"Why did you leave there?"
He did not reply. When she turned her eyes toward him he appeared to be listening almost drowsily to something that she could not hear, or else, since his sensitive-looking nostrils were dilated, to be relishing some sweet odor—perhaps the smell of the roses. She received an impression of deliberate, yet somnolent, sensuous enjoyment; and she recalled having seen long ago, in a doorway in Tunis, this same expression on the face of a beggar who had just been smoking hasheesh.
He gave a start, and looked like a man who in his sleep has fallen off a roof. But immediately, lowering his full eyelids, he became the handsome statue, or perhaps the delicately bearded effigy, in tan-colored wax, of a young caliph who had incurred the hatred of the jinn.
It was simple. He had squandered his fortune. It had sifted through his fingers like sand, the price of one clove tree after another, till the whole grove was gone. Then the Hindu money lenders had got the ancestral house. The friends had departed to make merry elsewhere; the gazelle-eyed girls with short, silk dresses and frilled pantalettes had turned cold; and, in the market, little boys had sung songs about the ruined young man. Burning with resentment and shame, he had sailed away in a dhow—it had landed him at Beira—believing that he would hate Zanzibar forever.
When he began to starve, he joined the safari of a Muscat trader, traveled up-country, returned to the coast sick with fever. Late one night, while walking below the sea wall, yearning for Zanzibar, he saw a man running, from time to time throwing something into the sea, and another man running silently in pursuit with a knife in his hand. He waded along the shore, and presently found in the surf a bag of gold-dust. Next morning he slipped aboard a north-bound coaster. Instead of calling at Zanzibar, this time it went clear to Suez!
In Suez a fortune-telling dervish, perhaps because he had just seen an American pass by, told Hamoud-bin-Said that his wanderings would take him to America. Hamoud accepted the words of the holy man as a second-hand pronouncement of God. At that time there was even a ship at Suez bound for New York.
"It was my destiny," he averred, sitting motionless in his atrocious suit, so young yet so full of bizarre recollections, impassive at the inevitable thought that this "destiny" of his might be preparing events stranger still than those which he had endured.
CHAPTER XXII
A pallid, black-haired woman with pendent earrings—a woman who rather resembled Anna Zanidov—was playing a sea-piece by MacDowell in the light of a tall lamp. The hall door swung open; the unsympathetic face and square shoulders of David Verne's attendant appeared above the back of the wheel chair. The invalid, looking up at Brantome, murmured: