“Hist!” whispered Mâs from the background. “Be silent, blockhead! It is his son who follows.”
Zeyd and Mâs together shrank away into the darkness.
Confused by the touch of Zeyd, by words which had failed to pierce his sad abstraction, and yet more by the vanishing of the disturbers ere he could ask what ailed them, Shems-ud-dìn stood still, as they had left him, looking back.
A tall shape grew out of the darkness. It loomed swiftly upon him. He heard a sobbing, felt his robe caught fast in a clutch of despair.
“Forsake me not, O my father!”
It was the voice of Abd-ur-Rahman, the one voice in all the world of power to strike him. Folding his son to his breast, the old man lifted up his voice and wept.
“Ah, have mercy, O my father! Go not now to the khan, but turn aside into this entry till I bare my soul to thee.”
“Is it worth the while, O beloved? Do I not know already?” said Shems-ud-dìn; but his son’s will constrained him.
In a gloom so profound that the night they had left without seemed a brightness by comparison, Abd-ur-Rahman fell at his father’s feet. When the sheykh strove to raise him, he uttered cries of pain.
“Let be, O my father! First hear me to an end. When I left thee to go to my uncle, I was the child of thy training; I knew no law but that God sent, in which thou hadst instructed me; I thought that all who call themselves Muslimûn deferred to that law in conscience as in form. But when I came to Istanbûl, and beheld the grandeur of that city, with its wealth and luxury, my soul doubted, and I looked two ways; for things I had reckoned sinful were there done openly in the daylight, while men of ripe years and superior judgment smiled at my careful observances and scruples against the use of this and that. After a little, thy likeness faded from my remembrance; thy maxims sounded faint amid the voices near me.