CHAPTER XLII
And the full force of the storm crashed about Jill's defenceless head at the midday hour also of the same day, when she ought to have been searching the coolness of her midday sleeping chamber, and forgetfulness of the last few hours in sleep.
Not quite defenceless was she, however, as she sat back in the chair, her eyes ablaze and her veil torn to shreds at her feet, ripping the moral atmosphere with words which seemed to have been dipped in some corrosive verbal fluid. She was angry, hurt, and deathly tired, and was doing her best to pass some of her mental suffering anyway on to the man who leant with folded arms against the cedar wall.
The inevitable crisis had come!
The independence of Western womanhood had clashed with the Eastern ideas on the privacy and seclusion of the gentler sex. Jill simply could not understand that there was any cause for the terrible jealousy which had suddenly blazed up in the Arab when she had innocently repeated her request to be allowed to see her old friend; Hahmed was as incapable of understanding the request, having failed in his sojourn in the West to fully realise the everyday kind of jolly, good, frank camaraderie which can exist between certain types of English man and woman.
Half a word of tenderness, half a gesture of love, and she would have been sobbing or laughing happily in his arms, but like a prairie fire before the wind, the terrible Eastern rage was blazing through the man, too fierce, too terrific to allow him to analyse the situation, or remember that the upbringing of his girl-wife had been totally different to that of the women of his country.
Jill suddenly sat forward, clasping one slim ankle across her knee in a slim hand, a position she knew perfectly well would rouse Hahmed to a frenzy, and spoke slowly and mockingly in English instead of the pretty lisping Arabic which always entranced him.
"You may lecture, and remonstrate, and admonish, which all comes to the same thing, until night falls, but you will never make me see eye to eye with you in this. It is simply absurd to threaten that you will shut me in my apartments until I learn reason. If you lock me in, or place guards about me, I will jump from the roof and gain my freedom by breaking my neck. Why Jack Wetherbourne—oh———"
Hahmed had leant forward, and gripping her by the shoulders had very suddenly, and not over gently, jerked her to her feet, holding her by the strength of his hands alone, as she desperately tried to liberate herself.
"Let me go, Hahmed! let me go! You are hurting me dreadfully. You must not hurt me—you must not bruise me. Oh! you don't understand!"
She struggled furiously and unavailingly, resorting at last to cruelty to gain her end.
"Let me go, Hahmed! Take your hands away—I—I hate to feel them upon me!"
He let her go, pushing her away from him ever so slightly, so that she stumbled against the chair, cracking her ankle-bone, that tenderest bit of anatomical scaffolding, against a projecting piece of ornamental wood.
It was a case of injury added to insult, and she crouched back furious in her physical hurt as she tore the silken covering from her arms, where already showed faint bruises above the little tattoo mark showing itself so black against the white skin, and upon which she put her finger.
"Oh! who would have thought when you tattooed that, Jack——!"
But she stood her ground and shrugged her naked shoulders irritatingly when Hahmed crossed the dividing space in a bound with his hand upon the hilt of his dagger.
"Bi—smi—llah! what sayest thou? This mark upon the fairness of thy arm which I have thought a blemish, and therefore have not questioned thee thereon—sayest thou it is a dakkh, what thou callest a tattoo mark? And if so what has it to do with the man whose name is unceasingly upon thy lips?"
Jill stood like a statue of disdain.
"What is the matter now, Hahmed? Please understand that I will not tolerate such continual fault-finding any longer! That is a tattoo mark of a pail of water—you may not know that we have a rhyme in England which begins like this:
"Jack and Jill went up a hill
To fetch a pail of water!"
Oh! shades of ancient Egypt, did you ever hear or see anything so pathetically absurd as Jill as she solemnly repeated the old doggerel.
"That makes no difference—a pail of water or the outline of a flower—did this man—this—this Jack make the mark upon thee?"
Jill hesitated for a second and then answered with a glint in her eye.
"Yes! he did—and he did Mary too—put the dinkiest little heart on her arm—we were under the cherry tree in the vegetable———!"
"Go!" suddenly thundered the Arab.
And Jill, gathering her raiment about her for departure, turned to look straight into the man's eyes, whilst her heart, in spite of the little scornful smile which twisted the corner of her mouth, leapt with the love which had blossomed a hundredfold under the torrent of jealousy, wrath, and mastery which he had poured forth upon her during the last hour.
"Behold! art thou weak," she said sweetly in his own tongue, "having not the strength to kill that which offends thee. 'Thou shalt not know this man, or any other man,'" she mocked, quoting his words, "and yet canst thou not break me to thy will! Of a truth, I have no further use for thee in thy weakness!"
But Hahmed's control had only been slightly cracked, so that he merely pointed to the curtain which divided Jill's quarters from the rest of the house.
"Go!" he said simply, "go to thy apartment, wherein thou shalt stay until thou seest good to come to me in obedience and love. Thou shalt not go forth except to the gardens; neither shall thy friends visit thee, neither shalt thou climb to the roof; and thou shalt obey me—many, aye, many a woman were dead for far less than this thy disobedience—but thou—thou art too beautiful to kill, except with love—go!"
And Jill went, with beautiful head held high, heart throbbing from love, and blood pounding in her ears from downright rage.
"I will not obey you! I shall do exactly as I wish!" she proclaimed, with the curtain in her hand. In which she was mistaken, for the simple fact that love held her fast.
And the curtain swinging to hide her from the Arab, as she stood for one moment holding out her arms toward him; and for the same reason she did not see him pick up her torn, scented veil, to thrust it between his inner silken vest and his sorely perturbed heart.