The Slaves of the Padishah Part 54

"Softly, softly, sir! This is the house of G.o.d, not the house of a great lord. Here I am just as good a man as you are."

Those standing beside him tried to pull him aside, but it is the peculiarity of the Szeklers that they grow more furious than ever when people try to pacify them; and on perceiving that Ladislaus Vajda, unable to make his way through the throng, began to look about him to see how he best could get to his seat, the Szekler cried in front of him:

"Cannot you let these two gentlemen get into the church? don't you see that the lesson is meant for them?"

Teleki meanwhile had forced his way just over the threshold, and taking off his kalpag, exposed his bald, defenceless head in the sight of all the people, with his face turned in the direction indicated by the boisterous Szekler.

Magyari continued his fulminating discourse from the pulpit.

"n.o.body dare speak against you now, for your words are very thunderbolts and strike down those with whom you are angry--nay, rather, men bow the knee before you and say, 'Your Excellency! Your Excellency!' but the judgment of the Lord shall descend upon you, the Lord will slay you, and then men will point the finger of scorn at you and say: 'That is the consort of the accursed one who betrayed his country!--these are the children of that G.o.dless man!' And your descendants will blush to bear the shameful name you have left them, for then the tongue of every man will wag in his mouth against you, and they will cry after your posterity: 'It was the father of those fellows who betrayed Transylvania and plunged us into slime from which we cannot now withdraw our feet'

"Come away, your Excellency!" said Ladislaus Vajda to Teleki, whom the parson seemed to have seen, for he turned straight towards him as he spoke.

"What are you thinking of?" Teleki whispered back; "the parson is speaking the truth, but it doesn't matter."

"Whither would ye go, ye senseless vacillators!" continued Magyari, "who empowered you to make the men of Transylvania fugitives, their wives widows, and their children orphans? Verily I say to you, ye shall fare like the camel who went to Jupiter for horns and got shorn of his ears instead."

"It may be so," said Teleki to Vajda, "but we shall pursue our course all the same."

The parson saw that the Minister of State was paying attention to his discourse, so he wrinkled his forehead, and thus proceeded:

"When King Louis perished on the field of Mohacs, the Turkish Emperor had the dead body brought before him, and recognising at the same time the corpse of an evil Hungarian politician lying there, he struck off its head with his sword, and said: 'If thou hadst not been there, thou dog! this honest child-king would not be lying dead here.' G.o.d grant that a foreign nation may not so deal with you."

Teleki scratched his head, and whispered:

"It may happen to me likewise, but that makes no difference."

Shortly afterwards another hymn was sung, the two magnates put on their kalpags and withdrew, and the emerging crowd of people flowed along all around them, among whom the Szekler, as recently mentioned, followed hard upon the heels of the two gentlemen with singular persistency, lauding to the skies before everyone, in a loud voice, the sermon he had just heard, so as to insult the two gentlemen walking in front of him as much as possible.

"That was something like a sermon," he cried, "that is just how our masters ought to have their heads washed--without too much soap. And quite right too! Why saddle the realm with war at all? Why should Transylvania put on a mustard plaster because Hungary has a pain in its stomach? What has all this coming and going of foreigners to do with us?

Why should we poor Transylvanians suffer for the sake of the lean foreigners among us?"

Ladislaus Vajda could put up with this no longer, and turning round, shouted at the Szekler:

"Keep your distance, you rascal, speak like a man at any rate; don't bark here like some mad beast when it sees a better man than itself."

At these words the Szekler thrust his neck forward, stuck his face beneath the very nose of the gentleman who had spoken to him, looked him straight in the face with bright eyes that p.r.i.c.ked like pins, and said, twisting his moustaches fiercely:

"Don't you try to fix any of your b.a.s.t.a.r.d names on me, sir, for if I go home for my sword I will pretty soon make you a present of a head, and that head shall be your own."

Ladislaus Vajda would have made some reply, but Teleki pulled him by the arm and dragged him away.

"Nothing aggravates your Excellency," said the offended gentleman.

"Let him growl, he'll be all the better soldier if we do have war; never quarrel with a Szekler, my friend, for he always has a greater respect for his own head than for anyone else's."

And so the two gentlemen disappeared through the gates of the Prince's palace.

The Prince himself was present at this sermon, and it produced this much impression that he enjoined a fast upon his whole household and then went to bed. In the night, however, he awoke repeatedly, and had so many tormenting visions that he woke up all his pages, and it was even necessary at last to send for the Princess herself, and only then did he become a little calmer when she appeared at his bedside; in fact, he kept her with him till dawn of day, continually telling her all sorts of sad and painful things so that the Princess's cries of horror could be heard through the door.

In the morning, after the Princess had retired to her own apartments, she immediately summoned to her presence Michael Teleki, who, living at that time at the Prince's court as if it were his own home, was not very long in making his appearance, and obeyed the command to be seated with as much cheerful alacrity as if he had been asked to sit down at a banquet, though well aware that a bitter cup had been prepared for him which he must drain to the dregs.

"Sir," said the Princess, "Apafi was very ill last night."

"That was owing to the fast, he isn't used to such practices. Generally, he has a good supper, and if he departs from his usual course of life he is bound to sleep badly. Bad dreams plague an empty stomach just as much as an overburdened one."

"And how about an overburdened conscience, sir? I have spent the whole night at his bedside, only this instant have I quitted him; he would not let me leave him, he pressed my hand continually, and he talked, soberly and wide-awake, of things which I should have thought could only have been talked about in the delirium of typhus. He said that that night he had stood before the judgment-seat of G.o.d, before a great table--which was so long that he could not see the end of it--and at this table sat the accusing witnesses, first of all Denis Banfy, and then Beldi, Dame Beldi and their daughter, and eldest son, who died in prison; Kepi, too, was there, and young Kornis, and old John Bethlen, and the rest of them; all these familiar faces were before him, and as tremblingly he approached the throne of G.o.d they all fixed their eyes upon him and pointed their fingers at him. Sir, it was a terrible picture."

"Does your Highness fancy that I am an interpreter of dreams?" asked Teleki maliciously.

"Sir, this is more than a dream--it is a vision, a revelation."

"It may be so; the souls of the gentlemen enumerated are, no doubt, in Heaven, and it is possible that countless other souls will follow them thither."

"And will the soul that shed their blood ascend thither too?"

"Will your Highness deign to speak quite plainly--I suppose you mean me?

Of course, I am the cause of all the evils of Transylvania. Till I came upon the scene, none but lamb-like men inhabited this state, in whose veins flowed milk and honey instead of blood! King Sigismund, Bethlen, Bocskai, George Rakoczy, for instance! Under them only some fifty or sixty thousand men lost their lives in their party feuds and ambitious struggles! Fine fellows, every one of them of course, everyone calls them great patriots. But I, whose sword has never aimed at a self-sought crown, I, who am animated by a great and mighty thought, a sublime idea, I am a murderer, and responsible not only for those who have fallen in battle, but also for those who have died quietly in their beds, if they were not my good friends."

"There was a time, sir, when you used every effort to prevent Transylvania from going to war."

"That was the very time when your Highness pleaded before the Prince for war in the name of your exiled Hungarian kinsfolk. Other times, other men."

"I knew not then that such a desire would lead to the ruin of so many great and honourable men."

"You feared war, and yet you fanned it. He who resists a snow-storm is swept away. Not the fate of men alone, but the fate of kingdoms also is here in question. Apafi may console himself with the reflection that G.o.d regards us both as far too petty instruments to lay upon our souls what He Himself has decreed in the fullness of time, and what will and must happen in spite of us, for the weeping and mourning which we listen to here is also heard in Heaven. The mottoes of our escutcheons go very well together. Apafi's is '_Fata viam inveniunt_,' mine is '_Gutta cavat lapidem_.' Let us trust ourselves to our mottoes."

The Princess, with folded arms, gazed out of the window and remained in a brown study for some time. And now, as though her thoughts were wandering far away, she suddenly sighed: "Ah! this Beldi family so unhappily ruined, and how many more must be ruined likewise!"

"Your Highness!" rejoined the Minister, without moving a muscle of his face, "when, in time of drought, we pray for rain the whole day, does anybody inquire what will become of the poor travellers who may be caught in the downpour? Yet it may well happen that some of them may take a chill and die in consequence."

"I don't grasp the metaphor."

"Well, the whole Princ.i.p.ality is now praying for rain--a rain of blood, I admit--and there is every sign that G.o.d will grant it. I do not mean those signs and wonders in which the common folks believe, but those signs of the times which rivet the attention of thinking men. Formerly there was a large party in Transylvania which had engaged to uphold an indolent peace, and which had so many ties, amongst the leading men both of the Kaiser and the Sultan, that Denis Banfy could at one time boldly tell me to my face that that Party was a hand with a hundred fingers, which could squeeze everything it laid hold of like a sponge. And lo!

the fingers have all dropped off one by one. Denis Banfy has perished--they say I killed him. Paul Beldi has died in prison--they say I have poisoned him. G.o.d hath called John Bethlen also to Himself. Kapi has died. The boldest of my enemies, Gabriel Kornis, has also died in the flower of his youth--naturally they attribute his death to me likewise. All those, too, who opposed war in the Divan have disappeared one by one. Kucsuk Pasha has been shot down by a bullet at Lippa.

Kiuprile Pasha has been stifled by his own fat; and the youngest of the Viziers, Feriz Beg, has gone mad.

"Gone mad!" cried the Princess, covering her face with her hands; "that n.o.ble, worthy youth who loved Transylvania so well?"

"Do you not see the hand of G.o.d in all this?" asked the Minister.

"No, sir," said the Princess, rising with a face full of sadness and approaching the Minister so as to look him straight in the face while she spoke to him, "it is your hand that I see everywhere. Denis Banfy perished, but it was you who had him beheaded. Beldi is dead, but it was you who drove him to despair. It was you, too, who threw his family into prison, and only let them out when the foul air had poured a deadly sickness into their blood. And Feriz Beg has gone mad because he loved Beldi's daughter, and she is dead."

"Very well, your Highness, let it be so," replied the imperturbable Minister. "To attribute to me the direction of destiny is praise indeed.

Believe, then, that everything which happens in the council chamber of this realm and in the heart of its members derives from me. I'll be responsible. And if your Highness believes that that flaming comet, which they call the Sword of G.o.d, is also in my hand--why--be it so! I will hurl it forth, and strike the earth with it so that all its hinges shall be out of joint."