Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida'.djvu/292

284 winds, he had caught a last sigh, a last breath in which, the name of Idalia was blent with the name of Italy, and died together with it down the Lombard breeze. Travelling once through Russian steppes of snow in the decline of the year, when all nature was perishing, and the great bleak yersts of whitened plain stretched out uubroken to Siberian desolation, he had found a prisoner working in fetters,—a haggard, blear-eyed, scarcely human thing livid with the hue of the lead-mines, disfigured with the ravages of frost- bite, idiotic, with a strange dull stupor, that made him utter incessantly as he toiled in a gang, one word alone; and, he had known that in this wretched creature was the wreck of what once had been the finest, the most fiery, the most glittering of all the aristocratic soldiery of Poland; and that the word he muttered ever as he laboured was that which had been his ignis fatuus, his idol, his ruin,—Idalia. In his own Venice, he had once seen a terrible struggle: it was when a mere lad of Venetia, a child of seventeen years, with the clear wild noble eyes of a young eastern colt, had been brought in amongst others who were "rebels", and was given over to the rods that he might tell who his chiefs and his comrades were; the boy was frail of make, and