The good priest of Amara, strolling by chance at the dinner-hour of the following day towards the camp of the hospitable strangers, was surprised and saddened to find only the sand-hill strewn with debris.
The tents, the camels, the mules, the horses--all were gone. No servants greeted him. No cook was busy. No kind hostess bade him come in and stay to dine. Forlornly he glanced around and made inquiry. An Arab told him that in the morning the camp had been struck and ere noon was far on its way towards the north. The priest had been on horseback to an neighbouring oasis, so had heard nothing of this flitting. He asked its explanation, and was told a hundred lies. The one most often repeated was to the effect that Monsieur, the husband of Madame, was overcome by the heat, and that for this reason the travellers were making their way towards the cooler climate that lay beyond the desert.
As he heard this a sensation of loneliness came to the priest. His usually cheerful countenance was overcast with gloom. For a moment he loathed his fate in the sands and sighed for the fleshpots of civilisation. With his white umbrella spread above his helmet he stood still and gazed towards the north across the vast spaces that were lemon-yellow in the sunset. He fancied that on the horizon he saw faintly a cloud of sand grains whirling, and imagined it stirred up by the strangers' caravan. Then he thought of the rich lands of the Tell, of the olive groves of Tunis, of the blue Mediterranean, of France, his country which he had not seen for many years. He sighed profoundly.
"Happy people," he thought to himself. "Rich, free, able to do as they like, to go where they will! Why was I born to live in the sand and to be alone?"
He was moved by envy. But then he remembered his intercourse with Androvsky on the previous day.
"After all," he thought more comfortably, "he did not look a happy man!" And he took himself to task for his sin of envy, and strolled to the inn by the fountain where he paid his pension.
The same day, in the house of the marabout of Beni-Hassan, Count Anteoni received a letter brought from Amara by an Arab. It was as follows:
"AMARA.
"MY DEAR FRIEND: Good-bye. We are just leaving. I had expected to be here longer, but we must go. We are returning to the north and shall not penetrate farther into the desert. I shall think of you, and of your journey on among the people of your faith. You said to me, when we sat in the tent door, that now you could pray in the desert. Pray in the desert for us. And one thing more. If you never return to Beni-Mora, and your garden is to pass into other hands, don't let it go into the hands of a stranger. I could not bear that. Let it come to me. At any price you name. Forgive me for writing thus. Perhaps you will return, or perhaps, even if you do not, you will keep your garden.--Your Friend, DOMINI."
In a postscript was an address which would always find her.
Count Anteoni read this letter two or three times carefully, with a grave face.
"Why did she not put Domini Androvsky?" he said to himself. He locked the letter in a drawer. All that night he was haunted by thoughts of the garden. Again and again it seemed to him that he stood with Domini beside the white wall and saw, in the burning distance of the desert, at the call of the Mueddin, the Arabs bowing themselves in prayer, and the man--the man to whom now she had bound herself by the most holy tie--fleeing from prayer as if in horror.
"But it was written," he murmured to himself. "It was written in the sand and in fire: 'The fate of every man have we bound about his neck.'"
In the dawn when, turning towards the rising sun, he prayed, he remembered Domini and her words: "Pray in the desert for us." And in the Garden of Allah he prayed to Allah for her, and for Androvsky.
Meanwhile the camp had been struck, and the first stage of the journey northward, the journey back, had been accomplished. Domini had given the order of departure, but she had first spoken with Androvsky.
After his narrative, and her words that followed it, he did not come into the tent. She did not ask him to. She did not see him in the moonlight beyond the tent, or when the moonlight waned before the coming of the dawn. She was upon her knees, her face hidden in her hands, striving as surely few human beings have ever had to strive in the difficult paths of life. At first she had felt almost calm. When she had spoken to Androvsky there had even been a strange sensation that was not unlike triumph in her heart. In this triumph she had felt disembodied, as if she were a spirit standing there, removed from earthly suffering, but able to contemplate, to understand, to pity it, removed from earthly sin, but able to commit an action that might help to purge it.
When she said to Androvsky, "Now you can pray," she had passed into a region where self had no existence. Her whole soul was intent upon this man to whom she had given all the treasures of her heart and whom she knew to be writhing as souls writhe in Purgatory. He had spoken at last, he had laid bare his misery, his crime, he had laid bare the agony of one who had insulted God, but who repented his insult, who had wandered far away from God, but who could never be happy in his wandering, who could never be at peace even in a mighty human love unless that love was consecrated by God's contentment with it. As she stood there Domini had had an instant of absolutely clear sight into the depths of another's heart, another's nature. She had seen the monk in Androvsky, not slain by his act of rejection, but alive, sorrow- stricken, quivering, scourged. And she had been able to tell this monk --as God seemed to be telling her, making of her his messenger--that now at last he might pray to a God who again would hear him, as He had heard him in the garden of El-Largani, in his cell, in the chapel, in the fields. She had been able to do this. Then she had turned away, gone into the tent and fallen upon her knees.