Having paid him we walked away with our heads high, but I trembled, and I know Djimlah did, too, for her arm in mine was shaking.
We spoke then of our feelings and of the awful thing that happened to our hearts when the man opened his eyes. Djimlah wept at the thought of being caught as a thief. “Why did we do it, yavroum?” she kept on wailing to me; “why did we do it?”
“I don’t know why we did it,” I replied, nor did I know then why we kept on getting into scrapes, from the consequences of which Semmeya always saved us. I know now that every bit of devilry we perpetrated was at her instigation.
While we were not conscious of her evil influence, and were fully grateful to her for saving us, yet we always mistrusted her; and once in despair we came together and debated how to tell her that we did not care to have her for a friend any more.
Nashan then gravely remarked: “We must remember that without her several times we should have been compelled to die.”
This we acknowledged to be true, and resolved still to bear with her. Moreover, Semmeya was a remarkable story-teller, and on rainy days, when we could not play outdoors, we would congregate in one house and Semmeya would hold us enthralled with a fabrication of her imagination. She could thrill us or make us laugh, at will, and was the undisputed queen of rainy days.
Just the same, we never felt that she was quite one of us—even I who was much more under her spell than the others. We came to know that whenever she wanted anything she was going to get it, and that some one else would pay for it.
“It is her Greek blood that makes her so,” Chakendé said one noon; then looked up at me in fear; but at these words Djimlah declared that it was time to pray, and they all fell on their knees, facing Mecca. They knew I would not attack them while they were praying, and they made their devotions long enough for my anger to cool somewhat.
The legend about her Greek blood was that her grandmother had been taken from the island of Cyprus, when a baby, and sold into a haremlik. Semmeya told us that only after she was married and had children did her grandmother learn that she was a Greek; and then she hanged herself from despair. Perhaps this matter of the Greek grandmother helped to make Semmeya dear to me, although now, as I look back upon it all, I think it was because instinctively I understood a little of the curse of temperament, and poor Semmeya had a large share of it.