"Your horse goes better now," she said at last to break the silence.
"Does it?" he said.
"You don"t know!"
"Madame, I know nothing of horses or riding. I have not been on a horse for twenty-three years."
She was amazed.
"We ought to go back then," she exclaimed.
"Why? Other men ride--I will ride. I do it badly. Forgive me."
"Forgive you!" she said. "I admire your pluck. But why have you never ridden all these years?"
After a pause he answered:
"I--I did not--I had not the opportunity."
His voice was suddenly constrained. She did not pursue the subject, but stroked her horse"s neck and turned her eyes towards the dark green line on the horizon. Now that she was really out in the desert she felt almost bewildered by it, and as if she understood it far less than when she looked at it from Count Anteoni"s garden. The thousands upon thousands of sand humps, each crowned with its dusty dwarf bush, each one precisely like the others, agitated her as if she were confronted by a vast mult.i.tude of people. She wanted some point which would keep the eyes from travelling but could not find it, and was mentally restless as the swimmer far out at sea who is pursued by wave on wave, and who sees beyond him the unceasing foam of those that are pressing to the horizon.
Whither was she riding? Could one have a goal in this immense expanse?
She felt an overpowering need to find one, and looked once more at the green line.
"Do you think we could go as far as that?" she asked Androvsky, pointing with her whip.
"Yes, Madame."
"It must be an oasis. Don"t you think so?"
"Yes. I can go faster."
"Keep your rein loose. Don"t pull his mouth. You don"t mind my telling you. I"ve been with horses all my life."
"Thank you," he answered.
"And keep your heels more out. That"s much better. I"m sure you could teach me a thousand things; it will be kind of you to let me teach you this."
He cast a strange look at her. There was grat.i.tude in it, but much more; a fiery bitterness and something childlike and helpless.
"I have nothing to teach," he said.
Their horses broke into a canter, and with the swifter movement Domini felt more calm. There was an odd lightness in her brain, as if her thoughts were being shaken out of it like feathers out of a bag.
The power of concentration was leaving her, and a sensation of carelessness--surely gipsy-like--came over her. Her body, dipped in the dry and thin air as in a clear, cool bath, did not suffer from the burning rays of the sun, but felt radiant yet half lazy too. They went on and on in silence as intimate friends might ride together, isolated from the world and content in each other"s company, content enough to have no need of talking. Not once did it strike Domini as strange that she should go far out into the desert with a man of whom she knew nothing, but in whom she had noticed disquieting peculiarities. She was naturally fearless, but that had little to do with her conduct. Without saying so to herself she felt she could trust this man.
The dark green line showed clearer through the sunshine across the gleaming flats. It was possible now to see slight irregularities in it, as in a blurred dash of paint flung across a canvas by an uncertain hand, but impossible to distinguish palm trees. The air sparkled as if full of a tiny dust of intensely brilliant jewels, and near the ground there seemed to quiver a maze of dancing specks of light. Everywhere there was solitude, yet everywhere there was surely a ceaseless movement of minute and vital things, scarce visible sun fairies eternally at play.
And Domini"s careless feeling grew. She had never before experienced so delicious a recklessness. Head and heart were light, reckless of thought or love. Sad things had no meaning here and grave things no place. For the blood was full of sunbeams dancing to a lilt of Apollo. Nothing mattered here. Even Death wore a robe of gold and went with an airy step. Ah, yes, from this region of quivering light and heat the Arabs drew their easy and l.u.s.trous resignation. Out here one was in the hands of a G.o.d who surely sang as He created and had not created fear.
Many minutes pa.s.sed, but Domini was careless of time as of all else.
The green line broke into feathery tufts, broadened into a still far-off dimness of palms.
"Water!"
Androvsky"s voice spoke as if startled. Domini pulled up. Their horses stood side by side, and at once, with the cessation of motion, the mysticism of the desert came upon them and the marvel of its silence, and they seemed to be set there in a wonderful dream, themselves and their horses dreamlike.
"Water!" he said again.
He pointed, and along the right-hand edge of the oasis Domini saw grey, calm waters. The palms ran out into them and were bathed by them softly.
And on their bosom here and there rose small, dim islets. Yes, there was water, and yet--The mystery of it was a mystery she had never known to brood even over a white northern sea in a twilight hour of winter, was deeper than the mystery of the Venetian _laguna morta_, when the Angelus bell chimes at sunset, and each distant boat, each bending rower and patient fisherman, becomes a marvel, an eerie thing in the gold.
"Is it mirage?" she said to him almost in a whisper.
And suddenly she shivered.
"Yes, it is, it must be."
He did not answer. His left hand, holding the rein, dropped down on the saddle peak, and he stared across the waste, leaning forward and moving his lips. She looked at him and forgot even the mirage in a sudden longing to understand exactly what he was feeling. His mystery--the mystery of that which is human and is forever stretching out its arms--was as the fluid mystery of the mirage, and seemed to blend at that moment with the mystery she knew lay in herself. The mirage was within them as it was far off before them in the desert, still, grey, full surely of indistinct movement, and even perhaps of sound they could not hear.
At last he turned and looked at her.
"Yes, it must be mirage," he said. "The nothing that seems to be so much. A man comes out into the desert and he finds there mirage. He travels right out and that"s what he reaches--or at least he can"t reach it, but just sees it far away. And that"s all. And is that what a man finds when he comes out into the world?"
It was the first time he had spoken without any trace of reserve to her, for even on the tower, though there had been tumult in his voice and a fierceness of some strange pa.s.sion in his words, there had been struggle in his manner, as if the pressure of feeling forced him to speak in despite of something which bade him keep silence. Now he spoke as if to someone whom he knew and with whom he had talked of many things.
"But you ought to know better than I do," she answered.
"I!"
"Yes. You are a man, and have been in the world, and must know what it has to give--whether there"s only mirage, or something that can be grasped and felt and lived in, and----"
"Yes, I"m a man and I ought to know," he replied. "Well, I don"t know, but I mean to know."
There was a savage sound in his voice.
"I should like to know, too," Domini said quietly. "And I feel as if it was the desert that was going to teach me."
"The desert--how?"
"I don"t know."
He pointed again to the mirage.
"But that"s what there is in the desert."
"That--and what else?"
"Is there anything else?"