"'I can be trusted to do my share of the task,' he said, eagerly. 'To save trouble, let me be paid now.'
"'Not so, thou slave,' I replied, curtly and with authority, as I returned the pearls to their place of safe-keeping. 'The price will be paid when the service is performed. To-morrow night you will be admitted, Malik Kafur, if you knock three times at my gate.'
"The fellow rose to his feet, with a servile and submissive smile, and, by a wave of my hand, I dismissed him from my presence.
"Here, indeed, was an adventure thrust upon me, a man of peace and of studious habits, who had ever shrunk from deeds of violence; but the hand of fate was clearly beckoning me along the path of duty, and not for a moment did I shrink from the dangers into which, perchance, I was being hurried.
"For the maharajah, worthless, besotted, and on the verge of dishonoured death, I could have no respect. For the lady of his household, who was confiding to me her very life, whose soft hand I had touched with due reverence, there was an instinctive feeling of sympathy. In her hour of dire need, most likely of extreme danger, she had turned to me, a man of staid repute and old enough, no doubt, to be her father. So this was no affair of conjugal wrong, from which my religious scruples and my abiding principles alike, would have repelled me. Clearly was I the instrument in God's directing hand for some great happening, and it was not for me, through thought of self or cowardice, to interpose obstacles to the carrying out of the divine will.
"And as I thus ruminated there came from a minaret close by the call to evening prayer. 'The world is but an hour,' I murmured to myself as I spread my carpet; 'spend it in devotion, the rest is unseen.'
"On the morrow I was astir even before the morning call to prayer. 'Prayer is better than sleep'—I listened to the familiar cry of the muezzin. But while again I prayed I felt that a good deed done may count more for a man at the gates of Paradise than the record of many prayers.
"Full an hour before the appointed time I was at the corner of the coppersmiths' and the money-changers' bazaars. Here I posted two of my retainers, in whom I could place complete confidence. They had already been instructed how to act when the proper moment arrived. For myself, I sauntered through the crowded and noisy bazaar of the makers and menders of copper vessels, so as not to attract undue attention. In my heart was not one flutter of excitement or of uncertainty: I felt the quiet confidence which in the crises of life comes to a man whose trust in God the Most High is implicit.
"After a period of waiting there came into sight the huge black moorman, in his hand a white wand of office, and, following close behind him, a brilliantly decorated palankeen suspended between a pair of mules and attended by two grooms, leading the animals. The throng had parted before this little procession, averting their eyes from the covered palankeen, as was beseeming.
"But suddenly, at the intersection of the two bazaars, a group of loiterers sprang forward, and with cries assailed the moorman and the grooms, turning the mules into the quieter thoroughfare. There I had now posted myself, and, while the shopkeepers ran up the street to see what had befallen, the cavalcade under my directions, and with my attendants at the animals' heads, hurried along, and as we threaded our way through the maze of streets the tumult of voices soon died away behind us.