“She is lame,” said the father.
“Oh, oh!” said the other, “let us see—it does not matter.”
They bargained anew, and the Mingrelian, taking advantage of his wife’s absence, ended by selling his oldest daughter for six English guns, a large supply of powder and lead, some smoking materials and two tuns of rack. Whilst he was in the humor, he would cheerfully have sold his wife, still in fine preservation, if custom, agreeing this time with the new Russian code, had permitted him to do so.
The two men were touching hands in conclusion of this new bargain when the mother returned. She uttered at first loud cries, thinking that all the household cares were henceforth to devolve on herself alone. The merchant was enabled to quiet her by a present of a necklace of false stones, and some ornaments of gilded brass.
On the following day the two Mingrelian sisters reached a small port on the shores of the Black Sea, whence they soon embarked for Trebizond. A month afterward, the man with the turban being suddenly seized with a desire to have a wife for himself, after having furnished so many to others, married the eldest sister, who had won his affections by her skill in making cake.
Such were the remembrances of her family which were awakened in the mind of the young odalisk, when retired and alone in her apartment, pouting and jealous.
She then called up the images of that other portion of her life, in which love was to play a part. She returned in imagination to Trebizond, to the house of her purchaser, become her brother-in-law. There, like the companions of her captivity, surrounded by attention and care, under a superintendence minute but not severe, she passed a year, during which she had acquired the Turkish language and skill in the toilette, at the same time perfecting herself in singing and dancing.
A year having passed, the brother-in-law of Baïla embarked with her and several of her companions for Constantinople. One fine morning he had dressed his graceful cargo in white, their hair had been anointed and perfumed, and after having passed the walls of the old seraglio and traversed some narrow and crooked streets, merchant and merchandise were installed in a chamber of the slave bazaar.
European ideas concerning the sales of females in the East are generally erroneous. Our knowledge on this subject rests essentially on what we have seen in the theatres and in pictures. But dramatic authors and painters desirous of obtaining the picturesque above all else, do not regard exactness very closely.
The latter, in order not to divide their pictures into apartments, have shown us a great common room, in which all, males and females, all young, all handsome and half naked, divided into groups, pass under the inspection of the first comers. The promenaders make the circuit of the galleries; huge Turks, crushed beneath their turbans, and muffled in their cashmere robes, their silk caftans and their furs, smoke tranquilly, seated in the corner as in a coffee-house. Sometimes, in these fantastic sketches, a slender greyhound, with his sharp muzzle, or a beautiful spaniel, with a flowing tail, figures as an accessory, as in the great compositions of Reubens or Vandyke; but in Turkey dogs are prohibited from entering.