第27章 CHAPTER V(8)

"Monsieur the Count paid much money for the dog," murmured Smain. "He is very valuable."

"How long has he been there?"

"For many years. He was there when I was born, and I have been married twice and divorced twice."

Domini turned from the window and looked at Smain with astonishment.

He was smelling his rose like a dreamy child.

"You have been divorced twice?"

"Yes. Now I will show Madame the smoking-room."

They followed another of the innumerable alleys of the garden. This one was very narrow and less densely roofed with trees than those they had already traversed. Tall shrubs bent forward on either side of it, and their small leaves almost meeting, were transformed by the radiant sunbeams into tongues of pale fire, quivering, well nigh transparent.

As she approached them Domini could not resist the fancy that they would burn her. A brown butterfly flitted forward between them and vanished into the golden dream beyond.

"Oh, Smain, how you must love this garden!" she said.

A sort of ecstasy was waking within her. The pure air, the caressing warmth, the enchanted stillness and privacy of this domain touched her soul and body like the hands of a saint with power to bless her.

"I could live here for ever," she added, "without once wishing to go out into the world."

Smain looked drowsily pleased.

"We are coming to the centre of the garden," he said, as they passed over a palm-wood bridge beneath which a stream glided under the red petals of geraniums.

The tongues of flame were left behind. Green darkness closed in upon them and the sand beneath their feet looked blanched. The sense of mystery increased, for the trees were enormous and grew densely here.

Pine needles lay upon the ground, and there was a stirring of sudden wind far up above their heads in the tree-tops.

"This is the part of the garden that Monsieur the Count loves," said Smain. "He comes here every day."

"What is that?" said Domini, suddenly stopping on the pale sand.

A thin and remote sound stole to them down the alley, clear and frail as the note of a night bird.

"It is Larbi playing upon the flute. He is in love. That is why he plays when he ought to be watering the flowers and raking out the sand."

The distant love-song of the flute seemed to Domini the last touch of enchantment making this indeed a wonderland. She could not move, and held up her hands to stay the feet of Smain, who was quite content to wait. Never before had she heard any music that seemed to mean and suggest so much to her as this African tune played by an enamoured gardener. Queer and uncouth as it was, distorted with ornaments and tricked out with abrupt runs, exquisitely unnecessary grace notes, and sudden twitterings prolonged till a strange and frivolous Eternity tripped in to banish Time, it grasped Domini's fancy and laid a spell upon her imagination. For it sounded as naively sincere as the song of a bird, and as if the heart from which it flowed were like the heart of a child, a place of revelation, not of concealment. The sun made men careless here. They opened their windows to it, and one could see into the warm and glowing rooms. Domini looked at the gentle Arab youth beside her, already twice married and twice divorced. She listened to Larbi's unending song of love. And she said to herself, "These people, uncivilised or not, at least live, and I have been dead all my life, dead in life." That was horribly possible. She knew it as she felt the enormously powerful spell of Africa descending upon her, enveloping her quietly but irresistibly. The dream of this garden was quick with a vague and yet fierce stirring of realities. There was a murmuring of many small and distant voices, like the voices of innumerable tiny things following restless activities in a deep forest. As she stood there the last grain of European dust was lifted from Domini's soul. How deeply it had been buried, and for how many years.

"The greatest act of man is the act of renunciation." She had just heard those words. The eyes of the priest had flamed as he spoke them, and she had caught the spark of his enthusiasm. But now another fire seemed lit within her, and she found herself marvelling at such austerity. Was it not a fanatical defiance flung into the face of the sun? She shrank from her own thought, like one startled, and walked on softly in the green darkness.

Larbi's flute became more distant. Again and again it repeated the same queer little melody, changing the ornamentation at the fantasy of the player. She looked for him among the trees but saw no one. He must be in some very secret place. Smain touched her.

"Look!" he said, and his voice was very low.

He parted the branches of some palms with his delicate hands, and Domini, peering between them, saw in a place of deep shadows an isolated square room, whose white walls were almost entirely concealed by masses of purple bougainvillea. It had a flat roof. In three of its sides were large arched window-spaces without windows. In the fourth was a narrow doorway without a door. Immense fig trees and palms and thickets of bamboo towered around it and leaned above it. And it was circled by a narrow riband of finely-raked sand.

"That is the smoking-room of Monsieur the Count," said Smain. "He spends many hours there. Come and I will show the inside to Madame."

They turned to the left and went towards the room. The flute was close to them now. "Larbi must be in there," Domini whispered to Smain, as a person whispers in a church.

"No, he is among the trees beyond."

"But someone is there."

She pointed to the arched window-space nearest to them. A thin spiral of blue-grey smoke curled through it and evaporated into the shadows of the trees. After a moment it was followed gently and deliberately by another.

"It is not Larbi. He would not go in there. It must be----"

He paused. A tall, middle-aged man had come to the doorway of the little room and looked out into the garden with bright eyes.