As he said the last word his grating voice dropped to a deep note of earnest, almost solemn, gravity. Then he lifted his hat, touched his horse with his heel, and galloped away into the sun.
Domini watched the three riders till they were only specks on the surface of the desert. Then they became one with it, and were lost in the dreamlike radiance of the morning. But she did not move. She sat with her eyes fixed up on the blue horizon. A great loneliness had entered into her spirit. Till Count Anteoni had gone she did not realise how much she had become accustomed to his friendship, how near their sympathies had been. But directly those tiny, moving specks became one with the desert she knew that a gap had opened in her life.
It might be small, but it seemed dark and deep. For the first time the desert, which she had hitherto regarded as a giver, had taken something from her. And now, as she sat looking at it, while the sun grew stronger and the light more brilliant, while the mountains gradually assumed a harsher aspect, and the details of things, in the dawn so delicately clear, became, as it were, more piercing in their sharpness, she realised a new and terrible aspect of it. That which has the power to bestow has another power. She had seen the great procession of those who had received gifts of the desert's hands.
Would she some day, or in the night when the sky was like a sapphire, see the procession of those from whom the desert had taken away perhaps their dreams, perhaps their hopes, perhaps even all that they passionately loved and had desperately clung to?
And in which of the two processions would she walk?
She got up with a sigh. The garden had become tragic to her for the moment, full of a brooding melancholy. As she turned to leave it she resolved to go to the priest. She had never yet entered his house.
Just then she wanted to speak to someone with whom she could be as a little child, to whom she could liberate some part of her spirit simply, certain of a simple, yet not foolish, reception of it by one to whom she could look up. She desired to be not with the friend so much as with the spiritual director. Something was alive within her, something of distress, almost of apprehension, which needed the soothing hand, not of human love, but of religion.
When she reached the priest's house Beni-Mora was astir with a pleasant bustle of life. The military note pealed through its symphony. Spahis were galloping along the white roads. Tirailleurs went by bearing despatches. Zouaves stood under the palms, staring calmly at the morning, their sunburned hands loosely clasped upon muskets whose butts rested in the sand. But Domini scarcely noticed the brilliant gaiety of the life about her. She was preoccupied, even sad. Yet, as she entered the little garden of the priest, and tapped gently at his door, a sensation of hope sprang up in her heart, born of the sustaining power of her religion.
An Arab boy answered her knock, said that the Father was in and led her at once to a small, plainly-furnished room, with whitewashed walls, and a window opening on to an enclosure at the back, where several large palm trees reared their tufted heads above the smoothly- raked sand. In a moment the priest came in, smiling with pleasure and holding out his hands in welcome.
"Father," she said at once, "I am come to have a little talk with you.
Have you a few moments to give me?"
"Sit down, my child," he said.
He drew forward a straw chair for her and took one opposite.
"You are not in trouble?"
"I don't know why I should be, but----"
She was silent for a moment. Then she said:
"I want to tell you a little about my life."
He looked at her kindly without a word.
His eyes were an invitation for her to speak, and, without further invitation, in as few and simple words as possible, she told him why she had come to Beni-Mora, and something of her parents' tragedy and its effect upon her.
"I wanted to renew my heart, to find myself," she said. "My life has been cold, careless. I never lost my faith, but I almost forgot that I had it. I made little use of it. I let it rust."
"Many do that, but a time comes when they feel that the great weapon with which alone we can fight the sorrows and dangers of the world must be kept bright, or it may fail us in the hour of need."
"Yes."
"And this is an hour of need for you. But, indeed, is there ever an hour that is not?"
"I feel to-day, I----"
She stopped, suddenly conscious of the vagueness of her apprehension.
It made her position difficult, speech hard for her. She felt that she wanted something, yet scarcely knew what, or exactly why she had come.
"I have been saying good-bye to Count Anteoni," she resumed. "He has gone on a desert journey."
"For long?"
"I don't know, but I feel that it will be."
"He comes and goes very suddenly. Often he is here and I do not even know it."
"He is a strange man, but I think he is a good man."
As she spoke about him she began to realise that something in him had roused the desire in her to come to the priest.
"And he sees far," she added.
She looked steadily at the priest, who was waiting quietly to hear more. She was glad he did not trouble her mind just then by trying to help her to go on, to be explicit.
"I came here to find peace," she continued. "And I thought I had found it. I thought so till to-day."
"We only find peace in one place, and only there by our own will according with God's."
"You mean within ourselves."
"Is it not so?"
"Yes. Then I was foolish to travel in search of it."
"I would not say that. Place assists the heart, I think, and the way of life. I thought so once."
"When you wished to be a monk?"
A deep sadness came into his eyes.
"Yes," he said. "And even now I find it very difficult to say, 'It was not thy will, and so it is not mine.' But would you care to tell me if anything has occurred recently to trouble you?"
"Something has occurred, Father."
More excitement came into her face and manner.