The Sultan heard him, and so did the Ministers of State; the women of
the hareem heard him, and so did the civil guards and the soldiers. But
his voice and his message came over them with the terror of a ghostly
thing, and no man raised a hand to stop him.

"The Mahdi," they whispered with awe, and fell back when he approached.

The streets were quiet as he left the Kasbah. The rabble of mountaineers
of Aissawa were gone. Hooded Talebs, with prayer-mats under their arms,
were picking their way in the gloom from the various mosques; and from
these there came out into the streets the plash of water in the porticos
and the low drone of singing voices behind the screens.

The Mahdi lodged that night in the quarter of the enclosure called the
M'Salla, and there a slave woman of Ben Aboo's came to him in secret.
It was Fatimah, and she told him much of her late master, whom she had
visited by stealth, and just left in great trouble and in madness; also
of her dead mistress, Ruth who was like rose-perfume in her memory, as
well as of Naomi, their daughter, and all her sufferings. In spasms, in
gasps, without sequence and without order, she told her story; but he
listened to her with emotion while the agitated black face was before
him, and when it was gone he tramped the dark house in the dead of
night, a silent man, with tender thoughts of the sweet girl who was
imprisoned in the dungeons of the Kasbah, and of her stricken father,
who supposed that she was living in luxury in the palace of his enemy
while he himself lay sick in the poor hut which had been their home.
These false notions, which were at once the seed and the fruit of
Israel's madness, should at least be dispelled. Let come what would, the
man should neither live nor die in such bitterness of cruel error.