“When will you let me go, O Asika?” he repeated.
“Not yet a while, I think,” she said again. “You are too comely and I like you,” and she smiled at him. There was nothing coarse in the smile, indeed it had a certain spiritual quality which thrilled him. “I like you,” she went on in her dreamy voice, “I would keep you with me until your spirit is drawn up into my spirit, making it strong and rich as all the spirits that went before have done, those spirits that my mothers loved from the beginning, which dwell in me to-day.”
Now Alan grew alarmed, desperate even.
“Queen,” he said, “but just now your husband sat here, is it right then that you should talk to me thus?”
“My husband,” she answered, laughing. “Why, that man is but a slave who plays the part of husband to satisfy an ancient law. Never has he so much as kissed my finger tips; my women—those who waited on you last night—are his wives, not I,—or may be, if he will. Soon he will die of love for me, and then when he is dead, though not before, I may take another husband, any husband that I choose, and I think that no black man shall be my lord, who have other, purer blood in me. Vernoon, five centuries have gone by since an Asika was really wed to a foreign man who wore a green turban and called himself a son of the Prophet, a man with a hooked nose and flashing eyes, who reviled our gods until they slew him, even though he was the beloved of their priestess. She who went before me also would have married that white man whose face was like your face, but he fled with Little Bonsa, or rather Little Bonsa fled with him. So she passed away unwed, and in her place I came.”
“How did you come, if she whom you call your mother was not your mother?” asked Alan.
“What is that to you, white man?” she replied haughtily. “I am here, as my spirit has been here from the first. Oh! I see you think I lie to you, come then, come, and I will show you those who from the beginning have been the husbands of the Asika,” and rising from her chair she took him by the hand.
They went through doors and by long, half-lit passages till they came to great gates guarded by old priests armed with spears. As they drew near to these priests the Asika loosed a scarf that she wore over her breast-plate of gold fish scales, and threw the star-spangled thing over Alan’s head, that even these priests should not see his face. Then she spoke a word to them and they opened the gates. Here Jeekie evinced a disposition to remain, remarking to his master that he thought that place, into which he had never entered, “much too holy for poor nigger like him.”
The Asika asked him what he had said and he explained his sense of unworthiness in her own tongue.
“Come, fellow,” she exclaimed, “to translate my words and to bear witness that no trick is played upon your lord.”