"Do not tire yourself with speaking," answered the Israelite, placing her hand on Tahoser's lips. "Try to sleep, to regain your strength. Thamar and I will watch over you."
Her agitation, the swim across the Nile, the long walk through the poor quarters of Thebes, had wearied out Petamounoph's daughter; her delicate frame was exhausted, and soon her long lashes closed, forming a dark semicircle upon her cheeks flushed with fever. Sleep came to her, but broken, restless, distorted by strange dreams, troubled by threatening hallucinations; nervous shivers made the sleeper start, and broken words, replying to the dream dialogue, were spoken by the half-opened lips.
Seated at the bed head, Ra'hel followed the changes in the features of Tahoser; troubled when she saw them contract and fill with grief, quieted again when the girl calmed down. Thamar, crouching beside her mistress, was also watching the priest's daughter, but her face expressed less kindliness. Coarse instincts showed in the wrinkles of her brow, pressed down by the broad band of the Hebrew head-dress; her eyes, still bright in spite of her age, sparkled with curious questionings in their brown and wrinkled orbits; her bony nose, shining and curved like a vulture's beak, seemed to scent out secrets; and her lips, slightly moving, appeared to be framing interrogations.
She was very much concerned about this stranger picked up at the door of the hut. Whence came she? How did she happen to be there? What was her purpose? Who could she be? Such were the questions which Thamar asked herself, and to which, very regretfully, she could find no satisfactory replies. Besides, Thamar, like all old women, was prejudiced against beauty, and in this respect Tahoser proved very unpleasant to her. The faithful servant forgave beauty in her mistress only; for her good looks she considered as her property, and she was proud and jealous of them.
Seeing that Ra'hel kept silence, the old woman rose and sat down near her, and winking her eyes, the brown lids of which rose and fell like a bat's wing, she whispered in the Hebrew tongue, "Mistress, nothing good will come of this woman."
"Why do you think so, Thamar?" answered Ra'hel, in the same low tone and using the same language.
"It is strange," went on the suspicious Thamar, "that she should have fainted there, and not elsewhere."
"She fell at the spot where weakness came upon her."
The old woman shook her head doubtfully.
"Do you suppose," said Poëri's beloved, "that her faint was simulated? The dissector might have cut her side with his sharp stone, so like a dead body did she seem. Her dull eyes, her pale lips, her pallid cheeks, her limp limbs, her skin as cold as that of the dead,—these things cannot be counterfeited."