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!”