CHAPTER V. AMBITION DISTORTED INTO VICE BY LAW.
On descending a broad flight of stairs from the apartment, the Hebrewencountered an old man, habited in loose garments of silk and fur,upon whose withered and wrinkled face life seemed scarcely to struggleagainst the advance of death--so haggard, wan, and corpse-like was itsaspect.
"Ximen," said the Israelite, "trusty and beloved servant, follow me tothe cavern." He did not tarry for an answer, but continued his way withrapid strides through various courts and alleys, till he came at lengthinto a narrow, dark, and damp gallery, that seemed cut from the livingrock. At its entrance was a strong grate, which gave way to the Hebrew'stouch upon the spring, though the united strength of a hundred men couldnot have moved it from its hinge. Taking up a brazen lamp that burnt ina niche within it, the Hebrew paused impatiently till the feeble stepsof the old man reached the spot; and then, reclosing the grate, pursuedhis winding way for a considerable distance, till he stopped suddenly bya part of the rock which seemed in no respect different from the rest:and so artfully contrived and concealed was the door which he nowopened, and so suddenly did it yield to his hand, that it appearedliterally the effect of enchantment, when the rock yawned, anddiscovered a circular cavern, lighted with brazen lamps, and spread withhangings and cushions of thick furs. Upon rude and seemingly naturalpillars of rock, various antique and rusty arms were suspended; inlarge niches were deposited scrolls, clasped and bound with iron; anda profusion of strange and uncouth instruments and machines (in whichmodern science might, perhaps, discover the tools of chemical invention)gave a magical and ominous aspect to the wild abode.
The Hebrew cast himself on a couch of furs; and, as the old man enteredand closed the door, "Ximen," said he, "fill out wine--it is a soothingcounsellor, and I need it."
Extracting from one of the recesses of the cavern a flask and goblet,Ximen offered to his lord a copious draught of the sparkling vintage ofthe Vega, which seemed to invigorate and restore him.
"Old man," said he, concluding the potation with a deep-drawn sigh,"fill to thyself-drink till thy veins feel young."
Ximen obeyed the mandate but imperfectly; the wine just touched hislips, and the goblet was put aside.
"Ximen," resumed the Israelite, "how many of our race have beenbutchered by the avarice of the Moorish kings since first thou didst setfoot within the city?"
"Three thousand--the number was completed last winter, by the orderof Jusef the vizier; and their goods and coffers are transformed intoshafts and cimiters against the dogs of Galilee."
"Three thousand--no more! three thousand only! I would the number hadbeen tripled, for the interest is becoming due!"
"My brother, and my son, and my grandson, are among the number," saidthe old man, and his face grew yet more deathlike.
"Their monuments shall be in hecatombs of their tyrants. They shall not,at least, call the Jews niggards in revenge."
"But pardon me, noble chief of a fallen people; thinkest thou we shallbe less despoiled and trodden under foot by yon haughty and stiff-neckedNazarenes, than by the Arabian misbelievers?"
"Accursed, in truth, are both," returned the Hebrew; "but the onepromise more fairly than the other. I have seen this Ferdinand, and hisproud queen; they are pledged to accord us rights and immunities we havenever known before in Europe."
"And they will not touch our traffic, our gains, our gold?"
"Out on thee!" cried the fiery Israelite, stamping on the ground. "Iwould all the gold of earth were sunk into the everlasting pit! It isthis mean, and miserable, and loathsome leprosy of avarice, that gnawsaway from our whole race the heart, the soul, nay--the very form,of man! Many a time, when I have seen the lordly features of thedescendants of Solomon and Joshua (features that stamp the nobility ofthe eastern world born to mastery and command) sharpened and furrowed bypetty cares,--when I have looked upon the frame of the strong man bowed,like a crawling reptile, to some huckstering bargainer of silks andunguents,--and heard the voice, that should be raising the battle-cry,smoothed into fawning accents of base fear, or yet baser hope,--I haveasked myself, if I am indeed of the blood of Israel! and thanked thegreat Jehovah that he hath spared me at least the curse that hathblasted my brotherhood into usurers and slaves"
Ximen prudently forbore an answer to enthusiasm which he neither sharednor understood; but, after a brief silence, turned back the stream ofthe conversation.
"You resolve, then, upon prosecuting vengeance on the Moors, atwhatsoever hazard of the broken faith of these Nazarenes?"
"Ay, the vapour of human blood hath risen unto heaven, and, collectedinto thunder-clouds, hangs over the doomed and guilty city. And now,Ximen, I have a new cause for hatred to the Moors: the flower that Ihave reared and watched, the spoiler hath sought to pluck it from myhearth. Leila--thou hast guarded her ill, Ximen; and, wert thou notendeared to me by thy very malice and vices, the rising sun should haveseen thy trunk on the waters of the Darro."
"My lord," replied Ximen, "if thou, the wisest of our people, canst notguard a maiden from love, how canst thou see crime in the dull eyes andnumbed senses of a miserable old man?"
The Israelite did not answer, nor seem to hear this deprecatoryremonstrance. He appeared rather occupied with his own thoughts; and,speaking to himself, he muttered, "It must be so: the sacrifice ishard--the danger great; but here, at least, it is more immediate. Itshall be done. Ximen," he continued, speaking aloud; "dost thou feelassured that even mine own countrymen, mine own tribe, know me not asone of them? Were my despised birth and religion published, my limbswould be torn asunder as an impostor; and all the arts of the Cabalacould not save me."
"Doubt not, great master; none in Granada, save thy faithful Ximen, knowthy secret."
"So let me dream and hope. And now to my work; for this night must bespent in toil."
The Hebrew drew before him some of the strange instruments we havedescribed; and took from the recesses in the rock several scrolls.The old man lay at his feet, ready to obey his behests; but, to allappearance, rigid and motionless as the dead, whom his blanched huesand shrivelled form resembled. It was, indeed, as the picture of theenchanter at his work, and the corpse of some man of old, revived fromthe grave to minister to his spells, and execute his commands.
Enough in the preceding conversation has transpired to convince thereader, that the Hebrew, in whom he has already detected the Almamen ofthe Alhambra, was of no character common to his tribe. Of a lineage thatshrouded itself in the darkness of his mysterious people, in their dayof power, and possessed of immense wealth, which threw into poverty theresources of Gothic princes,--the youth of that remarkable man had beenspent, not in traffic and merchandise but travel and study.
As a child, his home had been in Granada. He had seen his fatherbutchered by the late king, Muley Abul Hassan, without other crime thanhis reputed riches; and his body literally cut open, to search for thejewels it was supposed he had swallowed. He saw, and, boy as he was hevowed revenge. A distant kinsman bore the orphan to lands more securefrom persecution; and the art with which the Jews concealed theirwealth, scattering it over various cities, had secured to Almamen thetreasures the tyrant of Granada had failed to grasp.
He had visited the greater part of the world then known; and resided formany years at the court of the sultan of that hoary Egypt, which stillretained its fame for abstruse science and magic lore. He had not invain applied himself to such tempting and wild researches; and hadacquired many of those secrets now perhaps lost for ever to theworld. We do not mean to intimate that he attained to what legend andsuperstition impose upon our faith as the art of sorcery. He couldneither command the elements nor pierce the veil of the future-scatterarmies with a word, nor pass from spot to spot by the utterance ofa charmed formula. But men who, for ages, had passed their lives inattempting all the effects that can astonish and awe the vulgar, couldnot but learn some secrets which all the more sober wisdom of moderntimes would search ineffectually to solve or to revive. And ma
ny ofsuch arts, acquired mechanically (their invention often the work of achemical accident), those who attained to them could not always explain,not account for the phenomena they created, so that the mightiness oftheir own deceptions deceived themselves; and they often believed theywere the masters of the Nature to which they were, in reality, buterratic and wild disciples. Of such was the student in that grim cavern.He was, in some measure, the dupe, partly of his own bewildered wisdom,partly of the fervour of an imagination exceedingly high-wrought andenthusiastic. His own gorgeous vanity intoxicated him: and, if it be anhistorical truth that the kings of the ancient world, blinded by theirown power, had moments in which they believed themselves more thanmen, it is not incredible that sages, elevated even above kings, shouldconceive a frenzy as weak, or, it may be, as sublime: and imagine thatthey did not claim in vain the awful dignity with which the faith of themultitude invested their faculties and gifts.
But, though the accident of birth, which excluded him from all field forenergy and ambition, had thus directed the powerful mind of Almamen tocontemplation and study, nature had never intended passions so fiercefor the calm, though visionary, pursuits to which he was addicted.Amidst scrolls and seers, he had pined for action and glory; and,baffled in all wholesome egress, by the universal exclusion which, inevery land, and from every faith, met the religion he belonged to, thefaculties within him ran riot, producing gigantic but baseless schemes,which, as one after the other crumbled away, left behind feelings ofdark misanthropy and intense revenge.
Perhaps, had his religion been prosperous and powerful, he might havebeen a sceptic; persecution and affliction made him a fanatic. Yet, trueto that prominent characteristic of the old Hebrew race, which made themlook to a Messiah only as a warrior and a prince, and which taught themto associate all their hopes and schemes with worldly victories andpower, Almamen desired rather to advance, than to obey, his religion. Hecared little for its precepts, he thought little of its doctrines; but,night and day, he revolved his schemes for its earthly restoration andtriumph.
At that time, the Moors in Spain were far more deadly persecutors of theJews than the Christians were. Amidst the Spanish cities on thecoast, that merchant tribe had formed commercial connections withthe Christians, sufficiently beneficial, both to individuals and tocommunities, to obtain for them, not only toleration, but something ofpersonal friendship, wherever men bought and sold in the market-place.And the gloomy fanaticism which afterwards stained the fame of the greatFerdinand, and introduced the horrors of the Inquisition, had not yetmade it self more than fitfully visible. But the Moors had treated thisunhappy people with a wholesale and relentless barbarity. At Granada,under the reign of the fierce father of Boabdil,--"that king with thetiger heart,"--the Jews had been literally placed without the pale ofhumanity; and even under the mild and contemplative Boabdil himself,they had been plundered without mercy, and, if suspected of secretingtheir treasures, massacred without scruple; the wants of the statecontinued their unrelenting accusers,--their wealth, their inexpiablecrime.
It was in the midst of these barbarities that Almamen, for the firsttime since the day when the death-shriek of his agonised father rang inhis ears, suddenly returned to Granada. He saw the unmitigated miseriesof his brethern, and he remembered and repeated his vow. His namechanged, his kindred dead, none remembered, in the mature Almamen, thebeardless child of Issachar, the Jew. He had long, indeed, deemed itadvisable to disguise his faith; and was known, throughout the Africankingdoms, but as the potent santon, or the wise magician.
This fame soon lifted him, in Granada, high in the councils of thecourt. Admitted to the intimacy of Muley Hassan, with Boabdil, and thequeen mother, he had conspired against that monarch; and had lived,at least, to avenge his father upon the royal murderer. He was no lessintimate with Boabdil; but steeled against fellowship or affection forall men out of the pale of his faith, he saw in the confidence of theking only the blindness of a victim.
Serpent as he was, he cared not through what mire of treachery and fraudhe trailed his baleful folds, so that, at last, he could spring uponhis prey. Nature had given him sagacity and strength. The curse ofcircumstance had humbled, but reconciled him to the dust. He had thecrawl of the reptile,--he had, also, its poison and its fangs.