Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida'.djvu/293

Rh weakened with gunshot wounds, and he reeled and fell thrice under the rain of Austrian blows, but his teeth clenched on his tongue, and bit it through, so that no speech should pass it, and when the strokes told at last more mortally than those who lashed him knew, he smiled as he murmured, though his mouth was fall of blood, "Tell her I died silent!"—and he who had heard had sent the farewell message to Idalia, at whose bidding that silence was kept. Once on the brow of a steep hill, looking over the Moravian highlands, with the wide wastes of barren grasslands, mingled with jagged piles of bare rock or stunted larches, with here and there the sharp peaks of a pine belt to break the outline, and the angry lustre of a red evening fading out in the hot autumn skies, be had seen a Monarch, the centre of a little knot of Cuirassier officers, draw near, and look hardly and eagerly across to the westward, where, far as the eye could reach, a dark shadow, like a hovering bird above the stony plains, marked the place where the Uhlans rode down on a fugitive's wake; and when reeking and breathless and spent, the troopers dragged their weary horses backward without the prize they had pursued, he had heard the Kaiser mutter in the gloaming of the night, "I would give a province for that one woman!" and