Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/290

Rh sought from him, they heeded nothing beyond. His bound feet stumbled over the rough declivities, his chest was stifled under the crossed cords till he could barely breathe; with every jerked step that his guards took over the roughness of the ground their shot might be lodged in his brain; the red ants, disturbed in their hills, swarmed up his limbs and clung there; the open wound of his shoulder was cut by the tight-drawn ropes; still he said not one word, but went on in their midst, with his bloodshot eyes staring out at earth and sky yet seeing nothing, and with a heavy, sullen, murderous darkness on his face and on his soul.

Of physical suffering he was insensible; the deadness of despair had numbed in him all corporeal consciousness. There had only survived in him the mere mechanical brute instincts of defence and of resistance. Beaten in these, he resigned himself, passively, dumbly; too vast a ruin had fallen on his life for him to heed what befel his body. So far as thought still was distinct to him, so far as any ray of it pierced the blackness of desolation in which every memory save one was lost, he wished that they would strike him dead upon the plain they traversed.

They wondered that, cramped and bruised as he