well-beloved by the "maidens and young widows," for his fair handsome
face, as Harold the Gold-haired, he would have been more than mortal if
he had not been tolerably confident of "killing," and luxuriously
practised in that pleasant pastime. That if he could once get the
antelope eyes to look at him, they would look lovingly before long, he
was in comfortable security; but how to get into a presence, which it
was death for an unbeliever and a male creature to approach, was a
knottier question, and the difficulty absorbed him. There were several
rather telling Englishwomen out there, with whom he had flirted _faute
de mieux_, at the cavalry balls we managed to get up in Pera, at the
Embassy costume-ball, on board yacht-decks in the harbor, and in picnics
to Therapia or the Monastery. But they became as flavorless as
twice-told tales, and twice-warmed entremets, beside the new piquance,
the delicious loveliness, the divine difficulty of this captive
Circassian. That he had no more earthly business to covet her than he
had to covet the unlucky Turkish trader's lumps of lapis-lazuli and
agate, never occurred to him; the stones didn't tempt him, you see, but
the beauty did. That those rich, soft, unrivalled Eastern charms,
"merely born to bloom and drop," should be caged from the world and only
rejoice the eyes of a fat old opium-soddened Stamboul merchant, seemed a
downright reversal of all the laws of nature, a tampering with the
balance of just apportionment that clamored for redress; but, like most
other crying injustice, the remedy was hard to compass.
Day after day he rode down to the same place on the Sweet Waters on the
chance of the caique's passing; and, sure enough, the caique did pass
nine times out of ten, and, when opportunity served for such a hideous
Oriental crime not to be too perilous, the silver gauze floated aside
unveiling a face as fair as the morning, or, when that was impossible,
the eyes turned on him shyly and sadly in their lustrous appeal, as
though mutely bewailing such cruel captivity. Those eyes said as plainly
as language could speak that the lovely Favorite plaintively resisted
her bondage, and thought the Frank with his long fair beard, and his six
feet of height, little short of an angel of light, though he might be an
infidel.
Given--hot languid days, nothing to do, sultry air heavy with orange and
rose odors, and those "silent passages," repeating themselves every time
that Leilah Derran's caique glided past the myrtle screen, where her
Giaour lay _perdu_, the result is conjectural: though they had never
spoken a word, they had both fallen in love. Voiceless _amourettes_ have
their advantages:--when a woman speaks, how often she snaps her spell!
For instance, when the lips are divine but the utterance is slangy, when
the mouth is adorably rosebud but what it says is most horrible horsy!
A tender pity, too, gave its spur to his passion; he saw that, all Queen
of the Serail though she might be, this fettered gazelle was not happy
in her rose-chains, and to Galahad, who had a wonderful twist of the
knight-errant and lived decidedly some eight centuries too late, no
wiliest temptation would have been so fatal as this.
He swore to get inside those white inexorable walls, and he kept his
oath: one morning the latticed door stood ajar, with the pomegranates
and the citrons nodding through the opening; he flung prudence to the
winds and peril to the devil, and entered the forbidden ground where it
was death for any man, save the fat Omar himself, to be found. The
fountains were falling into marble basins, the sun was tempered by the
screen of leaves, the lories and humming-birds were flying among the
trumpet-flowers, altogether a most poetic and pleasant place for an
erratic adventure; more so still when, as he went farther, he saw
reclining alone by the mosaic edge of a fountain his lovely Circassian
unveiled. With a cry of terror she sprang to her feet, graceful as a
startled antelope, and casting the silver shroud about her head, would
have fled; but the scream was not loud enough to give the alarm--perhaps
she attuned it so--and flight he prevented. Such Turkish as he had he
poured out in passionate eloquence, his love declaration only made the
more piquant by the knowledge that in a trice the gardens might swarm
with the Mussulman's guards and a scimitar smite his head into the
fountain. But the danger he disdained, _la belle_ Leilah remembered;
rebuke him she did not, nor yet call her eunuchs to rid her of this
terrible Giaour, but the antelope eyes filled with piteous tears and she
prayed him begone--if he were seen here, in the gardens of the women, it
were his death, it were hers! Her terror at the infidel was outweighed
by her fear for his peril; how handsome he was with his blue eyes and
fair locks, after the bald, black-browed, yellow, obese little Omar!
"Let me see again the face that is the light of my soul and I will obey
thee; thou shalt do with thy slave as thou wilt!" whispered Galahad in
the most impassioned and poetical Turkish he could muster, thinking the
style of Hafiz understood better here than the style of Belgravia, while
the almond-eyed Leilah trembled like a netted bird under his look and
his touch, conscious, pretty creature, that were it once known that a
Giaour had looked on her, poison in her coffee, or a sullen plunge by
night into the Bosphorus, would expiate the insult to the honor of Omar,
a master whom she piteously hated. She let her veil float aside,
nevertheless, blushing like a sea-shell under the shame of an
unbeliever's gaze--a genuine blush that is banished from Europe--his
eyes rested on the lovely youth of her face, his cheek brushed the
Loose train of her amber dropping hair,
his lips met her own; then, with a startled stifled cry, his coy gazelle
sprang away, lost in the aisles of the roses, and Galahad quitted the
dangerous precincts, in safety so far, not quite clear whether he had
been drinking or dreaming, and of conviction that Pera had changed into
Paradise. For he was in love with two things at once, a romance and a
woman; and an anchorite would fairly have lost his head after the divine
dawn of beauty in Leilah Derran.
The morrow, of course, found him at the same place, at the same hour,
hoping for a similar fortune, but the lattice door was shut, and defied
all force; he was just about to try scaling the high slippery walls by
the fibres of a clinging fig-tree, when a negress, the sole living thing
in sight, beckoned him, a hideous Abyssinian enough for a messenger of
Eros; a grinning good-natured black, who had been bought in the same
bazaar and of the same owner as the lovely Circassian, to whose service
she was sworn. She told him by scraps of Turkish, and signs, that Leilah
had bidden her watch for and warn him, that it were as much as both
their lives were worth for him to be seen again in the women's gardens,
or anywhere near her presence; that the merchant Omar was a monster of
jealousy, and that the rest of the harem, jealous of her supremacy and
of the unusual liberty her ascendancy procured her, would love nothing
so well as to compass her destruction. Further meeting with her infidel
lover she pronounced impossible, unless he would see her consigned to
the Bosphorus; an ice avalanche of intelligence, which, falling on the
tropical Eden of his passion, had the effect, as it was probably meant
that it should have, of drowning the lingering remnant of prudence and
sanity that had remained to him after his lips had once touched the
exquisite Eastern's.
Under the circumstances the negress was his sole hope and chance; he
pressed her into his service and made her Mercury and mediatrix in one.
She took his messages, sent in the only alphabet the pretty gazelle
could read, i. e. flowers, plotted against her owner with true Eastern
finesse, wrought on the Circassian's tenderness for the Giaour, and her
terrified hatred of her grim lord Omar, and threw herself into the
intrigue with the avidity of all womanhood, be it black or be it white,
for anything on the face of the earth that has the charm of being
forbidden. The affair was admirably _en train_, and Galahad was
profoundly happy; he was deliciously in love,--a pleasant spice as
difficult to find in its full flavor as it is to bag a sand grouse;--and
had an adventure to amuse him that might very likely cost him his head,
and might fairly claim to rise into the poetic. The only reward he
received (or ever got, for that matter) for the Balaclava brush, where
he cut down three gunners, and had a ball put in his hip, had been a
cavil raised by a critic, not there, of doubt whether he had ever
ridden inside the lines at all; but his Circassian would have
recompensed him at once for a score of years of Chersonnesus
campaigning, and unprofessional chroniclers: he was perfectly happy, and
his soft, careless, _couleur de rose_ enjoyment of the paradise was
aggravating to behold,--when one was in Pera, and the heat broiled alive
every mortal thing that wasn't a negro, and Bass was limited, and there
were no Dailies, and one thought even lovingly and regretfully of the
old "beastly shells," that had at least this merit, that they scattered
bores when they burst!
"Old fellow!--want something to do?" he asked me one day. I nodded,
being silent and savage from having had to dance attendance on the
Sultan at an Embassy reception. Peace to his _manes_ now! but I know I
wished him heartily in Eblis at that time.
"Come with me to-night then, if you don't mind a probability of being
potted by a True Believer," went on Leilah Derran's lover, going into
some golden water Soyer had sent me.
"For the big game? Like it of all things; but you know I'm tied by the
leg here."
Galahad laughed. "Oh, I only want you an hour or two. I've got six days'
leave for the pigs and the deer: but the hills won't see much of me, I'm
going to make a raid in the rose-gardens. It may be hot work, so I
thought you would like it."
Of course I did, and asked the programme which Sir Galahad, as lucidly
as a man utterly in love can tell anything, unfolded to me. Fortune
favored him; it was the night of the Feast of Bairam, when all the world
of Turkey lights its lamps and turns out; he had got leave under pretext
of a shooting trip into Roumelia, but the game he was intent on was the
captive Circassian, who in the confusion and _tintamarre_ attendant on
Bairam, was to escape to him by the rose-gardens, and being carried off
as swiftly as Syrian stallions could take them, would be borne away by
her infidel lover on board a yacht, belonging to a man whom he knew who
was cruising in the Bosphorus, which would steam them away down the
Dardanelles before the Turk had a chance of getting in chase. Nothing
could be better planned for everybody but the luckless Mussulman who was
to be robbed,--and the whole thing had a fine flavor about it of dash
and difficulty, of piquance and poetry, of Mediaeval errantry and
Oriental coloring, that put Leilah's Giaour most deliciously in his
element, setting apart the treasure that he would carry off in that
rich, soft, antelope-eyed, bright-haired Circassian loveliness which
made all the dreams in Lalla Rookh and Don Juan look pale.
So his raid was planned, and I agreed to go with him to cover the rear
in case of pursuit, which was likely enough to be hot and sharp, for the
Moslems, for all their apathy, lack the philosophic gratitude which your
British husband usually exhibits towards his despoiler--but then, to be
sure, an Englishman can't make a fresh purchase unless he's first robbed
of the old! Night came; and the nights, I am forced to admit, have a
witching charm of their own in the East, that the West never knows. The
Commander of the Faithful went to prayer, with the roar of cannon and
the roll of drums pealing down the Golden Horn, and along the
cypress-clad valleys. The mosques and minarets, starred and circled with
a myriad of lamps, gleamed through the dark foliage, and were mirrored
in the silvery sheet of the waves. The caiques, as they swept along,
left tracks of light in the phosphor-lit waves, and while the chant of
the Muezzin rang through the air, the children of Allah, from one end of
the Bosphorus to the other, held festival on the most holy eve of
Bairam. A splendid night for a lyric of Swinburne's!--a superb scene for
an amorous adventure! And as we mingled amongst the crowds of the
Faithful, swarming with their painted lanterns, their wild music, their
gorgeous colors, their booming guns, in street and caique, on land and
sea, Sir Galahad, though an infidel, had certainly entered the Seventh
Heaven. He had never been more intensely in love in his life; and, if
the fates should decree that the dogs of Islam should slay him at her
feet, in the sanctuary of her rose-paradise, he was ready to say in his
pet poet's words, with the last breath of his lips,
It was ordained to be so, sweet and best
Comes now beneath thine eyes and on thy breast.
Still kiss me! Care not for the cowards! Care
Only to put aside thy beauteous hair
My blood will hurt!
In the night of the feast all the world was astir, Franks and Moslems,
believers and unbelievers, and we made our way through the press
unwatched to where Omar's house was illumined, the cressets, and
wreaths, and stars of light sparkling through the black foliage. Under
the walls, hidden by a group of planes, we fastened the stallions in
readiness, and Galahad, at the latticed door, gave the signal word,
"Kef," low whispered. The door unclosed, and, true to her tryst, in the
silvery Bosphorus moonlight, crouching in terror and shame, was the
veiled and trembling Circassian.
But not in peace was her capture decreed to be made; scarce had the door
flown open, when the shrill yell of "Allah hu! Allah hu!" rung through
the air; and from the dark aisles of the gardens poured Mussulmans,
slaves, and eunuchs, the Turk with a shoal at his back, giving the alarm
with hideous bellowings, while their drawn scimitars flashed in the
white starlight, and their cries filled the air with their din. "Make
off, while I hold the gate!" I shouted to Galahad, who, catching Leilah
Derran in his arms before the Moslems could be nigh us, held her close
with one hand, while with his right he levelled his revolver, as I did,
and backed--facing the Turks. At sight of the lean shining barrels, the
Moslems paused in their rush for a second--only a second; the next,
shouting to Allah till the minarets gave back the echo, they sprang at
us, their curled naked yataghans whirling above their heads, their jetty
eyeballs flaming like tigers' on the spring. Our days looked
numbered;--I gave them the contents of one barrel, and in the moment's
check we gained the outside of the gardens; the swarm rushed after us,
their shots flying wide, and whistling with a shrill hiss harmlessly
past; we reserved further fire, not wishing to kill, if we could manage
to cut our way through without bloodshed, and backed to the plane-trees,
where the horses were waiting. There was a moment's blind but breathless
struggle, swift and indistinct to remembrance, as a flash of lightning;
the Turks swarmed around us, while we beat them off, and hurled them
asunder somehow. Omar sprang like a rattlesnake on to his spoiler, his
yataghan circling viciously in the air, to crash down upon Galahad's
skull, who was encumbered by the clinging embrace of his stolen
Circassian. I straightened my left arm with a remnant of "science" that
savored more of old Cambridge than of Crimean custom; the Moslem went
down like an ox, and keeping the yelling pack at bay with the levelled
death-dealer, I threw myself into saddle just as Galahad flung himself
on his stallion, and the Syrians, fleet as Arab breeding could make
them, tore down the beach in the rich Eastern night, while the balls
shrieked through the air past our ears, and the shouts of our laughter,
with the salute of a ringing English cheer in victorious farewell,
answered the howls of our distant and baffled pursuers.
Sir Galahad's Raid was a triumph!
On we went through the hot fragrant air, through the silvery moonlight,
through the deep shade of cypress and pine woods; on we went through
gorge, and ravine, and defile, through stretches of sweet wild
lavender, of shining sands, of trampled rose-fields, with the
phosphor-lit sea gleaming beside us, and the Islam Feast of Bairam left
far distant behind. On and on--while the glorious night itself was
elixir, and one shouted to the starry silence Robert Browning's grand
challenge--
How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart, and the soul, and the senses, for ever in joy!
That ride was superb!
We never drew rein till some ten miles farther on, where we saw against
the clear skies the dark outline of the yacht with a blue light burning
at her mast-head, the signal selected; then Galahad checked the good
Syrian, who had proved pace as fleet as the "wild pigeon blue" is ever
vouched in the desert, and bent over his prize who, through that long
ride, had been held close to his breast, with her arms wound about him,
and the beautiful veiled face bowed on his heart. The moon was bright as
day, and he stooped his head to uplift the envious veil, and see the
radiant beauty that never again would be shrouded, and to meet once more
the lips which his own had touched before but in one single caress; he
bowed his head, and I thought that my disinterested ungrudging
friendship made the friendships of antiquity look small; when----an oath
that chilled my blood rang through the night and over the seas,
startling the echoes from rock and hill; the veiled captive reeled from
the saddle with a wailing scream, hurled to earth by the impetus with
which his arms loosed her from him; and away into the night, without
word or sign, plunging headlong down the dark defile, riding as men may
ride from a field that reeks with death, far out of sight into the heart
of the black dank woods, his Syrian bore Sir Galahad. And lo! in the
white moonlight, against the luminous sea, slowly there rose before me,
unveiled and confessed--THE NEGRESS!
* * * * *
The history of that night we never learnt. Whether Leilah Derran herself
played the cruel trick on her Giaour lover (but this _he_ always
scouted), whether Omar himself was a man of grim humor, whether the
Abyssinian, having betrayed her mistress, was used as a decoy-bird,
dressed like the Circassian, to lure the infidels into the rose-gardens
where the Faithful intended to dispatch them hastily to Eblis--no one
knows. We could never find out. The negress escaped me before my
surprise let me stay her, and the fray made the place too hot for close
investigation. Nor do I know where Galahad tore in that wild night-ride,
whose spur was the first maddened pain and rage of shame that his life
had tasted. I never heard where he spent the six days of his absence;
but when he joined us again, six weeks in the sick-wards would not have
altered him more; all he said to me was one piteous phrase--"For God's
sake don't tell the fellows!"--and I never did; I liked him well enough
not to make chaff of him. Unholily had I thirsted to see him
disenchanted, ungenerously had I pined to see him goaded out of temper:
I had my wish, and I don't think I enjoyed it. I saw him at last in
passion that I had much to do to tame down from a deadly vengeance that
would have rung through the Allied Armies; and I saw him loathe the
East, curse romance, burn all the poets with Hafiz at their head, and
shun a woman's beauty like the pestilence. To this day I believe that
the image of Leilah Derran haunts his memory, and that a certain remorse
consumes him for his lost gazelle, whom _he_ always thought paid penalty
for their love under the silent waves of the Bosphorus, with those lost
ones whose souls, according to the faith of Stamboul, flit ceaselessly
above its waters, in the guise of its white-winged unrestful sea-gulls.
He is far enough away just now--in which of the death-pots where we are
simmering and fritting away in little wretched driblets men and money
that would have sufficed Caesar or Scipio to conquer an Empire, matters
not to his story. When he reads this, he will remember the bitterest
night of his life, and the fiasco that ended SIR GALAHAD'S RAID!
'REDEEMED.'
"REDEEMED."
AN EPISODE WITH THE CONFEDERATE HORSE.
Bertie Winton had got the Gold Vase.
The Sovereign, one of the best horses that ever had a dash of the
Godolphin blood in him, had led the first flight over the
ridge-and-furrow, cleared the fences, trying as the shire-thorn could
make them, been lifted over the stiffest doubles and croppers, passed
the turning-flags, and been landed at the straight run-in with the stay
and pace for which his breed was famous, enrapturing the fancy, who had
piled capfuls of money on him, and getting the Soldiers' Blue Riband
from the Guards, who had stood crackers on little Benyon's mount--Ben,
who is as pretty as a girl, with his _petites mains blanches_, riding
like any professional.
Now, I take it--and I suppose there are none who will disagree with
me--that there are few things pleasanter in this life than to stand, in
the crisp winter's morning, winner of the Grand Military, having got the
Gold Vase for the old corps against the best mounts in the Service.
Life must look worth having to you, when you have come over those black,
barren pastures and rugged ploughed lands, where the field floundered
helplessly in grief, with Brixworth brook yawning gaunt and wide beneath
you, and the fresh cold north wind blowing full in your teeth, and have
ridden in at the distance alone, while the air is rent by the echoing
shouts of the surging crowd, and the best riding-men are left "nowhere"
behind. Life must look pleasant to you, if it had been black as thunder
the night before. Nevertheless, where Bertie Winton sat, having brought
the Sovereign in, winner of the G. M., with that superb bay's head a
little drooped, and his flanks steaming, but scarce a hair turned, while
the men who had won pots of money on him crowded round in hot
congratulation, and he drank down some Curacoa punch out of a
pocket-pistol, with his habitual soft, low, languid laugh, he had that
in his thoughts which took the flavor out of the Curacoa, and made the
sunny, cheery winter's day look very dull and gray to him. For Bertie,
sitting there while the cheers reeled round him like mad, with a
singularly handsome, reckless face, long tawny moustaches, tired blue
eyes, and a splendid length and strength of limb, knew that this was the
last day of the old times for him, and that he had sailed terribly near
the wind of--dishonor.
He had been brought to _envisager_ his position a little of late, and
had seen that it was very bad indeed--as bad as it could be. He had run
through all his own fortune from his mother, a good one enough, and owed
almost as much again in bills and one way and another. He had lost
heavily on the turf, gamed deeply, travelled with the most expensive
adventuresses of their day, startled town with all its worst crim.
cons.; had every vice under heaven, save that he drank not at all; and
now, having shot a Russian prince at Baden the August before, about
Lillah Lis, had received on the night just passed, from the Horse
Guards, a hint, which was a command, that his absence was requested from
her Majesty's Service--a mandate which, politely though inexorably
couched, would have taken a more forcible and public form but for the
respect in which his father, old Lion Winton, as he was called, was held
by the Army and the authorities. And Bertie, who for five-and-thirty
years had never thought at all, except on things that pleasured him,
and such bagatelles as _barriere_ duels abroad, delicately-spiced
intrigues, bills easily renewed, the _cru_ of wines, and the siege of
women, found himself pulled up with a rush, and face to face with
nothing less than ruin.
"I'm up a tree, Melcombe," he said to a man of his own corps that day as
he finished a great cheroot before mounting.
"Badly?"
"Well, yes. It'll be smash this time, I suppose."
"Bother! That's hard lines."
"It's rather a bore," he answered, with a little yawn, as he got into
the saddle; and that was all he ever said then or afterwards on the
matter; but he rode the Sovereign superbly over the barren wintry
grass-land, and landed him winner of the Blue Riband for all that,
though Black Care, for the first time in his life, rode behind him and
weighted the race.