Now the old teacher plucked his beard and began in wrath:
“Do I, a learned man, one who has thought and studied long, come here to wrangle with a hungry woman who covets the fruit she may not eat?—”
“Silence!” broke in Rupert, in his great voice—“silence! Tama, give not way to anger—it is not fitting, and you, my questioner and friend, speak no more words against the lady whom in your heart you love and honour. When that case of which you tell happens, as I pray it may not happen, then I will take counsel with my conscience, and do as it shall bid me. I have said.”
Now Rupert turned to Mea to soothe her, for this talk had made her more angry than she had been for years, so angry that in the old days that holy teacher’s life might well have paid its price; while the audience fell to arguing the point among themselves and were so occupied, all of them, that they never saw a woman with a shawl thrown over her head, who thrust her way through them till she stood in front of the platform.
CHAPTER XXII.
EDITH AND MEA
Edith had heard it all. Not one bitter taunt, not one rough word had that merciless interpreter glossed over. She had heard herself called “a woman who should be scourged with rods” and “a daughter of Satan.” She had heard herself, while Dick sniggered behind her, and Tabitha strove to repress a smile that she felt to be unholy, compared to mire in which, if a man rolled, he could never be clean again, and to a sower of poisonous weeds, and this by that other hateful woman who had bewitched her husband with her beauty. She could bear no more; for once her bitter anger made her almost heroic. She would face them there and then. She would demand an answer to the question urged in such forcible language by that blind and sardonic Arab, whose pleasure it was to pick the holiness of other men to pieces. She hid herself in the shawl. She pushed herself through the crowd; she stood in front of the platform, then suddenly unveiled.
Mea saw her first; some instinct of intense antipathy caused her to look round and find her rival’s eyes. Suddenly she stiffened, falling into that attitude which she assumed when, as judge, she passed sentence on a criminal. Then she spoke in English, asking, although already her heart knew the answer to the question, she who remembered well the picture in the locket that Rupert used to wear:
“Stranger, who are you who creep into my house not asked? And what seek you?”
Hearing her voice, Rupert looked round also. Next instant he was clinging to the arms of his chair to prevent himself from falling out of it, while over his face there spread a look of woe and terror, such as a man might wear who suddenly thinks he sees a hated ghost come to summon him to hell. His heart stopped, his sight grew dim, a cold sweat burst out upon his forehead.
“I am the Lady Devene,” Edith answered, “and I am here to seek my husband, Lord Devene, who sits at your side.”