“You must be right,” he said, “you must be right!  Ya Allah!  Ya Allah!  This is the dog that I picked out of the mire.  I found him a beggar, and I gave him wealth.  An impostor, a personator, a cheat, and I gave him place and rank.  When he had no home, I housed him, and when he could find no one to serve him, I gave him slaves.  I have banished his enemies, and imprisoned those he hated.  After his wife had died, and none came near him, and he was left to howk out her grave with his own hands, I gave him prisoners to bury her, and when he was done with them I set them free.  All these years I have heaped fortune upon him.  Ya Allah!  His master!  No, but his servant, doing his will at the lifting of his finger.  And all for what?  For this!  For this!  For this!  Ingrate!” he cried in his thick voice, turning hotly upon Israel again, “if you must give up your seal, why should you do it like a fool?  Could you not come to me and say, ’Kaid, I am old and weary; I am rich, and have enough; I have served you long and faithfully; let me rest’—­why not?  I say, why not?”

Israel answered calmly, “Because it would have been a lie, Basha.”

“So it would,” cried Ben Aboo sharply, “so it would:  you are right—­it would have been a lie, an accursed lie!  But why must you come to me and say, ’Basha, you are a tyrant, and have made me a tyrant also; you have sucked the blood of your people, and made me to drink it.”

“Because it is true, Basha,” said Israel.

At that Ben-Aboo stopped suddenly, and his swarthy face grew hideous and awful.  Then, pointing with one shaking hand at the farther end of the patio, he said, “There is another thing that is true.  It is true that on the other side of that wall there is a prison,” and, lifting his voice to a shriek, he added, “you are on the edge of a gulf, Israel ben Oliel.  One step more—­”

But just at that moment Israel turned full upon him, face to face, and the threat that he was about to utter seemed to die in his stifling throat.  If only he could have provoked Israel to anger he might have had his will of him.  But that slow, impassive manner, and that worn countenance so noble in sadness and suffering, was like a rebuke of his passion, and a retort upon his words.

And truly it seemed to Israel that against the Basha’s story of his ingratitude he could tell a different tale.  This pitiful slave of rage and fear, this thing of rags and patches, this whining, maudlin, shrieking, bleating, barking-creature that hurled reproaches at him, was the master in whose service he had spent his best brain and best blood.  But for the strong hand that he had lent him, but for the cool head wherewith he had guarded him, where would the man be now?  In the dungeons of Abd er-Rahman, having gone thither by way of the Sultan’s wooden jellabs and his houses of fierce torture.  By the mind’s eye Israel could see him there at that instant—­sightless, eyeless, hungry, gaunt.  But no, he was still here—­fat, sleek, voluptuous, imperious.  And good men lay perishing in his prisons, and children, starved to death, lay in their graves, and he himself, his servant and scapegoat, whose brains he had drained, whose blood he had sweated, stood before him there like an old lion, who had been wandering far and was beaten back by his cubs.