CHAPTER XLIV.
TEMPTATION AND FOLLY.
Never while life remains shall I forget the hours of delight I passed with Iola.
I know that it was wrong—exceedingly wrong—and blamable in me to have yielded to the tempting peril of engaging in this flirtation—to give my regard for Iola its mildest term—but what could I do? And having once yielded to the allurement, and encouraged her in it, how could I fly or avoid her?
I met her no more at the Ruined Hermitage, or at the green City of the Silent, for such interviews were full of peril; but I met her again and again, in the seclusion of her own apartments, into which not even the tongueless and mutilated slaves of Hussein could penetrate without a signal being given and permission accorded from within. Thus we had an interview every evening, and had much delightful conversation, and many an hour of mute reverie.
How strange and alluring were those long, deep, and dangerous reveries, which were full of beatings of the heart, and tender meanings which the pen cannot depict, and no written language can convey!
My word plighted to the absent Hussein—my honour, and more than all, her honour—yea, her very life, were in peril, yet I trifled with both, like the heedless, reckless, and it may be, selfish boy I was!
Poor Iola!
I related the story of her brother's desertion, recapture, trial, and the death he suffered so courageously in our presence at Heraclea. I mentioned the two little incidents which brought me in personal contact with him; first in the public khan, and secondly at the last terrible scene in the valley of the mosque, where from his dead hand I took the little coral cross, which by a strange course of events I was now enabled to suspend upon the bosom of his sister; and as I did so, I thought of all that high-spirited and noble Albanian soldier would have felt had he seen that sister, now a Mahommedan, (the wife of one of those barbarous Osmanli who pistolled his stately mother at Acre,) and hanging in all her loveliness, dissolved in tears and grief upon the bosom of a stranger—a soldier of Frangistan!
I deemed it well for Hussein, well for Iola, and particularly fortunate for myself, that the fiery young lieutenant of Albanians was sleeping in his quiet grave, where the slaves of the Mir Alai Saïd had laid him.