Chapter 20:  The Old Man Of The Mountain.

Ah, where was our Hubert?

No magic mirror have we, wherein you may see him; yet we may lift the veil, after the fashion of storytellers.

It is a scorching day in summer, the heat is all but unbearable to Europeans as the rays fall upon that Eastern garden, on the slopes of Lebanon, where a score of Christian slaves toil in fetters, beneath the watchful eyes of their taskmasters, who, clothed in loose white robes and folded turbans, are oblivious of the power of the sun to scorch.  There is a young man who toils amidst those vines and melons—­yet already he bears the scars of desperate combats, and trouble and adversity have wrought wrinkles on his brow, and added lines of care to a comely face.

A slave toiling in an Eastern garden—­taskmasters set over him with loaded whips—­alas! can this be our Hubert?

Indeed it is.

The story told by the pilgrim was partly true.  The Fleur de Lys had been wrecked on the coast of Sicily, but Hubert and two or three others escaped in an open boat.  They were a night and day on the deep, when a vessel bound for Antioch hove in sight, and made out their signals of distress.  They were taken on board, and arrived at Antioch duly, whence Hubert despatched a letter to his friends at Walderne (which never arrived); and then in the exquisite beauty of the Eastern summer—­“when the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds has come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land; when the fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grapes give a good smell”—­in all this beauty Hubert de Walderne and the three surviving members of his party set out to traverse the mountainous districts of Lebanon on their way to Jerusalem.

They engaged a guide, who feigned himself a Christian, and, in company with other pilgrims, all of course armed, travelled through the wondrous country beneath “The hill of Hermon” on their road southward.  Near the sources of the Jordan, while yet amongst the cedars of Lebanon, their guide led them into an ambush; and after a desperate but unavailing resistance, they were all either slain or taken prisoners.  Hubert, his sword broken in the struggle, was made captive, after doing all that valour could do, and bound.  He saw his faithful squire lying dead on the field, and the other two survivors of the party which had set out in such high hope from Walderne, captives like himself.

Resistance was impossible.  Their captors would have released them for ransom; but who was near to redeem them?  So they were taken to Damascus, and, in the absence of such ransom, were exposed in the slave market.  Oh, what degradation for the young knight!  Hubert prayed for death, but it never came.  Death flies the miserable, and seeks the happy who cling to life.

An old man with a flowing beard, and of great austerity of manner, had come to inspect the slaves.  He selected only the young and comely, and Hubert had the misfortune to be one so distinguished.  All men bowed before the potentate, whoever he was, and Hubert saw that he had become the property of “a prince among his people.”