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Hamoud-bin-Said inclined his handsome head, while concluding: "You will soon forget all you have learned from me, and I shall have received your money for nothing." His impassiveness was deranged by a look of chagrin, as he blurted out harshly: "I regret that the money also has flown away, or I should insist " He held his head high, as if trying to rise above his feeling of degradation.
In that clutch of his, all at once so strong despite his feebleness, Lilla found no sinister portent. She was thinking: "Death conquered me once; but now I shall conquer death." Next day, when a maid announced that Hamoud-bin-Said was waiting in the library, Lilla felt that the time had come to "stop that nonsense."
Hamoud-bin-Said suggested that she master first the most difficult consonants "ha," to be pronounced with the force at the back of the palate, "dâd" and "tâ," emphasized by pressing the tongue far back, and the strong guttural "en." These were sounds that had no association with any in English, French, German, or Italian. Lilla was filled with dismay.
Then, seeing nothing except the pen point, she wrote slowly, "What have you done? What have you done?" And suddenly, in a convulsive hand that sprawled over half the page, "Betrayed!" She stared at these words in amazement. Hamoud-bin-Said entered the sitting room. He had on the dark blue joho edged with a red pattern.
Lilla thought with envy of all this woman had never imagined nor felt, all that she had been able to enjoy without self-questioning. How simple life was for some people! "I'm giving a little party. No doubt it's useless to ask you " Fanny Brassfield interrupted herself to stare at Hamoud-bin-Said, who had entered the room without a sound.
And in order to impress his instructions upon the mind of Hamoud-bin-Said, he said to the Arab severely: "Remember, not one drop more!" "Lilla! Lilla!" She appeared in the doorway of the study like a muse that David had summoned by an infallible conjuration. His day's work was over. He showed her what he had done.
He saw her eyes misty with shadows which disappeared as she came forward into the lamplight. "Yes, she had been thinking of him." He suspected that she thought of "him" also in the night. "Don't go yet," he would plead, when she came to his bed, into which Hamoud-bin-Said had tucked him like a child.
Instead of calling at Zanzibar, this time it went clear to Suez! In Suez a fortune-telling dervish, perhaps because he had just seen an American pass by, told Hamoud-bin-Said that his wanderings would take him to America. Hamoud accepted the words of the holy man as a second-hand pronouncement of God. At that time there was even a ship at Suez bound for New York.
Tall and spare, with small hands, he wore an outrageously inappropriate, ill-fitting sack suit. To Lilla it was as if some romantic young character from the tales of Scheherazade had been degraded for his gallantries in this hideous attire. His name was Hamoud-bin-Said. He was an Omân Arab from Zanzibar.
In the drawing-room Hamoud-bin-Said paced to and fro, sometimes standing before the picture by Bronzino, and seeming to stare clear through it. He was serene, as water is serene that has been lashed by tempests, and that holds in the depths of its placidity secrets that none can discern.
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