Part 13

She came forward timidly and knelt upon the mat.

"You tell me, Hora, that you can play the lute. Take that instrument hanging upon the wall, strike its cords and sing me some old air, very sweet, very tender, and very slow. The sleep which comes to one cradled by music is full of lovely dreams."

The priest's daughter took down the mandore, drew near the couch on which Poëri was stretched, leaned the head of the lute against the wooden bed-head hollowed out in the shape of a half-moon, stretched her arm to the end of the handle of the instrument, the body of which was pressed against her beating heart, let her hand flutter along the strings, and struck a few chords. Then she sang in a true, though somewhat trembling voice, an old Egyptian air, the vague sigh breathed by the ancestors and transmitted from generation to generation, and in which recurred constantly one and the same phrase of a sweet and penetrating monotony.

"In very truth," said Poëri, turning his dark blue eyes upon the maid, "you know rhythm as does a professional musician, and you might practise your art in the palaces of kings. But you give to your song a new expression; the air you are singing, one would think you are inventing it, and you impart to it a magical charm. Your voice is no longer that of mourning; another woman seems to shine through you as the light shines from behind a veil. Who are you?"

"I am Hora," replied Tahoser. "Have I not already told you my story? Only, I have washed from my face the dust of the road, I have smoothed out the folds in my crushed gown and put a flower in my hair. If I am poor, that is no reason why I should be ugly, and the gods sometimes refuse beauty to the rich. But does it please you that I should go on?"

"Yes. Repeat that air; it fascinates, benumbs me, it takes away my memory like a cup of nepenthe. Repeat it until sleep and forgetfulness fall upon my eyelids."

Poëri's eyes, fixed at first upon Tahoser, soon were half-closed, and then completely so. The maiden continued to strike the strings of the mandore, and sang more and more softly the refrain of her song. Poëri slept. She stopped and fanned him with a palm-leaf fan thrown on the table.

Poëri was handsome, and sleep imparted to his pure features an indescribable expression of languor and tenderness. His long eyelashes falling upon his cheeks seemed to conceal from him a celestial vision, and his beautiful, red, half-open lips trembled as if they were speaking mute words to an invisible being. After a long contemplation, emboldened by silence and solitude, Tahoser, forgetting herself, bent over the sleeper's brow, kept back her breath, pressed her heart with her hand, and placed a timid, furtive, winged kiss upon it. Then she drew back ashamed and blushing. The sleeper had faintly felt in his dream Tahoser's lips; he uttered a sigh and said in Hebrew, "Oh, Ra'hel, beloved Ra'hel!"

Fortunately these words of an unknown tongue conveyed no meaning to Tahoser, and she again took up the palm-leaf fan, hoping yet fearing that Poëri would awake.

VII

When day dawned, Nofré, who slept on a cot at her mistress's feet, was surprised at not hearing Tahoser call her as usual by clapping her hands. She rose on her elbow and saw that the bed was empty; yet the first beams of the sun, striking the frieze of the portico, were only now beginning to cast on the wall the shadow of the capitals and of the upper part of the shafts of the pillars. Usually Tahoser was not an early riser, and she rarely rose without the assistance of her women. Neither did she ever go out until after her hair had been dressed, and perfumed water had been poured over her lovely body, while she knelt, her hands crossed upon her bosom.

Nofré, feeling uneasy, put on a transparent gown, slipped her feet into sandals of palm fibre, and set out in search of her mistress. She looked for her first under the portico of the two courts, thinking that, unable to sleep, Tahoser had perhaps gone to enjoy the coolness of dawn in the inner cloisters; but she was not there.

"Let me visit the garden," said Nofré to herself; "perhaps she took a fancy to see the night dew sparkle on the leaves of the plants and to watch for once the awakening of the flowers."

Although she traversed the garden in every direction, she found it absolutely untenanted. Nofré looked along every walk, under every arbour, under every arch, into every grove, but unsuccessfully. She entered the kiosk at the end of the arbour, but she did not find Tahoser; she hastened to the pond, in which her mistress might have taken a fancy to bathe, as she sometimes did with her companions, upon the granite steps which led from the edge of the basin to the bottom of fine sand. The broad nymphoea-leaves floated on the surface, and did not appear to have been disturbed; the ducks, plunging their blue necks into the calm water, alone rippled it, and they saluted Nofré with joyous cries.

The faithful maid began to feel seriously alarmed; she roused the whole household. The slaves and the maids emerged from their cells, and informed by Nofré of the strange disappearance of Tahoser, proceeded to make most minute search. They ascended the terraces, rummaged every room, every corner, every place where she might possibly be. Nofré, in her agitation, even opened the boxes containing the dresses and the caskets holding the jewels, as if they could possibly have held her mistress. Unquestionably Tahoser was not within the dwelling.

An old and consummately prudent servant bethought himself of examining the sand of the walks in search of the footprints of his young mistress. The heavy bolts of the gate leading into the city were in place, and this proved that Tahoser had not gone out that way. It is true that Nofré had carelessly traversed every path, marking them with her sandals, but by bending close to the ground, old Souhem speedily noticed among Nofré's footprints a slight imprint made by a narrow, dainty sole belonging to a much smaller foot than the maid's. He followed this track, which led him, passing under the arbour, from the pylon in the court to the water gate. The bolts, as he pointed out to Nofré, had been drawn, and the two leaves of the door were held merely by their weight; therefore Petamounoph's daughter had gone out that way. Farther on the track was lost; the brick quay had preserved no trace; the boatman who had carried Tahoser across had not returned to his station; the others were asleep, and when questioned replied that they had seen nothing. One, however, did report that a woman, poorly dressed and belonging apparently to the lowest class, had been ferried over early to the other side of the river to the Memnonia quarter, no doubt to carry out some funeral rite. This description, which in no way tallied with the elegant Tahoser, completely upset the suppositions of Nofré and Souhem.

They returned to the house sad and disappointed. The men and women servants sat down on the ground in desolate attitudes, letting one of their hands hang down, its palm turned up, and placing the other on their head, all of them calling together in plaintive chorus, "Woe! woe! woe! Our mistress is gone!"

"By Oms, the dog of the lower regions, I shall find her," said old Souhem, "even if I have to walk living to the very confines of the Western Region to which travel the dead. She was a kind mistress; she gave us food in abundance, did not exact excessive labour, and caused us to be beaten only when we deserved it and in moderation. Her foot was not heavy on our bowed necks, and in her home a slave might believe himself free."

"Woe! woe! woe!" repeated the men and women as they cast dust upon their heads.

"Alas! dear mistress, who knows where you are now?" said her faithful maid, whose tears were flowing. "Perchance some enchanter compelled you to leave your palace through a spell in order to work his odious will on you. He will lacerate your fair body, will draw your heart out through a cut like that made by the dissectors, will throw your remains to the ferocious crocodiles, and on the day of reunion your mutilated soul will find shapeless remains only. You will not go to join, at the end of the passages of which the undertaker keeps the plan, the painted and gilded mummy of your father, the high-priest Petamounoph, in the funeral chamber which has been cut out for you."

"Calm yourself, Nofré," said old Souhem; "let us not despair too soon. It may be that Tahoser will soon return. She has no doubt yielded to some fancy which we cannot guess, and presently we shall see her come back, gay and smiling, holding aquatic flowers in her hands."

Wiping her eyes with the corner of her dress, the maid nodded assent. Souhem crouched down, bending his knees like those of the dog-faced figures which are roughly carved out of a square block of basalt, and pressing his temples between his dry hands, seemed to reflect deeply. His face of a reddish brown, his sunken eyes, his prominent jaws, the deeply wrinkled cheeks, his straight hair framing in his face like bristles, made him altogether like the monkey-faced gods. He was certainly not a god, but he looked very much like a monkey.

The result of his meditations, anxiously awaited by Nofré, was thus expressed: "The daughter of Petamounoph is in love."

"Who told you?" cried Nofré, who thought that she was the only one who could read her mistress's heart.

"No one; but Tahoser is very beautiful; she has already beheld sixteen times the rise and fall of the Nile. Sixteen is the number symbolical of voluptuousness; and for some time past she has been calling at unaccustomed hours her players on the harp, the lute, and the flute, like one who seeks to calm the agitation of her heart by music."

"You speak sensibly, and wisdom dwells in your old bald head. But how have you learned to know women,--you who merely dig the earth in the garden and bear jars of water on your shoulders?"

The slave opened his lips with a silent smile and exhibited two rows of teeth fit to crush date-stones. The grin meant, "I have not always been old and a captive."

Enlightened by Souhem's suggestion, Nofré immediately thought of the handsome Ahmosis, the oëris of the Pharaoh, who so often passed below the terrace, and who had looked so splendid on his war chariot in the triumphal procession. As she was in love with him herself, though she was not fully aware of it, she assumed that her mistress shared her feelings. She put on a somewhat heavier dress and repaired to the officer's dwelling. It was there, she fancied, that Tahoser would certainly be found.