Domini drew back and glanced at Smain. She was not accustomed to feeling intrusive, and the sudden sensation rendered her uneasy.
"It is Monsieur the Count," Smain said calmly and quite aloud.
The man in the doorway took off his soft hat, as if the words effected an introduction between Domini and him.
"You were coming to see my little room, Madame?" he said in French.
"If I may show it to you I shall feel honoured."
The timbre of his voice was harsh and grating, yet it was a very interesting, even a seductive, voice, and, Domini thought, peculiarly full of vivid life, though not of energy. His manner at once banished her momentary discomfort. There is a freemasonry between people born in the same social world. By the way in which Count Anteoni took off his hat and spoke she knew at once that all was right.
"Thank you, Monsieur," she answered. "I was told at the gate you gave permission to travellers to visit your garden."
"Certainly."
He spoke a few words in fluent Arabic to Smain, who turned away and disappeared among the trees.
"I hope you will allow me to accompany you through the rest of the garden," he said, turning again to Domini. "It will give me great pleasure."
"It is very kind of you."
The way in which the change of companion had been effected made it seem a pleasant, inevitable courtesy, which neither implied nor demanded anything.
"This is my little retreat," Count Anteoni continued, standing aside from the doorway that Domini might enter.
She drew a long breath when she was within.
The floor was of fine sand, beaten flat and hard, and strewn with Eastern rugs of faint and delicate hues, dim greens and faded rose colours, grey-blues and misty topaz yellows. Round the white walls ran broad divans, also white, covered with prayer rugs from Bagdad, and large cushions, elaborately worked in dull gold and silver thread, with patterns of ibises and flamingoes in flight. In the four angles of the room stood four tiny smoking-tables of rough palm wood, holding hammered ash-trays of bronze, green bronze torches for the lighting of cigarettes, and vases of Chinese dragon china filled with velvety red roses, gardenias and sprigs of orange blossom. Leather footstools, covered with Tunisian thread-work, lay beside them. From the arches of the window-spaces hung old Moorish lamps of copper, fitted with small panes of dull jewelled glass, such as may be seen in venerable church windows. In a round copper brazier, set on one of the window-seats, incense twigs were drowsily burning and giving out thin, dwarf columns of scented smoke. Through the archways and the narrow doorway the dense walls of leafage were visible standing on guard about this airy hermitage, and the hot purple blossoms of the bougainvillea shed a cloud of colour through the bosky dimness.
And still the flute of Larbi showered soft, clear, whimsical music from some hidden place close by.
Domini looked at her host, who was standing by the doorway, leaning one arm against the ivory-white wall.
"This is my first day in Africa," she said simply. "You may imagine what I think of your garden, what I feel in it. I needn't tell you.
Indeed, I am sure the travellers you so kindly let in must often have worried you with their raptures."
"No," he answered, with a still gravity which yet suggested kindness, "for I leave nearly always before the travellers come. That sounds a little rude? But you would not be in Beni-Mora at this season, Madame, if it could include you."
"I have come here for peace," Domini replied simply.
She said it because she felt as if it was already understood by her companion.
Count Anteoni took down his arm from the white wall and pulled a branch of the purple flowers slowly towards him through the doorway.
"There is peace--what is generally called so, at least--in Beni-Mora," he answered rather slowly and meditatively. "That is to say, there is similarity of day with day, night with night. The sun shines untiringly over the desert, and the desert always hints at peace."
He let the flowers go, and they sprang softly back, and hung quivering in the space beyond his thin figure. Then he added:
"Perhaps one should not say more than that."
"No."
Domini sat down for a moment. She looked up at him with her direct eyes and at the shaking flowers. The sound of Larbi's flute was always in her ears.
"But may not one think, feel a little more?" she asked.
"Oh, why not? If one can, if one must? But how? Africa is as fierce and full of meaning as a furnace, you know."
"Yes, I know--already," she replied.
His words expressed what she had already felt here in Beni-Mora, surreptitiously and yet powerfully. He said it, and last night the African hautboy had said it. Peace and a flame. Could they exist together, blended, married?
"Africa seems to me to agree through contradiction," she added, smiling a little, and touching the snowy wall with her right hand.
"But then, this is my first day."
"Mine was when I was a boy of sixteen."
"This garden wasn't here then?"
"No. I had it made. I came here with my mother. She spoilt me. She let me have my whim."
"This garden is your boy's whim?"
"It was. Now it is a man's----"
He seemed to hesitate.
"Paradise," suggested Domini.
"I think I was going to say hiding-place."
There was no bitterness in his odd, ugly voice, yet surely the words implied bitterness. The wounded, the fearful, the disappointed, the condemned hide. Perhaps he remembered this, for he added rather quickly:
"I come here to be foolish, Madame, for I come here to think. This is my special thinking place."
"How strange!" Domini exclaimed impulsively, and leaning forward on the divan.
"Is it?"
"I only mean that already Beni-Mora has seemed to me the ideal place for that."
"For thought?"
"For finding out interior truth."
