Count Anteoni looked at her rather swiftly and searchingly. His eyes were not large, but they were bright, and held none of the languor so often seen in the eyes of his countrymen. His face was expressive through its mobility rather than through its contours. The features were small and refined, not noble, but unmistakably aristocratic. The nose was sensitive, with wide nostrils. A long and straight moustache, turning slightly grey, did not hide the mouth, which had unusually pale lips. The ears were set very flat against the head, and were finely shaped. The chin was pointed. The general look of the whole face was tense, critical, conscious, but in the defiant rather than in the timid sense. Such an expression belongs to men who would always be aware of the thoughts and feelings of others concerning them, but who would throw those thoughts and feelings off as decisively and energetically as a dog shakes the waterdrops from its coat on emerging from a swim.
"And sending it forth, like Ishmael, to shift for itself in the desert," he said.
The odd remark sounded like neither statement nor question, merely like the sudden exclamation of a mind at work.
"Will you allow me to take you through the rest of the garden, Madame?" he added in a more formal voice.
"Thank you," said Domini, who had already got up, moved by the examining look cast at her.
There was nothing in it to resent, and she had not resented it, but it had recalled her to the consciousness that they were utter strangers to each other.
As they came out on the pale riband of sand which circled the little room Domini said:
"How wild and extraordinary that tune is!"
"Larbi's. I suppose it is, but no African music seems strange to me. I was born on my father's estate, near Tunis. He was a Sicilian; but came to North Africa each winter. I have always heard the tomtoms and the pipes, and I know nearly all the desert songs of the nomads."
"This is a love-song, isn't it?"
"Yes. Larbi is always in love, they tell me. Each new dancer catches him in her net. Happy Larbi!"
"Because he can love so easily?"
"Or unlove so easily. Look at him, Madame."
At a little distance, under a big banana tree, and half hidden by clumps of scarlet geraniums, Domini saw a huge and very ugly Arab, with an almost black skin, squatting on his heels, with a long yellow and red flute between his thick lips. His eyes were bent down, and he did not see them, but went on busily playing, drawing from his flute coquettish phrases with his big and bony fingers.
"And I pay him so much a week all the year round for doing that," the Count said.
His grating voice sounded kind and amused. They walked on, and Larbi's tune died gradually away.
"Somehow I can't be angry with the follies and vices of the Arabs," the Count continued. "I love them as they are; idle, absurdly amorous, quick to shed blood, gay as children, whimsical as--well, Madame, were I talking to a man I might dare to say pretty women."
"Why not?"
"I will, then. I glory in their ingrained contempt of civilisation.
But I like them to say their prayers five times in the day as it is commanded, and no Arab who touches alcohol in defiance of the Prophet's law sets foot in my garden."
There was a touch of harshness in his voice as he said the last words, the sound of the autocrat. Somehow Domini liked it. This man had convictions, and strong ones. That was certain. There was something oddly unconventional in him which something in her responded to. He was perfectly polite, and yet, she was quite sure, absolutely careless of opinion. Certainly he was very much a man.
"It is pleasant, too," he resumed, after a slight pause, "to be surrounded by absolutely thoughtless people with thoughtful faces and mysterious eyes--wells without truth at the bottom of them."
She laughed.
"No one must think here but you!"
"I prefer to keep all the folly to myself. Is not that a grand cocoanut?"
He pointed to a tree so tall that it seemed soaring to heaven.
"Yes, indeed. Like the one that presides over the purple dog."
"You have seen my fetish?"
"Smain showed him to me, with reverence."
"Oh, he is king here. The Arabs declare that on moonlight nights they have heard him joining in the chorus of the Kabyle dogs."
"You speak almost as if you believed it."
"Well, I believe more here than I believe anywhere else. That is partly why I come here."
"I can understand that--I mean believing much here."
"What! Already you feel the spell of Beni-Mora, the desert spell! Yes, there is enchantment here--and so I never stay too long."
"For fear of what?"
Count Anteoni was walking easily beside her. He walked from the hips, like many Sicilians, swaying very slightly, as if he liked to be aware how supple his body still was. As Domini spoke he stopped. They were now at a place where four paths joined, and could see four vistas of green and gold, of magical sunlight and shadow.
"I scarcely know; of being carried who knows where--in mind or heart.
Oh, there is danger in Beni-Mora, Madame, there is danger. This startling air is full of influences, of desert spirits."
He looked at her in a way she could not understand--but it made her think of the perfume-seller in his little dark room, and of the sudden sensation she had had that mystery coils, like a black serpent, in the shining heart of the East.
"And now, Madame, which path shall we take? This one leads to my drawing-room, that on the right to the Moorish bath."
"And that?"
"That one goes straight down to the wall that overlooks the Sahara."
"Please let us take it."
"The desert spirits are calling to you? But you are wise. What makes this garden remarkable is not its arrangement, the number and variety of its trees, but the fact that it lies flush with the Sahara--like a man's thoughts of truth with Truth, perhaps."
He turned up the tail of the sentence and his harsh voice gave a little grating crack.
"I don't believe they are so different from one another as the garden and the desert."
She looked at him directly.
"It would be too ironical."
"But nothing is," the Count said.