'I am Achmet Effendi,' said the latter, a handsome but pale, sad, and emaciated young man; 'I was a lieutenant in the old regiment of Scherif Bey, and, as a mere boy, served in the campaign of Egypt. My younger friend whom you see here so heavily visited by heaven and the prophet, that his mind is gone or possessed by a devil, so that he requires chains and bars three times heavier than the most powerful villain here, is Ali Effendi, a Mulazim of artillery, and there is none better or braver in the army of his Imperial Majesty the Sultan.
'He was with that Turkish army which on the 28th October, 1853, crossed the Danube, and on the 4th of the following month won the victorious battle of Oltenitza, where he slew the aide-de-camp of the Russian General, and found those important despatches which informed us, but alas! too late, of the intended attack upon Sinope, where four thousand five hundred of the Faithful were slaughtered by the dogs of the Czar.
'Ali Effendi was next engaged and severely wounded at the battle of Kalaphat on the 8th of January, 1854—you may still see the scar of the Russian bullet on his bare right arm, above the iron fetter. Ali is tall—he was then handsome and winning; a clever poet and maker of verses; an expert player on the guitar, but poor; for, like myself, he had only one hundred and twenty piastres per month, as a lieutenant en seconde, of Topchis.
'For five years he had loved and been beloved by the daughter of a wealthy Stambouli merchant, and he had received her plighted troth. You may know all the danger, the difficulties, and the deadly snares that hover round a Turkish love; yet the skilful Ali had surmounted and escaped them all, and won the love of Saïda. But her father discovered them, and he was inexorable, of course—fathers always are so, for they are the evil Genii of all love stories, and so he proposed to barter or sell her to Ali Pasha himself!
'Poor Ali, my friend, was marched off with his brigade of artillery to fight the Russians under Mouravieff at Kars, and the unhappy Saïda was in despair when the Pasha sent the dressmakers from the bazaar to measure her for the bridal attire and pearl slippers. Then her grief and fury could no longer be controlled; and bruising the crystal pendant of a lamp to powder, she drank it in a cup of sherbet and expired, with the name of Ali on her lips, and a copy of his last farewell verses, written on fine silk, pressed to her heart.
'Kars fell! Its garrison was captured, but Ali escaped the Cossacks of Mouravieff, and hastened home to find Saïda, not as of old, at her chamber window to answer the tinkling of his lute at night, when the quiet stars looked down on the blue Bosphorus, and the thousand lights of Stamboul were shining on its waters; but to seek her green grave among the silent ones at Pera, and he was almost beside himself with grief. Three days he remained on his knees at her resting-place, until he had read over all the hundred and fourteen chapters of the Koran, and covered the grass with flowers. Then he placed above her a gilded tomb, on which he wrote in charming verses the whole history of their hopeless love; and this tomb cost the poor lieutenant nine hundred piastres. Beside that tomb he swore a dreadful vow to slay both Ali Pasha and her father.
'While this rash vow was trembling on his lips, that father of cruelty and avarice, the old merchant, tottering on his staff, and with tears rolling down his white beard, appeared under the tall and sombre cypresses of the cemetery; and then the frantic Ali, transported with rage, sprang up from amid the flowers of Saïda's grave, and drawing a pistol from his girdle, shot him dead!
'From that moment Ali became a maniac, and the sultan sent him here. Allah has dried up his brains; but He is ever merciful and just; so whether my poor comrade shall recover, and be as he was in other times, a merry companion, a true friend, and gallant soldier, I know not; our kismet is in the hands of God and the Prophet, whose holy finger traced it, at the moment of our birth, upon our infant brows.'[*]
[*] Ali did recover, and is now a cole agassi (major) of the Turkish artillery at Hunkiar Skellessi: but being, as Jack Belton says, in full possession of his senses, vows he will never think of marriage more.
'A mournful story, Achmet Effendi,' said I, gazing with deep interest on the hollow cheek, lack-lustre eyes, and wasted form of this brave young officer, who had seen as much service, and fought with the gallant Williams at Kars; 'but, if I may inquire, what brought you here?'
'Love, also,' he answered, with a smile, and then a frown of anger on his olive brow. 'A few words will tell you all. My father is the Bashi-katib or military secretary of the Egyptian Contingent. The orta or battalion to which I belonged, and still belong—'
'Still belong?' I reiterated, glancing at his fetters,
'Yes,' said he, colouring, 'you shall hear.'
'I was in cantonments at Pera, when I became acquainted with a lady who was wont to walk, unattended either by slaves or carpet-spreaders, in the great cemetery there—'
'Ah!' said I, with mournful interest.
'Her figure was graceful; her brow like alabaster; her eyes—strange in our sunny land—were a deep and bewitching blue, for her mother had been a Russian lady, stolen from the shores of the sea of Azof. Her eye-brows were brown, and arched, like the moon of the Prophet, and never did the divine Hafiz of Iraun pen a sonnet on a face more beautiful than hers; and as Jammee the Iraunee sings in his ode, I was miserable when absent from her.
'Oh! in what place soe'er I stray,
By midnight, morning, or by day,
Thou art the inmate of my breast;
I cannot linger, cannot stay,
But thy sweet image with me aye
Abides my bosom's dearest guest!'
Yet she was another's, and by one of the contrarieties of our nature for that reason, more perhaps than for her loveliness, did I love her! she was—'
'A wife?'
'No.'
'What then?'
'A slave.'
'Well?' said I, thinking it was only a distinction without a difference among 'the Faithful.'
'Her master was in the service of the Kislar Aga, so you will perceive at once that she was a dangerous person to meddle with. The arrival of the allied troops in the Bosphorus had attracted the attention of all in Stamboul, so Pera was almost deserted. Zarifa, by a prettily-arranged bouquet of flowers, asked me to visit her, and I did so, taking care, however, to arm me well. I had my sabre and a pair of pistols, which I loaded carefully, in case of being surprised by the Kislar Aga or any of the black guardians of the Royal Seraglio. I had with me a fleet horse, one of those carefully-trained barbs which are used by our Turkish cavalry, and are drilled to close to the right and close to the left; to dress back, or forward, at a single word of command; to remain beside the rider if he falls, or to drag him out of the press by their teeth. Leaving my horse concealed in an olive-thicket, without perceiving that I was watched and followed by a Moolah, named Moustapha, who had been a corporal in my regiment, I entered the garden of the Kislar Aga's country-house, and there Zarifa received me in a beautifully-gilded kiosk, covered with tendrils of the myrtle, the passion-flower, the gorgeous azalea, and the Damascus rose. There soft carpets were spread; hot coffee, sherbet, wine, and a chibouque awaited me—and more than all, Zarifa, in all her beauty, with her yashmack thrown aside!
'Reclining on that soft carpet, with my arm around the yielding waist of my love—a pipe on one hand, a cup of Greek wine on the other, I was in the seventh heaven!
'The roses were sparkling in the new-fallen rain, which had just refreshed the earth with a shower, and the sun was exhaling it, as he came up in his splendour; the breeze was laden with the melody of the joyous birds, and the large drops hung like diamonds on every flower and tree, while the perfume of the orange-groves, of the violet-beds, and of the china jars of heliotrope, loaded the air with delicious fragrance; everything spoke to my heart of love, delight, and silence, as I pressed my lips to those of Zarifa!
'At that moment the gleam of three or four bayonets appeared above the garden wall; the door of the kiosk was dashed in; I sprang to my feet, with a hand on my sabre, to be confronted by the scowling Moolah, who, I found, to my rage, had surrounded me by a guard from the nearest police-station. In short, the ruffians of the Bostandgi Bashi were upon me!
'Zarifa uttered a shriek, as I rushed from her, to find my horse captured, and bayonets opposed to me, breast-high. I was obliged to surrender at discretion, and on being deprived of my arms, was thrust into an araba, and, with the terrified and weeping girl, was taken before a corrupt and cunning kadi.
'"Remember," said I, "that I am the son of tho Bashi-katib, and the grandson of the Seraskier."'
'"You are wise to boast of your ancestry since you cannot boast of yourself," sneered the Moolah.
'"Did not the Prophet cast eyes of evil on Zeinab, the wife of Zeid, his adopted son, from whom he cajoled her away and then married her; and Zeinab, thereafter, vaunted that she was above all the other wives of Mohammed, since their marriage was made in heaven?"
'"Peace, blasphemous kite!" exclaimed the kadi.
'He then asked me, according to our law, when a man is discovered in the society of an unmarried woman, if I would wed Zarifa?
'But I remained silent.
'Zarifa was beautiful, and I loved her—true; but to marry the slave of a servant of the Kislar Aga, the Chief Eunuch to that son of a slave, the Sultan; I—a Mulazim—on one hundred and twenty piastres per month. Wallah! the thing was not to be thought of! I refused, and was sentenced to pass two years in chains. Zarifa was given to a deserving chaoush of cavalry as a wife, and I was sent here as a prisoner, and as such must remain a few months longer."
'And you were sentenced to pass two years in chains?'
'Two years, Effendi.'
'Heavens,' thought I, 'should such be my sentence, what will become of Callum Dhu, and what will be the fate of my commission, which I value as my own life!'