Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 05.djvu/93

613, and the other two, as well. They took precedence when we went calling, muffled in our veils and mantles till we looked like meal-sacks. If one of them was present I must keep still till she spoke to me; if I were talking and an elder wife broke in, I had to pause respectfully till she had finished, and wait until she gave me leave before I spoke again.

My husband seemed quite fond of me, as he might have been fond of a dog or cat. Almost every night a slave came to conduct me to his private rooms, and on entering I had to throw myself face-downward on the floor and wait until he gave me leave to rise. Sometimes he talked to me, more often he amused himself by having me take down my hair so he could run his fingers through it. Occasionally I sang to him, and when I finished he rewarded me by holding out a lump of halvah or some candied rose or violet petals, which I nibbled from his hand. Once he forbore to bid me rise from my prostration on entering the room, and I knelt upon the threshold with my forehead to the floor for almost an hour. When finally he gave me leave to rise he told me he had kept me prostrate because he liked the way the lamplight shone upon my hair.

There was nothing like a book or magazine in the haremlik, and when I asked a eunuch to procure some for me he drew away as from contagion. That night I asked Foulik if I might have some French or English magazines, and he laughed as if I'd been unutterably funny. "Ahee, thou small piece of my heart, what wouldst thou do with such things?" he asked between chuckles. "Wouldst thou scan the pictures—Allah's curse upon their unbelieving makers!—like a woman of the guelbi? Couldst thou read them—thou, the daughter of a pious Moslem? Wah, what are books to thee, my little tree of jewels? What does a parrot know of the Koran, or a monkey of the taste of ginger?"

Then I made an error. I began to tease, and he beat me—not angrily or in a rage, but very thoroughly, laying on the rattan with methodical exactitude which showed he was no novice at the work. Before Foulik had finished the chastisement I was groveling on the rug before him, trembling and sobbing. When he threw the cane away I kissed his hand.

Foulik Bey did not rise when the muezzin's call of prayer came quavering from the minaret of the near-by Mosque of Spears. His companion of the night had been the chicken-brained hanum-effendi Fathouma, who had half completed her orisons before she realized her lord still lay upon the silk mattress. When she spoke to him he did not answer. He did not move when she touched him. Then her strident "A-hee-e-e-e!" went shrilling through the haremlik like a siren sounding warning of a fire.

Presently the bash-kalfa, or chief slave, came to conduct us to the master's private suite. The room was thronged with women, wailing, shrieking, tearing their garments. I made my way through them and knelt beside the bed. Foulik lay upon his back, not dead, but certainly not sleeping. His head rolled back where the supporting pillow had slipped, or been jerked from underneath it, and his little pointed beard was thrust up truculently. Early sunlight blended with the lamplight in the room, shining on his finely chiseled face as he lay there at the end of his long road, the peace and wisdom—and fatigue—of eighty years upon