Читать книгу A Son of the Sahara - Louise Gerard - Страница 6

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The city of El-Ammeh lies about a hundred miles within the Sahara proper. It is a walled town of Moorish aspect, built of brown rock and baked mud. Within the walls is a tangle of narrow, twisted, squalid lanes—a jumble of flat-roofed houses, practically devoid of windows on the sides overlooking the streets. Here and there a minaret towers, and glimpses of strange trees can be seen peeping over walled gardens.

Along one side stands a domed palace; a straggling place, with horse-shoe arches, stone galleries and terraces. In front of it a blue lake spreads, surrounded by fertile gardens and groves of fruit trees. And the whole is encircled by the desert.

Annette Le Breton remembered nothing of her journey to El-Ammeh. Her life was a nightmare of horror that held nothing but her husband's murderer, whom she could not escape from. She was taken to the palace, and placed in the apartment reserved for the Sultan's favourite. A big room with walls and floor of gold mosaic, furnished with ottomans, rugs and cushions, and little tables and stools of carved sandalwood inlaid with ivory and silver.

On one side of the apartment a series of archways opened on a screened and fretted gallery, at the end of which a flight of wide, shallow steps led down into a walled garden, a dream of roses.

But it was weeks before Annette knew anything of this.

All day long she lay, broken and suffering, on one of the ottomans, and dark-faced women fawned upon her, saying words she could not understand; women who looked at her queerly, jealously, and talked about her among themselves.

A strange girl, this new fancy of the Sultan's! Who wanted none of the things he piled upon her—not even his love. A girl who looked as though life were a mirage; as if she moved in bad dreams,—a listless girl, beautiful beyond any yet seen in the harem, who seemed to have neither idea nor appreciation of the honour that was hers; who lay all day in silence, her only language tears. Tears that even the Sultan could not charm away.

In fact they seemed to fall more quickly and hopelessly when he came to see her.

Yet he did everything that mortal man could do to comfort her.

Jewels were showered upon her; jewels she refused to wear, to look at even; casting them from her with weak, angry hands, when her women would have decked her with them for her master's coming.

And never before were so many musicians, singers, dancers, and conjurors sent to the women's apartments. Hardly a day passed without bringing some such form of diversion; or merchants with rare silks, perfumes and ostrich feathers. The harem had never had such a perpetual round of amusements.

All for this new slave-girl. And she refused to be either amused or interested. She would look neither at the goods nor the entertainers. She just stayed with her face turned towards the wall and wept.

One day when the Sultan came to the harem to visit his new favourite, some of the older women drew him aside and whispered with him.

They suspected they had found a reason for the girl's strange behaviour.

Their words sent the Sultan from the big hall of the harem to the gilded chamber set aside for Annette, with hope in his savage heart, and left him looking down at her with a touch of tenderness on his cruel face.

He laid a dark hand on the girl, caressing her fondly.

"Give me a son, my pearl," he whispered. "Then my cup will be full indeed."

Annette shuddered at his touch.

She had no idea what he said. He and his language were beyond her.

As the long weeks ground out their slow and dreary course, Annette grew to suspect what her attendants now knew.

The weeks became months and Annette languished in her captor's palace; her only respite the times he was away on some marauding expedition. He loved rapine and murder, and was never happy unless dabbling in blood. Sometimes he was away for weeks together, killing and stealing, bringing slaves for the slave-market of his city, and fresh women for his harem.

During one of his absences Annette's baby arrived.

The child came a week or so before the women had expected it.

"The girl has wept so much," they said, "that her son has come before his time, to see what his mother's tears are about. And now, if Allah is kind, let us hope the child will dry them."

For a fortnight Annette was too ill to know even that she had a son.

When the baby was brought to her, she hardly dared look at it, not knowing what horror might have come from those ghastly nights spent with the Sultan Casim Ammeh.

But when she looked, it was not his face, dark and cruel, that looked back at her.

In miniature, she saw the face of Raoul Le Breton!

This son of hers did not owe his life to the Sultan. He was a legacy from her murdered husband. Something that belonged to her lost life.

With a wild sob of joy, Annette held out weak arms for her baby. Weeping she strained the mite to her breast, baptizing it with her tears. Tears of happiness this time.

Light and love had come into her life again. For Raoul was not dead. He had come back to her. Weak and tiny he lay upon her heart, hers to love and cherish.

She was lying on her couch one day, too absorbed in tracing out each one of her dead lover's features in the tiny face pillowed on her breast, to notice what was happening, when the voice she dreaded said in a fierce, fond manner:

"So, Pearl of my Heart, you love my son, even if you hate me."

Annette did not know what the Sultan said. But she held her child closer, watching its father's murderer with fear and loathing; afraid that he might put his dark, defiling hands upon her treasure.

But he did not attempt to touch either her or the child.

Seating himself at her side, he stayed watching her, tenderness on his cruel face, for the first time having pity on her weakness. The weakness of the woman who had given him the one thing his savage heart craved for, and which, until now, had been denied him—a son.