Who was bearing it? No doubt some desert man, some Arab. She imagined him tall, brown, lithe, half-naked, holding the lamp in his muscular fingers, treading on bare feet silently, over the deep sand. Why had he left the camp? What was his purpose?

The light drew near. It was now moving over the flats and seemed, she thought, to travel more quickly. And always it came straight towards where she was standing. A conviction dawned in her that it was travelling with an intention of reaching her, that it was carried by someone who was thinking of her. But how could that be? She thought of the light as a thing with a mind and a purpose, borne by someone who backed up its purpose, helping it to do what it wanted. And it wanted to come to her.

In Mogar! Androvsky had dreaded something in Mogar. De Trevignac had come. He dreaded something in Amara. This light came. For an instant she fancied that the light was a lamp carried by De Trevignac. Then she saw that it gleamed upon a long black robe, the soutane of a priest.

As she and Androvsky rode into Amara she had asked herself whether his second dread would be followed, as his first dread had been, by an unusual incident. When she saw the soutane of a priest, black in the lamplight, moving towards her over the whiteness of the sand, she said to herself that it was to be so followed. This priest stood in the place of De Trevignac.

Why did he come to her?

CHAPTER XXIII

When the priest drew close to the tent Domini saw that it was not he who carried the lantern, but a native soldier, one of the Tirailleurs, formerly called Turcos, who walked beside him. The soldier saluted her, and the priest took off his broad, fluffy black hat.

"Good-evening, Madame," he said, speaking French with the accent of Ma.r.s.eilles. "I am the Aumonier of Amara, and have just heard of your arrival here, and as I was visiting my friends on the sand-hills yonder, I thought I would venture to call and ask whether I could be of any service to you. The hour is informal, I know, but to tell the truth, Madame, after five years in Amara one does not know how to be formal any longer."

His eyes, which had a slightly impudent look, rare in a priest but not unpleasing, twinkled cheerfully in the lamplight as he spoke, and his whole expression betokened a highly social disposition and the most genuine pleasure at meeting with a stranger. While she looked at him, and heard him speak, Domini laughed at herself for the imaginations she had just been cherishing. He had a broad figure, long arms, large feet encased in stout, comfortable boots. His face was burnt brown by the sun and partially concealed by a heavy black beard, whiskers and moustache.

His features were blunt and looked boyish, though his age must have been about forty. The nose was snub, and accorded with the expression in his eyes, which were black like his hair and full of twinkling lights. As he smiled genially on Domini he showed two rows of small, square white teeth. His Ma.r.s.eilles accent exactly suited his appearance, which was rough but honest. Domini welcomed him gladly. Indeed, her reception of him was more than cordial, almost eager. For she had been vaguely expecting some tragic figure, some personality suggestive of mystery or sorrow, and she thought of the incidents at Mogar, and a.s.sociated the moving light with the approach of further strange events. This homely figure of her religion, beaming satisfaction and comfortable antic.i.p.ation of friendly intercourse, laid to rest fears which only now, when she was conscious of relief, she knew she had been entertaining.

She begged the priest to come into the dining-tent, and, taking up the little bell which was on the table, went out into the sand and rang it for Ouardi.

He came at once, like a shadow gliding over the waste.

"Bring us coffee for two, Ouardi, biscuits"--she glanced at her visitor--"bon-bons, yes, the bon-bons in the white box, and the cigars.

And take the soldier with you and entertain him well. Give him whatever he likes."

Ouardi went away with the soldier, talking frantically, and Domini returned to the tent, where she found the priest gleaming with joyous antic.i.p.ation. They sat down in the comfortable basket chairs before the tent door, through which they could see the shining of the city's lights and hear the distant sound of its throbbing and wailing music.

"My husband has gone to see the city," Domini said after she had told the priest her name and been informed that his was Max Beret.

"We only arrived this evening."

"I know, Madame."

He beamed on her, and stroked his thick beard with his broad, sunburnt hand. "Everyone in Amara knows, and everyone in the tents. We know, too, how many tents you have, how many servants, how many camels, horses, dogs."

He broke into a hearty laugh.

"We know what you've just had for dinner!"

Domini laughed too.

"Not really!"

"Well, I heard in the camp that it was soup and stewed mutton. But never mind! You must forgive us. We are barbarians! We are sand-rascals! We are ruffians of the sun!"

His laugh was infectious. He leaned back in his chair and shook with the mirth his own remarks had roused.

"We are ruffians of the sun!" he repeated with gusto. "And we must be forgiven everything."

Although clad in a soutane he looked, at that moment, like a type of the most joyous tolerance, and Domini could not help mentally comparing him with the priest of Beni-Mora. What would Father Roubier think of Father Beret?

"It is easy to forgive in the sun," Domini said.

The priest laid his hands on his knees, setting his feet well apart. She noticed that his hands were not scrupulously clean.

"Madame," he said, "it is impossible to be anything but lenient in the sun. That is my experience. Excuse me but are you a Catholic?"

"Yes."

"So much the better. You must let me show you the chapel. It is in the building with the cupolas. The congregation consists of five on a full Sunday." His laugh broke out again. "I hope the day after to-morrow you and your husband will make it seven. But, as I was saying, the sun teaches one a lesson of charity. When I first came to live in Africa in the midst of the sand-rascals--eh; Madame!--I suppose as a priest I ought to have been shocked by their goings-on. And indeed I tried to be, I conscientiously did my best. But it was no good. I couldn't be shocked. The sunshine drove it all out of me. I could only say, 'It is not for me to question _le bon Dieu_, and _le bon Dieu_ has created these people and set them here in the sand to behave as they do.' What is my business? I can't convert them. I can't change their morals. I must just be a friend to them, cheer them up in their sorrows, give them a bit if they're starving, doctor them a little. I'm a first-rate hand at making an Arab take a pill or a powder!--when they are ill, and make them at home with the white marabout. That's what the sun has taught me, and every sand-rascal and sand-rascal's child in Amara is a friend of mine."

He stretched out his legs as if he wished to elongate his satisfaction, and stared Domini full in the face with eyes that confidently, naively, asked for her approval of his doctrine of the sun. She could not help liking him, though she felt more as if she were sitting with a jolly, big, and rather rowdy boy than with a priest.

"You are fond of the Arabs then?" she said.

"Of course I am, Madame. I can speak their language, and I'm as much at home in their tents, and more, than I should ever be at the Vatican--with all respect to the Holy Father."

He got up, went out into the sand, expectorated noisily, then returned to the tent, wiping his bearded mouth with a large red cotton pocket-handkerchief.

"Are you staying here long, Madame?"

He sat down again in his chair, making it creak with his substantial weight.

"I don't know. If my husband is happy here. But he prefers the solitudes, I think."

"Does he? And yet he's gone into the city. Plenty of bustle there at night, I can tell you. Well, now, I don't agree with your husband. I know it's been said that solitude is good for the sad, but I think just the contrary. Ah!"

The last sonorously joyous exclamation jumped out of Father Beret at the sight of Ouardi, who at this moment entered with a large tray, covered with a coffee-pot, cups, biscuits, bon-bons, cigars, and a bulging flask of some liqueur flanked by little gla.s.ses.

"You fare generously in the desert I see, Madame," he exclaimed. "And so much the better. What's your servant's name?"

Domini told him.

"Ouardi! that means born in the time of the roses." He addressed Ouardi in Arabic and sent him off into the darkness chuckling gaily. "These Arab names all have their meanings--Onlagareb, mother of scorpions, Omteoni, mother of eagles, and so on. So much the better! Comforts are rare here, but you carry them with you. Sugar, if you please."

Domini put two lumps into his cup.

"If you allow me!"

He added two more.

"I never refuse a good cigar. These harmless joys are excellent for man. They help his Christianity. They keep him from bitterness, harsh judgments. But harshness is for northern climes--rainy England, eh?

Forgive me, Madame. I speak in joke. You come from England perhaps. It didn't occur to me that--"

They both laughed. His garrulity was irresistible and made Domini feel as if she were sitting with a child. Perhaps he caught her feeling, for he added:

"The desert has made me an _enfant terrible_, I fear. What have you there?"