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CHAPTER II.
On the following morning, Baïla, followed by Mariam, again traversed the garden, under the pretext of erasing the tracks of the unknown, should he have left any. The wind and the night had caused them to disappear from the walks which were covered with fine sand. Returning, however, from the neighborhood of the river, she found the recent mark of a boot impressed on a flower border. The foot-mark was small, straight, and graceful.
Baïla hesitated to efface it. Why? Was the stranger speaking decidedly to her heart? No; it was a woman’s caprice, and among women the odalisks are perhaps the most enigmatical. After having undertaken this expedition for the very purpose of effacing all traces of the Frank, she was now tempted to retain the only one that remained.
This print, which the bostangis, with their large sandals with wooden soles could not have left, and which the foot of the pacha would have over-lapped with a large margin, and which consequently might reveal the adventure of the evening, she was desirous of preserving. Why? Perhaps her imagination, over-excited by her ideas of gratitude, had, at the sight of this elegant impress, given the lie to her eyes, by clothing the stranger with a charm, which, in his first movement of alarm she was unable to recognize. Perhaps, blinded by passion, Baïla was desirous that Djezzar might see this denunciatory mark, so that his jealousy might be alarmed, and he might suffer in his pride and his love as she had done.
The old negress pointed out to her, that in case the unknown should be rash enough to return again, the pacha, his suspicions once excited, would certainly have him seized, and thus both might be compromised.
The Mingrelian then yielded; but she was unwilling, from a new caprice, that Mariam should remove the earth from this place. She contented herself with placing her own delicate foot upon it several times, and with trampling with her imprint in that of the stranger, and this double mark remained for a long time, protected as it was from inspection by the superabundant foliage of a Pontic Azalea.
This shrub grew in great abundance on the slopes of the Caucasus, and Baïla, when a child, had seen them flower in her native country. She conceived an affection for this spot, which spoke to her of her country, and of her second and mysterious lover. Her country she had left without regret; this young Frank, this giaour, he had been to her at first but a surprise, an apparition, a dream, and now, her wounded heart demands an aliment for this double recollection. During a whole month she took her walks in this direction; thither she came to dream of her country and the stranger, especially of the latter.
Did she then at length love him? Who can tell? Who would dare to give the name of love to those deceitful illuminations produced in the brain of a young girl, by a fermentation of ideas, like wills-of-the-wisp on earth; to those phantoms of a moment, with which solitudes are peopled by those who abandon themselves to a life of contemplation.
In Europe, the religious, though living under a very different rule, refer all the passionate tenderness of their soul to God; each of them finds, however, some mode of husbanding a part of it for some holy image of her choice, some concealed relic, which belongs to her alone; she addresses secret prayers to it, she perfumes it with incense which she carries away from the high altar; it is her aside worship. In the East, those other inhabitants of cloisters, the odalisks, have no worship but love, and in the endearments of that love they can prostrate themselves but before one alone; but there, as everywhere else, the idol is concealed in the shadow of the temple; they have their fetishes, their dreams, their fraudulent loves, their loves of the head, if we may so designate them. It is perhaps necessary for human nature thus to give the most decided counterpoise to its thoughts, in order to preserve the equilibrium of the soul, to protest in a low tone against that which we loudly adore, to oppose a shadow to a reality.