“Ah—” cried Mr. Blandhorn, suddenly dashing past him into the open.
The rumour of the crowd had become a sort of roaring chant. Over the thousands of bobbing heads that packed every cranny of the streets leading to the space before the Mosque there ran the mysterious sense of something new, invisible, but already imminent. Then, with the strange Oriental elasticity, the immense throng divided, and a new throng poured through it, headed by riders ritually draped, and overhung with banners which seemed to be lifted and floated aloft on the shouts of innumerable throats. It was the Pasha of Eloued coming to pray at the tomb of Sidi Oman.
Into this mass Mr. Blandhorn plunged and disappeared, while Willard Bent, for an endless minute, hung back in the shelter of the passage, the old “What’s the use?” in his ears.
A hand touched his sleeve, and a cracked voice echoed the words.
“What’s the use, master?” It was old Myriem, clutching him with scared face and pulling out a limp djellabah from under her holiday shawl.
“I saw you ... Ahmed’s father told me....” (How everything was known in the bazaars!) “Here, put this on quick, and slip away. They won’t trouble you....”
“Oh, but they will—they shall!” roared Willard, in a voice unknown to his own ears, as he flung off the old woman’s hand and, trampling on the djellabah in his flight, dashed into the crowd at the spot where it had swallowed up his master.
They would—they should! No more doubting and weighing and conjecturing! The sight of the weak unwieldy old man, so ignorant, so defenceless and so convinced, disappearing alone into that red furnace of fanaticism, swept from the disciple’s mind every thought but the single passion of devotion.
That he lay down his life for his friend—If he couldn’t bring himself to believe in any other reason for what he was doing, that one seemed suddenly to be enough....
The crowd let him through, still apparently indifferent to his advance. Closer, closer he pushed to the doors of the Mosque, struggling and elbowing through a mass of people so densely jammed that the heat of their breathing was in his face, the rank taste of their bodies on his parched lips—closer, closer, till a last effort of his own thin body, which seemed a mere cage of ribs with a wild heart dashing against it, brought him to the doorway of the Mosque, where Mr. Blandhorn, his head thrown back, his arms crossed on his chest, stood steadily facing the heathen multitude.