A sound of footsteps in the passage made them turn and peep.
“It is a eunuch!” the Circassian whispered. “He has been there all the time. He attends you like your shadow, have you noticed? How sweet to be so precious; and so respected, for he keeps his distance!”
Barakah preferred these confidences with Gulbeyzah to the endless fuss and noise about the trousseau. The hive was in commotion over the approaching marriage; angry, Gulbeyzah told her, with the Pasha for his wish to shear the festival of ancient ceremonies regarded as the woman’s right. When approached upon this subject in a crowded conclave, she said that she was anxious to conform to all their customs—an answer which was hailed with cries of triumph.
Mrs. Cameron appeared one afternoon, the Consul’s envoy, to ascertain that all was well with the perverted girl. She was shown to the state-room, and there regaled with tea in glasses and sweet biscuits, in what was thought to be the English manner. The ladies pestered her with eager questions, persisting, despite frank denials, in regarding her as a near and dear relation of the bride. She glanced reproachfully at Barakah from time to time. “You’re quite at home with them, I see,” she said at parting. “It sounds unkind, but I must say I wish you weren’t. It is a fall for any woman bred as you were. How can you put that kohl round your eyes? … Good-bye, my dear, and don’t forget our compact.”
The visit leaving an unpleasant, sad impression, Barakah withdrew to her own room, alleging headache. She was lying on her bed with eyes half closed, endeavouring to lay the ghost of former days, when some one entered without knocking, shut the door with care, and crept towards her. It was a strange old woman. She sidled up with much grimacing; whispered “Yûsuf,” laid her shrivelled cheek upon her hand; “Yûsuf,” again, and smacked her lips delectably; “Yûsuf Bey, thy bridegroom,” and made the motion of embracing with ecstatic grins.
Barakah grew interested. She longed to see the man she was to marry and, fresh from Mrs. Cameron’s reproach, was feeling reckless. She tried to question the old woman, but without result. The crone kept nodding, “Yûsuf Bey” and “Come.” She had brought with her a habbarah and mouth-veil, which Barakah put on by her direction. Then they stole forth, the temptress in high glee.
But they had not made ten steps in the hall before two eunuchs pounced on them and stared into their eyes. One beat the hag, whose screams were frightful. The other, smiling, dragged back Barakah, pushed her inside her room and locked the door.
The meaning of the whole adventure remained dark to her. Gulbeyzah, when informed of it, declared that the old woman could not have been employed by Yûsuf, who was much too honourable and obedient to his father to indulge in such low games. She ascribed the incident to machinations of the lady Fitnah, beheld a plot to lure the English girl to some lone place, there to be ravished if not slain. Barakah laughed at such wild fancies. That Yûsuf’s mother did not like her much was plain to see; she had doubtless cherished other projects for her first-born; but to impute the thought of crime to her was too absurd.
“I bring good news,” Gulbeyzah said to change the subject. “The Pasha has granted us the visit to the bath with you. He has engaged the best musicians and some famous dancers, and all the maidens of good houses are to be invited Oh, what joy!”
CHAPTER VII
The party at the bath with all its ritual was one of the ordeals which Muhammad Pasha had wished to spare the English girl. As a man he hated all the pranks that women play alone, and deemed them of necessity immodest. But the feeling roused in the harîm was too intense for him; and as Barakah, he was told, herself desired the entertainment, he could adduce no cogent reason for refusal. The place in the haramlik being ill adapted to a large assembly, he hired the finest of the public baths for the occasion. The dependants of the household clamouring for a procession through the streets, he gave them one, putting in place of Barakah a humbler bride whose nuptials would be celebrated at his cost.
About the first hour after noon, the bride of Yûsuf left the house, sped by the ululations of the whole harîm. In a carriage with the Pasha’s nieces and Gulbeyzah, she was driven through the streets to the Hammam. There, at the entrance, stood two eunuchs, and in the antechamber many women-servants of the Pasha’s house. The ladies on arrival were conducted to a second ante-room and there divested of all clothing. Each put on a pair of clogs and had her hair tied up in an embroidered kerchief. While they were disrobing, other veiled ones entered who laughed heartily at Barakah’s confusion. The procession of the humbler bride had arrived some minutes since, they were informed.
The elder of the Pasha’s nieces and Gulbeyzah took each a hand of Barakah and led her on from room to room, pausing in each to get accustomed to the growing warmth. Suddenly they came upon a noisy crowd. Two shiny negresses sprang forth, and, singling out the bride, lifted her up and bore her to a corner of the hall, beneath a tap. They flung her on her back. Seeing a razor flash, she uttered shriek on shriek the while they fell to rubbing, making her joints crack, kneading her very bones with their hard fingers. With eyes half blind with soapsuds, she beheld a wreath of naked figures moving round her in a kind of dance. The wall and vaulted ceiling of the building sweated. The windows were high up and gave no light; there entered not a whiff of outer air. A pulse beat at her temples. She felt suffocated.
At last the women stopped their rubbing, and by playful slaps informed her that her turn was ended. Like a sheep from the shearing she rose up, staggering, intent to flee. But she was caught again and made to sit down while her hair was plaited. Then some one—it was Gulbeyzah—grasped her hand and led her to the other end of the great hall, where were two tanks of water gently steaming. The hall presented a strange spectacle, for it was full of naked figures, ebon and mouse-brown, amber and snow-white. Singers, all naked, sat beside one wall, and hummed and droned and shrilled distractingly.
At a call, “The bride!” the whole crowd rushed on Barakah with ululations. Her shame became acute, an agony. Gulbeyzah led her up to one of the tanks. Some one behind administered a push, and she fell in; when some one else sprawled in upon the top of her. Her head was under water for some seconds. Spluttering, indignant, her throat choked with sobs, she found herself among a group of laughing girls, all colours, who were ducking one another as they splashed about. Gulbeyzah cried, “The butterflies! Look! Look!” and pointed to the smooth stone marge, where all the ripples in the light of smoky cressets were reflected like a thousand fluttering moths. The stir subsiding when all stopped to look, the moths united into one great butterfly, dimly perceived, whose wings beat faint and fainter as the water stilled.
“She has eaten them all! Behold, how fat she is!” cried out Gulbeyzah. “I believe she is just going to have some others. Look!” She plunged, and made fresh ripples. Laughter hailed this sally. A brown girl, lissom as a snake, sprang hard on the facetious one and promptly ducked her.
Angry, humiliated, feeling lost eternally, Barakah scrambled out to face a row of grinning, dancing hags. They and the shameless girls, the fiendish music, the sweating walls, the fumes of incense hiding the high roof, combined to make her fancy she was underneath the earth assisting at an orgy of malignant jinn.
Some one smote her from behind. She turned round angrily. A fair-haired girl was running. She ran after her. Another struck her lightly as she ran. She turned again. A third sprang on her, pinioned both her arms and kissed her on the mouth, amid applause. Then first she realized that it was all a game; the girls were friendly. In the magnitude of her relief, her shyness vanished. She soon led the romp. It was one long dancing game of follow-my-leader, varied with moods of hide-and-seek and leapfrog. All the while the singers kept up their wild din, the hired dancers never ceased their weird contortions.
