Free Lord Byron's Novel by John Crowley Page B

courage, ever heedless that not one El Dorado in a thousand yields up a shilling’s worth of gold, whereas the bones of countless seekers whiten in the deserts and forests of the world. No gold—his comrades (if such they may be named) dead around him, or deserted—himself cashiered upon return to his regiment for absence without leave, and for the string of lies he had left behind (what may we not admit to, if our hearer knows nothing of our tongue? What sins our dogs and horses are privy to, if they could but reckon them!)—and so he came again into his homeland, where there were many who thought they had seen the last of him, and who did not rejoice to greet him again.
    Not for gold was he now come back into these mountains, though. No! It was an heir that Lord Sane had returned to find, having no issue of his marriage, and no longer expecting any—for a wound in his thigh, suffered in a duel, would not permit him to engender further—which made it also superfluous for him to divorce, as he had for some time planned to do, his wife—broken in health herself—whose lands and fortunes he had despoiled, and take a fertile maid to wed. Therefore—though he knew not if the child he had so rudely spawned in these parts had lived, or was male —knew not the fate of Mother or Husband—was only driven to press on with his design, however mad the world would surely have deemed it, had the world known of it—he had come again to the coast of Epirus, and mounted his expedition. The one emotion perhaps creditable to the giant Lord was this, that he would not see his line extinguished; and who can say that he did not, in his cinder of a heart, feel remorse at least for this—that, had he not acted as he had in time gone by, a legitimate Heir might now be waiting to succeed him.
    A day and a night passed in the telling of this tale, in all its parts, some more dreadful than any here recounted, though the consequences of those untold deeds may yet figure in the present account; and at its end Ali was not wiser than he had been. Upon the following day, Lord Sane, by forcing his mount down a way that the horse considered too steep, the rock-strewn path too loose, caused the animal by his cruel goading to slip, and fall upon its delicate cannons, and twist a leg at the hock. When Lord Sane’s fury at his horse’s betrayal —as he considered it—was past, his groom was commanded to care for the horse, whose wound was considered by those horsemen as likely to heal with proper care, and to follow on after—by no means was he to mount the animal, but only to lead it. Lord Sane took another horse, and the party went on. When they had come to a town large enough to support so large a number as they were, they stopt, and with only the showing of the Firman he had obtained from the Pacha’s Vizier, Lord Sane and his son and his aides-de-camp were offered the upper storey of a large fortified house. The accommodating Landlord, who seemed to hope for something more than the approbation of Allah for his hospitality—though whether his hopes were realized Ali never knew—went, with his wives in closed chairs, to another house in the wooded hills. The Suliotes built their own cookfires in the courtyard, and set up to sleep on the ground floor with the beasts—yet till late at night they did not sleep, but passed the Wineskin, and sang their harsh balladry, and danced—man with man, at first stepping delicately and gravely as in a minuet, but by degrees growing wilder, and whirling faster, as the music of the drums and stringed gourds sped—let no mere waltzer of our lands attempt it! First among the dancers—a head higher than any of them, like Beelzebub amid his cohort—was the English Lord, his scarlet coat pulled open, and his handkerchief—as is the custom in that gallopade —aflutter in his right hand.
    At eve the next day there came into the courtyard two of the guard, who had gone ranging, and with them that groom into