But he spoke softly to her, and at last she said: “Kiss me, Mahommed Selim. Behold now thy discharge shall be bought from the palace of the Khedive, and soon thou wilt return,” she cried.
“If it be the will of God,” he answered; “but the look of thine eyes I will take with me, and the face of the child here.” He thrust a finger into the palm of the child, and the little dark hand closed round it. But when he would have taken it away, the little hand still clung, though the eyes were scarce opened upon life.
“See, Mahommed Selim,” Soada cried, “he would go with thee.”
“He shall come to me one day, by the mercy of God,” answered Mahommed Selim.
Then he went out into the market-place and gave himself up to the fat sergeant. As they reached the outskirts of the village a sorry camel came with a sprawling gallop after them, and swaying and rolling above it was Yusef, the drunken ghaffir, his naboot of dom-wood across his knees.
“What dost thou come for, friend of the mercy of God?” asked Mahommed Selim.
“To be thy messenger, praise be to God!” answered Yusef, swinging his water-bottle clear for a drink.
V
In Egypt, the longest way round is not the shortest way home, and that was why Mahommed Selim’s court-martial took just three minutes and a half; and the bimbashi who judged him found even that too long, for he yawned in the deserter’s face as he condemned him to death.
Mahommed Selim showed no feeling when the sentence was pronounced. His face had an apathetic look. It seemed as if it were all one to him. But when they had turned him round to march to the shed where he was to be kept, till hung like a pig at sunrise, his eyes glanced about restlessly. For even as the sentence had been pronounced a new idea had come into his mind. Over the heads of the Gippy soldiers, with their pipestem legs, his look flashed eagerly, then a little painfully—then suddenly stayed, for it rested on the green turban of Yusef, the drunken ghaffir. Yusef’s eyes were almost shut; his face had the grey look of fresh-killed veal, for he had come from an awful debauch of hashish.