“Friend, I cannot answer thee now,” he said, in a troubled voice.
Kaid rose. “I will give thee an hour to think upon it. Come with me.” He stepped forward. “To-morrow I will answer thee, Kaid.”
“To-morrow there is work for thee to do. Come.” David followed him.
The eyes that followed the Prince and the Quaker were not friendly. What Kaid had long foreshadowed seemed at hand: the coming of a European counsellor and confidant. They realised that in the man who had just left the room with Kaid there were characteristics unlike those they had ever met before in Europeans.
“A madman,” whispered High Pasha to Achmet the Ropemaker.
“Then his will be the fate of the swine of Gadarene,” said Nahoum Pasha, who had heard.
“At least one need not argue with a madman.” The face of Achmet the Ropemaker was not more pleasant than his dark words.
“It is not the madman with whom you have to deal, but his keeper,” rejoined Nahoum.
Nahoum’s face was heavier than usual. Going to weight, he was still muscular and well groomed. His light brown beard and hair and blue eyes gave him a look almost Saxon, and bland power spoke in his face and in every gesture.
He was seldom without the string of beads so many Orientals love to carry, and, Armenian Christian as he was, the act seemed almost religious. It was to him, however, like a ground-wire in telegraphy—it carried off the nervous force tingling in him and driving him to impulsive action, while his reputation called for a constant outward urbanity, a philosophical apathy. He had had his great fight for place and power, alien as he was in religion, though he had lived in Egypt since a child. Bar to progress as his religion had been at first, it had been an advantage afterwards; for, through it, he could exclude himself from complications with the Wakfs, the religious court of the Muslim creed, which had lands to administer, and controlled the laws of marriage and inheritance. He could shrug his shoulders and play with his beads, and urbanely explain his own helplessness and ineligibility when his influence was summoned, or it was sought to entangle him in warring interests. Oriental through and through, the basis of his creed was similar to that of a Muslim: Mahomet was a prophet and Christ was a prophet. It was a case of rival prophets—all else was obscured into a legend, and he saw the strife of race in the difference of creed. For the rest, he flourished the salutations and language of the Arab as though they were his own, and he spoke Arabic as perfectly as he did French and English.