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Updated: May 25, 2025
Consciously she helped to fulfil the prediction of the Diviner, and then she left Batouch free. Now outside the church, shrouded closely in hoods and haiks, grey and brown bundles with staring eyes, the desert men were huddled against the church wall in the wind. Hadj was there, and Smain, sheltering in his burnous roses from Count Anteoni's garden.
"But it is strange, and may seem to you ridiculous or even wrong ever since I have been here I have felt as if everything that happened had been arranged beforehand, as if it had to happen. And I feel that, too, about the future." "Count Anteoni's fatalism!" the priest said with a touch of impatient irritation. "I know. It is the guiding spirit of this land. And you too are going to be led by it.
Then she thought that it might be an hour, even more; that Count Anteoni's garden was long since left behind, and that they were passing, perhaps, along the narrow streets of the village of old Beni-Mora, and nearing the edge of the oasis.
She wondered if it was for the man at whom she had just been looking through Count Anteoni's field-glasses, the man who had fled from prayer in the "Garden of Allah." As she glanced at the empty chair standing before the knives and forks, and the white cloth, she was uncertain whether she wished it to be filled by the traveller or not. She felt his presence in Beni-Mora as a warring element.
The houses of Beni-Mora faded in the mist of the sand, the statue of the Cardinal holding the double cross, the tower of the hotel, the shuddering trees of Count Anteoni's garden. Along the white blue which was the road the camels painfully advanced, urged by the cries and the sticks of the running drivers.
Father Roubier looked straight before him, but Count Anteoni's eyes were fixed piercingly upon Androvsky. At last he said: "May I ask, Monsieur, if you are a Russian?" "My father was. But I have never set foot in Russia."
In the presence of this total stranger there was something unpleasantly distracting which she could not and did not ignore, something which roused her antagonism and which at the same time compelled her attention. She had been conscious of it in the train, conscious of it in the tunnel at twilight, at night in the hotel, and once again in Count Anteoni's garden.
All along the edge of the garden, from the villa to the boundary of Count Anteoni's domain, ran a straight high wall made of earth bricks hardened by the sun and topped by a coping of palm wood painted white. This wall was some eight feet high on the side next to the desert, but the garden was raised in such a way that the inner side was merely a low parapet running along the sand path.
Upon the cloth, in vases of rough pottery, stained with designs in purple, were arranged the roses brought by Smain from Count Anteoni's garden. "Our wedding breakfast!" Domini said under her breath. She felt just then as if she were living in a wonderful romance. They sat down side by side and ate with a good appetite, served by Batouch and Ali.
"I do not know it, but which is much more I feel it." She was silent, looking towards the trees where the Diviner had disappeared. Count Anteoni's boyish merriment had faded away. He looked grave, almost sad. "I am not afraid," she said at last. "No, but I will confess it there is something horrible about that man to me. I felt it the first time I saw him. His eyes are too intelligent.
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