Hadj"s lips curled back from his pointed teeth and he looked dangerous.
"It is Batouch!" he snarled.
Domini got up. Without a word, turning her back upon the court, she made her way out, still hearing the howl of the scorpion-eater, the roar of the tomtoms, and the knocking on the door. Hadj followed her quickly, protesting. At the door was the man with the pitted white face and the thick lips. When he saw her he held out his hand. She gave him some money, he opened the door, and she came out into the night by the triple palm tree. Batouch stood there looking furious, with the bridles of two horses across his arm. He began to speak in Arabic to Hadj, but she stopped him with an imperious gesture, gave Hadj his fee, and in a moment was in the saddle and cantering away into the dark. She heard the gallop of Batouch"s horse coming up behind her and turned her head.
"Batouch," she said, "you are the smartest"--she used the word _chic_--"Arab here. Do you know what is the fashion in London when a lady rides out with the attendant who guards her--the really smart thing to do?"
She was playing on his vanity. He responded with a ready smile.
"No, Madame."
"The attendant rides at a short distance behind her, so that no one can come up near her without his knowledge."
Batouch fell back, and Domini cantered on, congratulating herself on the success of her expedient.
She pa.s.sed through the village, full of strolling white figures, lights and the sound of music, and was soon at the end of the long, straight road that was significant to her as no other road had ever been. Each time she saw it, stretching on till it was lost in the serried ma.s.ses of the palms, her imagination was stirred by a longing to wander through barbaric lands, by a nomad feeling that was almost irresistible. This road was a track of fate to her. When she was on it she had a strange sensation as if she changed, developed, drew near to some ideal. It influenced her as one person may influence another. Now for the first time she was on it in the night, riding on the crowded shadows of its palms. She drew rein and went more slowly. She had a desire to be noiseless.
In the obscurity the thickets of the palms looked more exotic than in the light of day. There was no motion in them. Each tree stood like a delicately carven thing, silhouetted against the remote purple of the void. In the profound firmament the stars burned with a tremulous ardour they never show in northern skies. The mystery of this African night rose not from vaporous veils and the long movement of winds, but was breathed out by clearness, brightness, stillness. It was the deepest of all mystery--the mystery of vastness and of peace.
No one was on the road. The sound of the horse"s feet were sharply distinct in the night. On all sides, but far off, the guard dogs were barking by the hidden homes of men. The air was warm as in a hothouse, but light and faintly impregnated with perfume shed surely by the mystical garments of night as she glided on with Domini towards the desert. From the blackness of the palms there came sometimes thin notes of the birds of night, the whizzing noise of insects, the gla.s.sy pipe of a frog in the reeds by a pool behind a hot brown wall.
She rode through one of the villages of old Beni-Mora, silent, unlighted, with empty streets and closed cafes maures, touched her horse with the whip, and cantered on at a quicker pace. As she drew near to the desert her desire to be in it increased. There was some coa.r.s.e gra.s.s here. The palm trees grew less thickly. She heard more clearly the barking of the Kabyle dogs, and knew that tents were not far off. Now, between the trunks of the trees, she saw the twinkling of distant fires, and the sound of running water fell on her ears, mingling with the persistent noise of the insects, and the faint cries of the birds and frogs. In front, where the road came out from the shadows of the last trees, lay a vast dimness, not wholly unlike another starless sky, stretched beneath the starry sky in which the moon had not yet risen.
She set her horse at a gallop and came into the desert, rushing through the dark.
"Madame! Madame!"
Batouch"s voice was calling her. She galloped faster, like one in flight. Her horse"s feet padded over sand almost as softly as a camel"s.
The vast dimness was surely coming to meet her, to take her to itself in the night. But suddenly Batouch rode furiously up beside her, his burnous flying out behind him over his red saddle.
"Madame, we must not go further, we must keep near the oasis."
"Why?"
"It is not safe at night in the desert, and besides--"
His horse plunged and nearly rocketed against hers. She pulled in. His company took away her desire to keep on.
"Besides?"
Leaning over his saddle peak he said, mysteriously:
"Besides, Madame, someone has been following us all the way from Beni-Mora."
"Who?"
"A horseman. I have heard the beat of the hoofs on the hard road. Once I stopped and turned, but I could see nothing, and then I could hear nothing. He, too, had stopped. But when I rode on again soon I heard him once more. Someone found out we were going and has come after us."
She looked back into the violet night without speaking. She heard no sound of a horse, saw nothing but the dim track and the faint, shadowy blackness where the palms began. Then she put her hand into the pocket of her saddle and silently held up a tiny revolver.
"I know, but there might be more than one. I am not afraid, but if anything happens to Madame no one will ever take me as a guide any more."
She smiled for a moment, but the smile died away, and again she looked into the night. She was not afraid physically, but she was conscious of a certain uneasiness. The day had been long and troubled, and had left its mark upon her. Restlessness had driven her forth into the darkness, and behind the restlessness there was a hint of the terror of which she had been aware when she was left alone in the _salle-a-manger_. Was it not that vague terror which, shaking the restlessness, had sent her to the white house by the triple palm tree, had brought her now to the desert? she asked herself, while she listened, and the hidden horseman of whom Batouch had spoken became in her imagination one with the legendary victims of fate; with the Jew by the cross roads, the mariner beating ever about the rock-bound sh.o.r.es of the world, the climber in the witches" Sabbath, the phantom Arab in the sand. Still holding her revolver, she turned her horse and rode slowly towards the distant fires, from which came the barking of the dogs. At some hundreds of yards from them she paused.
"I shall stay here," she said to Batouch. "Where does the moon rise?"
He stretched his arm towards the desert, which sloped gently, almost imperceptibly, towards the east.
"Ride back a little way towards the oasis. The horseman was behind us.
If he is still following you will meet him. Don"t go far. Do as I tell you, Batouch."
With obvious reluctance he obeyed her. She saw him pull up his horse at a distance where he had her just in sight. Then she turned so that she could not see him and looked towards the desert and the east. The revolver seemed unnaturally heavy in her hand. She glanced at it for a moment and listened with intensity for the beat of horse"s hoofs, and her wakeful imagination created a sound that was non-existent in her ears. With it she heard a gallop that was spectral as the gallop of the black horses which carried Mephistopheles and Faust to the abyss. It died away almost at once, and she knew it for an imagination. To-night she was peopling the desert with phantoms. Even the fires of the nomads were as the fires that flicker in an abode of witches, the shadows that pa.s.sed before them were as goblins that had come up out of the sand to hold revel in the moonlight. Were they, too, waiting for a signal from the sky?
At the thought of the moon she drew up the reins that had been lying loosely on her horse"s neck and rode some paces forward and away from the fires, still holding the revolver in her hand. Of what use would it be against the spectres of the Sahara? The Jew would face it without fear. Why not the horseman of Batouch? She dropped it into the pocket of the saddle.
Far away in the east the darkness of the sky was slowly fading into a luminous mystery that rose from the underworld, a mystery that at first was faint and tremulous, pale with a pallor of silver and primrose, but that deepened slowly into a live and ardent gold against which a group of three palm trees detached themselves from the desert like messengers sent forth by it to give a salutation to the moon. They were jet black against the gold, distinct though very distant. The night, and the vast plain from which they rose, lent them a significance that was unearthly.
Their long, thin stems and drooping, feathery leaves were living and pathetic as the night thoughts of a woman who has suffered, but who turns, with a gesture of longing that will not be denied, to the luminance that dwells at the heart of the world. And those black palms against the gold, that stillness of darkness and light in immensity, banished Domini"s faint sense of horror. The spectres faded away. She fixed her eyes on the palms.
Now all the notes of the living things that do not sleep by night, but make music by reedy pools, in underwood, among the blades of gra.s.s and along the banks of streams, were audible to her again, filling her mind with the mystery of existence. The gla.s.sy note of the frogs was like a falling of something small and pointed upon a sheet of crystal. The whirs of the insects suggested a ceaselessly active mentality. The faint cries of the birds dropped down like jewels slipping from the trees.
And suddenly she felt that she was as nothing in the vastness and the complication of the night. Even the pa.s.sion that she knew lay, like a dark and silent flood, within her soul, a flood that, once released from its boundaries, had surely the power to rush irresistibly forward to submerge old landmarks and change the face of a world--even that seemed to lose its depth for a moment, to be shallow as the first ripple of a tide upon the sand. And she forgot that the first ripple has all the ocean behind it.
Red deepened and glowed in the gold behind the three palms, and the upper rim of the round moon, red too as blood, crept about the desert.
Domini, leaning forward with one hand upon her horse"s warm neck, watched until the full circle was poised for a moment on the horizon, holding the palms in its frame of fire. She had never seen a moon look so immense and so vivid as this moon that came up into the night like a portent, fierce yet serene, moon of a barbaric world, such as might have shone upon Herod when he heard the voice of the Baptist in his dungeon, or upon the wife of Pilate when in a dream she was troubled. It suggested to her the powerful watcher of tragic events fraught with long chains of consequence that would last on through centuries, as it turned its blood-red gaze upon the desert, upon the palms, upon her, and, leaning upon her horse"s neck, she too--like Pilate"s wife--fell into a sort of strange and troubled dream for a moment, full of strong, yet ghastly, light and of shapes that flitted across a background of fire.
In it she saw the priest with a fanatical look of warning in his eyes, Count Anteoni beneath the trees of his garden, the perfume-seller in his dark bazaar, Irena with her long throat exposed and her thin arms drooping, the sand-diviner spreading forth his hands, Androvsky galloping upon a horse as if pursued. This last vision returned again and again. As the moon rose a stream of light that seemed tragic fell across the desert and was woven mysteriously into the light of her waking dream. The three palms looked larger. She fancied that she saw them growing, becoming monstrous as they stood in the very centre of the path of the nocturnal glory, and suddenly she remembered her thought when she sat with Androvsky in the garden, that feeling grew in human hearts like palms rising in the desert. But these palms were tragic and aspired towards the blood-red moon. Suddenly she was seized with a fear of feeling, of the growth of an intense sensation within her, and realised, with an almost feverish vividness, the impotence of a soul caught in the grip of a great pa.s.sion, swayed hither and thither, led into strange paths, along the edges, perhaps into depths of immeasurable abysses. She had said to Androvsky that she would rather be the centre of a world tragedy than die without having felt to the uttermost even if it were sorrow. Was that not the speech of a mad woman, or at least of a woman who was so ignorant of the life of feeling that her words were idle and ridiculous? Again she felt desperately that she did not know herself, and this lack of the most essential of all knowledge reduced her for a moment to a bitterness of despair that seemed worse than the bitterness of death. The vastness of the desert appalled her. The red moon held within its circle all the blood of the martyrs, of life, of ideals. She shivered in the saddle. Her nature seemed to shrink and quiver, and a cry for protection rose within her, the cry of the woman who cannot face life alone, who must find a protector, and who must cling to a strong arm, who needs man as the world needs G.o.d.
Then again it seemed to her that she saw Androvsky galloping upon a horse as if pursued.
Moved by a desire to do something to combat this strange despair, born of the moonrise and the night, she sat erect in her saddle, and resolutely looked at the desert, striving to get away from herself in a hard contemplation of the details that surrounded her, the outward things that were coming each moment into clearer view. She gazed steadily towards the palms that sharply cut the moonlight. As she did so something black moved away from them, as if it had been part of them and now detached itself with the intention of approaching her along the track. At first it was merely a moving blot, formless and small, but as it drew nearer she saw that it was a horseman riding slowly, perhaps stealthily, across the sand. She glanced behind her, and saw Batouch not far off, and the fires of the nomads. Then she turned again to watch the horseman. He came steadily forward.
"Madame!"
It was the voice of Batouch.
"Stay where you are!" she called out to him.
She heard the soft sound of the horse"s feet and could see the att.i.tude of its rider. He was leaning forward as if searching the night. She rode to meet him, and they came to each other in the path of the light she had thought tragic.
"You followed me?"
"I cannot see you go out alone into the desert at night," Androvsky replied.
"But you have no right to follow me."
"I cannot let harm come to you, Madame."
She was silent. A moment before she had been longing for a protector.
One had come to her, the man whom she had been setting with those legendary figures who have saddened and appalled the imagination of men.
She looked at the dark figure of Androvsky leaning forward on the horse whose feet were set on the path of the moon, and she did not know whether she felt confidence in him or fear of him. All that the priest had said rose up in her mind, all that Count Anteoni had hinted and that had been visible in the face of the sand-diviner. This man had followed her into the night as a guardian. Did she need someone, something, to guard her from him? A faint horror was still upon her. Perhaps he knew it and resented it, for he drew himself upright on his horse and spoke again, with a decision that was rare in him.