Chapter XL: A Love Adventure

The next day passed slowly, and I thought of my love affair--(for a love affair I had determined to consider it)--with some anxiety: the path to Cupid in the East being strewn with more daggers than roses; for a panther in its hungry wrath is a lamb when contrasted to a Turk animated by a fit of jealousy; and that my unknown was the better-half of some dreamy Osmanli I had not the least doubt. I carefully loaded my revolver--placed all my money in my purse, to be ready for any emergency, and buckled on my dirk and claymore, as if I had been about to escalade the Malakoff or make a dash at the Redan, instead of merely meeting a pretty girl. I then set forth to keep my appointment, just as the Yuze Bashi was dropping off into his usual evening doze, and just as the long shadows of the towers and cypresses were falling to the eastward; and the muezzins on the upper galleries of the minarets were watching for the first dip of the sun's flaming disc, to shout the shrill summons to evening prayer.

Had I forgotten Laura?

Alas for the weakness of the human heart! I fear that after I saw my beautiful Oriental I had no memory for aught beyond that epoch in my history--for a time at least.

Though the evening was delightful, few persons were abroad; and after leaving the town, an old, white-bearded Grecian monk, wending his way staff in hand and wallet on back, was the only person I met; as with a beating heart I sought the sequestered ruins of the ancient Christian chapel and hermitage.

Once or twice a fear that I might have been lured here for some deadly purpose, and that her rendezvous was but a wicked snare, flashed upon me.

The scene was beautiful. On one hand lay the cemetery with its grove of tall and solemn cypresses; on the other rose a marble rock surrounded by an old rampart, having ruined towers, from which the cannon of the Greeks had poured their stone-shot upon the fierce Timariots of the Sultan Mohammed the Second, the founder of the new Empire. Amid these old ramparts the antique outline of a gilt dome and the white minar of a little mosque cut the evening sky. At the base of the rock a stream flowed from a ruined arch into a marble basin, over which flourished the beautiful leaves of the acanthus, under the shade of the graceful and delicate olive-tree.

The sun was setting with gorgeous brilliance; the western sky was all a lurid red, as if the whole horizon was in flames, and the shadows of three gigantic Grecian Doric columns of white marble--ascribed to the Genii in the times of old--were thrown far across the landscape. From the shattered cornice and four triglyphs which still surmounted them, some long and pendant creeping plants swung like garlands on the evening wind, that came from the deep and blue Propontis.

The shadows began to deepen; the horizon paled. The birds had ceased to sing; but the little snakes were hissing vigorously under the broad leaves of the acanthus and the dewy lentisuculus--for in ten minutes night would be on.

There was a sound; and my unknown, in her white yashmack and flowing robes, came before me like a graceful spirit, and quite as suddenly. Her hands were placed joyously and confidingly in mine, and her eyes--the loveliest of all those dark and soul-lit oriental eyes that seem to swim in their own lustrous glory--were beaming upon me. I was bewildered--confused--dazzled!

I felt the impossibility of resisting the fascinations of two such loving eyes. The inside of the delicate lids were blackened with kohol, and the ends of her slender fingers were tinged with rosyhenna--yet she spoke with somewhat of a Greek accent.

'Tell me your name, my beautiful one?' I whispered, retaining her soft hands in mine.

'Iola,' was the half-breathed reply.

'Iola--anything more?'

'Mashallah! what more would you require me to say?'

'Do you live in Rodosdchig?'

'Yes--but why do you inquire?'

'Because all that concerns you must be full of tender interest to me.'

'So soon! You have not known me quite five minutes.'

'I have known you four and twenty hours; yet when I gaze into your beautiful eyes, Iola, I seem to have known you for a life-time.'

'You love me then?' she exclaimed, as her large eyes filled with light and merriment.

'Oh, Iola! who could see you without loving you, tenderly and passionately?'

'Inshallah!'

'You are not a Turk?

'Turk--no! I am a Greek,' she answered, in a changed voice, and drooping of the eyelid.

I attempted to remove her yashmack; but she exclaimed,--

'In the name of Allah, not yet--not yet!' and shrinking laughingly back, with pretty coquetry, prevented me from doing so.

After a little flirtation, and permitting me to kiss her hands as often as I pleased, from a few words she let fall, greatly to my alarm, I suspected that she _was_ a married Moselema; but I was now too much involved with her to 'hang fire,' as we say at mess; and too much attracted by her beauty--though I had seen but little of it--to relinquish the chance of enlivening my dull detachment duty by a little love affair--though death, perhaps, should hover near it. The imminent risk we ran enhanced the charm of this new acquaintance. The darkness was deepening, for in these climates there is little twilight; and alarmed by the sombre aspect of the ruins, which were haunted, of course, by a Ghoule, Iola (a charming name!); started from my side, and insisted on retiring.

'Take these three rose-buds,' said I, for flowers are the language of love among the Asiatics; 'three on one stem. Iola--they are emblematic of the three qualities of love.'

'Of love?' she reiterated, in a tremulous whisper.

'Sprightly, secret, and sincere love, as ours shall be. Will you accept of them from me?'

She trembled like one about to do a guilty thing; but took them with a blush and something like a sob of joy; yet this excitable little one would not permit me to kiss her!

'You will wear them for my sake, Iola?'

'There is danger in doing so--yet I will treasure them even when faded, like the jewel of Prince Giamschid; and what is my reward?'

'Your reward?' I faltered, while reddening in turn.

'Yes, for the danger.'

'One dear little kiss--or a thousand if you will let me give them!' I exclaimed, and threw my arm round her.

She drew down the yashmack, and I pressed my lip to hers, again and again.

Until this moment my Oriental had never perhaps known what love was. Risk, life, death, all were forgotten! I remembered only the charm and the opportunity.

'And so in Frankistan, the rose is also an emblem of love?' she whispered, as we walked slowly hand in hand towards the town, the lights of which were sparkling in the distance.

'Yes, Iola.'

'Alas!'

'Why?'

'Because the rose lives but for a day--and if it should be so with love?'

'Why that thought, and why these doubts--my love will live for ever, Iola!'

(_For ever_? Alas! where were a heedless passion and two bright eyes hurrying me?)

'It is indeed delightful to have one's life thus entwined with another (and you will be always in Rodosdchig, I hope?); to have a double existence and double joy, as if we lived in the Rose Garden of Sadi.'

'Ah--but I fear your existence is so entwined already: your husband, Iola?'

She uttered a faint cry of anger, and thus I found my conjectures right.

'My husband!' she exclaimed; 'talk not of him! He bought me as he did his horse, in the common market-place. He never asked me to love him. O that were a condescension too much for a proud Turk! I am a Mohammedan now; but I was a Christian born, and am by blood a Greek, and my dead ancestors, who lie at Smyrna and at Scio, would raise their fleshless hands against me, could they know me as I know myself to-day. My husband bought me from a ruffian, reckless as himself. I was bathed, perfumed, and led to his arms. Bismillah! speak no more of my husband!'

These words removed every vestige of scruple in my heart. A purchased slave! could I ever view her as a wedded wife? But now she drew her feradjee close about her, and fled from my side without a word of to-morrow, or of meeting again; for we had unconsciously approached too near one of the town-gates, where, as she had previously mentioned, a _dumb_ slave awaited her. Here I lost sight of her, having pledged my word of honour neither to follow nor to make inquiries after her.

My heart sank as she left me; and the idea of this delicate and beautiful woman being bought and sold in a market-place, and being now the wedded slave of a sensual Moslem, made me writhe and ponder deeply, as I walked along the dark and muddy streets of Rodosdchig. The town was now sunk in silence, and not a sound was heard, save the occasional howling of wild and wandering dogs--the faithful but 'unclean beasts,' of the ungrateful Koran.

'Love begetteth love,' so my heart was sorely troubled. I could no longer doubt that this beautiful Oriental loved me. Her dark but brilliant eyes were full of it.

Her sighs but half suppressed as she had hung upon my shoulder; her cheek alternately pale and flushed, were also full of it.

Her tremulous voice--her conversation and manner--her very silence spoke of it--this deep fount of passion opened up within her ardent heart for the _first_ time, and yet--pardon me for the chilling close to my sentence--she had been some years _married_.

For two evenings I went to the ruins, but she did not come again. I was well nigh my wit's end, and more than once narrowly escaped a stab from a handjiar, or a shot from a pistol, as I rambled about the bazaars and bezestiens, running after every woman whose figure resembled Iola's, and poking my nose closer to their yashmacks than Oriental propriety permits; so close, indeed, that I was once nearly having my heels turned up by the ferashes of a mufti, despite my red coat and claymore.

Restless, thoughtful, anxious and abstracted--haunted by a pair of beautiful eyes that were the object of my waking thoughts in the morning, the last at night, and the source of many a lonely hour of reverie between, I was deeply in love with her before I knew the whole truth, or saw the full danger of our position; and even when cold reason displayed both, I was more charmed than startled by the novelty of this new passion.

And she loved me, the possessor of those beautiful eyes!

Oh, there was something delicious in the thought that this attractive woman, so bright, so brilliant, so happy in spirit--she who unconsciously attracted me to her, as in a better sphere she would have attracted all--even as the sun in his glory is said to absorb the atoms in the air--should love me!

Who was she? Where was she?

Oh, for Aladdin's lamp, or the ring of the Genii!

A thousand dazzling and daring schemes of elopement suggested themselves to me, for Laura's loss and desertion had made me reckless of consequences; but first I had to discover Iola among the closely-veiled hundreds of Kodosdchig; a task about as vain as the proverbial one, of attempting to find a needle in a haystack.