Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/285

274 her from Taverno—in the cavern his sleep had been too profound to awake to any distant sound—but the sight of the conflict and the capture alone sufficed to rouse all the revolutionary and patriotic soul that was in him. He wrung his hands as he watched the soldiers move over the plain, growing dark and distant as some far-off troop of buffalo. "Ah, the brigands: the assassins! And I could not fire a ballet for him!" he cried in his solitude. "Miladi must know of it. She can say whether he will bear the scourge and be silent. If I had thought he would speak, I would have shot him dead before they could have got him. Almost I wish I had. It had been surer."

For the Roman lad knew the means—passing the strength of humanity to endure—by which man who were mute against royal or priestly will were made to find voice in that fair dominión of Naples. "She must know," he mused;—waited an instant, then with the speed of a lapwing, once having the swell of the hillocks between him and the soldiery, he retraced his way over the lowlands to whence he came, until out of the laughing brilliancy of the noon-sun he came into the darkness of the cave, which now was only lightened by the low flicker of the expiring pine-flames.