Fin Tireur | Page 3

way. Well, one day she went to what they call a sand-diviner. She didn't pretend anything. She told me she wanted to go, and I was ready. I was always ready that she should have any little pleasure. I couldn't leave the café, so she went off alone to a room he had by the Garden of the Gazelles, at the end of the dancing-street."
"I know--over the place where they smoke the kief."
"She didn't answer, but went and sat down under the arbour, opposite to where they wash the clothes. I followed her, for she looked ill.
"'Did he read in the sand for you?' I said.
"'Yes,' she said; 'he did.'
"'What things did he read?'
"She turned, and looked right at me. 'That my fate lies in the sand,' she said--'and yours, and hers.'
"And she pointed at little Marie, who was playing with a yellow kid we had then just by the door.
"'What's that to be afraid of?' I asked her. 'Haven't we come to the desert to make our fortune, and isn't there sand in the desert?'
"'Not much by here,' she said.
"And that's true, m'sieu. It's hard ground, you know, at Beni-Mora."
"Yes," I said, offering him another cigar.
He refused it with a quick gesture.
"She never would say another word as to what the sand-diviner had told her; but she was never the same from that day. She was as uneasy as a lost bitch, m'sieu; and she made me uneasy too. Sometimes she wouldn't speak to our little one when the child ran to her, and sometimes she'd catch her up, and kiss her till the little one's cheek was as red as if you'd been striking it. And then one day, after dark, she went."
"Went!"
"I'd been ill with fever, and gone to spend the night at the sulphur baths; you know, m'sieu, Hammam-Salahkin, under the mountains. I came back just at dawn to open the café. When I got off my mule at the door I heard"--his face twitched convulsively--"the most horrible crying of a child. It was so horrible that I just stood there, holding on to the bridle of the mule, and listening, and didn't dare go in. I'd heard children cry often enough before; but--mon Dieu!--never like that. At last I dropped the bridle, and went in, with my legs shaking under me. I found the little one alone in the house, and like a mad thing. She'd been alone all night."
His face set rigidly.
"And her mother knew I should be all night at the Hammam," he said. "Fin Tireur--yes, it was coming back, and finding my little one left like that in such a place, made me earn the name."
He fell suddenly into a moody silence. I broke it by saying: "It was the sand-diviner?"
He looked at me sharply. "I don't know."
"You never found out?"
"At Beni-Mora the women go veiled," he said harshly.
Suddenly I realised the horror of the situation: the deserted husband living on with his child in the midst of the ordained and close secrecy of Beni-Mora, where many of the women never set foot out of doors, and those who do, unless they are the public dancers, are so heavily veiled that their features cannot be recognised.
"What did you do?" I asked.
"I searched, as far as one can search in an Arab town, and found out nothing. I wanted to tear the veil from every woman in the place; and then I was sent away from Beni-Mora."
"By whom?"
"The French authorities, my own countrymen," he laughed bitterly. "To save me from getting myself murdered, m'sieu."
"You would have been."
"Why not? Then I came here to keep the inn for the diligence that carries the mails to the south, for I wouldn't leave the country till----"
He paused.
"And the sand-diviner?"
"I left him at Beni-Mora. He smiled, and said he knew no more than I; and perhaps he didn't. How was I to tell?"
"But your name of Fin Tireur?"
"Ah!"--the thing in his eyes glowed like a thing red-hot--"I'd been here eleven months when, one afternoon of summer, just near sunset, I heard a noise of drums beating and African pipes screaming, and the snarl of camels on the road you came to-night. I was in the house, in this room where we are sitting now, and little Marie was playing just outside by the well, so that I could see her through the window. By the sounds, I knew a great caravan was coming up, and passing towards the south. They always water at the well, and I stood by the window to see them. Little Marie stood too, shading her eyes with her bit of a hand. The drums and pipes got louder, and round the corner of the inn came as big a caravan as I've ever seen; near a hundred camels, horsemen, and led mules