Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/115

104 "Yet you say your cause was noble?" he asked her, gently, at the last. "It was not to gain the cruel empty triumph of a woman's vanity that you beguiled them?"

"God knows! There was guilty triumph enough in me at times. In the main—yes—it was for the cause of freedom that I won them. That had been harmless; but my sin was that I made them stake their lives on me, yield their souls to me, surrender their consciences to me because I taught them love, and then, when they were my slaves, I used them to their own destruction, as these charcoal-makers thrust the fresh wood in to burn and feed their fires."

"Still—you believed that those fires were the sacrifice-fires of the peoples' altars of liberty?" She shivered slightly in the ardent heat of the broad noonday.

"At first, with all the youth and passion of faith that were in me, I did believe it. And I clung to the belief long—long after I knew it had its root in quicksands. But after I had learned how hopeless the struggle for pure freedom is, after I had learned that the absolutisms of thrones and churches are masked batteries of iron and granite on to which the thinker and the poet and the patriot fling themselves