Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/135



“The saheb has decided, Mehmet Iddrissy Khan,” she said, vivaciously, joyously. “He, too, has waited long for the wooing of swords!”

She turned to the Englishman as if asking him to confirm her words, and the latter suppressed a grim, sardonic smile.

The wooing of swords—he thought to himself—rather like some dashed Greek tragedy chorus, and about as intelligible to him, chiefly considering that he had never been exactly tophole at the classics!

But, what reason did he have to vent his mocking, unhappy humor on these people, who trusted him, surely trusted him, since they had let him, the saheb, the Christian, the foreigner, who was an outcast from his own land, into the jealously guarded intimacy of their Oriental household—and at night—with no credentials except an ancient weapon with a blurred, golden pattern on hilt and blade? And there was something so anxiously appealing in the girl's hooded, sable eyes, something so pathetically expectant in Mehmet Iddrissy Khan's shrewd, gray, gold-flecked eyes, and, finally, something in his own soul, so abstrusely compelling and jubilantly reckless, that his spoken words gave no inkling of the ironic thoughts that had flashed through his mind.

“Yes!” he said, looking straight at the others.

And he added, in purring, gliding Persian metaphor, in that cannily hyperbolic manner dear to turbaned and maddeningly annoying to hatted humanity:

“What I could not find in the written book, the blade whispered to me. My eyes were red and swollen with the revel of pain and despair, my soul was a