The first jackal laughed once more, was answered again. A third beast, evidently much farther off, lifted up a faint voice like a dismal echo.

Then there was silence.

"You loved that, Domini. It was like the calling of freedom to you--and to me. We've found freedom; we've found it. Let us feel it. Let us take hold of it. It is the only thing, the only thing. But you can't know that as I do, Domini."

Again she was conscious that his intensity surpa.s.sed hers, and the consciousness, instead of saddening or vexing, made her thrill with joy.

"I am maddened by this freedom," he said; "maddened by it, Domini. I can't help--I can't--"

He laid his lips upon hers in a desperate caress that almost suffocated her. Then he took his lips away from her lips and kissed her throat, holding her head back against his shoulder. She shut her eyes. He was indeed teaching her to forget. Even the memory of the day in the garden when she heard the church bell chime and the sound of Larbi's flute went from her. She remembered nothing any more. The past was lost or laid in sleep by the spell of sensation. Her nature galloped like an Arab horse across the sands towards the sun, towards the fire that sheds warmth afar but that devours all that draws near to it. At that moment she connected Androvsky with the tremendous fires eternally blazing in the sun. She had a desire that he should hurt her in the pa.s.sionate intensity of his love for her. Her nature, which till now had been ever ready to spring into hostility at an accidental touch, which had shrunk instinctively from physical contact with other human beings, melted, was utterly transformed. She felt that she was now the opposite of all that she had been--more woman than any other woman who had ever lived.

What had been an almost cold strength in her went to increase the completeness of this yielding to one stronger than herself. What had seemed boyish and almost hard in her died away utterly under the embrace of this fierce manhood.

"Domini," he spoke, whispering while he kissed her, "Domini, the fire's gone out. It's dark."

He lifted her a little in his arms, still kissing her.

"Domini, it's dark, it's dark."

He lifted her more. She stood up, with his arms about her, looking towards where the fire had been. She put her hands against his face and softly pressed it back from hers, but with a touch that was a caress. He yielded to her at once.

"Look!" he said. "Do you love the darkness? Tell me--tell me that you love it."

She let her hand glide over his cheek in answer.

"Look at it. Love it. All the desert is in it, and our love in the desert. Let us stay in the desert, let us stay in it for ever--for ever.

It is your garden--yours. It has brought us everything, Domini."

He took her hand and pressed it again and again over his cheek lingeringly. Then, abruptly, he dropped it.

"Come!" he said. "Domini."

And he drew her in through the tent door almost violently.

A stronger gust of the night wind followed them. Androvsky took his arms slowly from Domini and turned to let down the flap of the tent. While he was doing this she stood quite still. The flame of the lamp flickered, throwing its light now here, now there, uneasily. She saw the crucifix lit up for an instant and the white bed beneath it. The wind stirred her dark hair and was cold about her neck. But the warmth there met and defied it. In that brief moment, while Androvsky was fastening the tent, she seemed to live through centuries of intense and complicated emotion.

When the light flickered over the crucifix she felt as if she could spend her life in pa.s.sionate adoration at its foot; but when she did not see it, and the wind, coming in from the desert through the tent door, where she heard the movement of Androvsky, stirred in her hair, she felt reckless, wayward, savage--and something more. A cry rose in her that was like the cry of a stranger, who yet was of her and in her, and from whom she would not part.

Again the lamp flame flickered upon the crucifix. Quickly, while she saw the crucifix plainly, she went forward to the bed and fell on her knees by it, bending down her face upon its whiteness.

When Androvsky had fastened the tent door he turned round and saw her kneeling. He stood quite still as if petrified, staring at her. Then, as the flame, now sheltered from the wind, burned steadily, he saw the crucifix. He started as if someone had struck him, hesitated, then, with a look of fierce and concentrated resolution on his face, went swiftly to the crucifix and pulled it from the canvas roughly. He held it in his hand for an instant, then moved to the tent door and stooped to unfasten the cords that held it to the pegs, evidently with the intention of throwing the crucifix out into the night. But he did not unfasten the cords. Something--some sudden change of feeling, some secret and powerful reluctance--checked him. He thrust the crucifix into his pocket. Then, returning to where Domini was kneeling, he put his arms round her and drew her to her feet.

She did not resist him. Still holding her in his arms he blew out the lamp.

CHAPTER XIX

The Arabs have a saying, "In the desert one forgets everything, one remembers nothing any more."

To Domini it sometimes seemed the truest of all the true and beautiful sayings of the East. Only three weeks had pa.s.sed away since the first halt at Arba, yet already her life at Beni-Mora was faint in her mind as the dream of a distant past. Taken by the vast solitudes, journeying without definite aim from one oasis to another through empty regions bathed in eternal sunshine, camping often in the midst of the sand by one of the wells sunk for the nomads by the French engineers, strengthened perpetually, yet perpetually soothed, by airs that were soft and cool, as if mingled of silk and snow, they lived surely in a desert dream with only a dream behind them. They had become as one with the nomads, whose home is the moving tent, whose hearthstone is the yellow sand of the dunes, whose G.o.d is liberty.

Domini loved this life with a love which had already become a pa.s.sion.

All that she had imagined that the desert might be to her she found that it was. In its so-called monotony she discovered eternal interest. Of old she had thought the sea the most wonderful thing in Nature. In the desert she seemed to possess the sea with something added to it, a calm, a completeness, a mystical tenderness, a pa.s.sionate serenity. She thought of the sea as a soul striving to fulfil its n.o.blest aspirations, to be the splendid thing it knew how to dream of. But she thought of the desert as a soul that need strive no more, having attained. And she, like the Arabs, called it always in her heart the Garden of Allah. For in this wonderful calm, bright as the child's idea of heaven; clear as a crystal with a sunbeam caught in it, silent as a prayer that will be answered silently, G.o.d seemed to draw very near to His wandering children. In the desert was the still, small voice, and the still, small voice was the Lord.

Often at dawn or sundown, when, perhaps in the distance of the sands, or near at hand beneath the shade of the palms of some oasis by a waterspring, she watched the desert men in their patched rags, with their lean, bronzed faces and eagle eyes turned towards Mecca, bowing their heads in prayer to the soil that the sun made hot, she remembered Count Anteoni's words, "I like to see men praying in the desert," and she understood with all her heart and soul why. For the life of the desert was the most perfect liberty that could be found on earth, and to see men thus worshipping in liberty set before her a vision of free will upon the heights. When she thought of the world she had known and left, of the men who would always live in it and know no other world, she was saddened for a moment. Could she ever find elsewhere such joy as she had found in the simple and unfettered life of the wastes? Could she ever exchange this life for another life, even with Androvsky?

One day she spoke to him of her intense joy in the wandering fate, and the pain that came to her whenever she thought of exchanging it for a life of civilisation in the midst of fixed groups of men.

They had halted for the noonday rest at a place called Sidi-Hamdam, and in the afternoon were going to ride on to a Bordj called Mogar, where they meant to stay two or three days, as Batouch had told them it was a good halting place, and near to haunts of the gazelle. The tents had already gone forward, and Domini and Androvsky were lying upon a rug spread on the sand, in the shadow of the grey wall of a traveller's house beside a well. Behind them their horses were tethered to an iron ring in the wall. Batouch and Ali were in the court of the house, talking to the Arab guardian who dwelt there, but their voices were not audible by the well, and absolute silence reigned, the intense yet light silence that is in the desert at noontide, when the sun is at the zenith, when the nomad sleeps under his low-pitched tent, and the gardeners in the oasis cease even from pretending to work among the palms. From before the well the ground sank to a plain of pale grey sand, which stretched away to a village hard in aspect, as if carved out of bronze and all in one piece. In the centre of it rose a mosque with a minaret and a number of cupolas, faintly gilded and shining modestly under the fierce rays of the sun.

At the foot of the village the ground was white with saltpetre, which resembled a covering of new-fallen snow. To right and left of it were isolated groups of palms growing in threes and fours, like trees that had formed themselves into cliques and set careful barriers of sand between themselves and their despised brethren. Here and there on the grey sand dark patches showed where nomads had pitched their tents. But there was no movement of human life. No camels were visible. No guard dogs barked. The noon held all things in its golden grip.

"Boris!" Domini said, breaking a long silence.

"Yes, Domini?"

He turned towards her on the rug, stretching his long, thin body lazily as if in supreme physical contentment.

"You know that saying of the Arabs about forgetting everything in the desert?"

"Yes, Domini, I know it."

"How long shall we stay in this world of forgetfulness?"

He lifted himself up on his elbow quickly, and fixed his eyes on hers.

"How long!"

"Yes."

"But--do you wish to leave it? Are you tired of it?"

There was a note of sharp anxiety in his voice.

"I don't answer such a question," she said, smiling at him.

"Ah, then, why do you try to frighten me?"

She put her hand in his.

"How burnt you are!" she said. "You are like an Arab of the South."

"Let me become more like one. There's health here."

"And peace, perfect peace."

He said nothing. He was looking down now at the sand.

She laid her lips on his warm brown hand.