The Slaves of the Padishah Part 55

At that very moment the palace trembled to its very foundations.

The Princess leaped to her feet, shrieking.

"Ah! what was that?" she asked, as pale as death.

"It was an earthquake, madame," replied Teleki with amazing calmness.

"There is nothing to be afraid of, the palace has very strong vaults; but if you _are_ afraid, stand just beneath the doorway, that cannot fall."

On recovering from her first alarm the Princess quickly regained her presence of mind.

"G.o.d preserve us! I must hasten to the Prince. Will not you come too?"

"I'll remain here," replied Teleki coolly. "We are in the hands of G.o.d wherever we may be, and when He calls me to Him I will account to Him for all that I have done."

The Princess ran along the winding corridor, and, finding her husband, took him down with her into the garden.

It was terrible to see from the outside how the vast building moved and twisted beneath the sinuous motion of the earth; every moment one might fear it would fall to pieces.

The Prince asked where Teleki was; the Princess said she had left him in her apartments.

"We must go for him this instant!" cried the Prince, but amongst all the trembling faces around him he could find none to listen to his words, for a man who fears nothing else is a coward in the presence of an earthquake.

Meanwhile the Minister was sitting quietly at a writing-table and writing a letter to Kara Mustafa, who had taken the place of the dead Kiuprile. He was a great warrior and the Sultan's right hand, who not long before had been invited by the Cossacks to help them against the Poles, which he did very thoroughly, first of all ravaging numerous Polish towns, and then, turning against his confederate Cossacks, he cut down a few hundred thousands of them and led thirty thousand more into captivity.

To him Teleki wrote for a.s.sistance for the Hungarians.

Every bit of furniture was shaking and tottering around him, the windows rattled noisily as if shaken by an ague, the very chair on which he sat rocked to and fro beneath him, and the writing-table bobbed up and down beneath his hand so that the pen ran away from the paper; but for all that he finished his letter, and when he came to the end of it he wrote at the bottom in firm characters:

"Si fractus illabatur orbis, impavidum ferient ruinae!"

Mustafa puzzled his brains considerably when he came to that part of the letter containing the verse which had nothing to do with the text, which the Minister, under the influence of an iron will struggling against terror, had written there almost involuntarily.

When the menacing peril had pa.s.sed, and the pages had returned to the palace, he turned to them reproachfully with the sealed letter in his hand.

"Where have you been? Not one of you can be found when you are wanted.

Take this letter at once, with an escort of two mounted drabants, to Varna, for the Grand Vizier."

And then he began to walk up and down the room as if nothing had happened.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE MAD MAN.

In the most secret chamber of the Divan were a.s.sembled the Viziers for an important consultation. The impending war was the subject of their grave deliberations. For as Mohammed had said, there ought to be one G.o.d in Heaven and one Lord on earth, so many of the Faithful believed that the time for the accomplishment of this axiom had now arrived.

Those wise men of the empire, those honourable counsellors, Kucsuk and Kiuprile, were dead. Kara Mustafa, an arrogant, self-confidant man, directed the mind of the Divan, and everyone followed his lead.

The Sultan himself was present, a handsome man with regular features, but with an expression of la.s.situde and exhaustion. During the whole consultation he never uttered a word nor moved a muscle of his face; he sat there like a corpse.

One by one the amba.s.sadors of the Foreign Powers were admitted. The orator of Louis XIV. declared that the French King was about to attack the Kaiser with all his forces; if the Sultan would also rise up against him, he would be able to seize not only all Hungary but Vienna likewise.

The Sultan was silent. The Grand Vizier, answering for him, replied that Hungary had long since belonged to the Sultan, and no doubt Vienna and Poland would shortly share the same fate. The Sultan could only suffer tributary kings on the earth.

The amba.s.sador drew a somewhat wry face at these words, reflecting that France also was on the earth; then he withdrew.

After him came the envoys of Emeric Tokoly, offering the blood and the swords of the Hungarian malcontents to the Sultan if he would help them to win back Hungary.

This time the Sultan replied instead of Mustafa.

"The Grand Seignior greets his servants, and will be gracious to them if they will help him to win back Hungary."

The envoys noticed that their words had ingeniously been twisted, but as they also had their own _arriere-pensees_ in regard to the Turks, they only looked at each other with a smile and withdrew.

Then came the Transylvanian emba.s.sy--gentle, mild-looking men, whose orator delivered an extraordinarily florid discourse. His Highness, Michael Apafi, they said, and all the estates of Transylvania, were ready to draw their swords for the glory of the Grand Seignior and invade Hungary.

Mustafa replied:

"The Grand Seignior permits you to help your comrades in Hungary."

The orator would like to have heard something different--for example, that the crown of Hungary was reserved for Michael Apafi, the dignity of Palatine for Teleki, etc., etc., and there he stood scratching his ear till the Grand Vizier told him he might go.

Ha, ha! the Turkish policy was written in Turkish.

After the foreign envoys came the messengers from the various pashas and commandants in Hungary, who brought terrible tidings of raids, incursions, and outrages on the part of the Magyar population against the Turks. The Grand Vizier exclaimed angrily at every fresh report, only the Sultan was silent. Last of all came the ulemas.

On their decisions everything depended.

Very solemnly they appeared before the Divan. First of all advanced the Chief Mufti in a long mantle reaching to his heels, and with a large beehive-shaped hat upon his head; his white beard reached to his girdle.

After him came two imams, one of whom carried a large doc.u.ment in a velvet case, whose pendant seal swung to and fro beneath its long golden cord; the other bent beneath the weight of an enormous book--it was the Alkoran.

The Alkoran is a very nice large book, larger than our _corpus juris_ of former days, and in it may be found everything which everyone requires: accusatory, condemnatory, and absolvatory texts for one and the same thing.

The Mufti presented the Alkoran to the Sultan and all the Viziers in turn, and each one of them kissed it with deep reverence; then he beckoned to one of the imams to kneel down on a stool before the Divan and remain there resting on his hands and knees, and placing the Koran on his back, began to select expressly marked texts.

For seventy years he had thoroughly studied the sacred volume, and could say that he had read it through seven hundred and ninety-three times.

He, therefore, knew all its secrets, and could turn at once to the leaf on which the text he wanted to read aloud could be found.

"The Alkoran saith," he read with unctuous devotion, "'the knot which hath been tied in the name of Allah the hand of Allah can unloose!' The Alkoran saith moreover: 'Wherever we may be, and whatever we may be, everywhere we are all of us in the hand of Allah.' Therefore this treaty of peace is also in the hand of Allah, and the hand of Allah can unloose everything. Furthermore, the Alkoran saith: 'If any among thy suffering father's children implore help from thee, answer him not: come to me to-morrow, for my vow forbids me to rise up to-day; or, if any ask an alms of thee answer him not: to-day it cannot be, for my vow forbids me to touch money; or, if anyone beg thee to slay someone, answer him not: to-morrow I will help thee, for my vow forbids me to draw the sword to-day; verily the observance of thy vow will be a greater sin to thee than its violation.' Moreover, thus saith the Alkoran: 'The happiness of the nations is the first duty of the rulers of the earth, yet the glory of Allah comes before it.' And finally it is written: 'Whoso formeth a league with the infidel bindeth himself to wage war upon Allah, yet vainly do the nations of the earth bind themselves together that they may live long, for let Allah send his breath upon them and more of them are destroyed in one day than in ten years of warfare: kings and beggars--it is all one.'"

At each fresh sentence the viziers and the ulemas bowed their heads to the ground. Mustafa could not restrain a blood-thirsty smile, which distorted his face more and more at each fresh sentence, and at the last word, with a fanatical outburst, he threw off the mask altogether, and with a howl of joy kissed repeatedly the hem of the Chief Mufti's mantle.

The Mufti then unclasped the velvet case which contained the treaty of peace, and drawing forth the parchment, which was folded fourfold, he unfolded it with great ceremony, and placing it in the hands of the second imam that he might hold it spread open at both ends, he exhibited the doc.u.ment to the viziers.

It was a long and beautiful script. The initial letter was as big as a painted castle and wreathed around with a pattern of birds and flowers.

The whole of the first line of it was in ultramarine letters, the other lines much smaller on a gradually diminis.h.i.+ng scale, and whenever the name of Allah occurred, it was written in letters of gold. The Sultan's name was always in red, the Kaiser's in bright green letters. At the foot of it was the fantastic flourish which pa.s.sed for the Sultan's signature, which he would never have been able to write, but which was always engraved on the signet ring which he wore on his finger.