These words, and still more the heart-broken manner of their utterance, made a profound impression upon all who heard them. They were received as true by every one there except Abdullah, who talked of hiring ruffians to assassinate the wicked slanderer. He swore at once to clear his nephew's honour. But his excitement was regarded with mere pity, as natural to a man afflicted in so near a relative.
CHAPTER XIX
Abdullah's furious indignation with Elias was complicated by a strain of keen anxiety upon his own account. Though most of the story seemed absurd to his intelligence, there remained enough of possible and even probable to justify dismay in so respectable a man. It seemed more than likely that his nephew, that unlucky boy, had led a British subject into lawless regions quite unknown to him; if harm ensued there would be trouble with the consul; and the power called Cook was so careful for its dragomans that the mere relationship to one whose face was blackened might involve dismissal. The bare idea of this contingency swamped Abdullah's intellect in pure amazement, for since his vision of the Blessed Virgin years ago he had believed that the breath of scandal could not come near him. He crossed himself repeatedly and muttered prayers. But these misgivings were secreted from the world, before which he appeared as the intrepid champion of his absent nephew, prepared to refute the story in its entirety.
His first thought was to make Elias eat his words either by bribes or violence; but a little reflection sufficed to show it worthless. For, once pronounced, those words were all men's utterance; the town, the countryside, was now ablaze, and Elias but a fuse that had done its work. Abdullah demanded on behalf of Iskender that all who professed any knowledge of the matter should be called and questioned in the hearing of the group of dragomans. The proprietor and servants of the khan, who had beheld Iskender's mad excitement on the morning of the start, the discarded muleteer, Aflatûn and Fâris, who still lingered in the town in hopes to recover their expenses from Elias, with others quite unknown, bore witness to the suspicious manner of the young man's flight, and the dance he had led each and all of them. Abdullah gnawed his heavy grey moustache, with eyes downcast, when Elias turned towards him with expressive hands.
From the scene of this inquiry, which was the tavern in the ruined cloister, looking through shadowed arches on the purple sea, a professional errand led Abdullah to the hotel of Mûsa el Barûdi. The sons of Mûsa sat on stools before the door, as did also the priest Mîtri, taking coffee with them. "What news?" they asked. Abdullah hid his face. Could it be that they had not yet heard those wicked lies about Iskender? He enlightened them forthwith with fervent crossings of himself and prayers to Allah; and confessed that he was at his wits' end, since all the evidence obtainable tended strongly to confirm the insane story. The laughter of his hearers did him good. They ridiculed the very notion of Iskender's guile; and they were men of position, respectable men, whose opinion was worth having, while the rest were riff-raff. Abdullah went home greatly comforted.
But the story spread and grew in all the land, with variations and most wonderful additions. People came to Abdullah for the rights of it, and were visibly disappointed and incredulous at receiving a flat denial. They wanted the true story to replace the false, and Abdullah knew no more than that Elias was a liar. He sat still in his house for hours together, gnawing his thick moustache and staring at the ground. Then he bethought him to call on the mother of Iskender, who might have knowledge of her son's true purpose in this mad excursion. If he had abstained from visiting her till now, it was in the hope to keep from her a scandal which was sure to wound her. Now the time had come to try her value as a witness. Though the weather was bad, he could not wait for sunshine, but, taking his umbrella, walked out on to the sandhills through the pelting rain. His boots were caked with mud when he reached the little house; he would not enter therefore, but spoke from the doorway, sheltered by his umbrella. It seemed she had nothing to tell him. It was only from the voice of common rumour that she knew that her precious son had left the town, and since then reports had reached her which made her wash her hands of him for ever. When those reports came to the ears of the missionaries, as they were sure to do, it would ruin his mother in their eyes for ever.
"Take no thought for him, O Abdullah!" she cried furiously. "He is no son of mine, but a changeling of the children of the Jânn. Doubtless my true son, whom I loved and nursed, is with the devils somewhere in the Jebel Kâf. Allah knows he was too good for me; my pride in him was too great! And so they took him, and put a miscreant, a devil, in his place. They say he has a mighty treasure written in his name, so that none but he can free it from the spell that guards it; that shows us what he really is, for who but a jinni, a vile changeling, would hide so glad a secret from his loving mother? Thou sayest, Has he killed the good Emîr? He may have done so, for I say he is no child of mine; he is a devil. Tell all the world my son is lost to me, carried off to the Jebel Kâf or some lone ruin; and a jinni masquerades in his likeness, doing evil."
She screamed her parrot-scream; she could not talk. It was one of her black days when the world was turned to madness. Abdullah retired from the vain attempt to get some sense from her with hopelessness increased instead of lessened.
That same evening, as he sat in his house, enjoying a ray of pallid sunshine sent through the branches of a leafless fig-tree which stretched its gnarled, grey twisted arms before his door, Yuhanna Mahbûb came to him with an angry brow.