The old African rose again from the seat into which Edward had politely motioned him, and folding both his hands reverently in front of him, answered in a profoundly solemn voice: ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.’
‘But I thought—I understood—I was told that you were a teacher and preacher up yonder in the Methodist chapel.’
Delgado shrugged his shoulders with African expressiveness. ‘What can I do?’ he said, throwing open his hands sideways. ‘They have brought me here all the way from the Gold Coast. There is no mosque here, no ulema, no other Moslems. What can I do? I have to do as the other negroes do.—But see!’ and he drew something carefully from the folds of his dirty cotton shirt: ‘I have brought a Book with me. I have kept it sacredly all these years. Have you seen it? Do you know it?’
Edward opened the soiled and dog-eared but carefully treasured volume that the negro handed him. He knew it at once. It was a copy of the Koran. He turned the pages over lightly till he came to the famous chapter of the Seven Treasures; then he began to read aloud a few verses in a clear, easy, Arabic intonation.
Delgado started when he heard the young judge actually reading the sacred volume. ‘So you, too, are a Moslem!’ he cried excitedly.
Edward smiled. ‘No,’ he answered; ‘I am no Mussulman. But I have learned Arabic, and I have read the Koran.’
‘Mussulman or Christian,’ Delgado answered fervently, throwing up his head, ‘you are a servant of Allah. You have given judgment to-day like Daniel the Hebrew or like Othman Calif, the successor of the Prophet. When the great and terrible day of the Lord arrives, Allah will surely not forget the least among his servants.’
Edward did not understand the hidden meaning of that seemingly conventional pious tag, so he merely answered: ‘But you haven’t yet told me, remnant of the faithful, how you ever came to learn Arabic.’
Thus encouraged, Delgado loosed the strings of his tongue, and poured forth rapidly with African volubility the whole marvellous story of his life. The son of a petty chieftain on the Guinea coast, he had been sent in his boyhood by his father, a Mohammedan convert, to the native schools for the negroes at Cairo, where he had remained till he was over seventeen years old, and had then returned to his father’s principality. There, he had gone out to fight in some small war between two neighbouring negro chieftains, the events of which war he insisted on detailing to Edward at great length; and having been taken prisoner by the hostile party, he had at last been sold in the bad old days, when a contraband ‘ebony-trade’ still existed, to a Cuban slaver. The slaver had been captured off Sombrero Rock by an English cruiser, and all the negroes landed at Trinidad. That was the sum and substance of the strangely romantic story told by the old African to the young English barrister in the Westmoreland courthouse. Couched in his childish and ignorant negro English, it would no doubt have sounded ludicrous and puerile; but poured forth in classical Arabic almost as pure and fluent as Sheik Abdullah’s own, it was brimful of pathos, eloquence, interest, and weirdness. Yet strange and almost incredible as it seemed to Edward’s mind, the old African himself apparently regarded it as the most natural and simple concatenation of events that could easily happen to anybody anywhere.
‘And how is it,’ Edward asked at last, in profound astonishment, lapsing once more into English, ‘that you have never tried to get back to Africa?’