Complete works of hall c.., p.203
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 203
At that moment a new and dearer wonder came to her, such as every maiden knows whom God has made beautiful, yet none remembers the hour when she knew it first. For, tracing with her eyes the shadow of the cliff and of the continent of cloud that sailed double in two seas of blue to where they were broken by the dazzling half-round of the sun’s reflected disc on the shadowed quarter of the boat, she leaned over the side of it, and then saw the reflection of another and lovelier vision.
“Father,” she cried with alarm, “a face in the water! Look! look!”
“It is your own, my child,” said Israel. “Mine!” she cried.
“The reflection of your face,” said Israel; “the light and the water make it.”
The marvel was hard to understand. There was something ghostly in this thing that was herself and yet not herself, this face that looked up at her and laughed and yet made no voice. She leaned back in the boat and asked Israel if it was still in the water. But when at length she had grasped the mystery, the artlessness of her joy was charming. She was like a child in her delight, and like a woman that was still a child in her unconscious love of her own loveliness. Whenever the boat was at rest she leaned over its bulwark and gazed down into the blue depths.
“How beautiful!” she cried, “how beautiful!”
She clapped her hands and looked again, and there in the still water was the wonder of her dancing eyes. “Oh! how very beautiful!” she cried without lifting her face, and when she saw her lips move as she spoke and her sunny hair fall about her restless head she laughed and laughed again with a heart of glee.
Israel looked on for some moments at this sweet picture, and, for all his sense of the dangers of Naomi’s artless joy in her own beauty, he could not find it in his heart to check her. He had borne too long the pain and shame of one who was father of an afflicted child to deny himself this choking rapture of her recovery. “Live on like a child always, little one,” he thought; “be a child as long as you can, be a child for ever, my dove, my darling! Never did the world suffer it that I myself should be a child at all.”
The artlessness of Naomi increased day by day, and found constantly some new fashion of charming strangeness. All lovely things on the earth seemed to speak to her, and she could talk with the birds and the flowers. Also she would lie down in the grass and rest like a lamb, with as little shame and with a grace as sweet. Not yet had the great mystery dawned that drops on a girl like an unseen mantle out of the sky, and when it has covered her she is a child no more. Naomi was a child still. Nay, she was a child a second time, for while she had been blind she had seemed for a little while to become a woman in the awful revelation of her infirmity and isolation. Now she was a weak, patient, blind maiden no longer, but a reckless spirit of joy once again, a restless gleam of human sunlight gathering sunshine into her father’s house.
It was fit and beautiful that she who had lived so long without the better part of the gifts of God should enjoy some of them at length in rare perfection. Her sight was strong and her hearing was keen, but voice was the gift which she had in abundance. So sweet, so full, so deep, so soft a voice as Naomi’s came to be, Israel thought he had never heard before. Ruth’s voice? Yes, but fraught with inspiration, replete with sparkling life, and passionate with the notes of a joyous heart. All day long Naomi used it. She sang as she rose in the morning, and was still singing when she lay down at night. Wherever people came upon her, they came first upon the sound of her voice. The farmers heard it across the fields, and sometimes Israel heard it from over the hill by their hut. Often she seemed to them like a bird that is hidden in a tree, and only known to be there by the outbursts of its song.
Fatimah’s ditties were still her delight. Some of them fell strangely from her pure lips, so nearly did they border on the dangerous. But her favourite song was still her mother’s: —
Oh, come and claim thine own,
Oh, come and take thy throne,
Reign ever and alone
Reign glorious, golden Love.
Into these words, as her voice ripened, she seemed to pour a deeper fervour. She was as innocent as a child of their meaning, but it was almost as if she were fulfilling in some way a law of her nature as a maid and drifting blindly towards the dawn of Love. Never did she think of Love, but it was just as if Love were always thinking of her; it was even as if the spirit of Love were hovering over her constantly, and she were walking in the way of its outstretched wings.
Israel saw this, and it set him to chasing day-dreams that were like the drawing up of a curtain. A beautiful phantom of Naomi’s future would rise up before him. Love had come to her. The great mystery! the rapture, the blissful wonder, the dear, secret, delicious palpitating joy. He knew it must come some day — perhaps to day, perhaps to-morrow. And when it came it would be like a sixth sense.
In quieter moments — generally at night, when he would take a candle and look at her where she lay asleep — Israel would carry his dreams into Naomi’s future one stage farther, and see her in the first dawn of young motherhood. Her delicate face of pink an cream; her glance of pride and joy and yearning, an then the thrill of the little spreading red fingers fastening on her white bosom — oh, what a glimpse was there revealed to him!
But struggle as he would to find pleasure in these phantoms, he could not help but feel pain from them also. They had a perilous fascination for him, but he grudged them to Naomi. He thought he could have given his immortal soul to her, but these shadows he could not give. That was his poor tribute to human selfishness; his last tender, jealous frailty as a father. He dreaded the coming of that time when another — some other yet unseen — should come before him, and he should lose the daughter that was now his own.
Sometimes the memory of their old troubles in Tetuan seemed to cross like a thundercloud the azure of Naomi’s sky, but at the next hour it was gone. The world was too full of marvels for any enduring sense but wonder. Once she awoke from sleep in terror, and told Israel of something which she believed to have happened to her in the night. She had been carried away from him — she could not say when — and she knew no more until she found herself in a great patio, paved and wailed with tiles. Men were standing together there in red peaked caps and flowing white kaftans. And before them all was one old man in garments that were of the colour of the afternoon sun, with sleeves like the mouths of bells, a curling silver knife at his waistband, and little leather bags hung by yellow cords about his neck. Beside this man there was a woman of a laughing cruel face; and she herself, Naomi — alone her father being nowhere near — stood in the midst with all eyes upon her. What happened next she did not know, for blank darkness fell upon everything, and in that interval they who had taken her away must have brought her back. For when she opened her eyes she was in her own bed, and the things of their little home were about her, and her father’s eyes were looking down at her, and his lips were kissing her, and the sun was shining outside, and the birds were singing, and the long grass was whispering in the breeze, and it was the same as if she had been asleep during the night and was just awakening in the morning.
“It was a dream, my child,” said Israel, thinking only with how vivid a sense her eyes had gathered up in that instant of first sight the picture of that day at the Kasbah.
“A dream!” she cried; “no, no! I saw it!”
Hitherto her dreams had been blind ones, and if she dreamt of her own people it had not been of their faces, but of the touch of their hands or the sound of their voices. By one of these she had always known them, and sometimes it had been her mother’s arms that had been about her, and sometimes her father’s lips that had pressed her forehead, and sometimes Ali’s voice that had rung in her ears.
Israel smoothed her hair and calmed her fears, but thinking both of her dream and of her artless sayings, he said in his heart, “She is a child, a child born into life as a maid, and without the strength of a child’s weakness. Oh! great is the wisdom which orders it so that we come into the world as babes.”
Thus realising Naomi’s childishness, Israel kept close guard and watch upon her afterwards. But if she was a gleam of sunlight in his lonely dwelling, like sunlight she came and went in it, and one day he found her near to the track leading up to the fondak in talk with a passing traveller by the way, whom he recognised for the grossest profligate out of Tetuan. Unveiled, unabashed, with sweet looks of confidence she was gazing full into the man’s gross face, answering his evil questions with the artless simplicity of innocence. At one bound Israel was between them; and in a moment he had torn Naomi away. And that night, while she wept out her very heart at the first anger that her father had shown her, Israel himself, in a new terror of his soul, was pouring out a new petition to God. “O Lord, my God,” he cried, “when she was blind and dumb and deaf she was a thing apart, she was a child in no peril from herself for Thy hand did guide her, and in none from the world, for no man dared outrage her infirmity. But now she is a maid, and her dangers are many, for she is beautiful, and the heart of man is evil. Keep me with her always, O Lord, to guard and guide her! Let me not leave her, for she is without knowledge of good and evil. Spare me a little while longer, though I am stricken in years. For her sake spare me, Oh Lord — it is the last of my prayers — the last, O Lord, the last — for her sake spare me!”
God did not hear the prayer of Israel. Next morning a guard of soldiers came out from Tetuan and took him prisoner in the name of the Kaid. The release of the poor followers of Absalam out of the prison at Shawan had become known by the blind gratitude of one of them, who, hastening to Israel’s house in the Mellah, had flung himself down on his face before it.
CHAPTER XXI
ISRAEL IN PRISON
Short as the time was — some three months and odd days — since the prison at Shawan had been emptied by order of the warrant which Israel had sealed without authority in the name of Ben Aboo, it was now occupied by other prisoners. The remoteness of the town in the territory of the Akhmas, and the wild fanaticism of the Shawanis, had made the old fortress a favourite place of banishment to such Kaids of other provinces as looked for heavier ransoms from the relatives of victims, because the locality of their imprisonment was unknown or the danger of approaching it was terrible. And thus it happened that some fifty or more men and boys from near and far were already living in the dungeon from which Israel and Ali together had set the other prisoners free.
This was the prison to which Israel was taken when he was torn from Naomi and the simple home that he had made for himself near Semsa. “Ya Allah! Let the dog eat the crust which he thought too hard for his pups!” said Ben Aboo, as he sealed the warrant which consigned Israel to the Kaid of Shawan.
Israel was taken to the prison afoot, and reached it on the morning of the second day after his arrest. The sun was shining as he approached the rude old block of masonry and entered the passage that led down to the dungeon. In a little court at the door of the place the Kaid el habs, the jailer, was sitting on a mattress, which served him for chair by day and bed by night. He was amusing himself with a ginbri, playing loud and low according as the tumult was great or little which came from the other side of a barred and knotted doorway behind him, some four feet high, and having a round peephole in the upper part of it. On the wall above hung leather thongs, and a long Reefian flintlock stood in the corner.
At Israel’s approach there were some facetious comments between the jailer and the guard. Why the ginbri? Was he practising for the fires of Jehinnum? Was he to fiddle for the Jinoon? Well, what was a man to do while the dogs inside were snarling? Were the thongs for the correction of persons lacking understanding? Why, yes; everybody knew their old saying, “A hint to the wise, a blow to the fool.”
A bunch of great keys rattled, the low doorway was thrown open, Israel stooped and went in, the door closed behind him, the footsteps of the guard died away, and the twang of the ginbri began again.
The prison was dark and noisome, some sixty feet long by half as many broad, supported by arches resting on rotten pillars, lighted only by narrow clefts at either hand, exuding damp from its walls, dropping moisture from its roof, its air full of vermin, and its floor reeking of filth. And only less horrible than the prison itself was the condition of the prisoners. Nearly all wore iron fetters on their legs, and some were shackled to the pillars. At one side a little group of them — they were Shereefs from Wazzan — were conversing eagerly and gesticulating wildly; and at the other side a larger company — they were Jews from Fez — were languidly twisting palmetto leaves into the shape of baskets. Four Berbers at the farther end were playing cards, and two Arabs that were chained to a column near the door squatted on the ground with a battered old draughtboard between them. From both groups of players came loud shouts and laughter and a running fire of expostulation and of indignant and sarcastic comment. Down went the cards with triumphant bangs, and the moves of the “dogs” were like lightning. First a mocking voice: “You call yourself a player! There! — there! — there!” Then a meek, piping tone: “So — so — verily, you are my master. Well, let us praise Allah for your wisdom.” But soon a wild burst of irony: “You are like him who killed the dog and fell into the river. See! thus I teach you to boast over your betters! I shave your beard! There! — there! — and there!”
In the middle of the reeking floor, so placed that the thin shaft of light from the clefts at the ends might fall on them — a barber-doctor was bleeding a youth from a vein in the arm. “We’re all having it done,” he was saying. “It’s good for the internals. I did it to a shipload of pilgrims once.” A wild-looking creature sat in a corner — he was a saint, a madman, of the sect of the Darkaoa — rocking himself to and fro, and crying “Allah! All-lah! All-l-lah! All-l-l-lah!” Near to this person a haggard old man of the Grega sect was shaking and dancing at his prayers. And not far from either a Mukaddam, a high-priest of the Aissa, brotherhood — a juggler who had travelled through the country with a lion by a halter — was singing a frantic mockery of a Christian hymn to a tune that he had heard on the coast.
Such was the scene of Israel’s imprisonment, and such were the companions that were to share it. There had been a moment’s pause in the clamour of their babel as the door opened and Israel entered. The prisoners knew him, and they were aghast. Every eye looked up and every mouth was agape. Israel stood for a time with the closed door behind him. He looked around, made a step forward, hesitated, seemed to peer vainly through the darkness for bed or mattress, and then sat down helplessly by a pillar on the ground.
A young negro in a coarse jellab went up to him and offered a bit of bread. “Hungry, brother? No?” said the youth. “Cheer up, Sidi! No good letting the donkey ride on your head!”
This person was the Irishman of the company — a happy, reckless, facetious dog, who had lost little save his liberty and cared nothing for his life, but laughed and cheated and joked and made doggerel songs on every disaster that befell them. He made one song on himself —
El Arby was a black man
They called him “‘Larby Kosk:”
He loved the wives of the Kasbah,
And stole slippers in the Mosque.
Israel was stunned. Since his arrest he had scarcely spoken. “Stay here,” he had said to Naomi when the first outburst of her grief was quelled; “never leave this place. Whatever they say, stay here. I will come back.” After that he had been like a man who was dumb. Neither insult nor tyranny had availed to force a word or a cry out of him. He had walked on in silence doggedly, hardly once glancing up into the faces of his guard, and never breaking his fast save with a draught of water by the way.
At Shawan, as elsewhere in Barbary, the prisoners were supported by their own relatives and friends, and on the day after Israel’s arrival a number of women and children came to the prison with provisions. It was a wild and gruesome scene that followed. First, the frantic search of the prisoners for their wives and sons and daughters, and their wild shouts as each one found his own. “Blessed be God! She’s here! here!” Then the maddening cries of the prisoners whose relatives had not come. “My Ayesha! Where is she? Curses on her mother! Why isn’t she here?” After that the shrieks of despair from such as learned that their breadwinners were dying off one by one. “Dead, you say?” “Dead!” “No, no!” “Yes, yes!” “No, no, I say!” “I say yes! God forgive me! died last week. But don’t you die too. Here take this bag of zummetta.” Then inquiries after absent children. “Little Selam, where is he?” “Begging in Tetuan.” “Poor boy! poor boy! And pretty M’barka, what of her?” “Alas! M’barka’s a public woman now in Hoolia’s house at Marrakesh. No, don’t curse her, Jellali; the poor child was driven to it. What were we to do with the children crying for bread? And then there was nothing to fetch you this journey, Jellali.” “I’ll not eat it now it’s brought. My boy a beggar and my girl a harlot? By Allah! May the Kaid that keeps me here roast alive in the fires of hell!” Then, apart in one quiet corner, a young Moor of Tangier eating rice out of the lap of his beautiful young wife. “You’ll not be long coming again, dearest?” he whispers. She wipes her eyes and stammers, “No — that is — well—” “What’s amiss?” “Ali, I must tell you—” “Well?” “Old Aaron Zaggoory says I must marry him, or he’ll see that both of us starve.” “Allah! And you — you?” “Don’t look at me like that, Ali; the hunger is on me, and whatever happens I — I can love nobody else.” “Curses on Aaron Zaggoory! Curses on you! Curses on everybody!”
