"Manage with bread and butter till God brings the jam."
On the whole we fared not amiss, while our establishment, with its two Riffi servants, man and wife, worked well, until an occurrence took place which shook it to its very foundations, and left us to the end with a question which will never be solved.
One evening, about half-past five, just as we had settled ourselves down after tea to read, there was an unusual stir on the stairs. A minute later and the door burst open. Tahara staggered in, followed by S`lam, who seemed very much excited and alarmed. The woman was deathly pale; her eyes were ringed with black. R. and I, seeing she was ill, jumped to the conclusion that something or other was very wrong with her, and tried to make her sit down, or lie down, at once, on our divan. In a confused scene which followed, the only words we grasped were, "Tabiba, tabiba" (Doctor), and S`lam, at our instigation, rushed downstairs to go off to Tetuan, and to bring back with him Miss Z——, one of the lady missionaries. Tahara was almost beside herself, apparently with terror, and for a few moments one was inclined to doubt her sanity. We tried vainly to quiet her, almost holding her on the divan; but there was evidently something on her mind which every moment threw her into fresh agitations, and—ah! what would we not have given to have understood Arabic! for Tahara knew no French, like S`lam, and could barely say half a dozen words in English; her Spanish, of which she knew a few words, was Greek to us too.
"Signorita! signorita! tabiba!" she kept repeating, wailing, and then a torrent of Shillah and Arabic and Spanish would follow, and we were at our wits' end. At last R. managed to quiet her a little, and by-and-by to make her try to help us to understand, by saying slowly in Arabic two or three words which would be intelligible to us, together with the word or so of English which she herself knew. Then we gathered that her one desire was that I should go to the tabiba's. But why? We told her that S`lam had gone. She burst out into fresh agonies and shrieks: "S`lam not go! S`lam not go!" Then she got up, and apparently wished to go downstairs—the last thing we thought she ought to do; but all our efforts to keep her still seemed rather futile; and from what she was trying to make us understand, there was more behind than we had an idea of. She went, almost ran, down into her and S`lam's bedroom, we following hard behind. Inside the room she tip-toed up to a recess high in the wall, almost out of her reach, and with difficulty lifted down a small bundle of rags. This she unrolled, fold after fold, before our eyes, while a thousand guesses as to what was coming rushed through the brain; the last rag came off, and a small blue bottle, about four inches high, lay in her hand. She held it up to the light. It was half full of a colourless liquid like water. We read the label—"Prussic Acid. Poison"; and an ugly fear took the place of vague conjecture.
"Who has eaten this?" R. asked in scanty Arabic.
"Anna" (I), replied Tahara.
The remedy of hot boiled milk rushed into both our heads at once, but Tahara was again beginning in a fresh agony, which was now more persistent than only terrified; and choking off her stream of words, we managed to gather, that what she wanted was to go herself with me into the city, at once, to Miss Z——. Now a few drops of prussic acid of course meant that she had not long to live, and yet there were no symptoms of poisoning so far as we could gather at present. She might have taken it in a diluted form certainly. The whole thing was possibly wild imagination on her part. At any rate Miss Z—— would understand her, and that we could not do.
I hurried on my boots, questioning as to whether the woman really meant that S`lam had poisoned her. R. helped Tahara wind her long white woollen haik round her. In two minutes I was ready. Tahara slipped into her slippers, and, with the white shrouded figure clinging to me, in the fast-deepening dusk we started.
It took fully twenty minutes to walk from Jinan Dolero to the house in the middle of the city where the lady missionaries lived and had a dispensary. Miss Z—— had had some medical experience, and was a clever woman. She understood, probably as far as any European can understand, the Moorish character; and it was with some confidence—possibly on the part of us both—that we set out. But the way seemed lengthy; I knew that S`lam would be there long before we could arrive: through the city there are at least three intricate ways by which the house is reached, and my heart sank as I reflected that there was every chance of Miss Z—— and S`lam's taking another way than our own, and thus missing us. Meanwhile, it was growing darker every moment. Would the city gate still be open when we reached it? Was it not certain to be shut when we wanted to return?
Tahara hung on to my arm and hand. There had been rain, and we both slipped about in the dark, and splashed into unseen pools; she took off her pink slippers and carried them in one hand, and paddled along on her bare feet at a Moorish woman's top speed, still shaking with terror. Three or four times, dark as it was, she stopped and put out her tongue for me to look at it. It seemed very pink, and I did my utmost to reassure her, having disturbing visions of her collapsing altogether on the grass; for if she was to be understood rightly and believed, she had pains in her body, and breathing seemed an effort.