The Garden of Allah Part 61

It was a bitter, even a horrible, moment to him.

The little acolyte, a French boy, son of the postmaster of Beni-Mora, was startled by the sight of the Father's face when he opened the sacristy door. He had never before seen such an expression of almost harsh pain in those usually kind eyes, and he drew back from the threshold like one afraid. His movement recalled the priest to a sharp consciousness of the necessities of the moment, and with a strong effort he conquered his pain sufficiently to conceal all outward expression of it. He smiled gently at the little boy and said:

"Is it time?"

The child looked rea.s.sured.

"Yes, Father."

He came into the sacristy and went towards the cupboard where the vestments were kept, pa.s.sing the silver crucifix. As he did so he glanced at it. He opened the cupboard, then stood for a moment and again turned his eyes to the Christ. The Father watched him.

"What are you looking at, Paul?" he asked.

"Nothing, Father," the boy replied, with a sudden expression of reluctance that was almost obstinate.

And he began to take the priest's robes out of the cupboard.

Just then the wind wailed again furiously about the church, and the crucifix fell down upon the floor of the sacristy.

The priest started forward, picked it up, and stood with it in his hand. He glanced at the wall, and saw at once that the nail to which the crucifix had been fastened had come out of its hole. A flake of plaster had been detached, perhaps some days ago, and the hole had become too large to retain the nail. The explanation of the matter was perfect, simple and comprehensible. Yet the priest felt as if a catastrophe had just taken place. As he stared at the cross he heard a little noise near him. The acolyte was crying.

"Why, Paul, what's the matter?" he said.

"Why did it do that?" exclaimed the boy, as if alarmed. "Why did it do that?"

"Perhaps it was the wind. Everything is shaking. Come, come, my child, there is nothing to be afraid of."

He laid the crucifix on the table. Paul dried his eyes with his fists.

"I don't like to-day," he said. "I don't like to-day."

The priest patted him on the shoulder.

"The weather has upset you," he said, smiling.

But the nervous behaviour of the child deepened strangely his own sense of apprehension. When he had robed he waited for the arrival of the bride and bridegroom. There was to be no ma.s.s, and no music except the Wedding March, which the harmonium player, a Ma.r.s.eillais employed in the date-packing trade, insisted on performing to do honour to Mademoiselle Enfilden, who had taken such an interest in the music of the church.

Androvsky, as the priest had ascertained, had been brought up in the Catholic religion, but, when questioned, he had said quietly that he was no longer a practising Catholic and that he never went to confession.

Under these circ.u.mstances it was not possible to have a nuptial ma.s.s.

The service would be short and plain, and the priest was glad that this was so. Presently the harmonium player came in.

"I may play my loudest to-day, Father," he said, "but no one will hear me."

He laughed, settled the pin--Joan of Arc's face in metal--in his azure blue necktie, and added:

"Nom d'un chien, the wind's a cruel wedding guest!"

The priest nodded without speaking.

"Would you believe, Father," the man continued, "that Mademoiselle and her husband are going to start for Arba from the church door in all this storm! Batouch is getting the palanquin on to the camel. How they will ever--"

"Hus.h.!.+" said the priest, holding up a warning finger.

This idle chatter displeased him in the church, but he had another reason for wis.h.i.+ng to stop the conversation. It renewed his dread to hear of the projected journey, and made him see, as in a shadowy vision, Domini Enfilden's figure disappearing into the windy desolation of the desert protected by the living mystery he hated. Yes, at this moment, he no longer denied it to himself. There was something in Androvsky that he actually hated with his whole soul, hated even in his church, at the very threshold of the altar where stood the tabernacle containing the sacred Host. As he thoroughly realised this for a moment he was shocked at himself, recoiled mentally from his own feeling. But then something within him seemed to rise up and say, "Perhaps it is because you are near to the Host that you hate this man. Perhaps you are right to hate him when he draws nigh to the body of Christ."

Nevertheless when, some minutes later, he stood within the altar rails and saw the face of Domini, he was conscious of another thought, that came through his mind, dark with doubt, like a ray of gold: "Can I be right in hating what this good woman--this woman whose confession I have received, whose heart I know--can I be right in hating what she loves, in fearing what she trusts, in secretly condemning what she openly enthrones?" And almost in despite of himself he felt rea.s.sured for an instant, even happy in the thought of what he was about to do.

Domini's face at all times suggested strength. The mental and emotional power of her were forcibly expressed, too, through her tall and athletic body, which was full of easy grace, but full, too, of well-knit firmness. To-day she looked not unlike a splendid Amazon who could have been a splendid nun had she entered into religion. As she stood there by Androvsky, simply dressed for the wild journey that was before her, the slight hint in her personality of a Spartan youth, that stamped her with a very definite originality, was blended with, even transfigured by, a womanliness so intense as to be almost fierce, a womanliness that had the fervour, the glowing vigour of a glory that had suddenly become fully aware of itself, and of all the deeds that it could not only conceive, but do. She was triumph embodied in the flesh, not the triumph that is a school-bully, but that spreads wings, conscious at last that the human being has kins.h.i.+p with the angels, and need not, should not, wait for death to seek bravely their comrades.h.i.+p. She was love triumphant, woman utterly fearless because instinctively aware that she was fulflling her divine mission.

As he gazed at her the priest had a strange thought--of how Christ's face must have looked when he said, "Lazarus, come forth!"

Androvsky stood by her, but the priest did not look at him.

The wind roared round the church, the narrow windows rattled, and the clouds of sand driven against them made a pattering as of fingers tapping frantically upon the gla.s.s. The buff-coloured curtains trembled, and the dusty pink ribands tied round the ropes of the chandeliers shook incessantly to and fro, as if striving to escape and to join the mult.i.tudes of torn and disfigured things that were swept through s.p.a.ce by the breath of the storm. Beyond the windows, vaguely seen at moments through the clouds of sand, the outlines of the palm leaves wavered, descended, rose, darted from side to side, like hands of the demented.

Suzanne, who was one of the witnesses, trembled, and moved her full lips nervously. She disapproved utterly of her mistress' wedding, and still more of a honeymoon in the desert. For herself she did not care, very shortly she was going to marry Monsieur Helmuth, the important person in livery who accompanied the hotel omnibus to the station, and meanwhile she was to remain at Beni-Mora under the chaperonage of Madame Armande, the proprietor of the hotel. But it shocked her that a mistress of hers, and a member of the English aristocracy, should be married in a costume suitable for a camel ride, and should start off to go to _le Bon Dieu_ alone knew where, shut up in a palanquin like any black woman covered with lumps of coral and bracelets like handcuffs.

The other witnesses were the mayor of Beni-Mora, a middle-aged doctor, who wore the conventional evening-dress of French ceremony, and looked as if the wind had made him as sleepy as a bear on the point of hibernating, and the son of Madame Armande, a lively young man, with a bullet head and eager, black eyes. The latter took a keen interest in the ceremony, but the mayor blinked pathetically, and occasionally rubbed his large hooked nose as if imploring it to keep his whole person from drooping down into a heavy doze.

The priest, speaking in a conventional voice that was strangely inexpressive of his inward emotion, asked Androvsky and Domini whether they would take each other for wife and husband, and listened to their replies. Androvsky's voice sounded to him hard and cold as ice when it replied, and suddenly he thought of the storm as raging in some northern land over s...o...b..und wastes whose scanty trees were leafless. But Domini's voice was clear, and warm as the sun that would s.h.i.+ne again over the desert when the storm was past. The mayor, constraining himself to keep awake a little longer, gave Domini away, while Suzanne dropped tears into a pocket-handkerchief edged with rose-coloured frilling, the gift of Monsieur Helmuth. Then, when the troth had been plighted in the midst of a more pa.s.sionate roaring of the wind, the priest, conquering a terrible inward reluctance that beset him despite his endeavour to feel detached and formal, merely a priest engaged in a ceremony that it was his office to carry out, but in which he had no personal interest, spoke the fateful words:

"_Ego conjungo vos in matrimonium in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen_."

He said this without looking at the man and woman who stood before him, the man on the right hand and the woman on the left, but when he lifted his hand to sprinkle them with holy water he could not forbear glancing at them, and he saw Domini as a s.h.i.+ning radiance, but Androvsky as a thing of stone. With a movement that seemed to the priest sinister in its oppressed deliberation, Androvsky placed gold and silver upon the book and the marriage ring.

The priest spoke again, slowly, in the uproar of the wind, after blessing the ring:

"_Adjutorium nostrum in nomine Domini_."

After the reply the "_Domine, exaudi orationem meam_," the "_Et clamor_," the "_Dominus vobisc.u.m_," and the "_Et c.u.m spiritu tuo_," the "_Oremus_," and the prayer following, he sprinkled the ring with holy water in the form of a cross and gave it to Androvsky to give with gold and silver to Domini. Androvsky took the ring, repeated the formula, "With this ring," etc., then still, as it seemed to the priest, with the same sinister deliberation, placed it on the thumb of the bride's uncovered hand, saying, "_In the name of the Father_," then on her second finger, saying, "_Of the Son_," then on her third finger, saying, "_Of the Holy Ghost_," then on her fourth finger. But at this moment, when he should have said "_Amen_," there was a long pause of silence.

During it--why he did not know--the priest found himself thinking of the saying of St. Isidore of Seville that the ring of marriage is left on the fourth finger of the bride's hand because that finger contains a vein directly connected with the heart.

"_Amen_."

Androvsky had spoken. The priest started, and went on with the "_Confirma, hoc, Deus_." And from this point until the "_Per Christum Dominum nostrum, Amen_," which, since there was no Ma.s.s, closed the ceremony, he felt more master of himself and his emotions than at any time previously during this day. A sensation of finality, of the irrevocable, came to him. He said within himself, "This matter has pa.s.sed out of my hands into the hands of G.o.d." And in the midst of the violence of the storm a calm stole upon his spirit. "G.o.d knows best!" he said within himself. "G.o.d knows best!"

Those words and the state of feeling that was linked with them were and had always been to him as mighty protecting arms that uplifted him above the beating waves of the sea of life. The Wedding March sounded when the priest bade good-bye to the husband and wife whom he had made one. He was able to do it tranquilly. He even pressed Androvsky's hand.

"Be good to her," he said. "She is--she is a good woman."

To his surprise Androvsky suddenly wrung his hand almost pa.s.sionately, and the priest saw that there were tears in his eyes.

That night the priest prayed long and earnestly for all wanderers in the desert.

When Domini and Androvsky came out from the church they saw vaguely a camel lying down before the door, bending its head and snarling fiercely. Upon its back was a palanquin of dark-red stuff, with a roof of stuff stretched upon strong, curved sticks, and curtains which could be drawn or undrawn at pleasure. The desert men crowded about it like eager phantoms in the wind, half seen in the driving mist of sand.

Clinging to Androvsky's arm, Domini struggled forward to the camel. As she did so, Smain, unfolding for an instant his burnous, pressed into her hands his ma.s.s of roses. She thanked him with a smile he scarcely saw and a word that was borne away upon the wind. At Larbi's lips she saw the little flute and his thick fingers fluttering upon the holes.

She knew that he was playing his love-song for her, but she could not hear it except in her heart. The perfume-seller sprinkled her gravely with essence, and for a moment she felt as if she were again in his dark bazaar, and seemed to catch among the voices of the storm the sound of men muttering prayers to Allah as in the mosque of Sidi-Zazan.

Then she was in the palanquin with Androvsky close beside her.