Chapter XXIV: 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.