Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/96

Rh much poverty. Of the Byzantine, there was but one besides myself, the brother of my dead mother, a strange man; a rich, wayward, luxurious recluse; a feudal prínce, where he held his chieftainship in Roumelia; leading an existence more like an eastern story than aught else; magnificent, voluptuous, barbaric, solitary, with all the glitter of Oriental pomp and all the loneliness of a mountain fief. A terrible tragedy that had occurred in his youth—I can tell it you some other time—begot his love of solitude; his passions and his tastes led him to make that solitude, at once a palace and a prison, a harem and a fortress. I have little doubt that his life was evil enough; but I did not know it, and he loved me with a lavish tenderness that left me fearless of him, though he had a great terror for all others. So the life I led from my birth to my sixteenth year was this: sometimes I passed long months in Greece, in a great, desolate, poverty-stricken palace, with vast deserted gardens, in which I wandered looking at the bright ocean, while dreaming of the dead glories of my people, with an Armenian monk, old, and stern, and learned, for my only guide, who taught me all I would—more, perhaps, of abstruse lore, and strange scenes, and deep knowledge than was well for me while so young. Ere I had seen the