“Who knows, Mam’zelle? This village is dull, that is true, but it is odd. One does not find oneself in such places every day.”
Domini could not help laughing at these Delphic utterances, but she went downstairs thoughtfully. She knew Suzanne’s practical spirit. Till now the maid had never shown any capacity of imagination. Beni-Mora was certainly beginning to mould her nature into a slightly different shape. And Domini seemed to see an Eastern potter at work, squatting in the sun and with long and delicate fingers changing the outline of the statuette of a woman, modifying a curve here, an angle there, till the clay began to show another woman, but with, as it were, the shadow of the former one lurking behind the new personality.
The stranger was not at dinner. His table was laid and Domini sat expecting each moment to hear the shuffling tread of his heavy boots on the wooden floor. When he did not come she thought she was glad. After dinner she spoke for a moment to the priest and then went upstairs to the verandah to take coffee. She found Batouch there. He had renounced his determined air, and his café-au-lait countenance and huge body expressed enduring pathos, as of an injured, patient creature laid out for the trampling of Domini’s cruel feet.
“Well?” she said, sitting down by the basket table.
“Well, Madame?”
He sighed and looked on the ground, lifted one white-socked foot, removed its yellow slipper, shook out a tiny stone from the slipper and put it on again, slowly, gracefully and very sadly. Then he pulled the white sock up with both hands and glanced at Domini out of the corners of his eyes.
“What’s the matter?”
“Madame does not care to see the dances of Beni-Mora, to hear the music, to listen to the story-teller, to enter the café of El Hadj where Achmed sings to the keef smokers, or to witness the beautiful religious ecstasies of the dervishes from Oumach. Therefore I come to bid Madame respectfully goodnight and to take my departure.”
He threw his burnous over his left shoulder with a sudden gesture of despair that was full of exaggeration. Domini smiled.
“You’ve been very good to-day,” she said.