“Pray pardon this intrusion on the part of a total stranger. I have particular reasons for desiring to know the name and station of the gentleman who left you a short time ago, and knowing no one else to ask, have resolved to throw myself upon your good nature. I will ask of you not to require the reasons of me, assuring you that they are perhaps not entirely unconnected with the welfare of this gentleman. I observed from your manner toward one another that you were acquaintances and that it was no chance conversation between strangers. He is, I take it, an Italian.”
Without pausing to reflect that the emir might not be at all pleased to have this young woman know of his identity, Mr. Middleton exclaimed hastily and with a gesture of expostulation:
“Oh, no! He is not a Dago,” and then after a pause he remarked impressively, “He is an Arab,” and then after a still longer pause, he said still more impressively, “He is the Emir Achmed Ben Daoud, hereditary prince of the tribe of Al-Yam, which ranges on the borders of that fertile and smiling region of Arabia known as Yemen, or Arabia the Happy.”
“He is not a Dago!” said the young woman, clasping her hands with delighted fervor.
“He is not a Dago!” said another voice, and Mr. Middleton became aware that at his back stood a second young woman scarcely less charming than the first. “He is not a Dago!” she repeated, scarcely less delighted than the first.
Mr. Middleton arose and assumed an attitude which was at once indicative of proper deference toward his fair questioners and enabled him the better to feast his entranced eyes upon them. Moreover, on all sides he observed that people were looking at them and he needed no one to tell him that his conversation with these two daughters of the aristocracy was causing the assemblage to regard him as an individual of social importance. He gave the emir’s address upon Clark Street and after dwelling some time upon his graces of person and mind, related how it was that this Eastern potentate was resident in the city of Chicago in a comparatively humble capacity.
“His brother is shut up in a vermillion tower.”
“Vermillion, did you say?” breathlessly asked the first young lady.
“Oh, how romantic!” exclaimed the second young lady. “A tower of vermillion! Is he good looking, like this one? Do you suppose he will come here? Oh, Mildred, I must meet him. And the imam of Oman is going to give the vermillion tower to the brother, when he is released. We could send one of papa’s whalebacks after it. What a lovely house on Prairie Avenue it would make. ‘The Towers,’ we would call it. No, ‘Vermillion Towers.’ How lovely it would sound on a card, ‘Wednesdays, Vermillion Towers.’ We must get him out. Can’t we do it?”
“If it were in this country,” said Mr. Middleton, “I would engage to get him out. I would secure a writ of habeas corpus, or devise other means to speedily release him. But unfortunately, I am not admitted to practice in the dominions of Oman. But I do not pity the young man. One could well be willing to suffer incarceration in a tower of vermillion, if he knew he were an object of solicitude to one so fair as yourself. One could wear the gyves and shackles of the most terrible tyranny almost in happiness, if he knew that such lovely eyes grew moist over his fate and such beauteous lips trembled when they told the tale of his imprisonment.”