For the leader, with his curling hair and his black moustache, I felt an especial admiration, in spite of his stand-offishness. He was long my ideal of a hero; and it was one of the bitterest disappointments of my girlhood when, some years later, in a fight between his band and an overwhelming number of Turkish soldiers, he alone of all his men put up a pitiful fight, and died like a coward.
I wept when I read about it, not for him, but for my lost ideal—for the trust and admiration I had placed on a man not worthy to be a leader of Greek brigands.
CHAPTER XIV
ALI BABA, MY CAÏQUE-TCHI
OUR return journey to Constantinople was uneventful. There we found our mother, who had decided to spend the winter in the town and not on the island. I was not supposed to be well enough yet to resume my studies seriously. My brother left us shortly for Europe again.
It would have been a dreary and miserable winter for me, away from my home and the country, separated from my playmates and cooped up in small city rooms, with only buildings to look at on all sides, had it not been for a discovery I made. By accident I stumbled upon a big volume of Byzantine history, a history, till then, practically unknown to me.
As page after page gave forth its treasures, my interest in the people of which it wrote increased, and loneliness and boredom departed, not to return again that winter. After I finished the book it came over me that all these marvellous things I had been reading about had taken place yonder, at Stamboul, half an hour from where I sat. Instantly the desire took possession of me to re-read that history, chapter by chapter, then cross over to Stamboul and find the actual places mentioned.
This was not so easy to accomplish as one might think; for I had to reckon with the elders, who would have a thousand and one objections to my going over to the Turkish city. I went immediately to my mother, and without any preamble—which I knew to be the best way, in order to take her breath away—told her of my project, speaking of it casually as if it were as simple as drinking a glass of water.
She gave me the puzzled look with which she often regarded my little person. I believe that every time I came before her she wondered anew how I happened to be her child; for she was tall and beautiful, and very conventional in her desires, and I was small and elfish, and my desires were usually for things she could not imagine any person wanting. After I had finished speaking, she replied quietly:
“What you ask is out of the question; for we have no one, you know, who can waste so much time every week accompanying you.”