British -- Egypt -- Fiction; Egypt -- Fiction; Kidnapping -- Fiction; Love stories
She shook her head. "Sometimes I have wondered----" she said
reflectively. "He seemed different from the others, and there has been
so much that I could never understand. But then again there were times
when he seemed pure Arab," she added in a lower voice and with an
involuntary shiver.
"You ought to know," said Saint Hubert. "Yes!" he went on firmly, as
she tried to interrupt him. "It is due to you. It will explain so many
things. I will take the responsibility. His father is the Earl of
Glencaryll."
"But I know him," said Diana wonderingly. "He was a friend of my
father. I saw him only a few months ago when Aubrey and I passed
through Paris. He is such a magnificent-looking old man, so fierce and
sad. Oh, now I know why that awful frown of Ahmed's has always seemed
so familiar. Lord Glencaryll frowns like that. It is the famous Caryll
scowl. But I still don't understand." She looked from Saint Hubert to
the unconscious man on the divan and back to Saint Hubert with a new
trouble growing in her eyes.
"I had better tell you the whole story," said Raoul, dropping back into
his chair.
"Thirty-six years ago my father, who was as great a wanderer as I am,
was staying here in the desert with his friend the Sheik Ahmed Ben
Hassan. A chance acquaintance some years before over the purchase of
some horses had ripened into a very intimate friendship that was
unusual between a Frenchman and an Arab. The Sheik was a wonderful man,
very enlightened, with strong European tendencies. As a matter of pure
fact he was not too much in sympathy with the French form of
administration as carried on in Algeria, but he was not affected
sufficiently by it to make any real difficulty. The territory that he
regarded as his own lay too much to the south, and he kept his large
and scattered tribe in too good order for any interference to be
possible. He was unmarried, and the women of his own race seemed to
have no attraction for him. He was wrapped up in his tribe and his
horses. My father had come for a stay of some months. My mother had
recently died and he wanted to get away from everything that reminded
him of her. One evening, shortly after his arrival at the camp, a party
of the Sheik's men who had been absent for some days in the north on
the chief's affairs arrived, bringing with them a woman whom they had
found wandering in the desert. How she had got there, or from what
direction she had come, they did not know. They were nearer
civilisation than Ahmed Ben Hassan's camp at the time, but with true
native tendency to avoid responsibility they thought that the disposal
of her was a matter more for their Sheik than themselves. She could
give no account of herself, as, owing to the effects of the sun or
other causes, she was temporarily out of her mind. Arabs are very
gentle with any one who is mad--'Allah has touched them!' She was taken
to the tent of one of the headmen, whose wife looked after her. For
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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