Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/279

268 He comprehended and obeyed the gesture to secresy and silence; his heart was beating to suffocation, his blood felt on fire, wretchedness and rapture rioted together in him. He had found her! So much was mercy; but she was in the gripe of those who never spared; she was in the power of those who never unloosed their prey; the battalions of an army could scarce avail to wrench her from the united hate of Bourbon and of Rome. He knew it; he knew that e was but one man against the whole force of a government and a hierarchy, but the Border boldness in him rose the higher for that; the reckless romance of the old Spanish Paladins that slept in his blood awakened as wildly as it ever awakened in the comrades of Campeador or the knights of Ponce de Leon. "I will deliver her, or die for her!" he swore in bis throat: and he had never yet broken an oath. Forcing the dog to quietude, he drew back from the monastery into the shade of the stunted cypresses, and threw his lines into a lake-like pool that lay at the foot of the rocks; an angler's pursuit went well enough with bis barcarolo's dress. The water was reedy, yellow, stagnant in places, with islets of river grasses, in which water-fowl herded by