She waited on the Arabian hand and foot, climbed the ladder to the golden cage, wherein Zarah lay during the siesta, with coffee, sherbet, or whatever she desired, and descended and climbed again with ever the sweetest smile in her steady, blue eyes. She brushed and combed the red curls until her arms ached; carried and fetched and read aloud and looked after the birds; fanned the woman, fetched water from the river for her bath, washed the silken garments, and waited upon her at meals, without a murmur on her lips or a shadow in her eyes.
She spoke to no one, but through the gossiping of the women learned that the body of the surly negress had not been discovered, and that Zarah, owing to a certain spirit of insubordination that had lately swept through the camp, had not dared to punish the grooms of the kennels for their gross carelessness.
She was continually surrounded by the women, who, ignorant of the lies told them, jeered at and laughed at her and did everything in their power to make her tasks even yet more distasteful. When away from Zarah her every movement was spied upon and reported.
She slept in a hut in which tools had been stored during the alterations to the building, rough and infinitely uncomfortable, but a very haven of refuge at the end of the day when she returned, to fling herself on her knees and pray for strength and patience.
If only she had known it, spies watched her at her prayers, noting the look of peace which followed quickly upon them, and the content with which she stretched herself upon the bed composed of rugs flung upon the sand; watched her asleep and at her toilette, and ran to make report on all things, especially upon the delight she seemed to take in combing her masses of beautiful hair and in her bath in the river long before the dawn.
And when a rough hand shook Helen out of her sleep and ordered her to Zarah’s presence, it seemed that God had turned a deaf ear to her prayers and that fear must, after all, dominate her splendid courage.
It was long after midnight when, with a heavily beating heart, she entered the luxurious room.
Two Abyssinian women, nude save for a short petticoat which stopped above the knees, stood behind the divan upon which Zarah lay smoking a naghileh. She lay and looked at Helen without a word, hating her for the ethereal look, which heightened her beauty and had come to her in her days of toil and privation.
“I am told,” she said after a while in Arabic, “that the hut you sleep in is not clean, that your habits are not the cleanly habits of the Mohammedan, that your hair has not escaped contamination from the disorder in your hut; therefore——”
When Helen interrupted her quickly, she looked back at the tittering black women and laughed.