"Say His prayer again, Adila."
So Adila, with more constraint than before, but still softly and
sweetly, began afresh--
"Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come;
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven; give us this day our daily
bread; and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass
against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil;
for Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. Amen."
Thus the little Coptic woman, in her soft and mellow voice, said her
Lord's prayer in that mud hut on the edge of the desert, with only the
sick man to hear her, and he was a prisoner and in chains; but long
before she had finished, Ishmael's face was hidden in his bed-clothes
and he was crying like a child.
There were three weeks more of a painless and dreamy convalescence, in
which Adila repeated other stories her father had told her, and Ishmael
saw Christianity for the first time as it used to be, and wondered to
find it a faith so sweet and so true, and above all, save for the
character of Jesus, so like his own.
Then a new set of emotions took possession of him, and with returning
strength he began to see Adila with fresh eyes. He loved to look at her
soft, round form, and he found the air of his gloomy prison full of
perfume and light as she walked with her beautiful erect bearing and
smiling blue eyes about his bed. Hitherto she had slept on a mattress
which she had laid out on the ground by the side of his angerib, but now
he wished to change places, and when nothing would avail with her to do
so, he would stretch out his arm at night until their hands met and
clasped and thus linked together they would fall asleep.
But often he would awake in the darkness, not being able to sleep for
thinking of her, and, finding one night that she was awake too, he said
in a tremulous voice--
"Will you not come on to the angerib, Adila?"
"Should I?" she whispered, and she did.
Next day the black Soudanese guard that had been set to watch him
reported to the Mohammedan Sheikhs that the devotee had been swallowed
up in the man, whereupon the Sheikhs, with a chuckle, reported the same
to the Government, and then Ishmael, with certain formalities, was set
free.
At the expense of his uncle a house was found for him outside the town,
for in contempt of his weakness in being tricked, as his people
believed, by a Coptic slave girl, his following had gone, and he and
Adila were to be left alone. Little they recked of that, though, for in
the first sweet joys of husband and wife they were very happy, talking
in delicious whispers, and with the frank candour of the East, of the
child that was to come. He was sure it would be a girl, so they agreed
to call it Ayesha (Mary), she for the sake of the sinful soul who had
washed her Master's feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of
her head, and he in memory of the poor Jewish woman, the mother of Isa,
whose heart had been torn with grief for the sorrows of her son.
But when at length came their day of days, at the height of their
happiness a bolt fell out of a cloudless sky, for though God gave them a
child, and it was a girl, He took the mother in place of it.
She made a bravo end, the sweet Coptic woman, only thinking of Ishmael
and holding his hand to cheer him. It was noon, the sun was hot outside,
and in the cool shade of the courtyard three Moslems chanted the
"Islamee la Illaha," for so much they could do even for the infidel,
while Ishmael sat within on one side of his wife's angerib, with his
uncle, seventy years of age now, on the other. She was too weak to
speak to her husband, but she held up her mouth to him like a child to
be kissed.