The Garden Of Allah by Robert Hichens (page 4)

The animal, irritated by inaction, began to plunge violently and to get out of hand.

“Give me the reins,” Domini said to the poet. “That’s it. Now put your hand for me.”

Batouch obeyed. Her foot just touched his hand and she was in the saddle.

Androvsky sprang forward on to the pavement. His eyes were blazing with anxiety. She saw it and laughed gaily.

“Oh, he’s not vicious,” she said. “And vice is the only thing that’s dangerous. His mouth is perfect, but he’s nervous and wants handling. I’ll just take him up the gardens and back.”

She had been reining him in. Now she let him go, and galloped up the straight track between the palms towards the station. The priest had come out into his little garden with Bous-Bous, and leaned over his brushwood fence to look after her. Bous-Bous barked in a light soprano. The Arab boys jumped on their bare toes, and one of them, who was a bootblack, waved his board over his shaven head. The Arab waiter smiled as if with satisfaction at beholding perfect competence. But Androvsky stood quite still looking down the dusty road at the diminishing forms of horse and rider, and when they disappeared, leaving behind them a light cloud of sand films whirling in the sun, he sighed heavily and dropped his chin on his chest as if fatigued.

“I can get a horse for Monsieur too. Would Monsieur like to have a horse?”

It was the poet’s amply seductive voice. Androvsky started.

“I don’t ride,” he said curtly.

“I will teach Monsieur. I am the best teacher in Beni-Mora. In three lessons Monsieur will–“

“I don’t ride, I tell you.”

Androvsky was looking angry. He stepped out into the road. Bous-Bous, who was now observing Nature at the priest’s garden gate, emerged with some sprightliness and trotted towards him, evidently with the intention of making his acquaintance. Coming up to him the little dog raised his head and uttered a short bark, at the same time wagging his tail in a kindly, though not effusive manner. Androvsky looked down, bent quickly and patted him, as only a man really fond of animals and accustomed to them knows how to pat. Bous-Bous was openly gratified. He began to wriggle affectionately. The priest in his garden smiled. Androvsky had not seen him and went on playing with the dog, who now made preparations to lie down on his curly back in the road in the hope of being tickled, a process he was an amateur of. Still smiling, and with a friendly look on his face, the priest came out of his garden and approached the playmates.

“Good morning, M’sieur,” he said politely, raising his hat. “I see you like dogs.”

Androvsky lifted himself up, leaving Bous-Bous in a prayerful attitude, his paws raised devoutly towards the heavens. When he saw that it was the priest who had addressed him his face changed, hardened to grimness, and his lips trembled slightly.

“That’s my little dog,” the priest continued in a gentle voice. “He has evidently taken a great fancy to you.”

Batouch was watching Androvsky under the arcade, and noted the sudden change in his expression and his whole bearing.

“I–I did not know he was your dog, Monsieur, or I should not have interfered with him,” said Androvsky.

Bous-Bous jumped up against his leg. He pushed the little dog rather roughly away and stepped back to the arcade. The priest looked puzzled and slightly hurt. At this moment the soft thud of horse’s hoofs was audible on the road and Domini came cantering back to the hotel. Her eyes were sparkling, her face was radiant. She bowed to the priest and reined up before the hotel door, where Androvsky was standing.

“I’ll buy him,” she said to Batouch, who swelled with satisfaction at the thought of his commission. “And I’ll go for a long ride now–out into the desert.”

“You will not go alone, Madame?”

It was the priest’s voice. She smiled down at him gaily.

“Should I be carried off by nomads, Monsieur?”

“It would not be safe for a lady, believe me.”

Batouch swept forward to reassure the priest. “I am Madame’s guide. I have a horse ready saddled to accompany Madame. I have sent for it already, M’sieur.”

One of the little Arab boys was indeed visible running with all his might towards the Rue Berthe. Domini’s face suddenly clouded. The presence of the guide would take all the edge off her pleasure, and in the short gallop she had just had she had savoured its keenness. She was alive with desire to be happy.

“I don’t need you, Batouch,” she said.

But the poet was inexorable, backed up by the priest.

“It is my duty to accompany Madame. I am responsible for her safety.”

“Indeed, you cannot go into the desert alone,” said the priest.

Domini glanced at Androvsky, who was standing silently under the arcade, a little withdrawn, looking uncomfortable and self-conscious. She remembered her thought on the tower of the dice-thrower, and of how the presence of the stranger had seemed to double her pleasure then. Up the road from the Rue Berthe came the noise of a galloping horse. The shoeblack was returning furiously, his bare legs sticking out on either side of a fiery light chestnut with a streaming mane and tail.

“Monsieur Androvsky,” she said.

He started.

“Madame?”

“Will you come with me for a ride into the desert?”

His face was flooded with scarlet, and he came a step forward, looking up at her.

“I!” he said with an accent of infinite surprise.

“Yes. Will you?”

The chestnut thundered up and was pulled sharply back on its haunches. Androvsky shot a sideways glance at it and hesitated. Domini thought he was going to refuse and wished she had not asked him, wished it passionately.

“Never mind,” she said, almost brutally in her vexation at what she had done.

“Batouch!”

The poet was about to spring upon the horse when Androvsky caught him by the arm.

“I will go,” he said.

Batouch looked vicious. “But Monsieur told me he did not—-“

He stopped. The hand on his arm had given him a wrench that made him feel as if his flesh were caught between steel pincers. Androvsky came up to the chestnut.

“Oh, it’s an Arab saddle,” said Domini.

“It does not matter, Madame.”

His face was stern.

“Are you accustomed to them?”

“It makes no difference.”

He took hold of the rein and put his foot in the high stirrup, but so awkwardly that he kicked the horse in the side. It plunged.

“Take care!” said Domini.

Androvsky hung on, and climbed somehow into the saddle, coming down in it heavily, with a thud. The horse, now thoroughly startled, plunged furiously and lashed out with its hind legs. Androvsky was thrown forward against the high red peak of the saddle with his hands on the animal’s neck. There was a struggle. He tugged at the rein violently. The horse jumped back, reared, plunged sideways as if about to bolt. Androvsky was shot off and fell on his right shoulder heavily. Batouch caught the horse while Androvsky got up. He was white with dust. There was even dust on his face and in his short hair. He looked passionate.

“You see,” Batouch began, speaking to Domini, “that Monsieur cannot–“

“Give me the rein!” said Androvsky.

There was a sound in his deep voice that was terrible. He was looking not at Domini, but at the priest, who stood a little aside with an expression of concern on his face. Bous-Bous barked with excitement at the conflict. Androvsky took the rein, and, with a sort of furious determination, sprang into the saddle and pressed his legs against the horse’s flanks. It reared up. The priest moved back under the palm trees, the Arab boys scattered. Batouch sought the shelter of the arcade, and the horse, with a short, whining neigh that was like a cry of temper, bolted between the trunks of the trees, heading for the desert, and disappeared in a flash.

“He will be killed,” said the priest.

Bous-Bous barked frantically.

“It is his own fault,” said the poet. “He told me himself just now that he did not know how to ride.”

“Why didn’t you tell me so?” Domini exclaimed.

“Madame—-“

But she was gone, following Androvsky at a slow canter lest she should frighten his horse by coming up behind it. She came out from the shade of the palms into the sun. The desert lay before her. She searched it eagerly with her eyes and saw Androvsky’s horse far off in the river bed, still going at a gallop towards the south, towards that region in which she had told him on the tower she thought that peace must dwell. It was as if he had believed her words blindly and was frantically in chase of peace. And she pursued him through the blazing sunlight. She was out in the desert at length, beyond the last belt of verdure, beyond the last line of palms. The desert wind was on her cheek and in her hair. The desert spaces stretched around her. Under her horse’s hoofs lay the sparkling crystals on the wrinkled, sun-dried earth. The red rocks, seamed with many shades of colour that all suggested primeval fires and the relentless action of heat, were heaped about her. But her eyes were fixed on the far-off moving speck that was the horse carrying Androvsky madly towards the south. The light and fire, the great airs, the sense of the chase intoxicated her. She struck her horse with the whip. It leaped, as if clearing an immense obstacle, came down lightly and strained forward into the shining mysteries at a furious gallop. The black speck grew larger. She was gaining. The crumbling, cliff-like bank on her left showed a rent in which a faint track rose sharply to the flatness beyond. She put her horse at it and came out among the tiny humps on which grew the halfa grass and the tamarisk bushes. A pale sand flew up here about the horse’s feet. Androvsky was still below her in the difficult ground where the water came in the floods. She gained and gained till she was parallel with him and could see his bent figure, his arms clinging to the peak of his red saddle, his legs set forward almost on to his horse’s withers by the short stirrups with their metal toecaps. The animal’s temper was nearly spent. She could see that. The terror had gone out of his pace. As she looked she saw Androvsky raise his arms from the saddle peak, catch at the flying rein, draw it up, lean against the saddle back and pull with all his force. The horse stopped dead.

“His strength must be enormous,” Domini thought with a startled admiration.

She pulled up too on the bank above him and gave a halloo. He turned his head, saw her, and put his horse at the bank, which was steep here and without any gap. “You can’t do it,” she called.

In reply he dug the heels of his heavy boots into the horse’s flanks and came on recklessly. She thought the horse would either refuse or try to get up and roll back on its rider. It sprang at the bank and mounted like a wild cat. There was a noise of falling stones, a shower of scattered earth-clods dropping downward, and he was beside her, white with dust, streaming with sweat, panting as if the labouring breath would rip his chest open, with the horse’s foam on his forehead, and a savage and yet exultant gleam in his eyes.

They looked at each other in silence, while their horses, standing quietly, lowered their narrow, graceful heads and touched noses with delicate inquiry. Then she said:

“I almost thought—-“

She stopped.

“Yes?” he said, on a great gasping breath that was like a sob.

“–that you were off to the centre of the earth, or–I don’t know what I thought. You aren’t hurt?”

“No.”

He could only speak in monosyllables as yet. She looked his horse over.

“He won’t give much more trouble just now. Shall we ride back?”

As she spoke she threw a longing glance at the far desert, at the verge of which was a dull green line betokening the distant palms of an oasis.

Androvsky shook his head.

“But you—-” She hesitated. “Perhaps you aren’t accustomed to horses, and with that saddle—-“

He shook his head again, drew a tremendous breath and said

“I don’t care, I’ll go on, I won’t go back.”

He put up one hand, brushed the foam from his streaming forehead, and said again fiercely:

“I won’t go back.”

His face was extraordinary with its dogged, passionate expression showing through the dust and the sweat; like the face of a man in a fight to the death, she thought, a fight with fists. She was glad at his last words and liked the iron sound in his voice.

“Come on then.”

And they began to ride towards the dull green line of the oasis, slowly on the sandy waste among the little round humps where the dusty cluster of bushes grew.

“You weren’t hurt by the fall?” she said. “It looked a bad one.”

“I don’t know whether I was. I don’t care whether I was.”

He spoke almost roughly.

“You asked me to ride with you,” he added. “I’ll ride with you.”

She remembered what Batouch had said. There was pluck in this man, pluck that surged up in the blundering awkwardness, the hesitation, the incompetence and rudeness of him like a black rock out of the sea. She did not answer. They rode on, always slowly. His horse, having had its will, and having known his strength at the end of his incompetence, went quietly, though always with that feathery, light, tripping action peculiar to purebred Arabs, an action that suggests the treading of a spring board rather than of the solid earth. And Androvsky seemed a little more at home on it, although he sat awkwardly on the chair-like saddle, and grasped the rein too much as the drowning man seizes the straw. Domini rode without looking at him, lest he might think she was criticising his performance. When he had rolled in the dust she had been conscious of a sharp sensation of contempt. The men she had been accustomed to meet all her life rode, shot, played games as a matter of course. She was herself an athlete, and, like nearly all athletic women, inclined to be pitiless towards any man who was not so strong and so agile as herself. But this man had killed her contempt at once by his desperate determination not to be beaten. She knew by the look she had just seen in his eyes that if to ride with her that day meant death to him he would have done it nevertheless.

The womanhood in her liked the tribute, almost more than liked it.

“Your horse goes better now,” she said at last to break the silence.

“Does it?” he said.

“You don’t know!”

“Madame, I know nothing of horses or riding. I have not been on a horse for twenty-three years.”

She was amazed.

“We ought to go back then,” she exclaimed.

“Why? Other men ride–I will ride. I do it badly. Forgive me.”

“Forgive you!” she said. “I admire your pluck. But why have you never ridden all these years?”

After a pause he answered:

“I–I did not–I had not the opportunity.”

His voice was suddenly constrained. She did not pursue the subject, but stroked her horse’s neck and turned her eyes towards the dark green line on the horizon. Now that she was really out in the desert she felt almost bewildered by it, and as if she understood it far less than when she looked at it from Count Anteoni’s garden. The thousands upon thousands of sand humps, each crowned with its dusty dwarf bush, each one precisely like the others, agitated her as if she were confronted by a vast multitude of people. She wanted some point which would keep the eyes from travelling but could not find it, and was mentally restless as the swimmer far out at sea who is pursued by wave on wave, and who sees beyond him the unceasing foam of those that are pressing to the horizon. Whither was she riding? Could one have a goal in this immense expanse? She felt an overpowering need to find one, and looked once more at the green line.

“Do you think we could go as far as that?” she asked Androvsky, pointing with her whip.

“Yes, Madame.”

“It must be an oasis. Don’t you think so?”

“Yes. I can go faster.”

“Keep your rein loose. Don’t pull his mouth. You don’t mind my telling you. I’ve been with horses all my life.”

“Thank you,” he answered.

“And keep your heels more out. That’s much better. I’m sure you could teach me a thousand things; it will be kind of you to let me teach you this.”

He cast a strange look at her. There was gratitude in it, but much more; a fiery bitterness and something childlike and helpless.

“I have nothing to teach,” he said.

Their horses broke into a canter, and with the swifter movement Domini felt more calm. There was an odd lightness in her brain, as if her thoughts were being shaken out of it like feathers out of a bag. The power of concentration was leaving her, and a sensation of carelessness–surely gipsy-like–came over her. Her body, dipped in the dry and thin air as in a clear, cool bath, did not suffer from the burning rays of the sun, but felt radiant yet half lazy too. They went on and on in silence as intimate friends might ride together, isolated from the world and content in each other’s company, content enough to have no need of talking. Not once did it strike Domini as strange that she should go far out into the desert with a man of whom she knew nothing, but in whom she had noticed disquieting peculiarities. She was naturally fearless, but that had little to do with her conduct. Without saying so to herself she felt she could trust this man.

The dark green line showed clearer through the sunshine across the gleaming flats. It was possible now to see slight irregularities in it, as in a blurred dash of paint flung across a canvas by an uncertain hand, but impossible to distinguish palm trees. The air sparkled as if full of a tiny dust of intensely brilliant jewels, and near the ground there seemed to quiver a maze of dancing specks of light. Everywhere there was solitude, yet everywhere there was surely a ceaseless movement of minute and vital things, scarce visible sun fairies eternally at play.

And Domini’s careless feeling grew. She had never before experienced so delicious a recklessness. Head and heart were light, reckless of thought or love. Sad things had no meaning here and grave things no place. For the blood was full of sunbeams dancing to a lilt of Apollo. Nothing mattered here. Even Death wore a robe of gold and went with an airy step. Ah, yes, from this region of quivering light and heat the Arabs drew their easy and lustrous resignation. Out here one was in the hands of a God who surely sang as He created and had not created fear.

Many minutes passed, but Domini was careless of time as of all else. The green line broke into feathery tufts, broadened into a still far- off dimness of palms.

“Water!”

Androvsky’s voice spoke as if startled. Domini pulled up. Their horses stood side by side, and at once, with the cessation of motion, the mysticism of the desert came upon them and the marvel of its silence, and they seemed to be set there in a wonderful dream, themselves and their horses dreamlike.

“Water!” he said again.

He pointed, and along the right-hand edge of the oasis Domini saw grey, calm waters. The palms ran out into them and were bathed by them softly. And on their bosom here and there rose small, dim islets. Yes, there was water, and yet– The mystery of it was a mystery she had never known to brood even over a white northern sea in a twilight hour of winter, was deeper than the mystery of the Venetian /laguna morta/, when the Angelus bell chimes at sunset, and each distant boat, each bending rower and patient fisherman, becomes a marvel, an eerie thing in the gold.

“Is it mirage?” she said to him almost in a whisper.

And suddenly she shivered.

“Yes, it is, it must be.”

He did not answer. His left hand, holding the rein, dropped down on the saddle peak, and he stared across the waste, leaning forward and moving his lips. She looked at him and forgot even the mirage in a sudden longing to understand exactly what he was feeling. His mystery –the mystery of that which is human and is forever stretching out its arms–was as the fluid mystery of the mirage, and seemed to blend at that moment with the mystery she knew lay in herself. The mirage was within them as it was far off before them in the desert, still, grey, full surely of indistinct movement, and even perhaps of sound they could not hear.

At last he turned and looked at her.

“Yes, it must be mirage,” he said. “The nothing that seems to be so much. A man comes out into the desert and he finds there mirage. He travels right out and that’s what he reaches–or at least he can’t reach it, but just sees it far away. And that’s all. And is that what a man finds when he comes out into the world?”

It was the first time he had spoken without any trace of reserve to her, for even on the tower, though there had been tumult in his voice and a fierceness of some strange passion in his words, there had been struggle in his manner, as if the pressure of feeling forced him to speak in despite of something which bade him keep silence. Now he spoke as if to someone whom he knew and with whom he had talked of many things.

“But you ought to know better than I do,” she answered.

“I!”

“Yes. You are a man, and have been in the world, and must know what it has to give–whether there’s only mirage, or something that can be grasped and felt and lived in, and—-“

“Yes, I’m a man and I ought to know,” he replied. “Well, I don’t know, but I mean to know.”

There was a savage sound in his voice.

“I should like to know, too,” Domini said quietly. “And I feel as if it was the desert that was going to teach me.”

“The desert–how?”

“I don’t know.”

He pointed again to the mirage.

“But that’s what there is in the desert.”

“That–and what else?”

“Is there anything else?”

“Perhaps everything,” she answered. “I am like you. I want to know.”

He looked straight into her eyes and there was something dominating in his expression.

“You think it is the desert that could teach you whether the world holds anything but a mirage,” he said slowly. “Well, I don’t think it would be the desert that could teach me.”

She said nothing more, but let her horse go and rode off. He followed, and as he rode awkwardly, yet bravely, pressing his strong legs against his animal’s flanks and holding his thin body bent forward, he looked at Domini’s upright figure and brilliant, elastic grace–that gave in to her horse as wave gives to wind–with a passion of envy in his eyes.

They did not speak again till the great palm gardens of the oasis they had seen far off were close upon them. From the desert they looked both shabby and superb, as if some millionaire had poured forth money to create a Paradise out here, and, when it was nearly finished, had suddenly repented of his whim and refused to spend another farthing. The thousands upon thousands of mighty trees were bounded by long, irregular walls of hard earth, at the top of which were stuck distraught thorn bushes. These walls gave the rough, penurious aspect which was in such sharp contrast to the exotic mystery they guarded. Yet in the fierce blaze of the sun their meanness was not disagreeable. Domini even liked it. It seemed to her as if the desert had thrown up waves to protect this daring oasis which ventured to fling its green glory like a defiance in the face of the Sahara. A wide track of earth, sprinkled with stones and covered with deep ruts, holes and hummocks, wound in from the desert between the earthen walls and vanished into the heart of the oasis. They followed it.

Domini was filled with a sort of romantic curiosity. This luxury of palms far out in the midst of desolation, untended apparently by human hands–for no figures moved among them, there was no one on the road– suggested some hidden purpose and activity, some concealed personage, perhaps an Eastern Anteoni, whose lair lay surely somewhere beyond them. As she had felt the call of the desert she now felt the call of the oasis. In this land thrilled eternally a summons to go onward, to seek, to penetrate, to be a passionate pilgrim. She wondered whether her companion’s heart could hear it.

“I don’t know why it is,” she said, “but out here I always feel expectant. I always feel as if some marvellous thing might be going to happen to me.”

She did not add “Do you?” but looked at him as if for a reply.

“Yes, Madame,” he said.

“I suppose it is because I am new to Africa. This is my first visit here. I am not like you. I can’t speak Arabic.”

She suddenly wondered whether the desert was new to him as to her. She had assumed that it was. Yet as he spoke Arabic it was almost certain that he had been much in Africa.

“I do not speak it well,” he answered.

And he looked away towards the dense thickets of the palms. The track narrowed till the trees on either side cast patterns of moving shade across it and the silent mystery was deepened. As far as the eye could see the feathery, tufted foliage swayed in the little wind. The desert had vanished, but sent in after them the message of its soul, the marvellous breath which Domini had drunk into her lungs so long before she saw it. That breath was like a presence. It dwells in all oases. The high earth walls concealed the gardens. Domini longed to look over and see what they contained, whether there were any dwellings in these dim and silent recesses, any pools of water, flowers or grassy lawns.

Her horse neighed.

“Something is coming,” she said.

They turned a corner and were suddenly in a village. A mob of half- naked children scattered from their horses’ feet. Rows of seated men in white and earth-coloured robes stared upon them from beneath the shadow of tall, windowless earth houses. White dogs rushed to and fro upon the flat roofs, thrusting forward venomous heads, showing their teeth and barking furiously. Hens fluttered in agitation from one side to the other. A grey mule, tethered to a palm-wood door and loaded with brushwood, lashed out with its hoofs at a negro, who at once began to batter it passionately with a pole, and a long line of sneering camels confronted them, treading stealthily, and turning their serpentine necks from side to side as they came onwards with a soft and weary inflexibility. In the distance there was a vision of a glaring market-place crowded with moving forms and humming with noises.

The change from mysterious peace to this vivid and concentrated life was startling.

With difficulty they avoided the onset of the camels by pulling their horses into the midst of the dreamers against the walls, who rolled and scrambled into places of safety, then stood up and surrounded them, staring with an almost terrible interest upon them, and surveying their horses with the eyes of connoisseurs. The children danced up and began to ask for alms, and an immense man, with a broken nose and brown teeth like tusks, laid a gigantic hand on Domini’s bridle and said, in atrocious French:

“I am the guide, I am the guide. Look at my certificates. Take no one else. The people here are robbers. I am the only honest man. I will show Madame everything. I will take Madame to the inn. Look–my certificates! Read them! Read what the English lord says of me. I alone am honest here. I am honest Mustapha! I am honest Mustapha!”

He thrust a packet of discoloured papers and dirty visiting-cards into her hands. She dropped them, laughing, and they floated down over the horse’s neck. The man leaped frantically to pick them up, assisted by the robbers round about. A second caravan of camels appeared, preceded by some filthy men in rags, who cried, “Oosh! oosh!” to clear the way. The immense man, brandishing his recovered certificates, plunged forward to encounter them, shouting in Arabic, hustled them back, kicked them, struck at the camels with a stick till those in front receded upon those behind and the street was blocked by struggling beasts and resounded with roaring snarls, the thud of wooden bales clashing together, and the desperate protests of the camel-drivers, one of whom was sent rolling into a noisome dust heap with his turban torn from his head.

“The inn! This is the inn! Madame will descend here. Madame will eat in the garden. Monsieur Alphonse! Monsieur Alphonse! Here are clients for /dejeuner/. I have brought them. Do not believe Mohammed. It is I that–I will assist Madame to descend. I will—-“

Domini was standing in a tiny cabaret before a row of absinthe bottles, laughing, almost breathless. She scarcely knew how she had come there. Looking back she saw Androvsky still sitting on his horse in the midst of the clamouring mob. She went to the low doorway, but Mustapha barred her exit.

“This is Sidi-Zerzour. Madame will eat in the garden. She is tired, fainting. She will eat and then she will see the great Mosque of Zerzour.”

“Sidi-Zerzour!” she exclaimed. “Monsieur Androvsky, do you know where we are? This is the famous Sidi-Zerzour, where the great warrior is buried, and where the Arabs make pilgrimages to worship at his tomb.”

“Yes, Madame.”

He answered in a low voice.

“As we are here we ought to see. Do you know, I think we must yield to honest Mustapha and have /dejeuner/ in the garden. It is twelve o’clock and I am hungry. We might visit the mosque afterwards and ride home in the afternoon.”

He sat there hunched up on the horse and looked at her in silent hesitation, while the Arabs stood round staring.

“You’d rather not?”

She spoke quietly. He shook his feet out of the stirrups. A number of brown hands and arms shot forth to help him. Domini turned back into the cabaret. She heard a tornado of voices outside, a horse neighing and trampling, a scuffling of feet, but she did not glance round. In about three minutes Androvsky joined her. He was limping slightly and bending forward more than ever. Behind the counter on which stood the absinthe bottle was a tarnished mirror, and she saw him glance quickly, almost guiltily into it, put up his hands and try to brush the dust from his hair, his shoulders.

“Let me do it,” she said abruptly. “Turn round.”

He obeyed without a word, turning his back to her. With her two hands, which were covered with soft, loose suede gloves, she beat and brushed the dust from his coat. He stood quite still while she did it. When she had finished she said:

“There, that’s better.”

Her voice was practical. He did not move, but stood there.

“I’ve done what I can, Monsieur Androvsky.”

Then he turned slowly, and she saw, with amazement, that there were tears in his eyes. He did not thank her or say a word.

A small and scrubby-looking Frenchman, with red eyelids and moustaches that drooped over a pendulous underlip, now begged Madame to follow him through a small doorway beyond which could be seen three just shot gazelles lying in a patch of sunlight by a wired-in fowl-run. Domini went after him, and Androvsky and honest Mustapha–still vigorously proclaiming his own virtues–brought up the rear. They came into the most curious garden she had ever seen.

It was long and narrow and dishevelled, without grass or flowers. The uneven ground of it was bare, sun-baked earth, hard as parquet, rising here into a hump, falling there into a depression. Immediately behind the cabaret, where the dead gazelles with their large glazed eyes lay by the fowl-run, was a rough wooden trellis with vines trained over it, making an arbour. Beyond was a rummage of orange trees, palms, gums and fig trees growing at their own sweet will, and casting patterns of deep shade upon the earth in sharp contrast with the intense yellow sunlight which fringed them where the leafage ceased. An attempt had been made to create formal garden paths and garden beds by sticking rushes into little holes drilled in the ground, but the paths were zig-zag as a drunkard’s walk, and the round and oblong beds contained no trace of plants. On either hand rose steep walls of earth, higher than a man, and crowned with prickly thorn bushes. Over them looked palm trees. At the end of the garden ran a slow stream of muddy water in a channel with crumbling banks trodden by many naked feet. Beyond it was yet another lower wall of earth, yet another maze of palms. Heat and silence brooded here like reptiles on the warm mud of a tropic river in a jungle. Lizards ran in and out of the innumerable holes in the walls, and flies buzzed beneath the ragged leaves of the fig trees and crawled in the hot cracks of the earth.

The landlord wished to put a table under the vine close to the cabaret wall, but Domini begged him to bring it to the end of the garden near the stream. With the furious assistance of honest Mustapha he carried it there and quickly laid it in the shadow of a fig tree, while Domini and Androvsky waited in silence on two straw-bottomed chairs.

The atmosphere of the garden was hostile to conversation. The sluggish muddy stream, the almost motionless trees, the imprisoned heat between the surrounding walls, the faint buzz of the flies caused drowsiness to creep upon the spirit. The long ride, too, and the ardent desert air, made this repose a luxury. Androvsky’s face lost its emotional expression as he gazed almost vacantly at the brown water shifting slowly by between the brown banks and the brown walls above which the palm trees peered. His aching limbs relaxed. His hands hung loose between his knees. And Domini half closed her eyes. A curious peace descended upon her. Lapped in the heat and silence for the moment she wanted nothing. The faint buzz of the flies sounded in her ears and seemed more silent than even the silence to which it drew attention. Never before, not in Count Anteoni’s garden, had she felt more utterly withdrawn from the world. The feathery tops of the palms were like the heads of sentinels guarding her from contact with all that she had known. And beyond them lay the desert, the empty, sunlit waste. She shut her eyes, and murmured to herself, “I am in far away. I am in far away.” And the flies said it in her ears monotonously. And the lizards whispered it as they slipped in and out of the little dark holes in the walls. She heard Androvsky stir, and she moved her lips slowly. And the flies and the lizards continued the refrain. But she said now, “We are in far away.”

Honest Mustapha strode forward. He had a Bashi-Bazouk tread to wake up a world. /Dejeuner/ was ready. Domini sighed. They took their places under the fig tree on either side of the deal table covered with a rough white cloth, and Mustapha, with tremendous gestures, and gigantic postures suggesting the untamed descendant of legions of freeborn, sun-suckled men, served them with red fish, omelette, gazelle steaks, cheese, oranges and dates, with white wine and Vals water.

Androvsky scarcely spoke. Now that he was sitting at a meal with Domini he was obviously embarrassed. All his movements were self- conscious. He seemed afraid to eat and refused the gazelle. Mustapha broke out into turbulent surprise and prolonged explanations of the delicious flavour of this desert food. But Androvsky still refused, looking desperately disconcerted.

“It really is delicious,” said Domini, who was eating it. “But perhaps you don’t care about meat.”

She spoke quite carelessly and was surprised to see him look at her as if with sudden suspicion and immediately help himself to the gazelle.

This man was perpetually giving a touch of the whip to her curiosity to keep it alert. Yet she felt oddly at ease with him. He seemed somehow part of her impression of the desert, and now, as they sat under the fig tree between the high earth walls, and at their /al fresco/ meal in unbroken silence–for since her last remark Androvsky had kept his eyes down and had not uttered a word–she tried to imagine the desert without him.

She thought of the gorge of El-Akbara, the cold, the darkness, and then the sun and the blue country. They had framed his face. She thought of the silent night when the voice of the African hautboy had died away. His step had broken its silence. She thought of the garden of Count Anteoni, and of herself kneeling on the hot sand with her arms on the white parapet and gazing out over the regions of the sun, of her dream upon the tower, of her vision when Irena danced. He was there, part of the noon, part of the twilight, chief surely of the worshippers who swept on in the pale procession that received gifts from the desert’s hands. She could no longer imagine the desert without him. The almost painful feeling that had come to her in the garden–of the human power to distract her attention from the desert power–was dying, perhaps had completely died away. Another feeling was surely coming to replace it; that Androvsky belonged to the desert more even than the Arabs did, that the desert spirits were close about him, clasping his hands, whispering in his ears, and laying their unseen hands about his heart. But—-

They had finished their meal. Domini set her chair once more in front of the sluggish stream, while honest Mustapha bounded, with motions suggestive of an ostentatious panther, to get the coffee. Androvsky followed her after an instant of hesitation.

“Do smoke,” she said.

He lit a small cigar with difficulty. She did not wish to watch him, but she could not help glancing at him once or twice, and the conviction came to her that he was unaccustomed to smoking. She lit a cigarette, and saw him look at her with a sort of horrified surprise which changed to staring interest. There was more boy, more child in this man than in any man she had ever known. Yet at moments she felt as if he had penetrated more profoundly into the dark and winding valleys of experience than all the men of her acquaintance.

“Monsieur Androvsky,” she said, looking at the slow waters of the stream slipping by towards the hidden gardens, “is the desert new to you?”

She longed to know.

“Yes, Madame.”

“I thought perhaps–I wondered a little whether you had travelled in it already.”

“No, Madame. I saw it for the first time the day before yesterday.”

“When I did.”

“Yes.”

So they had entered it for the first time together. She was silent, watching the pale smoke curl up through the shade and out into the glare of the sun, the lizards creeping over the hot earth, the flies circling beneath the lofty walls, the palm trees looking over into this garden from the gardens all around, gardens belonging to Eastern people, born here, and who would probably die here, and go to dust among the roots of the palms.

On the earthen bank on the far side of the stream there appeared, while she gazed, a brilliant figure. It came soundlessly on bare feet from a hidden garden; a tall, unveiled girl, dressed in draperies of vivid magenta, who carried in her exquisitely-shaped brown hands a number of handkerchiefs–scarlet, orange, yellow green and flesh colour. She did not glance into the /auberge/ garden, but caught up her draperies into a bunch with one hand, exposing her slim legs far above the knees, waded into the stream, and bending, dipped the handkerchiefs in the water.

The current took them. They streamed out on the muddy surface of the stream, and tugged as if, suddenly endowed with life, they were striving to escape from the hand that held them.

The girl’s face was beautiful, with small regular features and lustrous, tender eyes. Her figure, not yet fully developed, was perfect in shape, and seemed to thrill softly with the spirit of youth. Her tint of bronze suggested statuary, and every fresh pose into which she fell, while the water eddied about her, strengthened the suggestion. With the golden sunlight streaming upon her, the brown banks, the brown waters, the brown walls throwing up the crude magenta of her bunched-up draperies, the vivid colours of the handkerchiefs that floated from her hand, with the feathery palms beside her, the cloudless blue sky above her, she looked so strangely African and so completely lovely that Domini watched her with an almost breathless attention.

She withdrew the handkerchiefs from the stream, waded out, and spread them one by one upon the low earth wall to dry, letting her draperies fall. When she had finished disposing them she turned round, and, no longer preoccupied with her task, looked under her level brows into the garden opposite and saw Domini and her companion. She did not start, but stood quite still for a moment, then slipped away in the direction whence she had come. Only the brilliant patches of colour on the wall remained to hint that she had been there and would come again. Domini sighed.

“What a lovely creature!” she said, more to herself than to Androvsky.

He did not speak, and his silence made her consciously demand his acquiescence in her admiration.

“Did you ever see anything more beautiful and more characteristic of Africa?” she asked.

“Madame,” he said in a slow, stern voice, “I did not look at her.”

Domini felt piqued.

“Why not?” she retorted.

Androvsky’s face was cloudy and almost cruel.

“These native women do not interest me,” he said. “I see nothing attractive in them.”

Domini knew that he was telling her a lie. Had she not seen him watching the dancing girls in Tahar’s cafe? Anger rose in her. She said to herself then that it was anger at man’s hypocrisy. Afterwards she knew that it was anger at Androvsky’s telling a lie to her.

“I can scarcely believe that,” she answered bluntly.

They looked at each other.

“Why not, Madame?” he said. “If I say it is so?”

She hesitated. At that moment she realised, with hot astonishment, that there was something in this man that could make her almost afraid, that could prevent her even, perhaps, from doing the thing she had resolved to do. Immediately she felt hostile to him, and she knew that, at that moment, he was feeling hostile to her.

“If you say it is so naturally I am bound to take your word for it,” she said coldly.

He flushed and looked down. The rigid defiance that had confronted her died out of his face.

Honest Mustapha broke joyously upon them with the coffee. Domini helped Androvsky to it. She had to make a great effort to perform this simple act with quiet, and apparently indifferent, composure.

“Thank you, Madame.”

His voice sounded humble, but she felt hard and as if ice were in all her veins. She sipped her coffee, looking straight before her at the stream. The magenta robe appeared once more coming out from the brown wall. A yellow robe succeeded it, a scarlet, a deep purple. The girl, with three curious young companions, stood in the sun examining the foreigners with steady, unflinching eyes. Domini smiled grimly. Fate gave her an opportunity. She beckoned to the girls. They looked at each other but did not move. She held up a bit of silver so that the sun was on it, and beckoned them again. The magenta robe was lifted above the pretty knees it had covered. The yellow, the scarlet, the deep purple robes rose too, making their separate revelations. And the four girls, all staring at the silver coin, waded through the muddy water and stood before Domini and Androvsky, blotting out the glaring sunshine with their young figures. Their smiling faces were now eager and confident, and they stretched out their delicate hands hopefully to the silver. Domini signified that they must wait a moment.

She felt full of malice.

The girls wore many ornaments. She began slowly and deliberately to examine them; the huge gold earrings that were as large as the little ears that sustained them, the bracelets and anklets, the triangular silver skewers that fastened the draperies across the gentle swelling breasts, the narrow girdles, worked with gold thread, and hung with lumps of coral, that circled the small, elastic waists. Her inventory was an adagio, and while it lasted Androvsky sat on his low straw chair with this wall of young womanhood before him, of young womanhood no longer self-conscious and timid, but eager, hardy, natural, warm with the sun and damp with the trickling drops of the water. The vivid draperies touched him, and presently a little hand stole out to his breast, caught at the silver chain that lay across it, and jerked out of its hiding-place–a wooden cross.

Domini saw the light on it for a second, heard a low, fierce exclamation, saw Androvsky’s arm push the pretty hand roughly away, and then a thing that was strange.

He got up violently from his chair with the cross hanging loose on his breast. Then he seized hold of it, snapped the chain in two, threw the cross passionately into the stream and walked away down the garden. The four girls, with a twittering cry of excitement, rushed into the water, heedless of draperies, bent down, knelt down, and began to feel frantically in the mud for the vanished ornament. Domini stood up and watched them. Androvsky did not come back. Some minutes passed. Then there was an exclamation of triumph from the stream. The girl in magenta held up the dripping cross with the bit of silver chain in her dripping fingers. Domini cast a swift glance behind her. Androvsky had disappeared. Quickly she went to the edge of the water. As she was in riding-dress she wore no ornaments except two earrings made of large and beautiful turquoises. She took them hastily out of her ears and held them out to the girl, signifying by gestures that she bartered them for the little cross and chain. The girl hesitated, but the clear blue tint of the turquoise pleased her eyes. She yielded, snatched the earrings with an eager, gave up the cross and chain with a reluctant, hand. Domini’s fingers closed round the wet gold. She threw some coins across the stream on to the bank, and turned away, thrusting the cross into her bosom.

And she felt at that moment as if she had saved a sacred thing from outrage.

At the cabaret door she found Androvsky, once more surrounded by Arabs, whom honest Mustapha was trying to beat off. He turned when he heard her. His eyes were still full of a light that revealed an intensity of mental agitation, and she saw his left hand, which hung down, quivering against his side. But he succeeded in schooling his voice as he asked:

“Do you wish to visit the village, Madame?”

“Yes. But don’t let me bother you if you would rather–“

“I will come. I wish to come.”

She did not believe it. She felt that he was in great pain, both of body and mind. His fall had hurt him. She knew that by the way he moved his right arm. The unaccustomed exercise had made him stiff. Probably the physical discomfort he was silently enduring had acted as an irritant to the mind. She remembered that it was caused by his determination to be her companion, and the ice in her melted away. She longed to make him calmer, happier. Secretly she touched the little cross that lay under her habit. He had thrown it away in a passion. Well, some day perhaps she would have the pleasure of giving it back to him. Since he had worn it he must surely care for it, and even perhaps for that which it recalled.

“We ought to visit the mosque, I think,” she said.

“Yes, Madame.”

The assent sounded determined yet reluctant. She knew this was all against his will. Mustapha took charge of them, and they set out down the narrow street, accompanied by a little crowd. They crossed the glaring market-place, with its booths of red meat made black by flies, its heaps of refuse, its rows of small and squalid hutches, in which sat serious men surrounded by their goods. The noise here was terrific. Everyone seemed shouting, and the uproar of the various trades, the clamour of hammers on sheets of iron, the dry tap of the shoemaker’s wooden wand on the soles of countless slippers, the thud of the coffee-beater’s blunt club on the beans, and the groaning grunt with which he accompanied each downward stroke mingled with the incessant roar of camels, and seemed to be made more deafening and intolerable by the fierce heat of the sun, and by the innumerable smells which seethed forth upon the air. Domini felt her nerves set on edge, and was thankful when they came once more into the narrow alleys that ran everywhere between the brown, blind houses. In them there was shade and silence and mystery. Mustapha strode before to show the way, Domini and Androvsky followed, and behind glided the little mob of barefoot inquisitors in long shirts, speechless and intent, and always hopeful of some chance scattering of money by the wealthy travellers.

The tumult of the market-place at length died away, and Domini was conscious of a curious, far-off murmur. At first it was so faint that she was scarcely aware of it, and merely felt the soothing influence of its level monotony. But as they walked on it grew deeper, stronger. It was like the sound of countless multitudes of bees buzzing in the noon among flowers, drowsily, ceaselessly. She stopped under a low mud arch to listen. And when she listened, standing still, a feeling of awe came upon her, and she knew that she had never heard such a strangely impressive, strangely suggestive sound before.

“What is that?” she said.

She looked at Androvsky.

“I don’t know, Madame. It must be people.”

“But what can they be doing?”

“They are praying in the mosque where Sidi-Zerzour is buried,” said Mustapha.

Domini remembered the perfume-seller. This was the sound she had beard in his sunken chamber, infinitely multiplied. They went on again slowly. Mustapha had lost something of his flaring manner, and his gait was subdued. He walked with a sort of soft caution, like a man approaching holy ground. And Domini was moved by his sudden reverence. It was impressive in such a fierce and greedy scoundrel. The level murmur deepened, strengthened. All the empty and dim alleys surrounding the unseen mosque were alive with it, as if the earth of the houses, the palm-wood beams, the iron bars of the tiny, shuttered windows, the very thorns of the brushwood roofs were praying ceaselessly and intently in secret under voices. This was a world intense with prayer as a flame is intense with heat, with prayer penetrating and compelling, urgent in its persistence, powerful in its deep and sultry concentration, yet almost oppressive, almost terrible in its monotony.

“Allah-Akbar! Allah-Akbar!” It was the murmur of the desert and the murmur of the sun. It was the whisper of the mirage, and of the airs that stole among the palm leaves. It was the perpetual heart-beat of this world that was engulfing her, taking her to its warm and glowing bosom with soft and tyrannical intention.

“Allah! Allah! Allah!” Surely God must be very near, bending to such an everlasting cry. Never before, not even when the bell sounded and the Host was raised, had Domini felt the nearness of God to His world, the absolute certainty of a Creator listening to His creatures, watching them, wanting them, meaning them some day to be one with Him, as she felt it now while she threaded the dingy alleys towards these countless men who prayed.

Androvsky was walking slowly as if in pain.

“Your shoulder isn’t hurting you?” she whispered.

This long sound of prayer moved her to the soul, made her feel very full of compassion for everybody and everything, and as if prayer were a cord binding the world together. He shook his head silently. She looked at him, and felt that he was moved also, but whether as she was she could not tell. His face was like that of a man stricken with awe. Mustapha turned round to them. The everlasting murmur was now so near that it seemed to be within them, as if they, too, prayed at the tomb of Zerzour.

“Follow me into the court, Madame,” Mustapha said, “and remain at the door while I fetch the slippers.”

They turned a corner, and came to an open space before an archway, which led into the first of the courts surrounding the mosque. Under the archway Arabs were sitting silently, as if immersed in profound reveries. They did not move, but stared upon the strangers, and Domini fancied that there was enmity in their eyes. Beyond them, upon an uneven pavement surrounded with lofty walls, more Arabs were gathered, kneeling, bowing their heads to the ground, and muttering ceaseless words in deep, almost growling, voices. Their fingers slipped over the beads of the chaplets they wore round their necks, and Domini thought of her rosary. Some prayed alone, removed in shady corners, with faces turned to the wall. Others were gathered into knots. But each one pursued his own devotions, immersed in a strange, interior solitude to which surely penetrated an unseen ray of sacred light. There were young boys praying, and old, wrinkled men, eagles of the desert, with fierce eyes that did not soften as they cried the greatness of Allah, the greatness of his Prophet, but gleamed as if their belief were a thing of flame and bronze. The boys sometimes glanced at each other while they prayed, and after each glance they swayed with greater violence, and bowed down with more passionate abasement. The vision of prayer had stirred them to a young longing for excess. The spirit of emulation flickered through them and turned their worship into war.

In a second and smaller court before the portal of the mosque men were learning the Koran. Dressed in white they sat in circles, holding squares of some material that looked like cardboard covered with minute Arab characters, pretty, symmetrical curves and lines, dots and dashes. The teachers squatted in the midst, expounding the sacred text in nasal voices with a swiftness and vivacity that seemed pugnacious. There was violence within these courts. Domini could imagine the worshippers springing up from their knees to tear to pieces an intruding dog of an unbeliever, then sinking to their knees again while the blood trickled over the sun-dried pavement and the lifeless body, lay there to rot and draw the flies.

“Allah! Allah! Allah!”

There was something imperious in such ardent, such concentrated and untiring worship, a demand which surely could not be overlooked or set aside. The tameness, the half-heartedness of Western prayer and Western praise had no place here. This prayer was hot as the sunlight, this praise was a mounting fire. The breath of this human incense was as the breath of a furnace pouring forth to the gates of the Paradise of Allah. It gave to Domini a quite new conception of religion, of the relation between Creator and created. The personal pride which, like blood in a body, runs through all the veins of the mind of Mohammedanism, that measureless hauteur which sets the soul of a Sultan in the twisted frame of a beggar at a street corner, and makes impressive, even almost majestical, the filthy marabout, quivering with palsy and devoured by disease, who squats beneath a holy bush thick with the discoloured rags of the faithful, was not abased at the shrine of the warrior, Zerzour, was not cast off in the act of adoration. These Arabs humbled themselves in the body. Their foreheads touched the stones. By their attitudes they seemed as if they wished to make themselves even with the ground, to shrink into the space occupied by a grain of sand. Yet they were proud in the presence of Allah, as if the firmness of their belief in him and his right dealing, the fury of their contempt and hatred for those who looked not towards Mecca nor regarded Ramadan, gave them a patent of nobility. Despite their genuflections they were all as men who knew, and never forgot, that on them was conferred the right to keep on their head-covering in the presence of their King. With their closed eyes they looked God full in the face. Their dull and growling murmur had the majesty of thunder rolling through the sky.

Mustapha had disappeared within the mosque, leaving Domini and Androvsky for the moment alone in the midst of the worshippers. From the shadowy interior came forth a ceaseless sound of prayer to join the prayer without. There was a narrow stone seat by the mosque door and she sat down upon it. She felt suddenly weary, as one being hypnotised feels weary when the body and spirit begin to yield to the spell of the operator. Androvsky remained standing. His eyes were fixed on the ground, and she thought his face looked almost phantom- like, as if the blood had sunk away from it, leaving it white beneath the brown tint set there by the sun. He stayed quite still. The dark shadow cast by the towering mosque fell upon him, and his immobile figure suggested to her ranges of infinite melancholy. She sighed as one oppressed. There was an old man praying near them at the threshold of the door, with his face turned towards the interior. He was very thin, almost a skeleton, was dressed in rags through which his copper- coloured body, sharp with scarce-covered bones, could be seen, and had a scanty white beard sticking up, like a brush, at the tip of his pointed chin. His face, worn with hardship and turned to the likeness of parchment by time and the action of the sun, was full of senile venom; and his toothless mouth, with its lips folded inwards, moved perpetually, as if he were trying to bite. With rhythmical regularity, like one obeying a conductor, he shot forth his arms towards the mosque as if he wished to strike it, withdrew them, paused, then shot them forth again. And as his arms shot forth he uttered a prolonged and trembling shriek, full of weak, yet intense, fury.

He was surely crying out upon God, denouncing God for the evils that had beset his nearly ended life. Poor, horrible old man! Androvsky was closer to him than she was, but did not seem to notice him. Once she had seen him she could not take her eyes from him. His perpetual gesture, his perpetual shriek, became abominable to her in the midst of the bowing bodies and the humming voices of prayer. Each time he struck at the mosque and uttered his piercing cry she seemed to hear an oath spoken in a sanctuary. She longed to stop him. This one blasphemer began to destroy for her the mystic atmosphere created by the multitudes of adorers, and at last she could no longer endure his reiterated enmity.

She touched Androvsky’s arm. He started and looked at her.

“That old man,” she whispered. “Can’t you speak to him?”

Androvsky glanced at him for the first time.

“Speak to him, Madame? Why?”

“He–he’s horrible!”

She felt a sudden disinclination to tell Androvsky why the old man was horrible to her.

“What do you wish me to say to him?”

“I thought perhaps you might be able to stop him from doing that.”

Androvsky bent down and spoke to the old man in Arabic.

He shot out his arms and reiterated his trembling shriek. It pierced the sound of prayer as lightning pierces cloud.

Domini got up quickly.

“I can’t bear it,” she said, still in a whisper. “It’s as if he were cursing God.”

Androvsky looked at the old man again, this time with profound attention.

“Isn’t it?” she said. “Isn’t it as if he were cursing God while the whole world worshipped? And that one cry of hatred seems louder than the praises of the whole world.”

“We can’t stop it.”

Something in his voice made her say abruptly:

“Do you wish to stop it?”

He did not answer. The old man struck at the mosque and shrieked. Domini shuddered.

“I can’t stay here,” she said.

At this moment Mustapha appeared, followed by the guardian of the mosque, who carried two pairs of tattered slippers.

“Monsieur and Madame must take off their boots. Then I will show the mosque.”

Domini put on the slippers hastily, and went into the mosque without waiting to see whether Androvsky was following. And the old man’s furious cry pursued her through the doorway.

Within there was space and darkness. The darkness seemed to be praying. Vistas of yellowish-white arches stretched away in front, to right and left. On the floor, covered with matting, quantities of shrouded figures knelt and swayed, stood up suddenly, knelt again, bowed down their foreheads. Preceded by Mustapha and the guide, who walked on their stockinged feet, Domini slowly threaded her way among them, following a winding path whose borders were praying men. To prevent her slippers from falling off she had to shuffle along without lifting her feet from the ground. With the regularity of a beating pulse the old man’s shriek, fainter now, came to her from without. But presently, as she penetrated farther into the mosque, it was swallowed up by the sound of prayer. No one seemed to see her or to know that she was there. She brushed against the white garments of worshippers, and when she did so she felt as if she touched the hem of the garments of mystery, and she held her habit together with her hands lest she should recall even one of these hearts that were surely very far off.

Mustapha and the guardian stood still and looked round at Domini. Their faces were solemn. The expression of greedy anxiety had gone out of Mustapha’s eyes. For the moment the thought of money had been driven out of his mind by some graver pre-occupation. She saw in the semi-darkness two wooden doors set between pillars. They were painted green and red, and fastened with clamps and bolts of hammered copper that looked enormously old. Against them were nailed two pictures of winged horses with human heads, and two more pictures representing a fantastical town of Eastern houses and minarets in gold on a red background. Balls of purple and yellow glass, and crystal chandeliers, hung from the high ceiling above these doors, with many ancient lamps; and two tattered and dusty banners of pale pink and white silk, fringed with gold and powdered with a gold pattern of flowers, were tied to the pillars with thin cords of camel’s hair.

“This is the tomb of Sidi-Zerzour,” whispered Mustapha. “It is opened once a year.”

The guardian of the mosque fell on his knees before the tomb.

“That is Mecca.”

Mustapha pointed to the pictures of the city. Then he, too, dropped down and pressed his forehead against the matting. Domini glanced round for Androvsky. He was not there. She stood alone before the tomb of Zerzour, the only human being in the great, dim building who was not worshipping. And she felt a terrible isolation, as if she were excommunicated, as if she dared not pray, for a moment almost as if the God to whom this torrent of worship flowed were hostile to her alone.

Had her father ever felt such a sensation of unutterable solitude?

It passed quickly, and, standing under the votive lamps before the painted doors, she prayed too, silently. She shut her eyes and imagined a church of her religion–the little church of Beni-Mora. She tried to imagine the voice of prayer all about her, the voice of the great Catholic Church. But that was not possible. Even when she saw nothing, and turned her soul inward upon itself, and strove to set this new world into which she had come far off, she heard in the long murmur that filled it a sound that surely rose from the sand, from the heart and the spirit of the sand, from the heart and the spirit of desert places, and that went up in the darkness of the mosque and floated under the arches through the doorway, above the palms and the flat-roofed houses, and that winged its fierce way, like a desert eagle, towards the sun.

Mustapha’s hand was on her arm. The guardian, too, had risen from his knees and drawn from his robe and lit a candle. She came to a tiny doorway, passed through it and began to mount a winding stair. The sound of prayer mounted with her from the mosque, and when she came out upon the platform enclosed in the summit of the minaret she heard it still and it was multiplied. For all the voices from the outside courts joined it, and many voices from the roofs of the houses round about.

Men were praying there too, praying in the glare of the sun upon their housetops. She saw them from the minaret, and she saw the town that had sprung up round the tomb of the saint, and all the palms of the oasis, and beyond them immeasurable spaces of desert.

“Allah-Akbar! Allah-Akbar!”

She was above the eternal cry now. She had mounted like a prayer towards the sun, like a living, pulsing prayer, like the soul of prayer. She gazed at the far-off desert and saw prayer travelling, the soul of prayer travelling–whither? Where was the end? Where was the halting-place, with at last the pitched tent, the camp fires, and the long, the long repose?

* * * * * *

When she came down and reached the court she found the old man still striking at the mosque and shrieking out his trembling imprecation. And she found Androvsky still standing by him with fascinated eyes.

She had mounted with the voice of prayer into the sunshine, surely a little way towards God.

Androvsky had remained in the dark shadow with a curse.

It was foolish, perhaps–a woman’s vagrant fancy–but she wished he had mounted with her.

BOOK III. THE GARDEN

CHAPTER X

It was noon in the desert.

The voice of the Mueddin died away on the minaret, and the golden silence that comes out of the heart of the sun sank down once more softly over everything. Nature seemed unnaturally still in the heat. The slight winds were not at play, and the palms of Beni-Mora stood motionless as palm trees in a dream. The day was like a dream, intense and passionate, yet touched with something unearthly, something almost spiritual. In the cloudless blue of the sky there seemed a magical depth, regions of colour infinitely prolonged. In the vision of the distances, where desert blent with sky, earth surely curving up to meet the downward curving heaven, the dimness was like a voice whispering strange petitions. The ranges of mountains slept in the burning sand, and the light slept in their clefts like the languid in cool places. For there was a glorious languor even in the light, as if the sun were faintly oppressed by the marvel of his power. The clearness of the atmosphere in the remote desert was not obscured, but was impregnated with the mystery that is the wonder child of shadows. The far-off gold that kept it seemed to contain a secret darkness. In the oasis of Beni-Mora men, who had slowly roused themselves to pray, sank down to sleep again in the warm twilight of shrouded gardens or the warm night of windowless rooms.

In the garden of Count Anteoni Larbi’s flute was silent.

“It is like noon in a mirage,” Domini said softly.

Count Anteoni nodded.

“I feel as if I were looking at myself a long way off,” she added. “As if I saw myself as I saw the grey sea and the islands on the way to Sidi-Zerzour. What magic there is here. And I can’t get accustomed to it. Each day I wonder at it more and find it more inexplicable. It almost frightens me.”

“You could be frightened?”

“Not easily by outside things–it least I hope not.”

“But what then?”

“I scarcely know. Sometimes I think all the outside things, which do what are called the violent deeds in life, are tame, and timid, and ridiculously impotent in comparison with the things we can’t see, which do the deeds we can’t describe.”

“In the mirage of this land you begin to see the exterior life as a mirage? You are learning, you are learning.”

There was a creeping sound of something that was almost impish in his voice.

“Are you a secret agent?” Domini asked him.

“Of whom, Madame?”

She was silent. She seemed to be considering. He watched her with curiosity in his bright eyes.

“Of the desert,” she answered at length, quite seriously.

“A secret agent has always a definite object. What is mine?”

“How can I know? How can I tell what the desert desires?”

“Already you personify it!”

The network of wrinkles showed itself in his brown face as he smiled, surely with triumph.

“I think I did that from the first,” she answered gravely. “I know I did.”

“And what sort of personage does the desert seem to you?”

“You ask me a great many questions to-day.”

“Mirage questions, perhaps. Forgive me. Let us listen to the question –or is it the demand?–of the desert in this noontide hour, the greatest hour of all the twenty-four in such a land as this.”

They were silent again, watching the noon, listening to it, feeling it, as they had been silent when the Mueddin’s nasal voice rose in the call to prayer.

Count Anteoni stood in the sunshine by the low white parapet of the garden. Domini sat on a low chair in the shadow cast by a great jamelon tree. At her feet was a bush of vivid scarlet geraniums, against which her white linen dress looked curiously blanched. There was a half-drowsy, yet imaginative light in her gipsy eyes, and her motionless figure, her quiet hands, covered with white gloves, lying loosely in her lap, looked attentive and yet languid, as if some spell began to bind her but had not completed its work of stilling all the pulses of life that throbbed within her. And in truth there was a spell upon her, the spell of the golden noon. By turns she gave herself to it consciously, then consciously strove to deny herself to its subtle summons. And each time she tried to withdraw it seemed to her that the spell was a little stronger, her power a little weaker. Then her lips curved in a smile that was neither joyous nor sad, that was perhaps rather part perplexed and part expectant.

After a minute of this silence Count Anteoni drew back from the sun and sat down in a chair beside Domini. He took out his watch.

“Twenty-five minutes,” he said, “and my guests will be here.”

“Guests!” she said with an accent of surprise.

“I invited the priest to make an even number.”

“Oh!”

“You don’t dislike him?”

“I like him. I respect him.”

“But I’m afraid you aren’t pleased?”

Domini looked him straight in the face.

“Why did you invite Father Roubier?” she said.

“Isn’t four better than three?”

“You don’t want to tell me.”

“I am a little malicious. You have divined it, so why should I not acknowledge it? I asked Father Roubier because I wished to see the man of prayer with the man who fled from prayer.”

“Mussulman prayer,” she said quickly.

“Prayer,” he said.

His voice was peculiarly harsh at that moment. It grated like an instrument on a rough surface. Domini knew that secretly he was standing up for the Arab faith, that her last words had seemed to strike against the religion of the people whom he loved with an odd, concealed passion whose fire she began to feel at moments as she grew to know him better.

It was plain from their manner to each other that their former slight acquaintance had moved towards something like a pleasant friendship.

Domini looked as if she were no longer a wonder-stricken sight-seer in this marvellous garden of the sun, but as if she had become familiar with it. Yet her wonder was not gone. It was only different. There was less sheer amazement, more affection in it. As she had said, she had not become accustomed to the magic of Africa. Its strangeness, its contrasts still startled and moved her. But she began to feel as if she belonged to Beni-Mora, as if Beni-Mora would perhaps miss her a little if she went away.

Ten days had passed since the ride to Sidi-Zerzour–days rather like a dream to Domini.

What she had sought in coming to Beni-Mora she was surely finding. Her act was bringing forth its fruit. She had put a gulf, in which rolled the sea, between the land of the old life and the land in which at least the new life was to begin. The completeness of the severance had acted upon her like a blow that does not stun, but wakens. The days went like a dream, but in the dream there was the stir of birth. Her lassitude was permanently gone. There had been no returning after the first hours of excitement. The frost that had numbed her senses had utterly melted away. Who could be frost-bound in this land of fire? She had longed for peace and she was surely finding it, but it was a peace without stagnation. Hope dwelt in it, and expectancy, vague but persistent. As to forgetfulness, sometimes she woke from the dream and was almost dazed, almost ashamed to think how much she was forgetting, and how quickly. Her European life and friends–some of them intimate and close–were like a far-off cloud on the horizon, flying still farther before a steady wind that set from her to it. Soon it would disappear, would be as if it had never been. Now and then, with a sort of fierce obstinacy, she tried to stay the flight she had desired, and desired still. She said to herself, “I will remember. It’s contemptible to forget like this. It’s weak to be able to.” Then she looked at the mountains or the desert, at two Arabs playing the ladies’ game under the shadow of a cafe wall, or at a girl in dusty orange filling a goatskin pitcher at a well beneath a palm tree, and she succumbed to the lulling influence, smiling as they smile who hear the gentle ripple of the waters of Lethe.

She heard them perhaps most clearly when she wandered in Count Anteoni’s garden. He had made her free of it in their first interview. She had ventured to take him at his word, knowing that if he repented she would divine it. He had made her feel that he had not repented. Sometimes she did not see him as she threaded the sandy alleys between the little rills, hearing the distant song of Larbi’s amorous flute, or sat in the dense shade of the trees watching through a window-space of quivering golden leaves the passing of the caravans along the desert tracks. Sometimes a little wreath of ascending smoke, curling above the purple petals of bougainvilleas, or the red cloud of oleanders, told her of his presence, in some retired thinking-place. Oftener he joined her, with an easy politeness that did not conceal his oddity, but clothed it in a pleasant garment, and they talked for a while or stayed for a while in an agreeable silence that each felt to be sympathetic.

Domini thought of him as a new species of man–a hermit of the world. He knew the world and did not hate it. His satire was rarely quite ungentle. He did not strike her as a disappointed man who fled to solitude in bitterness of spirit, but rather as an imaginative man with an unusual feeling for romance, and perhaps a desire for freedom that the normal civilised life restrained too much. He loved thought as many love conversation, silence as some love music. Now and then he said a sad or bitter thing. Sometimes she seemed to be near to something stern. Sometimes she felt as if there were a secret link which connected him with the perfume-seller in his little darkened chamber, with the legions who prayed about the tomb of Sidi-Zerzour. But these moments were rare. As a rule he was whimsical and kind, with the kindness of a good-hearted man who was human even in his detachment from ordinary humanity. His humour was a salt with plenty of savour. His imagination was of a sort which interested and even charmed her.

She felt, too, that she interested him and that he was a man not readily interested in ordinary human beings. He had seen too many and judged too shrewdly and too swiftly to be easily held for very long. She had no ambition to hold him, and had never in her life consciously striven to attract or retain any man, but she was woman enough to find his obvious pleasure in her society agreeable. She thought that her genuine adoration of the garden he had made, of the land in which it was set, had not a little to do with the happy nature of their intercourse. For she felt certain that beneath the light satire of his manner, his often smiling airs of detachment and quiet independence, there was something that could seek almost with passion, that could cling with resolution, that could even love with persistence. And she fancied that he sought in the desert, that he clung to its mystery, that he loved it and the garden he had created in it. Once she had laughingly called him a desert spirit. He had smiled as if with contentment.

They knew little of each other, yet they had become friends in the garden which he never left.

One day she said to him:

“You love the desert. Why do you never go into it?”

“I prefer to watch it,” he relied. “When you are in the desert it bewilders you.”

She remembered what she had felt during her first ride with Androvsky.

“I believe you are afraid of it,” she said challengingly.

“Fear is sometimes the beginning of wisdom,” he answered. “But you are without it, I know.”

“How do you know?”

“Every day I see you galloping away into the sun.”

She thought there was a faint sound of warning–or was it of rebuke– in his voice. It made her feel defiant.

“I think you lose a great deal by not galloping into the sun too,” she said.

“But if I don’t ride?”

That made her think of Androvsky and his angry resolution. It had not been the resolution of a day. Wearied and stiffened as he had been by the expedition to Sidi-Zerzour, actually injured by his fall–she knew from Batouch that he had been obliged to call in the Beni-Mora doctor to bandage his shoulder–she had been roused at dawn on the day following by his tread on the verandah. She had lain still while it descended the staircase, but then the sharp neighing of a horse had awakened an irresistible curiosity in her. She had got up, wrapped herself in a fur coat and slipped out on to the verandah. The sun was not above the horizon line of the desert, but the darkness of night was melting into a luminous grey. The air was almost cold. The palms looked spectral, even terrible, the empty and silent gardens melancholy and dangerous. It was not an hour for activity, for determination, but for reverie, for apprehension.

Below, a sleepy Arab boy, his hood drawn over his head, held the chestnut horse by the bridle. Androvsky came out from the arcade. He wore a cap pulled down to his eyebrows which changed his appearance, giving him, as seen from above, the look of a groom or stable hand. He stood for a minute and stared at the horse. Then he limped round to the left side and carefully mounted, following out the directions Domini had given him the previous day: to avoid touching the animal with his foot, to have the rein in his fingers before leaving the ground, and to come down in the saddle as lightly as possible. She noted that all her hints were taken with infinite precaution. Once on the horse he tried to sit up straight, but found the effort too great in his weary and bruised condition. He leaned forward over the saddle peak, and rode away in the luminous greyness towards the desert. The horse went quietly, as if affected by the mystery of the still hour. Horse and rider disappeared. The Arab boy wandered off in the direction of the village. But Domini remained looking after Androvsky. She saw nothing but the grim palms and the spectral atmosphere in which the desert lay. Yet she did not move till a red spear was thrust up out of the east towards the last waning star.

He had gone to learn his lesson in the desert.

Three days afterwards she rode with him again. She did not let him know of her presence on the verandah, and he said nothing of his departure in the dawn. He spoke very little and seemed much occupied with his horse, and she saw that he was more than determined–that he was apt at acquiring control of a physical exercise new to him. His great strength stood him in good stead. Only a man hard in the body could have so rapidly recovered from the effects of that first day of defeat and struggle. His absolute reticence about his efforts and the iron will that prompted them pleased Domini. She found them worthy of a man.

She rode with him on three occasions, twice in the oasis through the brown villages, once out into the desert on the caravan road that Batouch had told her led at last to Tombouctou. They did not travel far along it, but Domini knew at once that this route held more fascination for her than the route to Sidi-Zerzour. There was far more sand in this region of the desert. The little humps crowned with the scrub the camels feed on were fewer, so that the flatness of the ground was more definite. Here and there large dunes of golden- coloured sand rose, some straight as city walls, some curved like seats in an amphitheatre, others indented, crenellated like battlements, undulating in beastlike shapes. The distant panorama of desert was unbroken by any visible oasis and powerfully suggested Eternity to Domini.

“When I go out into the desert for my long journey I shall go by this road,” she said to Androvsky.

“You are going on a journey?” he said, looking at her as if startled.

“Some day.”

“All alone?”

“I suppose I must take a caravan, two or three Arabs, some horses, a tent or two. It’s easy to manage. Batouch will arrange it for me.”

Androvsky still looked startled, and half angry, she thought.

They had pulled up their horses among the sand dunes. It was near sunset, and the breath of evening was in the sir, making its coolness even more ethereal, more thinly pure than in the daytime. The atmosphere was so clear that when they glanced back they could see the flag fluttering upon the white of the great hotel of Beni-Mora, many kilometres away among the palms; so still that they could hear the bark of a Kabyle off near a nomad’s tent pitched in the green land by the water-springs of old Beni-Mora. When they looked in front of them they seemed to see thousands of leagues of flatness, stretching on and on till the pale yellowish brown of it grew darker, merged into a strange blueness, like the blue of a hot mist above a southern lake, then into violet, then into–the thing they could not see, the summoning thing whose voice Domini’s imagination heard, like a remote and thrilling echo, whenever she was in the desert.

“I did not know you were going on a journey, Madame,” Androvsky said.

“Don’t you remember?” she rejoined laughingly, “that I told you on the tower I thought peace must dwell out there. Well, some day I shall set out to find it.”

“That seems a long time ago, Madame,” he muttered.

Sometimes, when speaking to her, he dropped his voice till she could scarcely hear him, and sounded like a man communing with himself.

A red light from the sinking sun fell upon the dunes. As they rode back over them their horses seemed to be wading through a silent sea of blood. The sky in the west looked like an enormous conflagration, in which tortured things were struggling and lifting twisted arms.

Domini’s acquaintance with Androvsky had not progressed as easily and pleasantly as her intercourse with Count Anteoni. She recognised that he was what is called a “difficult man.” Now and then, as if under the prompting influence of some secret and violent emotion, he spoke with apparent naturalness, spoke perhaps out of his heart. Each time he did so she noticed that there was something of either doubt or amazement in what he said. She gathered that he was slow to rely, quick to mistrust. She gathered, too, that very many things surprised him, and felt sure that he hid nearly all of them from her, and would–had not his own will sometimes betrayed him–have hidden all. His reserve was as intense as everything about him. There was a fierceness in it that revealed its existence. He always conveyed to her a feeling of strength, physical and mental. Yet he always conveyed, too, a feeling of uneasiness. To a woman of Domini’s temperament uneasiness usually implies a public or secret weakness. In Androvsky’s she seemed to be aware of passion, as if it were one to dash obstacles aside, to break through doors of iron, to rush out into the open. And then–what then? To tremble at the world before him? At what he had done? She did not know. But she did know that even in his uneasiness there seemed to be fibre, muscle, sinew, nerve–all which goes to make strength, swiftness.

Speech was singularly difficult to him. Silence seemed to be natural, not irksome. After a few words he fell into it and remained in it. And he was less self-conscious in silence than in speech. He seemed, she fancied, to feel himself safer, more a man when he was not speaking. To him the use of words was surely like a yielding.

He had a peculiar faculty of making his presence felt when he was silent, as if directly he ceased from speaking the flame in him was fanned and leaped up at the outside world beyond its bars.

She did not know whether he was a gentleman or not.

If anyone had asked her, before she came to Beni-Mora, whether it would be possible for her to take four solitary rides with a man, to meet him–if only for a few minutes–every day of ten days, to sit opposite to him, and not far from him, at meals during the same space of time, and to be unable to say to herself whether he was or was not a gentleman by birth and education–feeling set aside–she would have answered without hesitation that it would be utterly impossible. Yet so it was. She could not decide. She could not place him. She could not imagine what his parentage, what his youth, his manhood had been. She could not fancy him in any environment–save that golden light, that blue radiance, in which she had first consciously and fully met him face to face. She could not hear him in converse with any set of men or women, or invent, in her mind, what he might be likely to say to them. She could not conceive him bound by any ties of home, or family, mother, sister, wife, child. When she looked at him, thought about him, he presented himself to her alone, like a thing in the air.

Yet he was more male than other men, breathed humanity–of some kind– as fire breathes heat.

The child there was in him almost confused her, made her wonder whether long contact with the world had tarnished her own original simplicity. But she only saw the child in him now and then, and she fancied that it, too, he was anxious to conceal.

This man had certainly a power to rouse feeling in others. She knew it by her own experience. By turns he had made her feel motherly, protecting, curious, constrained, passionate, energetic, timid–yes, almost timid and shy. No other human being had ever, even at moments, thus got the better of her natural audacity, lack of self- consciousness, and inherent, almost boyish, boldness. Nor was she aware what it was in him which sometimes made her uncertain of herself.

She wondered. But he often woke up wonder in her.

Despite their rides, their moments of intercourse in the hotel, on the verandah, she scarcely felt more intimate with him than she had at first. Sometimes indeed she thought that she felt less so, that the moment when the train ran out of the tunnel into the blue country was the moment in which they had been nearest to each other since they trod the verges of each other’s lives.

She had never definitely said to herself: “Do I like him or dislike him?”

Now, as she sat with Count Anteoni watching the noon, the half-drowsy, half-imaginative expression had gone out of her face. She looked rather rigid, rather formidable.

Androvsky and Count Anteoni had never met. The Count had seen Androvsky in the distance from his garden more than once, but Androvsky had not seen him. The meeting that was about to take place was due to Domini. She had spoken to Androvsky on several occasions of the romantic beauty of this desert garden.

“It is like a garden of the /Arabian Nights/,” she had said.

He did not look enlightened, and she was moved to ask him abruptly whether he had ever read the famous book. He had not. A doubt came to her whether he had ever even heard of it. She mentioned the fact of Count Anteoni’s having made the garden, and spoke of him, sketching lightly his whimsicality, his affection for the Arabs, his love of solitude, and of African life. She also mentioned that he was by birth a Roman.

“But scarcely of the black world I should imagine,” she added.

Androvsky said nothing.

“You should go and see the garden,” she continued. “Count Anteoni allows visitors to explore it.”

“I am sure it must be very beautiful, Madame,” he replied, rather coldly, she thought.

He did not say that he would go.

As the garden won upon her, as its enchanted mystery, the airy wonder of its shadowy places, the glory of its trembling golden vistas, the restfulness of its green defiles, the strange, almost unearthly peace that reigned within it embalmed her spirit, as she learned not only to marvel at it, to be entranced by it, but to feel at home in it and love it, she was conscious of a persistent desire that Androvsky should know it too.

Perhaps his dogged determination about the riding had touched her more than she was aware. She often saw before her the bent figure, that looked tired, riding alone into the luminous grey; starting thus early that his act, humble and determined, might not be known by her. He did not know that she had seen him, not only on that morning, but on many subsequent mornings, setting forth to study the new art in the solitude of the still hours. But the fact that she had seen, had watched till horse and rider vanished beyond the palms, had understood why, perhaps moved her to this permanent wish that he could share her pleasure in the garden, know it as she did.

She did not argue with herself about the matter. She only knew that she wished, that presently she meant Androvsky to pass through the white gate and be met on the sand by Smain with his rose.

One day Count Anteoni had asked her whether she had made acquaintance with the man who had fled from prayer.

“Yes,” she said. “You know it.”

“How?”

“We have ridden to Sidi-Zerzour.”

“I am not always by the wall.”

“No, but I think you were that day.”

“Why do you think so?”

“I am sure you were.”

He did not either acknowledge or deny it.

“He has never been to see my garden,” he said.

“No.”

“He ought to come.”

“I have told him so.”

“Ah? Is he coming?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Persuade him to. I have a pride in my garden–oh, you have no idea what a pride! Any neglect of it, any indifference about it rasps me, plays upon the raw nerve each one of us possesses.”

He spoke smilingly. She did not know what he was feeling, whether the remote thinker or the imp within him was at work or play.

“I doubt if he is a man to be easily persuaded,” she said.

“Perhaps not–persuade him.”

After a moment Domini said:

“I wonder whether you recognise that there are obstacles which the human will can’t negotiate?”

“I could scarcely live where I do without recognising that the grains of sand are often driven by the wind. But when there is no wind!”

“They lie still?”

“And are the desert. I want to have a strange experience.”

“What?”

“A /fete/ in my garden.”

“A fantasia?”

“Something far more banal. A lunch party, a /dejeuner/. Will you honour me?”

“By breakfasting with you? Yes, of course. Thank you.”

“And will you bring–the second sun worshipper?”

She looked into the Count’s small, shining eyes.

“Monsieur Androvsky?”

“If that is his name. I can send him an invitation, of course. But that’s rather formal, and I don’t think he is formal.”

“On what day do you ask us?”

“Any day–Friday.”

“And why do you ask us?”

“I wish to overcome this indifference to my garden. It hurts me, not only in my pride, but in my affections.”

The whole thing had been like a sort of serious game. Domini had not said that she would convey the odd invitation; but when she was alone, and thought of the way in which Count Anteoni had said “Persuade him,” she knew she would, and she meant Androvsky to accept it. This was an opportunity of seeing him in company with another man, a man of the world, who had read, travelled, thought, and doubtless lived.

She asked him that evening, and saw the red, that came as it comes in a boy’s face, mount to his forehead.

“Everybody who comes to Beni-Mora comes to see the garden,” she said before he could reply. “Count Anteoni is half angry with you for being an exception.”

“But–but, Madame, how can Monsieur the Count know that I am here? I have not seen him.”

“He knows there is a second traveller, and he’s a hospitable man. Monsieur Androvsky, I want you to come; I want you to see the garden.”

“It is very kind of you, Madame.”

The reluctance in his voice was extreme. Yet he did not like to say no. While he hesitated, Domini continued:

“You remember when I asked you to ride?”

“Yes, Madame.”

“That was new to you. Well, it has given you pleasure, hasn’t it?”

“Yes, Madame.”

“So will the garden. I want to put another pleasure into your life.”

She had begun to speak with the light persuasiveness of a woman of the world–wishing to overcome a man’s diffidence or obstinacy, but while she said the words she felt a sudden earnestness rush over her. It