Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/229

218 knew that with her beauty, and her power, and her sorcery, she had wooed them to passion only to drive them there, by their fealty to her, to perish like netted stags. She knew that it had been through the beguilement of her own unsparing temptation, her own ruthless witchery of fascination, that those who had been murdered in the night just gone had entered on a career which, without her, they might never have embraced.

The very masked banquet at which they had been trapped and slain had been given through her, given for her, and turned by her to that end for which the soldiers of the King had shot them down as rebels. She knew that but for her they would be living now in the fulness of their freedom and their manhood; and the remorse of an assassin seemed to weigh on her and haunt her, with the blood-red glow of that dying sun, in which the uplifted eyes of Viana, as they had sought hers through the mists of his last agony, seemed ever to gaze on her.

She was proud, she was daring, she was unscrupulous, she was self-controlled to a marvel, she was, as men counted, cruelly heartless; but in that moment Idalia could have doomed herself to the curse of any eternal travail of expiation—in that moment she could have rent out her living heart where it