The Garden of Allah Part 56

"Let me send Batouch back to Beni-Mora, Madame."

"Why?" she asked, in a low voice that was full of hesitation.

"You do not need him now."

He was looking at her with a defiant, a challenging expression that was his answer to her expression of vague distrust and apprehension.

"How do you know that?"

He did not answer the question, but only said:

"It is better here without him. May I send him away, Madame?"

She bent her head. Androvsky rode off and she saw him speaking to Batouch, who shook his head as if in contradiction.

"Batouch!" she called out. "You can ride back to Beni-Mora. We shall follow directly."

The poet cantered forward.

"Madame, it is not safe."

The sound of his voice made Domini suddenly know what she had not been sure of before--that she wished to be alone with Androvsky.

"Go, Batouch!" she said. "I tell you to go."

Batouch turned his horse without a word, and disappeared into the darkness of the distant palms.

When they were alone together Domini and Androvsky sat silent on their horses for some minutes. Their faces were turned towards the desert, which was now luminous beneath the moon. Its loneliness was overpowering in the night, and made speech at first an impossibility, and even thought difficult. At last Androvsky said:

"Madame, why did you look at me like that just now, as if you--as if you hesitated to remain alone with me?"

Suddenly she resolved to tell him of her oppression of the night. She felt as if to do so would relieve her of something that was like a pain at her heart.

"Has it never occurred to you that we are strangers to each other?" she said. "That we know nothing of each other's lives? What do you know of me or I of you?"

He shifted in his saddle and moved the reins from one hand to the other, but said nothing.

"Would it seem strange to you if I did hesitate--if even now--"

"Yes," he interrupted violently, "it would seem strange to me."

"Why?"

"You would rely on an Arab and not rely upon me," he said with intense bitterness.

"I did not say so."

"Yet at first you wished to keep Batouch."

"Yes."

"Then----"

"Batouch is my attendant."

"And I? Perhaps I am nothing but a man whom you distrust; whom--whom others tell you to think ill of."

"I judge for myself."

"But if others speak ill of me?"

"It would not influence me----for long."

She added the last words after a pause. She wished to be strictly truthful, and to-night she was not sure that the words of the priest had made no impression upon her.

"For long!" he repeated. Then he said abruptly, "The priest hates me."

"No."

"And Count Anteoni?"

"You interested Count Anteoni greatly."

"Interested him!"

His voice sounded intensely suspicious in the night.

"Don't you wish to interest anyone? It seems to me that to be uninteresting is to live eternally alone in a sunless desert."

"I wish--I should like to think that I--" He stopped, then said, with a sort of ashamed determination: "Could I ever interest you, Madame?"

"Yes," she answered quietly.

"But you would rather be protected by an Arab than by me. The priest has--"

"To-night I do not seem to be myself," she said, interrupting him.

"Perhaps there is some physical reason. I got up very early, and--don't you ever feel oppressed, suspicious, doubtful of life, people, yourself, everything, without apparent reason? Don't you know what it is to have nightmare without sleeping?"

"I! But you are different."

"To-night I have felt--I do feel as if there were tragedy near me, perhaps coming towards me," she said simply, "and I am oppressed, I am almost afraid."

When she had said it she felt happier, as if a burden she carried were suddenly lighter. As he did not speak she glanced at him. The moon rays lit up his face. It looked ghastly, drawn and old, so changed that she scarcely recognised it and felt, for a moment, as if she were with a stranger. She looked away quickly, wondering if what she had seen was merely some strange effect of the moon, or whether Androvsky was really altered for a moment by the action of some terrible grief, one of those sudden sorrows that rush upon a man from the hidden depths of his nature and tear his soul, till his whole being is lacerated and he feels as if his soul were flesh and were streaming with the blood from mortal wounds. The silence between them was long. In it she presently heard a reiterated noise that sounded like struggle and pain made audible. It was Androvsky's breathing. In the soft and exquisite air of the desert he was gasping like a man shut up in a cellar. She looked again towards him, startled. As she did so he turned his horse sideways and rode away a few paces. Then he pulled up his horse. He was now merely a black shape upon the moonlight, motionless and inaudible. She could not take her eyes from this shape. Its blackness suggested to her the blackness of a gulf. Her memory still heard that sound of deep-drawn breathing or gasping, heard it and quivered beneath it as a tender-hearted person quivers seeing a helpless creature being ill-used. She hesitated for a moment, and then, carried away by an irresistible impulse to try to soothe this extremity of pain which she was unable to understand, she rode up to Androvsky. When she reached him she did not know what she had meant to say or do. She felt suddenly impotent and intrusive, and even horribly shy. But before she had time for speech or action he turned to her and said, lifting up his hands with the reins in them and then dropping them down heavily upon his horse's neck:

"Madame, I wanted to tell you that to-morrow I----" He stopped.

"Yes?" she said.

He turned his head away from her till she could not see his face.