“If I believed that.”
“Boris!”
Suddenly burning tears rushed from her eyes.
“Don’t ever say a thing like that to me again!” she said with passion.
She pointed to the grave close to them.
“If you were there,” she said, “and I was living, and you had died before—before you had told me—I believe—God forgive me, but I do believe that if, when you died, I were taken to heaven I should find my hell there.”
She looked through her tears at the words: “Priez pour lui.”
“To pray for the dead,” she whispered, as if to herself. “To pray for my dead—I could not do it—I could not. Boris, if you love me you must trust me, you must give me your sorrow.”
The night drew on. Androvsky had gone to the priest. Domini was alone, sitting before the tent waiting for his return. She had told Batouch and Ouardi that she wanted nothing more, that no one was to come to the tent again that night. The young moon was rising over the city, but its light as yet was faint. It fell upon the cupolas of the Bureau Arabe, the towers of the mosque and the white sands, whose whiteness it seemed to emphasise, making them pale as the face of one terror-stricken. The city wall cast a deep shadow over the moat of sand in which, wrapped in filthy rags, lay nomads sleeping. Upon the sand-hills the camps were alive with movement. Fires blazed and smoke ascended before the tents that made patches of blackness upon the waste. Round the fires were seated groups of men devouring cous-cous and the red soup beloved of the nomad. Behind them circled the dogs with quivering nostrils. Squadrons of camels lay crouched in the sand, resting after their journeys. And everywhere, from the city and from the waste, rose distant sounds of music, thin, aerial flutings like voices of the night winds, acrid cries from the pipes, and the far-off rolling of the African drums that are the foundation of every desert symphony.
Although she was now accustomed to the music of Africa, Domini could never hear it without feeling the barbarity of the land from which it rose, the wildness of the people who made and who loved it. Always it suggested to her an infinite remoteness, as if it were music sounding at the end of the world, full of half-defined meanings, melancholy yet fierce passion, longings that, momentarily satisfied, continually renewed themselves, griefs that were hidden behind thin veils like the women of the East, but that peered out with expressive eyes, hinting their story and desiring assuagement. And tonight the meaning of the music seemed deeper than it had been before. She thought of it as an outside echo of the voices murmuring in her mind and heart, and the voices murmuring in the mind and heart of Androvsky, broken voices some of them, but some strong, fierce, tense and alive with meaning. And as she sat there alone she thought this unity of music drew her closer to the desert than she had ever been before, and drew Androvsky with her, despite his great reserve. In the heart of the desert he would surely let her see at last fully into his heart. When he came back in the night from the priest he would speak. She was waiting for that.