第93章

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.