The Scapegoat Part 30

he said in a damp voice. "Or perhaps she has gone in--perhaps she's hiding--the sweet rogue!"

The door was half open; he pushed it and entered the house. "Naomi!" he called in a voice like a caress. "Naomi!" His voice trembled now. "Come to me, come, dearest; come quickly, quickly, I cannot see!" He listened.

There was not a sound, not a movement. "Naomi!" The name was like a gurgle in his throat. There was a pause, and then he said very feebly and simply, "She's not here."

He looked around, and picked up something from the floor. It was a slipper covered with mould. As he gazed upon it a change came over his face. Dead? Was Naomi dead? He had thought of death before--for himself, for others, never for Naomi. At a stride the awful thing was on him.

Death! Oh, oh!

With a helpless, broken, blind look he was standing in the middle of the floor with the slipper in his hand, when a footstep came to the door. He flung the slipper away and threw open his arms. Naomi--it must be she!

It was Fatimah. She had come in secret, that the evil news of what had been done at the Kasbah and the Mosque might not be broken to Israel too suddenly. He met her with a terrible question. "Where is she laid?" he said in a voice of awe.

Fatimah saw his error instantly. "Naomi is alive," she said, and, seeing how the clouds lifted off his face, she added quickly, "and well, very well."

That is not telling a falsehood, she thought; but when Israel, with a cry of joy which was partly pain, flung his arms about her, she saw what she had done.

"Where is she?" he cried. "Bring her, you dear, good soul. Why is she not here? Lead me to her, lead me!"

Then Fatimah began to wring her hands. "Alas!" she said, weeping, "that cannot be."

Israel steadied himself and waited. "She cannot come to you, and neither can you go to her." said Fatimah. "But she is well, oh! very well.

Poor child, she is at the Kasbah--no, no, not the prison--oh no, she is happy--I mean she is well, yes, and cared for--indeed, she is at the palace--the women's palace--but set your mind easy--she--"

With such broken, blundering words the good woman blurted out the truth, and tried to deaden the blow of it. But the soul lives fast, and Israel lived a lifetime in that moment.

"The palace!" he said in a bewildered way. "The women's palace--the women's--" and then broke off shortly. "Fatimah, I want to go to Naomi,"

he said.

And Fatimah stammered, "Alas! alas! you cannot, you never can--"

"Fatimah," said Israel, with an awful calm. "Can't you see, woman, I have come home? I and Naomi have been long parted. Do you not understand?--I want to go to my daughter."

"Yes, yes," said Fatimah; "but you can never go to her any more. She is in the women's apartments--"

Then a great hoa.r.s.e groan came from Israel's throat.

"Poor child, it was not her fault. Listen," said Fatimah; "only listen."

But Israel would hear no more. The torrent of his fury bore down everything before it. Fatimah's feeble protests were drowned. "Silence!"

he cried. "What need is there for words? She is in the palace!--that's enough. The women's palace--the hareem--what more is there to say?"

Putting the fact so to his own consciousness, and seeing it grossly in all its horror, his pa.s.sion fell like a breaking in of waters. "O G.o.d!" he cried, "my enemy casts me into prison. I lie there, rotting, starving. I think of my little daughter left behind alone. I hasten home to her. But where is she? She is gone. She is in the house of my enemy.

Curse her! . . . . Ah! no, no; not that, either! Pardon me, O G.o.d; not that, whatever happens! But the palace--the women's palace. Naomi! My little daughter! Her face was so sweet, so simple. I could have sworn that she was innocent. My love! my dove! I had only to look at her to see that she loved me! And now the hareem--that h.e.l.l, and Ben Aboo--that libertine! I have lost her for ever! Yet her soul was mine--I wrestled with G.o.d for it--"

He stopped suddenly, his face became awfully discoloured, he dropped to his knees on the floor, lifted his eyes and his hands towards heaven, and cried in a voice at once stern and heartrending, "Kill her, O G.o.d!

Kill her body, O my G.o.d, that her soul may be mine again!"

At this awful cry Fatimah fled out of the hut. It was the last voice of tottering reason. After that he became quiet, and when Fatimah returned the following morning he was talking to himself in a childish way while sitting at the door, and gazing before him with a lifeless look.

Sometimes he quoted Scriptures which were startlingly true to his own condition: "I am alone, I am a companion to owls. . . . I have cleansed my heart in vain. . . . My feet are almost gone, my steps have well-nigh slipped. . . . I am as one whom his mother comforteth."

Between these Scriptures there were low incoherent cries and simple foolish play-words. Again and again he called on Naomi, always softly and tenderly, as if her name were a sacred thing. At times he appeared to think that he was back in prison, and made a little prayer--always the same--that some one should be kept from harm and evil. Once he seemed to hear a voice that cried, "Israel ben Oliel! Israel ben Oliel!"

"Here! Israel is here!" he answered. He thought the Kaid was calling him. The Kaid was the King. "Yes, I will go back to the King," he said.

Then he looked down at his tattered kaftan, which was mired with dirt, and tried to brush it clean, to b.u.t.ton it, and to tie up the ragged threads of it. At last he cried, as if servants were about him and he were a master still, "Bring me robes--clean robes--white robes; I am going back to the King!"

CHAPTER XXIV

THE ENTRY OF THE SULTAN

Meantime Tetuan was looking for the visit of His Shereefian Majesty, the Sultan Abd er-Rahman. He had been heard of about four hours away, encamped with his Ministers, a portion of his hareem, and a detachment of his army, somewhere by the foot of Beni Hosmar. His entry was fixed for eight o'clock next morning, and preparations for his coming were everywhere afoot. All other occupations were at a standstill, and nothing was to be heard but the noise and clamour of the cleansing of the streets, and the hanging of flags and of carpets.

Early on the following morning a street-crier came, beating a drum, and crying in a hoa.r.s.e voice, "Awake! Awake! Come and greet your Lord!

Awake! Awake!"

In a little while the streets were alive with motley and noisy crowds.

The sun was up, if still red and hazy, and sunlight came like a tunnel of gold down the swampy valley and from over the sea; the orange orchards lying to the south, called the gardens of the Sultan, were red rather than yellow, and the snowy crests of the mountain heights above them were crimson rather than white. In the town itself the small red flag that is the Moorish ensign hung out from every house, and carpets of various colours swung on many walls.

The sun was not yet high before the Sultan's army began to arrive. It was a mixed and noisy throng that came first, a sort of ragged regiment of Arabs, with long guns, and with their gun-cases wrapped about their heads--a big gang of wild country-folk lately enlisted as soldiers. They poured into the town at the western gate, and shuffled and jostled and squeezed their way through the narrow streets firing recklessly into the air, and shouting as they went, "Abd er-Rahman is coming! The Sultan is coming! Dogs! Men! Believers! Infidels! Come out! come out!"

Thus they went puffing along, covered with dust and sweltering in perspiration, and at every fresh shot and shout the streets they pa.s.sed through grew denser. But it was a grim satire on their lawless loyalty that almost at their heels there came into the town, not the Sultan himself, but a troop of his prisoners from the mountains. Ten of them there were in all, guarded by ten soldiers, and they made a sorry spectacle. They were chained together, man to man in single file, not hand to hand or leg to leg but neck to neck. So had they walked a hundred miles, never separated night or day, either sleeping or waking, or faint or strong. The feet of some were bare and torn, and dripping blood; the faces of all were black with grime, and streaked with lines of sweat. And thus they toiled into the streets in that sunlight of G.o.d's own morning, under the red ensigns of Morocco, by the many-coloured carpets of Rabat, to the Kasbah beyond the market-place.

They were Reefians whose homes the Sultan had just stripped, whose villages he had just burnt, whose wives and children he had just driven into the mountains. And they were going to die in his dungeons.

It was seven o'clock by this time, and rumour had it that the Sultan's train was moving down the valley. From the roofs of the houses a vast human ant-hill could be seen swarming across the plain in the distance.

Then came some rapid transformations of the scene below. First the streets were deserted by every decent blue jellab and clean white turban within range of sight. These presently reappeared on the roofs of the princ.i.p.al thoroughfare, where groups of women, closely covered in their haiks, had already begun to congregate with their dark attendants. Next, a body of the townsmen who possessed firearms mounted guard on the walls to protect the town from the lawlessness of the big army that was coming. Then into the Feddan, the square marketplace, came pouring from their own little quarter within its separate walls a throng of Jewish people, in their black gabardines and skull-caps, men and women and children, carrying banners that bore loyal inscriptions, tw.a.n.ging at tambourines and crying in wild discords, "G.o.d bless our Lord!" "G.o.d give victory to our Lord the Sultan!"

The poor Jews got small thanks for such loyalty to the last of the Caliphs of the Prophet. Every ragged Moor in the streets greeted them with exclamations of menace and abhorrence. Even the blind beggar crouching at the gate lifted up his voice and cursed them.

"Get out, you Jew! G.o.d burn your father! Dogs, take off your slippers--Abd er-Rahman is coming!"

Thus they were scolded and abused on every side, kicked, cuffed, jostled, and wedged together well-nigh to suffocation. Their banners were torn out of their hands, their tambourines were broken, their voices were drowned, and finally they were driven back into their Mellah and shut up there, and forbidden to look upon the entry of the Sultan even from their roofs.

And the vagabonds and ragam.u.f.fins among the faithful in the streets, having got rid of the unbelievers had enough ado to keep peace among themselves. They pushed and struggled and stormed and cried and laughed and clamoured down this main artery of the town through which the Sultan's train must pa.s.s. Men and boys, women also and young girls, donkeys with packs, bony mules too, and at least one dirty and terrified old camel. It was a confused and uproarious babel. Angry black faces thrust into white ones, flashing eyes and gleaming white teeth, and clenched fists uplifted. Human voices barking like dogs, yelping like hyenas, shrill and guttural, piercing and grating. Prayings, beggings, quarrellings, cursings.

"Arrah! Arrah! Arrah!"

"O Merciful! O Giver of good to all!"

"Curses on your grandfather!"

"Allah! Allah! Allah!"

"Balak! Balak! Balak!"

But presently the wild throng fell into order and silence. The gate of the Kasbah was thrown open, and a line of soldiers came out, headed by the Kaid of Tetuan, and moved on towards the city wall. The rabble were thrust back, the soldiers were drawn up in lines on either side of the street, and the Kaid, Ben Aboo himself, took a position by the western gate.

By this time there was commotion on the town walls among the townsmen who had gathered there. The Sultan's army was drawing near, a confused and disorderly ma.s.s of human beings moving on from the plain. As they came up to the walls, the people who were standing on the house-roofs could see them, and as they were ordered away to encamp by the river, none could help but hear their shouts and oaths.

When the motley and noisy concourse had been driven off to their camping-ground, the gates of the town were thrown wide, for the Sultan himself was at hand.