Having heard the verdict of the doctor, Ali returned in hot haste and silenced both the bondwomen:  “The Imam is a villain, and the Chacham is a thief.”  There was only one good man left in Tetuan, and that was his own Taleb, his schoolmaster, the same that had taught him the harp in the days of the Governor’s marriage.  This person was an old negro, bewrinkled by years, becrippled by ague, once stone deaf, and still partially so, half blind, and reputed to be only half wise, a liberated slave from the Sahara, just able to read the Koran and the Torah, and willing to teach either impartially, according to his knowledge, for he was neither a Jew nor a Muslim, but a little of both, as he used to say, and not too much of either.  For such a hybrid in a land of intolerance there must have been no place save the dungeons of the Kasbah, but that this good nondescript was a privileged pet of everybody.  In his dark cellar, down an alley by the side of the Grand Mosque in the Metamar, he had sat from early morning until sunset, year in year out, through thirty years on his rush-covered floor, among successive generations of his boys; and as often as night fell he had gone hither and thither among the sick and dying, carrying comfort of kind words, and often meat and drink of his meagre substance.

Such was Ali’s hero after Israel, and now, in Israel’s absence and his own great trouble, he tried away for him.

“Father,” cried the lad, “does it not say in the good book that the prayer of a righteous man availeth much?”

“It does, my son,” said the Taleb “You have truth.  What then?”

“Then if you will pray for Naomi she will recover,” said Ali.

It was a sweet instance of simple faith.  The old black Taleb dismissed his scholars, closed down his shutter, locked it with a padlock, hobbled to Naomi’s bedside in his tattered white selham, looked down at her through the big spectacles that sprawled over his broad black nose, and then, while a dim mist floated between the spectacles and his eyes, and a great lump rose at his throat to choke him, he fell to the floor and prayed, and Ali and the black women knelt beside him.

The negro’s prayer was simple to childishness.  It told God everything; it recited the facts to the heavenly Father as to one who was far away and might not know.  The maiden was sick unto death.  She had been three days and nights knowing no one, and eating and drinking nothing.  She was blind and dumb and deaf.  Her father loved her and was wrapped up in her.  She was his only child, and his wife was dead, and he was a lonely man.  He was away from his home now, and if, when he returned, the girl were gone and lost—­if she were dead and buried—­his strong heart would be broken and his very soul in peril.

Such was the Taleb’s prayer, and such was the scene of it—­the dumb angel of white and crimson turning and tossing on the bed in an aureole of her streaming yellow hair, and the four black faces about her, eager and hot and aflame, with closed eyelids and open lips, calling down mercy out of heaven from the God that might be seen by the soul alone.