The King Of The Mountains Part 19

Four brigands rose out of the earth! they caught me by the collar, saying: "Here thou art, a.s.sa.s.sin! Come! we will take thee back! the King will be happy! Vasile will be avenged!"

It appeared, that without knowing it, I had drowned my friend, Vasile.

At that time, Monsieur, I had never killed a man; Vasile was my first. I have fought others since, to defend myself and to save my life; but Vasile is the only one who has caused me any remorse, although his end was, probably, the result of a very innocent imprudence. You know that it is only the first step! No murderer, discovered by the police, surrounded with soldiers and led to the scene of his crime, hung his head more humbly than I. I dared not raise my eyes to the good people who had arrested me; I did not feel equal to encountering the eyes of these reprobates; I trembled; I presented a guilty appearance; I knew that I must appear before my judge, and be placed before my victim. How could I confront the King's frown, after what I had done? How could I see, without dying of shame, the inanimate body of the unfortunate Vasile? My knees shook; I would have fallen but for the kicks I received from those following me.

I crossed the deserted camp, the King's cabinet, occupied by some of the wounded, and I descended, or, rather, I fell to the bottom of the staircase to my chamber. The waters had receded, leaving traces of mud everywhere. A small pool of water still remained where I had raised the dam. The bandits, the King, and the monk, stood in a circle, about a dark and muddy object, the sight of which made my hair stand on end: it was Vasile! Heaven preserve you, Monsieur, from the sight of a corpse of your own making! The water and the mud, rushing over him, had deposited on him a hideous layer. Have you ever seen a great fly which had been caught, three or four days before, in a large spider-web? The artisan of the web, not being able to rid himself of his visitor, had enveloped him in a tangle of gray threads, and changed him to an unformed and unrecognizable ma.s.s. Such was Vasile a few hours after he had dined with me. I found him ten feet from the path where I had bidden him farewell.

I do not know whether the brigands had laid him there, or whether he had thrown himself there, in his convulsions of agony; I am inclined to believe, however, that death had come to him gently. Full of wine as I had left him, he must have succ.u.mbed, without a struggle, to some cerebral congestion.

A menacing murmur, which was a bad augury, greeted my arrival.

Hadgi-Stavros, with pale and contracted brow, walked up to me, seized me by the left wrist, and dragged me so violently that he dislocated my arm. He threw me into the middle of the circle with such force, that I almost fell on my victim; I instantly recoiled.

"Look!" he cried in thundering tones, "look at what you have done!

rejoice in your work; gaze upon your crime! Wretch! but where would you have stopped? Who would have said, the day I received you here, that I had opened my door to an a.s.sa.s.sin?"

I stammered some excuses; I tried to show the judge that I was guilty only of imprudence. I warmly accused myself of having intoxicated my guardian in order to escape his watchfulness, and to flee without hindrance from my prison; but I defended myself from the crime of a.s.sa.s.sinating him. Was it my fault if the rise of waters drowned him an hour after my departure? The proof that I had wished him no evil, was that I had not stabbed him when he was dead drunk, and that I had his weapons at hand. They could wash the body and see that he was not wounded.

"At least," the King replied, "confess that your act was very selfish and very culpable! When your life was not threatened, when you were held here for only a small sum, you fled through avarice; you thought only of saving a few ecus, and you did not trouble yourself about this poor unfortunate whom you left to die! You never thought of me! that you were going to deprive me of a valuable officer! And what moment did you choose to betray us? The day on which all kinds of troubles a.s.sailed us; when I had sustained a defeat; when I had lost my best soldiers; when Sophocles was wounded; when the Corfuan was dying; when the little Spiro, upon whom I relied, was killed; when all my men were weary and discouraged; it was then you had the heart to relieve me of Vasile! Have you, then, no humane sentiments? Would it not have been a hundred times better to have paid your ransom honestly, as became a good prisoner, than to have it said you sacrificed a life for 15,000 francs?"

"Eh! Zounds! You have killed people, and for less!"

He replied with dignity: "That is my business; it is not yours. I am a brigand, and you are a doctor. I am Greek, and you are German."

To that, I had nothing to reply. I felt convinced from the trembling of every fiber of my heart, that I had neither been born nor brought up to the profession of killing men. The King, angry at my silence, raised his voice, and said:

"Do you know, miserable young man, who was the excellent man of whose death you are guilty? He was a descendant of those heroic brigands of Souli who fought fierce battles for their religion, and against Ali de Tebelen, Pasha of Janina. For four generations, all of his ancestors have either been hung or decapitated; not one has died in his bed. Only six years ago, his own brother perished in Epirus, having been condemned to death; he had killed a Mohammedan. Devotion and courage are hereditary in that family. Never did Vasile forget his religious duties.

He gave to the churches; he gave to the poor. At Easter, he always lighted a larger taper than any one else. He would have killed himself rather than violate the law of abstinence, or eat meat on a fast-day. He economized in order to retire to a convent on Mount Athos. Did you know it?"

I humbly confessed that I did know it.

"Do you know that he was the most steadfast of all my band? I do not wish to detract from the personal merit of those who are listening to me, but Vasile possessed a blind devotion, a fearless obedience, a true zeal under all circ.u.mstances. No labor was too great for his courage; no occupation too repugnant for his fidelity. He would have killed every one in the kingdom if I had ordered him to do so. He would have torn out his best friend's eye, if I had given him a sign with my little finger.

And you have killed him! Poor Vasile! when I shall have a village to burn, a miser to torture, a woman to cut in pieces, an infant to burn alive, who will replace thee?"

All the brigands, electrified by this funeral oration, cried in one voice. "We! We!" Some held out their arms to the King, others unsheathed their daggers; the most zealous leveled their pistols at me.

Hadgi-Stavros checked their enthusiasm: he stepped in front of me to shield me, and went on with his discourse in these words:

"Be consoled, Vasile, thou shalt not rest without vengeance. If I listened only to my grief, I would offer to thy manes thy murderer's head; but it is worth 15,000 francs, and that thought restrains me.

Thou, thyself, if thou couldst speak, as formerly in our councils, thou wouldst beg me to spare him; thou wouldst refuse so costly a vengeance.

It is not proper, in the circ.u.mstances in which thy death has left us, to do foolish things, and to throw money away."

He stopped a moment; I drew a deep breath.

"But," the King went on, "I will know how to reconcile interest with justice. I will chastise the guilty one without risking the capital. His punishment shall be the most beautiful ornament of funeral obsequies; and, from above, from the homes of the Palikars, to which thy spirit has gone, thou shalt contemplate, with joy, an expiatory punishment, which shall not cost us a sou!"

This peroration aroused the audience. I was the only one not charmed. I puzzled my brain trying to imagine what the King had in store for me, and I felt so little a.s.sured, that my teeth chattered. Surely, I ought to esteem myself happy to save my life, and the preservation of my head seemed no mean advantage; but I knew the inventive imagination of these Greeks of the highway. Hadgi-Stavros, without putting me to death, could inflict such chastis.e.m.e.nt as would make me hate life. The old rascal refused to inform me as to what punishment he had in store for me. He pitied my agony so little, that he compelled me to a.s.sist in the funeral ceremonies of his lieutenant.

The body was stripped of its garments, carried to the brook, and bathed.

Vasile's features were changed but little; his mouth, half-open, still bore the silly smile of the drunkard; his open eyes preserved a stupid look. His limbs had not lost their suppleness; the rigor mortis does not come, for a long time, to those who die by accident.

The King's coffee-bearer and pipe-bearer proceeded to dress the dead.

The King bore the expenses as heir. Vasile had no relatives, and all his property reverted to the King. They clothed the body in a fine shirt, a shirt of beautiful percale, and a vest embroidered with silver. They covered his wet locks with a bonnet which was nearly new. They put leggins of red silk on the legs which would never run again. Slippers of Russia leather were slipped on his feet. In all his life, poor Vasile had never been so clean nor so gorgeous. They touched his lips with carmine; they whitened and rouged his face as if he was a young actor about to step on the stage. During the whole operation, the bandit orchestra executed a lugubrious air, which you must have heard in the streets of Athens. I congratulate myself that I did not die in Greece, because the music is abominable, and I never could have consoled myself, if I had been buried to that air.

Four brigands began to dig a grave in the middle of the chamber, upon the place where Mrs. Simons' tent stood, and on the spot where Mary-Ann had slept. Two others ran to the store-house to find wax-tapers, which they distributed. I was given one with all the others. The monk intoned the service for the dead. Hadgi-Stavros made the responses in firm tones which went to the depths of my soul. There was a light breeze, and the wax from my taper fell upon my hand in a burning shower; but that, alas!

was a small thing in comparison with what awaited me. I would have willingly endured that trouble, if the ceremony could never have been finished.

It was finished at last. When the last oration had been delivered, the King solemnly approached the bier on which the body lay, and kissed Vasile's lips. The bandits, one by one, followed his example. I shivered at the thought that my turn was coming. I tried to hide behind two who had already performed their duty, but they saw me and said: "It is your turn! Start then! You certainly owe him that!"

Was this, at last, the expiation which awaited me? A just man would have been satisfied, at least. I swear to you, Monsieur, that it is no child's play to kiss the lips of a corpse, above all, when one can reproach one's self with being the instrument of his death. I walked toward the bier, I looked at the face whose eyes seemed to laugh at my embarra.s.sment. I bent my head, I slightly touched the lips. A humorous brigand applied his hand to the nape of my neck. My mouth struck the cold lips! I felt the icy teeth, and seized with horror, I raised my head, carrying away with me I know not what terror of death, which seizes me at this moment! Women are very fortunate, they have the resource of fainting!

They then lowered the body into the earth, they threw in a handful of flowers, a loaf of bread, an apple, and a little wine. This latter was the thing of which he had the least need. The grave was quickly filled, more quickly than I wished. A brigand observed that they must get two sticks for a cross. Hadgi-Stavros replied: "Be quiet! we will put up milord's sticks." I leave it to you to think whether my heart beat tumultuously. What sticks? What was there in common between sticks and me?

The King made a sign to his pipe-bearer, who ran to the office and came back with two long laurel poles. Hadgi-Stavros took the funeral bier and laid it upon the grave. He pressed it down hard into the freshly turned earth, and he raised it up at one end, while the other lay in the soil, and he smilingly said to me: "It is for you that I am working! Take off your shoes, if you please!"

He must have read in my eyes a question full of agony and terror, for he replied to the demand which I dared not address to him:

"I am not wicked, and I have always detested useless severity. That is why I wish to inflict on you a chastis.e.m.e.nt which will be of use to us, inasmuch as it will dispense with any future watchfulness over you. You have had for several days a craze to escape. I hope, that when you have received twenty blows of the stick upon the soles of your feet, you will no longer need to be watched, and your love for traveling will cease for some time. I know what the punishment is; the Turks treated me to a dose of it in my youth, and I know, by experience, that one does not die of it. One suffers much from it; you will cry out, I warn you of it.

Vasile will hear from the depths of his tomb, and he will be pleased with us."

At this announcement, my first thought was to use my legs while I still had the freedom to do so. But you must believe that my will was very weak, for it was impossible to put one foot before the other.

Hadgi-Stavros raised me from the ground as lightly as we pick up an insect in our path. I felt myself bound down and unshod, before a thought, leaving my brain, had time to act upon any of my members. I knew neither upon what they supported my feet, nor how they kept them from falling at the first stroke of the stick. I saw the two sticks lifted in the air, the one to the right, the other to the left; I closed my eyes and waited. I certainly did not wait the tenth part of a second, and yet, so short a time was sufficient to send a tender thought to my father, a kiss to Mary-Ann, and more than a hundred imprecations to be divided between Mrs. Simons and John Harris.

I did not become unconscious for an instant; it is a weakness which I never possessed, I have told you so. There was, also, nothing to lose.

The first blow was so terrific that I believed that those which followed could amount to little. It took me in the middle of the soles, under that small, elastic arch, just in front of the heel, which supports the body. It was not the foot that hurt me most that time; but I believed that the bones of my poor legs were breaking in pieces. The second blow struck lower, just under the heels; it gave me a shock, profound, violent, which made my whole vertebral column quiver, and filled my brain with a frightful tumult that almost split my cranium. The third was given directly on the toes and produced an acute and stinging sensation, which shot all over my body and made me believe, for an instant, that the stick had hit me on the end of the nose. It was at this moment that the blood flowed for the first time. The blows succeeded each other in the same order and in the same places, at equal intervals. I had enough courage to keep silent during the first two; I cried out at the third; I howled at the fourth; I groaned at the fifth, and those which followed. At the tenth, the flesh itself could suffer no more; I was silent. But the prostration of my physical force diminished, in no wise, the clearness of my perceptions. I could not have raised my eyelids, and yet the lightest sounds reached my ears. I lost no word of what was said around me. It was an observation which I shall remember later, if I practice medicine. Doctors do not hesitate to condemn a sick man, four feet from his bed, without thinking that perhaps the poor devil can hear them. I heard a young brigand say to the King: "He is dead. What good to weary two men without profit to any one?"

Hadgi-Stavros replied: "Fear nothing. I received sixty, one after another, and two days afterward I danced the Romanique."

"How didst thou do that?"

"I used the pomade of the Italian renegade, Ludgi-Bey--Where were we?

How many blows?"

"Seventeen."

"Three more, my children; and lay on the last ones hard."

The stick had done its work well. The last blows fell upon a b.l.o.o.d.y but insentient ma.s.s of flesh. Pain had nearly paralyzed me!

They raised me from the stretcher; they unbound the cords; they swathed my feet with compresses dipped in fresh water, and, as I had the thirst of the wounded, they gave me a large cup of wine. Anger returned with my strength. I do not know whether you have ever been bastinadoed, but I know nothing more humiliating than physical chastis.e.m.e.nt. In order to become the sovereign of the whole world, I would not, for an instant, be the slave of a vile stick. Born in the nineteenth century, understanding the use of steam and electricity, possessing a good share of the secrets of nature, knowing thoroughly all that science has invented for the well-being and security of man, knowing also how to cure fevers, how to prevent taking small-pox, and then, not to be able to defend one's self against a blow from a stick. It is a little too much, surely! If I had been a soldier and had submitted to corporal punishment, I should certainly have killed my chiefs!

When I felt myself seated on the slimy ground, my feet paralyzed with pain, my hand useless; when I saw around me the men who had beaten me, the ones who had struck me and those who had seen me punished; anger, shame, a feeling of outraged dignity, of justice violated, of intelligence brutalized, swept through my enfeebled body in a wave of hate, of revolt, and of vengeance. I forgot everything, prudence, interest, discretion, the future, and I gave free vent to the thoughts which stifled me; a torrent of abuse poured from my lips, while an overflow of bile mounted to my eyes. Surely, I am no orator, and my solitary studies have given me no exercise in the use of words, but indignation, which has made some poets, lent me, for a quarter of an hour, the savage eloquence of those prisoners who rendered up their souls with insults and who breathed their last sighs in the face of the Roman conquerors. Everything which can outrage a man in his pride, in his affections, and in his dearest sentiments I said to the King of the Mountains. I put him in the rank with unclean animals, and I denied him even the name of man. I insulted him through his mother, his wife, his daughter, and all of his posterity. I would like to repeat to you, verbatim, all that I made him listen to, but words are wanting to-day, as I am not angry. I invented terms which are not found in the dictionary, but which were understood, however, for the audience of outcasts howled under my words like a pack of hounds under the lash of whippers-in. But although I kept watch of the old Palikar, eagerly scanning the muscles of his face, and searching for the slightest trace of a frown, I could discern not the slightest sign of emotion.

Hadgi-Stavros' face was like that of a marble statue. He replied to all insults with a contemptuous silence. His att.i.tude exasperated me to madness. I was certainly insane for a moment. A red cloud like blood pa.s.sed before my eyes. I rose suddenly on my wounded feet. I saw a pistol thrust in the waist-band of one of the brigands, I pulled it out, I aimed it at the King, I drew the trigger, and fell back murmuring, "I am avenged!"

It was the King himself who raised me. I looked at him with an astonishment as great as if I had seen him walking out of h.e.l.l. He seemed not at all moved, and smiled as tranquilly as an immortal. And moreover, Monsieur, I had not missed him. My ball had touched his forehead, a little above the left eyebrow; a trace of blood testified to it. Possibly the pistol was badly loaded, or the powder poor, or it may be, that the ball had glanced across the bone, but whatever it was, my bullet had made only an abrasion.

The invulnerable monster seated me carefully on the ground, leaned toward me, pulled my ear and said: "Why do you attempt the impossible, young man? I warned you that I had a head that was bullet-proof, and you know that I never lie. Were you not told that Ibrahim had seven Egyptians shoot at me and that he was unsuccessful? I hope that you do not pretend to be more powerful than seven Egyptians? But do you know that you have a nimble hand for a Northern man? Peste! if my mother, of whom you spoke lightly a few moments ago, had not endowed me with strength, I would now be a dead man. Another, in my place, would have died without having time to say, 'Thank you!' As for me, such things rejuvenate me. It recalls my best days. At your age, I exposed my life four times a day, and I only digested the better for it. Come, I will pardon you your hasty action. But as all my subjects are not proof against bullets, and that you may commit no new imprudence, I shall apply to your hands the same treatment as your feet received. Nothing prevents us from punishing you immediately; I will wait, however, until to-morrow, in the interests of your health. You see the stick is a blunt weapon which kills no one; you have yourself proved that one bastinadoed man is worth two. To-morrow's ceremony will occupy you. Prisoners do not know how to pa.s.s the time. It was idleness which gave you bad counsels.

Rest easy, moreover; as soon as your ransom arrives, I will cure your wounds. I still have some of Ludgi-Bey's balm. There will be no signs of them at the end of two days, and you can dance at the ball at the Palace, without telling your partners that they are leaning on the arm of a cavalier who has been beaten."

I am not a Greek, and the insults wounded me as grievously as the blows.

I shook my fist in the old rascal's face, and cried out with all my strength: