Early next morning the people of Stambul read the fetva, which was posted up at every corner. The decisive word had been spoken which was to evoke the bloody spectre to whom so many crowned heads had been sacrificed.
The first day a fearful expectation prevailed. Every one awaited the tempest, and prepared for it. The Sultan was passing the time at his summer palace, Bekshishtash, so, at least, it was said. An anxious, tormenting, and bloody pastime it proved to be.
In one wing of his palace were the damsels of the harem, in the others the chief Ulemas and councillors. Mahmoud paced from one room to another, and found peace nowhere.
Hundreds of times he sat in a row with his wise men, and caused the annals of the Ottoman Empire by his favorite historian, Ezaad Effendi, to be read aloud to him, and yet it was a terror to him to listen. The whole history from beginning to end was written in blood! The same principles always produced the same fruits! How many Grand Viziers, how many Padishahs, had not fallen? Their blood had flowed in streams from the throne, which had never tottered as it now tottered beneath him. And when he returned to the harem, and the charming odalisks appeared before him with their music and dances, and Milieva amongst them, the loveliest of them all, to whom in an hour of rapture he had given the rose-garden of his realm, Damascus, he bethought him that perchance to-morrow, or even that very night, those sweetly smiling heads might all be cut off, seized by their flowing locks and cast in heaps, while their dear and tender bodies might be sent swimming in the cold waves of the Bosphorus, to serve as food for the monsters of the deep. Who knows how many hours, who knows how many moments, they have still to live?
Every hour, every moment, the tidings arrive from Stambul that the Janissaries are assembling in menacing crowds, and now the conflagrations begin; every day fires break out in three or four parts of the town, but the heavy rains prevented any great damage from being done. This was always the way in which the riots began in Stambul.
The priests of Begtash stirred up the fanaticism of the masses in front of the mosques and in the public squares, incited the mob which had joined the ranks of the Janissaries to acts of outrage against the Sultan's officials and those of the Ulemas, softas, and Omarite fakirs who were in favor of the reforms.
On July 14th a rumor spread that a company of Janissaries, actuated by strong suspicion, had surrounded the cemetery which had been laid out and enclosed by the Omarite fakir, and cut down all the dervishes they found there, and amongst them their chief, Behram. They found upon him a bundle of papers which plainly revealed that a secret understanding existed between him and the great men of the Seraglio. They also found in his girdle a metal plate, on which was the following inscription:
"I am Behram, the son of Halil Patrona, the strong man, and of Gül-Bejáze,[14] the prophetess. My father in his lifetime began a great work, which after his death I continued. This work will only be accomplished and confirmed when I am dead and there is no further need of me. Blessed be he who knoweth the hours of his life and of his death."
[14] The heroine of Jókai's White Rose.
Those who were acquainted with the life and the end of Halil Patrona knew right well what this great work was thus mentioned by Behram, who had lived one hundred and eight years after his father's death, and had striven all that time to develop and mature the ideas which the former had vainly attempted to carry out at the point of the sword.