The Garden of Allah Part 81

"Yes," he said, "it is wonderful, but the solitudes are best. This is not the heart of the desert, this is what the Arabs call it, 'The belly of the Desert.' In the heart of the desert there is silence."

She thought of the falling of the wind when the Sahara took them, and knew that her love of the silence was intense. Nevertheless, to-night the other part of her was in the ascendant. She wanted him to share it.

He did not. Could she provoke him to share it?

"Yet, as we rode in, I had a feeling that the heart of the desert was here," she said. "You know I said so."

"Do you say so still?"

"The heart, Boris, is the centre of life, isn't it?"

He was silent. She felt his inner feeling fighting hers.

"To-night," she said, putting her arm through his, and looking towards the city. "I feel a tremendous sympathy with human life such as I never felt before. Boris, it comes to me from you. Yes, it does. It is born of my love for you, and seems to link me, and you with me, to all these strangers, to all men and women, to everything that lives. It is as if I was not quite human before, and my love for you had made me completely human, had done something to me that even--even my love for G.o.d had not been able to do."

She lowered her voice at the last words. After a moment she added:

"Perhaps in isolation, even with you, I could not come to completeness.

Perhaps you could not in isolation even with me. Boris, I think it's good for us to be in the midst of life for a time."

"You wish to remain here, Domini?"

"Yes, for a time."

The fatalistic feeling that had sometimes come upon her in this land entered into her at this moment. She felt, "It is written that we are to remain here."

"Let us remain here, Domini," he said quietly.

The note of disappointment had gone out of his voice, deliberately banished from it by his love for her, but she seemed to hear it, nevertheless, echoing far down in his soul. At that moment she loved him like a woman he had made a lover, but also like a woman he had made a mother by becoming a child.

"Thank you, Boris," she answered very quietly. "You are good to me."

"You are good to me," he said, remembering the last words of Father Roubier. "How can I be anything else?"

Directly he had spoken the words his body trembled violently.

"Boris, what is it?" she exclaimed, startled.

He took his arm away from hers.

"These--these noises of the city in the night coming across the sand-hills are extraordinary. I have become so used to silence that perhaps they get upon my nerves. I shall grow accustomed to them presently."

He turned towards the tents, and she went with him. It seemed to her that he had evaded her question, that he had not wished to answer it, and the sense sharply awakened in her by a return to life near a city made her probe for the reason of this. She did not find it, but in her mental search she found herself presently at Mogar. It seemed to her that the same sort of uneasiness which had beset her husband at Mogar beset him now more fiercely at Amara, that, as he had just said, his nerves were being tortured by something. But it could not be the noises from the city.

After dinner Batouch came to the tent to suggest that they should go down with him into the city. Domini, feeling certain that Androvsky would not wish to go, at once refused, alleging that she was tired.

Batouch then asked Androvsky to go with him, and, to Domini's astonishment, he said that if she did not mind his leaving her for a short time he would like a stroll.

"Perhaps," he said to her, as Batouch and he were starting, "perhaps it will make me more completely human; perhaps there is something still to be done that even you, Domini, have not accomplished."

She knew he was alluding to her words before dinner. He stood looking at her with a slight smile that did not suggest happiness, then added:

"That link you spoke of between us and these strangers"--he made a gesture towards the city--"I ought perhaps to feel it more strongly than I do. I--I will try to feel it."

Then he turned away, and went with Batouch across the sand-hills, walking heavily.

As Domini watched him going she felt chilled, because there was something in his manner, in his smile, that seemed for the moment to set them apart from each other, something she did not understand.

Soon Androvsky disappeared in a fold of the sands as he had disappeared in a fold of the sands at Mogar, not long before De Trevignac came.

She thought of Mogar once more, steadily, reviewing mentally--with the renewed sharpness of intellect that had returned to her, brought by contact with the city--all that had pa.s.sed there, as she never reviewed it before.

It had been a strange episode.

She began to walk slowly up and down on the sand before the tent. Ouardi came to walk with her, but she sent him away. Before doing so, however, something moved her to ask him:

"That African liqueur, Ouardi--you remember that you brought to the tent at Mogar--have we any more of it?"

"The monk's liqueur, Madame?"

"What do you mean--monk's liqueur?"

"It was invented by a monk, Madame, and is sold by the monks of El-Largani."

"Oh! Have we any more of it?"

"There is another bottle, Madame, but I should not dare to bring it if----"

He paused.

"If what, Ouardi?"

"If Monsieur were there."

Domini was on the point of asking him why, but she checked herself and told him to leave her. Then she walked up and down once more on the sand. She was thinking now of the broken gla.s.s on the ground at Androvsky's feet when she found him alone in the tent after De Trevignac had gone. Ouardi's words made her wonder whether this liqueur, brought to celebrate De Trevignac's presence in the camp, had turned the conversation upon the subject of the religious orders; whether Androvsky had perhaps said something against them which had offended De Trevignac, a staunch Catholic; whether there had been a quarrel between the two men on the subject of religion. It was possible. She remembered De Trevignac's strange, almost mystical, gesture in the dawn, following his look of horror towards the tent where her husband lay sleeping.

To-night her mind--her whole nature--felt terribly alive.

She tried to think no more of Mogar, but her thoughts centred round it, linked it with this great city, whose lights shone in the distance below her, whose music came to her from afar over the silence of the sands.

Mogar and Amara; what had they to do with one another? Leagues of desert divided them. One was a desolation, the other was crowded with men. What linked them together in her mind?

Androvsky's fear of both--that was the link. She kept on thinking of the glance he had cast at the watch-tower, to which Trevignac had been even then approaching, although they knew it not. De Trevignac! She walked faster on the sand, to and fro before the tent. Why had he looked at the tent in which Androvsky slept with horror? Was it because Androvsky had denounced the religion that he reverenced and loved? Could it have been that? But then--did Androvsky actively hate religion? Perhaps he hated it, and concealed his hatred from her because he knew it would cause her pain. Yet she had sometimes felt as if he were seeking, perhaps with fear, perhaps with ignorance, perhaps with uncertainty, but still seeking to draw near to G.o.d. That was why she had been able to hope for him, why she had not been more troubled by his loss of the faith in which he had been brought up, and to which she belonged heart and soul.

Could she have been wrong in her feeling--deceived? There were men in the world, she knew, who denied the existence of a G.o.d, and bitterly ridiculed all faith. She remembered the blasphemies of her father. Had she married a man who, like him, was lost, who, as he had, furiously denied G.o.d?

A cold thrill of fear came into her heart. Suddenly she felt as if, perhaps, even in her love, Androvsky had been a stranger to her.

She stood upon the sand. It chanced that she looked towards the camp of the Ouled Nails, whose fires blazed upon the dunes. While she looked she was presently aware of a light that detached itself from the blaze of the fires, and moved from them, coming towards the place where she was standing, slowly. The young moon only gave a faint ray to the night.

This light travelled onward through the dimness like an earth-bound star. She watched it with intentness, as people watch any moving thing when their minds are eagerly at work, staring, yet scarcely conscious that they see.

The little light moved steadily on over the sands, now descending the side of a dune, now mounting to a crest, and always coming towards the place where Domini was standing, And presently this determined movement towards her caught hold of her mind, drew it away from other thoughts, fixed it on the light. She became interested in it, intent upon it.