The crowd pressed closer upon us, and I saw the dagger pointed at my breast, when I recollected the letter. I gave it to the captain, who read it in silence, and then, with the utmost composure, desired it to be handed over to the Egyptian.
“Comrades,” said he, “I have to apologize for a breach of the confidence that should always subsist between men of honor. I have here accidentally read a letter which the cipher shows to have been intended for our trusty friend Memnon; but since the subject is no longer confined to himself, he will doubtless feel no objection to indulging us all with the correspondence.”
The band thronged round the table; expectation sat on every face, and its various expression in the crowded circle of those strong physiognomies—the keen, the wondering, the angry, the contemptuous, the convinced, the triumphant—would have made an incomparable study for a painter. The Egyptian took the letter with a trembling hand and read the fatal words.
“The fleet will be off the northern promontory by midnight. You will light a signal, and be ready to conduct the troops into the cavern.”
The reader let the fatal despatch fall from his hands.
An outcry of wrath rose on all sides, and the traitor was on the point of being sacrificed when the young Idumean generously started forward.
“It is known, I believe, to every man here,” said he, “that I dislike and distrust Memnon as much as any being on earth. I know him to be base and cruel, and therefore hate him. I have long suspected him of being connected with transactions that nothing but the madness of avarice could venture upon, and nothing but death atone. But he must not perish without a trial. Till inquiry is made, the man who strikes him must strike through me.”
The Egyptian’s Treachery
He placed himself before the culprit, who now taking courage, long and dexterously insisted that the letter was a forgery, invented by “assassins and those who employed assassins.”
The tide of popular wisdom is easily turned; opinion was now raging against me, and the Egyptian stood a fair chance of seeing his reputation cleared in my blood.