Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/203

192 arrests swept off all the musketry spared—among them your Countess. Indeed, she was doubtless the chief object of all."

"Where have they taken her?"

He spoke in his throat. At that moment he would have rather had a hundred balls fired into his own breast than have heard this of the woman he had so pitilessly chained and tormented.

"Poverino! how can we tell? It is not the fashion of the court to disclose its secrets, nor of Monsignore to let profane eyes see where his nets are spread."

His voice was unmoved, and almost careless, though it wore a natural gravity of regret, but in his heart he endured an agony greater than that of the man before him; the thought crossed him, to what fate would the Prince-Bishop devote a captive of the sex and the years and the charms of the prisoner he had betrayed to him? Phaulcon's hand clenched; the muscles of his throat and chest, where the loose shirt of the contadino left them to view, swelled to bursting. Idalia was his treasury, his sovereignty, his world, his sceptre; without her he was nothing; of her he had made with a twisted mixture in him of fear and homage, of tyranny and weakness, of hate and love,