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We, however, had quite another design, which was that my husband and Imam Sharif and I should go off to Bir Borhut, if the safety of our lives could in any way be guaranteed, we taking only Noura, one of the Indian servants, as our own attendant. Of course the others would be with their master.
For a time which seemed long, they waited, hoping that something would happen. They did not speak at all. Each heard her own heart beating, and imagined that she could hear the heart of the other. At last there were steps on the stairs which led from Saidee's rooms to the roof. Noura came up.
The woman had thrown off the blue drapery that had covered her head, and her auburn hair glittered in the light of the lamp by which she wrote. She looked up, vexed. "Thou knowest, Noura, that for years I have received no guests," she said, in a dialect of the Soudan, in which most Saharian mistresses of Negro servants learn to talk. "I can see no one.
She told her 'love story' to one of her negresses, who told Noura who repeated it to me. Perhaps I oughtn't to have listened, but why not?" Victoria did not answer. The clouds round Saidee and herself were dark, but she was trying to see the blue beyond, and find the way into it, with her sister. "She's barely sixteen now, and she's been here a year," Saidee went on.
She had her bedroom and reception-room, her roof terrace, and her garden court. On the ground floor her negresses lived, and cooked for their mistress and themselves. She did not wish to have Victoria with her, night and day, and so she had quietly directed Noura to make up a bed in the room which would have been her boudoir, if she had lived in Europe.
"O Lella Saïda, I have brought the Roumia," the negress announced. A slim figure in Arab dress came into the room, unfastening a white veil with fingers that trembled with impatience. The door shut softly. Noura had obeyed instructions. For ten years Victoria had been waiting for this moment, dreaming of it at night, picturing it by day. Now it had come.
Not a soul in the marabout's house could read English, except the marabout himself; and it was seldom he honoured her with a visit. Nevertheless, it had become a habit to lock up the books, and she found a secretive pleasure in it. She had only time to slip the ribbon back into her breast, and sit down stiffly on the divan, when the door was opened again by Noura.
Victoria asked the question mechanically, for she felt that Saidee expected it of her. "Bakta managed, and Noura helped. He came dressed like an Arab woman, and pretended to be old and lame, so that he could crouch down and use a stick as he walked, to disguise his height. Bakta waited and we had no more than ten minutes to say everything.
Before tying it under his wing again, she scattered more yellow seeds for the dove Imams, because she did not want them to fly away until she was ready to let her messenger go. Thus there was the less danger that the carrier-pigeon would be noticed. Only Noura, her negress, knew of him.
She was glad of an excuse to talk with his messenger alone, without waiting. "Go fetch her," she directed. "And when thou hast brought her to the door I shall no longer need thee, Noura." Her heart was beating fast. She dreaded some final decision, or the need to make a decision, yet she knew that she would be bitterly disappointed if, after all, the European woman were not what she thought.
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