CHAPTER XXVI
After that interview with her captor Pansy's life rapidly developed into one long struggle between inclination and upbringing.
She knew she loved the Sultan, but all her standards revolted against marrying him. She could not bear to think about the wild past that was his, but she equally could not bear to think that he might fall into sin again when hers was the power to prevent him.
What was more, she knew he had guessed her love for him, and was doing his best to make her succumb to his attractions.
After that one interview she was not allowed out of the sensual, scented precincts of the harem. She had no occupation, no amusements, no books even. Nothing to do all day except just think about her lover and fight her battle.
And he made the battle all the harder. Never a day passed but what he was there, big and handsome and fascinating. He would come upon her in the little walled garden, and linger with her among the roses. By the hour he would sit with her in the wide gallery overlooking the desert. Very often he dined with her in the gilded chamber, and stayed on afterwards in the dim light of the shaded lamps, watching her with soft, mocking eyes.
And very often he would say:
"Well, Pansy, have you made up your mind whether you are going to marry me or not?"
It seemed to the girl that the whole world was combining to drive her into the arms of a man she ought to turn from with contempt and disgust.
At the end of a fortnight he said:
"Pansy, you're the first woman who has ever fought against her love for me. It's an amusing sight, but I'm beginning to wish you weren't such a determined fighter."
At the end of a month some of the mockery had gone out of his eyes, giving place to a hungry gleam. For the girl had not succumbed to his fascinations, although her face was growing white and weary with close confinement and the ceaseless battle that went on within herself.
And the man who acknowledged no law except his own appetites, and who, up till now, had lived for nothing else, loved the girl all the more deeply because she did not succumb to his attractions, because she had a soul above her senses, and tried to live up to her own ideals, refusing to come down to his level. At times he felt he must try and grope his way up to the heights, and unconsciously he was rising from the depths.
"Water can always reach the level it rises from," Pansy had once said.
Although a wild craving for his girl-prisoner often kept him wakeful, although there was none to stop him, and only a short length of passage and a locked door, to which he alone had the key, lay between him and his desire, the passage was never crossed, the door never unlocked.
To escape his presence as much as possible, Pansy spent a lot of her time in the big hall of the harem with the other girls. But one by one they disappeared, to become the wives of various men of importance in the place, until only Rayma was left. A quiet, subdued Rayma who watched Pansy and the Sultan with longing, envious gaze.
"How happy you must be now you are his wife, and you know that he can't thrust you from him should another woman take his fancy," the Arab girl sighed one day to her rival.
Pansy was not his wife, and she had no intention of being. In her desire to escape from temptation she grew absolutely reckless.
"I should be much happier if I could get right away from him," she said in response to Rayma's remark.
"Don't you love him?" Rayma exclaimed.
"I hate him," Pansy said, lying to her heart. "I never want to see him again," she went on in a hysterical way. "I only want to escape from him and this place, once and for ever."
Astonished, Rayma gazed at her supplanter. Then a look of hope darted into her dark eyes.
If only this strange girl were out of the way, the Sultan's heart might return to her.