Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/293

282 touch of what looked to him like deception. His life had brought him into many critical moments when silence, acuteness, and caution had been as compulsory as hot action and reckless daring; and he had never been found wanting in them. But the rush of a lion, the swoop of an eagle, were more his instinct and his warfare; and he chafed feverishly under this part that he played for her sake in the Italian monastery.

The supper was brief; he had hoped the monks might be, as he had known many, laughter-loving riotous brethren, gossips in their cups, and not averse to heavy libations, from whom he might have gleaned some hint or knowledge of her. They were not; a cold, still, harsh asceticism brooded over them; they were chiefly saturnine, worn, impassive men, whose faces were chill and unreadable as masks of stone; there was nothing to give a suspicion that anything, save the severest form of religious devotion and abstinence, reigned there—nothing to hint that there was a prisoner within their keeping. There was not one from whom he could expect to extract any hope, except the poor porter and water-carrier, on whose round jocund face not even the silence and the hard labour of his life could impress either spirituality or resignation.