The emotions of the morning and the disappointment of the intended ride, together with the dismay produced by the unexpected visitor, all combined to agitate her powerfully, and she worked herself up into a fever of self-torture and unhappiness. She ended by falling asleep and slept heavily for some hours. Zilah waked her with a shy hand on her arm and a soft announcement of lunch, and Diana sat up, rubbing her eyes, flushed and drowsy. She stared uncomprehendingly for a moment at the Arab girl, and then waved her away imperiously and buried her head in the pillows again. Lunch, when her heart was breaking!
Mindful of her lord's deputy, who was waiting in the next room, and whom she regarded with awe, Zilah held her ground with a timid insistence until Diana started up wrathfully and bade her go in tones that she had never used before to the little waiting-girl. Zilah fled precipitately, and, thoroughly awakened, Diana swung her heels to the ground and with her elbows on her knees rested her hot head in her hands. She felt giddy, her head ached and her mouth was parched and dry. She got up languidly, and going to the table studied her face in the mirror intently. She frowned at the reflection. She had never been proud of her own beauty; she had lived with it always and it had seemed to her a thing of no consequence, and now that it had failed to arouse the love she wanted in Ahmed Ben Hassan she almost hated it.
"Are you going to have fever or are you merely bad-tempered?" she asked out loud, and the sound of her own voice made her laugh in spite of her heavy heart. She went into the bathroom and soused her head in cold water. When she came back a frightened Zilah was putting a small tray on the brass-topped table by the bed.
"M'sieur Gaston," she stammered, almost crying.
Diana looked at the tray, arranged with all the dainty neatness dear to the valet's heart, and then at the travelling clock on the table beside it, and realised that it was an hour past her usual lunch-time and that she was extremely hungry, after all. A little piece of paper on the tray caught her eye, and, picking it up, she read in Gaston's clear though minute handwriting, "At what hour does Madame desire to ride?"
The servant clearly had no intention of giving up the programme for the afternoon without a struggle. She smiled as she added a figure to the end of the note, and went to the curtains that divided the rooms. "Gaston!"
"Madame!"
She passed the paper silently through the curtains and went back to her lunch. When she sent Zilah away with the empty tray she rescued the Vicomte de Saint Hubert's book from the floor where she had thrown it and tried to read it dispassionately. She turned to the title-page and studied the pencilled scrawl "Souvenir de Raoul" closely. It did not look like the handwriting of a small-minded man, but handwriting was nothing to go by, she argued obstinately. Aubrey, who was the essence of selfishness, wrote beautifully, and had once been told by an expert that his writing denoted a generous love of his fellow-men, which deduction had aroused no enthusiasm in the baronet, and had given his sister over to helpless mirth. She turned the pages, dipping here and there, finally forgetting the author altogether in the book. It was a wonderful story of a man's love and faithfulness, and Diana pushed it aside at last with a very bitter sigh. Things happened so in books. In real life they happened very differently. She looked round the room with pain-filled eyes, at the medley of her own and the Sheik's belongings, her ivory toilet appointments jostling indiscriminately among his brushes and his razors on the dressing-table, and then at the pillow beside her where his head rested every night. She stooped and kissed it with a little quivering breath. "Ahmed. Oh, Monseigneur!" she murmured longingly. Then, with an impatient jerk of the head, she sprang up and dragged on her boots. She pulled a soft felt hat down over her eyes and picked up the revolver the Sheik had given her. She paused a moment, looking at it with an odd smile before buckling it round her slim waist. Gaston's face lit up with genuine pleasure when she came out to the horses. She had felt a momentary embarrassment before she left the tent, thinking of the last time he had ridden with her, but she had known from the moment he came back that night that he bore no malice, and the look on his face and his stammered words to the Sheik had indicated that the fear he felt for her was not for what might have happened in the desert, but for what might yet happen to her at the hands of his master and hers.
The horse that she rode always now was pure white, not so fast as Silver Star and very tricky, called The Dancer, from a nervous habit of dancing on his hind-legs at starting and stopping, like a circus-horse. He was difficult to mount, and edged away shyly as Diana tried to get her foot into the stirrup. But she swung up at last, and by the time The Dancer had finished his display of haute ecole Gaston was mounted. "After riding The Dancer I feel confident to enter for the Concours Hippique," she laughed over her shoulder, and touched the horse with her heel.
She wanted exercise primarily, hard physical exercise that would tire her out and keep her mind occupied and prevent her from thinking, and the horse she rode supplied both needs. He required watching all the time. She let him out to his full pace for his own sake and hers, and the air and the movement banished her headache, and a kind of exhilaration came over her, making her almost happy. After a while she reined in her horse and waved to Gaston to come alongside. "Tell me of this Vicomte de Saint Hubert who is coming. You know him, I suppose, as you have been so long with Monseigneur?"
Gaston smiled. "I knew him before Monseigneur did. I was born on the estate of Monsieur le Comte de Saint Hubert, the father of Monsieur le Vicomte. I and my twin brother Henri. We both went into Monsieur's le Comte's training stables, and then after our time in the Cavalry Henri became valet to Monsieur le Vicomte, and I came to Monseigneur."
Diana took off her hat and rubbed her forehead thoughtfully. Fifteen years ago Ahmed must have been about twenty. Why should an Arab chief of that age, or any age, indulge in such an anomaly as a French valet, or for that matter why should a French valet attach himself to an Arab Sheik and exile himself in the wilds of the desert? Whichever way she turned, the mystery of the man she loved seemed to crop up. She started arguing with herself in a circle—why should the Sheik have a European servant or why should he not, until she gave it up in hopeless confusion.
She turned to Gaston with the intention of asking further of the coming visitor, and, keeping The Dancer as still as she could, sat looking at the valet with great, questioning eyes, fanning her hot face with her hat. Gaston, whose own horse stood like a rock, was frankly mopping his forehead. Dianna decided against any more questions. Gaston would naturally be hopelessly biased, having been born and brought up in the shadow of the family, and after all she would rather judge for herself. One inquiry only she permitted herself: "The family of Saint Hubert, are they of the old or the new noblesse?"
"Of the old, Madame," replied Gaston quickly.
Diana coaxed her nervous mount close beside his steadier companion, and, thrusting his bridle and her hat into Gaston's hands, slipped to the ground and walked away a little distance to the top of a small mound. She sat down on the summit with her back to the horses and her arms clasped round her knees. All that the coming of this strange man meant to her rushed suddenly over her. He was a man, obviously, who moved in the world, her world, since he apparently travelled extensively and his father was wealthy enough to run a racing stable as a hobby and was a member of the dwindling class of ancienne noblesse. It was characteristic of her that she put first what she did. How could she bear to meet one of her own order in the position in which she was? She who had been proud Diana Mayo and now—the mistress of an Arab Sheik? She laid her face on her knees with a shudder. The ordeal before her cut like a knife into her heart. The pride that Ahmed Ben Hassan had not yet killed flamed up and racked her with humiliation and shame, the shame that still seared her soul like a hot iron, so that there were moments she could not bear even the presence of the man who had made her what she was, in spite of the love she bore him, and, pleading fever, prayed to be alone. Not that he ever granted her prayer, for he knew fever when he saw it, but would pull her down beside him with a mocking laugh that still had the power to hurt so much. The thought of what it would be to her to meet his friend had presumably never entered his mind, or if it had it had made no impression and been dismissed as negligible. It was the point of view, she supposed drearily; the standpoint from which he looked at things was fundamentally different from her own—racially and temperamentally they were poles apart. To him she was only the woman held in bondage, a thing of no account. She sat very still for a while with her face hidden, until a discreet cough from Gaston warned her that time was flying. She went back to the horses slowly with white face and compressed lips. There was the usual trouble in mounting, and her strained nerves made her impatient of The Dancer's idiosyncrasies, and she checked him sharply, making him rear dangerously.