" Si!" "He took the pipe from my hand, and requested me, in the same suppressed voice, to return to his shop. "And Maimuna" His only answer was to point to the door, and thinking it best to obey his orders implicitly, I made the best of my way out of the slavemarket, and was soon drinking a sherbet in his inner apartment, and listening to the shuffle of every passing slipper for the coming of the light step of the Gipsy. III. The rules of good-breeding discountenance in society what is usually called " a scene." I detest it as well on paper. There is no sufficient reason, apparent to me, why my sensibilities should be drawn upon at sight, as I read, any more than when I please myself by following my own devices in company. Violent sensations are, abstractly as well as conventionally, ill-bred. They derange the serenity, fluster the manner, and irritate the complexion. It is for this reason that I forbear to describe the meeting between Maimuna and myself after she had been bought for forty pounds by the wily and worthy seller of essences and pastilles-how she fell on my neck when she discovered that I, and not Mustapha, was her purchaser and master-how she explained, between her hysterical sobs, that the Turk who had sold her to the slave-dealer was a renegade gipsy, and her mother's brother (to whom she had been on an errand of affection) and how she sobbed herself to sleep with her face in the palms of my hands, and her masses of raven hair covering my knees and feet like the spreading fountains of San Pietro-and how I pressed my lips to the starry parting of those raven tresses on the top of her fairest head, and blessed the relying child as she slept-are circumstances, you will allow, my dear Madam! that could not be told passably well without moving your amiable tenderness to tears. You will consider this paragraph, therefore, less as an ingenious manner of disposing of the awkward angles of my story, than as a polite and praiseworthy consideration for your feelings and complexion. Flushed eyelids are so very unbecoming! IV. My confidential interviews with Job began to take rather an unpleasant colouring. The forty pounds I had paid for Maimuna's liberty, with the premium to Mustapha, the suit of European clothes necessary to disguise my new companion, and the addition of a third person in our European lodgings at Pera, rather drove my finances to the wall. Job cared very little for the loss of his allowance of pocket-money, and made no resistance to eating kibaubs at a meat-shop instead of his usual silver fork and French dinner at Madame Josepino's. He submitted with the same resignation to a one-oared caique on the Bosphorus, and several minor reductions in his expenses, thinking nothing a hardship, in short, which I shared cheerfully with him. He would have donned the sugar-loaf hat of a dervish, and begged his way home by Jerusalem or Mecca, so only I was content. But the morality of the thing! "What will you do with this beautiful girl when you get to Rome ? how will you dispose of her in Paris? how will your friends receive a female, already arrived at the age of womanhood, who shall have travelled with you two or three years on the continent? how will you provide for her? how educate her? how rid yourself of her, with any Christian feeling of compassion, when she has become irrevocably attached to you?" We were pulling up to the Symplegades while my plain-spoken Mentor thrust me these home questions, and Maimuna sat coiled between my feet in the bottom of the caique, gazing into my face with eyes that seemed as if they would search my very soul for the cause of my emotion. We seldom spoke English in her presence, for the pain it gave her when she felt excluded from the conversation amounted in her allexpressive features to a look of anguish, that made it seem to me a cruelty. She dared not ask me, in words, why I was vexed; but she gathered from Job's tone that there was reproof in what he said, and flashing a glance of inquiring anger at his serious face, she gently stole her hand under the cloak to mine, and laid the back of it softly in my palm. There was a delicacy and a confidingness in the motion that started a tear into my eye; and as I smiled through it, and drew her to me and impressed a kiss on her forehead, I inwardly resolved, that, as long as that lovely creature should choose to eat of my bread, it should be free to her in all honour and kindness, and, if need were, I would supply to her, with the devotion of my life, the wrong and misconstruetion of the world. As I turned over that leaf in my heart, there crept through it a breath of peace, and I felt that my good angel had taken me into favour. Job began to fumble for the lunch, and the dancing caique shot forth merrily into the Black Sea. 66 My dearest chum!" said I, as we sat round our brown paper of kibaubs on the highest point of the Symplegades, " you see yourself here at the outermost limit of your travels." His mouth was full, but as soon as he could conveniently swallow, he responded with the appropriate sigh. "Six thousand miles, more or less, lie between you and your spectacled and respectable mother; but nineteen thousand, the small remainder of the earth's circumference, extending due east from this paper of cold meat, remain to you untravelled!" Job fixed his eye on a white sea-bird apparently asleep on the wing, but diving away eastward into the sky, as if it were the heart within us sped onward with our boundless wishes. "Do you not envy him?" he asked enthusiastically. "Yes; for Nature pays his travelling expenses, and I would our common mother were as considerate to me! How soon, think you, he will see Trebisond, posting at that courier speed?"י "And Shiraz, and Ispahan, and the valley of Cashmere! To think how that stupid bird will fly over them, and, spite of all that Hafiz, and Saadi, and Tom Moore have written on the lands that his shadow may glide through, will return, as wise as he went, to Marmora! To compound natures with him were a nice arrangement, now!" "You would be better looking, my dear Job!" "How very unpleasant you are, Mr. Slingsby! But really, Philip, to cast the slough of this expensive and il-locomotive humanity, and find yourself afloat with all the necessary apparatus of life stowed snugly into breast and tail, your legs tucked quietly away under you, and, instead of coat and unmentionables, to be put off and on and renewed at such inconvenient expense, a self-renewing tegument of cleanly feathers brushed and washed in the common course of nature by wind and rain -no valet to be paid and drilled-no dressing-case to be supplied and left behind-no tooth-brushes to be mislaid-no tight boots-no cornsno passports nor post-horses! Do you know, Phil, on reflection, I find this 'mortal coil' a very inferior and inconvenient apparatus!" "If you mean your own, I quite agree with you." "I am surprised, Mr. Slingsby, that you, who value yourself on knowing what is due from one highly-civilized individual to another, should indulge in these very disagreeable reflections !" Maimuna did not quite comprehend the argument, but she saw that the tables were turned, and, without ill-will to Job, she paid me the compliment of always taking my side. I felt her slender arm around my neck, and as she got upon her knees behind me and put forward her little head to get a peep at my lips, her clear bird-like laugh of enjoyment and triumph added visibly to my friend's mortification. A compunctious visiting stole over me, and I began to feel that I should scarce have revenged myself for what was, after all, but a kind severity. "Do you know, Job," said I (anxious to restore his self-complacency without a direct apology for my rudeness), " do you know there is a very deep human truth hidden in the familiar story of 'Beauty and the Beast?' I really am of opinion, that, between the extremes of hideousness and the highest perfection of loveliness, there is no face which, after a month's intercourse, does not depend exclusively on its expression (or, in other words, on the amiable qualities of the individual) for the admiration it excites. The plainest features become handsome unaware when associated only with kind feelings, and the loveliest face disagreeable when linked with ill-humour or caprice. People should remember this when selecting a face which they are to see every morning across the breakfast-table for the remainder of their natural lives." Job was appeased by the indirect compliment contained in this speech; and, gathering up our kibaubs, we descended to the caique, and pulling around the easternmost point of the Symplegades, bade adieu to the Orient, and took the first step westward with the smile of conciliation on our lips. We were soon in the strong current of the Bosphorus, and shot swiftly down between Europe and Asia, by the light of a sunset that seemed to brighten the West for our return. It was a golden path homeward. The East looked cold behind; and the welcome of our far-away kinsmen seemed sent to us on those purpling clouds, winning us back. Beneath that kindling horizon-below that departed sun-lay the fresh and free land of our inheritance. The light of the world seemed gone over to it. These, from which the day had declined, were countries of Memory-ours, of Hope. The sun, that was setting on these, was dawning gloriously on ours. On ordinary occasions, Job would have given me a stave of "Hail, Columbia!" after such a burst of patriotism. The cloud was on his soul, however. "We have turned to go back," he said, in a kind of musing bitterness, "and see what we are leaving behind! In this fairly-shaped boat you are gliding like a dream down the Bosphorus. The curving shore of Therapia yonder is fringed for miles with the pleasure-loving inhabitants of this delicious land, who think a life too short, of which the highest pleasure is to ramble on the edge of these calm waters with their kinsmen and children. Is there a picture in the world more beautiful than that palace-lined shore? Is there a city so magnificent under the sun as that in which it terminates? Are there softer skies, greener hills, simpler or better people to live among, than these? Oh, Philip! ours, with all its freedom, is a 'working-day' land. There is no idleness there! The sweat is ever on the brow, the 'serpent of care' never loosened about the heart! I confess myself a worshipper of Leisure : I would let no moment of my golden youth go by unrecorded with a pleasure. Toil is ungodlike, and unworthy of the immortal spirit, that should walk unchained through the world. I love these idle Orientals. Their sliding and haste-forbidding slippers, their flowing and ungirded habiliments, are signs most expressive of their joy in life. Look around, and see how on every hill-top stands a maison de plaisance; how every hill-side is shelved into those green platforms*, so expressive of their habits of enjoyment! Rich or poor, their pleasures are the same. The open air, freedom to roam, a caique at the water-side, and a sairgah on the hill-these are their means of happiness, and they are within the reach of all: they are nearer Utopia than we, my dear Philip! We shall be more like Turks than Christians in Paradise!" "Inglorious Job!" "Why? Because I love idleness? Are there braver people in the world than the Turks? Are there people more capable of the romance of heroism? Energy, though it sound a paradox, is the child of Idle ness. All extremes are natural and easy; and the most indolent in peace is likely to be the most fiery in war. Here we are, opposite the summer serai of Sultan Mahmoud; and who more luxurious and idle ? Yet the massacre of the Janissaries was one of the boldest measures in history. There is the most perfect Orientalism in the description of the Persian beauty by Hafiz : On 'Her heart is full of passion, and her eyes are full of sleep.' Perhaps nothing would be so contradictory as the true analysis of the character of what is called an indolent man. With all the tastes I have just professed, my strongest feeling on leaving the Symplegades, for example, was, and is still, an unwillingness to retrace my steps. ward! onward!' is the perpetual cry of my heart. I could pass my life in going from land to land, so only that every successive one was new. Italy will be old to us; France, Germany, can scarce lure the imagination to adventure, with the knowledge we have; and England, though we have not seen it, is so familiar to us from its universality, that it will not seem, even on a first visit, a strange country. We have satiety before us, and the thought saddens me. I hate to go back. I could start now, with Maimuna for a guide, and turn gipsy in the wilds of Asia." * All around Constantinople are seen what are called sairgahs-small greensward platforms levelled in the side of a hill, and usually commanding some lovely view, intended as spots on which those who are abroad for pleasure may spread their carpets. I know nothing so expressive as this of the simple and natural lives led by these gentle Orientals. "Will you go with him, Maimuna?" "Signor, no!" I am the worst of story-tellers, gentle reader; for I never get to the end. The truth is, that, in these rambling papers, I go over the incidents I describe, not as they should be written in a romance, but as they occurred in my travels: I write what I remember. There are, of course, long intervals in adventure, filled up sometimes by feasting or philosophy, sometimes with idleness or love; and, to please myself, I must unweave the thread as it was woven. It is strange how, in the memory of a traveller, the most wayside and unimportant things are often the best remembered. You may have stood in the Parthenon, and, looking back upon it through the distance of years, a chance word of the companion who happened to be with you, or the attitude of a Greek seen in the plain below, may come up more vividly to the recollection than the immortal sculptures on the frieze. There is a natural antipathy in the human mind to fulfil expectations. We wander from the thing we are told to admire, to dwell on something we have discovered ourselves. The child in church occupies itself with the fly on its prayer-book, and "the child is father of the man." If I indulge in the same perversity in story-telling, dear reader, if, in the most important crisis of my tale, I digress to some trifling vein of speculation,-if, at the close even, the climax seem incomplete, and the moral vain,-I plead, upon all these counts, an adherence to truth and nature. Life-real life is made up of half-finished romance, The most interesting procession of events is delayed, and travestied, and mixed with the ridiculous and the trifling, and, at the end, oftenest left imperfect. Who ever saw, off the stage, a five-act tragedy, with its proprieties and its climax ? For another month, gentlest reader, adieu! SLINGSBY. SONNET TO SLEEP. SOFT! not a breeze is stirring in the trees ! Oh! gently breathe, sweet Sleep, upon mine eyes : Each outward object from my vision flees, A lonely watcher by the fold of years! G. L. MONTAGU. |