Dilama in her lighted chamber, with her fresh young eyes a little painted beneath their lids, and heavy gold chains about her soft young throat, sat looking into the little French mirror of cheap glass and gilt, and waiting for the attar of rose to be poured on her shining hair.
At last the boy returned breathless, and the precious stuff was poured on her hair and hands. Then she stood up radiant and the women sighed and smiled by turns as she went out, preceded by the old slave. A long narrow passage, lighted overhead by swinging coloured lamps, divided the women's from the men's apartments, and through this they passed noiselessly over the matting-covered floor. At the end fell heavy curtains, concealing the door and some steps. Here the slave left the girl, and Dilama went through the curtains alone. She mounted the steps and passed through the door. All was quite silent here, and the passage unlighted, except that through a tiny window high up above her head a streak of moonlight fell across her way. Dilama paused oppressed, she knew not by what feeling. Only a short passage and another curtained door divided her now from Ahmed's presence. Her breath came fast, her pulses beat nervously, and her feet dragged; slowly and unwillingly she crept onward, harassed by cold, vague fears. Before the door itself she trembled, and her soft hands and wrists hardly availed to push it open. It yielded slowly, and fell to behind her in silence.
The room was full of light; a silver blaze of moonlight illumined it from end to end. The great windows, over which usually the curtains were drawn, stood uncovered and wide open to the soft Damascus air. The scent of roses and jessamine from the great man's garden stole in with the silver light. The girl paused when just over the threshold: she was cold and frightened, and her body shook. Ahmed did not move or speak. He was sitting sideways to one great window, with his head resting against the high back of the one European chair that the room possessed. The light was so strong that the rich, deep blue of the turban was distinctly visible in it, but his face was in shadow. She could see, however, the noble throat and pose of the shoulders as he sat waiting. The girl's heart beat with a little sense of pleasure as she looked. Her feet crept slowly a little farther into the room. A great tide of pleasure was really just outside her heart, and would have rushed in and overwhelmed it in waves of joy had she but opened her heart's doors to it; but the shadow of Murad was on the bolts and locks, and she felt afraid. The silence and great silver light in the room oppressed her. Ahmed had not heard her enter, and had not stirred nor looked at her. She crept a little closer. The beauty of the majestic figure called her irresistibly. She drew closer. She had passed one window now, and was near enough to see the jewels flash on the slender hand that hung over the chair-arm, and the glistening light on the embroidered Turkish slippers on his feet. Shading her brow with one hand, Dilama came forward, fell at those feet and kissed them. Still there was no movement, no sound. This was so unlike Ahmed's way of treating his slaves, that the girl, forgetting her fears, looked up in sheer surprise. Then her heart seemed to stop suddenly, and then leap with excessive thuds of horror against her breast. The face above her seemed carved in stone, pale, bloodless, calm; it was set, as the girl realised in a moment of terror and agony, in a repose that would never be broken. The large, dark eyes, still open, gazed past her, sightless, changeless. Fear, her fear of him, her awe, her oppressed terror fell from her, giving way to an infinite regret, a sorrow, a sense of loss that rushed over her, filling every cell, every atom of her being. She, the unwilling, the reluctant, the slow-coming, the grudging bride, now stood free. The bridegroom asked of her nothing, demanded nothing, needed nothing, desired nothing.
The slave-girl neither shrieked nor fainted. A great, convulsive sob tore itself from her trembling body as she rose from her knees and bent over the sitting figure. Wildly she passed her soft, shaking fingers across his brow, still warm, and round his throat, seeking mechanically the wound; then her eyes fell on the gold silk of his tunic, and just over the left breast she saw a little brown patch, and on the left side of the chair the silver light gleamed on a small, dark-red pool. He had been stabbed as he sat there, waiting for her—stabbed from the back, and the dagger thrust through to the little brown spot in the front of the tunic. And through that tiny door his life had gone.
Lying at his feet, Dilama sobbed uncontrollably, rolling her head, with its wonderful crown of flower-decked hair, and her pink-silk clad body amongst the rugs on the floor. What was the worth or use of anything now, silk or bridal attire, or beauty, or flower-decked hair? Never would any of them now be mirrored in his eyes again. Never could anything change that awful serenity, that implacable silence, out of which she felt her own love, her own desire rush upon her and devour her. Ahmed had been hers and she had shrunk from him, and now all the blood in her body she would have given willingly to replace that little scarlet stream that had borne away his life.
As she lay there, weeping in an agony of despair, a dark shadow suddenly grew in the window, and fell a black patch in the panel of white light upon the floor. A lithe figure balanced a moment on the ledge of the open window, then leapt with the silent elastic bound of a cat into the room. Dilama sprang from the floor to her knees with a smothered cry of terror.
"Murad! why have you come here?"
The Druze leant over her and caught her arm fiercely.
"To claim my own. It is not the first visit I have made to-night, as you see," and as he dragged her up from her knees he indicated the motionless figure beside them.