第74章

She sang as she rose in the morning, and was still singing when she lay down at night.Wherever people came upon her, they came first upon the sound of her voice.The farmers heard it across the fields, and sometimes Israel heard it from over the hill by their hut.Often she seemed to them like a bird that is hidden in a tree, and only known to be there by the outbursts of its song.

Fatimah's ditties were still her delight.Some of them fell strangely from her pure lips, so nearly did they border on the dangerous.

But her favourite song was still her mother's:--Oh, come and claim thine own, Oh, come and take thy throne, Reign ever and alone Reign glorious, golden Love.

Into these words, as her voice ripened, she seemed to pour a deeper fervour.She was as innocent as a child of their meaning, but it was almost as if she were fulfilling in some way a law of her nature as a maid and drifting blindly towards the dawn of Love.

Never did she think of Love, but it was just as if Love were always thinking of her; it was even as if the spirit of Love were hovering over her constantly, and she were walking in the way of its outstretched wings.

Israel saw this, and it set him to chasing day-dreams that were like the drawing up of a curtain.A beautiful phantom of Naomi's future would rise up before him.Love had come to her.The great mystery!

the rapture, the blissful wonder, the dear, secret, delicious palpitating joy.He knew it must come some day--perhaps to day, perhaps to-morrow.And when it came it would be like a sixth sense.

In quieter moments--generally at night, when he would take a candle and look at her where she lay asleep--Israel would carry his dreams into Naomi's future one stage farther, and see her in the first dawn of young motherhood.Her delicate face of pink an cream;her glance of pride and joy and yearning, an then the thrill of the little spreading red fingers fastening on her white bosom--oh, what a glimpse was there revealed to him!

But struggle as he would to find pleasure in these phantoms, he could not help but feel pain from them also.They had a perilous fascination for him, but he grudged them to Naomi.He thought he could have given his immortal soul to her, but these shadows he could not give.That was his poor tribute to human selfishness;his last tender, jealous frailty as a father.He dreaded the coming of that time when another--some other yet unseen--should come before him, and he should lose the daughter that was now his own.

Sometimes the memory of their old troubles in Tetuan seemed to cross like a thundercloud the azure of Naomi's sky, but at the next hour it was gone.The world was too full of marvels for any enduring sense but wonder.Once she awoke from sleep in terror, and told Israel of something which she believed to have happened to her in the night.

She had been carried away from him--she could not say when--and she knew no more until she found herself in a great patio, paved and wailed with tiles.Men were standing together there in red peaked caps and flowing white kaftans.And before them all was one old man in garments that were of the colour of the afternoon sun, with sleeves like the mouths of bells, a curling silver knife at his waistband, and little leather bags hung by yellow cords about his neck.