His voice was peculiarly harsh at that moment. It grated like an instrument on a rough surface. Domini knew that secretly he was standing up for the Arab faith, that her last words had seemed to strike against the religion of the people whom he loved with an odd, concealed passion whose fire she began to feel at moments as she grew to know him better.
It was plain from their manner to each other that their former slight acquaintance had moved towards something like a pleasant friendship.
Domini looked as if she were no longer a wonder-stricken sight-seer in this marvellous garden of the sun, but as if she had become familiar with it. Yet her wonder was not gone. It was only different. There was less sheer amazement, more affection in it. As she had said, she had not become accustomed to the magic of Africa. Its strangeness, its contrasts still startled and moved her. But she began to feel as if she belonged to Beni-Mora, as if Beni-Mora would perhaps miss her a little if she went away.
Ten days had passed since the ride to Sidi-Zerzour—days rather like a dream to Domini.
What she had sought in coming to Beni-Mora she was surely finding. Her act was bringing forth its fruit. She had put a gulf, in which rolled the sea, between the land of the old life and the land in which at least the new life was to begin. The completeness of the severance had acted upon her like a blow that does not stun, but wakens. The days went like a dream, but in the dream there was the stir of birth. Her lassitude was permanently gone. There had been no returning after the first hours of excitement. The frost that had numbed her senses had utterly melted away. Who could be frost-bound in this land of fire? She had longed for peace and she was surely finding it, but it was a peace without stagnation. Hope dwelt in it, and expectancy, vague but persistent. As to forgetfulness, sometimes she woke from the dream and was almost dazed, almost ashamed to think how much she was forgetting, and how quickly. Her European life and friends—some of them intimate and close—were like a far-off cloud on the horizon, flying still farther before a steady wind that set from her to it. Soon it would disappear, would be as if it had never been. Now and then, with a sort of fierce obstinacy, she tried to stay the flight she had desired, and desired still. She said to herself, “I will remember. It’s contemptible to forget like this. It’s weak to be able to.” Then she looked at the mountains or the desert, at two Arabs playing the ladies’ game under the shadow of a café wall, or at a girl in dusty orange filling a goatskin pitcher at a well beneath a palm tree, and she succumbed to the lulling influence, smiling as they smile who hear the gentle ripple of the waters of Lethe.
She heard them perhaps most clearly when she wandered in Count Anteoni’s garden. He had made her free of it in their first interview. She had ventured to take him at his word, knowing that if he repented she would divine it. He had made her feel that he had not repented. Sometimes she did not see him as she threaded the sandy alleys between the little rills, hearing the distant song of Larbi’s amorous flute, or sat in the dense shade of the trees watching through a window-space of quivering golden leaves the passing of the caravans along the desert tracks. Sometimes a little wreath of ascending smoke, curling above the purple petals of bougainvilleas, or the red cloud of oleanders, told her of his presence, in some retired thinking-place. Oftener he joined her, with an easy politeness that did not conceal his oddity, but clothed it in a pleasant garment, and they talked for a while or stayed for a while in an agreeable silence that each felt to be sympathetic.
Domini thought of him as a new species of man—a hermit of the world. He knew the world and did not hate it. His satire was rarely quite ungentle. He did not strike her as a disappointed man who fled to solitude in bitterness of spirit, but rather as an imaginative man with an unusual feeling for romance, and perhaps a desire for freedom that the normal civilised life restrained too much. He loved thought as many love conversation, silence as some love music. Now and then he said a sad or bitter thing. Sometimes she seemed to be near to something stern. Sometimes she felt as if there were a secret link which connected him with the perfume-seller in his little darkened chamber, with the legions who prayed about the tomb of Sidi-Zerzour. But these moments were rare. As a rule he was whimsical and kind, with the kindness of a good-hearted man who was human even in his detachment from ordinary humanity. His humour was a salt with plenty of savour. His imagination was of a sort which interested and even charmed her.
She felt, too, that she interested him and that he was a man not readily interested in ordinary human beings. He had seen too many and judged too shrewdly and too swiftly to be easily held for very long. She had no ambition to hold him, and had never in her life consciously striven to attract or retain any man, but she was woman enough to find his obvious pleasure in her society agreeable. She thought that her genuine adoration of the garden he had made, of the land in which it was set, had not a little to do with the happy nature of their intercourse. For she felt certain that beneath the light satire of his manner, his often smiling airs of detachment and quiet independence, there was something that could seek almost with passion, that could cling with resolution, that could even love with persistence. And she fancied that he sought in the desert, that he clung to its mystery, that he loved it and the garden he had created in it. Once she had laughingly called him a desert spirit. He had smiled as if with contentment.
They knew little of each other, yet they had become friends in the garden which he never left.
One day she said to him: