"Dead?" echoed Morgiana, lifting her dark bare arms high, as if calling down heavenly wrath, and bidding it welcome; "almost I think His power ends there! If He had mercy on me, I were dead long ago. But no—I go on, living, breathing, talking, laughing,"—and here she did indeed laugh, in a terrible manner that made Mary quake.
"Pity me. God is angry enough with us already. Anger Him no more!" cried the Greek.
Morgiana laughed again. "Hei!" she continued, "let us look at our case with both eyes. You are back again at El Halebah. By your flight Iftikhar assuredly considers his pledge to you at an end. What do you expect?"
"To be treated like any other captive of his 'bow and spear,' as you people say. To be at his will, sometimes to be caressed as these birds are by you, sometimes neglected; when I grow old or out of favor to see new women thrust before me, as, St. Theodore pity me, I have supplanted you. I shall in time grow sleepy, fat, and in a poor way contented; for such is the manner of the harem. Within four walls and a garden I shall live out my life. If God is still angry, I shall become very old. At last I shall die—when I shall have been among you Moslems so long that I can scarce remember 'Our Father.' Where my soul then will go, I know not; it will be worth little; sodden and dried by this cageling's life till an ox's were nobler."
"O dearest," cried the Arabian, laughing, but half in tears now, "your words are arrows to my soul. You must be free, free—either you or I. What would you give to be truly free? Give for rest, peace, joy, an end of sorrow, struggle, longing?"
"That waits only beyond the stars," answered the Greek. But she started when she saw the wandering glitter in Morgiana's eyes, and there was a wild half-rhythm in the Arabian's words when she replied: "Why not the stars and beyond? Why not seek out the pathways of the moon, the gates of the sun, the enchanted islands of the sweet West, and rest, rest, sleep, sleep—pangless, painless, passionless!"
"Morgiana!" exclaimed Mary. The other answered still in half-chant. "Yes, there is a way—a way. I will go, will return, and to one of us the door is opened,—opened wide!"
Then with a gliding, uneasy step she started away. "Back!" warned Morgiana to Mary, who attempted to follow. "I will do myself no harm. I return at once." Almost immediately she reëntered, in each hand a silver cup, the cups identical, each filled with violet sherbet. She set them upon the slab by the fountain. There was no madness in her glance now.
"I am thirsty," said the Greek, simply; "may I drink?"
"Drink?" repeated the Arabian, with a strange intonation. "Yes, in Allah's name, but first hearken! Many years ago, in Bagdad, a wise old woman taught me of an Indian drug, two pellets, small as shrivelled peas, in a little wine. Drink, and go to sleep—sleep so sound that you waken only when Moukir and Nakir, the death angels, sift soul from body. In Palermo, Iftikhar brought to his harem a Moorish girl. It was the hour of the beginning of my sorrow. A little made my breast fire, and my jealousy was swifter than the falling stars, which are Allah's bolts against the rebel efreets. One night when the Moor drank sherbet, she tasted nothing, she went to sleep; they found her body with a smile on the lips—her soul—? Ask the winds and the upper air."