Medjidi decorations. It is bestowed alike on every drab and trollop as on the very few who really deserve it. Let us rank it, therefore, with the Medjidi decorations and pass on.
But Khalid, who has seen enough of the fair, would not be attracted to Najma, enchanted by her, if she were not endowed with such of the celestial treasures as rank above the visible lines of beauty. Our Scribe speaks of the “purity and naivete of her soul as purest sources of felicity and inspiration.” Indeed, if she were not constant in love, she would not have spurned the many opportunities in the absence of Khalid; and had she not a fine discerning sense of real worth, she would not have surrendered herself to her poor ostracised cousin; and if she were not intuitively, preternaturally wise, she would not marry an enemy of the Jesuits, a bearer withal of infiltrated lungs and a shrunken windpipe. “There is a great advantage in having a sickly husband,” she once said to Shakib, “it lessons a woman in the heavenly virtues of our Virgin Mother, in patient endurance and pity, in charity, magnanimity, and pure love.” What, with these sublimities of character, need we know of her visible charms, or lack of them? She might deserve the title Shakib bestows upon her; she might be a real houri, for all we know? In that event, the outward charms correspond, and Khalid is a lucky dog—if someone can keep the Jesuits away.
This, then, is our picture of Najma, to whom he is now relating, in the Temple of Venus, of the dangers he had passed and the felicities of the bedouin life he has in view. It is evening. The moon struggles through the poplars to light the Temple for them, and the ambrosial breeze caresses their cheeks.
“No,” says Khalid; “we can not live here, O my Heart, after we are formally married. The curse in my breast I must not let you share, and only when I am rid of it am I actually your husband. By the life of this blessed night, by the light of these stars, I am inalterably resolved on this,