Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/351

340 She felt his hands clench; she heard his breath catch on passionate words of imprecation.

"Ah, peace, peace!" she murmured to him.

"Aid me rather to forgive—if I can. My own wrongs I might, but yours"

"Nay, mine are but of the hour, yours are lifelong. Tell me all—all."

"I could not if I spoke for years! A brave nature bound to a coward, a proud one leashed with dishonour—that is an agony that lies beyond words. When he saw me thus, so young, given this wealth and this power he had so vainly desired, a desire of vengeance entered him against me; and also, with the craft of his school, he saw in me a fitting instrument for his many schemes! Well he knew his sway over me; Julian dead, there remained none to counteract it. A revolutionist ere I could reason, and ambitious with an ambition far out-leaping all the goals of the modern world, a child still in my ignorance of actual things and my belief in the omnipotence of truth, yet already mistress of what seemed to me the magnificence and the dominion of a Cleopatra, I came to his snare as a bird to the fowler's. I would have gone to martyrdom to have liberated the nations; I would have sold my soul to have reached the sovereignty of a Semiramis.