'Which means that she is—'
'Married—exactly.'
'So inquiries might only be unpleasant, if not dangerous?'
'Yes.'
'But when her brother is to die?'—began Belton.
'She shall never know of it,' replied Hussein. 'What useful end would be served by conveying the information to her. She would weep, and the tears of women are a great annoyance now, since we cannot apply the bastinado without permission from a Kadi or Moolah. Bah! this Constantine Vidimo is only a Greek, and one ball will kill him: in a moment all will be over.'
'Only a Greek!' reiterated Belton, who had been poring over the Corsair on our outward voyage; 'are not the Greeks human beings?'
'Scarcely—know you not, O Frank! that the Lord of the world hath sealed up their hearts and their hearing, and veiled their sight by a dimness.'
Tired of the Yuze Bashi and his barbarous ideas, we rose to bid him farewell and leave the khan; but he, having a wholesome terror of Ghoules, Guebres, and Genii in the dark, resolved on accompanying us to our quarters; for he too had rooms in the Coumbazadjilar-Kislaci. Thus we found the impossibility of shaking him off, and as we stumbled on, arm-in-arm with this epauletted assassin, followed step for step by Callum Dhu, through the dark, muddy, and unpaved streets of Heraclea, he told us various other pretty little episodes of himself and Ali Pasha.
The name of the latter must be familiar to the reader, as being the Turkish General of Brigade whose infamous abduction and murder of a young and beautiful Greek girl in the suburbs of Varna lately roused the indignation of the French commandant, by whose humane exertions, for the FIRST time in Oriental history, an Osmanli was tried for the murder of a Christian; and consequently Ali Pasha, the Brigadier; Lieutenant Mohammed Aga, his aide-de-camp; Hussein Aga, his steward; and Corporal Moustapha, appeared before a tribunal, which, of course, acquitted them; for every hair in the beard of a true Believer is worth all the benighted souls in Christendom.