Algeria -- Fiction; Dogs -- Fiction; France. Armée -- Officers -- Fiction; Heiresses -- Fiction; Love stories
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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