Читать книгу Zarah the Cruel - Joan Conquest - Страница 7

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“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.