The Slaves of the Padishah Part 53

By the morning the fever left her. The rising sun was just beginning to shine through the narrow round window and the sick girl begged to be carried out into the open air and the warm morning sunshine. She was no longer able to walk by herself, and they carried her out on to the bastions in an arm-chair.

It was a beautiful autumn morning, a sort of transparent light rested upon the whole region, giving a pale lilac blue to the sunlit scene.

Where the road wound down from the Szekler hills a light cloud of dust was visible in the morning vapour; it seemed to be coming from the direction of Szamosujvar.

"Ah! there is my mother coming!" whispered Aranka, with a smiling face.

The young Turk held his hand before his face and fixed his eagle eyes in that direction; and when for a moment the breeze swept the dust off the road, and a carriage on springs drawn by five horses appeared, he exclaimed with a beating heart:

"Yes, that is indeed the carriage in which they took away thy mother."

Aranka was dumb with joy and surprise; she could not speak a word, she only squeezed Feriz Beg's hands and fixed her tearful eyes upon him with a grateful look.

The carriage seemed to be rapidly approaching. "That is how people hasten who have something joyful to say," thought Feriz, and then he began to fear less boundless joy might injure the life of his darling.

Soon the carriage arrived in front of the fortress and rumbled noisily over the drawbridge. Aranka, supported by the arm of Feriz, descended into the courtyard. They pressed onward to meet the carriage, and the smile upon her pallid face was so melancholy.

The gla.s.s door of the carriage was opened, and who should come out but Kucsuk Pasha.

There was nothing encouraging in his look; he said not a word either to his son or to the girl who clung to him, but the castellan was standing hard by, and he beckoned to him.

"In the carriage," said Kucsuk, "is the prisoner for whom I left my son as an hostage; take her back, and look well after her, for she is very ill."

Dame Beldi lay in the carriage unconscious, motionless.

Aranka, paler than ever and trembling all over, asked:

"Where is my father?"

Kucsuk Pasha would have spoken, but tears came instead of words and ran down his manly face; silently he raised his hand, pointed upwards, and said, in a scarce audible voice: "In Heaven!"

The gentle girl, like a plucked flower, collapsed at these words. Feriz Beg caught her moaning in his arms, she raised her eyes, a long sigh escaped her lips, then her beautiful lips drooped, her beautiful eyes closed, and all was over.

The beloved maiden had gone to her father in Heaven.

CHAPTER XXVII.

THE SWORD OF G.o.d.

For some time past G.o.d's marvels had been multiplied over Transylvania.

No longer were they disquieting rumours which popular agitators invented for the disturbance of the public peace, but extraordinary natural phenomena whose rapid sequence stirred the heart of even the coldest sceptic.

One summer morning at dawn, after a clear night, an unusually thick heavy mist descended upon the earth, which only dispersed in the afternoon, spread over the whole sky in the shape of an endless black cloud, and there remained like a heavy motionless curtain. Not a drop of water fell from it, and at noonday in the houses it was impossible to see anything without a candle.

Towards evening every bird became silent, the flowers closed their calices, the leaves of the trees hung limply down. The people walking about outside began to complain of a stifling cough, and from that time forth the germs of every disease antagonistic to nature were seen in every herb, in every fruit; even the water of the streams was corrupted.

The hot blood of man, the earth itself was infected by a kind of epidemic, so that weeds never seen before sprang up and ruined the richest crops, and the strongest oaks of the forest withered beneath the a.s.sault of grey blight and funguses, and the good black soil of the fruitful arable land was covered with a hideous green mould.

For three whole days the sky did not clear. On the evening of the fourth day the stifling stillness was followed by a frightful hurricane, which tore off the roofs of the houses, wrenched the stars and crosses from the steeples of the churches, swept up the dust from the high-roads, caused such a darkness that it was impossible to see, and bursting open the willow trees, which had just begun to bloom, drove the red pollen before it in clouds, so that when the first big rain-drops began to fall they left behind them blood-red traces on the white walls of the houses. "It is raining blood from Heaven!" was the terrified cry.

Not long afterwards came the cracking thunderbolts flashing and flaming as if they would flog the earth with a thousand fiery whips, while one perpendicular flash of lightning plumped right down into the middle of the town, shaking the earth with its cracking concussion, so that everyone believed the hour of judgment was at hand.

Nevertheless the storm had scattered the clouds, and by eventide the sky had cleared, and lo! before the eyes of the gaping mult.i.tude a gigantic comet stood in the firmament, all the more startling as n.o.body had been aware of its proximity because for three days the sky had been blotted out by clouds.

The nucleus of the comet stood just over the place where the sun had gone down, and the blood-red light of evening was not sufficient to dim the brightness of the lurid star; it appeared as if it had just slain the sun and was now bathing in its blood.

The comet was so long that it seemed to stretch across two-thirds of the firmament, and the end of it bulged out broadly like a Turkish scimitar.

"The sword of G.o.d!" whispered the people with instinctive fear.

For two weeks this phenomenon stood in the sky, rising late one day and early the next. Sometimes it appeared with the bright sun, and in the solar brightness it looked like a huge streak of blue enamel in the sky and spread around it a sort of febrile pallor as if the atmosphere itself were sick: on bright afternoons the sun could be regarded with the naked eye.

The people were in fear and terror at this extraordinary phenomenon, and when the blind ma.s.ses are in an unconscious panic then a storm is close at hand, then they are capable of anything to escape from their fear.

In those days the priests of every faith could give strange testimony of the general consternation which prevailed in Transylvania. The churches were kept open all day long, and the indefatigable curers of souls spoke words of consolation to the a.s.sembled hosts of the faithful. Magyari, the Prince's chaplain, preached four sermons every day in the cathedral, which was so crowded at such times that half the people could not get in at all but remained standing outside the doors.

One evening the church was so filled with faithful worshippers that the very steps were covered with them, and all sorts of Klausenberg burgesses intermingled with travelling Szeklers in a group before the princ.i.p.al door, and after the hymn was finished they clapped to their clasped psalm-books and began to talk to each other while the sermon was going on inside.

"We live in evil times," said an old master-tanner, shaking his big cap.

"We can say a word about that too," interrupted a Szekler, who was up in town about a law-suit, and who seized the opportunity of saying what he knew because he had come from far.

"Then you also have seen the sword of G.o.d?" inquired a young man.

"Not only have we seen it, my little brother, but we have felt it also.

Not a single evening do we lay down to rest without reciting the prayers for the dead and dying, and scarce a night pa.s.ses but what we see the sky a fiery red colour, either on the right hand or to the left."

"What would that be?"

"Some village or town burning to ashes. They say the whole kingdom is full of destroying angels; one never knows whose roof will be fired over his head next."

"G.o.d and all good spirits guard us from it."

"We hear all sorts of evil reports," said a gingerbread baker.

"Yesterday I was talking to a Wallachian woman whose husband was faring on the Jaras-water on a raft taking cheese to Yorda. He was not a day's journey from his home when the Jaras turned, began to flow upwards, and took the Wallachian back to his house from which he had started."

A listening clergyman here explained the matter by saying that the Aranyos, into which the Jaras flows, was greatly flooded just then, and it was its overflow which filled up the Jaras; in fact it was Divine Providence which brought the Wallachian back, for if he had been able to go on farther, the Tartars would certainly have fallen upon him and cut him to pieces.

"I have experienced everything in my time," said the oldest of the burgesses, "war, plague, flood and pestilence, but there's only one thing I am afraid of, and that is earthquake, for a man cannot even go to church to pray against that."

At that moment the preacher in the church began to speak so loudly that those standing outside could hear his words, and, growing suddenly silent, they pressed nearer to the door of the church to hear what he was saying.

The right rev. Magyari was trouncing the gentlemen present unmercifully: "G.o.d prepares to war against you, for ye also are preparing to war against Him. You have broken the peace ye swore to observe right and left, and ye shall have what you want, war without and war within, so that ye may be constrained to say: 'Enough, enough, O Lord!' and ye shall not see the end of what you have so foolishly begun."

Magyari already knew that Teleki, at the Diet of Szamosujvar, had announced the impending war.

Just at this very time two men of the patrician order in sable kalpags were seen approaching, in whom the Klausenbergers at once recognised Michael Teleki and Ladislaus Vajda, and so far as they were able they made room for them to get into the church through the crowd; but the Szekler did not recognise either of them, and when Ladislaus Vajda very haughtily shoved him aside with his elbows, he turned upon him and said: