Part 5 (2/2)
With these words he pointed to the empty place which had been left for a fourth person. Rich meats were piled up there on gold and silver plate, and wine sparkled in transparent crystal.
”Come, Muhammad!” exclaimed Mukhtar, addressing the vacant place; ”thou in thy lifetime didst love many a beauteous woman, and in thy Paradise there is enough and to spare of beauty. I summon thee to appear before us. Here is a dispute between us two as to whose damsel is the sweeter and the lovelier. Thou hast seen them dance, thou hast heard them sing; now taste of their kisses!”
With that he beckoned to the two damsels, and they sat down, one on each side of the empty divan, and made as if they were embracing a shape sitting between them, and filled the air with their burning, fragrant kisses.
”Well, let us hear thy verdict, Muhammad!” cried Mukhtar, with drunken bravado; and, taking the crystal goblet from the empty place and raising it in the air, looked around him with a flushed, defiant face, and exclaimed, ”Come! drink of the wine of this goblet her health to whom thou awardest the prize!”
Ali Pasha, shocked and filled with horror at the shamelessly impudent words he heard from his hiding-place, drew a pistol from his girdle and softly raised the trigger.
”Drink, Muhammad!” bellowed Mukhtar, raising the goblet on high, ”drink to the health of the triumphant damsel! Which shall it be, Rebecca or Lizza?”
At that same instant a loud report rang through the room, and the upraised crystal goblet was s.h.i.+vered into a thousand fragments in Mukhtar's hand. Every one leaped from his place in terror. But whichever way they looked there was nothing to be seen. The only persons in the room were the three brothers and the damsels. Only at the spot from whence the shot had proceeded a little round cloud of bluish smoke was visible, which sluggishly dispersed. n.o.body present carried weapons, and there was no door or window there by which any one could have got in.
From the minarets outside the muezzins proclaimed the prayer of dawn: ”La illah il Allah! Muhammad razul Allah!”--”There is no G.o.d but G.o.d, and Muhammad is His Prophet!”
Ali Pasha did not pursue the fugitives. That day he was praying all the morning. He locked himself up in his inmost apartments, that n.o.body might see what he was doing. He now did what he had not done for seventy years--he wept. For a whole hour his inflexible soul was broken. So that woman whom he had loved better than life itself, she forsooth had given the first signal of approaching misfortune, the first sign of the coming struggle! Let it come! Let her veil be the first banner to lead an army against Janina! Tepelenti would not attempt to stay her in her flight. For one long hour he thought of her, and this hour was an hour of weeping; and then he bethought him of the approaching tempest which the prophetic voice had warned him of, and his heart turned to stone at the thought. Ali Pasha was not the man to cringe before danger; no, he was wont to meet it face to face, and ask of it why it had tarried so long. He used even to send occasionally for the _nimetullahita_ dervish who had been living a long time in the fortress, and question him concerning the future. It must not be supposed, indeed, that Tepelenti ever took advice from anybody; but he would listen to the words of lunatics and soothsayers, and liked to learn from magicians and astrologers, and their sayings were not without influence upon his actions.
The dervish was a decrepit old man. n.o.body knew how old he really was; it was said that only by magic did he keep himself alive at all. Every evening they laid him down on plates of copper and rubbed invigorating balsam into his withered skeleton, and so he lived on from day to day.
Two dumb eunuchs now brought him in to Tepelenti, and, bending his legs beneath him, propped him up in front of the pasha.
”Sikham,” said Ali to the dervish, ”I feel the approach of evil days.
My sword rusted in its sheath in a single night. My buckler, which I covered with gold, has cracked from end to end. A severed head, which hid itself away from me so that I could not find it, came forth to me at night and spoke to me of my death; and in my dreams I see my sons make free with the Prophet. I ask thee not what all these things signify. That I know. Just as surely as in winter-time the hosts of rooks and crows resort to the roofs of the mosques, so surely shall my sworn enemies fall upon me. I am old compared with them, and it is a thing unheard of among the Osmanlis that a man should reach the age of nine and seventy and still be rich and mighty. Let them come! But one thing I would know--who will be the first to attack me? Tell me his name.”
The dervish thereupon caused a wooden board to be placed before him on which meats were wont to be carried; then he put upon it an empty gla.s.s goblet, and across the gla.s.s he laid a thin bamboo cane. Next he wrote upon the wooden board the twenty-nine letters of the Turkish alphabet, and then, thrice prostrating himself to the ground with wide-extended arms, he fixed his eyes steadily upon the centre of the goblet.
In about half an hour the goblet began to tinkle as if some one were rubbing his wet finger along its rim. This tinkling grew stronger and stronger, louder and louder, till at last the goblet moved up and down on the wooden board, and began revolving along with the light cane placed across it, revolving at last so rapidly that it was impossible to discern the cane upon it at all.
Then, quite suddenly, the dervish raised his fingers from the table, and the goblet immediately stopped. The point of the cane stood opposite the letter _ghain_--G.[7]
[Footnote 7: The marvels of our modern table-turning and table-tapping spirits, and all the wonders of this sort, were known to the Arab dervishes long ago.--JoKAI.]
”That signifies the first letter of his name,” said the dervish--”G!”
And then the mysterious operation was repeated, and the magic stick spelled out the name letter by letter: ”G--a--s--k--h--o B--e--y.” At the last letter the goblet stopped short and would move no more.
”I know no man of that name,” said Ali, amazed that he whose name was so world-renowned was to tremble before one whose name he had never heard before.
”Where does the fellow live?” he inquired of the dervish.
The magic jugglery was set going again, and now the dancing goblet spelled out the name, ”Stambul.”
That was enough. Ali beckoned to the eunuchs to take the dervish away again.
Ali thereupon summoned forty Albanian soldiers from the garrison, and gave to each one of them twenty ducats.
”This,” said he, ”is only earnest money. I want a man put to death whose name and dwelling-place I know. His name is Gaskho Bey, and he lives in Stambul. This man's head is worth as many gold pieces as there are miles between him and me. He who brings the head can measure the distance and be paid for it. The first who brings but the report of his death shall receive two hundred ducats; he who slays him, a thousand.”
<script>