Most painfully did human voices affect her when she had this music; speech was a scourge to her sense of hearing, and touch distressed her:  an edge of purple flame would then unfold the vision of things to her eyes.  She had lost memory; and if by hazard unawares one idea was projected by some sudden tumult of her enslaved emotions beyond known and visible circumstances, her intelligence darkened with am oppressive dread like that of zealots of the guilt of impiety.

Thus destitute, her eye took innumerable pictures sharp as on a brass-plate:  torrents, goat-tracks winding up red earth, rocks veiled with water, cottage and children, strings of villagers mounting to the church, one woman kneeling before a wayside cross, her basket at her back, and her child gazing idly by; perched hamlets, rolling pasture-fields, the vast mountain lines.  She asked all that she saw, “Does he live?” but the life was out of everything, and these shows told of no life, neither of joy nor of grief.  She could only distantly connect the appearance of the white-coated soldiery with the source of her trouble.  They were no more than figures on a screen that hid the flashing of the sword which renders dumb.  She had charity for one who was footsore and sat cherishing his ankle by a village spring, and she fed him, and not until he was far behind, thought that he might have seen the white face of her husband.

Accurate tidings could not be obtained, though the whole course of the vale was full of stories of escapes, conflicts, and captures.  Merthyr learnt positively that some fugitives had passed the cordon.  He came across Wilfrid and Count Karl, who both verified it in the most sanguine manner.  They knew, however, that Major Nagen continued in the mountains.  Riding by a bend of the road, Merthyr beheld a man playing among children, with one hand and his head down apparently for concealment at his approach.  It proved to be Beppo.  The man believed that Count Ammiani had fled to Switzerland.  Barto Rizzo, he said, was in the mountains still, and Beppo invoked damnation on him, as the author of those lying proclamations which had ruined Brescia.  He had got out of the city later than the others and was seeking to evade the outposts, that he might join his master—­“that is, my captain, for I have only one master;” he corrected the slip of his tongue appealingly to Merthyr.  His left hand was being continually plucked at by the children while he talked, and after Merthyr had dispersed them with a shower of small coin, he showed the hand, saying, glad of eye, that it had taken a sword-cut intended for Count Ammiani.  Merthyr sent him back to mount the carriage, enjoining him severely not to speak.