Chapter XXII: Into the Desert

A week after the caravan of the Duc de Tremont left Algiers, Julia Redmond came unexpectedly to the villa of Madame de la Maine at an early morning hour. Madame de la Maine saw her standing on the threshold of her bedroom door.

"_Chère_ Madame," Julia said, "I am leaving to-day with a dragoman and twenty servants to go into the desert."

Madame de la Maine was still in bed. At nine o'clock she read her papers and her correspondence.

"Into the desert--alone!"

Julia, with her _cravache_ in her gloved hands, smiled sweetly though she was very pale. "I had not thought of going alone, Madame," she replied with charming assurance, "I knew you would go with me."

On a chair by her bed was a wrapper of blue silk and lace. The comtesse sprang up and then thrust her feet into her slippers and stared at Julia.

"What are you going to do in the desert?"

"Watch!"

"Yes, yes!" nodded Madame de la Maine. "And your aunt?"

"Deep in a bazaar for the hospital," smiled Miss Redmond.

Madame de la Maine regarded her slender friend with admiration and envy. "Why hadn't I thought of it?" She rang for her maid.

"Because your great-grandfather was not a pioneer!" Miss Redmond answered.

* * * * * * *

The sun which, all day long, held the desert in its burning embrace, went westward in his own brilliant caravan.

"The desert blossoms like a rose, Thérèse."

"Like a rose?" questioned Madame de la Maine.

She was sitting in the door of her tent; her white dress and her white hat gleamed like a touch of snow upon the desert's face. Julia Redmond, on a rug at her feet, and in her khaki riding-habit the color of the sand, blended with the desert as though part of it. She sat up as she spoke.

"How divine! See!" She pointed to the stretches of the Sahara before her. On every side they spread away as far as the eye could reach, suave, mellow, black, undulating finally to small hillocks with corrugated sides, as a group of little sand-hills rose softly out of the sea-like plain. "Look, Thérèse!"

Slowly, from ocher and gold the color changed; a faint wave-like blush crept over the sands, which reddened, paled, faded, warmed again, took depth and grew intense like flame.

"The heart of a rose! _N'est-ce pas_, Thérèse?"

"I understand now what you mean," said madame. The comtesse was not a dreamer. Parisian to the tips of her fingers, elegant, fine, she had lived a conventional life. Thérèse had been taught to conceal her emotions. She had been taught that our feelings matter very little to any one but ourselves. She had been taught to go lightly, to avoid serious things. Her great-grandmother had gone lightly to the scaffold, exquisitely courteous till the last.

"I ask your pardon if I jostled you in the tumbrel," the old comtesse had said to her companion on the way to the guillotine. "The springs of the cart are poor"--and she went up smiling.

In the companionship of the American girl, Thérèse de la Maine had thrown off restraint. If the Marquise d'Esclignac had felt Julia's influence, Thérèse de la Maine, being near her own age, echoed Julia's very feeling.

Except for their dragoman and their servants, the two women were alone in the desert.

Smiling at Julia, Madame de la Maine said: "I haven't been so far from the Rue de la Paix in my life."

"How can you speak of the Rue de la Paix, Thérèse?"

"Only to show you how completely I have left it behind."

Julia's eyes were fixed upon the limitless sands, a sea where a faint line lost itself in the red west and the horizon shut from her sight everything that she believed to be her life.

"This is the seventh day, Thérèse!"

"Already you are as brown as an Arab, Julia!"

"You as well, _ma chère amie_!"

"Robert does not like dark women," said the Comtesse de la Maine, and rubbed her cheek. "I must wear two veils."

"Look, Thérèse!"

Across the face of the desert the glow began to withdraw its curtain. The sands suffused an ineffable hue, a shell-like pink took possession, and the desert melted and then grew colder--it waned before their eyes, withered like a tea-rose.

"Like a rose!" Julia murmured, "smell its perfume!" She lifted her head, drinking in with delight the fragrance of the sands.

"_Ma chère_ Julia," gently protested the comtesse, lifting her head, "perfume, Julia!" But she breathed with her friend, while a sweetly subtle, intoxicating odor, as of millions and millions of roses, gathered, warmed, kept, then scattered on the airs of heaven, intoxicating her.

To the left were the huddled tents of their attendants. No sooner had the sun gone down than the Arabs commenced to sing--a song that Julia had especially liked.

"Love is like a sweet perfume,
It comes, it escapes.
When it's present, it intoxicates;
When it's a memory, it brings tears.
Love is like a sweet breath,
It comes and it escapes."

The weird music filled the silence of the silent place. It had the evanescent quality of the wind that brought the breath of the sand-flowers. The voices of the Arabs, not unmusical, though hoarse and appealing, cried out their love-song, and then the music turned to invocation and to prayer.

The two women listened silently as the night fell, their figures sharply outlined in the beautiful clarity of the eastern night.

Julia stood upright. In her severe riding-dress, she was as slender as a boy. She remained looking toward the horizon, immovable, patient, a silent watcher over the uncommunicative waste.

"Perhaps," she thought, "there is nothing really beyond that line, so fast blotting itself into night!--and yet I seem to see them come!"

Madame de la Maine, in the door of her tent, immovable, her hands clasped around her knees, looked affectionately at the young girl before her. Julia was a delight to her. She was carried away by her, by her frank simplicity, and drawn to her warm and generous heart. Madame de la Maine had her own story. She wondered whether ever, for any period of her conventional life, she could have thrown everything aside and stood out with the man she loved.

Julia, standing before her, a dark slim figure in the night--isolated and alone--recalled the figurehead of a ship, its face toward heaven, pioneering the open seas.

* * * * * * *

Julia watched, indeed. On the desert there is the brilliant day, a passionate glow, and the nightfall. They passed the nights sometimes listening for a cry that should hail an approaching caravan, sometimes hearing the wild cry of the hyenas, or of a passing vulture on his horrid flight. Otherwise, until the camp stirred with the dawn and the early prayer-call sounded "Allah! Allah! Akbar!" into the stillness, they were wrapped in complete silence.