The benevolent looking Patriarch, who had more death notches in his favourite spear than any man in the Peninsula, once more held up his hand. He stroked his flowing white beard as he looked at Al-Asad, who sat with no sign of his inner perturbation upon his handsome face, whilst at the top of his voice Yussuf cursed the white woman in her past, present and future, as well as in her morals, looks and ancestry.
“So it has been arranged, O my children,” said the Patriarch, who looked as though he should have been patting the heads of the third or fourth generation clustering about his knees instead of gambling on a woman’s death. “If our brother Al-Asad throws the dice so that three sixes fall upwards at the same time, then the thrice-accursed woman dies upon the night of feasting and banqueting. If Fate decrees that I throw these three figures of the same value at the same time, kismet, ’tis the will of Allah that she dies to-night. Throw, my son!”
Al-Asad shook the dice between his slender hands and tossed them high into the air. The men backed as the ivory squares fell amongst them and made way for the Patriarch and Al-Asad to examine them.
The Patriarch raised his hands, Al-Asad laughed softly, the men howled in disappointment.
The half-caste had thrown three sixes.
In one brief second the chances of a whole night of gambling, to be followed by the exhilarating task of putting an offender to death, had been wiped out, yet by the decision of the dice did those uneducated, semi-savage, grievously disappointed men abide.
True, they turned in the direction of the dwelling wherein Helen slept and fingered their knives, but more from the rancour aroused by her insult than with any intention of disputing the untoward ending to what might have been such an enjoyable night.
The Patriarch looked at them and grieved for their disappointment, as much as for his own, and walked to a little distance, where he lifted his benign countenance to the stars as he worked his wits, which in their cunning could have given points to a monkey; then he turned and spread wide his arms, looking for all the world as though he had stepped out of a picture by some old master, and called his sons so that they ran to him, like the children they really were, in spite of their ferocious appearance and still more ferocious deeds.
“Al-Asad the Lion of nimble wit saith that ’twere wise to allow our mistress to wed this white man—for a space. Allah alone wots of this power which drives the white to the dark, the fat to the lean, the well-favoured to the ill-favoured, and which causes more trouble than the rat in the corn or the viper on the hearth.”
“And the tiger-cat to meet its teeth in the flesh of the slave,” shrilled the youth who had been swung like a club, but who had revived sufficiently to gamble with the best.