CHAPTER XVI
Night filled the harem with shadows and scent. The silver lamps cast a soft glow through the huge hall, glinting on wide ottomans and piles of cushions, on little tables set with coffee and sherbet, sweets and fruit and cigarettes.
There were perhaps thirty women in the great room, but the majority of them were the attendants of the half-dozen girls lolling on couches and cushions around the splashing fountain.
Full length on a wide ottoman Leonora was stretched, her dark eyes fixed spitefully on an adjacent lounge where the Arab girl lay, her face hidden in the cushions, her golden form almost buried in her wealth of black hair.
"See, Rayma, it's night again," Leonora said, malice in her soft, drawling voice. "Night! And still our lord Casim has not come to visit you."
There was a sob from the other girl, but no reply.
"How you jeered at me, Rayma, when you stole his heart from me," Leonora went on. "But now it seems another has stolen his heart from you, since he no longer comes to see you. Another whom I shall welcome as a sister."
At the taunt Rayma sat up suddenly, with a wild gesture pushing the mass of black hair back from her face.
"For weeks and weeks he has not been here," she wailed. "Oh, my heart it breaks for love of him."
Leonora laughed, but an elderly woman sitting near laid a soothing hand on the distraught girl.
"Hush, Rayma, my pearl," she said. "Haven't I often told you our Sultan has had thoughts for nothing but vengeance of late?"
"Would vengeance keep him away from me all these weeks? It's more than vengeance. It's love. Love for some other girl."
Rayma clutched at the woman with slim, jewelled hands.
"Tell me, Sara, you come and go at will through the palace. Is there one?"
"My pearl, if there was one, wouldn't she be here in the harem?" Sara answered diplomatically.
"Yes, and so she would," Rayma replied more quietly. "And I could measure my beauty against hers."
Then she started rocking herself to and fro, in an agony of grief.
"Did he but come, my love, my Lord Casim, his heart would be mine again," she sobbed.
Then she stopped wailing suddenly, and faced the old woman anxiously.
"Sara, tell me quickly, have these weeks of weeping made me less beautiful?"
However, she did not wait for any reply.
Her gaze went to the arches, where night looked in at her mockingly.
"Look. It is night," she cried. "And my heart is hungry for love. For the love of my Lord Casim. For his arms. His kisses. Again it is night. And he has not come."
Then through the vaulted room piercing shriek after piercing shriek rang—the shrieks of a lovesick girl in the throes of hysteria.
As Sara sat patting Rayma's hands and trying to soothe her, she thought of the milk-white maid with the wide blue eyes and the golden curls, whom the Sultan himself had brought unconscious to his palace, and who was lodged—as no other slave girl had ever been—in his own private suite. And who treated her master—as no other slave had ever treated him—as if she were his equal, even his superior, making him wait on her. A task the Sultan seemed to find pleasure in!