Complete works of hall c.., p.192
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 192
When Israel was within a day’s journey of Tetuan a terrible scourge fell upon the country. A plague of locusts came up like a dense cloud from the direction of the desert, and ate up every leaf and blade of grass that the scorching sun had left green, so that the plain over which it had passed was as black and barren as a lava stream. The farmers were impoverished, and the poorer people made beggars. Even this last disaster they charged in their despair to Israel, for Allah was now cursing them for Israel’s sake. They were the same people that had thrust their presents upon him when he was setting out.
At the lonesome hut of the old woman who had offered him a bowl of buttermilk Israel rested and asked for a drink of water. She gave him a dish of zummetta — barley roasted like coffee — and inquired if he was going on to Tetuan. He told her yes, and she asked if his home was there. And when he answered that it was, she looked at him again, and said in a moving way, “Then Allah help you, brother.”
“Why me more than another, sister?” said Israel.
“Because it is plain to see that you are a poor man,” said the old woman. “And that is the sort he is hardest upon.”
Israel faltered and said, “He? Who, mother? Ah, you mean—”
“Who else but Israel the Jew?” said she, and then added, as by a sudden afterthought, “But they say he is gone at last, and the Sultan has stripped him. Well, Allah send us some one else soon to set right this poor Gharb of ours! And what a man for poor men he might have been — so wise and powerful!”
Israel listened with his head bent down, and, like a moth at the flame, he could not help but play with the fire that scorched him. “They tell me,” he said, “that Allah has cursed him with a daughter that has devils.”
“Blind and dumb, poor soul,” said the old woman; “but Allah has pity for the afflicted — he is taking her away.”
Israel rose. “Away?”
“She is ill since her father went to Fez.”
“Ill?”
“Yes, I heard so yesterday — dying.”
Israel made one loud cry like the cry of a beast that is slaughtered, and fled out of the hut. Oh, fool of fools, why had he been dallying with dreams — billing and cooing with his own fancies — fondling and nuzzling and coddling them? Let all dreams henceforth be dead and damned for ever; for only devils out of hell had made them that poor men’s souls might be staked and lost! Oh, why had he not remembered the pale face of Naomi when he left her, and the silence of her tongue that had used to laugh? Fool, fool! Why had he ever left her at all?
With such thoughts Israel hurried along, sometimes running at his utmost velocity, and then stopping dead short; sometimes shouting his imprecations at the pitch of his voice and beating his fist against the sharp aloes until it bled, and then whispering to himself in awe.
Would God not hear his prayer? God knew the child was very near and dear to him, and also that he was a lonely man. “Have pity on a lonely man, O God!” he whispered. “Let me keep my child; take all else that I have, everything, no matter what! Only let me keep her — yes, just as she is, let me have her still! Time was when I asked more of Thee, but now I am humble, and ask that alone.”
On his knees in a lonesome place, with the fierce sun beating down on his uncovered head, amid the blackened leaves left by the locust, he prayed this prayer, and then rose to his feet and ran.
When he got to Tetuan the white city was glistening under the setting sun. Then he thought of his Moorish jellab, and looked at himself, and saw that he was returning home like a beggar; and he remembered with what splendour he had started out. Should he wait for the darkness, and creep into his house under the cover of it? If the thought had occurred an hour before he must have scouted it. Better to brave the looks of every face in Tetuan than be kept back one minute from Naomi. But now that he was so near he was afraid to go in; and now that he was so soon to learn the truth he dreaded to hear it. So he walked to and fro on the heath outside the town, paltering with himself, struggling with himself, eating out his heart with eagerness, trying to believe that he was waiting for the night.
The night came at length, and, under a deep-blue sky fast whitening with thick stars, Israel passed unknown through the Moorish gate, which was still open, and down the narrow lane to the market square. At the gate of the Mellah, which was closed, he knocked, and demanded entrance in the name of the Kaid. The Moorish guards who kept it fell back at sight of him with looks of consternation.
“Israel!” cried one, and dropped his lantern.
Israel whispered, “Keep your tongue between your teeth!” and hurried on.
At the door of his own house, which was also closed, he knocked again, but more fearfully. The black woman Habeebah opened it cautiously, and, seeing his jellab, she clashed it back in his face.
“Habeebah!” he cried, and he knocked once more.
Then Ali came to the door. “What Moorish man are you?” cried Ali, pushing him back as he pressed forward.
“Ali! Hush! It is I — Israel.”
Then Ali knew him and cried, “God save us! What has happened?”
“What has happened here?” said Israel. “Naomi,” he faltered, “what of her?”
“Then you have heard?” said Ali. “Thank God, she is now well.”
Israel laughed — his laugh was like a scream.
“More than that — a strange thing has befallen her since you went away,” said Ali.
“What?”
“She can hear!”
“It’s a lie!” cried Israel, and he raised his hand and struck Ali to the floor. But at the next minute he was lifting him up and sobbing and saying, “Forgive me, my brave boy. I was mad, my son; I did not know what I was doing. But do not torture me. If what you tell me is true, there is no man so happy under heaven; but if it is false, there is no fiend in hell need envy me.”
And Ali answered through his tears, “It is true, my father — come and see.”
CHAPTER XII
THE BAPTISM OF SOUND
WHAT had happened at Israel’s house during Israel’s absence is a story that may be quickly told. On the day of his departure Naomi wandered from room to room, seeming to seek for what she could not find, and in the evening the black women came upon her in the upper chamber where her father had read to her at sunset, and she was kneeling by his chair and the book was in her hands.
“Look at her, poor child,” said Fatimah. “See, she thinks he will come as usual. God bless her sweet innocent face!”
On the day following she stole out of the house into the town and made her way to the Kasbah, and Ali found her in the apartments of the wife of the Basha, who had lit upon her as she seemed to ramble aimlessly through the courtyard from the Treasury to the Hall of Justice, and from there to the gate of the prison.
The next day after that she did not attempt to go abroad, and neither did she wander through the house, but sat in the same seat constantly, and seemed to be waiting patiently. She was pale and quiet and silent; she did not laugh according to her wont, and she had a look of submission that was very touching to see.
“Now the holy saints have pity on the sweet jewel,” said Fatimah. “How long will she wait, poor darling?”
On the morning of the day following that her quiet had given place to restlessness, and her pallor to a burning flush of the face. Her hands were hot, her head was feverish, and her blind eyes were bloodshot.
It was now plain that the girl was ill, and that Israel’s fears on setting out from home had been right after all. And making his own reckoning with Naomi’s condition, Ali went off for the only doctor living in Tetuan — a Spanish druggist living in the walled lane leading to the western gate. This good man came to look at Naomi, felt her pulse, touched her throbbing forehead, with difficulty examined her tongue, and pronounced her illness to be fever. He gave some homely directions as to her treatment — for he despaired of administering drugs to such a one as she was — and promised to return the next day.
About the middle of that night Naomi became delirious. Fatimah stood constantly by her bed, bathing her hot forehead with vinegar and water; Habeebah slept in a chair at her feet; and Ali crouched in a corner outside the door of her room.
The druggist came in the morning, according to his promise; but there was nothing to be done, so he looked wise, wagged his head very solemnly, and said, “I will come again after two days more, when the fever must be near to its height, and bring a famous leech out of Tangier along with me!”
Meantime, Naomi’s delirium continued. It was gentle as her own spirit tent there was this that was strange and eerie about her unconsciousness — that whereas she had been dumb while her mind in its dark cell must have been mistress of itself and of her soul, she spoke without ceasing throughout the time of her reason’s vanquishment. Not that her poor tongue in its trouble uttered speech such as those that heard could follow and understand, but only a restless babble of empty sounds, yet with tones of varying feeling, sometimes of gladness, sometimes of sorrow, sometimes of remonstrance, and sometimes of entreaty.
All that night, and the next night also, the two black women sat together by her bedside, holding each other’s hands like little children in great fear. Also Ali crouched again like a dog in the darkness outside the door, listening in terror to the silvery young voice that had never echoed in that house before. This was the night when Israel, sleeping at the squalid inn of the Jews of Wazzan, was hearing Naomi’s voice in his dreams.
At the first glint of daylight in the morning the lad was up and gone, and away through the town-gate to the heath beyond, as far as to the fondak, which stands on the hill above it, that he might strain his wet eyes in the pitiless sunlight for Israel’s caravan that should soon come. On the first morning he saw nothing, but on the second morning he came upon Israel’s men returning without him, and telling their lying story that he had been stripped of everything by the Sultan at Fez, and was coming behind them penniless.
Now, Israel was to Ali the greatest, noblest, mightiest man among men. That he should fall was incredible, and that any man should say he had fallen was an affront and an outrage. So, stripling as he was, the lad faced the rascals with the courage of a lion. “Liars and thieves!” he cried; “tell that story to another soul in Tetuan, and I will go straight to the Kaid at the Kasbah, and have every black dog of you all whipped through the streets for plundering my master.”
The men shouted in derision and passed on, firing their matchlocks as a mock salute. But Ali had his will of them; they told their tale no more, and when they entered Tetuan, and their fellows questioned them concerning their journey, they took refuge in the reticence that sits by right of nature on the tongues of Moors — they said and knew nothing.
While Ali was on the heath looking out for Israel, the doctor out of Tangier came to Naomi. The girl was still unconscious, and the wise leech shook his head over her. Her case was hopeless; she was sinking — in plain words, she was dying — and if her father did not come before the morrow he would come too late to find her alive.
Then the black women fell to weeping and wailing, and after that to spiritual conflict. Both were born in Islam, but Fatimah had secretly become a Jewess by persuasion of her mistress who was dead. She was, therefore, for sending for the Chacham. But Habeebah had remained a Muslim, and she was for calling the Imam. “The Imam is good, the Imam is holy; who so good and holy as the Imam?” “Nay, but our Sidi holds not with the Imam, for our lord is a Jew, and our lord is our master, our lord is our sultan, our lord is our king.” “Shoof! What is Sidi against paradise? And paradise is for her who makes a follower of Moosa into a follower of Mohammed. Let but the child die with the Kelmah on her lips, and we are all three blest for ever — otherwise we will burn everlastingly in the fires of Jehinnum.” “But, alack! how can the poor girl say the Kelmah, being as dumb as the grave?” “Then how can she say the Shemang either?”
Having heard the verdict of the doctor, Ali returned in hot haste and silenced both the bondwomen: “The Imam is a villain, and the Chacham is a thief.” There was only one good man left in Tetuan, and that was his own Taleb, his schoolmaster, the same that had taught him the harp in the days of the Governor’s marriage. This person was an old negro, bewrinkled by years, becrippled by ague, once stone deaf, and still partially so, half blind, and reputed to be only half wise, a liberated slave from the Sahara, just able to read the Koran and the Torah, and willing to teach either impartially, according to his knowledge, for he was neither a Jew nor a Muslim, but a little of both, as he used to say, and not too much of either. For such a hybrid in a land of intolerance there must have been no place save the dungeons of the Kasbah, but that this good nondescript was a privileged pet of everybody. In his dark cellar, down an alley by the side of the Grand Mosque in the Metamar, he had sat from early morning until sunset, year in year out, through thirty years on his rush-covered floor, among successive generations of his boys; and as often as night fell he had gone hither and thither among the sick and dying, carrying comfort of kind words, and often meat and drink of his meagre substance.
Such was Ali’s hero after Israel, and now, in Israel’s absence and his own great trouble, he tried away for him.
“Father,” cried the lad, “does it not say in the good book that the prayer of a righteous man availeth much?”
“It does, my son,” said the Taleb “You have truth. What then?”
“Then if you will pray for Naomi she will recover,” said Ali.
It was a sweet instance of simple faith. The old black Taleb dismissed his scholars, closed down his shutter, locked it with a padlock, hobbled to Naomi’s bedside in his tattered white selham, looked down at her through the big spectacles that sprawled over his broad black nose, and then, while a dim mist floated between the spectacles and his eyes, and a great lump rose at his throat to choke him, he fell to the floor and prayed, and Ali and the black women knelt beside him.
The negro’s prayer was simple to childishness. It told God everything; it recited the facts to the heavenly Father as to one who was far away and might not know. The maiden was sick unto death. She had been three days and nights knowing no one, and eating and drinking nothing. She was blind and dumb and deaf. Her father loved her and was wrapped up in her. She was his only child, and his wife was dead, and he was a lonely man. He was away from his home now, and if, when he returned, the girl were gone and lost — if she were dead and buried — his strong heart would be broken and his very soul in peril.
Such was the Taleb’s prayer, and such was the scene of it — the dumb angel of white and crimson turning and tossing on the bed in an aureole of her streaming yellow hair, and the four black faces about her, eager and hot and aflame, with closed eyelids and open lips, calling down mercy out of heaven from the God that might be seen by the soul alone.
And so it was, but whether by chance or Providence let no man dare to tell, that even while the four black people were yet on their knees by the bed, the turning and tossing of the white face stopped suddenly and Naomi lay still on her pillow. The hot flush faded from her cheeks; her features, which had twitched, were quiet; and her hands, which had been restless, lay at peace on the counterpane.
The good old Taleb took this for an answer to his prayer, and he shouted “El hamdu l’Illah!” (Praise be to God), while the big drops coursed down the deep furrows of his streaming face. And then, as if to complete the miracle, and to establish the old man’s faith in it, a strange and wondrous thing befell. First, a thin watery humour flowed from one of Naomi’s ears, and after that she raised herself on her elbow. Her eyes were open as if they saw; her lips were parted as though they were breaking into a smile; she made a long sigh like one who has slept softly through the night and has just awakened in the morning.
Then, while the black people held their breath in their first moment of surprise and gladness, her parted lips gave forth a sound. It was a laugh — a faint, broken, bankrupt echo of her old happy laughter. And then instantly, almost before the others had heard the sound, and while the notes of it were yet coming from her tongue, she lifted her idle hand and covered her ear, and over her face there passed a look of dread.
So swift had this change been that the bondwomen had not seen it, and they were shouting “Hallelujah!” with one voice, thinking only that she who had been dead to them was alive again. But the old Taleb cried eagerly, “Hush! my children, hush! What is coming is a marvellous thing! I know what it is — who knows so well as I? Once I was deaf, my children, but now I hear. Listen! The maiden has had fever — fever of the brain. Listen! A watery humour had gathered in her head. It has gone, it has flowed away. Now she will hear. Listen, for it is I that know it — who knows it so well as I? Yes; she will be no longer deaf. Her ears will be opened. She will hear. Once she was living in a land of silence; now she is coming into the land of sound. Blessed be God, for He has wrought this wondrous work. God is great! God is mighty! Praise the merciful God for ever! El hamdu l’Illah!”
And marvellous and passing belief as the old Taleb’s story seemed to be, it appeared to be coming to pass, for even while he spoke, beginning in a slow whisper and going on with quicker and louder breath, Naomi turned her face full upon him; and when the black women in their ready faith, joined in his shouts of praise, she turned her face towards them also; and wherever a voice sounded in the room she inclined her head towards it as one who knew the direction of the sounds, and also as one who was in fear of them.
But, seeing nothing of her look of pain, and knowing nothing but one thing only, and that was the wondrous and mighty change that she who had been deaf could now hear, that she who had never before heard speech now heard their voices as they spoke around her, Ali, in his frantic delight laughing and crying together, his white teeth aglitter, and his round black face shining with tears, began to shout and to sing, and to dance around the bed in wild joy at the miracle which God had wrought in answer to his old Taleb’s prayer. No heed did he pay to the Taleb’s cries of warning, but danced on and on, and neither did the bondwomen see the old man’s uplifted arms or his big lips pursed out in hushes, so overpowered were they with their delight, so startled and so joy drunken. But over their tumult there came a wild outburst of piercing shrieks. They were the cries of Naomi in her blind and sudden terror at the first sounds that had reached her of human voices. Her face was blanched, her eyelids were trembling, her lips were restless, her nostrils quivered, her whole being seemed to be overcome by a vertigo of dread, and, in the horrible disarray of all her sensations her brain, on its wakening from its dolorous sleep of three delirious days, was tottering and reeling at its welcome in this world of noise.
