Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/217

206 from pure or lofty lives would have made him feel his own degradation so deeply as the revolt of the man whose hardened guilt he had known so long, and whose scruples he had never before found check at any baseness that was offered him; the man in whom he had himself killed all remnant of better instincts, and whom he had looked on as a mercenary, to be hired at will for any infamy, by whichever side could bid the highest. No scorn from those of stainless honour or of blameless deeds could have cut him so unendurably as the contempt for his own sin of renegade betrayal which had flashed from the glance and lashed him in the words of the Greek, whom he had known steeled to all remorse and careless of all disgrace.

"Faugh!" he thought, with a disdainful bitterness that availed little to reconcile him to himself; "his is just such bastard honour, such childish folly, as we see a thousand times over in the most shameless scoundrels of Europe. The brigand murders at his fancy, and reverences a leaden saint in his hat; the brutes of the Abruzzi flay their prisoners, and pray to the Madonna; the soldiers of the Pope kill women and children as they would cut the throats of pigs, and tremble when their master blesses them on Easter-day;—it is all over the