The Sheik

"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."