Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/335

324 they wrestled together in that wild-beast conflict, which makes the men who are maddened by it savage and bloodthirsty as the beasts whose ferocity they share.

Such feeble flickering light as there was in the dungeon shone on the majestic figure of the priest clothed in the dark floating robes of the Church, and the athletic form of his foe, in the white loose linen dress of the Capriote sailors, as breast to breast, face to face, with their lofty limbs twined like gladiators, and their hands at each other's throats, they swayed, and reeled, and rocked to and fro, in that deadly embrace. It was the work of scarce twenty seconds; yet in it they rent and tore at each other as lion and leopard may do in the yellow dust of a tropic dawn, when long famine has made both ravenous for blood, and each beast knows that he must conquer and kill, or feel the fangs plough down into heart and flanks, and his own life pour out for ever. The prelate, who, ere now, had never even known a hand too roughly brush his sacred person, sought only to fling off the grasp that strangled him; his foe, rife with revenge and burning with a rival's hate, could have torn his heart out where they wrestled in as mortal a combat as ever was that with which retiarius and secutor