Two years passed over Fatma Hanoum, and she became the mother of a son; but her heart was not with its father, and, unhappily for the weak victim of passion and disappointment, it had found a resting-place elsewhere.
The merchant’s house was situated near a mosque, from the gallery of whose minaret all the windows of the harem were overlooked. The sun was setting on a glorious summer evening, when the Imaum ascended to this gallery, to utter the shrill cry of the muezzin which summons the faithful to prayer. Ere he commenced the invocation, he chanced to glance downwards, and he started as he beheld a man, clinging to a shawl which had been flung from above, and making his way into the harem of the merchant through an open window. Nor was this all, for the quick and jealous eye of the Imaum at once assured him that the delinquent was a Greek—that the wife of a Musselmaun had stooped to accept the love of a Christian—and he well knew that, in such a case, there was no mercy for the culprit.
The Imaum was a stern man; for one moment only he wavered; and during that moment he raised the ample turban from his brow, and suffered the cool evening breeze to breathe lovingly upon his temples: in the next, he bent over the gallery and spat upon the earth, as he murmured to himself, “The dog of an Infidel,”—“May his father’s grave be defiled!—May his mother eat dirt!”—and having so testified his contempt and abhorrence of the ill-fated lover, he lifted his gaze to the clear sky, and the ringing cry pealed out:—
“La Allah, illa Allah! Muhammed Resoul Allah!”
His duty done, the Imaum descended the dark and narrow stair of the minaret, and left the mosque; and in another instant he had put off his slippers at the entrance of the salemliek, and stood before the sofa, at the upper end of which sat the merchant smoking his chibouk of jasmine wood, and attended by two slaves.
The Turks are not fond husbands, but they are jealous ones. They are watchful of their women, not because they love them, but because they are anxious for their own honour; and no instance can be adduced in which an Osmanli is wilfully blind to the errors of his wife.
Here “the offence was rank, it smelt to Heaven.” The young and beautiful Fatma Hanoum had wronged him with a Greek! The gray-bearded merchant, trembling between rage and grief, rose from his seat and rushed into the harem—The tale was true—for one moment the aged and outraged husband looked upon the young and handsome lover; and in the next the agile Greek had flung up the lattice, and sprung from the open window. Ere long the house was filled with the relatives of the wife, and its spacious apartments were loud with anguish and invective; but Fatma Hanoum answered neither to the sobbing of grief, nor to the reproach of scorn; she sat doubled up upon her cushions, with her eyes riveted on the casement by which her lover had escaped.
The merchant, stung to the heart by the stain that had been cast upon his honour; embittered in spirit by the knowledge that it was a Christian by whom he had been wronged; and not altogether forgetful, it may be, of the grace and beauty of the mother of his child, sat moodily apart; and all the reasonings and beseechings of his wife’s anxious family only wrung from him the cold and unyielding answer that he would never see her more.
And the heretic lover, where was he?
Like an arrow shot by a strong arm, he had sped to the home of his widowed mother, and had hurriedly imparted to her the fearful jeopardy in which he stood. There was not a moment to be lost; and, hastily snatching up some food that had been prepared for his evening meal, he flung himself upon the neck of his weeping parent; and then, disengaging himself from her clinging arms, rushed from the house, no one knew whither.