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Updated: May 8, 2025
What dreadful words are these and even worse were at the tip of your tongue! Mother Mother Neforis! Your name means kindness, but you can be cruel, bitterly cruel!"
It came upon me just now like a revelation; I ask your blessing on my union with her!" So far had Neforis allowed her son to speak. He had frankly and boldly uttered what she had indeed feared to hear. And so long she had succeeded in keeping silence! But now her patience gave way. Trembling with anger she abruptly broke in, exclaiming, as her face grew crimson: "No more, no more!
I had some bad hours at home; and when Nilus came to us yesterday, after the opening of the will, and brought me the pretty little gold box with turquoises and pearls that I have always admired, and told me that the good Mukaukas had written with his own hand, in his last will, that it was to be given to me I his bright little 'Katharina, my mother insisted on my not taking it and sent it back to Neforis, though I begged and prayed to keep it.
When Neforis confessed how large a sum in debts Orion had left in Constantinople the old man put his hand in his purse with a sort of pride, delighted to find that his sole remaining heir knew how to spend the immense wealth which to him was now a burden rather than a pleasure to make good use of it, as he himself had done in his day, and display a magnificence of which the lustre was reflected on him and on his name.
At this Paula, who had been watching the physician all through his speech, turned to Dame Neforis, and unclasped her hands which were lying in her lap, ready to shake hands with her uncle's wife if she only offered hers, though she was still fully resolved to leave the house. A terrible storm was raging in the lady's soul. She felt that she had often been unkind to Paula.
Then she kissed her aunt his mother, and it was long since she had done so as she and little Mary bid her good-night. Neforis accepted the kiss coolly but with some surprise, and looked up enquiringly at the girl and at her son. No doubt she thought many things, but deemed it prudent to give them no utterance for the present.
"And besides, your father wished to see his new purchase once more," Neforis broke in, "and to ask the merchant how the gems might be removed without injury to the work itself. So I went to the tablinum myself with Sebek." "But I had the key!" cried Orion putting his hand into the breast of his robe. "That I had forgotten," replied his mother. "But unfortunately we did not need it.
A host of torturing thoughts haunted her unbidden; they were not to be exorcised, and added to her misery: Neforis dead; the residence in the hands of the Arabs; Orion bereft of his possessions and held guilty of a capital crime. And the peaceful house beyond the hedge what trouble was hanging over its white-haired master and his guileless wife and daughter?
Neforis looked up to heaven and for some minutes did not speak; then she asked: "And who has accused him of robbery?" "The head of his own Church. . . ." "Benjamin?" she murmured with a peculiar smile. Only yesterday she had made her will in favor of the patriarch and the Church.
It was no secret that even her uncle's wife, worthy Neforis, did not care for her haughty niece and only suffered her to please the invalid. And what business had a Melchite at Memphis, under the roof of a good Jacobite? Every word the dragoman spoke breathed the scorn which a mean and narrow-minded man is always ready to heap on those who share the kindness of his own benefactors.
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