“A rose fell to the lot of a monkey.”—Arabic Proverb. Zarah and Al-Asad sat in consultation.
Two beautiful beings in whom cunning stood for brain and nether millstones for hearts—where others were concerned.
To enhance her beauty in the eyes of the white man, who looked upon her but indifferently, the Arabian had worn a transparent yashmak, dyed her finger tips, plastered her person with as many jewels as she could fasten on to her garments, and walked like a cat on hot bricks or a mannequin or a Spaniard. In the presence of the Nubian, who loved her with all the might of his half-savage soul, she sat cross-legged on a pile of cushions, smoking endless cigarettes, wound in a wrapping of silk, which she kept in its place by tucking the ends in, and with her bare feet thrust into heelless slippers. She was far more beautiful in her simplicity than in her most extravagant apparel, if she had only known it, and a furnace would have but mildly described the tumult of love which she aroused in her magnificent slave.
An hour had passed since she had hastily summoned him on her return from her meeting with her blind enemy at the beginning of the secret path—an hour in which they had talked and suggested and yet had failed to find a way out of the difficulty which had arisen out of her lie.
“Thinkest thou, O Al-Asad, that the blind one knew?”
“I know not, mistress,” he said slowly. “Perchance ’tis Fate who guides his feet continually across thy path, or maybe the wind of chance. Yet can we do nothing.”
[191]
He touched an amulet of good luck at his neck; the Arabian made a circle in the air with her fingers.
“May the spirit of my father, who placed the safekeeping of the blind one in my hands, remain peacefully in Paradise.”
They got up solemnly, turned from left to right three times, and sat down again.
The heathens!
When will they learn to touch wood or to turn the whole chair or couch round three times, with themselves, as do their Christian and more civilized brethren!
“Thou dost worry overmuch, woman, about this white girl. She is but a fly to be blown from the rim of thy cup of happiness and good fortune. A word to thy slave and he pinches the fly between his thumb and finger.”
He illustrated his words, his splendid teeth flashing as he laughed, then ducked his handsome head so as to avoid the back-hander dealt him by the woman he worshipped.
“Thou fool!” she replied shortly. “Where findest thou the sense to drink when thou art thirsty or to eat when thou art empty? Have I not told thee that the white man believes the white woman to be dead, yea, buried in the sands, as she would verily have been buried this night if the thrice accursed blind one had not yet again crossed my path. If the white man who has, through the accursed foolishness of my tongue, been told that the girl is dead, speaks with one who tells him that she is alive, what then? Thou dullard! Canst thou not see a glimmer of light? Behold, art thou blinder than the blind one, thou imbecile offspring of foolish parents!” She got up and crossed to the door, from which nothing could be seen but the stars above great walls of rock, whilst the Nubian rose and followed her noiselessly.
Standing close to her, girt in his loin cloth, he towered above her. He bent his head so that the scented curls touched his lips, and gently stroked the silken wrapper[192] with his slender fingers, whilst his heart almost broke in the love he had for her.
He would have starved for her, endured torture for her, died for her; he was her rightful mate; she was his woman out of all the world; yet she hankered for the grapes which hung well beyond the reach of her crossbred hands, and he forgot his manhood in the fear of losing the little—which was yet so much—she gave him. He worked so hard to gain the barest word of gratitude; he found such joy in lying across the threshold o’ nights to keep her safe; he suffered such hell through jealousy; yet in his loyalty, in his desire to bring her happiness, he had not once thought of removing the white man from his own path. The white woman, yea, why not? What difference would one soulless woman more or less make in this world already overstocked with soulless women? Once she was removed and the woman of his heart’s desire married to the man she loved—and did Allah in His wisdom ever know of such a tangle—then he would ride out into the desert and die, or, better still, become chief of a band with which to harry the white man when he ventured across the quicksands.
Primitive reasoning, but not too bad for one who could neither read nor write, and whose idea of God was a vasty, corporeal deity who offered sweetmeats with one hand and struck one for taking them with the other.
He laughed as he spoke, on the spur of his primitive reasoning, and stroked the soft silk which wrapped his rightful mate.
“Mistress!”
At a certain tone in his voice with which she was unacquainted she turned her head and looked over her shoulder and up at him sideways, so that her yellow eyes gleamed through half-closed lids, just as gleamed the eyes of the wellnigh adolescent lion cub watching them from a corner of the luxurious room.
“Mistress, it were well if I broke the neck of the white[193] woman within the hour, and fastening her dead body upon some horse, sent them floundering into the sands of death. Then will I spread a tale of the white woman’s betrayal of thy hospitality, and how she stole thy horse and attempted to escape, so——”
He laughed as she turned upon him in anger, then bent and looked down into her beautiful, furious eyes with a look she did not understand, but which caused her to draw back a pace.
“Behold, are thy words as bright as a rusty sword and thy reasoning as sharp as the blunt edge,” she cried. “The white woman has found favour in the eyes of thy brethren, thou fool! Thinkest thou that when they hear of her death that their lamentations will not reach to the mountaintops, yea, and to the ears of the white man, so that he turns upon me in rage? Behold, are the wits of the deaf boy who waits upon the white man like two-edged daggers compared to thine, O Al-Asad of the camel head!”
Al-Asad of the camel head made no sign of the storm caused within him by the nearness of the woman and her contemptuous words. He stood quite still, the perfume of her hair in his nostrils, the silk of her garment in his hands.
“Thou makest a pond of a raindrop, woman,” he answered. “What are my brethren but children, pleased to-day at a smile, angered to-morrow at a word? Make great promise of feasting and fighting, and their love belongs to the giver of food and promoter of battle; laugh at them, mock them, make sport of their words and their raiment and their countenance, and they kill without a word.”
Zarah put her little hands against his chest and pushed him away, and looked at him sideways as she crossed to the couch, and looked at him again when he did not follow, and beckoned him with a backward movement of the head, which showed him the beauty of her throat as he leant against the lintel and looked at her, and laughed[194] at the simplicity of the plan that was formulating in his mind.
Dying of thirst, he stretched for the cup even if there was but a drop of water left; starving, he swept the very floor for a crust; destitute, he demanded the smallest coin as price for the way he had found for removing the obstacle from the Arabian girl’s path. When she beckoned he crossed to her and sat down, but not upon the floor at her feet. He sat beside her, close to her, and looked at her so that she shrank away.
“Shelter is given to the camel, meat to the dog, water to the horse at the end of a day of toil,” he said slowly. “What reward will be given this slave if he removes the cloud from before the sun of his mistress’s happiness?”
“Thou! A reward given unto thee?” She could hardly have shown more astonishment if he had asked for the heaped-up contents of her jewel safe. “My father gave thee shelter when thou didst flee from the wrath of those who desired thy life, dates when thy bones pierced thy skin, water when thou wast wellnigh dead from thirst. A reward? Behold, the whip across thy mouth will be thy reward for thy daring, thou mongrel!”
She had worked herself into a rare rage, and flung herself to the far end of the couch, so that an end of the silken wrapper became untucked; and she beat upon the cushions with clenched fists, thereby causing the loosened garment to slip yet lower still, until it exposed the splendid shoulders, which looked the more bewitching in that they were half draped.
Alas! that it be so hard a task to drill into the heads of women the simple truth that, where décollétage is concerned, a hint is far more potent than a whole hard fact.
“A reward for thee?” she repeated. “For thee?”
“Yea, a date, a drop of water....” He paused, then rose and walked to the door and looked up at the stars and laughed at the thought of the gift he would pluck from paradise. “Yea, a date for the camel and water[195] for the horse, but a kiss—one kiss—from thy mouth, which is as a red flower fashioned in rubies and set with pearls which are thy teeth. Nay, fling not thyself upon thy slave, for he could break thee with one hand. The camel works not without reward, the horse dies without water, thy slave will not reveal his plan without the promise of that which he craves.”
“But the camel and the horse fulfil their tasks,” said Zarah sweetly, slowly, baiting her trap, into which the simple barbarian would ultimately fall. “The reward comes afterwards, O Al-Asad, when the heat of the day is o’er and the peace of the night falleth apace. Come!”
She held out her hand and he ran to her, ran as swiftly as a deer, as noiselessly as the lion watching them out of tawny, half-closed eyes, and knelt at her feet and encircled her with his arms without touching her withal.
“Thou wilt—thou wilt—when my plan is unfolded—my tale is told—thou wilt?”
Zarah the liar, the hypocrite, the merciless, smiled gently as she looked down into the handsome face so near her own, nodded her head as she listened, and pushed away the encircling arms as she rose to her feet and moved a few steps.
It was such a simple plan and such an effective plan for getting her out of her quandary, and the reward was such a simple one to grant—a solitary kiss, a thing of nothing, a sound, a fleeting second of rapture to him; yet she vowed in her treacherous heart that no man but the man she loved should hold her in his arms or other lips than his touch her beautiful, lying mouth.
“Yea, verily, ’tis a good plan and easy,” she said, watching him out of the corner of her eyes. “Thou wilt spread tales of this white woman’s ingratitude and of her mocking of our sisters, so that the men, infuriated, fall upon her and kill her, not this night, but upon the night of feasting.”
“Yea, mistress, upon the night of feasting, so that the[196] women, occupied in the task of cooking, know nothing of her death, and knowing nothing, will say nothing. Mistress,” he ended in a whisper, “is it not a good plan and simple?”
Forgetting the Arabian proverb which teaches that “a spark can fire the whole quarter,” counting upon her power over the man, forgetting also that he was human even if he were a slave, she laughed mockingly as she answered: “Verily is it simple, and methinks that the little toil is not worthy of so great reward!”
He crossed the room in one bound and swept her, fighting desperately, into his arm. He crushed her down upon his heart and laughed at her when she met her teeth in his forearm until the blood ran, and caught her hands in one of his and held her beautiful head pressed against his shoulder with his arm and kissed her scented hair; then flung her upon the divan and, laughing, turned to meet the lion as it sprang.
He caught it in mid-air, grasping its throat with his left hand, and with a lightning sideways movement gripped its hind legs just at the joint with his right.
The beast’s front paws just reached his chest and tore it with great claws until the blood streamed; it roared and choked and moaned as, holding it at arm’s length as it struggled and fought, the gigantic man bent the head back to meet the feet of the hind legs, which he as slowly bent over the back to meet the head.
Zarah stood upon tiptoe, eyes blazing, hands clasped, insult forgotten in the wonderful feat of strength, of which even she did not think the man was capable.
“Wah! Wah!” she cried, a very child of the desert, as she watched the animal fighting for its life. “Wah! Wah!” she cried again, clapping her hands when Al-Asad, the magnificent half-caste, met the lion’s feet and head with a hardly perceptible effort, and at the little click which was all that announced the end, flung the carcass at the woman’s feet and walked towards the door.
[197]
“Al-Asad! Thy wounds!”
He turned and looked at the beautiful woman who, carried out of herself by the intoxication of the moment, held out her arms to him, then down at the mark of her teeth upon his arm.
“My wound, O woman, is thy seal upon me, which I shall carry to the day when Allah, the one and only God, shall bid me leave this maze which we call life. I go to work upon my plan, so that the desire of thy heart is granted thee.” He paused for one moment with his hand upon the curtain and took his revenge for all the bitterness of the past. “I have kissed thy hair, I have held thee upon my heart, I have bruised thee. Go to the white man an thou wilt; he will find thee marked by another man. I will have nothing, not even one kiss from thee, until of thy own free will thou givest it me.”
He was gone, leaving her staring at the curtain. She laughed, laughed at the thought of the white man’s love which awaited her, laughed at the memory of the just fled hour, and raised her hands to call her body-woman; then turned her head and listened.
From somewhere outside amongst the rocks came the sound of a man singing.
Over and over again he sang the Arabian proverb mockingly, sweetly.
“‘They wooed her and she resisted; they left her, and she fell in love.’”
Over and over again the Nubian sang the words in his golden tenor voice as he made his way to the men’s quarters.
Then she clapped her hands sharply, threw herself on the couch, and sought for the photograph of Ralph Trenchard, which she wore upon her heart in Helen Raynor’s golden locket.
[198]
“The fire of more than one war has been kindled by a single word.”—Arabic Proverb.
The firelight shone on ............