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He loves intrigue! So that, twenty-four hours later, Zulannah laughed shrilly when Qatim the Ethiopian repeated all he had learned of the white man and the white maid he presumably loved. "Love!" she scoffed. "He has not met me!"
And Qatim sat back on his haunches, and laughed, clapping his enormous hands. She was not dead, and her hands were not injured, but she was too hideous to show herself unveiled and too twisted to be recognised in the street.
And Qatim, grey-green with fright, thinking that it had been worked by the power of a djinn or devil, had flung her out into the night, and having scraped a hole in the foetid earth under the straw, with fervent prayers to whatever he worshipped, had withdrawn the jewels, hidden them, and called the woman back. Yes! she clung to life.
Zulannah drove back in her Rolls-Royce to the edge of the Arabian quarter, where, owing to the narrowness of the lanes called by courtesy streets, she alighted to finish what remained of the journey in a litter swung from the shoulders of four Nubian slaves, and, arrived at the great house, summoned her special bodyguard, Qatim the Ethiopian; and for acquiring information down to the smallest detail about some special individual there is, surely, no detective agency on earth to compare to one ordinary, native servant.
On account of his cunning, his stolidity, his mighty muscle and ferocious appearance Qatim had been made bank-messenger in chief to the House of Zulannah, and had often stood at his mistress's side when she had taken the cheque-book from the drawer and made strange black marks on one of the pink leaves.
Qatim had given out that the woman was bewitched, and that death, instantaneous and horrible, would be the fate awaiting anyone but himself who should speak to her or look upon her unveiled face before the setting of the sun some of us Christians refuse to walk under ladders and, although it entailed much fetching and carrying and marketing on his part, still, it ensured them solitude.
"When he is best he is little worse than a man; and when he is worst, he is little better than a beast." Even as the frail little old lady sat quietly looking out at the coming of the dawn, Qatim the Ethiopian sat looking with pride round his transformed hovel in the back reaches of the bazaar.
And once in the house, with a veil across her face, a whip or dagger in her hand, she would show them who was master, cripple or no cripple, fool that she had been to have submitted to the black Qatim, but thrice fool he, who knew nothing of that other bank in which one-half her fortune and one-half her jewels were kept in safe custody against such a rainy day as this.
Anyway, they came to an understanding which ensured the eunuch's silence at the price of so much good money, paid in instalments. Qatim had no intention of holding to his side of the agreement, nor his brother to his as is the way of such breed of Oriental. Then, just as he was, clad only in loin-cloth and with whip in hand, the gigantic brute strode to the House of Zulannah.
The Ethiopian slave Qatim gathered up the broken body of the woman from the filth of the gutter and carried her to his hovel and flung her upon the filthy straw under which he hid the jewels he stripped from her. "Best springs from strife and dissonant chords beget Divinest harmonies."
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