"Is there not always rich meat, and beer and brandy in season? I have also hundreds of women who are young, as slender as palm trees, with teeth like milk. I will buy women from the Arabs, with red or tawny skin and straight hair like waterfalls. I will send men to steal the women of Mozambique—white women with hair brighter than firelight. Why do you not marry my little sisters, my brother? They pine away for you. Or is it wealth? I know the little bible that you carry in that pouch! When you look into it, you remember all the quartz reefs in the gorges of the mountains beyond my forests, with their veins of gold and of gray and yellow copper; and the river sands full of gold; and the places where you have seen the iron that draws iron, and the tin, and the black grease. But I have already told you that you shall be rich. What is the matter with you, Bangana? Are you deaf?"
He squatted down before Lawrence Teck, and thrust forward his angry face; and his pendent, pear-shaped earrings of jasper, which some Phoenician adventurer had worn perhaps four thousand years ago, quivered as he shouted with all his might:
"Are you deaf, I say? Shall I open your ears with a spear point?"
He stared in stupefaction at Lawrence Teck's stony countenance, then suddenly burst into sobs.
"See how I love him!" he moaned, "and yet he hates me; and I shall never be great."
The prisoner thought to himself, "Now, if ever, is the time." He laid his hands on the shoulders of the king with a movement at once commanding and compassionate. All the courtiers stopped weeping to gasp in consternation at this sacrilege; one or two stood up; and in the shadows a blade of steel returned the crimson gleam of the embers.
Lawrence Teck said gently, as if talking to a child:
"Alas! my brother, I should lead you only to some death unbefitting a king. You were happy before you made me your captive; these chains have tormented you as much as me. Strike them off, and let me go. Forget me, and free yourself from vain thoughts."
"I should not forget you, Bangana," the king responded in a small, thin tone, as though the virile resonance of his voice had passed away with all his naïve and grandiose hopes. "All those tales! To whom shall I listen now at night? Besides, it has been good to see you here every day; for you alone in these forests have really understood my heart—and have stabbed it to death with your wisdom."
He pondered dismally, while the councilors and chieftains wept out his unexpressed grief, so that the whole pavilion was filled with their full-throated sobbing.