第75章

Beside this man there was a woman of a laughing cruel face;and she herself, Naomi--alone her father being nowhere near--stood in the midst with all eyes upon her.What happened next she did not know, for blank darkness fell upon everything, and in that interval they who had taken her away must have brought her back.

For when she opened her eyes she was in her own bed, and the things of their little home were about her, and her father's eyes were looking down at her, and his lips were kissing her, and the sun was shining outside, and the birds were singing, and the long grass was whispering in the breeze, and it was the same as if she had been asleep during the night and was just awakening in the morning.

"It was a dream, my child," said Israel, thinking only with how vivid a sense her eyes had gathered up in that instant of first sight the picture of that day at the Kasbah.

"A dream!" she cried; "no, no! I _saw_ it!"Hitherto her dreams had been blind ones, and if she dreamt of her own people it had not been of their faces, but of the touch of their hands or the sound of their voices.By one of these she had always known them, and sometimes it had been her mother's arms that had been about her, and sometimes her father's lips that had pressed her forehead, and sometimes Ali's voice that had rung in her ears.

Israel smoothed her hair and calmed her fears, but thinking both of her dream and of her artless sayings, he said in his heart, "She is a child, a child born into life as a maid, and without the strength of a child's weakness.Oh! great is the wisdom which orders it so that we come into the world as babes."Thus realising Naomi's childishness, Israel kept close guard and watch upon her afterwards.But if she was a gleam of sunlight in his lonely dwelling, like sunlight she came and went in it, and one day he found her near to the track leading up to the fondak in talk with a passing traveller by the way, whom he recognised for the grossest profligate out of Tetuan.Unveiled, unabashed, with sweet looks of confidence she was gazing full into the man's gross face, answering his evil questions with the artless simplicity of innocence.At one bound Israel was between them; and in a moment he had torn Naomi away.And that night, while she wept out her very heart at the first anger that her father had shown her, Israel himself, in a new terror of his soul, was pouring out a new petition to God."O Lord, my God," he cried, "when she was blind and dumb and deaf she was a thing apart, she was a child in no peril from herself for Thy hand did guide her, and in none from the world, for no man dared outrage her infirmity.But now she is a maid, and her dangers are many, for she is beautiful, and the heart of man is evil.Keep me with her always, O Lord, to guard and guide her!

Let me not leave her, for she is without knowledge of good and evil.

Spare me a little while longer, though I am stricken in years.

For her sake spare me, Oh Lord--it is the last of my prayers--the last, O Lord, the last--for her sake spare me!"God did not hear the prayer of Israel.Next morning a guard of soldiers came out from Tetuan and took him prisoner in the name of the Kaid.

The release of the poor followers of Absalam out of the prison at Shawan had become known by the blind gratitude of one of them, who, hastening to Israel's house in the Mellah, had flung himself down on his face before it.