Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/99

88 far beyond him, in that moment, as the thoughts of genius ever are far from those who love the thinker best, and are best loved in answer.

They were with the dreams of her youth; such dreams as lighted the youth of Vergniaud and found their fruition on the scaffold.

"Well," he asked gently, "with you they never perished?"

"No, not utterly. But they were tainted, how deeply tainted! So, thus I lived, a fairy story and a pageantry filling one half my years, monastic reclusion and heroic memories holding the rest. As I grew older, Julian Vassalis often spoke with me of many things; he was a bold, magnificent, kingly, reckless man, a chief who answered to none, a voluptuary who laughed at the world he had quitted, a genius who might have ruled widely and wisely with a Sulla's iron hand, a Sulla's careless laughter. He found me like him, and he made me yet more like. It might be—but it is not for my lips to blame him: he loved me well in life, and strove, so far as prescience could, to guard me when his life ended. That was in my sixteenth year. He bequeathed me all his vast properties, with the fief in Roumelia and other estates, requiring only that I took his name, and, wherever I wedded, never