CHAPTER XXIII.

The Doctor replied very quietly, without seeming to notice the outburst—

"I agree with you, Baroness, and I have already explained myself on this score. You are not in love. If our friends were to leave you to-morrow, you would forget them. It is their presence alone that makes you uneasy, I had almost said, irritable."

"In that case," replied Madame de Guéran, "my illness is known, and you have found out its cause. M. de Morin and M. Périères inspire me with a vague, indefinable, almost inexplicable interest, and this divided interest," she continued, smilingly, "upsets me, worries me, and is killing me by inches."

"No, no, my dear patient, we have not quite reached that point yet. You are not the woman to allow yourself to be done to death for so little. You are no ignorant girl, to languish and grow thin in such a case as this. The interest—the word is your own—you take in our friends has no such tremendous effect upon you. It does not give rise even to a feeling of remorse when you think of M. de Guéran and your hopes of recovering him. You had every reason to believe yourself to be a widow, and you were one from a legal or official point of view; you could, if you had so wished, have given your whole heart to either of your travelling companions, and one ought really to admire you for not having bestowed even a particle of that interest—shall I call it by that name?—on either of them, even though you were at perfect liberty to withdraw it if you thought fit. Therefore, I repeat, you have nothing wherewith to reproach yourself from this point of view."

"Is there another point, then?" said she, trying to smile, but unable entirely to hide the emotion caused by the last words addressed to her.

"Yes," said M. Delange, earnestly, "you are in love, seriously in love with him who could not accompany you, whose place I took. In other words, you are in love with Dr. Desrioux."

She trembled at the name, but she did not reply, neither did she attempt to impose silence on her indiscreet confidant.

He resumed, in a more sprightly tone—

"Do you think that one doctor can keep anything from another? I do not speak much, and I am, perhaps, looked upon as seeing less. People are apt to say—'Oh, M. Delange has only eyes for cards; you need not mind him.' They are wrong. T can see beyond my game, and I make my little mental notes. I subject my neighbours to a moral auscultation, though I appear only to be marking the king. The day on which I had the honour of being introduced to you, and of becoming acquainted, in your drawing-room, with M. Desrioux, I saw at once that my _confrère_ was sincerely attached to you. On the following day I discovered that he was not absolutely indifferent to you; but, to be perfectly open and leave nothing unexplained, I must also admit that on the day when you left France you had no idea of the strength of your affection for him. If it had come home to you, you would not have accepted MM. de Morin and Périères as your travelling companions. You knew that they were _éprise_ with you, and it would have been repugnant to your delicacy of feeling to have allowed them to become more, and at the same time hopelessly so. It was only by degrees, later on, by reason of separation, absence, the exchange of letters, and the receipt of news, that you found out the strength of your attachment, as well as that, in all probability, it was ever on the increase."

Pensive, and with her nature stirred to its innermost depths by what she had heard, she continued to preserve absolute silence. She had, it is true, with reluctance, and almost, fearfully, confessed all these things to herself, but it was the first time she had been told of them by anyone else.

She listened to everything the Doctor had to say without interruption, without any appearance of a desire that he would be less explicit and more considerate, and the sad smile which hovered about her lips seemed to say—

"Be perfectly open. Your words hurt me, but I must listen to them. I must open my eyes resolutely to my position; and you appear to have realized it more completely than I have. Say on then, and if, after you have said all, you can apply your healing art to me, you will be doing me a real service, I assure you."

M. Delange, for his part, derived encouragement from the silence, and continued in the same calm, brotherly tone, but slightly moved, withal, against his will.

"This love," he resumed, "which you have unknowingly brought with you, is weakening you and wearing you out. You would fain tear it out of your heart, but you lack the power so to do. At times you are tempted to reproach MM. de Morin and Périères for not making you forget him who is away, and yet if you yield for a moment to the pleasure of their society—and it is pleasant—you are at once assailed by the fear that you are wanting in truth towards that other one. You return, as it were, to him in all humility and submission, and then comes a sudden apparition of your husband looming in the distance, in the unknown land whither our steps are bent. You want to find him, duty beckons you on, and his memory is dear to you; but you shudder at the thought that your heart is no longer your own, and that it is impossible for you to give it to him. There, my dear Baroness, I have told you all that you could tell me; I am a queer confidant, for it is I alone who have been speaking all this time. I asked you to let me know your secrets; you have kept them to yourself, and I have narrated to you my own discoveries. Not that I regret in the least either my indiscretion or my garrulity, since they have taught you to know me and to see in me a devoted friend, a brother anxious for your welfare. You will no longer keep me at a distance; but, when you find your troubles too heavy for you to bear, you will summon me to your aid and open out your heart to me. And in that way alone can you alleviate your distress."

He was silent, and she, equally mute, got up and, in token of friendship, took the Doctor's arm. In this way they returned to the encampment and soon gained the nearest tents. When she reached her own, Madame de Guéran turned towards M. Delange, and held out her hand, as if to say—

"I forgive you for the boldness of your speech. You have shown yourself my friend, and I am glad to know that it is so."

She disappeared within her tent, and he betook himself to his.

M. Périères and M. de Morin were not so completely absorbed, the one in his notes of the expedition, and the other in his cigarette and the contemplation of nature, as to be entirely unconscious of the proceedings of Madam de Guéran and the Doctor. By-and-by they met, and made their comments on the lengthy _tête-à-tête_.

"What can he be saying to her?" asked M. Périères.

"I have not the remotest idea, but their conversation appears to be interesting."

"Yes, in this bright moonlight we can clearly distinguish Madame de Guéran's countenance, and she seems moved. Do you think that the Doctor is discussing our position with regard to her?"

"I am pretty sure of it," replied M, de Morin. "He is far too intelligent and observant not to have perceived the depth of our attachment. Why do you ask?"

"Because Delange is just the man to fall in love on his own account, if he did not see that we were in that plight."

"And, seeing it, you think that he would hold his hand?"

"Certainly, I do. He is too devoted to us, and he is too straightforward in his ideas to cross our path. Are you jealous, my dear fellow?"

"Of the Doctor? Oh, no. I have too much respect for Madame de Guéran; and, besides, I think she is too uncomfortable about her position with regard to us to wish to render it still more complicated."

"De Morin?"

"Périères?"

"Shall we be perfectly open with each other?"

"We have always been so."

"Except at Khartoum, where we were within an ace of falling out."

"True, but we profited by that escape to swear eternal friendship, and I have never gone back from my word."

"Nor I either. You are sure of that?"

"Perfectly. Moreover, we have adopted certain precautions against any temptation to tear each other to pieces which might assail us. Our agreement was both wise and just. If Madame de Guéran, whether by word or look, gives either of us to understand that he is the chosen one, the happy man is at once to inform his ill-fated companion of the fact, and the victim is at once to withdraw from the contest, abandon all hope, and quit the field."

"Yes, that was it. And I can only regret, my dear fellow, that I am not in a position to ask you to take yourself off."

"My dear Périères, I positively ache to tell you to make yourself scarce, and yet I have not the slightest authority for so doing."

"So much the better, because, as far as I am concerned, I should be in a regular fix if I had to make a solitary journey back through the land of those awful Bongos, those amiable Dinkas, not to mention the Shillooks and so many others. I am rather inclined to think that, for my sake, at all events, Madame de Guéran would do well not to decide in your favour."

"To tell you the truth, my dear fellow, I am afraid she will decide neither for one nor the other."

"Precisely my fear; she shrinks from inflicting too severe a wound on the rejected one. We are not behaving generously towards her; we take away from her all freedom of choice, and, very possibly, we prevent her from saying what she would like to say."

"Nevertheless, my very dear friend, I cannot propose that, instead of descending this hill to-morrow with all our companions, for the purpose of visiting the Niam-Niam, you should retrace your steps, cheered by the society of my faithful Joseph and the donkey, of which, in that case, you would be anxious to deprive the caravan."

"I am perfectly sure of it, my dear de Morin, and yet, if we had lived in another age than our own, we should hare found some means of coming to an understanding."

"Yes, the King's Musketeers, for instance, in our position, would not have hesitated to draw their swords. I have often thought about it myself. That age was a good one, and the sword settles matters so completely."

"We might revive the custom very easily. In the heart of Africa one cannot be said to belong to any age. I am sure that when we paid our visit to those Bongo women we had no very clear idea of what century we were in. At all events on that occasion nobody could have objected to our going a step backwards, to the seventeenth or eighteenth century in imagination."

"My notion, I perceive, makes you smile, and, after all, we had better let it drop. If I happened to kill you, or to be killed by you, Madame de Guéran, I am sure, would detest me, or hate you, as the case might be. She is not very fond of the eighteenth century; she belongs to the present day, and she is journeying on through Africa, pursuing one sole idea without paying much attention to Bongo customs."

"Very possibly so. Thus, my poor friend, we can only wait."

"As you say, we can only wait, and, in truth, it is the only course open to us just at present."

"There I differ from you—we can go to bed. It is two o'clock in the morning already, and we have to start at five."

"You are right. Yon do not mind my having thought of the King's Musketeers?"

"Mind it? The idea was capital, only, like many other excellent ideas, it was not practicable."

"I'll try to hit upon something else."

"And so will I. Good night."

"Good-bye—for three hours."

On the following day, before noon, the caravan, preceded by its band, set foot on the territory of the Niam-Niam.