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The Scapegoat

by Sir Hall Caine · English · Gutenberg #1303 · 561,401 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Scapegoat

Author: Sir Hall Caine


        
Release date: February 15, 2006 [eBook #1303]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1303

Credits: Produced by Alan Cleary and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SCAPEGOAT ***

THE SCAPEGOAT

By Hall Caine



CONTENTS


CHAPTER

     PREFACE
     1. ISRAEL BEN OLIEL
     2. THE BIRTH OF NAOMI
     3. THE CHILDHOOD OF NAOMI
     4. THE DEATH OF RUTH
     5. RUTH'S BURIAL
     6. THE SPIRIT-MAID
     7. THE ANGEL IN ISRAEL'S HOUSE
     8. THE VISION OF THE SCAPEGOAT
     9. ISRAEL'S JOURNEY
     10. THE WATCHWORD OF THE MAHDI
     11. ISRAEL'S HOME-COMING
     12. THE BAPTISM OF SOUND
     13. NAOMI'S GREAT GIFT
     14. ISRAEL AT SHAWAN
     15. THE MEETING ON THE SOK
     16. NAOMI'S BLINDNESS
     17. ISRAEL'S GREAT RESOLVE
     18. THE LIGHT-BORN MESSENGER
     19. THE RAINBOW SIGN
     20. LIFE'S NEW LANGUAGE
     21. ISRAEL IN PRISON
     22. HOW NAOMI TURNED MUSLIMA
     23. ISRAEL'S RETURN FROM PRISON
     24. THE ENTRY OF THE SULTAN
     25. THE COMING OF THE MAHDI
     26. ALI'S RETURN TO TETUAN
     27. THE FALL OF BEN ABOO
     28. “AT ALLAH-U-KABAR”




PREFACE


_Within sight of an English port, and within hail of English ships as
they pass on to our empire in the East, there is a land where the ways
of life are the same to-day as they were a thousand years ago; a land
wherein government is oppression, wherein law is tyranny, wherein
justice is bought and sold, wherein it is a terror to be rich and a
danger to be poor, wherein man may still be the slave of man, and women
is no more than a creature of lust--a reproach to Europe, a disgrace to
the century, an outrage on humanity, a blight on religion! That land is
Morocco!_

_This is a story of Morocco in the last years of the Sultan Abd
er-Rahman. The ashes of that tyrant are cold, and his grandson sits in
his place; but men who earned his displeasure linger yet in his noisome
dungeons, and women who won his embraces are starving at this hour in
the prison-palaces in which he immured them. His reign is a story of
yesterday; he is gone, he is forgotten; no man so meek and none so mean
but he might spit upon his tomb. Yet the evil work which he did in his
evil time is done to-day, if not by his grandson, then in his grandson's
name--the degradation of man's honour, the cruel wrong of woman's, the
shame of base usury, and the iniquity of justice that may be bought! Of
such corruption this story will tell, for it is a tale of tyranny that
is every day repeated, a voice of suffering going up hourly to the
powers of the world, calling on them to forget the secret hopes and
petty jealousies whereof Morocco is a cause, to think no more of any
scramble for territory when the fated day of that doomed land has come,
and only to look to it and see that he who fills the throne of Abd
er-Rahman shall be the last to sit there._

_Yet it is the grandeur of human nature that when it is trodden down
it waits for no decree of nations, but finds its own solace amid the
baffled struggle against inimical power in the hopes of an exalted
faith. That cry of the soul to be lifted out of the bondage of the
narrow circle of life, which carries up to God the protest and yearning
of suffering man, never finds a more sublime expression than where
humanity is oppressed and religion is corrupt. On the one hand, the hard
experience of daily existence; on the other hand, the soul crying out
that the things of this world are not the true realities. Savage vices
make savage virtues. God and man are brought face to face._

_In the heart of Morocco there is one man who lives a life that is like
a hymn, appealing to God against tyranny and corruption and shame. This
great soul is the leader of a vast following which has come to him from
every scoured and beaten corner of the land. His voice sounds throughout
Barbary, and wheresoever men are broken they go to him, and wheresoever
women are fallen and wrecked they seek the mercy and the shelter of his
face. He is poor, and has nothing to give them save one thing only, but
that is the best thing of all--it is hope. Not hope in life, but hope
in death, the sublime hope whose radiance is always around him. Man that
veils his face before the mysteries of the hereafter, and science that
reckons the laws of nature and ignores the power of God, have no place
with the Mahdi. The unseen is his certainty; the miracle is all in all
to him; he throngs the air with marvels; God speaks to him in dreams
when he sleeps, and warns and directs him by signs when he is awake._

_With this man, so singular a mixture of the haughty chief and the joyous
child, there is another, a woman, his wife. She is beautiful with a
beauty rarely seen in other women, and her senses are subtle beyond the
wonders of enchantment. Together these two, with their ragged fellowship
of the poor behind them, having no homes and no possessions, pass
from place to place, unharmed and unhindered, through that land of
intolerance and iniquity, being protected and reverenced by virtue of
the superstition which accepts them for Saints. Who are they? What have
they been?_



CHAPTER I

ISRAEL BEN OLIEL


Israel was the son of a Jewish banker at Tangier. His mother was
the daughter of a banker in London. The father's name was Oliel; the
mother's was Sara. Oliel had held business connections with the house of
Sara's father, and he came over to England that he might have a personal
meeting with his correspondent. The English banker lived over his
office, near Holborn Bars, and Oliel met with his family. It consisted
of one daughter by a first wife, long dead, and three sons by a second
wife, still living. They were not altogether a happy household, and the
chief apparent cause of discord was the child of the first wife in the
home of the second. Oliel was a man of quick perception, and he saw the
difficulty. That was how it came about that he was married to Sara. When
he returned to Morocco he was some thousand pounds richer than when he
left it, and he had a capable and personable wife into his bargain.

Oliel was a self-centred and silent man, absorbed in getting and
spending, always taking care to have much of the one, and no more than
he could help of the other. Sara was a nervous and sensitive little
woman, hungering for communion and for sympathy. She got little of
either from her husband, and grew to be as silent as he. With the people
of the country of her adoption, whether Jews or Moors, she made no
headway. She never even learnt their language.

Two years passed, and then a child was born to her. This was Israel, and
for many a year thereafter he was all the world to the lonely woman. His
coming made no apparent difference to his father. He grew to be a tall
and comely boy, quick and bright, and inclined to be of a sweet and
cheerful disposition. But the school of his upbringing was a hard one. A
Jewish child in Morocco might know from his cradle that he was not born
a Moor and a Mohammedan.

When the boy was eight years old his father married a second wife,
his first wife being still alive. This was lawful, though unusual in
Tangier. The new marriage, which was only another business transaction
to Oliel, was a shock and a terror to Sara. Nevertheless, she supported
its penalties through three weary years, sinking visibly under them day
after day. By that time a second family had begun to share her husband's
house, the rivalry of the mothers had threatened to extend to the
children, the domesticity of home was destroyed and its harmony was no
longer possible. Then she left Oliel, and fled back to England, taking
Israel with her.

Her father was dead, and the welcome she got of her half-brothers was
not warm. They had no sympathy with her rebellion against her husband's
second marriage. If she had married into a foreign country, she should
abide by the ways of it. Sara was heartbroken. Her health had long been
poor, and now it failed her utterly. In less than a month she died.
On her deathbed she committed her boy to the care of her brothers, and
implored them not to send him back to Morocco.

For years thereafter Israel's life in London was a stern one. If he had
no longer to submit to the open contempt of the Moors, the kicks and
insults of the streets, he had to learn how bitter is the bread that one
is forced to eat at another's table. When he should have been still at
school he was set to some menial occupation in the bank at Holborn Bars,
and when he ought to have risen at his desk he was required to teach the
sons of prosperous men the way to go above him. Life was playing an evil
game with him, and, though he won, it must be at a bitter price.

Thus twelve years went by, and Israel, now three-and-twenty, was a
tall, silent, very sedate young man, clear-headed on all subjects, and a
master of figures. Never once during that time had his father written
to him, or otherwise recognised his existence, though knowing of his
whereabouts from the first by the zealous importunities of his uncles.
Then one day a letter came written in distant tone and formal manner,
announcing that the writer had been some time confined to his bed, and
did not expect to leave it; that the children of his second wife had
died in infancy; that he was alone, and had no one of his own flesh
and blood to look to his business, which was therefore in the hands of
strangers, who robbed him; and finally, that if Israel felt any duty
towards his father, or, failing that, if he had any wish to consult his
own interest, he would lose no time in leaving England for Morocco.

Israel read the letter without a throb of filial affection; but,
nevertheless, he concluded to obey its summons. A fortnight later he
landed at Tangier. He had come too late. His father had died the day
before. The weather was stormy, and the surf on the shore was heavy, and
thus it chanced that, even while the crazy old packet on which he sailed
lay all day beating about the bay, in fear of being dashed on to the
ruins of the mole, his father's body was being buried in the little
Jewish cemetery outside the eastern walls, and his cousins, and
cousins' cousins, to the fifth degree, without loss of time or waste of
sentiment, were busily dividing his inheritance among them.

Next day, as his father's heir, he claimed from the Moorish court the
restitution of his father's substance. But his cousins made the Kadi,
the judge, a present of a hundred dollars, and he was declared to be an
impostor, who could not establish his identity. Producing his father's
letter which had summoned him from London, he appealed from the Kadi
to the Aolama, men wise in the law, who acted as referees in disputed
cases; but it was decided that as a Jew he had no right in Mohammedan
law to offer evidence in a civil court. He laid his case before the
British Consul, but was found to have no claim to English intervention,
being a subject of the Sultan both by birth and parentage. Meantime, his
dispute with his cousins was set at rest for ever by the Governor of the
town, who, concluding that his father had left neither will nor heirs,
confiscated everything he had possessed to the public treasury--that is
to say, to the Kaid's own uses.

Thus he found himself without standing ground in Morocco, whether as a
Jew, a Moor, or an Englishman, a stranger in his father's country, and
openly branded as a cheat. That he did not return to England promptly
was because he was already a man of indomitable spirit. Besides that,
the treatment he was having now was but of a piece with what he had
received at all times. Nothing had availed to crush him, even as nothing
ever does avail to crush a man of character. But the obstacles and
torments which make no impression on the mind of a strong man often make
a very sensible impression on his heart; the mind triumphs, it is
the heart that suffers; the mind strengthens and expands after every
besetting plague of life, but the heart withers and wears away.

So far from flying from Morocco when things conspired together to
beat him down, Israel looked about with an equal mind for the means of
settling there.

His opportunity came early. The Governor, either by qualm of conscience
or further freak of selfishness, got him the place of head of the
Oomana, the three Administrators of Customs at Tangier. He held the post
six months only, to the complete satisfaction of the Kaid, but amid the
muttered discontent of the merchants and tradesmen. Then the Governor of
Tetuan, a bigger town lying a long day's journey to the east, hearing
of Israel that as Ameen of Tangier he had doubled the custom revenues in
half a year, invited him to fill an informal, unofficial, and irregular
position as assessor of tributes.

Now, it would be a long task to tell of the work which Israel did in
his new calling: how he regulated the market dues, and appointed a
Mut'hasseb, a clerk of the market, to collect them--so many moozoonahs
for every camel sold, so many for every horse, mule, and ass, so many
floos for every fowl, and so many metkals for the purchase and sale of
every slave; how he numbered the houses and made lists of the trades,
assessing their tribute by the value of their businesses--so much for
gun-making, so much for weaving, so much for tanning, and so on through
the line of them, great and small, good and bad, even from the trades
of the Jewish silversmiths and the Moorish packsaddle-makers down to the
callings of the Arab water-carriers and the ninety public women.

All this he did by the strict law and letter of the Koran, which
entitled the Sultan to a tithe of all earnings whatsoever; but it would
not wrong the truth to say that he did it also by the impulse of a sour
and saddened heart. The world had shown no mercy to him, and he need
show no mercy to the world. Why talk of pity? It was only a name, an
idea a mocking thought. In the actual reckoning of life there was no
such name as pity. Thus did Israel justify himself in all his dealings,
whatever their severity and the rigour wherewith they wrought.

And the people felt the strong hand that was on them, and they cursed
it.

“Ya Allah! Allah!” the Moors would cry. “Who is this Jew--this son of
the English--that he should be made our master?”

They muttered at him in the streets, they scowled upon him, and at
length they insulted him openly. Since his return from England he had
resumed the dress of his race in his country--the long dark gabardine
or kaftan, with a scarf for girdle, the black slippers, and the black
skull-cap. And, going one day by the Grand Mosque, a group of the
beggars; who lay always by the gate, called on him to uncover his feet.

“Jew! Dog!” they cried, “there is no god but God! Curses on your
relations! Off with your slippers!”

He paid no heed to their commands, but made straight onward. Then one
blear-eyed and scab-faced cripple scrambled up and struck off his cap
with a crutch. He picked it up again without a look or a word, and
strode away. But next morning, at early prayers, there was a place empty
at the door of the mosque. Its accustomed occupant lay in the prison at
the Kasbah.

And if the Muslimeen hated Israel for what he was doing for their
Governor, the Jews hated him yet more because it was being done for a
Moor.

“He has sold himself to our enemy,” they said, “against the welfare of
his own nation.”

At the synagogue they ignored him, and in taking the votes of their
people they counted others and passed him by. He showed no malice. Only
his strong face twitched at each fresh insult and his head was held
higher. Only this, and one other sign of suffering in that secret place
of his withering heart, which God's eye alone could see.

Thus far he had done no more to Moor and Jew than exact that tenth part
of their substance which the faiths of both required that they should
pay. But now his work went further. A little group of old Jews, all held
in honour among their people--Abraham Ohana, nicknamed Pigman, son of
a former rabbi; Judah ben Lolo, an elder of his synagogue; and Reuben
Maliki, keeper of the poor-box--were seized and cast into the Kasbah for
gross and base usury.

At this the Jewish quarter was thrown into wild hubbub. The hand that
was on their people was a daring and terrible one. None doubted whose
hand it was--it was the hand of young Israel the Jew.

When the three old usurers had bought themselves out of the Kasbah, they
put their heads together and said, “Let us drive this fellow out of the
Mellah, and so shall he be driven out of the town.” Then the owner of
the house which Israel rented for his lodging evicted him by a poor
excuse, and all other Jewish owners refused him as tenant. But the
conspiracy failed. By command of the Governor, or by his influence,
Israel was lodged by the Nadir, the administrator of mosque property,
in one of the houses belonging to the mosque on the Moorish side of the
Mellah walls.

Seeing this, the usurers laid their heads together again and said, “Let
us see that no man of our nation serve him, and so shall his life be a
burden.” Then the two Jews who had been his servants deserted him, and
when he asked for Moors he was told that the faithful might not obey the
unbeliever; and when he would have sent for negroes out of the Soudan he
was warned that a Jew might not hold a slave. But the conspiracy failed
again. Two black female slaves from Soos, named Fatimah and Habeebah,
were bought in the name of the Governor and assigned to Israel's
service.

And when it was seen at length that nothing availed to disturb Israel's
material welfare, the three base usurers laid their heads together yet
again, that they might prey upon his superstitious fears, and they
said, “He is our enemy, but he is a Jew: let the woman who is named
the prophetess put her curse upon him.” Then she who was so called, one
Rebecca Bensabbot, deaf as a stone, weak in her intellect, seventy years
of age, and living fifty years on the poor-box which Reuben Maliki kept,
crossed Israel in the streets, and cursed him as a son of Beelzebub
predicting that, even as he had made the walls of the Kasbah to echo
with the groans of God's elect, so should his own spirit be broken
within them and his forehead humbled to the earth. He stood while he
heard her out, and his strong lip trembled at he words; but he only
smiled coldly, and passed on in silence.

“The clouds are not hurt,” he thought, “by the bark of dogs.”

Thus did his brethren of Judah revile him, and thus did they torture
him; yet there was one among them who did neither. This was the daughter
of their Grand Rabbi, David ben Ohana. Her name was Ruth. She was young,
and God had given her grace and she was beautiful, and many young
Jewish men, of Tetuan had vied with each other in vain for he favour. Of
Israel's duty she knew little, save what report had said of it, that
it was evil; and of the act which had made him an outcast among his
own people, and an Ishmael among the sons of Ishmael she could form
no judgment. But what a woman's eyes might see in him, without help of
other knowledge, that she saw.

She had marked him in the synagogue, that his face was noble and his
manners gracious; that he was young, but only as one who had been
cheated of his youth and had missed his early manhood, the when he was
ignored he ignored his insult, and when he was reviled he answered not
again; in a word, the he was silent and strong and alone, and, above all
that he was sad.

These were credentials enough to the true girl's favour, and Israel soon
learnt that the house of the Rabbi was open to him. There the lonely man
first found himself. The cold eyes of his little world had seen him as
his father's son, but the light and warmth of the eyes of Ruth saw
him as the son of his mother also. The Rabbi himself was old, very
old--ninety years of age--and length of days had taught him charity.
And so it was that when, in due time, Israel came with many excuses and
asked for Ruth in marriage, the Rabbi gave her to him.

The betrothal followed, but none save the notary and his witnesses stood
beside Israel when he crossed hands over the handkerchief; and, when
the marriage came in its course, few stood beside the Chief Rabbi.
Nevertheless, all the Jews of the quarter and all the Moors of Tetuan
were alive to what was happening, and on the night of the marriage a
great company of both peoples, though chiefly of the rabble among them,
gathered in front of the Rabbi's house that they might hiss and jeer.

The Chacham heard them from where he sat under the stars in his patio,
and when at last the voice of Rebecca the prophetess came to him above
the tumult, crying, “Woe to her that has married the enemy of her
nation, and woe to him that gave her against the hope of his people!
They shall taste death. He shall see them fall from his side and die,”
 then the old man listened and trembled visibly. In confusion and fierce
anger he rose up and stumbled through the crooked passage to the door,
and flinging it wide, he stood in the doorway facing them that stood
without.

“Peace! Peace!” he cried, “and shame! shame! Remember the doom of him
that shall curse the high priest of the Lord.”

This he spoke in a voice that shook with wrath. Then suddenly, his voice
failing him, he said in a broken whisper, “My good people, what is this?
Your servant is grown old in your service. Sixty and odd years he has
shared your sorrows and your burdens. What has he done this day that
your women should lift up their voices against him?”

But, in awe of his white head in the moonlight, the rabble that stood in
the darkness were silent and made no answer. Then he staggered back, and
Israel helped him into his house, and Ruth did what she could to compose
him. But he was woefully shaken, and that night he died.

When the Rabbi's death became known in the morning, the Jews whispered,
“It is the first-fruits!” and the Moors touched their foreheads and
murmured “It is written!”



CHAPTER II

THE BIRTH OF NAOMI


Israel paid no heed to Jew or Moor, but in due time he set about the
building of a house for himself and for Ruth, that they might live in
comfort many years together. In the south-east corner of the Mellah
he placed it, and he built it partly in the Moorish and partly in the
English fashion, with an open court and corridors, marble pillars, and a
marble staircase, walls of small tiles, and ceilings of stalactites, but
also with windows and with doors. And when his house was raised he put
no haities into it, and spread no mattresses on the floors, but sent for
tables and chairs and couches out of England; and everything he did in
this wise cut him off the more from the people about him, both Moors and
Jews.

And being settled at last, and his own master in his own dwelling, out
of the power of his enemies to push him back into the streets, suddenly
it occurred to him for the first time that whereas the house he had
built was a refuge for himself, it was doomed to be little better than a
prison for his wife. In marrying Ruth he had enlarged the circle of his
intimates by one faithful and loving soul, but in marrying him she had
reduced even her friends to that number. Her father was dead; if she was
the daughter of a Chief Rabbi she was also the wife of an outcast, the
companion of a pariah, and save for him, she must be for ever alone.
Even their bondwomen still spoke a foreign dialect, and commerce with
them was mainly by signs.

Thinking of all this with some remorse, one idea fixed itself on
Israel's mind, one hope on his heart--that Ruth might soon bear a child.
Then would her solitude be broken by the dearest company that a woman
might know on earth. And, if he had wronged her, his child would make
amends.

Israel thought of this again and again. The delicious hope pursued him.
It was his secret, and he never gave it speech. But time passed, and no
child was born. And Ruth herself saw that she was barren, and she began
to cast down her head before her husband. Israel's hope was of longer
life, but the truth dawned upon him at last. Then, when he perceived
that his wife was ashamed, a great tenderness came over him. He had been
thinking of her; that a child would bring her solace, and meanwhile she
had thought only of him, that a child would be his pride. After that he
never went abroad but he came home with stories of women wailing at the
cemetery over the tombs of their babes, of men broken in heart for loss
of their sons, and of how they were best treated of God who were given
no children.

This served his big soul for a time to cheat it of its disappointment,
half deceiving Ruth, and deceiving himself entirely. But one day the
woman Rebecca met him again at the street-corner by his own house, and
she lifted her gaunt finger into his face, and cried, “Israel ben Oliel,
the judgment of the Lord is upon you, and will not suffer you to raise
up children to be a reproach and a curse among your people!”

“Out upon you, woman!” cried Israel, and almost in the first delirium of
his pain he had lifted his hand to strike her. Her other predictions
had passed him by, but this one had smitten him. He went home and shut
himself in his room, and throughout that day he let no one come near to
him.

Israel knew his own heart at last. At his wife's barrenness he was now
angry with the anger of a proud man whose pride had been abased. What
was the worth of it, after all, that he had conquered the fate that had
first beaten him down? What did it come to that the world was at his
feet? Heaven was above him, and the poorest man in the Mellah who was
the father of a child might look down on him with contempt.

That night sleep forsook his eyelids, and his mouth was parched and
his spirit bitter. And sometimes he reproached himself with a thousand
offences, and sometimes he searched the Scriptures, that he might
persuade himself that he had walked blameless before the Lord in the
ordinances and commandments of God.

Meantime, Ruth, in her solitude, remembered that it was now three years
since she had been married to Israel, and that by the laws, both of
their race and their country, a woman who had been long barren might
straightway be divorced by her husband.

Next morning a message of business came from the Khaleefa, but Israel
would not answer it. Then came an order to him from the Governor, but
still he paid no heed. At length he heard a feeble knock at the door of
his room. It was Ruth, his wife, and he opened to her and she entered.

“Send me away from you!” she cried. “Send me away!”

“Not for the place of the Kaid,” he answered stoutly; “no, nor the
throne of the Sultan!”

At that she fell on his neck and kissed him, and they mingled their
tears together. But he comforted her at length, and said, “Look up, my
dearest! look up! I am a proud man among men, but it is even as the Lord
may deal with me. And which of us shall murmur against God?”

At that word Ruth lifted her head from his bosom and her eyes were full
of a sudden thought.

“Then let us ask of the Lord,” she whispered hotly, “and surely He will
hear our prayer.”

“It is the voice of the Lord Himself!” cried Israel; “and this day it
shall be done!”

At the time of evening prayers Israel and Ruth went up hand in hand
together to the synagogue, in a narrow lane off the Sok el Foki. And
Ruth knelt in her place in the gallery close under the iron grating and
the candles that hung above it, and she prayed: “O Lord, have pity on
this Thy servant, and take away her reproach among women. Give her grace
in Thine eyes, O Lord, that her husband be not ashamed. Grant her a
child of Thy mercy, that his eye may smile upon her. Yet not as
she willeth, but as Thou willest, O Lord, and Thy servant will be
satisfied.”

But Israel stood long on the floor with his hand on his heart and his
eyes to the ground, and he called on God as a debtor that will not
be appeased, saying: “How long wilt Thou forget me, O Lord? My enemies
triumph over me and foretell Thy doom upon me. They sit in the
lurking-places of the streets to deride me. Confound my enemies, O Lord,
and rebuke their counsels. Remember Ruth, I beseech Thee, that she is
patient and her heart is humbled. Give her children of Thy servant, and
her first-born shall be sanctified unto Thee. Give her one child, and
it shall be Thine--if it is a son, to be a Rabbi in Thy synagogues. Hear
me, O Lord, and give heed to my cry, for behold, I swear it before Thee.
One child, but one, only one, son or daughter, and all my desire is
before Thee. How long wilt Thou forget me, O Lord?”

The message of the Khaleefa which Israel had not answered in his trouble
was a request from the Shereef of Wazzan that he should come without
delay to that town to count his rent-charges and assess his dues. This
request the Governor had transformed into a command, for the Shereef
was a prince of Islam in his own country, and in many provinces the
believers paid him tribute. So in three days' time Israel was ready
to set out on his journey, with men and mules at his door, and camels
packed with tents. He was likely to be some months absent from Tetuan,
and it was impossible that Ruth should go with him. They had never been
separated before, and Ruth's concern was that they should be so long
parted, but Israel's was a deeper matter.

“Ruth,” he said when his time came, “I am going away from you, but my
enemies remain. They see evil in all my doings, and in this act also
they will find offence. Promise me that if they make a mock at you for
your husband's sake you will not see them; if they taunt you that you
will not hear them; and if they ask anything concerning me that you will
answer them not at all.”

And Ruth promised him that if his enemies made a mock at her she should
be as one that was blind, if they taunted her as one that was deaf, and
if they questioned her concerning her husband as one that was dumb. Then
they parted with many tears and embraces.

Israel was half a year absent in the town and province of Wazzan, and,
having finished the work which he came to do, he was sent back to Tetuan
loaded with presents from the Shereef, and surrounded by soldiers and
attendants, who did not leave him until they had brought him to the door
of his own house.

And there, in her chamber, sat Ruth awaiting him, her eyes dim with
tears of joy, her throat throbbing like the throat of a bird, and great
news on her tongue.

“Listen,” she whispered; “I have something to tell you--”

“Ah, I know it,” he cried; “I know it already. I see it in your eyes.”

“Only listen,” she whispered again, while she toyed with the neck of his
kaftan, and coloured deeply, not daring to look into his face.

Their prayer in the synagogue had been heard, and the child they had
asked for was to come.

Israel was like a man beside himself with joy. He burst in upon the
message of his wife, and caught her to his breast again and again,
and kissed her. Long they stood together so, while he told her of the
chances which had befallen him during his absence from her, and she
told him of her solitude of six long months, unbroken save for the poor
company of Fatimah and Habeebah, wherein she had been blind and deaf and
dumb to all the world.

During the months thereafter until Ruth's time was full Israel sat with
her constantly. He could scarce suffer himself to leave her company. He
covered her chamber with fruits and flowers. There was no desire of her
heart but he fulfilled it. And they talked together lovingly of how they
would name the child when the time came to name it. Israel concluded
that if it was a son it should be called David, and Ruth decided that if
it was a daughter it should be called Naomi. And Ruth delighted to tell
of how when it was weaned she should take it up to the synagogue and
say, “O Lord: I am the woman that knelt before Thee praying. For this
child I prayed, and Thou hast heard my prayer.” And Israel told of how
his son should grow up to be a Rabbi to minister before God, and how
in those days it should come to pass that the children of his father's
enemies should crouch to him for a piece of silver and a morsel of
bread. Thus they built themselves castles in the air for the future of
the child that was to come.

Ruth's time came at last, and it was also the time of the Feast of
the Passover, being in the month of Nisan. This was a cause of joy to
Israel, for he was eager to triumph over his enemies face to face, and
he could not wait eight other days for the Feast of the circumcision. So
he set a supper fit for a king: the fore-leg of a sheep and the fore-leg
of an ox, the egg roasted in ashes, the balls of Charoseth, the three
Mitzvoth, and the wine, And by the time the supper was ready the midwife
had been summoned, and it was the day of the night of the Seder.

Then Israel sent messengers round the Mellah to summon his guests. Only
his enemies he invited, his bitterest foes, his unceasing revilers, and
among them were the three base usurers, Abraham Pigman, Judah ben Lolo,
and Reuben Maliki. “They cursed me,” he thought, “and I shall look on
their confusion.” His heart thirsted to summon Rebecca Bensabbot also,
but well he knew that her dainty masters would not sit at meat with her.

And when the enemies were bidden, all of them excused themselves and
refused, saying it was the Feast of the Passover, when no man should
sit save in his own house and at his own table. But Israel was not to be
gainsaid. He went out to them himself, and said, “Come, let bygones be
bygones. It is the feast of our nation. Let us eat and drink together.”
 So, partly by his importunity, but mainly in their bewilderment, yet
against all rule and custom, they suffered themselves to go with him.

And when they were come into his house and were seated about his table
in the patio, and he had washed his hands and taken the wine and blessed
it, and passed it to all, and they had drunk together, he could not keep
back his tongue from taunting them. Then when he had washed again and
dipped the celery in the vinegar, and they had drunk of the wine once
more, he taunted them afresh and laughed. But nothing yet had they
understood of his meaning, and they looked into each other's faces and
asked, “What is it?”

“Wait! Only wait!” Israel answered. “You shall see!”

At that moment Ruth sent for him to her chamber, and he went in to her.

“I am a sorrowful woman,” she said. “Some evil is about to befall--I
know it, I feel it.”

But he only rallied her and laughed again, and prophesied joy on the
morrow. Then, returning to the patio, where the passover cakes had been
broken, he called for the supper, and bade his guests to eat and drink
as much as their hearts desired.

They could do neither now, for the fear that possessed them at sight of
Israel's frenzy. The three old usurers, Abraham, Judah, and Reuben, rose
to go, but Israel cried, “Stay! Stay, and see what is come!” and under
the very force of his will they yielded and sat down again.

Still Israel drank and laughed and derided them. In the wild torrent of
his madness he called them by names they knew and by names they did not
know--Harpagon, Shylock, Bildad, Elihu--and at every new name he laughed
again. And while he carried himself so in the outer court the slave
woman Fatimah came from the inner room with word that the child was
born.

At that Israel was like a man distraught. He leapt up from the table and
faced full upon his guests, and cried, “Now you know what it is; and now
you know why you are bidden to this supper! You are here to rejoice
with me over my enemies! Drink! drink! Confusion to all of them!” And he
lifted a winecup and drank himself.

They were abashed before him, and tried to edge out of the patio into
the street; but he put his back to the passage, and faced them again.

“You will not drink?” he said. “Then listen to me.” He dashed the
winecup out of his hand, and it broke into fragments on the floor. His
laughter was gone, his face was aflame, and his voice rose to a shrill
cry. “You foretold the doom of God upon me, you brought me low, you made
me ashamed: but behold how the Lord has lifted me up! You set your women
to prophesy that God would not suffer me to raise up children to be a
reproach and a curse among my people; but God has this day given me a
son like the best of you. More than that--more than that--my son shall
yet see--”

The slave woman was touching his arm. “It is a girl,” she said; “a
girl!”

For a moment Israel stammered and paused. Then he cried, “No matter!
She shall see your own children fatherless, and with none to show them
mercy! She shall see the iniquity of their fathers remembered against
them! She shall see them beg their bread, and seek it in desolate
places! And now you can go! Go! go!”

He had stepped aside as he spoke, and with a sweep of his arm he was
driving them all out like sheep before him, dumbfounded and with their
eyes in the dust, when suddenly there was a low cry from the inner room.

It was Ruth calling for her husband. Israel wheeled about and went in
to her hurriedly, and his enemies, by one impulse of evil instinct,
followed him and listened from the threshold.

Ruth's face was a face of fear, and her lips moved, but no voice came
from them.

And Israel said, “How is it with you, my dearest joy of my joy and pride
of my pride?”

Then Ruth lifted the babe from her bosom and said “The Lord has counted
my prayer to me as sin--look, see; the child is both dumb and blind!”

At that word Israel's heart died within him, but he muttered out of his
dry throat, “No, no, never believe it!”

“True, true, it is true,” she moaned; “the child has not uttered a cry,
and its eyelids have not blinked at the light.”

“Never believe it, I say!” Israel growled, and he lifted the babe in his
arms to try it.

But when he held it to the fading light of the window which opened upon
the street where the woman called the prophetess had cursed him, the
eyes of the child did not close, neither did their pupils diminish. Then
his limbs began to tremble, so that the midwife took the babe out of his
arms and laid it again on its mother's bosom.

And Ruth wept over it, saying, “Even if it were a son never could it
serve in the synagogue! Never! Never!”

At that Israel began to curse and to swear. His enemies had now pushed
themselves into the chamber, and they cried, “Peace! Peace!” And old
Judah ben Lolo, the elder of the synagogue, grunted, and said, “Is it
not written that no one afflicted of God shall minister in His temples?”

Israel stared around in silence into the faces about him, first into
the face of his wife, and then into the faces of his enemies whom he
had bidden. Then he fell to laughing hideously and crying, “What matter?
Every monkey is a gazelle to its mother!” But after that he staggered,
his knees gave way, he pitched half forward and half aside, like a
falling horse, and with a deep groan he fell with his face to the floor.

The midwife and the slave lifted him up and moistened his lips with
water; but his enemies turned and left him, muttering among themselves,
“The Lord killeth and maketh alive, He bringeth low and lifteth up, and
into the pit that the evil man diggeth or another He causeth his foot to
slip.”



CHAPTER III

THE CHILDHOOD OF NAOMI


Throughout Tetuan and the country round about Israel was now an object
of contempt. God had declared against him, God had brought him low,
God Himself had filled him with confusion. Then why should man show him
mercy?

But if he was despised he was still powerful. None dare openly insult
him. And, between their fear and their scorn of him, the shifts of the
rabble to give vent to their contempt were often ludicrous enough. Thus,
they would call their dogs and their asses by his name, and the dogs
would be the scabbiest in the streets, and the asses the laziest in the
market.

He would be caught in the crush of the traffic at the town gate or at
the gate of the Mellah, and while he stood aside to allow a line of
pack-mules to pass he would hear a voice from behind him crying huskily,
“Accursed old Israel! Get on home to your mother!” Then, turning quickly
round, he would find that close at his heels a negro of most innocent
countenance was cudgelling his donkey by that title.

He would go past the Saints' Houses in the public ways, and at the sound
of his footsteps the bleached and eyeless lepers who sat under the white
walls crying “Allah! Allah! Allah!” would suddenly change their cry to
“Arrah! Arrah! Arrah!” “Go on! Go on! Go on!”

He would walk across the Sok on Fridays, and hear shrieks and peals of
laughter, and see grinning faces with gleaming white teeth turned in his
direction, and he would know that the story-tellers were mimicking his
voice and the jugglers imitating his gestures.

His prosperity counted for nothing against the open brand of God's
displeasure. The veriest muck-worm in the market-place spat out at sight
of him. Moor and Jew, Arab and Berber--they all despised him!

Nevertheless, the disaster which had befallen his house had not crushed
him. It had brought out every fibre of his being, every muscle of his
soul. He had quarrelled with God by reason of it, and his quarrel with
God had made his quarrel with his fellow-man the fiercer.

There was just one man in the town who found no offence in either form
of warfare. The more wicked the one and the more outrageous the other,
the better for his person.

It was the Governor of Tetuan. His name was El Arby, but he was known
as Ben Aboo, the son of his father. That father had been none other
than the late Sultan. Therefore Ben Aboo was a brother of Abd er-Rahman,
though by another mother, a negro slave. To be a Sultan's brother in
Morocco is not to be a Sultan's favourite, but a possible aspirant to
his throne. Nevertheless Ben Aboo had been made a Kaid, a chief, in the
Sultan's army, and eventually a commander-in-chief of his cavalry.
In that capacity he had led a raid for arrears of tribute on the Beni
Hasan, the Beni Idar, and the Wad Ras These rebellious tribes inhabit
the country near to Tetuan, and hence Ben Aboo's attention had been
first directed to that town. When he had returned from his expedition he
offered the Sultan fifteen thousand dollars for the place of its Basha
or Governor, and promised him thirty thousand dollars a year as tribute.
The Sultan took his money, and accepted his promise. There was a Basha
at Tetuan already, but that was a trifling difficulty. The good man
was summoned to the Sultan's presence, accused of appropriating the
Shereefian tributes, stripped of all he had, and cast into prison.

That was how Ben Aboo had become Governor of Tetuan, and the story of
how Israel had become his informal Administrator of Affairs is no
less curious. At first Ben Aboo seemed likely to lose by his dubious
transaction. His new function was partly military and partly civil. He
was a valiant soldier--the black blood of his slave-mother had counted
for so much; but he was a bad administrator--he could neither read nor
write nor reckon figures. In this dilemma his natural colleague would
have been his Khaleefa, his deputy, Ali bin Jillool, but because this
man had been the deputy of his predecessor also, he could not trust him.
He had two other immediate subordinates, his Commander of Artillery and
his Commander of Infantry, but neither of them could spell the letters
of his name. Then there was his Taleb the Adel, his scribe the notary,
Hosain ben Hashem, styled Haj, because he had made the pilgrimage to
Mecca, but he was also the Imam, or head of the Mosque, and the wily
Ben Aboo foresaw the danger of some day coming into collision with the
religious sentiment of his people. Finally, there was the Kadi, Mohammed
ben Arby, but the judge was an official outside his jurisdiction, and he
wanted a man who should be under his hand. That was the combination of
circumstances whereby Israel came to Tetuan.

Israel's first years in his strange office had satisfied his master
entirely. He had carried the Basha's seal and acted for him in all
affairs of money. The revenues had risen to fifty thousand dollars, so
that the Basha had twenty thousand to the good. Then Ben Aboo's ambition
began to override itself. He started an oil-mill, and wanted Israel to
select a hundred houses owned by rich men, that he might compel each
house to take ten kollahs of oil--an extravagant quantity, at seven
dollars for each kollah--an exorbitant price. Israel had refused. “It is
not just,” he had said.

Other expedients for enlarging his revenue Ben Aboo had suggested, but
Israel had steadfastly resisted all of them. Sometimes the Governor
had pretended that he had received an order from the Sultan to impose a
gross and wicked tax, but Israel's answer had been the same. “There is
no evil in the world but injustice,” he had said. “Do justice, and you
do all that God can ask or man expect.”

For such opposition to the will of the Basha any other person would have
been cast into a damp dungeon at night, and chained in the hot sun by
day. Israel was still necessary. So Ben Aboo merely longed for the dawn
of that day whereon he should need him no more.

But since the disaster which had befallen Israel's house everything
had undergone a change. It was now Israel himself who suggested dubious
means of revenue. There was no device of a crafty brain for turning
the very air itself into money--ransoms, promissory notes, and false
judgments--but Israel thought of it. Thus he persuaded the Governor to
send his small currency to the Jewish shops to be changed into silver
dollars at the rate of nine ducats to the dollar, when a dollar was
worth ten in currency. And after certain of the shopkeepers, having
changed fifty thousand dollars at that rate, fled to the Sultan to
complain, Israel advised that their debtors should be called together,
their debts purchased, and bonds drawn up and certified for ten times
the amounts of them. Thus a few were banished from their homes in fear
of imprisonment, many were sorely harassed, and some were entirely
ruined.

It was a strange spectacle. He whom the rabble gibed at in the public
streets held the fate of every man of them in his hand. Their dogs and
their asses might bear his name, but their own lives and liberty must
answer to it.

Israel looked on at all with an equal mind, neither flinching at his
indignities nor glorying in his power. He beheld the wreck of families
without remorse, and heard the wail of women and the cry of children
without a qualm. Neither did he delight in the sufferings of them that
had derided him. His evil impulse was a higher matter--his faith in
justice had been broken up. He had been wrong. There was no such thing
as justice in the world, and there could, therefore, be no such thing
as injustice. There was no thing but the blind swirl of chance, and the
wild scramble for life. The man had quarrelled with God.

But Israel's heart was not yet dead. There was one place, where he who
bore himself with such austerity towards the world was a man of great
tenderness. That place was his own home. What he saw there was enough to
stir the fountains of his being--nay, to exhaust them, and to send him
abroad as a river-bed that is dry.

In that first hour of his abasement, after he had been confounded before
the enemies whom he had expected to confound, Israel had thought of
himself, but Ruth's unselfish heart had even then thought only of the
babe.

The child was born blind and dumb and deaf. At the feast of life there
was no place left for it. So Ruth turned her face from it to the wall,
and called on God to take it.

“Take it!” she cried--“take it! Make haste, O God, make haste and take
it!”

But the child did not die. It lived and grew strong. Ruth herself
suckled it, and as she nourished it in her bosom her heart yearned over
it, and she forgot the prayer she had prayed concerning it. So, little
by little, her spirit returned to her, and day by day her soul deceived
her, and hour by hour an angel out of heaven seemed to come to her side
and whisper “Take heart of hope, O Ruth! God does not afflict willingly.
Perhaps the child is not blind, perhaps it is not deaf, perhaps it is
not dumb. Who shall ye say? Wait and see!”

And, during the first few months of its life, Ruth could see no
difference in her child from the children of other women. Sometimes she
would kneel by its cradle and gaze into the flower-cup of its eye, an
the eye was blue and beautiful, and there was nothing to say that the
little cup was broken, and the little chamber dark. And sometimes she
would look at the pretty shell of its ear, and the ear was round and
full as a shell on the shore, and nothing told her that the voice of the
sea was not heard in it, and that all within was silence.

So Ruth cherished her hope in secret, and whispered her heart and said,
“It is well, all is well with the child. She will look upon my face and
see it, and listen to my voice and hear it, and her own little tongue
will yet speak to me, and make me very glad.” And then an ineffable
serenity would spread over her face and transfigure it.

But when the time was come that a child's eyes, having grown familiar
with the light, should look on its little hands, and stare at its
little fingers, and clutch at its cradle, and gaze about in a peaceful
perplexity at everything, still the eyes of Ruth's child did not open
in seeing, but lay idle and empty. And when the time was ripe that
a child's ears should hear from hour to hour the sweet babble of a
mother's love, and its tongue begin to give back the words in lisping
sounds, the ear of Ruth's child heard nothing, and its tongue was mute.

Then Ruth's spirit sank, but still the angel out of heaven seemed to
come to her, and find her a thousand excuses, and say, “Wait, Ruth; only
wait, only a little longer.”

So Ruth held back her tears, and bent above her babe again, and watched
for its smile that should answer to her smile, and listened for the
prattle of its little lips. But never a sound as of speech seemed to
break the silence between the words that trembled from her own tongue,
and never once across her baby's face passed the light of her tearful
smile. It was a pitiful thing to see her wasted pains, and most pitiful
of all for the pains she was at to conceal them. Thus, every day at
midday she would carry her little one into the patio, and watch if its
eyes should blink in the sunshine; but if Israel chanced to come upon
her then, she would drop her head and say, “How sweet the air is to-day,
and how pleasant to sit in the sun!”

“So it is,” he would answer, “so it is.”

Thus, too, when a bird was singing from the fig-tree that grew in the
court, she would catch up her child and carry it close, and watch if
its ears should hear; but if Israel saw her, she would laugh--a little
shrill laugh like a cry--and cover her face in confusion.

“How merry you are, sweetheart,” he would say, and then pass into the
house.

For a time Israel tried to humour her, seeming not to see what he saw,
and pretending not to hear what he heard. But every day his heart bled
at sight of her, and one day he could bear up no longer, for his very
soul had sickened, and he cried, “Have done, Ruth!--for mercy's sake,
have done! The child is a soul in chains, and a spirit in prison. Her
eyes are darkness, like the tomb's, and her ears are silence, like the
grave's. Never will she smile to her mother's smile, or answer to her
father's speech. The first sound she will hear will be the last trump,
and the first face she will see will be the face of God.”

At that, Ruth flung herself down and burst into a flood of tears.
The hope that she had cherished was dead. Israel could comfort her no
longer. The fountain of his own heart was dry. He drew a long breath,
and went away to his bad work at the Kasbah.

The child lived and thrived. They had called her Naomi, as they had
agreed to do before she was born, though no name she knew of herself,
and a mockery it seemed to name her. At four years of age she was
a creature of the most delicate beauty. Notwithstanding her Jewish
parentage, she was fair as the day and fresh as the dawn. And if her
eyes were darkness, there was light within her soul; and if her ears
were silence, there was music within her heart. She was brighter than
the sun which she could not see, and sweeter than the songs which she
could not hear. She was joyous as a bird in its narrow cage, and never
did she fret at the bars which bound her. And, like the bird that sings
at midnight, her cheery soul sang in its darkness.

Only one sound seemed ever to come from her little lips, and it was the
sound of laughter. With this she lay down to sleep at night, and rose
again in the morning. She laughed as she combed her hair, and laughed
again as she came dancing out of her chamber at dawn.

She had only one sentinel on the outpost of her spirit, and that was the
sense of touch and feeling. With this she seemed to know the day from
the night, and when the sun was shining and when the sky was dark. She
knew her mother, too, by the touch of her fingers, and her father by
the brushing of his beard. She knew the flowers that grew in the fields
outside the gate of the town, and she would gather them in her lap,
as other children did, and bring them home with her in her hands. She
seemed almost to know their colours also, for the flowers which she
would twine in her hair were red, and the white were those which she
would lay on her bosom. And truly a flower she was of herself, whereto
the wind alone could whisper, and only the sun could speak aloud.

Sweet and touching were the efforts she sometimes made to cling to them
that were about her. Thus her heart was the heart of a child, and she
knew no delight like to that of playing with other children. But her
father's house was under a ban; no child of any neighbour in Tetuan was
allowed to cross its threshold, and, save for the children whom she met
in the fields when she walked there by her mother's hand, no child did
she ever meet.

Ruth saw this, and then, for the first time, she became conscious of
the isolation in which she had lived since her marriage with Israel. She
herself had her husband for companion and comrade, but her little Naomi
was doubly and trebly alone--first, alone as a child that is the only
child of her parents; again, alone as a child whose parents are cut off
from the parents of other children; and yet again, once more, alone as a
child that is blind and dumb.

But Israel saw it also, and one day he brought home with him from the
Kasbah a little black boy with a sweet round face and big innocent white
eyes which might have been the eyes of an angel. The boy's name was
Ali, and he was four years old. His father had killed his mother for
infidelity and neglect of their child, and, having no one to buy him out
of prison, he had that day been executed. Then little Ali had been left
alone in the world, and so Israel had taken him.

Ruth welcomed the boy, and adopted him. He had been born a Mohammedan,
but secretly she brought him up as a Jew. And for some years thereafter
no difference did she make between him and her own child that other eyes
could see. They ate together, they walked abroad together, they played
together, they slept together, and the little black head of the boy lay
with the fair head of the girl on the same white pillow.

Strange and pathetic were the relations between these little exiles of
humanity I One knew not whether to laugh or cry at them. First, on Ali's
part, a blank wonderment that when he cried to Naomi, “Come!” she did
not hear, when he asked “Why?” she did not answer; and when he said
“Look!” she did not see, though her blue eyes seemed to gaze full into
his face. Then, a sort of amused bewilderment that her little nervous
fingers were always touching his arms and his hands, and his neck and
his throat. But long before he had come to know that Naomi was not as
he was, that Nature had not given her eyes to see as he saw, and ears to
hear as he heard, and a tongue to speak as he spoke, Nature herself had
overstepped the barriers that divided her from him. He found that Naomi
had come to understand him, whatever in his little way he did, and
almost whatever in his little way he said. So he played with her as he
would have played with any other playmate, laughing with her, calling
to her, and going through his foolish little boyish antics before her.
Nevertheless, by some mysterious knowledge of Nature's own teaching, he
seemed to realise that it was his duty to take care of her. And when the
spirit and the mischief in his little manly heart would prompt him to
steal out of the house, and adventure into the streets with Naomi by his
side, he would be found in the thick of the throng perhaps at the heels
of the mules and asses, with Naomi's hand locked in his hand, trying to
push the great creatures of the crowd from before her, and crying in his
brave little treble, “Arrah!” “Ar-rah!” “Ar-r-rah!”

As for Naomi, the coming of little black Ali was a wild delight to her.
Whatever Ali did, that would she do also. If he ran she would run; if he
sat she would sit; and meanwhile she would laugh with a heart of glee,
though she heard not what he said, and saw not what he did, and knew not
what he meant. At the time of the harvest, when Ruth took them out into
the fields, she would ride on Ali's back, and snatch at the ears of
barley and leap in her seat and laugh, yet nothing would she see of the
yellow corn, and nothing would she hear of the song of the reapers, and
nothing would she know of the cries of Ali, who shouted to her while
he ran, forgetting in his playing that she heard him not. And at night,
when Ruth put them to bed in their little chamber, and Ali knelt with
his face towards Jerusalem, Naomi would kneel beside him with a reverent
air, and all her laughter would be gone. Then, as he prayed his prayer,
her little lips would move as if she were praying too, and her little
hands would be clasped together, and her little eyes would be upraised.

“God bless father, and mother, and Naomi, and everybody,” the black boy
would say.

And the little maid would touch his hands and hi throat, and pass her
fingers over his face from his eyelids to his lips, and then do as he
did, and in her silence seem to echo him.

Pretty and piteous sights! Who could look on them without tears? One
thing at least was clear if the soul of this child was in prison,
nevertheless it was alive; and if it was in chains, nevertheless it
could not die, but was immortal and unmaimed and waited only for the
hour when it should be linked to other souls, soul to soul in the chains
of speech. But the years went on, and Naomi grew in beauty and increased
in sweetness, but no angel came down to open the darkened windows of her
eyes, and draw aside the heavy curtains of her ears.



CHAPTER IV

THE DEATH OF RUTH


For all her joy and all her prettiness, Naomi was a burden which only
love could bear. To think of the girl by day, and to dream of her by
night, never to sit by her without pity of her helplessness, and never
to leave her without dread of the mischances that might so easily
befall, to see for her, to hear for her, to speak for her, truly the
tyranny of the burden was terrible.

Ruth sank under it. Through seven years she was eyes of the child's
eyes, and ears of her ears, and tongue of her tongue. After that her
own sight became dim, and her hearing faint. It was almost as if she had
spent them on Naomi in the yearning of dove and pity. Soon afterwards
her bodily strength failed her also, and then she knew that her time had
come, and that she was to lay down her burden for ever. But her burden
had become dear, and she clung to it. She could not look upon the child
and think it, that she, who had spent her strength for her from the
first, must leave her now to other love and tending. So she betook
herself to an upper room, and gave strict orders to Fatimah and Habeebah
that Naomi was to be kept from her altogether, that sight of the child's
helpless happy face might tempt her soul no more.

And there in her death-chamber Israel sat with her constantly, settling
his countenance steadfastly, and coming and going softly. He was more
constant than a slave, and more tender than a woman. His love was great,
but also he was eating out his big heart with remorse. The root of his
trouble was the child. He never talked of her, and neither did Ruth
dwell upon her name. Yet they thought of little else while they sat
together.

And even if they had been minded to talk of the child, what had they to
say of her? They had no memories to recall, no sweet childish sayings,
no simple broken speech, no pretty lisp--they had nothing to bring back
out of any harvest of the past of all the dear delicious wealth that
lies stored in the treasure-houses of the hearts of happy parents. That
way everything was a waste. Always, as Israel entered her room, Ruth
would say, “How is the child?” And always Israel would answer, “She is
well.” But, if at that moment Naomi's laughter came up to them from the
patio, where she played with Ali, they would cover their faces and be
silent.

It was a melancholy parting. No one came near them--neither Moor
nor Jew, neither Rabbi nor elder. The idle women of the Mellah would
sometimes stand outside in the street and look up at their house,
knowing that the black camel of death was kneeling at their gate. Other
company they had none. In such solitude they passed four weeks, and when
the time of the end seemed near, Israel himself read aloud the prayer
for the dying, the prayer Shema' Yisrael, and Ruth repeated the words of
it after him.

Meantime, while Ruth lay in the upper chamber little Naomi sported and
played in the patio with Ali, but she missed her mother constantly. This
she made plain by many silent acts of helpless love that knew no way to
speak aloud. Thus she would lay flowers on the seats where her mother
had used to sit, and, if at night she found them untouched where she
had left them, her little face would fall, and her laughter die off her
lips; but if they had withered and some one had cast them into the oven,
she would laugh again and fetch other flowers from the fields, until
the house would be full of the odour of the meadow and the scent of the
hill.

And well they knew, who looked upon her then, whom she missed, and what
the question was that halted on her tongue; yet how could they answer
her? There was no way to do that until she herself knew how to ask.

But this she did on a day near to the end. It was evening, and she
was being put to bed by Habeebah, and had just risen from her innocent
pantomime of prayer beside Ali, when Israel, coming from Ruth's chamber,
entered the children's room. Then, touching with her hand the seat
whereon Ruth had used to sit, Naomi laid down her head on the pillow,
and then rose and lay down again, and rose yet again and rose yet again
lay down, and then came to where Israel was and stood before him. And at
that Israel knew that the soul of his helpless child had asked him, as
plainly as words of the tongue can speak, how often she should lie to
sleep at night and rise to play in the morning before her mother came to
her again.

The tears gushed into his eyes, and he left the children and returned to
his wife's chamber.

“Ruth,” he cried, “call the child to you, I beseech you!”

“No, no, no!” cried Ruth.

“Let her come to you and touch you and kiss you, and be with you before
it is too late,” said Israel. “She misses you, and fills the house with
flowers for you. It breaks my heart to see her.”

“It will break mine also,” said Ruth.

But she consented that Naomi should be called, and Fatimah was sent to
fetch her.

The sun was setting, and through the window which looked out to the
west, over the river and the orange orchards and the palpitating plains
beyond, its dying rays came into the room in a bar of golden light. It
fell at that instant on Ruth's face, and she was white and wasted. And
through the other window of the room, which looked out over the Mellah
into the town, and across the market-place to the mosque and to the
battery on the hill, there came up from the darkening streets below the
shuffle of the feet of a crowd and the sound of many voices. The Jews
of Tetuan were trooping back to their own little quarter, that their
Moorish masters might lock them into it for the night.

Naomi was already in bed, and Fatimah brought her away in her
nightdress. She seemed to know where she was to be taken, for she
laughed as Fatimah held her by the hand, and danced as she was led to
her mother's chamber. But when she was come to the door of it, suddenly
her laughter ceased, and her little face sobered, as if something in the
close abode of pain had troubled the senses that were left to her.

It is, perhaps, the most touching experience of the deaf and blind that
no greeting can ever welcome them. When Naomi stood like a little white
vision at the threshold of the room, Israel took her hand in silence,
and drew her up to the pillow of the bed where her mother rested, and in
silence Ruth brought the child to her bosom.

For a moment Naomi seemed to be perplexed. She touched her mother's
fingers, and they were changed, for they had grown thin and long. Then
she felt her face, and that was changed also, for it was become withered
and cold. And, missing the grasp of one and the smile of the other, she
first turned her little head aside as one that listens closely, and then
gently withdrew herself from the arms that held her.

Ruth had watched her with eyes that overflowed, and now she burst into
sobs outright.

“The child does not know me!” she cried. “Did I not tell you it would
break my heart?”

“Try her again,” said Israel; “try her again.”

Ruth devoured her tears, and called on Fatimah to bring the child back
to her side. Then, loosening the necklace that was about her own neck,
she bound it about the neck of Naomi, and also the bracelets that were
on her wrists she unclasped and clasped them on the wrists of the child.
This she did that Naomi might remember the hands that had been kind to
her always. But when the child felt the ornaments she seemed only to
know, by the quick instinct of a girl, that she was decked out bravely,
and giving no thought to Ruth, who waited and watched for the grasp of
recognition and the kiss of joy, she withdrew herself again from her
mother's arms, and bounded into the middle of the room, and suddenly
began to laugh and to dance.

The sun's dying light, which had rested on Ruth's wasted face, now
glistened and sparkled on the jewels of the child, and glowed on
her blind eyes, and gleamed on her fair hair, and reddened her white
nightdress, while she danced and laughed to her mother's death. Nothing
did the child know of death, any more than Adam himself before Abel was
slain, and it was almost as if a devil out of hell had entered into her
innocent heart and possessed it, that she might make a mock of the dying
of the dearest friend she had known on earth.

On and on she danced, to no measure and no time, and not with a child's
uncertain step which breaks down at motion as its tongue breaks down
at speech, but wildly and deliriously. The room was darkening fast, but
still across the nether end, by the foot of the bed, streamed the dull
red bar of sunlight with the little red figure leaping and prancing and
laughing in the midst of it.

With an awful cry Ruth fell back on the pillow and turned her eyes to
the wall. The black woman dropped her head that she might not see. And
Israel covered his face and groaned in his tearless agony, “O Lord God,
long hast Thou chastised me with whips, and now I am chastised with
scorpions!”

Ruth recovered herself quickly. “Bring her to me again!” she faltered;
and once more Fatimah brought Naomi back to the bedside. Then, embracing
and kissing the child, and seeming to forget in the torment of her
trouble that Naomi could not hear her, she cried, “It's your mother,
Naomi! your mother, darling, though so sick and changed! Don't you know
her, Naomi? Your mother, your own mother, sweet one, your dear mother
who loves you so, and must leave you now and see you no more!”

Now what it was in that wild plea that touched the consciousness of the
child at last, only God Himself can say. But first Naomi's cheeks grew
pale at the embrace of the arms that held her, and then they reddened,
and then her little nervous fingers grasped at Ruth's hands again, and
then her little lips trembled, and then, at length, she flung herself
along Ruth's bosom and nestled close in her embrace.

Ruth fell back on her pillow now with a cry of Joy; the black woman
stood and wept by the wall and Israel, unable to bear up his heart any
longer was melted and unmanned. The sun had gone down, and the room was
darkening rapidly, for the twilight in that land is short; the streets
were quiet, and the mooddin of the neighbouring minaret was chanting in
the silence, “God is great, God is great!”

After awhile the little one fell asleep at her mother's bosom, and,
seeing this, Fatimah would have lifted her away and carried her back
to her own bed; but Ruth said, “No; leave her, let me have her with me
while I may.”

“No one shall take her from you,” said Israel.

Then she gazed down at the child's face and said, “It is hard to leave
her and never once to have heard her voice.”

“That is the bitterest cup of all,” said Israel.

“I shall not return to her,” said Ruth, “but she shall come to me, and
then, perhaps--who knows?--perhaps in the resurrection I shall hear it.”

Israel made no answer.

Ruth gazed down at the child again, and said, “My helpless darling! Who
will care for you when I am gone?”

“Rest, rest, and sleep!” said Israel.

“Ah, yes, I know,” said Ruth. “How foolish of me! You are her father,
and you love her also. Yet promise me--promise--”

“For love and tending she shall never lack,” said Israel. “And now lie
you still, my dearest; lie still and sleep.”

She stretched out her hand to him. “Yes, that was what I meant,” she
said, and smiled. Then a shadow crossed her face in the gloom. “But when
I am gone,” she said, “will Naomi ever know that her mother who is dead
had wronged her?”

“You have never wronged her,” said Israel. “Have done, oh, have done!”

“God punished us for our prayer, my husband,” said Ruth.

“Peace, peace!” said Israel.

“But God is good,” said Ruth, “and surely He will not afflict our child
much longer.”

“Hush! Hush! You will awaken her,” said Israel, not thinking what he
said. “Now lie still and sleep, dearest. You are tired also.”

She lay quiet for a time, gazing, while the light remained, into the
face of the sleeping child, and listening, when the light failed, to her
gentle breathing. Then she babbled and crooned over her with a childish
joy. “Yes, yes, father is right, and mother must lie quiet--very quiet,
and so her little Naomi will sleep long--very long, and wake happy and
well in the morning. How bonny she will look! How fresh and rosy!”

She paused a moment. Her laboured breathing came quick and fast. “But
shall I be here to see her? shall I?”

She paused again, and then, as though to banish thought, she began to
sing in a low voice that was like a moan. Presently her singing ceased,
and she spoke again, but this time in broken whispers.

“How soft and glossy her hair is! I wonder if Fatimah will remember to
wash it every day. She should twist it around her fingers to keep it in
pretty curls. . . . Oh, why did God make my child so beautiful?. . . .
Dear me, her morning frock wanted stitching at the sleeves, it's a
chance if Habeebah has seen to it. Then there's her underclothing. . . .
Will she be deaf and blind and dumb always? I wonder if I shall see her
when I. . . . They say that angels are sent. . . . Yes, yes, that's it,
when I am there--there--I will go to God and say, 'O Lord! my little
girl whom I have left behind, she is. . . . You would never think, O
Lord, how many things may happen to one like her. Let me go--only let me
watch over her--O Lord, let me be her guar--'”

Her weakness had conquered her, and she was quiet at last. Israel sat in
silence by the post of the bed. His heart was surging itself out of his
choking breast. The black woman stood somewhere by the wall. After a
time Ruth seemed to awake as from sleep. She was in great excitement.

“Israel, Israel!” she cried in a voice of joy, “I have seen a vision. It
was Naomi. She was no longer deaf and blind and dumb. She was grown to
be a woman, but I knew her instantly. Not a woman either, but a young
maiden, and so beautiful, so beautiful! Yes, and she could see and hear
and speak.”

Israel thought Ruth had become delirious, and he tried to soothe her,
but her agitation was not to be overcome. “The Lord hath seen our
tears at last,” she cried. “He has put our sin beneath His feet. We are
forgiven. It will be well with the child yet.”

Israel did not try to gainsay her, and at sight and sound of her joy,
seeing it so beautiful, yet thinking it so vain, he could not help at
last but weep. Presently she became quiet again, and then again, after a
little while, she woke as from a sleep.

“I am ready now,” she said in a whisper, “quite ready, sweet Heaven,
quite, quite ready now.”

Then with her one free hand she felt in the darkness for Israel, where
he sat beside her, and touching his forehead she smoothed it, and said
very softly, “Farewell, my husband!”

And Israel answered her, “Farewell!”

“Good-night!” she whispered.

And Israel drew down her hand from his forehead to his lips and sobbed,
and said, “Good-night, beloved!”

Then she put her white lips to the child's blind eyes, and at that
moment the spirit of the Lord came to her, and the Lord took her, and
she died.

When lamps had been brought into the room, and Fatimah saw that the end
had come, she would have lifted Naomi from Ruth's bosom, but the child
awoke as she was being moved, and clasped her little fingers about the
dead mother's neck and covered the mouth with kisses. And when she felt
that the lips did not answer to her lips, and that the arms which had
held her did not hold her any longer, but fell away useless, she clung
the closer, and tears started to her eyes.



CHAPTER V

RUTH'S BURIAL


The people of Tetuan were not melted towards Israel by the depth of his
sorrow and the breadth of shadow that lay upon him. By noon of the day
following the night of Ruth's death, Israel knew that he was to be left
alone. It was a rule of the Mellah that on notice being given of a death
in their quarter, the clerk of the synagogue should publish it at the
first service thereafter, in order that a body of men, called the Hebra
Kadisha of Kabranim, the Holy Society of Buriers, might straightway make
arrangements for burial. Early prayers had been held in the synagogue
at eight o'clock that morning, and no one had yet come near to Israel's
house. The men of the Hebra were going about their ordinary occupations.
They knew nothing of Ruth's death by official announcement. The clerk
had not published it. Israel remembered with bitterness that notice
of it had not been sent. Nevertheless, the fact was known throughout
Tetuan. There was not a water-carrier in the market-place but had taken
it to each house he called at, and passed it to every man he met. Little
groups of idle Jewish women had been many hours congregated in the
streets outside, talking of it in whispers and looking up at the
darkened windows with awe. But the synagogue knew nothing of it.
Israel had omitted the customary ceremony, and in that omission lay the
advantage of his enemies. He must humble himself and send to them. Until
he did so they would leave him alone.

Israel did not send. Never once since the birth of Naomi had he crossed
the threshold of the synagogue. He would not cross it now, whether in
body or in spirit. But he was still a Jew, with Jewish customs, if he
had lost the Jewish faith, and it was one of the customs of the Jews
that a body should be buried within twenty-four hours, at farthest, from
the time of death. He must do something immediately. Some help must be
summoned. What help could it be?

It was useless to think of the Muslimeen. No believer would lend a hand
to dig a grave for an unbeliever, or to make apparel for his dead. It
was just as idle to think of the Jews. If the synagogue knew nothing of
this burial, no Jew in the Mellah would be found so poor that he would
have need to know more. And of Christians of any sort or condition there
were none in all Tetuan.

The gall of Israel's heart rose to his throat. Was he to be left alone
with his dead wife? Did his enemies wish to see him howk out her grave
with his own hands? Or did they expect him to come to them with bowed
forehead and bended knee? Either way their reckoning was a mistake.
They might leave him terribly and awfully alone--alone in his hour of
mourning even as they had left him alone in his hour of rejoicing, when
he had married the dear soul who was dead. But his strength and energy
they should not crush: his vital and intellectual force they should
not wither away. Only one thing they could do to touch him--they could
shrivel up his last impulse of sweet human sympathy. They were doing it
now.

When Israel had put matters to himself so, he despatched a message
to the Governor at the Kasbah, and received, in answer, six State
prisoners, fettered in pairs, under the guard of two soldiers.

The burial took place within the limit of twenty-four hours prescribed
by Jewish custom. It was twilight when the body was brought down from
the upper room to the patio. There stood the coffin on a trestle that
had been raised for it on chairs standing back to back. And there, too,
sat Israel, with Naomi and little black Ali beside him.

Israel's manner was composed; his face was as firm as a rock, and
his dress was more costly than Tetuan had ever seen him wear before.
Everything that related to the burial he had managed himself, down to
the least or poorest detail. But there was nothing poor about it in
the larger sense. Israel was a rich man now, and he set no value on his
riches except to subdue the fate that had first beaten him down and to
abash the enemies who still menaced him. Nothing was lacking that money
could buy in Tetuan to make this burial an imposing ceremony. Only one
thing it wanted--it wanted mourners, and it had but one.

Unlike her father, little Naomi was visibly excited. She ran to and fro,
clutched at Israel's clothes and seemed to look into his face, clasped
the hand of little Ali and held it long as if in fear. Whether she knew
what work was afoot, and, if she knew it, by what channel of soul or
sense she learnt it, no man can say. That she was conscious of the
presence of many strangers is certain, and when the men from the Kasbah
brought the roll of white linen down the stairway, with the two black
women clinging to it, kissing its fringe and wailing over it, she broke
away from Israel and rushed in among them with a startled cry, and her
little white arms upraised. But whatever her impulse, there was no need
to check her. The moment she had touched her mother she crept back in
dread to her father's side.

“God be gracious to my father, look at that,” whispered Fatimah.

“My child, my poor child,” said Israel, “is there but one thing in life
that speaks to you? And is that death? Oh, little one, little one!”

It was a strange procession which then passed out of the patio. Four of
the prisoners carried the coffin on their shoulders, walking in pairs
according to their fetters. They were gaunt and bony creatures. Hunger
had wasted their sallow cheeks, and the air of noisome dungeons had
sunken their rheumy eyes. Their clothes were soiled rags, and over them,
and concealing them down to their waists and yet lower, hung the deep,
rich, velvet pall, with its long silk fringes. In front walked the two
remaining prisoners, each bearing a great plume in his left hand--the
right arm, as well as the right leg, being chained. On either side was a
soldier, carrying a lighted lantern, which burnt small and feeble in the
twilight, and last of all came Israel himself, unsupported and alone.
Thus they passed through the little crowd of idlers that had congregated
at the door, through the streets of the Mellah and out into the
marketplace, and up the narrow lane that leads to the chief town gate.

There is something in the very nature of power that demands homage, and
the people of Tetuan could not deny it to Israel. As the procession went
through the town they cleared a way for it, and they were silent until
it had gone. Within the gate of the Mellah, a shocket was killing fowls
and taking his tribute of copper coins, but he stopped his work and fell
back as the procession approached. A blind beggar crouching at the other
side of the gate was reciting passages of the Koran, and two Arabs close
at his elbow were wrangling over a game at draughts which they were
playing by the light of a flare, but both curses and Koran ceased as the
procession passed under the arch. In the market-place a Soosi juggler
was performing before a throng of laughing people, and a story-teller
was shrieking to the twang of his ginbri; but the audience of the
juggler broke up as the procession appeared, and the ginbri of the
storyteller was no more heard. The hammering in the shops of
the gunsmiths was stopped, and the tinkling of the bells of the
water-carriers was silenced. Mules bringing wood from the country were
dragged out of the path, and the town asses, with their panniers full of
street-filth, were drawn up by the wall. From the market-place and out
of the shops, out of the houses and out of the mosque itself, the people
came trooping in crowds, and they made a long close line on either side
of the course which the procession must take. And through this avenue
of onlookers the strange company made its way--the two prisoners
bearing the plumes, the four others bearing the coffin, the two soldiers
carrying the lanterns, and Israel last of all, unsupported and alone.
Nothing was heard in the silence of the people but the tramp of the feet
of the six men, and the clank of their chains.

The light of the lanterns was on the faces of some of them, and every
one knew them for what they were. It was on the face of Israel also, yet
he did not flinch. His head was held steadily upward; he looked neither
to the right nor to the left, but strode firmly along.

The Jewish cemetery was outside the town walls, and before the
procession came to it the darkness had closed in. Its flat white
tombstones, all pointing toward Jerusalem, lay in the gloom like a flock
of sheep asleep among the grass. It had no gate but a gap in the fence,
and no fence but a hedge of the prickly pear and the aloe.

Israel had opened a grave for Ruth beside the grave of the old rabbi
her father. He had asked no man's permission to do so, but if no one had
helped at that day's business, neither had any one dared to hinder. And
when the coffin was set down by the grave-side no ceremony did Israel
forget and none did he omit. He repeated the Kaddesh, and cut the notch
in his kaftan; he took from his breast the little linen bag of the white
earth of the land of promise and laid it under the head; he locked a
padlock and flung away the key. Last of all, when the body had been
taken out of the coffin and lowered to its long home, he stepped in
after it, and called on one of the soldiers to lend him a lantern. And
then, kneeling at the foot of his dead wife, he touched her with both
his hands, and spoke these words in a clear, firm voice, looking down
at her where she lay in the veil that she had used to wear in the
synagogue, and speaking to her as though she heard: “Ruth, my wife, my
dearest, for the cruel wrong which I did you long ago when I suffered
you to marry me, being a man such as I was, under the ban of my people,
forgive me now, my beloved, and ask God to forgive me also.”

The dark cemetery, the six prisoners in their clanking irons, the two
soldiers with their lanterns the open grave, and this strong-hearted
man kneeling within it, that he might do his last duty, according to the
custom of his race and faith, to her whom he had wronged and should meet
no more until the resurrection itself reunited them! The traffic of the
streets had begun again by this time, and between the words which Israel
had spoken the low hum of many voices had come over the dark town walls.

The six prisoners went back to the Kasbah with joyful hearts, for
each carried with him a paper which procured his freedom on the day
following. But Israel returned to his home with a soured and darkened
mind. As he had plucked his last handful of the grass, and flung it over
his shoulder, saying, “They shall spring in the cities as the grass in
the earth,” he had asked himself what it mattered to him though all the
world were peopled, now that she, who had been all the world to him, was
dead. God had left him as a lonely pilgrim in a dreary desert. Only one
glimpse of human affection had he known as a man, and here it was taken
from him for ever.

And when he remembered Naomi, he quarrelled with God again. She was
a helpless exile among men, a creature banished from all human
intercourse, a living soul locked in a tabernacle of flesh. Was it a
good God who had taken the mother from such a child--the child from such
a mother? Israel was heart-smitten, and his soul blasphemed. It was not
God but the devil that ruled the world. It was not justice but evil that
governed it.

Thus did this outcast man rebel against God, thinking of the child's
loss and of his own; but nevertheless by the child itself he was yet to
be saved from the devil's snare, and the ways wherein this sweet flower,
fresh from God's hand, wrought upon his heart to redeem it were very
strange and beautiful.



CHAPTER VI

THE SPIRIT-MAID


The promise which Israel made to Ruth at her death, that Naomi should
not lack for love and tending, he faithfully fulfilled. From that time
forward he became as father and mother both to the child.

At the outset of his charge he made a survey of her condition, and found
it more terrible than imagination of the mind could think or words of
the tongue express. It was easy to say that she was deaf and dumb and
blind, but it was hard to realise what so great an affliction implied.
It implied that she was a little human sister standing close to the rest
of the family of man, yet very far away from them. She was as much apart
as if she had inhabited a different sphere. No human sympathy could
reach her in joy or pain and sorrow. She had no part to play in life. In
the midst of a world of light she was in a land of darkness, and she was
in a world of silence in the midst of a land of sweet sounds. She was a
living and buried soul.

And of that soul itself what did Israel know? He knew that it had
memory, for Naomi had remembered her mother; and he knew that it had
love, for she had pined for Ruth, and clung to her. But what were love
and memory without sight and speech? They were no more than a magnet
locked in a casket--idle and useless to any purposes of man or the
world.

Thinking of this, Israel realised for the first time how awful was the
affliction of his motherless girl. To be blind was to be afflicted once,
but to be both blind and deaf was not only to be afflicted twice, but
twice ten thousand times, and to be blind and deaf and dumb was not
merely to be afflicted thrice, but beyond all reckonings of human
speech.

For though Naomi had been blind, yet, if she could have had hearing, her
father might have spoken with her, and if she had sorrows he must have
soothed them, and if she had joys he must have shared them, and in this
beautiful world of God, so full of things to look upon and to love, he
must have been eyes of her eyes that could not see. On the other hand,
though Naomi had been deaf, yet if she could have had sight her father
might have held intercourse with her by the light of her eyes, and if
she felt pain he must have seen it, and if she had found pleasure he
must have known it, and what man is, and what woman is, and what the
world and what the sea and what the sky, would have been as an open book
for her to read. But, being blind and deaf together, and, by fault of
being deaf, being dumb as well, what word was to describe the desolation
of her state, the blank void of her isolation--cut off, apart, aloof,
shut in, imprisoned, enchained, a soul without communion with other
souls: alive, and yet dead?

Thus, realising Naomi's condition in; the deep infirmity of her nature,
Israel set himself to consider how he could reach her darkened and
silent soul. And first he tried to learn what good gifts were left to
her, that he might foster them to her advantage and nourish them to his
own great comfort and joy. Yet no gift whatever could he find in her but
the one gift only whereof he had known from the beginning--the gift of
touch and feeling. With this he must make her to see, or else her light
should always be darkness, and with this he must make her to hear, or
silence should be her speech for ever.

Then he remembered that during his years in England he had heard strange
stories of how the dumb had been made to speak though they could not
hear, and the blind and deaf to understand and to answer. So he sent
to England for many books written on the treatment of these children
of affliction, and when they were come he pondered them closely and was
thrilled by the marvellous works they described. But when he came to
practise the precepts they had given him, his spirits flagged, for the
impediments were great. Time after time he tried, and failed always,
to touch by so much as one shaft of light the hidden soul of the child
through its tenement of flesh and blood. Neither the simplest thought
nor the poorest element of an idea found any way to her mind, so dense
were the walls of the prison that encompassed it. “Yes” was a mystery
that could not at first be revealed to her, and “No” was a problem
beyond her power to apprehend. Smiles and frowns were useless to teach
her. No discipline could be addressed to her mind or heart. Except mere
bodily restraint, no control could be imposed upon her. She was swayed
by her impulses alone.

Israel did not despair. If he was broken down today he strengthened his
hands for tomorrow. At length he had got so far, after a world of toil
and thought, that Naomi knew when he patted her head that it was for
approval, and when he touched her hand it was for assent. Then he
stopped very suddenly. His hope had not drooped, and neither had his
energy failed, but the conviction had fastened upon him that such effort
in his case must be an offence against Heaven. Naomi was not merely an
infirm creature from the left hand of Nature; she was an afflicted being
from the right hand of God. She was a living monument of sin that was
not her own. It was useless to go farther. The child must be left where
God had placed her.

But meanwhile, if Naomi lacked the senses of the rest of the human
kind, she seemed to communicate with Nature by other organs than they
possessed. It was as if the spiritual world itself must have taught her,
and from that source alone could she have imbibed her power. To tell of
all she could do to guide her steps, and to minister to her pleasures,
and to cherish her affections, would be to go beyond the limit of
belief. Truly it seemed as if Naomi, being blind with her bodily eyes,
could yet look upon a light that no one else could see, and, being deaf
with her bodily ears, could yet listen to voices that no one else could
hear.

Thus, if she came skipping through the corridor of the patio, she knew
when any one approached her, for she would hold out her hands and stop.
Nay; but she knew also who it would be as well as if her eyes or ears
had taught her; for always, if it was her father, she reached out her
hands to take his left hand in both of hers, and then she pressed it
against her cheek; and always, if it was little Ali, she curved her arms
to encircle his neck; and always, if it was Fatimah, she leapt up to
her bosom; and always, if it was Habeebah, she passed her by. Did she go
with Ali into the streets, she knew the Mellah gate from the gate of
the town, and the narrow lanes from the open Sok. Did she pass the lofty
mosque in the market-place, she knew it from the low shops that nestled
under and behind and around. Did a troop of mules and camels come near
her, she knew them from a crowd of people; and did she pass where two
streets crossed, she would stand and face both ways.

And as the years grew she came to know all places within and around
Tetuan, the town of the Moors and the Mellah of the Jews, the Kasbah
and the narrow lane leading up to it, the fort on the hill and the river
under the town walls, the mountains on either side of the valley, and
even some of their rocky gorges. She could find her way among them all
without help or guidance, and no control could any one impose upon her
to keep her out of the way of harm. While Ali was a little fellow he was
her constant companion, always ready for any adventure that her unquiet
heart suggested; but when he grew to be a boy, and was sent to school
every day early and late, she would fare forth alone save for a tiny
white goat which her father had bought to be another playfellow.

And because feeling was sight to her, and touch was hearing, and the
crown of her head felt the winds of the heavens and the soles of her
feet felt the grass of the fields, she loved best to go bareheaded
whether the sun was high or the air was cool, and barefooted also, from
the rising of the morning until the coming of the stars. So, casting off
her slippers and the great straw hat which a Jewish maiden wears, and
clad in her white woollen shawl, wrapped loosely about her in folds of
airy grace, and with the little goat going before her, though she could
neither see nor hear it, she would climb the hill beyond the battery,
and stand on the summit, like a spirit poised in air. She could see
nothing of the green valley then stretched before her, or of the white
town lying below, with its domes and minarets, but she seemed to exult
in her lofty place, and to drink new life from the rush of mighty winds
about her. Then coming back to the dale, she would seem, to those who
looked up at her, with fear and with awe, to leap as the goat leapt
in the rocky places; and as a bird sweeps over the grass with wings
outstretched, so with her arms spread out, and her long fair hair flying
loose, she would sweep down the hill, as though her very tiptoes did not
touch it.

By what power she did these things no man could tell, except it were
the power of the spiritual world itself; but the distemper of the mind,
which loved such dangers, increased upon her as she grew from a child
into a maid, and it found new ways of strangeness. Thus, in the spring,
when the rain fell heavily, or in the winter, when the great winds were
abroad, or in the summer, when the lightning lightened and the thunder
thundered, her restless spirit seemed to be roused to sympathetic
tumults, and if she could escape the eyes that watched her she would run
and race in the tempest, and her eyes would be aglitter, and laughter
would be on her lips. Then Israel himself would go out to find her, and,
having found her in the pelting storm without covering on her head or
shoes on her feet, he would fetch her home by the hand, and as they
passed through the streets together his forehead would be bowed and his
eyes bent down.

But it was not always that Naomi made her father ashamed. More often her
joyful spirit cheered him, for above all things else she was a creature
of joy. A circle of joy seemed to surround her always. Her heart in its
darkness was full of radiance. As she grew her comeliness increased,
though this was strange and touching in her beauty, that her face did
not become older with her years, but was still the face of a child, with
a child's expression of sweetness through the bloom and flush of early
maidenhood. Her love of flowers increased also, and the sense of smell
seemed to come to her, for she filled the house with all fragrant
flowers in their season, twining them in wreaths about the white pillars
of the patio, and binding them in rings around the brown water-jars
that stood in it. And with the girl's expanding nature her love of dress
increased as well; but it was not a young maid's love of lovely things;
it was a wild passion for light, loose garments that swayed and swirled
in native grace about her. Truly she was a spirit of joy and gladness.
She was happy as a day in summer, and fresh as a dewy morning in spring.
The ripple of her laughter was like sunshine. A flood of sunshine seemed
to follow in the air wheresoever she went. And certainly for Israel, her
father, she was as a sunbeam gathering sunshine into his lonely house.

Nevertheless, the sunbeam had its cloud-shapes of gloom, and if Israel
in his darker hours hungered for more human company, and wished that
the little playfellow of the angels which had come down to his dwelling
could only be his simple human child, he sometimes had his wish, and
many throbs of anguish with it. For often it happened, and especially
at seasons when no winds were stirring, and blank peace and a doleful
silence haunted the air, that Naomi would seem to fall into a sick
longing from causes that were beyond Israel's power to fathom. Then her
sweet face would sadden, and her beautiful blind eyes would fill, and
her pretty laughter would echo no more through the house. And sometimes,
in the dead of the night, she would rise from her bed and go through
the dark corridors, for darkness and light were as one to her, until she
came to Israel's room, and he would awake from his sleep to find her,
like a little white vision, standing by his bedside. What she wanted
there he could never know, for neither had he power to ask nor she to
answer, whether she were sick or in pain, or whether in her sleep she
had seen a face from the invisible world, and heard a voice that called
her away, or whether her mother's arms had seemed to be about her once
again and then to be torn from her afresh, and she had come to him on
awakening in her trouble, not knowing what it is to dream, but thinking
all evil dreams to be true fact and new sorrow. So, with a sigh, he
would arise and light his lamp and lead her back to her bed, and more
scalding than the tears that would be standing in Naomi's eyes would be
the hot drops that would gush into his own.

“My poor darling,” he would say, “can you not tell me your trouble, that
I may comfort you? No, no, she cannot tell me, and I cannot comfort her.
My darling, my darling.”

Most of all when such things befell would Israel long for some miracle
out of heaven to find a way to the little maiden's mind that she might
ask and answer and know, yet he dared not to pray for it, for still
greater than his pity for the child was his fear of the wrath of God.
And out of this fear there came to him at length an awful and terrible
thought: though so severed on earth, his child and he, yet before the
bar of judgment they would one day be brought together, and then how
should it stand with her soul?

Naomi knew nothing of God, having no way of speech with man. Would God
condemn her for that, and cast her out for ever? No, no, no! God would
not ask her for good works in the land of silence, and for labour in the
land of night. She had no eyes to see God's beautiful world, and no ears
to hear His holy word. God had created her so, and He would not destroy
what He had made. Far rather would He look with love and pity on His
little one, so long and sorely tried on earth, and send her at last to
be a blessed saint in heaven.

Israel tried to comfort himself so, but the effort was vain. He was a
Jew to the inmost fibre of his being, and he answered himself out of his
own mouth that it was his own sinful wish, and not God's will, that
had sent Naomi into the world as she was. Then, on the day of the great
account, how should he answer to her for her soul?

Visions stood up before him of endless retribution for the soul that
knew not God. These were the most awful terrors of his sleepless nights,
but at length peace came to him, for he saw his path of duty. It was his
duty to Naomi that he should tell her of God and reveal the word of the
Lord to her! What matter if she could not hear? Though she had senses as
the sands of the seashore, yet in the way of light the Lord alone could
lead her. What matter though she could not see? The soul was the eye
that saw God, and with bodily eyes had no man seen Him.

So every day thereafter at sunset Israel took Naomi by the hand and led
her to an upper room, the same wherein her mother died, and, fetching
from a cupboard of the wall the Book of the Law, he read to her of
the commandments of the Lord by Moses, and of the Prophets, and of the
Kings. And while he read Naomi sat in silence at his feet, with his one
free hand in both of her hands, clasped close against her cheek.

What the little maid in her darkness thought of this custom, what
mystery it was to her and wherefore, only the eye that looks into
darkness could see; but it was so at length that as soon as the sun had
set--for she knew when the sun was gone--Naomi herself would take her
father by the hand, and lead him to the upper room, and fetch the book
to his knees.

And sometimes, as Israel read, an evil spirit would seem to come to him,
and make a mock at him, and say, “The child is deaf and hears not--go
read your book in the tombs!” But he only hardened his neck and laughed
proudly. And, again, sometimes the evil spirit seemed to say, “Why waste
yourself in this misspent desire? The child is buried while she is still
alive, and who shall roll away the stone?” But Israel only answered, “It
is for the Lord to do miracles, and the Lord is mighty.”

So, great in his faith, Israel read to Naomi night after night, and when
his spirit was sore of many taunts in the day his voice would be hoarse,
and he would read the law which says, “_Thou shalt not curse the deaf,
nor put a stumbling-block before the blind._” But when his heart was
at peace his voice would be soft, and he would read of the child Samuel
sanctified to the Lord in the temple, and how the Lord called him and he
answered--

“_And it came to pass at that time, when Eli was laid down in his place,
and his eyes began to wax dim, that he could not see; and ere the lamp
of God went out in the temple of the Lord, where the Ark of God was,
and Samuel was laid down to sleep, that the Lord called Samuel, and he
answered, Here am I. And he ran unto Eli and said, Here am I, for thou
calledst me. And he said, I called not; lie down again. And he went and
lay down. And the Lord called yet again, Samuel. And Samuel rose and
went to Eli and said, Here am I for thou didst call me. And he answered,
I called not my son; lie down again. Now Samuel did not yet know the
Lord, neither was the word of the Lord yet revealed to him._”

And, having finished his reading, Israel would close the book, and sing
out of the Psalms of David the psalm which says, “It is good for me that
I have been in trouble, that I may learn Thy statutes.”

Thus, night after night, when the sun was gone down, did Israel read
of the law and sing of the Psalms to Naomi, his daughter, who was both
blind and deaf. And though Naomi heard not, and neither did she see, yet
in their silent hour together there was another in their chamber always
with them--there was a third, for there was God.



CHAPTER VII

THE ANGEL IN ISRAEL'S HOUSE


When Israel had been some twenty years at Tetuan, Naomi being then
fourteen years of age, Ben Aboo, the Basha, married a Christian wife.
The woman's name was Katrina. She was a Spaniard by birth, and had
first come to Morocco at the tail of a Spanish embassy, which travelled
through Tetuan from Ceuta to the Sultan at Fez. What her belongings
were, and what her antecedents had been, no one appeared to know, nor
did Ben Aboo himself seem to care. She answered all his present needs in
her own person, which was ample in its proportions and abundant in its
charms.

In marrying Ben Aboo, the wily Katrina imposed two conditions. The first
was, that he should put away the full Mohammedan complement of
four Moorish wives, whom he had married already as well as the many
concubines that he had annexed in his way through life, and now kept
lodged in one unquiet nest in the women's hidden quarter of the Palace.
The second condition was, that she herself should never be banished
to such seclusion, but, like the wife of any European governor, should
openly share the state of her husband.

Ben Aboo was in no mood to stand on the rights of a strict Mohammedan,
and he accepted both of her conditions. The first he never meant to
abide by, but the second she took care he should observe, and, as a
prelude to that public life which she intended to live by his side, she
insisted on a public marriage.

They were married according to the rites of the Catholic Church by a
Franciscan friar settled at Tangier, and the marriage festival lasted
six days. Great was the display, and lavish the outlay. Every morning
the cannon of the fort fired a round of shot from the hill, every
evening the tribesmen from the mountains went through their feats of
powder-play in the market-place, and every night a body of Aissawa from
Mequinez yelled and shrieked in the enclosure called the M'salla, near
the Bab er-Remoosh. Feasts were spread in the Kasbah, and relays of
guests from among the chief men of the town were invited daily to
partake of them.

No man dared to refuse his invitation, or to neglect the tribute of a
present, though the Moors well knew that they were lending the light
of their countenance to a brazen outrage on their faith, and though
it galled the hearts of the Jews to make merry at the marriage of a
Christian and a Muslim--no man except Israel, and he excused himself
with what grace he could, being in no mood for rejoicing, but sick with
sorrow of the heart.

The Spanish woman was not to be gainsaid. She had taken her measure of
the man, and had resolved that a servant so powerful as Israel should
pay her court and tribute before all. Therefore she caused him to be
invited again; but Israel had taken his measure of the woman, and with
some lack of courtesy he excused himself afresh.

Katrina was not yet done. She was a creature of resource, and having
heard of Naomi with strange stories concerning her, she devised a
children's feast for the last day of the marriage festival, and
caused Ben Aboo to write to Israel a formal letter, beginning “To our
well-beloved the excellent Israel ben Oliel, Praise to the one God,”
 and setting forth that on the morrow, when the “Sun of the world” should
“place his foot in the stirrup of speed,” and gallop “from the kingdom
of shades,” the Governor would “hold a gathering of delight” for all the
children of Tetuan and he, Israel, was besought to “lighten it with the
rays of his face, rivalled only by the sun,” and to bring with him
his little daughter Naomi, whose arrival “similar to a spring breeze,”
 should “dissipate the dark night of solitude and isolation.” This
despatch written in the common cant of the people, concluded with
quotations from the Prophet on brotherly love and a significant and
more sincere assurance that the Basha would not admit of excuses “of the
thickness of a hair.”

When Israel received the missive, his anger was hot and furious. He
leapt to the conclusion that, in demanding the presence of Naomi, the
Spanish woman, who must know of the child's condition desired only to
make a show of it. But, after a fume, he put that thought from him as
uncharitable and unwarranted, and resolved to obey the summons.

And, indeed, if he had felt any further diffidence, the sight of Naomi's
own eagerness must have driven it away. The little maid seemed to know
that something unusual was going on. Troops of poor villagers from every
miserable quarter of the bashalic came into the town each day, beating
drums, firing long guns, driving their presents before them--bullocks,
cows, and sheep--and trying to make believe that they rejoiced and
were glad. Naomi appeared to be conscious of many tents pitched in
the marketplace, of denser crowds in the streets, and of much bustle
everywhere.

Also she seemed to catch the contagion of little Ali's excitement. The
children of all the schools of the town, both Jewish and Moorish, had
been summoned through their Talebs to the festival; there was to be
dancing and singing and playing on musical instruments and Ali himself,
who had lately practised the kanoon--the lute, the harp--under his
teacher, was to show his skill before the Governor. Therefore, great
was the little black man's excitement, and, in the fever of it, he would
talk to every one of the event forthcoming--to Fatima, to Habeebah, and
often to Naomi also, until the memory of her infirmity would come to
him, or perhaps the derisive laugh of his schoolfellows would stop him,
and then, thinking they were laughing at the girl, he would fall on them
like a fury, and they would scamper away.

When the great day came, Ali went off to the Kasbah with his school and
Taleb, in the long procession of many schools and many Talebs. Every
child carried a present for the rich Basha; now a boy with a goat, then
a girl with a lamb, again a poor tattered mite with a hen, all cuddling
them close like pets they must part with, yet all looking radiantly
happy in their sweet innocency, which had no alloy of pain from the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil.

Israel took Naomi by the hand, but no present with either of them, and
followed the children, going past the booths, the blind beggars, the
lepers, and the shrieking Arabs that lay thick about the gate, through
the iron-clamped door, and into the quadrangle, where groups of women
stood together closely covered in their blankets--the mothers and
sisters of the children, permitted to see their little ones pass into
the Kasbah, but allowed to go no farther--then down the crooked passage,
past the tiny mosque, like a closet, and the bath, like a dungeon, and
finally into the pillared patio, paved and walled with tiles.

This was the place of the festival, and it was filled already with a
great company of children, their fathers and their teachers. Moors,
Arabs, Berbers, and Jews, clad in their various costumes of white
and blue and black and red--they were a gorgeous, a voluptuous, and,
perhaps, a beautiful spectacle in the morning sunlight.

As Israel entered, with Naomi by the hand, he was conscious that every
eye was on them, and as they passed through the way that was made
for them, he heard the whispered exclamations of the people. “Shoof!”
 muttered a Moor. “See!” “It's himself,” said a Jew. “And the child,”
 said another Jew. “Allah has smitten her,” said an Arab “Blind and
dumb and deaf,” said another Moor “God be gracious to my father!” said
another Arab.

Musicians were playing in the gallery that ran round the court, and
from the flat roof above it the women of the Governor's hareem, not yet
dispersed, his four lawful Mohammedan wives, and many concubines, were
gazing furtively down from behind their haiks. There was a fountain in
the middle of the patio, and at the farther end of it, within an
alcove that opened out of a horseshoe arch, beneath ceilings hung with
stalactites, against walls covered with silken haities, and on Rabat
rugs of many colours, sat Ben Aboo and his Christian bride.

It was there that Israel saw the Spaniard for the first time, and at
the instant of recognition he shivered as with cold. She was a handsome
woman, but plainly a heartless one--selfish, vain, and vulgar.

Ben Aboo hailed Israel with welcomes and peace-blessings, and Katrina
drew Naomi to her side.

“So this is the little maid of whom wonderful rumours are so rife?” said
Katrina.

Israel bent his head and shuddered at seeing the child at the woman's
feet.

“The darling is as fair as an angel,” said Katrina, and she kissed
Naomi.

The kiss seemed to Israel to smite his own cheeks like a blow.

Then the performances of the children began, and truly they made a
pretty and affecting sight; the white walls, the deep blue sky, the
black shadows of the gallery, the bright sunlight, the grown people
massed around the patio, and these sweet little faces coming and going
in the middle of it. First, a line of Moorish girls in their embroidered
hazzams dancing after their native fashion, bending and rising, twisting
and turning, but keeping their feet in the same place constantly. Then,
a line of Jewish girls in their kilted skirts dancing after the Jewish
manner tripping on their slippered toes, whirling and turning around
with rapid motions, and playing timbrels and tambourines held high above
their heads by their shapely arms and hands. Then passages of the
Koran chanted by a group of Moorish boys in their jellabs, purple and
chocolate and white, peaked above their red tarbooshes. Then a psalm by
a company of Jewish boys in their black skull-caps--a brave old song
of Zion sung by silvery young voices in an alien land. Finally, little
black Ali, led out by his teacher, with his diminutive Moorish harp in
his hands, showing no fear at all, but only a negro boy's shy looks of
pleasure--his head aside, his eyes gleaming, his white teeth glinting,
and his face aglow.

Now down to this moment Naomi, at the feet of the woman, had been
agitated and restless, sometimes rising, then sinking back, sometimes
playing with her nervous fingers, and then pushing off her slippers.
It was as though she was conscious of the fine show which was going
forward, and knew that they were children who were making it. Perhaps
the breath of the little ones beat her on the level of her cheeks, or
perhaps the light air made by the sweep of their garments was wafted to
her sensitive body. Whatsoever the sense whereby the knowledge came to
her, clearly it was there in her flushed and twitching face, which was
full of that old hunger for child-company which Israel knew too well.

But when little Ali was brought out and he began to play on his kanoon,
his harp, it was impossible to repress Naomi's excitement. The girl
leaped up from her place at the woman's feet, and with the utmost
rapidity of motion she passed like a gleam of light across the patio to
the boy's side. And, being there, she touched the harp as he played it,
and then a low cry came from her lips. Again she touched it, and her
eyes, though blind, seemed for an instant to flame like fire. Then, with
both her hands she clung to it, and with her lips and her tongue she
kissed it, while her whole body quivered like a reed in the wind.

Israel saw what she did, and his very soul trembled at the sight with
wild thoughts that did not dare to take the name of hope. As well as he
could in the confusion of his own senses he stepped forward to draw the
little maiden back but the wife of the Governor called on him to leave
her.

“Leave her!” she cried. “Let us see what the child will do!”

At that moment Ali's playing came to as end, and the boy let the harp
pass to Naomi's clinging fingers, and then, half sitting, half kneeling
on the ground beside it, the girl took it to herself. She caressed it,
she patted it with her hand, she touched its strings, and then a faint
smile crossed her rosy lips. She laid her cheek against it and touched
its strings again, and then she laughed aloud. She flung off her
slippers and the garment that covered her beautiful arms, and laid
her pure flesh against the harp wheresoever her flesh might cling, and
touched its strings once more, and then her very heart seemed to laugh
with delight.

Now, what is to follow will seem to be no better than a superstitious
saying, but true it is, nevertheless, and simple sooth for all it sounds
so strange, that though Naomi was deaf as the grave, and had never yet
heard music, and though she was untaught and knew nothing of the notes
of a harp to strike them yet she swept the strings to strange sounds
such as no man had ever listened to before and none could follow.

It was not music that the little maiden made to her ear, but only motion
to her body, and just as the deaf who are deaf alone are sometimes found
to take pleasure in all forms of percussion, and to derive from them
some of the sensations of sound--the trembling of the air after thunder,
the quivering of the earth after cannon, and the quaking of vast walls
after the ringing of mighty bells--so Naomi, who was blind as well and
had no sense save touch, found in her fingers, which had gathered up the
force of all the other senses, the power to reproduce on this instrument
of music the movement of things that moved about her--the patter of the
leaves of the fig-tree in the patio of her home, the swirl of the great
winds on the hill-top, the plash of rain on her face, and the rippling
of the levanter in her hair.

This was all the witchery of Naomi's playing, yet, because every emotion
in Nature had its harmony, so there was harmony of some wild sort in the
music that was struck by the girl's fingers out of the strings of the
harp. But, more than her music, which was perhaps, only a rhapsody of
sound, was the frenzy of the girl herself as she made it. She lifted
her head like a bird, her throat swelled, her bosom heaved, and as she
played, she laughed again and again.

There was something fascinating and magical in the spectacle of the
beautiful fair face aglow with joy, the rounded limbs (visible through
the robes) clinging to the sides of the harp, and the delicate white
fingers flying across the strings. There was something gruesome and
awful, as well, for the face of the girl was blind, and her ears heard
nothing of the sounds that her fingers were making.

Every eye was on her, and in the wide circle around every mouth was
agape. And when those who looked on and listened had recovered from
their first surprise, very strange and various were the whispered words
they passed between them. “Where has she learnt it?” asked a Moor.
“From her master himself,” muttered a Jew. “Who is it?” asked the Moor.
“Beelzebub,” growled the Jew. “God pity me, the evil eye is on her,”
 said an Arab. “God will show,” said a Shereef from Wazzan. “They say
her mother was a childless woman, and offered petitions for Hannah's
blessing at the tomb of Rabbi Amran.” “No,” said the Arab; “she sent her
girdle.” “Anyhow, the child is a saint,” whispered the Shereef. “No, but
a devil,” snorted the Jew.

“Brava, brava, brava!” cried the new wife of Ben Aboo, and she cheered
and laughed as the girl played. “What did I tell you?” she said, looking
toward her husband. “The child is not deaf, no, nor blind either. Oh,
it's a brave imposture! Brava, brave!”

Still the little maiden played, but now her brow was clouded, her head
dropped, her eyelashes were downcast, and she hung over the harp and
sighed audibly.

“Good again!” cried the woman. “Very good!” and she clapped her
hands, whereupon the Arabs and the Moors, forgetting their dread, felt
constrained to follow her example, and they cheered in their wilder way,
but the Jews continued to mutter, “Beelzebub, Beelzebub!”

Israel saw it all, and at first, amid the commotion of his mind and the
confusion of his senses, his heart melted at sight of what Naomi did.
Had God opened a gateway to her soul? Were the poor wings of her spirit
to spread themselves out at last? Was this, then, the way of speech
that Heaven had given her? But hardly had Israel overflowed with the
tenderness of such thoughts when the bleating and barking of the faces
about him awakened his anger. Then, like blows on his brain, came the
cries of the wife of the Governor, who cheered this awakening of
the girl's soul as it were no better than a vulgar show; and at that
Israel's wrath rose to his throat.

“Brava, brava!” cried the woman again; and, turning to Israel, she said,
“You shall leave the child with me. I must have her with me always.”

Israel's throat seemed to choke him at that word. He looked at Katrina,
and saw that she was a woman lustful of breath and vain of heart, who
had married Ben Aboo because he was rich. Then he looked at Naomi,
and remembered that her heart was clear as the water, and sweet as the
morning, and pure as the snow.

And at that moment the wife of the Governor cheered again, and again the
people echoed her, and even the women on the housetops made bold to
take up her cry with their cooing ululation. The playing had ceased, the
spell had dissolved, Naomi's fingers had fallen from the harp, her head
had dropped into her breast, and with a sigh she had sunk forward on to
her face.

“Take her in!” said the wife of Ben Aboo, and two Arab soldiers stepped
up to where the little maiden lay. But before they had touched her
Israel strode out with swollen lips and distended nostrils.

“Stop!” he cried.

The Arabs hesitated, and looked towards their master.

“Do as you are bidden--take her in!” said Ben Aboo.

“Stop!” cried Israel again, in a loud voice that rang through the court.
Then, parting the Arabs with a sweep of his arms, he picked up the
unconscious maiden, and faced about on the new wife of Ben Aboo.

“Madam,” he cried, “I, Israel ben Oliel, may belong to the Governor, but
my child belongs to me.”

So saying, he passed out of the court, carrying the girl in his arms,
and in the dead silence and blank stupor of that moment none seemed to
know what he had done until he was gone.

Israel went home in his anger; but nevertheless, out of this event he
found courage in his heart to begin his task again. Let his enemies
bleat and bark “Beelzebub,” yet the child was an angel, though suffering
for his sin, and her soul was with God. She was a spirit, and the songs
she had played were the airs of paradise. But, comforting himself so,
Israel remembered the vision of Ruth, wherein Naomi had recovered her
powers. He had put it from him hitherto as the delirium of death, but
would the Lord yet bring it to pass? Would God in His mercy some day
take the angel out of his house, though so strangely gifted, so radiant
and beautiful and joyful, and give him instead for the hunger of his
heart as a man this sweet human child, his little, fair-haired Naomi,
though helpless and simple and weak?



CHAPTER VIII

THE VISION OF THE SCAPEGOAT


Israel's instinct had been sure: the coming of Katrina proved to be
the beginning of his end. He kept his office, but he lost his power. No
longer did he work his own will in Tetuan; he was required to work the
will of the woman. Katrina's will was an evil one, and Israel got the
blame of it, for still he seemed to stand in all matters of tribute and
taxation between the people and the Governor. It galled him to take the
woman's wages, but it vexed him yet more to do her work. Her work was to
burden the people with taxes beyond all their power of paying; her wages
was to be hated as the bane of the bashalic, to be clamoured against
as the tyrant of Tetuan, and to be ridiculed by the very offal of the
streets.

One day a gang of dirty Arabs in the market-place dressed up a blind
beggar in clothes such as Israel wore, and sent him abroad through the
town to beg as one that was destitute and in a miserable condition. But
nothing seemed to move Israel to pity. Men were cast into prison for no
reason save that they were rich, and the relations of such as were there
already were allowed to redeem them for money, so that no felon suffered
punishment except such as could pay nothing. People took fright and fled
to other cities. Israel's name became a curse and a reproach throughout
Barbary.

Yet all this time the man's soul was yearning with pity for the people.
Since the death of Ruth his heart had grown merciful. The care of the
child had softened him. It had brought him to look on other children
with tenderness, and looking tenderly on other children had led him to
think of other fathers with compassion. Young or old, powerful or weak,
mighty or mean, they were all as little children--helpless children who
would sleep together in the same bed soon.

Thinking so, Israel would have undone the evil work of earlier years;
but that was impossible now. Many of them that had suffered were
dead; some that had been cast into prison had got their last and long
discharge. At least Israel would have relaxed the rigour whereby his
master ruled, but that was impossible also. Katrina had come, and she
was a vain woman and a lover of all luxury, and she commanded Israel to
tax the people afresh. He obeyed her through three bad years; but many
a time his heart reproached him that he dealt corruptly by the poor
people, and when he saw them borrowing money for the Governor's tributes
on their lands and houses, and when he stood by while they and their
sons were cast into prison for the bonds which they could not pay to the
usurers Abraham or Judah or Reuben, then his soul cried out against him
that he ate the bread of such a mistress.

But out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth
sweetness, and out of this coming of the Spanish wife of Ben Aboo came
deliverance for Israel from the torment of his false position.

There was an aged and pious Moor in Tetuan, called Abd Allah, who was
rumoured to have made savings from his business as a gunsmith. Going to
mosque one evening, with fifteen dollars in his waistband, he unstrapped
his belt and laid it on the edge of the fountain while he washed his
feet before entering, for his back was no longer supple. Then a younger
Moor, coming to pray at the same time, saw the dollars, and snatched
them up and ran. Abd Allah could not follow the thief, so he went to the
Kasbah and told his story to the Governor.

Just at that time Ben Aboo had the Kaid of Fez on a visit to him. “Ask
him how much more he has got,” whispered the brother Kaid to Ben Aboo.

Abd Allah answered that he did not know.

“I'll give you two hundred dollars for the chance of all he has,” the
Kaid whispered again.

“Five bees are better than a pannier of flies--done!” said Ben Aboo.

So Abd Allah was sold like a sheep and carried to Fez, and there cast
into prison on a penalty of two hundred and fifty dollars imposed upon
him on the pretence of a false accusation.

Israel sat by the Governor that day at the gate of the hall of justice,
and many poor people of the town stood huddled together in the court
outside while the evil work was done. No one heard the Kaid of Fez when
he whispered to Ben Aboo, but every one saw when Israel drew the warrant
that consigned the gunsmith to prison, and when he sealed it with the
Governor's seal.

Abd Allah had made no savings, and, being too old for work, he had lived
on the earnings of his son. The son's name was Absalam (Abd es-Salem),
and he had a wife whom he loved very tenderly, and one child, a boy of
six years of age. Absalam followed his father to Fez, and visited him in
prison. The old man had been ordered a hundred lashes, and the flesh was
hanging from his limbs. Absalam was great of heart, and, in pity of his
father's miserable condition he went to the Governor and begged that the
old man might be liberated, and that he might be imprisoned instead.
His petition was heard. Abd Allah was set free, Absalam was cast into
prison, and the penalty was raised from two hundred and fifty dollars to
three hundred.

Israel heard of what had happened, and he hastened to Ben Aboo, in great
agitation, intending to say “Pay back this man's ransom, in God's name,
and his children and his children's children will live to bless you.”
 But when he got to the Kasbah, Katrina was sitting with her husband, and
at sight of the woman's face Israel's tongue was frozen.

Absalam had been the favourite of his neighbours among all the gunsmiths
of the market-place, and after he had been three months at Fez they
made common cause of his calamities, sold their goods at a sacrifice,
collected the three hundred dollars of his fine, bought him out of
prison, and went in a body through the gate to meet him upon his return
to Tetuan. But his wife had died in the meantime of fear and privation,
and only his aged father and his little son were there to welcome him.

“Friends,” he said to his neighbours standing outside the walls, “what
is the use of sowing if you know not who will reap?”

“No use, no use!” answered several voices.

“If God gives you anything, this man Israel takes it away,” said
Absalam.

“True, true! Curse him! Curse his relations!” cried the others.

“Then why go back into Tetuan?” said Absalam.

“Tangier is no better,” said one. “Fez is worse,” said another. “Where
is there to go?” said a third.

“Into the plains,” said Absalam--“into the plains and into the
mountains, for they belong to God alone.”

That word was like the flint to the tinder.

“They who have least are richest, and they that have nothing are best
off of all,” said Absalam, and his neighbours shouted that it was so.

“God will clothe us as He clothes the fields,” said Absalam, “and feed
our children as He feeds the birds.”

In three days' time ten shops in the market-place, on the side of the
Mosque, were sold up and closed, and the men who had kept them were gone
away with their wives and children to live in tents with Absalam on the
barren plains beyond the town.

When Israel heard of what had been done he secretly rejoiced; but Ben
Aboo was in a commotion of fear, and Katrina was fierce with anger, for
the doctrine which Absalam had preached to his neighbours outside the
walls was not his own doctrine merely, but that of a great man lately
risen among the people, called Mohammed of Mequinez, nicknamed by his
enemies Mohammed the Third.

“This madness is spreading,” said Ben Aboo.

“Yes,” said Katrina; “and if all men follow where these men lead, who
will supply the tables of Kaids and Sultans?”

“What can I do with them?” said Ben Aboo.

“Eat them up,” said Katrina.

Ben Aboo proceeded to put a literal interpretation upon his wife's
counsel. With a company of cavalry he prepared to follow Absalam and his
little fellowship, taking Israel along with him to reckon their taxes,
that he might compel them to return to Tetuan, and be town-dwellers
and house-dwellers and buy and sell and pay tribute as before, or else
deliver themselves to prison.

But Absalam and his people had secret word that the Governor was coming
after them, and Israel with him. So they rolled their tents, and fled to
the mountains that are midway between Tetuan and the Reef country, and
took refuge in the gullies of that rugged land, living in caves of the
rock, with only the table-land of mountain behind them, and nothing but
a rugged precipice in front. This place they selected for its safety,
intending to push forward, as occasion offered, to the sanctuaries of
Shawan, trusting rather to the humanity of the wild people, called the
Shawanis, than to the mercy of their late cruel masters. But the valley
wherein they had hidden is thick with trees, and Ben Aboo tracked them
and came up with them before they were aware. Then, sending soldiers
to the mountain at the back of the caves, with instructions that they
should come down to the precipice steadily, and kill none that they
could take alive, Ben Aboo himself drew up at the foot of it, and
Israel with him, and there called on the people to come out and deliver
themselves to his will.

When the poor people came from their hiding-places and saw that they
were surrounded, and that escape was not left to them on any side, they
thought their death was sure. But without a shout or a cry they knelt,
as with one accord, at the mouth of the precipice, with their backs
to it, men and women and children, knee to knee in a line, and joined
hands, and looked towards the soldiers, who were coming steadily down on
them. On and on the soldiers came, eye to eye with the people, and their
swords were drawn.

Israel gasped for his breath, and waited to see the people cut in pieces
at the next instant, when suddenly they began to sing where they knelt
at the edge of the precipice, “God is our refuge and our strength, a
very present help in trouble.”

In another moment the soldiers had drawn up as if swords from heaven
had fallen on them, and Israel was crying out of his dry throat, “Fear
nothing! Only deliver your bodies to the Governor, and none shall harm
you.”

Absalam rose up from his knees and called to his father and his son.
And standing between them to be seen by all, and first looking upon both
with eyes of pity, he drew from the folds of his selham a long knife
such as the Reefians wear, and taking his father by his white hair he
slew him and cast his body down the rocks. After that he turned towards
his son, and the boy was golden-haired and his face was like the
morning, and Israel's heart bled to see him.

“Absalam!” he cried in a moving voice; “Absalam, wait, wait!”

But Absalam killed his son also, and cast him down after his father.
Then, looking around on his people with eyes of compassion, as seeming
to pity them that they must fall again into the hands of Israel and his
master, he stretched out his knife and sheathed it in his own breast,
and fell towards the precipice.

Israel covered his face and groaned in his heart, and said, “It is the
end, O Lord God, it is the end--polluted wretch that I am, with the
blood of these people upon me!”

The companions of Absalam delivered themselves to the soldiers, who
committed them to the prison at Shawan, and Ben Aboo went home in
content.

Rumour of what had come to pass was not long in reaching Tetuan, and
Israel was charged with the guilt of it. In passing through the streets
the next day on his way to his house the people hissed him openly.
“Allah had not written it!” a Moor shouted as he passed. “Take care!”
 cried an Arab, “Mohammed of Mequinez is coming!”

It chanced that night, after sundown, when Naomi, according to her wont,
led her father to the upper room, and fetched the Book of the Law from
the cupboard of the wall and laid it upon his knees, that he read the
passage whereon the page opened of itself, scarce knowing what he read
when he began to read it, for his spirit was heavy with the bad doings
of those days. And the passage whereon the book opened was this--

“_Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats: one lot for the Lord, and
the other lot for the scapegoat. . . . Then shall he kill the goat of
the sin-offering that is for the people, and bring his blood within the
vail. And he shall make an atonement for the holy place, because of
the uncleanness of the children of Israel, and because of their
transgressions in all their sins. . . . And when he hath, made an end of
reconciling the holy place, and the tabernacle of the congregation, and
the altar, he shall bring the live goat: and Aaron shall lay both his
hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the
iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in
all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send
him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness. And the goat
shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited._”

That same night Israel dreamt a dream. He had been asleep, and
had awakened in a place which he did not know. It was a great arid
wilderness. Ashen sand lay on every side; a scorching sun beat down on
it, and nowhere was there a glint of water. Israel gazed, and slowly
through the blazing sunlight he discerned white roofless walls like the
ruins of little sheepfolds. “They are tombs,” he told himself, “and this
is a Mukabar--an Arab graveyard--the most desolate place in the world
of God.” But, looking again, he saw that the roofless walls covered the
ground as far as the eye could see, and the thought came to him that
this ashen desert was the earth itself, and that all the world of
life and man was dead. Then, suddenly, in the motionless wilderness, a
solitary creature moved. It was a goat, and it toiled over the hot sand
with its head hung down and its tongue lolled out. “Water!” it seemed
to cry, though it made no voice, and its eyes traversed the plain as if
they would pierce the ground for a spring. Fever and delirium fell upon
Israel. The goat came near to him and lifted up its eyes, and he saw its
face. Then he shrieked and awoke. The face of the goat had been the face
of Naomi.

Now Israel knew that this was no more than a dream, coming of the
passage which he had read out of the book at sundown, but so vivid was
the sense of it that he could not rest in his bed until he had first
seen Naomi with his waking eyes, that he might laugh in his heart to
think how the eye of his sleep had fooled him. So he lit his lamp, and
walked through the silent house to where Naomi's room was on the lower
floor of it.

There she lay, sleeping so peacefully, with her sunny hair flowing over
the pillow on either side of her beautiful face, and rippling in little
curls about her neck. How sweet she looked! How like a dear bud of
womanhood just opening to the eye!

Israel sat down beside her for a moment. Many a time before, at such
hours, he had sat in that same place, and then gone his ways, and she
had known nothing of it. She was like any other maiden now. Her eyes
were closed, and who should see that they were blind? Her breath came
gently, and who should say that it gave forth no speech? Her face was
quiet, and who should think that it was not the face of a homely-hearted
girl? Israel loved these moments when he was alone with Naomi while she
slept, for then only did she seem to be entirely his own, and he was not
so lonely while he was sitting there. Though men thought he was strong,
yet he was very weak. He had no one in the world to talk to save Naomi,
and she was dumb in the daytime, but in the night he could hold little
conversations with her. His love! his dove! his darling! How easily he
could trick and deceive himself and think, She will awake presently, and
speak to me! Yes; her eyes will open and see me here again, and I
shall hear her voice, for I love it! “Father!” she will say.
“Father--father--”

Only the moment of undeceiving was so cruel!

Naomi stirred, and Israel rose and left her. As he went back to his bed,
through the corridor of the patio, he heard a night-cry behind him that
made his hair to rise. It was Naomi laughing in her sleep.

Israel dreamt again that night, and he believed his second dream to be a
vision. It was only a dream, like the first; but what his dream would be
to us is nought, and what it was to him is everything. The vision as he
thought he saw it was this, and these were the words of it as he thought
he heard them--

It was the middle of the night, and he was lying in his own room, when
a dull red light as of dying flame crossed the foot of the bed, and a
voice that was as the voice of the Lord came out of it, crying “Israel!”

And Israel was sorely afraid, and answered, “Speak, Lord, Thy servant
heareth.”

Then the Lord said, “Thou has read of the goats whereon the high priest
cast lots, one lot for the sin offering and one lot for the scapegoat.”

And Israel answered trembling, “I have read.”

Then the Lord said to Israel, “Look now upon Naomi, thy child, for
she is as the sin-offering for thy sins, to make atonement for thy
transgressions, for thee and for thy household, and therefore she is
dumb to all uses of speech, and blind to all service of sight, a soul
in chains and a spirit in prison, for behold, she is as the lot that is
cast for justice and for the Lord.”

And Israel groaned in his agony and cried, “Would that the lot had
fallen upon me, O Lord, that Thou mightest be justified when thou
speakest, and be clear when Thou judgest, for I alone am guilty before
Thee.”

Then said the Lord to Israel, “On thee, also, hath the lot fallen, even
the lot of the scapegoat of the enemies of the people of God.”

And Israel quaked with fear, and the Lord called to him again, and said,
“Israel, even as the scapegoat carries the iniquities of the people, so
cost thou carry the iniquities of thy master, Ben Aboo, and of his wife,
Katrina; and even as the goat bears the sins of the people into the
wilderness, so, in the resurrection, shalt thou bear the sins of this
man and of this woman into a land that no man knoweth.”

Then Israel wrestled no longer with the Lord, but sweated as it were
drops of blood, and cried, “What shall I do, O Lord?”

And the Lord said, “Lie unto the morning, and then arise, get thee to
the country by Mequinez and to the man there whereof thou hast heard
tidings, and he shall show thee what thou shalt do.”

Then Israel wept with gladness, and cried, saying, “Shall my soul live?
Shall the lot be lifted from off me, and from off Naomi, my daughter?”

But the Lord left him, the red light died out from across the bed, and
all around was darkness.

Now to the last day and hour of his life Israel would have taken oath on
the Scriptures that he saw this vision, and he heard this voice, not in
his sleep and as in a dream, but awake, and having plain sight of all
common things about him--his room and his bed; and the canopy that
covered it. And on rising in the morning, at daydawn, so actual was the
sense of what he had seen and heard, and so powerful the impression of
it, that he straightway set himself to carry out the injunction it had
made, without question of its reality or doubt of its authority.

Therefore, committing his household to the care of Ali, who was now
grown to be a stalwart black lad his constant right hand and helpmate,
Israel first sent to the Governor, saying he should be ten days absent
from Tetuan, and then to the Kasbah for a soldier and guide, and to the
market-place for mules.

Before the sun was high everything was in readiness, and the caravan was
waiting at the door. Then Israel remembered Naomi. Where was the girl,
that he had not seen her that morning? They answered him that she had
not yet left her room, and he sent the black woman Fatimah to fetch
her. And when she came and he had kissed her, bidding her farewell in
silence, his heart misgave him concerning her, and, after raising his
foot to the stirrup, he returned to where she stood in the patio with
the two bondwomen beside her.

“Is she well?” he asked.

“Oh yes, well--very well,” said Fatimah, and Habeebah echoed her.
Nevertheless, Israel remembered that he had not heard the only language
of her lips, her laugh, and, looking at her again, he saw that her face,
which had used to be cheerful, was now sad. At that he almost repented
of his purpose, and but for shame in his own eyes he might have gone
no farther, for it smote him with terror that, though she were sick,
nothing could she say to stay him, and even if she were dying she must
let him go his ways without warning.

He kissed her again, and she clung to him, so that at last, with many
words of tender protest which she did not hear, he had to break away
from the beautiful arms that held him.

Ali was waiting by the mules in the streets, and the soldier and guide
and muleteers and tentmen were already mounted, amid a chattering throng
of idle people looking on.

“Ali, my lad,” said Israel, “if anything should befall Naomi while I am
away, will you watch over her and guard her with all your strength?”

“With all my life,” said Ali stoutly. He was Naomi's playfellow no
longer, but her devoted slave.

Then Israel set off on his journey.



CHAPTER IX

ISRAEL'S JOURNEY


MOHAMMED of Mequinez, the man whom Israel went out to seek, had been a
Kadi and the son of a Kadi. While he was still a child his father died,
and he was brought up by two uncles, his father's brothers, both men of
yet higher place, the one being Naib es-sultan, or Foreign Minister, at
Tangier, and the other Grand Vizier to the Sultan at Morocco. Thus in a
land where there is one noble only, the Sultan himself, where ascent and
descent are as free as in a republic, though the ways of both are
mired with crime and corruption, Mohammed was come as from the highest
nobility. Nevertheless, he renounced his rank and the hope of wealth
that went along with it at the call of duty and the cry of misery.

He parted from his uncles, abandoned his judgeship, and went out into
the plains. The poor and outcast and down-trodden among the people, the
shamed, the disgraced, and the neglected left the towns and followed
him. He established a sect. They were to be despisers of riches and
lovers of poverty. No man among them was to have more than another. They
were never to buy or sell among themselves, but every one was to give
what he had to him that wanted it. They were to avoid swearing, yet
whatever they said was to be firmer than an oath. They were to be
ministers of peace, and if any man did them violence they were never to
resist him. Nevertheless they were not to lack for courage, but to laugh
to scorn the enemies that tormented them, and smile in their pains and
shed no tear. And as for death, if it was for their glory they were to
esteem it more than life, because their bodies only were corruptible,
but their souls were immortal, and would mount upwards when released
from the bondage of the flesh. Not dissenters from the Koran, but
stricter conformers to it; not Nazarenes and not Jews, yet followers of
Jesus in their customs and of Moses in their doctrines.

And Moors and Berbers, Arabs and Negroes, Muslimeen and Jews, heard the
cry of Mohammed of Mequinez, and he received them all. From the streets,
from the market-places, from the doors of the prisons, from the service
of hard masters, and from the ragged army itself, they arose in hundreds
and trooped after him. They needed no badge but the badge of poverty,
and no voice of pleading but the voice of misery. Most of them brought
nothing with them in their hands, and some brought little on their backs
save the stripes of their tormentors. A few had flocks and herds, which
they drove before them. A few had tents, which they shared with their
fellows; and a few had guns, with which they shot the wild boar for
their food and the hyena for their safety. Thus, possessing little and
desiring nothing, having neither houses nor lands, and only considering
themselves secure from their rulers in having no money, this company of
battered human wrecks, life-broken and crime-logged and stranded,
passed with their leader from place to place of the waste country about
Mequinez. And he, being as poor as they were, though he might have been
so rich, cheered them always, even when they murmured against him, as
Absalam had cheered his little fellowship at Tetuan: “God will feed
us as He feeds the birds of the air, and clothe our little ones as He
clothes the fields.”

Such was the man whom Israel went out to seek. But Israel knew his
people too well to make known his errand. His besetting difficulties
were enough already. The year was young, but the days were hot; a
palpitating haze floated always in the air, and the grass and the broom
had the dusty and tired look of autumn. It was also the month of the
fast of Ramadhan, and Israel's men were Muslims. So, to save himself the
double vexation of oppressive days and the constant bickerings of his
famished people, Israel found it necessary at length to travel in the
night. In this way his journey was the shorter for the absence of some
obstacles, but his time was long.

And, just as he had hidden his errand from the men of his own caravan,
so he concealed it from the people of the country that he passed
through, and many and various, and sometimes ludicrous and sometimes
very pitiful were the conjectures they made concerning it. While he was
passing through his own province of Tetuan, nothing did the poor people
think but that he had come to make a new assessment of their lands and
holdings, their cattle and belongings, that he might tax them afresh and
more fully. So, to buy his mercy in advance, many of them came out of
their houses as he drew near, and knelt on the ground before his horse,
and kissed the skirts of his kaftan, and his knees, and even his foot
in his stirrup, and called him _Sidi_ (master, my lord), a title never
before given to a Jew, and offered him presents out of their meagre
substance.

“A gift for my lord,” they would say, “of the little that God has given
us, praise His merciful name for ever!”

Then they would push forward a sheep or a goat, or a string of hens tied
by the legs so as to hang across his saddle-bow, or, perhaps, at the two
trembling hands of an old woman living alone on a hungry scratch of land
in a desolate place, a bowl of buttermilk.

Israel was touched by the people's terror, but he betrayed no feeling.

“Keep them,” he would answer; “keep them until I come again,” intending
to tell them, when that time came, to keep their poor gifts altogether.

And when he had passed out of the province of Tetuan into the bashalic
of El Kasar, the bareheaded country-people of the valley of the Koos
hastened before him to the Kaid of that grey town of bricks and storks
and palm-trees and evil odours, and the Kaid, with another notion of his
errand, came to the tumble-down bridge to meet him on his approach in
the early morning.

“Peace be with you!” said the Kaid. “So my lord is going again to the
Shereef at Wazzan; may the mercy of the Merciful protect him!”

Israel neither answered yea nor nay, but threaded the maze of
crooked lanes to the lodging which had been provided for him near
the market-place, and the same night he left the town (laden with the
presents of the Kaid) through a line of famished and half-naked beggars
who looked on with feverish eyes.

Next day, at dawn, he came to the heights of Wazzan (a holy city of
Morocco), by the olives and junipers and evergreen oaks that grow at the
foot of the lofty, double-peaked Boo-Hallal, and there the young grand
Shereef himself, at the gate of his odorous orange-gardens, stood
waiting to give audience with yet another conjecture as to the intention
of his journey.

“Welcome! welcome!” said the Shereef; “all you see is yours until Allah
shall decree that you leave me too soon on your happy mission to our
lord the Sultan at Fez--may God prolong his life and bless him!”

“God make you happy!” said Israel, but he offered no answer to the
question that was implied.

“It is twenty and odd years, my lord,” the Shereef continued, “since my
father sent for you out of Tetuan, and many are the ups and downs that
time has wrought since then, under Allah's will; but none in the past
have been so grateful as the elevation of Israel ben Oliel, and none in
the future can be so joyful as the favours which the Sultan (God keep
our lord Abd er-Rahman!) has still in store for him.”

“God will show,” said Israel.

No Jew had ever yet ridden in this Moroccan Mecca; but the Shereef
alighted from his horse and offered it to Israel, and took Israel's
horse instead and together they rode through the market-place, and past
the old Mosque that is a ruin inhabited by hawks and the other mosque
of the Aissawa, and the three squalid fondaks wherein the Jews live
like cattle. A swarm of Arabs followed at their heels in tattered greasy
rags, a group of Jews went by them barefoot and a knot of bedraggled
renegades leaning against the walls of the prison doffed the caps from
their dishevelled heads and bowed.

That day, while the poor people of the town fasted according to the
ordinance of the Ramadhan, Israel's little company of Muslimeen--guests
in the house of the descendants of the Prophet--were, by special
Shereefian dispensation, permitted as travellers to eat and drink at
their pleasure. And before sunset, but at the verge of it, Israel and
his men started on their journey afresh, going out of the town, with
the Shereef's black bodyguard riding before them for guide and badge of
honour, through the dense and noisome market-place, where (like a clock
that is warning to strike) a multitude of hungry and thirsty people with
fierce and dirty faces, under a heavy wave of palpitating heat, and amid
clouds of hot dust, were waiting for the sound of the cannon that should
proclaim the end of that day's fast. Water-carriers at the fountains
stood ready to fill their empty goats' skins, women and children sat on
the ground with dishes of greasy soup on their knees and balls of grain
rolled in their fingers, men lay about holding pipes charged with keef,
and flint and tinder to light them, and the mooddin himself in the
minaret stood looking abroad (unless he were blind) to where the red sun
was lazily sinking under the plain.

Israel's soul sickened within him, for well he knew that, lavish as were
the honours that were shown him, they were offered by the rich out of
their selfishness and by the poor out of their fear. While they thought
the Sultan had sent for him, they kissed his foot who desired no homage,
and loaded him with presents who needed no gifts. But one word out of
his mouth, only one little word, one other name, and what then of this
lip-service, and what of this mock-honour!

Two days later Israel and his company reached before dawn the snake-like
ramparts of Mequinez the city of walls. And toiling in the darkness over
the barren plain and the belt of carrion that lies in front of the town,
through the heat and fumes of the fetid place, and amid the furious
barks of the scavenger dogs which prowl in the night around it, they
came in the grey of morning to the city gate over the stream called the
Father of Tortoises. The gate was closed, and the night police that kept
it were snoring in their rags under the arch of the wall within.

“Selam! M'barak! Abd el Kader! Abd el Kareem!” shouted the Shereef's
black guard to the sleepy gate-keepers. They had come thus far in
Israel's honour, and would not return to Wazzan until they had seen him
housed within.

From the other side of the gate, through the mist and the gloom, came
yawns and broken snores and then snarls and curses. “Burn your father!
Pretty hubbub in the middle of the night!”

“Selam!” shouted one of the black guard. “You dog of dogs! Your father
was bewitched by a hyena! I'll teach you to curse your betters. Quick!
get up,--or I'll shave your beard. Open! or I'll ride the donkey on your
head! There!--and there!--and there again!” and at every word the butt
of his long gun rang on the old oaken gate.

“Hamed el Wazzani!” muttered several voices within.

“Yes,” shouted the Shereef's man. “And my Lord Israel of Tetuan on his
way to the Sultan, God grant him victory. Do you hear, you dogs? Sidi
Israel el Tetawani sitting here in the dark, while you are sleeping and
snoring in your dirt.”

There was a whispered conference on the inside, then a rattle of keys,
and then the gate groaned back on its hinges. At the next moment two
of the four gatemen were on their knees at the feet of Israel's horse,
asking forgiveness by grace of Allah and his Prophet. In the meantime,
the other two had sped away to the Kasbah, and before Israel had
ridden far into the town, the Kaid--against all usage of his class and
country--ran and met him--afoot, slipperless, wearing nothing but selham
and tarboosh, out of breath, yet with a mouth full of excuses.

“I heard you were coming,” he panted--“sent for by the Sultan--Allah
preserve him!--but had I known you were to be here so soon--I--that
is--”

“Peace be with you!” interrupted Israel.

“God grant you peace. The Sultan--praise the merciful Allah!” the Kaid
continued, bowing low over Israel's stirrup--“he reached Fez from
Marrakesh last sunset; you will be in time for him.”

“God will show,” said Israel, and he pushed forward.

“Ah, true--yes--certainly--my lord is tired,” puffed the Kaid, bowing
again most profoundly. “Well, your lodging is ready--the best in
Mequinez--and your mona is cooking--all the dainties of Barbary--and
when our merciful Abd er-Rahman has made you his Grand Vizier--”

Thus the man chattered like a jay, bowing low at nigh every word, until
they came to the house wherein Israel and his people were to rest until
sunset; and always the burden of his words was the same--the Sultan, the
Sultan, the Sultan, and Abd er-Rahman, Abd er-Rahman!

Israel could bear no more. “Basha,” he said “it is a mistake; the Sultan
has not sent for me, and neither am I going to see him.”

“Not going to him?” the Kaid echoed vacantly.

“No, but to another,” said Israel; “and you of all men can best tell me
where that other is to be found. A great man, newly risen--yet a poor
man--the young Mahdi Mohammed of Mequinez.”

Then there was a long silence.

Israel did not rest in Mequinez until sunset of that day. Soon after
sunrise he went out at the gate at which he had so lately entered, and
no man showed him honour. The black guard of the Shereef of Wazzan had
gone off before him, chuckling and grinning in their disgust, and behind
him his own little company of soldiers, guides, muleteers, and tentmen,
who, like himself, had neither slept nor eaten, were dragging along in
dudgeon. The Kaid had turned them out of the town.

Later in the day, while Israel and his people lay sheltering within
their tents on the plain of Sais by the river Nagar, near the
tent-village called a Douar, and the palm-tree by the bridge, there
passed them in the fierce sunshine two men in the peaked shasheeah of
the soldier, riding at a furious gallop from the direction of Fez, and
shouting to all they came upon to fly from the path they had to pass
over. They were messengers of the Sultan, carrying letters to the Kaid
of Mequinez, commanding him to present himself at the palace without
delay, that he might give good account of his stewardship, or else
deliver up his substance and be cast into prison for the defalcations
with which rumour had charged him.

Such was the errand of the soldiers, according to the country-people,
who toiled along after them on their way home from the markets at
Fez; and great was the glee of Israel's men on hearing it, for they
remembered with bitterness how basely the Kaid had treated them at last
in his false loyalty and hypocrisy. But Israel himself was too nearly
touched by a sense of Fate's coquetry to rejoice at this new freak of
its whim, though the victim of it had so lately turned him from his
door. Miserable was the man who laid up his treasure in money-bags and
built his happiness on the favour of princes! When the one was taken
from him and the other failed him, where then was the hope of that man's
salvation, whether in this world or the next? The dungeon, the chain,
the lash, the wooden jellab--what else was left to him? Only the wail
of the poor whom he has made poorer, the curse of the orphan whom he
has made fatherless, and the execration of the down-trodden whom he has
oppressed. These followed him into his prison, and mingled their cries
with the clank of his irons, for they were voices which had never yet
deserted the man that made them, but clamoured loud at the last when his
end had come, above the death-rattle in his throat. One dim hour waited
for all men always, whether in the prison or in the palace--one lonely
hour wherein none could bear him company--and what was wealth and
treasure to man's soul beyond it? Was it power on earth? Was it
glory? Was it riches? Oh! glory of the earth--what could it be but a
will-o'-the-wisp pursued in the darkness of the night! Oh! riches of
gold and silver--what had they ever been but marsh-fire gathered in the
dusk! The empire of the world was evil, and evil was the service of the
prince of it!

Then Israel thought of Naomi, his sweet treasure--so far away. Though
all else fell from him like dry sand from graspless fingers, yet if by
God's good mercy the lot of the sin-offering could be lifted away from
his child, he would be content and happy! Naomi! His love! His darling!
His sweet flower afflicted for his transgression. Oh! let him lose
anything, everything, all that the world and all that the devil had
given him; but let the curse be lifted from his helpless child! For what
was gold without gladness, and what was plenty without peace?

Israel lit upon the Mahdi at last in the country of the verbena and the
musk that lies outside the walls of Fez. The prophet was a young man of
unusual stature, but no great strength of body, with a head that drooped
like a flower and with the wild eyes of an enthusiast. His people were
a vast concourse that covered the plain a furlong square, and included
multitudes of women and children. Israel had come upon them at an evil
moment. The people were murmuring against their leader. Six months ago
they had abandoned their houses and followed him They had passed from
Mequinez to Rabat, from Rabat to Mazagan, from Mazagan to Mogador, from
Mogador to Marrakesh, and finally from Marrakesh through the treacherous
Beni Magild to Fez. At every step their numbers had increased but
their substance had diminished, for only the destitute had joined them.
Nevertheless, while they had their flocks and herds they had borne their
privations patiently--the weary journeys, the exposure, the long rains
of the spring and the scorching heat of summer. But the soldiers of the
Kaids whose provinces they had passed through had stripped them of both
in the name of tribute. The last raid on their poverty had been made
that very day by the Kaid of Fez, and now they were without goats or
sheep or oxen, or even the guns with which they had killed the wild
bear, and their children were crying to them for bread.

So the people's faces grew black, and they looked into each other's eyes
in their impotent rage. Why had they been brought out of the cities to
starve? Better to stay there and suffer than come out and perish! What
of the vain promises that had been made to them that God would feed them
as He fed the birds! God was witness to all their calamities; He was
seeing them robbed day by day, He was seeing them famish hour by hour,
He was seeing them die. They had been fooled! A vain man had thought to
plough his way to power. Through their bodies he was now ploughing it.
“The hunger is on us!” “Our children are perishing!” “Find us food!”
 “Food!” “Food!”

With such shouts, mingled with deep oaths, the hungry multitude in their
madness had encompassed Mohammed of Mequinez as Israel and his company
came up with them. And Israel heard their cries, and also the voice of
their leader when he answered them.

First the young prophet rose up among his people, with flashing eyes and
quivering nostrils. “Do you think I am Moses,” he cried, “that I should
smite the rock and work you a miracle? If you are starving, am I full?
If you are naked, am I clothed?”

But in another instant the fire of anger was gone from his face, and he
was saying in a very moving voice, “My good people, who have followed
me through all these miseries, I know that your burdens are heavier than
you can bear, and that your lives are scarce to be endured, and that
death itself would be a relief. Nevertheless, who shall say but that
Allah sees a way to avert these trials of His poor servants, and that,
unknown to us all, He is even at this moment bringing His mercy to pass!
Patience, I beg of you; patience, my poor people--patience and trust!”

At that the murmurs of discontent were hushed. Then Israel remembered
the presents with which the Kaid of El Kasar and the Shereef of Wazzan
had burdened him. They were jewels and ornaments such as are sometimes
worn unlawfully by vain men in that country--silver signet rings and
earrings, chains for the neck, and Solomon's seal to hang on the breast
as safeguard against the evil eye--as well as much gold filagree of the
kind that men give to their women. Israel had packed them in a box
and laid them in the leaf pannier of a mule, and then given no further
thought to them; but, calling now to the muleteer who had charge of
them, he said, “Take them quickly to the good man yonder, and say, 'A
present to the man of God and to his people in their trouble.'”

And when the muleteer had done this, and laid the box of gold and silver
open at the feet of the young Mahdi, saying what Israel had bidden him,
it was the same to the young man and his followers as if the sky had
opened and rained manna on their heads.

“It is an answer to your prayer,” he cried; “an angel from heaven has
sent it.”

Then his people, as soon as they realised what good thing had happened
to them, took up his shout of joy, and shouted out of their own parched
throats--

“Prophet of Allah, we will follow you to the world's end!”

And then down on their knees they fell around him, the vast concourse of
men and women, all grinning like apes in their hunger and glee together,
and sobbing and laughing in a breath, like children, and sent up a great
broken cry of thanks to God that He had sent them succour, that they
might not die. At last, when they had risen to their feet again, every
man looked into the eyes of his fellow and said, as if ashamed, “I could
have borne it myself, but when the children called to me for bread. I
was a fool.”



CHAPTER X

THE WATCHWORD OF THE MAHDI


Early the next day Israel set his face homeward, with this old word of
the new prophet for his guide and motto: “Exact no more than is just; do
violence to no man; accuse none falsely; part with your riches and give
to the poor.” That was all the answer he got out of his journey, and if
any man had come to him in Tetuan with no newer story, it must have been
an idle and a foolish errand; but after El Kasar, after Wazzan, after
Mequinez, and now after Fez, it seemed to be the sum of all wisdom.
“I'll do it,” he said; “at all risks and all costs, I'll do it.”

And, as a prelude to that change in his way of life which he meant
to bring to pass he sent his men and mules ahead of him, emptied his
pockets of all that he should not need on his journey, and prepared to
return to his own country on foot and alone. The men had first gaped in
amazement, and then laughed in derision; and finally they had gone their
ways by themselves, telling all who encountered them that the Sultan
at Fez had stripped their master of everything, and that he was coming
behind them penniless.

But, knowing nothing of this graceless service. Israel began his
homeward journey with a happy heart. He had less than thirty dollars in
his waistband of the more than three hundred with which he had set out
from Tetuan; he was a hundred and fifty miles from that town, or five
long days' travel; the sun was still hot, and he must walk in the
daytime. Surely the Lord would see it that never before had any man done
so much to wipe out God's displeasure as he was now doing and yet would
do. He had said nothing of Naomi to the Mahdi even when he told him of
his vision; but all his hopes had centred in the child. The lot of the
sin-offering must be gone from her now, and in the resurrection he would
meet her without shame. If he had brought fruits meet to repentance,
then must her debt also be wiped away. Surely never before had any child
been so smitten of God, and never had any father of an afflicted child
bought God's mercy at so dear a price!

Such were the thoughts that Israel cherished secretly, though he dared
not to utter them, lest he should seem to be bribing God out of his love
of the child. And thus if his heart was glad as he turned towards home,
it was proud also, and if it was grateful it was also vain; but vanity
and pride were both smitten out of it in an hour, before he went through
the gates of Fez (wherein he had slept the night preceding), by three
sights which, though stern and pitiful, were of no uncommon occurrence
in that town and province.

First, it chanced that as he was passing from the south-east of the new
town of Fez to the gate that is at the north-west corner, going by the
high walls of the Sultan's hareem, where there is room for a thousand
women, and near to the Karueein mosque that is the greatest in Morocco
and rests on eight hundred pillars, he came upon two slaveholders
selling twelve or fourteen slaves. The slaves were all girls, and all
black, and of varying ages, ranging from ten years to about thirty. They
had lately arrived in caravans from the Soudan, by way of Tafilet and
the Wargha, and some of them looked worn from the desert passage. Others
were fresh and cheerful, and such as had claims to negro beauty were
adorned, after their doubtful fashion, or the fancy of their masters,
with love-charms of silver worn about their necks, with their fingers
pricked out with hennah, and their eyelids darkened with kohl. Thus they
were drawn up in a line for public auction; but before the sale of them
could begin among the buyers that had gathered about them in the street,
the overseers of the Sultan's hareem had to come and make a selection
for their master. This the eunuchs presently did, and when two of them
nicknamed Areefahs--gaunt and hairless men, with the faces of evil old
women and the hoarse voices of ravens--had picked out three fat black
maidens, the business of the auction began by the sale of a negro girl
of seventeen who was brought out from the rest and passed around.

“Now, brothers,” said the slave-master, “look see; sound of wind and
limb--how much?”

“Eighty dollars,” said a voice from the crowd.

“Eighty? Well, eighty to start with. Look at her--rosy lips, fit for the
kisses of a king, eh? How much?”

“A hundred dollars.”

“A hundred dollars offered; only a hundred. It's giving the girl away.
Look at her teeth, brothers, white and sound.”

The slave-master thrust his thumb into the girl's mouth and walked her
round the crowd again.

“Breath like new-mown hay, brothers. Now's the chance for true
believers. How much?”

“A hundred and ten.”

“A hundred and ten--thanks, Sidi! A hundred and ten for this jewel of a
girl. Dirt cheap yet, brothers. Try her muscles. Look at her flesh. Not
a flaw anywhere. Pass her round, test her, try her, talk to her--she
speaks good Arabic. Isn't she fit for a Sultan? She's the best thing
I'll offer to-day, and by the Prophet, if you are not quick I'll keep
her for myself. Now, for the third and last time--seventeen years of
age, sound, strong, plump, sweet, and intact--how much?”

Israel's blood tingled to see how the bidders handled the girl, and to
hear what shameless questions they asked of her, and with a long sigh he
was turning away from the crowd, when another man came up to it. The man
was black and old and hard-featured, and visibly poor in his torn white
selham. But when he had looked over the heads of those in front of him,
he made a great shout of anguish, and, parting the people, pushed his
way to the girl's side, and opened his arms to her, and she fell into
them with a cry of joy and pain together.

It turned out that he was a liberated slave, who, ten years before,
had been brought from the Soos through the country of Sidi Hosain ben
Hashem, having been torn away from his wife, who was since dead, and
from his only child, who thus strangely rejoined him. This story he
told, in broken Arabic; to those that stood around, and, hard as were
the faces of the bidders, and brutal as was their trade; there was not
an eye among them all but was melted at his story.

Seeing this, Israel cried from the back of the crowd, “I will give
twenty dollars to buy him the girl's liberty,” and straightway another
and another offered like sums for the same purpose until the amount of
the last bid had been reached, and the slave-master took it, and the
girl was free.

Then the poor negro, still holding his daughter by the hand, came to
Israel, with the tears dripping down his black cheeks, and said in his
broken way: “The blessing of Allah upon you, white brother, and if you
have a child of your own may you never lose her, but may Allah favour
her and let you keep her with you always!”

That blessing of the old black man was more than Israel could bear,
and, facing about before hearing the last of it, he turned down the
dark arcade that descends into the old town as into a vault, and having
crossed the markets, he came upon the second of the three sights that
were to smite out of his heart his pride towards God. A man in a blue
tunic girded with a red sash, and with a red cotton handkerchief tied
about his head, was driving a donkey laden with trunks of light trees
cut into short lengths to lie over its panniers. He was clearly a
Spanish woodseller and he had the weary, averted, and downcast look of
a race that is despised and kept under. His donkey was a bony creature,
with raw places on its flank and shoulders where its hide had been worn
by the friction of its burdens. He drove it slowly; crying “Arrah!” to
it in the tongue of its own country, and not beating it cruelly. At
the bottom of the arcade there was an open place where a foul ditch was
crossed by a rickety bridge. Coming to this the man hesitated a moment,
as if doubtful whether to drive his donkey over it or to make the beast
trudge through the water. Concluding to cross the bridge, he cried
“Arrah!” again, and drove the donkey forward with one blow of his stick.
But when the donkey was in the middle of it, the rotten thing gave way,
and the beast and its burden fell into the ditch. The donkey's legs were
broken, and when a throng of Arabs, who gathered at the Spaniard's cry,
had cut away its panniers and dragged it out of the water on to the
paving-stones of the street, the film covered its eyes, and in a moment
it was dead.

At that the man knelt down beside it, and patted it on its neck, and
called on it by its name, as if unwilling to believe that it was gone.
And while the Arabs laughed at him for doing so--for none seemed to pity
him--a slatternly girl of sixteen or seventeen came scudding down the
arcade, and pushed her way through the crowd until she stood where the
dead ass lay with the man kneeling beside it. Then she fell on the
man with bitter reproaches. “Allah blot out your name, you thief!” she
cried. “You've killed the creature, and may you starve and die yourself,
you dog of a Nazarene!”

This was more than Israel could listen to, and he commanded the girl
to hold her peace. “Silence, you young wanton!” he cried, in a voice
of indignation. “Who are you, that you dare trample on the man in his
trouble?”

It turned out that the girl was the man's daughter, and he was a
renegade from Ceuta. And when she had gone off, cursing Israel and his
father and his grandfather, the poor fellow lifted his eyes to Israel's
face, and said, “You are very kind, my father. God bless you! I may not
be a good man, sir, and I've not lived a right life, but it's hard when
your own children are taught to despise you. Better to lose them in
their cradles, before they can speak to you to curse you.”

Israel's hair seemed to rise from his scalp at that word, and he turned
about and hurried away. Oh no, no, no! He was not, of all men, the most
sorely tried. Worse to be a slave, torn from the arms he loves! Worse to
be a father whose children join with his enemies to curse him!

He had been wrong. What was wealth, that it was so noble a sacrifice
to part with it? Money was to give and to take, to buy and to sell,
and that was all. But love was for no market, and he who lost it lost
everything. And love was his, and would be his always, for he loved
Naomi, and she clung to him as the hyssop clings to the wall. Let him
walk humbly before God, for God was great.

Now these sights, though they reduced Israel's pride, increased his
cheerfulness, and he was going out at the gate with a humbler yet
lighter spirit, when he came upon a saint's house under the shadow of
the town walls. It was a small whitewashed enclosure, surmounted by a
white flag; and, as Israel passed it, the figure of a man came out to
the entrance. He was a poor, miserable creature--ragged, dirty, and with
dishevelled hair--and, seeing Israel's eyes upon him, he began to talk
in some wild way and in some unknown tongue that was only a fierce
jabber of sounds that had no words in them, and of words that had no
meaning. The poor soul was mad, and because he was distraught he was
counted a holy man among his people, and put to live in this place,
which was the tomb of a dead saint--though not more dead to the ways of
life was he who lay under the floor than he who lived above it. The
man continued his wild jabber as long as Israel's eyes were on him, and
Israel dropped two coins into his hand and passed on.

Oh no, no, no; Naomi was not the most afflicted of all God's creatures.
And yet, and yet, and yet, her bodily infirmities were but the type and
sign of how her soul was smitten.

On the hill outside the town the young Mahdi, with a great company of
his people, was waiting for him to bid him godspeed on his journey.
And then, while they walked some paces together before parting, and the
prophet talked of the poor followers of Absalam lying in the prison at
Shawan (for he had heard of them from Israel), Israel himself mentioned
Naomi.

“My father,” he said, “there is something that I have not told you.”

“Tell it now, my son,” said the Mahdi.

“I have a little daughter at home, and she is very sweet and beautiful.
You would never think how like sunshine she is to me in my lonely house,
for her mother is gone, and but for her I should be alone, and so she is
very near and dear to me. But she is in the land of silence and in the
land of night. Nothing can she see, and nothing hear, and never has
her voice opened the curtains of the air, for she is blind and dumb and
deaf.”

“Merciful Allah!” cried the Mahdi.

“Ah! is her state so terrible? I thought you would think it so. Yes, for
all she is so beautiful, she is only as a creature of the fields that
knows not God.”

“Allah preserve her!” cried the Mahdi.

“And she is smitten for my sin, for the Lord revealed it to me in the
vision, and my soul trembles for her soul. But if God has washed me with
water should not she also be clean?”

“God knows,” said the Mahdi. “He gives no rewards for repentance.”

“But listen!” said Israel. “In a vision of death her mother saw her, and
she was afflicted no more. No, for she could see, and hear, and speak.
Man of God, will it come to pass?”

“God is good,” said the Mahdi. “He needs that no man should teach Him
pity.”

“But I love her,” cried Israel, “and I vowed to her mother to guard her.
She is joy of my joy and life of my life. Without her the morning has
no freshness and the night no rest. Surely the Lord sees this, and will
have mercy?”

The Mahdi held back his tears, and answered, “The Lord sees all. Go your
way in trust. Farewell!”

“Farewell!”



CHAPTER XI

ISRAEL'S HOME-COMING


ISRAEL'S return home was an experience at all points the reverse of his
going abroad. He had seven dollars in the pocket of his waistband on
setting away from Fez, out of the three hundred and more with which he
had started from Tetuan. His men had gone on before him and told their
story. So the people whom he came upon by the way either ignored him or
jeered at him, and not one that on his coming had run to do him honour
now stepped aside that he might pass.

Two days after leaving Fez he came again to Wazzan. Women were going
home from market by the side of their camels, and charcoal-burners were
riding back to the country on the empty burdas of their mules. It
was nigh upon sunset when Israel entered the town, and so exactly
was everything the same that he could almost have tricked himself and
believed that scarce two minutes had passed since he had left it. There
at the fountains were the water-carriers waiting with their water-skins,
and there in the market-place sat the women and children with their
dishes of soup; there were the men by the booths with their pipes ready
charged with keef, and there was the mooddin in the minaret, looking
out over the plain. Everything was the same save one thing, and that
concerned Israel himself. No Grand Shereef stood waiting to exchange
horses with him, and no black guard led him through the town. Footsore
and dirty, covered with dust, and tired, he walked through the
streets alone. And when presently the voice rang out overhead, and the
breathless town broke instantly into bubbles of sounds--the tinkling
of the bells of the water-carriers, the shouts of the children, and the
calls of the men--only one man seemed to see him and know him. This was
an Arab, wearing scarcely enough rags to cover his nakedness, who was
bathing his hot cheeks in water which a water-carrier was pouring into
his hands, and he lifted his glistening face as Israel passed, and
called him “Dog!” and “Jew!” and commanded him to uncover his feet.

Israel slept that night in one of the three squalid fondaks of Wazzan
inhabited by the Jews. His room was a sort of narrow box, in a square
court of many such boxes, with a handful of straw shaken over the earth
floor for a bed. On the doorpost the figure of a hand was painted in
red, and over the lintel there was a rude drawing of a scorpion, with an
imprecation written under it that purported to be from the mouth of
the Prophet Joshua, son of Nun. If the charm kept evil spirits from the
place of Israel's rest, it did not banish good ones. Israel slept in
that poor bed as he had never slept under the purple canopy of his own
chamber, and all night long one angel form seemed to hover over him.
It was Naomi. He could see her clearly. They were together in a little
cottage somewhere. The house was a mean one, but jasmine and marjoram
and pinks and roses grew outside of it, and love grew inside. And Naomi!
How bright were her eyes, for they could see! Yes, and her ears could
hear, and her tongue could speak!

Two days after Israel left Wazzan he was back in the bashalic of Tetuan.
Each night he had dreamt the same dream, and though he knew each morning
when he awoke with a sigh that his dream was only a reflection of his
dead wife's vision, yet he could not help but think of it the long day
through. He tried to remember if he had ever seen the cottage with his
waking eyes, and where he had seen it, and to recall the voice of Naomi
as he had heard it in his dream, that he might know if it was the same
as he used to think he heard when he sat by her in his stolen watches of
the night while she lay asleep. Sometimes when he reflected he thought
he must be growing childish, so foolish was his joy in looking forward
to the night--for he had almost grown in love with it--that he might
dream his dream again.

But it was a dear, delicious folly, for it helped him to bear the
troubles of his journey, and they were neither light nor few. After
passing through El Kasar he had been robbed and stripped both of his
small remaining moneys and the better part of his clothes by a gang of
ruffians who had followed him out of the town. Then a good woman--the
old wife, turned into the servant of a Moor who had married a young
one--had taken pity on his condition and given him a disused Moorish
jellab. His misfortune had not been without its advantage. Being forced
to travel the rest of his way home in the disguise of a Moor, he had
heard himself discussed by his own people when they knew nothing of his
presence. Every evil that had befallen them had been attributed to him.
Ben Aboo, their Basha, was a good, humane man, who was often driven to
do that which his soul abhorred. It was Israel ben Oliel who was their
cruel taxmaster.

When Israel was within a day's journey of Tetuan a terrible scourge fell
upon the country. A plague of locusts came up like a dense cloud from
the direction of the desert, and ate up every leaf and blade of grass
that the scorching sun had left green, so that the plain over which it
had passed was as black and barren as a lava stream. The farmers
were impoverished, and the poorer people made beggars. Even this last
disaster they charged in their despair to Israel, for Allah was now
cursing them for Israel's sake. They were the same people that had
thrust their presents upon him when he was setting out.

At the lonesome hut of the old woman who had offered him a bowl of
buttermilk Israel rested and asked for a drink of water. She gave him
a dish of zummetta--barley roasted like coffee--and inquired if he
was going on to Tetuan. He told her yes, and she asked if his home was
there. And when he answered that it was, she looked at him again, and
said in a moving way, “Then Allah help you, brother.”

“Why me more than another, sister?” said Israel.

“Because it is plain to see that you are a poor man,” said the old
woman. “And that is the sort he is hardest upon.”

Israel faltered and said, “He? Who, mother? Ah, you mean--”

“Who else but Israel the Jew?” said she, and then added, as by a sudden
afterthought, “But they say he is gone at last, and the Sultan has
stripped him. Well, Allah send us some one else soon to set right this
poor Gharb of ours! And what a man for poor men he might have been--so
wise and powerful!”

Israel listened with his head bent down, and, like a moth at the flame,
he could not help but play with the fire that scorched him. “They
tell me,” he said, “that Allah has cursed him with a daughter that has
devils.”

“Blind and dumb, poor soul,” said the old woman; “but Allah has pity for
the afflicted--he is taking her away.”

Israel rose. “Away?”

“She is ill since her father went to Fez.”

“Ill?”

“Yes, I heard so yesterday--dying.”

Israel made one loud cry like the cry of a beast that is slaughtered,
and fled out of the hut. Oh, fool of fools, why had he been dallying
with dreams--billing and cooing with his own fancies--fondling and
nuzzling and coddling them? Let all dreams henceforth be dead and damned
for ever; for only devils out of hell had made them that poor men's
souls might be staked and lost! Oh, why had he not remembered the pale
face of Naomi when he left her, and the silence of her tongue that had
used to laugh? Fool, fool! Why had he ever left her at all?

With such thoughts Israel hurried along, sometimes running at his
utmost velocity, and then stopping dead short; sometimes shouting his
imprecations at the pitch of his voice and beating his fist against the
sharp aloes until it bled, and then whispering to himself in awe.

Would God not hear his prayer? God knew the child was very near and dear
to him, and also that he was a lonely man. “Have pity on a lonely man,
O God!” he whispered. “Let me keep my child; take all else that I have,
everything, no matter what! Only let me keep her--yes, just as she is,
let me have her still! Time was when I asked more of Thee, but now I am
humble, and ask that alone.”

On his knees in a lonesome place, with the fierce sun beating down on
his uncovered head, amid the blackened leaves left by the locust, he
prayed this prayer, and then rose to his feet and ran.

When he got to Tetuan the white city was glistening under the setting
sun. Then he thought of his Moorish jellab, and looked at himself, and
saw that he was returning home like a beggar; and he remembered with
what splendour he had started out. Should he wait for the darkness, and
creep into his house under the cover of it? If the thought had occurred
an hour before he must have scouted it. Better to brave the looks of
every face in Tetuan than be kept back one minute from Naomi. But now
that he was so near he was afraid to go in; and now that he was so soon
to learn the truth he dreaded to hear it. So he walked to and fro on the
heath outside the town, paltering with himself, struggling with himself,
eating out his heart with eagerness, trying to believe that he was
waiting for the night.

The night came at length, and, under a deep-blue sky fast whitening with
thick stars, Israel passed unknown through the Moorish gate, which was
still open, and down the narrow lane to the market square. At the gate
of the Mellah, which was closed, he knocked, and demanded entrance in
the name of the Kaid. The Moorish guards who kept it fell back at sight
of him with looks of consternation.

“Israel!” cried one, and dropped his lantern.

Israel whispered, “Keep your tongue between your teeth!” and hurried on.

At the door of his own house, which was also closed, he knocked again,
but more fearfully. The black woman Habeebah opened it cautiously, and,
seeing his jellab, she clashed it back in his face.

“Habeebah!” he cried, and he knocked once more.

Then Ali came to the door. “What Moorish man are you?” cried Ali,
pushing him back as he pressed forward.

“Ali! Hush! It is I--Israel.”

Then Ali knew him and cried, “God save us! What has happened?”

“What has happened here?” said Israel. “Naomi,” he faltered, “what of
her?”

“Then you have heard?” said Ali. “Thank God, she is now well.”

Israel laughed--his laugh was like a scream.

“More than that--a strange thing has befallen her since you went away,”
 said Ali.

“What?”

“She can hear!”

“It's a lie!” cried Israel, and he raised his hand and struck Ali to
the floor. But at the next minute he was lifting him up and sobbing and
saying, “Forgive me, my brave boy. I was mad, my son; I did not know
what I was doing. But do not torture me. If what you tell me is true,
there is no man so happy under heaven; but if it is false, there is no
fiend in hell need envy me.”

And Ali answered through his tears, “It is true, my father--come and
see.”



CHAPTER XII

THE BAPTISM OF SOUND


WHAT had happened at Israel's house during Israel's absence is a story
that may be quickly told. On the day of his departure Naomi wandered
from room to room, seeming to seek for what she could not find, and in
the evening the black women came upon her in the upper chamber where her
father had read to her at sunset, and she was kneeling by his chair and
the book was in her hands.

“Look at her, poor child,” said Fatimah. “See, she thinks he will come
as usual. God bless her sweet innocent face!”

On the day following she stole out of the house into the town and made
her way to the Kasbah, and Ali found her in the apartments of the wife
of the Basha, who had lit upon her as she seemed to ramble aimlessly
through the courtyard from the Treasury to the Hall of Justice, and from
there to the gate of the prison.

The next day after that she did not attempt to go abroad, and neither
did she wander through the house, but sat in the same seat constantly,
and seemed to be waiting patiently. She was pale and quiet and
silent; she did not laugh according to her wont, and she had a look of
submission that was very touching to see.

“Now the holy saints have pity on the sweet jewel,” said Fatimah. “How
long will she wait, poor darling?”

On the morning of the day following that her quiet had given place to
restlessness, and her pallor to a burning flush of the face. Her hands
were hot, her head was feverish, and her blind eyes were bloodshot.

It was now plain that the girl was ill, and that Israel's fears on
setting out from home had been right after all. And making his own
reckoning with Naomi's condition, Ali went off for the only doctor
living in Tetuan--a Spanish druggist living in the walled lane leading
to the western gate. This good man came to look at Naomi, felt her
pulse, touched her throbbing forehead, with difficulty examined her
tongue, and pronounced her illness to be fever. He gave some homely
directions as to her treatment--for he despaired of administering drugs
to such a one as she was--and promised to return the next day.

About the middle of that night Naomi became delirious. Fatimah stood
constantly by her bed, bathing her hot forehead with vinegar and water;
Habeebah slept in a chair at her feet; and Ali crouched in a corner
outside the door of her room.

The druggist came in the morning, according to his promise; but
there was nothing to be done, so he looked wise, wagged his head very
solemnly, and said, “I will come again after two days more, when the
fever must be near to its height, and bring a famous leech out of
Tangier along with me!”

Meantime, Naomi's delirium continued. It was gentle as her own
spirit tent there was this that was strange and eerie about her
unconsciousness--that whereas she had been dumb while her mind in its
dark cell must have been mistress of itself and of her soul, she spoke
without ceasing throughout the time of her reason's vanquishment. Not
that her poor tongue in its trouble uttered speech such as those that
heard could follow and understand, but only a restless babble of empty
sounds, yet with tones of varying feeling, sometimes of gladness,
sometimes of sorrow, sometimes of remonstrance, and sometimes of
entreaty.

All that night, and the next night also, the two black women sat
together by her bedside, holding each other's hands like little children
in great fear. Also Ali crouched again like a dog in the darkness
outside the door, listening in terror to the silvery young voice that
had never echoed in that house before. This was the night when Israel,
sleeping at the squalid inn of the Jews of Wazzan, was hearing Naomi's
voice in his dreams.

At the first glint of daylight in the morning the lad was up and gone,
and away through the town-gate to the heath beyond, as far as to the
fondak, which stands on the hill above it, that he might strain his
wet eyes in the pitiless sunlight for Israel's caravan that should soon
come. On the first morning he saw nothing, but on the second morning he
came upon Israel's men returning without him, and telling their lying
story that he had been stripped of everything by the Sultan at Fez, and
was coming behind them penniless.

Now, Israel was to Ali the greatest, noblest, mightiest man among men.
That he should fall was incredible, and that any man should say he had
fallen was an affront and an outrage. So, stripling as he was, the lad
faced the rascals with the courage of a lion. “Liars and thieves!”
 he cried; “tell that story to another soul in Tetuan, and I will go
straight to the Kaid at the Kasbah, and have every black dog of you all
whipped through the streets for plundering my master.”

The men shouted in derision and passed on, firing their matchlocks as a
mock salute. But Ali had his will of them; they told their tale no
more, and when they entered Tetuan, and their fellows questioned them
concerning their journey, they took refuge in the reticence that sits by
right of nature on the tongues of Moors--they said and knew nothing.

While Ali was on the heath looking out for Israel, the doctor out of
Tangier came to Naomi. The girl was still unconscious, and the
wise leech shook his head over her. Her case was hopeless; she was
sinking--in plain words, she was dying--and if her father did not come
before the morrow he would come too late to find her alive.

Then the black women fell to weeping and wailing, and after that to
spiritual conflict. Both were born in Islam, but Fatimah had secretly
become a Jewess by persuasion of her mistress who was dead. She was,
therefore, for sending for the Chacham. But Habeebah had remained a
Muslim, and she was for calling the Imam. “The Imam is good, the Imam
is holy; who so good and holy as the Imam?” “Nay, but our Sidi holds
not with the Imam, for our lord is a Jew, and our lord is our master, our
lord is our sultan, our lord is our king.” “Shoof! What is Sidi against
paradise? And paradise is for her who makes a follower of Moosa into a
follower of Mohammed. Let but the child die with the Kelmah on her
lips, and we are all three blest for ever--otherwise we will burn
everlastingly in the fires of Jehinnum.” “But, alack! how can the poor
girl say the Kelmah, being as dumb as the grave?” “Then how can she say
the Shemang either?”

Having heard the verdict of the doctor, Ali returned in hot haste and
silenced both the bondwomen: “The Imam is a villain, and the Chacham is
a thief.” There was only one good man left in Tetuan, and that was his
own Taleb, his schoolmaster, the same that had taught him the harp
in the days of the Governor's marriage. This person was an old negro,
bewrinkled by years, becrippled by ague, once stone deaf, and still
partially so, half blind, and reputed to be only half wise, a liberated
slave from the Sahara, just able to read the Koran and the Torah, and
willing to teach either impartially, according to his knowledge, for he
was neither a Jew nor a Muslim, but a little of both, as he used to say,
and not too much of either. For such a hybrid in a land of intolerance
there must have been no place save the dungeons of the Kasbah, but that
this good nondescript was a privileged pet of everybody. In his dark
cellar, down an alley by the side of the Grand Mosque in the Metamar,
he had sat from early morning until sunset, year in year out, through
thirty years on his rush-covered floor, among successive generations
of his boys; and as often as night fell he had gone hither and thither
among the sick and dying, carrying comfort of kind words, and often meat
and drink of his meagre substance.

Such was Ali's hero after Israel, and now, in Israel's absence and his
own great trouble, he tried away for him.

“Father,” cried the lad, “does it not say in the good book that the
prayer of a righteous man availeth much?”

“It does, my son,” said the Taleb “You have truth. What then?”

“Then if you will pray for Naomi she will recover,” said Ali.

It was a sweet instance of simple faith. The old black Taleb dismissed
his scholars, closed down his shutter, locked it with a padlock, hobbled
to Naomi's bedside in his tattered white selham, looked down at her
through the big spectacles that sprawled over his broad black nose, and
then, while a dim mist floated between the spectacles and his eyes, and
a great lump rose at his throat to choke him, he fell to the floor and
prayed, and Ali and the black women knelt beside him.

The negro's prayer was simple to childishness. It told God everything;
it recited the facts to the heavenly Father as to one who was far away
and might not know. The maiden was sick unto death. She had been three
days and nights knowing no one, and eating and drinking nothing. She was
blind and dumb and deaf. Her father loved her and was wrapped up in her.
She was his only child, and his wife was dead, and he was a lonely man.
He was away from his home now, and if, when he returned, the girl were
gone and lost--if she were dead and buried--his strong heart would be
broken and his very soul in peril.

Such was the Taleb's prayer, and such was the scene of it--the dumb
angel of white and crimson turning and tossing on the bed in an aureole
of her streaming yellow hair, and the four black faces about her, eager
and hot and aflame, with closed eye

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