“Ibrahîm,” he whispered.
Muriel understood, and, at a nod from Daniel, went out of the room to find the dying man’s son, whom she had seen at the doorway of the house, on her arrival, kneeling upon the praying-carpet, his hands extended towards the East. He had just risen to his feet as she came now to him, and she made signs to him to go upstairs.
When she entered the sick room once more she saw the younger man kneeling beside his father’s couch. Daniel was holding the feeble old hand, so that it rested upon Ibrahîm’s turbaned head. She heard and seemed almost to understand the whispered words of the old man’s blessing, and presently, to her surprise, she observed the tears start from Daniel’s eyes, and their quick brushing away, with the back of his hand. She had not thought him capable of tears.
Then suddenly she saw the dying man raise himself; she saw Daniel and Ibrahîm leaning forward to support him. She heard the rattling of his breath, and she recognized the words that he uttered as those of the Moslem formula which Daniel had more than once repeated to her: “I testify that there is no God but God....” They came rolling now from his lips with passionate energy: it was as though the sum of his whole life were being expressed in these guttural, rhyming sounds. But the declaration remained unfinished. The voice ceased upon the name of Allah, the mouth dropped open, and the patriarchal head fell back.
Muriel had only once before stood at a deathbed; and later, as she walked back to the monastery, she compared the scene of her mother’s death with that from which she had just come.
In the one case there had been the big four-poster bed, with its hangings of embroidered velvet; the sombre room, lit by a shaded bedside lamp and by the flickering of the fire in the wide Tudor grate; the tapestried walls with their designs of dim huntsmen pursuing phantom deer through the time-worn twilight of forgotten forests; the faded Jacobean painting upon the ceiling, representing the fat back-view of a reclining Venus and the fat front-view of naked Cupid. There had been the pompous family doctor and the frigid specialist in their black frock coats, and in the bed, between the embroidered sheets, her mother had lain inert, her dyed hair, tidy to the end, framing her carefully powdered face.
“Come here, my dear,” she had whispered to Muriel. “Tell me, do you believe in a God?”
“Yes, I think I do,” she had replied.
“Well, I don’t,” was her mother’s reply; and those were almost her last words.
And, in contrast, there was this patriarchal scene in the bare, whitewashed room, the sun beating upon the grass matting, the palms rustling outside, and the flies droning: the old, saintly face of the dying man, his withered hand laid upon the head of his beloved son, and the fervent affirmation of his faith in God upon his lips.