Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/377

366 to none, he had held lightly. Rulers who wore the purple of power had been scarcely less false to such oaths than he, and he had thought that for him as for them the blow might be temporised with, warded off, bought off, until he like them, should have risen too high for even that unerring and invisible hand to reach. Bat now, by the men whom he had scorned with all the scorn of his astute abilities, as the mere raw material that may be turned to the statesman's successes, the fools of patriotic visions and rude honesties, of childish faith, and of barbarían warfare; by these he had been baffled, checked, vanquished, meshed in the intrícate web of his own treacheries; by these he had been conquered and dragged down, to stand in his dishonour before the one glance which had power to make that dishonour worse to him than a thousand pangs of death. To this end had his life come! An end more bitter to him it could never have reached, if his limbs had swung in the hot air of Naples from the hangman's chains. The hooting lips and ravenous eyes of the million of upturned faces of a railing populace would have been powerless to bríng home to him his shame, as one regard bent on him, brought it now.

For, beyond the undulating wave of flame, and