"Djanum!" cried the young man, coming towards him and looking at him attentively. "Friends, this is Yon Effendi, the Englishman who married Oriort Shushan Meneshian."
Most of the twelve or fifteen prisoners who were shut up there together knew his story, and all gathered round him with sympathy and interest. In the awful strain of their position any momentary distraction was a relief. "How had he come there?" they asked. It happened that they had all been imprisoned before he set out on his desperate errand: some, like Kaspar, had been found outside the Armenian Quarter; others had been arrested by the Redifs, on various pretexts, within it. But Jack, before he told his story, asked if they could give him any food, for he was exhausted with hunger. All they had to offer was a piece of hard black bread, defiled by the mud and filth into which it had been purposely thrown by their jailors; and a draught of water, by no means either clean or fresh. But even for these he was very thankful, and ate and drank with eagerness.
Kaspar Hohanian quoted to him a proverb of their race. "'Eat and drink, and talk afterwards,' says the Turk. 'Eat and drink, and talk at the same time,' says the Armenian."
"At all events, while I eat you can talk to me," Jack said, with his mouth full. "Your people thought you were dead, Baron Kaspar."
"The Turks killed all my companions—oh, and so cruelly!" he answered with a shudder. "But an acquaintance I had among them persuaded them, instead of killing me at once, to tie me to one of the tall, upright tombstones in their cemetery outside the gate. Their thought was to leave me there to die of hunger; my friend's, as he whispered, was to come back at night and release me. But, Amaan! the patrol came along before he did, took me, and brought me here. And now I have a week given me to choose between Islam and death. It is hard."
They were all, as it seemed, in like case, only the period of respite varied a little. Meanwhile, it relaxed the intolerable tension of their thoughts, and wiled away a few weary hours, to tell and to hear each other's histories. Jack accordingly gave his, expressing sorrow for the fate of Der Garabed, the priest of Biridjik, and asking if any one present knew anything about him.
No one did; and while they were discussing the matter, the prison door was opened, and another captive led—or rather thrust—in, to join their mournful company. He was a man of middle age, good-looking, and well dressed in European fashion. But his head was bowed down and his fez pulled low over his face, his arms hung helplessly by his side, and his whole manner and bearing showed the most utter dejection.
Jack sprang up and came to him at once, with an exclamation of pity and sorrow. "Baron Muggurditch Thomassian!" he said.
"Don't speak to me!" said Thomassian, turning on him a look of unutterable anguish.