Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida'.djvu/99

Rh through which were seen stretches of green pine-woods and golden haze beyond: and an intense stillness through which pealed, softly and subdued, the chant of the Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi; these were what Erceldoime opened his eyes upon, and saw, and heard, when he awoke from a long trance that had been death itself for aught he knew, and through which he had only been conscious of burning torture, of intolerable pain, of mellow strains of music floating through his brain, and of one face of divinest beauty bent above him whilst he lay bound in bonds of iron, in swathes of fire. For he had been delirious for many days in the Convent of Monastica. His life had hung on a thread; the ball was in his breast, and the fever of his wounds, combined with the weakness consequent on loss of blood, had kept him in sharpest peril through all the rest of that sultry autumn. But the bullet had missed his lungs, and the intense vitality and resistance in him brought him through all which would have slain at a blow a weaker and less hardily trained frame. The skill in leechcraft of the Sisters of Monastica was proverbial in the Principalities; women who loved him could not have tended him more tenderly and unweariedly than did those high-born recluses