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He knew things behind closed doors by instinct; he was like a thought- reader in the sure touch of discovery; the Khedive looked upon him as occult almost and laughed in the face of Sadik the Mouffetish when he said some evil things of Dicky. Also, the Khedive told the Mouffetish that if any harm came to Dicky there would come harm to him.
But why should Imshi Pasha send the girl and his mouffetish on this miserable mission? Was not Imshi Pasha his friend? Quietly smoking his cigarette, he said to the man: "You may go, Mahommed Melik; I have had enough. Take your harem with you," he added quickly. The man scarcely stirred a muscle, the woman flushed deeply.
Ismail's fury was great, for the blue devils had him by the heels that day; but on the instant he saw the eyes of Sadik the Mouffetish, and their cunning, cruelty, and soulless depravity, their present search for a victim to his master's bad temper, acted at once on Ismail's sense of humour.
"True, O beloved of Heaven, who shall live for ever," said Dicky, his lips lost in an odorous cloud of 'ordinaire. "But there be evil tongues and evil hearts; and if some son of liars, some brother of foolish tales, should bear false witness upon this thing before our master the Khedive, or his gentle Mouffetish "
Wassef replied that the Mamour did well not to accept the backsheesh of Mahommed Selim's father, for the Mouffetish at the palace of Ismail would have heard of it, and there would have been an end to the Mamour. It was quite a different matter when it was backsheesh for sending Mahommed Selim to the Soudan.
If to the Soudan, well; if to remain, what conflagration might not occur! Dicky staked all. "Here, once more, among thy people, returned from conquest and the years of pilgrimage in the desert, like a prophet of old, thy zeal would lead the people, and once more Egypt should bloom like the rose. Thou wouldst be sirdar, mouffetish, pasha, all things soever.
Even Sadik the Mouffetish Sadik, who had four hundred women slaves dressed in purple and fine linen Sadik, whose kitchen alone cost him sixty thousand pounds a year, the price of whose cigarette ash-trays was equal to the salary of an English consul even Sadik, foster-brother, panderer, the Barabbas of his master, was silent and watchful to-day.
Looking into the distance, she saw two or three hundred men at work on a canal, draining the property of Selamlik Pasha, whose tyrannies, robberies, and intrigues were familiar to all Egypt, whose palaces were almost as many as those of the notorious Mouffetish. These men she saw now working in the dread corvee had been forced from their homes by a counterfeit Khedivial order.
"His gentle Mouffetish" was scarcely the name to apply to Sadik Pasha, the terrible right-hand of the Khedive. But Dicky's tongue was in his cheek. "There is the Mudir," said the Sheikh-el-beled: "he hath said that the woman should die, if she were found."
Hardly had the barber fled from the anger of Wassef, when a glittering kavass of the Mouffetish at Cairo passed by on a black errand of conscription. With a curse Wassef felt in his vest for his purse, and called to the kavass the being more dreaded in Egypt than the plague.
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