The Doctor replied very quietly, without seeming to notice the
outburst—
"I agree with you, Baroness, and I have already explained myself on
this score. You are not in love. If our friends were to leave you
to-morrow, you would forget them. It is their presence alone that makes
you uneasy, I had almost said, irritable."
"In that case," replied Madame de Guéran, "my illness is known, and
you have found out its cause. M. de Morin and M. Périères inspire me
with a vague, indefinable, almost inexplicable interest, and this
divided interest," she continued, smilingly, "upsets me, worries me,
and is killing me by inches."
"No, no, my dear patient, we have not quite reached that point yet.
You are not the woman to allow yourself to be done to death for so
little. You are no ignorant girl, to languish and grow thin in such a
case as this. The interest—the word is your own—you take in our
friends has no such tremendous effect upon you. It does not give rise
even to a feeling of remorse when you think of M. de Guéran and your
hopes of recovering him. You had every reason to believe yourself to
be a widow, and you were one from a legal or official point of view;
you could, if you had so wished, have given your whole heart to
either of your travelling companions, and one ought really to admire
you for not having bestowed even a particle of that interest—shall I
call it by that name?—on either of them, even though you were at
perfect liberty to withdraw it if you thought fit. Therefore, I
repeat, you have nothing wherewith to reproach yourself from this
point of view."
"Is there another point, then?" said she, trying to smile, but unable
entirely to hide the emotion caused by the last words addressed to
her.
"Yes," said M. Delange, earnestly, "you are in love, seriously in
love with him who could not accompany you, whose place I took. In
other words, you are in love with Dr. Desrioux."
She trembled at the name, but she did not reply, neither did she
attempt to impose silence on her indiscreet confidant.
He resumed, in a more sprightly tone—
"Do you think that one doctor can keep anything from another? I do
not speak much, and I am, perhaps, looked upon as seeing less. People
are apt to say—'Oh, M. Delange has only eyes for cards; you need not
mind him.' They are wrong. T can see beyond my game, and I make my
little mental notes. I subject my neighbours to a moral auscultation,
though I appear only to be marking the king. The day on which I had
the honour of being introduced to you, and of becoming acquainted, in
your drawing-room, with M. Desrioux, I saw at once that my _confrère_
was sincerely attached to you. On the following day I discovered that
he was not absolutely indifferent to you; but, to be perfectly open
and leave nothing unexplained, I must also admit that on the day when
you left France you had no idea of the strength of your affection for
him. If it had come home to you, you would not have accepted MM. de
Morin and Périères as your travelling companions. You knew that they
were _éprise_ with you, and it would have been repugnant to your
delicacy of feeling to have allowed them to become more, and at the
same time hopelessly so. It was only by degrees, later on, by reason
of separation, absence, the exchange of letters, and the receipt of
news, that you found out the strength of your attachment, as well as
that, in all probability, it was ever on the increase."
Pensive, and with her nature stirred to its innermost depths by what
she had heard, she continued to preserve absolute silence. She had,
it is true, with reluctance, and almost, fearfully, confessed all
these things to herself, but it was the first time she had been told
of them by anyone else.
She listened to everything the Doctor had to say without
interruption, without any appearance of a desire that he would be
less explicit and more considerate, and the sad smile which hovered
about her lips seemed to say—
"Be perfectly open. Your words hurt me, but I must listen to them. I
must open my eyes resolutely to my position; and you appear to have
realized it more completely than I have. Say on then, and if, after
you have said all, you can apply your healing art to me, you will be
doing me a real service, I assure you."
M. Delange, for his part, derived encouragement from the silence,
and continued in the same calm, brotherly tone, but slightly moved,
withal, against his will.
"This love," he resumed, "which you have unknowingly brought with
you, is weakening you and wearing you out. You would fain tear it out
of your heart, but you lack the power so to do. At times you are
tempted to reproach MM. de Morin and Périères for not making you
forget him who is away, and yet if you yield for a moment to the
pleasure of their society—and it is pleasant—you are at once assailed
by the fear that you are wanting in truth towards that other one. You
return, as it were, to him in all humility and submission, and then
comes a sudden apparition of your husband looming in the distance, in
the unknown land whither our steps are bent. You want to find him,
duty beckons you on, and his memory is dear to you; but you shudder
at the thought that your heart is no longer your own, and that it is
impossible for you to give it to him. There, my dear Baroness, I have
told you all that you could tell me; I am a queer confidant, for it
is I alone who have been speaking all this time. I asked you to let
me know your secrets; you have kept them to yourself, and I have
narrated to you my own discoveries. Not that I regret in the least
either my indiscretion or my garrulity, since they have taught you to
know me and to see in me a devoted friend, a brother anxious for your
welfare. You will no longer keep me at a distance; but, when you find
your troubles too heavy for you to bear, you will summon me to your
aid and open out your heart to me. And in that way alone can you
alleviate your distress."
He was silent, and she, equally mute, got up and, in token of
friendship, took the Doctor's arm. In this way they returned to the
encampment and soon gained the nearest tents. When she reached her
own, Madame de Guéran turned towards M. Delange, and held out her
hand, as if to say—
"I forgive you for the boldness of your speech. You have shown
yourself my friend, and I am glad to know that it is so."
She disappeared within her tent, and he betook himself to his.
M. Périères and M. de Morin were not so completely absorbed, the one
in his notes of the expedition, and the other in his cigarette and
the contemplation of nature, as to be entirely unconscious of the
proceedings of Madam de Guéran and the Doctor. By-and-by they met,
and made their comments on the lengthy _tête-à-tête_.
"What can he be saying to her?" asked M. Périères.
"I have not the remotest idea, but their conversation appears to be
interesting."
"Yes, in this bright moonlight we can clearly distinguish Madame de
Guéran's countenance, and she seems moved. Do you think that the
Doctor is discussing our position with regard to her?"
"I am pretty sure of it," replied M, de Morin. "He is far too
intelligent and observant not to have perceived the depth of our
attachment. Why do you ask?"
"Because Delange is just the man to fall in love on his own account,
if he did not see that we were in that plight."
"And, seeing it, you think that he would hold his hand?"
"Certainly, I do. He is too devoted to us, and he is too
straightforward in his ideas to cross our path. Are you jealous, my
dear fellow?"
"Of the Doctor? Oh, no. I have too much respect for Madame de Guéran;
and, besides, I think she is too uncomfortable about her position
with regard to us to wish to render it still more complicated."
"De Morin?"
"Périères?"
"Shall we be perfectly open with each other?"
"We have always been so."
"Except at Khartoum, where we were within an ace of falling out."
"True, but we profited by that escape to swear eternal friendship,
and I have never gone back from my word."
"Nor I either. You are sure of that?"
"Perfectly. Moreover, we have adopted certain precautions against any
temptation to tear each other to pieces which might assail us. Our
agreement was both wise and just. If Madame de Guéran, whether by
word or look, gives either of us to understand that he is the chosen
one, the happy man is at once to inform his ill-fated companion of
the fact, and the victim is at once to withdraw from the contest,
abandon all hope, and quit the field."
"Yes, that was it. And I can only regret, my dear fellow, that I am
not in a position to ask you to take yourself off."
"My dear Périères, I positively ache to tell you to make yourself
scarce, and yet I have not the slightest authority for so doing."
"So much the better, because, as far as I am concerned, I should be
in a regular fix if I had to make a solitary journey back through the
land of those awful Bongos, those amiable Dinkas, not to mention the
Shillooks and so many others. I am rather inclined to think that, for
my sake, at all events, Madame de Guéran would do well not to decide
in your favour."
"To tell you the truth, my dear fellow, I am afraid she will decide
neither for one nor the other."
"Precisely my fear; she shrinks from inflicting too severe a wound on
the rejected one. We are not behaving generously towards her; we take
away from her all freedom of choice, and, very possibly, we prevent
her from saying what she would like to say."
"Nevertheless, my very dear friend, I cannot propose that, instead of
descending this hill to-morrow with all our companions, for the
purpose of visiting the Niam-Niam, you should retrace your steps,
cheered by the society of my faithful Joseph and the donkey, of
which, in that case, you would be anxious to deprive the caravan."
"I am perfectly sure of it, my dear de Morin, and yet, if we had
lived in another age than our own, we should hare found some means of
coming to an understanding."
"Yes, the King's Musketeers, for instance, in our position, would not
have hesitated to draw their swords. I have often thought about it
myself. That age was a good one, and the sword settles matters so
completely."
"We might revive the custom very easily. In the heart of Africa one
cannot be said to belong to any age. I am sure that when we paid our
visit to those Bongo women we had no very clear idea of what century
we were in. At all events on that occasion nobody could have objected
to our going a step backwards, to the seventeenth or eighteenth
century in imagination."
"My notion, I perceive, makes you smile, and, after all, we had
better let it drop. If I happened to kill you, or to be killed by
you, Madame de Guéran, I am sure, would detest me, or hate you, as
the case might be. She is not very fond of the eighteenth century;
she belongs to the present day, and she is journeying on through
Africa, pursuing one sole idea without paying much attention to Bongo
customs."
"Very possibly so. Thus, my poor friend, we can only wait."
"As you say, we can only wait, and, in truth, it is the only course
open to us just at present."
"There I differ from you—we can go to bed. It is two o'clock in the
morning already, and we have to start at five."
"You are right. Yon do not mind my having thought of the King's
Musketeers?"
"Mind it? The idea was capital, only, like many other excellent
ideas, it was not practicable."
"I'll try to hit upon something else."
"And so will I. Good night."
"Good-bye—for three hours."
On the following day, before noon, the caravan, preceded by its band,
set foot on the territory of the Niam-Niam.