“I hate him! I have hated him from the first,” she said. “Aye, even as I clasped his clammy form in my arms, and knew that water rather than blood flowed in his veins, I loathed the man and guessed he would strive to ruin me!”
“You did this?” asked the vizier, sternly. “You clasped the Persian in your arms—a man so old that he might call you daughter? You played the wanton with this stranger?”
“Even so,” she answered, mockingly. “I would have sacrificed anything, at that time, to have cut old Burah’s thread of life. But, elai! your cold Persian would not respond. He spurned me from him. I was very safe in his presence, my father.”
Agahr’s brows did not unbend. He eyed his daughter with a look of smouldering fury.
“Hear me, Maie,” he commanded; “you are the child of my heart, my best beloved. With you I have plotted and intrigued until my very soul is stained with evil in the Prophet’s sight; but all for your future glory and pride, and with no thought of my own advantage. But if you disregard your own purity, if I find that you give yourself to strange men or humble me in the sight of Allah, I swear to kill you as quickly as I would a dog of an infidel! Aye, my own slaves shall cut you down like a noxious weed.”
She laughed then, showing her dimples and her pearl-like teeth; but the laugh rang hard in Agahr’s ears.
“What man has knowledge to teach a woman?” she asked, with a careless gesture. “Is your wisdom so little, my father, that you judge me lacking in worldly cunning? Bah! have comfort, then! Never can you plot so well for Maie as Maie can plot for herself. And when I fall the heavens shall follow in my wake. Enough of this. We face a real trouble. The Persian has returned to Mekran, bearing in a splendid palanquin a woman veiled and closely guarded, who is received into the harem of the khan after he had embraced her form in the sight of many servants. In this we read my own rejection, the failure of all our clever plotting. The harem, then, was not made beautiful for me, but for this strange woman whom the Persian brings to warm the cold heart of Ahmed Khan. Is she beautiful? Is she young and winning? Has she charms to delight the senses? Then why should she be chosen before me—the daughter you yourself have declared to be incomparable? Answer, you man of spies—spies so impotent that they cannot penetrate the secrets of the harem!”
“It is all a deep mystery, my Maie,” sighed the vizier, solemnly stroking his beard. “But let us not be disheartened. There is room in the khan’s harem for more than one woman.”
“Unless Maie is first, there is no room for her in any man’s harem,” she retorted, proudly. “Have done, my father, with thoughts of Ahmed Khan. Our Kasam is assembling an army. Perhaps it is not too late to bargain with him for our support.”
“Not long ago,” said the vizier, slowly, “we rejected Kasam.”