Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida'.djvu/257

Rh a mountain song with the old war-fire of Hellas in it. Her voice was of an exquisite beauty, highly cultivated and eloquent as any Pasta's, and it rang through the silence, throbbing on the air, and echoing far out to the night, where it was answered by the beating of the waves and the music of the nightingales among the roses. Those round her were stilled as by a sudden spell. She sang on, scarcely pausing, grand, mournful, impassioned chants, now Romaic, now Sicilian, now Venetian; songs of the nations, of the poets, of the hours of freedom, of the glories that were gone from Hellas and from Rome; songs of a profound pathos, of an eternal meaning. Neither Mozart nor Beethoven ever gave richer melodies than were those poems brought from the past, from the peoples, from the heart of dying nations, and from the treasures of their perished liberties.

Erceldoune leant against the white shaft of the marble walls, with his head bent; music always had power over him, and it gave her back all the divinity of his dreams, all the power of his lost ideal. Never, since the first moment when she had stooped to him with that one word "You!" had he seen her look as she looked now; those were the eyes that had bent above him with an angel's pity, when he had