By Far Euphrates: A Tale. Deborah Alcock

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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