The Knight of Malta Part 41

CHAPTER XXVI. POG AND EREBUS

Before continuing this narrative, some explanation is necessary concerning Erebus and Seigneur Pog, the silent and sarcastic man.

In the year 1612, twenty years before the period of which we write, a Frenchman, still young, arrived at Tripoli, with one servant.

The captain of the vessel which brought him to Tripoli had frequent opportunity to observe that his pa.s.senger was very expert in matters pertaining to navigation; he concluded finally that the traveller was an officer on the vessels and galleys of the king, and he was not mistaken.

Seigneur Pog--we continue to give him this a.s.sumed name--was an excellent sailor, as we shall soon see.

Upon his arrival at Tripoli, Pog, after having, according to the custom of Barbary, bought the protection of Bey Ha.s.san, hired a house in the suburbs of the city, not far from the sea. He lived there during one year with his valet in profound solitude.

Some French merchants, established at Tripoli, exhausted their powers of conjecture on the singular taste of their compatriot, who came, as they thought, through mere caprice, to inhabit a wild and deserted coast.

Some attributed this eccentricity to a violent, desperate grief; others saw, if not an unpardonable folly, a monomania, at least, in his strange determination.

These last suppositions did not lack foundation.

At certain periods of the year, Pog, it was said, was subject to such attacks of despair and rage that belated herdsmen, pa.s.sing his solitary house at night, would hear furious and frantic cries.

Three or four years pa.s.sed in this manner.

To distract his mind from gloomy thoughts, and to recuperate his health, Pog made long voyages at sea in a small vessel, but a very smooth and swift-sailing ship which he himself managed with rare skill. His crew consisted of two young slave Moors.

One day, one of the most famous and cruel corsairs of Tripoli, named Kemal-Reis, came near perishing with his galley, which ran aground on the Coast a short distance from the house of Pog.

Pog was just returning from one of his voyages. Recognising the galley of Kemal-Reis, he set sail toward her, and rendered her the most efficient aid.

One of Pog's slaves reported later that he had heard him say, "Man would be too happy if all the wolves and tigers were destroyed." So the saving of Kemal-Reis, dreaded for reason of his cruelties, was due to the bitter misanthropy of Pog. Instead of yielding to an impulse of natural generosity, he desired to preserve to humanity one of its most terrible scourges.

A short time after this event Kemal-Reis visited the isolated house of the Frenchman, and, by degrees, a sort of intimacy was established between the pirate and the misanthrope.

One day the newsmongers of Tripoli learned with astonishment that Pog had embarked on board the galley of Kemal-Reis. They supposed the Frenchman to be very rich, and that he had freighted the Tripolitan vessel in order to take a voyage of pleasure on the coast of Barbary and Egypt and Syria.

To the great astonishment of the public, Kemal-Reis returned a month after his departure, with his galley filled with French slaves, captured from the coasts of Languedoc and Provence, and the rumour was current in Tripoli that the favourable results of this audacious enter-prise were owing to the information and advice given by Pog, who knew better than any one else the weak points on the seash.o.r.e of France. This rumour soon acquired such probability that our consul at Tripoli deemed it his duty to inform against Pog, and to instruct the ministers of Louis XIII. of what had happened.

And here we make the statement, once for all, that in 1610, as well as in 1630 and in 1700, the abduction of inhabitants from our coasts by the regencies of Barbary was almost never considered a cause for a declaration of war against these powers. Our consuls a.s.sisted at the disembarking of the captives and generally acted as mediators for their ransom.

If any measures were taken against Pog, it was because he had, as a Frenchman, a.s.sisted with his own hand in an attack upon his country.

The information given by the consul was in vain, to the great scandal of our compatriots and of Europeans established at Tripoli. Pog made a solemn abjuration, renounced the cross, a.s.sumed the turban, and henceforth remained unmolested.

Kemal-Reis had everywhere proclaimed that the new renegade was one of the best captains whom he had ever known, and that the regency of Barbary could not have made a more useful acquisition. From that moment Pog-Reis equipped a galley and directed his operations solely against French vessels, and especially against the galleys of Malta, commanded by the chevaliers of our nation. Several times he ravaged the coasts of Languedoc and Provence with impunity. It must be said, however, that this fury for plunder and destruction only seized Pog, so to speak, periodically, and by paroxysms, and his rage seemed to reach its height about the end of the month of December.

During that month he showed himself without pity, and it is related, with a shudder of horror, that several times he had the throats of a great number of captives cut,--a frightful and b.l.o.o.d.y holocaust which he offered, doubtless, on some painful and dreaded anniversary. The month of December pa.s.sed, his mind, obscured by a bloodthirsty madness, became more calm, when, returning to Tripoli, and shutting himself up in his solitude, he remained sometimes two or three months without putting to sea. Then, his desperate soul again possessed by some bitter resentment, he equipped his galley anew, and recommenced his atrocious career.

Among the French captives whom he had taken in his first expedition with Kemal-Reis, and whom he had generously abandoned to this corsair, upon the sole condition that liberty should never be restored to them, was one whom he retained,--a child of four or five years carried away from the coast of Languedoc, with an old woman who died during the pa.s.sage.

This child of unparagoned beauty was Erebus.

Pog named him thus, as if he wished by the fatal name to predestinate the unfortunate child to the career to which his evil designs devoted him.

In the intensity of his hatred of the human race, Pog had the infernal desire to destroy the soul of this unfortunate child, by giving him the most pernicious education. He devoted himself to this task with abominable perseverance. As Erebus advanced in years, Pog, without reason for his absurd eccentricities, alternately expended upon the boy a furious aversion and cruelty, and impulsive demonstrations of solicitude,--these last being the only sentiments af kindness he had felt for many years. By degrees, these spasmodic expressions of sympathy discontinued, and Pog soon included Erebus in the common execration with which he pursued mankind, and adhered to his fatal resolution with deadly persistence. Far from leaving the boy's mind uneducated, he took particular pains in developing it. Among the numerous slaves which his avocation of rapine brought in his way, Pog-Reis easily found professors and teachers of all sorts, and what he failed to find he purchased from other corsairs or obtained by other means.

For instance, having learned that a celebrated Spanish painter, named Juan Pelieko, lived in Barcelona, he employed every stratagem to draw him out of the city, and at last succeeded in capturing him and taking him to Tripoli. When this artist had perfected Erebus in his art, Pog had him put in chains, in which servitude he remained until he died.

In his impious and cruel course of experiment, Pog, desiring to force his victim through every degree in the scale of iniquity, from vice to crime, took pleasure in making the child acquainted with all kinds of sin, and in giving him opportunities for culture and accomplishments.

He argued that with ordinary intelligence a man was only an ordinary villain, but that various resources enabled him to achieve the most wonderful results in audacious wickedness. Through this abominable system, the arts, instead of elevating the soul of Erebus, were designed to develop a pa.s.sion for sensual pleasures, and to materialise an otherwise exalted nature.

When the wonders of painting and music do not lift the soul into the infinite realm of the ideal, when one seeks only a melody more or less agreeable to the ear, or a form more or less attractive to the eye, then the arts deprave rather than enn.o.ble mankind.

Surely, Pog must have had a terrible vengeance to wreak upon humanity, his misanthropy must have partaken of the nature of madness, that he could have been guilty of the sacrilegious cruelty of thus degrading a pure young soul!

No scruple or regret made him hesitate. As a tender father would seek to guard his child's mind from dangerous thoughts, and to encourage in his young heart all n.o.ble and generous instincts, Pog, on the other hand, left no means untried to corrupt this unhappy child, and to excite his bad pa.s.sions.

It is with certain moral organisations as with physical natures,--they can be injured and enfeebled, but not completely ruined, so healthy and vigorous is their vital germ. Thus it was with Erebus. By a special providence, the pernicious teachings of Pog had not yet, so to speak, essentially altered the heart of the poor boy.

The singular instinct of contradiction peculiar to youth saved him from many dangers. The very facility with which he could, scarcely adolescent, have yielded to every excess, the odious temptations they dared set before him, sufficed to preserve him from precocious dissipations.

In a word, the natural exaltation of his sentiments urged him to cultivate the sweet, pure, and n.o.ble emotions from which they endeavoured to remove him, but unfortunately the fatal influence of Pog had not been absolutely vain. The ardent character of Erebus retained a sad evidence of the perversity of his education.

If in some moments he had pa.s.sionate yearnings toward good, if he struggled against the detestable counsels of his tutor, the habit of a warlike and adventurous life which he had led from the age of twelve or thirteen years, the impetuosity of his character, and the transport of his pa.s.sions, often dragged him into grievous excess. From his earliest youth, Pog had taken him along in the various incursions into the sh.o.r.e, and the courage and natural daring of Erebus had been valiantly exhibited in several combats.

Instructed by experience and by practice, he had learned with great facility the avocation of sailor and mariner, and the constant aim of Pog had been to inculcate in him a profound and relentless hatred of the chevaliers of Malta, who were represented to him as the murderers of his family, and the secret of this murder Pog had faithfully promised to reveal to him some day.

Yet nothing was more false. Pog had no knowledge of the parents of the child, left an orphan at such an early age, but he wished to perpetuate in his victim his own hatred of the chevaliers of religion.

Erebus renewed his vows, and an ardent desire for vengeance developed in his young soul against the soldiers of Christ, whom he believed to be the murderers of his family. In other respects, Erebus gave less satisfaction to Pog. Cruelty in cold blood was revolting to him, and sometimes he was deeply moved at the sight of human suffering. Pog had often observed that irony and sarcasm were a powerful and infallible arm in combating the natural n.o.bility of the youth's character, and by comparing him to a clergyman, or a tonsured Christian, or accusing him of weakness and cowardice, he often provoked the unhappy boy to culpable acts.

The scene in the rocks of Ollioules, where Erebus saw Reine for the first time, is a striking proof of that constant struggle between his natural inclinations and the bad pa.s.sions that Pog excited in his heart.

The first impulse of Erebus was to hasten to the rescue of Raimond V.

and to respond with almost filial veneration to the old man's outburst of grat.i.tude,--in fact, to believe himself rewarded for his generous conduct by the satisfaction of his conscience and the grateful looks of the young girl; but a bitter sarcasm from Pog, a coa.r.s.e jest from Trimalcyon, changed these n.o.ble emotions into sensual desire and a profound disdain for the courageous action by which he had just honoured himself.

Yet, in spite of the cynical bantering of the two pirates, the enchanting beauty of Reine made a profound impression upon Erebus.

He had never loved, his heart had never taken part in the coa.r.s.e pleasures which he had sought among the slaves that the hazard of war had thrown into his hands.

Pog and Trimalcyon were not long in perceiving a certain change in the character of Erebus.

Some indiscreet words enlightened Pog as to the powerful influence of this first love upon the young man, and he began to fear the consequences of this pa.s.sion, in elevating the heart of Erebus,--a love which would make the young man blush for the abominable life he was leading, and awaken in him the most generous sentiments. Pog, therefore resolved to kill this love by possession, and proposed to Erebus to abduct Reine by force.

He encountered a lively resistance in the young pirate. Erebus thought the proposed abduction atrocious; he wished to be loved or to make himself loved.

Pog then suggested another plan. He flattered the self-love of Erebus beyond measure, by proving to him that he must have made a profound impression on the heart of the young girl, but that it was necessary, by mysterious means, to preserve and increase the remembrance that she would necessarily hide from the knowledge of her father. Then, when he was sure of being loved, he was to appear, offer to carry her away, and withdraw if she did not accept his proposal.

This plan, which Pog intended to modify at its conclusion, satisfied Erebus. We have seen how it was partly executed at Maison-Forte.