"Do you feel better?" he asked her.
She nodded.
"I bought it in Naples."
He lifted the box in his strong brown hands, and held it nearer to her.
Nothing in his face betrayed any suspicion that she could be amused in
an ironical sense. It was obvious that he supposed her to be as happily
impressed as he was.
"You hear it better now."
She nodded again. Then:
"Hold it close to my ear," she said, in a whisper, keeping her eyes upon
him.
He obeyed. Once his hand touched her ear, and she felt its warm dryness,
and she sighed.
"Salve Dimora" ceased.
"Another!" she said.
And she said, "Another!" and "Another!" until the box's repertoire was
finished, and then she made him turn on once more, "Come o'er the
Moonlit Sea!"
Her gloves lay on the divan beside her, and she did not draw them on
again. She did not even pick them up till the heat of the sun's rays was
declining, and the musical box had long been silent.
"I must go," she said at last.
She put her hands up to her disordered hair.
"Indeed I must."
She looked at her watch and started up.
"It's horribly late. Where is Ibrahim?"
Ibrahim's smiling face was seen at the window.
"The donkey, Ibrahim! I want the donkey at once!"
"All what you want you must have."
He nodded his head, as if agreeing passively with himself, and looked on
the ground.
"Hamza he ready. Hamza very good donkey-boy."
"That's right. I am coming," she said.
Ibrahim saluted, still smiling, and disappeared. Mrs. Armine walked to
the window and looked out.
It was already the time of sunset, and the unearthly radiance of the
magical hour in this land of atmospheric magic began to fall upon the
little isolated house, upon the great garden of oranges by which it was
encircled. The dry earth of the alleys glowed gently; the narrow trunks
of the trees became delicately mysterious; the leaves and the treasure
they guarded seemed, in their perfect stillness, to be full of secret
promises. Still the birds that dwelled among them were singing to each
other softly the praises of God.
Mrs. Armine looked out, listened to the birds, while the sun went down
in the west she could not see. And now Magrib was over, and the first
time of the Moslem's prayer was come.
She wished she need not go, wished it so keenly, so fiercely, that she
was startled by her own desire almost as if it had been a spectre rising
suddenly to confront her. She longed to remain in this lodge in the
wilderness, to be overtaken by the night of the African stars in the
Villa of the Night of Gold. Now she heard again the far-away voice of
the fellah by the shaduf, warning her surely to go. Or was it not,
perhaps, telling her to stay? It was strange how that old, dead passion,
which had metamorphosed her life, returned to her mind in this land. In
its shackles at first she had struggled. But at last she had abandoned
herself, she had become its prisoner. She had become its slave. Then she
was young. She was able to realize how far more terrible must be the
fate of such a slave who is young no longer. Again the fellah cried to
her from the Nile, and now it seemed to her that his voice was certainly
warning her that she must withdraw herself, while yet there was time,
from the hands of El-Islam--while yet there was time!
She had been so concentrated upon herself and her own fears and desires
that, though part of her had been surely thinking of Baroudi, part of
her had forgotten his existence near her. As a factor in her life she
had been, perhaps, considering him, but not as a man in the room behind
her. The outside world, with its garden of dreaming trees, its gleaming
and dying lights, its voices of birds, and more distant voice from the
Nile, had subtly possessed her, though it had not given her peace. For
when passion, even of no high and ideal kind, begins to stir in a
nature, it rouses not only the bodily powers, but powers more strange
and remote--powers perhaps seldom used, or for long quite disregarded;
faculties connected with beauty that is not of man; with odours, with
lights, and with voices that have no yearning for man, but that man
takes to his inner sanctuary, as his special possession, in those
moments when he is most completely alive.
But now into this outer world came an intruder to break a spell, yet to
heighten for the watcher at the window fascination and terror. As the
fellah's voice died away, and Mrs. Armine moved, with an intention
surely of flight from dangerous and inexorable hands, Hamza appeared at
a short distance from her among the orange-trees. He spread a garment
upon the earth, folded his hands before him, then placed them upon his
thighs, inclined himself, and prayed. And as he made his first
inclination of humble worship in the little room behind her Mrs. Armine
heard a low murmuring, almost like the sound of bees in sultry weather.
She turned, and saw Baroudi praying, on a prayer-rug with a niche woven
in it, which was duly set towards Mecca.
She, the unbeliever, was encompassed by prayer. And something within her
told her that the moment for flight already lay behind her, that she had
let it go by unheeded, that the hands which already had touched her
would not relax their grasp until--what?
She did not answer that question.
But when the fellah cried out once more in the distance, it seemed to
her that she heard a savage triumph in his voice.