..! _Sacre cochon!_
That is how they grow rich."
Possibly he reasoned thus, but I fancy he reasoned not at all. There he
sat, and kept his eyes fixed on the ground; a European might have feigned
interest in something else, or cheerful indifference, but this
desert-child did none of these things. He simply sat and suffered dumbly:
it was a blow of fate, to be borne like all the rest of them. A fine
exemplar (_edition mignonne_) of the mektoub profession. It gave a dignity
to the fellow.
Presently I made him a gift of the whole apparatus. He was quite
speechless, at first, with surprise.
The spot was well chosen for indulgence in the divine herb, bland quencher
of doubts, begetter of blissful images; impossible to conceive anything
but a good genius residing amid these bubbling waters and gently stirring
foliage. Everything was kindly and gracious, and yet----
"Yonder," he said, pointing dreamily with his pipe-stem to a place not far
distant, "yonder they killed a man and a woman. They hacked them to little
pieces."
And he unfolded a tale of love and revenge.
It was the usual intrigue; with this peculiarity, that the woman was quite
a poor creature, of blameless past, married and mother of children; the
man--though what we should call a "gentleman by birth"--had long ago
become a vagabond, a child of iniquity, an outcast from the coast-towns,
whom some wave of misfortune had left stranded on this green island in the
desert.
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