“Basha,” said Israel—he spoke slowly and quietly; but with forced calmness—“Basha, you must seek another hand for work like that—this hand of mine shall never seal that warrant.”
“Tut, man!” whispered Ben Aboo. “Do your new measles break out everywhere? Am I not Kaid? Can I not make you my Khaleefa?”
Israel's face was worn and pale, but his eye burned with the fire of his great resolve.
“Basha,” he said again calmly and quietly, “if you were Sultan and could make me your Vizier, I would not do it.”
“Why?” cried Ben Aboo; “why? why?”
“Because,” said Israel, “I am here to deliver up your seal to you.”
“You? Grace of God!” cried Ben Aboo.
“I am here,” continued Israel, as calmly as before, “to resign my office.”
“Resign your office? Deliver up your seal?” cried Ben Aboo. “Man, man, are you mad?”
“No, Basha, not to-day,” said Israel quietly. “I must have been that when I came here first, five-and-twenty years ago.”
Ben Aboo gnawed his lip and scowled darkly, and in the flush of his anger, his consternation being over, he would have fallen upon Israel with torrents of abuse, but that he was smitten suddenly by a new and terrible thought. Quivering and trembling, and muttering short prayers under his breath, he recoiled from the place where Israel stood, and said, “There is something under all this? What is it? Let me think! Let me think!”
Meantime the face of Katrina beneath its covering of paint had grown white, and in scarcely smothered tones of wrath, by the swift instinct of a suspicious nature, she was asking herself the same question, “What does it mean? What does it mean?”
In another moment Ben Aboo had read the riddle his own way. “Wait!” he cried, looking vainly for help and answer into the faces of his people about him. “Who said that when he was away from Tetuan he went to Fez? The Sultan was there then. He had just come up from Soos. That's it! I knew it! The man is like all the rest of them. Abd er-Rahman has bought him. Allah! Allah! What have I done that every soul that eats my bread should spy and pry on me?”
Satisfied with this explanation of Israel's conduct, Ben Aboo waited for no further assurance, but fell to a wild outburst of mingled prayers and protests. “O Giver of Good to all! O Creator! It is Abd er-Rahman again. Ya Allah! Ya Allah! Or else his rapacious satellites—his thieves, his robbers, his cut-throats! That bloated Vizier! That leprous Naib es-Sultan! Oh, I know them. Bismillah! They want to fleece me. They want to squeeze me of my little wealth—my just savings—my hard earnings after my long service. Curse them! Curse their relations! O Merciful! O Compassionate! They'll call it arrears of taxes. But no, by the beard of my father, no! Not one feels shall they have if I die for it. I'm an old soldier—they shall torture me. Yes, the bastinado, the jellab—but I'll stand firm! Allah! Allah! Bismillah! Why does Abd er-Rahman hate me? It's because I'm his brother—that's it, that's it! But I've never risen against him. Never, never! I've paid him all! All! I tell you I've paid everything. I've got nothing left. You know it yourself, Israel, you know it.”
Thus, in the crawling of his fear he cried with maudlin tears, pleaded and entreated and threatened fumbling meantime the beads of his rosary and tramping nervously to and fro about the patio until he drew up at length, with a supplicating look, face to face with Israel. And if anything had been needed to fix Israel to his purpose of withdrawing for ever from the service of Ben Aboo, he must have found it in this pitiful spectacle of the Kaid's abject terror, his quick suspicion, his base disloyalty, and rancorous hatred of his own master, the Sultan.
But, struggling to suppress his contempt, Israel said, speaking as slowly and calmly as at first, “Basha, have no fear; I have not sold myself to Abd er-Rahman. It is true that I was at Fez—but not to see the Sultan. I have never seen him. I am not his spy. He knows nothing of me. I know nothing of him, and what I am doing now is being done for myself alone.”
Hearing this, and believing it, for, liars and prevaricators as were the other men about him, Israel had never yet deceived him, Ben Aboo made what poor shift he could to cover his shame at the sorry weakness he had just betrayed. And first he gazed in a sort of stupor into Israel's steadfast face; and then he dropped his evil eyes, and laughed in scorn of his own words, as if trying to carry them off by a silly show of braggadocio, and to make believe that they had been no more than a humorous pretence, and that no man would be so simple as to think he had truly meant them. But, after this mockery, he turned to Israel again, and, being relieved of his fears, he fell back to his savage mood once more, without disguise and without shame.
“And pray, sir,” said he, with a ghastly smile, “what riches have you gathered that you are at last content to hoard no more?”
“None,” said Israel shortly.
Ben Aboo laughed lustily, and exchanged looks of obvious meaning with Katrina.
“And pray, again,” he said, with a curl of the lip, “without office and without riches how may you hope to live?”
“As a poor man among poor men,” said Israel, “serving God and trusting to His mercy.”
Again Ben Aboo laughed hoarsely, and Katrina joined him, but Israel stood quiet and silent, and gave no sign.
“Serving God is hard bread,” said Ben Aboo.
“Serving the devil is crust!” said Israel.
At that answer, though neither by look nor gesture had Israel pointed it, the face of Ben Aboo became suddenly discoloured and stern.
“Allah! What do you mean?” he cried. “Who are you that you dare wag your insolent tongue at me?”
“I am your scapegoat, Basha,” said Israel, with an awful calm—“your scapegoat, who bears your iniquities before the eyes of your people. Your scapegoat, who sins against them and oppresses them and brings them by bitter tortures to the dust and death. That's what I am, Basha, and have long been, shame upon me! And while I am down yonder in the streets among your people—hated, reviled, despised, spat upon, cut off—you are up here in the Kasbah above them, in honour and comfort and wealth, and the mistaken love of all men.”
While Israel said this, Ben Aboo in his fury came down upon him from the opposite side of the patio with a look of a beast of prey. His swarthy cheeks were drawn hard, his little bleared eyes flashed, his heavy nose and thick lips and massive jaw quivered visibly, and from under his turban two locks of iron-grey fell like a shaggy mane over his ears.
But Israel did not flinch. With a look of quiet majesty, standing face to face with the tyrant, not a foot's length between them, he spoke again and said, “Basha, I do not envy you, but neither will I share your business nor your rewards. I mean to be your scapegoat no more. Here is your seal. It is red with the blood of your unhappy people through these five-and-twenty bad years past. I can carry it no longer. Take it.”
In a tempest of wrath Ben Aboo struck the seal out of Israel's hand as he offered it, and the silver rolled and rang on the tiled pavement of the patio.
“Fool!” he cried. “So this is what it is! Allah! In the name of the most merciful God, who would have believed it? Israel ben Oliel a prophet! A prophet of the poor! O Merciful! O Compassionate!”
Thus, in his frenzy, pretending to imitate with airs of manifest mockery his outbreak of fear a few minutes before, Ben Aboo raved and raged and lifted his clenched fist to the sky in sham imprecation of God.
“Who said it was the Sultan?” he cried again. “He was a fool. Abd er-Rahman? No; but Mohammed of Mequinez! Mohammed the Third! That's it! That's it!”
So saying, and forgetting in his fury what he had said before of Mohammed himself, he laughed wildly, and beat about the patio from side to side like a caged and angry beast.
“And if I am a tyrant,” he said in a thick voice, “who made me so? If I oppress the poor, who taught me the way to do it? Whose clever brain devised new means of revenue? Ransoms, promissory notes, bonds, false judgments—what did I know of such things? Who changed the silver dollars at nine ducats apiece? And who bought up the debts of the people that murmured against such robbery? Allah! Allah! Whose crafty head did all this? Why, yours—yours—Israel ben Oliel! By the beard of the Prophet, I swear it!”
Israel stood unmoved, and when these reproaches were hurled at him, he answered calmly and sadly, “God's ways are not our ways, neither are His thoughts our thoughts. He works His own will, and we are but His ministers. I thought God's justice had failed, but it has overtaken myself. For what I did long ago of my own free will and intention to oppress the poor, I have suffered and still am suffering.”
All this time the Spanish wife of Ben Aboo had sat in the alcove with lips whitening under their crimson patches of paint, beating her fan restlessly on the empty air, and breathing rapid and audible breath. And now, at this last word of Israel, though so sadly spoken, and so solemn in its note of suffering, she broke into a trill of laughter, and said lightly, “Ah! I thought your love of the poor was young. Not yet cut its teeth, poor thing! A babe in swaddling clothes, eh? When was it born?”
“About the time that you were, madam,” said Israel, lifting his heavy eyes upon her.
At that her lighter mood gave place to quick anger. “Husband,” she cried, turning upon Ben Aboo with the bitterness of reproach, “I hope you now see that I was right about this insolent old man. I told you from the first what would come of him. But no, you would have your own foolish way. It was easy to see that the devil's dues were in him. Yet you would not believe me! You would believe him. Simpleton as you are, you are believing him now! The poor? Fiddle-faddle and fiddlesticks! I tell you again this man is trying to put his foot on your neck. How? Oh, trust him, he's got his own schemes! Look to it, El Arby, look to it! He'll be master in Tetuan yet!”
Saying this, she had wrought herself up to a pitch of wrath, sometimes laughing wildly, and then speaking in a voice that was like an angry cry. And now, rising to her feet and facing towards the Arab soldiers, who stood aside in silence and wonder, she cried, “Arabs, Berbers, Moors, Christians, fight as you will, follow the Basha as you may, you'll lie in the same bed yet! But where? Under the heels of the Jew!”
A hoarse murmur ran from lip to lip among the men, and the ghostly smile came back into the face of Ben Aboo.
“You must be right,” he said, “you must be right! Ya Allah! Ya Allah! This is the dog that I picked out of the mire. I found him a beggar, and I gave him wealth. An impostor, a personator, a cheat, and I gave him place and rank. When he had no home, I housed him, and when he could find no one to serve him, I gave him slaves. I have banished his enemies, and imprisoned those he hated. After his wife had died, and none came near him, and he was left to howk out her grave with his own hands, I gave him prisoners to bury her, and when he was done with them I set them free. All these years I have heaped fortune upon him. Ya Allah! His master! No, but his servant, doing his will at the lifting of his finger. And all for what? For this! For this! For this! Ingrate!” he cried in his thick voice, turning hotly upon Israel again, “if you must give up your seal, why should you do it like a fool? Could you not come to me and say, 'Kaid, I am old and weary; I am rich, and have enough; I have served you long and faithfully; let me rest'—why not? I say, why not?”
Israel answered calmly, “Because it would have been a lie, Basha.”
“So it would,” cried Ben Aboo sharply, “so it would: you are right—it would have been a lie, an accursed lie! But why must you come to me and say, 'Basha, you are a tyrant, and have made me a tyrant also; you have sucked the blood of your people, and made me to drink it.”
“Because it is true, Basha,” said Israel.
At that Ben-Aboo stopped suddenly, and his swarthy face grew hideous and awful. Then, pointing with one shaking hand at the farther end of the patio, he said, “There is another thing that is true. It is true that on the other side of that wall there is a prison,” and, lifting his voice to a shriek, he added, “you are on the edge of a gulf, Israel ben Oliel. One step more—”
But just at that moment Israel turned full upon him, face to face, and the threat that he was about to utter seemed to die in his stifling throat. If only he could have provoked Israel to anger he might have had his will of him. But that slow, impassive manner, and that worn countenance so noble in sadness and suffering, was like a rebuke of his passion, and a retort upon his words.
And truly it seemed to Israel that against the Basha's story of his ingratitude he could tell a different tale. This pitiful slave of rage and fear, this thing of rags and patches, this whining, maudlin, shrieking, bleating, barking-creature that hurled reproaches at him, was the master in whose service he had spent his best brain and best blood. But for the strong hand that he had lent him, but for the cool head wherewith he had guarded him, where would the man be now? In the dungeons of Abd er-Rahman, having gone thither by way of the Sultan's wooden jellabs and his houses of fierce torture. By the mind's eye Israel could see him there at that instant—sightless, eyeless, hungry, gaunt. But no, he was still here—fat, sleek, voluptuous, imperious. And good men lay perishing in his prisons, and children, starved to death, lay in their graves, and he himself, his servant and scapegoat, whose brains he had drained, whose blood he had sweated, stood before him there like an old lion, who had been wandering far and was beaten back by his cubs.
But what matter? He could silence the Basha with a word; yet why should he speak it? Twenty times he had saved this man, who could neither read nor write nor reckon figures, from the threatened penalties of the Shereefean Court, and he could count them all up to him; yet why should he do so? Through five-and-twenty evil years he had built up this man's house; yet why should he boast of what was done, being done so foully? He had said his say, and it was enough. This hour of insult and outrage had been written on his forehead, and he must have come to it. Then courage! courage!
“Husband,” cried the woman, showing her toothless jaw in a bitter smile to Ben Aboo as he crossed the patio, “you must scour this vermin out of Tetuan!”
“You are right,” he answered. “By Allah, you are right! And henceforth I will be served by soldiers, not by scribblers.”
Then, wheeling about once more to where Israel stood, he said in a voice of mockery, “Master, my lord, my Sultan, you came to resign your office? But you shall do more than that. You shall resign your house as well, and all that's in it, and leave this town as a beggar.”
Israel stood unmoved. “As you will,” he said quietly.
“Where are the two women—the slaves?” asked Ben Aboo.
“At home,” said Israel.
“They are mine, and I take them back,” said Ben Aboo.
Israel's face quivered, and he seemed to be about to protest, but he only drew a longer breath, and said again, “As you will, Basha.”
Ben Aboo's voice gathered vehemence at every fresh question. “Where is your money?” he cried; “the money that you have made out of my service—out of me—mymoney—where is it?”
“Nowhere,” said Israel.
“It's a lie—another lie!” cried Ben Aboo. “Oh yes, I've heard of your charities, master. They were meant to buy over my people, were they? Were they? Were they, I ask?”
“So you say, Basha,” said Israel.
“So I know!” cried Ben Aboo; “but all you had is not gone that way. You're a fool, but not fool enough for that! Give up your keys—the keys of your house!”
Israel hesitated, and then said, “Let me return for a minute—it is all I ask.”
At that the woman laughed hysterically. “Ah! he has something left after all!” she cried.
Israel turned his slow eyes upon her, and said, “Yes, madam, Ihavesomething left—after all.”
Paying no heed to the reply, Katrina cried to Ben Aboo again, saying, “El Arby, make him give up the key of that house. He has treasure there!”
“It is true, madam,” said Israel; “it is true that I have a treasure there. My daughter—my little blind Naomi.”
“Is that all?” cried Katrina and Ben Aboo together.
“It is all,” said Israel, “but it is enough. Let me fetch her.”
“Don't allow it!” cried Katrina.
Israel's face betrayed feeling. He was struggling to suppress it. “Make me homeless if you will,” he said, “turn me like a beggar out of your town, but let me fetch my daughter.”
“She'll not thank you,” cried Katrina.
“She loves me,” said Israel, “I am growing old, I am numbering the steps of death. I need her joyous young life beside me in my declining age. Then, she is helpless, she is blind, she is my scapegoat, Basha, as I am yours, and no one save her father—”
“Ah! Ah! Ah!”
Israel had spoken warmly, and at the tender fibres of feeling that had been forced out of him at last the woman was laughing derisively. “Trust me,” she cried, “I know what daughters are. Girls like better things. No, I'll give her what will be more to her taste. She shall stay here with me.”
Israel drew himself up to his full height and answered, “Madam, I would rather see her dead at my feet.”
Then Ben Aboo broke in and said, “Don't wag your tongue at your mistress, sir.”
“Yourmistress, Basha,” said Israel; “not mine.”
At that word Katrina, with all her evil face aflame came sweeping down upon Israel, and struck him with her fan on the forehead. He did not flinch or speak. The blow had burst the skin, and a drop of blood trickled over the temple on to the cheek. There was a short deep pause.
Then the hard tension of silence was broken by a faint cry. It came from behind, from the doorway; it was the voice of a girl.
In the blank stupor of the moment, every eye being on the two that stood in the midst, no one had observed until then that another had entered the patio. It was Naomi. How long she had been there no one knew, and how she had come unnoticed through the corridors out of the streets scarce any one—even when time sufficed to arrange the scattered thoughts of the Makhazni, the guard at the gate—could clearly tell. She stood under the arch, with one hand at her breast, which heaved visibly with emotion, and the other hand stretched out to touch the open iron-clamped door, as if for help and guidance. Her head was held up, her lips were apart, and her motionless blind eyes seemed to stare wildly. She had heard the hot words. She had heard the sound of the blow that followed them. Her father was smitten! Her father! Her father! It was then that she uttered the cry. All eyes turned to her. Quaking, reeling, almost falling, she came tottering down the patio. Soul and sense seemed to be struggling together in her blind face. What did it all mean? What was happening? Her fixed eyes stared as if they must burst the bonds that bound them, and look and see, and know!
At that moment God wrought a mighty work, a wondrous change, such as He has brought to pass but twice or thrice since men were born blind into His world of light. In an instant, at a thought, by one spontaneous flash, as if the spirit of the girl tore down the dark curtains which had hung for seventeen years over the windows of her eyes, Naomi saw!
They all knew it at once. It seemed to them as if every feature of the girl's face had leapt into her eyes; as if the expression of her lips, her brow, her nostrils, had sprung to them: as if her face, so fair before, so full of quivering feeling, must have been nothing until then but a blank. Nay, but they seemed to see her now for the first time. This, only this, was she!
And to Naomi also, at that moment, it was almost as if she had been newly born into life. She was meeting the world at last face to face, eye to eye. Into her darkened chamber, that had never known the light, everything had entered at a blow—the white glare of the sun, the blue sky, the tiled patio, the faces of the Kaid and his wife and his soldiers, and of the old man also, with the unshed tears hanging on the fringe of his eyelid. She could not realise the marvel. She did not know what vision was. She had not learned to see. Her trembling soul had gone out from its dark chamber and met the mighty light in his mansion. “Oh! oh!” she cried, and stood bewildered and helpless in the midst. The picture of the world seemed to be falling upon her, and she covered her eyes with her hands, that she might abolish it altogether.
Israel saw everything. “Naomi!” he cried in a choking voice, and stretched out his hands to her. Then she uncovered her eyes, and looked, and paused and hesitated.
“Naomi!” he cried again, and made a step towards her. She covered her eyes once more that she might shut out the stranger they showed her, and only listen to the voice that she knew so well. Then she staggered into her father's arms. And Israel's heart was big, and he gathered her to his breast, and, turning towards the woman, he said, “Madam, we are in the hands of God. Look! See! He has sent His angel to protect His servant.”
Meantime, Ben Aboo was quaking with fear. He too, saw the finger of God in the wondrous thing which had come to pass. And, falling back on his maudlin mood, he muttered prayers beneath his breath, as he had done before when the human majesty, the Sultan Abd er-Rahman, was the object of his terror. “O Giver of good to all! What is this? Allah save us! Bismillah! Is it Allah or the Jinoon? Merciful! Compassionate! Curses on them both! Allah! Allah!”
The soldiers were affected by the fears of the Basha, and they huddled together in a group. But Katrina fell to laughing.
“Brava!” she cried. “Brava! Oh! a brave imposture! What did I say long ago? Blind? No more blind than you were! But a pretty pretence! Well acted! Very well acted! Brava! Brava!”
Thus she laughed and mocked, and the Basha, hearing her, took shame of his crawling fears, and made a poor show of joining her.
Israel heard them, and for a moment, seeing how they made sport of Naomi, a fire was kindled in his anger that seemed to come up from the lowest hell. But he fought back the passion that was mastering him, and at the next instant the laughter had ceased, and Ben Aboo was saying—
“Guards, take both of them. Set the man on an ass, and let the girl walk barefoot before him; and let a crier cry beside them, 'So shall it be done to every man who is an enemy of the Kaid, and to every woman who is a play-actor and a cheat!' Thus let them pass through the streets and through the people until they are come to a gate of the town, and then cast them forth from it like lepers and like dogs!”
THE RAINBOW SIGN
While this bad work had been going forward in the Kasbah a great blessing had fallen on the town. The long-looked for, hoped for, prayed for—the good and blessed rain—had come at last. In gentle drops like dew it had at first been falling from the rack of dark cloud which had gathered over the heads of the mountains, and now, after half an hour of such moisture, the sky over the town was grey, and the rain was pouring down like a flood.
Oh! the joy of it, the sweetness, the freshness, the beauty, the odour! The air overhead, which had been dense with dust, was clearing and whitening as if the water washed it. And the ground underfoot, which had reeked of creeping and crawling things, was running like a wholesome river, and bearing back to the lips a taste as of the sea.
And the people of the town, in their surprise and gladness at the falling of the rain, had come out of their houses to meet it. The streets and the marketplace were full of them. In childish joy they wandered up and down in the drenching flood, without fear or thought of harm, with laughing eyes and gleaming white teeth, holding out their palms to the rain and drinking it. Hailing each other in the voices of boys, jesting and shouting and singing, to and fro they went and came without aim or direction. The Jews trooped out of the Mellah, chattering like jays, and the Moors at the gate salaamed to them. Mule-drivers cried “Balak” in tones that seemed to sing; gunsmiths and saddle-makers sat idle at their doors, greeting every one that passed; solemn Talebs stood in knots, with faces that shone under the closed hoods of their dark jellabs; and the bareheaded Berbers encamped in the market-square capered about like flighty children, grinned like apes, fired their long guns into the air for love of hearing the powder speak, often wept, and sometimes embraced each other, thinking of their homes that were far away.
Now, it was just when the town was alive with this strange scene that the procession which had been ordered by Ben Aboo came out from the Kasbah. At the head of it walked a soldier, staff in hand and gorgeous—notwithstanding the rain—in peaked shasheeah and crimson selham. Behind him were four black police, and on either side of the company were two criers of the street, each carrying a short staff festooned with strings of copper coin, which he rattled in the air for a bell. Between these came the victims of the Basha's order—Naomi first, barefooted, bareheaded, stripped of all but the last garment that hid her nakedness, her head held down, her face hidden, and her eyes closed—and Israel afterwards, mounted on a lean and ragged ass. A further guard of black police walked at the back of all. Thus they came down the steep arcades into the market-square, where the greater body of the townspeople had gathered together.
When the people saw them, they made for them, hastening in crowds from every side of the Feddan, from every adjacent alley, every shop, tent, and booth. And when they saw who the prisoners were they burst into loud exclamations of surprise.
“Ya Allah! Israel the Jew!” cried the Moors.
“God of Jacob, save us! Israel ben Oliel!” cried the people of the Mellah.
“What is it? What has happened? What has befallen them?” they all asked together.
“Balak!” cried the soldier in front, swinging his staff before him to force a passage through the thronging multitude. “Attention! By your leave! Away! Out of the way!”
And as they walked the criers chanted, “So shall it be done to every man who is an enemy of the Kaid, and to every woman who is a play-actor and a cheat.”
When the people had recovered from their consternation they began to look black into each other's face, to mutter oaths between their teeth, and to say in voices of no pity or rush, “He deserved it!” “Ya Allah, but he's well served!” “Holy Saints, we knew what it would come to!” “Look at him now!” “There he is at last!” “Brave end to all his great doings!” “Curse him! Curse him!”
And over the muttered oaths and pitiless curses, the yelping and barking of the cruel voices of the crowd, as the procession moved along, came still the cry of the crier, “So shall it be done to every man who is an enemy of the Kaid, and to every woman who is a play-actor and a cheat.”
Then the mood of the multitude changed. The people began to titter, and after that to laugh openly. They wagged their heads at Israel; they derided him; they made merry over his sorry plight. Where he was now he seemed to be not so much a fallen tyrant as a silly sham and an imposture. Look at him! Look at his bony and ragged ass! Ya Allah! To think that they had ever been afraid of him!
As the procession crossed the market-place, a woman who was enveloped in a blanket spat at Israel as he passed. Then it was come to the door of the Mosque, an old man, a beggar, hobbled through the crowd and struck Israel with the back of his hand across the face. The woman had lost her husband and the man his son by death sentences of Ben Aboo. Israel had succoured both when he went about on his secret excursions after nightfall in the disguise of a Moor.
“Balak! Balak!” cried the soldier in front, and still the chant of the crier rang out over all other noises.
At every step the throng increased. The strong and lusty bore down the weak in the struggle to get near to the procession. Blind beggars and feeble cripples who could not see or stir shouted hideous oaths at Israel from the back of the crowd.
As the procession went past the gates of the Mellah, two companies came out into the town. The one was a company of soldiers returning to the Kasbah after sacking and wrecking Israel's house; the other was a company of old Jews, among whom were Reuben Maliki, Abraham Pigman, and Judah ben Lolo. At the advent of the three usurers a new impulse seized the people. They pretended to take the procession for a triumphal progress—the departure of a Kaid, a Shereef, a Sultan. The soldier and police fell into the humour of the multitude. Salaams were made to Israel; selhams were flung on the ground before the feet of Naomi. Reuben Maliki pushed through the crowd, and walked backward, and cried, in his harsh, nasal croak—
“Brothers of Tetuan, behold your benefactor! Make way for him! Make way! make way!”
Then there were loud guffaws, and oaths, and cries like the cry of the hyena. Last of all, old Abraham Pigman handed over the people's heads a huge green Spanish umbrella to a negro farrier that walked within; and the black fellow, showing his white teeth in a wide grim, held it over Israel's head.
Then from fifty rasping throats came mocking cries.
“God bless our Lord!”
“Saviour of his people!”
“Benefactor! King of men!”
And over and between these cries came shrieks and yells of laughter.
All this time Israel had sat motionless on his ass, neither showing humiliation nor fear. His face was worn and ashy, but his eyes burned with a piteous fire. He looked up and saw everything; saw himself mocked by the soldier and the crier, insulted by the Muslimeen, derided by the Jews, spat upon and smitten by the people whose hungry mouths he had fed with bread. Above all, he saw Naomi going before him in her shame, and at that sight his heart bled and his spirit burred. And, thinking that it was he who had brought her to this ignominy, he sometimes yearned to reach her side and whisper in her ear, and say, “Forgive me, my child, forgive me.” But again he conquered the desire, for he remembered what God had that day done for her; and taking it for a sign of God's pleasure, and a warranty that he had done well, he raised his eyes on her with tears of bitter joy, and thought, in the wild fever of his soul, “She is sharing the triumph of my humiliation. She is walking through the mocking and jeering crowd, but see! God Himself is walking beside her!”
The procession had now come to the walled lane to the Bab Toot, the gate going out to Tangier and to Shawan. There the way was so narrow and the concourse so great that for a moment the procession was brought to a stand. Seizing this opportunity, Reuben Maliki stepped up to Israel and said, so that all might hear, “Look at the crowds that have come out to speed you, O saviour of your people! Look! look! We shall all remember this day!”
“So you shall!” cried Israel. “Until your days of death you shall all remember it!”
He had not spoken before, and some of the Moors tried to laugh at his answer; but his voice, which was like a frenzied cry, went to the hearts of the Jews, and many of them fell away from the crowd straightway, and followed it no farther. It was the cry of the voice of a brother. They had been insulting calamity itself.
“Balak!” shouted the soldier, and the crier cried once more, and the procession moved again.
It was the hour of Israel's last temptation. Not a glance in his face disclosed passion, but his heart was afire. The devil seemed to be jarring at his ear, “Look! Listen! Is it for people like these that you have come to this? Were they worth the sacrifice? You might have been rich and great, and riding on their heads. They would have honoured you then, but now they despise you. Fool! You have sold all and given to the poor, and this is the end of it.” But in the throes and last gasp of his agony, hearing his voice in his ear, and seeing Naomi going barefooted on the stones before him, an angel seemed to come to him and whisper, “Be strong. Only a little longer. Finish as you have begun. Well done, servant of God, well done!”
He did not flinch, but rode on without a word or a cry. Once he lifted his head and looked down at the steaming, gaping, grinning cauldron of faces black and white. “O pity of men!” he thought. “What devil is temptingthem?”
By this time the procession had come to the town walls at a point near to the Bab Toot. No one had observed until then that the rain was no longer falling, but now everybody was made aware of this at once by sight of a rainbow which spanned the sky to the north-west immediately over the arch of the gate.
Israel saw the rainbow, and took it for a sign. It was God's hand in the heavens. To this gate then, and through it, out of Tetuan, into the land beyond—the plains, the hills, the desert where no man was wronged—God Himself, and not these people, had that day been leading them!
What happened next Israel never rightly knew. His proper sense of life seemed lost. Through thick waves of hot air he heard many voices.
First the voice of the crier, “So shall it be done to every man who is an enemy of the Kaid, and to every woman who is a play-actor and a cheat.”
Then the voice of the soldier, “Balak! Balak!”
After that a multitudinous din that seemed to break off sharply and then to come muffled and dense as from the other side of the closed gate.
When Israel came to himself again he was walking on a barren heath that was dotted over with clumps of the long aloe, and he was holding Naomi by the hand.
LIFE'S NEW LANGUAGE
Two days after they had been cast out of Tetuan, Israel and Naomi were settled in a little house that stood a day's walk to the north of the town, about midway between the village of Semsa and the fondak which lies on the road to Tangier. From the hour wherein the gates had closed behind them, everything had gone well with both. The country people who lay encamped on the heath outside had gathered around and shown them kindness. One old Arab woman, seeing Naomi's shame, had come behind without a word and cast a blanket over her head and shoulders. Then a girl of the Berber folk had brought slippers and drawn them on to Naomi's feet. The woman wore no blanket herself, and the feet of the girl were bare. Their own people were haggard and hollow-eyed and hungry, but the hearts of all were melted towards the great man in his dark hour. “Allah had written it,” they muttered, but they were more merciful than they thought their God.
Thus, amid silent pity and audible peace-blessings, with cheer of kind words and comfort of food and drink, Israel and Naomi had wandered on through the country from village to village, until in the evening, an hour after sundown, they came upon the hut wherein they made their home. It was a poor, mean place—neither a round tent, such as the mountain Berbers build, nor a square cube of white stone, with its garden in a court within, such as a Moorish farmer rears for his homestead, but an oblong shed, roofed with rushes and palmetto leaves in the manner of an Irish cabin. And, indeed, the cabin of an Irish renegade it had been, who, escaping at Gibraltar from the ship that was taking him to Sidney, had sailed in a Genoese trader to Ceuta, and made his way across the land until he came to this lonesome spot near to Semsa. Unlike the better part of his countrymen, he had been a man of solitary habit and gloomy temper, and while he lived he had been shunned by his neighbours, and when he died his house had been left alone. That was the chance whereby Israel and Naomi had come to possess it, being both poor and unclaimed.
Nevertheless, though bare enough of most things that man makes and values, yet the little place was rich in some of the wealth that comes only from the hand of God. Thus marjoram and jasmine and pinks and roses grew at the foot of its walls, and it was these sweet flowers which had first caught the eyes of Israel. For suddenly through the mazes of his mind, where every perception was indistinct at that time, there seemed to come back to him a vague and confused recollection of the abandoned house, as if the thing that his eyes then saw they had surely seen before. How this should be Israel could not tell, seeing that never before to his knowledge had he passed on his way to Tangier so near to Semsa. But when he questioned himself again, it came to him, like light beaming into a dark room, that not in any waking hour at all had he seen the little place before, but in a dream of the night when he slept on the ground in the poor fondak of the Jews at Wazzan.
This, then, was the cottage where he had dreamed that he lived with Naomi; this was where she had seemed to have eyes to see and ears to hear and a tongue to speak; this was the vision of his dead wife, which when he awoke on his journey had appeared to be vainly reflected in his dream; and now it was realised, it was true, it had come to pass. Israel's heart was full, and being at that time ready to see the leading of Heaven in everything, he saw it in this fact also; and thus, without more ado than such inquiries as were necessary, he settled himself with Naomi in the place they had chanced upon.
And there, through some months following, from the height of the summer until the falling of winter, they lived together in peace and content, lacking much, yet wanting nothing; short of many things that are thought to make men's condition happy, but grateful and thanking God.
Israel was poor, but not penniless. Out of the wreck of his fortune, after he sold the best contents of his house, he had still some three hundred dollars remaining in the pocket of his waistband when he was cast out of the town. These he laid out in sheep and goats and oxen. He hired land also of a tenant of the Basha, and sent wool and milk by the hand of a neighbour to the market at Tetuan. The rains continued, the eggs of the locust were destroyed, the grass came green out of the ground, and Israel found bread for both of them. With such simple husbandry, and in such a home, giving no thought to the morrow, he passed with cheer and comfort from day to day.
And truly, if at any weaker moment he had been minded to repine for the loss of his former poor greatness, or to fail of heart in pursuit of his new calling, for which heavier hands were better fit, he had always present with him two bulwarks of his purpose and sheet-anchors of his hope. He was reminded of the one as often as in the daytime he climbed the hillside above his little dwelling and saw the white town lying far away under its gauzy canopy of mist, and whenever in the night the town lamps sent their pale sheet of light into the dark sky.
“They are yonder,” he would think, “wrangling, contending, fighting, praying, cursing, blessing, and cheating; and I am here, cut off from them by ten deep miles of darkness, in the quiet, the silence, and sweet odour of God's proper air.”
But stronger to sustain him than any memory of the ways of his former life was the recollection of Naomi. God had given back all her gifts, and what were poverty and hard toil against so great a blessing? They were as dust, they were as ashes, they were what power of the world and riches of gold and silver had been without it. And higher than the joy of Israel's constant remembrance that Naomi had been blind and could now see, and deaf and could now hear, and dumb and could now speak, was the solemn thought that all this was but the sign and symbol of God's pleasure and assurance to his soul that the lot of the scapegoat had been lifted away.
More satisfying still to the hunger of his heart as a man was his delicious pleasure in Naomi's new-found life. She was like a creature born afresh, a radiant and joyful being newly awakened into a world of strange sights.
But it was not at once that she fell upon this pleasure. What had happened to her was, after all, a simple thing. Born with cataract on the pupils of her eyes, the emotion of the moment at the Kasbah, when her father's life seemed to be once more in danger, had—like a fall or a blow—luxated the lens and left the pupils clear. That was all. Throughout the day whereon the last of her great gifts came to her, when they were cast out of Tetuan, and while they walked hand in hand through the country until they lit upon their home, she had kept her eyes steadfastly closed. The light terrified her. It penetrated her delicate lids, and gave her pain. When for a moment she lifted her lashes and saw the trees, she put out her hand as if to push them away; and when she saw the sky, she raised her arms as if to hold it off. Everything seemed to touch her eyes. The bars of sunlight seemed to smite them. Not until the falling of darkness did her fears subside and her spirits revive. Throughout the day that followed she sat constantly in the gloom of the blackest corner of their hut.
But this was only her baptism of light on coming out of a world of darkness, just as her fear of the voices of the earth and air had been her baptism of sound on coming out of a land of silence. Within three days afterwards her terror began to give place to joy; and from that time forward the world was full of wonder to her opened eyes. Then sweet and beautiful, beyond all dreams of fancy, were her amazement and delight in every little thing that lay about her—the grass, the weeds, the poorest flower that blew, even the rude implements of the house and the common stones that worked up through the mould—all old and familiar to her fingers, but new and strange to her eyes, and marvellous as if an angel out of heaven had dropped them down to her.
For many days after the coming of her sight she continued to recognise everything by touch and sound. Thus one morning early in their life in the cottage, and early also in the day, after Israel had kissed her on the eyelids to awaken her, and she had opened them and gazed up at him as he stooped above her, she looked puzzled for an instant, being still in the mists of sleep, and only when she had closed her eyes again, and put out her hand to touch him, did her face brighten with recognition and her lips utter his name. “My father,” she murmured, “my father.”
Thus again, the same day, not an hour afterwards, she came running back to the house from the grass bank in front of it, holding a flower in her hand, and asking a world of hot questions concerning it in her broken, lisping, pretty speech. Why had no one told her that there were flowers that could see? Here was one which while she looked upon it had opened its beautiful eye and laughed at her. “What is it?” she asked; “what is it?”
“A daisy, my child,” Israel answered.
“A daisy!” she cried in bewilderment; and during the short hush and quick inspiration that followed she closed her eyes and passed her nervous fingers rapidly over the little ring of sprinkled spears, and then said very softly, with head aslant as if ashamed, “Oh, yes, so it is; it is only a daisy.”
But to tell of how those first days of sight sped along for Naomi, with what delight of ever-fresh surprise, and joy of new wonder, would be a long task if a beautiful one. They were some miles inside the coast, but from the little hill-top near at hand they could see it clearly; and one day when Naomi had gone so far with her father, she drew up suddenly at his side, and cried in a breathless voice of awe, “The sky! the sky! Look! It has fallen on to the land.”
“That is the sea, my child,” said Israel.
“The sea!” she cried, and then she closed her eyes and listened, and then opened them and blushed and said, while her knitted brows smoothed out and her beautiful face looked aside, “So it is—yes, it is the sea.”
Throughout that day and the night which followed it the eyes of her mind were entranced by the marvel of that vision, and next morning she mounted the hill alone, to look upon it again; and, being so far, she walked farther and yet farther, wandering on and on, through fields where lavender grew and chamomile blossomed, on and on, as though drawn by the enchantment of the mighty deep that lay sparkling in the sun, until at last she came to the head of a deep gully in the coast. Still the wonder of the waters held her, but another marvel now seized upon her sight. The gully was a lonesome place inhabited by countless sea-birds. From high up in the rocks above, and from far down in the chasm below, from every cleft on every side, they flew out, with white wings and black ones and grey and blue, and sent their voices into the air, until the echoing place seemed to shriek and yell with a deafening clangour.
It was midday when Naomi reached this spot, and she sat there a long hour in fear and consternation. And when she returned to her father, she told him awesome stories of demons that lived in thousands by the sea, and fought in the air and killed each other. “And see!” she cried; “look at this, and this, and this!”
Then Israel glanced at the wrecks she had brought with her of the devilish warfare that she had witnessed and “This,” said he, lifting one of them, “is a sea-bird's feather; and this,” lifting another, “is a sea-bird's egg; and this,” lifting the third, “is a dead sea-bird itself.”
Once more Naomi knit her brows in thought, and again she closed her eyes and touched the familiar things wherein her sight had deceived her. “Ah yes,” she said meekly, looking into her father's eye, with a smile, “they are only that after all.” And then she said very quietly, as if speaking to herself, “What a long time it is before you learn to see!”
It was partly due to the isolation of her upbringing in the company of Israel that nearly every fresh wonder that encountered her eyes took shapes of supernatural horror or splendour. One early evening, when she had remained out of the house until the day was well-nigh done, she came back in a wild ecstasy to tell of angels that she had just seen in the sky. They were in robes of crimson and scarlet, their wings blazed like fire, they swept across the clouds in multitudes, and went down behind the world together, passing out of the earth through the gates of heaven.
Israel listened to her and said, “That was the sunset my child. Every morning the sun rises and every night it sets.”
Then she looked full into his face and blushed. Her shame at her sweet errors sometimes conquered her joy in the new heritage of sight, and Israel heard her whisper to herself and say, “After all, the eyes are deceitful.” Vision was life's new language, and she had yet to learn it.
But not for long was her delight in the beautiful things of the world to be damped by any thought of herself. Nay, the best and rarest part of it, the dearest and most delicious throb it brought her, came of herself alone. On another early day Israel took her to the coast, and pushed off with her on the waters in a boat. The air was still, the sea was smooth, the sun was shining, and save for one white scarf of cloud the sky was blue. They were sailing in a tiny bay that was broken by a little island, which lay in the midst like a ruby in a ring, covered with heather and long stalks of seeding grass. Through whispering beds of rushes they glided on, and floated over banks of coral where gleaming fishes were at play. Sea-fowl screamed over their heads, as if in anger at their invasion, and under their oars the moss lay in the shallows on the pebbles and great stones. It was a morning of God's own making, and, for joy of its loveliness no less than of her own bounding life, Naomi rose in the boat and opened her lips and arms to the breeze while it played with the rippling currents of her hair, as if she would drink and embrace it.
At that moment a new and dearer wonder came to her, such as every maiden knows whom God has made beautiful, yet none remembers the hour when she knew it first. For, tracing with her eyes the shadow of the cliff and of the continent of cloud that sailed double in two seas of blue to where they were broken by the dazzling half-round of the sun's reflected disc on the shadowed quarter of the boat, she leaned over the side of it, and then saw the reflection of another and lovelier vision.
“Father,” she cried with alarm, “a face in the water! Look! look!”
“It is your own, my child,” said Israel. “Mine!” she cried.
“The reflection of your face,” said Israel; “the light and the water make it.”
The marvel was hard to understand. There was something ghostly in this thing that was herself and yet not herself, this face that looked up at her and laughed and yet made no voice. She leaned back in the boat and asked Israel if it was still in the water. But when at length she had grasped the mystery, the artlessness of her joy was charming. She was like a child in her delight, and like a woman that was still a child in her unconscious love of her own loveliness. Whenever the boat was at rest she leaned over its bulwark and gazed down into the blue depths.
“How beautiful!” she cried, “how beautiful!”
She clapped her hands and looked again, and there in the still water was the wonder of her dancing eyes. “Oh! how very beautiful!” she cried without lifting her face, and when she saw her lips move as she spoke and her sunny hair fall about her restless head she laughed and laughed again with a heart of glee.
Israel looked on for some moments at this sweet picture, and, for all his sense of the dangers of Naomi's artless joy in her own beauty, he could not find it in his heart to check her. He had borne too long the pain and shame of one who was father of an afflicted child to deny himself this choking rapture of her recovery. “Live on like a child always, little one,” he thought; “be a child as long as you can, be a child for ever, my dove, my darling! Never did the world suffer it that I myself should be a child at all.”
The artlessness of Naomi increased day by day, and found constantly some new fashion of charming strangeness. All lovely things on the earth seemed to speak to her, and she could talk with the birds and the flowers. Also she would lie down in the grass and rest like a lamb, with as little shame and with a grace as sweet. Not yet had the great mystery dawned that drops on a girl like an unseen mantle out of the sky, and when it has covered her she is a child no more. Naomi was a child still. Nay, she was a child a second time, for while she had been blind she had seemed for a little while to become a woman in the awful revelation of her infirmity and isolation. Now she was a weak, patient, blind maiden no longer, but a reckless spirit of joy once again, a restless gleam of human sunlight gathering sunshine into her father's house.
It was fit and beautiful that she who had lived so long without the better part of the gifts of God should enjoy some of them at length in rare perfection. Her sight was strong and her hearing was keen, but voice was the gift which she had in abundance. So sweet, so full, so deep, so soft a voice as Naomi's came to be, Israel thought he had never heard before. Ruth's voice? Yes, but fraught with inspiration, replete with sparkling life, and passionate with the notes of a joyous heart. All day long Naomi used it. She sang as she rose in the morning, and was still singing when she lay down at night. Wherever people came upon her, they came first upon the sound of her voice. The farmers heard it across the fields, and sometimes Israel heard it from over the hill by their hut. Often she seemed to them like a bird that is hidden in a tree, and only known to be there by the outbursts of its song.
Fatimah's ditties were still her delight. Some of them fell strangely from her pure lips, so nearly did they border on the dangerous. But her favourite song was still her mother's:—