Catherine: A time For Love by Juliette Benzoni

Author:Juliette Benzoni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Manuscript Template, Public
Publisher: Telos Publishing Ltd

Yet when the handsome, brass-studded double doors swung open before them, time seemed to melt away. Catherine suddenly felt ten years younger as she recognised the tall Negro, dressed and turbaned in white, who stood there. It was one of Abou-al-Khayr’s two mutes.

The slave frowned and looked disapprovingly at the three beggars, and was just about to close the door again when Gauthier swiftly put his foot in it, preventing him, while Josse spoke to him peremptorily.

‘Go and tell your master that one of his oldest friends wishes to speak to him. A friend from the country of …’

‘He cannot speak,’ Catherine interrupted. ‘This man is dumb.’

She spoke in French, and the Negro looked at her with astonishment and curiosity. She saw a spark of recognition kindling in the large protuberant eyes, and hastily pulled off her veil.

‘Look,’ she said again, in Arabic. ‘Do you remember me now?’

By way of reply the slave knelt, seized the hem of her gown and kissed it. Then he leapt to his feet and ran off into the inner garden that could be seen beyond the square hall with its brick-paved floor and slender columns, which gave on to a courtyard filled with flowering shrubs and the three famous palms. A big scallop of translucent alabaster let fall a trickle of fresh water that cooled the whole place.

The plants and, above all, the festoons of roses and orange-trees laden with white, superbly-scented blossom made up the whole decoration of this house. It was a beautiful house, certainly, but its elegance lay in the pure line of the colonnade, the transparent alabaster of the carving around the first-floor gallery, the clear water flowing through the garden. Abou-al-Khayr liked simplicity in his day-to-day life, though without any sacrifice of comfort.

Just then they heard a pair of slippers slap-slapping across the tiled courtyard, and in an instant Abou-al-Khayr appeared, so exactly like the mental picture Catherine kept of him that she could not help giving a cry of surprise. The little doctor’s face, still decorated with its absurd ritual white silk beard, was as smooth and clear-featured as ever, and he was dressed exactly as he had been on the day of their first encounter: the same gown of thick blue silk, the same immense red silk turban draped in the Persian style, the same crimson Moroccan slippers over blue silk socks. He appeared not to have aged by a year, by a day even! His black eyes still sparkled with their customary ironical flame; his smile was so familiar that Catherine suddenly longed to weep, for as she saw it she suddenly had the paradoxical sensation that she was coming home.

Abou-al-Khayr ignored Gauthier and Josse, who were bowing ceremoniously. He stopped in front of Catherine, looked her up and down for a moment and then said simply:

‘I was expecting you. But you have been slow in coming.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, yes. You will never change. O woman of a single love! Like a moth you prefer to die in the flame than to live in the dark, am I not right? Half your heart is here.

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