Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/311

300 were tolled monotonously from the campanila, ever and again the drone of the monks' voices rising in regular diapason, in chant or office, swelled through the narrow apertures of their chapel casements, and echoed with melancholy rise and fall over the silence. When he heard it, deadlier oaths than his lips had ever breathed were hurled over the slumbering pools at the priestly formulas that sheltered a Nero's cruelties, a Borgia's lusts. Once or twice a peasant or a muleteer passed across the horizon line: otherwise there was nothing to break the eternal sameness of the glittering sunlight, the sear country, the cypress points cutting so sharply against the intense blue of the sky. He knew what men had felt who had lost their reason through a captivity that made them dwell in one unending solitude—look on one unchanging scene.

The deep radiance of colour that precedes the sunset was just flushing earth and sky, as the shrill hoot of an owl's note pierced his ear—a night-bird's cry in the sunshine. He guessed at once that it was a signal of the little pifferaro, and followed it. Under the reeds, some half mile or less from the monastery, the boy was crouched, panting like a tired dog, but glowing with life and zest and eagerness as he lifted his hot brown face.