On the following morning, BaÏla, followed by Mariam, again traversed the garden, under the pretext of erasing the tracks of the unknown, should he have left any. The wind and the night had caused them to disappear from the walks which were covered with fine sand. Returning, however, from the neighborhood of the river, she found the recent mark of a boot impressed on a flower border. The foot-mark was small, straight, and graceful.

BaÏla hesitated to efface it. Why? Was the stranger speaking decidedly to her heart? No; it was a woman’s caprice, and among women the odalisks are perhaps the most enigmatical. After having undertaken this expedition for the very purpose of effacing all traces of the Frank, she was now tempted to retain the only one that remained.

This print, which the bostangis, with their large sandals with wooden soles could not have left, and which the foot of the pacha would have over-lapped with a large margin, and which consequently might reveal the adventure of the evening, she was desirous of preserving. Why? Perhaps her imagination, over-excited by her ideas of gratitude, had, at the sight of this elegant impress, given the lie to her eyes, by clothing the stranger with a charm, which, in his first movement of alarm she was unable to recognize. Perhaps, blinded by passion, BaÏla was desirous that Djezzar might see this denunciatory mark, so that his jealousy might be alarmed, and he might suffer in his pride and his love as she had done.

The old negress pointed out to her, that in case the unknown should be rash enough to return again, the pacha, his suspicions once excited, would certainly have him seized, and thus both might be compromised.

The Mingrelian then yielded; but she was unwilling, from a new caprice, that Mariam should remove the earth from this place. She contented herself with placing her own delicate foot upon it several times, and with trampling with her imprint in that of the stranger, and this double mark remained for a long time, protected as it was from inspection by the superabundant foliage of a Pontic Azalea.

This shrub grew in great abundance on the slopes of the Caucasus, and BaÏla, when a child, had seen them flower in her native country. She conceived an affection for this spot, which spoke to her of her country, and of her second and mysterious lover. Her country she had left without regret; this young Frank, this giaour, he had been to her at first but a surprise, an apparition, a dream, and now, her wounded heart demands an aliment for this double recollection. During a whole month she took her walks in this direction; thither she came to dream of her country and the stranger, especially of the latter.

Did she then at length love him? Who can tell? Who would dare to give the name of love to those deceitful illuminations produced in the brain of a young girl, by a fermentation of ideas, like wills-of-the-wisp on earth; to those phantoms of a moment, with which solitudes are peopled by those who abandon themselves to a life of contemplation.

In Europe, the religious, though living under a very different rule, refer all the passionate tenderness of their soul to God; each of them finds, however, some mode of husbanding a part of it for some holy image of her choice, some concealed relic, which belongs to her alone; she addresses secret prayers to it, she perfumes it with incense which she carries away from the high altar; it is her aside worship. In the East, those other inhabitants of cloisters, the odalisks, have no worship but love, and in the endearments of that love they can prostrate themselves but before one alone; but there, as everywhere else, the idol is concealed in the shadow of the temple; they have their fetishes, their dreams, their fraudulent loves, their loves of the head, if we may so designate them. It is perhaps necessary for human nature thus to give the most decided counterpoise to its thoughts, in order to preserve the equilibrium of the soul, to protest in a low tone against that which we loudly adore, to oppose a shadow to a reality.

It is true that where lovers are concerned, the shadow sometimes assumes a form and the reality evaporates.

Be this as it may, Djezzar had returned to BaÏla, and the latter, more assured than ever of her power, made him expiate his late infidelity by her caprices and her extravagances. They wondered in the Harem to see the Pacha of Shivas, before whom every thing trembled, bow before this handsome slave, so frail, so white, so delicate, whom he might have broken by a gesture or a word. The rumor of it spread even to the city, where it was whispered that Djezzar would turn Jew if BaÏla wished it.

This Ali-ben-Ali, surnamed Djezzar, or the Butcher, was, however, a terrible man. Originally a page in the palace of the Sultan, and brought up by Mahmoud, he had not participated at all in the civilizing ameliorations the latter had endeavored to introduce into his empire. The decree of Gulhana had found him the opponent of all reform. Assured of a protection in the divan, which he knew how to preserve, he sustained himself as the type of the old pachas, of whom his predecessors, Ali of Janina and Djezzar of Acre, were the paragons. He especially redoubled his barbarism when a philosophical breeze from Europe endeavored to breathe tolerance over his country.

Adjudging to himself the double part of judge and executioner, thanks to his expeditious justice, decrees emanating from his tribunal were executed as soon as rendered; sometimes the punishment preceded the judgment. A thousand examples were cited, tending to prove clearly that in Turkey, Djezzar was a relique of the old regime. An aga had prevaricated. The pacha unable to inflict punishment upon the culprit in person, as the friend of prompt and good justice, had ordered a young effendi, his secretary, to go at once to the residence of the prevaricator and deprive him of an eye. The young man hesitating and excusing himself on the plea of his inexperience, “Come nearer,” said Djezzar to him; and when the poor effendi approached him, the pacha, with marvelous dexterity, plunging quickly one of his fingers into the corner of an eye, drew out the globe from its socket, then with a quick twist and the assistance of his nail, the operation was performed.

“Slave, thou knowest now how to do it; obey at once,” he said to him; and the poor victim, with his wound undressed and bleeding, was constrained, on peril of his life, to inflict on the aga the punishment he had just undergone.

No one excelled as he did in cutting off a head at a blow of the yataghan. It is true, no one else had so much practice. There was a story told at Shivas, of a feat of this kind which did him the highest credit.

Two Arabian peasants, feulahs, were brought before him, on a charge of murder, and each of them accusing the other of the crime. Djezzar was perplexed for a moment. It was possible that one of them was innocent. Wanting proof of this, and not being in the humor to wait for it, he thought of an ingenious and prompt means of referring the judgment to God. By his orders the accused were fastened back to back by their bodies and shoulders; he draws his sabre—the head which falls is to be that of the guilty man.

Seeing death so near, the two wretched men struggle to avoid falling beneath the hand of the executioner; they turn—they shift—each endeavoring to place his companion on the side where the blow is to fall. Djezzar regarded this manoeuvering for some time with pleasure; at length, after having pronounced the name of Allah three times, he made his Damascene blade describe a large circle, and both heads fell off at a blow.

Notwithstanding his habitual gravity, the pacha could not avoid laughing at this unexpected result; he laughed immoderately, which he had probably never before done in his life, and his noisy bursts mingled with the hoarse roars and panting of a lion, which, confined in a neighboring apartment, inhaled the odor of the blood.

This lion was his master’s favorite. Custom had for a long time prescribed to the pachas of Shivas, as to other pachas of the East, that they should be accompanied by a lion on all solemn occasions. Galib, the predecessor of Djezzar, and a great partisan of reform, had a monstrous one which he fed particularly with Janizaries; the story ran, that the fanatical Djezzar appeased the appetite of his occasionally with Christian flesh.

And yet this ferocious man, who made a profession of the trade of an executioner, who laughed only when heads were cut off, who, according to public rumor, tossed human flesh to his lion, HaÏder, felt the power of love, doubtless not gallant and perfumed love—the love of the boudoir; but, endowed with an energetic and voluptuous temperament, he passed in the midst of his harem the time spared from business; and in the East, whatever may be the complexity of affairs, the administration, especially under such a mastery, is reduced to such simplicity, that leisure is never wanting.

Djezzar could say with Orasmanus,

ZaÏre, that is, BaÏla, awaited him on his quitting the Council. Especially in his summer palace of Kizil-Ermak did he spend the greater part of the day, extended on cushions at the feet of his beautiful slave, smoking the roses of Taif or Adrianople, mingled with the tobacco of Malatia or Latakia, sometimes chewing a leaf of haschich, or a grain of opium, or even of arsenic to exalt his imagination.

BaÏla sometimes smoked the hooka; and as they reclined there together, plunged into a dreamy state, full of reveries, caused by the juice of the yucca or the poppy of Aboutig, the one opening for himself in advance a sojourn among the celestial houris, the other thinking, perchance, of the audacious stranger, HaÏder, the lion, drawing in his claws, would stretch, himself familiarly beside them.

BaÏla would then lean carelessly on her elbow against this terrible creature, whilst the pacha would listlessly permit his head to recline on the lap of the odalisk. It was a sight to behold this beautiful young female, robed in light draperies, reposing thus quietly between these two ferocious beasts. She feared neither of them; the lion was tamed as well as the man; both obeyed her voice, her look.

At first, notwithstanding the violent passion of Djezzar, BaÏla had doubts as to the duration of her power, especially when she thought of the favorite who had preceded her.

This favorite, after a reign of three years, having dared to persist in soliciting pardon for a bostangi, who was condemned to lose his hand for having fished fraudulently, during the night, in the fish-ponds of the pacha, the latter, in a moment of rage, had cut off the nose of his beautiful Aysche, and then not desiring to keep her in that state, he had completed the punishment of the trustless bostangi and the refractory slave by uniting them in marriage. A piece of ground, situated on the confines of the city, had been given them as a dowry. Aysche now sold vegetables in the market, where she was known by the name of Bournouses (the noseless.)

This example of the instability of the power of favorites had ceased to disturb BaÏla, since the Christian had revealed to her the secret of her power. Besides, at the time of the events Aysche was no longer young, which might give rise to the thought, that her decreasing beauty, rather than any other cause, had excited the wrath of her master.

BaÏla was seventeen years old, with a Georgian head on a Circassian body, the voice of a syren, and the tread of a nymph—what had she to fear? Her will had become that of the pacha. Entirely cemented by habit to her love, he appeared never to think of his other odalisks, except when the Mingrelian, from caprice or petulance, revolted openly against his desires. Then, in the presence of the rebellious beauty, Djezzar would order a slave to carry to an odalisk, whom he designated, a piece of goods, which, according to the Oriental custom, announced the approach of the master, and which in accordance with our method of translating Turkish manners, we have naturalized among us by the phrase of “throwing the handkerchief.”

Formerly, at the idea of the infidelity which was to be practiced toward her, BaÏla fretted and pouted in a corner with a bereaved air. Her small mouth drawn down at the corners, muttered unintelligible complaints and threats; her beautiful black eyes, with their long, vibrating lashes, were half closed, and with her head bent, and the pupils drawn back to the angle of the eyelids, she cast upon the slave, the master, and the brilliant piece of goods, a look full of anger and jealousy. There her audacity ceased.

But now, when Djezzar, to avenge himself on her, takes a fancy to be inconstant, she falls upon the stuff and the slave, tears the one and cuffs the other; and if the omnipotent pacha carries out his plan of vengeance, it frequently happens on the next day that as the price of submission, the slave is, on some pretext, bastinadoed, and the favorite of a day driven away in disgrace, too happy to escape, without, like Aysche, leaving her nose within the palace, is sent to the bazaar to become the property of the highest bidder.

Such had lately been the fate of the beautiful daughter of Amasia.

Proud in the empire she exercised over her master, BaÏla became intoxicated in the triumph of her vanity. In the midst of its smoke, the remembrance of the stranger, the giaour, no longer reached her but at distant intervals.

She had remained shut up for a whole week without descending into the gardens, when one day that Djezzar had gone to raise some taxes, resuming her old promenades, she found herself unconsciously near the Azalea of Pontus.

What had become of that young Frank? Was he still in the pachalick of Shivas? Did he still entertain the plan of a second attempt, as Mariam had thought he would? He had doubtless gone, returned to his country, that singular country called France, where they say the women rule the men; she should see him no more. So much the better for both him and her.

Whilst she was in this train of reflection a roar of HaÏder was heard without; it announced the return of the pacha. The latter had taken him with him, for the pleasure of letting him loose at some jackall by the way. She was preparing to return to her apartments to await there the arrival of Djezzar, when a report of fire-arms, followed by a low noise, was heard by the side of Red River.

BaÏla trembled without being able to explain the cause of her emotion.

“Have you been successful in hunting?” she said to Djezzar, when they were alone.

“So, so,” he replied; “my falcon struck three pheasants, and I killed a dog.”

BaÏla dared not interrogate him as to the doubtful sense which this word might have in the mouth of so orthodox a Mussulman as Ali-ben-Ali.

That evening, when Mariam came to her mistress, after hesitating as to the information she was about to give her, and after ten preparatory exclamations, she informed her of the event of the day.

As the pacha was returning to his palace, and his hunting train was straggling along by the woods of Kizil-Ermak, near the place where they entered the second enclosure, HaÏder, whom a slave held by a leash, stopped obstinately before a copse, growling in low tones, which attracted the attention of Djezzar. The copse having been beaten by the train, a man sprung out from it, flying rapidly toward the river, across which he endeavored to swim, but before he could reach the opposite bank, the pacha, snatching a gun from the hand of one of his delhis, had drawn on the flyer with such certainty of eye and hand, that, struck in the head, he had disappeared immediately, carried down by the current. This man was a Christian, but an Asiatic Christian, as his head-dress of blue muslin proved. Besides, the pacha said that the roar of HaÏder of itself showed what his religion was.

“Be his country or religion what they may,” said Mariam, finishing her story, “he is dead, dead without any one being enabled to divine what motive could have induced him to secrete himself on this side of the river by the very verge of the palace.”

“At the verge of the gardens,” then interrupted BaÏla, who had listened to the recital of her old negress without interrupting her for a moment, or even without appearing to be greatly moved by it. “It was into the gardens that he wished to penetrate, as he had done before.”

Mariam looked at her with surprise.

“Yes,” pursued the Mingrelian, “the man whom they have killed is the young Frank, who had doubtless changed his dress, so as not to attract too much attention to himself by his European costume.”

Mariam remained silent.

“Do you not think so also?”

After some inarticulate words the negress said, “Who can tell?”

“Thyself,” replied BaÏla, “thou knowest more than thou hast told me.”

“I avow,” added Mariam, after a little hesitation, “that one of the delhis, who witnessed the affair, said in my presence, that the fugitive appeared to have a very white complexion for an Asiatic.”

“Thou seest it all well, Mariam,” said BaÏla, carelessly, still playing with the fan she held in her hand.

“If it is so,” replied the negress, “I am sorry for the fate of the poor young Christian; but we at least are out of the reach of danger in consequence of it, and I can now sleep, for, since his double apparition in the garden, I have but half closed my eyes. I feared constantly some imprudence on your part or his.”

“Faint-hearted;” and Mariam assisted BaÏla in arranging her toilet for the night.

Soon after daylight the Mingrelian left her solitary couch, for Djezzar fatigued by the chase had also slept alone, woke her old negress, and both descended into the gardens. BaÏla gave as a pretext for her walk, her desire to breathe the fresh air of the gardens.

She went first to the kiosk, then to the plateau, on which she had formerly seated herself; she cast a glance around her on the masses of flowers and shrubs, upon the small marble basin, and fixed for some time an attentive look upon the two palm-trees, as if some one was about to appear between their columns, under their green canopy. She went then to the spot where the Azalea covered with its shade and its flowers the last trace of the stranger; she broke off one of the branches, stripped it of its foliage, broke it into two, fastened together the pieces in the form of a cross, by means of a cord taken from a pelisse which she wore; she then set up this cross upon the foot-print, which was almost effaced. All this was done without any affectation of sentiment, and with a calm and almost listless air.

At the sight of the cross, Mariam, who was born a Christian in Abyssinia, signed herself, after having first cast a cautious glance around her. BaÏla contented herself with breathing a sigh, the sigh of a child who sees a game on which it has been for some time engaged, finished. She then returned to the isolated pavilion, in which her suite of apartments was situated, with her head bent down and pensive, but thinking, perhaps, of any thing else than the stranger.

From that moment, however, cross and fantastic with Djezzar, she had no longer for him those soft caresses, nor those melodious songs, nor those intoxicating dances which accompanied the clicking noise of her castinets, and appeared to open the gates of the seventh heaven. She finished by irritating him so much by her redoubled whims, caprices, and refusals, that he left her in a fury, and remained for three whole days without wishing to speak to her. On the third day, the attendants came to him to inform him that a terrible noise was heard in the apartments of the favorite, the cries of a woman mingled with the roarings of the lion.

Djezzar sent thither, but was unwilling to go himself. When they hastened to the assistance of the Mingrelian, they found her shut up alone with HaÏder. The rich carpet of Khorassan, which adorned the floor of her chamber, was in places rent to pieces, and all strewed over with bits of switches of the cherry. These shreds and fragments pointed out the places where the strife had taken place between the lion and the odalisk.

After having drawn him into her pavilion, BaÏla had shut him off from all retreat, and careless of the result to herself, armed with a light bunch of rods, she had struck him redoubled blows, resolutely renewing every stick which was broken on the body of her terrible antagonist. The latter, accustomed to obey the voice that scolded him, and the arm that struck him, without thinking of defending himself, bounded from one side of the chamber to the other, tearing up a strip of carpet with his curled talons at each bound; but finally his patience and long endurance exhausted, irritated by grief, groaning and palpitating, lying half on his croupe and his back, raising up one of his monstrous paws, he extended his glittering talons, and became in his turn threatening, when suddenly the bostangis and footmen of the pacha entered, armed with boar-spears. The door being opened, the lion fled through it in disgrace, not before the new comers, but from the Mingrelian, who still pursued him with her last cherry-stick.

On the evening of the day in which BaÏla had excited the royal anger of the lion against herself, that terrible animal, broken and degraded by his domestic habits, came, like a well-trained dog, confused and repentant, to couch at the feet of his mistress, imploring pardon.

On the following day Djezzar did the same. The favorite saw him approach her, humble, and laden with presents. The contest of BaÏla with HaÏder, of which a full account had been given to him, filled him with a singular admiration for the former. BaÏla received the two conquered with a cold dignity, which might pass for some remains of rigor.

This double victory found her indifferent; she had exhausted all the emotions she could experience; she had so far distanced her rivals, that triumph over them no longer excited her vanity; the slaves around her were so submissive that she no longer took pleasure in commanding them. The pacha was tamed, tamed even to weakness, to cowardice; every one, even the lion, submitted to the power of the favorite, and with such unanimous accord, that in this harem, where every thing prostrates itself before her, and every thing is done in accordance with her will or her caprice, she has but a single enemy whom she cannot conquer; it is ennui. That threatened to increase daily, and to strengthen itself by the weakness of the others.

The pacha went on the same day to the city; BaÏla consented to accompany him; and after having remained a short time at Shivas, they had scarcely returned to Kizil-Ermak, when she appeared entirely different from what she had been at her departure. Gayety and vivacity had returned to her; the smile to her lips, joy to her eyes; she had refound her sweetest songs, her most graceful dances. She was charming in the eyes of Djezzar and even of HaÏder. It was said she had been spontaneously metamorphosed by the way.

The good humor of the favorite communicating itself to the pacha, and spreading from him far and near, all was joy in the palace that night.

BaÏla alone possessed the secret of this general joy.

——