by Pamela Kent
Khalil lifted his head and saw them almost as quickly as she did, and his reaction was immediate. Notwithstanding the fact that he probably knew the lull was only temporary as was proved only a few minutes later, when a fresh, screaming wind arose—he suddenly leapt up and, before Susan could clutch at him or stop him, had vanished with something like a cry of terror on his lips.
Susan made a wild attempt to stumble after him, appalled by the thought of being left alone in that wilderness, with two vague shapes advancing towards her whom she did not know, whereas Khalil at least was someone with whom she had already lived endless hours of travelling and camping. But before she could lift one foot out of the sand into which she appeared to be sinking an arm caught her and held her with tremendous strength, so that even her frenzied attempts to break from it were utterly fruitless. She heard a voice that her panic did not allow to be recognizable, addressing her with an insistence that meant nothing at all, until all at once it said:
“Susan!”
She stopped resisting frantically, although she was certain this was a delirium resulting from her experiences. The hard body against which she was crushed could not be the body of the man she had thought about constantly for how many days and nights?... Or was it weeks and months?...
She had lost all count of time since the nightmare had started happening to her, and her brain seemed to have become permanently confused. She uttered a little sob, choked over the dryness in her throat as the sound tore its way through it, and then thrust the hair out of her eyes the better to see through their red rims. The man who held her thrust back his protecting kufiyya from his face, and at last she knew that unless it really was delirium she was safe, and that Raoul had found her as she should have known for a certainty he would.
“It’s all right, Susan, my darling,” he told her. “I’ve got you!”
And then the shrieking wind arose once more and he drew her down behind the shivering petrified horses.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
HOW long that second storm lasted Susan neither knew nor cared, for although it was still difficult to breathe, the only thought of which she was capable was that she was safe once more from a menace that she had never dared to contemplate fully.
Raoul, who was wearing a burnous, kept it wrapped around her so that the worst of the storm never reached her, and with her face pressed against the thin silk of his shirt, all that she really heard was the wild thunder of his heart below her cheek. She knew that his arms held her strongly, too, and that although it was impossible even to attempt to talk he had no more desire than she had just then to say anything at all, and that the moment, wild and tempestuous though it was, was enough, and more than enough, for him as well as her.
Later there came a lull which in the end was much more than a lull, for the dust-clouds had swept onwards, and once they had done so that leaden look departed from the sky and the light began to grow stronger. Susan realized it was Ibrahim ,who suddenly made his appearance through the new wilderness of sand with a metal-encased water-bottle from which she was allowed to drink enough to ease the dreadful dryness of her throat, and once her throat felt easier and her eyes were no longer filled with flying sand, she was able to look up at the man who still held her, and a tiny touch of pink stole into her hollow cheeks because of the way he looked at her.
The small mountain of sand behind them protected them by casting its shadow over them from the renewed glare of the sun, and as Ibrahim had led away the now much calmer horses, they were as good as alone in a world that was all at once uncannily still now that the recent tumult had died away. What had happened to Khalil Susan didn’t know, and just then she was in no condition to care. The only thing she cared about was that Raoul was holding her, that one of his hands was shakily trying to free her curls from the grit that clung to them, and that his voice when he spoke at last was hoarse and utterly unlike any voice she had ever heard from him.
“Oh, Susan!” he said. He pressed her face down into the hollow of his neck, and once again she heard the beating of his heart. He seemed unable to go on. His arms tightened about her so convulsively that in her bruised and weary condition they actually hurt her, but she would have suffered such hurt gladly for any length of time he cared to inflict it on her. “Oh, Susan!” he repeated again, at last, rather helplessly. “I don’t know what to say to you now I’ve found you!”
“I can’t think how you—did find me,” she answered, her own words coming with difficulty.
“We got on to your track early this morning. A woman in a Kurd village said she had seen you, and that you were heading this way. After that it was comparatively easy to pick up your tracks.”
“A woman in a Kurd village?” Susan’s eyes brightened a little with recollection and pleasure. “Then she was a friend! She did do something to help me!”
“She said she had never seen anyone like you before, and that you had hair the color of moonlight. She was right!” His voice quivered. “You have always been my little English moonflower of a girl, and I let you run into danger! I ought to be shot because I didn’t take enough care of you, because I hadn’t the sense to realize that for the past few weeks you’ve been in almost constant danger! And if anything had really happened to you! ... Khalil!” He broke off to shoot the question at her, and she saw that his eyes were agonized. “How did he treat you, Susan? Wherever he is I’ll find him if—”
“Khalil simply carried out instructions he received,” Susan replied soothingly. “I don’t think he liked his job...”
“He’ll like it still less when I get my hands on him, and Ibrahim won’t let him escape. If the sand hasn’t buried him alive I’ll have the pleasure of dealing with him quite soon!” And then his anguish overwhelmed him. “Oh, my darling, my little one, how are you? Have you been brutally used? Your wrists!” He picked one up, and he could plainly see the marks left there by the cords that had bound them during the early stages of her abduction. His dark eyes developed a tortured look, and he bent and laid his lips against the raw places. “Susan, I’ve suffered an agony since you disappeared,” he whispered, “and now that I’ve got you safe in my arms I can hardly believe it!”
“Neither can I,” she whispered back, and as they gazed deep into one another’s eyes there was no need for either of them to say anything at all about the further agonies each would have suffered if they’d never seen one another again.
“Beloved,” he told her, stroking her cheek with an unsteady forefinger, “this isn’t the time to weary you with words—you need rest and care, and Ibrahim will erect a tent to which I will carry you as soon as it is ready, and you shall stay there in absolute safety for an hour or so before we begin our homeward journey.” At the words “homeward journey” her eyes filled with tears, and as he saw them, and the way they started to overflow, wetting his finger, his control vanished, and he crushed her up against him with a kind of wild desperation. “But I must tell you that you are the most precious thing in my life, and if it had been so ordained that there wasn’t to be any homeward journey for you and me together, I wouldn’t have wanted to go on living! I love you, my beloved, as no man ever loved a woman before, and if you will only trust me in future nothing, and no one, shall ever hurt you again! I swear it, my heart!”
Susan hadn’t very much strength left, but her hands reached out and clung to him, and he could feel her clinging.
“Oh, Raoul,” she whispered, “Raoul!”
“Say that you believe I will guard you in future, Susan?” he implored.
“I do believe it—I do believe it!” Her face came out into the open, and she tried to reassure him with her look. “And, in any case—”
“There is no ‘in any case’ about it, but we will talk of what happened to you later. Just now I want to hear you say you love me, too. Say it, Susan,” he pleaded.
Susan would never have believed she would find the courage to say just that, but her recent experiences had made everything else seem quite
unimportant. Neither pride nor shyness was possible in those moments—there was only the wonder that they were together.
“I love you, Raoul,” she told him, with an intensity that made her lips quiver, and her face that suffering had caused to look heart-shakingly fine-drawn glowed as if a lamp had been lighted behind it.
“My darling!” he exclaimed, and for the first time their lips came together in a simple anguish of love and longing.
He refused to allow her to talk any more, only crooned over her as he held her as if she was a baby that had been returned to its mother’s arms, and had to be taken infinite care of; and then, when Ibrahim touched him on the arm and intimated that the tent was ready, and a meal ready to be served, he picked her up and carried her into the tent and laid her on the bed that been prepared for her.
She slept all through the heat of the afternoon—slept dreamlessly and peacefully, knowing he was within a few feet of her—and when darkness fell, and the huge, clear vault of the sky was full of stars, he once again held her in his arms, while Said, his horse, bore them homewards to Zor Oasis.
The decision had been taken to travel through the night because Raoul was anxious to get Susan back to the comforts of civilization as quickly as possible; and now, utterly content, and thinking in the world, Susan lay blissfully in his arms, and would have been happy to know that the journey ahead of them was twice as far in spite of her acute physical weariness.
Her head resting in the crook of his shoulder, his dark chin on a level with her forehead, and his mouth occasionally burying itself in the softness of her hair, she learned, too, all that had happened when it was discovered she was missing, and of the change that had come over a picnic party bored by the lack of anything to hold their interest in the Oasis of the Sparkling Wells.
They had all been getting ready to remount their horses and leave, when Ayse had raised the alarm because Susan was not with them. Raoul had had his attention distracted from her earlier in the afternoon by Jacqueline’s insisting on showing him something he hadn’t wanted to see, and when they returned to the square where the horses were tethered, and the others waited, Susan was not amongst them. Instantly the houses had been searched, and Carlton had announced that he had last seen Susan following in the wake of the others when they wandered through them. Jacqueline had endorsed this by insisting that she had actually seen the English girl in one of the huts, and that she had been seated on a divan bed in a corner enjoying a rest.
Therefore a great deal of time had been devoted to thoroughly searching the houses, and by that time Susan and Khalil must have been well away. Carlton, for some reason which Raoul could not understand at the time, had not looked happy, but Jacqueline had seemed genuinely anxious to do everything she could to find the missing girl.
“When did you first suspect Jacqueline?” Susan asked, realizing that every time he had to make any reference to Madame Dupont a hardness that would have almost alarmed her in the old days came into his voice, and although she could only see his face with difficulty in the starlight, the ferocity that came into it was both cold and ruthless.
“When Arnwood asked for a few moments alone with me, and told me his own suspicions. He told me all about the jug of lemon squash that—he was certain—had poisoned Ayse, and had been intended for you, and of his feeling of uneasiness when the desert trip was first mentioned. The advantage he had over me was that he had known Jacqueline for a short time only, and judged her purely as an acquaintance, and one whom he had, apparently instinctively mistrusted. I had no cause to mistrust her because I’ve known her for a long while, and have often felt sorry for her in the days when her elderly husband was still alive. But”—and he clenched his teeth—“apparently my pity was misplaced!”
“But, you did know—you must have known!—that she was in love with you,” Susan said softly, looking up at him.
“I knew she wanted to marry me,” he answered bluntly, “but even I never believed Jacqueline could fall very deeply in love. She isn’t the type to do that. She makes up her mind that she wants something, and she goes all out to get it—that’s her!”
“Well, she wanted you,” Susan murmured.
“Maybe—but I didn’t want her!” He looked down at her urgently, anxiously, in the starlight. “Susan, you do believe that I was never in love with her?—not even interested in her! She’s attractive, and as an attractive woman I sometimes found her company pleasant, but in no circumstances would I have married her! It was not my intention to marry anyone until I met you! You altered everything in life for me!”
Her hand stole up and caressed his cheek, and he caught it and crushed it against his mouth.
‘It’s the truth, Susan, and you’ve got to believe me! In the old days, when Jacqueline’s husband was alive, I tried to avoid her, but when she came back after his death that was not so easy. I think she had made up her mind that she was going to marry me, and she was shrewd enough to discover that I was interested in you. And being a worse than unscrupulous woman, apparently, she then made up her mind to get rid of you if she could!” His face was so dark and convulsed with his fury that Susan tried to divert him by getting him back on to his original story.
“But what happened after Nick told you his suspicions of Jacqueline?”
“I taxed her with them! I took her apart and I shook her like a rat, and I threatened to shake truth, and what had happened to you. But although she knew I was quite capable of carrying out my threat she wouldn’t say a word, and it was Carlton who finally told the truth. I think he had become thoroughly alarmed—and perhaps, also, he was more than a bit horrified by what he had done—and after that I wasted no time, but set out after you with Ibrahim. The others have gone back to Zor Oasis, and Ayse at this moment is probably consumed with anxiety for you. But I said I’d bring you back—and I’d have gone on searching for you until I found you! I wouldn’t have gone back without you, Susan! I couldn’t have gone back!”
Susan nestled with a blissful little sigh against him.
“I can even forgive Madame Dupont now that I know that,” she whispered drowsily, for the stars were paling and it was getting near dawn.
“You’ll never have an opportunity to forgive Madame Dupont, as you call her,” he told her grimly. “I warned her before I set off to look for you that if ever I found her in my part of the oasis I’d have her arrested for attempted murder and abduction, and now that I’ve got her man Khalil, and he’s confessed to everything, I don’t imagine we’ll ever see her in the oasis again, or Carlton,” he added. “I always knew he was absolutely no good, and the one thing I’ve got to thank him for is telling the truth about you.”
“I wonder why he did that?” Susan murmured. “It could have been because his conscience troubled him, but I think it was probably because he wants to marry Jacqueline himself. And now that she knows he knows so much, perhaps she’ll decide to marry him.”
“Which will be a fitting punishment for him,” Raoul declared darkly. “For he’ll undoubtedly regret it. I wish I could think up as fitting a punishment for Jacqueline.”
“Let’s forget her,” Susan said, trying to fight against her drowsiness. “Now that I know you were never in love with her she doesn’t seem to matter at all.”
He tightened one arm about her, and let Said’s reins lie in his free hand.
“You’re the only woman I’ve ever loved,” he said, and he kissed her drooping eyelids just as the last star vanished, put out of existence by the fires of dawn. “The only woman I’ll ever love!”
And when he saw that she was asleep he smiled at her utterly tranquil face with a tenderness that would have amazed her, even now that she thought she knew him, lying not only at the corners of his handsome mouth, but in the strange depths of his eyes.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A week later Susan stood on the balcony of her room at Zor Oasis, looking out across the courtyard to the green palms that girdled the oasis.
Their feathery
tops were touched with, light as they had been on the first morning after her arrival, and below her the lemon trees sparkled in the sunshine and the oleanders were still flowering. The mosaic paths looked brilliant and colorful, and the little low door in the wall had only just closed after departing figures going forth to enjoy a brisk gallop before breakfast. Susan could see the horses being led out by the grooms and Said’s chestnut-colored satin coat, beneath which his magnificent muscles rippled with every movement, glistening in the sunlight.
It was all very much as it had been on that morning after her arrival, save that Ayse was accompanied by Nicholas Arnwood, and there appeared to be no sign of Raoul. Arnwood was even being permitted to mount Said, and that filled Susan with sudden anxiety for she couldn’t think what had happened to Raoul, and why he wasn’t riding his own horse.
She went downstairs quickly to the patio to see if she could find out why he was not riding this morning, and there he was, waiting for her beside the fountain, quietly smoking a cigarette, am: watching the pigeons drinking from the marble basin.