“_Suspicious, treacherous, remote from good works._”—ARABIC
PROVERB.
Neither storms of tears nor threats of suicide having proved potent
enough to alter the Sheikh’s decision, Zarah, with as good a grace as she
could muster, had acknowledged a temporary defeat and resigned herself
to a visit of two years’ duration to the well-known school for young
European ladies over the age of fifteen in Cairo.
The school, exclusive, expensive, was looked upon more as a home from
home, where distracted mothers could deposit the offspring they had not
had the sense to leave behind in cooler climes; as an establishment where
angles could be rounded and manners polished rather than a seminary where
such dull things as grammar and arithmetic could be learned.
The Misses Cruikshanks had spent the hours they should have passed in the
_siesta_ in threshing out the question of introducing a pupil of mixed
parentage into the society of the pure-bred, if somewhat insipid, young
women entrusted to their charge.
“We have made it our strictest rule, Jane. Europeans _only_!”
“We have, Amelia, and Maria Oporto, the dull little Portuguese, is almost
as swarthy and dense as the new scullery-maid who is a mixture of Arab
and Abyssinian!” had countered Jane, who kept the books and knew to a
_piastre_ what the new wing, with the gymnasium, was going to cost.
“We may lose our entire connexion if we break it, Jane.”
“Not if we emphasize the title of her maternal grandfather. Remember,
he was a Spanish nobleman. Besides, look at the terms offered. No
interference from the father, who is evidently a person of great position
in Arabia, fees for two years which will come to as much, if not more,
than the fees for all the pupils put together for three years, and extra
for holidays if we will keep her with us.”
“Of course, we might make enough to buy a cottage in Cornwall and retire,
if we took the plunge, Jane.”
“We might, if you think we could exchange _this_ for east winds and grey
skies.”
They had both turned and looked out through the open window to the
intense blueness of the sky, the glare of the sun, and the green of the
palms tossing in the light breeze.
The school stood in the European quarter, within a stone’s throw of the
_Midan_ where the young ladies, whose parents could afford the extra
course in riding, exercised and worried their riding master’s patience
and their mounts to fiddle-strings before breakfast twice a week.
All the joyous or irritating noises, according to your mood, of a big
Egyptian city had come to the spinsters’ ears as they had sat, uncertain,
weighing the pros and cons of the problem.
“If we break the rule just this once—and after all she is half Spanish—we
might be able to go round the world before retiring,” had tempted Jane,
who hadn’t the slightest intention of giving up work until she dropped
dead between the shafts of enterprise.
“And I dare say she will be a dear, gentle, little soul, with big brown
eyes and pretty ways,” had replied Amelia, surrendering unconditionally.
The “gentle little soul” swept down upon Jane and Amelia Cruikshanks like
a tornado, leaving a trail of wreckage in her path.
She duly arrived at midday, on camelback, alone, surrounded by an
armed escort, with half a dozen snarling dromedaries, laden with gifts,
bringing up the rear.
A shouting, delighted crowd from the streets surged into the school
grounds in the wake of the dromedaries, trampling down the sparse flowers
and the cherished grass; the girls refused to move from the windows in
response to the bell for tiffin, and screamed with delight when the
boot-boy inadvertently opened the door of a cage containing six black and
white monkeys and allowed them to escape into the house.
Having sworn some unprintable oaths and lain her whip smartly across the
shoulders of the camel driver who had not shown himself over-deft in
getting her camel’s legs tucked under, Zarah swept regally into the cool
hall. She made a startling picture in blazing magenta satin embroidered
in gold, as she greeted the Misses Cruikshanks. They quaked visibly
at the knee—at least Amelia did—whilst the armed escort, in concert
with the school servants, packed the hall with bales of silk, boxes of
sweetmeats, cages of birds, trays of jewels, and exquisite pots in brass
and earthenware. Amelia trotted forward in greeting, and nearly swooned
under the overpowering scent which emanated from the new pupil’s raiment,
whilst Jane eyed her from veiled head to dainty sandal and, being an
infallible judge of character by dint of sheer practice, set her mouth.
Her heart, heavy through the school-books which had shown a distinct
deficit, had been considerably lightened when the Sheikh had paid her in
advance half the fees due for the taming of his child; and she had not
the slightest intention of refunding that thrice-blessed sum, even if she
had to emulate Job for a period of two years, whilst breaking in the girl
committed to her care.
“I’m here and I’m hungry!” said Zarah, in French, in response to Miss
Amelia’s greeting, who thereupon withdrew her hand with a hurt look in
her gentle, blue eyes.
“Are you?” decisively replied Jane, who adored the sister she ruled.
“Then you’d better come and join the other girls at tiffin after you’ve
washed your hands.”
Zarah walked slowly across to the insignificant looking little woman,
with the snap in the blue eyes and the kink in the reddish hair, and
smiled.
“Behold! we are sisters in command. I rule men, you women. It will, I
think, O Sister, rest with you if I stay or no!”
“You’re staying!” flatly replied Jane Cruikshanks. “Come and wash your
hands.”
“I wash them after food.”
“You wash them before, here. Come!”
Half a moment’s hesitation and Zarah turned to follow the one person who
was ultimately to win her respect, if not her affection.
“I will first command my men to depart.”
The girls hung out of every window, the servants peeked round the corners
of the house, a still greater crowd collected to watch beautiful,
disdainful Zarah when she appeared at the door and raised her right hand
as a sign of dismissal to the armed escort.
A firework display could hardly have been more entrancing to the native
onlookers than the escort’s departure.
With a shout the men flung themselves into their saddles, pulled their
horses until they reared, fired a salvo of farewell, and tore through
the gates like a cyclone, homeward bound; upon which Miss Amelia, who
believed in doing her duty against the most appalling odds, trotted out
to fetch the girl in.
“My dear!” she said sweetly, “I’m afraid the rice will be somewhat
heavy if you delay much longer, oh! and look, they have forgotten the
dromedaries!”
“They are a gift from the Sheikh, my father,” replied Zarah, as she bent
low before the astounded little school mistress. “To the honoured head
of the house in which his daughter is to dwell!”
“Quite so, my dear, quite so. I’m delighted with the pets. Come with me!”
replied Miss Amelia, who could always be depended upon to rise to any
occasion, and who secretly returned thanks that the great Sheikh had not
seen fit to send six oxen as well.
The heads of the house withdrew, after the usual introduction of the new
pupil to the older ones had taken place and a little speech of welcome
been made by Helen Raynor, the head of the school. She was the girls’
ideal, before whose shrine they offered the incense of their girlish
hero-worship, and was leaving next day to act as secretary to her
grandfather who, an expert in the sinking of wells, was known all the
world over as Egypt’s Water Finder.
Zarah, accustomed to cushions on the floor, sat down uncomfortably on a
chair at the end of the table and finally drew her feet up under her, to
the delight of the girls who surreptitiously nudged each other until they
met the reproachful eyes of Helen Raynor, their best-beloved and model in
all things.
They gasped when Zarah, whose thoughts were anywhere but on the doings of
the moment, took a handful of rice from the bowl passed down the line,
and stuffed a fair quantity between her teeth with her jewelled, hennaed
fingers, which she proceeded to wipe forthwith on the table-cloth; but
when she made use of her beautiful teeth to tear the meat from the
drumstick of the emaciated fowl which followed the rice, then Maria
Oporto, whose own methods of mastication were unduly audible and left
much to be desired, burst into a peal of uncontrollable laughter.
The laughter did not last long, for the simple reason that, with unerring
aim and almost as though she handled a loaded stick, Zarah flung the
chicken bone full in Maria Oporto’s swarthy face, hitting her straight
across the mouth; whereupon, taking no notice of Helen Raynor, as lovely
in her golden hair and blue eyes and exquisite skin as was Zarah in her
dusky beauty, when she rose to quell the tumult which broke out at the
table, Maria Oporto, in floods of tears, subsided on the floor.
“Girls!” Helen cried above the uproar that ensued, “do remember what is
expected of us towards a new boarder, and play up for the courtesy of the
house; at present, you are being simply vulgar.” There fell a complete
silence. “It’s ten to one if any of us were lunching with the friends of
our new companion that they would find our habits unusual, not to say
strange.”
She smiled across at Zarah, who sat sullenly, without a smile, victim
of a sudden, violent jealousy of the other girl’s charm and beauty and
breeding.
Yet might all have gone well if Maria Oporto had not lifted her swarthy
face, stained with a mixture of gravy and tears, above the edge of the
table.
“Yes!” she shrilled at Zarah in execrable Spanish, “and it’s a pity Helen
Raynor’s going away to-morrow or you might have learned how to behave
from her. She’s wonderful, and beautiful, and the dearest darling in the
whole world, but you will never, never, _never_ be anything like her, you
couldn’t, you’re a savage, that’s what you are, a _savage_!”
Followed a strangely dramatic scene.
Zarah, daughter of the desert, gifted with the Eastern’s prophetic
powers, rose slowly to her feet, gripping the back of her chair with one
hand as she pointed at the English girl with the other.
“I do not know who you are, English girl,” she said in French, “nor
whence you came or where you go, but our paths have crossed at the place
appointed by Fate, and they will cross and recross, and you will hold
what I desire, and I will wrest it from you.” Her great eyes, the colour
of the desert sand, opened wide as she leant forward in the shuttered
room, staring far beyond Helen Raynor and far beyond the room and the
garden wall outside, into the future. She spoke quietly, as though to
herself, and the girls and Jane Cruikshanks, who stood unnoticed in the
doorway, shivered slightly as they listened. “I know not what I have to
learn from you unless it is pain, English girl; I know not what it is
that you hold and I desire, for behold! I see myself upon the topmost
peak of a high mountain and you as dust beneath my feet. And I see steps,
and coming up the steps one who turns his face from me to you so that I
see naught but a scar upon his forehead. I can see no more. I—I——”
She backed from the table and stood against the wall, unconsciously
dramatic under the power of the gift of prophecy, which had come to her
with her father’s blood, then turned and left the room.
Jane Cruikshanks, who had never been known to miss an opportunity,
immediately stepped forward and poured the cold water of common sense
and reasoning upon the conflagration of immature romance which flared
in the twenty young hearts around the dining-room table: explained and
suggested things, until the girls declared themselves as only too willing
to co-operate in the task of civilizing the new arrival.
* * * * *
“_Sometimes love has been planted by one glance alone._”—ARABIC
PROVERB.
It proved no easy matter.
Stifled in the narrow confines of the best bedroom, Zarah smashed the
windows on the first night and plumped her mattress on the verandah, and,
waking at dawn, as was her custom in her mountain home, sprang at the
gardener, who gazed enraptured upon the sleeping beauty, causing him to
fall backwards down the steps and twist an ankle; upon which disaster,
and in an effort to stop his vociferous lamentations, she dashed into
her bedroom, and, through the broken window, flung a bag of gold at him,
which, catching him in the chest, caused him to forget the hurt to his
ankle and to fall upon his knees with his face turned towards Mecca in
thanksgiving for the unexpected stroke of good fortune.
Undisciplined, uncontrolled, miserable through want of occupation and
interest in those about her, she simply refused to work or to obey in any
way, until silver streaks appeared in Amelia Cruikshanks’ mousey, scanty
hair.
The first day after her arrival she flung her entire silken wardrobe on
the ground and her magnificent jewellery on the top, and stamped on it
all when the maid came to tidy the litter, then cursed the terrified
menial until she fled the room and rushed to the distracted maiden
sisters to give notice.
When Amelia Cruikshanks, greatly fearing, approached the new pupil with
a cotton skirt and blouse and necessary under-garments, and gently
intimated that they would become her better than the heavily embroidered
silks and satins and jewellery she wore, she tore the offending articles
to ribbons and wound herself from neck to heel in something scarlet and
of a great daring. She boxed the servants’ ears with one hand and loaded
them with gifts with the other, until their time was fully occupied in
running to give notice and running back to retract it. She smoked in bed
and all over the house, and trailed into class heavily scented, laden
with jewels, beautiful, arrogant, scornful, to sit cross-legged upon the
floor watching the girls from under her heavily fringed lids. The third
day after her arrival she lounged into the room where Signor Enrico was
essaying to find a golden thread among a British damsel’s throaty vocal
chords, and, seizing a guitar from the wall, sang a passionate Arabian
love song in her glorious contralto until the whole house crept to the
door to listen and the professor tore his hair in rapture.
She sat up o’ nights for the best part of the first week brooding upon
the incident of the chicken bone and the insult with which Maria Oporto’s
derisive words had scorched her memory. So deeply did she resent the
incident, for so long did she brood, that she ended by hating the very
memory of Helen Raynor and her beauty and her influence over the house.
It is not wise to jest with the Arab, but it is absolutely fatal to hold
him up to ridicule. He will revenge the pleasantry at his expense sooner
or later, even if he has to wait for years or even a lifetime; even if he
has to leave this world with the task unaccomplished, handing it down as
a heritage to his children.
“_Savage!_” she said, as she watched the sunset on the first night of her
arrival. “_Savage!_ I will make that toad-faced daughter of a cross-eyed
she-camel eat her words mixed with bitterness before we part. I will make
them, all of them, the pale-faced daughters, the plank-bodied elders, the
miserable servants, acknowledge _me_ as queen in this barren dwelling
before my two years of prison are spent. I will make them forget the
English girl as though she had never been, and when I meet her again,
the haughty, contemptuous, Helen Raynor-r-r, for it is written that we
shall meet, I will make her wish that death had smitten her before the
crossing of our paths. By ——” She swore a mighty oath as the sun slipped
behind the far horizon; she repeated it at every sunset, and she kept it,
spurred to its fulfillment by Jane Cruikshanks, who tumbled to the one
way of making the girl walk upon the road which stretched in the contrary
direction to that primrose path of dalliance upon which she desired to
travel.
“Wait, my dear Amelia!” Jane said at the end of the first two tempestuous
months as she brushed her crisp hair, whilst Amelia voiced the
desirability of returning the girl to her father. “She is learning
slowly, but she is learning; I can see a difference already, although she
_is_ too proud to confess to room for improvement. When we find something
to _really_ interest her, _then_ we shall be secure. I told her she
was not quick enough to learn English. What is the result? She already
speaks a few words. I tell her she is too clumsily built to wear European
clothes. What do we see, or, rather, what do we not see? She wears a
riding corset, many sizes too big for her it is true, but she wears it,
also shoes with heels as high as the Great Pyramid. I repeat, we have but
to find something that will really interest her and she will not want to
leave us.”
The riding lessons proved the cure for the homesickness which overwhelmed
the Sheikh’s daughter.
She went out one morning to watch the riding-master put six of the girls,
and the hacks they rode more or less intelligently, through their paces,
and stayed to make rings round the man and to terrify the girls by the
marvellous stunts she performed on the master’s horse. She sent a courier
for her own stallion, a pure white, pure bred Nejdee, to receive instead
six mares which she presented to the Misses Cruikshanks as a gift from
her father, with the intimation that he made himself responsible for
their upkeep and stable fees.
She established a class of her own for special riding lessons, to which
she invited a chosen few; she secretly trained the least gentle of the
mares to buck and rear at the word “Oporto”; she lured Maria Oporto on
to the beast’s back and put the girl through half an hour which nearly
proved her end.
“It’s a pity you can’t stick on!” she cried scornfully when the
Portuguese fell at her feet in a sitting position and with a most
resounding thud. “You might learn to ride if you did. The mare’s
wonderful and beautiful and the dearest darling in the world, but you’ll
never, never, _never_ ride, you couldn’t, you’re a sack of potatoes,
that’s what you are, a sack of potatoes.”
The first shoot of the poisonous weed of revenge rooted in her heart.
Little by little she changed outwardly, until Amelia and Jane Cruikshanks
came to look upon her as one of their best pupils, plus a millionaire in
the way of a father.
“How beautifully she sits, and walks, and behaves at table,” said Amelia
to Jane as they watched Zarah in the grounds one morning in the middle of
her last term. “What a credit to us when she goes with the elder girls to
a theatre or a dance. How attractive to the opposite sex——”
“And yet, how dignified, almost scornful!”
“How beautiful in her European clothes, and how sweetly obedient in
wearing them and in only smoking three times a day, and then in the
seclusion of her bedroom.”
“Yes! But I am glad we allowed her to wear her native dress every morning
when she rides by herself on the Midan before anyone is about. One cannot
be too severe with an opening little heart like hers.”
“We shall be simply lost without her—how quick she is in her studies—how
generous——”
“Yes, indeed. Did you know that she found little Cissie Jenkins in tears
this morning and gave her a silver bracelet and a big box of Turkish
delight to comfort her?”
She hadn’t.
She had struck the child for no cause whatever, in a sudden flash
of the cruelty which had earned her her nickname, even amongst her
father’s savage followers, and which deep down, lay dormant, fierce and
terrible, under the veneer of breeding with which the deluded little
school-mistresses had plastered her. She had bribed the child to silence
with gifts, whilst longing to strike the podgy little face again; she
craved for the end of the term when she could tear the stifling European
clothes from her, eat with her fingers, sit cross-legged, and smoke all
day long if she so pleased.
One thing she had learned in her sojourn amongst the whites, which,
for a time, was to enable her to establish herself as a very ruler of
uncivilized men.
She had learnt the rudiments of self-control.
Where she had leapt blindly under the lash of her ungovernable temper,
she now waited, giving her crafty brain time to work; where she had once
stormed and raved, she now shrugged her shoulders and smiled with a “I
will give you my answer later. I must have time to think.”
Admired for her beauty, envied for her brilliance, liked for the
seemingly generous way in which she flung money to beggars and gifts to
all and sundry, yet she had failed to take Helen Raynor’s place in the
hearts of those who had known her, so that she cherished an incredible
hatred for the girl who had done her no harm whatever.
She stood on the verandah this morning, an hour before breakfast, waiting
for her _syce_ to bring her mare, staring across the grounds towards
the Midan where guests of the Hotel Savoy also waited for their horses;
stared without seeing them or Fate crouching under the cactus hedge which
separated the school grounds from the Midan.
She was almost at the zenith of her beauty, which, in the East, buds,
blossoms, and fades almost in the passing of an hour; she was infinitely
good to look upon, as thought the gardener who had gazed upon her the
first night of her arrival, as he peered in admiration at her from behind
a clump of shrubs this day—her last in the school if she had but known it.
She wore satin trousers so voluminous that they hung like a skirt when
she did not move; a full short-sleeved chiffon vest under a black velvet
bolero, sandals on her feet, a scarlet belt about her slim waist and an
orange-coloured flower in her rebellious curls.
As she stood waiting, she idly compared the men who had come as suitors
for her hand to her mountain home just over two years ago, with the
European men she had met in her short excursions into the world under the
wing of a schoolmate’s mother, stationed in Cairo.
She smiled and shrugged her shoulders and reached for a pomegranate into
which, knowing herself to be alone, she drove her teeth in none too
dainty a manner.
“Love,” she said, as she laughed. “What have I, who will one day rule, to
do with men? If love is to come to me, to me it will come. ‘Thy beloved
is the object that thou lovest, were it even a monkey.’” She laughed
again as she quoted the Arabian proverb. “_Kismet!_ let love come to me,
I will even conquer love!”
She spread her fingers against the Arab’s belief in the ill-luck of even
numbers as a clock struck six, and ran to the top of the steps at the
sound of shouting from the Midan.
Shouting and a scream and the thunder of a horse’s hoofs. She clapped
her hands in delight at the sound, knowing that a horse, with the bit
between its teeth, was heading straight for the cactus hedge and trouble;
thrilled from head to foot, and ran down the steps towards the spot
where, her desert-trained ear told her, the horse was making for; raised
herself on tiptoe and laughed aloud at the sight of the terrified,
riderless beast racing towards her.
“Blind and mad with fear,” she thought as she stood waiting.
Terror is just the one thing that will take a horse over a cactus hedge
with its dagger points as strong as steel; on ordinary occasions you may
use your spurs or your whip or try coaxing or deception, only to find
that your horse will rear or plunge or roll or stand stock still, shaking
with fear, rather than approach within yards of the deadly barrier.
Terrified by a newspaper which had been blown into its face by the
breeze, Bustard, thoroughbred stallion and Ralph Trenchard’s favorite
mount, had broken from his _syce_ and made for the open, heedless of the
prickly fence which stretched between the white thing that had jumped
from the ground and struck him across the eyes, and liberty.
Tucking his hindquarters well under, he cleared the hedge with a inch
to spare and landed magnificently by the side of the girl who, judging
to a nicety the infinitesimal pause which follows a landing, caught the
flowing mane and was into the saddle before the great beast had realized
that a human was anywhere near. Shouts of “_Wah-wah!_” and “By gad! well
done!” came from the Midan where the riders rode up to the hedge to see
what was happening, whilst those girls who were advanced enough in their
toilet tore from the school-house to witness this fresh escapade of the
Sheikh’s daughter.
Recognizing the stallion as a Nejdee, which, being translated, means
perfection in horseflesh, Zarah did not attempt to use the reins; she
rode with her knees, talking soothingly, calling the beautiful beast
by soft names in the language of his own country until, bit by bit, he
slackened from the runaway gallop to a canter, a canter to a trot, then
stopped dead a few yards away from the school gates.
Zarah looked over her shoulder and thrilled again; this time with a great
desire to show her power over horses to the onlookers, but especially to
her schoolmates, who seemed to think that life consisted of wearing the
right clothes and eating from the end of a fork.
She turned Bustard and took him at a canter to the place in the hedge
where the cactus was well hidden under a mass of creeper; she smiled
when, scenting mischief, he danced sideways and shook his handsome head,
and took him back over and over again, talking to him until at last he
stood quite still and tried to nibble the nearest leaf. By the same
token, if she had been by herself and wearing her golden spurs, she
would have raked the satiny sides with the needle points until she had
forced him over through sheer agony. Instead, aware of spectators, she
took him back to the far side of the grounds, turned him, called to him,
rode him at a thundering gallop at the hedge and lifted him magnificently
over, failing to notice what looked like an overhanging branch, but was
really a finger of Fate, which swept her out of the saddle and senseless
into Ralph Trenchard’s arms.
She opened her eyes and looked into the handsome face as he carried her
across the grounds. “You,” she said, raising her hand to touch a scar
upon his forehead, then smiled at the stirring of love in her heart. “I
knew you would come, for so it is written,” she whispered, and relapsed
into unconsciousness just as Jane Cruikshanks ran from the house,
followed by a stately Bedouin, who had been sent by the dying Sheikh to
fetch his daughter home.