They had been having coffee in the tent and had just finished. Androvsky got up from his chair and went to the tent door. The grey of the sky was pierced by a gleaming shaft from the sun.
"Do you mind if I go?" he said, turning towards her after a glance to the desert.
"No, but aren"t you tired?"
He shook his head.
"I couldn"t ride, and now I can ride. I couldn"t shoot, and I"m just beginning--"
"Go," she said quickly. "Besides, we want gazelle for dinner, Batouch says, though I don"t suppose we should starve without it." She came to the tent door and stood beside him, and he put his arm around her.
"If I were alone here, Boris," she said, leaning against his shoulder, "I believe I should feel horribly sad to-day."
"Shall I stay?"
He pressed her against him.
"No. I shall know you are coming back. Oh, how extraordinary it is to think we lived so many years without knowing of each other"s existence, that we lived alone. Were you ever happy?"
He hesitated before he replied.
"I sometimes thought I was."
"But do you think now you ever really were?"
"I don"t know--perhaps in a lonely sort of way."
"You can never be happy in that way now?"
He said nothing, but, after a moment, he kissed her long and hard, and as if he wanted to draw her being into his through the door of his lips.
"Good-bye," he said, releasing her. "I shall be back directly after sundown."
"Yes. Don"t wait for the dark down there. If you were lost in the dunes!"
She pointed to the distant sand hills rising and falling monotonously to the horizon.
"If you are not back in good time," she said, "I shall stand by the tower and wave a brand from the fire."
"Why by the tower?"
"The ground is highest by the tower."
She watched him ride away on a mule, with two Arabs carrying guns. They went towards the plains of saltpetre that looked like snow beside the sea that was only a mirage. Then she turned back into the tent, took up a volume of Fromentin"s, and sat down in a folding-chair at the tent door. She read a little, but it was difficult to read with the mirage beneath her. Perpetually her eyes were attracted from the book to its mystery and plaintive sadness, that was like the sadness of something unearthly, of a spirit that did not move but that suffered. She did not put away the book, but presently she laid it down on her knees, open, and sat gazing. Androvsky had disappeared with the Arabs into some fold of the sands. The sun-ray had vanished with him. Without Androvsky and the sun--she still connected them together, and knew she would for ever.
The melancholy of this desert scene was increased for her till it became oppressive and lay upon her like a heavy weight. She was not a woman inclined to any morbid imaginings. Indeed, all that was morbid roused in her an instinctive disgust. But the sudden greyness of the weather, coming after weeks of ardent sunshine, and combined with the fantastic desolation of the landscape, which was half real and half unreal, turned her for the moment towards a dreariness of spirit that was rare in her.
She realised suddenly, as she looked and did not see Androvsky even as a black and moving speck upon the plain; what the desert would seem to her without him, even in sunshine, the awfulness of the desolation of it, the horror of its distances. And realising this she also realised the uncertainty of the human life in connection with any other human life.
To be dependent on another is to double the sum of the terrors of uncertainty. She had done that.
If the immeasurable sands took Androvsky and never gave him back to her!
What would she do?
She gazed at the mirage sea with its dim red islands, and at the sad white plains along its edge.
Winter--she would be plunged in eternal winter. And each human life hangs on a thread. All deep love, all consuming pa.s.sion, holds a great fear within the circle of a great glory. To-day the fear within the circle of her glory seemed to grow. But she suddenly realised that she ought to dominate it, to confine it--as it were--to its original and permanent proportions.
She got up, came out upon the edge of the hill, and walked along it slowly towards the tower.
Outside, freed from the shadow of the tent, she felt less oppressed, though still melancholy, and even slightly apprehensive, as if some trouble were coming to her and were near at hand. Mentally she had made the tower the limit of her walk, and therefore when she reached it she stood still.
It was a squat, square tower, strongly constructed, with loopholes in the four sides, and now that she was by it she saw built out at the back of it a low house with small shuttered windows and a narrow courtyard for mules. No doubt Androvsky was right and French soldiers had once been here to work the optic telegraph. She thought of the recruits and of Ma.r.s.eilles, of Notre Dame de la Garde, the Mother of G.o.d, looking towards Africa. Such recruits came to live in such strange houses as this tower lost in the desert and now abandoned. She glanced at the shuttered windows and turned back towards the tent; but something in the situation of the tower--perhaps the fact that it was set on the highest point of the ground--attracted her, and she presently made Batouch bring her out some rugs and ensconced herself under its shadow, facing the mirage sea.
How long she sat there she did not know. Mirage hypnotises the imaginative and suggests to them dreams strange and ethereal, sad sometimes, as itself. How long she might have sat there dreaming, but for an interruption, she knew still less. It was towards evening, however, but before evening had fallen, that a weary and travel-stained party of three French soldiers, Zouaves, and an officer rode slowly up the sandy track from the dunes. They were mounted on mules, and carried their small baggage with them on two led mules. When they reached the top of the hill they turned to the right and came towards the tower. The officer was a little in advance of his men. He was a smart-looking, fair man of perhaps thirty-two, with blonde moustaches, blue eyes with blonde lashes, and hair very much the colour of the sand dunes. His face was bright red, burnt, as a fair delicate skin burns, by the sun. His eyes, although protected by large sun spectacles, were inflamed. The skin was peeling from his nose. His hair was full of sand, and he rode leaning forward over his animal"s neck, holding the reins loosely in his hands, that seemed nerveless from fatigue. Yet he looked smart and well-bred despite his evident exhaustion, as if on parade he would be a dashing officer. It was evident that both he and his men were riding in from some tremendous journey. The latter looked dog-tired, scarcely human in their collapse. They kept on their mules with difficulty, shaking this way and that like sacks, with their unshaven chins wagging loosely up and down. But as they saw the tower they began to sing in chorus half under their breath, and leaning their broad hands on the necks of the beasts for support they looked with a sort of haggard eagerness in its direction.
Domini was roused from her contemplation of the mirage and the daydreams it suggested by the approach of this small cavalcade. The officer was almost upon her ere she heard the clatter of his mule among the stones.
She looked up, startled, and he looked down, even more surprised, apparently, to see a lady ensconced at the foot of the tower. His astonishment and exhaustion did not, however, get the better of his instinctive good breeding, and sitting straight up in the saddle he took off his sun helmet and asked Domini"s pardon for disturbing her.
"But this is my home for the night, Madame," he added, at the same time drawing a key from the pocket of his loose trousers. "And I"m thankful to reach it. _Ma foi_! there have been several moments in the last days when I never thought to see Mogar."
Slowly he swung himself off his mule and stood up, catching on to the saddle with one hand.
"F-f-f-f!" he said, pursing his lips. "I can hardly stand. Excuse me, Madame."
Domini had got up.
"You are tired out," she said, looking at him and his men, who had now come up, with interest.
"Pretty well indeed. We have been three days lost in the great dunes in a sand-storm, and hit the track here just as we were preparing for a--well, a great event."
"A great event?" said Domini.
"The last in a man"s life, Madame."
He spoke simply, even with a light touch of humour that was almost cynical, but she felt beneath his words and manner a solemnity and a thankfulness that attracted and moved her.
"Those terrible dunes!" she said.
And, turning, she looked out over them.
There was no sunset, but the deepening of the grey into a dimness that seemed to have blackness behind it, the more ghastly hue of the white plains of saltpetre, and the fading of the mirage sea, whose islands now looked no longer red, but dull brown specks in a pale mist, hinted at the rapid falling of night.
"My husband is out in them," she added.
"Your husband, Madame!"
He looked at her rather narrowly, shifted from one leg to the other as if trying his strength, then added:
"Not far, though, I suppose. For I see you have a camp here."