In
the languor of love that knows no fear and has no cares, that
opiate of the soul, Dilama lay in his arms and sought his lips and
eyes, and asked no more about caravans and journeys and mountains,
drugged and heavy with love. In an hour when all was velvet
blackness beneath the wall, they kissed farewell. He scaled the
crumbling bricks, and regained the sheltering orange grove, and she
walked slowly back, drawing smooth her filmy veil, towards the
darkened palace.
Five days later at noontime, as Dilama was sitting in the garden
playing with the tame white doves by the fountain, one of the black
female slaves approached her. Dilama looked up questioningly,
holding a dove to her bosom.
"The lord is sorrowing within for his dead wife and dead son. He
has sent for you; go in, and lead him away from grief," and the
woman smiled and prostrated herself before Dilama, who shrank
instinctively away like a frightened child. But there is only one
law and one will in the harem, and she rose obediently, letting the
dove go, and stood ready to follow the slave. That meaning smile on
the woman's face filled her with an intuitive, instinctive,
undefined fear, and at the same instant there rushed over her the
realisation of the great happiness that same smile would have
brought her had there been no Murad, had she fled from that
rose-filled corner on that first evening--had she, in a word,
_waited_! This summons to the presence of their lord is what so
many of the harem slaves pine and long for through weary months,
and sometimes years.
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