Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/205

194 love borne her by the man who had left him waa to the love that he himself had borne as the purity and value of purged gold against a pile of tinsel. It stilled in something the tortures of jealousy, it sated in something the thirst of hatred, to cast—were it only ín thought—irony and invective, and scornful calumny upon his rival; it waa natural to him to despise with all the contempt of his fine and subtle intelligence a character that its own frankness and loyalty and high courage left naked to all poisoned shafts, and that was so rashly liberal in faith, so unwisely incapable of falsehood, so blindly and wildly careless to how it wrought its own weal and woe. Yet the most carking wound of all that now ached in him was the latent sense of superiority in the one who had supplanted him, who had succeeded where he had been vanquished, and whom he had regarded, with the cold disdain of a flippant wit, as holding all his worth and merit in an athlete's mere physical perfection of thews and sinews. Steeled against all such emotion as he was, the greatness and the nobleness of Erceldoune's faith forced themselves on him; they wrung a reverence out of him despite himself, and they dealt him a mortal pain; pain that was in one sense vanity-moved, since it would no longer leave him the one solace of scorn for his rival,