"Hora, remain here until I have appointed a room for you. I shall send you some food by one of my servants."
And he walked away quietly, the whip which marked his rank hanging from his wrist. The workmen saluted him, placing one hand on their head and the other to the ground, but by the cordiality of their salute it was easily seen that he was a kind master. Sometimes he stopped to give an order or a piece of advice, for he was greatly skilled in matters of agriculture and gardening. Then he resumed his walk, looking to the right and left and carefully inspecting everything. Tahoser, who had humbly accompanied him to the door, and had crouched on the threshold, her elbow on her knee and her chin on the palm of her hand, followed him with her glance until he disappeared under the leafy arches. She kept on looking long after he had pa.s.sed out by the gate into the fields.
A servant, in accordance with an order which Poeri had given when he went out, brought on a tray a goose-leg, onions baked in the ashes, wheaten bread and figs, and a jar of water closed with myrtle flowers.
"The master sends you this. Eat, maiden, and regain your strength."
Tahoser was not very hungry, but her part required that she should exhibit some appet.i.te; the poor must necessarily devour the food which pity throws them. So she ate, and drank a long draught of the cool water. The servant having gone, she resumed her contemplative att.i.tude.
Innumerable contradictory thoughts filled her mind: sometimes with maidenly shame she repented the step she had taken; at others, carried away by her pa.s.sion, she exulted in her own audacity. Then she said to herself: "Here I am, it is true, under Poeri"s roof; I shall see him freely every day; I shall silently drink in his beauty, which is more that of a G.o.d than of a man; I shall hear his lovely voice, which is like the music of the soul. But will he, who never paid any attention to me when I pa.s.sed by his home dressed in my most brilliant garments, adorned with my richest gems, perfumed with scents and flowers, mounted on my painted and gilded car surmounted by a sunshade, and surrounded like a queen with a retinue of servants,--will he pay more attention to the poor suppliant maiden whom he has received through pity and who is dressed in mean stuff? Will my wretchedness accomplish what my wealth could not do? It may be, after all, that I am ugly, and that Nofre flatters me when she maintains that from the unknown sources of the Nile to the place where it casts itself into the sea there is no lovelier maid than her mistress. Yet no,--I am beautiful; the blazing eyes of men have told me so a thousand times, and especially have the annoyed airs and the disdainful pouts of the women who pa.s.sed by me confirmed it.
Will Poeri, who has inspired me with such mad pa.s.sion, never love me? He would have received just as kindly an old, wrinkled woman with withered b.r.e.a.s.t.s, clothed in hideous rags, and with feet grimy with dust. Any one but he would at once have recognised, under the disguise of Hora, Tahoser the daughter of the high-priest Petamounoph; but he never cast his eyes upon me any more than does the basalt statue of a G.o.d upon the devotees who offer up to it quarters of antelope and baskets of lotus."
These thoughts cast down the courage of Tahoser. Then she regained confidence, and said to herself that her beauty, her youth, her love would surely at last move that insensible heart. She would be so sweet, so attentive, so devoted, she would use so much art and coquetry in dressing herself, that certainly Poeri would not be able to resist. Then she promised herself to reveal to him that the humble servant-maid was a girl of high rank, possessing slaves, estates, and palaces, and she foresaw, in her imagination, a life of splendid and radiant happiness following upon a period of obscure felicity.
"First and foremost, let me make myself beautiful," she said, as she rose and walked towards one of the pools.
On reaching it, she knelt upon the stone margin, washed her face, her neck, and her shoulders. The disturbed water showed her in its mirror, broken by innumerable ripples, her vague, trembling image which smiled up to her as through green gauze; and the little fishes, seeing her shadow and thinking that crumbs of bread were about to be thrown to them, drew near the edge in shoals. She gathered two or three lotus flowers which bloomed on the surface of the pool, twisted their stems around the band that held in her hair, and made thus a head-dress which all the skill of Nofre could never have equalled, even had she emptied her mistress"s jewel-caskets.
When she had finished and rose refreshed and radiant, a tame ibis, which had gravely watched her, drew itself up on its two long legs, stretched out its long neck, and flapped its wings two or three times as if to applaud her.
Having finished her toilet, Tahoser resumed her place at the door of the house and waited for Poeri. The heavens were of a deep blue; the light shimmered in visible waves through the transparent air; intoxicating perfumes rose from the flowers and the plants; the birds hopped amid the branches, pecking at the berries; the fluttering b.u.t.terflies chased one another. This charming spectacle was rendered yet more bright by human activity, which enlivened it by the communication of a soul. The gardeners came and went, the servants returned laden with panniers of gra.s.s or vegetables; others, standing at the foot of the fig trees, caught in baskets the fruits thrown to them by monkeys trained to pluck them and perched on the highest branches.
Tahoser contemplated with delight this beautiful landscape, the peacefulness of which was filling her soul, and she said to herself, "How sweet it would be to be beloved here, amid the light, the scents, and the flowers."
Poeri returned. He had finished his tour of inspection, and withdrew to his room to spend the burning hours of the day. Tahoser followed him timidly, and stood near the door, ready to leave at the slightest gesture, but Poeri signed to her to remain.
She came forward timidly and knelt upon the mat.
"You tell me, Hora, that you can play the lute. Take that instrument hanging upon the wall, strike its cords and sing me some old air, very sweet, very tender, and very slow. The sleep which comes to one cradled by music is full of lovely dreams."
The priest"s daughter took down the mandore, drew near the couch on which Poeri was stretched, leaned the head of the lute against the wooden bed-head hollowed out in the shape of a half-moon, stretched her arm to the end of the handle of the instrument, the body of which was pressed against her beating heart, let her hand flutter along the strings, and struck a few chords. Then she sang in a true, though somewhat trembling voice, an old Egyptian air, the vague sigh breathed by the ancestors and transmitted from generation to generation, and in which recurred constantly one and the same phrase of a sweet and penetrating monotony.
"In very truth," said Poeri, turning his dark blue eyes upon the maid, "you know rhythm as does a professional musician, and you might practise your art in the palaces of kings. But you give to your song a new expression; the air you are singing, one would think you are inventing it, and you impart to it a magical charm. Your voice is no longer that of mourning; another woman seems to shine through you as the light shines from behind a veil. Who are you?"
"I am Hora," replied Tahoser. "Have I not already told you my story?
Only, I have washed from my face the dust of the road, I have smoothed out the folds in my crushed gown and put a flower in my hair. If I am poor, that is no reason why I should be ugly, and the G.o.ds sometimes refuse beauty to the rich. But does it please you that I should go on?"
"Yes. Repeat that air; it fascinates, benumbs me, it takes away my memory like a cup of nepenthe. Repeat it until sleep and forgetfulness fall upon my eyelids."
Poeri"s eyes, fixed at first upon Tahoser, soon were half-closed, and then completely so. The maiden continued to strike the strings of the mandore, and sang more and more softly the refrain of her song. Poeri slept. She stopped and fanned him with a palm-leaf fan thrown on the table.
Poeri was handsome, and sleep imparted to his pure features an indescribable expression of languor and tenderness. His long eyelashes falling upon his cheeks seemed to conceal from him a celestial vision, and his beautiful, red, half-open lips trembled as if they were speaking mute words to an invisible being. After a long contemplation, emboldened by silence and solitude, Tahoser, forgetting herself, bent over the sleeper"s brow, kept back her breath, pressed her heart with her hand, and placed a timid, furtive, winged kiss upon it. Then she drew back ashamed and blushing. The sleeper had faintly felt in his dream Tahoser"s lips; he uttered a sigh and said in Hebrew, "Oh, Ra"hel, beloved Ra"hel!"
Fortunately these words of an unknown tongue conveyed no meaning to Tahoser, and she again took up the palm-leaf fan, hoping yet fearing that Poeri would awake.
VII
When day dawned, Nofre, who slept on a cot at her mistress"s feet, was surprised at not hearing Tahoser call her as usual by clapping her hands. She rose on her elbow and saw that the bed was empty; yet the first beams of the sun, striking the frieze of the portico, were only now beginning to cast on the wall the shadow of the capitals and of the upper part of the shafts of the pillars. Usually Tahoser was not an early riser, and she rarely rose without the a.s.sistance of her women.
Neither did she ever go out until after her hair had been dressed, and perfumed water had been poured over her lovely body, while she knelt, her hands crossed upon her bosom.
Nofre, feeling uneasy, put on a transparent gown, slipped her feet into sandals of palm fibre, and set out in search of her mistress. She looked for her first under the portico of the two courts, thinking that, unable to sleep, Tahoser had perhaps gone to enjoy the coolness of dawn in the inner cloisters; but she was not there.
"Let me visit the garden," said Nofre to herself; "perhaps she took a fancy to see the night dew sparkle on the leaves of the plants and to watch for once the awakening of the flowers."
Although she traversed the garden in every direction, she found it absolutely untenanted. Nofre looked along every walk, under every arbour, under every arch, into every grove, but unsuccessfully. She entered the kiosk at the end of the arbour, but she did not find Tahoser; she hastened to the pond, in which her mistress might have taken a fancy to bathe, as she sometimes did with her companions, upon the granite steps which led from the edge of the basin to the bottom of fine sand. The broad nymphoea-leaves floated on the surface, and did not appear to have been disturbed; the ducks, plunging their blue necks into the calm water, alone rippled it, and they saluted Nofre with joyous cries.
The faithful maid began to feel seriously alarmed; she roused the whole household. The slaves and the maids emerged from their cells, and informed by Nofre of the strange disappearance of Tahoser, proceeded to make most minute search. They ascended the terraces, rummaged every room, every corner, every place where she might possibly be. Nofre, in her agitation, even opened the boxes containing the dresses and the caskets holding the jewels, as if they could possibly have held her mistress. Unquestionably Tahoser was not within the dwelling.
An old and consummately prudent servant bethought himself of examining the sand of the walks in search of the footprints of his young mistress.
The heavy bolts of the gate leading into the city were in place, and this proved that Tahoser had not gone out that way. It is true that Nofre had carelessly traversed every path, marking them with her sandals, but by bending close to the ground, old Souhem speedily noticed among Nofre"s footprints a slight imprint made by a narrow, dainty sole belonging to a much smaller foot than the maid"s. He followed this track, which led him, pa.s.sing under the arbour, from the pylon in the court to the water gate. The bolts, as he pointed out to Nofre, had been drawn, and the two leaves of the door were held merely by their weight; therefore Petamounoph"s daughter had gone out that way. Farther on the track was lost; the brick quay had preserved no trace; the boatman who had carried Tahoser across had not returned to his station; the others were asleep, and when questioned replied that they had seen nothing.
One, however, did report that a woman, poorly dressed and belonging apparently to the lowest cla.s.s, had been ferried over early to the other side of the river to the Memnonia quarter, no doubt to carry out some funeral rite. This description, which in no way tallied with the elegant Tahoser, completely upset the suppositions of Nofre and Souhem.
They returned to the house sad and disappointed. The men and women servants sat down on the ground in desolate att.i.tudes, letting one of their hands hang down, its palm turned up, and placing the other on their head, all of them calling together in plaintive chorus, "Woe! woe!
woe! Our mistress is gone!"
"By Oms, the dog of the lower regions, I shall find her," said old Souhem, "even if I have to walk living to the very confines of the Western Region to which travel the dead. She was a kind mistress; she gave us food in abundance, did not exact excessive labour, and caused us to be beaten only when we deserved it and in moderation. Her foot was not heavy on our bowed necks, and in her home a slave might believe himself free."
"Woe! woe! woe!" repeated the men and women as they cast dust upon their heads.
"Alas! dear mistress, who knows where you are now?" said her faithful maid, whose tears were flowing. "Perchance some enchanter compelled you to leave your palace through a spell in order to work his odious will on you. He will lacerate your fair body, will draw your heart out through a cut like that made by the dissectors, will throw your remains to the ferocious crocodiles, and on the day of reunion your mutilated soul will find shapeless remains only. You will not go to join, at the end of the pa.s.sages of which the undertaker keeps the plan, the painted and gilded mummy of your father, the high-priest Petamounoph, in the funeral chamber which has been cut out for you."
"Calm yourself, Nofre," said old Souhem; "let us not despair too soon.
It may be that Tahoser will soon return. She has no doubt yielded to some fancy which we cannot guess, and presently we shall see her come back, gay and smiling, holding aquatic flowers in her hands."
Wiping her eyes with the corner of her dress, the maid nodded a.s.sent.
Souhem crouched down, bending his knees like those of the dog-faced figures which are roughly carved out of a square block of basalt, and pressing his temples between his dry hands, seemed to reflect deeply.
His face of a reddish brown, his sunken eyes, his prominent jaws, the deeply wrinkled cheeks, his straight hair framing in his face like bristles, made him altogether like the monkey-faced G.o.ds. He was certainly not a G.o.d, but he looked very much like a monkey.
The result of his meditations, anxiously awaited by Nofre, was thus expressed: "The daughter of Petamounoph is in love."
"Who told you?" cried Nofre, who thought that she was the only one who could read her mistress"s heart.
"No one; but Tahoser is very beautiful; she has already beheld sixteen times the rise and fall of the Nile. Sixteen is the number symbolical of voluptuousness; and for some time past she has been calling at unaccustomed hours her players on the harp, the lute, and the flute, like one who seeks to calm the agitation of her heart by music."
"You speak sensibly, and wisdom dwells in your old bald head. But how have you learned to know women,--you who merely dig the earth in the garden and bear jars of water on your shoulders?"
The slave opened his lips with a silent smile and exhibited two rows of teeth fit to crush date-stones. The grin meant, "I have not always been old and a captive."
Enlightened by Souhem"s suggestion, Nofre immediately thought of the handsome Ahmosis, the oeris of the Pharaoh, who so often pa.s.sed below the terrace, and who had looked so splendid on his war chariot in the triumphal procession. As she was in love with him herself, though she was not fully aware of it, she a.s.sumed that her mistress shared her feelings. She put on a somewhat heavier dress and repaired to the officer"s dwelling. It was there, she fancied, that Tahoser would certainly be found.
The young officer was seated on a low seat at the end of the room. On the walls hung trophies of different weapons: the leather tunic covered with bronze plates on which was engraved the cartouche of the Pharaoh; the brazen poniard, with the jade handle open-worked to allow the fingers to pa.s.s through; the flat-edged battle-axe, the falchion with curved blade; the helmet with its double plume of ostrich-feathers; the triangular bow; and the red-feathered arrows. His distinctive necklaces were placed upon pedestals, and open coffers showed booty taken from the enemy.
When he saw Nofre, whom he knew well, standing on the threshold, he felt quick pleasure, his brown cheeks flushed, his muscles quivered, his heart beat high. He thought Nofre brought him a message from Tahoser, although the priest"s daughter had never taken notice of his glances; but the man to whom the G.o.ds have imparted the gift of beauty easily fancies that all women fall in love with him. He rose and took a few steps towards Nofre, whose anxious glance examined the corners of the room to make sure whether Tahoser was there or not.
"What brings you here, Nofre?" said Ahmosis, seeing that the young maid, full of her search, did not break silence. "Your mistress is well, I hope, for I think I saw her yesterday at the Pharaoh"s entry."