Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/75

64 He drew out of his pocket a letter in a miniature Italian hand; such a hand as a Machiavelli, a John de Medici, or an Acquaviva, might have written. He read it slowly, weighing every line, then put it back into its resting-place, with a certain dísdain and sneer upon his face:—there was not the brain in Europe, he thought, that could outwit his.

"Austria will bid higher than that," he mused, "and the young wretch here will fall as Bourbons always fell. Six months, and he will be driven out of Naples—it would be much to be his 'Count d'Avalto' and his 'Lord Chamberlain' then! Fools! do they think such a bribe as that would take? If I make terms, it shall be with the Hapsburg; they shall pay me in proportion to my hate. They know what my enmity has meant!"

He leaned musingly over the marble parapet of his terrace, the lines of cruelty and of craft sinking deeper into his fair unworn face; even to him, free from all such weaknesses as an unprofítable honour, and not unwilling to sell his hate, as he would have sold his intellect, for power, even to him there was something bitter and shameful in the thought of treason—something that made him recoil from the desertion of those who had been allied to him so long, and acceptance of those who had so long had