style="font-size:15px;"> “And he?” asked the old dame.
“He certainly did not make it easy for me,” was the reply, “but as I remained firm, he was obliged to yield. I granted only his earnest desire to see me again this evening. I fancy I can still hear him exclaim, with loving impetuosity, that he hated every day and every night which kept him from me. And now? Now? For another’s sake he lets me wait for him in vain, and if his slave does not lie, this is only the beginning of his infamous, treacherous game.”
She had uttered the last words in a hoarse cry, but Tabus answered soothingly: “Hush, child, hush! The first thing is to see clearly, if I am to interpret correctly what is shown me here. The demons are to be fully informed they have required it. But you? Did you come to hear whether the spirits still intend to keep the promise they made then?”
Ledscha eagerly assented to this question, and the old woman continued urgently: “Then tell me first what suddenly incenses you so violently against the man whom you have so highly praised?”
The girl related what had formerly been rumoured in Tennis, and which she had just heard from the slave.
He had lured other women—even her innocent young sister—to his studio. Now he wanted to induce Ledscha to go there, not from love, but merely to model her limbs so far as he considered them useful for his work. He was in haste to do so because he intended to return to the capital immediately. Whether he meant to leave her in the lurch after using her for his selfish purposes, she also desired to learn from the sorceress. But she would ask him that question herself to-morrow. Woe betide him if the spirits recognised in him the deceiver she now believed him.
Hitherto Tabus had listened quietly, but when she closed her passionate threats with the exclamation that he also deserved punishment for alienating Gula, the sailor’s wife, from her absent husband, the enchantress also lost her composure and cried out angrily: “If that is true, if the Greek really committed that crime—then certainly. The foreigners destroy, with their laughing levity, much that is good among us. We must endure it; but whoever broke the Biamite’s marriage bond, from the earliest times, forfeited his life, and so, the gods be thanked, it has remained. This very last year the fisherman Phabis killed with a hammer the Alexandrian clerk who had stolen into his house, and drowned his faithless wife. But your lover—though you should weep for sorrow till your eyes are red—”
“I would denounce the traitor, if he made himself worthy of death,” Ledscha passionately interrupted, with flashing eyes. “What portion of the slave’s charge is true will appear at once—and if it proves correct, to morrow’s full moon shall indeed bring me the greatest bliss; for though, when I was younger and happier, I contradicted Abus when he declared that one thing surpassed even the raptures of love—satisfied vengeance—now I would agree with him.”
A loud cry of “Right! right!” from the old crone’s lips expressed the gray-haired Biamite’s pleasure in this worthy daughter of her race.
Then she again gazed at the wine in the vessel, and this time she did so silently, as if spellbound by the mirror on its bottom.
At last, raising her aged head, she said in a tone of the most sincere compassion: “Poor child! Yes, you would be cruelly and shamefully deceived. Tear your love for this man from your heart, like poisonous hemlock. But the full moon which is to bring you great happiness is scarcely the next, perhaps not even the one which follows it, but surely and certainly a later one will rise, by whose light the utmost bliss awaits you. True, I see it come from another man than the Greek.”
The girl had listened with panting breath. She believed as firmly in the infallibility of the knowledge which the witch received from the demons who obeyed her as she did in her own existence.
All her happiness, all that had filled her joyous soul with freshly awakened hopes, now lay shattered at her feet, and sobbing aloud she threw herself down beside the old woman and buried her beautiful face in her lap.
Completely overwhelmed by the great misfortune which had come upon her, without thinking of the vengeance which had just made her hold her head so proudly erect, or the rare delight which a later full moon was to bring, she remained motionless, while the old woman, who loved her and who remembered an hour in the distant past when she herself had been dissolved in tears at the prediction of another prophetess, laid her trembling hand upon her head.
Let the child weep her fill.
Time, perhaps vengeance also, cured many a heartache, and when they had accomplished this office upon the girl who had once been betrothed to her grandson, perhaps the full moon bringing happiness, whose appearance first the cords, then the wine mirror in the bottom of the vessel had predicted, would come to Ledscha, and she believed she knew at whose side the girl could regain what she had twice lost—satisfaction for the young heart that yearned for love.
“Only wait, wait,” she cried at last, repeating the consoling words again and again, till Ledscha raised her tear-stained face.
Impulse urged her to kiss the sufferer, but as she bent over the mourner the copper dish slipped from her knees and fell rattling on the floor.
Ledscha started up in terror, and at the same moment the Alexandrian’s packs of hounds on the shore opposite to the Owl’s Nest began to bark so loudly that the deaf old woman heard the baying as if it came from a great distance; but the girl ran out into the open air and, returning at the end of a few minutes, called joyously to the sorceress from the threshold, “They are coming!”
“They, they,” faltered Tabus, hurriedly pushing her disordered gray hair under the veil on the back of her head, while exclaiming, scarcely able to use her voice in her joyous excitement: “I knew it. He keeps his word. My Satabus is coming. The ducks, the bread, the fish, girl! Good, loyal heart.”
Then a wide, long shadow fell across the dimly lighted room, and from the darkened threshold a strangely deep, gasping peal of laughter rang from a man’s broad breast.
“Satabus! My boy!” the witch’s shriek rose above the peculiar sound.
“Mother!” answered the gray-bearded lips of the pirate.
For one short moment he remained standing at the door with outstretched arms. Then he took a step toward the beloved being from whom he had been separated more than two years, and suddenly throwing himself down before her, while his huge lower limbs covered part of the floor, he stretched his hands toward the little crooked old woman, who had not strength to rise from her crouching posture, and seizing her with loving impetuosity, lifted her as if she were a child, and placing her on his knees, drew her into a close embrace.
Tabus willingly submitted to this act of violence, and passing her thin left arm around her son’s bull neck with her free hand, patted his bearded cheeks, wrinkled brow, and bushy, almost white hair.
No intelligible words passed the lips of either the mother or the son at this meeting; nothing but a confused medley of tender and uncouth natural sounds, which no language knows.
Yet they understood each other, and Ledscha, who had moved silently aside, also comprehended that these low laughs, moans, cries, and stammers were the expressions of love of two deeply agitated hearts, and for a moment an emotion of envy seized her.
The gods had early bereft her of her mother, while this savage fighter against the might of the waves, justice, law, and their pitiless, too powerful defenders, this man, already on the verge of age, still possessed his, and sunned his rude heart in her love.
It was some time
