Part 52 (1/2)
The woman fainted in his arms as the Turks entered his prison. Beldi beckoned Kucsuk Pasha to him. A sort of leaden, death-like hue had begun to spread over his face; he could scarce see with whom he was conversing. He laid his swooning wife in the arms of the Pasha, and stammered with barely intelligible words: ”I thank you for your good will. Here is my wife--take her--back to her dungeon!”
The Turks, in speechless astonishment, lifted up the fainting woman, and left the dungeon without plaguing Beldi with any more questions.
Beldi stood stonily there as they went out, with open lips and a dull light in his eyes. When the last Turk had gone, and he saw his wife no longer, his head began to nod and droop down, and suddenly he fell p.r.o.ne upon the floor.
Kortovely, the old hound, began sorrowfully, bitterly, to whine.
At that moment Zulfikar entered the dungeon with the poisoned letter.
He was too late. Paul Beldi had already departed from this world.
When Ladislaus Szekely heard of Beldi's death he gave a magnificent banquet, and when the company was at its merriest Zulfikar came rus.h.i.+ng in.
”Come! out with those hundred ducats!” he whispered in the ear of Master Ladislaus Szekely.
”What do you mean?” cried Szekely in a voice flushed with wine. ”Paul Beldi had a stroke; be content with what you have had already.”
”Thou faithless dog of a giaour!” cried the renegade at the top of his voice so that everyone could hear him, ”is this the way thou dost deceive me? Thou didst bargain with me for the death of Paul Beldi for two hundred ducats, and now thou wouldst beat me down by one half. Thou art a rogue meet for the hangman's hands. Is it thus thou dost treat an honest man? I'll not kill a man for thee another time until thou pay me in advance, thou faithless robber!”
The company laughed aloud at this scene, but Master Ladislaus Szekely seemed very much put out by the joke. ”What are you talking about, you crazy fellow?” said he. ”Who asked you to do anything? I never saw you in my life before!”
”What!” cried Zulfikar. ”I suppose thou wilt deny next that thou didst write this letter to Paul Beldi!” and with that he gave Ladislaus Szekely the poisoned letter. He seized it, broke the seal, brushed away the dust, and ran his eye over it, whereupon he flung it at the feet of Zulfikar, exclaiming: ”I never wrote that.”
Then he beckoned to the servants to seize Zulfikar by the collar and pitch him into the street. But the renegade stood outside in front of the windows and began to curse Szekely before the a.s.sembled crowd for not paying him the price of the poison.
Inside the house the guests laughed more heartily than ever, and at last Szekely himself began to look upon the matter in the light of a joke, and laughed like the rest; but when he returned home to Transylvania he felt a pain in his stomach, and did not know what was the matter. He became deaf, could neither eat nor drink, and his bowels began to rot.
n.o.body could cure him of his terrible malady, till at last he fell in with a German leech, who persuaded him that he could cure him with the dust of genuine diamonds and sapphires. Ladislaus Szekely handed to the charlatan his collection of precious stones. He abstracted the stones from their settings, but ground up common stones instead of them in his medical mortar, and stampeded himself with the real stones, leaving Ladislaus Szekely to die the terrible death by poison which he had intended for Paul Beldi.
Paul Beldi they buried in foreign soil; none visited his grave. Only his faithful dog sat beside it. For eight days it neither ate nor drank. On the ninth day it died on the deserted grave of its master.
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE FADING OF FLOWERS.
And now let us see what became of Aranka and Feriz.
At last they were beneath one roof together--this roof was a little better than the roof of a tomb, but not much, for it was the roof of a dungeon. They could only see each other through a narrow little window, but even this did them good. They were able to press each other's hands through the iron bars, console each other, and talk of their coming joys and boundless happiness. The walls of the prison were so narrow, so damp, the narrow opening scarce admitted the light of day; but when the youth began to talk of his native land, Damascus, rich in roses, of palm-trees waving in the breeze, of warm sunny skies, where the housetops were planted with flowers, and the evergreens give a shade against the ever-burning sun, at such times the girl forgot her dungeon and fancied she was among the rose-groves of Damascus, and when the youth spoke of the future she forgot the rose-groves of Damascus and fancied she was in heaven.
Days and days pa.s.sed since the departure of Dame Beldi, and there were no news of her. Every day the spirits of the girl declined, every evening she parted more and more sadly with Feriz, and every morning he found it more and more difficult to comfort her. And now with great consternation the youth began to perceive that the girl was very pale, the colour of life began to fade from her round, rosy cheeks, and there was something new in the brightness of her eyes--it was no earthly light there which made him tremble as he gazed upon her. The youth durst not ask her: ”What is the matter?” But the girl said to him:
”Oh, Feriz! I am dying here; I shall never see your smiling skies.”
”I would rather see the sky black than thee dead.”
”The sky will smile again, but I never shall. I feel something within me which makes my heart's blood flow languidly, and at night I see my dead kinsfolk, and walk with them in unknown regions which I never saw before, and which appear before me so vividly that I could describe every house and every bush by itself.”