"I had better tell you the whole story," said Raoul, dropping back into
his chair.
"Thirty-six years ago my father, who was as great a wanderer as I am,
was staying here in the desert with his friend the Sheik Ahmed Ben
Hassan. A chance acquaintance some years before over the purchase of
some horses had ripened into a very intimate friendship that was
unusual between a Frenchman and an Arab. The Sheik was a wonderful man,
very enlightened, with strong European tendencies. As a matter of pure
fact he was not too much in sympathy with the French form of
administration as carried on in Algeria, but he was not affected
sufficiently by it to make any real difficulty. The territory that he
regarded as his own lay too much to the south, and he kept his large
and scattered tribe in too good order for any interference to be
possible. He was unmarried, and the women of his own race seemed to
have no attraction for him. He was wrapped up in his tribe and his
horses.
My father had come for a stay of some months. My mother had
recently died and he wanted to get away from everything that reminded
him of her. One evening, shortly after his arrival at the camp, a party
of the Sheik's men who had been absent for some days in the north on
the chief's affairs arrived, bringing with them a woman whom they had
found wandering in the desert. How she had got there, or from what
direction she had come, they did not know. They were nearer
civilisation than Ahmed Ben Hassan's camp at the time, but with true
native tendency to avoid responsibility they thought that the disposal
of her was a matter more for their Sheik than themselves. She could
give no account of herself, as, owing to the effects of the sun or
other causes, she was temporarily out of her mind. Arabs are very
gentle with any one who is mad--'Allah has touched them!' She was taken
to the tent of one of the headmen, whose wife looked after her. For
some days it was doubtful whether she would recover, and her condition
was aggravated by the fact that she was shortly to become a mother. She
did regain her senses after a time, however, but nothing could make her
say anything about herself, and questions reduced her to terrible fits
of hysterical crying which were prejudicial in her state of health. She
seemed calmest when she was left quite alone, but even then she started
at the slightest sound, and the headman's wife reported that she would
lie for hours on her bed crying quietly to herself. She was quite
young--seemingly not more than nineteen or twenty. From her accents my
father decided that she was Spanish, but she would admit nothing, not
even her nationality. In due course of time the child was born, a boy."