Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/325

314 the tender of his horn for its replenishing. Erceldoune sought first to make him garrulous, so that he might glean intelligence from his drunken verbiage. The Umbrian's idle tergiversation of speech soon wandered off to the captive of their clerical bondage—wandered to such ardent maudlin ecstasies on the subject of her beauty that his hearer suffered tortures as he listened perforce to the profanation. Erceldoune flung himself down on the flag floor, resting on his elbow, in such enforced stillness as he could command, while the rambling fervour of the gluttonous Brother desecrated her name and catalogued her charms; happily, the drinker was too giddy with his potations to notice the shudder that every now and then at his hottest epithets of descriptive admiration shook his listener's limbs, or the flash that darted over him from his hearer's eagle eyes when he betrayed, in his unconscious loquacity, the purpose of her imprisonment in the Cistercian sanctuary.

It needed no questions to elicit all he knew; the brandy fumes rising over his brain undid all caution it had ever been taught, and spread out all its shreds of knowledge as a pedlar spreads his wares. Erceldoune heard enough to convulse him with horror as he was stretched there on the naked