God and Heaven are still my own."
Chapter XXII GIVEN BACK FROM THE DEAD
"When we can love and pray over all and through all, the battle's past and the victory's come—glory be to God!"
—"Uncle Tom's Cabin."
One day Jack roused himself to go to the desolated house of the Vartonians. Very few of the surviving Armenians dared to be seen walking in their own Quarter; and, it was said by an eye-witness, no man was ever seen to walk upright there. They crept furtively about with bowed heads, slipping from shadow to shadow, afraid of the face of day and the eyes of their fellow men.
Jack's object in going was to find, if possible, his father's note-book, which he had entrusted to Kevork to give Shushan in case of his own death. It was to him a very precious relic, and he thought it might probably be amongst the things that had escaped the plunderers, as there was nothing in its plain appearance and binding to attract them.
It was agony to enter that blood-stained court, knowing all that had happened there, and to pass through those desolate rooms, associated in his mind with all the pleasant trifles of domestic life, thinking that every voice which he had heard there, save Gabriel's, was now hushed in death: every foot that trod those floors was dust. Even that dust had no quiet resting-place in the shadow of a Christian church. Those horrible trenches outside the gate, those hotbeds of fever and pestilence, told that, if the living were dumb, a cry that "shivered to the tingling stars" was going up from the desecrated dead.
Jack passed sadly through the rooms he knew, yet did not know as they looked now, but failed in any of them to find what he sought. At last he came to a chamber upstairs, where he was startled to see a human figure lying at full length on the floor. If it were a dead man, the death must have been very recent. But when he came near he saw at once that this was not death, but quiet, natural sleep. The man's dress was à la Frank, good and new; and his side face, which was all Jack could see, had the look of life, almost of health.