Part 24 (2/2)

”Good afternoon, your Ladys.h.i.+p,” he said. ”I trust I see you well. I'm Captain Kettle, master of that steamboat now lying in your roads, and this is Mr. Wenlock, a pa.s.senger of mine, who heard that you were English, and has come to put you in the way of some property at home.”

The lady sat more upright, and set back her great shoulders. ”I am English,” she said. ”I was called in the Giaour faith Teresa Anderson.”

”That's the name,” said Kettle. ”Mr. Wenlock's come to take you away to step into a nice thing at home.”

”I am Emir here. Am I asked to be Emir in your country?”

”Why, no,” said Kettle; ”that job's filled already, and we aren't thinking of making a change. Our present Emir in England (who, by the way, is a lady like yourself) seems to suit us very well. No, you'll be an ordinary small-potato citizen, like everybody else, and you will probably find it a bit of a change.”

”I do not onderstand,” said the woman. ”I have not spoke your language since I was child. Speak what you say again.”

”I'll leave it to Mr. Wenlock, your Majesty, if you've no objections, as he's the party mostly interested; and if you'd ask one of your young men to bring me a long drink and a chair, I'll be obliged. It's been a hot walk up here. I see you don't mind smoke,” he added, and lit a cheroot.

Now, it was clear from the att.i.tude of the guards and the civilians present, that Kettle was jostling heavily upon court etiquette, and at first the Lady Emir was very clearly inclined to resent it, and had sharp orders for repression ready upon her lips. But she changed her mind, perhaps through some memory that by blood she was related to this nonchalant race; and presently cus.h.i.+ons were brought, on which Captain Kettle bestowed himself tailor-fas.h.i.+on (with his back cautiously up against a wall), and then a negro slave knelt before him and offered sweet sticky sherbet, which he drank with a wry face.

But in the mean while Mr. Wenlock was stating his case with small forensic eloquence. The sight of Miss Teresa Anderson in the flesh awed him. He had pictured to himself some slim, quiet exile, perhaps a little gauche and timid, but at any rate amenable to instruction and to his will. He had forgotten the developing power of tropical suns. The woman before him, whose actual age was twenty-nine, looked fifty, and even for a desperate man like himself was impossible as a wife in England.

He felt daunted before her already. It flashed through his mind that it was she who had ordered those grisly heads to be stuck above the water-gate, and he heartily wished himself away back on the steamer, tramping for cargo. He was not wanting in pluck as a usual thing, this unsuccessful solicitor, but before a woman like this, with such a record behind her, a man may well be scared and yet not be accused of cowardice.

But the Lady Emir looked on Wenlock in a very different way to that in which she had regarded Kettle. Mr. Wenlock possessed (as indeed he had himself pointed out on the _Parakeet_) a fine outward appearance, and in fact anywhere he could have been remarked on as a personable man. And things came about as Kettle shrewdly antic.i.p.ated they would. The Lady Emir had not remained unmarried all these years through sheer distaste for matrimony. She had been celibate through an unconquerable pride of blood. None but men of colored race had been around her in all her wars, her governings, and her diplomacies; and always she had been too proud to mate with them. But here now stood before her a male of her own race, handsome, upstanding, and obviously impressed by her power and majesty.

He would not rule her; he would not even attempt a mastery; she would still be Emir--and a wife. The chance had never occurred to her before; might never occur again. She was quick to make her decision.

Ruling potentates are not as other folk with their love affairs, and the Lady Emir of Dunkhot (forgetting that she was once Teresa Anderson, and a modest English maiden) unconsciously fell in with the rule of her caste. The English speech, long disused, came to her unhandily, but the purport of what she said was plain. She made proclamation that the Englishman Wenlock should there and then become her husband, and let slaves fetch the mullah to unite them before the sun had dropped below another bar of the windows.

She did not ask her future husband's wishes or his permission. She simply stated her sovereign will and looked that it should be carried out forthwith.

A couple of slaves scurried out on their missions--evidently their Emir was accustomed to have her orders carried out with promptness--and for long enough Wenlock stood wordless in front of the divan, far more like a criminal than a prospective bridegroom. The lady, with the tube of the water-pipe between her lips, puffed smoke and made no further speech.

She had stated her will: the result would follow in due course.

But at last Wenlock, as though wrenching himself into wakefulness out of some horrid dream, turned wildly to Kettle, and in a torrent of words implored for rescue.

The little sailor heard him quite unmoved. ”You asked my help,” he said, ”in a certain matter, and I've given it, and things have turned out just as I've guessed they would. You maundered about your dear Teresa on my steamboat till I was nearly sick, and, by James! you've got her now, and no error about it.”

”But you said you didn't approve,” cried the wretched man.

”I quite know what I said,” retorted Kettle grimly. ”I didn't approve of your way. But this is different. You're not a very fine specimen, but anyway you're English, and it does good to the old shop at home to have English people for kings and queens of foreign countries. I've got a theory about that.”

[Ill.u.s.tration: ”I'M A BRITISH SUBJECT”]

Now the Lady Emir was not listening to all this tirade by any means unmoved. To begin with, it was not etiquette to speak at all in her presence if unaddressed, and to go on with, although she did not understand one word in ten of what was being spoken, she gathered the gist of it, and this did not tend to compose her. She threw away the snaky stem of water-pipe, and gripped both hands on the trooper's sword, till the muscles stood out in high relief.

”Do you say,” she demanded, ”you onwilling marry me?”

”Yes,” said Wenlock, with sullen emphasis.

She turned her head, and gave orders in Arabic. With marvellous readiness, as though it was one of the regular appointments of the place, a couple of the guards trundled a stained-wooden block into the middle of the floor, another took his station beside it with an ominous-looking axe poised over his shoulder, and almost before Wenlock knew what was happening, he was pinned by a dozen men at wrist and ankle, and thrust down to kneel ”with his neck over the block.

”Do you say,” the Lady Emir repeated, ”you onwilling marry me?”

<script>