Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/319

308 moment he feared to move rashly or wrongly; the people were inflamed, moreover; the times were rife with unrest and sedition, the mouths of the populace were whispering tales that made the national blood burn hot against the Bourbon; he feared a riot—even it might be a rescue—if he bore this woman, to whom his superstition gave such spells, and to whom the revolutionists gave such homage, in the full noonday captive towards Naples.

Where they had fastened her she sat with her head bowed down, and her eyes, that burned like fire under their swollen aching lids, fastened on him where he lay. He had lost all actual knowledge that she was near, in the exhaustion that had succeeded to the long strain on every nerve and fibre. Delirious teeming fancies swam before his brain even in that lethargy of worn-out powers; in them he had no sense of the reality of her presence beside him; but in visions he believed he beheld her, the priestess of passion and pain, the goddess of darkness and of the spells of the senses, whom no man shall worship and live.

The messenger returned. The answeríng command was whispered by him to his officer. There was noise and movement and haste and delay around them under the shadow of the aged silvered olive