"Yes, if he knew why, and if he knew you, and what you are going through at this time. He fell in love with my mother at first sight in Paris, and she with him. He was on leave, and she was there with her parents from Ireland. He'd never meant to marry, but he was swept off his feet. Mother's people wouldn't hear of it. They took her home in a hurry, and tried to make her marry some one else. She nearly did—because they were stronger than she. She wrote father a letter of good-bye, to his post in the southern desert, where he was stationed then. He supposed, when he read the letter, that she was already married when he got it. But suddenly she appeared—as unexpectedly as I appeared to-day. She'd run away from home, because she couldn't live without him. Oh, how well I understand her! Think of the joy! It was like waking from a dreadful dream for both of them. They were going to be married at once, though mother was half dead with fatigue and excitement after her long, hurried journey; but on their wedding eve she was taken ill, and became delirious. It was typhoid fever. She had got it somehow on the journey. She had come without stopping to rest, from Dublin to Touggourt, where father was stationed. They say it's wild there even now. It was far wilder then, more than twenty-one years ago. He nursed mother himself, scarcely eating or sleeping: not taking off his clothes for weeks. One of his aunts—my great-aunt—told me the story. It came to her from a friend of father's. He never spoke of it. For three months mother wasn't out of danger. Father was her nurse, her doctor, not her husband. But at last she was well again. They had their honeymoon in a tent in the desert. She loved the desert, then—or thought she did. Afterward, though, she changed, for I was coming, and she was ill again. By that time they were stationed still farther south. She grew so homesick for the north that my father got leave. They started to travel by easy stages through the desert, with a small caravan. Their hope was to reach Algiers, and to get to France long before the baby should come; but the heat grew suddenly terrible, and one day they were caught in a fearful sandstorm. My mother was terrified. I was born two months before the time. That same night she died, while the storm was still raging; and before she went, she begged my father to promise, whatever happened, not to leave her body buried in the desert. He did promise. And then began his martyrdom. The caravan could not march fast because of me. A negro woman who'd come as mother's maid took care of me as well as she could, and fed me on condensed milk. Strange I should have lived.... My father had his men make for my mother's body a case of many tins, which they spread open and soldered together, with lead from bullets they melted. In the next oasis they cut down a palm tree and hollowed out the trunk for a coffin. They sealed up the tin case in it, and the coffin travelled on the camel mother had ridden when she was alive, in one of those beautiful hooded bassourahs you must have seen in pictures. At night the coffin rested in my father's tent, and he lay beside it as he had lain beside my mother when she lived, and they were happy. Because she'd been a Catholic, and because she'd always hated the dark, father burned candles on the coffin always till dawn; and the men who loved him looked for wild flowers in the desert to lay upon it. He had forty days, and forty nights, marching through the desert with the dead body of his love, before they came to the railway. Then he took mother to France, and left me with his two aunts there. Now do you wonder he never loved me, or wanted to have me with him?"
"No, perhaps not," said Max. Deep sadness had fallen upon him. He was in the desert with the man beside whose agony his own trial was as nothing. All the world seemed to be full of sorrow and pain sharper than his own personal pain. And as the girl asked her question and he answered it, their cab passed the procession of recruits for the Foreign Legion, tramping along between tall plane trees toward the town gate.
Once again a pair of tortured black eyes looked at Max, who winced as the thick yellow dust from the wheels enveloped the marching men.
"Will you let me tell my father your story, as I have told you his?" Sanda asked.
"Do as you think best," he said.
In another moment the cab had rolled past a few gardens and villas, a green plateau and a moat, and passed through a great gateway. Overhead, carved in the stone, were the words "Porte d'Oran," and the date, 1855. Once, when the town was young, the gates had been kept tightly closed, and through the loopholes in the stout, stone wall (the old part yellow, the newer part gray) guns had been fired at besieging Arabs, the tribe of the Beni Amer, who had worshipped at the shrine of the dead Saint, Sidi-bel-Abbés. But all that was past long ago. No hope of fighting for the Legionnaires, save over the frontier in Morocco, or far away in the South! The shrine of Sidi-bel-Abbés stood neglected in the Arab graveyard. Even the meaning of the name, once sacred to his followers, was well-nigh forgotten; and all that was Arab in Sidi-bel-Abbés had been relegated to the Village Négre, strictly forbidden as Blue Beard's Room of Secrets, to the Soldiers of the Legion.
Inside the wall everything was modern and French, except for a few trudging or labouring Arabs in white, or in gray burnouses of camel's hair made in Morocco. As the daughter of the Legion's colonel drove humbly in her shabby cab to the Hotel Splendide, she felt vaguely depressed and disappointed in the town which she expected to be her home. She had fancied that it would be very eastern, with mosques and bazaars, and perhaps surrounded with desert; but there was no desert within many miles; and there was only one minaret rising in the distance, like a long white finger to mark the beginning of the Village Négre. Instead of bazaars, there were new French shops and a sinister predominance of drinking places of all sorts: a few "smart" cafés, with marble-topped tables on the pavement, but mostly dull dens, appealing to the poorest and most desperate. The town was like a Maltese cross in shape, the arms of the cross being wide streets, each leading to a gate in the fortifications; Porte d'Oran, Porte de Tlemcen, Porte de Mascarra, and Porte de Daya; and the one great charm of the place seemed to be in its trees; giant planes which made arbours across the streets, giving a look of dreaming peace, despite the rattle of wheels on roughly set paving-stones.
There were middle-aged buildings, low and small and dun-coloured, exactly like those of every other French-Algerian settlement, but big new blocks of glittering white gave an air of almost ostentatious prosperity to the place. There was even an attempt at gayety in the ornamentation, yet there appeared to be nothing attractive to tourists, save the Foreign Legion, which gave mystery and romance to all that would otherwise have been banal. Noise was everywhere, loud, shrill, insistent; rumbling, shrieking, rattling, roaring. Huge wagons, loaded with purple-stained cases of Algerian wine, bumping over the stones; strings of bells wound round the great horns of horses' collars jingling like sleigh-bells in winter; whips in the hands of fierce-eyed carters cracking round the heads of large, sad mules; hooters of automobiles and immense motor diligences blaring; men shouting at animals; animals barking or braying, snorting or clucking at men; unseen soldiers marching to music; a town clock sweetly chiming the hour, and, above all, rising like spray from the ocean of din, high voices of Arabs chaffering, disputing, arguing. This was the "Arabian Night's Paradise" that Sanda had dreamed of!
Presently the cab passed a great town clock with four faces (one for each of the four diverging streets) and drew up before a flat-faced building with the name "Hotel Splendide" stretching across its dim, yellow front. Inside a big, open doorway, stairs went steeply up, past piles of commercial travellers' show trunks, and an Arab bootblack who clamoured for custom. At the top Max Doran and his charge came into a hall, whence a bare-looking restaurant and several other rooms opened out. On a gigantic hatrack like a withered tree hung coats and hats in dark bunches, brightened with a few military coats and gold-braided caps. As Max and Sanda appeared, an officer—youngish, dark, sharp-featured, with a small waxed moustache and near-sighted black eyes—turned hastily away from a window, and with a stride added his cap and cloak to the hatrack's burden. He had an almost childishly guilty air of not wishing to be caught at something. And what that something was, Max Doran guessed with a queer constriction of the throat as he looked through the window. This opened into a dim room, which was labelled "Bureau," and framed the head and bust of a young woman.
Such light as there was in the hall fell full upon her short, white face, into her slanting yellow eyes and on to the elaborately dressed red hair. She had been smiling at the officer, but on the interruption of the strangers' entrance she frowned with annoyance. It was the frank, animal annoyance of a beautiful young lynx, teased by having a piece of meat snatched away. The eyes were clear in colour as a dark topaz, and full of topaz light. This was remarkable; but their real strangeness lay in expression. They seemed not unintelligent, but devoid of all human experience. They gazed at the newcomers from the little window of the bureau, as an animal gazes from the bars of its cage, looking at the eyes which regard it, not into them; near yet remote; a creature of another species.