Happily for Jack, some of those present had the sense to reflect that the women's apartment would not hold them all, and that therefore their assistance might be dispensed with. Still the grandfather and father of the maiden, two of her uncles, the priest, and three other persons thought it behoved them to go and witness the due performance of this ceremony of the English.
Jack was conducted by this solemn group to the room where Shushan sat with her mother. As with trembling footsteps he approached her, the rest fell back and stood in a grave half-circle, their ears and eyes intent upon his every word and motion. "Heaven help me!" thought Jack. "Had ever man to propose in such a way? What shall I say?" But no words would come to him; sense and speech seemed both to have departed from him.
The silence throbbed in his ears like a pulse of pain—the awful silence, which he knew he ought to break, which he must break, for his life, and more than his life—and yet he could not. Not a word could he utter.
Shushan, meanwhile, not knowing what all this might portend, hastily veiled her face, and clung to her mother. Mariam had a copper dish which she had been cleaning in her hand, and in her surprise and alarm she let it go. It slipped slowly down her dress, and fell at last with a slight sound upon the floor. In the strained silence every one started, and Shushan dropped her veil with a little frightened cry.
Jack saw her sweet face, pale with anguish, her soft, dark eyes, heavy with unshed tears. Every thought was lost in an unutterable longing to snatch her from the fate that threatened her. "Will you let me save you, Shushan?" he pleaded, coming close to her,—and his voice was the voice of a strong man's infinite tenderness.
Shushan stood up, looked around upon her father, her grandfather, and all the rest, then looked calmly and steadily in the face of the Englishman. "Yes," she said softly.
For she knew there was one way of escape for the Christian maiden in a strait like hers. There had been often in Armenia Christian fathers strong enough to say, like Virginius,—
"And now, my own dear little girl, there is no way but this."
What more likely than that the brave, kind Englishman—whom it would not hurt so much, as he was not of her own blood—might do for her that which her kindred would find too hard? There was a strange fascination, a sort of rapture in the thought of dying by his hand. "I am not afraid," she said, with a firm sweet look,—"not afraid to die."