Brainless as a sheep, swift as the wind, as enduring as it was obstinate, it was worth the price of many blood-red rubies on account of its colour, and had fallen to Yussuf as his share of the spoil resultant upon a sanguinary and none too successful attack upon a caravan of camels belonging to the great Sheikh Hahmed, the Camel King.
And with it all he waited, patiently and with the Oriental’s fatalism, throughout the years, for his revenge upon Zarah the Arabian.
Subtle, crafty, determined that by his hand alone should punishment fall upon her, he had argued with and beseeched the Sheikh and his fellow-men to spare her. Even upon the night of the disaster had he whispered, between the cut lips held together by the hour in Namlah’s tender fingers—had whispered in urgent entreaty, until the men, crowding about his couch, thinking him crazed with fever, touched their foreheads as they looked at each other and made oath upon the beard of the Prophet to do so.
They had thought him crazed with fever then, thereafter they ever thought him slightly mad.
They would touch their foreheads when he spoke gently of the girl, and would shake their heads when he questioned them closely about the suitors who, afire with the tales of her beauty and her wealth, came themselves or sent emissaries laden with gifts, piled high on camel back, to ask her hand in marriage.
They thought him slightly mad, whereas, if they could but have seen into his sane and cunning mind, they would have understood that his interest in the girl’s marriage had root in a great fear that he would so be cheated of his revenge.
But Zarah, exceeding proud of the European blood in her veins, had no wish to wed at an age when European girls were still at school, neither had she the slightest intention of becoming one of the four wives which Mohammed the Prophet in his wisdom, knowing the weakness of character and want of self-control in man, allotted unto the male sex. So that Yussuf sighed in relief as each suitor, blindfolded, was led back across the path by which, blindfolded, he had come, and, laden with gifts, set upon the homeward track.
Actively, he knew he could do nothing in revenge until Fate whispered in his ear, but in a hundred ways, a hundred times a day, he made the girl’s life a burden to her.
He refused to cover his face, which was no fit sight for man or woman, and took to haunting her, craftily withal, so that it seemed that by mere chance his shadow fell so often upon the path she trod.
She had no escape from him.