The priest nodded without speaking.
“Would you believe, Father,” the man continued, “that Mademoiselle and her husband are going to start for Arba from the church door in all this storm! Batouch is getting the palanquin on to the camel. How they will ever—”
“Hush!” said the priest, holding up a warning finger.
This idle chatter displeased him in the church, but he had another reason for wishing to stop the conversation. It renewed his dread to hear of the projected journey, and made him see, as in a shadowy vision, Domini Enfilden’s figure disappearing into the windy desolation of the desert protected by the living mystery he hated. Yes, at this moment, he no longer denied it to himself. There was something in Androvsky that he actually hated with his whole soul, hated even in his church, at the very threshold of the altar where stood the tabernacle containing the sacred Host. As he thoroughly realised this for a moment he was shocked at himself, recoiled mentally from his own feeling. But then something within him seemed to rise up and say, “Perhaps it is because you are near to the Host that you hate this man. Perhaps you are right to hate him when he draws nigh to the body of Christ.”
Nevertheless when, some minutes later, he stood within the altar rails and saw the face of Domini, he was conscious of another thought, that came through his mind, dark with doubt, like a ray of gold: “Can I be right in hating what this good woman—this woman whose confession I have received, whose heart I know—can I be right in hating what she loves, in fearing what she trusts, in secretly condemning what she openly enthrones?” And almost in despite of himself he felt reassured for an instant, even happy in the thought of what he was about to do.
Domini’s face at all times suggested strength. The mental and emotional power of her were forcibly expressed, too, through her tall and athletic body, which was full of easy grace, but full, too, of well-knit firmness. To-day she looked not unlike a splendid Amazon who could have been a splendid nun had she entered into religion. As she stood there by Androvsky, simply dressed for the wild journey that was before her, the slight hint in her personality of a Spartan youth, that stamped her with a very definite originality, was blended with, even transfigured by, a womanliness so intense as to be almost fierce, a womanliness that had the fervour, the glowing vigour of a glory that had suddenly become fully aware of itself, and of all the deeds that it could not only conceive, but do. She was triumph embodied in the flesh, not the triumph that is a school-bully, but that spreads wings, conscious at last that the human being has kinship with the angels, and need not, should not, wait for death to seek bravely their comradeship. She was love triumphant, woman utterly fearless because instinctively aware that she was fulflling her divine mission.
As he gazed at her the priest had a strange thought—of how Christ’s face must have looked when he said, “Lazarus, come forth!”
Androvsky stood by her, but the priest did not look at him.
The wind roared round the church, the narrow windows rattled, and the clouds of sand driven against them made a pattering as of fingers tapping frantically upon the glass. The buff-coloured curtains trembled, and the dusty pink ribands tied round the ropes of the chandeliers shook incessantly to and fro, as if striving to escape and to join the multitudes of torn and disfigured things that were swept through space by the breath of the storm. Beyond the windows, vaguely seen at moments through the clouds of sand, the outlines of the palm leaves wavered, descended, rose, darted from side to side, like hands of the demented.
Suzanne, who was one of the witnesses, trembled, and moved her full lips nervously. She disapproved utterly of her mistress’ wedding, and still more of a honeymoon in the desert. For herself she did not care, very shortly she was going to marry Monsieur Helmuth, the important person in livery who accompanied the hotel omnibus to the station, and meanwhile she was to remain at Beni-Mora under the chaperonage of Madame Armande, the proprietor of the hotel. But it shocked her that a mistress of hers, and a member of the English aristocracy, should be married in a costume suitable for a camel ride, and should start off to go to le Bon Dieu alone knew where, shut up in a palanquin like any black woman covered with lumps of coral and bracelets like handcuffs.