CHAPTER XV
Considering it was nearly two in the morning before Le Breton would let Pansy out of his arms, he did not expect her to be out and about at six o'clock for her usual ride. Nevertheless, he looked in at the hotel at that hour and then rode on, indulging in blissful daydreams.
He knew Pansy had no idea who he really was. He was prepared to marry her according to her creed, for her sake to put aside the fierce profligate religion the late Sultan Casim Ammeh had instilled into him.
And he was prepared to do very much more than this.
In spite of his colossal pride in his sultanship and his desert kingdom, he knew that if Pansy got an inkling of that side of his life his case would be hopeless. His one idea was to keep all knowledge of the supposed Arab strain in him from her. The sultanship could go, his kingdom be but a source of income. He would buy a house in Paris. They would settle down there, and he would become wholly the European she imagined him to be.
Full of a future that held nothing but the English girl to whom; he was betrothed, and a desire to keep from her all knowledge of his dark, savage heritage, at least until it would be too late for her to draw back, Le Breton rode on, rejoicing in the early morning freshness that reminded him of the girl he loved.
On returning to the villa he interviewed the head gardener. Then he went to the library to write a note and tie up the package he was sending to Pansy; and from there down to breakfast, a solitary meal with no companion save a few purple pansies smiling at him from a crystal vase.
As he sat at his light repast one of his Arab servants entered with a note on a beaten-gold salver.
Le Breton took it.
On the envelope was just his name, written in a pretty, girlish hand. Although he had never seen Pansy's writing before, he guessed it was hers. A tender smile hovered about his hard mouth as he opened it.
What had she to say to him, this slim, winsome girl, who held his fierce heart in her small white hands? Some fond reply, no doubt, in return for his gifts and flowers. Thanks and words of love that she could not keep until he went round to see her.
There were many things Le Breton expected of Pansy, but certainly not the news the note contained.
He read it through, unable to believe what he saw written before him. And as he read his face lost all its tender, caressing look and took on, instead, a savage, incredulous expression.
Women had always come to him easily, as easily as Pansy herself had come. But they had not withdrawn themselves again: he had done the withdrawing.
For some moments he just stared at the note.
He, flouted and scorned and played with by a girl! He, to whom all women were but toys! He, the Sultan of El-Ammeh!
Le Breton was like one plunged suddenly into an icy cold bath.
The unexpectedness of it all left him numb. Then a surge of hot rage went through him, finally leaving him cold, collected, and furious.
She had dared to scorn him, this English girl! Dared to hurl his love and protestations back into his teeth. Protestations such as he had made to no other woman.
It was the greatest shock and surprise Le Breton had had during the course of his wild life of unquestioned power and limitless money.
He was in no mood to see the love her note breathed. He saw only one fact—that he had been cast aside.
A woman had dared to act towards him as he had often acted towards women.
As he brooded on the note, trying to grasp the almost incredible truth, the cruel look about his mouth deepened.
Putting the note into his pocket, he poured himself another cup of coffee. Then he sat on, staring at the purple pansies, no longer lost in dreams of love and delight, where his one aim was to be all the girl imagined him to be; but in a savage reverie that had love in it, perhaps, but of quite another quality than that which he had already offered.
Full of anger and injured pride as Le Breton was, it did not prevent him going over to the hotel and inquiring for Miss Langham.
He learnt that she was out, on board her yacht. And it seemed to him that she had fled from his wrath.
But he was wrong.
Pansy had gone there knowing he would be sure to come and inquire into the meaning of her note. On board her yacht there was more privacy; a privacy she wanted for Le Breton's sake, not her own. Considering his fiery Latin temperament, he might not take his congé in the manner of her more stolid nation. There might be a scene.
She never imagined he would take her decree calmly. There was an air about him as if he had never been thwarted in any way. She was prepared for some unpleasant minutes—minutes, nevertheless, that she had no intention of shirking, which she knew she had brought upon herself by her impetuous promises.
She was sitting alone in her own special sanctum on the yacht.
It was a large saloon—boudoir, music-room, and study combined; white and gold and purple, like herself, with a grand piano in one corner, deep chairs upholstered in yellow with purple cushions, a yellow carpet and white walls and ceiling.
In the midst of it she sat cool and collected, in a simple white yachting suit.
As Le Breton entered she rose, scanning him quickly. She had never seen him so proud and aloof-looking, his face so set and hard. But there was a look of suppressed suffering in his eyes that cut her to the quick.
Neither said a word until the door closed behind the steward.
Then Le Breton crossed to the girl's side.
"What nonsense is this?" he asked in a cold, angry voice, holding her note towards her. "You promised to marry me, and you must carry out your promise. I'm not going to be put lightly to one side in this manner."
"I haven't put you lightly to one side," she answered. "I think I explained exactly how things were in my note."
"Explanations! I'm not here for explanations," he said, with cold impatience; "but to insist that you fulfill your promise."
"I couldn't do that," she replied quietly.
With the air of still moving in the midst of some incredible truth, he stared at her.
"You've been flirting with me," he said presently, a note of savagery and scorn in his voice. "You are a true English demievierge. You rouse a man without the least intention of satisfying him."
Pansy flushed under his contempt. She hated being called "a flirt"; she was not one. She did not know why she had acted as she had done the previous night. But once in his arms, she had wanted to stay. And once he had started talking of love, she wanted to listen. With him she had forgotten all about her own scheme of life and her cherished liberty.
She knew she had not played the game with Le Breton. From the bottom of her heart she was sorry. She did not blame him, but herself.
"I'm not a flirt," she said quietly. "I've never let any man kiss me before. I'm very sorry for all that happened last night."
He laughed in a harsh, grating manner.
"Good God, Pansy! there are a hundred women and more plotting and scheming to try and make me feel for them what I feel for you. And you say you're sorry!"
He broke off, his proud face twisted with pain and chagrin.
Pansy knew his was no idle boast. An army of women must lie in wait for a man of his wealth combined with good looks and such powers of fascination.
"I'm only sorry you picked on me," she said, a note of distress in her voice. "More sorry than I can say. You know I hate giving pain."
Like one dazed, the Sultan Casim Ammeh listened to a woman saying she was sorry he had favoured her as he had no other of her sex—To an extent he had never imagined he would favour any woman, so that he was ready to change his religion, his whole mode of life, for her sake.
"But I couldn't give up my liberty," her voice was saying. "I couldn't get married. And I've a perfect right to change my mind."
"It's not a privilege I intend to allow you," he said in a strangled voice.
"Well, it's one I intend to assert," she answered, suddenly goaded by his imperious attitude.
"You've deliberately fooled me," he said savagely.
"No, I haven't really," she replied, patient again under the pain in the fierce, restless eyes watching her. "I like you immensely, but not enough to marry you."
"I suppose I ought to feel flattered," he said cuttingly.
Pansy laid a hand on his sleeve with a little soothing, conciliatory gesture.
"Don't be so horrid, Raoul. Do try and see things as I see them. I didn't mean to say 'yes' last night; but when you held me in your arms and kissed me there was nothing else I could do."
His name on her lips, her touch on his arm, broke through his seethe of cold anger.
"And if I held and kissed you again, what then?" he asked, suddenly melting.
"Here in the 'garish light of day' it wouldn't alter my intention in the least," she said. "There are so many things that call me in the daytime. But last night, Raoul, there was only you."
He bent over her, dark and handsome, looking the king the Sultan Casim Ammeh had made him.
"Give me the nights, Pansy," he whispered, "and the days I'll leave to you."
"Oh no, I couldn't. Before so long you'd have swallowed up my days too. For there's an air about you as if you wouldn't be satisfied until you had the whole of me. But I shall often think of last night," she went on, a touch of longing in her voice. "In days to come, when we're thousands of miles apart, in the midst of my schemes, when the lights are brightest and the bands their loudest and the fun at its highest, I shall stop all at once with a little pain in my heart and wonder where the nice man is who kissed me under the palms in the Grand Canary. And I shall say to myself, 'Now, if I'd been a marrying sort, I'd have married him.' And twenty years hence, when pleasure palls, I shall wish I had married him; because there'll never be any man I shall like half as much as I like you."
As she talked Le Breton watched her, wild schemes budding and blossoming in his head.
"And I? What shall I be thinking?" he asked.
"You! Oh, you'll have forgotten all about me by next year—Perhaps next month, even," she replied, smiling at him rather sadly. "One girl is much the same to you as the next, provided she's equally pretty. And you'll be thinking, 'What an idiotic fuss I made over that girl I met in Grand Canary. Let me see, what was her name? Violet or Daisy, or some stupid flower name. Who said yes in the moonlight, and no in the cool, calm light of day. Good Lord! but for her sense I should be married now. Married! Phew, what an escape! For if she'd roped me in there'd have been no gallivanting with other women'!"
Le Breton laughed.
"Now I'm forgiven," she said quickly.
"Forgiven, Heart's Ease, yes. But whilst there's life in me you'll never be forgotten."
He paused, looking at her speculatively.
"So far as I see, there's nothing between us except that you're too fond of your own way to get married," he remarked presently.
"Yes. I suppose that's it really."
"'If I were a king in Babylon and you were a Christian slave,'" he quoted, "or, to get down to more modern times, if I were a barbaric Sultan somewhere in Africa and you a girl I'd fancied and caught and carried off, I'd just take you into my harem and nothing more would be said."
"I should fight like a wildcat. You'd get horribly scratched and bitten."
"Possibly, but—I should win in the end."
Pansy's face went suddenly crimson under the glowing eyes that watched her with such love and desire in their dark depths.
"I think we're talking a lot of nonsense," she remarked.
"What is it you English say? 'There's many a true word spoken in jest,'" he replied with curious emphasis.
It was not jest to him.
Even as he stood talking to Pansy he was cogitating on how he could best get her into his power, should persuasion fail to bring her back to his arms within a week or two.
His yacht was in the harbour. She was in the habit of wandering about alone. He had half a dozen Arab servants with him, men who would do without question anything their Sultan told them. To abduct her would be an easy matter. Once she was in his power, he would take her to El-Ammeh and keep her there. As his wife, if she would marry him; as his slave, if she would not.
Le Breton had no desire to do any such thing except as a last resource, but he had no intention of letting Pansy go.
Her voice broke into his broodings.
"Since you've been so nice about everything, I'm going to keep you and take you for a cruise round the island. I want to have just one day alone with you, so that in years to come I shall know exactly how much I've missed."
He smiled in a slightly savage manner. It amused him to hear the girl talking as if he were but a pleasant incident in her life, when he intended to be the biggest fact that had ever been there.
"In your way of doing things, Pansy, you remind me rather of myself," he remarked. "You're carrying me off, willy nilly, as I might be tempted to carry you."
"It must be because we're both millionaires," she replied. "Little facts of the sort are apt to make one a trifle high-handed."
She touched a bell.
When a steward appeared she put Le Breton into his care. Leaving the saloon, she went herself to interview the captain about her plans.
She was leaning against the yacht's rail, slim and white, with the breeze blowing her curls when Le Breton joined her. And she smiled at him in a frank, boyish fashion, as if their little difference of opinion had never been.
"What can I do to amuse you?" she asked.
"I don't need any amusing when I'm with you," he said. "You're all-sufficing."
"You mustn't say things like that, Raoul," she replied; "they're apt to make one's decisions wobble."
For Pansy the morning sped quickly. For Le Breton it was part of the dream he had dreamt before her note had come and upset his calculations, making him rearrange his plans in a manner that, although it would give him a certain amount of satisfaction, might not be so pleasing to the girl.
The vessel skirted the rounded island, bringing glimpses of quiet bays where white houses nestled, rocky cliffs, stony barrancos cut deep into the hill-side, and pine-clad heights.
There was a lunch à deux, with attentive stewards hovering in the background. Afterwards they had coffee and liqueurs and cigarettes on deck. An hour or so was dawdled away there, then Pansy took her guest back to her own special sanctum.
He went over to the piano, touching a note here and there.
"Play me something," she said, for he touched the instrument with the hand of a music lover.
"I was brought up in the backwoods," he replied, "and I never saw a piano until I was nearly nineteen. After that I was too busy making money and doing what I thought was enjoying myself to have time to go in for anything of the sort. But I'd like to listen to you," he finished.
Willingly Pansy seated herself at the piano. Le Breton likewise sat himself in a deep chair close by, and gave himself up to the delight of her playing. She wandered from one song to another, quick to see she had an appreciative audience.
In the end she paused and glanced at him as he sat quiet, all his restless look gone, as if at peace with himself and the world.
"Does music 'soothe your savage breast'?" she asked.
"It could never be savage where you're concerned, Pansy,"
"You talk as if I were quite different from other people."
"So you are. The only woman I've ever loved."
"When you talk like that, the wobbling comes on," she remarked.
To avoid his reply, she started playing again.
Getting to his feet, Le Breton went to the piano. Standing behind her, his arms encircling her, he lifted the small, music-making hands from the keys, and holding them, drew her back until her head rested against him.
"Pansy, suppose I consent to a six months' engagement? The waiting would be purgatory; but I could do it with paradise beyond."
"I'm not taking on any engagements. Not for the next ten years, at least."
He laughed softly and put the slim hands back on the piano with a lingering, careful touch, letting them pursue their way. Whether she liked it or not, this lovely, wayward girl would be his before many weeks had passed.
Then he returned to his chair and sat there deep in some reverie, this time not planning the sort of home he would make for her in Paris, but how he would have certain rooms in his palace at El-Ammeh furnished for her reception.
A steward announcing tea brought him out of his meditations.
Tea was served on deck, with the sun glinting on the blue water and running in golden cascades down the hill-side.
Together they watched the sun set and saw night barely shadow the world when the moon rose, filling the scene with silver glory.
Its white light led them back into harbour, and in its flood the two walked to the hotel together.
In the garden Le Breton paused to take leave of his hostess.
"Just one kiss, Heart's Ease, for the sake of last night," he whispered.
Willingly Pansy lifted her flower-like face to his.
"Just one then, Raoul, you darling, since you've been so nice about everything."
As Le Breton stooped to kiss her it seemed to him that he would not have to resort to force in order to get the girl. Only a little patience and persuasion were needed, and he would win her in her own, white, English way.