The Captain of the Janizaries Part 26

This feeling was followed by a chagrin, which showed itself in the deep color mounting his haughty face. Then rage ensued, and he stamped upon the ground as if crushing some helpless thing beneath his feet, and muttered to himself:

"If not I, no man shall have her and live. Can it be that Albanian Constantine? Who is that vagrant? that menial? that h.e.l.l-headed hireling who follows her? Angels and toads do not brood together; and he is of no kin to her."

CHAPTER x.x.xIII.

Through a narrow street, lighted by the lanterns which hung before the doors of the few wine shops that were still open--for the hour was late--a man, wrapped in a hooded cloak, went stumbling over the dogs that were asleep in the middle of the way, and not unfrequently over the watchmen lying upon the mats before the closed entrances to the bazaars they were guarding. He entered one wine shop after another, muttering an oath of disappointment as he withdrew from each. At length he turned into an alley, which seemed like a mere crevice in the compact ma.s.s of houses, and threaded his way between windowless and doorless walls, until the pa.s.sage widened into a small and filthy court. At the extreme rear of this a lamp was just flickering with its exhausted oil, and only sufficed to show him a doorway. Rapping gently he called in Italian:

"Pedro! Giovan!"

The door was opened by a short, stout man with bullet head, who spread himself across the entrance and peered into the face of the late comer. Two villainous looking men stared through the lurid glare of a rush light on a low table, at which, squatted on the ground, they were playing dice. A purse or pouch of gold thread, decorated with some device wrought with pearls and various precious stones, lay beside them.

"Ah, the gentleman from Genoa!" exclaimed one. "You are quite welcome to our castle. Ricardo, where is the stool? Well! if you can't find it, lie down, and let the gentleman sit on your head."

"You appear to be in luck, Pedro, if I am to judge from the purse yonder," said the visitor. "Your lady has taken you back to her affection, and given you this as a love token, I suppose."

"I'll tell you the secrets of my lady's chamber, Signior, when you tell me those of yours," replied Pedro.

"Perhaps," interposed Giovan, "the gentleman would have us help him in to the secrets of his lady's chamber. How now, Signior Alexis, have you trapped a new beauty so soon in Byzantium?"

"Let's throw for this before we talk," interposed Ricardo, holding the purse in one hand and a dice cup in the other. "One business at a time."

The three men threw. The stake fell to Ricardo, who thrust the rich prize into his dirty pocket, where a third of the contents of the purse had previously been deposited.

"May I see the little bag?" asked Alexis.

"No!" was the surly response.

"You see, Signior," interposed Giovan, in an attempt to mitigate the rudeness of his comrade, "You see it was a trust from--from a dead man, who was afraid to take it with him to purgatory, lest the fire might tarnish it. So we keep it for him until he comes back. And we are still in the trust business, Signior! Our credit is without a stain. You know it was just a suspicion of our integrity--we would not have our honor even suspected by the police--that led us to leave Genoa. Will you trust us with any little business?"

"Do you know the Albanian officer in the emperor's guards?" asked Alexis.

"No, and want to know nothing about officers of any sort," growled Giovan.

"Ay!" interposed Ricardo, "the red-topped fellow, with a body like Giovan's, and the neck the right height to come under my sword arm?"

making the gesture of cutting off one's head with a sabre. "Does he disturb you?"

"Yes!"

"It will be worth a hundred ducats," said Giovan.

"A hundred and fifty," said Ricardo; and, lowering his voice to the others, added, "I need fifty, and I would take only my even share."

"You shall have it," said Alexis, counting out the gold. "If you deceive me, you know that one word from me here in Byzantium will cost you your heads. Good night!"

When he had gone, Giovan said in low voice:

"I say, Pedro, we will divide a thousand ducats out of this."

"How?" exclaimed the two.

"The young officer is brother to the lady at the grand chamberlain's.

She will pay heavy ransom if we deliver him instead of--" drawing his finger across his throat. "Of course we should have to leave Byzantium. But Ricardo and I have concluded that it were best to be gone anyhow; for the people here are so poor that our business does not thrive. This purse once held ducats, but when we took it, it had only silver bits. We pocket-bankers need better const.i.tuency."

"Yes, we had better get out of this," said Pedro. "General Giustiniani has come to live in Galata.[69] He got his weasel-eyes on me yesterday as I was doing a little business by the old wharf. That man knows too much, he does. But he'll never get me on the galley benches again. I'd crawl like a mud turtle on the bottom of Marmora before I'd go under the hatches a second time. I like freedom and fresh air, I do--"

blowing out of his face the thick smoke emitted by the wick floating on the surface of a saucer of oil.

"Right!" said Giovan. "Let's get out of this if we can do so with enough gold to pay our royal travelling expenses. But if we spare the neck of that fellow who is in Signior Alexis' way, where will we keep him that Alexis will not know it?"

"Our mansion here is hardly commodious enough for so distinguished and lively a guest as the young officer will be likely to be," said Ricardo, sc.r.a.ping the spiders' webs from the low ceiling of the room with his cap.

"Try the old water vault," suggested Pedro.

"Good!" said Ricardo, "when the Albanian goes to the walls, as he does every day, he will pa.s.s near to the opening."

FOOTNOTE:

[69] A suburb of Constantinople, occupied by the Genoese.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV.

The day following the three ruffians lingered about the site of the old Hippodrome--through the open s.p.a.ce of which the citizens pa.s.sed in going from one part of the city to another. Toward evening a stone was thrown against the bronze-sheathed column, or walled pyramid, which still held some of the great plates that in the palmy days of Byzantium made it one of the wonders of the city. It was the signal for alertness. A short-bodied, long-armed, red-haired man, dressed in the white kilt and gold-embroidered jacket of a citizen, sauntered leisurely through the Hippodrome. He measured with his eye the s.p.a.ce which once blazed with the splendor of fashion, when, beneath the imperial eye of a Justinian or Theodosius, the horses of Araby and Thracia ran, and the factions of "the Blues" and "the Greens" shouted, and the whirling wheels of the golden chariots sprinkled the dust upon the mult.i.tudes.

The man paused to gaze at the bronze column of three intertwined serpents, with silver-crested heads, which was believed to have been brought from the temple at Delphi to his new city by the great Constantine. He stood reverently before the tall Egyptian obelisk of rose-granite, whose light red glowed with deeper hue in the eastern flush of the twilight sky; puzzled over its vertical lines of hieroglyphs which thirty centuries had not obliterated, and studied the figures on its marble base, representing the machines used by the engineers of Theodosius in hoisting the great monolith to its place, a thousand years ago. Broken statues--the spoil of conquered cities in generations of Greek prowess which shamed the supineness of the present, stood or lay about the grand pillar of porphyry, which was once surmounted by the statue of Apollo wrought by Phidias.

"Shame for such neglect!" muttered the man. "A people that cannot keep its art from cracking to pieces with age, cannot long keep the old empire of the Caesars."

The narrow street to the north of the Hippodrome square shut out the remnant of daylight as the man turned into it. His attention was drawn by the groaning of some poor outcast crouching in the dark shadow of an angle in the wall. As he stooped to inspect this object a stunning blow fell upon his head. Two stalwart men instantly pinioned his arms.

They rolled his helpless body a few yards, and carried or slid it down a flight of steps into a dark cavern, whose sides echoed their footfalls and whispers, as if it were the place of the last Judgment where the secrets of life are all to be proclaimed. Reaching the bottom, one of the men produced a light. The glare seemed to excavate a hollow sphere out of the thick darkness, but revealed nothing, except the spectral flash of the bats flitting around the heads of the intruders, and the damp earthen floor upon which the men had thrown their victim. At length great forms rose through the gloom, like the trunks of a forest. The water of a subterranean lake gleamed from near their feet, but its smooth black sheen was soon lost in the darkness.

A small boat, or raft, was near, into which the man was lifted; one of the ruffians sitting on his feet, the other by his head, while the third propelled the craft by pushing against great granite pillars between which they pa.s.sed. After going some distance the boat ground its bottom against a ma.s.s of fallen masonry and dirt, which made a sort of island, perhaps twenty feet across. Here they landed, and dragged their victim.

"What would you have with me?" said the prostrate man.

"It is enough that we have you," said Pedro, in broken Greek. "We want nothing more; not even to keep your miserable carca.s.s, since we have already got our pay for burying it. I'll be your father-confessor and shrive you. If you like the Latin--Absolvo te! and away go your sins as easily as I can strip this gold-laced jacket off your back. Or if you prefer the Greek--By the horns of Nebuchadnezzar, I've forgotten the priestly words! But I'll shrive you all the same without the holy mumble. And if you want to pray a bit yourself, why fold your feet in front of your nose and kneel on your back."

"Why do you kill me?" said the man. "I am nothing to you."

"Nothing to us, but something to him who has hired us. As honest men we must do what we were paid to do."

"Unless I can pay you more," said the man, instantly taking a hopeful hint.

"Do you wear the belt of Phranza, that you think you can pay so much?"