"Beware your leopard when he growls! but where is the other Arnaout? I will have the pearl with the ruby of the harem! where is she, I say? Did I not order you to bring all the odalisks to my feast?"
"From your Majesty's orders but lately, Sire, I supposed—" began the eunuch.
"Supposed? You are to obey, not to suppose," cried the demented man, slashing at him with the cimeter that lay at his feet.
"But she is not robed for the feast."
"Bring her as she is, and robe her here. You said that she was fairer than this one. If she is not fairer than this one, the leopard's claws will grip her, and the beast shall have your black body for his next supper. Bring her!"
The eunuch soon returned with Morsinia. She wore a sombre feridjé, or cloak completely enveloping the person. This she had on at the moment she was summoned, and the eunuch obeyed literally the mandate of the monarch to bring her as she was.
As she stood before the Sultan she appeared, in contrast with her half naked and bejeweled sisters, like a prophetess; some female Elijah before Ahab surrounded by his household of Jezebels. Throwing back the yashmak, or long veil—the one Moslem costume she had very willingly assumed after her captivity—she gazed upon the tyrant with a look of amazed inquiry of his meaning in summoning her to such a place. The sovereignty of her soul asserted and expressed itself in her noble brow, her clear and steady eye, her dauntless bearing.
"Sire, I have obeyed," said she, making the obeisance which in form was obsequious, but which she executed with such dignity that even the dull wit of the reveller felt that she had not really humbled herself before him by so much as the shadow of a thought.
"Disrobe her!" cried the monarch.
The woman stepped back, as if to avoid the contact of her person with the black eunuch; but as suddenly threw off the feridjé herself. If she had seemed a gloomy prophetess before, her appearance now would have suggested to an ancient Greek the apparition of Pudicitia, the goddess of modesty. Her gown of rich pearl-tinted cloth covered her shoulders; and, though opened upon the bosom, it was to show only the thick folds of white lace which embraced the throat in a ruffle, and was clasped with a single gem—a cameo presented to her by the Greek Emperor.