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 passed 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 hell."
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 ejaculated.
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.
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," Rayma said, her voice dropping to a whisper.
"Who is that?" Pansy asked quickly.
"One of the eunuchs who guards your room at night. He loves jewels beyond all things on earth. And surely the Sultan has given you plenty, although you never wear them."
The Sultan had given Pansy none, because he knew she would not accept them. But she had jewels of her own; one that would be bribe enough for anybody—the great diamond that had aroused her lover's comments one night in the moonlit garden of Grand Canary.
Pansy clutched at the mere idea of escape. Where she would escape to, she did not pause to consider. To escape she forgot his colour, his religion, his wild life, his treatment of her father, everything, except her own love for him.
"How do you know he'll let himself be bribed?" she asked.
"One of the women told me. He is her brother. I've spent days in trying to help you get away."
"Oh, Rayma, I can never thank you enough," Pansy said, hysterically grateful.
The Arab girl cast a spiteful glance at her, wondering why the other could not guess that it was her, Rayma's, one desire to get rid of her rival.
"Each night after dark you must open your door," the Arab girl went on. "There will come a night when only one of the guards will be here. Then, if you bribe him enough, he will let you pass."
Rayma did not imagine that Pansy would escape. She expected and hoped that she would be caught in the attempt. Judging by her desert standards, death would be the portion of any slave-girl who dared attempt to fly from her owner.
After that, every night when she was alone, Pansy opened the sandalwood door leading into the long, dark passage by which she had first entered the palace.
Then, one evening, she found only one of the jewelled guards there.
On seeing this, she closed the door again, and going to her jewel case got out the one big diamond.
From the gallery of her sumptuous prison she had gathered that beyond the rose garden lay the grounds of the Sultan's own quarters, where she had spent those three days prior to his unveiling. During that brief time she had noticed that, at night and during the heat of the day, the horses that browsed in the sun-scorched paddock were stabled in a long, low building at the far end of the scanty field. And she knew, too, that the iron gates by which she had entered the palace could not lie so very far away from the paddock.
With trembling hands and almost sick with anxiety and excitement, Pansy opened the door of her prison. She said nothing to the guard there. She merely held the gem towards him.
On seeing it, his eyes glittered covetously.
Without a word he took the diamond.
Pansy passed down the dim passage. She hardly knew how her feet took her along its ill-lit length. Every moment she expected to meet someone, or that one of the several doors leading into it would open, and her flight be brought to an abrupt end.
However, unchallenged she reached the iron gates.
A lamp flickering in a niche close by, showed her that one of the doors was slightly ajar. With shaking hands she pulled it further open and slipped out.
Outside all was silence and whiteness. Like a sea, the desert stretched away to a milky horizon. In a luminous vault the moon hung, a great round molten mass, that filled the world with a shimmer of silver.
Finding herself really beyond the palace precincts, took all strength from the girl. Hardly daring to breathe, she crept a few steps further, and leant against the city wall, to recover a little and get her bearings. Then, furtive as a shadow, she made her way towards a long, low building that showed up like a huge ebony block in the whiteness.
There were others as furtive as Pansy prowling round the city walls; jackals searching for offal, snarled at her as she passed along, slinking away and showing teeth that gleamed like ivory in the moonlight.
The first sound of them made her start violently, for she felt the Sultan's hand upon her, drawing her back to himself and captivity. But when she saw the prowlers were four-footed, she passed on, heedless of them, until the paddock fence was reached.
To climb over was a simple task. Then she ran swiftly across the grassy space; suddenly deadly afraid, not of the loneliness, but that the stable doors might be locked and she would not be able to carry out her project.
However, in El-Ammeh there were no thieves daring enough to steal the Sultan's horses, so the doors were never locked. They creaked ominously when Pansy opened them, filling the still night with harsh sounds—sounds that she felt must reach her captor's ears.
Inside, the stables were vaguely light with the rays of the moon that dripped in from high little windows. Fortunately for Pansy's plan it was the hour for the palace servants' evening meal, or there might have been half a dozen men in the building. As it was, there was only a long row of horses, each in separate stalls.
Pansy knew that if her protégé were there, he would answer to her call.
"Sultan," she said softly.
There was a whinny from a stall some twenty yards away. Guided by the sound she went in that direction.
It was the work of a few moments to unfasten the animal. But to Pansy it seemed an age. Her hands trembled as she fumbled at the halter, for she heard pursuit in every sound.
Then she led the animal out of the building, into the moonlight, and closed the door behind her.
She was an expert bare-back rider.
Leading the horse to the fence, she mounted. Then she trotted him back to the middle of the enclosure, and with voice and hand urged him towards the fence again.
In his old steeplechasing days, a hurdle the height of the rails had presented no difficulties to "The Sultan." And, even now, he took the fence at an easy bound.
Once over, it seemed to Pansy that the last obstacle between herself and freedom had been circumvented.
She leant forward, patting her horse encouragingly.
"Oh, Sultan," she said hysterically. "I don't mind where you take me, so long as I can get away from here."
Left to itself, after the manner of horses, the animal picked the route it knew the best; the sandy track along which the Sultan Casim generally took it for exercise.
For the first mile or so Pansy was conscious of nothing except that she had escaped—escaped from a love she could not conquer, a man she could not hate.
White and billowy the world lay around her, an undulating sea of sand with only one dark patch upon it, the city of El-Ammeh. The track the horse followed wound through tufted hillocks, mounds of silver in the moonlight. Here and there a stunted shrub cast black lines on the all-prevailing whiteness.
At the end of an hour Pansy discovered she was not the rider she once was. Her months of confinement had left her sadly "out of form." She was worn out with the exertion and the excitement of escape. It took all her skill to keep her seat on the horse. And the animal knew, for it slackened speed as a good horse will when conscious of a tired rider.
Others, also, seemed aware that something weak and helpless was abroad, and with the strange magnetism of the wild they were drawn towards the girl.
Here and there in the melting, misty distance, a dark form appeared, lopping along at a safe range, keeping pace with the old horse and its rider, every now and again glancing at the two with glaring green eyes, and calling one to another with shrieks of maniacal laughter.
Pansy hardly heard the hyenas. She was too intent on keeping her seat. But the horse heard them and he snorted with rage and fear.
As the miles sped by, the girl was aware of nothing except a desire to get further and further away from her lover, and to keep her seat on the horse.
Then she became aware of something else.
For the horse halted and she fell off, flat on the soft sand.
Shaken, but not hurt, she sat up and gazed around.
A little oasis had been reached, where date palms stood black against the all-prevailing silver, and a tiny spring bubbled with cheerful whisper.
When the Sultan took his namesake out for exercise, this was the extreme limit of their ride—the horse had been there once already that day—and in the shade of the date palms the man and the horse would rest awhile before returning to the city.
But Pansy knew none of these things. She only knew that valuable time was being lost sitting there on the ground. But it was such an effort to get up.
Green eyes had seen her fall as if dead. The hyenas crept stealthily forward to feast upon what lay helpless in the sand. But when she sat up they retreated, to squat on their haunches at a safe distance, and fill the night with demoniacal laughter.
The sound brought Pansy to her feet, swaying with fatigue. She had heard it before, around her father's camp in Gambia.
But it was one thing to hear the hyenas when there were thirty or more people between herself and them, and another now that she was quite alone in the desert, with no one to come to her aid.
The chorus of mad, mocking mirth brought fear clutching at her, a fear that the horse's wild snorts increased. She looked round sharply to find there were at least a dozen of the brutes on her trail.
It was not Pansy's nature to show fear, even though she felt it.
Going to the spring, she picked up several large stones, and threw them at the hyenas.
A note of fear crept into their hideous voices. They beat a swift retreat, melting away into distance. There was too much life left in the girl and horse for them to attack as yet.
Gathering her tired self together Pansy looked round for a rock high enough to enable her to mount by. As it happened there was none handy. Taking her horse by the mane, she led him from the oasis. Somewhat protestingly he went.
Pansy had to stagger on for nearly a mile on foot, in the deep, fatiguing sand, before she could find a tussock high enough to mount by.
Once on, she left the route to her horse.
To the uninitiated, one portion of the desert looks very similar to another. And the girl had no idea that the horse was retracing his steps, making his way slowly and laboriously back to El-Ammeh.
She had not the strength left even to look around her. The hot night, the long ride, the sickly excitement attached to escaping, the thirst that now raged within her, and the final tiring walk, after months of inactivity, had told upon her. Utterly worn out, she just managed to keep her seat, in a world that had become a place of aching weariness, through which there rang occasional wild shrieks of laughter.
Then it became impossible to cling on any longer.
All at once, she fell off and stayed in the sand, half stunned by her fall, conscious of nothing except that she had escaped from the Sultan Casim Ammeh.
When she fell the horse stopped. He stretched a long neck and sniffed and sniffed at her. But since she did not get up, he did not leave her. He waited until she was ready to start off again, quite glad of the rest himself.
However, there was not to be much rest for him.
A shriek of diabolical laughter rang out at his very heels. With a snort of fear and rage, he lashed out. The laughter turned into a howl of pain, and one of the hyenas retreated on three legs, with a broken shoulder.
But there were twenty or more of them now, against one old horse and a girl too utterly exhausted to know even that her life was in danger. And each of the hyenas had a strength of jaw that could break the thigh of an ox, and a cowardice of heart equalled only by their strength.
For sometime they circled round, watching their prey with ravenous, glaring green eyes, and every now and again one or the other made a forward rush, only to find those iron heels between it and its meal. The horse understood being baited in this manner, by foes just beyond his reach. It had been part of the hell the girl he guarded had rescued him from.
As time went on, the hyenas grew bolder.
Once they rushed in a body. But they retreated. One with a broken jaw, one with a mouthful of live flesh torn from "The Sultan's" flank, and one did not retreat at all. It lay with its skull smashed in, its brains bespattering the horse's hoofs—hoofs over which now a red stream oozed, filling the hot night air with the smell of live blood.
A desperate battle raged in the lonely desert under the white light of the moon. A battle that filled the night with the mad mirth of hyenas, and the wild shrieks of a frightened, hurt, infuriated horse—"The Sultan"—fighting as he had fought that day in the East End of London when Pansy had first come across him. But fighting for her life as well as his own, against the cowards that beset him.
The sound of that desperate conflict rang through the stillness of the night, reaching the ears of a man who was riding at break-neck speed along the sandy track leading in the direction of the oasis. Those diabolical shrieks of laughter filled him with a torture of mind almost past bearing. In them he heard the voices of hyenas mangling the girl he loved.
Le Breton had always known Pansy would run away if an opportunity occurred. But he had imagined that he had made escape impossible.
After dinner, he went to the gilded room, to pay an evening visit to his prisoner, since business affairs had kept him from dining with her.
However, she was not there.
Experience had taught him that it would be no use looking for her in the moonlit, rose-scented garden. She never went there after sunset, for fear he should come across her, and the beauty and romance of it all, combined with his presence, should force the surrender he was waiting for.
Not finding Pansy in her own private quarters, he went into the big hall of the harem, only to be told she had not been there since well before dinner.
On learning this he set the women searching in every corner of the harem. But Pansy was nowhere to be found.
Beyond a doubt, she had managed to escape. For a moment the news dazed him. He did not waste time in trying to discover how she had escaped, or who was responsible for her getting away. She had gone. That one fact glared at him. No one knew better than the Sultan himself the dangers awaiting the girl once she strayed beyond his care.
Within a few minutes all his servants and soldiers were out looking for the fugitive, scouring the city, with threats of the dire fate awaiting anyone who dared either hide or injure the Sultan's wife.
A hasty search brought no trace of the girl, but one of the search parties learnt that a horse was missing from the royal stables.
On hearing this the Sultan went at once to the stables, looking for a clue there. The missing horse was Pansy's. The discovery sent a sudden glow of hope coursing through him. It argued that somehow or other she had managed to reach the stables and had set out into the desert.
The Sultan understood horses, even better, it seemed to him now, than he understood women. Left to its own devices the old horse would go the way it knew the best; the way he generally took it. And left to itself it was almost certain to be, since its rider had no knowledge of any of the sandy tracks that lay around the city.
Within a few moments he was on the swiftest of his own horses, riding with all speed towards the oasis; but not before leaving orders with his officers to scour the desert in every direction.
He had ridden perhaps five miles when into the stealthy hiss of the sand another sound came. At first so far away that it was but a distant moan in the night. As he tore on rapidly it grew louder, developing into a chorus of hideous laughter, the cry of hyenas howling round their prey.
Desert reared, instinctively he knew there must be at least twenty of them.
When, above the mêlée he heard the terrorized screams of a horse, a deadly fear clutched him. Where the horse was, the girl was. And the sound told him the two had been attacked.
Around Pansy the ghastly conflict was raging. Around her mangled corpse, perhaps.
He suffered all the tortures of the damned, as with spur and crop he urged the great stallion onwards, until the animal was a lather of sweat and foam.
The hyenas heard the throb of those approaching hoofs, and fear gripped their cowardly hearts.
The disconcerting noise grew speedily louder. On the whiteness of the lonely desert a dark patch appeared; a patch that rapidly became bigger and headed straight towards them.
It was one thing to attack a tired old horse and a half-stunned girl, but another to face a huge black stallion and the big man in the white burnoose who rode it.
The hyenas did not face the combination. With a weird howl of disappointment, they turned tail suddenly and scuttled away into the desert, leaving the old horse shivering with relief and pain and exhaustion.
The feeling of someone touching her made Pansy open her eyes. Into her hazy world her captor's face intruded. He was half-kneeling on the sand beside her, examining her limbs, feeling her heart, to see if she were injured in any way.
For a moment Pansy could not believe her eyes.
Then she put out a weak hand to push him away. But a push did not remove him. He was still there, in white cloak and hood; a desert chief who wanted to marry her. Big and solid he knelt beside her, a fact not to be escaped from. And his hand was on her bosom as if to steal the heart she would not give him.
Satisfied Pansy was not hurt in any way, the Sultan got to his feet, and turned towards the horse. It needed more attention than the girl.
He petted and patted the worn-out shivering animal, talking to it in a deep, caressing voice, as he bound up its gaping wounds with lengths torn from his own white garments.
Then he lifted the girl on his own horse, and, mounting himself, set out on a slow walk towards his city.
Pansy made a feeble struggle when she found herself in his arms, her head resting against his shoulder, held in a tight, possessive grip.
"So, little flower, you would still try to escape from me," he said in a fierce, fond manner. "But I don't let love go so lightly."
He ignored her struggles as he talked to and encouraged the old horse that hobbled along by their side, with stiff, painful steps.
As the slow journey went on, Pansy fell asleep against the strength that held her.
The Sultan was quick to note this, and he smiled at the small tired face on his shoulder. He knew the nature of the girl he held. It would be impossible for her to go to sleep in any man's arms except those of the man she loved. She was very foolish to fight against him, but fight she would until he used his strength and ended the battle. An uneven contest the last round would be, with no doubt as to who would be the victor.
On a wide ottoman in her room Pansy lay. The golden lamps were burning low, casting black shadows on the gilded walls of her cage. Through the open arches the moonlight streamed, pouring in from a misty, mystic world where trees sighed vaguely in a silvered air.
Early that morning the Sultan had brought Pansy back to the palace. Since then she had seen nothing of him.
She brooded on her attempt to escape, which had only ended in her being more of a prisoner than ever. The guards about the entrance of her quarters had been doubled. The door leading into the harem was locked. Alice had been removed, her place taken by an Arab woman who would not or could not understand a word Pansy said to her.
Sleepless she lay among the silken cushions, brooding on the life that had once been hers; a life so remote from her present one that it might never have been.
It was impossible to believe that far beyond this desert city there lay a place called London, where she had been free as air, where she could come and go as she pleased, where she had dined and danced and lunched and visited. A world of dreams, remote, unreal, lost to her for ever, where she had been Pansy Langham, fêted and courted, with society at her feet. Now she was a sultan's slave, a chattel, her very life dependent on a barbaric ruler's whim.
On what punishment would be doled out to her for her attempt to get away, she next brooded. There had been such a set, determined expression on her captor's face when he brought her back to her prison.
The sound of someone coming towards her apartment broke in on her dreary reverie. It was close on midnight. She had never been disturbed at that hour before.
She looked up quickly.
The third door of her room was opening; one that had never opened before; a door the harem girls had told her led to the Sultan's private suite. And the Sultan, himself, was entering. The Sultan attired as she had never seen him before—in silk pyjamas.
Pansy started to her feet. She stood slight and white and silken-clad against the golden walls; her heart beating with a sickly force that almost choked her; her eyes wide with fear.
The end had come with a suddenness she was not prepared for.
He crossed to her side; tenderness and determination on his face; love and passion in his eyes.
For a moment there was silence.
"So, Pansy," he said at length. "You've tried to solve the problem your way. Now I'm going to solve it mine. You've fought against love quite long enough, against yourself and against me. I'm going to end the fight between us. To-night, my little slave, you sleep within my arms and learn all that love means."
At his words a flood of crimson swept over her strained face. She had but a vague idea of what was before her, but instinct told her it was something she must fight against.
Her gaze went to the arches, as if in search of some way of escape there. There was none. Only the white stars looked in coldly, and night breathed on her, soft and sensuous.
He knew where her thoughts were, and he laughed softly.
"There's no escape this time, Pansy," he said.
The fear in her eyes deepened. Wildly she searched round in her head for a way of getting rid of him for the time being. And only one course presented itself.
"I ... I'll marry you," she stammered.
"We'll be married by all means, if you wish, as soon as I can find a man to do the job. But you've been just a little too long in making up your mind. My patience is worn out."
In her determination to live up to her own standards—standards that had no value in this desert city:—Pansy saw she had tried this half-tamed man too far.
He came closer, and held out his arms.
"Come, my little flower," he whispered passionately.
Quickly she moved further away from the arms that would have held her.
"Won't you come willingly?" he asked, in soft, caressing tones. "Do you still refuse me the love I want, and which I know is mine?"
"I don't want you or your love," she cried wildly, frantic at the knowledge of her own helplessness.
He laughed with a touch of fierceness.
"What cruel words to throw at your lover! But since you won't come, my little slave, then—I must take you."
He would have taken her there and then, but with a swift movement she avoided him.
Then Pansy ran, as she had run from him once before, like a white wraith in the moonlight. But this time he followed.
There were no electric lights and ragtime band to run to now. Only a moonlit garden full of the scent of roses. There was no crowd of people to give her shelter, only the deep shadows of the cypresses.
In the darkness she paused, out of breath, hoping he would not see her. A vain hope. His eyes had learnt to pierce the gloom. She was in his arms almost before she knew it.
There was a brief, uneven struggle, as Pansy fought against a man who knew no law except his own desires.
Weak and weeping she collapsed against him, on a heart that leapt to meet her.
There was a stone seat near. On it the Sultan seated himself, the girl in his arms. And in the scented, sighing silence he tried to soothe the tears his methods had roused.
And trembling she lay against the passion and power that held her, refusing to be comforted.
"There's nothing to weep about, my darling," he whispered. "Sooner or later you have to learn that I'm your master. Just as you've taught me that all women are not ripe fruit, willing and anxious to fall into my hands. And I must have some closer tie between us since love alone won't keep you from running away from me."
Pansy's tears fell all the faster. For now it seemed her own doings were responsible for this crisis.
He sat on, waiting until the storm was over.
The tremors of the slight form that lay against his heart, so helpless yet so anxious not to do wrong, struck through the fire and passion in the man, to what lay beneath—true love and protection.
Presently he kissed the strained, tear-stained face pillowed against his shoulder.
"It's like old times to be sitting in the moonlight and among the roses, with you in my arms," he said, all at once.
"Do you remember, Pansy, that sweet night in Grand Canary? But you were not weeping then. Why are you now, my little slave? Because a Sultan loves you more than his life? More than anything that has been in his life. You're not very flattering. But then, you never were."
He paused for a moment, watching her tenderly.
"Yet you paid me the greatest compliment I ever had in my life. When you said you loved me. There could be no sweeter music that those words. And the choicest gift life has ever given me was a kiss from your lips, given willingly."
He bent his head.
"Won't you give me another, Pansy?"
But the girl's strained face was turned away from the proud, passionate one so close to her own.
"No, my little flower? Will you make a thief of your Sultan? Will you give him nothing willingly now? I know I don't deserve it. But still—I want it. And my wants have been my only law so far."
Again he paused, stroking her curls with a loving hand.
"Just now, as man and woman together, Pansy, I know I don't deserve you. I know I'm not worthy of you. But I want my soul, although I've only a blackened body to offer it. And the soul will have to do the best it can with the grimy accommodation. For I must have you, my darling. You've taken everything out of my life, but a desire for you."
From a tangle of trees in an adjacent garden a nightingale burst into song, filling the night with liquid melody. At the sound the Sultan's arms tightened around the slender figure he held.
"No man appreciates virtue so much as the one who has had his fill of vice," he continued presently. "And I was born into it, steeped and sodden in it from my earliest recollection, until I didn't realise it was vice until I met you. And then it seemed to me I had run off the lines, and pretty badly."
As he sat talking and caressing her, Pansy's sobs died down. There was always magic in his touch, happiness within his arms. With throbbing heart she lay against him, watching him anxiously.
He smiled into the tired, purple eyes.
"No, perhaps, I won't be a thief," he said. "Perhaps I shall climb up and up with many a stumble to the clear heights where you are, my darling. What would you say if you saw me there? 'Here is a poor wretch who has climbed painfully upwards to touch the feet of his ideal,' you would say to yourself. And to me you would say, 'As a reward, will you come and have breakfast with me?' And I should come, like a shot. And I should want lunch and tea and dinner and—you. Just you, my soul, always and for ever."
After this outburst, he was quiet.
Passive within his arms Pansy waited for the last hopeless struggle for right against wrong.
He sat on, as if at peace with himself and the world. The restless look that always lurked in his eyes had gone; in its place was one of happiness and contentment.
Pansy's shivers roused him from his reverie. Not shivers of fear, but of chilliness. A heavy dew had started falling, bringing a sudden coolness into the night.
"Why, Heart's Ease," he said, full of concern. "I'm keeping you out here when you ought to be indoors. But with you in my arms, I forget everything but you."
Getting to his feet, he took her back to the gilded room. The lamps had burnt out. It was a place of deep shadows, and here and there the silver of the moon patched its golden richness.
Once within its dimness Pansy started struggling again.
He took the slim white hands into one of his own, and kissed them.
"There's no need for you to fight against me with weak little hands," he whispered. "There's another fighting for you, far stronger than you are. A new Raoul Le Breton of your making, Pansy. A man strong enough to wait until we're really married."
Laying his burden on a couch, he bent his head until his ear almost touched the girl's lips.
"Say 'Yes,' Pansy, and I'll go, 'nicely and quietly like a good boy,' still remembering 'your reputation,'" he said in a teasing tone.
Into his ear "Yes" trembled.
He kissed the lips that at last had consented to his wishes.
"Good night, my little girl, and if you go on at this rate you'll make a white man of me yet."
Long after he had gone Pansy stayed brooding on his words. The battle between them was over at last.
On one of the terraces of his palace the Sultan sat at breakfast. As he lingered in the sweet cool air of early morning, he pondered on the happenings of the night before.
At last he had wrung a reluctant consent from his cherished prisoner.
There was a flaw in his victory that he tried not to see. That "Yes" would not have come except that the girl had been absolutely cornered. The word had not come from her lips spontaneously as those three words, "I love you," had.
He tried to forget this fact, as he thought out the best means of bringing about a speedy wedding.
There was no minister of her faith in El-Ammeh. The nearest Christian Mission lay at least two hundred miles distant. It would be risky work bringing a white missionary to his city. The safest course would be to take her down to a mission station and marry her there. No one would know then where they had come from. And the journey back would make a delightful honeymoon.
On the delights of that honeymoon he pondered.
From his reverie he was rudely aroused by a sound which made marriage seem very remote, and death much more likely to be his portion.
There was a sudden shriek high above the city, followed by a deafening roar, as a shell exploded over El-Ammeh—a command for its surrender.
The Sultan started to his feet, his face reckless and savage. The cup was at his lips only to be dashed away.
He knew what had happened.
Somehow or other the French Government must have heard that he was responsible for the capture of the English Governor; and an expedition had been sent up to punish him for his marauding ways.
That same death-dealing sound startled Pansy as she stood by the sunken pond in the rose garden, feeding the carp. Wondering what had happened, she looked up at the smoke that lay like a little cloud between the city and the sky.
She did not wonder for very long.
Present another shell came shrieking out of the distance.
Then she guessed what had occurred, and her face blanched.
Swiftly she went to her room; her only idea to reach the Sultan and save him from his enemies.
But all the doors of her prison were locked, and neither knocks nor shouts produced any answer.
She went back to the fretted gallery, to see what could be seen from there.
A mile or so away, like a dark snake on the desert, she saw the relief party. As she watched, a white-robed force left El-Ammeh; an array of Arab soldiers. On recognising their leader, her soul went sick within her.
He was there. Her lover. The man she ought to hate. Going out to fight the men who had come to her rescue.
If the French officers heading the expeditionary force imagined the Sultan of El-Ammeh had come out to surrender, they quickly discovered their mistake.
He had come out to fight; and what was more, fight well and recklessly against a force that, if inferior in numbers, was vastly superior in arms.
Presently the shells no longer shrieked above El-Ammeh. They were aimed at it.
From her gallery Pansy saw the two forces meet.
Then she could look no longer. Men fell in the sand and rose no more. And any one of them might be her lover.
She went back to her room and crouched there in terror; her father and friends all forgotten at the thought of the man who might be lying dead in the sand.
As the morning wore on, the din of battle grew nearer. Every now and again a shell got home. There were screams of terrified people; the heavy fall of masonry; the moans and cries of the injured.
Once Pansy thought her end had come.
A shell struck the palace. The place rocked to its foundations. There was the thunder of falling masonry as if the four walls of her room were crashing down upon her.
She closed her eyes and waited.
A few moments later she opened them, and was surprised to find her gilded prison very little damaged. It was badly cracked, and several blocks of stone had crashed down from the ceiling, one on the sandalwood bureau near where she crouched, smashing it to splinters and scattering the contents about her feet.
More than once Pansy had rummaged in its scented recesses, until she knew its contents by heart. She had found nothing but a few quills, sheets of paper yellow with age, and quaint, cut-crystal bottles in which the coloured inks had dried. She knew the desk had belonged to the Sultan's mother. Just as she knew the gilded room had been the French girl's prison.
As she gazed at the debris at her feet, it seemed she could not have searched thoroughly. Among the splinters was something she had not seen before. A few sheets of paper folded flat and tied with a strand of silk, that must have been hidden behind one of the many drawers.
More to get her thoughts away from the battle raging round her than anything else, Pansy picked up the tiny packet. Untying the silk, she opened the faded, scented sheets and glanced at them.
After the first glance, she stayed riveted. And as she read on, she forgot everything except what the letter said.
It was in French, in a woman's hand, and the date was now more than twenty years old; a statement written by Annette Le Breton before she died, proclaiming her son's real identity, and left by her in the bureau. Some servant rummaging in the desk for trinkets, after her mistress's death, must have let it slip behind one of the numerous drawers.
Pansy read of Colonel Raoul Le Breton's ill-fated expedition to the north-east; how he and his little force had been murdered by the Sultan Casim Ammeh. She learnt of Annette Le Breton's fate at the hands of her savage captor. Of the son who had come nearly nine months after her husband's death—the son the Sultan Casim Ammeh imagined to be his.