He glanced at the radiant sky, at the golden beams slanting down upon the palms.
"The Coran says: "The fate of every man have We bound about his neck."
May yours be as serene, as beautiful, as a string of pearls."
"But I have never cared to wear pearls," she answered.
"No? What are your stones?"
"Rubies."
"Blood! No others?"
"Sapphires."
"The sky at night."
"And opals."
"Fires gleaming across the white of moonlit dunes. Do you remember?"
"I remember."
"And you do not ask me for the end of the Diviner"s vision even now?"
"No."
She hesitated for an instant. Then she added:
"I will tell you why. It seemed to me that there was another"s fate in it as well as my own, and that to hear would be to intrude, perhaps, upon another"s secrets."
"That was your reason?"
"My only reason." And then she added, repeating consciously Androvsky"s words: "I think there are things that should be let alone."
"Perhaps you are right."
A stronger breath of the cool wind came over the flats, and all the palm trees rustled. Through the garden there was a delicate stir of life.
"My children are murmuring farewell," said the Count. "I hear them. It is time! Good-bye, Miss Enfilden--my friend, if I may call you so.
May Allah have you in his keeping, and when your summons comes, obey it--alone."
As he said the last word his grating voice dropped to a deep note of earnest, almost solemn, gravity. Then he lifted his hat, touched his horse with his heel, and galloped away into the sun.
Domini watched the three riders till they were only specks on the surface of the desert. Then they became one with it, and were lost in the dreamlike radiance of the morning. But she did not move. She sat with her eyes fixed up on the blue horizon. A great loneliness had entered into her spirit. Till Count Anteoni had gone she did not realise how much she had become accustomed to his friendship, how near their sympathies had been. But directly those tiny, moving specks became one with the desert she knew that a gap had opened in her life. It might be small, but it seemed dark and deep. For the first time the desert, which she had hitherto regarded as a giver, had taken something from her. And now, as she sat looking at it, while the sun grew stronger and the light more brilliant, while the mountains gradually a.s.sumed a harsher aspect, and the details of things, in the dawn so delicately clear, became, as it were, more piercing in their sharpness, she realised a new and terrible aspect of it. That which has the power to bestow has another power. She had seen the great procession of those who had received gifts of the desert"s hands. Would she some day, or in the night when the sky was like a sapphire, see the procession of those from whom the desert had taken away perhaps their dreams, perhaps their hopes, perhaps even all that they pa.s.sionately loved and had desperately clung to?
And in which of the two processions would she walk?
She got up with a sigh. The garden had become tragic to her for the moment, full of a brooding melancholy. As she turned to leave it she resolved to go to the priest. She had never yet entered his house. Just then she wanted to speak to someone with whom she could be as a little child, to whom she could liberate some part of her spirit simply, certain of a simple, yet not foolish, reception of it by one to whom she could look up. She desired to be not with the friend so much as with the spiritual director. Something was alive within her, something of distress, almost of apprehension, which needed the soothing hand, not of human love, but of religion.
When she reached the priest"s house Beni-Mora was astir with a pleasant bustle of life. The military note pealed through its symphony. Spahis were galloping along the white roads. Tirailleurs went by bearing despatches. Zouaves stood under the palms, staring calmly at the morning, their sunburned hands loosely clasped upon muskets whose b.u.t.ts rested in the sand. But Domini scarcely noticed the brilliant gaiety of the life about her. She was preoccupied, even sad. Yet, as she entered the little garden of the priest, and tapped gently at his door, a sensation of hope sprang up in her heart, born of the sustaining power of her religion.
An Arab boy answered her knock, said that the Father was in and led her at once to a small, plainly-furnished room, with whitewashed walls, and a window opening on to an enclosure at the back, where several large palm trees reared their tufted heads above the smoothly-raked sand. In a moment the priest came in, smiling with pleasure and holding out his hands in welcome.
"Father," she said at once, "I am come to have a little talk with you.
Have you a few moments to give me?"
"Sit down, my child," he said.
He drew forward a straw chair for her and took one opposite.
"You are not in trouble?"
"I don"t know why I should be, but----"
She was silent for a moment. Then she said:
"I want to tell you a little about my life."
He looked at her kindly without a word.
His eyes were an invitation for her to speak, and, without further invitation, in as few and simple words as possible, she told him why she had come to Beni-Mora, and something of her parents" tragedy and its effect upon her.
"I wanted to renew my heart, to find myself," she said. "My life has been cold, careless. I never lost my faith, but I almost forgot that I had it. I made little use of it. I let it rust."
"Many do that, but a time comes when they feel that the great weapon with which alone we can fight the sorrows and dangers of the world must be kept bright, or it may fail us in the hour of need."
"Yes."
"And this is an hour of need for you. But, indeed, is there ever an hour that is not?"
"I feel to-day, I----"
She stopped, suddenly conscious of the vagueness of her apprehension.
It made her position difficult, speech hard for her. She felt that she wanted something, yet scarcely knew what, or exactly why she had come.
"I have been saying good-bye to Count Anteoni," she resumed. "He has gone on a desert journey."
"For long?"
"I don"t know, but I feel that it will be."
"He comes and goes very suddenly. Often he is here and I do not even know it."
"He is a strange man, but I think he is a good man."
As she spoke about him she began to realise that something in him had roused the desire in her to come to the priest.
"And he sees far," she added.