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"I carry in it goods of price, which I'll not see riddled to please a pert boy," he said. "Goods of price?" echoed Asad, with a snort. "They'll need to be of price indeed that are valued above the life of my son. Let us see these goods of price." And to the men upon the waist-deck he shouted, "Open me that pannier." Sakr-el-Bahr sprang forward, and laid a hand upon the Basha's arm.
"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.
Under the inquisitive gaping stare of all about them stood Rosamund and Sakr-el-Bahr regarding each other in silence for a little spell after the Basha's departure. The very galley-slaves, stirred from their habitual lethargy by happenings so curious and unusual, craned their sinewy necks to peer at them with a flicker of interest in their dull, weary eyes.
The innocent eyes faced him without a sign of embarrassment. "Aunt Basha's my old black mammy. Do you know her? All her name's longer'n that. I can say it." Then with careful, slow enunciation, "Bathsheba Salina Mosina Angelica Preston." "Is that your little bit of name too?" the Bishop asked, "Are you a Preston?" "Why, of course." The child opened her gray eyes wide. "Don't you know my name?
Yet here was one as by a miracle, of a beauty so amazing and so diverse from any that ever yet had feasted the Basha's sight, that plainly she had acted as a charm upon his senses. "She is white as the snows upon the Atlas, luscious as the dates of Tafilalt," he murmured fondly, his gleaming eyes considering her what time she stood immovable before him.
Turkish janissaries of the Basha's guard, invisible almost in their flowing black garments, moved to answer that summons and challenge those who came. From the dark vaulted entrance of the courtyard leapt a gleam of lanterns containing tiny clay lamps in which burned a wick that was nourished by mutton fat.
Two hundred soldiers are allowed by Government to the governor of Tetuan, by means of which he is to maintain law and order. However, a hundred only were maintained, and the pay of the remaining half went into somebody's pocket. There was apparently little for them to do; drill was a thing unheard of, and they spent most of the day hanging round the basha's house or doing errands for him.
The stage during the second act was to represent "a private apartment in the palace," and here the action assumed some dramatic semblance, taking the following course: The Christian lover manages to effect an entry into this same private apartment and to hold a long, loving discourse with the Basha's favourite, and when eventually the two are about to embrace, in comes no less a personage than the Basha himself, and advances quietly on tip-toe and listens for awhile.
Between these came the victims of the Basha's order Naomi first, barefooted, bareheaded, stripped of all but the last garment that hid her nakedness, her head held down, her face hidden, and her eyes closed and Israel afterwards, mounted on a lean and ragged ass. A further guard of black police walked at the back of all.
And do you think, too," he cried, lifting one hand and his voice together, "that my Master in heaven would not see and know it on an errand of mercy His servant perished? Ben Aboo, ask pardon of God, I say; you are a fool." The Basha's face became black and swelled with rage. But he was cowed. He hesitated a moment in silence, and then said with an air of braggadocio
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