After some more bargaining on both sides, the mother finally received the ten thousand piastres in her apron, and disappeared immediately, to conceal it in some hiding-place, careless whether she should see her daughter again or not.
Whilst she was gone the merchant glanced on the elder sister of Baïla, who had assisted at the bargaining, whilst she was kneading bread in a kneading trough.
“And she,” said he; “shall I not carry her off also?”
The elder sister, flattered in her vanity, made him a reverence.
“Oh, oh!” said the other, “let us see—it does not matter.”
They bargained anew, and the Mingrelian, taking advantage of his wife’s absence, ended by selling his oldest daughter for six English guns, a large supply of powder and lead, some smoking materials and two tuns of rack. Whilst he was in the humor, he would cheerfully have sold his wife, still in fine preservation, if custom, agreeing this time with the new Russian code, had permitted him to do so.
The two men were touching hands in conclusion of this new bargain when the mother returned. She uttered at first loud cries, thinking that all the household cares were henceforth to devolve on herself alone. The merchant was enabled to quiet her by a present of a necklace of false stones, and some ornaments of gilded brass.
On the following day the two Mingrelian sisters reached a small port on the shores of the Black Sea, whence they soon embarked for Trebizond. A month afterward, the man with the turban being suddenly seized with a desire to have a wife for himself, after having furnished so many to others, married the eldest sister, who had won his affections by her skill in making cake.
Such were the remembrances of her family which were awakened in the mind of the young odalisk, when retired and alone in her apartment, pouting and jealous.
She then called up the images of that other portion of her life, in which love was to play a part. She returned in imagination to Trebizond, to the house of her purchaser, become her brother-in-law. There, like the companions of her captivity, surrounded by attention and care, under a superintendence minute but not severe, she passed a year, during which she had acquired the Turkish language and skill in the toilette, at the same time perfecting herself in singing and dancing.
