CHAPTER XXII
One day when Le Breton returned from one of the mad rides he frequently indulged in, in a vain effort to assuage the pain and chagrin that raged within him, he found among a pile of letters put aside for his inspection, one with an English stamp.
Letters from that country rarely came his way. But it was not the novelty that attracted him, making him pick it out from the others, but the writing.
He had seen it once before, on a note that had turned his heaven into hell, when for the first time he had learnt what it was to be rejected by a woman.
He tore the envelope open, eager for the contents.
What had the girl to say to him? Why had she written?
With a wild throb of hope, he drew out the message.
Once he had called Pansy a little creature of rare surprises. But none equalled the surprise in store for him now.
It was not the apologies in the note he saw; nor a girl's desire to try and see things from his point of view; nor the fact that, despite everything, she was unable to break away from him.
He saw only one thing.
She was Sir George Barclay's daughter! The girl he loved to distraction was the child of his father's murderer!
Astounded he stared at the note. He could not believe it. Yet it was there, written in Pansy's own hand.
"With my father, Sir George Barclay."
Pansy, the child of the man he hated! That brave, kind, slim, teasing girl, who for one brief week had filled him with a happiness and love and contentment such as he had once deemed impossible.
As he brooded on the note a variety of emotions raged within him.
A vengeance that had rankled for sixteen years fought with a love that had grown up in a week.
Then he pulled himself together, as if amazed at his own indecision.
He took the note, with its pathos and pleading; a girl's endeavour to meet the view of the man she loved, whose outlook was quite beyond her. Deliberately he tore it across and across, into shreds, slowly and with a cruel look on his face, as if it were something alive that he was torturing, and that gave him pleasure to torture.
For Le Breton had decided what his course was to be. The vengeance he had promised long years ago should be carried out, with slight alterations. He had a way now of torturing Sir George Barclay that would be punishment beyond any death. And Pansy was the tool he intended to use. What was more, she was to pay the penalty of her father's crime. For he would mete out to her the measure he had promised sixteen years ago.
However, this decision did not prevent Le Breton from going to Pansy's yacht the evening of its arrival in Grand Canary.
After dinner he made his way along the quay towards the white vessel with its flare of light that stood out against the dark night.
Evidently he was expected. On inquiring for Miss Langham, he was shown into the cabin where he had had his previous interview with her; and with the feeling that things would go his way, if he had but a little patience: a virtue he had never been called upon to exercise where a woman was concerned.
Le Breton's feelings as he stayed on in the pretty cabin would be difficult to describe. Everything was redolent of the girl, touching his heart with fairy fingers; a heart he had hardened against her.
But, as he waited there, he despised himself for even having momentarily contemplated letting a woman come between him and his cherished vengeance.
Once in Africa Sir George Barclay would prove an easy and unsuspecting prey. According to custom, the Governor should tour his province. That tour would bring him within six hundred miles of Le Breton's desert kingdom. The latter intended to keep himself well posted in his enemy's movements. And he knew exactly the spot where he would wait for the Governor and his suite—the spot where sixteen years before the Sultan Casim Ammeh had been shot.
He, Le Breton, would wait near there with a troop of his Arab soldiers. Unsuspecting, the Governor would walk into the trap. The whole party would be captured with a completeness and unexpectedness that would leave no trace of what had happened. With his prisoners he would sweep back to the desert.
Once in El-Ammeh, the daughter should be sold as a slave in the public market, to become the property of any Arab or negro chief who fancied her. And her father should see her sold. But he should not be killed afterwards. He should live on to brood over his child's fate—a torture worse than any death.
"Put your ear quite close. It's not a matter that can be shouted from the house-tops."
Like a sign from the sea, the echo of Pansy's voice whispered in his ear, a breath from his one night in heaven.
But he would not listen. Vengeance had stifled love—vengeance he had waited sixteen years for.
He glanced round with set, cold face.
It seemed to him no other woman could look so lovely and desirable as the girl entering.
Pansy was wearing a flounced dress of some soft pink silky material that spread around her like the petals of a flower. The one great diamond sparkled on her breast—a dewdrop in the heart of a half-blown rose.
On seeing her Le Breton caught his breath sharply. This girl the daughter of his father's murderer! This lovely half-blown English rose! What a trick Fate had played him!
Then, ashamed of his momentary craving, he faced her, a cruel smile on his lips.
There was a brief silence.
Pansy looked at him, thinking she had never seen him so handsome, so proud, so aloof, so hard as now. He stood watching her coldly with no word of welcome, no greeting on his lips.
He was the first to speak. And he said none of the things Pansy was expecting and was prepared for.
"Why did you tell me your name was Langham?" he asked in a peremptory manner.
"It is Langham," she answered, with some surprise.
"How is it, then, that you say Sir George Barclay is your father?"
"He is my father. Langham was my godfather's name, my own second name. I had to take it when I inherited his money. That was his one stipulation."
Another pause ensued.
There was a hurt look in Pansy's soft eyes as she watched Le Breton. As he looked back at her a hungry gleam came to his hard ones.
"What have you learnt about me?" he demanded presently.
"That you're half Arab."
He had almost expected her to say she had discovered he was the Sultan Casim Ammeh, her own and her father's sworn enemy.
"Is that all?" he asked, with a savage laugh.
"It's quite enough to account for everything," Pansy replied.
"Even for your coming into my arms and letting me kiss and caress you," he said, with biting sarcasm.
Pansy flushed.
"I didn't know anything about you then. And you know I didn't," she said with indignation.
"Or you wouldn't have listened to a word of love from me."
Much as he tried to hate the girl, now that he was with her he could not keep the word "love" off his lips.
Pansy felt she was not shining. She wanted to apologise, but he seemed determined to be disagreeable. What was more, she had a feeling she was dealing with quite a different man from the Raoul Le Breton who had won and broken her heart within a week. She put it down to her own treatment of him and it made her all the more anxious for an understanding. She could not bear to see him looking at her in that hard, cruel way, as if she were his mortal enemy—someone who had injured him past all forgiveness.
"It's not that I want to talk about at all," she said desperately.
"What do you want to talk about, then?" he asked, his cruel smile deepening.
"I want to say how sorry I am that I was angry with you that night. But I ... I didn't know you were ... are——"
Pansy stopped before she got deeper into the mire.
She was going to say "a coloured man," but with him standing before her, her lips refused to form the words.
However, Le Breton finished the sentence for her.
"'A nigger.' Don't spare my feelings. I've had it cast up at me before by you English."
"You know I wouldn't say anything so cruel and untrue."
Again there was silence.
Le Breton watched her, torturing himself with the thought of what might have been.
"If you'd kept your word, you'd be my wife now. The wife of 'a nigger,'" he said presently.
"Don't be so cruel. I never thought you'd be like this," she cried, her voice full of pain.
"And I never thought you would break your word."
"In any case, I couldn't have married you, considering you're a Mohammedan," she said, goaded out of all patience by his unfriendly attitude.
"Religion is nothing to me nowadays. I was quite prepared to change to yours."
"You couldn't have done that. There would be your ... your wives to consider."
"I have no wife by my religion or yours."
"But that woman at your villa, wasn't she——" Pansy began.
"I've half a dozen women in one of my—houses; but none of them are my wives. You're the only woman I've ever asked for in marriage. You!"
He laughed in a cruel, hard way, as if at some devil's joke.
Pansy's hand went to her head—a weary, hopeless gesture.
He was beyond her comprehension, this man who calmly confessed to having a half a dozen women in one of his houses, to a woman he would have made his wife.
"I'm sorry," she said in a dreary tone, "but I can't understand you. I'd no idea there were men who seemed just like other men and yet behaved in this ... this extraordinary fashion."
"I'm not aware that my behaviour is extraordinary. Every man in my country has a harem if he can afford it."
Deliberately he put these facts before the girl in his desire to hurt and hate her as he hated her father. But the look of suffering on her face hurt him as much as he was hurting her. And he hated himself more than he hated her, because uprooting the love he had for her out of his heart was proving such a difficult task.
"It's a harem, is it?" Pansy said distastefully. "Now I'm beginning to understand. But I don't want to hear anything more about it. I see now it was a mistake my asking you here. But I wanted you to know—to know——"
She floundered and stopped and started again, anxious to be fair with him in spite of everything.
"I wanted you to understand that the fact of your religion and race made your behaviour seem quite different from what it would have been were you a ... a European. I want you to see that I know you have your point of view, that I can't in all fairness blame you for doing what is not wrong according to your standpoint, even if it is according to mine."
With his cold, cruel smile deepening, he watched her floundering after excuses for him, endeavouring to see his point of view, to be just and fair.
"You're very magnanimous," he said, with biting scorn.
"And you are very unkind," she flashed, suddenly out of patience. "You're making everything as hard for me as you possibly can. You're doing it deliberately; and you look as if you enjoyed hurting me. I never thought you'd be like this, Raoul. I would have liked to part as friends since ... since anything else is impossible."
His name on her lips made a spasm cross Le Breton's face.
As he stood there fighting against himself he knew he was still madly in love with the girl he was determined to hate, and he despised himself for his own weakness.
Pansy watched him, a look of suppressed suffering shadowing her eyes.
She would have given all she possessed—her cherished freedom, her vast riches, her life—to have had him as she once thought him, a man of her own colour, not with this dreadful black barrier between them; a tragedy so ghastly that the fact of Lucille Lemesurier now seemed a laughing matter. He was lost to her for ever. No amount of love or understanding could pull down that barrier.
"Good-bye," she said, holding out her hand. "I'm sorry we ever dropped across one another."
Le Breton made no reply. Cold and unsmiling, he watched her.
There was a brief silence.
Outside, the sea sobbed and splashed like tears against the vessel's side. But all the tears in the world could not wash the black stain from him.
As they stood looking at one another, a verse came and sang like a dirge in Pansy's head:
What are we waiting for? Oh, my heart,
Kiss me straight on the brow and part:
Again! Again, my heart, my heart
What are we waiting for, you and I?
A pleading look—a stifled cry—
Good-bye for ever. Good-bye, good-bye.
"Good-bye," she said again.
Then he smiled his cold, cruel smile.
"No, Pansy. I say—au revoir."
Ignoring her outstretched hand, he bowed. Then, after one long look at her, he turned and was gone.
As the door closed behind him Pansy blinked back two tears.
It had hurt her horribly to see him so set and cold, with that cruel look in his eyes where love once had been.
She wished that "The Sultan" had killed her that day in the East End of London; or that Raoul Le Breton had been drowned that night in the sea. Anything rather than that they should have met to make each other suffer.