THE SUBTLETY OF FENZILEH
Oliver considered the woman for a long moment as she sat half-crouching
on the divan, her hands locked, her face set and stony, her eyes
lowered. He sighed gently and turned away. He paced to the parapet and
looked out upon the city bathed in the white glare of the full risen
moon. There arose thence a hum of sound, dominated, however, by the
throbbing song of a nightingale somewhere in his garden and the
croaking of the frogs by the pool in the valley.
Now that truth had been dragged from its well, and tossed, as it were,
into Rosamund’s lap, he felt none of the fierce exultation which he had
conceived that such an hour as this must bring him. Rather, indeed, was
he saddened and oppressed. To poison the unholy cup of joy which he had
imagined himself draining with such thirsty zest there was that
discovery of a measure of justification for her attitude towards him in
her conviction that his disappearance was explained by flight.
He was weighed down by a sense that he had put himself entirely in the
wrong; that in his vengeance he had overreached himself; and he found
the fruits of it, which had seemed so desirably luscious, turning to
ashes in his mouth.
Long he stood there, the silence between them entirely unbroken. Then
at length he stirred, turned from the parapet, and paced slowly back
until he came to stand beside the divan, looking down upon her from his
great height.
“At last you have heard the truth,” he said. And as she made no answer
he continued: “I am thankful it was surprised out of him before the
torture was applied, else you might have concluded that pain was
wringing a false confession from him.” He paused, but still she did not
speak; indeed, she made no sign that she had heard him. “That,” he
concluded, “was the man whom you preferred to me. Faith, you did not
flatter me, as perhaps you may have learnt.”
At last she was moved from her silence, and her voice came dull and
hard. “I have learnt how little there is to choose between you,” she
said. “It was to have been expected. I might have known two brothers
could not have been so dissimilar in nature. Oh, I am learning a deal,
and swiftly!”
It was a speech that angered him, that cast out entirely the softer
mood that had been growing in him.
“You are learning?” he echoed. “What are you learning?”
“Knowledge of the ways of men.”
His teeth gleamed in his wry smile. “I hope the knowledge will bring
you as much bitterness as the knowledge of women—of one woman—has
brought me. To have believed me what you believed me—me whom you
conceived yourself to love!” He felt, perhaps the need to repeat it
that he might keep the grounds of his grievance well before his mind.
“If I have a mercy to beg of you it is that you will not shame me with
the reminder.”
“Of your faithlessness?” he asked. “Of your disloyal readiness to
believe the worst evil of me?”
“Of my ever having believed that I loved you. That is the thought that
shames me, as nothing else in life could shame me, as not even the
slave-market and all the insult to which you have submitted me could
shame me. You taunt me with my readiness to believe evil of you....”
“I do more than taunt you with it,” he broke in, his anger mounting
under the pitiless lash of her scorn. “I lay to your charge the wasted
years of my life, all the evil that has followed out of it, all that I
have suffered, all that I have lost, all that I am become.”
She looked up at him coldly, astonishingly mistress of herself. “You
lay all this to my charge?” she asked him.
“I do.” He was very vehement. “Had you not used me as you did, had you
not lent a ready ear to lies, that whelp my brother would never have
gone to such lengths, nor should I ever have afforded him the
opportunity.”
She shifted on the cushions of the divan and turned her shoulder to
him.
“All this is very idle,” she said coldly. Yet perhaps because she felt
that she had need to justify herself she continued: “If, after all, I
was so ready to believe evil of you, it is that my instincts must have
warned me of the evil that was ever in you. You have proved to me
to-night that it was not you who murdered Peter; but to attain that
proof you have done a deed that is even fouler and more shameful, a
deed that reveals to the full the blackness of your heart. Have you not
proved yourself a monster of vengeance and impiety?” She rose and faced
him again in her sudden passion. “Are you not—you that were born a
Cornish Christian gentleman—become a heathen and a robber, a renegade
and a pirate? Have you not sacrificed your very God to your vengeful
lust?”
He met her glance fully, never quailing before her denunciation, and
when she had ended on that note of question he counter-questioned her.
“And your instincts had forewarned you of all this? God’s life, woman!
can you invent no better tale than that?” He turned aside as two slaves
entered bearing an earthenware vessel. “Here comes your supper. I hope
your appetite is keener than your logic.”
They set the vessel, from which a savoury smell proceeded, upon the
little Moorish table by the divan. On the ground beside it they placed
a broad dish of baked earth in which there were a couple of loaves and
a red, short-necked amphora of water with a drinking-cup placed over
the mouth of it to act as a stopper.
They salaamed profoundly and padded softly out again.
“Sup,” he bade her shortly.
“I want no supper,” she replied, her manner sullen.
His cold eye played over her. “Henceforth, girl, you will consider not
what you want, but what I bid you do. I bid you eat; about it,
therefore.”
“I will not.”
“Will not?” he echoed slowly. “Is that a speech from slave to master?
Eat, I say.”
“I cannot! I cannot!” she protested.
“A slave may not live who cannot do her master’s bidding.”
“Then kill me,” she answered fiercely, leaping up to confront and dare
him. “Kill me. You are used to killing, and for that at least I should
be grateful.”
“I will kill you if I please,” he said in level icy tones. “But not to
please you. You don’t yet understand. You are my slave, my thing, my
property, and I will not suffer you to be damaged save at my own good
pleasure. Therefore, eat, or my Nubians shall whip you to quicken
appetite.”
For a moment she stood defiant before him, white and resolute. Then
quite suddenly, as if her will was being bent and crumpled under the
insistent pressure of his own, she drooped and sank down again to the
divan. Slowly, reluctantly she drew the dish nearer. Watching her, he
laughed quite silently.
She paused, appearing to seek for something. Failing to find it she
looked up at him again, between scorn and intercession.
“Am I to tear the meat with my fingers?” she demanded.
His eyes gleamed with understanding, or at least with suspicion. But he
answered her quite calmly—“It is against the Prophet’s law to defile
meat or bread by the contact of a knife. You must use the hands that
God has given you.”
“Do you mock me with the Prophet and his laws? What are the Prophet’s
laws to me? If eat I must, at least I will not eat like a heathen dog,
but in Christian fashion.”
To indulge her, as it seemed, he slowly drew the richly hilted dagger
from his girdle. “Let that serve you, then,” he said; and carelessly he
tossed it down beside her.
With a quick indrawn breath she pounced upon it. “At last,” she said,
“you give me something for which I can be grateful to you.” And on the
words she laid the point of it against her breast.
Like lightning he had dropped to one knee, and his hand had closed
about her wrist with such a grip that all her arm felt limp and
powerless. He was smiling into her eyes, his swarthy face close to her
own.
“Did you indeed suppose I trusted you? Did you really think me deceived
by your sudden pretence of yielding? When will you learn that I am not
a fool? I did it but to test your spirit.”
“Then now you know its temper,” she replied. “You know my intention.”
“Forewarned, forearmed,” said he.
She looked at him, with something that would have been mockery but for
the contempt that coloured it too deeply. “Is it so difficult a thing,”
she asked, “to snap the thread of life? Are there no ways of dying save
by the knife? You boast yourself my master; that I am your slave; that,
having bought me in the market-place, I belong to you body and soul.
How idle is that boast. My body you may bind and confine; but my
soul.... Be very sure that you shall be cheated of your bargain. You
boast yourself lord of life and death. A lie! Death is all that you can
command.”
Quick steps came pattering up the stairs, and before he could answer
her, before he had thought of words in which to do so, Ali confronted
him with the astounding announcement that there was a woman below
asking urgently to speak with him.
“A woman?” he questioned, frowning. “A Nasrani woman, do you mean?”
“No, my lord. A Muslim,” was the still more surprising information.
“A Muslim woman, here? Impossible!”
But even as he spoke a dark figure glided like a shadow across the
threshold on to the terrace. She was in black from head to foot,
including the veil that shrouded her, a veil of the proportions of a
mantle, serving to dissemble her very shape.
Ali swung upon her in a rage. “Did I not bid thee wait below, thou
daughter of shame?” he stormed. “She has followed me up, my lord, to
thrust herself in here upon you. Shall I drive her forth?”
“Let her be,” said Sakr-el-Bahr. And he waved Ali away. “Leave us!”
Something about that black immovable figure arrested his attention and
fired his suspicions. Unaccountably almost it brought to his mind the
thought of Ayoub-el-Sarnin and the bidding there had been for Rosamund
in the sôk.
He stood waiting for his visitor to speak and disclose herself. She on
her side continued immovable until Ali’s footsteps had faded in the
distance. Then, with a boldness entirely characteristic, with the
recklessness that betrayed her European origin, intolerant of the
Muslim restraint imposed upon her sex, she did what no True-believing
woman would have done. She tossed back that long black veil and
disclosed the pale countenance and languorous eyes of Fenzileh.
For all that it was no more than he had expected, yet upon beholding
her—her countenance thus bared to his regard—he recoiled a step.
“Fenzileh!” he cried. “What madness is this?”
Having announced herself in that dramatic fashion she composedly
readjusted her veil so that her countenance should once more be
decently concealed.
“To come here, to my house, and thus!” he protested. “Should this reach
the ears of thy lord, how will it fare with thee and with me? Away,
woman, and at once!” he bade her.
“No need to fear his knowing of this unless, thyself, thou tell him,”
she answered. “To thee I need no excuse if thou’lt but remember that
like thyself I was not born a Muslim.”
“But Algiers is not thy native Sicily, and whatever thou wast born it
were well to remember what thou art become.”
He went on at length to tell her of the precise degree of her folly,
but she cut in, stemming his protestation in full flow.
“These are idle words that but delay me.”
“To thy purpose then, in Allah’s name, that thus thou mayest depart the
sooner.”
She came to it straight enough on that uncompromising summons. She
pointed to Rosamund. “It concerns that slave,” said she. “I sent my
wazeer to the sôk to-day with orders to purchase her for me.”
“So I had supposed,” he said.
“But it seems that she caught thy fancy, and the fool suffered himself
to be outbidden.”
“Well?”
“Thou’lt relinquish her to me at the price she cost thee?” A faint note
of anxiety trembled in her voice.
“I am anguished to deny thee, O Fenzileh. She is not for sale.”
“Ah, wait,” she cried. “The price paid was high—many times higher than
I have ever heard tell was given for a slave, however lovely. Yet I
covet her. ’Tis a whim of mine, and I cannot suffer to be thwarted in
my whims. To gratify this one I will pay three thousand philips.”
He looked at her and wondered what devilries might be stirring in her
mind, what evil purpose she desired to serve.
“Thou’lt pay three thousand philips?” he said slowly. Then bluntly
asked her: “Why?”
“To gratify a whim, to please a fancy.”
“What is the nature of this costly whim?” he insisted.
“The desire to possess her for my own,” she answered evasively.
“And this desire to possess her, whence is it sprung?” he returned, as
patient as he was relentless.
“You ask too many questions,” she exclaimed with a flash of anger.
He shrugged and smiled. “You answer too few.”
She set her arms akimbo and faced him squarely. Faintly through her
veil he caught the gleam of her eyes, and he cursed the advantage she
had in that her face was covered from his reading.
“In a word, Oliver-Reis,” said she, “wilt sell her for three thousand
philips?”
“In a word—no,” he answered her.
“Thou’lt not? Not for three thousand philips?” Her voice was charged
with surprise, and he wondered was it real or assumed.
“Not for thirty thousand,” answered he. “She is mine, and I’ll not
relinquish her. So since I have proclaimed my mind, and since to tarry
here is fraught with peril for us both, I beg thee to depart.”
There fell a little pause, and neither of them noticed the alert
interest stamped upon the white face of Rosamund. Neither of them
suspected her knowledge of French which enabled her to follow most of
what was said in the lingua franca they employed.
Fenzileh drew close to him. “Thou’lt not relinquish her, eh?” she
asked, and he was sure she sneered. “Be not so confident. Thou’lt be
forced to it, my friend—if not to me, why then, to Asad. He is coming
for her, himself, in person.”
“Asad?” he cried, startled now.
“Asad-ed-Din,” she answered, and upon that resumed her pleading. “Come,
then! It were surely better to make a good bargain with me than a bad
one with the Basha.”
He shook his head and planted his feet squarely. “I intend to make no
bargain with either of you. This slave is not for sale.”
“Shalt thou dare resist Asad? I tell thee he will take her whether she
be for sale or not.”
“I see,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “And the fear of this, then, is
the source of thy whim to acquire her for thyself. Thou art not subtle,
O Fenzileh. The consciousness that thine own charms are fading sets
thee trembling lest so much loveliness should entirely cast thee from
thy lord’s regard, eh?”
If he could not see her face, and study there the effect of that thrust
of his, at least he observed the quiver that ran through her muffled
figure, he caught the note of anger that throbbed in her reply—“And if
that were so, what is’t to thee?”
“It may be much or little,” he replied thoughtfully.
“Indeed, it should be much,” she answered quickly, breathlessly. “Have
I not ever been thy friend? Have I not ever urged thy valour on my
lord’s notice and wrought like a true friend for thine advancement,
Sakr-el-Bahr?”
He laughed outright. “Hast thou so?” quoth he.
“Laugh as thou wilt, but it is true,” she insisted. “Lose me and thy
most valuable ally is lost—one who has the ear and favour of her lord.
For look, Sakr-el-Bahr, it is what would befall if another came to fill
my place, another who might poison Asad’s mind with lies against
thee—for surely she cannot love thee, this Frankish girl whom thou hast
torn from her home!”
“Be not concerned for that,” he answered lightly, his wits striving in
vain to plumb the depths and discover the nature of her purpose. “This
slave of mine shall never usurp thy place beside Asad.”
“O fool, Asad will take her whether she be for sale or not.”
He looked down upon her, head on one side and arms akimbo. “If he can
take her from me, the more easily can he take her from thee. No doubt
thou hast considered that, and in some dark Sicilian way considered too
how to provide against it. But the cost—hast thou counted that? What
will Asad say to thee when he learns how thou hast thwarted him?”
“What do I care for that?” she cried in sudden fury, her gestures
becoming a little wild. “She will be at the bottom of the harbour by
then with a stone about her neck. He may have me whipped. No doubt he
will. But ’twill end there. He will require me to console him for his
loss, and so all will be well again.”
At last he had drawn her, pumped her dry, as he imagined. Indeed,
indeed, he thought, he had been right to say she was not subtle. He had
been a fool to have permitted himself to be intrigued by so shallow, so
obvious a purpose. He shrugged and turned away from her.
“Depart in peace, O Fenzileh,” he said. “I yield her to none—be his
name Asad or Shaitan.”
His tone was final, and her answer seemed to accept at last his
determination. Yet she was very quick with that answer; so quick that
he might have suspected it to be preconceived.
“Then it is surely thine intent to wed her.” No voice could have been
more innocent and guileless than was hers now. “If so,” she went on,
“it were best done quickly, for marriage is the only barrier Asad will
not overthrow. He is devout, and out of his deep reverence for the
Prophet’s law he would be sure to respect such a bond as that. But be
very sure that he will respect nothing short of it.”
Yet notwithstanding her innocence and assumed simplicity—because of it,
perhaps—he read her as if she had been an open book; it no longer
mattered that her face was veiled.
“And thy purpose would be equally well served, eh?” he questioned her,
sly in his turn.
“Equally,” she admitted.
“Say ‘better,’ Fenzileh,” he rejoined. “I said thou art not subtle. By
the Koran, I lied. Thou art subtle as the serpent. Yet I see whither
thou art gliding. Were I to be guided by thine advice a twofold purpose
would be served. First, I should place her beyond Asad’s reach, and
second, I should be embroiled with him for having done so. What could
more completely satisfy thy wishes?”
“Thou dost me wrong,” she protested. “I have ever been thy friend. I
would that....” She broke off suddenly to listen. The stillness of the
night was broken by cries from the direction of the Bab-el-Oueb. She
ran swiftly to the parapet whence the gate was to be seen and leaned
far out.
“Look, look!” she cried, and there was a tremor of fear in her voice.
“It is he—Asad-ed-Din.”
Sakr-el-Bahr crossed to her side and in a glare of torches saw a body
of men coming forth from the black archway of the gate.
“It almost seems as if, departing from thy usual custom, thou hast
spoken truth, O Fenzileh.”
She faced him, and he suspected the venomous glance darted at him
through her veil. Yet her voice when she spoke was cold. “In a moment
thou’lt have no single doubt of it. But what of me?” The question was
added in a quickening tone. “He must not find me here. He would kill
me, I think.”
“I am sure he would,” Sakr-el-Bahr agreed. “Yet muffled thus, who
should recognize thee? Away, then, ere he comes. Take cover in the
courtyard until he shall have passed. Didst thou come alone?”
“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.