Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/219

208 words—"the shot or the steel that follows the renegade, as the night follows the day." He knew that they were no hyperbole, no metaphor; he knew that men who were false to the political Order of which they were sworn, died so by that Order's vengeance, almost as surely as darkness falls on the sun's setting—died with a dagger-stroke in the winter nights of Rome, a pistol-shot in the gay chambers of Paris, a blow from behind in the riotous carnival times of Venice; died wherever they were, struck by unerring hands, and knowing that it was but wild justice for their own Judas sin, though the world saw in their fall but some common street scuffle, some murder of continental lawlessness, some thief's assassination for a few gold coins.

He knew it, and a chill tremor passed over him as he mused. But a few months before, a sculptor had been found at the door of his studio in Rome with a great wound slashed across his breast, and the blood choking his voice, so that he died speechless. The talk of the day had drafted that death in amongst the deeds of violence that Roman thieves will deal in, and babbled of the insecuríty of life under the Papal tenure, and of the sad fate of the young genius struck down for a few bajocchi on his own threshold. Victor Vane had been aware, as many