Domini’s lips ceased to move. She could not speak any more. She could not even pray without words.
Yet, in that moment, she did not feel alone.
CHAPTER XXXI
In the garden of Count Anteoni, which has now passed into other hands, a little boy may often be seen playing. He is gay, as children are, and sometimes he is naughty and, as if out of sheer wantonness, he destroys the pyramids of sand erected by the Arab gardeners upon the narrow paths between the hills, or tears off the petals of the geraniums and scatters them to the breezes that whisper among the trees. But when Larbi’s flute calls to him he runs to hear. He sits at the feet of that persistent lover, and watches the big fingers fluttering at the holes of the reed, and his small face becomes earnest and dreamy, as if it looked on far-off things, or watched the pale pageant of the mirages rising mysteriously out of the sunlit spaces of the sands to fade again, leaving no trace behind.
Only one other song he loves more than the twittering tune of Larbi.
Sometimes, when twilight is falling over the Sahara, his mother calls him to her, to the white wall where she is sitting beneath a jamelon tree.
“Listen, Boris!” she whispers.
The little boy climbs up on her knee, leans his face against her breast and obeys. An Arab is passing below on the desert track, singing to himself as he goes towards his home in the oasis:
“No one but God and I
Knows what is in my heart.”
He is singing the song of the freed negroes. When his voice has died away the mother puts the little boy down. It is bed time, and Smain is there to lead him to the white villa, where he will sleep dreamlessly till morning.