IN THE morning when he asked for his bill, he was surprised to find as an item upon it, "Speciale Diner for six persons," at a price equally special; and, beneath it, another even more striking, for this one referred to a number of bottles of "Beaune Rouge 1907." That vintage, moreover, was evidently all that Sir William had said of it; the hotel authorities, who should have known, heartily agreed with him upon its worth.
"This is a mistake," Ogle informed the landlord, in the "Bureau." "General Broadfeather would be annoyed, I think, if I paid more than half upon these items. It was his proposal that our two parties dine together, and I think you'd better transfer half the amount to his account."
The landlord looked blank. "How can I? He is gone two hours."
"That's singular," the American said. "Did he look over his own bill before he left?"
"Eh? Did he? I escape with my life!"
"Then he must have misunderstood. It's rather odd he" Ogle was puzzled. "Singular!" he said. "Did he have lunch put up to be taken in his car?"
"No, gentleman. He did nothing."
"Singular," Ogle repeated thoughtfully; and he paid the bill.
Outdoors, in the morning sunshine, the automobile was waiting for him. The chauffeur and a porter were strapping bags upon the roof; Hyacinthe stood pensively regarding an unlighted cigarette; and Mme. Momoro, already in her accustomed place in the car, gaily waved her long black-gloved hand and smiled a greeting to her preoccupied squire as he appeared.
"Broadfeather didn't do anything about lunch," he informed her. "He has two hours' start of us, and if you expect to carry out his idea of hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches and wood-nymphs and fauns and so forth in the Gorge du Chabat"
"No, no; I don't," she laughed. "Those English will not be there, thank heaven! We will lunch at any place where there is food. Get in and let us forget the English."
He obeyed half of this request; but, when they were again forth upon the road, reverted to "the English."
"Then you knew the Broadfeathers had started a long time ahead of us, I take it," he said.
"At least I was certain they knew I hoped they would! Last night I think he drank too much. After we had played bridge for a time he was so confused he didn't know how to count. One moment he would be almost quarrelsome with poor little Hyacinthe and the next he would be—with me—too pleasant! He became—well, I must call it odious; and we had to stop playing. I am afraid his poor, round, little, old wife must have been very mortified; and I hope she is giving him such a day of it now as he deserves. We'll not see them again. Do you object if we don't talk of him? It was a little painful."
Ogle had his own reasons for regarding the subject of General Sir William Broadfeather as a little painful; but he acquiesced without mentioning them. "Very well," he said, and, as he added nothing to that, she looked at him inquiringly.
"You are hating me again? Have I done somesing more?"
"Not at all."
She shook her head and sighed. "I shouldn't have come with you. You are not happy."
"I'm quite all right."
"No," she said. "I don't know what has happened; but somesing has changed very much." She spoke with a sorrowful conviction that proved itself well-founded in the utterance of a single word. Upon the "Duumvir" and in Algiers, and, indeed, until the ascent of the Djurdjurra, he had thought her most irresistible of all whenever she said "somesing"; and once he had spoken of this to her, telling her he found the word, on her lips, "adorable." But when she said it now, his emotional experience took the form of a wish that she might be content to say nothing at all.
"I should never have come with you. I should" Her voice trembled, and then suddenly she sank back against the cushions, her hand pressed upon her forehead in an impulsive gesture of pain. "Ah! I should have known it!"
"You should have known what?"
"That you might come to look upon me and poor Hyacinthe as an imposition upon you." She drew in her breath sharply, then straightened herself to her usual erectness. "It is one, too."
"An imposition? No, indeed!" he protested with some apparent warmth. "You mustn't say such things."
"Not if they were true?" And when he would have protested again, she checked him. "No. You see you offered me an escape, and I was weak enough to take advantage of it."
"You mean an escape from Paris in winter-time?"
She shook her head. "I must make a confession to you. The escape was from much worse: it was from the long tyranny of Mademoiselle Daurel. You write comedies—or tragedies, it may be;—but you don't understand women's quarrels, because even the most adroit man can't understand them. When men really quarrel it is over; they have done with each other; but it isn't so with women. When I said we would go to Paris I knew that before we should quite leave, Mademoiselle Daurel would make overtures, and I was afraid I would be weak enough to listen. My feeling for Hyacinthe might conquer; so we should have gone back to that old life of petty persecution. It has happened before, you see."
"You've broken away and gone back before this, you mean?"
"More than once. The last time it was because—ah, a man could never understand how a woman's hopes can chain her to a persecution! I had this hope for Hyacinthe: Hyacinthe's work is drudgery; he is unhappy in it, and since our friend who gave him that appointment is dead, he has no political influence to go higher. He is very quiet, but he is clever; he knows music; and a Parisian impresario wishes him to buy an interest in his office for one hundred thousand francs. It would be heaven for Hyacinthe, and one hundred thousand francs is nothing to Mademoiselle Daurel. I was so absurd as to say to her that she might be happier to do a little for him in her lifetime. She was infuriated!"
"Why?"
"Because she thought it might allow us to escape from her. That terrible old woman" Mme. Momoro again caught in her breath audibly, and for a moment could not speak. "It is incredible, but there are some old women like that. They are unable to exist unless they have somebody beside them whom they are keeping in torment. I think she can't live without me. So I felt that just to step into an automobile with you—well, it was simple enough to seem an escape. It was to go out upon the road like a gypsy. Gypsies are hard to find, and they are free. You can't understand what it means to be free from such a pressure, or how happy I've been these quick little days away from it. But—well, I thought it was what you wanted. I thought I could be" Her voice trembled again; but she laughed bravely and went on, "I thought I could be—well, entertaining to you. You see, I didn't know you hated—mountains!"
"I don't in the least know what you mean," he said valiantly. "I'm stupid and silent sometimes without reason. You mustn't think"
But she interrupted him. "You mustn't struggle so hard to be kind; we can't be impositions upon you any longer."
"What a horrible light that puts me in!" he protested. "Merely because I'm a little quiet"
"No!" she said with sudden sharpness. "I shall sail from Tunis for Marseilles as soon as there is a steamer; but to get to Tunis I am afraid I must go as far as Biskra with you; that is only one more day. I leave you as soon as I can, you see, which should be some consolation to you."
"Then you say good-bye to me at Biskra?"
"Because it isn't possible sooner!"
The sharpness of her tone, unfortunately, roused a sharpness in him; and his sense of being used rose suddenly above the treacherous sympathy he had begun to feel for her. He spoke with bitterness.
"I see! You feel pretty sure he'll be in Biskra."
She stared at him. "I think you may mean Mr. Tinker."
"Yes."
She said nothing; but, after looking at him expressionlessly for a moment or two longer, made an odd movement as if she had forgotten that she was in a moving vehicle and meant to rise from her seat and leave him. Then she leaned forward, her hand uplifted to tap on the glass before her and her lips parted in the impulse to speak to the chauffeur.
Ogle caught the uplifted hand and held it.
"Aurélie!" he said. "You can't get out here on the road."
"Why not?" she asked fiercely. "There are some things one prefers to others." Then she released her hand from his, put it over her eyes, and again sank back upon the cushions. "Just a second," she murmured. "Sometimes one must think a little."
"I hope so. Certainly before one does anything absurd." He went on talking, as men do when they begin to feel remorseful. "I don't see why you resent my inference; surely it wasn't an unfair one. However, since you do resent it, I'll gladly apologize and withdraw what I said. I didn't mean to"
"Thank you," she said; and she laughed helplessly, as if in apology for the tears that now trembled upon her eyelids and the emotion that kept her from speaking. She sought her handkerchief vainly for a moment, a search always disastrous to the strength of a gentleman witnessing it; and, when she had found it and used it, gave him her hand without looking at him.
"Please forgive me," he said huskily; for the pathetic trustfulness of this final gesture necessarily completed the unmanning of him. "Could you? And forget it?"
"Of course," she murmured; and she pressed his hand fondly before gently withdrawing her own. "We must both forget a little, my dear!" And with that, she brightened, once more bravely smiling upon him. "We are spoiling a beautiful day with our nonsense. You are going to see the Gorge du Chabat el Ahkra—hillsides covered with apes, but no English—and then a great desolate plateau coloured in pastel. We are on our way to the Desert! Could we be happy again—for a little while?"
He assured her that they could and he almost believed it. Late in the day, by the time they reached Setif, that bleak little city of the Atlas plateau, he believed it with a better conviction; Mme. Momoro showed herself never more charming. She was even the more so because, during this day and the next, she seemed to lay aside every vestige of the delicate coquetry that until then had been the elusive spicing of all her manner with him; she became wholly the gentle gay companion, anxious that he should miss nothing, living in the humble hope that he would be pleased, frankly tender with him—or merry with him, if that was his mood.
When he was cold upon the plateau beyond Setif, in the morning, she put about his shoulders a fur coat of her own that she insisted she was too warm to wear; and she did it almost by force. She sang Arab songs to him in a thrilling low voice he could just hear; she made word pictures for him of the Phœnician merchants who had once travelled this way, and of the coming of the Romans, and then of the overrunning Eastern hordes under Sidi Okba devouring the very fertility of the earth and leaving only the tumbled rocky débris through which the long road wound its way down to El Kantara and the gates of the Desert.
Something of the spell that had been upon him returned; and he wished again, as he had wished at Tizi-Ouzou on the first stage of their journey, that this dreamlike wandering with her might be for ever. But by the time he realized that this was his true desire, and spoke of it to her, the second afternoon of their two days of mild motoring from Bougie was on the wane; Biskra was not many kilometres ahead of them, and, although the car had run smoothly, Mme. Momoro had begun to look a little fatigued.
"I do wish that," he said. "I wish we could go straight on down into the Desert and never turn back."
"It is difficult motoring," she returned. "And what of the dramas you write? Won't you be expected to come back to New York some day to write new ones?"
"I suppose so. It seems pretty far away and unreal—all that—and insignificant. If I should go back"
"Yes?"
"I suppose since your conscience won't let you marry again"
"No. Not even if I were honoured by an invitation!"
"Then I wish"—he paused and laughed musingly—"I wish you weren't a woman, but a boy, so that you could go with me."
At this her look of fatigue deepened a little. "It is curious," she said. "When a man becomes interested in these platonic excursions, he always wishes that the lady were a boy; he never wishes to be a girl. I fear I should be a 'boy' a little mature for you, my dear."
"I believe you often deliberately try to make me feel idiotically young," he returned with some annoyance. "Why do you"
"But you see our journey would be very improper if you weren't. It is one thing for me to travel with my son and his young friend; but quite another thing for me to travel with a gentleman and use my son only as a chaperon. I am much more conventional than you suspect. You see, you must be young—or I shall have to stop the car and get out, as I threatened to yesterday."
"You're mocking me again. Sometimes I have a feeling that from the very beginning you've done nothing else. Is it true?"
"No," she said, and without complicating her reply by any explanation, she changed the subject. "Look before you. I promise that you will like it better than the mountains."
Her promise was already fulfilled. They had come through many miles of dismaying mountainous desert and were in a gorge of tumbled, bright-coloured rocks. Now they passed a charming French inn, and just beyond it the barren gorge culminated in one of those dramatic climaxes that Nature, laughing rather mockingly, sometimes throws into the faces of human contrivers of climax and motoring playwrights. The automobile ran out through an appalling gateway of savage, gigantically ragged stone, and suddenly was in the green oasis of El Kantara. Hundreds of palm trees tossed their great feathered leaves above flat-roofed mud houses and long mud walls; there were glimpses of white-robed figures, mottled with orange sunshine and violet shadow, as they moved in the cool green avenues; somewhere a tom-tom throbbed, and there was the tinkling sound of running waters.
Mme. Momoro turned smilingly to her startled companion. "Your first oasis!"
"It's worth it!" he exclaimed impulsively, not realizing that his meaning might be construed as not impeccably gallant. She gave him a quick side glance, which he did not notice; but although her fine eyebrows showed the slightest elevation she said nothing.
Beyond the Arab town they passed the long, whitewashed wall of a fort; and near the gateway a Nubian sentry stood blacker than black lacquer against the intolerable whiteness of the white wall under the African sun. Ogle was enraptured with him. "Look at that!" he cried. "It's a blot of printer's ink on white chalk. Or it's as if you saw the glaring white wall through the hollow eye-holes in a mask of blue-black enamel. This is getting to be a show!"
"Wait," she said, and a little later, as they came down a gentle and curving slope, she tapped upon the glass before them. The chauffeur stopped the car. "Now," she said.
But she had no need to tell Ogle to look: he was leaning forward, staring with all his eyes at the unending level of the pale blue horizon—for, except that there were no tossing waters near him, he might have been again, with this same companion beside him, upon the deck of the "Duumvir," looking out to sea.
"It's true then," he said. "I've always heard that the Desert looked exactly like the ocean; but most things like that turn out to be untrue when you come to them yourself. I suppose that blue ocean yonder" He hesitated, doubting; the illusion was so strong. "I suppose that ocean yonder really is the Desert?"
"Yes," she answered, and she sighed as if relieved to have come to it. "It is the Sahara."