"Well, remember I have warned thee!" shouted Asad after him.
Relieved of the irritant of the lank youth's voice and presence, Iskender felt dismay at his own boastfulness, and repented of it humbly before Allah. He knew that a jealous eye is fixed upon the heart of every man to mark when pride leaps up and straightway blight it. To show elation was to court calamity. However, he repeated divers formulas reputed potent to avert the evil; and when, from a high point of the dunes, he saw the minarets and the square roofs of the town standing forth clear and white with the blue sea for background, beyond the gardens freshened by the rain, he clean forgot misgivings.
CHAPTER VIII
The love Iskender bore to his Emîr transfigured every detail of familiar life. The walk to the hotel each morning was a joy through expectation, the return each evening a delight through memory. The vestibule in which he waited his lord's pleasure, with its marble pavement and its painted walls, a few cane chairs and tables, and a great clock ticking steadily, became the entrance-hall of paradise. Of nights the thought of sitting there next morning caused his pulse to quicken. The sons of Mûsa and the negro doorkeeper shared in the radiance of his loved one's neighbourhood. It was easier for his mind to pasture on accessories than to conjure up the Emîr's own presence, which left the memory blind as with excess of light. At times he would recall with a thrill the lofty brow with short fair hair reposing on its summit as lightly as tamarisks upon the crest of a dune, the laughing sea-blue eyes with golden lashes, or it might be the smooth curves of mouth and chin. But the face as a whole escaped him, though he never tired of studying it, and was always trying to produce its likeness; now with pencil upon paper, now with finger in the sand. No artist in the world could hope to show the beauty of that face as he beheld it, the glow its smile diffused through all his being. Even his mother's shrieks to him to get money from the Emîr enhanced his rapture, making his own pure love shine forth more brightly.
A week's fine weather followed on the rain. The Emîr rode out on horseback every day, with Iskender at his right hand, and Elias, who was a showy rider, circling round them. Iskender had told Elias plainly:
"The Emîr is mine. I found him; and shall keep him all my own."
"It is known he is thine," the elder had made answer with all deference. "Allah forbid that I should seem to rival thee! But his Honour has been merciful to me, and my soul is bound to him and thee in gratitude. Moreover, nowadays I have much spare time, which I can scarcely hope to spend more profitably than in the society and conversation of so exalted and refined a nobleman. He is thine and shall remain so. Only drive me not away!"
Iskender acceded to this petition the more readily that his Emîr, he could see, regarded the most exquisite of dragomans simply as a standing joke. They laughed together at his superstition and his boastfulness. But their butt was really serviceable in small ways, knowing where to hire good horses at the lowest price, and pointing out in the course of their rides objects of interest of the very existence of which Iskender had been ignorant.
Never had the son of Yâcûb known such happiness as he tasted in those rides across the plain which basked in sunshine, with violet mountains before them and a gleam of the sea behind. Here they traversed a mud-village plumed with palms, its narrow ways alive with dogs, and fowls, and children, where Iskender shouted, "Way for the Emîr!" till men and women bowed their heads and praised him; there an olive-grove profuse of dappled shade, where they were content to let their horses walk at ease. In their saddle-bags was much good food from the hotel, which they devoured at noon in some secluded spot; when Elias would discourse to them of strange vicissitudes, of beggars suddenly uplifted to the height of honour, and the Emîr, reclining lazily, would smile and wink privately at Iskender, who, at every such mark of preferment, longed to kiss his feet. No marvel yet related by Elias could compare with his own good fortune in Iskender's eyes.