Sixteen years ago, when the Allied Powers united to assist the Sultan in his conflict with old Mehemet Ali, then pasha of Egypt, and nominally his vassal, the insurgent garrison of Acre was successfully bombarded, as all the world knows, by the British fleet, under the flag of Commodore Sir Charles Napier, who on that occasion distinguished himself with his usual skill, bravery, and intrepidity. The fortress was taken in a few hours; but the destruction and slaughter were fearfully augmented by the explosion of a magazine of powder and live bombs, by which the venerable ramparts of St. John were reduced to a pile of blackened ruins. The roar of the exploding powder was appalling; from the low headland of Acre there ascended into the pure blue Syrian sky a mighty column of smoke and dust. The lonely Kishon was startled in its stony bed; every mosque, khan, and bazaar in the city rocked to its foundation, while the whole waters of the bay were agitated by the concussion and rolled in foamy ripples on the rocks of Cape Carmel.
In that explosion one thousand five hundred brave soldiers who had escaped the dangers and withstood the horrors of the bombardment were in a moment swept into eternity.
Of the many who perished, none was more universally regretted by the Egyptian garrison, and even by the British commander, than Demetrius Vidimo, a Greek captain, who served the Pasha, in mere hatred of the Sultan and of the Turks, who were the tyrants of his people—a hatred in which he was sustained by his wife, who was the daughter of a Sciote patriot of high rank. Demetrius had participated in all the horrors of the Greek struggle for independence, when the men of Missolonghi, after a year's siege of hardship unparalleled, and after defying all the united power of Turkey and of Egypt—after having a hundred thousand bombs and balls shot among them, buried themselves in the ruins of the city. He had seen the pyramid of Grecian skulls that rose near the grave of Bozzaris; he had seen the horrors of the massacre of Scio, when fifty thousand frantic Turks drenched the loveliest of the Ægean Isles in blood, slaying sixty thousand Sciotes in its streets, and carrying thirty thousand into hopeless slavery. He had seen the manly boys and beautiful girls of Greece sold at a dollar a-head in the streets of Smyrna. He had seen their mothers ripped open by the Turkish sabre and the handjiar, and the children torn reeking from the womb and dashed against the walls of Athens, for the wildest beasts of Africa or India were mild as tender lambs when compared to the merciless, brutal, and unglutted soldiery of Mahmoud the Second. He had seen the slave-market of Stamboul crowded with Grecian captives—brave men struggling and raving in their futile vengeance against the Osmanlies; and women—the pale virgin and the weeping mother—shrinking in the agonies of separation from all they loved, and in horror of their lewd and sensual purchasers, who bought them from the troops for the value of twelve cartridges, a pipe-stick, or a piastre, and dragged them away to slavery, and worse than slavery, in their harems, dens, and anderuns at Stamboul.
He had seen all these things, and the soul of Demetrius was fired by a thirst for undying vengeance upon the oppressors of his people.
He was an Albanian, and chief of one of the eight tribes of the Scutari mountains. Hardy, brave, reckless to a fault, and fired alike by enthusiasm and revenge, he had distinguished himself on a thousand occasions against the Turks; and at the previous storming of Acre—eight years before—when Ibrahim Pasha, at the head of forty thousand Egyptians and Arabs, besieged it for six months, the Grecian Captain Vidimo in every assault was conspicuous, both by his bravery and his picturesque Albanian costume; for wherever death was to be found or danger sought and glory won, there towered the figure of Vidimo, in his skull-cap, with his long hair flowing under it; his fleecy capote flung loosely over his shoulder; his white kilt and scarlet buskins, leading on the van of battle, and handling in rapid succession the long musket, the crooked sabre, deadly yataghan and pistols, which are the native weapons of the Albanian mountaineer.
But he perished in the explosion at Acre, and so there was an end of him, greatly to the regret of his comrades, and very much to the grief of the Yuze Bashi Hussein, who had set his whole heart upon taking the valiant Greek dead or alive, and laying his head at the feet of Mahmoud the Second, to claim the promised reward.
The Turks were furious! not even his body was to be found, though the Sultan had offered a princely sum for it; and amid all the heads hewn off after the bombardment, there was not one found that would pass muster as having belonged to Vidimo, whose face was well known by a peculiar sabre cut which he received at the defence of Missolonghi in 1826.
After the capture, Ali Pasha, and Hussein Ebn al Ajuz, with other officers of the corps of Bombardiers, enjoyed to their hearts' content the pleasure of slicing off the head of the dark Egyptians, or stuffing their pockets with tawny ears, and with something better still the various good things to be picked up in the bazaars, the great khan, the Franciscan monastery, the Greek church, the Armenian synagogue, and other places where the unbelieving dogs of Jews and Christians presumed to worship in any other fashion than that proscribed by the holy camel-driver.
During his minute researches in a certain flat-roofed mansion near the Castle of Iron, the enterprising Hussein and several of his soldiers discovered a female, of great beauty, with two children, a boy and a girl, concealed in an alcove; and while the poor little ones with terror in their wild black eyes, screamed and clung to the skirt of their pale mother, the soldiers of Hussein, with brandished weapons, and fierce Turkish imprecations, dragged them forth. The woman was too handsome to be sacrificed: so Hussein, who had a special eye to female loveliness, saved her at once, by sabring one of his Majesty's soldiers and pistolling another, to cool the ardour of the rest; but now, a dozen or more of Turkish officers, flushed alike by blood, which is enjoined by the Koran, and by wine, which is forbidden by it, crowded into the apartment.
The beauty of the captive inflamed them all, and a furious contention ensued, as to who should possess her.
She offered a thousand Xeriffs as the ransom of her honour and her children's lives; but the princely guerdon was received and rent from her, with shouts of derision.
Then Ali Pasha asserting his senior rank, seized her rudely.
'Hold!' she exclaimed, in a piercing voice and with a nobility of gesture which made even him draw back; 'I am a Christian woman—the daughter of a Sciote noble, and the widow of him who died to-day, Demetrius Vidimo, and these are his children, Constantine and Iola—we shall die together!' and with these words, she took from her bosom a coral cross and tied it round the neck of her little boy, believing him to be in more imminent danger than her daughter.
Again the Turks uttered a fierce derisive shout; but stood irresolute, when confronted by this Greek woman, whose aspect awed them.
She was clad in black, as being indicative of her fallen fortune; a snow-white kerchief covered her head, and gave a Madonna-like expression to her deep, black, thoughtful eyes, and soft but marble features; for she possessed, in its greatest purity, all the classic beauty of the ancient Greek women—a clear complexion, and long thick tresses, dark as the northern night. She was lovely, feminine, and sad in her expression, for in her time she had seen those things which were more than enough to banish smiles for ever from her face; yet, unblanched by past sorrow or by present danger, her lips were—strange to say—alluringly rosy, as her teeth were dazzingly white.
Her form was tall and full, and maternity had given a charming roundness to the slenderness of figure which usually falls to the lot of Greek women.
Inflamed by the desire of possessing a captive so fair, every Turk stood by with pistol and sabre in hand, resolved to die rather than yield her to another. The stern altercation was fierce and noisy; and there amid that terrible group, pale, and, like Niobe, all in tears, with her younglings clinging to her skirts, the widowed mother stood, trembling in her soul, for she knew that such mercy as tigers accord would be the mercy given to her.
'Since all cannot possess—by everything that is holy! let us all destroy her!' cried Hussein, levelling a pistol.
'Allah—Allah! Amaum! Amaum!' cried Ali Pasha, and the crowd of Turks. A confused discharge of pistols took place, and pierced by more than twenty balls, the mother fell dead with her blood spouting over her children, and so ended the dispute; for the sun set at that moment, and they all hastened out, to kneel and say the Salât al Moghreb, or evening prayer, so Hussein was left in possession alike of the dead body, of the children, and the premises.
After rifling the corpse of its rings and jewels, he took away the orphans to make slaves of them.
Perceiving that the girl, Iola, then in her sixth year, promised to be beautiful, he kept her; the boy, Constantine, he gave to Ali Pasha, colonel of the Bombardiers, who made a soldier of him, and in time he became a lieutenant of Albanians in the service of the Sultan—but he never forgot the cause for which his father fought—vengeance for Greece, or the death which his mother died; and thus, seeking the first opportunity of leaving a service so hateful as that of Abdul Medjid, he had deserted from Heraclea; but was retaken, tried and sent back by the Mahmoudieh steam-ship, and on the morrow was to die. The cry of the exterminating angel would be heard, and an Unbeliever would perish like a withered bud, or like a palm-tree struck by lightning.
I cannot express the aversion we felt for the old Yuze Bashi, who with singular coolness related the part he had borne in this barbarous episode of the Egyptian revolt; and which, with occasional whiffs of his chibouque, he related as quietly as one might do the account of a little shooting excursion, or the result of a pic-nic party, and nothing more.
'And Iola—the daughter,' I asked; 'what became of her?'
'That I cannot tell you,' said he; 'she is never named to me now.'
'Does she know of the fate that hangs over her brother?'
'No!'
'She is dead, then?'
'To him—and to the world, at least.'
'Which means that she is—'
'Married—exactly.'
'So inquiries might only be unpleasant, if not dangerous?'
'Yes.'
'But when her brother is to die?'—began Belton.
'She shall never know of it,' replied Hussein. 'What useful end would be served by conveying the information to her. She would weep, and the tears of women are a great annoyance now, since we cannot apply the bastinado without permission from a Kadi or Moolah. Bah! this Constantine Vidimo is only a Greek, and one ball will kill him: in a moment all will be over.'
'Only a Greek!' reiterated Belton, who had been poring over the Corsair on our outward voyage; 'are not the Greeks human beings?'
'Scarcely—know you not, O Frank! that the Lord of the world hath sealed up their hearts and their hearing, and veiled their sight by a dimness.'
Tired of the Yuze Bashi and his barbarous ideas, we rose to bid him farewell and leave the khan; but he, having a wholesome terror of Ghoules, Guebres, and Genii in the dark, resolved on accompanying us to our quarters; for he too had rooms in the Coumbazadjilar-Kislaci. Thus we found the impossibility of shaking him off, and as we stumbled on, arm-in-arm with this epauletted assassin, followed step for step by Callum Dhu, through the dark, muddy, and unpaved streets of Heraclea, he told us various other pretty little episodes of himself and Ali Pasha.
The name of the latter must be familiar to the reader, as being the Turkish General of Brigade whose infamous abduction and murder of a young and beautiful Greek girl in the suburbs of Varna lately roused the indignation of the French commandant, by whose humane exertions, for the FIRST time in Oriental history, an Osmanli was tried for the murder of a Christian; and consequently Ali Pasha, the Brigadier; Lieutenant Mohammed Aga, his aide-de-camp; Hussein Aga, his steward; and Corporal Moustapha, appeared before a tribunal, which, of course, acquitted them; for every hair in the beard of a true Believer is worth all the benighted souls in Christendom.