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those alone. He took out a short leather whip, so thick at the base that it
was difficult to see where it joined the handle, and tapering to a point in
which there was a thin hard knot.
"An excellent instrument," Osman said, "which has helped to drive a proper
sense of respect into the man you see."
He ran the lash through his fingers thoughtfully, gazing down at the
grovelling creature by his feet. Something in the sight of that last triumph
of his, that living completeness of humiliation, seemed to snap the thread of
his gloating self-control. With his thick lips twisting back wolfishly, he
leapt at Halidom and slashed twice at his face; then he turned and dragged
Clements up again, holding him pinned against the wall with a hand grasping
his throat.
"Look at them, Clements!" he screamed. "Look at them!" He forced the man's
livid face round towards Toby and Laura. "Can you see them or are you too
hungry for the needle? They're white white the colour you were so proud of!
And you're not ashamed, are you? I've thrashed you often enough before my
blacks you're used to that but how do you like your own people to see what
you've sunk to ? Look at them, I tell you. A white man and a white
girl staring at you despising you and even that doesn't give you enough
self-respect to stand up for yourself. Bah!"
He stepped back and sent the whip hissing about the man's thin shoulders; and
then he came close to Halidom again.
"And that," he said hoarsely "that is what you will be like, Halidom."
His mouth was drooling at the corners, his fingers twitching with the
intensity of his passion. Toby looked him in the eyes.
"You'll never get away with this," he said, as quietly as he could. "Stride
knows we're here, and as soon as he gets worried about Laura "
Abdul Osman laughed harshly.
"My dear Halidom, you're mistaken. Stride sent Laura to me to stay! He did not
send you, but I imagine your disappearance will be a relief to him if you had
been left on his hands he might not have known what to do with you. By this
time he is making his preparations to leave."
"I don't believe it!" cried the girl. "Toby it can't be true he's lying "
Osman looked at her.
"It doesn't matter to me what you believe," he said silkily. "Doubtless you
will be convinced in course of time."
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"It's a lie!" she protested again, but a chill fear had closed on her heart.
"He'll go straight to the police "
"The police?" Osman's sinister chuckle whispered through the room. "They would
be delighted to see him. You little fool! Didn't you know where his money came
from? Didn't you know that all his life he's done nothing but trade in women
and drugs that I hold enough evidence to send him to prison for twenty years?
You, my dear Laura, are the price of his liberty: you and er his retirement
from business. A price that he was glad to offer, and that I was very happy to
accept."
She could not think properly, could not comprehend the whole hideous
significance of what he was saying. She could not believe it; and yet, from
the manner in which he said it, either it must be true or he must be mad And
neither alternative opened out a gleam of hope. But she remembered the
strangeness that she had seen in Galbraith Stride's eyes when he insisted that
she must deliver his message herself, and she was frozen with dread before
that unspeakable explanation.
Beside her, Toby Halidom was struggling again in a blind fury of helplessness;
and Osman looked at him again.
"I shall commence your treatment very soon, my friend," he said; and then he
spoke again to Ali. "Take him away and bind him carefully I shall ring when I
wish to see him again."
Almost before he could speak, Halidom was hustled out of the room, with the
girl's wild pitiful cry ringing in his ears. Rough brown hands forced him down
a dark alleyway, tightened ropes round his wrists and ankles, and hurled him
into an evil-smelling unlighted cabin. He heard the door locked on the
outside, and was alone with a despair such as he had never dreamed of in his
life, a despair haunted with visions that verged on sheer shrieking madness.
There was only one hope left for him a hope so small that it was almost worse
than no hope at all. They had not troubled to search him, and there was a
penknife in his pocket. If he could reach that, saw at the ropes on his
wrists... then there would still be the locked door, and a hostile crew to
break through unarmed.... But he was trying to get at that knife, with strange
futile tears burning under his eyelids.
Laura Berwick thought that her reason would break. The last of the swarthy
seamen had released her and gone out with Toby there was no one in the saloon
but herself and Abdul Osman, and that ghastly relic of a man cowering in a
corner and watching Osman's movements with blubbering hate-filled eyes. Osman
did not even seem to be aware of his existence perhaps he had grown so used to
having that thing of his own creation with him that he took no more notice of
him than if he had been a dog; or perhaps in the foul depths of his mind there
was some spawning idea of heaping humiliation on humiliation both for the girl
and his beaten slave. He edged towards her unsteadily, his glittering eyes
leering with unutterable things, and she retreated from him as she would have
done before a snake, until her back was to the wall and she could retreat no
further.
"Come to me, beautiful white rose!"
His arms reached out for her. She tried to slip side-ways away from their
clawing grasp, keeping her eyes out of sheer terror from looking full into
that puffed lecherous face; but he caught her arm and held it with a strength
greater than her own. She was drawn irresist-ibly into his hot embrace she
felt the horrible softness of his paunch against her firm young flesh, and
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shud-dered until mists swam before her eyes. She could not possibly endure it
much longer. Her senses reeled, and she seemed to have lost all her
strength....
And then, as his greedy lips found her face, her brain went out at last into
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