For now she knew a moment of utter despair, in which all things seemed to dissolve into atoms and sink down out of her sight. She stood quivering in blackness. She stood absolutely alone, more absolutely alone than any woman had ever been, than any human being had ever been. She seemed presently, as the blackness faded into something pale, like a ghastly twilight, to see herself--her wraith, as it were --standing in a vast landscape, vast as the desert, companionless, lost, forgotten, out of mind, watching for something that would never come, listening for some voice that was hushed in eternal silence.
That was to be her life, she thought--could she face it? Could she endure it? And everything within her said to her that she could not.
And then, just then, when she felt that she must sink down and give up the battle of life, she seemed to see by her side a shape, a little shape like a child. And it lifted up a hand to her hand.
And she knew that the vast landscape was God's garden, the Garden of Allah, and that no day, no night could ever pass without God walking in it.
Hearing a knock upon the great gate of the garden Smain uncurled himself on his mat within the tent, rose lazily to his feet, and, without a rose, strolled languidly to open to the visitor. Domini stood without. When he saw her he smiled quietly, with no surprise.
"Madame has returned?"
Domini smiled at him, but her lips were trembling, and she said nothing.
Smain observed her with a dawning of curiosity.
"Madame is changed," he said at length. "Madame looks tired. The sun is hot in the desert now. It is better here in the garden."
With an effort she controlled herself.
"Yes, Smain," she answered, "it is better here. But I can not stay here long."
"You are going away?"
"Yes, I am going away."
She saw more quiet questions fluttering on his lips, and added:
"And now I want to walk in the garden alone."
He waved his hand towards the trees.
"It is all for Madame. Monsieur the Count has always said so. But Monsieur?"
"He is in Beni-Mora. He is coming presently to fetch me."
Then she turned away and walked slowly across the great sweep of sand towards the trees and was taken by their darkness. She heard again the liquid bubbling of the hidden waterfall, and was again companioned by the mystery of this desert Paradise, but it no longer whispered to her of peace for her. It murmured only its own personal peace and accentuated her own personal agony and struggle. All that it had been it still was, but all that she had been in it was changed. And she felt the full terror of Nature's equanimity environing the fierce and tortured lives of men.
As she walked towards the deepest recesses of the garden along the winding tracks between the rills she had no sensation of approaching the hidden home of the Geni of the garden. Yet she remembered acutely all her first feelings there. Not one was forgotten. They returned to her like spectres stealing across the sand. They lurked like spectres among the dense masses of the trees. She strove not to see their pale shapes, not to hear their terrible voices. She strove to draw calm once more from this infinite calm of silently-growing things aspiring towards the sun. But with each step she took the torment in her heart increased. At last she came to the deeper darkness and the blanched sand, and saw pine needles strewed about her feet. Then she stood still, instinctively listening for a sound that would complete the magic of the garden and her own despair. She waited for it. She even felt, strangely, that she wanted, that she needed it--the sound of the flute of Larbi playing his amorous tune. But his flute to-day was silent. Had he fallen out of an old love and not yet found a new? or had he, perhaps, gone away? or was he dead? For a long time she stood there, thinking about Larbi. He and his flute and his love were mingled with her life in the desert. And she felt that she could not leave the desert without bidding them farewell.
But the silence lasted and she went on and came to the /fumoir/. She went into it at once and sat down. She was going to wait for Androvsky here.
Her mind was straying curiously to-day. Suddenly she found herself thinking of the fanatical religious performance she had seen with Hadj on the night when she had ridden out to watch the moon rise. She saw in imagination the bowing bodies, the foaming mouths, the glassy eyes of the young priests of the Sahara. She saw the spikes behind their eyeballs, the struggling scorpions descending into their throats, the flaming coals under their arm-pits, the nails driven into their heads.
She heard them growling as they saw the glass, like hungry beasts at the sight of meat. And all this was to them religion. This madness was their conception of worship. A voice seemed to whisper to her: "And your madness?"
It was like the voice that whispered to Androvsky in the cemetery of El-Largani, "Come out with me into that world, that beautiful world which God made for men. Why do you reject it?"
For a moment she saw all religions, all the practices, the renunciations of the religions of the world, as varying forms of madness. She compared the self-denial of the monk with the fetish worship of the savage. And a wild thrill of something that was almost like joy rushed through her, the joy that sometimes comes to the unbelievers when they are about to commit some act which they feel would be contrary to God's will if there were a God. It was a thrill of almost insolent human emancipation. The soul cried out: "I have no master. When I thought I had a master I was mad. Now I am sane."
But it passed almost as it came, like a false thing slinking from the sunlight, and Domini bowed her head in the obscurity of Count Anteoni's thinking-place and returned to her true self. That moment had been like the moment upon the tower when she saw below her the Jewess dancing upon the roof for the soldiers, a black speck settling for an instant upon whiteness, then carried away by a purifying wind.