"You are Michael, son of Milosch. I am Morsinia, child of Kabilovitsch. For the love of Jesu! save me from this hell. We can communicate by this means."
It was a long row that Captain Ballaban took that night upon the Bosphorus. Yet he went not far, but back and forth around the new seraglio point, scarcely out of sight of the clear-cut outline of the Phranza Palace, as it stood out against the sky above the ordinary dwellings of the city. The dawn began to peer over the hills back of Chalcedon, and to send its scouts of ruddy light down the side of Mt. Olympus, when he landed. But the length of the night to him could not be measured by hours. He had lived over again ten years. He had gone through a battle which tired his soul as it had never been tired under the flashing of steel and the roar of culverin. Only once before, when, as a mere child he was conquered by the terrors of the Janizaries' discipline, had he suffered so intensely. Yet the battle was an undecided one. He staggered up the hill from the landing to the barracks with the cry of conflict ringing through his soul. "What shall I do?" On the one side were the habit of loyalty, his oath of devotion to the Padishah, all his earthly ambition which blazed with splendors just before him—for he was the favorite of both the Sultan and the soldiers—and all that the education of his riper years had led him to hope for in another world. On the other side were this new passion of love which he could no longer laugh down, and the appeal of a helpless fellow creature for rescue from what he knew was injustice, cruelty and degradation;—the first personal appeal a human being had ever made to him, and he the only human being to whom she could appeal. To heed this cry of Morsinia he knew would be treason to his outward and sworn loyalty. To refuse to heed it he felt would be treason to his manhood. What could he do? Neither force was preponderating.
The battle wavered.
What did he do? What most people do in such circumstances—he temporized: said, "I will do nothing to-day." Like a genuine Turk he grunted to himself, "Bacaloum!" "We shall see!"
But though he arranged and ordered an armistice between his contending thoughts, there was no real cessation of hostilities. Arguments battered against arguments. Feelings of the gentler sort mined incessantly beneath those which he would have called the braver and more manly. And the latter counter-mined: loyalty against love: ambition against pity.
But all the time the gentler ones were gaining strength. On their side was the advantage of a definite picture—a lovely face; of an immediate and tangible project—the rescue of an individual. The danger of the enterprise weighed nothing with him, or, at least, it was counter-balanced by the inspiriting anticipation of an adventure, an exploit:—the very hazard rather fascinating than repelling. Yet he had not decided.
CHAPTER XLVII.
Captain Ballaban was summoned by the Sultan.
"Well, comrade," said Mahomet, familiarly throwing his arm about his friend, much to the disgust of the Capee Aga, the master of ceremonies, through whom alone it was the custom of the Sultans to be approached.