The Sheik Part 8

She went slowly back into the tent, shaken with what she had seen, and stood in undecided hesitation beside the divan. The helpless feeling that she so often experienced swept over her with renewed force. There was nowhere that she could get away from him, no privacy, no respite.

Day and night she must endure his presence with no hope of escape. She closed her eyes in a sudden agony, and then stiffened at the sound of his voice outside.

He came in laughing, a cigarette dangling from one blood-stained hand, while with the other he wiped the perspiration from his forehead, leaving a dull red smear. She shrank from him, looking at him with blazing eyes. "You are a brute, a beast, a devil! I hate you!" she choked furiously.

For a moment an ugly look crossed his face, and then he laughed again.

"Hate me by all means, _ma belle_, but let your hatred be thorough. I detest mediocrity," he said lightly, as he pa.s.sed on into the other room.

She sank down on to the couch. She had never felt so desperate, so powerless. She stared straight before her, shivering, as she went over the scene she had just witnessed, her fingers picking nervously at the jade-green silk of her dress. She longed for some power that would deaden her feelings and blunt her capacity for suffering. She looked at Gaston with hard eyes when he came in. He had approved of what the Sheik had done, would have done it himself if he had been able. They were all alike.

"The man who was hurt first," she asked abruptly, with a touch of her old hauteur in her voice, "is he dead?"

"Oh no, Madame. He has concussion but he will be all right. They have hard heads, these Arabs."

"And Yusef?"

Gaston grinned. "_Le pet.i.t_ Sheik has a broken collar-bone. It is nothing. A few days' holiday to be petted in his harem, _et voila_!"

"His harem?" echoed Diana in surprise. "Is he married?"

"_Mais oui_, Madame. He has two wives."

At Diana's exclamation he shrugged deprecatingly. "_Que voulez-vous?_ It is the custom of the country," he said tolerantly, with the air of conceding a melancholy fact with the best grace possible.

The customs of the country was dangerous ground, and Diana changed the subject hastily. "Where did you learn to ride, Gaston?"

"In a racing-stable at Auteuil, Madame, when I was a boy. Then I was five years in the French cavalry. After that I came to Monseigneur."

"And you have been with him--how long?"

"Fifteen years, Madame."

"Fifteen years," she repeated wonderingly. "Fifteen years here, in the desert?"

"Here and elsewhere, Madame," he answered rather more shortly than usual, and with a murmur of excuse left the tent.

Diana leaned back against the cushions with a little sigh. Gaston need not have been afraid that she was trying to learn his master's secrets from him. She had not fallen as low as that. The mystery of the man whose path had crossed hers so terribly seemed to augment instead of lessen as the time went on. What was the power in him that compelled the devotion of his wild followers and the little French ex-cavalryman?

She knit her forehead in perplexity and was still puzzling over it when he came back. Immaculate and well-groomed he was very different from the dishevelled, bloodstained savage of half-an-hour before. She shot a nervous glance at him, remembering her outburst, but he was not angry.

He looked grave, but his gravity seemed centred in himself as he pa.s.sed his lean fingers tenderly over his smooth chin. She had seen Aubrey do similarly hundreds of times. Occidental or Oriental, men seemed very alike. She waited for him to speak and waited vainly. One of the taciturn fits to which she had grown accustomed had come over him--hours sometimes in which he simply ignored her altogether. The evening meal was silent. He spoke once to Gaston, but he spoke in Arabic, and the servant replied only with a nod of compliance. And after Gaston was gone he did not speak for a long time, but sat on the divan, apparently absorbed in his thoughts.

Restless, Diana moved about the tent, listlessly examining objects that she knew by heart, and flirting over the pages of the French magazines she had read a dozen times. Usually she was thankful for his silent moods. To-night with a woman's perversity she wanted him to speak. She was unstrung, and the utter silence oppressed her. She glanced over her shoulder at him once or twice, but his back looked unapproachable. Yet when he called her, with a swift revulsion of feeling, she wished he had kept silent. She went to him slowly. She was too unnerved to-night to struggle against him. What would be the use? she thought wearily; it would only end in defeat as it always did. He pulled her down on the divan beside him, and before she realised what he was doing slipped a long jade necklace over her head. For a moment she looked stupidly at the wonderful thing, almost unique in the purity of its colour and the marvellous carving on the uniform square pieces of which it was composed, and then with a low cry she tore it off and flung it on the ground.

"How dare you?" she gasped.

"You don't like it?" he asked in his low, unruffled voice, his eyebrows raised in real or a.s.sumed surprise. "Yet it matches your dress," and lightly his long fingers touched the folds of green silk swathed across the youthful curve of her breast. He glanced at an open box filled with shimmering stones on a low stool beside him.

"Pearls are too cold and diamonds too ba.n.a.l for you," he said slowly.

"You should wear nothing but jade. It is the colour of the evening sky against the sunset of your hair."

He had never spoken like that to her before, or used that tone of voice. His methods had been more fierce than tender. She glanced up swiftly at his face, but it baffled her. There was no love in his eyes or even desire, nothing but an unusual gentleness. "Perhaps you would prefer the diamonds and the pearls," he went on, pointing disdainfully at the box.

"No, no. I hate them! I hate them all! I will not wear your jewels. You have no right to think that I am that kind of woman," she cried hysterically.

"You do not like them? _Bon Dieu!_ None of the other women ever refused them. On the contrary, they could never get enough," he said with a laugh.

Diana looked up with a startled glance, a look of horror dawning in her eyes. "Other women?" she repeated blankly.

"You didn't suppose you were the first, did you?" he asked with brutal candour. "Don't look at me like that. They were not like you, they came to me willingly enough--too willingly. Allah! How they bored me! I tired of them before they tired of me."

She flung her arm across her eyes with a dry sob, straining away from him. She had never thought of that. In the purity of her mind it had never occurred to her. She was only one of many, one of a succession of mistresses, taken and discarded at his whim. She writhed with the shame that filled her. "Oh, you hurt me!" she whispered very low, and then anger killed all other feeling. He had loosened his arm about her and she wrenched herself free and sprang to her feet. "I hate you, do you understand? I hate you! I hate you!"

He lit a cigarette leisurely before answering and moved into a more comfortable position on the divan. "So you have already told me this afternoon," he said at length coolly, "and with reiteration your remark becomes less convincing, _ma cherie_."

Her anger ebbed away. She was too tired to be angry. She was humiliated and hurt, and the man before her had it in his power to hurt her more, but she was at his mercy and to-night she could not fight. She pushed the hair off her forehead with a heavy sigh and looked at the Sheik's long length stretched out on the couch, the steely strength of his limbs patent even in the indolent att.i.tude in which he was lying, at his brown handsome face, inscrutable as it always was to her, and the feeling of helplessness came back with renewed force and with it the sense of her own pitiful weakness against his force, compelling her to speak. "Have you never felt pity for a thing that was weaker than yourself? Have you never spared anything or any one in all your life?

Have you nothing in your nature but cruelty? Are all Arabs hard like you?" she said shakily. "Has love never even made you merciful?"

He glanced up at her with a harsh laugh, and shook his head. "Love?

_Connais pas!_ Yes, I do," he added with swift mockery, "I love my horses."

"When you don't kill them," she retorted.

"I am corrected. When I don't kill them."

There was something in his voice that made her reckless, that made her want to hurt him. "If you give no love to the--the women whom you bring here, do you give love to the women of your harem? You have a harem, I suppose, somewhere?" she braved him with curling lip and scornful voice, but as she spoke she knew that she had only hurt herself and her voice faltered.

His hand reached out suddenly and he dragged her down into his arms again with a laugh. "And if I have, are you jealous? What if the nights I spent away from you were pa.s.sed in my harem--what then?"

"Then may Allah put it into the heart of one of your wives to poison you so that you never come back," she said fiercely.

"Allah! So beautiful and so bloodthirsty," he said in bantering reproof. Then he turned her face up to his, smiling into her angry eyes with amus.e.m.e.nt. "I have no harem and, thanks be to Allah, no wives, _cherie._ Does that please you?"

"Why should I care? It is nothing to me," she replied sharply, with a vivid blush.

He held her closer, looking deeply into her eyes, holding them as he could when he liked, in spite of her efforts to turn them away--a mesmerism she could not resist.

"Shall I make you care? Shall I make you love me? I can make women love me when I choose."

She went very white and her eyes flickered. She knew that he was only amusing himself, that he was utterly indifferent to her feelings, that he did not care if she hated or loved him, but it was a new form of torture that was more detestable than anything that had gone before it.

It infuriated her that he could even suggest that she could come to care for him, that she could ever look on him as anything but a brutal savage who had committed a hideous outrage, that she could ever have any feeling for him except hatred and loathing. That he should cla.s.s her with the other women he spoke of revolted her, she felt degraded, soiled as she had never done before, and she had thought that she had felt the utmost humiliation of her position.

The colour rushed back into her face. "I would rather you killed me,"

she cried pa.s.sionately.

"So would I," he said drily, "for if you loved me you would bore me and I should have to let you go. While as it is"--he laughed softly--"as it is I do not regret the chance that took me into Biskra that day."

He let her go and got up with a yawn, watching her approvingly as she crossed the tent. The easy swing of her boyish figure and the defiant carriage of her head reminded him of one of his own thoroughbred horses. She was as beautiful and as wild as they were. And as he broke them so would he break her. She was nearly tamed now, but not quite, and by Allah! it should be quite! As he turned his foot struck against the jade necklace lying on the rug where she had thrown it. He picked it up and called her back. She came reluctantly, slowly, with mutinous eyes.

He held out the necklace silently, and silently she stared not at it but at him. Her heart began to beat faster, and the colour slowly left her face. "Take it. I wish it," he said quietly.

"No." It was little more than a gasp.