The Scapegoat

by Sir Hall Caine

Saying this, he made a downward sweep of his open hand over the place where the Basha lay, and Ben Aboo shrank under it as a worm shrinks under a blow. Then with head erect he went out unhindered.

But he was not yet done. In the garden of the palace, as he passed through it to the street, he stood a moment in the darkness under the stars before the chamber where he knew the Sultan lay, and cried, “Abd er-Rahman! Abd er-Rahman! slave of the Merciful! Listen: I hear the sound of the trumpet and the alarum of war. My heart makes a noise in me for my country, but the day of her tribulation is near. Woe to you, Abd er-Rahman! You have filled up the measure of your fathers. Woe to you, slave of the Compassionate!”

The Sultan heard him, and so did the Ministers of State; the women of the hareem heard him, and so did the civil guards and the soldiers. But his voice and his message came over them with the terror of a ghostly thing, and no man raised a hand to stop him.

“The Mahdi,” they whispered with awe, and fell back when he approached.

The streets were quiet as he left the Kasbah. The rabble of mountaineers of Aissawa were gone. Hooded Talebs, with prayer-mats under their arms, were picking their way in the gloom from the various mosques; and from these there came out into the streets the plash of water in the porticos and the low drone of singing voices behind the screens.

The Mahdi lodged that night in the quarter of the enclosure called the M'Salla, and there a slave woman of Ben Aboo's came to him in secret. It was Fatimah, and she told him much of her late master, whom she had visited by stealth, and just left in great trouble and in madness; also of her dead mistress, Ruth who was like rose-perfume in her memory, as well as of Naomi, their daughter, and all her sufferings. In spasms, in gasps, without sequence and without order, she told her story; but he listened to her with emotion while the agitated black face was before him, and when it was gone he tramped the dark house in the dead of night, a silent man, with tender thoughts of the sweet girl who was imprisoned in the dungeons of the Kasbah, and of her stricken father, who supposed that she was living in luxury in the palace of his enemy while he himself lay sick in the poor hut which had been their home. These false notions, which were at once the seed and the fruit of Israel's madness, should at least be dispelled. Let come what would, the man should neither live nor die in such bitterness of cruel error.

The Mahdi resolved to set out for Semsa with the first grey of morning, and meantime he went up to the house-top to sleep. The town was quiet, the traffic of the street was done, the raggabash of the Sultan's following had slunk away ashamed or lain down to rest. It was a wonderful night. The air was cool, for the year was deep towards winter, but not a breath of wind was stirring, and the orange-gardens behind the town wall did not send over the river so much as the whisper of a leaf. Stars were out and the big moon of the East shone white on the white walls and minarets. Nowhere is night so full of the spirit of sleep as in an Eastern city. Below, under the moonlight, lay the square white roofs, and between them were the dark streets going in and out, trailing through and along, like to narrow streams of black water in a bed of quarried chalk. Here or there, where a belated townsman lit himself homeward with a lamp, a red light gleamed out of one of the thin darknesses, crept along a few paces, and then was gone. Sometimes a clamour of voices came up with their own echo from some unseen place, and again everything was still. Sleep, sleep, all was sleep.

“O Tetuan,” thought the Mahdi, “how soon will your streets be uprooted and your sanctuaries destroyed!”

The Mooddin was chanting the call to prayers, and the old porter at the gate was muttering over his rosary as the Mahdi left the town in the dawn. He had to pick his way among the soldiers who were lying on the bare soil outside, uncovered to the sky. Not one of them seemed to be awake. Even their camels were still sleeping, nose to nose, in the circles where they had last fed. Only their mules and asses, all hobbled and still saddled, were up and feeding.

The Mahdi found Israel ben Oliel in the hut at Semsa. So poor a place he had not seen in all his wanderings through that abject land. Its walls were of clay that was bulged and cracked, and its roof was of rushes, which lay over it like sea-wreck on a broken barrel. Israel was in his right mind. He was sitting by the door of his house, with a dejected air, a hopeless look, but the slow sad eyes of reason. His clothing was one worn and torn kaftan; his feet were shoeless, and his head was bare. But so grand a head the Mahdi thought he had never beheld before. Not until then had he truly seen him, for the poverty and misery that sat on him only made his face stand out the clearer. It was the face of a man who for good or ill, for struggle or submission, had walked and wrestled with God.