As the voice of the Diviner fainted away on the wind, and the vision of his wounded face and piercing eyes was lost in the whirling sand grains, Androvsky stretched out his hand and drew together the heavy curtains of the palanquin. The world was shut out. They were alone for the first time as man and wife; moving deliberately on this beast they could not see, but whose slow and monotonous gait swung them gently to and fro, out from the last traces of civilisation into the life of the sands. With each soft step the camel took they went a little farther from Beni-Mora, came a little nearer to that liberty of which Domini sometimes dreamed, to the smiling eyes and the lifted spheres of fire.
She shut her eyes now. She did not want to see her husband or to touch his hand. She did not want to speak. She only wanted to feel in the uttermost depths of her spirit this movement, steady and persistent, towards the goal of her earthly desires, to realise absolutely the marvellous truth that after years of lovelessness, and a dreaminess more benumbing than acute misery, happiness more intense than any she had been able to conceive of in her moments of greatest yearning was being poured into her heart, that she was being taken to the place where she would be with the one human being whose presence blotted out even the memory of the false world and gave to her the true. And whereas in the dead years she had sometimes been afraid of feeling too much the emptiness and the desolation of her life, she was now afraid of feeling too little its fulness and its splendour, was afraid of some day looking back to this superb moment of her earthly fate, and being conscious that she had not grasped its meaning till it was gone, that she had done that most terrible of all things--realised that she had been happy to the limits of her capacity for happiness only when her happiness was numbered with the past.
But could that ever be? Was Time, such Time as this, not Eternity?
Could such earthly things as this intense joy ever have been and no longer be? It seemed to her that it could not be so. She felt like one who held Eternity's hand, and went out with that great guide into the endlessness of supreme perfection. For her, just then, the Creator's scheme was rounded to a flawless circle. All things fell into order, stars and men, the silent growing things, the seas, the mountains and the plains, fell into order like a vast choir to obey the command of the canticle: Benedicite, omnia opera!"
"Bless ye the Lord!" The roaring of the wind about the palanquin became the dominant voice of this choir in Domini's ears.
"Bless ye the Lord!" It was obedient, not as the slave, but as the free will is obedient, as her heart, which joined its voice with this wind of the desert was obedient, because it gloriously chose with all its powers, passions, aspirations to be so. The real obedience is only love fulfilling its last desire, and this great song was the fulfilling of the last desire of all created things. Domini knew that she did not realise the joy of this moment of her life now when she felt no longer that she was a woman, but only that she was a living praise winging upward to God.
A warm, strong hand clasped hers. She opened her eyes. In the dim twilight of the palanquin she saw the darkness of Androvsky's tall figure sitting in the crouched attitude rendered necessary by the peculiar seat, and swaying slightly to the movement of the camel. The light was so obscure that she could not see his eyes or clearly discern his features, but she felt that he was gazing at her shadowy figure, that his mind was passionately at work. Had he, too, been silently praising God for his happiness, and was he now wishing the body to join in the soul's delight?
She left her hand in his passively. The sense of her womanhood, lost for a moment in the ecstasy of worship, had returned to her, but with a new and tremendous meaning which seemed to change her nature.
Androvsky forcibly pressed her hand with his, let it go, then pressed it again, repeating the action with a regularity that seemed suggested by some guidance. She imagined him pressing her hand each time his heart pulsed. She did not want to return the pressure. As she felt his hand thus closing and unclosing over hers, she was conscious that she, who in their intercourse had played a dominant part, who had even deliberately brought about that intercourse by her action on the tower, now longed to be passive and, forgetting her own power and the strength and force of her nature, to lose herself in the greater strength and force of this man to whom she had given herself. Never before had she wished to be anything but strong. Nor did she desire weakness now, but only that his nature should rise above hers with eagle's wings, that when she looked up she should see him, never when she looked down. She thought that to see him below her would kill her, and she opened her lips to say so. But something in the windy darkness kept her silent. The heavy curtains of the palanquin shook perpetually, and the tall wooden rods on which they were slung creaked, making a small, incessant noise like a complaining, which joined itself with the more distant but louder noise made by the leaves of the thousands of palm trees dashed furiously together. From behind came the groaning of one of the camels, borne on the gusts of the wind, and faint sounds of the calling voices of the Arabs who accompanied them. It was not a time to speak.
