The Albanians consulted together for a brief moment, and then intimated that if a bey of the name of Gaskho really existed, he was as good as dead already.

Towards mid-day Ali sent for his sons. He said not a word to them of the anxieties, the visions, and the apparitions of the night before, but made them, after they had respectfully kissed his hands, sit down all around him. Mukhtar Bey he invited to sit down on his left hand, Vely on his right, and Sulaiman directly opposite.

He addressed himself first of all to Sulaiman.

"Thou art the youngest and boldest," said he. "To-morrow thou must go to sea and take three ships with thee. These ships thou must take to Sicily, load them there with sulphur, and return without losing an instant."

"Oh, my father!" replied Sulaiman, "the tempest is now abroad upon the sea. Who would venture now with a ship upon the billows? All the monsters of the ocean are now running upon the surface seeking whom they may devour, and the phantom ship, with her shadowy rigging and her shadowy crew, pursues her zigzag course across the waters."

Ali Pasha said no more, but turned towards Mukhtar Bey.

"Thou art the most crafty," said he; "go then to the captains of the Suliotes and invite them to a.s.semble with their forces at Janina with all despatch. Spare neither promises nor a.s.surances nor fair winds."

Mukhtar Bey's face turned quite angry, and, wagging his head, still heavy from his overnight debauch, he answered, sullenly: "In the mountains the snow is now thawing; every stream is swollen into a river; naught but a bird can find a place for its foot on the dry ground; how, then, can armies move hither and thither? Wait for a week, till the inundations have subsided. Truly there is no enemy on thy borders. In thy whole realm there is not so much as a rat to nibble at thy walls. What dost thou want now with chariots and armed men?"

Ali now turned to Vely, who was sitting on his right hand. "Go thou over to Misrim," said he, "and purchase for me two thousand horses; a thousand of them shall be meet for war-chargers, and a thousand for drawing guns."

"Oh, my father!" answered Vely, who was the eldest and wisest of Ali's sons, "I will not object to thy command that the simoon has now begun in Misrim, before whose burning, suffocating breath every living creature is forced to fly. I reck little of that, but the horses, thy precious horses, will perish. And, moreover, I would ask of thee one question. Wherefore dost thou get together a host, and horses and guns, without cause, and with no danger threatening thee? Will not all these warlike preparations excite the rage of the Padishah against thee, and so thy preparing against an imagined peril will saddle thee with a real war?"

Ali Pasha laughed aloud--a very unusual habit with him.

"Well," said he, "it is for me to prove to you, I suppose, that you are all wrong in your calculations. Dine with me and be merry. After dinner you shall see that the sea is not stormy, that the rivers are not in flood, and that the simoon is not suffocating. I have a talisman which will convince you thereof."

So he entertained his sons till late in the evening, and immediately after dinner he whispered to one of the dumb eunuchs, and then he took his sons with him into the red tower, the doors of which were left wide open. He stopped short with them in one of the rooms, the solitary semicircular window of which looked out upon the lake of Acheruz. The window was guarded by an iron grating. Here he sat down with them to smoke his narghily and sip his coffee. The sons would have preferred to mount upon the roof of the tower, where the fresh air and the fine view would have made their siesta perfect; but Ali facetiously observed that in the open air cold and hot winds were just then blowing together at the same time, and he did not want the simoon to make them sweat or the trade-winds to make them shiver.

As they were sipping their coffee there the splashing of oars was audible beneath the tower, and the sons beheld three large, flat-bottomed boats propelled upon the surface of the water, in which sat the damsels of their harems; the boats were rowed by muscular eunuchs.

The faces of the three beys lighted up when they saw the damsels being rowed on the water, and Mukhtar Bey whispered roguishly in Sulaiman's ear, "Shall we make the old man also one of our party?"

Ali overheard the whisper, and replied, with a smile, "Truly your damsels are most beauteous"--here he stroked his white beard from end to end--"I am not surprised, therefore, that you like to stay at home here and call the wind hot and cold, though it is nothing but the breath of Allah, and what comes from G.o.d cannot be bad. But your damsels _are_ beautiful, of that there can be no doubt. Now, last night I dreamt a dream. Before me stood the Prophet, and he told me how you had challenged him to say which of your damsels was the sweeter and the more beautiful." (Here the sons regarded each other, full of fear and amazement.) "The Prophet replied," continued Ali, "that it was not meet that he should come to your damsels; they should rather go to him. So I mean to send them to Paradise."

"What doest thou?" cried all three sons, horror-stricken.

The only answer Ali gave was to give a long shrill whistle, at which signal the eunuchs drew out the plugs from holes secretly bored at the bottom of the three boats, leaping at the same time into the water, and leaving the boats in the middle of the lake.

The damsels shrieked with terror as the water began to rush into the boats from all sides. The air was filled with cries of agony.

Mukhtar rushed madly to the door and found it locked. With impotent violence he attempted to burst it open. Sulaiman meanwhile tore away at the iron window-grating with both hands, as if he fancied himself capable of pulling down the whole of the vast building by the sheer strength of his arms. The blue-eyed Albanian girl and the languishing Jewish damsel, with the fear of death in their eyes, looked up at the closed window; the waves had already begun to swallow their beautiful limbs.

Only Vely Bey remained motionless. He, at any rate, had not sinned. He had not angered the Prophet in that orgie of amorous rivalry. He had loved one only, by her only had he been loved, and she, yes, she was perishing there among the others!

The boats sank deeper and deeper; nothing could be heard but the cries of the drowning wretches in all the accents of despair. The two sons saw their damsels dying before their eyes, and were unable to rush out and save them; not even one could be rescued. One more shriek of woe, and then the boats sank. For a few moments the surface of the water was covered with bright gauze veils and shiny turbans and white limbs and dishevelled tresses, and then a few solitary turbans floated on the water.

Sulaiman, sobbing in despair, fell down in a heap close by the window, while Mukhtar fell madly on the door and kicked it with all his might, as if he would drown in the din the cries for help of the perishing damsels. Only Vely Bey looked in bitter silence upon the detestable waves, which within a minute had swallowed three heavens.

Far, far away on the crest of the rising waves a black object appeared to be swimming. What was it? Perhaps one of the damsels. One moment it vanished in the wave-valleys, the next it appeared again on the top of a high ridge of water. What could it be? But farther and farther it receded. Perchance some one had escaped, after all. Greek girls are good swimmers.

And now Ali Pasha arose from his place and said, with a smile, to his sons:

"Methinks that neither the storms of ocean, nor the swollen waters, nor the breath of the simoon will now appear so terrible to you as they did a few hours ago. Depart now with all speed. When you return you will find new harems here, which will make you forget the old ones." And with that he quitted them.

Sulaiman and Mukhtar immediately went their way. Woe to whomsoever shall now give them a pretext for wreaking their vengeance upon him!

But Vely Bey remained there looking out upon the water, and as the evening grew darker he thought upon Ali Pasha. His brothers had loaded their father with curses; he had not said a word. They will soon make their peace with their father--he never will.[8]

[Footnote 8: It is a fact that Ali drowned the harems of his sons in the lake of Acheruz because he feared their excessive influence.--JoKAI.]

CHAPTER IV

GASKHO BEY

The lightning strikes to the earth the man that flies from it. Ill luck is a venomous dog, which runs after him who would escape it.

Ali Pasha's band of Albanians, on arriving at Stambul, began to make inquiries about Gaskho Bey.

He turned out to be a good honest man, by profession an inspector of the ichoglanler of the Seraglio, and a particularly mild and peaceful Mussulman to boot. In temperament he was somewhat phlegmatic, with a leaning to melancholy. A palmist would have told you that the sympathetic line on the palm of his hand was so little prominent as to be scarcely visible, whereas on Tepelenti's palm there was such an abundant concourse of sympathetic lines that they even ran over on to the back of the hand. In those days the Mussulmans frequently diverted themselves with such superst.i.tious games as palmistry.

As to his figure--well, Gaskho Bey might have stood for a perfect model of the Farnese Hercules; his huge shoulders were almost out of proportion with the rest of his body. He could stop the wing of a windmill with one hand; on the birthday of the Sultan's heir he hoisted a six-pound cannon on his shoulders and fired it off, and he could break a hard piastre in two when he was in a good humor.

It could not be said that he had hitherto used this terrible strength to injure any one; on the contrary, he was universally known as the most forbearing of men. The pages of the court, whom he taught to fence, would sometimes in the midst of a lesson, as if by accident, but really from sheer petulance, batter him with their blunt swords till they rang again, and Gaskho Bey would always reprimand them, not for striking him but for striking so clumsily. He had never gone to war, and those who did not send him thither flattered themselves not a little on their humanity, for if it came to a serious tussle there was really no knowing what damage he might not do.

At home he was the gentlest paterfamilias conceivable. You would frequently find him on all-fours, with his little four-year-old son, Sidali, riding on his back, and persecuting his father with all sorts of barbarities. He did nothing all day but teach the pages of the Seraglio games and exercises, and at home he made paper birds for his own little boy, flew kites for and played blind man's buff with him.

Whatever time he could spare from these occupations he would spend in leaning out of the window of the Summer Palace overlooking the Gokk-su, or Sweet Waters, and looking about him a bit with a pipe in his mouth, the stem of which reached to the ground, and if any one had asked him while so engaged what he was looking at, he would a.s.suredly have answered, "Nothing at all."

Now there were always the liveliest goings-on in the Gokk-su Park of an evening. The harems of the beys and pashas who dwelt on its banks took the air there under the plantain-trees, and swung and danced and sang; the wandering Persian jugglers exhibited their hocus-pocus, and the magnificent Janissaries resorted thither to fight with one another. Every Friday afternoon whole bands of these rival warriors flocked thither as if to a common battle-field, and frequently left two or three corpses on the scene of their diversions.

Gaskho Bey appeared to take very little notice of all these things, his chibook curled comfortably on the ground beneath him. At every pull at it large light-blue clouds of smoke rolled upwards from its crater, taking all manner of misty shapes and forms till they disappeared through the window, and Gaskho Bey buried himself in the contemplation of these smoky phantasms as deeply as if he were intent on writing a dissertation on the philosophy of pipe-smoking, oblivious of the fact that below the very house in which he was sitting two Albanian soldiers, in high-peaked, broad-brimmed caps and coa.r.s.e black woollen mantles, who seemed to be taking the greatest possible interest in him and trying to get as near him as they could, had already strolled past for the third time, always separating and going in different directions, somewhat nervously, if they perceived any one coming towards them.

Only now and then a sly expression on Gaskho's face betrayed the fact that he was conscious of something going on behind his back. There little Sidali was amusing himself, while Gaskho Bey was leaning out of the window, by kneeling on the ottoman behind, and tickling the uplifted naked soles of his father's feet with a blunt arrow.

Sometimes the arrow would slip and come plumping down on Gaskho's head, and then the bey would smile indulgently at the naughtiness of his little son.

And now the evening was falling, and the crowd beneath the plantain-trees grew thinner. The two Albanians, side by side, again came towards Gaskho Bey, who now puffed forth such clouds of smoke from his chibook that one could see neither heaven nor earth because of them. But the two Albanian mercenaries could make him out very well, and both of them standing a little way from the window drew forth their pistols, and one of them standing on the right hand and the other on the left, they both aimed at Gaskho Bey's temples at a distance of three paces.

But little Sidali was too quick for them, for he now gave his father such a poke with the arrow that the latter, provoked partly by the pain and partly by the tickling, sharply turned his head, and the same instant there was the report of two shots, and two bullets--one on the right hand and one on the left--buried themselves in the window-sill.

Gaskho's movement was so unexpected that the two Albanian braves, who had imagined that their bullets must of necessity have met each other in the middle of the bey's brain, were so terrified when they saw him still sitting there unwounded, that they stood as if nailed to the earth. Indeed, before they could make up their minds to fly, Gaskho was already outside the window, upon them with a single bound, and immediately seizing the pair of them with his terrible fists, flung them to the ground as if he were playing with a couple of dummies, and without wasting so much as a word upon them, tied them together with their own leather belts, so that on the arrival of the members of his own family, who flew to the spot, alarmed by Sidali's shrieks, the two hired a.s.sa.s.sins lay half dead and all of a heap upon the ground, for Gaskho Bey's grip had wellnigh broken all their bones.

They were conveyed at once to the Kapu-Kiaja, and Gaskho Bey went too.

For a long time he was unable to contain himself, and bellowed out all along the road, "I never heard of anything like it--never!"

"It is an unheard-of case, sir," said he, on arriving at the Kapu-Kiaja's. "To furtively shoot at a peaceful Mussulman when he is smoking his pipe and amusing himself with his children, I never heard the like. If any one wants to kill me, he might at least, I think, let me know beforehand, so that I may perform my ablutions, say my prayers, and take leave of my children. But just when I am smoking my chibook!--I never heard of such a thing!"

It was plain that what he took to heart the most was that they should have tried to shoot him while he was smoking his chibook.

The Kapu-Kiaja, on the other hand, looked upon the case from another point of view. To him it was a matter of comparative indifference whether the deed was attempted before or after prayers. Why, he wanted to know, should these madmen run amuck of their fellow-men at all? He therefore asked the a.s.sa.s.sins who had set them on to murder Gaskho Bey. They, at the very first stroke of the bamboo, made a clean breast of it, and threw the blame on Tepelenti.