She seemed to hear him not, as she rushed forward. She lifted the cloak from the face, before any one could prevent her. She shrieked not; she did not swoon; but, with a fixed gaze of despair, she stood like a monumental statue, bending over the corpse of her slaughtered husband, as cold and inanimate as he.
At length, she seized a hand; it fell heavily down. She pressed her lips to those cold and lifeless ones, as if to find that breath still animated them. She seemed scarcely conscious what death was. It was long ere she was convinced of the reality; yet no tear escaped her eye, no sob, her heart. Her soft and gentle nature was fearfully changing.
“Who did this?” she cried. “The savage Urus! well I know their work! Alp, you shall be avenged!” Again she stood silently over the corpse, rigid and immovable. None could find it in their hearts to disturb her, until the mother of the slain youth arrived to bewail, with frantic grief, her loss, joined by the other women of their household. Their cries and shrieks rent the air.
“My son! my son!” cried the distracted mother, “why hast thou been torn from me? Could not some more aged warrior have satisfied our foes? Why hast thou been cut off in the prime of thy youth? Wai! wai! wai! Was it for this that thou wast reared, the boldest, the bravest, the most beautiful? No more shall I hear thy joyous laugh resounding through the groves, or see thy graceful form bounding on thy steed, across the green meadows. My son! my son! Curses on the foes who have slain thee! May they, like me, be made childless! Can they give me another son like thee? Bear him along,” she cried to the attendants, “bear my son to our home, that I may mourn over him. Wai! wai!”
The followers of the Hadji carried the bier of their young lord as ordered; the women leading Zara, who seemed like one in a trance, her eye resting alone on the bier; yet she faltered not in her steps, nor did a word escape her. Her grief was too deep for words or cries. Her heart was not broken; gentle and soft, as she seemed, it was of too tough a texture for that; though none, not even she herself, would have deemed it so.
We know not of what nature we are, until we are tried. She would have thought that she could not have borne the sight of blood, or the slightest misery, without sinking beneath the blow: but now, alas! she knew herself. Her heart, in a moment, was seared and blighted, as by the breath of the dark simoon, in an instant, the traveller is overwhelmed and scorched. Her breast was now hardened to feelings of pity, and burnt with vengeance against those who had deprived her of her loved one.
Such are the cursed effects of war. Let the victorious conqueror look around beyond the dazzling scene, and the gorgeous pageant which attends his triumph, and he would shudder, were he to see the agony, the hopeless despair, of one alone out of the thousands, of whose misery he is the cause. The heaps of slain are as nothing; the eye soon grows accustomed to gaze on them: the feelings become familiarised with the sight of blood, which first sickened at the thought. The slain have played their game of life, and are at rest; but it is those who watch anxiously for their return, who suffer: the fond parents, the doting wife, or mistress, the affectionate sister—it is their loving hearts which are wrung with anguish—it is their curses which blast the laurel-crowned brow of ambition!
The Hadji accompanied his son’s body to the door of his home, where he saw it committed to the charge of the youth’s weeping mother; ushering his friends into the guest-house, he insisted on performing the duties of hospitality. After these had been accomplished, he called for his horse, and rode hastily away into the neighbouring forest. There, unseen by the eye of any, he gave way to the grief and torment of his breast. “The boy died for me! Oh! Allah! that I might have been in his place!” he cried, in a burst of agony.
Selem with his father and several other chiefs remained to pay the last sad respects to the gallant young hero. The funeral cry sounded through the woods with a deep and thrilling solemnity; all the women of the neighbouring hamlet assembling to increase the melancholy wail.
In about two hours before the sun sunk low, the Hadji returned; the body of Alp was then brought out from the house, round which a large concourse of people had assembled, to accompany it to its last resting-place.