Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/76

Rh his deepest hatred; something that made the very silence of the Italian noon, the very melody of the Italian seas, the very cadence of a boat-song, that echoed dreamily over the waves from a distance, that only let its closing cadence, "Libertà! O Libertà!" come upon his ear, seem like a reproach to him by whom she—this Italy in chains, this Italy ruined through her own fatal dower of a too great beauty—was about to be betrayed.

There never yet was the man so hardened that he could play the part, and take the wage of an Iscariot, without this pang.

"She does it," he said, in his teeth, with a sophism that ere now he would have disdained. "She might have made me what she would; she chooses to make me" "A traitor," was not uttered even clearly in his thoughts; who thinks out clearly such thoughts as these to the last iota of their own damnable meaning? A shiver, too, ran through him as he recalled a risk that even his fertile statecraft could not avail to ward off from him, the step he meditated once being taken;—the risk of the stab-thrust in the back from the poinard of the "Brotherhood", which even in this day, even in the streets of polished European capitals, strikes soon or late,