“It is most singularly odd that he should have undertaken that long voyage to England to wrest thence just those two captives; that being there he should not have raided in true corsair fashion and packed his ship with slaves. Most singularly odd!”
They were alone behind the green lattices through which filtered the perfumes of the garden and the throbbing of a nightingale’s voice laden with the tale of its love for the rose. Fenzileh reclined upon a divan that was spread with silken Turkey carpets, and one of her gold-embroidered slippers had dropped from her henna-stained toes. Her lovely arms were raised to support her head, and she stared up at the lamp of many colours that hung from the fretted ceiling.
Marzak paced the length of the chamber back and forth, and there was silence save for the soft swish of his slippers along the floor.
“Well?” she asked him impatiently at last. “Does it not seem odd to thee?”
“Odd, indeed, O my mother,” the youth replied, coming to a halt before her.
“And canst think of naught that was the cause of it?”
“The cause of it?” quoth he, his lovely young face, so closely modelled upon her own, looking blank and vacant.
“Ay, the cause of it,” she cried impatiently. “Canst do naught but stare? Am I the mother of a fool? Wilt thou simper and gape and trifle away thy days whilst that dog-descended Frank tramples thee underfoot, using thee but as a stepping-stone to the power that should be thine own? And that be so, Marzak, I would thou hadst been strangled in my womb.”
He recoiled before the Italian fury of her, was dully resentful even, suspecting that in such words from a woman were she twenty times his mother, there was something dishonouring to his manhood.
“What can I do?” he cried.