THE MEETING
Under the sun, under the starry nights Tremont, with his burden,
journeyed toward the north. The halts were distasteful to him, and
although he was forced to rest he would rather have been cursed with
sleeplessness and have journeyed on and on. He rode his camel like a
Bedouin; he grew brown like the Bedouins and under the hot breezes,
swaying on his desert ship, he sank into dreamy, moody and melancholy
reveries, like the wandering men of the Sahara, and felt himself part
of the desolation, as they were.
"What will be, will be!" Hammet Abou said to him a hundred times, and
Tremont wondered: "Will Charles live to see Algiers?"
Sabron journeyed in a litter carried between six mules, and they
traveled slowly, slowly. Tremont rode by the sick man's side day
after day. Not once did the soldier for any length of time regain
his reason. He would pass from coma to delirium, and many times
Tremont thought he had ceased to breathe. Slender, emaciated under
his covers, Sabron lay like the image of a soldier in wax--a wounded
man carried as a votive offering to the altars of desert warfare.
At night as he lay in his bed in his tent, Tremont and Hammet Abou
cooled his temples with water from the earthen bottles, where the
sweet ooze stood out humid and refreshing on the damp clay. They
gave him acid and cooling drinks, and now and then Sabron would smile
on Tremont, calling him "_petit frère_", and Tremont heard the words
with moisture in his eyes, remembering what he had said to the
Marquise d'Esclignac about being Sabron's brother. Once or twice the
soldier murmured a woman's name, but Tremont could not catch it, and
once he said to the duke:
"Sing! Sing!"
The Frenchman obeyed docilely, humming in an agreeable barytone the
snatches of song he could remember, La Fille de Madame Angot_, Il
Trovatore_; running then into more modern opera, _La Veuve Joyeuse_.
But the lines creased in Sabron's forehead indicated that the singer
had not yet found the music which haunted the memory of the sick man.
"Sing!" he would repeat, fixing his hollow eyes on his companion, and
Tremont complied faithfully. Finally, his own thoughts going back to
early days, he hummed tunes that he and a certain little girl had
sung at their games in the _allées_ of an old château in the valley
of the Indre.
"_Sonnez les matines
Ding--din--don,_"
and other children's melodies.
In those nights, on that desolate way, alone, in a traveling tent, at
the side of a man he scarcely knew, Robert de Tremont learned serious
lessons. He had been a soldier himself, but his life had been an
inconsequent one. He had lived as he liked, behind him always the
bitterness of an early deception. But he had been too young to break
his heart at seventeen. He had lived through much since the day his
father exiled him to Africa.
Thérèse had become a dream, a memory around which he did not always
let his thoughts linger. When he had seen her again after her
husband's death and found her free, he was already absorbed in the
worldly life of an ambitious young man. He had not known how much he
loved her until in the Villa des Bougainvilleas he had seen and
contrasted her with Julia Redmond.
All the charm for him of the past returned, and he realized that, as
money goes, he was poor--she was poorer.
The difficulties of the marriage made him all the more secure in his
determination that nothing should separate him again from this woman.
By Sabron's bed he hummed his little insignificant tunes, and his
heart longed for the woman. When once or twice on the return journey
they had been threatened by the engulfing sand-storm, he had prayed
not to die before he could again clasp her in his arms.
Sweet, tantalizing, exquisite with the sadness and the passion of
young love, there came to him the memories of the moonlight nights on
the terrace of the old château. He saw her in the pretty girlish
dresses of long ago, the melancholy droop of her quivering mouth, her
bare young arms, and smelled the fragrance of her hair as he kissed
her. So humming his soothing melodies to the sick man, with his
voice softened by his memories, he soothed Sabron.
Sabron closed his eyes, the creases in his forehead disappeared as
though brushed away by a tender hand. Perhaps the sleep was due to
the fact that, unconsciously, Tremont slipped into humming a tune
which Miss Redmond had sung in the Villa des Bougainvilleas, and of
whose English words De Tremont was quite ignorant.
"Will he last until Algiers, Hammet Abou?"
"What will be, will be, Monsieur!" Abou replied.
"He must," De Tremont answered fiercely. "He shall."
He became serious and meditative on those silent days, and his blue
eyes, where the very whites were burned, began to wear the far-away
mysterious look of the traveler across long distances. During the
last sand-storm he stood, with the camels, round Sabron's litter, a
human shade and shield, and when the storm ceased, he fell like one
dead, and the Arabs pulled off his boots and put him to bed like a
child.
One sundown, as they traveled into the after-glow with the East
behind them, when Tremont thought he could not endure another day of
the voyage, when the pallor and waxness of Sabron's face were like
death itself, Hammet Abou, who rode ahead, cried out and pulled up
his camel short. He waved his arm.
"A caravan, Monsieur!"
In the distance they saw the tents, like lotus leaves, scattered on
the pink sands, and the dark shadows of the Arabs and the couchant
beasts, and the glow of the encampment fire.
"An encampment, Monsieur!"
Tremont sighed. He drew the curtain of the litter and looked in upon
Sabron, who was sleeping. His set features, the growth of his uncut
beard, the long fringe of his eyes, his dark hair upon his forehead,
his wan transparency--with the peace upon his face, he might have
been a figure of Christ waiting for sepulture. Tremont cried to him:
"Sabron, _mon vieux_ Charles, _réveille-toi_! We are in sight of
human beings!"
But Sabron gave no sign that he heard or cared.
Throughout the journey across the desert, Pitchouné had ridden at his
will and according to his taste, sometimes journeying for the entire
day perched upon Tremont's camel. He sat like a little figurehead or
a mascot, with ears pointed northward and his keen nose sniffing the
desert air. Sometimes he would take the same position on one of the
mules that carried Sabron's litter, but his favorite post was within
the litter, at his master's feet. There he would lie hour after
hour, with his soft eyes fixed with understanding sympathy upon
Sabron's face.
He was, as he had been to Fatou Anni, a kind of fetish: the caravan
adored him. Now from his position at Sabron's feet, he crawled up
and licked his master's hand.
"Charles!" Tremont cried, and lifted the soldier's hand.
Sabron opened his eyes. He was sane. The glimmer of a smile touched
his lips. He said Tremont's name, recognized him. "Are we home?" he
asked weakly. "Is it France?"
Tremont turned and dashed away a tear.
He drew the curtains of the litter and now walked beside it, his legs
feeling like cotton and his heart beating.
As they came up toward the encampment, two people rode out to meet
them, two women in white riding-habits, on stallions, and as the
evening breeze fluttered the veils from their helmets, they seemed to
be flags of welcome.
Under his helmet Tremont was red and burned. He had a short rough
growth of beard.
Thérèse de la Maine and Julia Redmond rode up. Tremont recognized
them, and came forward, half staggering. He looked at Julia and
smiled, and pointed with his left hand toward the litter; but he went
directly up to Madame de la Maine, who sat immovable on her little
stallion. Tremont seemed to gather her in his arms. He lifted her
down to him.
Julia Redmond's eyes were on the litter, whose curtains were stirring
in the breeze. Hammet Abou, with a profound salaam, came forward to
her.
"Mademoiselle," he said respectfully, "he lives. I have kept my
word."
Pitchouné sprang from the litter and ran over the sands to Julia
Redmond. She dismounted from her horse alone and called him:
"Pitchouné! Pitchouné!" Kneeling down on the desert, she stooped to
caress him, and he crouched at her feet, licking her hands.