Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/158

Rh "Liberty! No marvel that the peoples are in chains if the apostles of their freedom think to serve them thus."

The words echoed over the stillness of the tranquil seas with a profound eternal pathos; it was the sigh of the Girondists, when through the death-mists of the scaffold they saw the ángel of freedom they had dreamed of changed into a vampire of blood.

The man before her, the lover who had left her were alike forgotten; in that moment her heart was with the nations of the earth, the blind who find but the blind to lead them when they escape the iron heel to track them down; the vast sum of suffering and heart-sick humanity that has no choice betwixt those who leave it to perish in its slough, or beat it forth to rot on battle-fields, and those who fill its parching throat with the fetid water of distorted truths, and fool its patient ignorance with lying grossness, that by it they may force upward into power.

First—beyond all, grief for them was with her; for those innumerable, uncounted, uncompassionated millions who are the prey alike of despot and of demagogue; by each alike condemned to be the long, unnoted, pitilessly-consumed coil of fuse, lit