According to her story she had gone among the first to St. Sophia. When the Moslems entered they tied her by a silken girdle to the person of the Grand Chamberlain, and, amid the jeers of the soldiers, marched them together to the Hippodrome. She remembered the Sultan as he rode on his horse,—how he struck with his battle hammer one of the silver heads of the bronze serpents, and cried: "So I smite the heads of the kingdoms!" Just as he did so he turned, and saw her in her rags tied to the courtly-robed lord, and in an angry voice commanded that the princely man be loosed from contact with the filthy hag. Phranza was taken away: but nobody cared to take her away. She was trampled by the crowd, but lived. And nobody thought of turning her out of her hovel home. She was as safe as is a rat when the robbers have killed the nobler inmates of a house.
The woman said that she had heard that the daughter of Phranza was sent away somewhere to an island home. But the Albanian Princess,—Yes, she knew her well; for no hand used to drop so bountifully the alms she asked, or said so kindly "Jesu pity you, my good woman!" as did that beautiful lady. The beggar declared that she stood near her by the altar in St. Sophia. "She looked so saintly there! There was a real aureole about her head as she prayed, so she was a saint indeed. Then she raised her dagger!" But the wretched watcher could watch no longer, though she heard her cry, so wild that she would never cease to hear it.
The beggar ceased her story; all her words had cut through her listener's heart as if they had been daggers.
"It is well!" he said, "I will go to Albania. Among those who loved her I will worship her memory; and, under Castriot, I will seek my revenge."
CHAPTER XLIII.
Morsinia's fears, and her horror at the anticipated life in the harem, were not confirmed by its actual scenes. Except for the constant surveillance of the Nubian eunuchs and female attendants, there was no restriction upon her liberty. She passed through the familiar corridors, and rested upon the divan in what had been her own chamber in better days. Other female captives became her companions; but among them were none of those belonging to Constantinople. Suburban villages were represented; but most of the odalisks[84] were Circassian beauties, whose conduct did not indicate that they felt any shame in their condition. They indulged in jealous rivalry, estimating their own worth by the sums which the agents of the Sultan had paid their parents for their possession; or bantering one another as to who of their number would first meet the fancy of their royal master. There were several Greeks, who, with more modesty of speech, spared none of the arts of the toilet to prepare themselves to better their condition in the only way that was now open to them. A Coptic girl had been sent by Eenal, the Borghite Khalif of Egypt, as a present to the Sultan. Her form was slight, and without the fullness of development which other races associate with female beauty, but of wonderful grace of pose and motion; her face was broad; eyes wide and expressionless; mouth straight. Yet her features had that symmetry and balance which gave to them a strange fascination. The Turcoman Emir who had already given his daughter to Mahomet—the nuptials with whom he was celebrating when called to the throne—exercised still further his fatherly office in presenting to his son-in-law as fine a pair of black eyes as ever flashed their cruel commands to an amative heart. To study this physiognomical museum afforded Morsinia an entertaining relief from the otherwise constant torture of her thoughts.
To her further diversion one was introduced into the harem who spoke her own Albanian tongue. This new comer was of undoubted beauty, so far as that quality could be the product of merely physical elements. It was of the kind that might bind a god on earth, but could never help a soul to heaven. Her lower face, with full red lips arching the pearliest teeth, and complexion ruddy with the glow of health, shading into the snowy bosom, might perhaps serve to make a Venus; but her upper features, the low forehead and dilated nostrils, could never have been made to bespeak the thoughtful Minerva in this retreat of those, who, to the Moslem imagination, are the types of heavenly perfection. Her eyes were bright, but only with surface lustre. Her nature evidently contained no depths which could hold either noble resentment or self sacrificing love; either grand earthly passion or heavenly faith.
This woman's vanity did not long keep back the story of her life. She told of her conquest of the village swains who fought for the possession of her charms; of the devotion of an Albanian prince who took her dowerless in preference to the ladies of great family and fortune, and would have bestowed upon her the heirship to his estates: of how she was stolen away from the great castle by a company of Turkish officers, who afterward fought among themselves for the privilege of presenting her to the Validé Sultana;[85] for it was about the time of the Ramedan feast when the Sultan's mother made an annual gift to her son of the most beautiful woman she could secure. The vain captive declared that the jealousy of the odalisks at Adrianople had led the Kislar Aga to send her here to Constantinople.
"And who was the Albanian nobleman whose bride you had become?" asked Morsinia.