Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/197

186 loveliness. Mercy he had none; such love as he had borne her was of the character to change into a relentless and envenomed hate; but it was passion still, and there were times when the thought of her yielded up to her adversary's will, and buried for ever beneath the stones of a dungeon-vault, drove his own revenge back into his heart, and tortured him not less than that revenge could her. Moreover, he had betrayed her; he had sold her into the hands of her foes, and though the subtle art of silken treachery had long been a science in whose proficiency he took his highest pride, there was manhood and there was dignity enough in him to make his forehead burn with a red flush of shame when there rose in remembrance before him the challenge of her eyes, and to make him long to know her dead in her youth, so that those eyes should never be turned on him in accusation and rebuke. "Great heaven!" he muttered in his teeth, where he lay with his head sunk on his arms, "if she would only have believed I loved her!" That was the one misery which had goaded him on to his crime. For once in his life he had been in earnest; for the sole time, from his boyhood up, an emotion genuine, however alloyed, had risen in