From the sea over the flats came to them a breeze that had a savour of freshness, of cool and delicate life.

They walked for some time without speaking, then Domini said:

"From the cemetery of El-Largani you looked out over this, didn't you, Boris?"

"Yes, Domini," he answered. "It was then that the voice spoke to me."

"It will never speak again. God will not let it speak again."

"How can you know that?"

"We are tried in the fire, Boris, but we are not burnt to death."

She said it for herself, to reassure herself, to give a little comfort to her own soul.

"To-night I feel as if it were not so," he answered. "When we came to the hotel it seemed—I thought that I could not go on."

"And now?"

"Now I do not know anything except that this is my last night with you. And, Domini, that seems to me to be absolutely incredible although I know it. I cannot imagine any future away from you, any life in which I do not see you. I feel as if in parting from you I am parting from myself, as if the thing left would be no more a man, but only a broken husk. Can I pray without you, love God without you?"

"Best without me."

"But can I live without you, Domini? Can I wake day after day to the sunshine, and know that I shall never see you again, and go on living? Can I do that? I don't feel as if it could be. Perhaps, when I have done my penance, God will have mercy."

"How, Boris?"

"Perhaps He will let me die."

"Let us fix all the thoughts of our hearts on the life in which He may let us be together once more. Look, Boris, there are lights in the darkness, there will always be lights."

"I can't see them," he said.

She looked at him and saw that tears were running down his cheeks. Again, on this last night of companionship, God summoned her to be strong for him. On the edge of the hill, close to them, she saw a Moorish temple built of marble, with narrow arches and columns, and marble seats.

"Let us sit here for a moment, Boris," she said.

He followed her up the marble steps. Two or three times he stumbled, but she did not give him her hand. They sat down between the slender columns and looked out over the city, whose blanched domes and minarets were faintly visible in the night. Androvsky was shaken with sobs.

"How can I part from you?" he said brokenly. "How am I to do it? How can I—how can I? Why was I given this love for you, this terrible thing, this crying out, this reaching out of the flesh and heart and soul to you? Domini—Domini—what does it all mean—this mystery of torture—this scourging of the body—this tearing in pieces of my soul and yours? Domini, shall we know—shall we ever know?"

"I am sure we shall know, we shall all know some day, the meaning of the mystery of pain. And then, perhaps, then surely, we shall each of us be glad that we have suffered. The suffering will make the glory of our happiness. Even now sometimes when I am suffering, Boris, I feel as if there were a kind of splendour, even a kind of nobility in what I am doing, as if I were proving my own soul, proving the force that God has put into me. Boris, let us—you and I—learn to say in all this terror, 'I am unconquered, I am unconquerable.'"

"I feel that I could say that, be it in the most frightful circumstances, if only I could sometimes see you—even far away as now I see those lights."

"You will see me in your prayers every day, and I shall see you in mine."

"But the cry of the body, Domini, of the eyes, of the hands, to see, to touch—it's so fierce, it's so—it's so—"

"I know, I hear it too, always. But there is another voice, which will be strong when the other has faded into eternal silence. In all bodily things, even the most beautiful, there is something finite. We must reach out our poor, feeble, trembling hands to the infinite. I think everyone who is born does that through life, often without being conscious of it. We shall do it consciously, you and I. We shall be able to do it because of our dreadful suffering. We shall want, we shall have to do it, you—where you are going, and I——"

"Where will you be?"

"I don't know, I don't know. I won't think of the afterwards now, in these last few hours—in these last——"

Her voice faltered and broke. Then the tears came to her also, and for a while she could not see the distant lights.

Then she spoke again; she said:

"Boris, let us go now."

He got up without a word. They found the carriage and drove back to Tunis.

When they reached the hotel they came into the midst of the American tourists, who were excitedly discussing the dances they had seen, and calling for cooling drinks to allay the thirst created by the heat of the close rooms of Oriental houses.

Early next morning a carriage was at the door. When they had got into it the coachman looked round.

"Where shall I drive to, Monsieur?"

Androvsky looked at him and made no reply.

"To El-Largani," Domini said.

"To the monastery, Madame?"

He whistled to his horses gaily. As they trotted on bells chimed about their necks, chimed a merry peal to the sunshine that lay over the land. They passed soldiers marching, and heard the call of bugles, the rattle of drums. And each sound seemed distant and each moving figure far away. This world of Africa, fiercely distinct in the clear air under the cloudless sky, was unreal to them both, was vague as a northern land wrapped in a mist of autumn. The unreal was about them. Within themselves was the real. They sat beside each other without speaking. Words to them now were useless things. What more had they to say? Everything and nothing. Lifetimes would not have been long enough for them to speak their thoughts for each other, of each other, to speak their emotions, all that was in their minds and hearts during that drive from the city to the monastery that stood upon the hill. Yet did not their mutual action of that morning say all that need be said? The silence of the Trappists surely floated out to them over the plains and the pale waters of the bitter lakes and held them silent.

But the bells on the horses' necks rang always gaily, and the coachman, who would presently drive Domini back alone to Tunis, whistled and sang on his high seat.

Presently they came to a great wooden cross standing on a pedestal of stone by the roadside at the edge of a grove of olive trees. It marked the beginning of the domain of El-Largani. When Domini saw it she looked at Androvsky, and his eyes answered her silent question. The coachman whipped his horses into a canter, as if he were in haste to reach his destination. He was thinking of the good red wine of the monks. In a cloud of white dust the carriage rolled onwards between vineyards in which, here and there, labourers were working, sheltered from the sun by immense straw hats. A long line of waggons, laden with barrels and drawn by mules covered with bells, sheltered from the flies by leaves, met them. In the distance Domini saw forests of eucalyptus trees. Suddenly it seemed to her as if she saw Androvsky coming from them towards the white road, helping a man who was pale, and who stumbled as if half-fainting, yet whose face was full of a fierce passion of joy—the stranger whose influence had driven him out of the monastery into the world. She bent down her head and hid her face in her hands, praying, praying with all her strength for courage in this supreme moment of her life. But almost directly the prayers died on her lips and in her heart, and she found herself repeating the words of The Imitation:

"Love watcheth, and sleeping, slumbereth not. When weary it is not tired; when straitened it is not constrained; when frightened it is not disturbed; but like a vivid flame and a burning torch it mounteth upwards and securely passeth through all. Whosoever loveth knoweth the cry of this voice."

Again and again she said the words: "It securely passeth through all—it securely passeth through all." Now, at last, she was to know the uttermost truth of those words which she had loved in her happiness, which she clung to now as a little child clings to its father's hand.

The carriage turned to the right, went on a little way, then stopped.

Domini lifted her face from her hands. She saw before her a great door which stood open. Above it was a statue of the Madonna and Child, and on either side were two angels with swords and stars. Underneath was written, in great letters:

JANUA COELI.

Beyond, through the doorway, she saw an open space upon which the sunlight streamed, three palm trees, and a second door which was shut. Above this second door was written:

"Les dames n'entrent pas ici."

As she looked the figure of a very old monk with a long white beard shuffled slowly across the patch of sunlight and disappeared.

The coachman turned round.

"You descend here," he said in a cheerful voice. "Madame will be entertained in the parlour on the right of the first door, but Monsieur can go on to the hotellerie. It's over there."

He pointed with his whip and turned his back to them again.

Domini sat quite still. Her lips moved, once more repeating the words of The Imitation. Androvsky got up from his seat, stepped heavily out of the carriage, and stood beside it. The coachman was busy lighting a long cigar. Androvsky leaned forward towards Domini with his arms on the carriage and looked at her with tearless eyes.

"Domini," at last he whispered. "Domini!"

Then she turned to him, bent towards him, put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his face for a long time, as if she were trying to see it now for all the years that were perhaps to come. Her eyes, too, were tearless.

At last she leaned down and touched his forehead with her lips.

She said nothing. Her hands dropped from his shoulders, she turned away and her lips moved once more.

Then Androvsky moved slowly in through the doorway of the monastery, crossed the patch of sunlight, lifted his hand and rang the bell at the second door.

"Drive back to Tunis, please."

"Madame!" said the coachman.

"Drive back to Tunis."

"Madame is not going to enter! But Monsieur—"

"Drive back to Tunis!"

Something in the voice that spoke to him startled the coachman. He hesitated a moment, staring at Domini from his seat, then, with a muttered curse, he turned his horses' heads and plied the whip ferociously.

* * * * *

"Love watcheth, and sleeping, slumbereth not. When weary it is not tired. When weary—it—is not—tired."

Domini's lips ceased to move. She could not speak any more. She could not even pray without words.

Yet, in that moment, she did not feel alone.



CHAPTER XXXI

In the garden of Count Anteoni, which has now passed into other hands, a little boy may often be seen playing. He is gay, as children are, and sometimes he is naughty and, as if out of sheer wantonness, he destroys the pyramids of sand erected by the Arab gardeners upon the narrow paths between the hills, or tears off the petals of the geraniums and scatters them to the breezes that whisper among the trees. But when Larbi's flute calls to him he runs to hear. He sits at the feet of that persistent lover, and watches the big fingers fluttering at the holes of the reed, and his small face becomes earnest and dreamy, as if it looked on far-off things, or watched the pale pageant of the mirages rising mysteriously out of the sunlit spaces of the sands to fade again, leaving no trace behind.

Only one other song he loves more than the twittering tune of Larbi.

Sometimes, when twilight is falling over the Sahara, his mother calls him to her, to the white wall where she is sitting beneath a jamelon tree.

"Listen, Boris!" she whispers.

The little boy climbs up on her knee, leans his face against her breast and obeys. An Arab is passing below on the desert track, singing to himself as he goes towards his home in the oasis:

"No one but God and I Knows what is in my heart."

He is singing the song of the freed negroes. When his voice has died away the mother puts the little boy down. It is bed time, and Smain is there to lead him to the white villa, where he will sleep dreamlessly till morning.

But the mother stays alone by the wall till the night falls and the desert is hidden.

"No one but God and I Knows what is in my heart."

She whispers the words to herself. The cool wind of the night blows over the vast spaces of the Sahara and touches her cheek, reminding her of the wind that, at Arba, carried fire towards her as she sat before the tent, reminding her of her glorious days of liberty, of the passion that came to her soul like fire in the desert.

But she does not rebel.

For always, when night falls, she sees the form of a man praying who once fled from prayer in the desert; she sees a wanderer who at last has reached his home.

THE END