第99章 CHAPTER XIV(4)

Batouch's voice was calling her. She galloped faster, like one in flight. Her horse's feet padded over sand almost as softly as a camel's. The vast dimness was surely coming to meet her, to take her to itself in the night. But suddenly Batouch rode furiously up beside her, his burnous flying out behind him over his red saddle.

"Madame, we must not go further, we must keep near the oasis."

"Why?"

"It is not safe at night in the desert, and besides--"

His horse plunged and nearly rocketed against hers. She pulled in. His company took away her desire to keep on.

"Besides?"

Leaning over his saddle peak he said, mysteriously:

"Besides, Madame, someone has been following us all the way from Beni-Mora."

"Who?"

"A horseman. I have heard the beat of the hoofs on the hard road. Once I stopped and turned, but I could see nothing, and then I could hear nothing. He, too, had stopped. But when I rode on again soon I heard him once more. Someone found out we were going and has come after us."

She looked back into the violet night without speaking. She heard no sound of a horse, saw nothing but the dim track and the faint, shadowy blackness where the palms began. Then she put her hand into the pocket of her saddle and silently held up a tiny revolver.

"I know, but there might be more than one. I am not afraid, but if anything happens to Madame no one will ever take me as a guide any more."

She smiled for a moment, but the smile died away, and again she looked into the night. She was not afraid physically, but she was conscious of a certain uneasiness. The day had been long and troubled, and had left its mark upon her. Restlessness had driven her forth into the darkness, and behind the restlessness there was a hint of the terror of which she had been aware when she was left alone in the /salle-a- manger/. Was it not that vague terror which, shaking the restlessness, had sent her to the white house by the triple palm tree, had brought her now to the desert? she asked herself, while she listened, and the hidden horseman of whom Batouch had spoken became in her imagination one with the legendary victims of fate; with the Jew by the cross roads, the mariner beating ever about the rock-bound shores of the world, the climber in the witches' Sabbath, the phantom Arab in the sand. Still holding her revolver, she turned her horse and rode slowly towards the distant fires, from which came the barking of the dogs. At some hundreds of yards from them she paused.

"I shall stay here," she said to Batouch. "Where does the moon rise?"

He stretched his arm towards the desert, which sloped gently, almost imperceptibly, towards the east.

"Ride back a little way towards the oasis. The horseman was behind us.

If he is still following you will meet him. Don't go far. Do as I tell you, Batouch."

With obvious reluctance he obeyed her. She saw him pull up his horse at a distance where he had her just in sight. Then she turned so that she could not see him and looked towards the desert and the east. The revolver seemed unnaturally heavy in her hand. She glanced at it for a moment and listened with intensity for the beat of horse's hoofs, and her wakeful imagination created a sound that was non-existent in her ears. With it she heard a gallop that was spectral as the gallop of the black horses which carried Mephistopheles and Faust to the abyss.

It died away almost at once, and she knew it for an imagination.

To-night she was peopling the desert with phantoms. Even the fires of the nomads were as the fires that flicker in an abode of witches, the shadows that passed before them were as goblins that had come up out of the sand to hold revel in the moonlight. Were they, too, waiting for a signal from the sky?

At the thought of the moon she drew up the reins that had been lying loosely on her horse's neck and rode some paces forward and away from the fires, still holding the revolver in her hand. Of what use would it be against the spectres of the Sahara? The Jew would face it without fear. Why not the horseman of Batouch? She dropped it into the pocket of the saddle.

Far away in the east the darkness of the sky was slowly fading into a luminous mystery that rose from the underworld, a mystery that at first was faint and tremulous, pale with a pallor of silver and primrose, but that deepened slowly into a live and ardent gold against which a group of three palm trees detached themselves from the desert like messengers sent forth by it to give a salutation to the moon.

They were jet black against the gold, distinct though very distant.

The night, and the vast plain from which they rose, lent them a significance that was unearthly. Their long, thin stems and drooping, feathery leaves were living and pathetic as the night thoughts of a woman who has suffered, but who turns, with a gesture of longing that will not be denied, to the luminance that dwells at the heart of the world. And those black palms against the gold, that stillness of darkness and light in immensity, banished Domini's faint sense of horror. The spectres faded away. She fixed her eyes on the palms.

Now all the notes of the living things that do not sleep by night, but make music by reedy pools, in underwood, among the blades of grass and along the banks of streams, were audible to her again, filling her mind with the mystery of existence. The glassy note of the frogs was like a falling of something small and pointed upon a sheet of crystal.

The whirs of the insects suggested a ceaselessly active mentality. The faint cries of the birds dropped down like jewels slipping from the trees. And suddenly she felt that she was as nothing in the vastness and the complication of the night. Even the passion that she knew lay, like a dark and silent flood, within her soul, a flood that, once released from its boundaries, had surely the power to rush irresistibly forward to submerge old landmarks and change the face of a world--even that seemed to lose its depth for a moment, to be shallow as the first ripple of a tide upon the sand. And she forgot that the first ripple has all the ocean behind it.