AMBITION DISTORTED INTO VICE BY LAW.
On descending a broad flight of stairs from the apartment, the Hebrew
encountered an old man, habited in loose garments of silk and fur, upon
whose withered and wrinkled face life seemed scarcely to struggle against
the advance of death--so haggard, wan, and corpse-like was its aspect.
"Ximen," said the Israelite, "trusty and beloved servant, follow me to
the cavern." He did not tarry for an answer, but continued his way with
rapid strides through various courts and alleys, till he came at length
into a narrow, dark, and damp gallery, that seemed cut from the living
rock. At its entrance was a strong grate, which gave way to the Hebrew's
touch upon the spring, though the united strength of a hundred men could
not have moved it from its hinge. Taking up a brazen lamp that burnt in
a niche within it, the Hebrew paused impatiently till the feeble steps of
the old man reached the spot; and then, reclosing the grate, pursued his
winding way for a considerable distance, till he stopped suddenly by a
part of the rock which seemed in no respect different from the rest: and
so artfully contrived and concealed was the door which he now opened, and
so suddenly did it yield to his hand, that it appeared literally the
effect of enchantment, when the rock yawned, and discovered a circular
cavern, lighted with brazen lamps, and spread with hangings and cushions
of thick furs. Upon rude and seemingly natural pillars of rock, various
antique and rusty arms were suspended; in large niches were deposited
scrolls, clasped and bound with iron; and a profusion of strange and
uncouth instruments and machines (in which modern science might, perhaps,
discover the tools of chemical invention) gave a magical and ominous
aspect to the wild abode.
The Hebrew cast himself on a couch of furs; and, as the old man entered
and closed the door, "Ximen," said he, "fill out wine--it is a soothing
counsellor, and I need it."
Extracting from one of the recesses of the cavern a flask and goblet,
Ximen offered to his lord a copious draught of the sparkling vintage of
the Vega, which seemed to invigorate and restore him.
"Old man," said he, concluding the potation with a deep-drawn sigh, "fill
to thyself-drink till thy veins feel young."
Ximen obeyed the mandate but imperfectly; the wine just touched his lips,
and the goblet was put aside.
"Ximen," resumed the Israelite, "how many of our race have been butchered
by the avarice of the Moorish kings since first thou didst set foot
within the city?"
"Three thousand--the number was completed last winter, by the order of
Jusef the vizier; and their goods and coffers are transformed into shafts
and cimiters against the dogs of Galilee."
"Three thousand--no more! three thousand only! I would the number had
been tripled, for the interest is becoming due!"
"My brother, and my son, and my grandson, are among the number," said the
old man, and his face grew yet more deathlike.
"Their monuments shall be in hecatombs of their tyrants. They shall not,
at least, call the Jews niggards in revenge."
"But pardon me, noble chief of a fallen people; thinkest thou we shall be
less despoiled and trodden under foot by yon haughty and stiff-necked
Nazarenes, than by the Arabian misbelievers?"
"Accursed, in truth, are both," returned the Hebrew; "but the one promise
more fairly than the other. I have seen this Ferdinand, and his proud
queen; they are pledged to accord us rights and immunities we have never
known before in Europe."
"And they will not touch our traffic, our gains, our gold?"
"Out on thee!" cried the fiery Israelite, stamping on the ground. "I
would all the gold of earth were sunk into the everlasting pit! It is
this mean, and miserable, and loathsome leprosy of avarice, that gnaws
away from our whole race the heart, the soul, nay--the very form, of man!
Many a time, when I have seen the lordly features of the descendants of
Solomon and Joshua (features that stamp the nobility of the eastern world
born to mastery and command) sharpened and furrowed by petty cares,--when
I have looked upon the frame of the strong man bowed, like a crawling
reptile, to some huckstering bargainer of silks and unguents,--and heard
the voice, that should be raising the battle-cry, smoothed into fawning
accents of base fear, or yet baser hope,--I have asked myself, if I am
indeed of the blood of Israel! and thanked the great Jehovah that he hath
spared me at least the curse that hath blasted my brotherhood into
usurers and slaves"
Ximen prudently forbore an answer to enthusiasm which he neither shared
nor understood; but, after a brief silence, turned back the stream of the
conversation.
"You resolve, then, upon prosecuting vengeance on the Moors, at
whatsoever hazard of the broken faith of these Nazarenes?"
"Ay, the vapour of human blood hath risen unto heaven, and, collected
into thunder-clouds, hangs over the doomed and guilty city. And now,
Ximen, I have a new cause for hatred to the Moors: the flower that I have
reared and watched, the spoiler hath sought to pluck it from my hearth.
Leila--thou hast guarded her ill, Ximen; and, wert thou not endeared to
me by thy very malice and vices, the rising sun should have seen thy
trunk on the waters of the Darro."
"My lord," replied Ximen, "if thou, the wisest of our people, canst not
guard a maiden from love, how canst thou see crime in the dull eyes and
numbed senses of a miserable old man?"
The Israelite did not answer, nor seem to hear this deprecatory
remonstrance. He appeared rather occupied with his own thoughts; and,
speaking to himself, he muttered, "It must be so: the sacrifice is hard--
the danger great; but here, at least, it is more immediate. It shall be
done. Ximen," he continued, speaking aloud; "dost thou feel assured that
even mine own countrymen, mine own tribe, know me not as one of them?
Were my despised birth and religion published, my limbs would be torn
asunder as an impostor; and all the arts of the Cabala could not save
me."
"Doubt not, great master; none in Granada, save thy faithful Ximen, know
thy secret."
"So let me dream and hope. And now to my work; for this night must be
spent in toil."
The Hebrew drew before him some of the strange instruments we have
described; and took from the recesses in the rock several scrolls.
The old man lay at his feet, ready to obey his behests; but, to all
appearance, rigid and motionless as the dead, whom his blanched hues and
shrivelled form resembled. It was, indeed, as the picture of the
enchanter at his work, and the corpse of some man of old, revived from
the grave to minister to his spells, and execute his commands.
Enough in the preceding conversation has transpired to convince the
reader, that the Hebrew, in whom he has already detected the Almamen of
the Alhambra, was of no character common to his tribe. Of a lineage that
shrouded itself in the darkness of his mysterious people, in their day of
power, and possessed of immense wealth, which threw into poverty the
resources of Gothic princes,--the youth of that remarkable man had been
spent, not in traffic and merchandise but travel and study.
As a child, his home had been in Granada. He had seen his father
butchered by the late king, Muley Abul Hassan, without other crime than
his reputed riches; and his body literally cut open, to search for the
jewels it was supposed he had swallowed. He saw, and, boy as he was he
vowed revenge. A distant kinsman bore the orphan to lands more secure
from persecution; and the art with which the Jews concealed their wealth,
scattering it over various cities, had secured to Almamen the treasures
the tyrant of Granada had failed to grasp.
He had visited the greater part of the world then known; and resided for
many years at the court of the sultan of that hoary Egypt, which still
retained its fame for abstruse science and magic lore. He had not in
vain applied himself to such tempting and wild researches; and had
acquired many of those secrets now perhaps lost for ever to the world.
We do not mean to intimate that he attained to what legend and
superstition impose upon our faith as the art of sorcery. He could
neither command the elements nor pierce the veil of the future-scatter
armies with a word, nor pass from spot to spot by the utterance of a
charmed formula. But men who, for ages, had passed their lives in
attempting all the effects that can astonish and awe the vulgar, could
not but learn some secrets which all the more sober wisdom of modern
times would search ineffectually to solve or to revive. And many of such
arts, acquired mechanically (their invention often the work of a chemical
accident), those who attained to them could not always explain, not
account for the phenomena they created, so that the mightiness of their
own deceptions deceived themselves; and they often believed they were the
masters of the Nature to which they were, in reality, but erratic and
wild disciples. Of such was the student in that grim cavern. He was, in
some measure, the dupe, partly of his own bewildered wisdom, partly of
the fervour of an imagination exceedingly high-wrought and enthusiastic.
His own gorgeous vanity intoxicated him: and, if it be an historical
truth that the kings of the ancient world, blinded by their own power,
had moments in which they believed themselves more than men, it is not
incredible that sages, elevated even above kings, should conceive a
frenzy as weak, or, it may be, as sublime: and imagine that they did not
claim in vain the awful dignity with which the faith of the multitude
invested their faculties and gifts.
But, though the accident of birth, which excluded him from all field for
energy and ambition, had thus directed the powerful mind of Almamen to
contemplation and study, nature had never intended passions so fierce for
the calm, though visionary, pursuits to which he was addicted. Amidst
scrolls and seers, he had pined for action and glory; and, baffled in all
wholesome egress, by the universal exclusion which, in every land, and
from every faith, met the religion he belonged to, the faculties within
him ran riot, producing gigantic but baseless schemes, which, as one
after the other crumbled away, left behind feelings of dark misanthropy
and intense revenge.
Perhaps, had his religion been prosperous and powerful, he might have
been a sceptic; persecution and affliction made him a fanatic. Yet, true
to that prominent characteristic of the old Hebrew race, which made them
look to a Messiah only as a warrior and a prince, and which taught them
to associate all their hopes and schemes with worldly victories and
power, Almamen desired rather to advance, than to obey, his religion.
He cared little for its precepts, he thought little of its doctrines;
but, night and day, he revolved his schemes for its earthly restoration
and triumph.
At that time, the Moors in Spain were far more deadly persecutors of the
Jews than the Christians were. Amidst the Spanish cities on the coast,
that merchant tribe had formed commercial connections with the
Christians, sufficiently beneficial, both to individuals and to
communities, to obtain for them, not only toleration, but something of
personal friendship, wherever men bought and sold in the market-place.
And the gloomy fanaticism which afterwards stained the fame of the great
Ferdinand, and introduced the horrors of the Inquisition, had not yet
made it self more than fitfully visible. But the Moors had treated this
unhappy people with a wholesale and relentless barbarity. At Granada,
under the reign of the fierce father of Boabdil,--"that king with the
tiger heart,"--the Jews had been literally placed without the pale of
humanity; and even under the mild and contemplative Boabdil himself, they
had been plundered without mercy, and, if suspected of secreting their
treasures, massacred without scruple; the wants of the state continued
their unrelenting accusers,--their wealth, their inexpiable crime.
It was in the midst of these barbarities that Almamen, for the first time
since the day when the death-shriek of his agonised father rang in his
ears, suddenly returned to Granada. He saw the unmitigated miseries of
his brethern, and he remembered and repeated his vow. His name changed,
his kindred dead, none remembered, in the mature Almamen, the beardless
child of Issachar, the Jew. He had long, indeed, deemed it advisable to
disguise his faith; and was known, throughout the African kingdoms, but
as the potent santon, or the wise magician.
This fame soon lifted him, in Granada, high in the councils of the court.
Admitted to the intimacy of Muley Hassan, with Boabdil, and the queen
mother, he had conspired against that monarch; and had lived, at least,
to avenge his father upon the royal murderer. He was no less intimate
with Boabdil; but steeled against fellowship or affection for all men out
of the pale of his faith, he saw in the confidence of the king only the
blindness of a victim.
Serpent as he was, he cared not through what mire of treachery and fraud
he trailed his baleful folds, so that, at last, he could spring upon his
prey. Nature had given him sagacity and strength. The curse of
circumstance had humbled, but reconciled him to the dust. He had the
crawl of the reptile,--he had, also, its poison and its fangs.