"It is the form of an Angel," answered he, with looks of the highest rapture, "and deserves to shine, encircled with a glory, in the courts of the Christian Heaven, compared with which, the delights of the Prophet's Paradise are empty shadows."
These words, spoken with warmth and visible conviction, found free entrance into the open heart of the Princess: especially, the glory, it appeared to her, must be a sort of head-dress that would sit not ill upon the face. Her quick fancy fastened on this idea, which she asked to have explained; and the Count with all eagerness embraced this opportunity of painting the Christian Heaven to her as charming as he possibly could; he chose the loveliest images his mind would suggest; and spoke with as much confidence as if he had descended directly from the place on a mission to the Princess. Now, as it has pleased the Prophet to endow the fair sex with very scanty expectations in the other world, our apostolic preacher failed the less in his intentions; though it cannot be asserted that he was preëminently qualified for the missionary duty. But whether it were that Heaven itself favoured the work of conversion, or that the foreign tastes of the Princess extended to the spiritual conceptions of the Western nations, or that the person of this Preacher to the Heathen mixed in the effect, certain it is she was all ear, and would have listened to her pedagogue with pleasure for many hours longer, had not the approach of night cut short their lesson. For the present, she hastily dropped her veil, and retired to the Seraglio.
It is a well-known fact, that the children of princes are always very docile, and make giant steps in every branch of profitable knowledge, as our Journals often plainly enough testify; while the other citizens of this world must content themselves with dwarf steps. It was not surprising, therefore, that the Sultan of Egypt's daughter had in a short space mastered the whole synopsis of Church doctrine as completely as her teacher could impart it, bating a few heresies, which, in his inacquaintance with the delicate shades of faith, he had undesignedly mingled with it. Nor did this acquisition remain a dead letter with her; it awakened the most zealous wish for proselytising. Accordingly, the plan of the Princess had now in so far altered, that she no longer insisted on converting the Count, but rather felt inclined to let herself be converted by him; and this not only in regard to unity in faith, but also to the purposed unity in love. The whole question now was, by what means this intention could be realised. She took counsel with Bostangi, he with the mettled Kurt, in their nocturnal deliberations on this weighty matter; and the latter voted distinctly to strike the iron while it was hot; to inform the fair proselyte of the Count's rank and birth; propose to her to run away with him; instantly to cross the water for the European shore; and live together in Thuringia as Christian man and wife.
The Count clapped loud applause to this well-grounded scheme of his wise Squire; it was as if the mettled Kurt had read it in his master's eyes. Whether the fulfilment of it might be clogged with difficulties or not, was a point not taken into view in the first fire of the romantic project: Love removes all mountains, overleaps walls and trenches, bounds across abyss and chasm, and steps the barrier of a city as lightly as it does a straw. At the next lecture, the Count disclosed the plan to his beloved catechumena.
"Thou reflection of the Holy Virgin," said he, "chosen of Heaven from an outcast people, to gain the victory over prejudice and error, and acquire a lot and inheritance in the Abodes of Felicity, hast thou the courage to forsake thy native country, then prepare for speedy flight. I will guide thee to Rome, where dwells the Porter of Heaven, St. Peter's deputy, to whom are committed the keys of Heaven's gate; that he may receive thee into the bosom of the Church, and bless the covenant of our love. Fear not that thy father's potent arm may reach us; every cloud above our heads will be a ship manned with angelic hosts, with diamond shields and flaming swords; invisible indeed to mortal eye, but armed with heavenly might, and appointed to watch and guard thee. Nor will I conceal any longer, that I am, by birth and fortune, all that the Sultan's favour could make me; a Count, that is a Bey born, who rules over land and people. The limits of my lordship include towns and villages, palaces also and strongholds. Knights and squires obey me; horses and carriages stand ready for my service. In my native land, thou thyself, enclosed by no walls of a seraglio, shalt live and rule in freedom as a queen."
This oration of the Count the Princess thought a message from above; she entertained no doubts of his truth; and it seemed to please her that the Ringdove was to nestle, not beside a Linnet, but beside a bird of the family of the Eagle. Her warm fancy was filled with such sweet anticipations, that she consented, with all the alacrity of the Children of Israel, to forsake the land of Egypt, as if a new Canaan, in another quarter of the world, had been waiting her beyond the sea. Confident in the protection of the unseen life-guard promised to her, she would have followed her conductor from the precincts of the Palace forthwith, had he not instructed her that many preparations were required, before the great enterprise could be engaged in with any hope of a happy issue.
Among all privateering transactions by sea or land, there is none more ticklish, or combined with greater difficulties, than that of kidnapping the Grand Signior's favourite from his arms. Such a masterstroke could only be imagined by the teeming fancy of a W*z*l,[25] nor could any but a Kakerlak achieve it. Yet the undertaking of Count Ernst of Gleichen to carry off the Sultan of Egypt's daughter, was environed with no fewer difficulties; and as these two heroes come, to a certain extent, into competition in this matter, we must say, that the adventure of the Count was infinitely bolder, seeing everything proceeded merely by the course of Nature, and no serviceable Fairy put a finger in the pie: nevertheless, the result of both these corresponding enterprises, in the one as well as in the other, came about entirely to the wish of parties. The Princess filled her jewel-box sufficiently with precious stones; changed her royal garment with a Kaftan; and one evening, under the safe-conduct of her beloved, his trusty Squire and the phlegmatic Water-drawer, glided forth from the Palace into the Garden, unobserved, to enter on her far journey to the West. Her absence could not long remain concealed; her women sought her, as the proverb runs, like a lost pin; and as she did not come to light, the alarm in the Seraglio became boundless. Hints here and there had already been dropped, and surmises made, about the private audiences of the Bostangi; supposition and fact were strung together; and the whole produced, in sooth, no row of pearls, but the horrible discovery of the real nature of the case. The Divan of Dames had nothing for it but to send advice of the occurrence to the higher powers. Father Sultan, whom the virtuous Melechsala, everything considered, might have spared this pang, and avoided flying her country to make purchase of a glory, demeaned himself at this intelligence like an infuriated lion, who shakes his brown mane with dreadful bellowing, when by the uproar of the hunt, and the baying of the hounds, he is frightened from his den. He swore by the Prophet's beard that he would utterly destroy every living soul in the Seraglio, if at sunrise the Princess were not again in her father's power. The Mameluke guard had to mount, and gallop towards the four winds, in chase of the fugitives, by every road from Cairo; and a thousand oars were lashing the broad back of the Nile, in case she might have taken a passage by water.
[25] J. K. Wetzel, author of some plays and novels; among the latter, of Kakerlak.—Ed.
Under such efforts, to elude the far-stretching arm of the Sultan was impossible, unless the Count possessed the secret of rendering himself and his travelling party invisible; or the miraculous gift of smiting all Egypt with blindness. But of these talents neither had been lent him. Only the mettled Kurt had taken certain measures, which, in regard to their effect, might supply the place of miracles. He had rendered his flying caravan invisible, by the darkness of an unlighted cellar in the house of Adullam the sudorific Hebrew. This Jewish Hermes did not satisfy himself with practising the healing art to good advantage, but drew profit likewise from the gift which he had received by inheritance from his fathers; and thus honoured Mercury in all his three qualities, of Patron to Doctors, to Merchants, and to Thieves. He drove a great trade in spiceries and herbs with the Venetians, from which he had acquired much wealth; and he disdained no branch of business whereby anything was to be made. This worthy Israelite, who for money and money's worth, stood ready, without investigating moral tendencies, for any sort of deed, the trusty Squire had prevailed on, by a jewel from the casket of the Princess, to undertake the transport of the Count, whose rank and intention were not concealed from him, with three servants, to a Venetian ship that was loading at Alexandria; but it had prudently been hidden from him, that in the course of this contraband transaction, he must smuggle out his master's daughter. On first inspecting his cargo, the figure of the fair youth struck him somewhat; but he thought no ill of it, and took him for a page of the Count's. Ere long the report of the Princess Melechsala's disappearance sounded over all the city: then Adullam's eyes were opened; deadly terror took possession of his heart, so that his gray beard began to stir, and he wished with all his soul that his hands had been free of this perilous concern. But now it was too late; his own safety required him to summon all his cunning, and conduct this breakneck business to a happy end. In the first place, he laid his subterranean lodgers under rigorous quarantine; and then, after the sharpest of the search was over, the hope of finding the Princess considerably faded, and the zeal in seeking for her cooled, he packed the whole caravan neatly up in four bales of herbs, put them on board a Nile-boat, and sent them with a proper invoice, under God's guidance, safe and sound to Alexandria; where so soon as the Venetian had gained the open sea, they were liberated, all and sundry, from their strait confinement in the herb-sacks.[26]
[26] The invention of travelling in a sack was several times employed during the Crusades. Dietrich the Hard-bested, Markgraf of Meissen (Misnia), returned from Palestine to his hereditary possessions, under this incognito, and so escaped the snares of the Emperor Henry VI., who had an eye to the productive mines of Freyberg.—M.