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"Should I trust anyone with the knowledge that I had visited thee?" she asked, and he admired the strong Sicilian spirit in her that not all these years in the Basha's hareem had sufficed to extinguish. She moved quickly to the door, to pause again on the threshold. "Thou'lt not relinquish her? Thou'lt not." "Be at ease," he answered her, on so resolved a note that she departed satisfied.
"Most extraordinary man, your friend yonder," said the officer; "I don't remember to have seen him in Turkey, and yet I recognize upon his feet the boots that I wore in the great Russian cavalry charge, where I individually rode down five hundred and thirty Turks, slew seven hundred, at a moderate computation, by the mere force of my rush, and, taking the seven insurmountable walls of Constantinople at one clean flying leap, rode straight into the seraglio, and, dropping the bridle, cut the sultan's throat with my bridle-hand, kissed the other to the ladies of the hareem, and was back again within our lines and taking a glass of wine with the hereditary Grand Duke Generalissimo before he knew that I had mounted.
Perhaps, in Morocco, she is even thought good enough for the Sultan plump, clear-skinned, bright-eyed. Could she but get a place in the Royal hareem, it would be in the hands of God to make her the mother of the coming sultan. But good looks alone will not suffice to take her there. Influence a word translatable in the Orient by a shorter one, cash must be brought to bear.
"Our present Lord was young," he continued at last thoughtfully; "he was a very young man, and so Ba Ahmad spoke for him and acted for him, and threw into prison all who might have stood before his face. Also, as was natural, he piled up great stores of gold, and took to his hareem the women he desired, and oppressed the poor and the rich, so that many men cursed him privately.
And if I invite all Newgate or all Bedlam here, by they shall be welcome." After this vigorous allocution, to one of which sort Lord Steyne treated his "Hareem" whenever symptoms of insubordination appeared in his household, the crestfallen women had nothing for it but to obey.
"Too long already hast thou queened it in my hareem with thine infidel, Frankish ways," he muttered, so that none but those immediately about overheard his angry words. "Thou art become a very scandal in the eyes of the Faithful," he added very grimly. "It were well, perhaps, that we amended that."
Frequently, however, the bad-tempered guardians of the hareem commit outrages on the persons of real or supposed aggressors in this way, and from these even members of the foreign embassies have not always been exempt.
But now that the celebrated hareem had ceased to exist, it was felt that one would do well to be a little careful; at least, to put a more or less summary end to the flirtation when the house was finished. But Eleanor hadn't done that. She was playing with him more exclusively than ever.
Often there is a courtyard in the middle of the house, so that all the rooms can have windows and light. One part of the house is separated from the rest for the women to use. This is called the "hareem," and no man, except the master of the house, is allowed to go into it. All rich Mohammedans have a separate part of their house for the women.
The mass of building whereof this court occupied the centre, is believed to have constituted the hareem or private apartments of the monarch. It adjoined the state apartments at its northern angle, but had no direct communication with them. These latter portals, it is to be observed, are so placed as to command no view into the Hareem Court, though it is opposite to them.
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