The first day after her arrival she flung her entire silken wardrobe on the ground and her magnificent jewellery on the top, and stamped on it all when the maid came to tidy the litter, then cursed the terrified menial until she fled the room and rushed to the distracted maiden sisters to give notice.
When Amelia Cruikshanks, greatly fearing, approached the new pupil with a cotton skirt and blouse and necessary under-garments, and gently intimated that they would become her better than the heavily embroidered silks and satins and jewellery she wore, she tore the offending articles to ribbons and wound herself from neck to heel in something scarlet and of a great daring. She boxed the servants’ ears with one hand and loaded them with gifts with the other, until their time was fully occupied in running to give notice and running back to retract it. She smoked in bed and all over the house, and trailed into class heavily scented, laden with jewels, beautiful, arrogant, scornful, to sit cross-legged upon the floor watching the girls from under her heavily fringed lids. The third day after her arrival she lounged into the room where Signor Enrico was essaying to find a golden thread among a British damsel’s throaty vocal chords, and, seizing a guitar from the wall, sang a passionate Arabian love song in her glorious contralto until the whole house crept to the door to listen and the professor tore his hair in rapture.
She sat up o’ nights for the best part of the first week brooding upon the incident of the chicken bone and the insult with which Maria Oporto’s derisive words had scorched her memory. So deeply did she resent the incident, for so long did she brood, that she ended by hating the very memory of Helen Raynor and her beauty and her influence over the house.
It is not wise to jest with the Arab, but it is absolutely fatal to hold him up to ridicule. He will revenge the pleasantry at his expense sooner or later, even if he has to wait for years or even a lifetime; even if he has to leave this world with the task unaccomplished, handing it down as a heritage to his children.
“Savage!” she said, as she watched the sunset on the first night of her arrival. “Savage! I will make that toad-faced daughter of a cross-eyed she-camel eat her words mixed with bitterness before we part. I will make them, all of them, the pale-faced daughters, the plank-bodied elders, the miserable servants, acknowledge me as queen in this barren dwelling before my two years of prison are spent. I will make them forget the English girl as though she had never been, and when I meet her again, the haughty, contemptuous, Helen Raynor-r-r, for it is written that we shall meet, I will make her wish that death had smitten her before the crossing of our paths. By ——” She swore a mighty oath as the sun slipped behind the far horizon; she repeated it at every sunset, and she kept it, spurred to its fulfillment by Jane Cruikshanks, who tumbled to the one way of making the girl walk upon the road which stretched in the contrary direction to that primrose path of dalliance upon which she desired to travel.
“Wait, my dear Amelia!” Jane said at the end of the first two tempestuous months as she brushed her crisp hair, whilst Amelia voiced the desirability of returning the girl to her father. “She is learning slowly, but she is learning; I can see a difference already, although she is too proud to confess to room for improvement. When we find something to really interest her, then we shall be secure. I told her she was not quick enough to learn English. What is the result? She already speaks a few words. I tell her she is too clumsily built to wear European clothes. What do we see, or, rather, what do we not see? She wears a riding corset, many sizes too big for her it is true, but she wears it, also shoes with heels as high as the Great Pyramid. I repeat, we have but to find something that will really interest her and she will not want to leave us.”
The riding lessons proved the cure for the homesickness which overwhelmed the Sheikh’s daughter.
She went out one morning to watch the riding-master put six of the girls, and the hacks they rode more or less intelligently, through their paces, and stayed to make rings round the man and to terrify the girls by the marvellous stunts she performed on the master’s horse. She sent a courier for her own stallion, a pure white, pure bred Nejdee, to receive instead six mares which she presented to the Misses Cruikshanks as a gift from her father, with the intimation that he made himself responsible for their upkeep and stable fees.
She established a class of her own for special riding lessons, to which she invited a chosen few; she secretly trained the least gentle of the mares to buck and rear at the word “Oporto”; she lured Maria Oporto on to the beast’s back and put the girl through half an hour which nearly proved her end.
“It’s a pity you can’t stick on!” she cried scornfully when the Portuguese fell at her feet in a sitting position and with a most resounding thud. “You might learn to ride if you did. The mare’s wonderful and beautiful and the dearest darling in the world, but you’ll never, never, never ride, you couldn’t, you’re a sack of potatoes, that’s what you are, a sack of potatoes.”