‘Good here is not good hereafter.’
‘The life of a dog and waur here,’ muttered Yusuf; ‘ye’ll mind me when it is too late.’
‘Nay, Yusuf, if you will only take word of our condition to Algiers, we shall—at least the boy—be assuredly redeemed, and you would win a high reward.’
‘I am no free to gang to Algiers,’ said Yusuf. ‘I fell out with a loon there, one of those Janissaries that gang hectoring aboot as though the world were not gude enough for them, and if I hadna made the best of my way out of the toon, my pow wad be a worricow on the wa’s of the tower.’
‘There are French at Bona, you say. Remember, I ask you to put yourself in no danger, only to bear the tidings to any European,’ entreated Arthur.
‘And how are they to find ye?’ demanded Yusuf. ‘Abou Ben Zegri will never keep you here after having evened his gude-daughter to ye. He’ll sell you to some corsair captain, and then the best that could betide ye wad be that a shot frae the Knights of Malta should make quick work wi’ ye. Or look at the dumbie there, Fareek. A Christian, he ca’s himsel’, too, though ’tis of a by ordinar’ fashion, such as Deacon Shortcoats would scarce own. I coft him dog cheap at Tunis, when his master, the Vizier, had had his tongue cut out—for but knowing o’ some deed that suld ne’er have been done—and his puir feet bastinadoed to a jelly. Gin a’ the siller in the Dey’s treasury ransomed ye, what gude would it do ye after that?’
‘I cannot help that—I cannot forsake my God. I must trust Him not to forsake me.’
And, as usual, Yusuf went off angrily muttering, ‘He that will to Cupar maun to Cupar.’
Perhaps Arthur’s resistance had begun more for the sake of honour, and instinctive clinging to hereditary faith, without the sense of heroism or enthusiasm for martyrdom which sustained Estelle, and rather with the feeling that inconstancy to his faith and his Lord would be base and disloyal. But, as the long days rolled on, if the future of toil and dreary misery developed itself before him, the sense of personal love and aid towards the Lord and Master whom he served grew upon him. Neither the gazelle-eyed Ayesha nor the prosperous village life presented any great temptation. He would have given them all for one bleak day of mist on a Border moss; it was the appalling contrast with the hold of a Moorish galley that at times startled him, together with the only too great probability that he should be utterly incapable of saving poor little Ulysse from unconscious apostacy.
Once Yusuf observed, that if he would only make outward submission to Moslem law, he might retain his own belief and trust in the Lord he seemed so much to love, and of whom he said more good than any Moslem did of the Prophet.