Hamoud-bin-Said suggested that she master first the most difficult
consonants--"ha," to be pronounced with the force at the back of the
palate, "dâd" and "tâ," emphasized by pressing the tongue far back, and
the strong guttural "en." These were sounds that had no association
with any in English, French, German, or Italian. Lilla was filled with
dismay.
"But this poor young man lost from the _Arabian Nights_ must live," she
reflected, eyeing the salt-and-pepper suit with secret horror.
He was extremely neat, however; and his small right hand, with which he
turned the pages of the textbook, was as well cared for as hers. He
brought with him into the library an almost imperceptible scent of
burnt aloes. His grave composure sometimes made her forget his youth.
Now and then, the lesson finished, she detained him in talk, out of
curiosity.
From his father he had inherited a house in Zanzibar, a mansion,
indeed, of coraline limestone fitted with doors of palmwood elegantly
carved. At the same time he had fallen heir to a grove of clove trees;
in short, he had been wealthy. There had been no end of hospitality in
his home. In the large, white rooms strewn with Persian carpets, where
there were no pictures, but a variety of clocks, the slaves were always
bringing in to visitors an excess of refreshment--stews of mutton, fine
soups, cakes, sherbets, Turkish delight. The world had been a good
place, full of friends.
And there was no spot as fair as Zanzibar! The hills, crowned with
palms, embraced a sea as deeply blue as lapis-lazuli. The clove trees
were covered with pink blossoms whose fragrance entered the city. It
was a place of brilliant sunshine and purple shadows, of gray walls
over which peacocks hung their tails, of mysterious stairways, and
latticed windows behind which ladies sat peering through their
embroidered face screens resembling semicircular candle shades; and
there was always a marvelous clamor in the streets, and silence in the
patios full of flowers. At dusk, one still saw, sometimes, the
daughters of the rich hurrying through the alleys, muffled up, escorted
by slaves with lanterns, going to call on their women friends, leaving
behind them a trail of perfumes.
"It was in Zanzibar," thought Lilla, "that Lawrence found my picture."
And gazing as if indifferently at a vaseful of roses, she asked, with a
feeling of suffocation:
"Why did you leave there?"
He did not reply. When she turned her eyes toward him he appeared to
be listening almost drowsily to something that she could not hear, or
else, since his sensitive-looking nostrils were dilated, to be
relishing some sweet odor--perhaps the smell of the roses. She
received an impression of deliberate, yet somnolent, sensuous
enjoyment; and she recalled having seen long ago, in a doorway in
Tunis, this same expression on the face of a beggar who had just been
smoking hasheesh.
He gave a start, and looked like a man who in his sleep has fallen off
a roof. But immediately, lowering his full eyelids, he became the
handsome statue, or perhaps the delicately bearded effigy, in
tan-colored wax, of a young caliph who had incurred the hatred of the
jinn.
It was simple. He had squandered his fortune. It had sifted through
his fingers like sand, the price of one clove tree after another, till
the whole grove was gone. Then the Hindu money lenders had got the
ancestral house. The friends had departed to make merry elsewhere; the
gazelle-eyed girls with short, silk dresses and frilled pantalettes had
turned cold; and, in the market, little boys had sung songs about the
ruined young man. Burning with resentment and shame, he had sailed
away in a dhow--it had landed him at Beira--believing that he would
hate Zanzibar forever.
When he began to starve, he joined the safari of a Muscat trader,
traveled up-country, returned to the coast sick with fever. Late one
night, while walking below the sea wall, yearning for Zanzibar, he saw
a man running, from time to time throwing something into the sea, and
another man running silently in pursuit with a knife in his hand. He
waded along the shore, and presently found in the surf a bag of
gold-dust. Next morning he slipped aboard a north-bound coaster.
Instead of calling at Zanzibar, this time it went clear to Suez!
In Suez a fortune-telling dervish, perhaps because he had just seen an
American pass by, told Hamoud-bin-Said that his wanderings would take
him to America. Hamoud accepted the words of the holy man as a
second-hand pronouncement of God. At that time there was even a ship
at Suez bound for New York.
"It was my destiny," he averred, sitting motionless in his atrocious
suit, so young yet so full of bizarre recollections, impassive at the
inevitable thought that this "destiny" of his might be preparing events
stranger still than those which he had endured.