"Why did you send Monsieur Androvsky to me this afternoon?" he said at last abruptly.

"I knew you were a good man, and I fancied if you became friends you might help him."

His face softened.

"A good man," he said. "Ah!" He shook his head sadly, with a sound that was like a little pathetic laugh. "I--a good man! And I allow an almost invincible personal feeling to conquer my inward sense of right! Madame, come into the garden for a moment."

He opened the gate, she pa.s.sed in, and he led her round the house to the enclosure at the back, where they could talk in greater privacy. Then he continued:

"You are right, Madame. I am here to try to do G.o.d's work, and sometimes it is better to act for a human being, perhaps, even than to pray for him. I will tell you that I feel an almost invincible repugnance to Monsieur Androvsky, a repugnance that is almost stronger than my will to hold it in check." He shivered slightly. "But, with G.o.d's help, I'll conquer that. If he stays on here I'll try to be his friend. I'll do all I can. If he is unhappy, far away from good, perhaps--I say it humbly, Madame, I a.s.sure you--I might help him. But"--and here his face and manner changed, became firmer, more dominating--"you are not a priest, and--"

"No, only a woman," she said, interrupting him.

Something in her voice arrested him. There was a long silence in which they paced slowly up and down on the sand between the palm trees. The twilight was dying into night. Already the tomtoms were throbbing in the street of the dancers, and the shriek of the distant pipes was faintly heard. At last the priest spoke again.

"Madame," he said, "when you came to me this afternoon there was something that you could not tell me."

"Yes."

"Had it anything to do with Monsieur Androvsky?"

"I meant to ask you to advise me about myself."

"My advice to you was and is--be strong but not too foolhardy."

"Believe me I will try not to be foolhardy. But you said something else too, something about women. Don't you remember?"

She stopped, took his hands impulsively and pressed them.

"Father, I've scarcely ever been of any use all my life. I've scarcely ever tried to be. Nothing within me said, 'You could be,' and if it had I was so dulled by routine and sorrow that I don't think I should have heard it. But here it is different. I am not dulled. I can hear.

And--suppose I can be of use for the first time! You wouldn't say to me, 'Don't try!' You couldn't say that?"

He stood holding her hands and looking into her face for a moment. Then he said, half-humorously, half-sadly:

"My child, perhaps you know your own strength best. Perhaps your safest spiritual director is your own heart. Who knows? But whether it be so or not you will not take advice from me."

She knew that was true now and, for a moment, felt almost ashamed.

"Forgive me," she said. "But--it is strange, and may seem to you ridiculous or even wrong--ever since I have been here I have felt as if everything that happened had been arranged beforehand, as if it had to happen. And I feel that, too, about the future."

"Count Anteoni's fatalism!" the priest said with a touch of impatient irritation. "I know. It is the guiding spirit of this land. And you too are going to be led by it. Take care! You have come to a land of fire, and I think you are made of fire."

For a moment she saw a fanatical expression in his eyes. She thought of it as the look of the monk crushed down within his soul. He opened his lips again, as if to pour forth upon her a torrent of burning words. But the look died away, and they parted quietly like two good friends. Yet, as she went to the hotel, she knew that Father Roubier could not give her the kind of help she wanted, and she even fancied that perhaps no priest could. Her heart was in a turmoil, and she seemed to be in the midst of a crowd.

Batouch was at the door, looking elaborately contrite and ready with his lie. He had been seized with fever in the night, in token whereof he held up hands which began to shake like wind-swept leaves. Only now had he been able to drag himself from his quilt and, still afflicted as he was, to creep to his honoured patron and crave her pardon. Domini gave it with an abstracted carelessness that evidently hurt his pride, and was pa.s.sing into the hotel when he said:

"Irena is going to marry Hadj, Madame."

Since the fracas at the dancing-house both the dancer and her victim had been under lock and key.

"To marry her after she tried to kill him!" said Domini.

"Yes, Madame. He loves her as the palm tree loves the sun. He will take her to his room, and she will wear a veil, and work for him and never go out any more."

"What! She will live like the Arab women?"

"Of course, Madame. But there is a very nice terrace on the roof outside Hadj's room, and Hadj will permit her to take the air there, in the evening or when it is hot."

"She must love Hadj very much."

"She does, or why should she try to kill him?"

So that was an African love--a knife-thrust and a taking of the veil!

The thought of it added a further complication to the disorder that was in her mind.

"I will see you after dinner, Batouch," she said.

She felt that she must do something, go somewhere that night. She could not remain quiet.

Batouch drew himself up and threw out his broad chest. His air gave place to importance, and, as he leaned against the white pillar of the arcade, folded his ample burnous round him, and glanced up at the sky he saw, in fancy, a five-franc piece glittering in the chariot of the moon.

The priest did not come to dinner that night, but Androvsky was already at his table when Domini came into the _salle-a-manger_. He got up from his seat and bowed formally, but did not speak. Remembering his outburst of the morning she realised the suspicion which her second interview with the priest had probably created in his mind, and now she was not free from a feeling of discomfort that almost resembled guilt. For now she had been led to discuss Androvsky with Father Roubier, and had it not been almost an apology when she said, "I know he is not evil"? Once or twice during dinner, when her eyes met Androvsky's for a moment, she imagined that he must know why she had been at the priest's house, that anger was steadily increasing in him.

He was a man who hated to be observed, to be criticised. His sensitiveness was altogether abnormal, and made her wonder afresh where his previous life had been pa.s.sed. It must surely have been a very sheltered existence. Contact with the world blunts the fine edge of our feeling with regard to others' opinion of us. In the world men learn to be heedless of the everlasting buzz of comment that attends their goings out and their comings in. But Androvsky was like a youth, alive to the tiniest whisper, set on fire by a glance. To such a nature life in the world must be perpetual torture. She thought of him with a sorrow that--strangely in her--was not tinged with contempt. That which manifested by another man would certainly have moved her to impatience, if not to wrath, in this man woke other sensations--curiosity, pity, terror.

Yes--terror. To-night she knew that. The long day, begun in the semidarkness before the dawn and ending in the semidarkness of the twilight, had, with its events that would have seemed to another ordinary and trivial enough, carried her forward a stage on an emotional pilgrimage. The half-veiled warnings of Count Anteoni and of the priest, followed by the latter's almost pa.s.sionately abrupt plain speaking, had not been without effect. To-night something of Europe and her life there, with its civilised experience and drastic training in the management of woman's relations with humanity in general, crept back under the palm trees and the brilliant stars of Africa; and despite the fatalism condemned by Father Roubier, she was more conscious than she had hitherto been of how others--the outside world--would be likely to regard her acquaintance with Androvsky. She stood, as it were, and looked on at the events in which she herself had been and was involved, and in that moment she was first aware of a thrill of something akin to terror, as if, perhaps, without knowing it, she had been moving amid a great darkness, as if perhaps a great darkness were approaching.

Suddenly she saw Androvsky as some strange and ghastly figure of legend; as the wandering Jew met by a traveller at cross roads and distinguished for an instant in an oblique lightning flash; as Vanderdecken pa.s.sing in the hurricane and throwing a blood-red illumination from the sails of his haunted ship; as the everlasting climber of the Brocken, as the shrouded Arab of the Eastern legend, who announced coming disaster to the wanderers in the desert by beating a death-roll on a drum among the dunes.

And with Count Anteoni and the priest she set another figure, that of the sand-diviner, whose tortured face had suggested a man looking on a fate that was terrible. Had not he, too, warned her? Had not the warning been threefold, been given to her by the world, the Church, and the under-world--the world beneath the veil?

She met Androvsky's eyes. He was getting up to leave the room. His movement caught her away from things visionary, but not from worldly things. She still looked on herself moving amid these events at which her world would laugh or wonder, and perhaps for the first time in her life she was uneasily self-conscious because of the self that watched herself, as if that self held something coldly satirical that mocked at her and marvelled.

CHAPTER XIV

"What shall I do to-night?"

Alone in the now empty _salle-a-manger_ Domini asked herself the question. She was restless, terribly restless in mind, and wanted distraction. The idea of going to her room, of reading, even of sitting quietly in the verandah, was intolerable to her. She longed for action, swiftness, excitement, the help of outside things, of that exterior life which she had told Count Anteoni she had begun to see as a mirage. Had she been in a city she would have gone to a theatre to witness some tremendous drama, or to hear some pa.s.sionate or terrible opera.

Beni-Mora might have been a place of many and strange tragedies, would be no doubt again, but it offered at this moment little to satisfy her mood. The dances of the Cafes Maures, the songs of the smokers of the keef, the long histories of the story-tellers between the lighted candles--she wanted none of these, and, for a moment, she wished she were in London, Paris, any great capital that spent itself to suit the changing moods of men. With a sigh she got up and went out to the Arcade. Batouch joined her immediately.

"What can I do to-night, Batouch?" she said.

"There are the femmes mauresques," he began.

"No, no."

"Would Madame like to hear the story-teller?"