Part 34 (1/2)
The Turks placed his ghastly head between the feet of the bronze horse, a part of the equestrian statue of Justinian, where it was reverently saluted even by the Moslems, who paused in the rage of the sack to think upon the virtue and courage of the unfortunate monarch.
Captain Ballaban had pressed rapidly through the city to the doors of St. Sophia. The oaken gates flew back under the axes of the Moslems.
Monks and matrons, children and nuns, lords and beggars were crowded together, not knowing whether the grand dome would melt away and a legion of angels descend for their relief, or the vast enclosure would become a pen of indiscriminate slaughter. The motley and helpless misery excited the pity of the captors. Ballaban's voice rang through the arches, proclaiming safely to those who should submit. That he might the better command the scene, he made his way to the chancel in front of the grand altar. It was filled with the nuns, repeating their prayers. Among them was the fair Albanian. Her face was but partly toward him, yet he could never mistake that queenly head. She was addressing the Sisters. Holding aloft the bright shaft of a stiletto, she cried,--
”Let us give ourselves to heaven, but never to the harem!”
Ballaban paused an instant. But that instant seemed to him many minutes. As, under the lightning's flash, the whole moving panorama of the wide landscape seems to stand still, and paints vividly its prominent objects, however scattered, upon the startled eye of the beholders; so his mind marvellously quickened by the excitement, took in at once the long track of his own life. He saw a little child's hand wreathing him with flowers plucked beside a cottage on the Balkans; a lovely captive whose face was lit by the blazing home in a hamlet of Albania; a form of one at Sfetigrade lying still and faint with sickness, but radiant as with the beginning of transfiguration for the spirit life; and the queenly being who was borne in the palanquin through the gate of Phranza. But how changed! How much more glorious now! Earthly beauty had become haloed with the heavenly. He never had conceived of such majesty, such glory of personality, such splendor of character, as were revealed by her att.i.tude, her eye, her voice, her purpose.
”But now,” thought he, ”the descending blade will change this utmost sublimity of being into a little heap of gory dust!”
All this flashed through his mind. In another instant his strong hand had caught the arm of the voluntary sacrifice. The stiletto, falling, caught in the folds of her garments, and then rang upon the marble floor of the chancel. Morsinia uttered a shriek and fell, apparently as lifeless as if the blade had entered her heart.
The Janizary stood astounded. A tide of feeling strange to him poured through his soul. For the first time in his life he felt a horror of war. Not thousands writhing on the battle field could blanch his cheek with pity for their pangs: but that one voice rang through and through him, and rent his heart with sympathetic agony. Her cry had become a cry of his own soul too.
For the first time he realized the dignity of woman's character. This woman was not even wounded. She had fallen beneath the stroke of a thought, a sentiment, a woman's notion of her honor! The women he had known had no such fatal scruples. Other captive beauties soon became accustomed to their new surroundings. Many even offered to buy with their charms an exchange of poverty for the luxuries of the harem of Pashas and wealthy Moslems. Was this a solitary woman's tragedy of virtue? Or was it some peculiar teaching of the Christian's faith that inspired her to such heroism? However it came, the man knew that with her it was a mighty reality; this instinct of virtue; this sanct.i.ty of person.
And this woman was his dream made real! A celestial ideal which he had touched!
The man's brain reeled with the shock of these tenderer and deeper feelings, coming after the wildness of the battle rage. He grasped the altar for support. The blood seemed to have ceased to bound in his veins, the temples to be pulseless; a band to have been drawn tightly about his brain so as to paralyze its action. He felt himself falling.
A deathly sickness spread through his frame. He was sure he had fainted. He thought he must have been unconscious for a while. Yet when he opened his eyes, the soldier near him was in the same att.i.tude of dragging a nun by her wrists as when he last saw him. Time had stood still with his pulses. He shuddered at the cruelty on every side, as the shrieks from the high galleries were answered by those in distant alcoves and from the deep crypt. He watched the groups of old men and children, monks and senators, nuns and courtesans, tied together and dragged away, some for slaughter, some for princely ransom, some for shame.
The building was well emptied when the Sultan entered.
He at once advanced to the altar and proclaimed:
”G.o.d is G.o.d; there is but one G.o.d, and Mahomet is the apostle of G.o.d!”
”But whom have we here, Captain Ballaban?”
”Your Majesty, I am guarding a beautiful captive whom I would not have fall into the hands of the common soldiers; I take it, of high estate,” replied the Janizary, knowing that such an introduction to the royal attention alone could save her from the fate which awaited the unhappy maidens, most of whom were liable to be sold to brutal masters and transported to distant provinces.
The Sultan gazed upon the partly conscious woman, and commanded,----
”Let her be veiled! Seek out a goodly house. Find the Eunuch Tamlich.”
Ballaban shuddered at this command, and was about to reply, when his judgment suggested that he was impotent to dispute the royal will except by endangering the life or the welfare of his captive.
The safest place for her was, after all, with the maidens who were known to be the choice of the Sultan, and thus beyond insult by any except the imperial debauchee.
Mahomet II. gave orders for the immediate transformation of the Christian temple of St. Sophia into a Mosque. In a few hours desolation reigned in those ”Courts of the Lord's House,” which, when first completed, ages ago, drew from the imperial founder, the remark: ”Oh, Solomon! I have surpa.s.sed thee!” and which, though the poverty of later monarchs had allowed it to become sadly impaired, was yet regarded by the Greek Christians as worthy of being the vestibule of heaven.
The command of the Sultan: ”Take away every trace of the idolatry of the infidel!” was obeyed in demolis.h.i.+ng the rarest gems of Christian art to which attached the least symbolism of the now abolished wors.h.i.+p. The arms were chiseled off the marble crosses which stood out in relief from the side walls, and from the bases of the gigantic pillars. The rare mosaics which lined the church as if it were a vast casket--the fitting gift of the princes of the earth to the King of Kings--were plastered or painted over. The altar, that marvellous combination of gold and silver and bronze, conglomerate with a thousand precious stones, was torn away, that the red slab of the Mihrab might point the prayers of the new devotees toward Mecca. The furniture, from that upon the grand altar to the banners and mementoes of a thousand years, the donations of Greek emperors and sovereigns of other lands, was broken or torn into pieces. There remained only the grand proportions of the building--its chief glory--enriched by polished surfaces of marble and porphyry slabs; the superb pillars brought by the reverent cupidity of earlier ages from the ruined temple of Diana at Ephesus, the temple of the Sun at Palmyra, the temple on the Acro-Corinthus, and the mythologic urn from Pergamus, which latter, having been used as a baptismal font by the followers of Jesus, was now devoted to the ablutions of the Moslems.
From St. Sophia the Sultan pa.s.sed to the palace of the Greek Caesars.
”Truly! truly!” said he ”The spider's web is the royal curtain; the owl sounds the watch cry on the towers of Afrasiab,” quoting from the Persian poet Firdusi, as he gazed about the deserted halls. He issued his mandate which should summon architects and decorators, not only from his dominions, but from Christian nations, to adorn the splendid headland with the palatial motley of walls and kiosks which were to const.i.tute his new seraglio.
The considerateness of Ballaban led him to select the house of Phranza as the place to which Morsinia was taken. The n.o.ble site and substantial structure of the mansion of the late chamberlain commended it to the Sultan for the temporary haremlik; and the familiar rooms alleviated, like the faces of mute friends, the wildness of the grief of their only familiar captive.