Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/274

Rh by her that she could purchase freedom from it all by betraying those whose lives she held in her keeping, or by going willingly to the loathed love of her ecclesiastical captor. Such weakness as that was not possible to her nature; she had a virile courage, a masculine reading of all bonds of honour; this woman, bred in luxury, in self-indulgence, in power, in patrician tastes, and epicurean habits, had the nerve in her to endure all things, rather than to purchase her redemption by a traitor's recreancy. She had been successful hitherto in concealing from her gaoler the slender shaft of the stiletto, and she was prepared in extremity to use it; she had too much of the old Greek heroism to fear such a death, and had too many of the old, dauntless, pagan creeds not to hold its resource far nobler than a long dishonoured life of endless misery. Where she leaned now, with her chained hands lying on the stone, and the darkness and the silence of the stone cell about her, her face was colourless, but it had on it no fear, no weakness: it was only grave, and very weary. Her thoughts had gone to many scenes and memories of her past—the past which, in eight brief years of sovereignty, had been fuller and more richly coloured than a thousand drawn-out lives that never change their grey still