“Love,” she said, as she laughed. “What have I, who will one day rule, to do with men? If love is to come to me, to me it will come. ‘Thy beloved is the object that thou lovest, were it even a monkey.’” She laughed again as she quoted the Arabian proverb. “Kismet! let love come to me, I will even conquer love!”
She spread her fingers against the Arab’s belief in the ill-luck of even numbers as a clock struck six, and ran to the top of the steps at the sound of shouting from the Midan.
Shouting and a scream and the thunder of a horse’s hoofs. She clapped her hands in delight at the sound, knowing that a horse, with the bit between its teeth, was heading straight for the cactus hedge and trouble; thrilled from head to foot, and ran down the steps towards the spot where, her desert-trained ear told her, the horse was making for; raised herself on tiptoe and laughed aloud at the sight of the terrified, riderless beast racing towards her.
“Blind and mad with fear,” she thought as she stood waiting.
Terror is just the one thing that will take a horse over a cactus hedge with its dagger points as strong as steel; on ordinary occasions you may use your spurs or your whip or try coaxing or deception, only to find that your horse will rear or plunge or roll or stand stock still, shaking with fear, rather than approach within yards of the deadly barrier.
Terrified by a newspaper which had been blown into its face by the breeze, Bustard, thoroughbred stallion and Ralph Trenchard’s favorite mount, had broken from his syce and made for the open, heedless of the prickly fence which stretched between the white thing that had jumped from the ground and struck him across the eyes, and liberty.
Tucking his hindquarters well under, he cleared the hedge with a inch to spare and landed magnificently by the side of the girl who, judging to a nicety the infinitesimal pause which follows a landing, caught the flowing mane and was into the saddle before the great beast had realized that a human was anywhere near. Shouts of “Wah-wah!” and “By gad! well done!” came from the Midan where the riders rode up to the hedge to see what was happening, whilst those girls who were advanced enough in their toilet tore from the school-house to witness this fresh escapade of the Sheikh’s daughter.
Recognizing the stallion as a Nejdee, which, being translated, means perfection in horseflesh, Zarah did not attempt to use the reins; she rode with her knees, talking soothingly, calling the beautiful beast by soft names in the language of his own country until, bit by bit, he slackened from the runaway gallop to a canter, a canter to a trot, then stopped dead a few yards away from the school gates.
Zarah looked over her shoulder and thrilled again; this time with a great desire to show her power over horses to the onlookers, but especially to her schoolmates, who seemed to think that life consisted of wearing the right clothes and eating from the end of a fork.
She turned Bustard and took him at a canter to the place in the hedge where the cactus was well hidden under a mass of creeper; she smiled when, scenting mischief, he danced sideways and shook his handsome head, and took him back over and over again, talking to him until at last he stood quite still and tried to nibble the nearest leaf. By the same token, if she had been by herself and wearing her golden spurs, she would have raked the satiny sides with the needle points until she had forced him over through sheer agony. Instead, aware of spectators, she took him back to the far side of the grounds, turned him, called to him, rode him at a thundering gallop at the hedge and lifted him magnificently over, failing to notice what looked like an overhanging branch, but was really a finger of Fate, which swept her out of the saddle and senseless into Ralph Trenchard’s arms.