“Gone mad!” cried the Princess, covering her face with her hands; “that noble, worthy youth who loved Transylvania so well?”
“Do you not see the hand of God in all this?” asked the Minister.
“No, sir,” said the Princess, rising with a face full of sadness and approaching the Minister so as to look him straight in the face while she spoke to him, “it is your hand that I see everywhere. Denis Banfi perished, but it was you who had him beheaded. Béldi is dead, but it was you who drove him to despair. It was you, too, who threw his family into prison, and only let them out when the foul air had poured a deadly sickness into their blood. And Feriz Beg has gone mad because he loved Béldi’s daughter, and she is dead.”
“Very well, your Highness, let it be so,” replied the imperturbable Minister. “To attribute to me the direction of destiny is praise indeed. Believe, then, that everything which happens in the council chamber of this realm and in the heart of its members derives from me. I’ll be responsible. And if your Highness believes that that flaming comet, which they call the Sword of God, is also in my hand—why—be it so! I will hurl it forth, and strike the earth with it so that all its hinges shall be out of joint.”
At that very moment the palace trembled to its very foundations.
The Princess leaped to her feet, shrieking.
“Ah! what was that?” she asked, as pale as death.
“It was an earthquake, madame,” replied Teleki with amazing calmness. “There is nothing to be afraid of, the palace has very strong vaults; but if you are afraid, stand just beneath the doorway, that cannot fall.”
On recovering from her first alarm the Princess quickly regained her presence of mind.
“God preserve us! I must hasten to the Prince. Will not you come too?”
“I’ll remain here,” replied Teleki coolly. “We are in the hands of God wherever we may be, and when He calls me to Him I will account to Him for all that I have done.”
The Princess ran along the winding corridor, and, finding her husband, took him down with her into the garden.
It was terrible to see from the outside how the vast building moved and twisted beneath the sinuous motion of the earth; every moment one might fear it would fall to pieces.
The Prince asked where Teleki was; the Princess said she had left him in her apartments.
“We must go for him this instant!” cried the Prince, but amongst all the trembling faces around him he could find none to listen to his words, for a man who fears nothing else is a coward in the presence of an earthquake.
Meanwhile the Minister was sitting quietly at a writing-table and writing a letter to Kara Mustafa, who had taken the place of the dead Kiuprile. He was a great warrior and the Sultan’s right hand, who not long before had been invited by the Cossacks to help them against the Poles, which he did very thoroughly, first of all ravaging numerous Polish towns, and then, turning against his confederate Cossacks, he cut down a few hundred thousands of them and led thirty thousand more into captivity.
To him Teleki wrote for assistance for the Hungarians.
Every bit of furniture was shaking and tottering around him, the windows rattled noisily as if shaken by an ague, the very chair on which he sat rocked to and fro beneath him, and the writing-table bobbed up and down beneath his hand so that the pen ran away from the paper; but for all that he finished his letter, and when he came to the end of it he wrote at the bottom in firm characters:
“Si fractus illabatur orbis, impavidum ferient ruinae!”
Mustafa puzzled his brains considerably when he came to that part of the letter containing the verse which had nothing to do with the text, which the Minister, under the influence of an iron will struggling against terror, had written there almost involuntarily.
When the menacing peril had passed, and the pages had returned to the palace, he turned to them reproachfully with the sealed letter in his hand.
“Where have you been? Not one of you can be found when you are wanted. Take this letter at once, with an escort of two mounted drabants, to Varna, for the Grand Vizier.”
And then he began to walk up and down the room as if nothing had happened.
XXVIII
The Mad Man
In the most secret chamber of the Divan were assembled the Viziers for an important consultation. The impending war was the subject of their grave deliberations. For as Mohammed had said, there ought to be one God in Heaven and one Lord on earth, so many of the Faithful believed that the time for the accomplishment of this axiom had now arrived.
Those wise men of the empire, those honourable counsellors, Kucsuk and Kiuprile, were dead. Kara Mustafa, an arrogant, self-confidant man, directed the mind of the Divan, and everyone followed his lead.
The Sultan himself was present, a handsome man with regular features, but with an expression of lassitude and exhaustion. During the whole consultation he never uttered a word nor moved a muscle of his face; he sat there like a corpse.
One by one the ambassadors of
