Part 36 (1/2)

”No,” they all replied. And one asked, ”Is she expected?”

”I don't know whether she will come or not,” Pamela replied. ”I asked her to come with me, but she could not do that, and she was not sure that she would come at all.”

This she said, thinking that if Millie did arrive it might seem that she came because Pamela herself was there. Pamela went back to Roquebrune that afternoon, and after she had walked through the village and had come out on the slope of hill above, she met the postman coming down from the Villa Pontignard.

”You have a telegram for me?” she said anxiously.

”Mademoiselle,” he replied, ”I have just left it at the house.”

Pamela hurried on, and found the telegram in the _salon_. She tore it open. It was from Warrisden. It told her that Tony Stretton was found, and would return. It gave the news in vague and guarded language, mentioning no names. But Pamela understood the message. Tony Stretton was actually coming back. ”Would he come too late?” she asked, gazing out in fear across the sea. Of any trouble, out there in Algeria, which might delay his return, she did not think at all. If it was true that he had enlisted in the Legion, there might be obstacles to a quick return. But such matters were not in her thoughts. She thought only of Callon upon the terrace of Monte Carlo. ”Would Tony come too late?” she asked; and she prayed that he might come in time.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE END OF THE EXPERIMENT

The village of Ain-Sefra stands upon a high and fertile oasis on the very borders of Morocco. The oasis is well watered, and the date-palm grows thickly there. It lies far to the south. The railway, in the days when Tony Stretton served in the Foreign Legion, did not reach to it; the barracks were newly built, the parade ground newly enclosed; and if one looked southwards from any open s.p.a.ce, one saw a tawny belt of sand in the extreme distance streak across the horizon from east to west. That is the beginning of the great Sahara. Tony Stretton could never see that belt of sand, but his thoughts went back to the terrible homeward march from Bir-el-Ghiramo to Ouargla. From east to west the Sahara stretched across Africa, breaking the soldiers who dared to violate its privacy, thrusting them back maimed and famine-stricken, jealously guarding its secrets and speaking by its very silence, its terrible ”thus far and no farther,” no less audibly, and a thousand times more truthfully than ever did the waves of the sea.

On one noonday Stretton mounted the steps on to the verandah of the hospital. He looked across open country to the great yellow line. He thought of the Touaregs hanging persistently upon the flanks of his tiny force, the long laborious days of thirst and hunger, the lengthening trail of graves which he left behind--those milestones of invasion. He felt as though the desert gripped him again and would not loose its hold, clinging to his feet with each step he took in the soft, yielding sand. He had brought back his handful of men, it was true; they had stumbled into Ouargla at the last; but there were few of them who were men as good as they had been when they had set out.

Even the best, it almost seemed to him, had lost something of vitality which they would never recover; had a look fixed in their eyes which set them apart from their fellows--the look of those who have endured too much, who gazed for too long a time upon horrors; while the others were for the most part only fit to squat in the shade and to wait for things to cease. There was one whom Stretton had pa.s.sed only a minute before sitting on the ground under the shadow of the barrack wall.

Stretton was haunted by the picture of that man, for he was the only white man he had ever seen who did not trouble to raise a hand to brush away the flies from his face, but allowed them to settle and cl.u.s.ter about the corners of his mouth.

There was another in the hospital behind him. Him the Sahara definitely claimed. Stretton turned and walked into the building.

He pa.s.sed down the line of beds, and stopped where a man lay tossing in a fever. Stretton leaned over the bed.

”Barbier,” he said.

Fusilier Barbier had grown very gaunt and thin during these latter weeks. He turned his eyes upon Stretton, and muttered incoherently.

But there was recognition neither in his eyes nor in his voice. An orderly approached the bed as Stretton stood beside it; and, in a low voice, lest, haply, Barbier should hear and understand, Tony asked--

”What did the doctor say?”

”Nothing good, my sergeant,” the orderly replied, with an expressive shrug of the shoulders.

”I am very sorry,” said Stretton, gravely.

Certainly Barbier looked to be lying at death's door. One hand and arm, emaciated and the colour of wax, lay outside upon the coverlet of the bed. His eyes, unnaturally l.u.s.trous, unnaturally large, shone deep-sunken in dark purple rings. His eyelids were red, as though with much weeping, and, below the eyes, his face was drawn with fever and very white. Stretton laid his hand gently upon Barbier's forehead. It was burning hot. Stretton dismissed the orderly with a nod. There was a haggard n.o.bility in Barbier's appearance--his long, finely shaped hands, his lithe, well-knit figure, all betrayed the man of race. Yet he had once sunk to babbling about persecution at a fire in the desert, like any morbid child.

A heavy step sounded in the ward, and Stretton's colonel stood beside him, a stoutly built man, with a white moustache and imperial, and a stern yet not unkindly face. It expressed a deal of solicitude at this moment.

”I have seen the doctor this morning,” said the colonel, ”and he has given up hope. Barbier will hardly live out the night. They should never have sent him to us here. They should not have discharged him from the asylum as cured.”

The idea of persecution had become fixed in Barbier's brain. It had never left him since the evening when he first gave utterance to it in the desert. The homeward march, indeed, had aggravated his mania. On his return he had been sent to the asylum at Bel-Abbes, but there he had developed cunning enough to conceal his hallucination. He had ceased to complain that his officers were in a conspiracy to entrap and ruin him, no more threats were heard, no more dangerous stealthy glances detected. He was sent back to his battalion at Ain-Sefra. A few weeks and again his malady was manifest, and on the top of that had come fever.

”I am very sorry,” Stretton said again; and then, after looking about him and perceiving that the orderly was out of earshot, he bent down towards Barbier, lower than he had bent before, and he called upon him in a still lower voice.

But Barbier was no longer the name he used.

”Monsieur le Comte,” he said, first of all, and then ”Monsieur de----”