By Far Euphrates A Tale 5
Of the three--Kevork, Gabriel, and little Hagop--Gabriel was his
favourite. Indeed the child was like his shadow, waiting on him
continually, and often bringing him beautiful flowers--gorgeous
pomegranate blossoms, or roses of many kinds and of most exquisite
perfume. Or he would bring him fruit--delicious grapes, pears, plums,
and peaches. Or sometimes he would just steal silently up to kiss his
hand, and touch it with his forehead, or stand or sit quietly beside
him.
There was one thing that soothed him inexpressibly; though, like all
else, it was accepted without question or comprehension. When Mariam and
the other women went about the household tasks that, as he grew better,
he liked to watch, they would say, "Hesoos ockna menk"--"Jesus, help
us." When they finished, they would say, "Park Derocha"--"Praise the
Lord." In everything there was devout acknowledgment of God; and the
sweetest of all names that are named in heaven or upon earth was often
on their lips, spoken with reverence and love. Something that for John
Grayson still lived on,
"In the purple twilight under the sea"
of conscious thought, made this very grateful to him, and joined it with
what were like the first heavenward thoughts and prayers of a little
child.
So time passed on. But, as he grew stronger, there awoke again within
him a vague sense of want and longing. He had no power to express his
feelings, but he felt something was wrong with him--he was not in his
proper place. Or was it, rather, that there was something wrong with all
the people about him? They were very kind; but they and their ways had a
queer, distorted, unnatural look in his eyes, like the things one sees
reflected in the bowl of a spoon. He longed continually, longed
inexpressibly, for something he could not get, for some one who was not
there; yet he could not tell who it was he wanted.
He grew silent and melancholy, and his friends thought him in danger of
another relapse, which would certainly have been fatal. Happily, it was
now autumn again, the sultriest months of the year being over. So one
day they wrapped him up carefully, seated him comfortably on cushions
upon a donkey, and brought him with them, to a vineyard which Hohannes
possessed on a slope of one of the hills above Biridjik. He was a man of
some property, having flocks and herds also. The great, luscious grapes,
"as large as plums," purple, green, and amber, hung in ripe profusion,
nearly breaking down the low bushes they grew upon. Jack ate of them to
his heart's content, and lay in the pleasant shade of a fig-tree,
watching the other young people as they gathered them for their various
uses. Tents had been brought, and it gave him a kind of dreamy
satisfaction to sleep in one of these; it seemed somehow to bring him
nearer to the things he had lost, and was vaguely feeling after. Often
hints of them seemed to flash on him unbidden, but when he tried to
grasp them vanished as they came, leaving him confused and faint, with a
fluttering heart and an aching head.
However, his strength improved in the cooler air and amidst the new
surroundings. He had soon an opportunity of testing it. One day he
happened to be by himself, resting under his favourite fig-tree, when he
heard a noise as of something trampling and tearing the vines. Looking
up, he saw that a flock of goats had got in among them, and were doing
terrible damage, not only to the ripe fruit but even to the trees. He
got up and called for help, but no one heeded, and he supposed no one
heard. It was dreadful to see all this harm done; in fact, he could not
endure it. Taking heart, he went to the rescue himself, or rather, for
the first time since his illness, he _ran_. His steps were unsteady, his
limbs shook under him; once indeed he fell, but he was up and on again
in a moment. The exercise seemed to give back strength to his muscles
and vigour to his brain. He shouted aloud; he took up stones and flung
them at the trespassers, sending them flying over the low stone wall.
Then, the Englishman's joy of battle waking in him, he gave chase as
fast, or faster, than his limbs would carry him.
He heard the others crying out to him; but he thought they were
encouraging his efforts. Even when they came running up with evident
intent to stop him, he thought they were only afraid he would do himself
harm. But at last the youngest son of Hohannes caught him bodily in his
arms, shook the stones out of his hand, and cried breathlessly, "You
must _not_! You must _not_!"
Jack had a good deal of Armenian by this time. "_Inchu? Inchu?_--Why?
why?" he gasped; "they were destroying your vines."
The young man, by name Avedis, or "good tidings," looked sadly at the
injured trees, but only said, "Those goats belong to the Kourds."
Jack stammered in his eagerness to find the words he wanted. "What has
that to do with it?" he got out at last. "What right have the Kourds to
spoil your vines?"
"Don't you know, Yon Effendi, that if we dare to stop them doing it, or
even to drive their sheep and goats out of our fields and vineyards,
they think a great deal less of stabbing or shooting one of us than you
would of killing a cat?"
"But then they would be hanged for it!" cried Jack. "Have you no--oh,
what is the word for it?--have you no--_police_?" He said the word in
English, and a rush of old, new thoughts and impressions came crowding
into his brain.
"_Police?_"
"The men who keep order, and take people to prison."
"Do you mean the zaptiehs? They are worse than the Kourds. The Turk and
the Kourd are the upper and the nether millstone, grinding us to powder.
If one of us is fool enough to complain of a Kourd or a Turk, the
Kamaikan--the governor, I mean--says he will enquire into the matter.
And he does. He sends for the man who has complained, throws him into a
dungeon, and keeps him there till he confesses all the wrong is on his
own side; or perhaps until his people pay a sum of money. Or perhaps he
may be never heard of again at all."
Avedis did not say this with fierce looks and indignant gestures, but in
a calm, matter-of-fact way, as if such things were part of the
everlasting order of nature, which has been from the beginning and will
be until the end. Jack did not follow every word; but one thing he
understood very clearly: they must all stand still and see their
beautiful vines destroyed. There was no remedy--why? Because this was
not England. _England!_ Now he knew everything. He was an English boy,
left alone here in this strange land. And his father--where was his
father? "Where is my father?" he cried aloud in English.
"What is that you say?" asked Avedis.
Jack repeated his question in Armenian.
"Come and sit down under the tree," said Avedis.
Jack obeyed, silent and trembling. Avedis stood, looking at him sadly.
"Tell me, where is my father?" Jack repeated with pleading eyes, into
which a new __EXPRESSION__ was dawning slowly.
"You know, Yon Effendi, you have been very ill," Avedis said. "Your
father, a great English Effendi, very wise and good, was ill too. You
recovered; your father did not recover. He is gone to God. Do you
understand me, Yon Effendi?"
Jack understood so well that he flung himself face downwards on the
ground, and burst into a passion of weeping. In vain Avedis tried to
comfort him. "God forgive me," he thought, "I ought not to have told
him. I fear I have killed him." And he certainly had not acted up to the
meaning of his name. The rest of the family blamed him severely, when
they heard what he had done. It was the custom of their country for the
bearer of sad tidings to go about his task with great circumlocution,
carefully "breaking" them, as we say in England.
Yet the shock, instead of killing John Grayson, brought him back to his
true life. Up to this there had been a serious danger that his brain
would never wholly recover the shock of that long and terrible illness;
and that, if he lived, he might go through the future years as one whose
mind had an important leaf left out of it. But that day's agony of
weeping, and the days and nights of distress that followed it, meant
that he would either die, or else recover wholly, and claim his
intellectual inheritance in the present and the past. This full
recovery, however, might well be an affair of time--perhaps of a long
time.
Old Hohannes heard with the rest that the English youth knew now that
his father was dead, and that he was weeping and refusing comfort, in a
manner very likely to make him ill again. "We will take him back to the
town," he said; and so they did the next day.
The following morning Hohannes took him by the hand, led him into a low,
dark room on the ground-floor, where bulghour and rice were stored, and
shut and barred the door.
"Sit down," he said. Jack did so; and looked on wonderingly while the
old man dug a hole in the ground with some implement resembling a
trowel.
At last he grew impatient, and asked, "Will you not tell me about my
father?"
Hohannes looked up. "There is not much to tell," he said. "Feeling
himself, no doubt, very ill, the English Effendi sent for me, and I
came. He asked me to take care of you, and if you should recover to try
and send you back to your friends in England. And he gave me, to use for
you as I thought best, the things I have kept hidden here. He spoke
somewhat also of certain papers, but before he could finish what he
wanted to say, the fever increased upon him, and his mind began to
wander. As to the papers, we never got them. They were stolen away, with
his other baggage, by the two Syrian servants, who were brothers, and
precious rascals. But these I have." He stooped and took out of the hole
something wrapped in a skin and tied with cords. These he carefully
unfastened, took off the skin, and revealed two books and a belt of
chamois leather. The books he gave to Jack, who recognised, with a
thrill of joy and a pang of sorrow, the pocket Bible his father always
carried with him, and the note-book in which he used to see him write.
"Keep these thyself," said Hohannes. "This," holding up the belt, "I
must keep still. There is gold in it." Instinctively his voice dropped
lower, though there was none to hear the dangerous word.
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