第180章 CHAPTER XXVII(3)

The cry of this voice! At that moment, in the vast silence of the desert, she seemed to hear it. And it was the cry of her own voice. It was the cry of the voice of her own soul. Startled, she lifted her face from her hands and listened. She did not look out at the tent door, but she saw the moonlight falling upon the matting that was spread upon the sand within the tent, and she repeated, "Love watcheth--Love watcheth--Love watcheth," moving her lips like the child who reads with difficulty. Then came the thought, "I am watching."

The passion of personal anger had died away as suddenly as it had come. She felt numb and yet excited. She leaned forward and once more laid her face in her hands.

"Love watcheth--I am watching." Then a moment--then--"God is watching me."

She whispered the words over again and again. And the numbness began to pass away. And the anger was dead. Always she had felt as if she had been led to Africa for some definite end. Did not the freed negroes, far out in the Desert, sing their song of the deeper mysteries--"No one but God and I knows what is in my heart"? And had not she heard it again and again, and each time with a sense of awe?

She had always thought that the words were wonderful and beautiful.

But she had thought that perhaps they were not true. She had said to Androvsky that he knew what was in her heart. And now, in this night, in its intense stillness, close to the man who for so long had not dared to pray but who now was praying, again she thought that they were not quite true. It seemed to her that she did not know what was in her heart, and that she was waiting there for God to come and tell her. Would He come? She waited. Patience entered into her.

The silence was long. Night was travelling, turning her thoughts to a distant world. The moon waned, and a faint breath of wind that was almost cold stole over the sands, among the graves in the cemetery, to the man and the woman who were keeping vigil upon their knees. The wind died away almost ere it had risen, and the rigid silence that precedes the dawn held the desert in its grasp. And God came to Domini in the silence, Allah through Allah's garden that was shrouded still in the shadows of night. Once, as she journeyed through the roaring of the storm, she had listened for the voice of the desert. And as the desert took her its voice had spoken to her in a sudden and magical silence, in a falling of the wind. Now, in a more magical silence, the voice of God spoke to her. And the voice of the desert and of God were as one. As she knelt she heard God telling her what was in her heart.

It was a strange and passionate revelation. She trembled as she heard.

And sometimes she was inclined to say, "It is not so." And sometimes she was afraid, afraid of what this--all this that was in her heart-- would lead her to do. For God told her of a strength which she had not known her heart possessed, which--so it seemed to her--she did not wish it to possess, of a strength from which something within her shrank, against which something within her protested. But God would not be denied. He told her she had this strength. He told her that she must use it. He told her that she would use it. And she began to understand something of the mystery of the purposes of God in relation to herself, and to understand, with it, how closely companioned even those who strive after effacement of self are by selfishness--how closely companioned she had been on her African pilgrimage. Everything that had happened in Africa she had quietly taken to herself, as a gift made to her for herself.