The Sheik

"You didn't suppose you were the first, did you?" he asked with brutal candour. "Don't look at me like that. They were not like you, they came to me willingly enough—too willingly. Allah! How they bored me! I tired of them before they tired of me."

She flung her arm across her eyes with a dry sob, straining away from him. She had never thought of that. In the purity of her mind it had never occurred to her. She was only one of many, one of a succession of mistresses, taken and discarded at his whim. She writhed with the shame that filled her. "Oh, you hurt me!" she whispered very low, and then anger killed all other feeling. He had loosened his arm about her and she wrenched herself free and sprang to her feet. "I hate you, do you understand? I hate you! I hate you!"

He lit a cigarette leisurely before answering and moved into a more comfortable position on the divan. "So you have already told me this afternoon," he said at length coolly, "and with reiteration your remark becomes less convincing, ma cherie."

Her anger ebbed away. She was too tired to be angry. She was humiliated and hurt, and the man before her had it in his power to hurt her more, but she was at his mercy and to-night she could not fight. She pushed the hair off her forehead with a heavy sigh and looked at the Sheik's long length stretched out on the couch, the steely strength of his limbs patent even in the indolent attitude in which he was lying, at his brown handsome face, inscrutable as it always was to her, and the feeling of helplessness came back with renewed force and with it the sense of her own pitiful weakness against his force, compelling her to speak. "Have you never felt pity for a thing that was weaker than yourself? Have you never spared anything or any one in all your life? Have you nothing in your nature but cruelty? Are all Arabs hard like you?" she said shakily. "Has love never even made you merciful?"

He glanced up at her with a harsh laugh, and shook his head. "Love? Connais pas! Yes, I do," he added with swift mockery, "I love my horses."

"When you don't kill them," she retorted.

"I am corrected. When I don't kill them."

There was something in his voice that made her reckless, that made her want to hurt him. "If you give no love to the—the women whom you bring here, do you give love to the women of your harem? You have a harem, I suppose, somewhere?" she braved him with curling lip and scornful voice, but as she spoke she knew that she had only hurt herself and her voice faltered.

His hand reached out suddenly and he dragged her down into his arms again with a laugh. "And if I have, are you jealous? What if the nights I spent away from you were passed in my harem—what then?"

"Then may Allah put it into the heart of one of your wives to poison you so that you never come back," she said fiercely.

"Allah! So beautiful and so bloodthirsty," he said in bantering reproof. Then he turned her face up to his, smiling into her angry eyes with amusement. "I have no harem and, thanks be to Allah, no wives, cherie. Does that please you?"

"Why should I care? It is nothing to me," she replied sharply, with a vivid blush.

He held her closer, looking deeply into her eyes, holding them as he could when he liked, in spite of her efforts to turn them away—a mesmerism she could not resist.

"Shall I make you care? Shall I make you love me? I can make women love me when I choose."

She went very white and her eyes flickered. She knew that he was only amusing himself, that he was utterly indifferent to her feelings, that he did not care if she hated or loved him, but it was a new form of torture that was more detestable than anything that had gone before it. It infuriated her that he could even suggest that she could come to care for him, that she could ever look on him as anything but a brutal savage who had committed a hideous outrage, that she could ever have any feeling for him except hatred and loathing. That he should class her with the other women he spoke of revolted her, she felt degraded, soiled as she had never done before, and she had thought that she had felt the utmost humiliation of her position.

The colour rushed back into her face. "I would rather you killed me," she cried passionately.

"So would I," he said drily, "for if you loved me you would bore me and I should have to let you go. While as it is"—he laughed softly—"as it is I do not regret the chance that took me into Biskra that day."