And the heart of Dunoisse echoed with unspeakable gladness:
“She is there!”
XC
For days the dark malodorous blue fog had hung over Stamboul. Now the southwest wind had rolled it up like a curtain and carried it away into Syria, and the great imperial city of marble domes and snowy minarets tipped with golden crescents, cypress-groves, and fountains, bagnios and beggars, sylvan vistas and screeching stinks, lay basking in golden November sunshine under a sky of purest turquoise. The scarlet and yellow tinting of the vines and creepers that draped the walls and the balconies of the black and red and white and yellow houses, alone told of winter, like the deepened crimson of the robin’s breast, and the pale purple of the crocus-like colchicum starring the meadows by the Sweet Waters. For those who chose, it would be summer. And all the vices of the Old World and the New came out to bask in the warmth and the beauty. And the roar of traffic and the confusion of tongues in the offal-ridden, stinking thoroughfares and on the filthy quays, above the broad belt of discarded straw slippers, rusty tin kettles, and wooden basins, and decomposing cats and dogs, that rose and fell upon the margin of the crystal-blue Bosphorus—deafened the ears and dazed the brain.
The roadsteads of Beshiktash were packed with French and English battleships and transports. The vessels of the Turkish Fleet, with the great golden lions sprawling on their prows, were anchored lower down. Innumerable gilded caïques, richly draped and cushioned, propelled by rowers in gay liveries and crowded—not only by Turkish ladies veiled in the yashmak, and swathed in the feridjeh, but by English and French women of Society—dressed in the latest Parisian fashions, and accompanied by uniformed officers and civilian friends in correct afternoon attire—shot to and fro over the surface of the harbor; seeming to avoid, yet encircling and following a large galley, gorgeous as a dying dolphin in colors of crimson and silver and green, and closely attended by one or two vessels of magnificence only inferior to the first, which had been waiting all the morning at the Dolma Bâghchi Palace Stairs.
His Sublime Majesty, the Padishah, a sallow, black-bearded, impassive personage—suggestive, in his tightly-buttoned frock coat and plain fez, of a dark blue glass medicine-bottle with a red seal—attended by one or two privileged Ministers, corpulent and spectacled dignitaries with gray beards, was pleased to take the air of the harbor instead of seeking the refreshment of the Sweet Waters; and it was etiquette to follow, at a respectful distance, the galley containing the Luminary of the World. Thus, the gilded caïques containing the veiled inmates of the harems of Stamboul and Pera and Therapia, or the well-dressed ladies of the Legations and Consulates with their male companions, followed the turns and windings of the monster dolphin, like a flock of variegated Pacific parrot-fish, while the fervid sunshine poured down upon the glory and the loveliness, the filth and the degradation of the ancient seat of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, and all the vices of the East and of the West mingled in the olla-podrida of nations and of tongues.
Veiled and muffled Turkish ladies, elevated above the mud upon wooden clogs, went by, with chattering Nubian women in attendance on them. Old men in green turbans hawked coco and sweetmeats; gypsy-girls, brazen of glance and bold of tongue, trafficked in fortunes and did business in smiles. Turkish soldiers of the Reserve, garrisoning the capital—the fine flower of the Ottoman Army being with Omar Pasha at Eupatoria—shambled by, smoking cigarettes, or munching lumps of coarse ration-bread. And Jews, Armenians, Germans of the Legion, Styrians, Levantines, Africans, Bulgarians, Wallachs, Czechs, rubbed shoulders with men of every rank and branch of the Sister Services of Britain and her Ally of France.
And amongst the English officers who thronged the European Clubs, and crowded the hotels, and strolled upon the public places, were well-groomed, dandified, curled and whiskered Adonises who had been the spoiled and petted beauty-men of their regiments at Home, and were going out to Balaklava under the impression that they were heroes. But when they encountered the men who had come down invalided from the Front, the luster fled from their Macassared whiskers, and the assurance of their manners underwent alteration. For these were the Real Thing—the genuine article—and only for the genuine article were the ladies, English and French, Greek or Italian—possessed of ears and eyes.
Upon the deck of a large, luxurious steam-yacht, anchored with other private vessels in the roadstead below Beshiktash, and flying the Ensign of St. George, with the white, red-crossed, gold-crowned burgee of the Royal Yacht Squadron, were gathered so many men and women representative of Society in Paris or London, that the background might have been Cowes, or Ryde, or Henley at the height of the season, instead of the European shore of the Bosphorus in November drear. And though many brilliant uniforms were present, with handsome men inside some of them, the loveliest ladies, icily ignoring these, vied with each other in attentions to certain hairy, ragged, bandaged, and limping tatterdemalions, who sported their rags with insufferable arrogance, or the profound reposeful pride of old Egyptian kings. For they were officers of Infantry and Artillery who had been wounded at the Alma, or they were Cavalrymen whose stained red jackets, striped overalls, and battered brass helmets, proclaimed them to be of Redlett’s Heavy Brigade.... And he who lolled under the green-and-white after-deck awning in a big Indian cane chair, with a little court of admiring beauties gathered round him, and the wife of the English Ambassador sitting upon his right hand—the man whose astrakhan-trimmed Hussar jacket, stiff with tarnished gold lace, was slashed to ribbons; whose busby had been shorn by a sword-cut of its red plume and gilded cord—whose crimson overalls were stained like the tights of a street tumbler—who had lost his sabretasche and half a spur, and whose boots—once the pride of a Pall Mall maker’s heart—were slit in places and had burst in others, was the most cosseted, complimented, caressed and waited-on of all those who basked in the light of admiring glances and the warmth of approving smiles.
As Houris in rustling silks, marvelous lace mantles, and bonnets of the latest Parisian mode hovered about him, ministering with champagne-cup, Russian tea, caviar-sandwiches, little Turkish pastries, and large Turkish cigarettes to his imperial needs, you saw him as a man of forty-nine or thereabouts, tall and lean in figure, sinewy of muscle, long of bone. His features were boldly aquiline and not unhandsome; his eyes were of keen, sparkling yellowish hazel, his reddish curling hair and bushy, untrimmed whiskers of the same shade were just sprinkled with gray. The outline of his jaw had the sharp salient line that distinguished the bows of the brand-new pivot-gun screw-steamer that lay anchored with the French and British line-of-battleships in the roads at Beshiktash; his smile revealed a magnificent unbroken row of shining white teeth, and his left arm was bandaged and slung. Also, he had a Russian saber-cut on his sharp cheekbone, and a Russian bullet in the muscles of his ribs made him catch his breath and grimace occasionally. For this egregious dandy, the owner of the luxurious steam-yacht and many things more desirable; who said “aw” for “are” and “wheiah” for “where,” and “Bay Jove!” with the drawl one has heard Bancroft use in Robertson comedies, was Lord Cardillon, the Brigadier who had led the famous Light Cavalry Charge at Balaklava, on the white-legged, big brown horse—who was even then being pampered with cakes and sugar in his loose-box in the ’tween decks—and whose tail the hero-worshiping crowd were to pluck bare when he got back to London.