Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/105

 absolute devotion moved Este to some emotion that was nearly love, and so in its momentary empire possessed him and consoled him. But it took no real hold upon him, had no real power to absorb him and reconcile him to his fate; nay, his very infidelity to his dead mistress made him remember her with renewed tenderness. With his heart beating against Musa's he would think bitterly: 'Why cannot I love as I once loved? Why does all her beauty leave me cold? Why cannot I know again that old sweet madness? Alas! alas! with her—my dead queen—should I have cared whether a prison or a palace held her, should I have known where we were, so long as we were left together?'

That was all dead in him.

He knew it. Vainly he strove to call alight the fire that had died down in him; vainly he sought to persuade himself that sensual covetousness was the same thing as passion, and chill desire sweet as adoration.

Like those kings of the East, who slay living slaves to warm their own frozen veins, he had thought by sacrifice of her to make himself drunk once more with that intoxication of the soul and senses in which the despair of