Meantime Tetuan was looking for the visit of His Shereefian Majesty, the Sultan Abd er-Rahman. He had been heard of about four hours away, encamped with his Ministers, a portion of his hareem, and a detachment of his army, somewhere by the foot of Beni Hosmar. His entry was fixed for eight o'clock next morning, and preparations for his coming were everywhere afoot. All other occupations were at a standstill, and nothing was to be heard but the noise and clamour of the cleansing of the streets, and the hanging of flags and of carpets.
Early on the following morning a street-crier came, beating a drum, and crying in a hoarse voice, “Awake! Awake! Come and greet your Lord! Awake! Awake!”
In a little while the streets were alive with motley and noisy crowds. The sun was up, if still red and hazy, and sunlight came like a tunnel of gold down the swampy valley and from over the sea; the orange orchards lying to the south, called the gardens of the Sultan, were red rather than yellow, and the snowy crests of the mountain heights above them were crimson rather than white. In the town itself the small red flag that is the Moorish ensign hung out from every house, and carpets of various colours swung on many walls.
The sun was not yet high before the Sultan's army began to arrive. It was a mixed and noisy throng that came first, a sort of ragged regiment of Arabs, with long guns, and with their gun-cases wrapped about their heads—a big gang of wild country-folk lately enlisted as soldiers. They poured into the town at the western gate, and shuffled and jostled and squeezed their way through the narrow streets firing recklessly into the air, and shouting as they went, “Abd er-Rahman is coming! The Sultan is coming! Dogs! Men! Believers! Infidels! Come out! come out!”
Thus they went puffing along, covered with dust and sweltering in perspiration, and at every fresh shot and shout the streets they passed through grew denser. But it was a grim satire on their lawless loyalty that almost at their heels there came into the town, not the Sultan himself, but a troop of his prisoners from the mountains. Ten of them there were in all, guarded by ten soldiers, and they made a sorry spectacle. They were chained together, man to man in single file, not hand to hand or leg to leg but neck to neck. So had they walked a hundred miles, never separated night or day, either sleeping or waking, or faint or strong. The feet of some were bare and torn, and dripping blood; the faces of all were black with grime, and streaked with lines of sweat. And thus they toiled into the streets in that sunlight of God's own morning, under the red ensigns of Morocco, by the many-coloured carpets of Rabat, to the Kasbah beyond the market-place. They were Reefians whose homes the Sultan had just stripped, whose villages he had just burnt, whose wives and children he had just driven into the mountains. And they were going to die in his dungeons.
It was seven o'clock by this time, and rumour had it that the Sultan's train was moving down the valley. From the roofs of the houses a vast human ant-hill could be seen swarming across the plain in the distance. Then came some rapid transformations of the scene below. First the streets were deserted by every decent blue jellab and clean white turban within range of sight. These presently reappeared on the roofs of the principal thoroughfare, where groups of women, closely covered in their haiks, had already begun to congregate with their dark attendants. Next, a body of the townsmen who possessed firearms mounted guard on the walls to protect the town from the lawlessness of the big army that was coming. Then into the Feddan, the square marketplace, came pouring from their own little quarter within its separate walls a throng of Jewish people, in their black gabardines and skull-caps, men and women and children, carrying banners that bore loyal inscriptions, twanging at tambourines and crying in wild discords, “God bless our Lord!” “God give victory to our Lord the Sultan!”
The poor Jews got small thanks for such loyalty to the last of the Caliphs of the Prophet. Every ragged Moor in the streets greeted them with exclamations of menace and abhorrence. Even the blind beggar crouching at the gate lifted up his voice and cursed them.
“Get out, you Jew! God burn your father! Dogs, take off your slippers—Abd er-Rahman is coming!”
Thus they were scolded and abused on every side, kicked, cuffed, jostled, and wedged together well-nigh to suffocation. Their banners were torn out of their hands, their tambourines were broken, their voices were drowned, and finally they were driven back into their Mellah and shut up there, and forbidden to look upon the entry of the Sultan even from their roofs.
And the vagabonds and ragamuffins among the faithful in the streets, having got rid of the unbelievers had enough ado to keep peace among themselves. They pushed and struggled and stormed and cried and laughed and clamoured down this main artery of the town through which the Sultan's train must pass. Men and boys, women also and young girls, donkeys with packs, bony mules too, and at least one dirty and terrified old camel. It was a confused and uproarious babel. Angry black faces thrust into white ones, flashing eyes and gleaming white teeth, and clenched fists uplifted. Human voices barking like dogs, yelping like hyenas, shrill and guttural, piercing and grating. Prayings, beggings, quarrellings, cursings.
“Arrah! Arrah! Arrah!”
“O Merciful! O Giver of good to all!”
“Curses on your grandfather!”
“Allah! Allah! Allah!”
“Balak! Balak! Balak!”
But presently the wild throng fell into order and silence. The gate of the Kasbah was thrown open, and a line of soldiers came out, headed by the Kaid of Tetuan, and moved on towards the city wall. The rabble were thrust back, the soldiers were drawn up in lines on either side of the street, and the Kaid, Ben Aboo himself, took a position by the western gate.
By this time there was commotion on the town walls among the townsmen who had gathered there. The Sultan's army was drawing near, a confused and disorderly mass of human beings moving on from the plain. As they came up to the walls, the people who were standing on the house-roofs could see them, and as they were ordered away to encamp by the river, none could help but hear their shouts and oaths.
When the motley and noisy concourse had been driven off to their camping-ground, the gates of the town were thrown wide, for the Sultan himself was at hand.
First came two soldiers afoot, and then followed five artillerymen, with their small pieces packed on mules. Next came mounted standard-bearers four deep, some in red, some in blue, and some in green. Then came the outrunners and the spearmen, and then the Sultan's six led horses. And then at length with the great red umbrella of royalty held over him, came the Sultan himself, the elderly sensualist, with his dusky cheeks, his rheumy eyes, his thick lips, and his heavy nostrils. The fat Father of Islam was mounted that day on a snow-white stallion, bedecked in gorgeous trappings. Its bridle was of green silk, embroidered in gold. Solomon's seal was stamped on its headgear, and the tooth of a boar—a safeguard against the evil eye—was suspended from its neck. Its saddle was of orange damask, with girths of stout silk, and its stirrups were of chased silver. The Sultan's own trappings were of the colour of his horse. His kaftan was of white cloth, with an embroidered leathern girdle; his turban was of white cotton, and his kisa was also white and transparent.
As he passed under the archway of the town's gate the cannon of the Kasbah boomed forth a salute, Ben Aboo dismounted and kissed his stirrup, and the crowds in the streets burst upon him with blessings.
“God bless our Lord!”
“Sultan Abd er-Rahman!”
“God prolong the life of our Lord!”
He seemed hardly to hear them. Once his hand touched his breast when the Kaid approached him. After that he looked neither to the right nor to the left, nor gave any sign of pleasure or recognition. Nevertheless the people in the streets ceased not to greet him with deafening acclamations.
“All's well, all's well,” they told each other, and pointed to the white horse—the sign of peace—which the Sultan rode, and to the riderless black horse—the sign of strife—that pranced behind him.
The women on the housetops also, in their hooded cloaks, welcomed the Sultan with a shrill ululation: “Yoo-yoo, yoo-yoo, yoo-yoo!”
Not content with this, the usual greeting of their sex and nation, some of them who had hitherto been closely veiled threw back their muslin coverings, exposed their faces to his face, and welcomed him with more articulate cries.
He gave them neither a smile nor a glance, but rode straight onward. Beside him walked the fly-flappers, flapping the air before his podgy cheeks with long scarfs of silk, and behind him rode his Ministers of State, five sleek dogs who daily fed his appetites on carrion that his head might be like his stomach, and their power over him thereby the greater. After the Ministers of State came a part of the royal hareem. The ladies rode on mules, and were attended by eunuchs.
Such was the entry into Tetuan of the Sultan Abd er-Rahman. In their heart of hearts did the people rejoice at his visit? No. Too well they knew that the tyrant had done nothing for his subjects but take their taxes. Not a man had he protected from injustice; not a woman had he saved from dishonour. Never a rich usurer among them but trembled at his messages, nor a poor wretch but dreaded his dungeons. His law existed only for himself; his government had no object but to collect his dues. And yet his people had received him amid wild vociferations of welcome.
Fear, fear! Fear it was in the heart of the rich man on the housetops, whose moneys were hidden, as well as in the darkened soul of the blind beggar at the gate, whose eyes had been gouged out long ago because he dared not divulge the secret place of his wealth.
But early in the evening of that same day, at the corners of quiet streets, in the covered ways, by the doors of bazaars, among the horses tethered in the fondaks, wheresoever two men could stand and talk unheard and unobserved by a third, one secret message of twofold significance passed with the voice of smothered joy from lip to lip. And this was the way and the word of it:
“She is back in the Kasbah!”
“The daughter of Ben Oliel? Thank God! But why? Has she recanted?”
“She has fallen sick.”
“And Ben Aboo has sent her to prison?”
“He thinks that the physician who will cure her quickest.”
“Allah save us! The dog of dogs! But God be praised! At least she is saved from the Sultan.”
“For the present, only for the-present.”
“For ever, brother, for ever! Listen! your ear. A word of news for your news: the Mahdi is coming! The boy has been for him.”
“Bismillah! Ben Oliel's boy?”
“Ali. He is back in Tetuan. And listen again! Behind the Mahdi comes the—”
“Ya Allah! well?”
“Hark! A footstep on the street—some one is near—”
“But quick. Behind the Mahdi—what?”
“God will show! In peace, brother, in peace!”
“In peace!”
The Mahdi came back in the evening. He had no standard-bearers going before him, no outrunners, no spearmen, no fly-flappers, no ministers of state; he rode no white stallion in gorgeous trappings, and was himself bedecked in no snowy garments. His ragged following he had left behind him; he was alone; he was afoot; a selham of rough grey cloth was all his bodily adornment; yet he was mightier than the monarch who had entered Tetuan that day.
He passed through the town not like a sultan, but like a saint; not like a conquering prince, but like an avenging angel. Outside the town he had come upon the great body of the Sultan's army lying encamped under the walls. The townspeople who had shut the soldiers out, with all the rabble of their following, had nevertheless sent them fifty camels' load of kesksoo, and it had been served in equal parts, half a pound to each man. Where this meal had already been eaten, the usual charlatans of the market-place had been busily plying their accustomed trades. Black jugglers from Zoos, sham snake-charmers from the desert, and story-tellers both grave and facetious, all twanging their hideous ginbri, had been seated on the ground in half-circles of soldiers and their women. But the Mahdi had broken up and scattered every group of them.
“Away!” he had cried. “Away with your uncleanness and deception.”
And the foulest babbler of them all, hot with the exercise of the indecent gestures wherewith he illustrated his filthy tale, had slunk off like a pariah dog.
As the Mahdi entered the town a number of mountaineers in the Feddan were going through their feats of wonder-play before a multitude of excited spectators. Two tribes, mounted on wild barbs, were charging in line from opposite sides of the square, some seated, some kneeling, some standing. Midway across the market-place they were charging, horses at full gallop, firing their muskets, then reining in at a horse's length, throwing their barbs on their haunches, wheeling round and galloping back, amid deafening shouts of “Allah! Allah! Allah!”
“Allah indeed!” cried the Mahdi, striding into their midst without fear. “That is all the part that God plays in this land of iniquity and bloodshed. Away, away!”
The people separated, and the Mahdi turned towards the Kasbah. As he approached it, the lanes leading to the Feddan were being cleared for the mad antics of the Aissawa. Before they saw him the fanatics came out in all the force of their acting brotherhood, a score of half-naked men, and one other entirely naked, attended by their high-priests, the Mukaddameen, three old patriarchs with long white beards, wearing dark flowing robes and carrying torches. Then goats and dogs were riven alive and eaten raw; while women and children; crouching in the gathering darkness overhead looked down from the roofs and shuddered. And as the frenzy increased among the madmen, and their victims became fewer, each fanatic turned upon himself, and tore his own skin and battered his head against the stones until blood ran like water.
“Fools and blind guides!” cried the Mahdi sweeping them before him like sheep. “Is this how you turn the streets into a sickening sewer? Oh, the abomination of desolation! You tear yourselves in the name of God, but forget His justice and mercy. Away! You will have your reward. Away! Away!”
At the gate of the Kasbah he demanded to see the Kaid, and, after various parleyings with the guards and negroes who haunted the winding ways of the gloomy place, he was introduced to the Basha's presence. The Basha received him in a room so dark that he could but dimly see his face. Ben Aboo was stretched on a carpet, in much the position of a dog with his muzzle on his forepaws.
“Welcome,” he said gruffly, and without changing his own unceremonious posture, he gave the Mahdi a signal to sit.
The Mahdi did not sit. “Ben Aboo,” he said in a voice that was half choked with anger, “I have come again on an errand of mercy, and woe to you if you send me away unsatisfied.”
Ben Aboo lay silent and gloomy for a moment, and then said with a growl, “What is it now?”
“Where is the daughter of Ben Oliel?” said the Mahdi.
With a gesture of protestation the Basha waved one of the hands on which his dusky muzzle had rested.
“Ah, do not lie to me,” cried the Mahdi. “I know where she is—she is in prison. And for what? For no fault but love of her father, and no crime but fidelity to her faith. She has sacrificed the one and abandoned the other. Is that not enough for you, Ben Aboo? Set her free.”
The Basha listened at first with a look of bewilderment, and some half-dozen armed attendants at the farther end of the room shuffled about in their consternation. At length Ben Aboo raised his head, and said with an air of mock inquiry, “Ya Allah! who is this infidel?”
Then, changing his tone suddenly, he cried, “Sir, I know who you are! You come to me on this sham errand about the girl, but that is not your purpose, Mohammed of Mequinez! Mohammed the Third! What fool said you were a spy of the Sultan? Abd er-Rahman is here—my guest and protector. You are a spy of his enemies, and a revolutionary, come hither to ruin our religion and our State. The penalty for such as you is death, and by Allah you shall die!”
Saying this, he so wrought upon his indignation, that in spite of his superstitious fears, and the awe in which he stood of the Mahdi, he half deceived himself, and deceived his attendants entirely. But the Mahdi took a step nearer and looked straight into his face, and said—
“Ben Aboo, ask pardon of God; you are a fool. You talk of putting me to death. You dare not and you cannot do it.”
“Why not?” cried Ben Aboo, with a thrill of voice that was like a swagger. “What's to hinder me? I could do it at this moment, and no man need know.”
“Basha,” said the Mahdi, “do you think you are talking to a child? Do you think that when I came here my visit was not known to others than ourselves outside? Do you think there are not some who are waiting for my return? And do you think, too,” he cried, lifting one hand and his voice together, “that my Master in heaven would not see and know it on an errand of mercy His servant perished? Ben Aboo, ask pardon of God, I say; you are a fool.”
The Basha's face became black and swelled with rage. But he was cowed. He hesitated a moment in silence, and then said with an air of braggadocio—
“And what if I do not liberate the girl?”
“Then,” said the Mahdi, “if any evil befalls her the consequences shall be on your head.”
“What consequences?” said the Basha.
“Worse consequences than you expect or dream,” said the Mahdi.
“What consequences?” said the Basha again.
“No matter,” said the Mahdi. “You are walking in darkness, and do not know where you are going.”
“What consequences?” the Basha cried once more.
“That is God's secret,” said the Mahdi.
Ben Aboo began to laugh. “Light the infidel out of the Kasbah,” he shouted to his people.
“Enough!” cried the Mahdi. “I have delivered my message. Now woe to you, Ben Aboo! A second time I have come to you as a witness, but I will come no more. Fill up the measure of your iniquity. Keep the girl in prison. Give her to the Sultan. But know that for all these things your reward awaits you. Your time is near. You will die with a pale face. The sword will reach to your soul.”
Then taking yet another step nearer, until he stood over the Basha where he lay on the ground, he cried with sudden passion, “This is the last word that will pass between you and me. So part we now for ever, Ben Aboo—I to the work that waits for me, and you to shame and contempt, and death and hell.”
Saying this, he made a downward sweep of his open hand over the place where the Basha lay, and Ben Aboo shrank under it as a worm shrinks under a blow. Then with head erect he went out unhindered.
But he was not yet done. In the garden of the palace, as he passed through it to the street, he stood a moment in the darkness under the stars before the chamber where he knew the Sultan lay, and cried, “Abd er-Rahman! Abd er-Rahman! slave of the Merciful! Listen: I hear the sound of the trumpet and the alarum of war. My heart makes a noise in me for my country, but the day of her tribulation is near. Woe to you, Abd er-Rahman! You have filled up the measure of your fathers. Woe to you, slave of the Compassionate!”
The Sultan heard him, and so did the Ministers of State; the women of the hareem heard him, and so did the civil guards and the soldiers. But his voice and his message came over them with the terror of a ghostly thing, and no man raised a hand to stop him.
“The Mahdi,” they whispered with awe, and fell back when he approached.
The streets were quiet as he left the Kasbah. The rabble of mountaineers of Aissawa were gone. Hooded Talebs, with prayer-mats under their arms, were picking their way in the gloom from the various mosques; and from these there came out into the streets the plash of water in the porticos and the low drone of singing voices behind the screens.
The Mahdi lodged that night in the quarter of the enclosure called the M'Salla, and there a slave woman of Ben Aboo's came to him in secret. It was Fatimah, and she told him much of her late master, whom she had visited by stealth, and just left in great trouble and in madness; also of her dead mistress, Ruth who was like rose-perfume in her memory, as well as of Naomi, their daughter, and all her sufferings. In spasms, in gasps, without sequence and without order, she told her story; but he listened to her with emotion while the agitated black face was before him, and when it was gone he tramped the dark house in the dead of night, a silent man, with tender thoughts of the sweet girl who was imprisoned in the dungeons of the Kasbah, and of her stricken father, who supposed that she was living in luxury in the palace of his enemy while he himself lay sick in the poor hut which had been their home. These false notions, which were at once the seed and the fruit of Israel's madness, should at least be dispelled. Let come what would, the man should neither live nor die in such bitterness of cruel error.
The Mahdi resolved to set out for Semsa with the first grey of morning, and meantime he went up to the house-top to sleep. The town was quiet, the traffic of the street was done, the raggabash of the Sultan's following had slunk away ashamed or lain down to rest. It was a wonderful night. The air was cool, for the year was deep towards winter, but not a breath of wind was stirring, and the orange-gardens behind the town wall did not send over the river so much as the whisper of a leaf. Stars were out and the big moon of the East shone white on the white walls and minarets. Nowhere is night so full of the spirit of sleep as in an Eastern city. Below, under the moonlight, lay the square white roofs, and between them were the dark streets going in and out, trailing through and along, like to narrow streams of black water in a bed of quarried chalk. Here or there, where a belated townsman lit himself homeward with a lamp, a red light gleamed out of one of the thin darknesses, crept along a few paces, and then was gone. Sometimes a clamour of voices came up with their own echo from some unseen place, and again everything was still. Sleep, sleep, all was sleep.
“O Tetuan,” thought the Mahdi, “how soon will your streets be uprooted and your sanctuaries destroyed!”
The Mooddin was chanting the call to prayers, and the old porter at the gate was muttering over his rosary as the Mahdi left the town in the dawn. He had to pick his way among the soldiers who were lying on the bare soil outside, uncovered to the sky. Not one of them seemed to be awake. Even their camels were still sleeping, nose to nose, in the circles where they had last fed. Only their mules and asses, all hobbled and still saddled, were up and feeding.
The Mahdi found Israel ben Oliel in the hut at Semsa. So poor a place he had not seen in all his wanderings through that abject land. Its walls were of clay that was bulged and cracked, and its roof was of rushes, which lay over it like sea-wreck on a broken barrel. Israel was in his right mind. He was sitting by the door of his house, with a dejected air, a hopeless look, but the slow sad eyes of reason. His clothing was one worn and torn kaftan; his feet were shoeless, and his head was bare. But so grand a head the Mahdi thought he had never beheld before. Not until then had he truly seen him, for the poverty and misery that sat on him only made his face stand out the clearer. It was the face of a man who for good or ill, for struggle or submission, had walked and wrestled with God.
With salutations, barely returned to him, the Mahdi sat down beside Israel at a little distance. He began to speak to him in a tender way, telling him who he was, and where they had met before, and why he came, and whither he was going. And Israel listened to him at first with a brave show of composure as if the very heart of the man were a frozen clod, whereby his eyes and the muscles of his face and even the nerves of his fingers were also frozen.
Then the Mahdi spoke of Naomi, and Israel made a slow shake of the head. He told him what had happened to her when her father was taken to prison, and Israel listened with a great outward calmness. After that he described the girl's journey in the hope of taking food to him, and how she fell into the hands of Habeebah; and then he saw by Israel's face that the affection of the father was tearing his old heart woefully. At last he recited the incidents of her cruel trial, and how she had yielded at length, knowing nothing of religion, being only a child, seeing her father in everything and thinking to save his life, though she herself must see him no more (for all this he had gathered from Fatimah), and then the great thaw came to Israel, and his fingers trembled, and his face twitched, and the hot tears rained down his cheeks.
“My poor darling!” he muttered in a trembling undertone, and then he asked in a faltering voice where she was at that time.
The Mahdi told him that she was back in prison, for rebelling against the fortune intended for her—that of becoming a concubine of the Sultan.
“My brave girl!” he muttered, and then his face shone with a new light that was both pride and pain.
He lifted his eyes as if he could see her, and his voice as if she could hear: “Forgive me, Naomi! Forgive me, my poor child! Your weak old father; forgive him, my brave, brave daughter!”
This was as much as the Mahdi could bear; and when Israel turned to him, and said in almost a childish tone, “I suppose there is no help for it now, sir. I meant to take her to England—to my poor mother's home, but—”
“And so you shall, as sure as the Lord lives,” said the Mahdi, rising to his feet, with the resolve that a plan for Naomi's rescue which he had thought of again and again, and more than once rejected, which had clamoured at the door of his heart, and been turned away as a barbarous impulse, should at length be carried into effect.
The plan which the Mahdi thought of had first been Ali's, for the black lad was back in Tetuan. After he had fulfilled his errand of mercy at Shawan; he had gone on to Ceuta; and there, with a spirit afire for the wrongs of his master, from whom he was so cruelly parted, he had set himself with shrewdness and daring to incite the Spanish powers to vengeance upon his master's enemies. This had been a task very easy of execution, for just at that time intelligence had come from the Reef, of barbarous raids made by Ben Aboo upon mountain tribes that had hitherto offered allegiance to the Spanish crown. A mission had gone up to Fez, and returned unsatisfied. War was to be declared, Marteel was to be bombarded, the army of Marshal O'Donnel was to come up the valley of the river, and Tetuan was to be taken.
Such were the operations which by the whim of fate had been so strangely revealed to Ali, but Ali's own plan was a different matter. This was the feast of the Moolood, and on one of the nights of it, probably the eighth night, the last night, Friday night, Ben Aboo the Basha was to give a “gathering of delight,” to the Sultan, his Ministers, his Kaids, his Kadis, his Khaleefas, his Umana, and great rascals generally. Ali's stout heart stuck at nothing. He was for having the Spaniards brought up to the gates of the town, on the very night when the whole majesty and iniquity of Barbary would be gathered in one room; then, locking the entire kennel of dogs in the banqueting hall, firing the Kasbah and burning it to the ground, with all the Moorish tyrants inside of it like rats in a trap.
One danger attended his bold adventure, for Naomi's person was within the Kasbah walls. To meet this peril Ali was himself to find his way into the dungeon, deliver Naomi, lock the Kasbah gate, and deliver up to another the key that should serve as a signal for the beginning of the great night's work.
Also one difficulty attended it, for while Ali would be at the Kasbah there would be no one to bring up the Spaniards at the proper moment for the siege—no one in Tetuan on whom the strangers could rely not to lead them blindfold into a trap. To meet this difficulty Ali had gone in search of the Mahdi, revealed to him his plan, and asked him to help in the downfall of his master's enemies by leading the Spaniards at the right moment to the gates that should be thrown open to receive them.
Hearing Ali's story, the Mahdi had been aflame with tender thoughts of Naomi's trials, with hatred of Ben Aboo's tyrannies, and pity of Israel's miseries. But at first his humanity had withheld him from sympathy with Ali's dark purpose, so full, as it seemed, of barbarity and treachery.
“Ali,” he had said, “is it not all you wish for to get Naomi out of prison and take her back to her father?”
“Yes, Sidi,” Ali had answered promptly.
“And you don't want to torture these tyrants if you can do what you desire without it?”
“No-o, Sidi,” Ali had said doubtfully.
“Then,” the Mahdi had said, “let us try.”
But when the Mahdi was gone to Tetuan on his errand of warning that proved so vain, Ali had crept back behind him, so that secretly and independently he might carry out his fell design. The towns-people were ready to receive him, for the air was full of rebellion, and many had waited long for the opportunity of revenge. To certain of the Jews, his master's people, who were also in effect his own, he went first with his mission, and they listened with eagerness to what he had come to say. When their own time came to speak they spoke cautiously, after the manner of their race, and nervously, like men who knew too well what it was to be crushed and kept under; but they gave their help notwithstanding, and Ali's scheme progressed.
In less than three days the entire town, Moorish and Jewish, was honeycombed with subterranean revolt. Even the civil guard, the soldiers of the Kasbah, the black police that kept the gates, and the slaves that stood before the Basha's table were waiting for the downfall to come.
The Mahdi had gone again by this time, and the people had resumed their mock rejoicings over the Sultan's visit. These were the last kindlings of their burnt-out loyalty, a poor smouldering pretence of fire. Every morning the town was awakened by the deafening crackle of flintlocks, which the mountaineers discharged in the Feddan by way of signal that the Sultan was going to say his prayers at the door of some saint's house. Beside the firing of long guns and the twanging of the ginbri the chief business of the day seemed to be begging. One bow-legged rascal in a ragged jellab went about constantly with a little loaf of bread, crying, “An ounce of butter for God's sake!” and when some one gave him the alms he asked he stuck the white sprawling mess on the top of the loaf and changed his cry to “An ounce of cheese for God's sake!” A pert little vagabond—street Arab in a double sense—promenaded the town barefoot, carrying an odd slipper in his hand, and calling on all men by the love of God and the face of God and the sake of God to give him a moozoonah towards the cost of its fellow. Every morning the Sultan went to mosque under his red umbrella, and every evening he sat in the hall of the court of justice, pretending to hear the petitions of the poor, but actually dispensing charms in return for presents. First an old wrinkled reprobate with no life left in him but the life of lust: “A charm to make my young wife love me!” Then an ill-favoured hag behind a blanket: “A charm to wither the face of the woman that my husband has taken instead of me!” Again, a young wife with a tearful voice: “A charm to make me bear children!” A greasy smile from the fat Sultan, a scrap of writing to every supplicant, chinking coins dropped into the bag of the attendant from the treasury, and then up and away. It was a nauseous draught from the bitterest waters of Islam.
But, for all the religious tumult, no man was deceived by the outward marks of devotion. At the corners of the streets, on the Feddan, by the fountains, wherever men could meet and talk unheard, there they stood in little groups, crossing their forefingers, the sign of strife, or rubbing them side by side, the sign of amity. It was clear that, notwithstanding the hubbub of their loyalty to the sultan, they knew that the Spaniard was coming and were glad of it.
Meantime Ali waited with impatience for the day that was to see the end of his enterprise. To beguile himself of his nervousness in the night, during the dark hours that trailed on to morning, he would venture out of the lodging where he lay in hiding throughout the day, and pick his steps in the silence up the winding streets, until he came under a narrow opening in an alley which was the only window to Naomi's prison. And there he would stay the long dark hours through, as if he thought that besides the comfort it brought to him to be near to Naomi, the tramp, tramp, tramp of his footsteps, which once or twice provoked the challenge of the night-guard on his lonely round, would be company to her in her solitude. And sometimes, watching his opportunity that he might be unseen and unheard, he would creep in the darkness under the window and cry up the wall in an underbreath, “Naomi! Naomi! It is I, Ali! I have come back! All will be well yet!”
Then if he heard nothing from within he would torture himself with a hundred fears lest Naomi should be no longer there, but in a worse place; and if he heard a sob he would slink away like a dog with his muzzle to the dust, and if he heard his own name echoed in the softer voice he knew so well he would go off with head erect, feeling like a man who walked on the stars rather than the stones of the street. But, whatever befell, before the day dawned he went back to his lodging less sore at heart for his lonely vigil, but not less wrathful or resolute.
The day of the feast came at length, and then Ali's impatience rose to fever. All day he longed for the night, that the thing he had to do could be done. At last the sunset came and the darkness fell, and from his place of concealment Ali saw the soldiers of the assaseen going through the streets with lanterns to lead honoured guests to the banquet. Then he set out on his errand. His foresight and wit had arranged everything. The negro at the gate of the Kasbah pretended to recognise him as a messenger of the Vizier's, and passed him through. He pushed his way as one with authority along the winding passages to the garden where the Mahdi had called on Abd er-Rahman and foretold his fate. The garden opened upon the great hall, and a number of guests were standing there, cooling themselves in the night air while they waited for the arrival of the Sultan. His Shereefian Majesty came at length, and then, amid salaams and peace-blessings, the company passed in to the banquet. “Peace on you!” “And on you the peace!” “God make your evening!” “May your evening be blessed!”
Did Ali shrink from the task at that moment? No, a thousand times no! While he looked on at these men in their muslin and gauze and linen and scarlet, sweeping in with bows and hand-touchings to sup and to laugh and to tell their pretty stories, he remembered Israel broken and alone in the poor hut which had been described to him, and Naomi lying in her damp cell beyond the wall.
Some minutes he stood in the darkness of the garden, while the guests entered, and until the barefooted servants of the kitchen began to troop in after them with great dishes under huge covers. Then he held a short parley with the negro gatekeeper, two keys were handed to him, and in another minute he was standing at the door of Naomi's prison.
Now, carefully as Ali had arranged every detail of his enterprise, down to the removal of the black woman Habeebah from this door, one fact he had never counted with, and that seemed to him then the chief fact of all—the fact that since he had last looked upon Naomi she had come by the gift of sight, and would now first look upon him. That he would be the same as a stranger to her, and would have to tell her who he was; that she would have to recognise him by whatsoever means remained to belie the evidence of the newborn sense—this was the least of Ali's trouble. By a swift rebound his heart went back to the fear that had haunted him in the days before he left her with her father on his errand to Shawan. He was black, and she would see him.
With the gliding of the key into the lock all this, and more than this, flashed upon his mind. His shame was abject. It cut him to the quick. On the other side of that door was she who had been as a sister to him since times that were lost in the blue clouds of childhood. She had played with him and slept by his side, yet she had never seen his face. And she was fair as the morning, and he was black as the night! He had come to deliver her. Would she recoil from him?
Ali had to struggle with himself not to fly away and leave everything. But his stout heart remembered itself and held to its purpose. “What matter?” he thought. “What matter about me?” he asked himself aloud in a shrill voice and with a brave roll of his round head. Then he found himself inside the cell.
The place was dark, and Ali drew a long breath of relief. Naomi must have been lying at the farther end of it. She spoke when the door was opened. As though by habit, she framed the name of her jailer Habeebah, and then stopped with a little nervous cry and seemed to rise to her feet. In his confusion Ali said simply, “It is I,” as though that meant everything. Recovering himself in a moment he spoke again, and then she knew his voice: “Naomi!”
“It's Ali,” she whispered to herself. After that she cried in a trembling undertone “Ali! Ali! Ali!” and came straight in the accustomed darkness to the spot where he stood.
Then, gathering courage and voice together, Ali told her hurriedly why he was there. When he said that her father was no longer in prison, but at their home near Semsa and waiting to receive her, she seemed almost overcome by her joy. Half laughing, half weeping, clutching at her breast as if to ease the wild heaving of her bosom she was transformed by his story.
“Hush!” said Ali; “not a sound until we are outside the town,” and Naomi knitted her fingers in his palm, and they passed out of the place.
The banquet was now at its height, and hastening down dark corridors where they were apt to fall, for they had no light to see by, and coming into the garden, they heard the ripple and crackle of laughter from the great hall where Ben Aboo and his servile rascals feasted together. They reached the quiet alley outside the Kasbah (for the negro was gone from his post), and drew a lone breath, and thanked Heaven that this much was over. There had been no group of beggars at the gate, and the streets around it were deserted; but in the distance, far across the town in the direction of the Bab el Marsa, the gate that goes out to Marteel, they heard a low hum as of vast droves of sheep. The Spaniard was coming, and the townsmen were going out to meet him. Casual passers-by challenged them, and though Ali knew that even if recognised they had nothing to fear from the people, yet more than once his voice trembled when he answered, and sometimes with a feeling of dread he turned to see that no one was following.
As he did so he became aware of something which brought back the shame of that awful moment when he stood with the key in hand at the door of Naomi's prison. By the light of the lamps in the hands of the passers-by Naomi was looking at him. Again and again, as the glare fell for an instant, he felt the eyes of the girl upon his face. At such moments he thought she must be drawing away from him, for the space between them seemed wider. But he firmly held to the outstretched arm, kept his head aside, and hastened on.
“What matter about me?” he whispered again. But the brave word brought him no comfort. “Now she's looking at my hand,” he told himself, but he could not draw it away. “She is doubting if I am Ali after all,” he thought. “Naomi!” he tried to say with averted head, so that once again the sound of his voice might reassure her; but his throat was thick, and he could not speak. Still he pushed on.
The dark town just then was like a mountain chasm when a storm that has been gathering is about to break. In the air a deep rumble, and then a loud detonation. Blackness overhead, and things around that seemed to move and pass.
Drawing near to the Bab Toot, the gate that witnessed the last scene of Israel's humiliation and Naomi's shame, Ali, with the girl beside him, came suddenly into a sheet of light and a concourse of people. It was the Mahdi and his vast following with lamps in their hands, entering the town on the west, while the Spaniards whom they had brought up to the gates were coming in on the east. The Mahdi himself was locking the synagogues and the sanctuaries.
“Lock them up,” he was saying. “It is enough that the foreigner must burn down the Sodom of our tyrant; let him not outrage the Zion of our God.”
Ali led Naomi up to the Mahdi, who saw her then for the first time.
“I have brought her,” he said breathlessly; “Naomi, Israel's daughter, this is she.” And then there was a moment of surprise and joy, and pain and shame and despair, all gathered up together into one look of the eyes of the three.
The Mahdi looked at Naomi, and his face lightened. Naomi looked at Ali, and her pale face grew paler, and she passed a tress of her fair hair across her lips to smother a little nervous cry that began to break from her mouth. Then she looked at the Mahdi, and her lips parted and her eyes shone. Ali looked at both, and his face twitched and fell.
This was only the work of an instant, but it was enough. Enough for the Mahdi, for it told him a secret that the wisdom of life had not yet revealed; enough for Naomi, for a new sense, a sixth sense, had surely come to her; enough for Ali also, for his big little heart was broken.
“What matter about me?” thought Ali again. “Take her, Mahdi,” he said aloud in a shrill voice. “Her father is waiting for her—take her to him.”
“Lady,” said the Mahdi, “can you trust me?”
And then without a word she went to him; like the needle to the magnet she went to the Mahdi—a stranger to her, when all strangers were as enemies—and laid her hand in his.
Ali began to laugh, “I'm a fool,” he cried. “Who could have believed it? Why, I've forgotten to lock the Kasbah! The villains will escape. No matter, I'll go back.”
“Stop!” cried the Mahdi.
But Ali laughed so loudly that he did not hear. “I'll see to it yet,” he cried, turning on his heel. “Good night, Sidi! God bless you! My love to my father! Farewell!”
And in another moment he was gone.
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