"Pretending, Madame?" he said in a startled voice.
"Yes. I that I want to show you this garden, you that you want to see it. I no longer wish to show it to you, and you have never wished to see it. Let us cease to pretend. It is all my fault. I bothered you to come here when you didn"t want to come. You have taught me a lesson. I was inclined to condemn you for it, to be angry with you. But why should I be? You were quite right. Freedom is my fetish. I set you free, Monsieur Androvsky. Good-bye."
As she spoke she felt that the air was clearing, the clouds were flying.
Constraint at least was at an end. And she had really the sensation of setting a captive at liberty. She turned to leave him, but he said:
"Please, stop, Madame."
"Why?"
"You have made a mistake."
"In what?"
"I do want to see this garden."
"Really? Well, then, you can wander through it."
"I do not wish to see it alone."
"Larbi shall guide you. For half a franc he will gladly give up his serenading."
"Madame, if you will not show me the garden I will not see it at all. I will go now and will never come into it again. I do not pretend."
"Ah!" she said, and her voice was quite changed. "But you do worse."
"Worse!"
"Yes. You lie in the face of Africa."
She did not wish or mean to say it, and yet she had to say it. She knew it was monstrous that she should speak thus to him. What had his lies to do with her? She had been told a thousand, had heard a thousand told to others. Her life had been pa.s.sed in a world of which the words of the Psalmist, though uttered in haste, are a clear-cut description. And she had not thought she cared. Yet really she must have cared. For, in leaving this world, her soul had, as it were, fetched a long breath. And now, at the hint of a lie, it instinctively recoiled as from a gust of air laden with some poisonous and suffocating vapour.
"Forgive me," she added. "I am a fool. Out here I do love truth."
Androvsky dropped his eyes. His whole body expressed humiliation, and something that suggested to her despair.
"Oh, you must think me mad to speak like this!" she exclaimed. "Of course people must be allowed to arm themselves against the curiosity of others. I know that. The fact is I am under a spell here. I have been living for many, many years in the cold. I have been like a woman in a prison without any light, and--"
"You have been in a prison!" he said, lifting his head and looking at her eagerly.
"I have been living in what is called the great world."
"And you call that a prison?"
"Now that I am living in the greater world, really living at last. I have been in the heart of insincerity, and now I have come into the heart, the fiery heart of sincerity. It"s there--there"--she pointed to the desert. "And it has intoxicated me; I think it has made me unreasonable. I expect everyone--not an Arab--to be as it is, and every little thing that isn"t quite frank, every pretence, is like a horrible little hand tugging at me, as if trying to take me back to the prison I have left. I think, deep down, I have always loathed lies, but never as I have loathed them since I came here. It seems to me as if only in the desert there is freedom for the body, and only in truth there is freedom for the soul."
She stopped, drew a long breath, and added:
"You must forgive me. I have worried you. I have made you do what you didn"t want to do. And then I have attacked you. It is unpardonable."
"Show me the garden, Madame," he said in a very low voice.
Her outburst over, she felt a slight self-consciousness. She wondered what he thought of her and became aware of her unconventionality. His curious and persistent reticence made her frankness the more marked.
Yet the painful sensation of oppression and exasperation had pa.s.sed away from her and she no longer thought of his personality as destructive.
In obedience to his last words she walked on, and he kept heavily beside her, till they were in the deep shadows of the closely-growing trees and the spell of the garden began to return upon her, banishing the thought of self.
"Listen!" she said presently.
Larbi"s flute was very near.
"He is always playing," she whispered.
"Who is he?"
"One of the gardeners. But he scarcely ever works. He is perpetually in love. That is why he plays."
"Is that a love-tune then?" Androvsky asked.
"Yes. Do you think it sounds like one?"
"How should I know, Madame?"
He stood looking in the direction from which the music came, and now it seemed to hold him fascinated. After his question, which sounded to her almost childlike, and which she did not answer, Domini glanced at his attentive face, to which the green shadows lent a dimness that was mysterious, at his tall figure, which always suggested to her both weariness and strength, and remembered the pa.s.sionate romance to whose existence she awoke when she first heard Larbi"s flute. It was as if a shutter, which had closed a window in the house of life, had been suddenly drawn away, giving to her eyes the horizon of a new world.
Was that shutter now drawn back for him? No doubt the supposition was absurd. Men of his emotional and virile type have travelled far in that world, to her mysterious, ere they reach his length of years. What was extraordinary to her, in the thought of it alone, was doubtless quite ordinary to him, translated into act. Not ignorant, she was nevertheless a perfectly innocent woman, but her knowledge told her that no man of Androvsky"s strength, power and pa.s.sion is innocent at Androvsky"s age.
Yet his last dropped-out question was very deceptive. It had sounded absolutely natural and might have come from a boy"s pure lips. Again he made her wonder.
There was a garden bench close to where they were standing. "If you like to listen for a moment we might sit down," she said.
He started.
"Yes. Thank you."
When they were sitting side by side, closely guarded by the gigantic fig and chestnut trees which grew in this part of the garden, he added:
"Whom does he love?"
"No doubt one of those native women whom you consider utterly without attraction," she answered with a faint touch of malice which made him redden.
"But you come here every day?" he said.
"I!"
"Yes. Has he ever seen you?"
"Larbi? Often. What has that to do with it?"
He did not reply.