The Count then directed his prow to what is now Aleppo, with the purpose of procuring Arab horses; and having purchased five of the purest blood, he made sail for Constantinople.
We shall now, for a time, permit the title Emir to lapse. The knight we have seen on the deck of the new arrival in the Golden Horn viewing with melancholy interest the cities on either side of the fairest harbor on earth, is in easy English speech, Count Corti, the Italian.
Thus far the Count had been successful in his extraordinary mission, yet he was not happy. He had made three discoveries during his journey—his mother, his country, his religion. Ordinarily these relations—if we may so call them—furnish men their greatest sum of contentment; sadly for him, however, he had made a fourth finding, of itself sufficient to dash all the others—in briefest term, he was not in condition to acknowledge either of them. Unable to still the cry heard while retiring from his father's ruined castle, he surrendered himself more and more to the wisdom brought away from the box of the Madonna and Child in the angle of the road to Brindisi—God and Allah are the same. Conscience and a growing sense of misappropriated life were making Count Corti a very different person from the light-hearted Emir of Mahommed.
CHAPTER V
THE PRINCESS IRENE IN TOWN
An oblong room divided in the middle crosswise by two fluted pillars of pink-stained marble, light, delicately capped, and very graceful—between the pillars a segmental arch—between the walls and the pillars square ties;—the wall above the pillars elaborately scrolled;—three curtains of woollen stuff uniformly Tyrian dyed filling the open places—the central curtain drawn to the pillars, and held there by silken ropes richly tasselled—the side curtains dropped;—a skylight for each division of the room, and under each skylight an ample brazier dispensing a comfortable degree of warmth;—floor laid in pink and saffron tiles;—chairs with and without arms, some upholstered, all quaintly carved—to each chair a rug harmoniously colored;—massive tables of carven wood, the tops of burnished copper inlaid with blocks of jasper, mostly red and yellow—on the tables murrhine pitchers vase-shaped, with crystal drinking goblets about them;—the skylights conical and of clear glass;—the walls panelled, a picture in every panel, and the raised margins and the whole space outside done in arabesque of studied involution;—doors opposite each other and bare;—such was the reception-room in the town-house of the Princess Irene arranged for the winter.
On an armless chair in one of the divisions of the beautiful room, the Princess sat, slightly bending over a piece of embroidery stretched upon a frame. What with the accessories about her—the chair, a small table at her right covered with the bright materials in use, the slanted frame, and a flexible lion's skin under her feet—she was a picture once seen never forgotten. The wonderful setting of the head and neck upon the Phidian shoulders was admirably complemented by the long arms, bare, round, and of the whiteness of an almond kernel freshly broken, the hands, blue-veined and dimpled, and the fingers, tapering, pliant, nimble, rapid, each seemingly possessed of a separate intelligence.
To the left of the Princess, a little removed, Lael half reclined against a heap of cushions, pale, languid, and not wholly recovered from the effects of the abduction by Demedes, the terrible doom which had overtaken her father, and the disappearance of the Prince of India, the latter unaccountable except upon the hypothesis of death in the great fire. The dying prayer of the son of Jahdai had not failed with the Princess Irene. Receiving the unfortunate girl from Sergius the day after the rescue from the cistern, she accepted the guardianship, and from that hour watched and tended her with maternal solicitude.
The other division of the room was occupied by attendants. They were visible through the opening left by the drawn curtain; yet it is not to be supposed they were under surveillance; on the contrary, their presence in the house was purely voluntary. They read, sang, accepted tasks in embroidery from their mistress, accompanied her abroad, loved her—in a word, their service was in every respect compatible with high rank, and in return they derived a certain education from her. For by universal acknowledgment she was queen and arbiter in the social world of Byzantium; in manner the mirror, in taste and fashion its very form. Indeed, she was the subject of but one objection—her persistent protest against the encumbrance of a veil.