THE COLONEL OF THE LEGION
All Sanda's anxiously laid plans were swept away in the wind of emotion.
She and the father she had meant to win with loving diplomacy had
stumbled upon each other crudely in a railway station. The dear
resemblance upon which she had founded her best hope had struck Colonel
DeLisle like a blow over the heart.
The dapper little officer, with the figure of a boy and the face of a
tragic mask, stared straight at the girl, with the look of one who meets
a ghost in daylight. "My God! who are you?" he faltered, in French. The
words seemed to speak themselves against his will.
Sanda was deathly pale. But she caught at her courage as a soldier
grasps his flag: "I am--Corisande, your daughter," she answered in that
small, sweet voice of a child with which she had begged Max to pardon
her, yesterday. And she too spoke in French. "My father, forgive me if
I've done wrong to come to you like this. But I was so unhappy. I wanted
so much to see you. And I've travelled such a long way!"
For an instant the man still stared at her in silence. He had the air of
listening for a voice within a voice, as one listens through the sound
of running water for its tune. Max, who must now unfortunately be
explained and accounted for in spite of every difficulty, found a
strange likeness between the middle-aged soldier and the young girl. It
was in the eyes: long, gray, haunted with thoughts and dreams. If Sanda
DeLisle ever had to become acquainted with sorrow her eyes would be like
her father's.
The pause was but for a second or two, though it was full of suspense
for the girl, and even for Max, who forgot himself in anxiety for her.
The hardness of straining after self-control melted to sudden beauty, as
Max had seen Sanda's face transfigured. Never again, it seemed to
him--no matter what Colonel DeLisle's actions might be--could he believe
him to be cruel or cold.
"Ma petite," DeLisle said, with a quiver in his voice that echoed up
from heartstrings swept by some spirit hand. "Can it be true? You have
come--across half the world, to me?"
"Oh, father, yes, it is true. And always I've wanted to come." Sanda's
voice caressed him. No man could have resisted her then. "You're not
angry?"
"Mon Dieu, no, I'm not angry, though my life is not the life for a girl.
I only--for a moment I thought I saw----"
"I know, I guessed," Sanda gently filled up his pause. "Since I began
growing into a woman every one told me I was like--her. But I wouldn't
send you a photograph. For years I've planned to surprise you--and make
you _care_ a little, if I could."
"Care!" he echoed, a look as of anguish passing over his face like the
shadow of a cloud; then leaving it clear, though sad with the habitual
sadness which had scored its many lines. "You have surprised me,
indeed. But----" He stopped abruptly, and apparently for the first time
noticed the young man standing near. Stiffening slightly, Colonel
DeLisle looked keenly at Max, his eyes trying to solve the new puzzle.
"But--my daughter, you have come to me with----"
"Only a friend," Sanda broke in desperately, blushing up to her bright
hair. "A kind friend, Mr. Doran, an American who had to travel to
Sidi-bel-Abbés on business of his own, and who's been more good to me
than I can describe. I want him to let me tell you all about him, and
then you will understand."
"I thank you in advance, Monsieur," said Colonel DeLisle, unbending
again, and a faint--a very faint--twinkle brightening his eyes, at the
thought of the error he had nearly made, and because of Doran's blush at
being mistaken for an unwelcome son-in-law.
"I've done nothing, Monsieur le Colonel," stammered Max. "I had to come.
I have business with a person at the Hotel Splendide. It is Mademoiselle
who is kind to me in saying----"
"Could he not take me to the hotel to wait for you?" Sanda cut in. "I
shouldn't have interrupted you in such a place as this, and at such a
time, my father, if I could have helped doing so, even though I
recognized your face from the old photograph that is my treasure. But
acting on impulse is my greatest fault, the aunts all say. And when I
saw you I cried out before I stopped to think. Then I drew back, but it
was too late. I have taken you from some duty."
"I came officially with my comrades to meet General Sauvanne, who is
visiting our Algerian garrisons," said DeLisle. He glanced again at Max,
giving him one of those soldier looks which long experience has taught
to penetrate flesh and bone and brain down to a man's hidden self. "It
is true that I have no right to excuse myself for my own private
affairs." He hesitated, almost imperceptibly, then turned to Max. "Add
to your past kindness by taking my daughter to the hotel, Monsieur,
where in my name she will engage a room for herself--since,
unfortunately, I have no home to offer her. I will go with you both to a
cab, and then return to duty. My child, I will see you again before
_dejeuner_."
Max's quick mind promptly comprehended the full meaning of Colonel
DeLisle's seemingly unconventional decision. Not only was he being made
friendly use of, in a complicated situation, but Sanda's father wished
all who had seen the girl arrive with a man to know once for all that
the man had his official approval. Soon Sanda's relationship to the
Colonel of the First Regiment of the Foreign Legion would be known, and
there must be no stupid gossip regarding the scene at the station. As
they passed the other officers and their guests (who for these few
dramatic moments had discreetly awaited developments, outside the
platform gate), Colonel DeLisle lingered an instant to murmur; "It is my
daughter, who has come unexpectedly. A young friend whom I can trust to
see her to the hotel will take her there, and I am at your service when
I have put them into a cab."
"What do you think?" cried Sanda, as the rickety vehicle rattled them
toward the nearest gate of the walled town. "Have I failed with him--or
have I succeeded?"
"Succeeded," Max answered. "Don't you feel it?"
"I hoped it. Oh, Mr. Doran, I am going to love him!"
"I don't wonder," Max said. "I'm sure he's worth it."
"Yet I saw by your look when I spoke of him before, that you were
thinking him heartless."
"I had no right to think anything."
"I gave you the right, by confiding in you. But I didn't confide enough,
to do my father justice. I knew he wasn't heartless, though he couldn't
bear the sight of me when I was a baby, and put me out of his life. He
has always said that a soldier's life was not for a young girl to share.
I knew he had a heart, _because_ of that, not in spite of it. It was
that he loved my mother so desperately, and I'd robbed him of her. Now
you've seen him, you must let me tell you a little----"
"Would he wish it?"
"Yes, if he knew why, and if he knew you, and what you are going through
at this time. He fell in love with my mother at first sight in Paris,
and she with him. He was on leave, and she was there with her parents
from Ireland. He'd never meant to marry, but he was swept off his feet.
Mother's people wouldn't hear of it. They took her home in a hurry, and
tried to make her marry some one else. She nearly did--because they were
stronger than she. She wrote father a letter of good-bye, to his post in
the southern desert, where he was stationed then. He supposed, when he
read the letter, that she was already married when he got it. But
suddenly she appeared--as unexpectedly as I appeared to-day. She'd run
away from home, because she couldn't live without him. Oh, how well I
understand her! Think of the joy! It was like waking from a dreadful
dream for both of them. They were going to be married at once, though
mother was half dead with fatigue and excitement after her long, hurried
journey; but on their wedding eve she was taken ill, and became
delirious. It was typhoid fever. She had got it somehow on the journey.
She had come without stopping to rest, from Dublin to Touggourt, where
father was stationed. They say it's wild there even now. It was far
wilder then, more than twenty-one years ago. He nursed mother himself,
scarcely eating or sleeping: not taking off his clothes for weeks. One
of his aunts--my great-aunt--told me the story. It came to her from a
friend of father's. He never spoke of it. For three months mother wasn't
out of danger. Father was her nurse, her doctor, not her husband. But at
last she was well again. They had their honeymoon in a tent in the
desert. She loved the desert, then--or thought she did. Afterward,
though, she changed, for I was coming, and she was ill again. By that
time they were stationed still farther south. She grew so homesick for
the north that my father got leave. They started to travel by easy
stages through the desert, with a small caravan. Their hope was to reach
Algiers, and to get to France long before the baby should come; but the
heat grew suddenly terrible, and one day they were caught in a fearful
sandstorm. My mother was terrified. I was born two months before the
time. That same night she died, while the storm was still raging; and
before she went, she begged my father to promise, whatever happened, not
to leave her body buried in the desert. He did promise. And then began
his martyrdom. The caravan could not march fast because of me. A negro
woman who'd come as mother's maid took care of me as well as she could,
and fed me on condensed milk. Strange I should have lived.... My father
had his men make for my mother's body a case of many tins, which they
spread open and soldered together, with lead from bullets they melted.
In the next oasis they cut down a palm tree and hollowed out the trunk
for a coffin. They sealed up the tin case in it, and the coffin
travelled on the camel mother had ridden when she was alive, in one of
those beautiful hooded bassourahs you must have seen in pictures. At
night the coffin rested in my father's tent, and he lay beside it as he
had lain beside my mother when she lived, and they were happy. Because
she'd been a Catholic, and because she'd always hated the dark, father
burned candles on the coffin always till dawn; and the men who loved him
looked for wild flowers in the desert to lay upon it. He had forty days,
and forty nights, marching through the desert with the dead body of his
love, before they came to the railway. Then he took mother to France,
and left me with his two aunts there. Now do you wonder he never loved
me, or wanted to have me with him?"
"No, perhaps not," said Max. Deep sadness had fallen upon him. He was in
the desert with the man beside whose agony his own trial was as nothing.
All the world seemed to be full of sorrow and pain sharper than his own
personal pain. And as the girl asked her question and he answered it,
their cab passed the procession of recruits for the Foreign Legion,
tramping along between tall plane trees toward the town gate.
Once again a pair of tortured black eyes looked at Max, who winced as
the thick yellow dust from the wheels enveloped the marching men.
"Will you let me tell my father your story, as I have told you his?"
Sanda asked.
"Do as you think best," he said.
In another moment the cab had rolled past a few gardens and villas, a
green plateau and a moat, and passed through a great gateway. Overhead,
carved in the stone, were the words "Porte d'Oran," and the date, 1855.
Once, when the town was young, the gates had been kept tightly closed,
and through the loopholes in the stout, stone wall (the old part yellow,
the newer part gray) guns had been fired at besieging Arabs, the tribe
of the Beni Amer, who had worshipped at the shrine of the dead Saint,
Sidi-bel-Abbés. But all that was past long ago. No hope of fighting for
the Legionnaires, save over the frontier in Morocco, or far away in the
South! The shrine of Sidi-bel-Abbés stood neglected in the Arab
graveyard. Even the meaning of the name, once sacred to his followers,
was well-nigh forgotten; and all that was Arab in Sidi-bel-Abbés had
been relegated to the _Village Négre_, strictly forbidden as Blue
Beard's Room of Secrets, to the Soldiers of the Legion.
Inside the wall everything was modern and French, except for a few
trudging or labouring Arabs in white, or in gray burnouses of camel's
hair made in Morocco. As the daughter of the Legion's colonel drove
humbly in her shabby cab to the Hotel Splendide, she felt vaguely
depressed and disappointed in the town which she expected to be her
home. She had fancied that it would be very eastern, with mosques and
bazaars, and perhaps surrounded with desert; but there was no desert
within many miles; and there was only one minaret rising in the
distance, like a long white finger to mark the beginning of the _Village
Négre_. Instead of bazaars, there were new French shops and a sinister
predominance of drinking places of all sorts: a few "smart" cafés, with
marble-topped tables on the pavement, but mostly dull dens, appealing to
the poorest and most desperate. The town was like a Maltese cross in
shape, the arms of the cross being wide streets, each leading to a gate
in the fortifications; Porte d'Oran, Porte de Tlemcen, Porte de
Mascarra, and Porte de Daya; and the one great charm of the place seemed
to be in its trees; giant planes which made arbours across the streets,
giving a look of dreaming peace, despite the rattle of wheels on roughly
set paving-stones.
There were middle-aged buildings, low and small and dun-coloured,
exactly like those of every other French-Algerian settlement, but big
new blocks of glittering white gave an air of almost ostentatious
prosperity to the place. There was even an attempt at gayety in the
ornamentation, yet there appeared to be nothing attractive to tourists,
save the Foreign Legion, which gave mystery and romance to all that
would otherwise have been banal. Noise was everywhere, loud, shrill,
insistent; rumbling, shrieking, rattling, roaring. Huge wagons, loaded
with purple-stained cases of Algerian wine, bumping over the stones;
strings of bells wound round the great horns of horses' collars jingling
like sleigh-bells in winter; whips in the hands of fierce-eyed carters
cracking round the heads of large, sad mules; hooters of automobiles
and immense motor diligences blaring; men shouting at animals; animals
barking or braying, snorting or clucking at men; unseen soldiers
marching to music; a town clock sweetly chiming the hour, and, above
all, rising like spray from the ocean of din, high voices of Arabs
chaffering, disputing, arguing. This was the "Arabian Night's Paradise"
that Sanda had dreamed of!
Presently the cab passed a great town clock with four faces (one for
each of the four diverging streets) and drew up before a flat-faced
building with the name "Hotel Splendide" stretching across its dim,
yellow front. Inside a big, open doorway, stairs went steeply up, past
piles of commercial travellers' show trunks, and an Arab bootblack who
clamoured for custom. At the top Max Doran and his charge came into a
hall, whence a bare-looking restaurant and several other rooms opened
out. On a gigantic hatrack like a withered tree hung coats and hats in
dark bunches, brightened with a few military coats and gold-braided
caps. As Max and Sanda appeared, an officer--youngish, dark,
sharp-featured, with a small waxed moustache and near-sighted black
eyes--turned hastily away from a window, and with a stride added his cap
and cloak to the hatrack's burden. He had an almost childishly guilty
air of not wishing to be caught at something. And what that something
was, Max Doran guessed with a queer constriction of the throat as he
looked through the window. This opened into a dim room, which was
labelled "Bureau," and framed the head and bust of a young woman.
Such light as there was in the hall fell full upon her short, white
face, into her slanting yellow eyes and on to the elaborately dressed
red hair. She had been smiling at the officer, but on the interruption
of the strangers' entrance she frowned with annoyance. It was the frank,
animal annoyance of a beautiful young lynx, teased by having a piece of
meat snatched away. The eyes were clear in colour as a dark topaz, and
full of topaz light. This was remarkable; but their real strangeness lay
in expression. They seemed not unintelligent, but devoid of all human
experience. They gazed at the newcomers from the little window of the
bureau, as an animal gazes from the bars of its cage, looking at the
eyes which regard it, not into them; near yet remote; a creature of
another species.
The girl appeared to be well-shaped enough, though her strong white
throat was short, and the hands which lay on the wide window ledge were
as small as a child's. Yet like a shadow thrown on the wall behind her
was a lurking impression of deformity of body and mind, a spirit cast
out of her, to point at something veiled. If there could have lingered
in the mind of Max a grain of doubt concerning Rose Doran's confession,
it was burnt up in a moment; for the girl was an Aubrey Beardsley
caricature of Rose. No need to ask if this were Mademoiselle Delatour.
He knew. And this lieutenant in the uniform of the Spahis was the
"namesake" of whom the men had talked in the train.