Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/382

Rh their loyalty to her could still, rolled through the vault.

"A traitor dies! A traitor dies!" By his crime they claimed their justice.

A heavy sigh parted her lips; then the full sweet melody of her voice carne on the clamour like music that moves men to tears.

"A traitor he is! And for that you would deal him death! Nay, think me not gentler than you. I meant to deliver him up to your hands. I bade him be brought to my judgment, that your vengeance might strike him, and lay him dead at my feet. I am no holier than you. There was an hour in which I longed for his life with that thirst you know now; there was an hour in which I would have taken it, and not spared, though his mother had prayed to me. Ah, friends! such hours come to all. But now, the darkness has passed. I see clearer. Death is not ours to deal. And were it ours, should we give him the nameless mystic mercy which all men live to crave—give it as the chastisement of crime? Death! It is rest to the aged, it is oblivion to the atheist, it is immortality to the poet! It is a vast, dim, exhaustless pity to all the world. And would you summon it as your hardest cruelty to sin?"