"Then--then you did not wish--you did not mean to see me again before I went?"

"It was not that. I came to the garden--I had to come--I had to be alone."

"You want to be alone?" he said. "You want to be alone?"

Already the strength was dying out of his voice and face, and the old uneasiness was waking up in him. A dreadful expression of pain came into his eyes.

"Was that why you--you looked so happy?" he said in a harsh, trembling voice.

"When?"

"I stood for a long while looking at you when you were in there"--he pointed to the _fumoir_--"and your face was happy--your face was happy."

"Yes, I know."

"You will be happy alone?--alone in the desert?"

When he said that she felt suddenly the agony of the waterless s.p.a.ces, the agony of the unpeopled wastes. Her whole spirit shrank and quivered, all the great joy of her love died within her. A moment before she had stood upon the heights of her heart. Now she shrank into its deepest, blackest abysses. She looked at him and said nothing.

"You will not be happy alone."

His voice no longer trembled. He caught hold of her left hand, awkwardly, nervously, but held it strongly with his close to his side, and went on speaking.

"n.o.body is happy alone. Nothing is--men and women--children--animals." A bird flew across the shadowy s.p.a.ce under the trees, followed by another bird; he pointed to them; they disappeared. "The birds, too, they must have companionship. Everything wants a companion."

"Yes."

"But then--you will stay here alone in the desert?"

"What else can I do?" she said.

"And that journey," he went on, still holding her hand fast against his side, "Your journey into the desert--you will take it alone?"

"What else can I do?" she repeated in a lower voice.

It seemed to her that he was deliberately pressing her down into the uttermost darkness.

"You will not go."

"Yes, I shall go."

She spoke with conviction. Even in that moment--most of all in that moment--she knew that she would obey the summons of the desert.

"I--I shall never know the desert," he said. "I thought--it seemed to me that I, too, should go out into it. I have wanted to go. You have made me want to go."

"I?"

"Yes. Once you said to me that peace must dwell out there. It was on the tower the--the first time you ever spoke to me."

"I remember."

"I wondered--I often wonder why you spoke to me."

She knew he was looking at her with intensity, but she kept her eyes on the sand. There was something in them that she felt he must not see, a light that had just come into them as she realised that already, on the tower before she even knew him, she had loved him. It was that love, already born in her heart but as yet unconscious of its own existence, which had so strangely increased for her the magic of the African evening when she watched it with him. But before--suddenly she knew that she had loved Androvsky from the beginning, from the moment when his face looked at her as if out of the heart of the sun. That was why her entry into the desert had been full of such extraordinary significance.

This man and the desert were, had always been, as one in her mind.

Never had she thought of the one without the other. Never had she been mysteriously called by the desert without hearing as a far-off echo the voice of Androvsky, or been drawn onward by the mystical summons of the blue distances without being drawn onward, too, by the mystical summons of the heart to which her own responded. The link between the man and the desert was indissoluble. She could not conceive of its being severed, and as she realised this, she realised also something that turned her whole nature into flame.

She could not conceive of Androvsky's not loving her, of his not having loved her from the moment when he saw her in the sun. To him, too, the desert had made a revelation--the revelation of her face, and of the soul behind it looking through it. In the flames of the sun, as they went into the desert, the flames of their two spirits had been blended.

She knew that certainly and for ever. Then how could it be possible that Androvsky should not go out with her into the desert?

"Why did you speak to me?" he said.

"We came into the desert together," she answered simply. "We had to know each other."

"And now--now--we have to say----"

His voice ceased. Far away there was the thin sound of a chime. Domini had never before heard the church bell in the garden, and now she felt as if she heard it, not with her ears, but with her spirit. As she heard she felt Androvsky's hand, which had been hot upon hers, turn cold. He let her hand go, and again she was stricken by the horrible sound she had heard the previous night in the desert, when he turned his horse and rode away with her. And now, as then, he turned away from her in silence, but she knew that this time he was leaving her, that this movement was his final good-bye. With his head bowed down he took a few steps. He was near to a turning of the path. She watched him, knowing that within less than a moment she would be watching only the trees and the sand. She gazed at the bent figure, calling up all her faculties, crying out to herself pa.s.sionately, desperately, "Remember it--remember it as it is--there--before you--just as it is--for ever." As it reached the turning, in the distance of the garden rose the twitter of the flute of Larbi. Androvsky stopped, stood still with his back turned towards her. And Larbi, hidden and far off, showered out his little notes of African love, of love in the desert where the sun is everlasting, and the pa.s.sion of man is hot as the sun, where Liberty reigns, lifting her cymbals that are as spheres of fire, and the footsteps of Freedom are heard upon the sand, treading towards the south.

Larbi played--played on and on, untiring as the love that blossomed with the world, but that will not die when the world dies.

Then Androvsky came back quickly till he reached the place where Domini was standing. He put his hands on her shoulders. Then he sank down on the sand, letting his hands slip down over her breast and along her whole body till they clasped themselves round her knees. He pressed his face into her dress against her knees.

"I love you," he said. "I love you but don't listen to me--you mustn't hear it--you mustn't. But I must say it. I can't--I can't go till I say it. I love you--I love you."

She heard him sobbing against her knees, and the sound was as the sound of strength made audible. She put her hands against his temples.

"I am listening," she said. "I must hear it."

He looked up, rose to his feet, put his hands behind her shoulders, held her, and set his lips on hers, pressing his whole body against hers.

"Hear it!" he said, muttering against her lips. "Hear it. I love you--I love you."

The two birds they had seen flew back beneath the trees, turned in an airy circle, rose above the trees into the blue sky, and, side by side, winged their way out of the garden to the desert.

BOOK IV. THE JOURNEY

CHAPTER XVI

In the evening before the day of Domini's marriage with Androvsky there was a strange sunset, which attracted even the attention and roused the comment of the Arabs. The day had been calm and beautiful, one of the most lovely days of the North African spring, and Batouch, resting from the triumphant labour of superintending the final preparations for a long desert journey, augured a morning of Paradise for the departure along the straight road that led at last to Tombouctou. But as the radiant afternoon drew to its end there came into the blue sky a whiteness that suggested a heaven turning pale in the contemplation of some act that was piteous and terrible. And under this blanching heaven the desert, and all things and people of the oasis of Beni-Mora, a.s.sumed an aspect of apprehension, as if they felt themselves to be in the thrall of some power whose omnipotence they could not question and whose purpose they feared. This whiteness was shot, at the hour of sunset, with streaks of sulphur yellow and dappled with small, ribbed clouds tinged with yellow-green, a bitter and cruel shade of green that distressed the eyes as a merciless light distresses them, but these colours quickly faded, and again the whiteness prevailed for a brief s.p.a.ce of time before the heavy falling of a darkness unpierced by stars.

With this darkness came a faint moaning of hollow wind from the desert, a lamentable murmur that shuddered over the great s.p.a.ces, crept among the palms and the flat-roofed houses, and died away at the foot of the brown mountains beyond the Hammam Salahine. The succeeding silence, short and intense, was like a sound of fear, like the cry of a voice lifted up in protest against the approach of an unknown, but dreaded, fate. Then the wind came again with a stronger moaning and a lengthened life, not yet forceful, not yet with all its powers, but more tenacious, more acquainted with itself and the deeds that it might do when the night was black among the vast sands which were its birth-place, among the crouching plains and the trembling palm groves that would be its battle-ground.

Batouch looked grave as he listened to the wind and the creaking of the palm stems one against another. Sand came upon his face. He pulled the hood of his burnous over his turban and across his cheeks, covered his mouth with a fold of his haik and stared into the blackness, like an animal in search of something his instinct has detected approaching from a distance.

Ali was beside him in the doorway of the Cafe Maure, a slim Arab boy, bronze-coloured and serious as an idol, who was a troubadour of the Sahara, singer of "Janat" and many lovesongs, player of the guitar backed with sand tortoise and faced with stretched goatskin. Behind them swung an oil lamp fastened to a beam of palm, and the red ashes glowed in the coffee niche and shed a ray upon the shelf of small white cups with faint designs of gold. In a corner, his black face and arms faintly relieved against the wall, an old negro crouched, gazing into vacancy with bulging eyes, and beating with a curved palm stem upon an oval drum, whose murmur was deep and hollow as the murmur of the wind, and seemed indeed its echo prisoned within the room and striving to escape.