Once he was her husband, if she had learnt the truth, she would not have had to fight against herself and him. There would have been only one course left open to her—to do her utmost to make a better man of him. And circumstances had shown her that in her hands the task would have been an easy one.
CHAPTER XXV
When Sir George Barclay returned to prison, he was a broken man. His officers were surprised to see him back alive, and anxious to hear what had occurred. But a day or two passed before he was able to talk about what had happened. And always before him was the bestial figure of the miser feather merchant, into whose hands he imagined his daughter had fallen.
When he told the story of her sale a strained silence fell on his officers. A silence that Cameron broke.
"The damned brute," he said in a wild, heart-broken way, "and he knew her in Grand Canary."
The fact of Pansy's acquaintance with the Sultan Casim Ammeh, Barclay had learnt from Cameron in the early days of their capture. The younger man immediately had recognised the Sultan as the Raoul Le Breton, who when out of Africa posed as a French millionaire.
"He's worse than a savage," one of the other officers put in, "since he knows better."
Sir George had nothing to say, once the story was told. Pansy's fate was always before him; an agony that chased him into dreams, compared with which his own death would have been as nothing.
One morning about ten days after the sale of slaves, one of the Arab guards brought him a letter.