CHAPTER VI.

Pangs of soul and doubtings of conscience had, in fact, prompted the governor to purchase the hanging and he therefore might have been glad if it had cost him still dearer.  The greater the gift the better founded his hope of grace and favor from the recipient!  And he had grounds for being uneasy and for asking himself whether he had acted rightly.  Revenge was no Christian virtue, but to let the evil done to him by the Melchites go unpunished when the opportunity offered for crushing them was more than he could bring himself to.  Nay, what father whose two bright young sons had been murdered, but would have done as he did?  That fearful blow had struck him in a vital spot.  Since that day he had felt himself slowly dying; and that sense of weakness, those desperate tremors, the discomforts and suffering which blighted every hour of his life, 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 and his burning thirst for revenge, and fate had allowed him to quench it in a way which, as time went on, seemed too absolute to his peace-loving nature.  Though not indeed by his act, still with his complicity he saw the Byzantine Empire bereft of the rich province which Caesar had entrusted to his rule, saw the Greeks and everything that bore the name of Melchite driven out of Egypt with ignominy—­though he would gladly have prevented it—­in many places slain like dogs by the furious populace who hailed the Moslems as their deliverers.

Thus all the evil he had invoked on the murderers of his children and the oppressors and torturers of his people had come upon them; his revenge was complete.  But, in the midst of his satisfaction at this strange fulfilment of the fervent wish of years, his conscience had lifted up its voice; new, and hitherto unknown terrors had come upon him.  He lacked the strength of mind to be a hero or a reformer.  Too great an event had been wrought through his agency, too fearful a doom visited on thousands of men!  The Christian Faith—­to him the highest consideration—­had been too greatly imperilled by his act, for the thought that he had caused all this to be calmly endurable.  The responsibility proved too heavy for his shoulders; and whenever he repeated to himself that it was not he who had invited the Arabs into the land, and that he must have been crushed in the attempt to repel them, he could hear voices all round him denouncing him as the man who had surrendered his native land to them, and he fancied himself environed by dangers—­believing those who spoke to him of assassins sent forth by the Byzantines to kill him.—­But even more appalling, was his dread of the wrath of Heaven against the man who had betrayed a Christian country to the Infidels.  Even his consciousness of having been, all his life long, a right-minded, just man could not