Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/235

224 Rafaelle-like face drooped, pale and weary, over them.

It was the lad Berto; left sentinel whilst his comrades spent the daybreak seeking a vessel down the shore. He was but a child; yet he had long put away childish things; when he had owned but four years he had seen two of his brethren fall side by side at the butchery of the Villa Carsini, on that awful day of June, and ere then had been borne in infancy, in a mountain flight in his mother's arms, and had kept as his first memory of life the echo of his own vain cries when her heart grew still under his eager caress, and there flowed from her breast a deep stream like the purple flood that wells forth when the grapes are pressed—for the Papal troops had shot down like a chaméis the woman who dared to love, and follow, and bear sons to a republican rebeL

He started, and rose with a sentinel's challenge; then, as he saw who came, bowed low; the weary sternness of his fair countenance never changed in boyish sport, or youthful laughter, or under the light of a girl's shy eyes; wrong had been stamped on him too early, and, if in his future, the purity and greatness of high aims should be marred in him by an unchangeable unrelenting chillness, like