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Now and again Hamoud, a robed figment always beside her, addressed her in an unintelligible language. "Dying. Dying. Dying." Too late, perhaps, even for that last embrace of glances, that moment of pardon and love which was all that she had asked. Closed eyes, sealed lips, a similacrum to mock her will, left behind by the spirit that had gone where she and the safari could not follow.
The servants moved softly through the corridors, paused to whisper to one another, then hurried out of sight as David Verne appeared in his wheel chair, slowly propelled toward the sick room by Hamoud.
The newspaper was in his left hand, half concealed, like a weapon, in the folds of his robe. He heard a feeble cry: "What has happened? What has happened?" "And I who have eaten his bread," thought Hamoud, in sudden shame and horror. If only some one would come! But the shadowy perspective of the living room remained empty; and there was nowhere any sound except the beating of his heart.
"They sing of you," said Hamoud, turning his limpid eyes toward her face which was veiled by swaying fringes of the awning. She unclenched her fists; her body slowly relaxed; and a look of incredulity appeared in her eyes, as she returned from afar to this oscillating world of steamy heat, throbbing with aboriginal song, impregnated with the smell of putrefying foliage and of sweat.
"Besides," he concluded, "keeping you here all this while a prisoner " "How can you be so unkind?" "At least I'm not ungrateful." He made a sign to Hamoud, who stole forward to take his post behind the wheel chair; and the two faces regarded her with the same brave, secret look, the same queer impassiveness that was like a deafening cry. Her nerves began to fail her.
"There is nothing here," Hamoud said gently, when he had looked round the tent. As she made no reply, he was about to withdraw; but, kneeling down, instead, he raised the weighted hem of the mosquito net, to take her hand and press it to his brow. "Sleep always without fear. Till Hamoud is dead no harm shall come to you." "And dreams?" she moaned, letting her hand go limp in his frozen grasp.
The young Arab paused beyond the living-room door, his handsome head inclined to one side, waiting for the response not for the words, but for the mere tone of her voice. He heard: "While you are holding your own, and working so well, I am happy." Hamoud closed his eyes, in order to let those silvery vibrations occupy his whole consciousness.
And Parr, sagging, shivering, softly groaning on the back of the Muscat donkey, and Hamoud, ever pacing beside her, and the askaris with their rifle barrels glinting against their fezzes, and the porters and the camp boys, were only the instrument that her will had welded together. They were wraiths obediently advancing her dream of one fleeting moment of triumph over fate.
As the lash described a flourish above the first outstretched back she turned away to her tent. Hamoud was before her, raising the curtain. He said: "They will speak no more about the coast when we are through with them." At dawn he came to tell her that Parr had the black-water fever.
Hamoud remained, rigid at the foot of the bed, his face a dingy white, staring before him as one who meditates on some immense, intolerable injury. When her cries burst forth, he laid his hand upon his dagger, as if against these invisible forces, these jinn from the Pit, that had taken possession of her. The physician arrived to find the convulsions ended.
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