"Your white man has over-reached himself, though. 'I will outdo Ishmael in her eyes,' he thought. But he has only fallen into the pit that was dug for me. Let him perish there, and the curse of God be upon him!"
Again she tried to protest, and again in the blind hurricane of his anger he silenced her.
"And you—it was nothing to you that in betraying me you were betraying my people also—my poor people, who have suffered so much and followed me so faithfully."
His face was terrible—it had the sullen glow of the Western sky before a storm.
"You have wrecked my hopes in the hour of their fulfilment. You have made dust and ashes of the expectations of my people. You have uncovered my nakedness, and made me a thing to point the finger at and to scorn. You have turned my heart to stone."
Then the wild anguish of the jealous man became united to the fierce wrath of the fanatic, and going nearer to Helena, and leaning over her, he said—
"Worse than that—a hundredfold worse—you have made the plans and promises of God of no avail. You have allowed the Evil One to enter into your heart, and to use your guilty passions to defeat the schemes of the Most High. Therefore," he said, raising his quivering voice until it rang through the tent like a tortured cry—"therefore, as the instrument of Satan you have no right to live. I say you have no right even to live. And I ... I, who have loved you ... I, whose heart has been wrapped about you like the rope about the wheel of the well ... I, whom you have betrayed and destroyed, and ... and my people with me ... it is I ... yes, it is I who must ... who must——"
Helena heard him stammering and sobbing over her. At the same time she felt that his trembling, ferocious hands were laying hold of her. She felt that the long Eastern veil that had hung down her back was being wrapped around her throat. She felt that its folds were growing tighter and yet tighter, and that she was being strangled and was losing consciousness.
Then suddenly she became aware that Ishmael's formidable grasp had slackened, that he had stepped back from the angerib on which she lay, and was saying to himself in a tremulous whisper—
"Allah! Allah! what is this I am doing? Allah! Allah! Allah!"