Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/35

24 branches above, she saw that his face was white as the arum lilies amongst which he fell, and that the snowy crowns of the flowers and their broad and pointed leaves were darkened with the stain of blood, soaking through the linen of his barcarolo's dress. He was stretched there as when first, under the Carpathian pine-woods, she had found him laid struck down by the ballets of the Greek assassin, with the vultures waiting above to swoop to their feast. For many moments she knelt by him; no tears rose before her sight, and her lips were pressed close without a sound, almost without a breath, but as she gazed an agony came in her eyes greater than any that the uplifted scourge or the locked fetters of her prison had wrung from her.

She had seen so many perish for her, perish through her; she had seen the brave lives at Antina fall like the ears of wheat ripe to the reaping; she had known that east and west, far and near, in the wide wastes of the Magyar-land as in the silent streets of Venice, in the snow-plains of the Muscovite empire as in the laughing loveliness of Lombard meadows, men had poured out their blood like water at her bidding, under her will, only for sake of