As he uttered this threat the merchant’s eyes glistened through tears; it grieved him to be unjustly suspected and to be forced to express himself so hardly to the Mukaukas for whom he felt both reverence and pity. It was clear from the tone of his speech that he was in fact a determined and a powerful personage, and Orion interrupted him with the eager enquiry: “Who has dared to think so basely of you?”
“Your own mother, I regret to say,” replied the Moslem sadly, with an oriental shrug of distress and annoyance—his shoulders up to his ears.
“Forget it, I beg of you,” said the governor. “God knows women have softer hearts than men, and yet they more readily incline to think evil of their fellow-creatures, and particularly of the enemies of their faith. On the other hand they are more sensitive to kindness. A woman’s hair is long and her wits short, says the saw.”
“You have plenty to say against us women!” retorted Neforis. “But scold away—scold if it is a comfort to you!” But she added, while she affectionately turned her husband’s pillows and gave him another of his white pillules: “I will submit to the worst to-day for I am in the wrong. I have already asked your pardon, worthy Haschim, and I do so again, with all my heart.”
As she spoke, she went up to the Arab and held out her hand; he took it, but lightly, however, and quickly released it, saying:
“I do not find it hard to forgive. But I find it impossible, here or anywhere, to let so much as a grain of dust rest on my bright good name. I shall follow up this affair, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left.—And now, one question: Is the dog that guarded the tablinum a watchful, savage beast?”
“How savage he is he unfortunately proved on the person of the poor Persian slave; and his watchfulness is known to all the household,” cried Orion.
“But I would beg you, worthy merchant,” said Neforis, “and in the name of all present, to give us the help of your experience. I myself—wait a little wait: in spite of her long hair and her short wits a woman often has a happy idea. I, probably, was the first to come on the robber’s track. It is clear that he must belong to the household since the dog did not attack him. Paula, who was so wonderfully quick in coming to the rescue of the Persian, is of course not to be thought of…”
Here her husband interrupted her with an angry exclamation: “Leave the girl quite out of the question wife!”
“As if I supposed her to be the thief!” retorted Neforis indignantly, and she shrugged her shoulders as Orion, in mild reproach, also cried: “Mother! consider…” and the merchant asked:
“Do you mean the young girl from whom I had to take such hard words last night?—Well, then, I will stake my whole fortune on her innocence. That beautiful, passionate creature is incapable of any underhand dealings.”
“Passionate!” Neforis smiled. “Her heart is as cold and as hard as the lost emerald; we have proved that by experience.”
“Nevertheless,” said Orion, “she is incapable of baseness.”
“How zealous men can be for a pair of fine eyes!” interrupted his mother. “But I have not the most remote suspicion of her; I have something quite different in my mind. A pair of man’s shoes were found lying by the wounded girl. Did you do what my lord Orion ordered, Sebek?”
“At once, Mistress,” replied the steward, “and I have been expecting the captain of the watch for some time; for Psamtik....”
But here he was interrupted: the officer in question, who for more than twenty years had commanded the Mukaukas’ guard of honor, was shown into the room; after answering a few preliminary enquiries he began his report in a voice so loud that it hurt the governor, and his wife was obliged to request the soldier to speak more gently.
The bloodhounds and terriers had been let out after being allowed to smell at the shoes, and a couple of them had soon found their way to the side-door where Hiram had waited for Paula. There they paused, sniffing about on all sides, and had then jumped up a few steps.
“And those stairs lead to Paula’s room,” observed Neforis with a shrug.
“But they were on a false scent,” the officer eagerly added. “The little toads might have thrown suspicion on an innocent person. The curs immediately after rushed into the stables, and ran up and down like Satan after a lost soul. The pack had soon pulled down the boy—the son of the freedman who came here from Damascus with the daughter of the great Thomas—and they went quite mad in his father’s room: Heaven and earth! what a howling and barking and yelping. They poked their noses into every old rag, and now we knew where the hole in the wine-skin was.—I am sorry for the man. He stammered horribly, but as a trainer, and in all that has to do with horses, all honor to him!—The shoes are Hiram’s as surely as my eyes are in my head; but we have not caught him yet. He is across the river, for a boat is missing and where it had been lying the dogs began again. Unless the unbelievers over there give him shelter we are certain to have him.”
“Then we know who is the criminal!” cried Orion, with a sigh as deep as though some great burden were lifted from his soul. Then he went on in a commanding tone—and his voice rang so fiercely that the color which had mounted to his cheeks could hardly be due to satisfaction at this last good news....
“As it is not yet two hours after noon, send all your men out to search for him and deliver him up. My father will give you a warrant, and the Arabs on the other shore will assist you. Perhaps the thief may fall into our hands even sooner and with him the emerald, unless the rogue has succeeded in hiding it or selling it.” Then his voice sank, and he added in a tone of regret. “It is a pity as concerns the man, we had not one in our stables who knew more about horses! Fresh proof of your maxim, mother: if you want to be well served you must buy rascals!”
“Strictly speaking,” said Neforis meditatively, “Hiram is not one of our people. He was a freedman of Thomas’ and came here with his daughter. Every one speaks highly of his skill in the stable; but for this robbery we might have kept him for the rest of his life still, if the girl had ever taken it into her head to leave us and to take him with her, we could not have detained him.—You may say what you will, and abuse me and mock me; I have none of what you call imagination; I see things simply as they are: but there must be some understanding between that girl and the thief.”
“You are not to say another word of such monstrous nonsense!” exclaimed her husband; and he would have said more, but that at that moment the groom of the chambers announced that Gamaliel, the Jewish goldsmith, begged an audience. The man had come to give information with regard to the fate of the lost emerald.
At this statement Orion changed color, and he turned away from the merchant as the slave admitted the same Israelite who had been sitting over the fire with the head-servants. He at once plunged into his story, telling it in his peculiar light-hearted style. He was so rich that the loss he might suffer did not trouble him enough to spoil his good-humor, and so honest that it was a pleasure to him to restore the stolen property to its rightful owner. Early that morning, so he told them, Hiram the groom had been to him to offer him a wonderfully large and splendid emerald for sale. The freedman had assured him that the stone was part of the property left by the famous Thomas, his former master. It had decorated the head-stall of the horse which the hero of Damascus had last ridden, and it had come to him with the steed.
“I offered him what I thought fair,” the Jew went on, “and paid him two thousand drachmae on account; the remainder he begged me to take charge of for the present. To this I agreed, but ere long a fly began to hum suspicion in my ear. Then the police rushed through the town with the bloodhounds. Good Heavens, what a barking! The creatures yelped as if they would bark my poor house down, like the trumpets