Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/198

Rh him. In what he had felt for Idalia he had been true, with. a truth he had never known before; for her he would have become anything that she had bidden him; to win her he would have endured and achieved all tasks she could have pointed out; and in the single hour in which this sincerity and this reality had possessed him, his own sceptical mockery had recoiled on him in hers; he had been powerless to induce her to hear one beat save that of egotism in his heart; he had been powerless to make her credit one throb of love or loyalty in him. That she should have rejected him he would have pardoned her; that she disbelieved him was the iron which went so far down into his soul, and changed every desire in him into one cruel thirst—the thirst for his vengeance and for her destruction. She had contemptuously doubted the force of his love. Well! he had said in his teeth that she should feel that force—feel it in the weight of fetters, in the burden of ignominy, in the oppression of dungeon solitude—feel it till she cursed the day that ever she braved it and mocked at it.

Awhile ago, and he would have laughed in the beard of any man who should have told him that such barbaric folly, such desert passions as these, could ever blind and rule him. Now he never