Part 4

The musket-barrels were leveled upon us. It seemed to me that they stretched out immeasurably, and that their muzzles were about to join above our heads. It was not that fear disturbed my vision; but I had never remarked so sensibly the desperate length of the Greek muskets! The whole arsenal soon debouched into the road, and every barrel showed its stock and its master.

The only difference which exists between devils and brigands is, that devils are less black than they are said to be, and brigands more dirty than people suppose. The eight bullies, who packed themselves in a circle around us, were so filthy in appearance that I should have wished to give them my money with a pair of tongs. You might guess, with a little effort, that their caps had been red; but lye-wash itself could not have restored the original color of their clothes. All the rocks of the kingdom had stained their cotton shirts, and their vests preserved a sample of the different soils on which they had reposed. Their hands, their faces, and even their moustachios were of a reddish-gray, like the soil which supports them. Every animal is colored according to its abode and its habits: the foxes of Greenland are of the color of snow; lions, of the desert; partridges, of the furrow; Greek brigands, of the highway.

The chief of the little troop which had made us prisoners was distinguished by no outward mark. Perhaps, however, his face, his hands, and his clothes were richer in dust than those of his comrades. He leaned toward us from the height of his tall figure, and examined us so closely that I felt the grazing of his moustachios. You would have pronounced him a tiger, who smells of his prey before tasting it. When his curiosity was satisfied, he said to Dimitri, "Empty your pockets!"

Dimitri did not give him cause to repeat the order: he threw down before him a knife, a tobacco-pouch, and three Mexican dollars, which compose a sum of about sixteen francs.

"Is that all?" demanded the brigand.

"Yes, brother."

"You are the servant?"

"Yes, brother."

"Take back one dollar. You must not return to the city without money."

Dimitri haggled. "You could well allow me two," said he: "I have two horses below; they are hired from the riding-school; I shall have to pay for the day."

"You will explain to Zimmerman that we have taken your money from you."

"And if he wishes to be paid, notwithstanding?"

"Answer that he is lucky enough to see his horses again."

"He knows very well that you do not take horses. What would you do with them in the mountains?"

"Enough! What is this big raw-boned animal next you?"

I answered for myself: "An honest German, whose spoils will not enrich you."

"You speak Greek well. Empty your pockets."

I deposited on the road a score of francs, my tobacco, my pipe, and my handkerchief.

"What is that?" asked the grand inquisitor.

"A handkerchief."

"For what purpose?"

"To wipe my nose."

"Why did you tell me that you were poor? It is only milords who wipe their noses with handkerchiefs. Take off the box which you have behind your back. Good! Open it!"

My box contained some plants, a book, a knife, a little package of arsenic, a gourd nearly empty, and the remnants of my breakfast, which kindled a look of covetousness in the eyes of Mrs. Simons. I had the assurance to offer them to her before my baggage changed masters. She accepted greedily, and began to devour the bread and meat. To my great astonishment, this act of gluttony scandalized our robbers, who murmured among themselves the word "Schismatic:" The monk made half a dozen signs of the cross, according to the rite of the Greek Church.

"You must have a watch," said the brigand: "put it with the rest."

I gave up my silver watch, a hereditary toy of the weight of four ounces. The villains passed it from hand to hand, and thought it very beautiful. I was in hopes that admiration, which makes men better, would dispose them to restore me something, and I begged their chief to let me have my tin box. He imposed silence upon me roughly. "At least," said I, "give me back two crowns for my return to the city!" He answered with a sardonic smile, "You will not have need of them."

The turn of Mrs. Simons had come. Before putting her hand in her pocket, she warned our conquerors in the language of her fathers. The English is one of those rare idioms which one can speak with a mouth full. "Reflect well on what you are going to do," said she, in a menacing tone. "I am an Englishwoman, and English subjects are inviolable in all the countries of the world. What you will take from me will serve you little, and will cost you dear. England will avenge me, and you will all be hanged, to say the least. Now if you wish my money, you have only to speak; but it will burn your fingers: it is English money!"

"What does she say?" asked the spokesman of the brigands.

Dimitri answered, "She says that she is English."

"So much the better! All the English are rich. Tell her to do as you have done."

The poor lady emptied on the sand a purse, which contained twelve sovereigns. As her watch was not in sight, and as they made no show of searching us, she kept it. The clemency of the conquerors left her her pocket-handkerchief.

Mary Ann threw down her watch, with a whole bunch of charms against the evil eye. She cast before her, by a movement full of mute grace, a shagreen bag, which she carried in her belt. The brigand opened it with the eagerness of a custom-house officer. He drew from it a little English dressing-case, a vial of English salts, a box of pastilles of English mint, and a hundred and some odd francs in English money.

"Now," said the impatient beauty, "you can let us go: we have nothing more for you." They indicated to her, by a menacing gesture, that the session was not ended. The chief of the band squatted down before our spoils, called "the good old man," counted the money in his presence, and delivered to him the sum of forty-five francs. Mrs. Simons nudged me on the elbow. "You see," said she, "the monk and Dimitri have betrayed us: he is dividing the spoils with them."

"No, madam," replied I, immediately. "Dimitri has received a mere pittance from that which they had stolen from him. It is a thing which is done everywhere. On the banks of the Rhine, when a traveler is ruined at roulette, the conductor of the game gives him something wherewith to return home."

"But the monk?"

"He has received a tenth part of the booty in virtue of an immemorial custom. Do not reproach him, but rather be thankful to him for having wished to save us, when his convent was interested in our capture."

This discussion was interrupted by the farewells of Dimitri. They had just set him at liberty.

"Wait for me," said I to him: "we will return together." He shook his head sadly, and answered me in English, so as to be understood by the ladies:-- "You are prisoners for some days, and you will not see Athens again before paying a ransom. I am going to inform the milord. Have these ladies any messages to give me for him?"

"Tell him," cried Mrs. Simons, "to run to the embassy, to go then to the Piraeus and find the admiral, to complain at the foreign office, to write to Lord Palmerston! They shall take us away from here by force of arms, or by public authority, but I do not intend that they shall disburse a penny for my liberty."

"As for me," replied I, without so much passion, "I beg you to tell my friends in what hands you have left me. If some hundreds of drachms are necessary to ransom a poor devil of a naturalist, they will find them without trouble. These gentlemen of the highway cannot rate me very high. I have a mind, while you are still here, to ask them what I am worth at the lowest price."

"It would be useless, my dear Mr. Hermann! It is not they who fix the figures of your ransom."

"And who then?"

"Their chief, Hadgi-Stavros."

HADGI-STAVROS

From 'The King of the Mountains'

The camp of the King was a plateau, covering a surface of seven or eight hundred metres. I looked in vain for the tents of our conquerors. The brigands are not sybarites, and they sleep under the open sky on the 30th of April. I saw neither spoils heaped up nor treasures displayed, nor any of those things which one expects to find at the headquarters of a band of robbers. Hadgi-Stavros makes it his business to have the booty sold; every man receives his pay in money, and employs it as he chooses. Some make investments in commerce, others take mortgages on houses in Athens, others buy land in their villages; no one squanders the products of robbery. Our arrival interrupted the breakfast of twenty-five or thirty men, who flocked around us with their bread and cheese. The chief supports his soldiers; there is distributed to them every day one ration of bread, oil, wine, cheese, caviare, allspice, bitter olives, and meat when their religion permits it. The epicures who wish to eat mallows or other herbs are at liberty to gather delicacies in the mountains.

The office of the King was as much like an office as the camp of the robbers was like a camp. Neither tables nor chairs nor movables of any sort were to be seen there. Hadgi-Stavros was seated cross-legged on a square carpet in the shade of a fir-tree. Four secretaries and two servants were grouped around him. A boy of sixteen or eighteen was occupied incessantly in filling, lighting, and cleaning the chibouk of his master. He carried in his belt a tobacco-pouch, embroidered with gold and fine mother-of-pearl, and a pair of silver pincers intended for taking up coals. Another servant passed the day in preparing cups of coffee, glasses of water, and sweetmeats to refresh the royal mouth. The secretaries, seated on the bare rock, wrote on their knees, with pens made of reeds. Each of them had at hand a long copper box containing reeds, penknife, and inkhorn. Some tin cylinders, like those in which our soldiers roll up their discharges, served as a depository for the archives. The paper was not of native manufacture, and for a good reason, Every leaf bore the word BATH in capital letters.

The King was a fine old man, marvelously well preserved, straight, slim, supple as a spring, spruce and shining as a new sabre. His long white moustachios hung under his chin like two marble stalactites. The rest of his face was carefully shaved, the skull bare even to the occiput, where a long tress of white hair was rolled up under his hat. The expression of his features appeared to me calm and thoughtful. A pair of small, clear blue eyes and a square chin announced an indomitable will. His face was long, and the position of the wrinkles lengthened it still more. All the creases of the forehead were broken in the middle, and seemed to direct themselves toward the meeting of the eyebrows; two wide and deep furrows descended perpendicularly to the corners of the lips, as if the weight of the moustachios had drawn in the muscles of the face.

I have seen a good many septuagenarians; I have even dissected one who would have reached a hundred years, if the diligence of Osnabrück had not passed over his body: but I do not remember to have observed a more green and robust old age than that of Hadgi-Stavros. He wore the dress of Tino and of all the islands of the Archipelago. His red cap formed a large crease at its base around his forehead. He had a vest of black cloth, faced with black silk, immense blue pantaloons which contained more than twenty metres of cotton cloth, and great boots of Russia leather, elastic and stout. The only rich thing in his costume was a scarf embroidered with gold and precious stones, which might be worth two or three thousand francs. It inclosed in its folds an embroidered cashmere purse, a Damascus sanjar in a silver sheath, a long pistol mounted in gold and rubies, and the appropriate baton.

Quietly seated in the midst of his employees, Hadgi-Stavros moved only the ends of his fingers and his lips; the lips to dictate his correspondence, the fingers to count the beads in his chaplet. It was one of those beautiful chaplets of milky amber which do not serve to number prayers, but to amuse the solemn idleness of the Turk.

He raised his head at our approach, guessed at a glance the occurrence which had brought us there, and said to us, with a gravity which had in it nothing ironical, "You are welcome! Be seated."

"Sir," cried Mrs. Simons, "I am an Englishwoman, and--" He interrupted the discourse by making his tongue smack against the teeth of his upper jaw--superb teeth, indeed! "Presently," said he: "I am occupied." He understood only Greek, and Mrs. Simons knew only English; but the physiognomy of the King was so speaking that the good lady comprehended easily without the aid of an interpreter.

Selections from 'The King of the Mountains' used by permission of J.E. Tilton and Company.

THE VICTIM

From 'The Man with the Broken Ear': by permission of Henry Holt, the Translator.

Léon took his bunch of keys and opened the long oak box on which he had been seated. The lid being raised, they saw a great leaden casket which inclosed a magnificent walnut box carefully polished on the outside, lined on the inside with white silk, and padded.

The others brought their lamps and candles near, and the colonel of the Twenty-third of the line appeared as if he were in a chapel illuminated for his lying in state.

One would have said that the man was asleep. The perfect preservation of the body attested the paternal care of the murderer. It was truly a remarkable preparation, and would have borne comparison with the finest European mummies described by Vicq d'Azyr in 1779, and by the younger Puymaurin in 1787. The part best preserved, as is always the case, was the face. All the features had maintained a proud and manly expression. If any old friend of the colonel had been at the opening of the third box, he would have recognized him at first sight. Undoubtedly the point of the nose was a little sharper, the nostrils less expanded and thinner, and the bridge a little more marked, than in the year 1813. The eyelids were thinned, the lips pinched, the corners of the mouth drawn down, the cheek bones too prominent, and the neck visibly shrunken, which exaggerated the prominence of the chin and larynx. But the eyelids were closed without contraction, and the sockets much less hollow than one could have expected; the mouth was not at all distorted, like the mouth of a corpse; the skin was slightly wrinkled, but had not changed color,--it had only become a little more transparent, showing after a fashion the color of the tendons, the fat, and the muscles, wherever it rested directly upon them. It also had a rosy tint which is not ordinarily seen in embalmed corpses. Dr. Martout explained this anomaly by saying that if the colonel had actually been dried alive, the globules of the blood were not decomposed, but simply collected in the capillary vessels of the skin and subjacent tissues, where they still preserved their proper color, and could be seen more easily than otherwise on account of the semi-transparency of the skin.

The uniform had become much too large, as may be readily understood, though it did not seem at a casual glance that the members had become deformed. The hands were dry and angular, but the nails, although a little bent inward toward the root, had preserved all their freshness. The only very noticeable change was the excessive depression of the abdominal walls, which seemed crowded downward to the posterior side; at the right, a slight elevation indicated the place of the liver. A tap of the finger on the various parts of the body produced a sound like that from dry leather. While Léon was pointing out these details to his audience and doing the honors of his mummy, he awkwardly broke off the lower part of the right ear, and a little piece of the colonel remained in his hand. This trifling accident might have passed unnoticed had not Clémentine, who followed with visible emotion all the movements of her lover, dropped her candle and uttered a cry of affright. All gathered around her. Léon took her in his arms and carried her to a chair. M. Renault ran after salts. She was as pale as death, and seemed on the point of fainting. She soon recovered, however, and reassured them all by a charming smile.

"Pardon me," she said, "for such a ridiculous exhibition of terror; but what Monsieur Léon was saying to us--and then--that figure which seemed sleeping--it appeared to me that the poor man was going to open his mouth and cry out, when he was injured."

Léon hastened to close the walnut box, while M. Martout picked up the piece of ear and put it in his pocket. But Clémentine, while continuing to smile and make apologies, was overcome by a fresh access of emotion and melted into tears. The engineer threw himself at her feet, poured forth excuses and tender phrases, and did all he could to console her inexplicable grief.

Clémentine dried her eyes, looked prettier than ever, and sighed fit to break her heart, without knowing why.

"Beast that I am!" muttered Léon, tearing his hair. "On the day when I see her again after three years' absence, I can think of nothing more soul-inspiring than showing her mummies!" He launched a kick at the triple coffin of the colonel, saying, "I wish the devil had the confounded colonel!"

"No!" cried Clémentine, with redoubled energy and emotion. "Do not curse him, Monsieur Léon! He has suffered so much! Ah! poor, poor, unfortunate man!"

Mlle. Sambucco felt a little ashamed. She made excuses for her niece, and declared that never, since her tenderest childhood, had she manifested such extreme sensitiveness ... Clémentine was no sensitive plant. She was not even a romantic school-girl. Her youth had not been nourished by Anne Radcliffe, she did not trouble herself about ghosts, and she would go through the house very tranquilly at ten o'clock at night without a candle. When her mother died, some months before Léon's departure, she did not wish to have any one share with her the sad satisfaction of watching and praying in the death chamber.

"This will teach us," said the aunt, "what staying up after ten o'clock does. What! it is midnight, within a quarter of an hour! Come, my child; you will recover fast enough after you get to bed."

Clémentine arose submissively; but at the moment of leaving the laboratory she retraced her steps, and with a caprice more inexplicable than her grief, she absolutely demanded to see the mummy of the colonel again. Her aunt scolded in vain; in spite of the remarks of Mlle. Sambucco and all the others present, she reopened the walnut box, knelt down beside the mummy, and kissed it on the forehead.

"Poor man!" said she, rising. "How cold he is! Monsieur Léon, promise me that if he is dead you will have him laid in consecrated ground!"

"As you please, mademoiselle. I intended to send him to the anthropological museum, with my father's permission; but you know that we can refuse you nothing."

Selections from 'The Man with the Broken Ear' used by permission of Henry Holt and Company.

THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY

From 'The Man with the Broken Ear': by permission of Henry Holt, the Translator.

Forthwith the colonel marched and opened the windows with a precipitation which upset the gazers among the crowd.

"People," said he, "I have knocked down a hundred beggarly pandours, who respect neither sex nor infirmity. For the benefit of those who are not satisfied, I will state that I call myself Colonel Fougas of the Twenty-third. And _Vive l'Empéreur!_"

A confused mixture of plaudits, cries, laughs, and jeers answered this unprecedented allocution. Léon Renault hastened out to make apologies to all to whom they were due. He invited a few friends to dine the same evening with the terrible colonel, and of course he did not forget to send a special messenger to Clémentine. Fougas, after speaking to the people, returned to his hosts, swinging himself along with a swaggering air, set himself astride a chair, took hold of the ends of his mustache, and said:--

"Well! Come, let's talk this over. I've been sick, then?"

"Very sick."

"That's incredible! I feel entirely well; I'm hungry; and moreover, while waiting for dinner I'll try a glass of your schnick."

Mme. Renault went out, gave an order, and returned in an instant.

"But tell me, then, where I am?" resumed the colonel. "By these paraphernalia of work, I recognize a disciple of Urania; possibly a friend of Monge and Berthollet. But the cordial friendliness impressed on your countenances proves to me that you are not natives of this land of sauerkraut. Yes, I believe it from the beatings of my heart. Friends, we have the same fatherland. The kindness of your reception, even were there no other indications, would have satisfied me that you are French. What accidents have brought you so far from our native soil? Children of my country, what tempest has thrown you upon this inhospitable shore?"

"My dear colonel," replied M. Nibor, "if you want to become very wise, you will not ask so many questions at once. Allow us the pleasure of instructing you quietly and in order, for you have a great many things to learn."

The colonel flushed with anger, and answered sharply:--

"At all events, you are not the man to teach them to me, my little gentleman!"

A drop of blood which fell on his hand changed the current of his thoughts.

"Hold on!" said he: "am I bleeding?"

"That will amount to nothing: circulation is re-established, and--and your broken ear--"

He quickly carried his hand to his ear, and said:--

"It's certainly so. But devil take me if I recollect this accident!"

"I'll make you a little dressing, and in a couple of days there will be no trace of it left."

"Don't give yourself the trouble, my dear Hippocrates: a pinch of powder is a sovereign cure!"

M. Nibor set to work to dress the ear in a little less military fashion. During his operations Léon re-entered.

"Ah! ah!" said he to the doctor: "you are repairing the harm I did."

"Thunderation!" cried Fougas, escaping from the hands of M. Nibor so as to seize Léon by the collar, "was it you, you rascal, that hurt my ear?"

Léon was very good-natured, but his patience failed him. He pushed his man roughly aside.