The caravan of Domini and Androvsky was leaving Arba.
Already the tents and the attendants, with the camels and the mules, were winding slowly along the plain through the scrub in the direction of the mountains, and the dark shadow which indicated the oasis of Beni-Mora. Batouch was with them. Domini and Androvsky were going to be alone on this last stage of their desert journey. They had mounted their horses before the great door of the bordj, said goodbye to the Sheikh of Arba, scattered some money among the ragged Arabs gathered to watch them go, and cast one last look behind them.
In that mutual, instinctive look back they were both bidding a silent farewell to the desert, that had sheltered their passion, surely taken part in the joy of their love, watched the sorrow and the terror grow in it to the climax at Amara, and was now whispering to them a faint and mysterious farewell.
To Domini the desert had always been as a great and significant personality, a personality that had called her persistently to come to it. Now, as she turned on her horse, she felt as if it were calling her no longer, as if its mission to her were accomplished, as if its voice had sunk into a deep and breathless silence. She wondered if Androvsky felt this too, but she did not ask him. His face was pale and severe. His eyes stared into the distance. His hands lay on his horse's neck like tired things with no more power to grip and hold.
His lips were slightly parted, and she heard the sound of his breath coming and going like the breath of a man who is struggling. This sound warned her not to try his strength or hers.
"Come, Boris," she said, and her voice held none of the passionate regret that was in her heart, "we mustn't linger, or it will be night before we reach Beni-Mora."
"Let it be night," he said. "Dark night!"
The horses moved slowly on, descending the hill on which stood the bordj.
"Dark--dark night!" he said again.
She said nothing. They rode into the plain. When they were there he said:
"Domini, do you understand--do you realise?"
"What, Boris?" she asked quietly.
"All that we are leaving to-day?"
"Yes, I understand."
"Are we--are we leaving it for ever?"
"We must not think of that."
"How can we help it? What else can we think of? Can one govern the mind?"
"Surely, if we can govern the heart."
"Sometimes," he said, "sometimes I wonder----"
He looked at her. Something in her face made it impossible for him to go on, to say what he had been going to say. But she understood the unfinished sentence.
"If you can wonder, Boris," she said, "you don't know me, you don't know me at all!"
"Domini," he said, "I don't wonder. But sometimes I understand your strength, and sometimes it seems to me scarcely human, scarcely the strength of a woman."
She lifted her whip and pointed to the dark shadow far away.
"I can just see the tower," she said. "Can't you?"
"I will not look," he said. "I cannot. If you can, you are stronger than I. When I remember that it was on that tower you first spoke to me--oh, Domini, if we could only go back! It is in our power. We have only to draw a rein and--and--"
"I look at the tower," she said, "as once I looked at the desert. It calls us, the shadow of the palm trees calls us, as once the desert did."
"But the voice--what a different voice! Can you listen to it?"
"I have been listening to it ever since we left Amara. Yes, it is a different voice, but we must obey it as we obeyed the voice of the desert. Don't you feel that?"
"If I do it is because you tell me to feel it; you tell me that I must feel it."
His words seemed to hurt her. An expression of pain came into her face.
"Boris," she said, "don't make me regret too terribly that I ever came into your life. When you speak like that I feel almost as if you were putting me in the place of--of--I feel as if you were depending upon me for everything that you are doing, as if you were letting your own will fall asleep. The desert brings dreams. I know that. But we, you and I, we must not dream any more."
"A dream, you call it--the life we have lived together, our desert life?"
"Boris, I only mean that we must live strongly now, act strongly now, that we must be brave. I have always felt that there was strength in you."
"Strength!" he said bitterly.
"Yes. Otherwise I could never have loved you. Don't ever prove to me that I was utterly wrong. I can bear a great deal. But that--I don't feel as if I could bear that."
After a moment he answered:
"I will try to give you nothing more to bear for me."
And he lifted his eyes and fixed them upon the tower with a sort of stern intentness, as a man looks at something cruel, terrible.
She saw him do this.
"Let us ride quicker," she said. "To-night we must be in Beni-Mora."
He said nothing, but he touched his horse with his heel. His eyes were always fixed upon the tower, as if they feared to look at the desert any more. She understood that when he had said "I will try to give you nothing more to bear for me," he had not spoken idly. He had waked up from the egoism of his despair. He had been able to see more clearly into her heart, to feel more rightly what she was feeling than he had before. As she watched him watching the tower, she had a sensation that a bond, a new bond between them, was chaining them together in a new way. Was it not a bond that would be strong and lasting, that the future, whatever it held, would not be able to break? Ties, sacred ties, that had bound them together might, must, be snapped asunder.
And the end was not yet. She saw, as she gazed at the darkness of the palms of Beni-Mora, a greater darkness approaching, deeper than any darkness of palms, than any darkness of night. But now she saw also a ray of light in the gloom, the light of the dawning strength, the dawning unselfishness in Androvsky. And she resolved to fix her eyes upon it as he fixed his eyes upon the tower.
