“A greater liar than Moseylama.”—Arabic Proverb. Three weeks passed, in which the Arabian nursed Ralph Trenchard until the fever, brought on by exhaustion, thirst and terrific heat, had left him, and left him very sane and not unduly weak, and very full of gratitude to the beautiful girl whom he seemed to have seen at his bedside day and night, and who seemed to have changed her dress a hundred times, if she had changed it once.
The nerve-racking jangle of her bracelets and anklets and the overwhelming strength of her perfume drove him wellnigh crazy at times, but, remembering what he would learn from her upon his complete recovery, he stuffed the ends of the silk sheets into his ears and held his nostrils forcibly between thumb and finger under cover of the same luxurious bed-spread.
Truly once or twice he grievously feared for his reason.
He wakened one night to see a remarkably handsome and muscular man, clad in naught but a loin-cloth, sitting motionless in the middle of the floor with what looked like a woman’s sandal pressed to his heart; and right strange and idiotic did he look, too, when he placed the sandal upon the floor and proceeded to press his forehead upon it. Then, two or three, or maybe more, nights following—for he had completely lost all sense of time—he wakened to see nothing less than a lion rolling blithely upon its back not two yards from him, which, having rolled awhile, proceeded to gambol playfully about the room, then slouched to the doorway, through which it disappeared for good. When he turned slowly upon his[178] bed to see what else might be in store for him, he saw the face of the beautiful girl looking down upon him from a spot ’twixt floor and ceiling as though suspended in mid-air.
He laughed when, the delirium passed, these strange occurrences were explained to him by Zarah, who, just because he felt too uncertain for the moment about past events to question her about Helen, allowed herself to be deluded into the belief that he had forgotten the tale Al-Asad had told when he visited the Bedouin camp disguised as a holy man. Then this evening he sent the youth who waited upon him to ask her to come to him.
She came quickly, Zarah the beautiful, the tender, the pitiful, Zarah the most perfect hypocrite and liar, and sat at his feet upon the floor, appropriately clothed in black and silver, with the lower part of her lovely face semi-hidden by a yashmak, over which her beautiful eyes gazed into his with an expression which would have deceived even the astutest old Holy Father.
“Where is Helen Raynor?”
He asked the question abruptly, taking her unawares.
She had intended telling him—if he should remember the Nubian’s story—that Helen had returned to Hutah under escort and had perished in the locust storm, but the abrupt question took her off her guard.
“She is dead and buried in the quicksands,” she lied instantly, uncontrollably, infinitely unwisely, without giving a thought to the far-reaching effects of the lie.
“Dead! My God! When? How?”
Seeing the terrible mistake she had made, seeing no way out of it, she backed the lie, planning in a flash to give a slight foundation to the disastrous mistake by getting rid of the girl that very night. She laid her henna-tipped, jewelled hand upon Ralph Trenchard’s and told him the sad story of Helen Raynor’s death, and mopped her melting, dry eyes with the corner of the silken sheet as she answered his horrified questions.
[179]
“ ... yes! I made a gr-r-reat effort to save her-r, my dear-r schoolmate,” she said, “but, alas! kismet, Allah had decr-r-r-eed other-r-wise....” Her arms showed like creamy-yellow ivory as she raised them dutifully above her downcast head in a gesture that showed off her alluring figure to perfection. “ ... Nay! dear-r Helena said no wor-rd, she just died. Wher-r-re? Oh! in a bed. Yes! here in the mountain dwelling. By the mercy of Mohammed the Pr-r-ophet did she die, so zat her face should be a beautiful memor-r-y to her fr-r-ien’s, even if I, Zarah ...” She struck her breast with a beautiful gesture of resignation, but not hard enough to mark it, even in her intense grief. “ ... Yea! even if I, Zarah, shall have to car-r-y the dr-r-readful picture of it, all br-r-oken, before my eyes until ze day when death shall claim me also.” When Ralph Trenchard shivered in absolute horror, she shivered also, perhaps out of sympathy for him, perhaps to impress the thought of the English girl’s face upon him—who knows? Then she got up and trailed across the floor to a table laden with drinks of divers sweetness and coolness.
He looked at the exquisite picture she made, and, longing to hear more about the girl he loved, stretched out his hand; and she looked at him with the love of all women in her glorious eyes, and walked back to him swiftly and with all the grace of her Spanish mother, carrying a tray with glasses of frothing sherbet, which he did not want or touch.
“Thou art indeed a man,” she said softly in Arabic, as she placed the tray on a stool, ensconced herself cross-legged upon the divan, and leant towards him as she lit her cigarette, so that he was almost suffocated with the pungency of her perfume. “Yea! verily amongst my subjects, who are of a truth somewhat misshapen about the legs from overmuch bestriding of the Nejdee, thou art indeed a man!”
She sat and looked at him with all her love in her[180] eyes, whilst he sat and wished that in some way he could express his gratitude for all she had done for Helen. But when, after much searching in those portions of her raiment which looked as though they might be large enough to conceal a minute pocket, she showed him Helen’s wrist-watch upon her palm, then he moved close to her and crushed her hand in both of his until he almost broke her fingers, as she told him how Helen had given it to her in memory of old times.
“ ... I give it to you,” she said at last.
It was a sacrifice.
Smothered in jewels as she was, yet, with the delight some Orientals have in the purloined object, she coveted that looted watch more than all her rubies, emeralds, pearls and diamonds put together in a heap.
He sat for a long time with the tragic, lying, little token in his hand, then turned and looked into the doe-like eyes, which looked fearlessly back into his.
“And this is all? You have nothing else, no little thing, a handkerchief, a hair-pin, anything, no matter how trivial, that belonged to your old school friend?”
Zarah shook her beautiful head and sighed as she lied once more with the ease of long-established custom, and the certainty of being able before long to give some foundation to the lie.
“Nozing! No little zing! We bur-r-ried her-r, as I have told you, in her-r cloze. She was not beautiful to look upon. A?, a?, she was not pr-r-etty in ze gr-r-eat sleep, so we bur-r-ied her-r-r deep, deep in ze comfor-r-ting sands, which tell no tales.”
She rose once more as she spoke and trailed across the marble floor to the door.
Perchance she wished to study astronomy or, perchance, to draw a comparison between the beauty of those who live in luxury and the disfigurement of those who die in battle. Whatever her intent, she certainly made a striking[181] picture as she leaned against the lintel, wrapped in a sheath of black and silver.
Ralph Trenchard stared at her, his eyes wandering from the red curls to the small feet in silver sandals.
She knew his eyes to be upon her, and turned slowly sideways and sighed as she raised her bare arms above her head so that their creamy whiteness shone against the purple background of the sky; she sighed again and pressed her hands upon the spot where by rights her heart should have been, whilst her melting eyes showed fine specimens of the tears of the crocodile as she inwardly asked herself if, in the whole world, there was to be found anything quite so slow as an Englishman.
And he sat and gazed and gazed at the exquisite figure, in which he saw the golden head and the broad shoulders, the slender waist and the polished riding-boots, of the girl to whom he had given the gold watch he held in his hand.
He sat quite still for a long time, stunned with horror, then, quite unconscious of what he did, caused the beautiful Arabian to totally lose her bearings, so that fear, jealousy and love linked hands in her heart and drove her down the road of tragedy which had been marked out for her through the ages.
Saying nothing, he smiled at her and held out his hand, so that, completely on the wrong tack, she ran to him, the silver embroidery glittering in response to her fast-beating heart; then he kissed her hand in gratitude, which was just about the most idiotic thing he could have done, and, considering all things, spoke words of equal idiocy into her willing ear.
“You will come and talk to me to-morrow, will you not?” By talk he meant talk of Helen, but how on earth was the Arabian to know that? “You will? Thank you so much, so very much!” He stopped; then, in his craving to regain his strength so as to get away from the horror of the place where Helen lay dead, hidden from[182] him for ever in the ghastly sands, misled the Arabian entirely. “Can I walk about the camp? Can I have a horse or a camel or something to ride in the desert so as to get really strong?”
“Ride with me?”
She barely whispered the words.
“Rather! If you have the time to spare. It would be awfully kind of you. Then we could talk about the school you were at and everything.”
By which he meant Helen’s schooldays and Helen’s illness and Helen’s death; but how was the Arabian, blinded by love and vanity, to know that, especially as out of sheer gratitude he held her hand in both of his whilst he talked.
He took her to the steps and watched her descend, then turned and flung himself upon the divan with the watch against his lips, whilst Zarah the Cruel, wide awake to the danger of his walking amongst her men whilst Helen remained in the camp, climbed the narrow path to the building where dwelt the girl he thought to be dead.
“May her envier stumble over her hair.”—Arabic Proverb.
She had told Ralph Trenchard that the girl was dead, when not only was she alive, but a person of some consequence in the camp through the thrice cursed episode of the black mare.
Knowing nothing about constancy and honour and about as much about the question of nationality in marriage, she was firmly convinced that in time the white man, forgetting Helen, would succumb to her beauty and marry her.
But before that thrice blessed day, even before he left his dwelling to walk with her in the camp as he had just suggested, the girl must disappear so that the unlucky[183] lie should have a slight foundation of truth, as have so many falsehoods in the East when sifted to the bottom.
Once the girl was dead she would rely upon her own power over her own people to prevent the real facts of the case from reaching his ears.
The first thing was to find a way of ridding herself of the girl who stood as an obstacle in that path of peace and love which ended in the white man’s heart, but, above all, a way which would cause no comment amongst the men. The way was shown her, startlingly clear and simple, within the hour.
She cursed herself, the lie, fate and the black mare as she climbed the steep steps to Helen’s prison.
If only she had not saved the girl in the first place, if only, in the second, she had not so foolishly allowed Helen to win the men’s hearts by her magnificent horsemanship, if only she had not lied. If it had not been for that thrice cursed episode with Lulah, the mare, she would not have hesitated an hour ridding herself of the girl, either by sending her back to civilization under escort or by some more drastic method.
Up till then the white girl had meant nothing more than a prisoner to the men, and the disappearance of a prisoner, even one of the white race, would have been no subject of comment amongst them. As it was she could do nothing.
The Nubian reported that the men constantly talked............