“Read aloud then what you are writing.”
Apafi wrote with a trembling hand and read: “Whereas—”
The Pasha furiously tore away the parchment and roared at him.
“Plague take all your whereases and inasmuch-ases! Why all this beating about the bush? Write the usual formula—‘We, Michael Apafi, Prince of Transylvania, command you, wretched slaves, by these presents, to appear incontinently before us at Kis-Selyk, under pain of death.’ ”
Apafi was brought almost to his wits’ ends before he could make the Pasha comprehend that it was not usual to correspond in this style with free Hungarian noblemen. At last the Pasha allowed him to write his letter in his own way, but took care that its purport should be emphatic and dictatorial. As soon as Apafi had written the letters, Ali Pasha put a Ciaus on horseback, and sent him off at full speed to all those to whom the writ was addressed.
“And now,” said Apafi to himself, sighing deeply as he wiped his pen, “and now I should like to see the man who could tell me what will come of it all!”
“Till the Diet assembles,” said the Pasha, “you will remain here as my guest.”
“Cannot I go home then to my wife and child?” asked Apafi, with a beating heart.
“To give us the slip, eh? A likely tale. That is always the way with you Hungarian nobles. Those we won’t have at any price are always dangling about our necks, and begging and praying for the princely diadem; and those we would place on the throne take to their heels as if we were going to impale them.” And with that the Pasha assigned Apafi a tent and dismissed him, at the same time giving secret but strict orders to the guard of honour stationed at the door of the new Prince, not to lose sight of him for an instant.
“I’m nicely in for it now,” sighed Apafi with the resignation of despair.
His solitary hope now was, that the deputies whom he had summoned would ignore his informal mandate by failing to appear.
A few days afterwards, as Apafi still lay on his camp bedstead in the early morning, Stephen Kun, John Daczo, and Stephen Nalaczi, with all the other noble Szeklers to whom the circular had been sent, suddenly walked into his tent.
“In Heaven’s name!” cried Apafi, starting up, “why have you come hither?”
“Your Highness ordered us to come hither,” replied Nalaczi.
“True; but you would have shown far greater wisdom if you had kept away. What are you going to do?”
“Solemnly install your Highness, and, if need be, defend you also in the good old Szekler fashion,” replied Stephen Kun.
“You are too few for that, my brothers,” objected Apafi.
“Pray be so good as to cast a glance outside the tent!” replied Nalaczi, drawing aside the curtain and pointing to a band of Szeklers armed with sabres and lances, who had remained outside the tent. “We have marched out cum gentibus, to prove to your Highness that if we have accepted you as our Prince, we have not done so simply by way of a jest.”
Apafi shrugged his shoulders and began to draw on his boots; but he was so dazed all the while, that almost an hour elapsed before he was half dressed. He put on every article of clothing the wrong way, and had to take it off again. Thus, for example, he had slipped into his mantle before he even thought of his vest.
Several hundred gentlemen had met together in Selyk at his bidding, a thing he had never expected, still less desired.
When Ali Pasha came out of his tent, he went towards the deputies, took Apafi by the hand in the presence of them all, threw over his shoulders a broad, new green velvet mente, put an ermine embroidered cap on his head, and explained to the assembled crowd that henceforth they were to regard him as their legitimate Prince; whereupon the Szeklers roared out deafening “Eljens,” raised Apafi on their shoulders, and hoisted him on to a dais covered with velvet which Ali Pasha had expressly provided for the occasion.
“And now,” said the Pasha, “go to church, administer the oaths to the Prince according to ancient custom, and yourselves take the oath of allegiance. I have ordered the bells to be rung myself, and you had better have a mass sung in the usual way.”
“Your pardon, but I am a Calvinist,” protested Apafi.
“So much the better. The ceremony will be over all the quicker, and will cost less trouble. There is the Rev. Francis Magyari, he will preach the sermon.”
After that Apafi let them do whatever they liked with him, merely twirling his long moustaches hither and thither, and shrugging his shoulders whenever they asked him questions.
Nalaczi and the other Szeklers thought good to treat him in church with all the respect due to a sovereign prince, and the Rev. Francis Magyari improvised a powerful sermon, in which he prophesied, in a voice of thunder, that the God of Israel who had called David from the sheepfolds to a throne, and exalted him over all his adversaries, would now also graciously maintain the cause of His elect even though his enemies were as numerous as the grass of the field or the sand on the seashore.
This modest little house of prayer could never have thought that it would have been the scene of a Diet and a coronation; and as for Apafi, not even in his wildest dreams had it ever occurred to him that such things might befall him.
He had eyes and ears neither for the coronation nor for the sermon, but kept on thinking of his wife and child. What would become of them, poor creatures; where would they be able to hide their heads when John Kemeny had put him in prison, confiscated his estates, and driven them out of house and home? It next occurred to him that, somewhere in Szeklerland, he had a brother, Stephen Apafi,
