They set the vessel, from which a savoury smell proceeded, upon the little Moorish table by the divan. On the ground beside it they placed a broad dish of baked earth in which there were a couple of loaves and a red, short-necked amphora of water with a drinking-cup placed over the mouth of it to act as a stopper.
They salaamed profoundly and padded softly out again.
“Sup,” he bade her shortly.
“I want no supper,” she replied, her manner sullen.
His cold eye played over her. “Henceforth, girl, you will consider not what you want, but what I bid you do. I bid you eat; about it, therefore.”
“I will not.”
“Will not?” he echoed slowly. “Is that a speech from slave to master? Eat, I say.”
“I cannot! I cannot!” she protested.
“A slave may not live who cannot do her master’s bidding.”
“Then kill me,” she answered fiercely, leaping up to confront and dare him. “Kill me. You are used to killing, and for that at least I should be grateful.”
“I will kill you if I please,” he said in level icy tones. “But not to please you. You don’t yet understand. You are my slave, my thing, my property, and I will not suffer you to be damaged save at my own good pleasure. Therefore, eat, or my Nubians shall whip you to quicken appetite.”
For a moment she stood defiant before him, white and resolute. Then quite suddenly, as if her will was being bent and crumpled under the insistent pressure of his own, she drooped and sank down again to the divan. Slowly, reluctantly she drew the dish nearer. Watching her, he laughed quite silently.
She paused, appearing to seek for something. Failing to find it she looked up at him again, between scorn and intercession.
“Am I to tear the meat with my fingers?” she demanded.
His eyes gleamed with understanding, or at least with suspicion. But he answered her quite calmly—
“It is against the Prophet’s law to defile meat or bread by the contact of a knife. You must use the hands that God has given you.”
“Do you mock me with the Prophet and his laws? What are the Prophet’s laws to me? If eat I must, at least I will not eat like a heathen dog, but in Christian fashion.”
To indulge her, as it seemed, he slowly drew the richly hilted dagger from his girdle. “Let that serve you, then,” he said; and carelessly he tossed it down beside her.
With a quick indrawn breath she pounced upon it. “At last,” she said, “you give me something for which I can be grateful to you.” And on the words she laid the point of it against her breast.
Like lightning he had dropped to one knee, and his hand had closed about her wrist with such a grip that all her arm felt limp and powerless. He was smiling into her eyes, his swarthy face close to her own.
“Did you indeed suppose I trusted you? Did you really think me deceived by your sudden pretence of yielding? When will you learn that I am not a fool? I did it but to test your spirit.”
“Then now you know its temper,” she replied. “You know my intention.”
“Forewarned, forearmed,” said he.
She looked at him, with something that would have been mockery but for the contempt that coloured it too deeply. “Is it so difficult a thing,” she asked, “to snap the thread of life? Are there no ways of dying save by the knife? You boast yourself my master; that I am your slave; that, having bought me in the marketplace, I belong to you body and soul. How idle is that boast. My body you may bind and confine; but my soul. … Be very sure that you shall be cheated of your bargain. You boast yourself lord of life and death. A lie! Death is all that you can command.”
Quick steps came pattering up the stairs, and before he could answer her, before he had thought of words in which to do so, Ali confronted him with the astounding announcement that there was a woman below asking urgently to speak with him.
“A woman?” he questioned, frowning. “A Nasrani woman, do you mean?”
“No, my lord. A Muslim,” was the still more surprising information.
“A Muslim woman, here? Impossible!”
But even as he spoke a dark figure glided like a shadow across the threshold on to the terrace. She was in black from head to foot, including the veil that shrouded her, a veil of the proportions of a mantle, serving to dissemble her very shape.
Ali swung upon her in a rage. “Did I not bid thee wait below, thou daughter of shame?” he stormed. “She has followed me up, my lord, to thrust herself in here upon you. Shall I drive her forth?”
“Let her be,” said Sakr-el-Bahr. And he waved Ali away. “Leave us!”
Something about that black immovable figure arrested his attention and fired his suspicions. Unaccountably almost it brought to his mind the thought of Ayoub-el-Sarnin and the bidding there had been for Rosamund in the sôk.
He stood waiting for his visitor to speak and disclose herself. She on her side continued immovable until Ali’s footsteps had faded in the distance. Then, with a boldness entirely characteristic, with the recklessness that betrayed her European origin, intolerant of the Muslim restraint imposed upon her sex, she did what no True-believing woman would have done. She tossed back that long black veil and disclosed the pale countenance and languorous eyes of Fenzileh.
For all that it was no more than he had expected, yet upon beholding her—her countenance thus bared to his regard—he recoiled a step.
“Fenzileh!” he cried. “What madness is this?”
Having announced herself in that dramatic fashion she composedly readjusted her veil so that her countenance should once more be decently concealed.
“To come here, to my house, and thus!” he protested. “Should this reach the ears of thy lord, how will it fare with thee and with me? Away,
