Chapter LV: The Turret

My first impulse was to look from the window of this apartment. It was large for the window of a turret, but so closely grated that the iron bars, together with its height from the ground, precluded all chance of escape either by rope or ladder, if I had them. The fire-place was also enclosed by a complicated iron-grating, so that the chamber seemed peculiarly adapted for retention, escape by the chimney being even contemplated and provided against. The storm was dying away; the rain ceased to lash the walls and batter on the windows. I could see the steep brows and black defiles of the Vosges, over which the murky shadows of the clouds and the wavering gleams of the moon were flitting. Lofty and dusky these mountains were--dark and solemn too, seeming to approach as the moonlight gleamed along their rocky steeps, and anon receding into gloom as the crape-like clouds wrapped up the moon in their pall of murky vapour.

Morning soon began to dawn; and, as the sun came up, the storm, with all its clouds and shadows, its gusts of rain and wind, retired westward over the mountains, together with the gloom of night.

The steep Vosges looked green and bright, with all their thick waving woods and chestnut groves, many of these mountains being clothed from base to summit in foliage. In the valleys and defiles between them, nestled little thatched hamlets, bordered by rich meadows, by flower gardens, and by pastures of emerald green; in others I saw the lurid gleam of furnaces, where the copper-ore was smelted in mines that were old as the days of Hilderic, King of the Franks, who was lord of all Alsatia.

As the morning brightened and the day wore on, voices loud and clamorous came at times along the corridor from the hall, mingled with the tipsy shrieks and coarse laughter of women. These sounds gave me vague alarm. De Bitche and his ruffianly companions might be arranging and planning my death; and the contemplation of enduring a lonely and helpless murder at their hands filled my soul with a sickly horror which it is impossible to portray.

I knew the cruelties of which the Imperialists were capable. I knew that Colonel Sir James Ramsey, one of Scotland's best and bravest officers, was enclosed by them in a chamber of the castle of Dillingen, on the Danube, and there starved to death--he a prisoner of war, taken gallantly in battle under the Swedish banner. I knew that, like Caribs or Mohawks, these Austrians frequently murdered or mutilated their prisoners. At New Brandenburg they put a whole Scottish garrison to the sword, and tore the heart of Major Dunbar from his breast. At the dreadful sack of Magdeburg they rent the children from their mothers' wombs before they burned them both. In Saxony they roasted men before slow fires; in Silesia they boiled them like lobsters, to force them to discover hidden wealth; and in Lower Germany, committed such atrocities as were enough to bring a curse upon the house of Hapsburg.

My comrades were only six miles distant; twenty, perhaps thirty, thousand men were there, who, to save me, would each man have lent a hand to tear Phalsbourg from its foundations. This was a bitter, an agonising reflection! But that Marie Louise might never know the barbarous death I suffered for her sake was the bitterest thought of all! The hope of acquainting the Prince of Vaudemont of my danger was as vain as the chance of my being able to communicate with the besiegers of Zaberne; vain as the prospect of escape when I looked from the barred window of the lofty turret and saw the scarped hill and valley, overhung by the castle, a hundred feet below.

So, amid these reflections, the long night had passed away; morning came without sleep once visiting my eyes; and I felt neither hunger nor thirst, nor fear at times, but only a fierce impatience to have the last act of this diabolical drama played out. I knew that I was in the hands of desperate men, and had but one desire--that, if I was to be sent untimeously out of this world, the malevolent De Bitche should not remain in it behind me. But I was without a weapon, and saw nothing that could be made one. With this thought I threw a hurried glance around my room.

The walls were covered by tapestry, which hung on tenterhooks, and represented a banquet of the gods, whose scanty costume displayed a considerable oblivion of decency. They were hideously grotesque and mis-shapen; but were regaling themselves on every variety of fish, flesh, and fowl, and were quaffing water from huge Rhenish tankards. Round the cornice were the arms, crests, and mottoes of the princes of Phalsbourg and the counts palatine of Lutzelstein, with whose family the former had intermarried, and whose castle stands on the skirts of the Vosges, but six miles nearer the frontier of Lorraine.

In a distant defile of the hills a gleam caught my eye: it wavered at first, but came again and again steadily. It was the glitter of arms; and, with a keen glance and an anxious heart, I watched that glitter sparkling afar off like a beam of hope: that it came from the arms of soldiers on the line of march I had no doubt. Anon it disappeared, but gave a new current to my bitter imaginings.