A Son of the Sahara Part 63

And he made the battle all the harder. Never a day pa.s.sed but what he was there, big and handsome and fascinating. He would come upon her in the little walled garden, and linger with her among the roses. By the hour he would sit with her in the wide gallery overlooking the desert.

Very often he dined with her in the gilded chamber, and stayed on afterwards in the dim light of the shaded lamps, watching her with soft, mocking eyes.

And very often he would say:

"Well, Pansy, have you made up your mind whether you are going to marry me or not?"

It seemed to the girl that the whole world was combining to drive her into the arms of a man she ought to turn from with contempt and disgust.

At the end of a fortnight he said:

"Pansy, you're the first woman who has ever fought against her love for me. It's an amusing sight, but I'm beginning to wish you weren't such a determined fighter."

At the end of a month some of the mockery had gone out of his eyes, giving place to a hungry gleam. For the girl had not succ.u.mbed to his fascinations, although her face was growing white and weary with close confinement and the ceaseless battle that went on within herself.

And the man who acknowledged no law except his own appet.i.tes, and who, up till now, had lived for nothing else, loved the girl all the more deeply because she did not succ.u.mb to his attractions, because she had a soul above her senses, and tried to live up to her own ideals, refusing to come down to his level. At times he felt he must try and grope his way up to the heights, and unconsciously he was rising from the depths.

"Water can always reach the level it rises from," Pansy had once said.

Although a wild craving for his girl-prisoner often kept him wakeful, although there was none to stop him, and only a short length of pa.s.sage and a locked door, to which he alone had the key, lay between him and his desire, the pa.s.sage was never crossed, the door never unlocked.

To escape his presence as much as possible, Pansy spent a lot of her time in the big hall of the harem with the other girls. But one by one they disappeared, to become the wives of various men of importance in the place, until only Rayma was left. A quiet, subdued Rayma who watched Pansy and the Sultan with longing, envious gaze.

"How happy you must be now you are his wife, and you know that he can't thrust you from him should another woman take his fancy," the Arab girl sighed one day to her rival.

Pansy was not his wife, and she had no intention of being. In her desire to escape from temptation she grew absolutely reckless.

"I should be much happier if I could get right away from him," she said in response to Rayma's remark.

"Don't you love him?" Rayma exclaimed.

"I hate him," Pansy said, lying to her heart. "I never want to see him again," she went on in a hysterical way. "I only want to escape from him and this place, once and for ever."

Astonished, Rayma gazed at her supplanter. Then a look of hope darted into her dark eyes.

If only this strange girl were out of the way, the Sultan's heart might return to her.

CHAPTER XXVII

Outside a little French military settlement several ragged tents had been pitched. In the largest of them the miser feather merchant was sitting, cross-legged, on a pile of dirty cushions. As chance would have it, his caravan had gone to the south-west, and that night he had halted within three hundred miles of St. Louis.

With him was an Arab friend, a nomad like himself, who chanced also to be encamped outside the little settlement. A year had pa.s.sed since their last meeting. After the first exchange of compliments, as the two sat smoking together, the new-comer remarked to the miser:

"In your hunger for gold you grow ever thinner and more haggard."

A wild look came into the feather merchant's eyes.

"It is not hunger for gold that has robbed my bones of their flesh," he replied. "But another hunger, far more raging."

His friend puffed away in silence, and as he puffed, he had in mind an Arab proverb wherein it is said that a man can fall madly in love with the shadow of a woman's heel.

"Then it's the shadow of some woman's heel," he remarked.

"More than her shadow," the miser replied in a parched voice. "I saw her before me, as plainly as I see you. A houri from Paradise."

His friend made no reply. Considering a woman was under discussion it was bad manners to ask questions. He waited, knowing that silence on his part would be the most likely way of hearing the story.

The miser's bony hands clenched, and his tongue went round his bearded lips.

"There was a girl I desired," he began presently. "A milk-white maid, more beautiful than the morning, with hair golden as the sun, and eyes deep blue as desert night. She was a slave, and with my wealth I would have bought her. She was more to me than my gold. But there was another more rich and powerful. And he took her--may his soul perish in h.e.l.l."

As the miser talked, an amazed look crossed his friend's face.

"And where did you see her, this milk-white maid, with the hair of gold, and deep blue eyes?" he asked quickly.

"In a desert city, a month's journey or more from here."

"And how did she come to be there?"

"She was captured by the Sultan who rules there. Allah curse him!"

"So!" his friend e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed.

Then he stayed for some moments ruminating on the matter.

"Such a maid was stolen three months or more ago, from a mighty white nation whose territory lies far beyond the Senegal," he began presently. "And that white nation has made great stir and commotion with our rulers, the French. For the maid is one of great wealth and importance in her own country, possessed of undreamt-of riches, a fortune in gold pieces more numerous than the grains of sand in the Sahara. A month ago I was in the town of St. Louis, and the people there talked of nothing else. The white officers here search for her in all directions. And great will be the reward of the man who can lead them to her abductor. And great also will be the punishment of that desert ruler--even death."

Tensely the feather merchant listened. Then he started up with a wild cry.

"Allah be praised!" he shouted. "For my prayer has been granted. I have found those who are the enemies of the Sultan Casim Ammeh. The nation most mighty of all on this earth. And they will break him, as he has broken me."

Then he darted from the tent, running like a madman in the direction of the French military quarters.

CHAPTER XXVIII

One day when Pansy was in the large hall of the harem, Rayma came to her, a look of feverish excitement in her eyes.

"Do you still wish to escape?" she asked, watching her supplanter as if she could not believe such a desire could lie in the heart of any woman the Sultan pleased to favour.

For Pansy her struggle became daily more difficult. It was an obsession now, her wish to escape from her captor.

"How can I? Whichever way I turn someone is there to stop me."

"There is one who will not stop you. Not if he is paid well enough,"