Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/354

Rh had drunk so deeply and so freshly of the draught of Power, I could not have laid down the cup though I had known there was death in it. And under scorn and hate, and all the unutterable misery that came to me when I saw myself betrayed by him, my very nature changed. I grew hardened, reckless, pitiless. My loyalty to liberty, to truth, to the peoples, never altered; but that was all the better thing left in me. I remained faithful, even to a traitor. But the world and I were for ever at war. I cared not how I struck, so that I only struck home. Evil had been spoken against me falsely, and I lived in such fashion that they should know one woman at least breathed whose neck could not be bent, nor whose spirit bowed by calumny. Men came about me, mad for the smile of my lips, but not true enough in themselves, as you were true, to pierce to the truth ín me, and I gave them a bitter chastisement for their blindness: I slew them with their own steel. But—Oh God! what avail to tell you this? I can tell you how that which was spoken against me has, in part, been truth deserved, and, in part, the malignant coinage of envy. I can tell you that at dawn to-day I had no choice but to leave myself a traitress in your sight, or see you slaughtered by him as the issue of my love. I can tell you