CHAPTER XIV.
THE GOLDEN HORN.
Since the English and French armies had established themselves in the Crimea and the magnitude of their undertaking grew more and more apparent, they had found their true base of operations at Constantinople. Here were collected vast masses of supplies and stores, waiting to be forwarded to the front; here the reinforcements—horse, foot, and guns—paused ere they joined their respective armies; here hospitals, extensive, but still ill-organised and incomplete, received the sick and wounded sent back from the Crimea; here also lingered, crowding the tortuous streets of Mussulman Stamboul and filling to overflowing the French-like suburb of Pera, a strange medley of people, a motley crew of various faiths and many nationalities, polyglot in tongue and curiously different in attire, drawn together by such various motives as duty, mere curiosity, self-interest, and greed. Jews, infidels, and Turks were met at every corner: the first engaged in every occupation that could help them to make money, from touting at the bazaars to undertaking large contracts and selling bottled beer; the second, representatives going or coming from the forces now devoted to upholding the Crescent; the third, mostly apathetic, self-indulgent, corpulent old Mussulmans riding in state, accompanied by their pipe-bearers, or sitting half-asleep in coffee-houses or at the doors of their shops. Now and again a bevy of Turkish ladies glided by: mere peripatetic bundles of white linen, closely-veiled and yellow-slippered; or a Greek in his white petticoat, fierce in aspect and armed to the teeth; or an Armenian merchant, Arnauts, Bashi-Bazouks, French Spahis, the Bedouins of the desert, but half-disguised as civilised troops, while occasionally there appeared, amidst the heterogeneous throng, the plain suit of grey dittoes worn by the travelling Englishman, or the more or less simple female costumes that hailed from London or Paris.
Misseri's hotel did a roaring trade. It was crowded from roof-tree to cellar. Rooms cost a fabulous price. Mrs. Wilders managed to be very comfortably lodged there notwithstanding.
She still lingered in Constantinople. Her anxiety for her husband forbade her to leave the East, although she told her friends it was misery for her to be separated from her infant boy. She might have had a passage home in a dozen different steamers returning empty, all of them in search of fresh freights of men or material; or there was Lord Lydstone's yacht still lying in the Golden Horn and ready to take her anywhere if only she said the word. But that, of course, was out of the question, as she had laughingly told her husband's cousin more than once when he had placed the Arcadia at her disposal.
They met sometimes, but never on board the yacht, for that would have outraged Mrs. Wilders's nice sense of propriety. It was generally at Scutari, where poor young Anastasius Wilders lay hovering between life and death, for Mrs. Wilders, with cousinly kindliness, came frequently to the wounded lad's bedside.
She was bound for the other side of the Bosphorus as she went downstairs one fine morning towards the end of October, dressed, as usual, to perfection.
A man met her as she crossed the threshold, a man dressed like, and with the air of, an Englishman—a pale-faced, sandy-haired man, with white eyebrows, rather prominent cheek-bones, and a retreating chin.