Odd and disconnected as Larbi's melodies were, they created an atmosphere of wild tenderness. Spontaneously they bubbled up out of the heart of the Eastern world and, when the player was invisible as now, suggested an ebon faun couched in hot sand at the foot of a palm tree and making music to listening sunbeams and amorous spirits of the waste.

"Do you like it?" she said presently in an under voice.

"Yes, Madame. And you?"

"I love it, but not as I love the song of the freed negroes. That is a song of all the secrets of humanity and of the desert too. And it does not try to tell them. It only says that they exist and that G.o.d knows them. But, I remember, you do not like that song."

"Madame," he answered slowly, and as if he were choosing his words, "I see that you understood. The song did move me though I said not. But no, I do not like it."

"Do you care to tell me why?"

"Such a song as that seems to me an--it is like an intrusion. There are things that should be let alone. There are dark places that should be left dark."

"You mean that all human beings hold within them secrets, and that no allusion even should ever be made to those secrets?"

"Yes."

"I understand."

After a pause he said, anxiously, she thought:

"Am I right, Madame, or is my thought ridiculous?"

He asked it so simply that she felt touched.

"I'm sure you could never be ridiculous," she said quickly. "And perhaps you are right. I don't know. That song makes me think and feel, and so I love it. Perhaps if you heard it alone--"

"Then I should hate it," he interposed.

His voice was like an uncontrolled inner voice speaking.

"And not thought and feeling--" she began.

But he interrupted her.

"They make all the misery that exists in the world."

"And all the happiness."

"Do they?"

"They must."

"Then you want to think deeply, to feel deeply?"

"Yes. I would rather be the central figure of a world-tragedy than die without having felt to the uttermost, even if it were sorrow. My whole nature revolts against the idea of being able to feel little or nothing really. It seems to me that when we begin to feel acutely we begin to grow, like the palm tree rising towards the African sun."

"I do not think you have ever been very unhappy," he said. The sound of his voice as he said it made her suddenly feel as if it were true, as if she had never been utterly unhappy. Yet she had never been really happy.

Africa had taught her that.

"Perhaps not," she answered. "But--some day--"

She stopped.

"Yes, Madame?"

"Could one stay long in such a world as this and not be either intensely happy or intensely unhappy? I don't feel as if it would be possible.

Fierceness and fire beat upon one day after day and--one must learn to feel here."

As she spoke a sensation of doubt, almost of apprehension, came to her.

She was overtaken by a terror of the desert. For a moment it seemed to her that he was right, that it were better never to be the prey of any deep emotion.

"If one does not wish to feel one should never come to such a place as this," she added.

And she longed to ask him why he was here, he, a man whose philosophy told him to avoid the heights and depths, to shun the ardours of nature and of life.

"Or, having come, one should leave it."

A sensation of lurking danger increased upon her, bringing with it the thought of flight.

"One can always do that," she said, looking at him. She saw fear in his eyes, but it seemed to her that it was not fear of peril, but fear of flight. So strongly was this idea borne in upon her that she bluntly exclaimed:

"Unless it is one's nature to face things, never to turn one's back. Is it yours, Monsieur Androvsky?"

"Fear could never drive me to leave Beni-Moni," he answered.

"Sometimes I think that the only virtue in us is courage," she said, "that it includes all the others. I believe I could forgive everything where I found absolute courage."

Androvsky's eyes were lit up as if by a flicker of inward fire.

"You might create the virtue you love," he said hoa.r.s.ely.

They looked at each other for a moment. Did he mean that she might create it in him?

Perhaps she would have asked, or perhaps he would have told her, but at that moment something happened. Larbi stopped playing. In the last few minutes they had both forgotten that he was playing, but when he ceased the garden changed. Something was withdrawn in which, without knowing it, they had been protecting themselves, and when the music faded their armour dropped away from them. With the complete silence came an altered atmosphere, the tenderness of mysticism instead of the tenderness of a wild humanity. The love of man seemed to depart out of the garden and another love to enter it, as when G.o.d walked under the trees in the cool of the day. And they sat quite still, as if a common impulse muted their lips. In the long silence that followed Domini thought of her mirage of the palm tree growing towards the African sun, feeling growing in the heart of a human being. But was it a worthy image? For the palm tree rises high. It soars into the air. But presently it ceases to grow.

There is nothing infinite in its growth. And the long, hot years pa.s.s away and there it stands, never nearer to the infinite gold of the sun.

But in the intense feeling of a man or woman is there not infinitude? Is there not a movement that is ceaseless till death comes to destroy--or to translate?

That was what she was thinking in the silence of the garden. And Androvsky? He sat beside her with his head bent, his hands hanging between his knees, his eyes gazing before him at the ordered tangle of the great trees. His lips were slightly parted, and on his strongly-marked face there was an expression as of emotional peace, as if the soul of the man were feeling deeply in calm. The restlessness, the violence that had made his demeanour so embarra.s.sing during and after the _dejeuner_ had vanished. He was a different man. And presently, noticing it, feeling his sensitive serenity, Domini seemed to see the great Mother at work about this child of hers, Nature at her tender task of pacification. The shared silence became to her like a song of thanksgiving, in which all the green things of the garden joined. And beyond them the desert lay listening, the Garden of Allah attentive to the voices of man's garden. She could hardly believe that but a few minutes before she had been full of irritation and bitterness, not free even from a touch of pride that was almost petty. But when she remembered that it was so she realised the abysses and the heights of which the heart is mingled, and an intense desire came to her to be always upon the heights of her own heart. For there only was the light of happiness. Never could she know joy if she forswore n.o.bility. Never could she be at peace with the love within her--love of something that was not self, of something that seemed vaguer than G.o.d, as if it had entered into G.o.d and made him Love--unless she mounted upwards during her little span of life. Again, as before in this land, in the first sunset, on the tower, on the minaret of the mosque of Sidi-Zerzour, Nature spoke to her intimate words of inspiration, laid upon her the hands of healing, giving her powers she surely had not known or conceived of till now. And the pa.s.sion that is the chiefest grace of goodness, making it the fire that purifies, as it is the little sister of the poor that tends the suffering, the hungry, the groping beggar-world, stirred within her, like the child not yet born, but whose destiny is with the angels. And she longed to make some great offering at the altar on whose lowest step she stood, and she was filled, for the first time consciously, with woman's sacred desire for sacrifice.

A soft step on the sand broke the silence and scattered her aspirations.

Count Anteoni was coming towards them between the trees. The light of happiness was still upon his face and made him look much younger than usual. His whole bearing, in its elasticity and buoyant courage, was full of antic.i.p.ation. As he came up to them he said to Domini:

"Do you remember chiding me?"

"I!" she said. "For what?"

Androvsky sat up and the expression of serenity pa.s.sed away from his face.