These events created no little sensation in Alexandria, and Hassan’s skill, courage, and his remarkable beauty of form and feature were the general subject of conversation among those who had witnessed the merchant’s purchase of the restive horse. All manner of speculations were afloat as to who or whence he was, for those who had most nearly observed him declared that, although his dress and language proclaimed the Bedouin Arab, his features seemed to be those of a Georgian or some northern race.
Many questions were addressed to Hadji Ismael on the subject by his friends, but he was either unable or unwilling to satisfy their curiosity. All that they could learn was that the youth had been sent to the merchant with a letter of recommendation from his old acquaintance Sheik Sâleh, and that he was to be employed in the purchase of the collection of horses to be sent to Constantinople.
Meanwhile Hassan passed his time more agreeably than he had expected, for he had abundance of liberty and exercise in his new vocation, and was treated with the greatest kindness and confidence both by the merchant and by the chief clerk. One remarkable feature they found in his character, that under no circumstances whatever did he deviate in the slightest degree from the truth. Whether money was concerned, or the relation of an event, they always found his statements confirmed, even in the most minute particular. He seemed, also, to have no care or thought of the acquisition of money, and these two features of character were so rare in Alexandria that some of the merchant’s friends, when speaking of his young protégé, were in the habit of shaking their heads and touching their foreheads significantly with the index-finger, thereby indicating that probably he was somewhat deranged.
These vague suggestions were confirmed by other traits of his character very different from other Alexandrian youths of his own age. He was never seen to enter a drinking-shop, nor to idle and lounge about the bazaars. When not employed in exercising his horses, one of his favourite amusements was to go down to the beach for a swim in the sea. The boundless expanse of salt water was new to him: the more angry the surf, the more it seemed to please and excite him.
His companion on these bathing excursions was Ahmed, the chief clerk’s son, a lad of some twenty years of age, to whom, notwithstanding the difference in their characters, Hassan became much attached. He was short and slight in figure, with a pale but intelligent countenance, and remarkable for his studious and industrious habits. Having been for some time employed as a junior clerk of an English mercantile house (there were only two at that time in Alexandria), he had not only become a very good English scholar, but had acquired a fair knowledge of Greek and Italian. He was a bold and practised swimmer; but on one or two occasions when he had followed Hassan to enjoy his favourite pastime in the surf, he had received contusions which stunned him for the moment, and might have cost him dear, had not the powerful arm of his athletic comrade been always near and ready to assist him.
This companionship, which soon ripened into friendship, was not without its corresponding advantage to Hassan. His eager imagination had already drunk in with avidity the feats of Antar, Sindebad, and other heroes of Arab story; but his new friend could tell him yet stranger tales of the regions beyond the sea—regions where from cold the waters grew as hard as stone, and bore the passage of loaded waggons; where ships, by the aid of fire, sailed against the wind and stream, and where the inhabitants of one small island possessed and ruled at a distance of many thousand miles possessions five times larger and more populous than those of the great Sultan of Islam.
These narrations, and especially the last, excited so forcibly the ardent imagination of Hassan, that he was never weary of listening, and he prevailed upon his new friend one day to take him to the counting-house where he was employed, that he might see some of these wonderful islanders. Probably he expected to find in them marvellous beings, like the giants or jinns of Arab fiction; but after accompanying his friend to the house of Mr ——, whom he saw through an open door at the extremity of the counting-house, seated at a table writing letters and tying up papers, he went out again, with disappointment evidently written upon his countenance.
“What tales are these which you have been telling me, Ahmed?” said he to his companion; “by Allah, that is no man at all! He is smaller than I am; he has not the beard of Hadji, and he has not even a scribe to write his letters!”
“Hassan,” replied his friend, smiling, “the habits of these islanders are different from those of Turks and Arabs. The pen is their sword in commerce, and they like to wield it themselves. Our chief writes on matters of importance with his own hand; it is good, for no scribe can betray him; but in the adjoining room he has two or three clerks who write on his affairs from morning till night.”
Hassan shook his head, thought of the swift horse and the open desert, and said, “Allah be praised, I am not a merchant of these islanders.” Nevertheless there was something mysterious about their history which continued to excite his fancy, and as weeks and months passed on, they found him, during the leisure hours of evening, employed in learning English from his friend.
As Turkish was the language habitually spoken in the family of Mohammed Aga and in other places which Hassan’s avocations led him to frequent, he soon acquired a sufficient knowledge of it to enable him to understand and converse in it with tolerable fluency.
During the next three years of our hero’s life he remained in the employment of Hadji Ismael, who never repented having trusted him implicitly in every commission with which he had been charged, and had procured for him a teacher under whose instructions he had learnt to read Arabic and to write a legible hand; but Hassan, though ready and quick of apprehension, did not evince any fondness for the study of books; his pleasures were a ride on the back of a fiery horse or a crested wave, and listening after sunset to the popular Arab romances of old, recited by some wandering ràwi.[19]
Of these last he was so fond that he knew many of them by heart. Stories of princes and princesses in disguise, mingled with the mystery hanging over his own birth, floated in his imaginative brain, but the mystery remained unravelled. He had kept the secret confined to his own breast, never even communicating it to his friend Ahmed; nevertheless from him, from his father, and from all his acquaintance, he had diligently inquired into the early history of all the Turkish pashas, beys, and officers in Alexandria, but no known episode of their lives threw any light upon the object of his search. His passions were strong and turbulent, but he generally kept them under the control of a determined will, and the secret conviction that he was the son of “somebody” imparted to his character a certain pride and reserve which assorted better with his form and features than with his outward condition of life.
Connected with the mystery of his birth and with the events related in the wild tales with which he had fed his youthful imagination, was the image of a lovely princess whom he had clothed with all the attributes of beauty ascribed by Arab poetry to such damsels; waking or dreaming, she was constantly before his eyes: he had given her a name, and he loved this creature of his imagination with all the ardent fondness of a young and passionate heart.
If it be true that such visionary dreams of youth are necessarily followed by disappointment on awaking to the rude realities of life, it is also true that in some cases, as in his, they preserve those who are under their influence from the temptations to which that age is exposed. It is one of the evils of modern education in what we are pleased to call highly civilised countries to cultivate the understanding at the expense of the heart. The simplicity, the trusting confidence, the warm imagination, the love of all that is pure and high and holy, which are the proper attributes of youth, are sacrificed to what is termed a practical knowledge of the world, and the result is, that there is now many a young gentleman at Eton and Oxford who would listen with a sneer of contempt to a sentiment or a trait of character which would have drawn a tear of sympathy and admiration from the eye of a Burke or a Fox, a Pascal or a Newton.
To return from this digression. Hassan loved his imaginary princess; nevertheless, like a true lover, he put her in the deepest corner of his heart, and never spoke of her.