The next day the three travellers reached the edge of the desert, and
refreshed themselves for a week in an adjacent village, which, with
its shady trees and green pastures, seemed like a little paradise in
contrast to the joyless Sahara. Fadrique’s condition especially made
this rest necessary. He had never left the desert during the whole time,
gaining his subsistence by fighting with wandering Arabs, and often
almost exhausted by the utter want of all food and drink. At length he
had become so thoroughly confused that the stars could no longer guide
him, and he had been driven about, sadly and objectless, like the dust
clouds of the desert.
Even now, at times, when he would fall asleep after the midday meal, and
Antonia and Heimbert would watch his slumbers like two smiling angels,
he would suddenly start up and gaze round him with a terrified air,
and then it was not till he had refreshed himself by looking at the two
friendly faces that he would sink back again into quiet repose. When
questioned on the matter, after he was fully awake, he told them that in
his wanderings nothing had been more terrible to him than the deluding
dreams which had transported him, sometimes to his own home, sometimes
to the merry camp of his comrades, and sometimes into Zelinda’s
presence, and then leaving him doubly helpless and miserable in the
horrible solitude as the delusion vanished. It was on this account
that even now waking was fearful to him, and even in sleep a vague
consciousness of his past sufferings would often disturb him. “You
cannot imagine it,” he added. “To be suddenly transported from
well-known scenes into the boundless desert! And instead of the
longed-for enchanting face of my beloved, to see an ugly camel’s head
stretched over me inquisitively with its long neck, starting back as I
rose with still more ugly timidity!”
This, with all other painful consequences of his past miseries, soon
wholly vanished, from Fadrique’s mind, and they cheerfully set out on
their journey to Tunis. The consciousness, indeed, of his injustice to
Heimbert and its unavoidable results often lay like a cloud upon the
noble Spaniard’s brow, but it also softened the natural proud severity
of his nature, and Antonia could cling the more tenderly and closely to
him with her loving heart.
Tunis, which had been before so amazed at Zelinda’s magic power and
enthusiastic hostility against the Christians, now witnessed Antonia’s
solemn baptism in a newly-consecrated edifice, and soon after the three
companions took ship with a favorable wind for Malaga.