“What ails thee, woman?” he asked in dismay.
“O hard of heart! O cruel!” she whimpered. “Art thou not lord of me? Has my fancy ever strayed from thy goodliness to desire another’s? Now Alia is dead, what am I? The women at the spring will mock me, saying, ‘O thing despised, alone in his house, yet unembraced.’ O my dear lord, O tree of sweet fruit shading me, could I tell when I joined thy harìm, to wait upon thy daughter, that by so doing I should render my widowhood eternal? I knew thou hadst no other, save me and that very old one who is since dead.... Let not the offense which I committed at that other tree stand ever in thy sight against me. May Allah blast that other till the Last Day. Died not my soul beneath its branches? But this is a good tree, of shade most pleasant. Ah, put me not away, O lord of justice.”
Slowly the import of her blubbering reached Shems-ud-dìn’s intelligence; and he saw plainly how, immersed in selfish grief, he had dealt harshly by his servant. Her desires were natural and legitimate. She was now alone in his house. He sought no other woman.
“So be it,” he said. “Very kind hast thou been to me through this time of trouble. When the days of my grief are accomplished, if Allah spares us, thou shalt have thy will.”
The creature’s gladness seemed excessive to one for whom all things were now equal under heaven.
In the wide archway of his own house, overlooking the small white city which had been his care so many years, the minaret which he had caused to be built, and the yellow hills rolling to violet in the distance, Shems-ud-dìn sat on a morning and wrote to his brother Milhem. Behind him, in the shadow, knelt Mâs employed in trimming the lamps of the house, shaking one after another to be sure it had oil enough. The sheykh paused often before recharging his reed to gaze out over the sun-baked land and smile, part ruefully.
“After inquiry touching thy illustrious health, I submit to thee, O my dear brother, that my son Abd-ur-Rahman does, upon mature reflection, elect to retire to a private station and has returned to this little city, to the house of me his father; that he entreats thy pardon for a defection which must bear the look of ingratitude; but that, in excuse, he has not the strength of thee, O my brother, to escape corruption in a path so full of temptations. Forget not, O my dear, how his childhood was spent in a quiet place, among simple folk, far from all those seductions which spring from too much luxury and the intercourse with foreigners and men unsteadfast in the faith.
“Notwithstanding, I will not hide from thee my own lively pleasure in this end to his deliberations, which appears to me the right one in the sight of Allah.
“Furthermore, let me thank thee once again for thy gracious intervention when Allah willed that I should be accused falsely in El Cûds, whither I went last spring, on an evil prompting, to subject my beloved daughter, then very ill, to the treatment of a Frank physician, in whose house she died very peacefully, the praise to Allah. Though sad for the loss of my daughter, and more for the inordinate affection my soul bore her, which conscience tells was the cause of that loss, I am not unhappy. Thanks to Allah! Here I am surrounded by friends who wish me well. A woman, long a servant in my house and attendant on my little Alia, now tends to the comfort of my age, and lavishes on me the endearments for which her sort were created. Hassan Agha, our old acquaintance, was felled from his horse and wounded recently in a conflict with certain of the Bedû who, harboring a grudge against him for some wrong he did to them in El Cûds, have harried us these three months past—against all precedent, for their time of sojourn here is the winter—but now seem gone from the land, for which we praise Allah. As for Hassan, thy bounteous grant of rifles and powder has done much to reconcile him to my son, with whom he quarreled in El Cûds. All my neighbors, alike Arab and Circassian, honored my son with a great reception on his arrival yesterday in the morning.