for glory that the army is here? I
thought, in my woman's delusion, that it was for revenge!'
'Dishonour will avenge you--Famine will avenge you--Pestilence will
avenge you!'
'They will avenge my nation; they will not avenge me. I have seen the
blood of Gothic women spilt around me--I have looked on my children's
corpses bleeding at my feet! Will a famine that I cannot see, and a
pestilence that I cannot watch, give me vengeance for this? Look! Here
is the helmet-crest of my husband and your brother--the helmet-crest
that was flung to me as a witness that the Romans had slain him! Since
the massacre of Aquileia it has never quitted my bosom.
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