“Hum!—thou art Kaid Rahal now, then.” He turned on the Vizier. “Tell El Mechouar to let him take what horses he chooses; he knows how to keep them. Go!”
He flung the fruit rind at Ortho by way of dismissal.
Ortho gave his long-suffering men a feast that night with the last ready money in his possession. They voted him a right good fellow—soldiers have short memories.
He was on his feet now. As Kaid Rahal, with nominally a thousand cut-throats at his beck and nod, he would be a fool indeed if he couldn’t blackmail the civilians to some order. Also there was a handsome sum to be made by crafty manipulation of his men’s pay and rations. El Mechouar would expect his commission out of this, naturally, and sundry humbler folk—“big fleas have little fleas . . .”—but there would be plenty left. He was clear of the financial thicket. He went prancing home to his little house, laid aside his arms and burnoose, took the key from the negress, ran upstairs and unlocked the room in which the Arab girl, Ourida, was imprisoned. It was a pleasant prison with a window overlooking the Aguedal, its miles of pomegranate, orange, and olive trees. It was the best room in the house and he had furnished it as well as his thin purse would afford, but to the desert girl it might have been a tomb.
She sat all day staring out of the barred window, looking beyond the wide Haouz plain to where the snow peaks of the High Atlas rose, a sheer wall of sun-lit silver—and beyond them even. She never smiled, she never spoke, she hardly touched her food. Ortho in all his experience had encountered nothing like her. He did his utmost to win her over, brought sweetmeats, laughed, joked, retailed the gossip of the palace and the souks, told her stories of romance and adventure which would have kept any other harem toy in shivers of bliss, took his gounibri and sang Romany songs, Moorish songs, English ballads, flowery Ottoman kasidas, ghazels and gûlistâns, learned from Osman Bâki, cursed her, adored her.
All to no avail; he might have been dumb, she deaf. Driven desperate, he seized her in his arms; he had as well embraced so much ice. It was maddening. Osman Bâki, who watched him in the lines of a morning, raving at the men over trifles, twisted his yellow mustache and smiled. This evening, however, Ortho was too full of elation to be easily repulsed. He had worked hard and intrigued steadily for this promotion. Three years before he had landed in Morocco a chained slave, now he was the youngest of his rank in the first arm of the service. Another few years at this pace and what might he not achieve? He bounded upstairs like a lad home with a coveted prize, told the girl of his triumph, striding up and down the room, flushed, laughing, smacking his hands together, boyish to a degree. He looked his handsomest, a tall, picturesque figure in the plum-colored breeches, soft riding boots, blue kaftan and scarlet tarboosh tilted rakishly on his black curls. The girl stole a glance at him from under her long lashes, but when he looked at her she was staring out of the window at the snow wall of the Atlas rose-flushed with sunset, and when he spoke to her she made no answer; he might as well have been talking to himself. But he was too full of his success to notice, and he rattled on and on, pacing the little room up and down, four strides each way. He dropped beside her, put his arm about her shoulders, drew her cold cheek to his flushed one.
“Listen, my pearl,” he rhapsodized. “I have money now and you shall have dresses like rainbows, a gold tiara and slave girls to wait on you, and when we move garrison you shall ride a white ambling mule with red trappings and lodge in a striped tent like the royal women. I am a Kaid Rahal now, do you hear? The youngest of any, and in the Sultan’s favor. I will contrive and scheme, and in a few years . . . the Standard!—eschkoun-i-araf? And then, my honey-sweet, you shall have a palace with a garden and fountains. Hey, look!”
He scooped in his voluminous breeches’ pockets, brought out a handful of trinkets and tossed them into her lap. The girl stared at him, then at the treasures, and drew a sharp breath. They were her own, the jewelry he had wrenched from her on that wild night of carnage three months before.
“You thought I had sold them—eh?” he laughed. “No, no, my dear; it very nearly came to it, but not quite. They are safe now and yours again—see?”
He seized her wrists and worked the bangles on, snapped the crude black necklace round her neck and hung the elaborate gold one over it, kissed her full on the quivering mouth. “Yours again, for always.”