The Sheik’s Shekels
To prevent the effects of their returning intrepidity, no time was to be lost in our escape. But the sun, which would have scorched anything but a lizard or a Bedouin to death, kept us prisoners until evening. We were actively employed in the mean time. The plunder of the horde was examined, with the curiosity that makes one of the indefeasible qualities of the fair in all climates; and the young Jewess had not been an inmate of the tent, nor possessed the brightest eyes among the daughters of women, for nothing. With an air between play and revenge, she hunted out every recess in which even the art of Arab thievery could dispose of its produce; and at length rooted up from a hole in the very darkest corner of the tent that precious deposit for which the sheik would have sacrificed all mankind, and even the last hair of his beard—a bag of shekels. She danced with exultation as she poured the shining contents on the ground before me.
“If ever Arab regretted his capture,” said she, “this most unlucky of sheiks shall have cause. But I shall teach him at least one virtue—repentance to the last hour of his life. I think that I see him at this moment frightened into a philosopher, and wishing from the bottom of his soul that he had, for once, resisted the temptation of his trade.”
“But what will you do with the money, my pretty teacher of virtue to Arabs?”
“Give it to my preserver,” said she, advancing, with a look suddenly changed from sportiveness to blushing timidity; “give it to him who was sent by Providence to rescue a daughter of Israel from the hands of the heathen.”
In the emotion of gratitude to me there was mingled a loftier feeling, never so lovely as in youth and woman; she threw up a single glance to heaven, and a tear of piety filled her sparkling eye.
“But, temptress and teacher at once,” said I, “by what right am I to seize on the sheik’s treasury? May it not diminish my supernatural dignity with the tribe to be known as a plunderer?”
“Ha!” said she, with a rosy smile; “who is to betray you but your accomplice? Besides, money is reputation and innocence, wisdom and virtue, all over the world.”
Touching, with the tip of one slender finger, my arm as it lay folded on my bosom, she waved the other hand, in attitudes of untaught persuasion.
A Maiden’s Philosophy