Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/314

Rh "He is not dead," she said, with that vibration of an exquisite joy crossing the icy desolation of despair, which smote the most callous there to some vague sense of answering pain;—as though her voice reached him, he raised himself slightly, where two soldiers held up his sinking frame, his lips gasped for breath, his eyes unclosed to the dazzling gleam of the day, he stood erect, while a loud cry broke from him:

"O God:—I cannot die!"

The English words missed the listening southern ears; she alone knew the agony in them of the great imperishable strength that would not let life leave him, that would survive all which strove to slay it—survive to keep sensation, memory, knowledge in him, and to refuse the only mercy he could ever know, the mercy of oblivion and annihilation.

The Calabrian went and laid his hand upon his prisoner's shoulder. "You are a fine brute. I am sorry you provoked us. See here—this woman is the guiltier: she says so: she is come to suffer in your stead."

He heard, though all his senses still were dim—though earth, and sea, and sky, and the ring of the armed men, and her face in the white furnace-heat