THE CONVERT
That tale of Othmani’s being borne anon to Fenzileh by her son was gall
and wormwood to her jealous soul. Evil enough to know that Sakr-el-Bahr
was returned in spite of the fervent prayers for his foundering which
she had addressed both to the God of her forefathers and to the God of
her adoption. But that he should have returned in triumph bringing with
him heavy spoils that must exalt him further in the affection of Asad
and the esteem of the people was bitterness indeed. It left her mute
and stricken, bereft even of the power to curse him.
Anon, when her mind recovered from the shock she turned it to the
consideration of what at first had seemed a trivial detail in Othmani’s
tale as reported by Marzak.
“It is most singularly odd that he should have undertaken that long
voyage to England to wrest thence just those two captives; that being
there he should not have raided in true corsair fashion and packed his
ship with slaves. Most singularly odd!”
They were alone behind the green lattices through which filtered the
perfumes of the garden and the throbbing of a nightingale’s voice laden
with the tale of its love for the rose. Fenzileh reclined upon a divan
that was spread with silken Turkey carpets, and one of her
gold-embroidered slippers had dropped from her henna-stained toes. Her
lovely arms were raised to support her head, and she stared up at the
lamp of many colours that hung from the fretted ceiling.
Marzak paced the length of the chamber back and forth, and there was
silence save for the soft swish of his slippers along the floor.
“Well?” she asked him impatiently at last. “Does it not seem odd to
thee?”
“Odd, indeed, O my mother,” the youth replied, coming to a halt before
her.
“And canst think of naught that was the cause of it?”
“The cause of it?” quoth he, his lovely young face, so closely modelled
upon her own, looking blank and vacant.
“Ay, the cause of it,” she cried impatiently. “Canst do naught but
stare? Am I the mother of a fool? Wilt thou simper and gape and trifle
away thy days whilst that dog-descended Frank tramples thee underfoot,
using thee but as a stepping-stone to the power that should be thine
own? And that be so, Marzak, I would thou hadst been strangled in my
womb.”
He recoiled before the Italian fury of her, was dully resentful even,
suspecting that in such words from a woman were she twenty times his
mother, there was something dishonouring to his manhood.
“What can I do?” he cried.
“Dost ask me? Art thou not a man to think and act? I tell thee that
misbegotten son of a Christian and a Jew will trample thee in the dust.
He is greedy as the locust, wily as the serpent, and ferocious as the
panther. By Allah! I would I had never borne a son. Rather might men
point at me the finger of scorn and call me mother of the wind than
that I should have brought forth a man who knows not how to be a man.”
“Show me the way,” he cried. “Set me a task; tell me what to do and
thou shalt not find me lacking, O my mother. Until then spare me these
insults, or I come no more to thee.”
At this threat that strange woman heaved herself up from her soft
couch. She ran to him and flung her arms about his neck, set her cheek
against his own. Not eighteen years in the Basha’s hareem had stifled
the European mother in her, the passionate Sicilian woman, fierce as a
tiger in her maternal love.
“O my child, my lovely boy,” she almost sobbed. “It is my fear for thee
that makes me harsh. If I am angry it is but my love that speaks, my
rage for thee to see another come usurping the place beside thy father
that should be thine. Ah! but we will prevail, sweet son of mine. I
shall find a way to return that foreign offal to the dung-heap whence
it sprang. Trust me, O Marzak! Sh! Thy father comes. Away! Leave me
alone with him.”
She was wise in that, for she knew that alone Asad was more easily
controlled by her, since the pride was absent which must compel him to
turn and rend her did she speak so before others. Marzak vanished
behind the screen of fretted sandalwood that masked one doorway even as
Asad loomed in the other.
He came forward smiling, his slender brown fingers combing his long
beard, his white djellaba trailing behind him along the ground.
“Thou hast heard, not a doubt, O Fenzileh,” said he. “Art thou answered
enough?”
She sank down again upon her cushions and idly considered herself in a
steel mirror set in silver.
“Answered?” she echoed lazily, with infinite scorn and a hint of
rippling contemptuous laughter running through the word. “Answered
indeed. Sakr-el-Bahr risks the lives of two hundred children of Islam
and a ship that being taken was become the property of the State upon a
voyage to England that has no object but the capturing of two
slaves—two slaves, when had his purpose been sincere, it might have
been two hundred.”
“Ha! And is that all that thou hast heard?” he asked her mocking in his
turn.
“All that signifies,” she replied, still mirroring herself. “I heard as
a matter of lesser import that on his return, meeting fortuitously a
Frankish ship that chanced to be richly laden, he seized it in thy
name.”
“Fortuitously, sayest thou?”
“What else?” She lowered the mirror, and her bold, insolent eyes met
his own quite fearlessly. “Thou’lt not tell me that it was any part of
his design when he went forth?”
He frowned; his head sank slowly in thought. Observing the advantage
gained she thrust it home. “It was a lucky wind that blew that Dutchman
into his path, and luckier still her being so richly fraught that he
may dazzle thine eyes with the sight of gold and gems, and so blind
thee to the real purpose of his voyage.”
“Its real purpose?” he asked dully. “What was its real purpose?” She
smiled a smile of infinite knowledge to hide her utter ignorance, her
inability to supply even a reason that should wear an air of truth.
“Dost ask me, O perspicuous Asad? Are not thine eyes as sharp, thy wits
as keen at least as mine, that what is clear to me should be hidden
from thee? Or hath this Sakr-el-Bahr bewitched thee with enchantments
of Babyl?”
He strode to her and caught her wrist in a cruelly rough grip of his
sinewy old hand.
“His purpose, thou jade! Pour out the foulness of thy mind. Speak!”
She sat up, flushed and defiant.
“I will not speak,” said she.
“Thou wilt not? Now, by the Head of Allah! dost dare to stand before my
face and defy me, thy Lord? I’ll have thee whipped, Fenzileh. I have
been too tender of thee these many years—so tender that thou hast
forgot the rods that await the disobedient wife. Speak then ere thy
flesh is bruised or speak thereafter, at thy pleasure.”
“I will not,” she repeated. “Though I be flung to the hooks, not
another word will I say of Sakr-el-Bahr. Shall I unveil the truth to be
spurned and scorned and dubbed a liar and the mother of lies?” Then
abruptly changing she fell to weeping. “O source of my life!” she cried
to him, “how cruelly unjust to me thou art!” She was grovelling now, a
thing of supplest grace, her lovely arms entwining his knees. “When my
love for thee drives me to utter what I see, I earn but thy anger,
which is more than I can endure. I swoon beneath the weight of it.”
He flung her off impatiently. “What a weariness is a woman’s tongue!”
he cried, and stalked out again, convinced from past experiences that
did he linger he would be whelmed in a torrent of words.
But her poison was shrewdly administered, and slowly did its work. It
abode in his mind to torture him with the doubts that were its very
essence. No reason, however well founded, that she might have urged for
Sakr-el-Bahr’s strange conduct could have been half so insidious as her
suggestion that there was a reason. It gave him something vague and
intangible to consider. Something that he could not repel since it had
no substance he could grapple with. Impatiently he awaited the morning
and the coming of Sakr-el-Bahr himself, but he no longer awaited it
with the ardent whole-hearted eagerness as of a father awaiting the
coming of a beloved son.
Sakr-el-Bahr himself paced the poop deck of the carack and watched the
lights perish one by one in the little town that straggled up the
hillside before him. The moon came up and bathed it in a white hard
light, throwing sharp inky shadows of rustling date palm and spearlike
minaret, and flinging shafts of silver athwart the peaceful bay.
His wound was healed and he was fully himself once more. Two days ago
he had come on deck for the first time since the fight with the
Dutchman, and he had spent there the greater portion of the time since
then. Once only had he visited his captives. He had risen from his
couch to repair straight to the cabin in the poop where Rosamund was
confined. He had found her pale and very wistful, but with her courage
entirely unbroken. The Godolphins were a stiff-necked race, and
Rosamund bore in her frail body the spirit of a man. She looked up when
he entered, started a little in surprise to see him at last, for it was
the first time he stood before her since he had carried her off from
Arwenack some four weeks ago. Then she had averted her eyes, and sat
there, elbows on the table, as if carved of wood, as if blind to his
presence and deaf to his words.
To the expressions of regret—and they were sincere, for already he
repented him his unpremeditated act so far as she was concerned—she
returned no slightest answer, gave no sign indeed that she heard a word
of it. Baffled, he stood gnawing his lip a moment, and gradually,
unreasonably perhaps, anger welled up from his heart. He turned and
went out again. Next he had visited his brother, to consider in silence
a moment the haggard, wild-eyed, unshorn wretch who shrank and cowered
before him in the consciousness of guilt. At last he returned to the
deck, and there, as I have said, he spent the greater portion of the
last three days of that strange voyage, reclining for the most part in
the sun and gathering strength from its ardour.
To-night as he paced under the moon a stealthy shadow crept up the
companion to call him gently by his English name—
“Sir Oliver!”
He started as if a ghost had suddenly leapt up to greet him. It was
Jasper Leigh who hailed him thus.
“Come up,” he said. And when the fellow stood before him on the poop—“I
have told you already that here is no Sir Oliver. I am Oliver-Reis or
Sakr-el-Bahr, as you please, one of the Faithful of the Prophet’s
House. And now what is your will?”
“Have I not served you faithfully and well?” quoth Captain Leigh.
“Who has denied it?”
“None. But neither has any acknowledged it. When you lay wounded below
it had been an easy thing for me to ha’ played the traitor. I might ha’
sailed these ships into the mouth of Tagus. I might so by God!”
“You’ld have been carved in pieces on the spot,” said Sakr-el-Bahr.
“I might have hugged the land and run the risk of capture and then
claimed my liberation from captivity.”
“And found yourself back on the galleys of his Catholic Majesty. But
there! I grant that you have dealt loyally by me. You have kept your
part of the bond. I shall keep mine, never doubt it.”
“I do not. But your part of the bond was to send me home again.”
“Well?”
“The hell of it is that I know not where to find a home, I know not
where home may be after all these years. If ye send me forth, I shall
become a wanderer of no account.”
“What else am I to do with you?”
“Faith now I am as full weary of Christians and Christendom as you was
yourself when the Muslims took the galley on which you toiled. I am a
man of parts, Sir Ol-Sakr-el-Bahr. No better navigator ever sailed a
ship from an English port, and I ha’ seen a mort o’ fighting and know
the art of it upon the sea. Can ye make naught of me here?”
“You would become a renegade like me?” His tone was bitter.
“I ha’ been thinking that ‘renegade’ is a word that depends upon which
side you’re on. I’d prefer to say that I’ve a wish to be converted to
the faith of Mahound.”
“Converted to the faith of piracy and plunder and robbery upon the seas
is what you mean,” said Sakr-el-Bahr.
“Nay, now. To that I should need no converting, for all that I were
afore,” Captain Leigh admitted frankly. “I ask but to sail under
another flag than the Jolly Roger.”
“You’ll need to abjure strong drink,” said Sakr-el-Bahr.
“There be compensations,” said Master Leigh.
Sakr-el-Bahr considered. The rogue’s appeal smote a responsive chord in
his heart. It would be good to have a man of his own race beside him,
even though it were but such a rascal as this.
“Be it as you will,” he said at last. “You deserve to be hanged in
spite of what promises I made you. But no matter for that. So that you
become a Muslim I will take you to serve beside me, one of my own
lieutenants to begin with, and so long as you are loyal to me, Jasper,
all will be well. But at the first sign of faithlessness, a rope and
the yard-arm, my friend, and an airy dance into hell for you.”
The rascally skipper stooped in his emotion, caught up Sakr-el-Bahr’s
hand and bore it to his lips. “It is agreed,” he said. “Ye have shown
me mercy who have little deserved it from you. Never fear for my
loyalty. My life belongs to you, and worthless thing though it may be,
ye may do with it as ye please.”
Despite himself Sakr-el-Bahr tightened his grip upon the rogue’s hand,
and Jasper shuffled off and down the companion again, touched to the
heart for once in his rough villainous life by a clemency that he knew
to be undeserved, but which he swore should be deserved ere all was
done.