“Guess you are keeping your hand in, Count, against the time they fix you up with a whole territory to practise your fascinations upon.”
“Don’t dabble in prophecy, Hicks, unless you want to postpone that desirable time until the Greek Kalends. So poor Mansfield is tortured to make a pastime for me, is he? Well, it will be all made up to him. I intend him to marry my niece, and she takes after her father, and could not hurt any one’s feelings in cold blood to save her life.”
“Is that so, Count? Well, Mr Mansfield will have earned his happiness,” said Mr Hicks drily. “But I guess you know some folks have figured it out that the young lady is to marry the King of Thracia? Old Prince Mirkovics is flying round putting the kingdom in order, and whispering the secret to most every one he meets. You are not in it, then?”
“Scarcely. For one thing, I don’t think my niece would come into the scheme, and I am not so foolish as to undertake to marry her to any one against her will. And then, you see, I am retained, as I said, in Mansfield’s behalf.”
CHAPTER XIV.
NO PLACE OF REPENTANCE.
The sojourn at Urtas, which had proved so irksome to Cyril, was not doomed to last much longer. As soon as the watchful Mr Hicks could be induced, against his better judgment, to allow him to travel, he was on the road again, riding whenever it was possible. When the country was so rough as to render horse exercise unsafe for a rider able only to use one hand, he was content to be conveyed ignominiously in the mule-litter. In his train followed Mr Hicks, acting both as surgeon and chronicler. Cyril was well pleased to keep the American supplied with exclusive information on points of general interest, since he found him prepared to exercise a wise discretion with regard to matters of real importance. Mr Hicks asked no more favourable treatment than this. He had been sent out to write up the Palestine question for the ‘Crier,’ and how could he do so better than by encamping continually, so to speak, close to the fountainhead of information on the subject? His retinue, added to Cyril’s, made an imposing cavalcade, and the local governors and petty sheikhs honoured with a visit were duly impressed.
The minds of these functionaries were found to be much perturbed, owing to the reports which had been spread as to the intentions of the new government, and it was sometimes a long business to reassure them. Curiously enough, the worst and most malevolent of the mischief-makers were the Jews whose families had been settled in the larger towns for two or more generations. Supported in idleness by means of the Chalukah—a kind of voluntary tax which the Jews throughout the world imposed on themselves for the benefit of their poor brethren in Palestine—these men, quite naturally, were fully satisfied with the present. The prospect of a future in which their pretensions would be examined and their privileges curtailed was not enticing. Hard work in stubborn soil, even on land which was their own, would be a poor exchange for ease and idleness, and these degenerate Israelites did their best to avert it by inciting the Moslems to resist the change of rule. Calumny after calumny was brought forward by the local authorities, and refuted by Cyril, who made his way to the hardest hearts by dint of a judicious combination of bonhomie and bakhshish. It is true that the natives, having seen the colour of his money, and heard of the liberty and other blessings in store for them, chose to ignore the existence of the Jewish State altogether. However, since they accepted all Cyril’s suggestions, and agreed to pay their taxes to the officials whom he should appoint, their belief that England was about to take possession of the country, and had sent him in advance as her representative, mattered little.
Owing to the singular success of his labours, Count Mortimer’s journey through the country bore the aspect of a triumphal progress. When he arrived at length at Damascus, there remained only the Beni Ismail and their Desert Queen to be placated before he could announce that the whole Moslem population of Palestine was well affected towards the new rule. To gain the goodwill of the Christians was a hopeless task, he knew; but at this moment they were all fully occupied in intriguing, with the support of the consuls of the Powers who protected them respectively, for the aggrandisement of their property or prestige at the expense of rival sects. Even Bishop Philaret had forgotten the iniquities of the Jews for a time, and was so hotly engaged in a controversy with the Latins over a piece of ground some seven feet square, in which a ruined cistern (which he imagined to be a tomb) had been discovered, that he had no leisure to waste in attacking Cyril.
As the travellers approached Damascus, it seemed to Mansfield and Mr Hicks that their pace was faster than it had been at first. Cyril had become more impatient of delay, less tolerant of any proposal to digress from the appointed route for the purpose of visiting some object of interest. They could see that his spirits were variable, in spite of the rigid self-control which he exercised, and his physician discovered that for the first time in his life he slept badly night after night. When they reached the city, however, and had taken up their quarters in the house of an Oriental cousin of the Chevalier’s, he was calm and cheerful again. On the first evening of their stay he was the life of the party, which included a cheerful young Roumi aide-de-camp of the Vali or Governor-General, who was the bearer of his superior’s respects and compliments. When the story of their journeys had been told, Mahmud Fadil Bey had a good deal to say about the one task that remained to be completed.
“We are all anxious to see how you get on with the Beni Ismail,” he said, in his excellent French. “They have been a thorn in our side for many a day, and we shall not be sorry to turn them over to you.”