"Ah, do not lie to me," cried the Mahdi. "I know where she is--she is in prison. And for what? For no fault but love of her father, and no crime but fidelity to her faith. She has sacrificed the one and abandoned the other. Is that not enough for you, Ben Aboo? Set her free."
The Basha listened at first with a look of bewilderment, and some half-dozen armed attendants at the farther end of the room shuffled about in their consternation. At length Ben Aboo raised his head, and said with an air of mock inquiry, "Ya Allah! who is this infidel?"
Then, changing his tone suddenly, he cried, "Sir, I know who you are!
You come to me on this sham errand about the girl, but that is not your purpose, Mohammed of Mequinez! Mohammed the Third! What fool said you were a spy of the Sultan? Abd er-Rahman is here--my guest and protector.
You are a spy of his enemies, and a revolutionary, come hither to ruin our religion and our State. The penalty for such as you is death, and by Allah you shall die!"
Saying this, he so wrought upon his indignation, that in spite of his superst.i.tious fears, and the awe in which he stood of the Mahdi, he half deceived himself, and deceived his attendants entirely. But the Mahdi took a step nearer and looked straight into his face, and said--
"Ben Aboo, ask pardon of G.o.d; you are a fool. You talk of putting me to death. You dare not and you cannot do it."
"Why not?" cried Ben Aboo, with a thrill of voice that was like a swagger. "What"s to hinder me? I could do it at this moment, and no man need know."
"Basha," said the Mahdi, "do you think you are talking to a child? Do you think that when I came here my visit was not known to others than ourselves outside? Do you think there are not some who are waiting for my return? And do you think, too," he cried, lifting one hand and his voice together, "that my Master in heaven would not see and know it on an errand of mercy His servant perished? Ben Aboo, ask pardon of G.o.d, I say; you are a fool."
The Basha"s face became black and swelled with rage. But he was cowed. He hesitated a moment in silence, and then said with an air of braggadocio--
"And what if I do not liberate the girl?"
"Then," said the Mahdi, "if any evil befalls her the consequences shall be on your head."
"What consequences?" said the Basha.
"Worse consequences than you expect or dream," said the Mahdi.
"What consequences?" said the Basha again.
"No matter," said the Mahdi. "You are walking in darkness, and do not know where you are going."
"What consequences?" the Basha cried once more.
"That is G.o.d"s secret," said the Mahdi.
Ben Aboo began to laugh. "Light the infidel out of the Kasbah," he shouted to his people.
"Enough!" cried the Mahdi. "I have delivered my message. Now woe to you, Ben Aboo! A second time I have come to you as a witness, but I will come no more. Fill up the measure of your iniquity. Keep the girl in prison.
Give her to the Sultan. But know that for all these things your reward awaits you. Your time is near. You will die with a pale face. The sword will reach to your soul."
Then taking yet another step nearer, until he stood over the Basha where he lay on the ground, he cried with sudden pa.s.sion, "This is the last word that will pa.s.s between you and me. So part we now for ever, Ben Aboo--I to the work that waits for me, and you to shame and contempt, and death and h.e.l.l."
Saying this, he made a downward sweep of his open hand over the place where the Basha lay, and Ben Aboo shrank under it as a worm shrinks under a blow. Then with head erect he went out unhindered.
But he was not yet done. In the garden of the palace, as he pa.s.sed through it to the street, he stood a moment in the darkness under the stars before the chamber where he knew the Sultan lay, and cried, "Abd er-Rahman! Abd er-Rahman! slave of the Merciful! Listen: I hear the sound of the trumpet and the alarum of war. My heart makes a noise in me for my country, but the day of her tribulation is near. Woe to you, Abd er-Rahman! You have filled up the measure of your fathers. Woe to you, slave of the Compa.s.sionate!"
The Sultan heard him, and so did the Ministers of State; the women of the hareem heard him, and so did the civil guards and the soldiers. But his voice and his message came over them with the terror of a ghostly thing, and no man raised a hand to stop him.
"The Mahdi," they whispered with awe, and fell back when he approached.
The streets were quiet as he left the Kasbah. The rabble of mountaineers of Aissawa were gone. Hooded Talebs, with prayer-mats under their arms, were picking their way in the gloom from the various mosques; and from these there came out into the streets the plash of water in the porticos and the low drone of singing voices behind the screens.
The Mahdi lodged that night in the quarter of the enclosure called the M"Salla, and there a slave woman of Ben Aboo"s came to him in secret.
It was Fatimah, and she told him much of her late master, whom she had visited by stealth, and just left in great trouble and in madness; also of her dead mistress, Ruth who was like rose-perfume in her memory, as well as of Naomi, their daughter, and all her sufferings. In spasms, in gasps, without sequence and without order, she told her story; but he listened to her with emotion while the agitated black face was before him, and when it was gone he tramped the dark house in the dead of night, a silent man, with tender thoughts of the sweet girl who was imprisoned in the dungeons of the Kasbah, and of her stricken father, who supposed that she was living in luxury in the palace of his enemy while he himself lay sick in the poor hut which had been their home.
These false notions, which were at once the seed and the fruit of Israel"s madness, should at least be dispelled. Let come what would, the man should neither live nor die in such bitterness of cruel error.
The Mahdi resolved to set out for Semsa with the first grey of morning, and meantime he went up to the house-top to sleep. The town was quiet, the traffic of the street was done, the raggabash of the Sultan"s following had slunk away ashamed or lain down to rest. It was a wonderful night. The air was cool, for the year was deep towards winter, but not a breath of wind was stirring, and the orange-gardens behind the town wall did not send over the river so much as the whisper of a leaf.
Stars were out and the big moon of the East shone white on the white walls and minarets. Nowhere is night so full of the spirit of sleep as in an Eastern city. Below, under the moonlight, lay the square white roofs, and between them were the dark streets going in and out, trailing through and along, like to narrow streams of black water in a bed of quarried chalk. Here or there, where a belated townsman lit himself homeward with a lamp, a red light gleamed out of one of the thin darknesses, crept along a few paces, and then was gone. Sometimes a clamour of voices came up with their own echo from some unseen place, and again everything was still. Sleep, sleep, all was sleep.
"O Tetuan," thought the Mahdi, "how soon will your streets be uprooted and your sanctuaries destroyed!"
The Mooddin was chanting the call to prayers, and the old porter at the gate was muttering over his rosary as the Mahdi left the town in the dawn. He had to pick his way among the soldiers who were lying on the bare soil outside, uncovered to the sky. Not one of them seemed to be awake. Even their camels were still sleeping, nose to nose, in the circles where they had last fed. Only their mules and a.s.ses, all hobbled and still saddled, were up and feeding.
The Mahdi found Israel ben Oliel in the hut at Semsa. So poor a place he had not seen in all his wanderings through that abject land. Its walls were of clay that was bulged and cracked, and its roof was of rushes, which lay over it like sea-wreck on a broken barrel. Israel was in his right mind. He was sitting by the door of his house, with a dejected air, a hopeless look, but the slow sad eyes of reason. His clothing was one worn and torn kaftan; his feet were shoeless, and his head was bare.
But so grand a head the Mahdi thought he had never beheld before. Not until then had he truly seen him, for the poverty and misery that sat on him only made his face stand out the clearer. It was the face of a man who for good or ill, for struggle or submission, had walked and wrestled with G.o.d.
With salutations, barely returned to him, the Mahdi sat down beside Israel at a little distance. He began to speak to him in a tender way, telling him who he was, and where they had met before, and why he came, and whither he was going. And Israel listened to him at first with a brave show of composure as if the very heart of the man were a frozen clod, whereby his eyes and the muscles of his face and even the nerves of his fingers were also frozen.
Then the Mahdi spoke of Naomi, and Israel made a slow shake of the head. He told him what had happened to her when her father was taken to prison, and Israel listened with a great outward calmness. After that he described the girl"s journey in the hope of taking food to him, and how she fell into the hands of Habeebah; and then he saw by Israel"s face that the affection of the father was tearing his old heart woefully.
At last he recited the incidents of her cruel trial, and how she had yielded at length, knowing nothing of religion, being only a child, seeing her father in everything and thinking to save his life, though she herself must see him no more (for all this he had gathered from Fatimah), and then the great thaw came to Israel, and his fingers trembled, and his face twitched, and the hot tears rained down his cheeks.
"My poor darling!" he muttered in a trembling undertone, and then he asked in a faltering voice where she was at that time.
The Mahdi told him that she was back in prison, for rebelling against the fortune intended for her--that of becoming a concubine of the Sultan.
"My brave girl!" he muttered, and then his face shone with a new light that was both pride and pain.
He lifted his eyes as if he could see her, and his voice as if she could hear: "Forgive me, Naomi! Forgive me, my poor child! Your weak old father; forgive him, my brave, brave daughter!"
This was as much as the Mahdi could bear; and when Israel turned to him, and said in almost a childish tone, "I suppose there is no help for it now, sir. I meant to take her to England--to my poor mother"s home, but--"
"And so you shall, as sure as the Lord lives," said the Mahdi, rising to his feet, with the resolve that a plan for Naomi"s rescue which he had thought of again and again, and more than once rejected, which had clamoured at the door of his heart, and been turned away as a barbarous impulse, should at length be carried into effect.
CHAPTER XXVI
ALI"S RETURN TO TETUAN
The plan which the Mahdi thought of had first been Ali"s, for the black lad was back in Tetuan. After he had fulfilled his errand of mercy at Shawan; he had gone on to Ceuta; and there, with a spirit afire for the wrongs of his master, from whom he was so cruelly parted, he had set himself with shrewdness and daring to incite the Spanish powers to vengeance upon his master"s enemies. This had been a task very easy of execution, for just at that time intelligence had come from the Reef, of barbarous raids made by Ben Aboo upon mountain tribes that had hitherto offered allegiance to the Spanish crown. A mission had gone up to Fez, and returned unsatisfied. War was to be declared, Marteel was to be bombarded, the army of Marshal O"Donnel was to come up the valley of the river, and Tetuan was to be taken.
Such were the operations which by the whim of fate had been so strangely revealed to Ali, but Ali"s own plan was a different matter. This was the feast of the Moolood, and on one of the nights of it, probably the eighth night, the last night, Friday night, Ben Aboo the Basha was to give a "gathering of delight," to the Sultan, his Ministers, his Kaids, his Kadis, his Khaleefas, his Umana, and great rascals generally. Ali"s stout heart stuck at nothing. He was for having the Spaniards brought up to the gates of the town, on the very night when the whole majesty and iniquity of Barbary would be gathered in one room; then, locking the entire kennel of dogs in the banqueting hall, firing the Kasbah and burning it to the ground, with all the Moorish tyrants inside of it like rats in a trap.
One danger attended his bold adventure, for Naomi"s person was within the Kasbah walls. To meet this peril Ali was himself to find his way into the dungeon, deliver Naomi, lock the Kasbah gate, and deliver up to another the key that should serve as a signal for the beginning of the great night"s work.
Also one difficulty attended it, for while Ali would be at the Kasbah there would be no one to bring up the Spaniards at the proper moment for the siege--no one in Tetuan on whom the strangers could rely not to lead them blindfold into a trap. To meet this difficulty Ali had gone in search of the Mahdi, revealed to him his plan, and asked him to help in the downfall of his master"s enemies by leading the Spaniards at the right moment to the gates that should be thrown open to receive them.
Hearing Ali"s story, the Mahdi had been aflame with tender thoughts of Naomi"s trials, with hatred of Ben Aboo"s tyrannies, and pity of Israel"s miseries. But at first his humanity had withheld him from sympathy with Ali"s dark purpose, so full, as it seemed, of barbarity and treachery.