The wind grew louder and sand was blown along the cafe floor and about the coffee-cups.
"The love of women is like the rose of the Caid's garden That is full of silver tears--The love of women is like the first day of the spring When the children play at Cora--The love of women is like the Derbouka that has been warmed at the fire And gives out a sweet sound.
Take it in thy hands, O loving man!
And sing to the Derbouka that is the love of women.
Janat! Janat! Janat!"
In the doorway, where the lamp swung from the beam, a man in European dress stood still to listen. The wind wailed behind him and stirred his clothes. His eyes shone in the faint light with a fierceness of emotion in which there was a joy that was almost terrible, but in which there seemed also to be something that was troubled. When the song died away, and only the voices of the wind and the drum spoke to the darkness, he disappeared into the night. The Arabs did not see him.
"Janat! Janat! Janat!"
The night drew on and the storm increased. All the doors of the houses were closely shut. Upon the roofs the guard dogs crouched, shivering and whining, against the earthen parapets. The camels groaned in the fondouks, and the tufted heads of the palms swayed like the waves of the sea. And the Sahara seemed to be lifting up its voice in a summons that was tremendous as a summons to Judgment.
Domini had always known that the desert would summon her. She heard its summons now in the night without fear. The roaring of the tempest was sweet in her ears as the sound of the Derbouka to the loving man of the sands. It accorded with the fire that lit up the cloud of passion in her heart. Its wildness marched in step with a marching wildness in her veins and pulses. For her gipsy blood was astir to-night, and the recklessness of the boy in her seemed to clamour with the storm. The sound of the wind was as the sound of the clashing cymbals of Liberty, calling her to the adventure that love would glorify, to the far-away life that love would make perfect, to the untrodden paths of the sun of which she had dreamed in the shadows, and on which she would set her feet at last with the comrade of her soul.
To-morrow her life would begin, her real life, the life of which men and women dream as the prisoner dreams of freedom. And she was glad, she thanked God, that her past years had been empty of joy, that in her youth she had been robbed of youth's pleasures. She thanked God that she had come to maturity without knowing love. It seemed to her that to love in early life was almost pitiful, was a catastrophe, an experience for which the soul was not ready, and so could not appreciate at its full and wonderful value. She thought of it as of a child being taken away from the world to Paradise without having known the pain of existence in the world, and at that moment she worshipped suffering. Every tear that she had ever shed she loved, every weary hour, every despondent thought, every cruel disappointment. She called around her the congregation of her past sorrows, and she blessed them and bade them depart from her for ever.
As she heard the roaring of the wind she smiled. The Sahara was fulfilling the words of the Diviner. To-morrow she and Androvsky would go out into the storm and the darkness together. The train of camels would be lost in the desolation of the desert. And the people of Beni-Mora would see it vanish, and, perhaps, would pity those who were hidden by the curtains of the palanquin. They would pity her as Suzanne pitied her, openly, with eyes that were tragic. She laughed aloud.
It was late in the night. Midnight had sounded yet she did not go to bed. She feared to sleep, to lose the consciousness of her joy of the glory which had come into her life. She was a miser of the golden hours of this black and howling night. To sleep would be to be robbed.
A splendid avarice in her rebelled against the thought of sleep.
Was Androvsky sleeping? She wondered and longed to know.
To-night she was fully aware for the first time of the inherent fearlessness of her character, which was made perfect at last by her perfect love. Alone, she had always had courage. Even in her most listless hours she had never been a craven. But now she felt the completeness of a nature clothed in armour that rendered it impregnable. It was a strange thing that man should have the power to put the finishing touch to God's work, that religion should stoop to be a handmaid to faith in a human being, but she did not think it strange. Everything in life seemed to her to be in perfect accord because her heart was in perfect accord with another heart.
And she welcomed the storm. She even welcomed something else that came to her now in the storm: the memory of the sand-diviner's tortured face as he gazed down, reading her fate in the sand. For what was an untroubled fate? Surely a life that crept along the hollows and had no impulse to call it to the heights. Knowing the flawless perfection of her armour she had a wild longing to prove it. She wished that there should be assaults upon her love, because she knew she could resist them one and all, and she wished to have the keen joy of resisting them. There is a health of body so keen and vital that it desires combat. The soul sometimes knows a precisely similar health and is filled with a similar desire.
"Put my love to the proof, O God!" was Domini's last prayer that night when the storm was at its wildest. "Put my love to the uttermost proof that he may know it, as he can never know it otherwise."
And she fell asleep at length, peacefully, in the tumult of the night, feeling that God had heard her prayer.
