Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/94

Rh would not have been able to surprise. Ah, Monsignore, there is mine under mine; government spies are too often content to believe that when they have explored the topmost one they know all! There, at Antina, will be the Countess Vassalis, and not she alone: Caffradali, Aldino, Villlari, Laldeschi, all the Neapolitans who are written in your Livre Rouge will meet. You may strike a great stroke at one blow; by day-dawn Viana and his glittering maskers may fill the Castel Capuano, if you will. Ask for what proofs against them you choose, you can have sufficient to justify the galleys for life against one and all of them; out of their own words shall you convict them, and, once yours, how shall this lawless Empress, this queenly Democrat, this patrician with the Marseillaise on her lips, this liberator with the pride of all the Empires in her heart, ever escape again to mine your thrones with her arts, to sap your creeds with her ironies, to arm your enemies with her riches, to overthrow your policies with her genius, to dare, to mock, to scheme, to revolutionise, to rule—to be, in one word, Idalia? Where will her power be when the same fetters as Poerio's hang on her wrists, where her loveliness when day and night the skies alone look on it from a chink in a dungeon wall, where