“My lord,” he said quietly, “it is not the profit that is in question. She is not for sale.”
Asad blinked at him, speechless, and slowly a faint colour crept into his sallow cheeks.
“Not... not for sale?” he echoed, faltering in his amazement.
“Not if thou offered me thy Bashalik as the price of her,” was the solemn answer. Then more warmly, in a voice that held a note of intercession—“Ask anything else that is mine,” he continued, “and gladly will I lay it at thy feet in earnest of my loyalty and love for thee.”
“But I want nothing else.” Asad’s tone was impatient, petulant almost. “I want this slave.”
“Then,” replied Oliver, “I cast myself upon thy mercy and beseech thee to turn thine eyes elsewhere.”
Asad scowled upon him. “Dost thou deny me?” he demanded, throwing back his head.
“Alas!” said Sakr-el-Bahr.
There fell a pause. Darker and darker grew the countenance of Asad, fiercer glowed the eyes he bent upon his lieutenant. “I see,” he said at last, with a calm so oddly at variance with his looks as to be sinister. “I see. It seems that there is more truth in Fenzileh than I suspected. So!” He considered the corsair a moment with his sunken smouldering eyes.
Then he addressed him in a tone that vibrated with his suppressed anger. “Bethink thee, Sakr-el-Bahr, of what thou art, of what I have made thee. Bethink thee of all the bounty these hands have lavished on thee. Thou art my own lieutenant, and mayest one day be more. In Algiers there is none above thee save myself. Art, then, so thankless as to deny me the first thing I ask of thee? Truly is it written ‘Ungrateful is Man.’”