This eBook was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of thefile for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making anentire meal of them. D.W.]
By Georg Ebers
Pangs of soul and doubtings of conscience had, in fact, prompted thegovernor to purchase the hanging and he therefore might have been glad ifit had cost him still dearer. The greater the gift the better foundedhis hope of grace and favor from the recipient! And he had grounds forbeing uneasy and for asking himself whether he had acted rightly.Revenge was no Christian virtue, but to let the evil done to him by theMelchites go unpunished when the opportunity offered for crushing themwas more than he could bring himself to. Nay, what father whose twobright young sons had been murdered, but would have done as he did? Thatfearful blow had struck him in a vital spot. Since that day he had felthimself slowly dying; and that sense of weakness, those desperatetremors, the discomforts and suffering which blighted every hour of hislife, were also to be set down to the account of the Melchite tyrants.
His waning powers had indeed only been kept up by his original vigor andhis burning thirst for revenge, and fate had allowed him to quench it ina way which, as time went on, seemed too absolute to his peace-lovingnature. Though not indeed by his act, still with his complicity he sawthe Byzantine Empire bereft of the rich province which Caesar hadentrusted to his rule, saw the Greeks and everything that bore the nameof Melchite driven out of Egypt with ignominy—though he would gladlyhave prevented it—in many places slain like dogs by the furious populacewho hailed the Moslems as their deliverers.
Thus all the evil he had invoked on the murderers of his children and theoppressors and torturers of his people had come upon them; his revengewas complete. But, in the midst of his satisfaction at this strangefulfilment of the fervent wish of years, his conscience had lifted up itsvoice; new, and hitherto unknown terrors had come upon him. He lackedthe strength of mind to be a hero or a reformer. Too great an event hadbeen wrought through his agency, too fearful a doom visited on thousandsof men! The Christian Faith—to him the highest consideration—had beentoo greatly imperilled by his act, for the thought that he had caused allthis to be calmly endurable. The responsibility proved too heavy for hisshoulders; and whenever he repeated to himself that it was not he who hadinvited the Arabs into the land, and that he must have been crushed inthe attempt to repel them, he could hear voices all round him denouncinghim as the man who had surrendered his native land to them, and hefancied himself environed by dangers—believing those who spoke to him ofassassins sent forth by the Byzantines to kill him.—But even moreappalling, was his dread of the wrath of Heaven against the man who hadbetrayed a Christian country to the Infidels. Even his consciousness ofhaving been, all his life long, a right-minded, just man could notfortify him against this terror; there was but one thing which couldraise his quelled spirit: the white pillules which had long been asindispensable to him as air and water. The kind-hearted old bishop ofMemphis, Plotinus, and his clergy had forgiveness for all; the PatriarchBenjamin, on the contrary, had treated him as a reprobate sentenced toeternal damnation, though at the time of this prelate's exile in thedesert he had hailed the Arabs as their deliverers from the