"Boris, don't rely too much on my strength. I am only a woman, and I have to struggle. I have had to struggle more than perhaps you will ever know. You--must not make--make things impossible for me. I am trying--very hard--to--I'm--you must not touch me to-night, Boris."
She drew a little farther away from him. A faint breath of air made the leaves of the palm trees rustle slightly, made the reeds move for an instant by the pool. He laid his hand again on the wall from which he had lifted it. There was a pleading sound in her voice which made him feel as if it were speaking close against his heart.
"I said I would tell you to-night where we are going."
"Tell me now."
"We are going back to Beni-Mora. We are not very far off from Beni-Mora to-night--not very far."
"We are going to Beni-Mora!" he repeated in a dull voice. "We are----"
He sat up on the wall, looking straight into her face.
"Why?" he said. His voice was sharp now, sharp with fear.
"Boris, do you want to be at peace, not with me, but with God? Do you want to get rid of your burden of misery, which increases--I know it-- day by day?"
"How can I?" he said hopelessly.
"Isn't expiation the only way? I think it is."
"Expiation! How--how can--I can never expiate my sin."
"There's no sin that cannot be expiated. God isn't merciless. Come back with me to Beni-Mora. That little church--where you married me-- come back to it with me. You could not confess to the--to Father Beret. I feel as if I knew why. Where you married me you will--you must--make your confession."
"To the priest who--to Father Roubier!"
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 God 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 passing 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 God and I knows what is in my heart.' I hear it now so often, always almost. It seems to gather meaning, it seems to--God 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.