Beatrice Boville and Other Stories Part 34

"Call a dog Hervey, and I shall love him," said Johnson, so dear was his friend to him:--"call a dog Johnny, and I shall kick him," so abominable grew that word in the eternal Turkish jabber! Tell me, O prettiest, softest-voiced, most beguiling, feminine aeothen, in as romantic periods as you will, of bird-like feluccas darting over the Bosphorus, of curled caques gliding through fragrant water-weeds; of Arabian Nights reproduced, when up through the darkness peals the roll of the drums calling the Faithful to prayers; of the nights of Ramadan, with the starry cl.u.s.ters of light gleaming all down Stamboul, and flas.h.i.+ng, firefly-like, through the dark citron groves;--tell me of it as you will, I don't care; you may think me a Goth, _ce m'est bien egal_, and _you_ were not in cavalry quarters at Pera. I wasn't exacting; I did not mind having ants in my jam, nor centipedes in my boots, nor a s.h.i.+rt in six months, nor bacon for a luxury that strongly resembled an old file rusted by sea-water, nor any little trifle of that sort up in the front; all that is in the fortune of war: but I confess that Pera put me fairly out of patience, specially when a certain trusty friend of mine, who has no earthly fault, that I wot of, except that of perpetually looking at life through a Claude gla.s.s (which is the most aggravating opticism to a dispa.s.sionate and unblinded mind that the world holds), _would_ poetize upon it, or at least on the East in general, which came pretty much to the same thing.

The sun poured down on me till (conscience, probably) I remembered the scriptural threat to the wicked, "their brains shall boil in their skulls like pots;"--Sir Galahad, as I will call him, would murmur to himself, with his cheroot in his teeth, Manfred's _salut_ to the sun, looking as lovingly at it as any eagle. Mosquitoes reduced me to the very borders of madness,--Sir Galahad would placidly remark, how Buckland would revel here in all those gorgeous beetles. A Greek told crackers till I had to double-thong him like a puppy,--Sir Galahad would shout to me to let the fellow alone, he looked so deuced picturesque, he must have him for a study. I made myself wretched in a ticklish caque, the size of a c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.l, where, when one was going full harness to the Great Effendi's, it was a moral impossibility to be doubled without one's sash swinging into the water, one's sword sticking over the side, and the liveliest sensation of cramp pervading one's body,--Sir Galahad, blandly indifferent, would discourse, with superb Ruskin obscurity, of "tone," and "coloring," and "harmonized light," while he looked down the Golden Horn, for he was a little Art-mad, and painted so well that if he had been a professional, the hanging committee would have shut him out to a certainty.

Now he was a good fellow, a _beau sabreur_, who had fetched some superb back strokes in the battery at Balaclava, who could send a line spinning, and land his horse in a gentleman riders' race, and pot the big game, and lead the first flight over Northamptons.h.i.+re doubles at home, as well as a man wants to do; but I put it to any dispa.s.sionate person, whether this persistent poetism of his, flying in the face of facts and of fleas, was not enough to make anybody swear in that mosquito-purgatorio of Pera?

Sir Galahad was a capital fellow, and the men would have gone after him to the death; the fair, frank, handsome face, a little womanish perhaps, was very pleasant to look at, and he got the Victoria not long ago for a deed that would suit Arthur's Table; but in Pera, I avow, he made me swear hard, and if he would just have set his heel on his Claude gla.s.s, cursed the Turks, and growled refres.h.i.+ngly, I should have loved him better. He was philosophic and he was poetic; and the combination of temperaments lifted him in a mortifying alt.i.tude above ordinary humanity, that was baked, broiled, grumbling, savage, bitten, fleeced, and holding its own against miserable rats, Greeks, and Bono Johnnies, with an Aristides thieving its last s.h.i.+rt, and a Pisistratus getting drunk at its case-bottle! That sublime serenity of his in Pera ended in making me unholy and ungenerous; if he would but have sworn once at the confounded country, I should have borne it, but he never did, and I longed to see him out of temper, I pined and thirsted to get him disenchanted. "_Tout vient a point, a qui sait attendre_," they say; a motto, by the way, that might be written over the Horse Guards for the comfort of gloomy souls, when, in the words of the Psalmist, "Promotion cometh neither from the south, nor from the east, nor from the west"--by which lament one might conclude David of Israel to have been a sufferer by the Purchase-system!

"Delicious!" said Sir Galahad, sending a whiff of Turkish tobacco into the air one morning after exercise, when he and I, having ridden out a good many miles along the Sweet Waters, turned the horses loose, bought some grapes and figs of an old Turk, dispossessed him of his bit of cocoa-matting, and flung ourselves under a plane-tree. And the fellow looked round him through his race-gla.s.s at the cypress woods, the mosques and minarets, the almond thickets, the "soft creamy distance,"

as he called it in his _argot d'atelier_, and the Greek fishermen near, drawing up a net full of silvery prismatic fishes, with a relish absolutely exasperating. Exasperating--when the sun was broiling one's brain through the linen, and there wasn't a drop of Ba.s.s or soda and B to be got for love or money, and one thought thirstily of days at home in England, with the birds whirring up from the stubble in the cool morning, and the cold punch uncorked for luncheon, under the home woods fringing the open.

"One wants Hunt to catch that bit of color," murmured Sir Galahad, luxuriously eying a mutilated Janissary's tomb covered with scarlet creepers.

"Hunt be hanged!" said I (meaning no disrespect to that eminent Pre-Raphaelite, whose "Light of the World" I took at first sight to be a policeman going his night rounds, and come out in his s.h.i.+rt by mistake; by the way, it is a droll idea to symbolize the "light of the world" by a watchman with a dark lantern, _lux in tenebras_ with a vengeance!).

"Give me the sweet shady side of Pall Mall, and the devil may take the Sweet Waters. What's the Feast of Bairam beside the Derby-day, or your confounded coloring beside a well-done cutlet? What's lemonade by Brighton Tipper, and a veiled bundle by a pretty blonde, and an eternity of Stamboul by an hour of Piccadilly?"

Sir Galahad smiled superior, and s.h.i.+ed a date at me.

"Goth! can't you be content to feed like the Patriarchs and live an idyl?"

"No! I'd rather feed like a Parisian and live an idler! Eat grapes if you choose; I agree with Brillat-Savarin, and don't like my wine in pills."

"My good fellow, you're all prose."

"And you're all poetry. You're as bad as that pretty little commissariat girl who lisped me to death last night at the Emba.s.sy with plat.i.tudes of bosh about the 'poetry of marriage.'"

"The deuce!" said Sir Galahad, with a whistle, "that must be like most other poetry nowadays--uncommon dull prose, sliced up in uneven lengths!

Didn't you tell her so?"

"Couldn't; I should have pulled the string for a shower-bath of sentiment! When a woman's bolted on romance you only make the pace worse if you gall her with the curb of common sense. When romance is in, reason's out,--excuse the personality!"

He didn't hear me; he was up like a retriever who scents a wild duck or a water-rat among the sedges, for sweeping near us with soft gliding motion, as pretty as a toy and as graceful as a swan, came a caque, with the wife of a Pacha of at least a hundred tails in it, to judge by the costliness of her exquisite attire. Now, women were not rare, but then they were always veiled, which is like giving a man a nugget he mustn't take out of the quartz, a case of champagne he mustn't undo, a cover-side he is never to beat, a trout stream in which he must never fling a fly; and Sir Galahad, whose loves were not, I admit, quite so saintly as Arthur's code exacted, lost his head in a second as the caque drifted past us, and, raising herself on her cus.h.i.+ons, the Leilah Duda, or Salya within it, glanced toward the myrtle screen that half hid us, with the divinest antelope eyes in the world, and letting the silver gauze folds of her veil float half aside, showed us the beautiful warm bloom, the proud lips, and the chestnut tresses braided with pearls and threaded with gold, of your genuine Circa.s.sian beauty. Shade of Don Juan! what a face it was!

A yataghan might have been at his throat, a bowstring at his neck, eunuchs might have slaughtered, and pachas have impaled him, Galahad would have seen more of that loveliness: headlong he plunged down the slope, crus.h.i.+ng through the almond thickets and scattering the green tree-frogs right and left; the caque was just rounding past as he reached the water's edge, and the beauty's veil was drawn in terror of her guard. But as the little c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.l, pretty and ticklish as a nautilus, was moored to a broad flight of marble stairs, the Circa.s.sian turned her head towards the place where the Unbeliever stood in the sunlight--her eyes were left her, and with them women speak in a universal tongue. Then the green lattice gate shut, the white impenetrable walls hid her from sight, and Sir Galahad stood looking down the Sweet Waters in a sort of beatific vision, in love for the 1360th time in his life. And certainly he had never been in love with better reason; for is there anything on earth so divine as your antelope-eyed and gold-haired Circa.s.sian?

"I shall be inside those walls or know the reason why," said he, whom two gazelle eyes had fired and captured, there by the side of the sunny Sweet Waters, where the lazy air was full of syringa and rose odors, and there was no sound but the indolent beating of the tired oars on the ripples.

"Which reason you will rapidly find," I suggested, "in a knock on the head from the Faithful!"

"Well! a very picturesque way of coming to grief; to go off the scene in the sick-wards, from raki and fruit, would be commonplace and humiliating, but to die in a serail, stabbed through and through by green-eyed jealousy, would be piquant and refres.h.i.+ng to the last degree; do you really think there's a chance of it?" said Galahad, rather anxiously--the eager wistful anxiety of a man who, athirst for the forest, hears of the rumored slot of an outlying deer--while he shouted the Greek fishermen to him, and learned after sore travail through a slough of mixed Italian, Turkish, and Albanian, that the white palace, with its green lattice and its hanging gardens, belonged to a rich merchant of Constantinople, and that this veiled angel was the favorite of his harem, Leilah Derran, a recent purchase in Circa.s.sia, and the queen of the Anderun.

"The old rascal!" swore Galahad, in his wrath, which was not, however, I think, caused by any particular Christian disgust at polygamy. "A fat old sinner, I'll be bound, who sits on his divan puffing his chibouque and stuffing his sweetmeats, as yellow as Beppo, and as round as a ball.

Bah! what pearls before swine! It's enough to make a saint swear. Those heavenly eyes!..." And Galahad went into a somewhat earthly reverie, colored with a thirsty jealousy of the purchaser and the possessor of this Circa.s.sian gazelle, as he rode reluctantly back towards Pera.

The Circa.s.sian was in his head, and did not get out again. He let himself be bewitched by that lovely face which had flashed on him for a second, and began to feel himself as aggrieved by that innocent and unoffending Turkish lord of hers, as if the unlucky gentleman had stolen his own property! The antelope eyes had looked softly and hauntingly sad, moreover: I demonstrated to him that it was nothing more than the way that the eyelashes drooped, but n.o.body in love (very few people out of it) have any taste for logic; he was simply disgusted with my realism, and saw an instant vision for himself of this loveliest of slaves, captive in a bazaar and sold into the splendid bondage of the harem as into an inevitable fate, mournful in her royalty as a nightingale in a cage stifled with roses, and as little able to escape as the bird. A vision which intoxicated and enraptured Sir Galahad, who, in the teeth of every abomination of Pera, had been content to see only what he wished to see, and had maintained that the execrable East, to make it the East of Hafiz and all the poets, only wanted--available Haidees!

"Hang it! I think it's nothing _but_ Hades," said an Aide, overhearing that statement one night, as we stumbled out of a half-cafe, half-gambling-booth pandemonium into the crooked, narrow, pitch-dark street, where dogs were snarling over offal, jackals screaming, Turkish bands shrieking, cannon booming out the hour of prayer, women yelling alarms of fire, a Zouave was spitting a Greek by way of practice, and an Irishman had just potted a Dalmatian, in as brawling, rowing, pestiferous, unodorous an earthly Gehenna as men ever succeeded in making.

Sir Galahad was the least vain of mortals; nevertheless, being as 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 b.a.l.l.s we managed to get up in Pera, at the Emba.s.sy 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 Circa.s.sian. 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 compa.s.s.

Day after day he rode down to the same place on the Sweet Waters on the chance of the caque's pa.s.sing; and, sure enough, the caque did pa.s.s 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 l.u.s.trous 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 pa.s.sages," repeating themselves every time that Leilah Derran's caque 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 pa.s.sion; 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 Circa.s.sian 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 pa.s.sionate 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 impa.s.sioned 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, blus.h.i.+ng like a sea-sh.e.l.l 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 Circa.s.sian, to whose service she was sworn. She told him by sc.r.a.ps 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 compa.s.s her destruction. Further meeting with her infidel lover she p.r.o.nounced impossible, unless he would see her consigned to the Bosphorus; an ice avalanche of intelligence, which, falling on the tropical Eden of his pa.s.sion, 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 circ.u.mstances 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 Circa.s.sian'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 Circa.s.sian 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 Ba.s.s was limited, and there were no Dailies, and one thought even lovingly and regretfully of the old "beastly sh.e.l.ls," 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 Emba.s.sy 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 Circa.s.sian, 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 Circa.s.sian 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 grat.i.tude 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 caques, 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 caque, 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 Circa.s.sian.

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 s.h.i.+ning 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 eyeb.a.l.l.s 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 wis.h.i.+ng 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 enc.u.mbered by the clinging embrace of his stolen Circa.s.sian. 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 friends.h.i.+p made the friends.h.i.+ps 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!