And again there was a sort of sternness in his voice, as if he were insisting on something, were bent on conquering some reluctance, or some voice contradicting.
"I know that you are right," he added.
She did not speak, but--why she did not know--her thought went to the wooden crucifix fastened in the canvas of the tent close by, and for a moment she felt a faint creeping sadness in her. But he pressed her hand more closely, and she was conscious only of these two warmths--- of his hand above her hand and of the desert beneath it. Her whole life seemed set in a glory of fire, in a heat that was life-giving, that dominated her and evoked at the same time all of power that was in her, causing her dormant fires, physical and spiritual, to blaze up as if they were sheltered and fanned. The thought of the crucifix faded. It was as if the fire destroyed it and it became ashes--then nothing. She fixed her eyes on the distant fire of the Arabs, which was beginning to die down slowly as the night grew deeper.
"I have doubted many things," he said. "I've been afraid."
"You!" she said.
"Yes. You know it."
"How can I? Haven't I forgotten everything--since that day in the garden?"
He drew up her hand and put it against his heart.
"I'm jealous of the desert even," he whispered. "I won't let you touch it any more tonight."
He looked into her eyes and saw that she was looking at the distant fire, steadily, with an intense eagerness.
"Why do you do that?" he said.
"To-night I like to look at fire," she answered.
"Tell me why."
"It is as if I looked at you, at all that there is in you that you have never said, never been able to say to me, all that you never can say to me but that I know all the same."
"But," he said, "that fire is----"
He did not finish the sentence, but put up his hand and turned her face till she was looking, not at the fire, but at him.
"It is not like me," he said. "Men made it, and--it's a fire that can sink into ashes."
An expression of sudden exaltation shone in her eyes.
"And God made you," she said. "And put into you the spark that is eternal."
And now again she thought, she dared, she loved to think of the crucifix and of the moment when he would see it in the tent.
"And God made you love me," she said. "What is it?"
Androvsky had moved suddenly, as if he were going to get up from the warm ground.
"Did you--?"
"No," he said in a low voice. "Go on, Domini. Speak to me."
He sat still.
A sudden longing came to her to know if to-night he were feeling as she was the sacredness of their relation to each other. Never had they spoken intimately of religion or of the mysteries that lie beyond and around human life. Once or twice, when she had been about to open her heart to him, to let him understand her deep sense of the things unseen, something had checked her, something in him. It was as if he had divined her intention and had subtly turned her from it, without speech, merely by the force of his inward determination that she should not break through his reserve. But to-night, with his hand on hers and the starry darkness above them, with the waste stretching around them, and the cool air that was like the breath of liberty upon their faces, she was unconscious of any secret, combative force in him. It was impossible to her to think there could have been any combat, however inward, however subtle, between them. Surely if it were ever permitted to two natures to be in perfect accord theirs were in perfect accord to-night.
"I never felt the presence of God in His world so keenly as I feel it to-night," she went on, drawing a little closer to him. "Even in the church to-day He seemed farther away than tonight. But somehow--one has these thoughts without knowing why--I have always believed that the farther I went into the desert the nearer I should come to God."
Androvsky moved again. The clasp of his hand on hers loosened, but he did not take his hand away.
"Why should--what should make you think that?" he asked slowly.
"Don't you know what the Arabs call the desert?"
"No. What do they call it?"
"The Garden of Allah."
"The Garden of Allah!" he repeated.
There was a sound like fear in his voice. Even her great joy did not prevent her from noticing it, and she remembered, with a thrill of pain, where and under what circumstances she had first heard the Arab's name for the desert.
Could it be that this man she loved was secretly afraid of something in the desert, some influence, some--? Her thought stopped short, like a thing confused.
"Don't you think it a very beautiful name?" she asked, with an almost fierce longing to be reassured, to be made to know that he, like her, loved the thought that God was specially near to those who travelled in this land of solitude.
"Is it beautiful?"
"To me it is. It makes me feel as if in the desert I were specially watched over and protected, even as if I were specially loved there."
Suddenly Androvsky put his arm round her and strained her to him.
"By me! By me!" he said. "Think of me to-night, only of me, as I think only of you."
He spoke as if he were jealous even of her thought of God, as if he did not understand that it was the very intensity of her love for him that made her, even in the midst of the passion of the body, connect their love of each other with God's love of them. In her heart this overpowering human love which, in the garden, when first she realised it fully, had seemed to leave no room in her for love of God, now in the moment when it was close to absolute satisfaction seemed almost to be one with her love of God. Perhaps no man could understand how, in a good woman, the two streams of the human love which implies the intense desire of the flesh, and the mystical love which is absolutely purged of that desire, can flow the one into the other and mingle their waters. She tried to think that, and then she ceased to try.