Tancred - Benjamin Disraeli (little readers txt) 📗

he told you everything. Though he intended to make a person his tool, and often succeeded, such was his susceptibility, and so strong were his sympathetic qualities, that he was perpetually, without being aware of it, showing his cards. The victim thought himself safe, but the teeming resources of Fakredeen were never wanting, and some fresh and brilliant combination, as he styled it, often secured the prey which so heedlessly he had nearly forfeited. Recklessness with him was a principle of action. He trusted always to his fertile expedients if he failed, and ran the risk in the meanwhile of paramount success, the fortune of those who are entitled to be rash. With all his audacity, which was nearly equal to his craft, he had no moral courage; and, if affairs went wrong, and, from some accident, exhaustion of the nervous system, the weather, or some of those slight causes which occasionally paralyse the creative mind, he felt without a combination, he would begin to cry like a child, and was capable of any action, however base and humiliating, to extricate himself from the impending disaster.

Fakredeen had been too young to have fatally committed himself during the Egyptian occupation. The moment he found that the Emir Bescheer and his sons were prisoners at Constantinople, he returned to Syria, lived quietly at his own castle, affected popularity among the neighbouring chieftains, who were pleased to see a Shehaab among them, and showed himself on every occasion a most loyal subject of the Porte. At seventeen years of age, Fakredeen was at the head of a powerful party, and had opened relations with the Divan. The Porte looked upon him with confidence, and although they intended, if possible, to govern Lebanon in future themselves, a young prince of a great house, and a young prince so perfectly free from all disagreeable antecedents, was not to be treated lightly. All the leaders of all the parties of the mountain frequented the castle of Fakredeen, and each secretly believed that the prince was his pupil and his tool. There was not one of these men, grey though some of them were in years and craft, whom the innocent and ingenuous Fakredeen did not bend as a nose of wax, and, when Adam Besso returned to Syria in '43, he found his foster-child by far the most considerable person in the country, and all parties amid their doubts and distractions looking up to him with hope and confidence. He was then nineteen years of age, and Eva was sixteen. Fakredeen came instantly to Damascus to welcome them, hugged Besso, wept like a child over his sister, sat up the whole night on the terrace of their house smoking his nargileh, and telling them all his secrets without the slightest reserve: the most shameful actions of his career as well as the most brilliant; and finally proposed to Besso to raise a loan for the Lebanon, ostensibly to promote the cultivation of mulberries, really to supply arms to the discontented population who were to make Fakredeen and Eva sovereigns of the mountain. It will have been observed, that to supply the partially disarmed tribes of the mountain with weapons was still, though at intervals, the great project of Fakredeen, and to obtain the result in his present destitution of resources involved him in endless stratagems. His success would at the same time bind the tribes, already well affected to him, with unalterable devotion to a chief capable of such an undeniable act of sovereignty, and of course render them proportionately more efficient instruments in accomplishing his purpose. It was the interest of Fakredeen that the Lebanon should be powerful and disturbed.

Besso, who had often befriended him, and who had frequently rescued him from the usurers of Beiroot and Sidon, lent a cold ear to these suggestions. The great merchant was not inclined again to embark in a political career, or pass another three or four years away from his Syrian palaces and gardens. He had seen the most powerful head that the East had produced for a century, backed by vast means, and after having apparently accomplished his purpose, ultimately recoil before the superstitious fears of Christendom, lest any change in Syria should precipitate the solution of the great Eastern problem. He could not believe that it was reserved for Fakredeen to succeed in that which had baffled Mehemet Ali.

Eva took the more sanguine view that becomes youth and woman. She had faith in Fakredeen. Though his position was not as powerful as that of the great viceroy, it was, in her opinion, more legitimate. He seemed indicated as the natural ruler of the mountain. She had faith, too, in his Arabian origin. With Eva, what is called society assumed the character of a continual struggle between Asia and the North. She dreaded the idea that, after having escaped the crusaders, Syria should fall first under the protection, and then the colonisation of some European power. A link was wanted in the chain of resistance which connected the ranges of Caucasus with the Atlas. She idealised her foster-brother into a hero, and saw his standard on Mount Lebanon, the beacon of the oriental races, like the spear of Shami, or the pavilion of Abd-el-Kader. Eva had often influenced her father for the advantage of Fakredeen, but at last even Eva felt that she should sue in vain.

A year before, involved in difficulties which it seemed no combination could control, and having nearly occasioned the occupation of Syria by a united French and English force, Fakredeen burst out a-cry-ing like a little boy, and came whimpering to Eva, as if somebody had broken his toy or given him a beating. Then it was that Eva had obtained for him a final assistance from her father, the condition being, that this application should be the last.

Eva had given him jewels, had interested other members of her family in his behalf, and effected for him a thousand services, which only a kind-hearted and quick-witted woman could devise. While Fakredeen plundered her without scruple and used her without remorse, he doted on her; he held her intellect in absolute reverence; a word from her guided him; a look of displeasure, and his heart ached. As long as he was under the influence of her presence, he really had no will, scarcely an idea of his own. He spoke only to elicit her feelings and opinions. He had a superstition that she was born under a fortunate star, and that it was fatal to go counter to her. But the moment he was away, he would disobey, deceive, and, if necessary, betray her, loving her the same all the time. But what was to be expected from one whose impressions were equally quick and vivid, who felt so much for himself, and so much for others, that his life seemed a perpetual re-action between intense selfishness and morbid sensibility?

Had Fakredeen married Eva, the union might have given him some steadiness of character, or at least its semblance. The young Emir had greatly desired this alliance, not for the moral purpose that we have intimated, not even from love of Eva, for he was totally insensible to domestic joys, but because he wished to connect himself with great capitalists, and hoped to gain the Lebanon loan for a dower. But this alliance was quite out of the question. The hand of Eva was destined, according to the custom of the family, for her cousin, the eldest son of Besso of Aleppo. The engagement had been entered into while she was at Vienna, and it was then agreed that the marriage should take place soon after she had completed her eighteenth year. The ceremony was therefore at hand; it was to occur within a few months.

Accustomed from an early period of life to the contemplation of this union, it assumed in the eyes of Eva a character as natural as that of birth or death. It never entered her head to ask herself whether she liked or disliked it. It was one of those inevitable things of which we are always conscious, yet of which we never think, like the years of our life or the colour of our hair. Had her destiny been in her own hands, it is probable that she would not have shared it with Fakredeen, for she had never for an instant entertained the wish that there should be any change in the relations which subsisted between them. According to the custom of the country, it was to Besso that Fakredeen had expressed his wishes and his hopes. The young Emir made liberal offers: his wife and children might follow any religion they pleased; nay, he was even ready to conform himself to any which they fixed upon. He attempted to dazzle Besso with the prospect of a Hebrew Prince of the Mountains. 'My daughter,' said the merchant, 'would certainly, under any circumstances, marry one of her own faith; but we need not say another word about it; she is betrothed, and has been engaged for some years, to her cousin.'

When Fakredeen, during his recent visit to Bethany, found that Eva, notwithstanding her Bedouin blood, received his proposition for kidnapping a young English nobleman with the utmost alarm and even horror, he immediately relinquished it, diverted her mind from the contemplation of a project on her disapproval of which, notwithstanding his efforts at distraction, she seemed strangely to dwell, and finally presented her with a new and more innocent scheme in which he required her assistance. According to Fakredeen, his new English acquaintance at Beiroot, whom he had before quoted, was ready to assist him in the fulfilment of his contract, provided he could obtain sufficient time from Scheriff Effendi; and what he wished Eva to do was personally to request the Egyptian merchant to grant time for this indulgence. This did not seem to Eva an unreasonable favour for her foster-brother to obtain, though she could easily comprehend why his previous irregularities might render him an unsuccessful suitor to his creditor. Glad that it was still in her power in some degree to assist him, and that his present project was at least a harmless one, Eva offered the next day to repair to the city and see Scheriff Effendi on his business. Pressing her hand to his heart, and saluting her with a thousand endearing names, the Emir quitted the Rose of Sharon with the tears in his grateful eyes.

Now the exact position of Fakredeen was this: he had induced the Egyptian merchant to execute the contract for him by an assurance that Besso would be his security for the venture, although the peculiar nature of the transaction rendered it impossible for Besso, in his present delicate position, personally to interfere in it. To keep up appearances, Fakredeen, with his usual audacious craft, had appointed Scheriff Effendi to meet him at Jerusalem, at the house of Besso, for the completion of the contract; and accordingly, on the afternoon of the day preceding his visit to Bethany, Fakredeen had arrived at Jerusalem without money, and without credit, in order to purchase arms for a province.

The greatness of the conjuncture, the delightful climate, his sanguine temperament, combined, however, to sustain him. As he traversed his delicious mountains, with their terraces of mulberries, and olives, and vines, lounged occasionally for a short time at the towns on the coast, and looked in at some of his creditors to chatter charming delusions, or feel his way for a new combination most necessary at this moment, his blood was quick and his brain creative; and although he had ridden nearly two hundred miles when he arrived at the 'Holy City,' he was fresh and full of faith that 'something would turn up.' His Egyptian friend, awfully punctual, was the first figure