She went into her little salon and looked at the volumes scattered about there, some books of devotion, travel, books on sport, Rossetti's and Newman's poems, some French novels, and the novels of Jane Austen, of which, oddly, considering her nature, she was very fond. For the first time in her life they struck her as shrivelled, petty chronicles of shrivelled, bloodless, artificial lives. She turned back into her bedroom, took up the little white volume of the /Imitation/, which lay always near her bed, and went out into the verandah. She looked neither to right nor left, but at once descended the staircase and took her way along the arcade.
When she reached the gate of the garden she hesitated before knocking upon it. The sight of the villa, the arches, the white walls and clustering trees she knew so well hurt her so frightfully, so unexpectedly, that she felt frightened and sick, and as if she must go away quickly to some place which she had never seen, and which could call up no reminiscences in her mind.
Perhaps she would have gone into the oasis, or along the path that skirted the river bed, had not Smain softly opened the gate and come out to meet her, holding a great velvety rose in his slim hand.
He gave it to her without a word, smiling languidly with eyes in which the sun seemed caught and turned to glittering darkness, and as she took it and moved it in her fingers, looking at the wine-coloured petals on which lay tiny drops of water gleaming with thin and silvery lights, she remembered her first visit to the garden, and the mysterious enchantment that had floated out to her through the gate from the golden vistas and the dusky shadows of the trees, the feeling of romantic expectation that had stirred within her as she stepped on to the sand and saw before her the winding ways disappearing into dimness between the rills edged by the pink geraniums.
How long ago that seemed, like a remembrance of early childhood in the heart of one who is old.
Now that the gate was open she resolved to go into the garden. She might as well be there as elsewhere. She stepped in, holding the rose in her hand. One of the drops of water slipped from an outer petal and fell upon the sand. She thought of it as a tear. The rose was weeping, but her eyes were dry. She touched the rose with her lips.
To-day the garden was like a stranger to her, but a stranger with whom she had once--long, long ago--been intimate, whom she had trusted, and by whom she had been betrayed. She looked at it and knew that she had thought it beautiful and loved it. From its recesses had come to her troops of dreams. The leaves of its trees had touched her as with tender hands. The waters of its rills had whispered to her of the hidden things that lie in the breast of joy. The golden rays that played through its scented alleys had played, too, through the shadows of her heart, making a warmth and light there that seemed to come from heaven. She knew this as one knows of the apparent humanity that greeted one's own humanity in the friend who is a friend no longer, and she sickened at it as at the thought of remembered intimacy with one proved treacherous. There seemed to her nothing ridiculous in this personification of the garden, as there had formerly seemed to her nothing ridiculous in her thought of the desert as a being; but the fact that she did thus instinctively personify the nature that surrounded her gave to the garden in her eyes an aspect that was hostile and even threatening, as if she faced a love now changed to hate, a cold and inimical watchfulness that knew too much about her, to which she had once told all her happy secrets and murmured all her hopes. She did not hate the garden, but she felt as if she feared it.
The movements of its leaves conveyed to her uneasiness. The hidden places, which once had been to her retreats peopled with tranquil blessings, were now become ambushes in which lay lurking enemies.
Yet she did not leave it, for to-day something seemed to tell her that it was meant that she should suffer, and she bowed in spirit to the decree.
She went on slowly till she reached the /fumoir/. She entered it and sat down.
She had not seen any of the gardeners or heard the note of a flute.
The day was very still. She looked at the narrow doorway and remembered exactly the attitude in which Count Anteoni had stood during their first interview, holding a trailing branch of the bougainvillea in his hand. She saw him as a shadow that the desert had taken. Glancing down at the carpet sand she imagined the figure of the sand-diviner crouching there and recalled his prophecy, and directly she did this she knew that she had believed in it. She had believed that one day she would ride, out into the desert in a storm, and that with her, enclosed in the curtains of a palanquin, there would be a companion. The Diviner had not told her who would be this companion.
Darkness was about him rendering him invisible to the eyes of the seer. But her heart had told her. She had seen the other figure in the palanquin. It was a man. It was Androvsky.
She had believed that she would go out into the desert with Androvsky, with this traveller of whose history, of whose soul, she knew nothing.
Some inherent fatalism within her had told her so. And now----?