Night had fallen over the desert, a clear purple night, starry but without a moon. Around the Bordj, and before a Cafe Maure built of brown earth and palm-wood, opposite to it, the Arabs who were halting to sleep at Arba on their journeys to and from Beni-Mora were huddled, sipping coffee, playing dominoes by the faint light of an oil lamp, smoking cigarettes and long pipes of keef. Within the court of the Bordj the mules were feeding tranquilly in rows. The camels roamed the plain among the tamarisk bushes, watched over by shrouded shadowy guardians sleepless as they were. The mountains, the palms of Beni-Mora, were lost in the darkness that lay over the desert.

On the low hill, at some distance beyond the white tent of Domini and Androvsky, the obscurity was lit up fiercely by the blaze of a huge fire of brushwood, the flames of which towered up towards the stars, flickering this way and that as the breeze took them, and casting a wild illumination upon the wild faces of the rejoicing desert men who were gathered about it, telling stories of the wastes, singing songs that were melancholy and remote to Western ears, even though they hymned past victories over the infidels, or passionate ecstasies of love in the golden regions of the sun. The steam from bowls of cous-cous and stews of mutton and vegetables curled up to join the thin smoke that made a light curtain about this fantasia, and from time to time, with a shrill cry of exultation, a half-naked form, all gleaming eyes and teeth and polished bronze-hued limbs, rushed out of the blackness beyond the fire, leaped through the tongues of flame and vanished like a spectre into the embrace of the night.

All the members of the caravan, presided over by Batouch in glory, were celebrating the wedding night of their master and mistress.

Domini and Androvsky had already visited them by their bonfire, had received their compliments, watched the sword dance and the dance of the clubs, touched with their lips, or pretended to touch, the stem of a keef, listened to a marriage song warbled by Ali to the accompaniment of a flute and little drums, and applauded Ouardi’s agility in leaping through the flames. Then, with many good-nights, pressures of the hand, and auguries for the morrow, they had gone away into the cool darkness, silently towards their tent.

They walked slowly, a little apart from each other. Domini looked up at the stars and saw among them the star of Liberty. Androvsky looked at her and saw all the stars in her face. When they reached the tent door they stopped on the warm earth. A lamp was lit within, casting a soft light on the simple furniture and on the whiteness of the two beds, above one of which Domini imagined, though from without she could not see, the wooden crucifix Androvsky had once worn in his breast.

“Shall we stay here a little?” Domini said in a low voice. “Out here?” There was a long pause. Then Androvsky answered:

“Yes. Let us feel it all—all. Let us feel it to the full.”

He caught hold of her hand with a sort of tender roughness and twined his fingers between hers, pressing his palm against hers.

“Don’t let us miss anything to-night,” he said. “All my life is to-night. I’ve had no life yet. To-morrow—who knows whether we shall be dead to-morrow? Who knows? But we’re alive to-night, flesh and blood, heart and soul. And there’s nothing here, there can be nothing here to take our life from us, the life of our love to-night. For we’re out in the desert, we’re right away from anyone, everything. We’re in the great freedom. Aren’t we, Domini? Aren’t we?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

He took her other hand in the same way. He was facing her, and he held his hands against his heart with hers in them, then pressed her hands against her heart, then drew them back again to his.

“Then let us realise it. Let us forget our prison. Let us forget everything, everything that we ever knew before Beni-Mora, Domini. It’s dead, absolutely dead, unless we make it live by thinking. And that’s mad, crazy. Thought’s the great madness. Domini, have you forgotten everything before we knew each other?”

“Yes,” she said. “Now—but only now. You’ve made me forget it all.”

There was a deep breathing under her voice. He held up her hands to his shoulders and looked closely into her eyes, as if he were trying to send all himself into her through those doors of the soul opened to seeing him. And now, in this moment, she felt that her fierce desire was realised, that he was rising above her on eagle’s wings. And as on the night before the wedding she had blessed all the sorrows of her life, now she blessed silently all the long silence of Androvsky, all his strange reticence, his uncouthness, his avoidance of her in the beginning of their acquaintance. That which had made her pain by being, now made her joy by having been and being no more. The hidden man was rushing forth to her at last in his love. She seemed to hear in the night the crash of a great obstacle, and the voice of the flood of waters that had broken it down at length and were escaping into liberty. His silence of the past now made his speech intensely beautiful and wonderful to her. She wanted to hear the waters more intensely, more intensely.

“Speak to me,” she said. “You’ve spoken so little. Do you know how little? Tell me all you are. Till now I’ve only felt all you are. And that’s so much, but not enough for a woman—not enough. I’ve taken you, but now—give me all I’ve taken. Give—keep on giving and giving. From to-night to receive will be my life. Long ago I’ve given all I had to you. Give to me, give me everything. You know I’ve given all.”

“All?” he said, and there was a throb in his deep voice, as if some intense feeling rose from the depths of him and shook it.

“Yes, all,” she whispered. “Already—and long ago—that day in the garden. When I—when I put my hands against your forehead—do you remember? I gave you all, for ever.”

And as she spoke she bent down her face with a sort of proud submission and put her forehead against his heart.

The purity in her voice and in her quiet, simple action dazzled him like a flame shining suddenly in his eyes out of blackness. And he, too, in that moment saw far up above him the beating of an eagle’s wings. To each one the other seemed to be on high, and as both looked up that was their true marriage.

“I felt it,” he said, touching her hair with his lips. “I felt it in your hands. When you touched me that day it was as if you were giving me the world and the stars. It frightened me to receive so much. I felt as if I had no place to put my gift in.”

“Did your heart seem so small?” she said.

“You make everything I have and am seem small—and yet great. What does it mean?”

“That you are great, as I am, because we love. No one is small who loves. No one is poor, no one is bad, who loves. Love burns up evil. It’s the angel that destroys.”

Her words seemed to send through his whole body a quivering joy. He took her face between his hands and lifted it from his heart.

“Is that true? Is that true?” he said. “I’ve—I’ve tried to think that. If you know how I’ve tried.”

“And don’t you know it is true?”

“I don’t feel as if I knew anything that you do not tell me to-night. I don’t feel as if I have, or am, anything but what you give me, make me to-night. Can you understand that? Can you understand what you are to me? That you are everything, that I have nothing else, that I have never had anything else in all these years that I have lived and that I have forgotten? Can you understand it? You said just now ‘Speak to me, tell me all you are.’ That’s what I am, all I am, a man you have made a man. You, Domini—you have made me a man, you have created me.”

She was silent. The intensity with which he spoke, the intensity of his eyes while he was speaking, made her hear those rushing waters as if she were being swept away by them.

“And you?” he said. “You?”

“I?”

“This afternoon in the desert, when we were in the sand looking at Beni-Mora, you began to tell me something and then you stopped. And you said, ‘I can’t tell you. There’s too much light.’ Now the sun has gone.”

“Yes. But—but I want to listen to you. I want——”

She stopped. In the distance, by the great fire where the Arabs were assembled, there rose a sound of music which arrested her attention. Ali was singing, holding in his hand a brand from the fire like a torch. She had heard him sing before, and had loved the timbre of his voice, but only now did she realise when she had first heard him and who he was. It was he who, hidden from her, had sung the song of the freed negroes of Touggourt in the gardens of Count Anteoni that day when she had been angry with Androvsky and had afterwards been reconciled with him. And she knew now it was he, because, once more hidden from her—for against the curtain of darkness she only saw the flame from the torch he held and moved rhythmically to the burden of his song—he was singing it again. Androvsky, when she ceased to speak, suddenly put his arms round her, as if he were afraid of her escaping from him in her silence, and they stood thus at the tent door listening:

The chorus of hidden men by the fire rose in a low murmur that was like the whisper of the desert in the night. Then the contralto voice of Ali came to Domini and Androvsky again, but very faintly, from the distance where the flaming torch was moving:

When the voice died away for a moment Domini whispered the refrain. Then she said:

“But is it true? Can it be true for us to-night?”

Androvsky did not reply.

“I don’t think it is true,” she added. “You know—don’t you?”

The voice of Ali rose again, and his torch flickered on the soft wind of the night. Its movement was slow and eerie. It seemed like his voice made visible, a voice of flame in the blackness of the world. They watched it. Presently she said once more:

“You know what is in my heart—don’t you?”

“Do I?” he said. “All?”

“All. My heart is full of one thing—quite full.”

“Then I know.”

“And,” she hesitated, then added, “and yours?”

“Mine too.”

“I know all that is in it then?”

She still spoke questioningly. He did not reply, but held her more closely, with a grasp that was feverish in its intensity.

“Do you remember,” she went on, “in the garden what you said about that song?”

“No.”

“You have forgotten?”

“I told you,” he said, “I mean to forget everything.”

“Everything before we came to Beni-Mora?”

“And more. Everything before you put your hands against my forehead, Domini. Your touch blotted out the past.”

“Even the past at Beni-Mora?”

“Yes, even that. There are many things I did and left undone, many things I said and never said that—I have forgotten—I have forgotten for ever.”

There was a sternness in his voice now, a fiery intention.

“I understand,” she said. “I have forgotten them too, but not some things.”

“Which?”

“Not that night when you took me out of the dancing-house, not our ride to Sidi-Zerzour, not—there are things I shall remember. When I am dying, after I am dead, I shall remember them.”

The song faded away. The torch was still, then fell downwards and became one with the fire. Then Androvsky drew Domini down beside him on to the warm earth before the tent door, and held her hand in his against the earth.

“Feel it,” he said. “It’s our home, it’s our liberty. Does it feel alive to you?”

“Yes.”

“As if it had pulses, like the pulses in our hearts, and knew what we know?”

“Yes. Mother Earth—I never understood what that meant till to-night.”

“We are beginning to understand together. Who can understand anything alone?”

He kept her hand always in his pressed against the desert as against a heart. They both thought of it as a heart that was full of love and protection for them, of understanding of them. Going back to their words before the song of Ali, he said:

“Love burns up evil, then love can never be evil.”

“Not the act of loving.”

“Or what it leads to,” he said.

And again there was a sort of sternness in his voice, as if he were insisting on something, were bent on conquering some reluctance, or some voice contradicting.

“I know that you are right,” he added.

She did not speak, but—why she did not know—her thought went to the wooden crucifix fastened in the canvas of the tent close by, and for a moment she felt a faint creeping sadness in her. But he pressed her hand more closely, and she was conscious only of these two warmths—-of his hand above her hand and of the desert beneath it. Her whole life seemed set in a glory of fire, in a heat that was life-giving, that dominated her and evoked at the same time all of power that was in her, causing her dormant fires, physical and spiritual, to blaze up as if they were sheltered and fanned. The thought of the crucifix faded. It was as if the fire destroyed it and it became ashes—then nothing. She fixed her eyes on the distant fire of the Arabs, which was beginning to die down slowly as the night grew deeper.

“I have doubted many things,” he said. “I’ve been afraid.”

“You!” she said.

“Yes. You know it.”

“How can I? Haven’t I forgotten everything—since that day in the garden?”

He drew up her hand and put it against his heart.

“I’m jealous of the desert even,” he whispered. “I won’t let you touch it any more tonight.”

He looked into her eyes and saw that she was looking at the distant fire, steadily, with an intense eagerness.

“Why do you do that?” he said.

“To-night I like to look at fire,” she answered.

“Tell me why.”

“It is as if I looked at you, at all that there is in you that you have never said, never been able to say to me, all that you never can say to me but that I know all the same.”

“But,” he said, “that fire is——”

He did not finish the sentence, but put up his hand and turned her face till she was looking, not at the fire, but at him.

“It is not like me,” he said. “Men made it, and—it’s a fire that can sink into ashes.”

An expression of sudden exaltation shone in her eyes.

“And God made you,” she said. “And put into you the spark that is eternal.”

And now again she thought, she dared, she loved to think of the crucifix and of the moment when he would see it in the tent.

“And God made you love me,” she said. “What is it?”

Androvsky had moved suddenly, as if he were going to get up from the warm ground.

“Did you—?”

“No,” he said in a low voice. “Go on, Domini. Speak to me.”

He sat still.

A sudden longing came to her to know if to-night he were feeling as she was the sacredness of their relation to each other. Never had they spoken intimately of religion or of the mysteries that lie beyond and around human life. Once or twice, when she had been about to open her heart to him, to let him understand her deep sense of the things unseen, something had checked her, something in him. It was as if he had divined her intention and had subtly turned her from it, without speech, merely by the force of his inward determination that she should not break through his reserve. But to-night, with his hand on hers and the starry darkness above them, with the waste stretching around them, and the cool air that was like the breath of liberty upon their faces, she was unconscious of any secret, combative force in him. It was impossible to her to think there could have been any combat, however inward, however subtle, between them. Surely if it were ever permitted to two natures to be in perfect accord theirs were in perfect accord to-night.

“I never felt the presence of God in His world so keenly as I feel it to-night,” she went on, drawing a little closer to him. “Even in the church to-day He seemed farther away than tonight. But somehow—one has these thoughts without knowing why—I have always believed that the farther I went into the desert the nearer I should come to God.”

Androvsky moved again. The clasp of his hand on hers loosened, but he did not take his hand away.

“Why should—what should make you think that?” he asked slowly.

“Don’t you know what the Arabs call the desert?”

“No. What do they call it?”

“The Garden of Allah.”

“The Garden of Allah!” he repeated.

There was a sound like fear in his voice. Even her great joy did not prevent her from noticing it, and she remembered, with a thrill of pain, where and under what circumstances she had first heard the Arab’s name for the desert.

Could it be that this man she loved was secretly afraid of something in the desert, some influence, some—? Her thought stopped short, like a thing confused.

“Don’t you think it a very beautiful name?” she asked, with an almost fierce longing to be reassured, to be made to know that he, like her, loved the thought that God was specially near to those who travelled in this land of solitude.

“Is it beautiful?”

“To me it is. It makes me feel as if in the desert I were specially watched over and protected, even as if I were specially loved there.”

Suddenly Androvsky put his arm round her and strained her to him.

“By me! By me!” he said. “Think of me to-night, only of me, as I think only of you.”

He spoke as if he were jealous even of her thought of God, as if he did not understand that it was the very intensity of her love for him that made her, even in the midst of the passion of the body, connect their love of each other with God’s love of them. In her heart this overpowering human love which, in the garden, when first she realised it fully, had seemed to leave no room in her for love of God, now in the moment when it was close to absolute satisfaction seemed almost to be one with her love of God. Perhaps no man could understand how, in a good woman, the two streams of the human love which implies the intense desire of the flesh, and the mystical love which is absolutely purged of that desire, can flow the one into the other and mingle their waters. She tried to think that, and then she ceased to try. Everything was forgotten as his arms held her fast in the night, everything except this great force of human love which was like iron, and yet soft about her, which was giving and wanting, which was concentrated upon her to the exclusion of all else, plunging the universe in darkness and setting her in light.

“There is nothing for me to-night but you,” he said, crushing her in his arms. “The desert is your garden. To me it has always been your garden, only that, put here for you, and for me because you love me—but for me only because of that.”

The Arabs’ fire was rapidly dying down.

“When it goes out, when it goes out!” Androvsky whispered it her ear.

His breath stirred the thick tresses of her hair.

“Let us watch it!” he whispered.

She pressed his hand but did not reply. She could not speak any more. At last the something wild and lawless, the something that was more than passionate, that was hot and even savage in her nature, had risen up in its full force to face a similar force in him, which insistently called it and which it answered without shame.

“It is dying,” Androvsky said. “It is dying. Look how small the circle of the flame is, how the darkness is creeping up about it! Domini—do you see?”

She pressed his hand again.

“Do you long for the darkness?” he asked. “Do you, Domini? The desert is sending it. The desert is sending it for you, and for me because you love me.”

A log in the fire, charred by the flames, broke in two. Part of it fell down into the heart of the fire, which sent up a long tongue of red gold flame.

“That is like us,” he said. “Like us together in the darkness.”

She felt his body trembling, as if the vehemence of the spirit confined within it shook it. In the night the breeze slightly increased, making the flame of the lamp behind them in the tent flicker. And the breeze was like a message, brought to them from the desert by some envoy in the darkness, telling them not to be afraid of their wonderful gift of freedom with each other, but to take it open-handed, open-hearted, with the great courage of joy.

“Domini, did you feel that gust of the wind? It carried away a cloud of sparks from the fire and brought them a little way towards us. Did you see? Fire wandering on the wind through the night calling to the fire that is in us. Wasn’t it beautiful? Everything is beautiful to-night. There were never such stars before.”

She looked up at them. Often she had watched the stars, and known the vague longings, the almost terrible aspirations they wake in their watchers. But to her also they looked different to-night, nearer to the earth, she thought, brighter, more living than ever before, like strange tenderness made visible, peopling the night with an unconquerable sympathy. The vast firmament was surely intent upon their happiness. Again the breeze came to them across the waste, cool and breathing of the dryness of the sands. Not far away a jackal laughed. After a pause it was answered by another jackal at a distance. The voices of these desert beasts brought home to Domini with an intimacy not felt by her before the exquisite remoteness of their situation, and the shrill, discordant noise, rising and falling with a sort of melancholy and sneering mirth, mingled with bitterness, was like a delicate music in her ears.

“Hark!” Androvsky whispered.

The first jackal laughed once more, was answered again. A third beast, evidently much farther off, lifted up a faint voice like a dismal echo. Then there was silence.

“You loved that, Domini. It was like the calling of freedom to you—and to me. We’ve found freedom; we’ve found it. Let us feel it. Let us take hold of it. It is the only thing, the only thing. But you can’t know that as I do, Domini.”

Again she was conscious that his intensity surpassed hers, and the consciousness, instead of saddening or vexing, made her thrill with joy.

“I am maddened by this freedom,” he said; “maddened by it, Domini. I can’t help—I can’t—”

He laid his lips upon hers in a desperate caress that almost suffocated her. Then he took his lips away from her lips and kissed her throat, holding her head back against his shoulder. She shut her eyes. He was indeed teaching her to forget. Even the memory of the day in the garden when she heard the church bell chime and the sound of Larbi’s flute went from her. She remembered nothing any more. The past was lost or laid in sleep by the spell of sensation. Her nature galloped like an Arab horse across the sands towards the sun, towards the fire that sheds warmth afar but that devours all that draws near to it. At that moment she connected Androvsky with the tremendous fires eternally blazing in the sun. She had a desire that he should hurt her in the passionate intensity of his love for her. Her nature, which till now had been ever ready to spring into hostility at an accidental touch, which had shrunk instinctively from physical contact with other human beings, melted, was utterly transformed. She felt that she was now the opposite of all that she had been—more woman than any other woman who had ever lived. What had been an almost cold strength in her went to increase the completeness of this yielding to one stronger than herself. What had seemed boyish and almost hard in her died away utterly under the embrace of this fierce manhood.

“Domini,” he spoke, whispering while he kissed her, “Domini, the fire’s gone out. It’s dark.”

He lifted her a little in his arms, still kissing her.

“Domini, it’s dark, it’s dark.”

He lifted her more. She stood up, with his arms about her, looking towards where the fire had been. She put her hands against his face and softly pressed it back from hers, but with a touch that was a caress. He yielded to her at once.

“Look!” he said. “Do you love the darkness? Tell me—tell me that you love it.”

She let her hand glide over his cheek in answer.

“Look at it. Love it. All the desert is in it, and our love in the desert. Let us stay in the desert, let us stay in it for ever—for ever. It is your garden—yours. It has brought us everything, Domini.”

He took her hand and pressed it again and again over his cheek lingeringly. Then, abruptly, he dropped it.

“Come!” he said. “Domini.”

And he drew her in through the tent door almost violently.

A stronger gust of the night wind followed them. Androvsky took his arms slowly from Domini and turned to let down the flap of the tent. While he was doing this she stood quite still. The flame of the lamp flickered, throwing its light now here, now there, uneasily. She saw the crucifix lit up for an instant and the white bed beneath it. The wind stirred her dark hair and was cold about her neck. But the warmth there met and defied it. In that brief moment, while Androvsky was fastening the tent, she seemed to live through centuries of intense and complicated emotion. When the light flickered over the crucifix she felt as if she could spend her life in passionate adoration at its foot; but when she did not see it, and the wind, coming in from the desert through the tent door, where she heard the movement of Androvsky, stirred in her hair, she felt reckless, wayward, savage—and something more. A cry rose in her that was like the cry of a stranger, who yet was of her and in her, and from whom she would not part.

Again the lamp flame flickered upon the crucifix. Quickly, while she saw the crucifix plainly, she went forward to the bed and fell on her knees by it, bending down her face upon its whiteness.

When Androvsky had fastened the tent door he turned round and saw her kneeling. He stood quite still as if petrified, staring at her. Then, as the flame, now sheltered from the wind, burned steadily, he saw the crucifix. He started as if someone had struck him, hesitated, then, with a look of fierce and concentrated resolution on his face, went swiftly to the crucifix and pulled it from the canvas roughly. He held it in his hand for an instant, then moved to the tent door and stooped to unfasten the cords that held it to the pegs, evidently with the intention of throwing the crucifix out into the night. But he did not unfasten the cords. Something—some sudden change of feeling, some secret and powerful reluctance—checked him. He thrust the crucifix into his pocket. Then, returning to where Domini was kneeling, he put his arms round her and drew her to her feet.

She did not resist him. Still holding her in his arms he blew out the lamp.