The Mating of the Blades/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI
In which a fat Arab, called “The Basin,” plays Cupid.
The Babu's tale was substantially the same which he had told Mr. Warburton and which had caused the latter to rush out of the audience hall and straddle the first horse he saw in the palace courtyard.
One of the tofanghees, the irregular soldiers, who had been left behind as a body-guard for Jane at the little village not far from the capital, had ridden into town with the news that the fat Afghan charpadar who, with his lean companion, had joined the caravan a day or two earlier, had returned to the village atop a swift dromedary. He had talked to Jane Warburton; then, suddenly, had dismounted, had picked her up and lifted her into the saddle, and, in spite of his immense bulk, had vaulted up behind her, using the dromedary's tail as a handle in true desert style, and had been off at a gallop.
Of course, the tofanghees had not been able to shoot, afraid they might hit the girl, but half-a-dozen of them had started in pursuit
Thus the Babu's tale, told with a beatific smile and a conscious stressing and straining of dramatic high spots, and, momentarily, Hector Wade came near to fainting. It seemed to him as if he were sinking into a cushion of air.
His senses reeled as he pictured it all: the girl he loved—the rough Afghan charpadar who had kidnaped her—the …
No, no!
For a moment, subconsciously, as much out of pity and love for the girl as pity for himself, he tried to force the conviction on his mind that the reality could not be half as bad, as appalling, as dreadfully anguishing, as the fantastic terrors of his imagination. Later on, thinking of the experience, he would say that during that minute his heart was pierced with all the accumulated sufferings of humanity since first God and the Devil fought over the soul of Cain.
Jane—Jane Warburton—at the mercy of an Afghan charpadar, a lawless hillman who brooked no master except his own passion, his own greed, his own cruelty!
In the midst of all that eddying swirl of teeming, turbaned humanity who, sensing the tragedy, looked at him, some with sympathy, some with wonder, others, the majority, with frank curiosity, he felt utterly alone—racially alone, than which there is no worse loneliness in all the world.
A sharp pain tugged at his heart. His knees tottered. The low-dipping sun seemed to swing to and fro in a blazing brownish-yellow pendulum. A flood of red color with broad, interlacing veins floated before his eyes.
Again—and, being a strong man, physically, and unconsciously proud of the fact, he was ashamed even as he realized it—he came near to fainting; and then, unmindful of the staring crowd, the princess put her slight arms about him.
“Al Nakia,” she whispered, “cousin mine—tell me! This foreign girl of whom the Babu spoke—is she …?”
Hector inclined his head without speaking. Dry eyed, vacant eyed, he stared at his feet.
“Cousin—cousin mine!”
Aziza Nurmahal did not say what she was going to say, perhaps did not know what she was going to say. She could not speak. Sympathy? To be sure, she felt sympathy with Hector. But she was too Oriental to attempt the impossible which a European would have tried: to grapple with another human's sentiments; to pronounce words of condolence or pity.
It would have seemed indelicate to her. For, in her psychology, grief and sorrow and pain were harsh things, lonely, cut-off things—invisible units of Fate which every man must bear alone, which no man can share; and typically Oriental, too, was she in her reactions, which were practically always mental, and not, as in a European, emotional.
Thus, when words finally came to her, they were soberly practical and constructive.
“The Babu spoke of two Afghans, one lean and the other fat. It is a wise thing to draw out the thorn in one's foot with the thorn in one's hand.”
“What dost thou mean?” asked Hector.
“That we have one of the—ah—'Afghans' here. The lean one, who turned out to be a Tamerlani, by the name of Abderrahman Yahiah Khan. Let us ask him about his brother-rogue. Hey—Shikandar!” She turned to a servant. “Fetch me the governor of the western marches!”
Abderrahman Yahiah Khan came, listened, and took in the situation, including its ramified potentialities, at a glance.
Serenely overlooking the detail that, not long before, in the mausoleum, he had been willing and ready to sacrifice Musa Al-Mutasim's head on the altar of his own safety, he now felt hurt and indignant that the Arab, without consulting him, should have kidnaped Warburton saheb's daughter, with evidently not the slightest intention of letting him share in whatever ransom he might be able to extort.
His words, therefore, throbbed with bitterness as well as unfeigned, simon-pure moral shock.
“The fat—what didst thou say, Aziza Nurmahal—Afghan? Afghan indeed! He is an obese and indecent impostor! He is Musa Al-Mutasim, the renegade Arab who for years has made the western marches unsafe …”
“Which thou knowest well, O grandson of abundant filth!” cut in the old nurse, wagging a grimy, threatening thumb.
“Silence, Not-Wanted!” said the governor.
Then, turning to Hector and the princess, the crowd having dispersed at a gesture of the latter, he told them about the ancient Tartar castle named Jabul-i-Shuhada, “The Place of the Martyrs,” which belonged to the Arab and was his ever-ready place of refuge in case of dire need.
“It is a stout place, easily defended, and can stand a long siege,” he went on. “Before Al-Mutasim and I left the western marches he had it put in readiness—originally for me and thee, Aziza Nurmahal, when I, being a foolish man and almost childlike in my impulsiveness …”
“Childlike? Thou? Childlike!” screamed Ayesha Zemzem. “By Zubalzan, son of Satan! I …”
“Childlike indeed, O Pig's Brain!” came the governor's ready repartee. “Childlike in thinking that I might be able to throw a noose around the far stars of desire and sweetness and beauty—that thou, Aziza, wouldst give me thy love and flood me with it, as the blessed rain floods the thirsty earth, and …”
“What about the Arab?” asked Hector, fretting. “Come on. What about him? And what about the Tartar castle?!”—he loosened the blade in its scabbard—“by God, I think that thou art delaying us on purpose with all this talk about …”
“Patience, son of a most impatient mother,” said Abderrahman Yahiah Khan, gently, “and remember that this same patience is the key of relief—is-subr miftah il-faraj, yah saheb! As to the castle, Musa Al-Mutasim is doubtless on his way there.”
“Where is it?” asked the princess.
“Ah—a sensible question—where is it? I know where it is, and I shall go there, myself, at the head of a squadron of troopers, and presently we will storm the castle—though it will take weeks—and, with my own hand, in sign of my loyalty, shall I cut that Arab dog's throat from his fat left ear to his fat right ear.”
“And what will happen to the girl in the meantime?” demanded Hector.
“Nothing, saheb. See—Musa Al-Mutasim is not as I am”—he smiled, shamelessly, at the princess who, being perversely feminine and as perversely Oriental, liked him better with every word he spoke—“no! he is not as I am, full-blooded, a dallier with the words of love, a drawer of the sword of passion. Passion? By my beard! Gold is his passion—for he is a hoarder of coin, a swollen money bag, a cursed borrower of half-rupees! He only holds the girl for ransom!”
“But …”
“But”—continued the governor—“when he sees that there is no gold for him, but a dagger across his throat, he will pipe a different tune. Trust me, saheb, and do not worry. I know that obese son of a thousand devils!”
He walked away, snapping his fingers, well pleased with himself; and it was a proof of the man's eloquence, in a way of the man's greatness, that, for a moment, Hector was persuaded that the scheme was perfectly feasible, that, with the exception of certain unavoidable inconveniences, Jane Warburton was really safe, and it took the old nurse to see the flaw in the argument.
“Fool!” she shouted after Abderrahman Yahiah Khan's retreating back. “A blind fool, filling the lap of the morning wind with seventy times seventy bundles of empty vaporings! For”—she turned to Hector—“consider! Will Musa Al-Mutasim spare the girl when he sees that he is lost?”
“Why …”
At once Hector understood, and he felt again that terrible sensation of faintness when, amidst the shouts of the servants that crowded the outer gate, three people entered the courtyard, and he saw, to his unspeakable joy and amazement, that it was Jane, accompanied by her father and by a gigantic figure of a man whom the old nurse, with a shrill scream, greeted as:
“Musa Al-Mutasim! By the red pig's bristles! Musa Al-Mutasim!”
Hector did not hear the last words. He heard nothing, saw nothing except Jane; and, forgetting the crowd that watched curiously from the gate, forgetting the princess, the nurse, the Arab, and Mr. Ezra Warburton, he rushed up to her and took her in his arms.
“My dear—oh, my dear …”
He stammered. English to the core he was, for all his strain of Tamerlani blood which bound his destiny with that of Asia, and English, too, was his love, lean, wiry, strong, a little hard. But, as he held her to him, close, the love he bore her swept over him with an overwhelming force and sweetness, and he did not have to use Cambuscan's Mirror to tell him that his love was returned.
She kissed him full on the lips.
Then she laughed.
“Hector,” she said, “I am surprised at you. This isn't the correct way to propose to a girl—nor exactly the correct place!”
“I don't care,” laughed Hector, “I'm never going to be correct again as long as I live!”—and he kissed her, very much to the delight of the old nurse who, remembering a lover of her youth, a Rajput with split beard and hooded eyes and a sprig of jessamine behind his ear who had drifted across the Himalayas into Central Asia, broke into a high-pitched Indian love song:
“As the sugar cane has a sweeter taste,
Knot after knot from the top,
Even thus is the sweetness of thy body, beloved,
Each time thou givest it to me …
And, in the exuberance of her emotion, she threw her bony arms around Mr. Warburtons neck and kissed him smackingly on the lips. The financier, embarrassed, indignant, would doubtless have been even more indignant had he been able to understand the words of her song, as she continued:
“For thy body, beloved,
Is a garden of strange and lascivious flowers
Which I gather in the night …
By this time Musa Al-Mutasim, who had enjoyed to the full the sensation which his arrival had caused, had salaamed before the princess with outstretched hands.
“I am in the shade of thy little white feet,” he said, with that rather grandiose and irresistible hypocrisy which is the Arab's birthright as much as passion and greed, “and my sword is thine and my manhood and my loyalty and my strength!”
Words which, given Musa Al-Mutasim's reputation as a robber and murderer and border raider and all-round “bad man,” served only to increase the sensation his arrival had caused.
Even the princess, an Oriental herself, thus used to the, to a European forever inexplicable, but in reality quite logical, turns and twists of Asiatic reasoning, looked puzzled.
“Thy sword?” she demanded. “Thy loyalty and strength and manhood? And what then would I do with them, O thou great and shameless thief?”
“Behold!” said the Arab, with a magnificent gesture, “I give them all to thee!”
“Gidar rakhe mans ke thati”—Ayesha Zemzem cut in—“who would keep meat on trust with a jackal?”
“A wise man would,” retorted the robber.
“What? A wise man?”
“Indeed! After he has caused the jackal to be well fed—exceedingly well fed—as I am well fed!” and he produced a silk purse filled to the bursting point with gold.
He went on to explain that, on his way to the Tartar castle, his dromedary had tripped, fallen, broken a leg, and left him helpless in the desert not far from the village. The tofanghees who had ridden in pursuit had, in consequence, caught up with him, but had again been afraid to shoot.
“For,” he said, “I value life—life which is as uncertain as the trick of the peg to the hand of the unskilled horseman,, and so”—naïvely—“I used the foreign girl as a shield—a soft shield, a warm shield, but a strong shield!”
“Wert thou not ashamed of thyself?” asked Aziza Nurmahal, to be met by the counter question:
“Wouldst thou be ashamed to drink when thou art thirsty? Wah!”
He shrugged his fat shoulders, and continued.
It appeared that, with the tofanghees afraid to shoot and himself unable to for the simple reason that he had no weapon except his short dagger, the situation had reached an impasse; and so they had sat there, in the desert, carefully watching each other, the Arab never for a moment releasing his bearlike hold on Jane Warburton, when, riding as he had never ridden before, Mr. Ezra Warburton had arrived on the scene.
He was a business man, first, last, and all the time. At times unreasonable, at other times irritable and nervous, he always emerged from his fits of temper or despondency to be frankly practical.
Thus, seeing his daughter in the Arab's arms, he had at first rushed forward—to be pulled back by one of the tofanghees, Mansoor Khan, who spoke a little English and warned him that his daughter's life was at stake.
Then he had hurled a flood of epithets at the other's head which, being in English, affected the Arab as much as a buzzing of flies.
Finally, his business instinct had come to the fore, and he had discovered that the robber, too, was at heart a business man. So, with the tofanghee playing interpreter, the two business men had arrived at an agreement, by the terms of which—“a simple matter of trade,” the Arab called it—Mr. Warburton paid a thumping ransom for his daughter.
“He furthermore guaranteed,” Musa Al-Mutasim wound up, “that, if I surrendered to the Tamerlanistan authorities, my life would be safe.”
What the Arab did not explain was his reasoning for the latter resolve. He did not explain that, never before, had he realized that there was as much money in the world as Mr. Warburton was paying as ransom for his daughter, nor, if there were, that anybody should have as little sense as to pay it out. He had therefore considered Warburton what an American would have called an “easy mark,” and had proposed to stick to him, through thick and thin, as a financial prospect far more promising and much less dangerous than border brigandage.
There was of course his former companion in crime, Abderrahman Yahiah Khan; but, very much as the latter had been ready to sacrifice him during the interview with Hector in the mausoleum, so he was willing to sacrifice the governor for his own advantage. In the Orient, at least, it is not true that there is honor amongst thieves—nor, perhaps, in the Occident.
“Aziza Nurmahal,” he said; and to Hector, the words sounded suspiciously like those which the governor of the western marches had used, “I have been bad and wicked. Now I have reformed. Command me—”
“To do what?” asked the princess.
“To bring peace to the western marches that—alas!— too long have been torn by strife and turmoil and”—he said it quite naïvely—“the plundering of the caravans. Say the word, and I myself shall see to it that the armed men under my command join thy service. As to Higgins saheb and the other saheb, the easiest way would be to kill them. For a dead horse does not eat grass, and a dead saheb does not ask for 'concessions.'”
“What about Abderrahman Yahiah Khan?” demanded Hector, with a twinkle in his eye.
“He is a scoundrel,” said the Arab. “He is in league with Musboot, the lord of lies and fleas. It is he who led me astray from the right path—the path of virtue—I swear it by my mother's honor! He is …”
Quite suddenly, he was silent. His jaws dropped, and, perhaps for the first time in his life, he blushed.
For there in the crowd stood Abderrahman Yahiah Khan, a smile curling his thin lips—a smile that presently changed into a laugh.
The Arab, too, laughed.
“Ho, brother!” he shouted. “Ho, soul of my soul!”—and, without any more ado, they fell in each other's arms.
It was Babu Chandra who, talking to Gulabian that night, put it all in a nutshell.
“If the man be ugly,” he said, “what can the mirror do? If a man be a liar, how can we expect truth from him? But even an ugly man has his uses. Even a liar has his uses. I myself,” he added, unblushingly, “have been known to lie at times.”