XIX
The fever lasted another week, and daily at noon Jean became delirious. Each renewed attack was regarded with anxiety. Nevertheless the danger was over, and the disease conquered.
Oh those hot hours of midday, hours that weigh most heavily upon the sick! Those who have had fever on the banks of these African rivers know them well, those deadly hours of torpor and slumber. Shortly before noon, Jean would fall asleep. It was a kind of suspended existence, haunted by confused visions and a persistent impression of suffering. And from time to time he had the sensation of dying, and for an instant he would lose all consciousness of himself. These were his moments of peace.
Towards four o’clock he would awake and ask for water. The visions faded, shrank away into remote corners of the ward, behind the white curtains, and vanished. Only his head continued to hurt violently, as if boiling lead had been poured into it, but the delirium had passed its climax.
Among these faces, gentle or grimacing, real or imaginary, that hovered around him, he had two or three times thought he recognised Cora’s lover standing near his bed and looking at him kindly, but disappearing as soon as Jean’s eyes were raised to his. Doubtless he, too, was an illusion, like those people from his village whom he imagined he saw there, strange in demeanour, vague and distorted in appearance.
Yet, curiously enough, since he had seemed to see him thus, he no longer felt that he hated him.
But one evening—no, he was certainly not dreaming—one evening he really saw him there before him, in the same uniform he had worn at Cora’s house, with his two officer’s stripes shining on his blue sleeve. Jean looked at him with his great eyes, raising his head slightly, and he stretched out his wasted arm as if to feel if there were really someone there.
Then, seeing that Jean recognised him, the young man, before he disappeared as usual, took the spahi’s hand and pressed it, saying simply,
“Pardon me.”
Tears, his first tears, sprang to the spahi’s eyes and brought relief.