Page:Eothen, or, Traces of travel brought home from the East by Kinglake, Alexander William.djvu/91

 place during her illness, were afterwards re-enacted at the time of her death. Since I wrote the words to which this note is appended, I received from an English traveller, this interesting account of the heroine's death, or rather of the circumstances attending the discovery of the event; the letter is dated Djoun (Lady Hester's late residence) and contains the following passages:—I reached this strange hermitage last night, and though time and some naval officers are urging my departure, I am too glad to find myself in a place whereof we have often discoursed, to allow the opportunity of writing to you to pass by. How beautiful must this convent-palace have been when you saw it, its strange mistress doing its hospitalities and exercising her self- won regal power! A friend of has a letter from the Sultan to her, beginning 'Cousin.' She annihilated a village for disobedience, and burned a mountain chalet with all its inhabitants, for the murder of a traveller. * * * She held on gallantly to the last Moore, our Consul at Beyroot, heard she was ill, and rode over the mountains accompanied by a missionary, to visit her. A profound silence was over all the palace—no one met them—they lighted their own lamps in the outer court, and passed unquestioned through court and gallery, till they came to where she lay: a corpse was the only inhabitant of Djoun, and the isolation from her kind which she so long sought, was indeed completed. That morning thirty-seven servants had watched every motion of her eye; that spell once darkened by death, every one fled with the plunder; not a single thing was left in the room where she lay dead, except upon her person; no one had ventured to touch that, and even in death she seemed able to protect herself. At midnight the missionary carried her out to a favorite resort of hers in the garden, and there they buried her. * * * The buildings are fast falling into decay." that they actually unroofed a great part of the building, and employed engines with pulleys for the purpose of hoisting out such of her valuables as were too bulky to pass through doors. It would seem that, before this catastrophe. Lady Hester had been rich in the possession of Eastern luxuries, for she told me that when the chiefs of the Ottaman force took refuge with her after the fall of Acre, they brought their wives also in great numbers; to all of these Lady Hester, as she said, presented magnificent dresses, but her generosity occasioned strife only instead of gratitude, for every woman who fancied her present less splendid than that of another, with equal or less pretension, became absolutely furious; ail these audacious guests had now been got rid of, but the Albanian soldiers who had taken refuge with Lady Hester at the same time, still remained under her protection.

In truth, this half ruined convent, guarded by the proud heart