The Garden of Allah Part 103

There was fierce protest in his voice.

"It does not matter who is the priest who will receive your confession.

Only make it there--make it in the church at Beni-Mora where you married me."

"That was your purpose! That is where you are taking me! I can't go, I won't! Domini, think what you are doing! You are asking too much--"

"I feel that G.o.d is asking that of you. Don't refuse Him."

"I cannot go--at Beni-Mora where we--where everything will remind us--"

"Ah, don't you think I shall feel it too? Don't you think I shall suffer?"

He felt horribly ashamed when she said that, bowed down with an overwhelming weight of shame.

"But our lives"--he stammered--"but--if I go--afterwards--if I make my confession--afterwards--afterwards?"

"Isn't it enough to think of that one thing? Isn't it better to put everything else, every other thought, away? It seems so clear to me that we should go to Beni-Mora. I feel as if I had been told--as a child is told to do something by its father."

She looked up into the clear sky.

"I am sure I have been told," she added. "I know I have."

There was a long silence between them. Androvsky felt that he did not dare to break it. Something in Domini's face and voice cast out from him the instinct of revolt, of protest. He began to feel exhausted, without power, like a sick man who is being carried by bearers in a litter, and who looks at the landscape through which he is pa.s.sing with listless eyes, and who scarcely has the force to care whither he is being borne.

"Domini," he said at last, and his voice sounded very tired, "if you say I must go to Beni-Mora I will go. I have done you a great wrong and--and--"

"Don't think of me any more," she said. "Think--think as I do--of--of----

"What am I? I have loved you, I shall always love you, but I am as you are, here for a little while, elsewhere for all eternity. You told him--that man in the monastery--that we are shadows set in a world of shadows."

"That was a lie," he interrupted, and the weariness had gone out of his voice. "When I said that I had never loved, I had never loved you."

"Or was it a half-truth? Aren't we, perhaps, shadow now in comparison--comparison to what we shall be? Isn't this world, even this--this desert, this pool with the light on it, this silence of the night around us--isn't all this a shadow in comparison to the world where we are going, you and I? Boris, I think if we are brave now we shall be together in that world. But if we are cowards now, I think, I am sure, that in that world--the real world--we shall be separated for ever. You and I, whatever we may be, whatever we may have done, at least are one thing--we are believers. We don't think this is all. If we did it would be different. But we can't change the truth that is in our souls, and as we can't change it we must live by it, we must act by it.

We can't do anything else. I can't--and you? Don't you feel, don't you know, that you can't?"

"To-night," he said, "I feel that I know nothing--nothing except that I am suffering."

His voice broke on the last words. Tears were shining in his eyes. After a long silence he said:

"Domini, take me where you will. If it is to Beni-Mora I will go.

But--but--afterwards?"

"Afterwards----" she said.

Then she stopped.

The little note of the frog sounded again and again by the still water among the reeds. The moon was higher in the sky. "Don't let us think of afterwards, Boris," she said at length. "That song we have heard together, that song we love--'No one but G.o.d and I knows what is in my heart.' I hear it now so often, always almost. It seems to gather meaning, it seems to--G.o.d knows what is in your heart and mine. He will take care of the--afterwards. Perhaps in our hearts already He has put a secret knowledge of the end."

"Has He--has He put it--that knowledge--into yours?"

"Hush!" she said.

They spoke no more that night.

CHAPTER XXIX

The caravan of Domini and Androvsky was leaving Arba.

Already the tents and the attendants, with the camels and the mules, were winding slowly along the plain through the scrub in the direction of the mountains, and the dark shadow which indicated the oasis of Beni-Mora. Batouch was with them. Domini and Androvsky were going to be alone on this last stage of their desert journey. They had mounted their horses before the great door of the bordj, said goodbye to the Sheikh of Arba, scattered some money among the ragged Arabs gathered to watch them go, and cast one last look behind them.

In that mutual, instinctive look back they were both bidding a silent farewell to the desert, that had sheltered their pa.s.sion, surely taken part in the joy of their love, watched the sorrow and the terror grow in it to the climax at Amara, and was now whispering to them a faint and mysterious farewell.

To Domini the desert had always been as a great and significant personality, a personality that had called her persistently to come to it. Now, as she turned on her horse, she felt as if it were calling her no longer, as if its mission to her were accomplished, as if its voice had sunk into a deep and breathless silence. She wondered if Androvsky felt this too, but she did not ask him. His face was pale and severe.

His eyes stared into the distance. His hands lay on his horse's neck like tired things with no more power to grip and hold. His lips were slightly parted, and she heard the sound of his breath coming and going like the breath of a man who is struggling. This sound warned her not to try his strength or hers.

"Come, Boris," she said, and her voice held none of the pa.s.sionate regret that was in her heart, "we mustn't linger, or it will be night before we reach Beni-Mora."

"Let it be night," he said. "Dark night!"

The horses moved slowly on, descending the hill on which stood the bordj.

"Dark--dark night!" he said again.

She said nothing. They rode into the plain. When they were there he said:

"Domini, do you understand--do you realise?"

"What, Boris?" she asked quietly.

"All that we are leaving to-day?"

"Yes, I understand."

"Are we--are we leaving it for ever?"

"We must not think of that."

"How can we help it? What else can we think of? Can one govern the mind?"

"Surely, if we can govern the heart."

"Sometimes," he said, "sometimes I wonder----"

He looked at her. Something in her face made it impossible for him to go on, to say what he had been going to say. But she understood the unfinished sentence.

"If you can wonder, Boris," she said, "you don't know me, you don't know me at all!"