“Not now.”
“Why not?” snapped the doctor firmly.
“Not to you, if you were to break me on the wheel.”
“I’ll bastinado you.”
“Not if you impaled me, I say.”
“Gregory! If you anger me, I’ll make you drink three pints of physic.”
“They are here, eh!” exclaimed Gregory, approaching the hearth, skipping among the flasks of the doctor, and seizing one of them, but he had the sense to choose alcohol, and dragging it from its case, sipped away at it till there was not a drop of it left.
“Leave a little in it, you dog!” yelled the doctor, snatching the flask away from him, “don’t drink it all!”
“I’ll drink up the whole shop, but speak I won’t unless I like.”
The doctor perceived that he had met his match.
“Then will you speak before Feriz Beg?” he asked.
“I’ll speak the whole truth then.”
So there was nothing for it but to open Feriz Beg’s door before Gregory and shove him inside.
Feriz Beg was sitting there on a couch, a feverish flush was burning upon his pale face; he still held the jewel in his hand, and his eyes were fastened upon it; just such a similar clasp he had given to Aranka Béldi when they were both children together.
“How did you come by this jewel?” inquired Feriz in a soft, mournful voice.
“She to whom you gave it gave it to me that you might believe she sent me to you.”
At these words Feriz Beg arose with flashing eyes.
“She sent you to me! She! So she remembers me! She thinks of me sometimes, then.”
“She sent you a letter through me.”
Feriz Beg stretched out a tremulous hand.
“Where is the letter?”
“I flung it into the fire,” interjected the doctor.
“How dared you do that?” exclaimed Feriz angrily.
But the doctor was not afraid.
“I am your doctor, and every letter injures your health.”
“Panajot! you are an impertinent fellow!” thundered Feriz, with a face of inflamed purple; and he smote the table such a blow with his fist that all the medicine bottles tumbled off it.
“Don’t be angry, sir!” said Gregory, twisting his moustache at both ends, while Panajot coolly swept together the fragments of the broken bottles and boxes on the floor; “the worthy man did not burn the letter but only the envelope. I had gumption enough not to entrust the inside of it to him.”
And with these words he drew from his pouch a letter written on all four sides of the sheet and handed it to Feriz, who before reading it covered with kisses the lines traced by that dear hand, while Master Panajot looked at Gregory in amazement.
“Go along, you old fox, Gregory,” said he; “next time you come, I’ll throw you into the fire to boot.”
But Gregory, highly delighted, feasted his eyes on the youth’s face all the time he was reading the letter.
As if his soul had changed within him, as if he had passed from the troubles of this world to the joys of Paradise, every feature of the youth’s face became smiling and joyful. The farther he read the brighter grew his eyes; and when he came to the last word he pressed the leaf to his heart with an expression of the keenest rapture, and held it there a long time, closing his eyes as if in a happy dream, as if he had shut them to see no other object when he conjured up her image before his mind.
Master Panajot was alarmed, fancying some mischief had happened to the invalid, and turned upon Gregory with gnashing teeth:
“What infernal document have you brought along with you, Gregory?”
Feriz meanwhile smilingly nodded his head as if he would thank some invisible shape, and whispered softly:
“So it shall be, so it shall be.”
“I’m afraid you feel bad, my master,” said the doctor.
Feriz looked up, and his face had grown quite round.
“I?—I feel very well. Take your drugs from my table, and bring me wine and costly meats dear to the eyes and mouth. I would rejoice my soul and my palate. Call hither musicians, and open wide my gate. Pile flowers upon my windows, I would be drunk with the fragrance of the flowers that the breeze brings to me.”
Panajot fancied that the invalid had gone out of his mind, and yet full of the joy of life he rose from his couch, laid aside his warm woollen garment, put on instead a light silk robe, wound round his head a turban of the finest linen instead of the warm shaggy shawl, and he who had hitherto been brooding and fretting apathetically, had suddenly become as light as a bird, paced the room with rapid steps, with proudly erected face, from which the livid yellow of sickness had suddenly disappeared, and his eyes sparkled like fire.
Panajot could not account for the change, and really believed that the patient had fallen into some dangerous paroxysm and in this persuasion bawled for all the members of the negro family. The old Egyptian doorkeeper, a young Nubian huntsman, a Chinese cook, trampling upon each other in their haste, all rushed into the room at his cry.
Feriz Beg, with boyish mirth, stopped them all before the doctor could say a word.
“Thou, Ali,” he said to the old doorkeeper, “go to the mosque and cast this silver among the poor that they may give thanks to Allah for my recovery. And thou, O cook! prepare a dinner for twelve persons, looking to it that there is wine and flowers and music; and thou, my huntsman, bring forth the fieriest steed and put upon him the most costly wrappings; and ye others, take this worthy doctor and lock him up among his drugs that he may not get away, and call hither all my friends and acquaintances, and tell them we will celebrate the festival of my recovery.”
The servants with shouts of joy fulfilled the commands of Feriz. First of all they shoved good Panajot into his drug-brewing kitchen, and then they dispersed to do their master’s bidding.
Feriz then took the hand of
