CHAPTER I.

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FOLLE-FARINE.

By OUIDA,

AUTHOR OF "STRATHMORE," "CHANDOS," "IDALIA," "TRICOTRIN," "PUCK,"

"GRANVILLE DE VIGNE," "UNDER TWO FLAGS," ETC.

"Un gazetier fumeux qui se croit au flambeau

Dit au pauvre qu'il a noyé dans les ténèbres:

Où donc l'aperçois-tu ce Créateur du Beau?

Ce Rédresseur que tu célèbres!"

BAUDELAIRE.

PHILADELPHIA

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.

1871.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.,

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.

À

LA MÉMOIRE

D'INGRES,

PEINTRE-POËTE.

FOLLE-FARINE.

BOOK I.

CHAPTER I.

Not the wheat itself; not even so much as the chaff; only the dust from

the corn. The dust which no one needs or notices; the mock farina which

flies out from under the two revolving circles of the grindstones; the

impalpable cloud which goes forth to gleam golden in the sun a moment,

and then is scattered--on the wind, into the water, up in the sunlight,

down in the mud. What matters? who cares?

Only the dust: a mote in the air; a speck in the light; a black spot in

the living daytime; a colorless atom in the immensity of the atmosphere,

borne up one instant to gleam against the sky, dropped down the next to

lie in a fetid ditch.

Only the dust: the dust that flows out from between the grindstones,

grinding exceeding hard and small, as the religion which calls itself

Love avers that its God does grind the world.

"It is a nothing, less than nothing. The stones turn; the dust is born;

it has a puff of life; it dies. Who cares? No one. Not the good God; not

any man; not even the devil. It is a thing even devil-deserted. Ah, it

is very like you," said the old miller, watching the millstones.

Folle-Farine heard--she had heard a hundred times,--and held her peace.

Folle-Farine: the dust; only the dust.

As good a name as any other for a nameless creature. The

dust,--sharp-winnowed and rejected of all, as less worthy than even the

shred husks and the shattered stalks.

Folle-Farine,--she watched the dust fly in and out all day long from

between the grindstones. She only wondered why, if she and the dust were

thus kindred and namesakes, the wind flew away with the dust so

mercifully, and yet never would fly away with her.

The dust was carried away by the breeze, and wandered wherever it

listed. The dust had a sweet, short, summer-day life of its own ere it

died. If it were worthless, it at least was free. It could lie in the

curl of a green leaf, or on the white breast of a flower. It could

mingle with the golden dust in a lily, and almost seem to be one with

it. It could fly with the thistle-down, and with the feathers of the

dandelion, on every roving wind that blew.

In a vague dreamy fashion, the child wondered why the dust was so much

better dealt with than she was.

"Folle-Farine! Folle--Folle--Folle--Farine!" the other children hooted

after her, echoing the name by which the grim humor of her

bitter-tongued taskmaster had called her. She had got used to it, and

answered to it as others to their birthnames.

It meant that she was a thing utterly useless, absolutely worthless; the

very refuse of the winnowings of the flail of fate. But she accepted

that too, so far as she understood it; she only sometimes wondered in a

dull fierce fashion why, if she and the dust were sisters, the dust had

its wings while she had none.

All day long the dust flew in and out and about as it liked, through the

open doors, and among the tossing boughs, and through the fresh cool

mists, and down the golden shafts of the sunbeams; and all day long she

stayed in one place and toiled, and was first beaten and then cursed, or

first cursed and then beaten,--which was all the change that her life

knew. For herself, she saw no likeness betwixt her and the dust; for

that escaped from the scourge and flew forth, but she abode under the

flail, always.

Nevertheless, Folle-Farine was all the name she knew.

The great black wheel churned and circled in the brook water, and

lichens and ferns and mosses made lovely all the dark, shadowy, silent

place; the red mill roof gleamed in the sun, under a million summer

leaves; the pigeons came and went all day in and out of their holes in

the wall; the sweet scents of ripening fruits in many orchards filled

the air; the great grindstones turned and turned and turned, and the

dust floated forth to dance with the gnat and to play with the sunbeam.

Folle-Farine sat aloft, on the huge, black, wet timbers above the wheel,

and watched with her thoughtful eyes, and wondered again, after her own

fashion, why her namesake had thus liberty to fly forth whilst she had

none.

Suddenly a shrill, screaming voice broke the stillness savagely.

"Little devil!" cried the miller, "go fetch me those sacks, and carry

them within, and pile them; neatly, do you hear? Like the piles of stone

in the road."

Folle-Farine swung down from the timbers in obedience to the command,

and went to the heap of sacks that lay outside the mill; small sacks,

most of them; all of last year's flour.

There was an immense gladiolus growing near, in the mill-garden, where

they were; a tall flower all scarlet and gold, and straight as a palm,

with bees sucking into its bells, and butterflies poising on its stem.

She stood a moment looking at its beauty; she was scarce any higher than

its topmost bud, and was in her way beautiful, something after its

fashion. She was a child of six or eight years, with limbs moulded like

sculpture, and brown as the brook water; great lustrous eyes, half

savage and half soft; a mouth like a red pomegranate bud, and straight

dark brows--the brows of the friezes of Egypt.

Her only clothing was a short white linen kirtle, knotted around her

waist, and falling to her knees; and her skin was burned, by exposure in

the sun, to a golden-brown color, though in texture it was soft as

velvet, and showed all the veins like glass. Standing there in the deep

grass, with the great scarlet flower against her, and purple butterflies

over her head, an artist would have painted her and called her by a

score of names, and described for her some mystical or noble fate: as

Anteros, perhaps, or as the doomed son of Procne, or as some child born

to the Forsaken in the savage forests of Naxos, or conceived by

Persephone, in the eternal night of hell, while still the earth lay

black and barren and fruitless, under the ban and curse of a bereaved

maternity.

But here she had only one name, Folle-Farine; and here she had only to

labor drearily and stupidly like the cattle of the field; without their

strength, and with barely so much even as their scanty fare and

begrudged bed.

The sunbeams that fell on her might find out that she had a beauty which

ripened and grew rich under their warmth, like that of a red flower bud

or a golden autumn fruit. But nothing else ever did. In none of the eyes

that looked on her had she any sort of loveliness. She was Folle-Farine;

a little wicked beast that only merited at best a whip and a cruel word,

a broken crust and a malediction; a thing born of the devil, and out of

which the devil needed to be scourged incessantly.

The sacks were all small; they were the property of the peasant

proprietors of the district,--a district of western Normandy. But though

small they were heavy in proportion to her age and power. She lifted

one, although with effort, yet with the familiarity of an accustomed

action; poised it on her back, clasped it tight with her round slender

arms, and carried it slowly through the open door of the mill. That one

put down upon the bricks, she came for a second,--a third,--a fourth,--a

fifth,--a sixth, working doggedly, patiently and willingly, as a little

donkey works.

The sacks were in all sixteen; before the seventh she paused.

It was a hot day in mid-August: she was panting and burning with the

exertion; the bloom in her cheeks had deepened to scarlet; she stood a

moment, resting, bathing her face in the sweet coolness of a white tall

tuft of lilies.

The miller looked round where he worked, among his beans and cabbages,

and saw.

"Little mule! Little beast!" he cried. "Would you be lazy--you!--who

have no more right to live at all than an eft, or a stoat, or a toad?"

And as he spoke he came toward her. He had caught up a piece of rope

with which he had been about to tie his tall beans to a stake, and he

struck the child with it. The sharp cord bit the flesh cruelly, curling

round her bare chest and shoulders, and leaving a livid mark.

She quivered a little, but she said nothing; she lifted her head and

looked at him, and dropped her hands to her sides. Her great eyes glowed

fiercely; her red curling lips shut tight; her straight brows drew

together.

"Little devil! Will you work now?" said the miller. "Do you think you

are to stand in the sun and smell at flowers--you? Pouf-f-f!"

Folle-Farine did not move.

"Pick up the sacks this moment, little brute," said the miller. "If you

stand still a second before they are all housed, you shall have as many

stripes as there are sacks left untouched. Oh-hè, do you hear?"

She heard, but she did not move.

"Do you hear?" he pursued. "As many strokes as there are sacks, little

wretch. Now--I will give you three moments to choose. One!"

Folle-Farine still stood mute and immovable, her head erect, her arms

crossed on her chest. A small, slender, bronze-hued, half-nude figure

among the ruby hues of the gladioli and the pure snowlike whiteness of

the lilies.

"Two!"

She stood in the same attitude, the sacks lying untouched at her feet, a

purple-winged butterfly lighting on her head.

"Three!"

She was still mute; still motionless.

He seized her by the shoulder with one hand, and with the other lifted

the rope.

It curled round her breast and back, again and again and again; she

shuddered, but she did not utter a single cry. He struck her the ten

times; with the same number of strokes as there remained sacks

uncarried. He did not exert any great strength, for had he used his

uttermost he would have killed her, and she was of value to him; but he

scourged her with a merciless exactitude in the execution of his threat,

and the rope was soon wet with drops of her bright young blood.

The noonday sun fell golden all around; the deep sweet peace of the

silent country reigned everywhere; the pigeons fled to and fro in and

out of their little arched homes; the millstream flowed on, singing a

pleasant song; now and then a ripe apricot dropped with a low sound on

the turf; close about was all the radiance of summer flowers; of heavy

rich roses, of yellow lime tufts, of sheaves of old-fashioned comely

phlox, and all the delicate shafts of the graceful lilies. And in the

warmth the child shuddered under the scourge; against the light the

black rope curled like a serpent darting to sting; among the sun-fed

blossoms there fell a crimson stain.

But never a word had she uttered. She endured to the tenth stroke in

silence.

He flung the cord aside among the grass. "Daughter of devils!--what

strength the devil gives!" he muttered.

Folle-Farine said nothing. Her face was livid, her back bruised and

lacerated, her eyes still glanced with undaunted scorn and untamed

passion. Still she said nothing; but, as his hand released her, she

darted as noiselessly as a lizard to the water's edge, set her foot on

the lowest range of the woodwork, and in a second leaped aloft to the

highest point, and seated herself astride on that crossbar of black

timber on which she had been throned when he had summoned her first,

above the foam of the churning wheels, and in the deepest shadow of

innumerable leaves.

Then she lifted up a voice as pure, as strong, as fresh as the voice of

a mavis in May-time, and sang, with reckless indifference, a stave of

song in a language unknown to any of the people of that place; a loud

fierce air, with broken words of curious and most dulcet melody, which

rang loud and defiant, yet melancholy, even in their rebellion, through

the foliage, and above the sound of the loud mill water.

"It is a chant to the foul fiend," the miller muttered to himself.

"Well, why does he not come and take his own? he would be welcome to

it."

And he went and sprinkled holy water on his rope, and said an ave or two

over it to exorcise it.

Every fiber of her childish body ached and throbbed; the stripes on her

shoulders burned like flame; her little brain was dizzy; her little

breast was black with bruises; but still she sang on, clutching the

timber with her hands to keep her from falling into the foam below, and

flashing her fierce proud eyes down through the shade of the leaves.

"Can one never cut the devil out of her?" muttered the miller, going

back to his work among the beans.

After awhile the song ceased; the pain she suffered stifled her voice

despite herself; she felt giddy and sick, but she sat there still in the

shadow, holding on by the jutting woodwork, and watching the water foam

and eddy below.

The hours went away; the golden day died; the grayness of evening stole

the glow from the gladioli and shut up the buds of the roses; the great

lilies gleamed but the whiter in the dimness of twilight; the vesper

chimes were rung from the cathedral two leagues away over the fields.

The miller stopped the gear of the mill; the grindstones and the

water-wheels were set at rest; the peace of the night came down; the

pigeons flew to roost in their niches; but the sacks still lay unearned

on the grass, and a spider had found time to spin his fairy ropes about

them.

The miller stood on his threshold, and looked up at her where she sat

aloft in the dusky shades of the leaves.

"Come down and carry these sacks, little brute," he said. "If not--no

supper for you to-night."

Folle-Farine obeyed him and came down from the huge black pile slowly,

her bands crossed behind her back, her head erect, her eyes glancing

like the eyes of a wild hawk.

She walked straight past the sacks, across the dew-laden turf, through

the tufts of the lilies, and so silently into the house.

The entrance was a wide kitchen, paved with blue and white tiles, clean

as a watercress, filled with the pungent odor of dried herbs, and

furnished with brass pots and pans, with walnut presses, and with

pinewood trestles, and with strange little quaint pictures and images of

saints. On one of the trestles were set a jug of steaming milk, some

rolls of black bread, and a big dish of stewed cabbages. At the meal

there was already seated a lean, brown, wrinkled, careworn old

serving-woman, clad in the blue-gray kirtle and the white head-gear of

Normandy.

The miller stayed the child at the threshold.

"Little devil--not a bit nor drop to-night if you do not carry the

sacks."

Folle-Farine said nothing, but moved on, past the food on the board,

past the images of the saints, past the high lancet window, through

which the moonlight had begun to stream, and out at the opposite door.

There she climbed a steep winding stairway on to which that door had

opened, pushed aside a little wooden wicket, entered a loft in the roof,

loosened the single garment that she wore, shook it off from her, and

plunged into the fragrant mass of daisied hay and of dry orchard mosses

which served her as a bed. Covered in these, and curled like a dormouse

in its nest, she clasped her hands above her head and sought to forget

in sleep her hunger and her wounds. She was well used to both.

Below there was a crucifix, with a bleeding god upon it; there was a

little rudely-sculptured representation of the Nativity; there was a

wooden figure of St. Christopher; a portrait of the Madonna, and many

other symbols of the church. But the child went to her bed without a

prayer on her lips, and with a curse on her head and bruises on her

body.

Sleep, for once, would not come to her. She was too hurt and sore to be

able to lie without pain; the dried grasses, so soft to her usually,

were like thorns beneath the skin that still swelled and smarted from

the stripes of the rope. She was feverish; she tossed and turned in

vain; she suffered too much to be still; she sat up and stared with her

passionate wistful eyes at the leaves that were swaying against the

square casement in the wall, and the moonbeam that shone so cold and

bright across her bed.

She listened, all her senses awake, to the noises of the house. They

were not many: a cat's mew, a mouse's scratch, the click-clack of the

old woman's step, the shrill monotony of the old man's voice, these were

all. After awhile even these ceased; the wooden shoes clattered up the

wooden stairs, the house became quite still; there was only in the

silence the endless flowing murmur of the water breaking against the

motionless wheels of the mill.

Neither man nor woman had come near to bring her anything to eat or

drink. She had heard them muttering their prayers before they went to

rest, but no hand unlatched her door. She had no disappointment, because

she had had no hope.

She had rebellion, because Nature had implanted it in her; but she went

no further. She did not know what it was to hope. She was only a young

wild animal, well used to blows, and drilled by them, but not tamed.

As soon as the place was silent, she got out of her nest of grass,

slipped on her linen skirt, and opened her casement--a small square hole

in the wall, and merely closed by a loose deal shutter, with a hole cut

in it scarcely bigger than her head. A delicious sudden rush of summer

air met her burning face; a cool cluster of foliage hit her a soft blow

across the eyes as the wind stirred it. They were enough to allure her.

Like any other young cub of the woods, she had only two instincts--air

and liberty.

She thrust herself out of the narrow window with the agility that only

is born of frequent custom, and got upon the shelving thatch of a shed

that sloped a foot or so below, slid down the roof, and swung herself by

the jutting bricks of the outhouse wall on to the grass. The housedog, a

brindled mastiff, that roamed loose all night about the mill, growled

and sprang at her; then, seeing who she was, put up his gaunt head and

licked her face, and turned again to resume the rounds of his vigilant

patrol.

Ere he went, she caught and kissed him, closely and fervently, without

a word. The mastiff was the only living thing that did not hate her; she

was grateful, in a passionate, dumb, unconscious fashion. Then she took

to her feet, ran as swiftly as she could along the margin of the water,

and leaped like a squirrel into the wood, on whose edge the mill-house

stood.

Once there she was content.

The silence, the shadows, the darkness where the trees stood thick, the

pale quivering luminance of the moon, the mystical eerie sounds that

fill a woodland by night, all which would have had terror for tamer and

happier creatures of her years, had only for her a vague entranced

delight. Nature had made her without one pulse of fear; and she had

remained too ignorant to have been ever taught it.

It was still warm with all the balmy breath of midsummer; there were

heavy dews everywhere; here and there, on the surface of the water,

there gleamed the white closed cups of the lotos; through the air there

passed, now and then, the soft, gray, dim body of a night-bird on the

wing; the wood, whose trees were pines, and limes, and maples, was full

of a deep dreamy odor; the mosses that clothed many of the branches

hung, film-like, in the wind in lovely coils and weblike fantasies.

Around stretched the vast country, dark and silent as in a trance, the

stillness only broken by some faint note of a sheep's bell, some distant

song of a mule-driver passing homeward.

The child strayed onward through the trees, insensibly soothed and made

glad, she knew not why, by all the dimness and the fragrance round her.

She stood up to her knees in the shallow freshets that every now and

then broke up through the grasses; she felt the dews, shaken off the

leaves above, fall deliciously upon her face and hair; she filled her

hands with the night-blooming marvel-flower, and drank in its sweetness

as though it were milk and honey; she crouched down and watched her own

eyes look back at her from the dark gliding water of the river.

Then she threw herself on her back upon the mosses--so cool and moist

that they seemed like balm upon the bruised hot skin--and lay there

looking upward at the swift mute passage of the flitting owls, at the

stately flight of the broad-winged moths, at the movement of the swift

brown bats, at the soft trembling of the foliage in the breeze, at the

great clouds slowly sailing across the brightness of the moon. All these

things were vaguely sweet to her--with the sweetness of freedom, of

love, of idleness, of rest, of all things which her life had never

known: so may the young large-eyed antelope feel the beauty of the

forest in the hot lull of tropic nights, when the speed of the pursuer

has relaxed and the aromatic breath of the panther is no more against

its flank.

She lay there long, quite motionless, tracing with a sort of voluptuous

delight, all movements in the air, all changes in the clouds, all

shadows in the leaves. All the immense multitude of ephemeral life

which, unheard in the day, fills the earth with innumerable whispering

voices after the sun has set, now stirred in every herb and under every

bough around her. The silvery ghostlike wing of an owl touched her

forehead once. A little dormouse ran across her feet. Strange shapes

floated across the cold white surface of the water. Quaint things,

hairy, film-winged, swam between her and the stars. But none of these

things had terror for her; they were things of the night, with which she

felt vaguely the instinct of kinship.

She was only a little wild beast, they said, the offspring of darkness,

and vileness, and rage and disgrace. And yet, in a vague, imperfect way,

the glories of the night, its mysterious and solemn beauty, its

melancholy and lustrous charm, quenched the fierceness in her dauntless

eyes, and filled them with dim wondering tears, and stirred the

half-dead soul in her to some dull pain, some nameless ecstasy, that

were not merely physical.

And then, in her way, being stung by these, and moved, she knew not why,

to a strange sad sense of loneliness and shame, and knowing no better

she prayed.

She raised herself on her knees, and crossed her hands upon her chest,

and prayed after the fashion that she had seen men and women and

children pray at roadside shrines and crosses; prayed aloud, with a

little beating, breaking heart, like the young child she was.

"O Devil! if I be indeed thy daughter, stay with me; leave me not alone:

lend me thy strength and power, and let me inherit of thy kingdom. Give

me this, O great lord! and I will praise thee and love thee always."

She prayed in all earnestness, in all simplicity, in broken, faltering

language; knowing no better; knowing only that she was alone on the

earth and friendless, and very hungry and in sore pain, while this

mighty unknown King of the dominion of darkness, whose child she ever

heard she was, had lost her or abandoned her, and reigned afar in some

great world, oblivious of her misery.

The silence of the night alone gave back the echo of her own voice. She

waited breathless for some answer, for some revelation, some reply;

there only came the pure cold moon, sailing straight from out a cloud

and striking on the waters.

She rose sadly to her feet and went back along the shining course of the

stream, through the grasses and the mosses and under the boughs, to her

little nest under the eaves.

As she left the obscurity of the wood and passed into the fuller light,

her bare feet glistening and her shoulders wet with the showers of dew,

a large dark shape flying down the wind smote her with his wings upon

the eyes, lighted one moment on her head, and then swept onward lost in

shade. At that moment, likewise, a radiant golden globe flashed to her

sight, dropped to her footsteps, and shone an instant in the glisten

from the skies.

It was but a great goshawk seeking for its prey; it was but a great

meteor fading and falling at its due appointed hour; but to the heated,

savage, dreamy fancy of the child it seemed an omen, an answer, a thing

of prophecy, a spirit of air; nay, why not Him himself?

In legends, which had been the only lore her ears had ever heard, it had

been often told her that he took such shapes as this.

"If he should give me his kingdom!" she thought; and her eyes flashed

alight; her heart swelled; her cheeks burned. The little dim untutored

brain could not hold the thought long or close enough to grasp, or sift,

or measure it; but some rude rich glory, impalpable, unutterable, seemed

to come to her and bathe her in its heat and color. She was his

offspring, so they all told her; why not, then, also his heir?

She felt, as felt the goatherd or the charcoal-burner in those legends

she had fed on, who was suddenly called from poverty and toil, from

hunger and fatigue, from a tireless hearth and a bed of leaves, to

inherit some fairy empire, to ascend to some region of the gods. Like

one of these, hearing the summons to some great unknown imperial power

smite all his poor pale barren life to splendor, so Folle-Farine,

standing by the water's side in the light of the moon, desolate,

ignorant, brutelike, felt elected to some mighty heritage unseen of men.

If this were waiting for her in the future, what matter now were stripes

or wounds or woe?

She smiled a little, dreamily, like one who beholds fair visions in his

sleep, and stole back over the starlit grass, and swung herself upward

by the tendrils of ivy, and crouched once more down in her nest of

mosses.

And either the courage of the spirits of darkness, or the influence of

instincts dumb but nascent, was with her, for she fell asleep in her

little loft in the roof as though she were a thing cherished of heaven

and earth, and dreamed happily all through the hours of the

slowly-rising dawn; her bruised body and her languid brain and her

aching heart all stilled and soothed, and her hunger and passion and

pain forgotten; with the night-blooming flowers still clasped in her

hands, and on her closed mouth a smile.

For she dreamed of her Father's Kingdom, a kingdom which no man denies

to the creature that has beauty and youth, and is poor and yet proud,

and is of the sex of its mother.

CHAPTER II.

In one of the most fertile and most fair districts of northern France

there was a little Norman town, very very old, and beautiful exceedingly

by reason of its ancient streets, its high peaked roofs, its marvelous

galleries and carvings, its exquisite grays and browns, its silence and

its color, and its rich still life. Its center was a great cathedral,

noble as York or Chartres; a cathedral, whose spire shot to the clouds,

and whose innumerable towers and pinnacles were all pierced to the day,

so that the blue sky shone and the birds of the air flew all through

them. A slow brown river, broad enough for market-boats and for

corn-barges, stole through the place to the sea, lapping as it went the

wooden piles of the houses, and reflecting the quaint shapes of the

carvings, the hues of the signs and the draperies, the dark spaces of

the dormer windows, the bright heads of some casement-cluster of

carnations, the laughing face of a girl leaning out to smile on her

lover.

All around it lay the deep grass unshaven, the leagues on leagues of

fruitful orchards, the low blue hills tenderly interlacing one another,

the fields of colza, where the white bead-dress of the women workers

flashed in the sun like a silvery pigeon's wing. To the west were the

deep-green woods and the wide plains golden with gorse of Arthur's and

of Merlin's lands; and beyond, to the northward, was the great dim

stretch of the ocean breaking on a yellow shore, whither the river ran,

and, whither led straight shady roads, hidden with linden and with

poplar-trees, and marked ever and anon by a wayside wooden Christ, or by

a little murmuring well crowned with a crucifix.

A beautiful, old, shadowy, ancient place; picturesque everywhere; often

silent, with a sweet sad silence that was chiefly broken by the sound of

bells or the chanting of choristers. A place of the Middle Ages still.

With lanterns swinging on cords from house to house as the only light;

with wondrous scroll-works and quaint signs at the doors of all its

traders; with monks' cowls and golden croziers and white-robed acolytes

in its streets; with the subtle smoke of incense coming out from the

cathedral door to mingle with the odors of the fruits and flowers in the

market-place; with great flat-bottomed boats drifting down the river

under the leaning eaves of its dwellings; and with the galleries of its

opposing houses touching so nearly that a girl leaning in one could

stretch a Provence rose or toss an Easter-egg across to her neighbor in

the other.

Doubtless there were often squalor, poverty, dust, filth, and

uncomeliness within these old and beautiful homes. Doubtless often the

dwellers therein were housed like cattle and slept like pigs, and looked

but once out to the woods and waters of the landscapes round for one

hundred times that they looked at their hidden silver in an old delf

jug, or at their tawdry colored prints of St. Victorian or St. Scævola.

But yet much of the beauty and the nobility of the old, simple, restful

rich-hued life of the past still abode there, and remained with them. In

the straight lithe form of their maidens, untrammeled by modern garb,

and moving with the free majestic grace of forest does. In the vast,

dim, sculptured chambers, where the grandam span by the wood fire and

the little children played in the shadows, and the lovers whispered in

the embrasured window. In the broad market-place, where the mules

cropped the clover, and the tawny awnings caught the sunlight, and the

white caps of the girls framed faces fitted for the pencils of missal

painters, and the wondrous flush of color from mellow fruits and flowers

glanced amidst the shelter of deepest, freshest green. In the perpetual

presence of their cathedral, which through sun and storm, through frost

and summer, through noon and midnight, stood there amidst them, and

beheld the galled oxen tread their painful way, and the scourged mules

droop their humble heads, and the helpless harmless flocks go forth to

the slaughter, and the old weary lives of the men and women pass through

hunger and cold to the grave, and the sun and the moon rise and set, and

the flowers and the children blossom and fade, and the endless years

come and go, bringing peace, bringing war; bringing harvest, bringing

famine; bringing life, bringing death; and, beholding these, still said

to the multitude in its terrible irony, "Lo! your God is Love."

This little town lay far from the great Paris highway and all greatly

frequented tracks. It was but a short distance from the coast, but near

no harbor of greater extent than such as some small fishing village had

made in the rocks for the trawlers. Few strangers ever came to it,

except some wandering painters or antiquaries. It sent its apples and

eggs, its poultry and honey, its colza and corn, to the use of the great

cities; but it was rarely that any of its own people went thither.

Now and then some one of the oval-faced, blue-eyed, lithe-limbed maidens

of its little homely households would sigh and flush and grow restless,

and murmur of Paris; and would steal out in the break of a warm gray

morning whilst only the birds were still waking; and would patter away

in her wooden shoes over the broad, white, southern road, with a stick

over her shoulder, and a bundle of all her worldly goods upon the stick.

And she would look back often, often as she went; and when all was lost

in the blue haze of distance save the lofty spire that she still saw

through her tears, she would say in her heart, with her lips parched and

trembling, "I will come back again. I will come back again."

But none such ever did come back.

They came back no more than did the white sweet sheaves of the lilies

that the women gathered and sent to be bought and sold in the city--to

gleam one faint summer night in a gilded balcony, and to be flung out

the next morning, withered and dead.

One among the few who had thus gone whither the lilies went, and of whom

the people would still talk as their mules paced homewards through the

lanes at twilight, had been Reine Flamma, the daughter of the miller of

Yprès.

Yprès was a beechen-wooded hamlet on the northern outskirt of the town,

a place of orchards and wooded tangle; through which there ran a branch

of the brimming river, hastening to seek and join the sea, and caught a

moment on its impetuous way, and forced to work by the grim mill-wheels

that had churned the foam-bells there for centuries. The mill-house was

very ancient; its timbers were carved all over into the semblance of

shields and helmets, and crosses, and fleur-de-lis, and its frontage was

of quaint pargeted work, black and white, except where the old

blazonries had been.

It had been handed down from sire to son of the same race through many

generations--a race hard, keen, unlearned, superstitious, and

caustic-tongued--a race wedded to old ways, credulous of legend, chaste

of life, cruel of judgment; harshly strong, yet ignorantly weak; a race

holding dearer its heir-loom of loveless, joyless, bigoted virtue even

than those gold and silver pieces which had ever been its passion,

hidden away in earthen pipkins under old apple-roots, or in the crannies

of wall timber, or in secret nooks of oaken cupboards.

Claudis Flamma, the last of this toilsome, God-fearing, man-begrudging,

Norman stock, was true to the type and the traditions of his people.

He was too ignorant even to read; but priests do not deem this a fault.

He was avaricious; but many will honor a miser quicker than a

spendthrift. He was cruel; but in the market-place he always took heed

to give his mare a full feed, so that if she were pinched of her hay in

her stall at home none were the wiser, for she had no language but that

of her wistful black eyes; and this is a speech to which men stay but

little to listen. The shrewd, old bitter-tongued, stern-living man was

feared and respected with the respect that fear begets; and in truth he

had a rigid virtue in his way, and was proud of it, with scorn for those

who found it hard to walk less straightly and less circumspectly than

himself.

He married late; his wife died in childbirth; his daughter grew into the

perfection of womanhood under the cold, hard, narrow rule of his

severity and his superstition. He loved her, indeed, with as much love

as it was possible for him ever to feel, and was proud of her beyond all

other things; saved for her, toiled for her, muttered ever that it was

for her when at confession he related how his measures of flour had

been falsely weighted, and how he had filched from the corn brought by

the widow and the fatherless. For her he had sinned: from one to whom

the good report of his neighbors and the respect of his own conscience

were as the very breath of life, it was the strongest proof of love that

he could give. But this love never gleamed one instant in his small

sharp gray eyes, nor escaped ever by a single utterance from his lips.

Reprimand, or homily, or cynical rasping sarcasm, was all that she ever

heard from him. She believed that he despised, and almost hated her; he

held it well for women to be tutored in subjection and in trembling.

At twenty-two Reine Flamma was the most beautiful woman in Calvados, and

the most wretched.

She was straight as a pine; cold as snow; graceful as a stem of wheat;

lovely and silent; with a mute proud face, in which the great blue eyes

alone glowed with a strange, repressed, speechless passion and

wishfulness. Her life was simple, pure, chaste, blameless, as the lives

of the many women of her race who, before her, had lived and died in the

shadow of that water-fed wood had always been. Her father rebuked and

girded at her, continually dreaming that he could paint whiter even the

spotlessness of this lily, refine even the purity of this virgin gold.

She never answered him anything, nor in anything contradicted his will;

not one among all the youths and maidens of her birthplace had ever

heard so much as a murmur of rebellion from her; and the priests said

that such a life as this would be fitter for the cloister than the

marriage-bed. None of them ever read the warning that these dark-blue

slumbering eyes would have given to any who should have had the skill to

construe them right. There were none of such skill there; and so, she

holding her peace, the men and women noted her ever with a curious dumb

reverence, and said among themselves that the race of Flamma would die

well and nobly in her.

"A saint!" said the good old gentle bishop of the district, as he

blessed her one summer evening in her father's house, and rode his mule

slowly through the pleasant poplar lanes and breeze-blown fields of

colza back to his little quiet homestead, where he tended his own

cabbages and garnered his own honey.

Reine Flamma bowed her tall head meekly, and took his benediction in

silence.

The morning after, the miller, rising, as his custom was, at daybreak,

and reciting his paternosters, thanked the Mother of the World that she

had given him thus strength and power to rear up his motherless daughter

in purity and peace. Then he dressed himself in his gray patched blouse,

groped his way down the narrow stair, and went in his daily habit to

undraw the bolts and unloose the chains of his dwelling.

There was no need that morning for him; the bolts were already back; the

house-door stood wide open; on the threshold a brown hen perched pluming

herself; there were the ticking of the clock, the chirming of the birds,

the rushing of the water, these were the only sounds upon the silence.

He called his daughter's name: there was no answer. He mounted to her

chamber: it had no tenant. He searched hither and thither, in the house,

and the stable, and the granary: in the mill, and the garden, and the

wood; he shouted, he ran, he roused his neighbors, he looked in every

likely and unlikely place: there was no reply.

There was only the howl of the watch-dog, who sat with his face to the

south and mourned unceasingly.

And from that day neither he nor any man living there ever heard again

of Reine Flamma.

Some indeed did notice that at the same time there disappeared from the

town one who had been there through all that spring and summer. One who

had lived strangely, and been clad in an odd rich fashion, and had been

whispered as an Eastern prince by reason of his scattered gold, his

unfamiliar tongue, his black-browed, star-eyed, deep-hued beauty, like

the beauty of the passion-flower. But none had ever seen this stranger

and Reine Flamma in each other's presence; and the rumor was discredited

as a foulness absurd and unseemly to be said of a woman whom their

bishop had called a saint. So it died out, breathed only by a few

mouths, and it came to be accepted as a fact that she must have perished

in the deep fast-flowing river by some false step on the mill-timber, as

she went at dawn to feed her doves, or by some strange sad trance of

sleep-walking, from which she had been known more than once to suffer.

Claudis Flamma said little; it was a wound that bled inwardly. He

toiled, and chaffered, and drove hard bargains, and worked early and

late with his hireling, and took for the household service an old Norman

peasant woman more aged than himself, and told no man that he suffered.

All that he ever said was, "She was a saint: God took her;" and in his

martyrdom he found a hard pride and a dull consolation.

It was no mere metaphoric form of words with him. He believed in

miracles and all manner of divine interposition, and he believed

likewise that she, his angel, being too pure for earth, had been taken

by God's own hand up to the bosom of Mary; and this honor which had

befallen his first-begotten shed a sanctity and splendor on his

cheerless days; and when the little children and the women saw him pass,

they cleared from his way as from a prince's, and crossed themselves as

they changed words with one whose daughter was the bride of Christ.

So six years passed away; and the name of Reine Flamma was almost

forgotten, but embalmed in memories of religious sanctity, as the dead

heart of a saint is imbedded in amber and myrrh.

At the close of the sixth year there happened what many said was a thing

devil-conceived and wrought out by the devil to the shame of a pure

name, and to the hinderance of the people of God.

One winter's night Claudis Flamma was seated in his kitchen, having

recently ridden home his mare from the market in the town. The fire

burned in ancient fashion on the hearth, and it was so bitter without

that even his parsimonious habits had relaxed, and he had piled some

wood, liberally mingled with dry moss, that cracked, and glowed, and

shot flame up the wide black shaft of the chimney. The day's work was

over; the old woman-servant sat spinning flax on the other side of the

fire; the great mastiff was stretched sleeping quietly on the brick

floor; the blue pottery, the brass pans, the oaken presses that had been

the riches of his race for generations, glimmered in the light; the

doors were barred, the shutters closed; around the house the winds

howled, and beneath its walls the fretting water hissed.

The miller, overcome with the past cold and present warmth, nodded in

his wooden settle and slept, and muttered dreamily in his sleep, "A

saint--a saint!--God took her."

The old woman, hearing, looked across at him, and shook her head, and

went on with her spinning with lips that moved inaudibly: she had been

wont to say, out of her taskmaster's hearing, that no woman who was

beautiful ever was a saint as well. And some thought that this old

creature, Marie Pitchou, who used to live in a miserable hut on the

other side of the wood, had known more than she had chosen to tell of

the true fate of Reine Flamma.

Suddenly a blow on the panels of the door sounded through the silence.

The miller, awakened in a moment, started to his feet and grasped his

ash staff with one hand, and with the other the oil-lamp burning on the

trestle. The watch-dog arose, but made no hostile sound.

A step crushed the dead leaves without and passed away faintly; there

was stillness again; the mastiff went to the bolted door, smelt beneath

it, and scratched at the panels.

On the silence there sounded a small, timid, feeble beating on the wood

from without; such a slight fluttering noise as a wounded bird might

make in striving to rise.

"It is nothing evil," muttered Flamma. "If it were evil the beast would

not want to have the door opened. It may be some one sick or stray."

All this time he was in a manner charitable, often conquering the

niggardly instincts of his character to try and save his soul by serving

the wretched. He was a miser, and he loved to gain, and loathed to give;

but since his daughter had been taken to the saints he had striven with

all his might to do good enough to be taken likewise to that Heavenly

rest.

Any crust bestowed on the starveling, any bed of straw afforded to the

tramp, caused him a sharp pang; but since his daughter had been taken he

had tried to please God by this mortification of his own avarice and

diminution of his own gains. He could not vanquish the nature that was

ingrained in him. He would rob the widow of an ephah of wheat, and leave

his mare famished in her stall, because it was his nature to find in all

such saving a sweet savor; but he would not turn away a beggar or refuse

a crust to a wayfarer, lest, thus refusing, he might turn away from him

an angel unawares.

The mastiff scratched still at the panels; the sound outside had ceased.

The miller, setting the lamp down on the floor, gripped more firmly the

ashen stick, undrew the bolts, turned the stout key, and opened the door

slowly, and with caution. A loud gust of wind blew dead leaves against

his face; a blinding spray of snow scattered itself over his bent

stretching form. In the darkness without, whitened from head to foot,

there stood a little child.

The dog went up to her and licked her face with kindly welcome. Claudis

Flamma drew her with a rough grasp across the threshold, and went out

into the air to find whose footsteps had been those which had trodden

heavily away after the first knock. The snow, however, was falling fast;

it was a cloudy moonless night. He did not dare to go many yards from

his own portals, lest he should fall into some ambush set by robbers.

The mastiff too was quiet, which indicated that there was no danger

near, so the old man returned, closed the door carefully, drew the bolts

into their places, and came towards the child, whom the woman Pitchou

had drawn towards the fire.

She was a child of four or five years old; huddled in coarse linen and

in a little red garment of fox's skin, and blanched from head to foot,

for the flakes were frozen on her and on the little hood that covered,

gypsy-like, her curls. It was a strange, little, ice-cold, ghostlike

figure, but out of this mass of icicles and whiteness there glowed great

beaming frightened eyes and a mouth like a scarlet berry; the radiance

and the contrast of it were like the glow of holly fruit thrust out

from a pile of drifted snow.

The miller shook her by the shoulder.

"Who brought you?"

"Phratos," answered the child, with a stifled sob in her throat.

"And who is that?"

"Phratos," answered the child again.

"Is that a man or a woman?"

The child made no reply; she seemed not to comprehend his meaning. The

miller shook her again, and some drops of water fell from the ice that

was dissolving in the warmth.

"Why are you come here?" he asked, impatiently.

She shook her head, as though to say none knew so little of herself as

she.

"You must have a name," he pursued harshly and in perplexity. "What are

you called? Who are you?"

The child suddenly raised her great eyes that had been fastened on the

leaping flames, and flashed them upon his in a terror of bewildered

ignorance--the piteous terror of a stray dog.

"Phratos," she cried once more, and the cry now was half a sigh, half a

shriek.

Something in that regard pierced him and startled him; he dropped his

hand off her shoulder, and breathed quickly; the old woman gave a low

cry, and staring with all her might at the child's small, dark, fierce,

lovely face, fell to counting her wooden beads and mumbling many

prayers.

Claudis Flamma turned savagely on her as if stung by some unseen snake,

and willing to wreak his vengeance on the nearest thing that was at

hand.

"Fool! cease your prating!" he muttered, with a brutal oath. "Take the

animal and search her. Bring me what you find."

Then he sat down on the stool by the fire, and braced his lips tightly,

and locked his bony hands upon his knees. He knew what blow awaited him;

he was no coward, and he had manhood enough in him to press any iron

into his soul and tell none that it hurt him.

The old woman drew the child aside to a dusky corner of the chamber, and

began to despoil her of her coverings. The creature did not resist; the

freezing cold and long fatigue had numbed and silenced her; her eyelids

were heavy with the sleep such cold produces, and she had not strength,

because she had not consciousness enough, to oppose whatsoever they

might choose to do to her. Only now and then her eyes opened, as they

had opened on him, with a sudden luster and fierceness, like those in a

netted animal's impatient but untamed regard.

Pitchou seized and searched her eagerly, stripping her of her warm

fox-skin wrap, her scarlet hood of wool, her little rough hempen shirt,

which were all dripping with the water from the melted snow.

The skin of the child was brown, with a golden bloom on it; it had been

tanned by hot suns, but it was soft as silk in texture, and transparent,

showing the course of each blue vein. Her limbs were not well nourished,

but they were of perfect shape and delicate bone; and the feet were the

long, arched, slender feet of the southern side of the Pyrenees.

She allowed herself to be stripped and wrapped in a coarse piece of

homespun linen; she was still half frozen, and in a state of stupor,

either from amazement or from fear. She was quite passive, and she never

spoke. Her apathy deceived the old crone, who took it for docility, and

who, trusting to it, proceeded to take advantage of it, after the manner

of her kind. About the child's head there hung a little band of

glittering coins; they were not gold, but the woman Pitchou thought they

were, and seized them with gloating hands and ravenous eyes.

The child started from her torpor, shook herself free, and fought to

guard them--fiercely, with tooth and nail, as the young fox whose skin

she had worn might have fought for its dear life. The old woman on her

side strove as resolutely; long curls of the child's hair were clutched

out in the struggle; she did not wince or scream, but she fought--fought

with all the breath and the blood that were in her tiny body.

She was no match, with all her ferocity and fury, for the sinewy grip

of the old peasant; and the coins were torn off her forehead and hidden

away in a hole in the wood, out of her sight, where the old peasant

hoarded all her precious treasures of copper coins and other trifles

that she managed to secrete from her master's all-seeing eyes.

They were little Oriental sequins engraved with Arabic characters,

chained together after the Eastern fashion. To Pitchou they looked a

diadem of gold worthy of an empress. The child watched them removed in

perfect silence; from the moment they had been wrenched away, and the

battle had been finally lost to her, she had ceased to struggle, as

though disdainful of a fruitless contest. But a great hate gathered in

her eyes, and smouldered there like a half-stifled fire--it burned on

and on for many a long year afterwards, unquenched.

When Pitchou brought her a cup of water, and a roll of bread, she would

neither eat nor drink, but turned her face to the wall,--mute.

"Those are just her father's eyes," the old woman muttered. She had seen

them burn in the gloom of the evening through the orchard trees, as the

stars rose, and as Reine Flamma listened to the voice that wooed her to

her destruction.

She let the child be, and searched her soaked garments for any written

word or any token that might be on them. Fastened roughly to the fox's

skin there was a faded letter. Pitchou could not read; she took it to

her master.

Claudis Flamma grasped the paper and turned its superscription to the

light of the lamp.

He likewise could not read, yet at sight of the characters his tough

frame trembled, and his withered skin grew red with a sickly, feverish

quickening of the blood. He knew them. Once, in a time long dead, he had

been proud of those slender letters that had been so far more legible

than any that the women of her class could pen, and on beholding which

the good bishop had smiled, and passed a pleasant word concerning her

being almost fitted to be his own clerk and scribe. For a moment,

watching those written ciphers that had no tongue for him, and yet

seemed to tell their tale so that they scorched and withered up all the

fair honor and pious peace of his old age, a sudden faintness, a sudden

swooning sense seized him for the first time in all his life; his limbs

failed him, he sank down on his seat again, he gasped for breath; he

needed not to be told anything, he knew all. He knew that the creature,

whom he had believed so pure that God had deemed the earth unworthy of

her youth, was----

His throat rattled, his lips were covered with foam, his ears were

filled with a rushing hollow sound, like the roaring of his own

mill-waters in a time of storm. All at once he started to his feet, and

glared at the empty space of the dim chamber, and struck his hands

wildly together in the air, and cried aloud:

"She was a saint, I said--a saint! A saint in body and soul! And I

thought that God begrudged her, and held her too pure for man!"

And he laughed aloud--thrice.

The child hearing, and heavy with sleep, and eagerly desiring warmth, as

a little frozen beast that coils itself in snow to slumber into death,

startled by that horrible mirth, came forward.

The serge fell off her as she moved. Her little naked limbs glimmered

like gold in the dusky light; her hair was as a cloud behind her; her

little scarlet mouth was half open, like the mouth of a child seeking

its mother's kiss; her great eyes, dazzled by the flame, flashed and

burned and shone like stars. They had seen the same face ere then in

Calvados.

She came straight to Claudis Flamma as though drawn by that awful and

discordant laughter, and by that leaping ruddy flame upon the hearth,

and she stretched out her arms and murmured a word and smiled, a little

dreamily, seeking to sleep, asking to be caressed, desiring she knew not

what.

He clinched his fist, and struck her to the ground. She fell without a

sound. The blood flowed from her mouth.

He looked at her where she lay, and laughed once more.

"She was a saint!--a saint! And the devil begot in her _that_!"

Then he went out across the threshold and into the night, with the

letter still clinched in his hand.

The snow fell, the storm raged, the earth was covered with ice and

water; he took no heed, but passed through it, his head bare and his

eyes blind.

The dog let him go forth alone, and waited by the child.

CHAPTER III.

All night long he was absent.

The old serving-woman, terrified, in so far as her dull brutish nature

could be roused to fear, did what she knew, what she dared. She raised

the little wounded naked creature, and carried her to her own pallet

bed; restored her to consciousness by such rude means as she had

knowledge of, and stanched the flow of blood. She did all this harshly,

as it was her custom to do all things, and without tenderness or even

pity, for the sight of this stranger was unwelcome to her, and she also

had guessed the message of that unread letter.

The child had been stunned by the blow, and she had lost some blood, and

was weakened and stupefied and dazed; yet there seemed to her rough

nurse no peril for her life, and by degrees she fell into a feverish,

tossing slumber, sobbing sometimes in her sleep, and crying perpetually

on the unknown name of Phratos.

The old woman Pitchou stood and looked at her. She who had always known

the true story of that disappearance which some had called death and

some had deemed a divine interposition, had seen before that transparent

brown skin, those hues in cheeks and lips like the carnation leaves,

that rich, sunfed, dusky beauty, those straight dark brows.

"She is his sure enough," she muttered. "He was the first with Reine

Flamma. I wonder has he been the last."

And she went down the stairs chuckling, as the low human brute will at

any evil thought.

The mastiff stayed beside the child.

She went to the fire and threw more wood on, and sat down again to her

spinning-wheel, and span and dozed, and span and dozed again.

She was not curious: to her, possessing that thread to the secret of the

past which her master and her townfolk had never held, it all seemed

natural. It was an old, old story; there had been thousands like it; it

was only strange because Reine Flamma had been held a saint.

The hours passed on; the lamp paled, and its flame at last died out; in

the loft above, where the dog watched, there was no sound; the old woman

slumbered undisturbed, unless some falling ember of the wood aroused

her.

She was not curious, nor did she care how the child fared. She had led

that deadening life of perpetual labor and of perpetual want in which

the human animal becomes either a machine or a devil. She was a machine;

put to what use she might be--to spin flax, to card wool, to wring a

pigeon's throat, to bleed a calf to death, to bake or stew, to mumble a

prayer, or drown a kitten, it was all one to her. If she had a

preference, it might be for the office that hurt some living thing; but

she did not care: all she heeded was whether she had pottage enough to

eat at noonday, and the leaden effigy of her Mary safe around her throat

at night.

The night went on, and passed away: one gleam of dawn shone through a

round hole in the shutter; she wakened with a start to find the sun

arisen, and the fire dead upon the hearth.

She shook herself and stamped her chill feet upon the bricks, and

tottered on her feeble way, with frozen body, to the house-door. She

drew it slowly open, and saw by the light of the sun that it had been

for some time morning.

The earth was everywhere thick with snow; a hoar frost sparkled over all

the branches; great sheets of ice were whirled down the rapid

mill-stream; in one of the leafless boughs a robin sang, and beneath the

bough a cat was crouched, waiting with hungry eager eyes, patient even

in its famished impatience.

Dull as her sympathy was, and slow her mind, she started as she saw her

master there.

Claudis Flamma was at work; the rough, hard, rude toil, which he spared

to himself no more than to those who were his hirelings. He was carting

wood; going to and fro with huge limbs of trees that men in youth would

have found it a severe task to move; he was laboring breathlessly,

giving himself no pause, and the sweat was on his brow, although he trod

ankle deep in snow, and although his clothes were heavy with icicles.

He did not see or hear her; she went up to him and called him by his

name; he started, and raised his head and looked at her.

Dull though she was, she was in a manner frightened by the change upon

his face; it had been lean, furrowed, weather-beaten always, but it was

livid now, with bloodshot eyes, and a bruised, broken, yet withal savage

look that terrified her. He did not speak, but gazed at her like a man

recalled from some drugged sleep back to the deeds and memories of the

living world.

The old woman held her peace a few moments; then spoke out in her old

blunt, dogged fashion,--

"Is she to stay?"

Her mind was not awake enough for any curiosity; she only cared to know

if the child stayed: only so much as would concern her soup-kettle, her

kneaded dough, her spun hemp, her household labor.

He turned for a second with the gesture that a trapped fox may make,

held fast, yet striving to essay a death-grip; then he checked himself,

and gave a mute sign of assent, and heaved up a fresh log of wood, and

went on with his labors, silently. She knew of old his ways too well to

venture to ask more. She knew, too, that when he worked like this,

fasting and in silence, there had been long and fierce warfare in his

soul, and some great evil done for which he sought to make atonement.

So she left him, and passed in to the house, and built up afresh her

fire, and swept her chamber out, and fastened up her round black pot to

boil, and muttered all the while,--

"Another mouth to feed; another beast to tend."

And the thing was bitter to her; because it gave trouble and took food.

Now, what the letter had been, or who had deciphered it for him, Claudis

Flamma never told to any man; and from the little strange creature no

utterance could be ever got.

But the child who had come in the night and the snow tarried at Yprès

from that time thenceforward.

Claudis Flamma nourished, sheltered, clothed her; but he did all these

begrudgingly, harshly, scantily; and he did all these with an acrid hate

and scorn, which did not cease but rather grew with time.

The blow which had been her earliest welcome was not the last that she

received from him by many; and whilst she was miserable exceedingly, she

showed it, not as children do, but rather like some chained and untamed

animal, in tearless stupor and in sudden, sharp ferocity. And this the

more because she spoke but a very few words of the language of the

people among whom she had been brought; her own tongue was one full of

round vowels and strange sounds, a tongue unknown to them.

For many weeks he said not one word to her, cast not one look at her; he

let her lead the same life that was led by the brutes that crawled in

the timbers, or by the pigs that couched and were kicked in the straw.

The woman Pitchou gave her such poor scraps of garments or of victuals

as she chose; she could crouch in the corner of the hearth where the

fire warmth reached; she could sleep in the hay in the little loft under

the roof; so much she could do and no more.

After that first moment in which her vague appeal for pity and for rest

had been answered by the blow that struck her senseless, the child had

never made a moan, nor sought for any solace.

All the winter through she lay curled up on the tiles by the fence, with

her arms round the great body of the dog and his head upon her chest;

they were both starved, beaten, kicked, and scourged, with brutal words

oftentimes; they had the community of misfortune, and they loved one

another.

The blow on her head, the coldness of the season, the scanty food that

was cast to her, all united to keep her brain stupefied and her body

almost motionless. She was like a young bear that is motherless,

wounded, frozen, famished, but which, coiled in an almost continual

slumber, keeps its blood flowing and its limbs alive. And, like the

bear, with the spring she awakened.

When the townsfolk and the peasants came to the mill, and first saw this

creature there, with her wondrous vivid hues, and her bronzed half-naked

limbs, they regarded her in amazement, and asked the miller whence she

came. He set his teeth, and answered ever:

"The woman that bore her was Reine Flamma."

The avowal was a penance set to himself, but to it he never added more;

and they feared his bitter temper and his caustic tongue too greatly to

press it on him, or even to ask him whether his daughter were with the

living or the dead.

With the unfolding of the young leaves, and the loosening of the

frost-bound waters, and the unveiling of the violet and the primrose

under the shadows of the wood, all budding life revives, and so did

hers. For she could escape from the dead, cold, bitter atmosphere of the

silent loveless house, where her bread was begrudged, and the cudgel was

her teacher, out into the freshness and the living sunshine of the young

blossoming world, where the birds and the beasts and tender blue flowers

and the curling green boughs were her comrades, and where she could

stretch her limbs in freedom, and coil herself among the branches, and

steep her limbs in the coolness of waters, and bathe her aching feet in

the moisture of rain-filled grasses.

With the spring she arose, the true forest animal she was; wild, fleet,

incapable of fear, sure of foot, in unison with all the things of the

earth and the air, and stirred by them to a strange, dumb, ignorant,

passionate gladness.

She had been scarce seen in the winter; with the breaking of the year

the people from more distant places who rode their mules down to the

mill on their various errands stared at this child, and wondered among

themselves greatly, and at length asked Claudis Flamma whence she came.

He answered ever, setting hard his teeth:

"The woman that bore her was one accursed, whom men deemed a

saint--Reine Flamma."

And he never added more. To tell the truth, the horrible, biting,

burning, loathsome truth, was a penance that he had set to himself, and

from which he never wavered.

They dared not ask him more; for many were his debtors, and all feared

his scourging tongue. But when they went away, and gossiped among

themselves by the wayside well or under the awnings of the

market-stalls, they said to one another that it was just as they had

thought long ago; the creature had been no better than her kind; and

they had never credited the fable that God had taken her, though they

had humored the miller because he was aged and in dotage. Whilst one old

woman, a withered and witchlike crone, who had toiled in from the

fishing village with a creel upon her back and the smell of the sea

about her rags, heard, standing in the market-place, and laughed, and

mocked them, these seers who were so wise after the years had gone, and

when the truth was clear.

"You knew, you knew, you knew!" she echoed, with a grin upon her face.

"Oh, yes! you were so wise! Who said seven years through that Reine

Flamma was a saint, and taken by the saints into their keeping? And who

hissed at me for a foul-mouthed crone when I said that the devil had

more to do with her than the good God, and that the black-browed gypsy,

with jewels for eyes in his head, like the toad, was the only master to

whom she gave herself? Oh-hè, you were so wise!"

So she mocked them, and they were ashamed, and held their peace; well

knowing that indeed no creature among them had ever been esteemed so

pure, so chaste, and so honored of heaven as had been the miller's

daughter.

Many remembered the "gypsy with the jeweled eyes," and saw those

brilliant, fathomless, midnight eyes reproduced in the small rich face

of the child whom Reine Flamma, as her own father said, had borne in

shame whilst they had been glorifying her apotheosis. And it came to be

said, as time went on, that this unknown stranger had been the fiend

himself, taking human shape for the destruction of one pure soul, and

the mocking of all true children of the church.

Legend and tradition still held fast their minds in this remote,

ancient, and priest-ridden place; in their belief the devil was still a

living power, traversing the earth and air in search of souls, and not

seldom triumphing: of metaphor or myth they were ignorant, Satan to them

was a personality, terrific, and oftentimes irresistible, assuming at

will shapes grotesque or awful, human or spiritual. Their forefathers

had beheld him; why not they?

So the henhucksters and poulterers, the cider-makers and tanners, the

fisherfolk from the seaboard, and the peasant proprietors from the

country round, came at length in all seriousness to regard the young

child at Yprès as a devil-born thing. "She was hell-begotten," they

would mutter when they saw her; and they would cross themselves, and

avoid her if they could.

The time had gone by, unhappily, as they considered, when men had been

permitted to burn such creatures as this; they knew it and were sorry

for it; the world, they thought, had been better when Jews had blazed

like torches, and witches had crackled like firewood; such treats were

forbidden now, they knew, but many, for all that, thought within

themselves that it was a pity it should be so, and that it was mistaken

mercy in the age they lived in which forbade the purifying of the earth

by fire of such as she.

In the winter-time, when they first saw her, unusual floods swept the

country, and destroyed much of their property; in the spring which

followed there were mildew and sickness everywhere; in the summer there

was a long drought, and by consequence there came a bad harvest, and

great suffering and scarcity.

There were not a few in the district who attributed all these woes to

the advent of the child of darkness, and who murmured openly in their

huts and homesteads that no good would befall them so long as this

offspring of hell were suffered in their midst.

Since, however, the time was past when the broad market-place could have

been filled with a curious, breathless, eager crowd, and the gray

cathedral have grown red in the glare of flames fed by a young living

body, they held their hands from doing her harm, and said these things

only in their own ingle-nooks, and contented themselves with forbidding

their children to consort with her, and with drawing their mules to the

other side of the road when they met her. They did not mean to be cruel,

they only acted in their own self-defense, and dealt with her as their

fellow-countrymen dealt with a cagote--"only."

Hence, when, with the reviving year the child's dulled brain awakened,

and all the animal activity in her sprang into vigorous action, she

found herself shunned, marked, and glanced at with averted looks of

mingled dread and scorn. "A daughter of the devil!" she heard again and

again muttered as they passed her; she grew to take shelter in this

repute as in a fortress, and to be proud, with a savage pride, of her

imputed origin.

It made her a little fierce, mute, fearless, reckless, all-daring, and

all-enduring animal. An animal in her ferocities, her mute instincts,

her supreme patience, her physical perfectness of body and of health.

Perfect of shape and hue; full of force to resist; ignorant either of

hope or fear; desiring only one thing, liberty; with no knowledge, but

with unerring instinct.

She was at an age when happier creatures have scarce escaped from their

mother's arms; but she had not even thus early a memory of her mother,

and she had been shaken off to live or die, to fight or famish, as a

young fox whose dam has been flung to the hounds is driven away to

starve in the winter woods, or save himself, if he have strength, by

slaughter.

She was a tame animal only in one thing: she took blows uncomplainingly,

and as though comprehending that they were her inevitable portion.

"The child of the devil!" they said. In a dumb, half-unconscious

fashion, this five-year-old creature wondered sometimes why the devil

had not been good enough to give her a skin that would not feel, and

veins that would not bleed.

She had always been beaten ever since her birth; she was beaten here;

she thought it a law of life, as other children think it such to have

their mother's kiss and their daily food and nightly prayer.

Claudis Flamma did after this manner his duty by her. She was to him a

thing accursed, possessed, loathsome, imbued with evil from her origin;

but he did what he deemed his duty. He clothed her, if scantily; he fed

her, if meagerly; he lashed her with all the caustic gibes that came

naturally to his tongue; he set her hard tasks to keep her from

idleness; he beat her when she did not, and not seldom when she did,

them. He dashed holy water on her many times; and used a stick to her

without mercy.

After this light he did his duty. That he should hate her, was to

fulfill a duty also in his eyes; he had always been told that it was

right to abhor the things of darkness; and to him she was a thing of

utter darkness, a thing born of the black ruin of a stainless soul,

begotten by the pollution and corruption of an infernal tempter.

He never questioned her as to her past--that short past, like the span

of an insect's life, which yet had sufficed to gift her with passions,

with instincts, with desires, even with memories,--in a word, with

character:--a character he could neither change nor break; a thing

formed already, for good or for evil, abidingly.

He never spoke to her except in sharp irony or in curt command. He set

her hard tasks of bodily labor which she did not dispute, but

accomplished so far as her small strength lay, with a mute dogged

patience, half ferocity, half passiveness.

In those first winter days of her arrival he called her Folle-Farine;

taking the most worthless, the most useless, the most abject, the most

despised thing he knew in all his daily life from which to name her; and

the name adhered to her, and was the only one by which she was ever

known.

Folle-Farine!--as one may say, the Dust.

In time she grew to believe that it was really hers; even as in time she

began to forget that strange, deep, rich tongue in which she had babbled

her first words, and to know no other tongue than the Norman-French

about her.

Yet in her there existed imagination, tenderness, gratitude, and a

certain wild and true nobility, though the old man Flamma would never

have looked for them, never have believed in them. She was devil-born:

she was of devil nature: in his eyes.

Upon his own mill-ditch, foul and fetid, refuse would sometimes gather,

and receiving the seed of the lily, would give birth to blossoms born

stainless out of corruption. But the allegory had no meaning for him.

Had any one pointed it out to him he would have taken the speaker into

his orchard, and said:

"Will the crab bear a fruit not bitter? Will the nightshade give out

sweetness and honey? Fool!--as the stem so the branch, as the sap so the

blossom."

And this fruit of sin and shame was poison in his sight.

CHAPTER IV.

The little dim mind of the five-year-old child was not a blank; it was

indeed filled to overflowing with pictures that her tongue could not

have told of, even had she spoken the language of the people amidst whom

she had been cast.

A land altogether unlike that in which she had been set down that bitter

night of snow and storm: a land noble and wild, and full of color,

broken into vast heights and narrow valleys, clothed with green beech

woods and with forests of oak and of walnut, filled with the noise of

torrents leaping from crag to crag, and of brown mountain-streams

rushing broad and angry through wooded ravines. A land, made beautiful

by moss-grown water-mills, and lofty gateways of gray rock; and still

shadowy pools, in which the bright fish leaped, and mules' bells that

rang drowsily through leafy gorges; and limestone crags that pierced the

clouds, spirelike, and fantastic in a thousand shapes; and high blue

crests of snow-topped mountains, whose pinnacles glowed to the divinest

flush of rose and amber with the setting of the sun.

This land she remembered vaguely, yet gloriously, as the splendors of a

dream of Paradise rest on the brain of some young sleeper wakening in

squalor, cold, and pain. But the people of the place she had been

brought to could not comprehend her few, shy, sullen words, and her

strange, imperfect trills of song; and she could not tell them that this

land had been no realm enchanted of fairy or of fiend, but only the

forest region of the Liebana.

Thither, one rich autumn day, a tribe of gypsies had made their camp.

They were a score in all; they held themselves one of the noblest

branches of their wide family; they were people with pure Eastern blood

in them, and all the grace and the gravity of the Oriental in their

forms and postures.

They stole horses and sheep; they harried cattle; they stopped the mules

in the passes, and lightened their load of wine-skins: they entered the

posada, when they deigned to enter one at all, with neither civil

question nor show of purse, but with a gleam of the teeth, like a

threatening dog, and the flash of the knife, half drawn out of the

girdle. They were low thieves and mean liars; wild daredevils and loose

livers; loathers of labor and lovers of idle days and plundering nights;

yet they were beautiful, with the noble, calm, scornful beauty of the

East, and they wore their rags with an air that was in itself an empire.

They could play, too, in heavenly fashion, on their old three-stringed

viols; and when their women danced on the sward by moonlight, under the

broken shadows of some Moorish ruin, clanging high their tambourines

above their graceful heads, and tossing the shining sequins that bound

their heavy hair, the muleteer or the herdsman, seeing them from afar,

shook with fear, and thought of the tales told him in his childhood by

his grandam of the spirits of the dead Moors that rose to revelry, at

midnight, in the haunts of their old lost kingdom.

Among them was a man yet more handsome than the rest, taller and lither

still; wondrous at leaping and wrestling, and all athletic things;

surest of any to win a woman, to tame a horse, to strike down a bull at

a blow, to silence an angry group at a wineshop with a single glance of

his terrible eyes.

His name was Taric.

He had left them often to wander by himself into many countries, and at

times when, by talent or by terrorism, he had netted gold enough to play

the fool to his fancy, he had gone to some strange city, where credulity

and luxury prevailed, and there had lived like a prince, as his own

phrase ran, and gamed and intrigued, and feasted, and roystered right

royally whilst his gains lasted.

Those spent, he would always return awhile, and lead the common, roving,

thieving life of his friends and brethren, till the fit of ambition or

the run of luck were again on him. Then his people would afresh lose

sight of him to light on him, velvet-clad, and wine-bibbing, in some

painter's den in some foreign town, or welcome him ragged, famished, and

footweary, on their own sunburnt sierras.

And the mystery of his ways endeared him to them; and they made him

welcome whenever he returned, and never quarreled with him for his

faithlessness; but if there were anything wilder or wickeder, bolder or

keener, on hand than was usual, his tribe would always say--"Let Taric

lead."

One day their camp was made in a gorge under the great shadows of the

Picos da Europa, a place that they loved much, and settled in often,

finding the chestnut woods and the cliff caverns fair for shelter, the

heather abounding in grouse, and the pools full of trout, fair for

feeding. That day Taric returned from a year-long absence, suddenly

standing, dark and mighty, between them and the light, as they lay

around their soup-kettle, awaiting their evening meal.

"There is a woman in labor, a league back; by the great cork-tree,

against the bridge," he said to them. "Go to her some of you."

And, with a look to the women which singled out two for the errand, he

stretched himself in the warmth of the fire, and helped himself to the

soup, and lay quiet, vouchsafing them never a word, but playing

meaningly with the knife handle thrust into his shirt; for he saw that

some of the men were about to oppose his share of a common meal which he

had not earned by a common right.

It was Taric--a name of some terror came to their fierce souls.

Taric, the strongest and fleetest and most well favored of them all;

Taric, who had slain the bull that all the matadors had failed to daunt;

Taric, who had torn up the young elm, when they needed a bridge over a

flood, as easily as a child plucks up a reed; Taric, who had stopped the

fiercest contrabandista in all those parts, and cut the man's throat

with no more ado than a butcher slits a lamb's.

So they were silent, and let him take his portion of the fire and of the

broth, and of the thin red wine.

Meanwhile the two gypsies, Quità and Zarâ, went on their quest, and

found things as he had said.

Under the great cork-tree, where the grass was long and damp, and the

wood grew thickly, and an old rude bridge of unhewn blocks of rock

spanned, with one arch, the river as it rushed downward from its

limestone bed aloft, they found a woman just dead and a child just born.

Quità looked the woman all over hastily, to see if, by any chance, any

gold or jewels might be on her; there were none. There was only an ivory

cross on her chest, which Quità drew off and hid. Quità covered her with

a few boughs and left her.

Zarâ wrapped the child in a bit of her woolen skirt, and held it warm in

her breast, and hastened to the camp with it.

"She is dead, Taric," said Quità, meaning the woman she had left.

He nodded his handsome head.

"This is yours, Taric?" said Zarâ, meaning the child she held.

He nodded again, and drank another drop of wine, and stretched himself.

"What shall we do with her?" asked Quità.

"Let her lie there," he answered her.

"What shall we do with it?" asked Zarâ.

He laughed, and drew his knife against his own brown throat in a

significant gesture.

Zarâ said no word to him, but she went away with the child under some

branches, on which was hung a tattered piece of awning, orange striped,

that marked her own especial resting-place.

Out of the group about the fire, one man, rising, advanced, and looked

Taric full in the eyes.

"Has the woman died by foul means?"

Taric, who never let any living soul molest or menace him, answered him

without offense, and with a savage candor,--

"No--that I swear. I used no foul play against her. Go look at her if

you like. I loved her well enough while she lived. But what does that

matter? She is dead. So best. Women are as many as the mulberries."

"You loved her, and you will let the wolves eat her body?"

Taric laughed.

"There are no wolves in Liebana. Go and bury her if you choose,

Phratos."

"I will," the other answered him; and he took his way to the cork-tree

by the bridge.

The man who spoke was called Phratos.

He was not like his tribe in anything: except in a mutual love for a

life that wandered always, and was to no man responsible, and needed no

roof-tree, and wanted no settled habitation, but preferred to dwell wild

with the roe and the cony, and to be hungry and unclad, rather than to

eat the good things of the earth in submission and in durance.

He had not their physical perfection: an accident at his birth had made

his spine misshapen, and his gait halting. His features would have been

grotesque in their ugliness, except for the sweet pathos of the eyes and

the gay archness of the mouth.

Among a race noted for its singular beauty of face and form, Phratos

alone was deformed and unlovely; and yet both deformity and unloveliness

were in a way poetic and uncommon; and in his rough sheepskin garments,

knotted to his waist with a leathern thong, and with his thick tangled

hair falling down on his shoulders, they were rather the deformity of

the brake-haunting faun, the unloveliness of the moon-dancing satyr,

than those of a man and a vagrant. With the likeness he had the temper

of the old dead gods of the forests and rivers, he loved music, and

could make it, in all its innumerable sighs and songs, give a voice to

all creatures and things of the world, of the waters and the woodlands;

and for many things he was sorrowful continually, and for other things

he forever laughed and was glad.

Though he was misshapen, and even, as some said, not altogether straight

in his wits, yet his kin honored him.

For he could draw music from the rude strings of his old viol that

surpassed their own melodies as far as the shining of the sun on the

summits of the Europa surpassed the trembling of the little lamps under

the painted roadside Cavaries.

He was only a gypsy; he only played as the fancy moved him, by a bright

fountain at a noonday halt, under the ruined arches of a Saracenic

temple, before the tawny gleam of a vast dim plain at sunrise; in a cool

shadowy court where the vines shut out all light; beneath a balcony at

night, when the moonbeams gleamed on some fair unknown face, thrust for

a moment from the darkness through the white magnolia flowers. Yet he

played in suchwise as makes women weep, and holds children and dogs

still to listen, and moves grown men to shade their eyes with their

hands, and think of old dead times, when they played and prayed at their

mothers' knees.

And his music had so spoken to himself that, although true to his tribe

and all their traditions, loving the vagrant life in the open air, and

being incapable of pursuing any other, he yet neither stole nor slew,

neither tricked nor lied, but found his way vaguely to honesty and

candor, and, having found them, clove to them, so that none could turn

him; living on such scant gains as were thrown to him for his music from

balconies and posada windows and winehouse doors in the hamlets and

towns through which he passed, and making a handful of pulse and a slice

of melon, a couch of leaves and a draught of water, suffice to him for

his few and simple wants.

His people reproached him, indeed, with demeaning their race by taking

payment in lieu of making thefts; and they mocked him often, and taunted

him, though in a manner they all loved him,--the reckless and

blood-stained Taric most, perhaps, of all. But he would never quarrel

with them, neither would he give over his strange ways which so incensed

them, and with time they saw that Phratos was a gifted fool, who, like

other mad simple creatures, had best be left to go on his own way

unmolested and without contradiction.

If, too, they had driven him from their midst, they would have missed

his music sorely; that music which awoke them at break of day soaring up

through their roof of chestnut leaves like a lark's song piercing the

skies.

Phratos came now to the dead woman, and drew off the boughs, and looked

at her. She was quite dead. She had died where she had first sunk down,

unable to reach her promised resting-place. It was a damp green nook on

the edge of the bright mountain-river, at the entrance of that narrow

gorge in which the encampment had been made.

The face, which was white and young, lay upward, with the shadows of the

flickering foliage on it; and the eyes, which Quità had not closed, were

large and blue; her hair, which was long and brown, was loose, and had

got wet among the grass, and had little buds of flowers and stray golden

leaves twisted in it.

Phratos felt sorrow for her as he looked.

He could imagine her history.

Taric, whom many women had loved, had besought many a one thus to share

his fierce free life for a little space, and then drift away out of it

by chance, or be driven away from it by his fickle passions, or be taken

away like this one by death.

In her bosom, slipped in her clothes, was a letter. It was written in a

tongue he did not know. He held it awhile, thinking, then he folded it

up and put it in his girdle,--it might be of use, who could tell? There

was the child, there, that might live; unless the camp broke up, and

Zarâ left it under a walnut-tree to die, with the last butterflies of

the fading summer, which was in all likelihood all she would do.

Nevertheless he kept the letter, and when he had looked long enough at

the dead creature, he turned to the tools he had brought with him, and

set patiently to make her grave.

He could only work slowly, for he was weak of body, and his infirmity

made all manual toil painful to him. His task was hard, even though the

earth was so soft from recent heavy rains.

The sun set whilst he was still engaged on it; and it was quite

nightfall before he had fully accomplished it. When the grave was ready

he filled it carefully with the golden leaves that had fallen, and the

thick many-colored mosses that covered the ground like a carpet.

Then he laid the body tenderly down within that forest shroud, and, with

the moss like a winding-sheet between it and the earth which had to fall

on it, he committed the dead woman to her resting-place.

It did not seem strange to him, or awful, to leave her there.

He was a gypsy, and to him the grave under a forest-tree and by a

mountain-stream seemed the most natural rest at last that any creature

could desire or claim. No rites seemed needful to him, and no sense of

any neglect, cruel or unfitting, jarred on him in thus leaving her in

her loneliness, with only the cry of the bittern or the bell of the wild

roe as a requiem.

Yet a certain sorrow for this unknown and lost life was on him, bohemian

though he was, as he took up his mattock and turned away, and went

backward down the gorge, and left her to lie there forever, through rain

and sunshine, through wind and storm, through the calm of the summer and

the flush of the autumn, and the wildness of the winter, when the

swollen stream should sweep above her tomb, and the famished beasts of

the hills would lift up their voices around it.

When he reached the camp, he gave the letter to Taric.

Taric, knowing the tongue it was written in, and being able to

understand the character, looked at it and read it through by the light

of the flaming wood. When he had done so he tossed it behind, in among

the boughs, in scorn.

"The poor fool's prayer to the brute that she hated!" he said, with a

scoff.

Phratos lifted up the letter and kept it.

In a later time he found some one who could decipher it for him.

It was the letter of Reine Flamma to the miller at Yprès, telling him

the brief story of her fatal passion, and imploring from him mercy to

her unborn child should it survive her and be ever taken to him.

Remorse and absence had softened to her the harshness and the meanness

of her father's character; she only remembered that he had loved her,

and had deemed her pure and faithful as the saints of God. There was no

word in the appeal by which it could have been inferred that Claudis

Flamma had been other than a man much wronged and loving much, patient

of heart, and without blame in his simple life.

Phratos took the letter and cherished it. He thought it might some day

save her offspring. This old man's vengeance could not, he thought, be

so cruel to the child as might be the curse and the knife of Taric.

"She must have been beautiful?" said Phratos to him, after awhile, that

night; "and you care no more for her than that."

Taric stretched his mighty limbs in the warmth of the flame and made his

answer:

"There will be as good grapes on the vines next year as any we gathered

this. What does it signify?--she was only a woman.

"She loved me; she thought me a god, a devil, a prince, a chief,--all

manner of things;--the people thought so too. She was sick of her life.

She was sick of the priests and the beads, and the mill and the market.

She was fair to look at, and the fools called her a saint. When a woman

is young and has beauty, it is dull to be worshiped--in that way.

"I met her in the wood one summer night. The sun was setting. I do not

know why I cared for her--I did. She was like a tall white lily; these

women of ours are only great tawny sunflowers.

"She was pure and straight of life; she believed in heaven and hell; she

was innocent as the child unborn; it was tempting to kill all that. It

is so easy to kill it when a woman loves you. I taught her what passion

and freedom and pleasure and torment all meant. She came with me,--after

a struggle, a hard one. I kept her loyally while the gold lasted; that I

swear. I took her to many cities. I let her have jewels and music, and

silk dresses, and fine linen. I was good to her; that I swear.

"But after a bit she pined, and grew dull again, and wept in secret, and

at times I caught her praying to the white cross which she wore on her

breast. That made me mad. I cursed her and beat her. She never said

anything; she seemed only to love me more, and that made me more mad.

"Then I got poor again, and I had to sell her things one by one. Not

that she minded that, she would have sold her soul for me. We wandered

north and south; and I made money sometimes by the dice, or by breaking

a horse, or by fooling a woman, or by snatching a jewel off one of their

dolls in their churches; and I wanted to get rid of her, and I could not

tell how. I had not the heart to kill her outright.

"But she never said a rough word, you know, and that makes a man mad.

Maddalena or Kara or Rachel--any of them--would have flown and struck a

knife at me, and hissed like a snake, and there would have been blows

and furious words and bloodshed; and then we should have kissed, and

been lovers again, fast and fierce. But a woman who is quiet, and only

looks at you with great, sad, soft eyes, when you strike her,--what is

one to do?

"We were horribly poor at last: we slept in barns and haylofts; we ate

berries and drank the brook-water. She grew weak, and could hardly walk.

Many a time I have been tempted to let her lie and die in the hedgeway

or on the plains, and I did not,--one is so foolish sometimes for sake

of a woman. She knew she was a burden and curse to me,--I may have said

so, perhaps; I do not remember.

"At last I heard of you in the Liebana, from a tribe we fell in with on

the other side of the mountains, and so we traveled here on foot. I

thought she would have got to the women before her hour arrived. But she

fell down there, and could not stir: and so the end came. It is best as

it is. She was wretched, and what could I do with a woman like that? who

would never hearken to another lover, nor give up her dead God on his

cross, nor take so much as a broken crust if it were stolen, nor even

show her beauty to a sculptor to be carved in stone--for I tried to make

her do that, and she would not. It is best as it is. If she had lived we

could have done nothing with her. And yet I see her sometimes as I saw

her that night, so white and so calm, in the little green wood, as the

sun set----"

His voice ceased, and he took up a horn full of vino clarete; and

drained it; and was very still, stretching his limbs to bask in the heat

of the fire. The wine had loosened his tongue, and he had spoken from

his heart,--truthfully.

Phratos, his only hearer, was silent.

He was thinking of the great blue sightless eyes that he had closed, and

of the loose brown hair on which he had flung the wet leaves and the

earth-clogged mosses.

"The child lives?" he said at length.

Taric, who was sinking to sleep after the long fatigues of a heavy tramp

through mountain-passes, stirred sullenly with an oath.

"Let it go to hell!" he made answer.

And these were the only words of baptism that were spoken over the

nameless daughter of Taric the gypsy and of Reine Flamma.

That night Phratos called out to him in the moonlight the woman Zarâ,

who came from under her tent, and stood under the glistening leaves,

strong and handsome, with shining eyes and snowy teeth.

"The child lives still?" he asked.

Zarâ nodded her head.

"You will try and keep it alive?" he pursued.

She shrugged her shoulders.

"What is the use? Taric would rather it were dead."

"What matter what Taric wishes. Living or dead, it will not hinder him.

A child more or less with us, what is it? Only a draught of goat's milk

or a handful of meal. So little; it cannot be felt. You have a child of

your own, Zarâ; you cared for it?"

"Yes," she answered, with a sudden softening gleam of her bright savage

eyes.

She had a brown, strong, year-old boy, who kicked his naked limbs on the

sward with joy at Phratos's music.

"Then have pity on this motherless creature," said Phratos, wooingly. "I

buried that dead woman; and her eyes, though there was no sight in them,

still seemed to pray to mine--and to pray for her child. Be merciful,

Zarâ. Let the child have the warmth of your arms and the defense of your

strength. Be merciful, Zarâ; and your seed shall multiply and increase

tenfold, and shall be stately and strong, and shall spread as the

branches of the plane-trees, on which the storm spends its fury in vain,

and beneath which all things of the earth can find refuge. For never was

a woman's pity fruitless, nor the fair deeds of her days without

recompense."

Zarâ listened quietly, as the dreamy, poetic, persuasive words stole on

her ear like music. Like the rest of her people, she half believed in

him as a seer and prophet; her teeth shone out in a soft sudden smile.

"You are always a fool, Phratos," she said; "but it shall be as you

fancy."

And she went in out of the moonlit leaves and the clear cool, autumn

night into the little dark stifling tent, where the new-born child had

been laid away in a corner upon a rough-and-ready bed of gathered dusky

fir-needles.

"It is a little cub, not worth the saving; and its dam was not of our

people," she said to herself, as she lifted the wailing and alien

creature to her bosom.

"It is for you, my angel, that I do it," she murmured, looking at the

sleeping face of her own son.

Outside the tent the sweet strains of Phratos's music rose sighing and

soft; and mingling, as sounds mingle in a dream, with the murmurs of the

forest leaves and the rushing of the mountain-river. He gave her the

only payment in his power.

Zarâ, hushing the strange child at her breast, listened, and was half

touched, half angered.

"Why should he play for this little stray thing, when he never played

once for you, my glory?" she said to her son, as she put the dead

woman's child roughly away, and took him up in its stead, to beat

together in play his rosy hands and cover his mouth with kisses.

For even from these, the world's outcasts, this new life of a few hours'

span was rejected as unworthy and despised.

Nevertheless, the music played on through the still forest night; and

nevertheless, the child grew and throve.

The tribe of Taric abode in the Liebana or in the adjacent country along

the banks of the Deva during the space of four years and more, scarcely

losing in that time the sight, either from near or far, of the rosy

peaks of the Europa.

He did not abide with them; he quarreled with them violently concerning

some division of a capture of wine-skins, and went on his own way to

distant provinces and cities; to the gambling and roystering, the

woman-fooling and the bull-fighting, that this soul lusted after always.

His daughter he left to dwell in the tent of Zarâ, and under the defense

of Phratos.

Once or twice, in sojourns of a night or two among his own people, as

the young creature grew in stature and strength, Taric had glanced at

her, and called her to him, and felt the litheness of her limbs and the

weight of her hair, and laughed as he thrust her from him, thinking, in

time to come, she--who would know nothing of her mother's dead God on

the cross, and of her mother's idle, weak scruples--might bring him a

fair provision in his years of age, when his hand should have lost its

weight against men and his form its goodliness in the sight of women.

Once or twice he had given her a kick of his foot, or blow with his

leathern whip, when she crawled in the grass too near his path, or lay

asleep in the sun as he chanced to pass by her.

Otherwise he had naught to do with her, absent or present; otherwise he

left her to chance and the devil, who were, as he said, according to the

Christians, the natural patrons and sponsors of all love-children.

Chance and the Devil, however, had not wholly their way in the Liebana;

for besides them there was Phratos.

Phratos never abandoned her.

Under the wolfskin and pineboughs of Zarâ's tent there was misery very

often.

Zarâ had a fresh son born to her with each succeeding year; and having a

besotted love for her own offspring, had little but indifference and

blows for the stranger who shared their bed and food. Her children,

brown and curly, naked and strong, fought one another like panther cubs,

and rode in a cluster like red mountain-ash berries in the sheepskin

round her waist, and drank by turns out of the pitcher of broth, and

slept all together on dry ferns and mosses, rolled in warm balls one in

another like young bears.

But the child who had no affinity with them, who was not even wholly of

their tribe, but had in her what they deemed the taint of gentile blood,

was not allowed to gnaw her bare bone or her ripe fig in peace if they

wished for it; was never carried with them in the sheepskin nest, but

left to totter after in the dust or mud as best she might; was forced to

wait for the leavings in the pitcher, or go without if leavings there

were none; and was kicked away by the sturdy limbs of these young males

when she tried to creep for warmth's sake in among them on their fern

bed. But she minded all this little; since in the Liebana there was

Phratos.

Phratos was always good to her. The prayer which those piteous dead eyes

had made he always answered. He had always pity for the child.

Many a time, but for his remembrance, she would have starved outright or

died of cold in those wild winters when the tribe huddled together in

the caverns of the limestone, and the snow-drifts were driven up by the

northern winds and blocked them there for many days. Many a time but for

his aid she would have dropped on their march and been left to perish as

she might on the long sunburnt roads, in the arid midsummers, when the

gypsies plodded on their dusty way through the sinuous windings of

hillside paths and along the rough stones of dried-up water-courses, in

gorges and passages known alone to them and the wild deer.

When her throat was parched with the torment of long thirst, it was he

who raised her to drink from the rill in the rock, high above, to which

the mothers lifted their eager children, leaving her to gasp and gaze

unpitied. When she was driven away from the noonday meal by the hungry

and clamorous youngsters, who would admit no share of their partridge

broth and stewed lentils, it was he who bruised the maize between stones

for her eating, and gathered for her the wild fruit of the quince and

the mulberry.

When the sons of Zarâ had kicked and bruised and spurned her from the

tent, he would lead her away to some shadowy place where the leaves grew

thickly, and play to her such glad and buoyant tunes that the laughter

seemed to bubble from the listening brooks and ripple among the swinging

boughs, and make the wild hare skip with joy, and draw the timid lizard

from his hole to frolic. And when the way was long, and the stony paths

cruel to her little bare feet, he would carry her aloft on his misshapen

shoulders, where his old viol always traveled; and would beguile the

steep way with a thousand quaint, soft, grotesque conceits of all the

flowers and leaves and birds and animals: talking rather to himself than

her, yet talking with a tender fancifulness, half humor and half

pathos, that soothed her tired senses like a lullaby. Hence it came to

pass that the sole creature whom she loved and who had pity for her was

the uncouth, crippled, gay, sad, gentle, dauntless creature whom his

tribe had always held half wittol and half seer.

Thus the life in the hills of the Liebana went on till the child of

Taric had entered her sixth year.

She had both beauty and grace; she had the old Moresco loveliness in its

higher type; she was fleet as the roe, strong as the young izard, wild

as the wood-partridge on the wing; she had grace of limb from the

postures and dances with which she taught herself to keep time to the

fantastic music of the viol; she was shy and sullen, fierce and savage,

to all save himself, for the hand of every other was against her; but to

him, she was docile as the dove to the hand that feeds it. He had given

her a string of bright sequins to hang on her hair, and when the

peasants of the mountains and valleys saw her by the edge of some green

woodland pool, whirling by moonlight to the sound of his melodies, they

took her to be some unearthly spirit, and told wonderful things over

their garlic of the elf crowned with stars they had seen dancing on a

round lotos-leaf in the hush of the night.

In the Liebana she was beaten often, hungry almost always, cursed

fiercely, driven away by the mothers, mocked and flouted by the

children; and this taught her silence and ferocity. Yet in the Liebana

she was happy, for one creature loved her, and she was free--free to lie

in the long grass, to bathe in the still pools, to watch the wild things

of the woods, to wander ankle-deep in forest blossoms, to sleep under

the rocking of pines, to run against the sweet force of the wind, to

climb the trees and swing cradled in leaves, and to look far away at the

snow on the mountains, and to dream, and to love, and to be content in

dreaming and loving, their mystical glory that awoke with the sun.

One day in the red autumn, Taric came; he had been wholly absent more

than two years.

He was superb to the sight still, with matchless splendor of face and

form, but his carriage was more reckless and disordered than ever, and

in his gemlike and night-black eyes, there was a look of cunning and of

subtle ferocity new to them.

His life had gone hardly with him, and to the indolence, the passions,

the rapacity, the slothful sensuality of the gypsy--who had retained all

the vices of his race whilst losing the virtues of simplicity in living,

and of endurance under hardship--the gall of a sharp poverty had become

unendurable: and to live without dice, and women, and wine, and boastful

brawling, seemed to him to be worse than any death.

The day he returned, they were still camped in the Liebana; in one of

its narrow gorges, overhung with a thick growth of trees, and coursed

through by a headlong hill-stream that spread itself into darkling

breadths and leafy pools, in which the fish were astir under great snowy

lilies and a tangled web of water-plants.

He strode into the midst of them, as they sat round their camp-fire lit

beneath a shelf of rock, as his wont was; and was welcomed, and fed, and

plied with such as they had, with that mixture of sullen respect and

incurable attachment which his tribe preserved, through all their

quarrels, for this, the finest and the fiercest, the most fickle and the

most faithless, of them all.

He gorged himself, and drank, and said little.

When the meal was done, the young of the tribe scattered themselves in

the red evening light under the great walnuts; some at feud, some at

play.

"Which is mine?" he asked, surveying the children. They showed her to

him. The sequins were round her head; she swung on a bough of ash; the

pool beneath mirrored her; she was singing as children sing, without

words, yet musically and gladly, catching at the fireflies that danced

above her in the leaves.

"Can she dance?" he asked lazily of them.

"In her own fashion,--as a flower in the wind," Phratos answered him,

with a smile; and, willing to woo for her the good graces of her father,

he slung his viol off his shoulders and tuned it, and beckoned the

child.

She came, knowing nothing who Taric was; he was only to her a

fierce-eyed man like the rest, who would beat her, most likely, if she

stood between him and the sun, or overturned by mischance his horn of

liquor.

Phratos played, and all the gypsy children, as their wont was, danced.

But she danced all alone, and with a grace and a fire that surpassed

theirs. She was only a baby still; she had only her quick ear to guide

her, and her only teacher was such inborn instinct as makes the birds

sing and the young kids gambol.

Yet she danced with a wondrous subtlety and intensity of ardor beyond

her years; her small brown limbs glancing like bronze in the fire-glow,

the sequins flashing in her flying hair, and her form flung high in air,

like a bird on the wing, or a leaf on the wind; never still, never

ceasing to dart, and to leap, and to whirl, and to sway, yet always with

a sweet dreamy indolence, even in her fiery unrest.

Taric watched her under his bent brow until the music ceased, and she

dropped on the grass spent and panting like a swallow after a long ocean

flight.

"She will do," he muttered.

"What is it you mean with the child?" some women asked.

Taric laughed.

"The little vermin is good for a gold piece or two," he answered.

Phratos said nothing, but he heard.

After awhile the camp was still; the gypsies slept. Two or three of

their men went out to try and harry cattle by the light of the moon if

they should be in luck; two others went forth to set snares for the wood

partridges and rabbits; the rest slumbered soundly, the dogs curled to a

watching sleep of vigilant guard in their midst.

Taric alone sat by the dying fire. When all was very quiet, and the

stars were clear in midnight skies, the woman Zarâ stole out of her tent

to him.

"You signed to me," she said to him in a low voice. "You want the child

killed?"

Taric showed his white teeth like a wolf.

"Not I; what should I gain?"

"What is it you want, then, with her?"

"I mean to take her, that is all. See here--a month ago, on the other

side of the mountains, I met a fantoccini player. It was at a wineshop,

hard by Luzarches. He had a woman-child with him who danced to his

music, and whom the people praised for her beauty, and who anticked like

a dancing-dog, and who made a great deal of silver. We got friends, he

and I. At the week's end the brat died: some sickness of the throat,

they said. Her master tore his hair and raved; the little wretch was

worth handfuls of coin to him. For such another he would give twelve

gold pieces. He shall have her. She will dance for him and me; there is

plenty to be made in that way. The women are fools over a handsome

child; they open their larders and their purses. I shall take her away

before sunrise; he says he teaches them in seven days, by starving and

giving the stick. She will dance while she is a child. Later on--there

are the theaters; she will be strong and handsome, and in the great

cities, now, a woman's comeliness is as a mine of gold ore. I shall take

her away by sunrise."

"To sell her?"

The hard fierce heart of Zarâ rebelled against him; she had no

tenderness save for her own offspring, and she had maltreated the stray

child many a time; yet the proud liberty and the savage chastity of her

race were roused against him by his words.

Taric laughed again.

"Surely; why not? I will make a dancing-dog of her for the peasants'

pastime; and in time she will make dancing-dogs of the nobles and the

princes for her own sport. It is a brave life--none better."

The gypsy woman stood, astonished and irresolute. If he had flung his

child in the river, or thrown her off a rock, he would have less

offended the instincts and prejudices of her clan.

"What will Phratos say?" she asked at length.

"Phratos? A rotten fig for Phratos! What can he say--or do? The little

beast is mine; I can wring its neck if I choose, and if it refuse to

pipe when we play for it, I will."

The woman sought in vain to dissuade him; he was inflexible. She left

him at last, telling herself that it was no business of hers. He had a

right to do what he chose with his own. So went and lay down among her

brown-faced boys, and was indifferent, and slept.

Taric likewise slept, upon a pile of moss under the ledge of the rock,

lulled by the heat of the fire, which, ere lying down, he had fed with

fresh boughs of resinous wood.

When all was quite still, and his deep quiet breathing told that his

slumber was one not easily broken, a man softly rose from the ground and

threw off a mass of dead leaves that had covered him, and stood erect, a

dark, strange, misshapen figure, in the moonlight: it was Phratos.

He had heard, and understood all that Taric meant for the present and

the future of the child: and he knew that when Taric vowed to do a thing

for his own gain, it were easier to uproot the chain of the Europa than

to turn him aside from his purpose.

"It was my doing!" said Phratos to himself bitterly, as he stood there,

and his heart was sick and sore in him, as with self-reproach for a

crime.

He thought awhile, standing still in the hush of the midnight; then he

went softly, with a footfall that did not waken a dog, and lifted up the

skins of Zarâ's tent as they hung over the fir-poles. The moonbeams

slanting through the foliage strayed in, and showed him the woman,

sleeping among her rosy robust children, like a mastiff with her litter

of tawny pups; and away from them, on the bare ground closer to the

entrance, the slumbering form of the young daughter of Taric.

She woke as he touched her, opening bright bewildered eyes.

"Hush! it is I, Phratos," he murmured over her, and the stifled cry died

on her lips.

He lifted her up in his arms and left the tent with her, and dropped the

curtain of sheepskin, and went out into the clear, crisp, autumn night.

Her eyes had closed again, and her head had sunk on his shoulder heavy

with sleep; she had not tried to keep awake one moment after knowing

that it was Phratos who had come for her; she loved him, and in his hold

feared nothing.

Taric lay on the ledge of the rock, deaf with the torpor of a

half-drunken slumber, dreaming gloomily; his hand playing in his dreams

with the knife that was thrust in his waistband.

Phratos stepped gently past him, and through the outstretched forms of

the dogs and men, and across the died-out embers of the fire, over which

the emptied soup-kettle still swung, as the night-breeze blew to and fro

its chain. No one heard him.

He went out from their circle and down the path of the gorge in silence,

carrying the child. She was folded in a piece of sheepskin, and in her

hair there were still the sequins. They glittered in the white light as

he went; as the wind blew, it touched the chords of the viol on his

shoulder, and struck a faint, musical, sighing sound from them.

"Is it morning?" the child murmured, half asleep.

"No, dear; it is night," he answered her, and she was content and slept

again--the strings of the viol sending a soft whisper in her drowsy ear,

each time that the breeze arose and swept across them.

When the morning came it found him far on his road, leaving behind him

the Liebana.

There followed a bright month of autumn weather. The child was happy as

she had never been.

They moved on continually through the plains and the fields, the hills

and the woods, the hamlets and the cities; but she and the viol were

never weary. They rode aloft whilst he toiled on. Yet neither was he

weary, for the viol murmured in the wind, and the child laughed in the

sunshine.

CHAPTER V.

It was late in the year.

The earth and sky were a blaze of russet and purple, and scarlet and

gold. The air was keen and swift, and strong like wine. A summer

fragrance blended with a winter frost. The grape harvest had been

gathered in, and had been plentiful, and the people were liberal and of

good humor.

Sometimes before a wineshop or beneath a balcony, or in a broad

market-square at evening, Phratos played; and the silver and copper

coins were dropped fast to him. When he had enough by him to get a crust

for himself, and milk and fruit for her, he did not pause to play, but

moved on resolutely all the day, resting at night only.

He bought her a little garment of red foxes' furs; her head and her feet

were bare. She bathed in clear running waters, and slept in a nest of

hay. She saw vast towers, and wondrous spires, and strange piles of wood

and stone, and rivers spanned by arches, and great forests half

leafless, and plains red in stormy sunset light, and towns that lay hid

in soft gold mists of vapor; and saw all these as in a dream, herself

borne high in air, wrapped warm in fur, and lulled by the sweet familiar

fraternity of the old viol. She asked no questions, she was content,

like a mole or a dormouse; she was not beaten or mocked, she was never

hungry nor cold; no one cursed her, and she was with Phratos.

It takes time to go on foot across a great country, and Phratos was

nearly always on foot.

Now and then he gave a coin or two, or a tune or two, for a lift on some

straw-laden wagon, or some mule-cart full of pottery or of vegetables,

that was crawling on its slow way through the plains of the marshy

lands, or the poplar-lined leagues of the public highways. But as a rule

he plodded on by himself, shunning the people of his own race, and

shunned in return by the ordinary populace of the places through which

he traveled. For they knew him to be a Spanish gypsy by his skin and his

garb and his language, and by the starry-eyed Arab-faced child who ran

by his side in her red fur and her flashing sequins.

"There is a curse written against all honest folk on every one of those

shaking coins," the peasants muttered as she passed them.

She did not comprehend their sayings, for she knew none but her gypsy

tongue, and that only very imperfectly; but she knew by their glance

that they meant that she was something evil; and she gripped tighter

Phratos's hand--half terrified, half triumphant.

The weather grew colder and the ground harder. The golden and scarlet

glories of the south and of the west, their red leafage and purple

flowers, gorgeous sunsets and leaping waters, gave place to the level

pastures, pale skies, leafless woods, and dim gray tints of the

northerly lands.

The frosts became sharp, and mists that came from unseen seas enveloped

them. There were marvelous old towns; cathedral spires that arose,

ethereal as vapor; still dusky cities, aged with many centuries, that

seemed to sleep eternally in the watery halo of the fog; green

cultivated hills, from whose smooth brows the earth-touching clouds

seemed never to lift themselves; straight sluggish streams, that flowed

with leisurely laziness through broad flat meadow-lands, white with snow

and obscure with vapor. These were for what they exchanged the pomp of

dying foliage, the glory of crimson fruits, the fierce rush of the

mistral, the odors of the nowel-born violets, the fantastic shapes of

the aloes and olives raising their dark spears and their silvery network

against the amber fires of a winter dawn in the rich southwest.

The child was chilled, oppressed, vaguely awestruck, and disquieted; but

she said nothing; Phratos was there and the viol.

She missed the red forests and the leaping torrents, and the prickly

fruits, and the smell of the violets and the vineyards, and the wild

shapes of the cactus, and the old myrtles that were hoary and contorted

with age. But she did not complain nor ask any questions; she had

supreme faith in Phratos.

One night, at the close of a black day in midwinter, the sharpest and

hardest in cold that they had ever encountered, they passed through a

little town whose roadways were mostly canals, and whose spires and

roofs and pinnacles and turrets and towers were all beautiful with the

poetry and the majesty of a long-perished age.

The day had been bitter; there was snow everywhere; great blocks of ice

choked up the water; the belfry chimes rang shrilly through the rarefied

air; the few folks that were astir were wrapped in wool or sheepskin;

through the casements there glowed the ruddy flush of burning logs; and

the muffled watchmen passing to and fro in antique custom on their

rounds called out, under the closed houses, that it was eight of the

night in a heavy snowstorm.

Phratos paused in the town at an old hostelry to give the child a hot

drink of milk and a roll of rye bread. There he asked the way to the

wood and the mill of Yprès.

They told it him sullenly and suspiciously: since for a wild gypsy of

Spain the shrewd, thrifty, plain people of the north had no liking.

He thanked them, and went on his way, out of the barriers of the little

town along a road by the river towards the country.

"Art thou cold, dear?" he asked her, with more tenderness than common in

his voice.

The child shivered under her little fur-skin, which would not keep out

the searching of the hurricane and the driving of the snowflakes; but

she drew her breath quickly, and answered him, "No."

They came to a little wood, leafless and black in the gloomy night; a

dead crow swung in their faces on a swaying pear-tree; the roar of the

mill-stream loudly filled what otherwise would have been an intense

silence.

He made his way in by a little wicket, through an orchard and through a

garden, and so to the front of the mill-house. The shutters were not

closed; through the driving of the snow he could see within. It looked

to him--a houseless wanderer from his youth up--strangely warm and safe

and still.

An old man sat on one side of the wide hearth; an old woman, who span,

on the other; the spinning-wheel turned, the thread flew, the logs

smoked and flamed, the red glow played on the blue and white tiles of

the chimney-place, and danced on the pewter and brass on the shelves;

from the rafters there hung smoked meats and dried herbs and strings of

onions; there was a crucifix, and below it a little Nativity, in wax and

carved wood.

He could not tell that the goodly stores were only gathered there to be

sold later at famine prices to a starving peasantry; he could not tell

that the wooden god was only worshiped in a blind, bigoted, brutal

selfishness, that desired to save its own soul, and to leave all other

souls in eternal damnation.

He could not tell; he only saw old age and warmth and comfort; and what

the people who hooted him as a heathen called the religion of Love.

"They will surely be good to her?" he thought. "Old people, and

prosperous, and alone by their fireside."

It seemed that they must be so.

Anyway, there was no other means to save her from Taric.

His heart was sore within him, for he had grown to love the child; and

to the vagrant instincts of his race the life of the house and of the

hearth seemed like the life of the cage for the bird. Yet Phratos, who

was not altogether as his own people were, but had thought much and

often in his own wild way, knew that such a life was the best for a

woman-child,--and, above all, for a woman-child who had such a sire as

Taric.

To keep her with himself was impossible. He had always dwelt with his

tribe, having no life apart from theirs; and even if he had left them,

wherever he had wandered, there would Taric have followed, and found

him, and claimed the child by his right of blood. There was no other way

to secure her from present misery and future shame, save only this; to

place her with her mother's people.

She stood beside him, still and silent, gazing through the snowflakes at

the warmth of the mill-kitchen within.

He stooped over her, and pushed between her fur garment and her skin the

letter he had found on the breast of the dead woman in the Liebana.

"Thou wilt go in there to the old man yonder, and sleep by that pleasant

fire to-night," he murmured to her. "And thou wilt be good and gentle,

and even as thou art to me always; and to-morrow at noontide I will come

and see how it fares with thee."

Her small hands tightened upon his.

"I will not go without thee," she muttered in the broken tongue of the

gypsy children.

There were food and milk, fire and shelter, safety from the night and

the storm there, she saw; but these were naught to her without Phratos.

She struggled against her fate as the young bird struggles against being

thrust into the cage,--not knowing what captivity means, and yet afraid

of it and rebelling by instinct.

He took her up in his arms, and pressed her close to him, and for the

first time kissed her. For Phratos, though tender to her, had no woman's

foolishness, but had taught her to be hardy and strong, and to look for

neither caresses nor compassion--knowing well that to the love-child of

Taric in her future years the first could only mean shame, and the last

could only mean alms, which would be shame likewise.

"Go, dear," he said softly to her; and then he struck with his staff on

the wooden door, and, lifting its latch, unclosed it; and thrust the

child forward, ere she could resist, into the darkness of the low

entrance-place.

Then he turned and went swiftly himself through the orchard and wood

into the gloom and the storm of the night.

He knew that to show himself to a northern householder were to do her

evil and hurt; for between the wanderer of the Spanish forests and the

peasant of the Norman pastures there could be only defiance, mistrust,

and disdain.

"I will see how it is with her to-morrow," he said to himself as he

faced again the wind and the sleet. "If it be well with her--let it be

well. If not, she must come forth with me, and we must seek some lair

where her wolf-sire shall not prowl and discover her. But it will be

hard to find; for the vengeance of Taric is swift of foot and has a

far-stretching hand and eyes that are sleepless."

And his heart was heavy in him as he went. He had done what seemed to

him just and due to the child and her mother; he had been true to the

vow he had made answering the mute prayer of the sightless dead eyes; he

had saved the flesh of the child from the whip of the trainer, and the

future of the child from the shame of the brothel; he had done thus much

in saving her from her father, and he had done it in the only way that

was possible to him.

Yet his heart was heavy as he went; and it seemed to him even as though

he had thrust some mountain-bird with pinions that would cleave the

clouds, and eyes that would seek the sun, and a song that would rise

with the dawn, and a courage that would breast the thunder, down into

the darkness of a trap, to be shorn and crippled and silenced for

evermore.

"I will see her to-morrow," he told himself; restless with a vague

remorse, as though the good he had done had been evil.

But when the morrow dawned there had happened that to Phratos which

forbade him to see whether it were well with her that day or any day in

all the many years that came.

For Phratos that night, being blinded and shrouded in the storm of snow,

lost such slender knowledge as he had of that northern country, and

wandered far afield, not knowing where he was in the wide white desert,

on which no single star-ray shone.

The violence of the storm grew with the hours. The land was a sheet of

snow. The plains were dim and trackless as a desert. Sheep were frozen

in their folds, and cattle drowned amidst the ice in the darkness. All

lights were out, and the warning peals of the bells were drowned in the

tempest of the winds.

The land was strange to him, and he lost all knowledge where he was.

Above, beneath, around, were the dense white rolling clouds of snow.

Now and then through the tumult of the hurricane there was blown a

strange harsh burst of jangled chimes that wailed a moment loudly on the

silence and then died again.

At many doors he knocked: the doors of little lonely places standing in

the great colorless waste.

But each door, being opened cautiously, was with haste shut in his face

again.

"It is a gypsy," the people muttered, and were afraid; and they drew

their bars closer and huddled together in their beds, and thanked their

saints that they were safe beneath a roof.

He wrapped his sheepskin closer round him and set his face against the

blast.

A hundred times he strove to set his steps backwards to the town, and a

hundred times he failed; and moved only round and round vainly, never

escaping the maze of the endless white fields.

Now the night was long, and he was weakly.

In the midst of the fields there was a cross, and at the head of the

cross hung a lantern. The wind tossed the light to and fro. It flickered

on the head of a woman. She lay in the snow, and her hand grasped his

foot as he passed her.

"I am dead," she said to him: "dead of hunger But the lad lives--save

him."

And as she spoke, her lips closed together, her throat rattled, and she

died.

The boy slept at her feet, and babbled in his sleep, delirious.

Phratos stooped down and raised him. He was a child of eight years, and

worn with famine and fever, and his gaunt eyes stared hideously up at

the driving snow.

Phratos folded him in his arms, and went on with him: the snow had

nearly covered the body of his mother.

All around were the fields. There was no light, except from the lantern

on the cross. A few sheep huddled near without a shepherd. The stillness

was intense. The bells had ceased to ring or he had wandered far from

the sound of them.

The lad was senseless; he muttered drearily foolish words of fever; his

limbs hung in a dead weight; his teeth chattered. Phratos, bearing him,

struggled on: the snow was deep and drifted heavily; every now and then

he stumbled and plunged to his knees in a rift of earth or in a shallow

pool of ice.

At last his strength, feeble at all times, failed him; his arms could

bear their burden no longer; he let the young boy slip from his hold

upon the ground; and stood, breathless and broken, with the snowflakes

beating on him.

"The woman trusted me," he thought; she was a stranger, she was a

beggar, she was dead. She had no bond upon him. Neither could she ever

bear witness against him. Yet he was loyal to her.

He unwound the sheepskin that he wore, and stripped himself of it and

folded it about the sick child, and with a slow laborious effort drew

the little body away under the frail shelter of a knot of furze, and

wrapped it closely round, and left it there.

It was all that he could do.

Then, with no defense between him and the driving cold, he strove once

more to find his road.

It was quite dark; quite still.

The snow fell ceaselessly; the white wide land was patchless as the sea.

He stumbled on, as a mule may which being blind and bruised yet holds

its way from the sheer instinct of its sad dumb patience. His veins were

frozen; his beard was ice; the wind cut his flesh like a scourge; a

sickly dreamy sleepiness stole on him.

He knew well what it meant.

He tried to rouse himself; he was young, and his life had its sweetness;

and there were faces he would fain have seen again, and voices whose

laughter he would fain have heard.

He drew the viol round and touched its strings; but his frozen fingers

had lost their cunning, and the soul of the music was chilled and dumb:

it only sighed in answer.

He kissed it softly as he would have kissed a woman's lips, and put it

in his bosom. It had all his youth in it.

Then he stumbled onward yet again, feebly, being a cripple, and cold to

the bone, and pierced with a million thorns of pain.

There was no light anywhere.

The endless wilderness of the white plowed lands stretched all around

him; where the little hamlets clustered the storm hid them; no light

could penetrate the denseness of that changeless gloom; and the only

sound that rose upon the ghastly silence was the moaning of some

perishing flock locked in a flood of ice, and deserted by its shepherd.

But what he saw and what he heard were not these going barefoot and

blindfold to his death, the things of his own land were with him; the

golden glories of sunsets of paradise; the scarlet blaze of a wilderness

of flowers; the sound of the fountains at midnight; the glancing of the

swift feet in the dances; the sweetness of songs sad as death sung in

the desolate courts of old palaces; the deep dreamy hush of white moons

shining through lines of palms straight on a silvery sea.

These arose and drifted before him, and he ceased to suffer or to know,

and sleep conquered him; he dropped down on the white earth noiselessly

and powerlessly as a leaf sinks; the snow fell and covered him.

When the morning broke, a peasant, going to his labor in the fields,

while the stormy winter sun rose red over the whitened world, found both

his body and the child's.

The boy was warm and living still beneath the shelter of the sheepskin:

Phratos was dead.

The people succored the child, and nursed and fed him so that his life

was saved; but to Phratos they only gave such burial as the corby gives

the stricken deer.

"It is only a gypsy; let him lie," they said; and they left him there,

and the snow kept him.

His viol they robbed him of, and cast it as a plaything to their

children.

But the children could make no melody from its dumb strings. For the

viol was faithful; and its music was dead too.

And his own land and his own people knew him never again; and never

again at evening was the voice of his viol heard in the stillness, and

never again did the young men and maidens dance to his bidding, and the

tears and the laughter rise and fall at his will, and the beasts and the

birds frisk and sing at his coming, and the children in his footsteps

cry, "Lo, it is summer, since Phratos is here!"

BOOK II.

CHAPTER I.

The hottest sun of a hot summer shone on a straight white dusty road.

An old man was breaking stones by the wayside; he was very old, very

bent, very lean, worn by nigh a hundred years if he had been worn by

one; but he struck yet with a will, and the flints flew in a thousand

pieces under his hammer, as though the youth and the force of nineteen

years instead of ninety were at work on them.

When the noon bell rang from a little odd straight steeple, with a

slanting roof, that peered out of the trees to the westward, he laid his

hammer aside, took off his brass-plated cap, wiped his forehead of its

heat and dust, sat down on his pile of stones, took out a hard black

crust and munched with teeth that were still strong and wiry.

The noontide was very quiet; the heat was intense, for there had been no

rainfall for several weeks; there was one lark singing high up in the

air, with its little breast lifted to the sun; but all the other birds

were mute and invisible, doubtless hidden safely in some delicious

shadow, swinging drowsily on tufts of linden bloom, or underneath the

roofing of broad chestnut leaves.

The road on either side was lined by the straight forms of endless

poplars, standing side by side in sentinel. The fields were all ablaze

around on every side with the gold of ripening corn or mustard, and the

scarlet flame of innumerable poppies.

Here and there they were broken by some little house, white or black, or

painted in bright colors, which lifted up among its leaves a little

tower like a sugar-loaf, or a black gable, and a pointed arch beneath

it. Now and then they were divided by rows of trees standing breathless

in the heat, or breadths of apple orchards, some with fruits ruby red,

some with fruits as yet green as their foliage.

Through it all the river ran, silver in the light, with shallow fords,

where the deep-flanked bullocks drank; and ever and anon an ancient

picturesque bridge of wood, time-bronzed and moss-imbedded.

The old man did not look round once; he had been on these roads a score

of years; the place had to him the monotony and colorlessness which all

long familiar scenes wear to the eyes that are weary of them.

He was ninety-five; he had to labor for his living; he ate black bread;

he had no living kith or kin; no friend save in the mighty legion of the

dead; he sat in the scorch of the sun; he hated the earth and the sky,

the air and the landscape: why not?

They had no loveliness for him; he only knew that the flies stung him,

and that the red ants could crawl through the holes in his shoes, and

bite him sharply with their little piercing teeth.

He sat in such scanty shade as the tall lean poplar gave, munching his

hard crusts; he had a fine keen profile and a long white beard that were

cut as sharply as an intaglio against the golden sunlight, in which the

gnats were dancing. His eyes were fastened on the dust as he ate; blue

piercing eyes which had still something of the fire of their youth; and

his lips under the white hair moved a little now and then, half audibly.

His thoughts were with the long dead years of an unforgotten time--a

time that will be remembered as long as the earth shall circle round the

sun.

With the present he had nothing to do; he worked to satisfy the

lingering cravings of a body that age seemed to have lost all power to

kill; he worked because he was too much of a man still to beg, and

because suicide looked to his fancy like a weakness. But life for all

that was over with him; life in the years of his boyhood had been a

thing so splendid, so terrible, so drunken, so divine, so tragic, so

intense, that the world seemed now to him to have grown pale and gray

and pulseless, with no sap in its vines, no hue in its suns, no blood in

its humanity.

For his memory held the days of Thermidor; the weeks of the White

Terror; the winter dawn, when the drums rolled out a King's threnody;

the summer nights, when all the throats of Paris cried "Marengo!"

He had lived in the wondrous awe of that abundant time when every hour

was an agony or a victory, when every woman was a martyr or a bacchanal;

when the same scythe that had severed the flowering grasses, served also

to cleave the fair breasts of the mother, the tender throat of the

child; when the ground was purple with the blue blood of men as with the

juices of out-trodden grapes, and when the waters were white with the

bodies of virgins as with the moon-fed lilies of summer. And now he sat

here by the wayside in the dust and the sun, only feeling the sting of

the fly and the bite of the ant; and the world seemed dead to him,

because so long ago, though his body still lived on, his soul had cursed

God and died.

Through the golden motes of the dancing air and of the quivering

sunbeams, whilst high above the lark sang on, there came along the road

a girl.

She was bare-footed, and bare-throated, lithe of movement, and straight

and supple as one who passed her life on the open lands and was abroad

in all changes of the weather. She walked with the free and fearless

measure of the countrywomen of Rome or the desert-born women of Nubia;

she had barely completed her sixteenth year, but her bosom and limbs

were full and firm, and moulded with almost all the luxuriant splendor

of maturity; her head was not covered after the fashion of the country,

but had a scarlet kerchief wound about. On it she bore a flat basket,

filled high with fruits and herbs and flowers; a mass of color and of

blossom, through which her dark level brows and her great eyes,

blue-black as a tempestuous night, looked out, set straight against the

sun.

She came on, treading down the dust with her long and slender feet, that

were such feet as a sculptor would give to his Cleopatra or his Phryne.

Her face was grave, shadowed, even fierce; and her mouth, though scarlet

as a berry and full and curled, had its lips pressed close on one

another, like the lips of one who has long kept silence, and may keep

it--until death.

As she saw the old man her eyes changed and lightened with a smile which

for the moment banished all the gloom and savage patience from her eyes,

and made them mellow and lustrous as a southern sun.

She paused before him, and spoke, showing her beautiful white teeth,

small and even, like rows of cowry shells.

"You are well, Marcellin?"

The old man started, and looked up with a certain gladness on his own

keen visage, which had lost all expression save such as an intense and

absorbed retrospection will lend.

"Fool!" he made answer, harshly yet not unkindly. "When will you know

that so long as an old man lives so long it cannot be 'well' with him?"

"Need one be a man, or old, to answer so?"

She spoke in the accent and the language of the province, but with a

voice rich and pure and cold; not the voice of the north, or of any

peasantry.

She put her basket down from off her head, and leaned against the trunk

of the poplar beside him, crossing her arms upon her bare chest.

"To the young everything is possible; to the old nothing," he said

curtly.

Her eyes gleamed with a thirsty longing; she made him no reply.

He broke off half his dry bread and tendered it to her. She shook her

head and motioned it away; yet she was as sharp-hungered as any hawk

that has hunted all through the night and the woods, and has killed

nothing. The growing life, the superb strength, the lofty stature of her

made her need constant nourishment, as young trees need it; and she was

fed as scantily as a blind beggar's dog, and less willingly than a

galley-slave.

The kindly air had fed her richly, strongly, continually; that was all.

"Possible!" she said slowly, after awhile. "What is 'possible'? I do not

understand."

The old man, Marcellin, smiled grimly.

"You see that lark? It soars there, and sings there. It is possible that

a fowler may hide in the grasses; it is possible that it may be shot as

it sings; it is possible that it may have the honor to die in agony, to

grace a rich man's table. You see?"

She mused a moment; her brain was rapid in intuitive perception, but

barren of all culture; it took her many moments to follow the filmy

track of a metaphorical utterance.

But by degrees she saw his meaning, and the shadow settled over her face

again.

"The 'possible,' then, is only--the worse?" she said slowly.

The old man smiled still grimly.

"Nay; our friends the priests say there is a 'possible' which will

give--one day--the fowler who kills the lark the wings of the lark, and

the lark's power to sing _Laus Deo_ in heaven. _I_ do not say--they do."

"The priests!" All the scorn of which her curved lips were capable

curled on them, and a deep hate gathered in her eyes--a hate that was

unfathomable and mute.

"Then there is no 'possible' for me," she said bitterly, "if so be that

priests hold the gifts of it?"

Marcellin looked up at her from under his bushy white eyebrows; a glance

fleet and keen as the gleam of blue steel.

"Yes, there is," he said curtly. "You are a woman-child, and have

beauty: the devil will give you one."

"Always the devil!" she muttered. There was impatience in her echo of

the words, and yet there was an awe also as of one who uses a name that

is mighty and full of majesty, although familiar.

"Always the devil!" repeated Marcellin. "For the world is always of

men."

His meaning this time lay too deep for her, and passed her; she stood

leaning against the poplar, with her head bent and her form motionless

and golden in the sunlight like a statue of bronze.

"If men be devils they are my brethren," she said suddenly; "why do

they, then, so hate me?"

The old man stroked his beard.

"Because Fraternity is Hate. Cain said so; but God would not believe

him."

She mused over the saying; silent still.

The lark dropped down from heaven, suddenly falling through the air,

mute. It had been struck by a sparrow-hawk, which flashed back against

the azure of the skies and the white haze of the atmosphere; and which

flew down in the track of the lark, and seized it ere it gained the

shelter of the grass, and bore it away within his talons.

Marcellin pointed to it with his pipe-stem.

"You see, there are many forms of the 'possible'----"

"When it means Death," she added.

The old man took his pipe back and smoked.

"Of course. Death is the key-note of creation."

Again she did not comprehend; a puzzled pain clouded the luster of her

eyes.

"But the lark praised God--why should it be so dealt with?"

Marcellin smiled grimly.

"Abel was praising God; but that did not turn aside the steel."

She was silent yet again; he had told her that old story of the sons

born of Eve, and the one whom, hearing it, she had understood and pitied

had been Cain.

At that moment, through the roadway that wound across the meadows and

through the corn lands and the trees, there came in sight a gleam of

scarlet that was not from the poppies, a flash of silver that was not

from the river, a column of smoke that was not from the weeds that

burned on the hillside.

There came a moving cloud, with a melodious murmur softly rising from

it; a cloud that moved between the high flowering hedges, the tall amber

wheat, the slender poplars, and the fruitful orchards; a cloud that grew

larger and clearer as it drew more near to them, and left the green

water-meadows and the winding field-paths for the great highroad.

It was a procession of the Church.

It drew closer and closer by slow imperceptible degrees, until it

approached them; the old man sat upright, not taking his cap from his

head nor his pipe from his mouth; the young girl ceased to lean for rest

against the tree, and stood with her arms crossed on her breast.

The Church passed them; the gilt crucifix held aloft, the scarlet and

the white of the floating robes catching the sunlight; the silver chains

and the silver censers gleaming, the fresh young voices of the singing

children cleaving the air like a rush of wind; the dark shorn faces of

the priests bowed over open books, the tender sound of little bells

ringing across the low deep monotony of prayer.

The Church passed them; the dust of the parched road rose up in a

choking mass; the heavy mist of the incense hung darkly on the sunlit

air; the tramp of the many feet startled the birds from their rest, and

pierced through the noonday silence.

It passed them, and left them behind it; but the fresh leaves were

choked and whitened; the birds were fluttered and affrightened; the old

man coughed, the girl strove to brush the dust motes from her smarting

eyelids.

"That is the Church!" said the stone-breaker, with a smile.

"Dust--terror--a choked voice--and blinded eyes."

Now she understood; and her beautiful curled lips laughed mutely.

The old man rammed some more tobacco into the bowl of his pipe.

"That is the Church!" he said. "To burn incense and pray for rain, and

to fell the forests that were the rain-makers."

The procession passed away out of sight, going along the highway and

winding by the course of the river, calling to the bright blue heavens

for rain; whilst the little bells rang and the incense curled and the

priests prayed themselves hoarse, and the peasants toiled footsore, and

the eager steps of the choral children trod the tiny gnat dead in the

grasses and the bright butterfly dead in the dust.

The priests had cast a severer look from out their down-dropped eyelids;

the children had huddled together, with their voices faltering a

little; and the boy choristers had shot out their lips in gestures of

defiance and opprobrium as they had passed these twain beneath the

wayside trees. For the two were both outcasts.

"Didst thou see the man that killed the king?" whispered to another one

fair and curly-headed baby, who was holding in the sun her little,

white, silver-fringed banner, and catching the rise and fall of the

sonorous chant as well as she could with her little lisping tones.

"Didst thou see the daughter of the devil?" muttered to another a

handsome golden-brown boy, who had left his herd untended in the meadow

to don his scarlet robes and to swing about the censer of his village

chapel.

And they all sang louder, and tossed more incense on high, and marched

more closely together under the rays of the gleaming crucifix as they

went; feeling that they had been beneath the shadow of the powers of

darkness, and that they were purer and holier, and more exalted, because

they had thus passed by in scorn what was accursed with psalms on their

lips, with the cross as their symbol.

So they went their way through the peaceful country with a glory of

sunbeams about them--through the corn, past the orchards, by the river,

into the heart of the old brown quiet town, and about the foot of the

great cathedral, where they kneeled down in the dust and prayed, then

rose and sang the "Angelus."

Then the tall dark-visaged priest, who had led them all thither under

the standard of the golden crucifix, lifted his voice alone and implored

God, and exhorted man; implored for rain and all the blessings of

harvest, exhorted to patience and the imitation of God.

The people were moved and saddened, and listened, smiting their breasts;

and after awhile rising from their knees, many of them in tears,

dispersed and went their ways: muttering to one another:--"We have had

no such harvests as those of old since the man that slew a saint came to

dwell here;" and answering to one another:--"We had never such droughts

as these in the sweet cool weather of old, before the offspring of hell

was among us."

For the priests had not said to them, "Lo, your mercy is parched as the

earth, and your hearts as the heavens are brazen."

CHAPTER II.

In the days of his youngest youth, in the old drunken days that were

dead, this stone-breaker Marcellin had known such life as it is given to

few men to know--a life of the soul and the senses; a life of storm and

delight; a life mad with blood and with wine; a life of divinest dreams;

a life when women kissed them, and bid them slay; a life when mothers

blessed them and bade them die; a life, strong, awful, splendid,

unutterable; a life seized at its fullest and fiercest and fairest, out

of an air that was death, off an earth that was hell.

When his cheeks had had a boy's bloom and his curls a boy's gold, he had

seen a nation in delirium; he had been one of the elect of a people; he

had uttered the words that burn, and wrought the acts that live; he had

been of the Thousand of Marsala; and he had been of the avengers of

Thermidor; he had raised his flutelike voice from the tribune, and he

had cast in his vote for the death of a king; passions had been his

playthings, and he had toyed with life as a child with a match; he had

beheld the despised enthroned in power, and desolation left within

king's palaces; he, too, had been fierce, and glad, and cruel, and gay,

and drunken, and proud, as the whole land was; he had seen the white

beauty of princely women bare in the hands of the mob, and the throats

that princes had caressed kissed by the broad steel knife; he had had

his youth in a wondrous time, when all men had been gods or devils, and

all women martyrs or furies.

And now,--he broke stones to get daily bread, and those who passed him

by cursed him, saying,--

"This man slew a king."

For he had outlived his time, and the life that had been golden and red

at its dawn was now gray and pale as the ashes of a fire grown cold; for

in all the list of the world's weary errors there is no mistake so

deadly as age.

Years before, in such hot summer weather as this against which the

Church had prayed, the old man, going homewards to his cabin amidst the

fields, had met a little child coming straight towards him in the full

crimson glow of the setting sun, and with the flame of the poppies all

around her. He hardly knew why he looked at her; but when he had once

looked his eyes rested there.

She had the hues of his youth about her; in that blood-red light, among

the blood-red flowers, she made him think of women's forms that he had

seen in all their grace and their voluptuous loveliness clothed in the

red garment of death, and standing on the dusky red of the scaffold, as

the burning mornings of the summers of slaughter had risen over the

land.

The child was all alone before him in that intense glow as of fire;

above her there was a tawny sky, flushed here and there with purple;

around her stretched the solitary level of the fields burnt yellow as

gold by the long months of heat. There were stripes on her shoulders,

blue and black from the marks of a thong.

He looked at her, and stopped her, why he hardly knew, except that a

look about her, beaten but yet unsubdued, attracted him. He had seen the

same look in the years of his youth, on the faces of the nobles he

hated.

"Have you been hurt?" he asked her in his harsh strong voice. She put

her heavy load of fagots down and stared at him.

"Hurt?" She echoed the word stupidly. No one ever thought she could be

hurt; what was done to her was punishment and justice.

"Yes. Those stripes--they must be painful?"

She gave a gesture of assent with her head, but she did not answer.

"Who beat you?" he pursued.

A cloud of passion swept over her bent face.

"Flamma."

"You were wicked?"

"They said so."

"And what do you do when you are beaten?"

"I shut my mouth."

"For what?"

"For fear they should know it hurt me--and be glad."

Marcellin leaned on his elm stick, and fastened on her his keen,

passionless eyes with a look that, for him who was shamed and was

shunned by all his kind, was almost sympathy.

"Come to my hut," he said to her. "I know a herb that will take the fret

and the ache out of your bruises."

The child followed him passively, half stupidly; he was the first

creature that had ever bidden her go with him, and this rough pity of

his was sweet to her, with an amazing incredible balm in it that only

those can know who see raised against them every man's hand, and hear on

their ears the mockery of all the voices of their world. Under reviling

and contempt and constant rejection, she had become savage as a trapped

hawk, wild as an escaped panther; but to him she was obedient and

passive, because he had spoken to her without a taunt and without a

curse, which until now had been the sole two forms of human speech she

had heard. His little hut was in the midst of those spreading

cornfields, set where two pathways crossed each other, and stretched

down the gentle slope of the cultured lands to join the great highway--a

hut of stones and plaited rushes, with a roof of thatch, where the old

republican, hardy of frame and born of a toiling race, dwelt in

solitude, and broke his scanty bitter bread without lament, if without

content.

He took some leaves of a simple herb that he knew, soaked them with

water, and bound them on her shoulders, not ungainly, though his hand

was so rough with labor, and, as men said, had been so often red with

carnage. Then he gave her a draught of goat's milk, sweet and fresh,

from a wooden bowl; shared with her the dry black crusts that formed his

only evening meal; bestowed on her a gift of a rare old scarlet scarf of

woven wools and Eastern broideries, one of the few relics of his buried

life; lifted the fagots on her back, so that she could carry them with

greater ease; and set her on her homeward way.

"Come to me again," he said, briefly, as she went across the threshold.

The child bent her head in silence, and kissed his hand quickly and

timidly, like a grateful dog that is amazed to have a caress, and not a

blow.

"After a forty years' vow I have broken it; I have pitied a human

thing," the old man muttered as he stood in his doorway looking after

her shadow as it passed small and dark across the scarlet light of the

poppies.

"They call him vile, and they say that he slew men," thought the child,

who had long known his face, though he never had noted hers; and it

seemed to her that all mercy lay in her father's kingdom--which they

called the kingdom of evil. The cool moist herbs soaked on her bruises;

and the draught of milk had slaked the thirst of her throat.

"Is evil good?" she asked in her heart as she went through the tall red

poppies.

And from that evening thenceforward Folle-Farine and Marcellin cleaved

to one another, being outcasts from all others.

CHAPTER III.

As the religious gathering broke up and split in divers streams to

wander divers ways, the little town returned to its accustomed

stillness--a stillness that seemed to have in it the calm of a thousand

sleeping years, and the legends and the dreams of half a score of old

dead centuries.

On market-days and saint-days, days of high feast or of perpetual

chaffering, the town was full of color, movement, noise, and population.

The country people crowded in, filling it with the jingling of

mule-bells; the fisher people came, bringing in with them the crisp salt

smell of the sea and the blue of the sea on their garments; its own

tanners and ivory carvers, and fruiterers, and lacemakers turned out by

the hundred in all the quaint variety of costumes that their forefathers

had bequeathed to them, and to which they were still wise enough to

adhere.

But at other times, when the fishers were in their hamlets, and the

peasantry on their lands and in their orchards, and the townsfolk at

their labors in the old rich renaissance mansions which they had turned

into tanneries, and granaries, and wool-sheds, and workshops, the place

was profoundly still; scarcely a child at play in the streets, scarcely

a dog asleep in the sun.

When the crowds had gone, the priests laid aside their vestments, and

donned the black serge of their daily habit, and went to their daily

avocations in their humble dwellings. The crosses and the censers were

put back upon their altars, and hung up upon their pillars. The boy

choristers and the little children put their white linen and their

scarlet robes back in cupboards and presses, with heads of lavender and

sprigs of rosemary to keep the moth and the devil away, and went to

their fields, to their homes, to their herds, to their paper kites, to

their daisy chains, to the poor rabbits they pent in a hutch, to the

poor flies they killed in the sun.

The streets became quite still, the market-place quite empty; the drowsy

silence of a burning, cloudless afternoon was over all the quiet places

about the cathedral walls, where of old the bishops and the canons

dwelt; gray shady courts; dim open cloisters; houses covered with oaken

carvings, and shadowed with the spreading branches of chestnuts and of

lime-trees that were as aged as themselves.

Under the shelter of one of the lindens, after the populace had gone,

there was seated on a broad stone bench the girl who had stood by the

wayside erect and unbending as the procession had moved before her.

She had flung herself down in dreamy restfulness. She had delivered her

burden of vegetables and fruit at a shop near by, whose awning stretched

out into the street like a toadstool yellow with the sun.

The heat was intense; she had been on foot all day; she sat to rest a

moment, and put her burning hands under a little rill of water that

spouted into a basin in a niche in the wall--an ancient well, with a

stone image sculptured above, and a wreath of vine-leaves in stone

running around, in the lavish ornamentation of an age when men loved

loveliness for its own sake, and begrudged neither time nor labor in its

service.

She leaned over the fountain, kept cool by the roofing of the thick

green leaves; there was a metal cup attached to the basin by a chain,

she filled it at the running thread of water, and stooped her lips to it

again and again thirstily.

The day was sultry; the ways were long and white with powdered

limestone; her throat was still parched with the dust raised by the many

feet of the multitude; and although she had borne in the great basket

which now stood empty at her side, cherries, peaches, mulberries,

melons, full of juice and lusciousness, this daughter of the devil had

not taken even one to freshen her dry mouth.

Folle-Farine stooped to the water, and played with it, and drank it, and

steeped her lips and her arms in it; lying there on the stone bench,

with her bare feet curled one in another, and her slender round limbs

full of the voluptuous repose of a resting panther.

The coolness, the murmur, the clearness, the peace, the soft flowing

movement of water, possess an ineffable charm for natures that are

passion-tossed, feverish, and full of storm.

There was a dreamy peace about the place, too, which had charms likewise

for her, in the dusky arch of the long cloisters, in the lichen-grown

walls, in the broad pamments of the paven court, in the clusters of

delicate carvings beneath and below; in the sculptured frieze where

little nests that the birds had made in the spring still rested; in the

dense brooding thickness of the boughs that brought the sweetness and

the shadows of the woods into the heart of the peopled town.

She stayed there, loath to move; loath to return where a jeer, a bruise,

a lifted stick, a muttered curse, were all her greeting and her guerdon.

As she lay thus, one of the doors in the old houses in the cloisters

opened; the head of an old woman was thrust out, crowned with the high,

fan-shaped comb, and the towering white linen cap that are the female

note of that especial town.

The woman was the mother of the sacristan, and she, looking out,

shrieked shrilly to her son,--

"Georges, Georges! come hither. The devil's daughter is drinking the

blest water!"

The sacristan was hoeing among his cabbages in the little garden behind

his house, surrounded with clipt yew, and damp from the deep shade of

the cathedral, that overshadowed it.

He ran out at his mother's call, hoe in hand, himself an old man, though

stout and strong.

The well in the wall was his especial charge and pride; immeasurable

sanctity attached to it.

According to tradition, the water had spouted from the stone itself, at

the touch of a branch of blossoming pear, held in the hand of St.

Jerome, who had returned to earth in the middle of the fourteenth

century, and dwelt for awhile near the cathedral, working at the

honorable trade of a cordwainer, and accomplishing mighty miracles

throughout the district.

It was said that some of his miraculous power still remained in the

fountain, and that even yet, those who drank on St. Jerome's day in full

faith and with believing hearts, were, oftentimes, cleansed of sin, and

purified of bodily disease. Wherefore on that day, throngs of peasantry

flocked in from all sides, and crowded round it, and drank; to the

benefit of the sacristan in charge, if not to that of their souls and

bodies.

Summoned by his mother, he flew to the rescue of the sanctified spring.

"Get you gone!" he shouted. "Get you gone, you child of hell! How durst

you touch the blessed basin? Do you think that God struck water from the

stone for such as you?"

Folle-Farine lifted her head and looked him in the face with her

audacious eyes and laughed; then tossed her head again and plunged it

into the bright living water, till her lips, and her cheeks, and all the

rippling hair about her temples sparkled with its silvery drops.

The sacristan, infuriated at once by the impiety and the defiance,

shrieked aloud:

"Insolent animal! Daughter of Satan! I will teach you to taint the gift

of God with lips of the devil!"

And he seized her roughly with one hand upon her shoulder, and with the

other raised the hoe and brandished the wooden staff of it above her

head in threat to strike her; whilst his old mother, still thrusting her

lofty headgear and her wrinkled face from out the door, screamed to him

to show he was a man, and have no mercy.

As his grasp touched her, and the staff cast its shadow across her,

Folle-Farine sprang up, defiance and fury breathing from all her

beautiful fierce face.

She seized the staff in her right hand, wrenched it with a swift

movement from its hold, and, catching his head under her left arm,

rained blows on him from his own weapon, with a sudden gust of

breathless rage which blinded him, and lent to her slender muscular

limbs the strength and the force of man.

Then, as rapidly as she had seized and struck him, she flung him from

her with such violence that he fell prostrate on the pavement of the

court, caught up the metal pail which stood by ready filled, dashed the

water over him where he lay, and, turning from him without a word,

walked across the courtyard, slowly, and with a haughty grace in all the

carriage of her bare limbs and the folds of her ragged garments, bearing

the empty osier basket on her head, deaf as the stones around her to the

screams of the sacristan and his mother.

In these secluded cloisters, and in the high noontide, when all were

sleeping or eating in the cool shelter of their darkened houses, the old

woman's voice remained unheard.

The saints heard, no doubt, but they were too lazy to stir from their

niches in that sultry noontide, and, except the baying of a chained dog

aroused, there was no answer to the outcry: and Folle-Farine passed out

into the market-place unarrested, and not meeting another living

creature. As she turned into one of the squares leading to the open

country, she saw in the distance one of the guardians of the peace of

the town, moving quickly towards the cloisters, with his glittering lace

shining in the sun and his long scabbard clattering upon the stones.

She laughed a little as she saw.

"They will not come after _me_," she said to herself. "They are too

afraid of the devil."

She judged rightly; they did not come.

She crossed all the wide scorching square, whose white stones blazed in

the glare of the sun. There was nothing in sight except a stray cat

prowling in a corner, and three sparrows quarreling over a foul-smelling

heap of refuse.

The quaint old houses round seemed all asleep, with the shutters closed

like eyelids over their little, dim, aged orbs of windows.

The gilded vanes on their twisted chimneys and carved parapets pointed

motionless to the warm south. There was not a sound, except the cawing

of some rooks that built their nests high aloft in the fretted pinnacles

of the cathedral.

Undisturbed she crossed the square and took her way down the crooked

streets that led her homeward to the outlying country. It was an old,

twisted, dusky place, with the water flowing through its center as its

only roadway; and in it there were the oldest houses of the town, all of

timber, black with age, and carved with the wonderful florid fancies and

grotesque conceits of the years when a house was to its master a thing

beloved and beautiful, a bulwark, an altar, a heritage, an heirloom, to

be dwelt in all the days of a long life, and bequeathed in all honor and

honesty to a noble offspring.

The street was very silent, the ripple of the water was the chief sound

that filled it. Its tenants were very poor, and in many of its antique

mansions the beggars shared shelter with the rats and the owls.

In one of these dwellings, however, there were still some warmth and

color.

The orange and scarlet flowers of a nasturtium curled up its twisted

pilasters; the big, fair clusters of hydrangea filled up its narrow

casements; a breadth of many-colored saxafrage, with leaves of green and

rose, and blossoms of purple and white, hung over the balcony rail,

which five centuries earlier had been draped with cloth of gold; and a

little yellow song-bird made music in the empty niche from which the

sculptured flower-de-luce had been so long torn down.

From that window a woman looked down, leaning with folded arms above the

rose-tipped saxafrage, and beneath the green-leaved vine.

She was a fair woman, white as the lilies, she had silver pins in her

amber hair, and a mouth that laughed sweetly. She called to

Folle-Farine,--

"You brown thing; why do you stare at me?"

Folle-Farine started and withdrew the fixed gaze of her lustrous eyes.

"Because you are beautiful," she answered curtly. All beautiful things

had a fascination for her.

This woman above was very fair to see, and the girl looked at her as she

looked at the purple butterflies in the sun; at the stars shining down

through the leaves; at the vast, dim, gorgeous figures in the cathedral

windows; at the happy children running to their mothers with their hands

full of primroses, as she saw them in the woods at springtime; at the

laughing groups round the wood-fires in the new year time when she

passed a lattice pane that the snowdrift had not blocked; at all the

things that were so often in her sight, and yet with which her life had

no part or likeness.

She stood there on the rough flints, in the darkness cast from the

jutting beams of the house; and the other happier creature leaned above

in the light, white and rose-hued, and with the silver bells of the pins

shaking in her yellow tresses.

"You are old Flamma's granddaughter," cried the other, from her leafy

nest above. "You work for him all day long at the mill?"

"Yes."

"And your feet are bare, and your clothes are rags, and you go to and

fro like a packhorse, and the people hate you? You must be a fool. Your

father was the devil, they say: why do you not make him give you good

things?"

"He will not hear," the child muttered wearily. Had she not besought him

endlessly with breathless prayer?

"Will he not? Wait a year--wait a year."

"What then?" asked Folle-Farine, with a quick startled breath.

"In a year you will be a woman, and he always hears women, they say."

"He hears you."

The fair woman above laughed:

"Perhaps; in his fashion. But he pays me ill as yet."

And she plucked one of the silver pins from her hair, and stabbed the

rosy foam of the saxafrage through and through with it; for she was but

a gardener's wife, and was restless and full of discontent.

"Get you gone," she added quickly, "or I will throw a stone at you, you

witch; you have the evil eye, they say, and you may strike me blind if

you stare so."

Folle-Farine went on her way over the sharp stones with a heavy heart.

That picture in the casement had made that passage bright to her many a

time; and when at last the picture had moved and spoken, it had only

mocked her and reviled her as the rest did.

The street was dark for her like all the others now.

The gardener's wife, leaning there, with the green and gold of the

vineleaves brushing her hair, looked after her down the crooked way.

"That young wretch will be more beautiful than I," she thought; and the

thought was bitter to her, as such a one is to a fair woman.

Folle-Farine went slowly and sadly through the street, with her head

dropped, and the large osier basket trailing behind her over the stones.

She was well used to be pelted with words hard as hailstones, and

usually heeded them little, or gave them back with sullen defiance. But

from this woman they had wounded her; from that bright bower of golden

leaves and scarlet flowers she had faintly fancied some stray beam of

light might wander even to her.

She was soon outside the gates of the town, and beyond the old walls,

where the bramble and the lichen grew over the huge stones of ramparts

and fortifications, useless and decayed from age.

The country roads and lanes, the silver streams and the wooden bridges,

the lanes through which the market mules picked their careful way, the

fields in which the white-capped peasant women, and the brindled oxen

were at work, stretched all before her in a radiant air, sweet with the

scent of ripening fruits from many orchards.

Here and there a wayside Calvary rose dark against the sun; here and

there a chapel bell sounded from under some little peaked red roof. The

cattle dozed beside meadow ditches that were choked with wild flowers;

the dogs lay down beside their sheep and slept.

At the first cottage which she passed, the housewife sat out under a

spreading chestnut-tree, weaving lace upon her knee.

Folle-Farine looked wistfully at the woman, who was young and pretty,

and who darted her swift skilled hand in and out and around the bobbins,

keeping time meanwhile with a mirthful burden that she sang.

The woman looked up and frowned as the girl passed by her.

A little way farther on there was a winehouse by the roadside, built of

wood, vine-wreathed, and half hidden in the tall flowering briers of its

garden.

Out of the lattice there was leaning a maiden with the silver cross on

her bosom shining in the sun, and her meek blue eyes smiling down from

under the tower of her high white cap. She was reaching a carnation to a

student who stood below, with long fair locks and ruddy cheeks, and a

beard yellow with the amber down of twenty years; and who kissed her

white wrist as he caught the red flower.

Folle-Farine glanced at the pretty picture with a dull wonder and a

nameless pain: what could it mean to be happy like that?

Half a league onward she passed another cottage shadowed by a

sycamore-tree, and with the swallows whirling around its tall twisted

stone chimneys, and a beurré pear covering with branch and bloom its old

gray walls.

An aged woman sat sipping coffee in the sun, and a young one was

sweeping the blue and white tiles with a broom, singing gayly as she

swept.

"Art thou well placed, my mother?" she asked, pausing to look tenderly

at the withered brown face, on which the shadows of the sycamore leaves

were playing.

The old mother smiled, steeping her bread in the coffee-bowl.

"Surely, child; I can feel the sun and hear you sing."

She was happy though she was blind.

Folle-Farine stood a moment and looked at them across a hedge of

honeysuckle.

"How odd it must feel to have any one to care to hear your voice like

that!" she thought; and she went on her way through the poppies and the

corn, half softened, half enraged.

Was she lower than they because she could find no one to care for her or

take gladness in her life? Or was she greater than they because all

human delights were to her as the dead letters of an unknown tongue?

Down a pathway fronting her that ran midway between the yellowing seas

of wheat and a belt of lilac clover, over which a swarm of bees was

murmuring, there came a countrywoman, crushing the herbage under her

heavy shoes, ragged, picturesque, sunbrowned, swinging deep brass pails

as she went to the herds on the hillside.

She carried a child twisted into the folds of her dress; a boy, half

asleep, with his curly head against her breast. As she passed, the woman

drew her kerchief over her bosom and over the brown rosy face of the

child.

"She shall not look at thee, my darling," she muttered. "Her look

withered Rémy's little limb."

And she covered the child jealously, and turned aside, so that she

should tread a separate pathway through the clover, and did not brush

the garments of the one she was compelled to pass.

Folle-Farine heard, and laughed aloud.

She knew of what the woman was thinking.

In the summer of the previous year, as she had passed the tanyard on the

western bank of the river, the tanner's little son, rushing out in

haste, had curled his mouth in insult at her, and clapping his hands,

hissed in a child's love of cruelty the mocking words which he had heard

his elders use of her. In answer, she had only turned her head and

looked down at him with calm eyes of scorn.

But the child, running out fast, and startled by that regard, had

stepped upon a shred of leather and had fallen heavily, breaking his

left leg at the knee. The limb, unskillfully dealt with, and enfeebled

by a tendency to disease, had never been restored, but hung limp,

crooked, useless, withered from below the knee.

Through all the country side the little cripple, Rémy, creeping out into

the sun upon his crutches, was pointed out in a passionate pity as the

object of her sorcery, the victim of her vengeance. When she had heard

what they said she had laughed as she laughed now, drawing together her

straight brows and showing her glistening teeth.

All the momentary softness died in her as the peasant covered the boy's

face and turned aside into the clover. She laughed aloud and swept on

through the half-ripe corn with that swift, harmonious, majestic

movement which was inborn in her, as it is inborn in the deer or the

antelope, singing again as she went those strange wild airs, like the

sigh of the wind, which were all the language that lingered in her

memory from the land that had seen her birth.

To such aversion as this she was too well used for it to be a matter of

even notice to her. She knew that she was marked and shunned by the

community amidst which her lot was cast; and she accepted proscription

without wonder and without resistance.

Folle-Farine: the Dust. What lower thing did earth hold?

In this old-world district, amidst the pastures and cornlands of

Normandy, superstition had taken a hold which the passage of centuries

and the advent of revolution had done very little to lessen.

Few of the people could read and fewer still could write. They knew

nothing but what their priests and their politicians told them to

believe. They went to their beds with the poultry, and rose as the cock

crew: they went to mass, as their ducks to the osier and weed ponds; and

to the conscription as their lambs to the slaughter. They understood

that there was a world beyond them, but they remembered it only as the

best market for their fruit, their fowls, their lace, their skins.

Their brains were as dim as were their oil-lit streets at night; though

their lives were content and mirthful, and the most part pious. They

went out into the summer meadows chanting aves, in seasons of drought to

pray for rain on their parching orchards, in the same credulity with

which they groped through the winter fog, bearing torches and chanting

dirges to gain a blessing at seed-time on their bleak black fallows.

The beauty and the faith of the old Mediæval life were with them still;

and with its beauty and its faith were its bigotry and its cruelty

likewise. They led simple and contented lives; for the most part honest,

and among themselves cheerful and kindly; preserving much grace of

color, of costume, of idiosyncrasy, because apart from the hueless

communism and characterless monotony of modern cities.

But they believed in sorcery and in devilry; they were brutal to their

beasts, and could be as brutal to their foes; they were steeped in

legend and tradition from their cradles; and all the darkest

superstitions of dead ages still found home and treasury in their hearts

and at their hearths.

Therefore, believing her a creature of evil, they were inexorable

against her, and thought that in being so they did their duty.

They had always been a religious people in this birth country of the

Flamma race; the strong poetic veneration of their forefathers, which

had symbolized itself in the carving of every lintel, corbel, or

buttress in their streets, and in the fashion of every spire on which a

weather-vane could gleam against their suns, was still in their blood;

the poetry had departed, but the bigotry remained.

Their ancestors had burned wizards and witches by the score in the open

square of the cathedral place, and their grandsires and grandams had in

brave, dumb, ignorant peasant fashion held fast to the lily and the

cross, and gone by hundreds to the salutation of the axe and the baptism

of the sword in the red days of revolution.

They were the same people still: industrious, frugal, peaceful, loyal,

wedded to old ways and to old relics, content on little, and serene of

heart; yet, withal, where they feared or where they hated, brutal with

the brutality begotten of abject ignorance. And they had been so to this

outcast whom they all called Folle-Farine.

When she had first come amidst them, a little desolate foreign child,

mute with the dumbness of an unknown tongue, and cast adrift among

strange people, unfamiliar ways, and chill blank glances, she had shyly

tried in a child's vague instincts of appeal and trust to make friends

with the other children that she saw, and to share a little in the

mothers' smiles and the babies' pastimes that were all around her in the

glad green world of summer.

But she had been denied and rejected with hard words and harder blows;

at her coming the smiles had changed to frowns, and the pastime into

terror. She was proud, she was shy, she was savage; she felt rather than

understood that she was suspected and reviled; she ceased to seek her

own kind, and only went for companionship and sympathy to the creatures

of the fields and the woods, to the things of the earth and the sky and

the water.

"Thou art the devil's daughter!" half in sport hissed the youths in the

market-place against her as the little child went among them, carrying a

load for her grandsire heavier than her arms knew how to bear.

"Thou wert plague-spotted from thy birth," said the old man himself, as

she strained her small limbs to and fro the floors of his storehouses,

carrying wood or flour or tiles or rushes, or whatever there chanced to

need such convoy.

"Get thee away, we are not to touch thee!" hissed the six-year-old

infants at play by the river when she waded in amidst them to reach with

her lither arm the far-off water-flowers they were too timorous to

pluck, and tender it to the one who had desired it.

"The devil begot thee, and my cow fell ill yesternight after thou hadst

laid hands on her!" muttered the old women, lifting a stick as she went

near to their cattle in the meadows to brush off with a broad dockleaf

the flies that were teasing the poor, meek, patient beasts.

So, cursed when she did her duty, and driven away when she tried to do

good, her young soul had hardened itself and grown fierce, mute,

callous, isolated.

There were only the four-footed things, so wise, so silent, so tender of

heart, so bruised of body, so innocent, and so agonized, that had

compassion for her, and saved her from utter desolation. In the mild sad

gaze of the cow, in the lustrous suffering eyes of the horse, in the

noble frank faith of the dog, in the soft-bounding glee of the lamb, in

the unwearied toil of the ass, in the tender industry of the bird, she

had sympathy and she had example.

She loved them and they loved her. She saw that they were sinless,

diligent, faithful, devoted, loyal servers of base masters; loving

greatly, and for their love goaded, beaten, overtasked, slaughtered.

She took the lesson to heart; and hated men and women with a bitter

hatred.

So she had grown up for ten years, caring for no human thing, except in

a manner for the old man Marcellin, who was, like her, proscribed.

The priests had striven to turn her soul what they had termed

heavenward; but their weapons had been wrath and intimidation. She would

have none of them. No efforts that they or her grandsire made had

availed; she would be starved, thrashed, cursed, maltreated as they

would; she could not understand their meaning, or would not submit

herself to their religion.

As years went on they had found the contest hopeless, so had abandoned

her to the devil, who had made her; and the daughter of one whom the

whole province had called saint had never passed within church-doors or

known the touch of holy water save when they had cast it on her as an

exorcism. And when she met a priest in the open roads or on the bypaths

of the fields, she always sang in loud defiance her wildest melodies.

Where had she learnt these?

They had been sung to her by Phratos, and taught by him.

Who had he been?

Her old life was obscure to her memory, and yet glorious even in its

dimness.

She did not know who those people had been with whom she had wandered,

nor in what land they had dwelt. But that wondrous free life remained on

her remembrance as a thing never to be forgotten or to be known again; a

life odorous with bursting fruits and budding flowers; full of strangest

and of sweetest music; spent forever under green leaves and suns that

had no setting; forever beside fathomless waters and winding forests;

forever rhymed to melody and soothed to the measure of deep winds and

drifting clouds.

For she had forgotten all except its liberty and its loveliness; and the

old gypsy life of the Liebana remained with her only as some stray

fragment of an existence passed in another world from which she was now

an exile, and revived in her only in the fierce passion of her nature,

in her bitter, vague rebellion, in her longing to be free, in her

anguish of vain desires for richer hues and bluer skies and wilder winds

than those amidst which she toiled. At times she remembered likewise the

songs and the melodies of Phratos; remembered them when the moon rays

swept across the white breadth of water-lilies, or the breath of spring

stole through the awakening woods; and when she remembered them she

wept--wept bitterly, where none could look on her.

She never thought of Phratos as a man; as of one who had lived in a

human form and was now dead in an earthly grave; her memory of him was

of some nameless creature, half divine, whose footsteps brought laughter

and music, with eyes bright as a bird's, yet sad as a dog's, and a voice

forever singing; clad in goat's hair, and gigantic and gay; a creature

that had spoken tenderly to her, that had bidden her laugh and rejoice,

that had carried her when she was weary; that had taught her to sleep

under the dewy leaves, and to greet the things of the night as soft

sisters, and to fear nothing in the whole living world, in the earth,

or the air, or the sky, and to tell the truth though a falsehood were to

spare the bare feet flintstones, and naked shoulders the stick, and an

empty body hunger and thirst. A creature that seemed to her in her

memories even as the faun seemed to the fancies of the children of the

Piræus; a creature half man and half animal, glad and grotesque, full of

mirth and of music, belonging to the forest, to the brook, to the stars,

to the leaves, wandering like the wind, and, like the wind, homeless.

This was all her memory; but she cherished it; in the face of the

priests she bent her straight black brows and curled her scornful

scarlet lips, but for the sake of Phratos she held one religion; though

she hated men she told them never a lie, and asked them never an alms.

She went now along the white level roads, the empty basket balanced on

her head, her form moving with the free harmonious grace of desert

women, and she sang as she went the old sweet songs of the broken viol.

She was friendless and desolate; she was ill fed, she was heavily

tasked; she toiled without thanks; she was ignorant of even so much

knowledge as the peasants about her had; she was without a past or a

future, and her present had in it but daily toil and bitter words;

hunger, and thirst, and chastisement.

Yet for all that she sang;--sang because the vitality in her made her

dauntless of all evil; because the abundant life opening in her made her

glad in despite of fate; because the youth, and the strength, and the

soul that were in her could not utterly be brutalized, could not wholly

cease from feeling the gladness of the sun, the coursing of the breeze,

the liberty of nature, the sweet quick sense of living.

Before long she reached the spot where the old man Marcellin was

breaking stones.

His pile was raised much higher; he sat astride on a log of timber and

hammered the flints on and on, on and on, without looking up; the dust

was still thick on the leaves and the herbage where the tramp of the

people had raised it; and the prayers and the chants had failed as yet

to bring one slightest cloud, one faintest rain mist across the hot

unbroken azure of the skies.

Marcellin was her only friend; the proscribed always adhere to one

another; when they are few they can only brood and suffer, harmlessly;

when they are many they rise as with one foot and strike as with one

hand. Therefore, it is always perilous to make the lists of any

proscription overlong.

The child, who was also an outcast, went to him and paused; in a

curious, lifeless bitter way they cared for one another; this girl who

had grown to believe herself born of hell, and this man who had grown to

believe that he had served hell.

With the bastard Folle-Farine and with the regicide Marcellin the people

had no association, and for them no pity; therefore they had found each

other by the kinship of proscription; and in a way there was love

between them.

"You are glad, since you sing!" said the old man to her, as she passed

him again on her homeward way, and paused again beside him.

"The birds in cage sing," she answered him. "But, think you they are

glad?"

"Are they not?"

She sat down a moment beside him, on the bank which was soft with moss,

and odorous with wild flowers curling up the stems of the poplars and

straying over into the corn beyond.

"Are they? Look. Yesterday I passed a cottage, it is on the great south

road; far away from here. The house was empty; the people, no doubt,

were gone to labor in the fields; there was a wicker cage hanging to the

wall, and in the cage there was a blackbird. The sun beat on his head;

his square of sod was a dry clod of bare earth; the heat had dried every

drop of water in his pan; and yet the bird was singing. Singing how? In

torment, beating his breast against the bars till the blood started,

crying to the skies to have mercy on him and to let rain fall. His song

was shrill; it had a scream in it; still he sang. Do you say the merle

was glad?"

"What did you do?" asked the old man, still breaking the stones with a

monotonous rise and fall of his hammer.

"I took the cage down and opened the door."

"And he?"

"He shot up in the air first, then dropped down amidst the grasses,

where a little brook which the drought had not dried, was still running;

and he bathed and drank and bathed again, seeming mad with the joy of

the water. When I lost him from sight he was swaying on a bough among

the leaves over the river; but then he was silent!"

"And what do you mean by that?"

Her eyes clouded; she was mute. She vaguely knew the meaning it bore to

herself, but it was beyond her to express it.

All things of nature had voices and parables for her, because her fancy

was vivid and her mind was dreamy; but that mind was still too dark, and

too profoundly ignorant, for her to be able to shape her thoughts into

metaphor or deduction.

The bird had spoken to her; by his silence as by his song; but what he

had uttered she could not well utter again. Save, indeed, that song was

not gladness, and neither was silence pain.

Marcellin, although he had asked her, had asked needlessly; for he also

knew.

"And what, think you, the people said, when they went back and found the

cage empty?" he pursued, still echoing his words and hers by the ringing

sound of the falling hammer.

A smile curled her lips.

"That was no thought of mine," she said carelessly. "They had done

wickedly to cage him; to set him free I would have pulled down their

thatch, or stove in their door, had need been."

"Good!" said the old man briefly, with a gleam of light over his harsh

lean face.

He looked up at her as he worked, the shivered flints flying right and

left.

"It was a pity to make you a woman," he muttered, as his keen gaze swept

over her.

"A woman!" She echoed the words dully and half wonderingly; she could

not understand it in connection with herself.

A woman; that was a woman who sat in the sun under the fig-tree, working

her lace on a frame; that was a woman who leaned out of her lattice

tossing a red carnation to her lover; that was a woman who swept the

open porch of her house, singing as she cleared the dust away; that was

a woman who strode on her blithe way through the clover, carrying her

child at her breast.

She seemed to have no likeness to them, no kindred with them; she a

beast of burden, a creature soulless and homeless, an animal made to

fetch and carry, to be cursed and beaten, to know neither love nor hope,

neither past nor future, but only a certain dull patience and furious

hate, a certain dim pleasure in labor and indifference to pain.

"It was a pity to make you a woman," said the old man once more. "You

might be a man worth something; but a woman!--a thing that has no

medium; no haven between hell and heaven; no option save to sit by the

hearth to watch the pot boil and suckle the children, or to go out into

the streets and the taverns to mock at men and to murder them. Which

will you do in the future?"

"What?"

She scarcely knew the meaning of the word. She saw the female creatures

round her were of all shades of age, from the young girls with their

peachlike cheeks to the old crones brown and withered as last year's

nuts; she knew that if she lived on she would be old likewise; but of a

future she had no conception, no ideal. She had been left too ignorant

to have visions of any other world hereafter than this one which the low

lying green hills and the arc of the pale blue sky shut in upon her.

She had one desire, indeed--a desire vague but yet fierce--the desire

for liberty. But it was such desire as the bird which she had freed had

known; the desire of instinct, the desire of existence only; her mind

was powerless to conceive a future, because a future is a hope, and of

hope she knew nothing.

The old man glanced at her, and saw that she had not comprehended. He

smiled with a certain bitter pity.

"I spoke idly," he said to himself; "slaves cannot have a future. But

yet----"

Yet he saw that the creature who was so ignorant of her own powers, of

her own splendors, of her own possibilities, had even now a beauty as

great as that of a lustrous Eastern-eyed passion-flower; and he knew

that to a woman who has such beauty as this the world holds out in its

hand the tender of at least one future--one election, one kingdom, one

destiny.

"Women are loved," she said, suddenly; "will any one love me?"

Marcellin smiled bitterly.

"Many will love you, doubtless--as the wasp loves the peach that he

kisses with his sting, and leaves rotten to drop from the stem!"

She was silent again, revolving his meaning; it lay beyond her, both in

the peril which it embodied from others, and the beauty in herself which

it implied. She could reach no conception of herself, save as what she

now was, a body-servant of toil, a beast of burden like a young mule.

"But all shun me, as even the wasp shuns the bitter oak apple," she

said, slowly and dreamily; "who should love me, even as the wasp loves

the peach?"

Marcellin smiled his grim and shadowy smile. He made answer,--

"Wait!"

She sat mute once more, revolving this strange, brief word in her

thoughts--strange to her, with a promise as vague, as splendid, and as

incomprehensible as the prophecy of empire to a slave.

"The future?" she said, at last. "That means something that one has not,

and that is to come--is it so?"

"Something that one never has, and that never comes," muttered the old

man, wearily cracking the flints in two; "something that one possesses

in one's sleep, and that is farther off each time that one awakes; and

yet a thing that one sees always--sees even when one lies a-dying, they

say--for men are fools."

Folle-Farine listened, musing, with her hands clasped on the handle of

her empty basket, and her chin resting upon them, and her eyes watching

a maimed butterfly drag its wings of emerald and diamond through the

hot, pale, sickly dust.

"I dream!" she said, suddenly, as she stooped and lifted the wounded

insect gently on to the edge of a leaf. "But I dream wide awake."

Marcellin smiled.

"Never say so. They will think you mad. That is only what foolish

things, called poets, do."

"What is a poet?"

"A foolish thing, I tell you--mad enough to believe that men will care

to strain their eyes, as he strains his, to see the face of a God who

never looks and never listens."

"Ah!"

She was so accustomed to be told that all she did was unlike to others,

and was either wicked or was senseless, that she saw nothing except the

simple statement of a fact in the rebuke which he had given her. She sat

quiet, gazing down into the thick white dust of the road, bestirred by

the many feet of mules and men that had trodden through it since the

dawn.

"I dream beautiful things," she pursued, slowly. "In the moonlight most

often. I seem to remember, when I dream--so much! so much!"

"Remember--what should you remember? You were but a baby when they

brought you hither."

"So they say. But I might live before, in my father's kingdom--in the

devil's kingdom. Why not?"

Why not, indeed! Perhaps we all lived there once; and that is why we all

through all our lives hanker to get back to it.

"I ask him so often to take me back, but he does not seem ever to hear."

"Chut! He will hear in his own good time. The devil never passes by a

woman."

"A woman!" she repeated. The word seemed to have no likeness and no

fitness with herself.

A woman!--she!--a creature made to be beaten, and sworn at, and shunned,

and loaded like a mule, and driven like a bullock!

"Look you," said the old man, resting his hammer for a moment, and

wiping the sweat from his brow, "I have lived in this vile place forty

years. I remember the woman that they say bore you--Reine Flamma. She

was a beautiful woman, and pure as snow, and noble, and innocent. She

wearied God incessantly. I have seen her stretched for hours at the foot

of that cross. She was wretched; and she entreated her God to take away

her monotonous misery, and to give her some life new and fair. But God

never answered. He left her to herself. It was the devil that heard--and

replied."

"Then, is the devil juster than their God?"

Marcellin leaned his hammer on his knees and his voice rose clear and

strong as it had done of yore from the Tribune.

"He looks so, at the least. It is his wisdom, and that is why his

following is so large. Nay, I say, when God is deaf the devil listens.

That is his wisdom, see you. So often the poor little weak human soul,

striving to find the right way, cries feebly for help, and none answer.

The poor little weak soul is blind and astray in the busy streets of the

world. It lifts its voice, but its voice is so young and so feeble, like

the pipe of a newly-born bird in the dawn, that it is drowned in the

shouts and the manifold sounds of those hard, crowded, cruel streets,

where every one is for himself, and no man has ears for his neighbor. It

is hungered, it is athirst, it is sorrowful, it is blinded, it is

perplexed, it is afraid. It cries often, but God and man leave it to

itself. Then the devil, who harkens always, and who, though all the

trumpets blowing their brazen music in the streets bray in his honor,

yet is too wise to lose even the slightest sound of any in

distress--since of such are the largest sheaves of his harvest--comes to

the little soul, and teaches it with tenderness, and guides it towards

the paths of gladness, and fills its lips with the bread of sweet

passions, and its nostrils with the savor of fair vanities, and blows in

its ear the empty breath of men's lungs, till that sickly wind seems

divinest music. Then is the little soul dazzled and captured, and made

the devil's for evermore; half through its innocence, half through its

weakness; but chiefly of all because God and man would not hear its

cries whilst yet it was sinless and only astray."

He ceased, and the strokes of his hammer rang again on the sharp flint

stones.

She had listened with her lips parted breathlessly, and her nightlike

eyes dilated.

In the far distant time, when he had been amidst the world of men, he

had known how to utter the words that burned, and charm to stillness a

raging multitude. He had not altogether lost this power, at such rare

times as he still cared to break his silence, and to unfold the

unforgotten memories of a life long dead. He would speak thus to her,

but to no other.

Folle-Farine listened, mute and breathless, her great eyes uplifted to

the sun, where it was sinking westward through a pomp of golden and of

purple cloud. He was the only creature who ever spoke to her as though

she likewise were human, and she followed his words with dumb

unquestioning faith, as a dog its master's footsteps.

"The soul! What is the soul?" she muttered, at length.

He caught in his hand the beautiful diamond-winged butterfly, which now,

freed of the dust and drinking in the sunlight, was poised on a foxglove

in the hedge near him, and held it against the light.

"What is it that moves this creature's wings, and glances in its eyes,

and gives it delight in the summer's warmth, in the orchid's honey, and

in the lime-tree's leaves? I do not know; but I know that I can kill

it--with one grind of my heel. So much we know of the soul--no more."

She freed it from his hand.

"Whoever made it, then, was cruel. If he could give it so much power,

why not have given it a little more, so that it could escape you

always?"

"You ask what men have asked ten times ten thousand years--since the

world began--without an answer. Because the law of all creation is

cruelty, I suppose; because the dust of death is always the breath of

life. The great man, dead, changes to a million worms, and lives again

in the juices of the grass above his grave. It matters little. The worms

destroy; the grasses nourish. Few great men do more than the first, or

do as much as the last."

"But get you homeward," he continued, breaking off his parable; "it is

two hours past noon, and if you be late on the way you pay for it with

your body. Begone."

She nodded her head, and went; he seldom used gentle words to her, and

yet she knew, in a vague way, that he cared for her; moreover, she

rejoiced in that bitter, caustic contempt in which he, the oldest man

amidst them, held all men.

His words were the only thing that had aroused her dulled brain to its

natural faculties; in a manner, from him she had caught something of

knowledge--something, too, of intellect; he alone prevented her from

sinking to that absolute unquestioning despair which surely ends in

idiocy or in self-murder.

She pursued her way in silence across the fields, and along the straight

white road, and across a wooden bridge that spanned the river, to her

home.

There was a gentler luster in her eyes, and her mouth had the faint

light of a half smile upon it; she did not know what hope meant; it

never seemed possible to her that her fate could be other than it was,

since so long the messengers and emissaries of her father's empire had

been silent and leaden-footed to her call.

Yet, in a manner, she was comforted, for had not two mouths that day

bidden her "wait"?

She entered at length the little wood of Yprès, and heard that rush and

music of the deep mill water which was the sole thing she had learned to

love in all the place.

Beyond it were the apple orchards and fruit gardens which rendered

Claudis Flamma back full recompense for all the toil they cost

him--recompense so large, indeed, that many disbelieved in that poverty

which he was wont to aver weighed so hardly and so lightly on him. Both

were now rich in all their maturer abundance, since the stream which

rushed through them had saved them from the evil effects of the long

drought so severely felt in all other districts.

The cherry-trees were scarlet with their latest fruit; the great

pumpkins glowed among their leaves in tawny orange heaps; little

russet-breasted bullfinches beat their wings vainly at the fine network

that enshrouded the paler gold of the wall apricots; a gray cat was

stealing among the delicate yellows of the pear-shaped marrows; where a

round green wrinkled melon lay a-ripening in the sun, a gorgeous

dragon-fly was hovering, and a mother-mavis, in her simple coif of brown

and white and gray, was singing with all the gladness of her sunny

summer joys.

Beyond a hedge of prickly thorn the narrower flower-garden stretched,

spanned by low stone walls, made venerable by the silvery beards of

lichens; and the earth was full of color from the crimson and the golden

gladioli; from the carmine-hued carnations; from the deep-blue lupins,

and the Gloire de Dijon roses; from the green slender stems and the pure

white cups of the virginal lilies; and from the gorgeous beetles, with

their purple tunics and their shields of bronze, like Grecian hoplites

drawn in battle array. While everywhere, above this sweet glad garden

world, the butterflies, purple and jeweled, the redstarts in their ruby

dress, the dainty azure-winged and blue warblers, the golden-girdled

wasp with his pinions light as mist, and the velvet-coated bee with his

pleasant harvest song, flew ever in the sunlight, murmuring, poising,

praising, rejoicing.

The place was beautiful in its own simple, quiet way; lying in a hollow,

where the river tumbled down in two or three short breaks and leaps

which broke its habitual smooth and sluggish form, and brought it in a

sheet of dark water and with a million foam-bells against the walls of

the mill-house and under the ponderous wheels.

The wooden house itself also was picturesque in the old fashion when men

builded their dwellings slowly and for love; common with all its

countless carvings black by age, its jutting beams shapen into grotesque

human likeness and tragic masks; its parquetted work run over by the

green cups of stoneworts, and its high roof with deep shelving eaves

bright with diapered tiles of blue and white and rose, and alive all day

with curling swallows, with pluming pigeons, with cooing doves.

It was beautiful; and the heart of Reine Flamma's young daughter

doubtless would have clung to it with all a child's instinct of love and

loyalty to its home had it not been to her only a prison-house wherein

three bitter jailers forever ruled her with a rod of iron--bigotry and

penury and cruelty.

She flung herself down a moment in the garden, on the long grass under a

mulberry-tree, ere she went in to give her account of the fruit sold and

the moneys brought by her.

She had been on foot since four o'clock in the dawn of that sultry day;

her only meal had been a bowl of cold milk and a hunch of dry bread

crushed in her strong small teeth. She had toiled hard at such bodily

labor as was set to her; to domestic work, to the work of the distaff

and spindle, of the stove and the needle, they had never been able to

break her; they had found that she would be beaten black and blue ere

she would be bound to it; but against open air exertion she had never

rebelled, and she had in her all the strength and the swiftness of the

nomadic race of the Liebana, and had not their indolence and their

dishonesty.

She was very hungry, she was again thirsty; yet she did not break off a

fruit from any bough about her; she did not steep her hot lips in any

one of the cool juicy apricots which studded the stones of the wall

beyond her.

No one had ever taught her honesty, except indeed in that dim dead time

when Phratos had closed her small hands in his whenever they had

stretched out to some forbidden thing, and had said, "Take the goods the

gods give thee, but steal not from men." And yet honest she was, by

reason of the fierce proud savage independence in her, and her dim

memories of that sole friend loved and lost.

She wanted many a thing, many a time--nay, nearly every hour that she

lived, she wanted those sheer necessaries which make life endurable; but

she had taught herself to do without them rather than owe them, by

prayer or by plunder, to that human race which she hated, and to which

she always doubted her own kinship.

Buried in the grass, she now abandoned herself to the bodily delights of

rest, of shade, of coolness, of sweet odors; the scent of the fruits and

flowers was heavy on the air; the fall of the water made a familiar

tempestuous music on her ear; and her fancy, poetic still, though

deadened by a life of ignorance and toil, was stirred by the tender

tones of the numberless birds that sang about her.

"The earth and the air are good," she thought, as she lay there watching

the dark leaves sway in the foam and the wind, and the bright-bosomed

birds float from blossom to blossom.

For there was latent in her, all untaught, that old pantheistic instinct

of the divine age, when the world was young, to behold a sentient

consciousness in every leaf unfolded to the light; to see a soul in

every created thing the day shines on; to feel the presence of an

eternal life in every breeze that moves, in every grass that grows; in

every flame that lifts itself to heaven; in every bell that vibrates on

the air; in every moth that soars to reach the stars.

Pantheism is the religion of the poet; and nature had made her a poet,

though man as yet had but made of her an outcast, a slave, and a beast

of burden.

"The earth and the air are good," she thought, watching the sunrays

pierce the purple heart of a passion-flower, the shadows move across the

deep brown water, the radiant butterfly alight upon a lily, the

scarlet-throated birds dart in and out through the yellow feathery

blossoms of the limes.

All birds were her friends.

Phratos had taught her in her infancy many notes of their various songs,

and many ways and means of luring them to come and rest upon her

shoulder and peck the berries in her hand.

She had lived so much in the open fields and among the woods that she

had made her chief companions of them. She could emulate so deftly all

their voices, from the call of the wood dove to the chant of the

blackbird, and from the trill of the nightingale to the twitter of the

titmouse, that she could summon them all to her at will, and have dozens

of them fluttering around her head and swaying their pretty bodies on

her wrist.

It was one of her ways that seemed to the peasantry so weird and

magical, and they would come home from their fields on a spring daybreak

and tell their wives in horror how they had seen the devil's daughter in

the red flush of the sunrise, ankle-deep in violets, and covered with

birds from head to foot, hearing their whispers, and giving them her

messages to carry in return.

One meek-eyed woman had dared once to say that St. Francis had done as

much and it had been accredited to him as a fair action and virtuous

knowledge, but she was frowned down and chattered down by her louder

neighbors, who told her that she might look for some sharp judgment of

heaven for daring to couple together the blessed name of the holy saint

and the accursed name of this foul spirit.

But all they could say could not break the charmed communion between

Folle-Farine and her feathered comrades.

She loved them and they her. In the hard winter she had always saved

some of her scanty meal for them, and in the springtime and the summer

they always rewarded her with floods of songs and soft caresses from

their nestling wings.

There were no rare birds, no birds of moor and mountain, in that

cultivated and populous district; but to her all the little home-bred

things of pasture and orchard were full of poetry and of characters.

The robins with that pretty air of boldness with which they veil their

real shyness and timidity; the strong and saucy sparrows, powerful by

the strength of all mediocrities and majorities; all the dainty families

of finches in their gay apparelings; the plain brown bird that fills the

night with music; the gorgeous oriole ruffling in gold, the gilded

princeling of them all; the little blue warblers, the violets of the

air; the kingfishers that have hovered so long over the forget-me-nots

upon the rivers that they have caught the colors of the flowers on their

wings; the bright blackcaps green as the leaves, with their yellow

waistcoats and velvet hoods, the innocent freebooters of the woodland

liberties; all these were her friends and lovers, various as any human

crowds of court or city.

She loved them; they and the fourfooted beasts were the sole things that

did not flee from her; and the woeful and mad slaughter of them by the

peasants was to her a grief passionate in its despair. She did not

reason on what she felt; but to her a bird slain was a trust betrayed,

an innocence defiled, a creature of heaven struck to earth.

Suddenly on the silence of the garden there was a little shrill sound of

pain; the birds flew high in air, screaming and startled; the leaves of

a bough of ivy shook as with a struggle. She rose and looked; a line of

twine was trembling against the foliage; in its noosed end the throat of

the mavis had been caught; it hung trembling and clutching at the air

convulsively with its little drawn up feet. It had flown into the trap

as it had ended its joyous song and soared up to join its brethren.

There were a score of such traps set in the miller's garden.

She unloosed the cord from about its tiny neck, set it free, and laid it

down upon the ivy; the succor came too late; the little gentle body was

already without breath; the feet had ceased to beat the air; the small

soft head had drooped feebly on one side; the lifeless eyes had started

from their sockets; the throat was without song for evermore.

"The earth would be good but for men," she thought, as she stood with

the little dead bird in her hand.

Its mate, which was poised on a rose bough, flew straight to it, and

curled round and round about the small slain body, and piteously

bewailed its fate, and mourned, refusing to be comforted, agitating the

air with trembling wings, and giving out vain cries of grief.

Vain; for the little joyous life was gone; the life that asked only of

God and Man a home in the green leaves; a drop of dew from the cup of a

rose; a bough to swing on in the sunlight; a summer day to celebrate in

song.

All the winter through, it had borne cold and hunger and pain without

lament; it had saved the soil from destroying larvæ, and purified the

trees from all foul germs; it had built its little home unaided, and

had fed its nestlings without alms; it had given its sweet song lavishly

to the winds, to the blossoms, to the empty air, to the deaf ears of

men; and now it lay dead in its innocence; trapped and slain because a

human greed begrudged it a berry worth the thousandth part of a copper

coin.

Out from the porch of the mill-house Claudis Flamma came, with a knife

in his hand and a basket to cut lilies for one of the choristers of the

cathedral, since the morrow would be the religious feast of the

Visitation of Mary.

He saw the dead thrush in her hand, and chuckled as he went by to

himself.

"The tenth bird trapped since sunrise," he said, thinking how shrewd and

how sure in their make were these traps of twine that he set in the

grass and the leaves.

She said nothing; but a darkness of disgust swept over her face, as he

came in sight in the distance.

She knelt down and scraped a hole in the earth and laid moss in it and

put the mavis softly on its green and fragrant bier, and covered it with

handfuls of fallen rose leaves and with a sprig or two of thyme. Around

her head the widowed thrush flew ceaselessly, uttering sad cries;--who

now should wander with him through the sunlight?--who now should rove

with him above the blossoming fields?--who now should sit with him

beneath the boughs hearing the sweet rain fall between the leaves?--who

now should wake with him whilst yet the world was dark, to feel the dawn

break ere the east were red, and sing a welcome to the unborn day?

CHAPTER IV.

Meanwhile Claudis Flamma cut the lilies for the cathedral altars,

muttering many holy prayers as he gathered the flowers of Mary.

When the white lily sheaves had been borne away, kept fresh in wet moss

by the young chorister who had been sent for them, the miller turned to

her.

"Where is the money?"

She, standing beside the buried bird, undid the leathern thong about her

waist, opened the pouch, and counted out the coins, one by one, on the

flat stone of a water-tank among the lilies and the ivy.

There were a few silver pieces of slight value and some dozens of copper

ones. The fruit had been left at various stalls and houses in small

portions, for it was the custom to supply it fresh each day.

He caught them up with avidity, bit and tested each, counted them again

and again, and yet again; after the third enumeration he turned sharply

on her:

"There are two pieces too little: what have you done with them?"

"There are two sous short," she answered him curtly. "Twelve of the figs

for the tanner Florian were rotten."

"Rotten!--they were but overripe."

"It is the same thing."

"You dare to answer me?--animal! I say they had only tasted a little too

much of the sun. It only made them the sweeter."

"They were rotten."

"They were not. You dare to speak! If they had been rotten they lay

under the others; he could not have seen----"

"I saw."

"You saw! Who are you?--a beggar--a beast--a foul offspring of sin. You

dared to show them to him, I will warrant?"

"I showed him that they were not good."

"And gave him back the two sous?"

"I took seven sous for what were good. I took nothing for the rotten

ones."

"Wretch! you dare to tell me that!"

A smile careless and sarcastic curled her mouth; her eyes looked at him

with all their boldest fiercest luster.

"I never steal--not even from you, good Flamma."

"You have stolen now!" he shrieked, his thin and feeble voice rising in

fury at his lost coins and his discovered treachery. "It is a lie that

the figs were rotten; it is a lie that you took but seven sous. You

stole the two sous to buy you bread and honey in the streets, or to get

a drink at the wineshops. I know you; I know you; it is a devil's device

to please your gluttonous appetite. The figs rotten!--not so rotten as

is your soul would they be, though they were black as night and though

they stunk as river mud! Go back to Denis Florian and bring me the two

sous, or I will thrash you as a thief."

She laughed a hard, scornful, reckless laughter.

"You can thrash me; you cannot make me a thief."

"You will not go back to Florian?"

"I will not ask him to pay for what was bad."

"You will not confess that you stole the money?"

"I should lie if I did."

"Then strip."

She set her teeth in silence; and without a moment's hesitation

unloosened the woolen sash knotted round her waist, and pushed down the

coarse linen shirt from about her throat.

The white folds fell from off the perfect curves of her brown arms, and

left bare her shining shoulders beautiful as any sculptured Psyche's.

She was not conscious of degradation in her punishment; she had been

bidden to bow her head and endure the lash from the earliest years she

could remember. According to the only creed she knew, silence and

fortitude and strength were the greatest of all the virtues. She stood

now in the cross-lights among the lilies as she had stood when a little

child, erect, unquailing, and ready to suffer, insensible of humiliation

because unconscious of sin, and because so tutored by severity and

exposure that she had as yet none of the shy shame and the fugitive

shrinking of her sex.

She had only the boldness to bear, the courage to be silent, which she

had had when she had stood among the same tall lilies, in the same

summer radiance, in the years of her helpless infancy.

She uncovered herself to the lash as a brave hound crouches to it; not

from inborn cowardice, but simply from the habit of obedience and of

endurance.

He had ever used her as the Greeks the Helots; he always beat her when

she was in fault to teach her to be faultless, and when without offense

beat her to remind her that she was the offspring of humiliation and a

slave.

He took, as he had taken in an earlier time, a thick rope which lay

coiled upon the turf ready for the binding of some straying boughs; and

struck her with it, slowly. His arm had lost somewhat of its strength,

and his power was unequal to his will. Still rage for the loss of his

copper pieces and the sense that she had discovered the fraudulent

intention of his small knavery lent force to his feebleness; as the

scourge whistled through the air and descended on her shoulders it left

bruised swollen marks to stamp its passage, and curling, adder-like, bit

and drew blood.

Yet to the end she stood mute and motionless, as she had stood in her

childhood; not a nerve quivered, not a limb flinched; the color rushed

over her bent face and her bare bosom, but she never made a movement;

she never gave a sound.

When his arm dropped from sheer exhaustion, she still said not one word;

she drew tight once more the sash about her waist, and fastened afresh

the linen of her bodice.

The bruised and wounded flesh smarted and ached and throbbed; but she

was used to such pain, and bore it as their wounds were borne by the

women of the Spartan games.

"Thy two sous have borne thee bitterness," he muttered with a smile.

"Thou wilt scarce find fruit rotten again in haste. There are bread and

beans within; go get a meal; I want the mule to take flour to

Barbizène."

She did not go within to eat; the bruises and the burning of her skin

made her feel sick and weak. She went away and cast herself at full

length in the shade of the long grasses of the orchard, resting her chin

upon her hands, cooling her aching breast against the soft damp moss;

thinking, thinking, thinking, of what she hardly knew, except indeed

that she wished that she were dead, like the bird she had covered with

the rose leaves.

He did not leave her long to even so much peace as this; his shrill

voice soon called her from her rest; he bade her get ready the mule and

go.

She obeyed.

The mule was saddled with his wooden pack; as many sacks as he could

carry were piled upon the framework; she put her hand upon his bridle,

and set out to walk to Barbizène, which was two leagues away.

"Work is the only thing to drive the devil that begat her out of her,"

muttered the miller, as he watched the old mule pace down the narrow

tree-shadowed road that led across the fields: and he believed that he

did rightly in this treatment of her.

It gratified the sharp hard cruelty of temper in him, indeed, but he did

not think that in such self-indulgence he ever erred. He was a bitter,

cunning, miserly old man, whose solitary tenderness of feeling and

honesty of pride had been rooted out forever when he had learned the

dishonor of the woman whom he had deemed a saint. In the ten years of

time which had passed since first the little brown, large-eyed child had

been sent to seek asylum with him, he had grown harder and keener and

more severe with each day that rose.

Her presence was abhorrent to him, though he kept her, partly from a

savage sense of duty, partly from the persuasion that she had the power

in her to make the strongest and the cheapest slave he had ever owned.

For the rest, he sincerely and devoutly believed that the devil, in some

witchery of human guise, had polluted his daughter's body and soul, and

that it was by the foul fiend and by no earthly lover that she had

conceived and borne the creature that now abode with him.

Perhaps, also, as was but natural, he sometimes felt more furious

against this offspring of hell because ever and again some gleam of

fantastic inborn honor, some strange savage instinct of honesty, would

awake in her and oppose him, and make him ashamed of those small and

secret sins of chicanery wherein his soul delighted, and for which he

compounded with his gods.

He had left her mind a blank, because he thought the body labored

hardest when the brain was still asleep, which is true; she could not

read; she could not write; she knew absolutely nothing. Yet there was a

soul awake in her; yet there were innumerable thoughts and dreams

brooding in her fathomless eyes; yet there was a desire in her fierce

and unslacked for some other life than this life of the packhorse and of

the day laborer which alone she knew.

He had done his best to degrade and to brutalize her, and in much he had

succeeded; but he had not succeeded wholly. There was a liberty in her

that escaped his thraldom; there was a soul in her that resisted the

deadening influence of her existence.

She had none of the shame of her sex; she had none of the timorous

instincts of womanhood. She had a fierce stubborn courage, and she was

insensible of the daily outrages of her life. She would strip bare to

his word obediently, feeling only that it would be feeble and worthless

to dread the pain of the lash. She would bathe in the woodland pool,

remembering no more that she might be watched by human eyes than does

the young tigress that has never beheld the face of man.

In all this she was brutalized and degraded by her tyrant's bondage: in

other things she was far higher than he and escaped him.

Stupefied as her mind might be by the exhaustion of severe physical

labor, it had still irony and it had still imagination; and under the

hottest heats of temptation there were two things which by sheer

instinct she resisted, and resisted so that neither of them had ever

been forced on her--they were falsehood and fear.

"It is the infamous strength of the devil!" said Claudis Flamma, when he

found that he could not force her to deviate from the truth.

The world says the same of those who will not feed it with lies.

CHAPTER V.

That long dry summer was followed by an autumn of drought and scarcity.

The prayers of the priests and peoples failed to bring down rain. The

wooden Christs gazed all day long on parching lands and panting cattle.

Even the broad deep rivers shrank and left their banks to bake and stink

in the long drought. The orchards sickened for lack of moisture, and the

peasants went about with feverish faces, ague-stricken limbs, and

trembling hearts. The corn yielded ill in the hard scorched ground, and

when the winter came it was a time of dire scarcity and distress.

Claudis Flamma and a few others like him alone prospered.

The mill-house at Yprès served many purposes. It was a granary, a

market, a baker's shop, an usurer's den, all in one.

It looked a simple and innocent place. In the summertime it was peaceful

and lovely, green and dark and still, with the blue sky above it, and

the songs of birds all around; with its old black timbers, its

many-colored orchards, its leafy gardens, its gray walls washed by the

hurrying stream.

But in the winter it was very dreary, utterly lonely. The water roared,

and the leafless trees groaned in the wind, and the great leaden clouds

of rain or fog enveloped it duskily.

To the starving, wet, and woe-begone peasants who would go to it with

aching bones and aching hearts, it seemed desolate and terrible; they

dreaded with a great dread the sharp voice of its master--the hardest

and the shrewdest and the closest-fisted Norman of them all.

For they were most of them his debtors, and so were in a bitter

subjugation to him, and had to pay those debts as best they might with

their labor or their suffering, with the best of all their wool, or oil,

or fruit; often with the last bit of silver that had been an heirloom

for five centuries, or with the last bit of money buried away in an old

pitcher under their apple-tree to be the nest-egg of their little pet

daughter's dowry.

And yet Claudis Flamma was respected among them; for he could outwit

them, and was believed to be very wealthy, and was a man who stood well

with the good saints and with holy church,--a wise man, in a word, with

whom these northern folks had the kinship of mutual industry and

avarice.

For the most part the population around Yprès was thrifty and thriving

in a cautious, patient, certain way of well-doing; and by this portion

of it the silent old miser was much honored as a man laborious and

penurious, who chose to live on a leek and a rye loaf, but who must

have, it was well known, put by large gains in the thatch of his roof or

under the bricks of his kitchen.

By the smaller section of it--poor, unthrifty, loose-handed fools--who

belied the province of their birth so far as to be quick to spend and

slow to save, and who so fell into want and famine and had to borrow of

others their children's bread, the old miller was hated with a hate

deeper and stronger because forced to be mute, and to submit, to cringe,

and to be trod upon, in the miserable servitude of the hopeless debtor.

In the hard winter which followed on that sickly autumn, these and their

like fell further in the mire of poverty than ever, and had to come and

beg of Flamma loans of the commonest necessaries of their bare living.

They knew that they would have to pay a hundredfold in horrible

extortion when the spring and summer should bring them work, and give

them fruit on their trees and crops on their little fields; but they

could do no better.

It had been for many years the custom to go to Flamma in such need; and

being never quit of his hold his debtors never could try for aid

elsewhere.

The weather towards the season of Noël became frightfully severe; the

mill stream never stopped, but all around it was frozen, and the swamped

pastures were sheets of ice. The birds died by thousands in the open

country, and several of the sheep perished in snowstorms on the higher

lands.

There was dire want in many of the hovels and homesteads, and the bare

harvests of a district usually so opulent in all riches of the soil

brought trouble and dearth in their train. Sickness prevailed because

the old people and the children in their hunger ate berries and roots

unfit for human food; the waters swelled, the ice melted, many homes

were flooded, and some even swept away.

Old Pitchou and Claudis Flamma alone were content; the mill wheel never

stopped work, and famine prices could be asked in this extremity.

Folle-Farine worked all that winter, day after day, month after month,

with scarcely a word being spoken to her, or scarcely an hour being left

her that she could claim as her own.

She looked against the snow as strangely as a scarlet rose blossoming in

frost there could have done; but the people that came to and fro, even

the young men among them, were too used to that dark vivid silent face

of hers, and those lithe brown limbs that had the supple play and the

golden glow of the East in them, to notice them as any loveliness: and

if they did note them on some rare time, thought of them only as the

marks of a vagrant and accursed race.

She was so unlike to themselves that the northern peasantry never

dreamed of seeing beauty in her; they turned their heads away when she

went by, striding after her mule or bearing her pitcher from the well

with the free and vigorous grace of a mountain or desert-born creature.

The sheepskin girt about her loins, the red kerchief knotted to her

head, the loose lithe movements of her beautiful limbs, the fire and

dreams in her musing eyes--all these were so unlike themselves that they

saw nothing in them except what was awful or unlovely.

Half the winter went by without a kind word to her from any one except

such as in that time of suffering and scarcity Marcellin spoke to her.

So had every winter gone since she had come there--a time so long ago

that the memory of Phratos had become so dim to her that she often

doubted if he also were not a mere shadow of a dream like all the rest.

Half the winter she fared hardly and ate sparingly, and did the work of

the mule and the bullocks--indifferent and knowing no better, and only

staring at the stars when they throbbed in the black skies on a frosty

night, and wondering if she would ever go to them, or if they would ever

come to her--those splendid and familiar unknown things that looked on

all the misery of the earth, and shone on tranquilly and did not seem to

care.

Time came close on to the new year, and the distress and the cold were

together at their height. The weather was terrible; and the poor

suffered immeasurably.

A score of times a-day she heard them ask bread at the mill, and a score

of times saw them given a stone; she saw them come in the raw fog,

pinched and shivering, and sick with ague, and she saw her grandsire

deny them with a grating sarcasm or two, or take from them fifty times

its value for some niggard grant of food.

"Why should I think of it, why should I care?" she said to herself; and

yet she did both, and could not help it.

There was among the sufferers one old and poor, who lived not far from

the mill, by name Manon Dax.

She was a little old hardy brown woman, shriveled and bent, yet strong,

with bright eyes like a robin's, and a tough frame, eighty years old.

She had been southern born, and the wife of a stone-cutter; he had been

dead fifty years, and she had seen all her sons and daughters and their

offspring die too; and had now left on her hand to rear four young

great-grandchildren, almost infants, who were always crying to her for

food as new-born birds cry in their nests.

She washed a little when she could get any linen to wash, and she span,

and she picked up the acorns and the nuts, and she tilled a small plot

of ground that belonged to her hut, and she grew cabbages and potatoes

and herbs on it, and so kept a roof over her head, and fed her four

nestlings, and trotted to and fro in her wooden shoes all day long, and

worked in hail and rain, in drought and tempest, and never complained,

but said that God was good to her.

She was anxious about the children, knowing she could not live

long--that was all. But then she felt sure that the Mother of God would

take care of them, and so was cheerful; and did what the day brought her

to do, and was content.

Now on Manon Dax, as on thousands of others, the unusual severity of the

winter fell like a knife. She was only one among thousands.

Nobody noticed her; still it was hard.

All the springs near her dwelling were frozen for many weeks; there was

no well nearer than half a league, and half a league out and half a

league back every day over ground sharp and slippery with ice, with two

heavy pails to carry, is not a little when one is over eighty, and has

only a wisp of woolen serge between the wind and one's withered limbs.

The acorns and horse-chestnuts had all been disputed with her fiercely

by boys rough and swift, who foresaw a hard time coming in which their

pigs would be ill fed. The roots in her little garden-plot were all

black and killed by the cold. The nettles had been all gathered and

stewed and eaten.

The snow drove in through a big hole in her roof. The woods were

ransacked for every bramble and broken bough by rievers younger and more

agile than herself; she had nothing to eat, nothing to burn.

The children lay in their little beds of hay and cried all day long for

food, and she had none to give them.

"If it were only myself!" she thought, stopping her ears not to hear

them; if it had been only herself it would have been so easy to creep

away into the corner among the dry grass, and to lie still till the cold

froze the pains of hunger and made them quiet; and to feel numb and

tired, and yet glad that it was all over, and to murmur that God was

good, and so to let death come--content.

But it was not only herself.

The poor are seldom so fortunate--they themselves would say so

unhappy--as to be alone in their homes.

There were the four small lives left to her by the poor dead foolish

things she had loved,--small lives that had been rosy even on so much

hunger, and blithe even amidst so much cold; that had been mirthful

even at the flooding of the snowdrift, and happy even over a meal of

mouldy crusts, or of hips and haws from the hedges. Had been--until now,

when even so much as this could not be got, and when their beds of hay

were soaked through with snow-water; now--when they were quite silent,

except when they sobbed out a cry for bread.

"I am eighty-two years old, and I have never since I was born asked man

or woman for help, or owed man or woman a copper coin," she thought,

sitting by her black hearth, across which the howling wind drove, and

stopping her ears to shut out the children's cries.

She had often known severe winters, scanty food, bitter living,--she had

scores of times in her long years been as famished as this, and as cold,

and her house had been as desolate. Yet she had borne it all and never

asked for an alms, being strong and ignorant, and being also in fear of

the world, and holding a debt a great shame.

But now she knew that she must do it, or let those children perish;

being herself old and past work, and having seen all her sons die out in

their strength before her.

The struggle was long and hard with her. She would have to die soon, she

knew, and she had striven all her lifetime so to live that she might die

saying, "I have asked nothing of any man."

This perhaps, she thought sadly, had been only a pride after all; a

feeling foolish and wicked, that the good God sought now to chasten. Any

way she knew that she must yield it up and go and ask for something; or

else those four small things, who were like a cluster of red berries on

a leafless tree, must suffer and must perish.

"It is bitter, but I must do it," she thought. "Sure it is strange that

the good God cares to take any of us to himself through so sharp a way

as hunger. It seems, if I saw His face now, I should say, 'Not heaven

for me, Monseigneur: only bread and a little wood.'"

And she rose up on her bent stiff limbs, and went to the pile of hay on

which the children were lying, pale and thin, but trying to smile, all

of them, because they saw the tears on her cheeks.

"Be still, my treasures," she said to them, striving to speak cheerily,

and laying her hands on the curls of the eldest born; "I go away for a

little while to try and get you food. Be good, Bernardou, and take care

of them till I come back."

Bernardou promised, being four years old himself; and she crept out of

the little black door of the hut on to the white road and into the

rushing winds.

"I will go to Flamma," she said to herself.

It was three in the afternoon, nearly dark at this season of midwinter.

The business of the day was done. The people had come and gone, favored

or denied, according to such sureties as they could offer. The great

wheel worked on in the seething water; the master of the mill sat

against the casement to catch the falling light, adding up the sums in

his ledger--crooked little signs such as he had taught himself to

understand, though he could form neither numerals nor letters with his

pen.

All around him in the storehouses there were corn, wood, wool, stores of

every sort of food. All around him, in the room he lived in, there were

hung the salt meats, the sweet herbs, and the dried fruits, that he had

saved from the profusion of other and healthier years. It pleased him to

know that he held all that, and also withheld it. It moved him with a

certain saturnine glee to see the hungry wistful eyes of the peasants

stare longingly at all those riches, whilst their white lips faltered

out an entreaty--which he denied.

It was what he liked; to sit there and count his gains after his

fashion, and look at his stores and listen to the howling wind and

driving hail, and chuckle to think how lean and cold and sick they were

outside--those fools who mocked him because his saint had been a gypsy's

leman.

To be prayed to for bread, and give the stone of a bitter denial; to be

implored with tears of supplication, and answer with a grim jest; to see

a woman come with children dying for food, and to point out to her the

big brass pans full of milk, and say to her "All that makes butter for

Paris," and then see her go away wailing and moaning that her child

would die, and tottering feebly through the snow--all this was sweet to

him.

Before his daughter had gone from him, he had been, though a hard man,

yet honest, and had been, though severe, not cruel; but since he had

been aware of the shame of the creature whom he had believed in as an

angel, every fiber in him had been embittered and salted sharp with the

poignancy of an acrid hate towards all living things. To hurt and to

wound, and to see what he thus struck bleed and suffer, was the only

pleasure life had left for him. He had all his manhood walked justly,

according to his light, and trusted in the God to whom he prayed; and

his God and his child had denied and betrayed him, and his heart had

turned to gall.

The old woman toiled slowly through the roads which lay between her hut

and the water-mill.

They were roads which passed through meadows and along cornfields,

beside streamlets, and among little belts of woodland, lanes and paths

green and pleasant in the summer, but now a slough of frozen mud, and

whistled through by northeast winds. She held on her way steadily,

stumbling often, and often slipping and going slowly, for she was very

feeble from long lack of food, and the intensity of the cold drove

through and through her frame. Still she held on bravely, in the teeth

of the rough winds and of the coming darkness, though the weather was so

wild that the poplar-trees were bent to the earth, and the little light

in the Calvary lamp by the river blew to and fro, and at last died out.

Still she held on, a little dark, tottering figure, with a prayer on her

lips and a hope in her heart.

The snow was falling, the clouds were driving, the waters were roaring,

in the twilight: she was only a little black speck in the vast gray

waste of the earth and the sky, and the furious air tossed her at times

to and fro like a withered leaf. But she would not let it beat her; she

groped her way with infinite difficulty, grasping a bough for strength,

or waiting under a tree for breath a moment, and thus at last reached

the mill-house.

Such light as there was left showed her the kitchen within, the stores

of wood, the strings of food; it looked to her as it had looked to

Phratos, a place of comfort and of plenty; a strong safe shelter from

the inclement night.

She lifted the latch and crept in, and went straight to Claudis Flamma,

who was still busy beneath the window with those rude signs which

represented to him his earthly wealth.

She stood before him white from the falling snow, with her brown face

working with a strong emotion, her eyes clear and honest, and full of an

intense anxiety of appeal.

"Flamma," she said simply to him, "we have been neighbors fifty years

and more--thou and I, and many have borrowed of thee to their hurt and

shame, but I never. I am eighty-two, and I never in my days asked

anything of man or woman or child. But I come to-night to ask bread of

you--bread for the four little children at home. I have heard them cry

three days, and have had nothing to give them save a berry or two off

the trees. I cannot bear it any more. So I have come to you."

He shut his ledger, and looked at her. They had been neighbors, as she

had said, half a century and more; and had often knelt down before the

same altar, side by side.

"What dost want?" he asked simply.

"Food," she made answer; "food and fuel. They are so cold--the little

ones."

"What canst pay for them?" he asked.

"Nothing--nothing now. There is not a thing in the house except the last

hay the children sleep on. But if thou wilt let me have a little--just a

little--while the weather is so hard, I will find means to pay when the

weather breaks. There is my garden; and I can wash and spin. I will pay

faithfully. Thou knowest I never owed a brass coin to any man. But I am

so old, and the children so young----"

Claudis Flamma got up and walked to the other side of the kitchen.

Her eyes followed him with wistful, hungry longing. Where he went there

stood pans of new milk, baskets of eggs, rolls of bread, piles of

fagots. Her feeble heart beat thickly with eager hope, her dim eyes

glowed with pleasure and with thankfulness.

He came back and brought to her a few sharp rods, plucked from a

thorn-tree.

"Give these to thy children's children," he said, with a dark smile.

"For these--and for no more--will they recompense thee when they shall

grow to maturity."

She looked at him startled and disquieted, yet thinking that he meant

but a stern jest.

"Good Flamma, you mock me," she murmured, trembling; "the babies are

little, and good. Ah, give me food quickly, for God's sake! A jest is

well in season, but to an empty body and a bitter heart it is like a

stripe."

He smiled, and answered her in his harsh grating voice,--

"I give thee the only thing given without payment in this world--advice.

Take it or leave it."

She reeled a little as if he had struck her a blow with his fist, and

her face changed terribly, whilst her eyes stared without light or sense

in them.

"You jest, Flamma! You only jest!" she muttered. "The little children

starve, I tell you. You will give me bread for them? Just a little

bread? I will pay as soon as the weather breaks."

"I can give nothing. I am poor, very poor," he answered her, with the

habitual lie of the miser; and he opened his ledger again, and went on

counting up the dots and crosses by which he kept his books.

His servant Pitchou sat spinning by the hearth: she did not cease her

work, nor intercede by a word. The poor can be better to the poor than

any princes; but the poor can also be more cruel to the poor than any

slave-drivers.

The old woman's head dropped on her breast, she turned feebly, and felt

her way, as though she were blind, out of the house and into the air. It

was already dark with the darkness of the descending night.

The snow was falling fast. Her hope was gone; all was cold--cold as

death.

She shivered and gasped, and strove to totter on: the children were

alone. The winds blew and drove the snowflakes in a white cloud against

her face; the bending trees creaked and groaned as though in pain; the

roar of the mill-water filled the air.

There was now no light: the day was gone, and the moon was hidden;

beneath her feet the frozen earth cracked and slipped and gave way. She

fell down; being so old and so weakly she could not rise again, but lay

still with one limb broken under her, and the winds and the snowstorm

beating together upon her.

"The children! the children!" she moaned feebly, and then was still; she

was so cold, and the snow fell so fast; she could not lift herself nor

see what was around her; she thought that she was in her bed at home,

and felt as though she would soon sleep.

Through the dense gloom around her there came a swiftly-moving shape,

that flew as silently and as quickly as a night-bird, and paused as

though on wings beside her.

A voice that was at once timid and fierce, tender and savage, spoke to

her through the clouds of driven snow-spray.

"Hush, it is I! I--Folle-Farine. I have brought you my food. It is not

much--they never give me much. Still it will help a little. I heard what

you said--I was in the loft. Flamma must not know; he might make you

pay. But it is all mine, truly mine; take it."

"Food--for the children!"

The blessed word aroused her from her lethargy; she raised herself a

little on one arm, and tried to see whence the voice came that spoke to

her.

But the effort exhausted her; she fell again to the ground with a

groan--her limb was broken.

Folle-Farine stood above her; her dark eyes gleaming like a hawk's

through the gloom, and full of a curious, startled pity.

"You cannot get up; you are old," she said abruptly. "See--let me carry

you home. The children! yes, the children can have it. It is not much;

but it will serve."

She spoke hastily and roughly; she was ashamed of her own compassion.

What was it to her whether any of these people lived or died? They had

always mocked and hated her.

"If I did right, I should let them rot, and spit on their corpses," she

thought, with the ferocity of vengeance that ran in her Oriental blood.

Yet she had come out in the storm, and had brought away her food for

strangers, though she had been at work all day long, and was chilled to

the bone, and was devoured with ravenous hunger.

Why did she do it?

She did not know. She scorned herself. But she was sorry for this woman,

so poor and so brave, with her eighty-two years, and so bitterly denied

in her extremity.

Manon Dax dimly caught the muttered words, and feebly strove to answer

them, whilst the winds roared and the snow beat upon her fallen body.

"I cannot rise," she murmured; "my leg is broken, I think. But it is no

matter. Go you to the little ones; whoever you are, you are good, and

have pity. Go to them, go. It is no matter for me. I have lived my

life--anyway. It will soon be over. I am not in pain--indeed."

Folle-Farine stood in silence a minute, then she stooped and lifted the

old creature in her strong young arms, and with that heavy burden set

out on her way in the teeth of the storm.

She had long known the woman, and the grandchildren, by sight and name.

Once or twice when she had passed by them, the grandam, tender of heart,

but narrow of brain, and believing all the tales of her neighbors, had

drawn the little ones closer to her, under the wing of her serge cloak,

lest the evil eye that had bewitched the tanner's youngest born, should

fall on them, and harm them in like manner.

Nevertheless the evil eyes gleamed on her with a wistful sorrow, as

Folle-Farine bore her with easy strength and a sure step, through the

frozen woodland ways, as she would have borne the load of wood, or the

sacks of corn, that she was so well used to carry to and fro like a

packhorse.

Manon Dax did not stir nor struggle, she did not even strive to speak

again; she was vaguely sensible of a slow, buoyant, painless movement,

of a close, soft pressure that sheltered her from the force of the

winds, of a subtle warmth that stole through her emaciated aching frame,

and made her drowsy and forgetful, and content to be still.

She could do no more. Her day for struggle and for work was done.

Once she moved a little. Her bearer paused and stopped and listened.

"Did you speak?" she whispered.

Manon Dax gave a soft troubled sigh.

"God is good," she muttered, like one speaking in a dream.

Folle-Farine held on her way; fiercely blown, blinded by the snow,

pierced by the blasts of the hurricane, but sure of foot on the ice as a

reindeer, and sure of eye in the dark as a night-hawk.

"Are you in pain?" she asked once of the burden she carried.

There was no answer. Old Manon seemed to sleep.

The distance of the road was nothing to her, fleet and firm of step, and

inured to all hardships of the weather; yet short as it was, it cost her

an hour to travel it, heavily weighted as she was, soaked with

snow-water, blown back continually by the opposing winds, and forced to

stagger and to pause by the fury of the storm.

At last she reached the hut.

The wind had driven open the door. The wailing cries of the children

echoed sorrowfully on the stillness, answered by the bleating of sheep,

cold and hungry in their distant folds. The snow had drifted in

unchecked; all was quite dark.

She felt her way within, and being used by long custom to see in the

gloom, as the night-haunting beasts and birds can see, she found the bed

of hay, and laid her burden gently down on it.

The children ceased their wailing, and the two eldest ones crept up

close to their grandmother, and pressed their cheeks to hers, and

whispered to her eagerly, with their little famished lips, "Where is

the food, where is the food?"

But there was still no answer.

The clouds drifted a little from the moon that had been so long

obscured; it shone for a moment through the vapor of the heavy sky; the

whitened ground threw back the rays increased tenfold; the pale gleam

reached the old still face of Manon Dax.

There was a feeble smile upon it--the smile with which her last words

had been spoken in the darkness; "God is good!"

She was quite dead.

CHAPTER VI.

All that night Folle-Farine tarried with the children.

The youngest had been suffocated whilst they had been alone, by the snow

which had fallen through the roof, and from which its elders had been

too small and weakly to be able to drag it out, unaided.

She laid it, stiff already in the cold of the night, beside the body of

its old grandam, who had perished in endeavoring to save it; they lay

together, the year-old child and the aged woman, the broken bud and the

leafless bough. They had died of hunger, as the birds die on the moors

and plains; it is a common fate.

She stayed beside the children, who were frightened and bewildered and

quite mute. She divided such food as she had brought between them, not

taking any herself. She took off the sheepskin which she wore in winter,

tied round her loins as her outdoor garment, and made a little nest of

it for the three, and covered them with it. She could not close the

door, from the height of the drifted snow, and the wind poured in all

night long, though in an hour the snow ceased to fall. Now and then the

clouds parting a little, let a ray of the moon stray in; and then she

could see the quiet faces of the old dead woman and the child.

"They die of famine--and they die saying their 'God is good,'" she

thought and she pondered on it deeply, and with the bitter and

melancholy irony which life had already taught her, while the hours of

the night dragged slowly on; the winds howled above the trembling hovel,

and the children sobbed themselves to sleep at last, lulled by the

warmth of the skin, into which they crept together like young birds in a

nest.

She sat there patiently; frozen and ravenous; yet not drawing a corner

of the sheepskin to her own use, nor regretting a crumb of the bread she

had surrendered. She hated the human race, whose hand was always against

her. She had no single good deed to thank them for, nor any single

gentle word. Yet she was sorry for that old creature, who had been so

bitterly dealt with all her years through, and who had died saying "God

is good." She was sorry for those little helpless, unconscious starving

animals, who had lost the only life that could labor for them.

She forgave--because she forgot--that in other winters this door had

been shut against her, as against an accursed thing, and these babes had

mocked her in their first imperfect speech.

The dawn broke; the sharp gray winter's day came; the storm had lulled,

but the whole earth was frost-bound and white with snow, and the air was

piercing, and the sky dark and overcast.

She had to leave them; she was bound to her daily labor at the mill, she

knew that if when the sun rose she should be found absent, she and they

too would surely suffer. What to do for them she could not tell. She had

no friend save Marcellin, who himself was as poor as these. She never

spoke to any living thing, except a sheep-dog, or a calf bleating for

its mother, or a toil-worn bullock staggering over the plowed clods.

Between her and all those around her there were perpetual enmity and

mistrust, and scarcely so much of a common bond as lies in a common

humanity. For in her title to a common humanity with them they

disbelieved; while she in her scorn rejected claim to it.

At daybreak there passed by the open door in the mist a peasant going

to his cattle in the fields beyond, pushing through the snow a rude

hand-cart full of turnips, and other winter food.

She rose and called to him.

He stared and stood still.

She went to the doorway and signed to him.

"Old Manon Dax is dead. Will you tell the people? The children are here,

alone, and they starve."

"Manon Dax dead?" he echoed stupidly: he was her nearest neighbor; he

had helped her fetch her washing-water sometimes from the well half a

league away; when his wife had been down with fever and ague, the old

woman had nursed her carefully and well through many a tedious month.

"Yes, I found her on the road, in the snow, last night. She had broken

her leg, and she was dead before I got here. Go and send some one. The

little children are all alone, and one of them is dead too."

It was so dark still, that he had not seen at first who it was that

addressed him; but slowly, as he stared and stared, and drew nearer to

her, he recognized the scarlet girdle, the brown limbs, the straight

brow, the fathomless eyes. And he feared her, with a great fear rising

there suddenly, before him, out of that still white world of dawn and

shadow.

He dropped the handles of his cart and fled; a turn in the road, and the

darkness of the morning, soon hid him from sight. She thought that he

had gone to summon his people, and she went back and sat again by the

sleeping children, and watched the sad still faces of the dead.

The peasant flew home as swiftly as his heavy shoes and the broken ice

of the roads would allow.

His cabin was at some distance, at a place where, amidst the fields, a

few huts, a stone crucifix, some barns and stacks, and a single wineshop

made up a little village, celebrated in the district for its

wide-spreading orchards and their excellence of fruits.

Even so early the little hamlet was awake; the shutters were opened; the

people were astir; men were brushing the snow from their thresholds;

women were going out to their field-work; behind the narrow lattices the

sleepy-eyes and curly heads of children peered, while their fingers

played with the fanciful incrustations of the frost.

The keeper of the tavern was unbarring his house door; a girl broke the

ice in a pool for her ducks to get at the water; a few famished robins

flew to and fro songless.

His own wife was on her doorstep; to her he darted.

"Manon Dax is dead!" he shouted.

"What of that?" said his wife shouldering her broom; a great many had

died that winter, and they were so poor and sharp-set with famine

themselves, that they had neither bread nor pity to spare.

"This of that," said the man, doggedly, and full of the excitement of

his own terrors. "The young devil of Yprès has killed her, that I am

sure. She is there in the hut, in the dark, with her eyes glaring like

coals. And for what should she be there if not for evil? Tell me that."

"Is it possible?" his wife cried, incredulous, yet willing to believe;

while the girl left her ducks, and the wineshop-keeper his door, and the

women their cabins, and came and stood round the bearer of such strange

news. It was very welcome news in a raw frost-bitten dawn, when a day

was beginning that would otherwise have had nothing more wonderful in it

than tidings of how a litter of black pigs throve, and how a brown horse

had fared with the swelling in the throat.

They were very dull there from year's end to year's end; once a month,

maybe, a letter would come in from some soldier-son or brother, or a

peddler coming to buy eggs would bring likewise some stray rumor from

the outer world;--beyond this there was no change. They heard nothing,

and saw nothing, seldom moving a league away from that gray stone

crucifix, round which their little homes were clustered.

This man had nothing truly to tell; he had fled horrified to be

challenged in the twilight, and the snow, by a creature of such evil

omen as Folle-Farine. But when he had got an audience, he was too true

an orator and not such a fool as to lose it for such a little beggarly

matter as truth; and his tongue clacked quickly of all which his fears

and fancies had conceived, until he had talked himself and his

listeners into the full belief that Manon Dax being belated had

encountered the evil glance of the daughter of all evil, and had been

slain thereby in most cruel sorcery.

Now, in the whole neighborhood there was nothing too foul to be

accredited of the begotten of the fiend:--a fiend, whom all the grown

men and women remembered so well in his earthly form, when he had come

to ruin poor Reine Flamma's body and soul, with his eyes like jewels,

and his strength passing the strength of all men.

The people listened, gaping, and wonder-struck, and forgetting the

bitterness of the cold, being warmed with those unfailing human cordials

of foul suspicion and of gratified hatred. Some went off to their daily

labor, being unable to spare time for more gossip; but divers women, who

had nothing to occupy them, remained about Flandrin.

A shriveled dame, who owned the greatest number of brood-hens in the

village, who had only one son, a priest, and who was much respected and

deferred to by her neighbors, spoke first when Flandrin had ended his

tale for the seventh time, it being a little matter to him that his two

hungry cows would be lowing all the while vainly for their morning meal.

"Flandrin, you have said well, beyond a doubt; the good soul has been

struck dead by sorcery. But, you have forgot one thing, the children are

there, and that devil of Yprès is with them. We--good Christians and

true--should not let such things be. Go, and drive her out and bring the

young ones hither."

Flandrin stood silent. It was very well to say that the devil should be

driven out, but it was not so well to be the driver.

"That is as it should be," assented the other women. "Go, Flandrin, and

we--we will take the little souls in for this day, and then give them to

the public charity; better cannot be done. Go."

"But mind that thou dost strike that beast, Folle-Farine, sharply,"

cried his wife.

"If thou showest her the cross, she will have to grovel and flee," said

another.

"Not she," grumbled the old dame, whose son was a priest. "One day my

blessed son, who is nearly a saint, Heaven knows, menaced her with his

cross, and she stood straight, and fearless, and looked at it, and said

'By that sign you do all manner of vileness in this world, and say you

are to be blest in another; I know!' and so laughed and went on. What

are you to do with a witch like that,--eh?"

"Go, Flandrin," shrieked the women in chorus. "Go! Every minute you

waste, the little angels are nearer to hell!"

"Come yourselves with me, then," said Flandrin, sullenly. "I will not go

after those infants, it is not a man's work."

In his own mind he was musing on a story his priests had often told him,

of swine into which exorcised devils had entered, and dispatched swiftly

down a slope to a miserable end; and he thought of his own pigs, black,

fat, and happy, worth so much to him in the market. Better, he mused,

that Manon Dax's grandchildren should be the devil's prey, than those,

his choicest, swine.

The women jeered him, menaced him, flouted him, besought him. But

vainly--he would not move alone. He had become possessed with the

terrors that his own fancy had created; and he would not stir a step for

all their imprecations.

"Let us go ourselves, then!" screamed his wife at length, flourishing

above her head the broom with which she had swept the snow. "Men are

forever cowards. It shall never be said of me, that I left those babes

to the fiend while I gave my own children their porridge by the fire!"

There was a sentiment in this that stirred all her companions to

emulation. They rushed into their homes, snatched a shovel, a staff, a

broom, a pegstick, each whatever came uppermost, and, dragging Flandrin

in the midst, went down the sloping frozen road between its fringe of

poplars. They were not very sure in their own minds why they went, nor

for what they went; but they had a vague idea of doing what was wise and

pious, and they had a great hate in their hearts against her.

They sped as fast as the slippery road would let them, and their

tongues flew still faster than their feet; the cold of the daybreak made

them sharp and keen on their prey; they screamed themselves hoarse,

their voices rising shrilly above the whistling of the winds, and the

creaking of the trees; and they inflamed each other with ferocious

belief in the sorcery they were to punish.

They were in their way virtuous; they were content on very little, they

toiled hard from their birth to their grave, they were most of them

chaste wives and devoted mothers, they bore privation steadily, and they

slaved in fair weather and foul without a complaint. But they were

narrow of soul, greedy of temper, bigoted and uncharitable, and, where

they thought themselves or their offspring menaced, implacable. They

were of the stuff that would be burned for a creed, and burn others for

another creed. It is the creed of the vast majority of every nation; the

priests and lawgivers of every nation have always told their people that

it is a creed holy and honorable--how can the people know that it is at

once idiotic and hellish?

Folle-Farine sat within on the damp hay under the broken roof, and

watched the open door.

The children were still asleep. The eldest one in his sleep had turned

and caught her hand, and held it.

She did not care for them. They had screamed, and run behind the

woodstack, or their grandam's skirts, a hundred times when they had seen

her on the road or in the orchard. But she was sorry for them; almost as

sorry as she was for the little naked woodpigeons when their nests were

scattered on the ground in a tempest, or for the little starveling

rabbits when they screamed in their holes for the soft, white mother

that was lying, tortured and twisted, in the jaws of a steel trap.

She was sorry for them--half roughly, half tenderly--with some shame at

her own weakness, and yet too sincerely sorry to be able to persuade

herself to leave them to their fate there, all alone with their dead.

For in the savage heart of Taric's daughter there was an innermost

corner wherein her mother's nature slept.

She sat there quite still, watching the open porch and listening for

footsteps.

The snow was driven in circling clouds by the winds; the dense fog of

the dawn lifted itself off the surrounding fields; the branches of the

trees were beautiful with hanging icicles; from the meadow hard by there

wailed unceasingly the mournful moaning of Flandrin's cattle, deserted

of their master and hungry in their wooden sheds.

She heard a distant convent clock strike six: no one came. Yet, she had

resolved not to leave the children all alone; though Flamma should come

and find her there, and thrash her for her absence from his tasks. So

she sat still and waited.

After a little she heard the crisp cracking of many feet on the frozen

snow and ice-filled ruts of the narrow road; she heard a confused

clatter of angry voices breaking harshly on the stillness of the winter

morning.

The light was stronger now, and through the doorway she saw the little

passionate crowd of angry faces as the women pressed onward down the

hill with Flandrin in their midst.

She rose and looked out at them quietly.

For a minute they paused--irresolute, silent, perplexed: at the sight of

her they were half daunted; they felt the vagueness of the crime they

came to bring against her.

The wife of Flandrin recovered speech first, and dared them to the

onslaught.

"What!" she screamed, "nine good Christians fearful of one daughter of

hell? Fie! for shame! Look; my leaden Peter is round my neck! Is he not

stronger than she any day?"

In a moment more, thus girded at and guarded at the same time, they were

through the door and on the mud floor of the hearth, close to her,

casting hasty glances at the poor dead body on the hearth, whose fires

they had left to die out all through that bitter winter. They came about

her in a fierce, gesticulating, breathless troop, flourishing their

sticks in her eyes, and casting at her a thousand charges in one breath.

Flandrin stood a little aloof, sheepishly on the threshold, wishing he

had never said a word of the death of Manon Dax to his good wife and

neighbors.

"You met that poor saint and killed her in the snow with your

witcheries!" one cried.

"You have stifled that poor babe where it lay!" cried another.

"A good woman like that!" shrieked a third, "who was well and blithe and

praising God only a day ago, for I saw her myself come down the hill for

our well water!"

"It is as you did with the dear little Rémy, who will be lame all his

life through you," hissed a fourth. "You are not fit to live; you spit

venom like a toad."

"Are you alive, my angels?" said a fifth, waking the three children

noisily, and rousing their piercing cries. "Are you alive after that

witch has gazed on you? It is a miracle! The saints be praised!"

Folle-Farine stood mute and erect for the moment, not comprehending why

they thus with one accord fell upon her. She pointed to the bodies on

the hearth, with one of those grave and dignified gestures which were

her birthright.

"She was cold and hungry," she said curtly, her mellow accent softening

and enriching the provincial tongue which she had learned from those

amidst whom she dwelt. "She had fallen, and was dying. I brought her

here. The young child was killed by the snow. I stayed with the rest

because they were frightened, and alone. There is no more to tell. What

of it?"

"Thou hadst better come away. What canst thou prove?" whispered Flandrin

to his wife.

He was afraid of the storm he had invoked, and would fain have stilled

it. But that was beyond his power. The women had not come forth half a

league in the howling winds of a midwinter daybreak only to go back with

a mere charity done, and with no vengeance taken.

They hissed, they screamed, they hurled their rage at her; they accused

her of a thousand crimes; they filled the hut with clamor as of a

thousand tongues; they foamed, they spat, they struck at her with their

sticks; and she stood quiet, looking at them, and the old dead face of

Manon Dax lay upward in the dim light.

The eldest boy struggled in the grasp of the peasant woman who had

seized him, and stretched his arms, instead, to the one who had fed him

and whose hand he had held all through his restless slumber in that long

and dreary night.

The woman covered his eyes with a scream.

"Ah--h!" she moaned, "see how the innocent child is bewitched! It is

horrible!"

"Look on that;--oh, infernal thing!" cried Flandrin's wife, lifting up

her treasured figure of Peter. "You dare not face that blessed image.

See--see all of you--how she winces, and turns white!"

Folle-Farine had shrunk a little as the child had called her. Its

gesture of affection was the first that she had ever seen towards her in

any human thing.

She laughed aloud as the image of Peter was thrust in her face. She saw

it was some emblem and idol of their faith, devoutly cherished. She

stretched her hand out, wrenched it away, trampled on it, and tossed it

through the doorway into the snow, where it sank and disappeared. Then

she folded her arms, and waited for them.

There was a shriek at the blasphemy of the impious act; then they rushed

on her.

They came inflamed with all the fury which abject fear and bigoted

hatred can beget in minds of the lowest and most brutal type. They were

strong, rude, ignorant, fanatical peasants, and they abhorred her, and

they believed no child of theirs to be safe in its bed while she walked

alive abroad. Beside such women, when in wrath and riot, the tiger and

the hyena are as the lamb and the dove.

They set on her with furious force; they flung her, they trod on her,

they beat her, they kicked her with their wood-shod feet, with all the

malignant fury of the female animal that fights for its offspring's and

its own security.

Strong though she was, and swift, and full of courage, she had no power

against the numbers who had thrown themselves on her, and borne her

backward by dint of their united effort, and held her down to work their

worst on her. She could not free herself to return their blows, nor lift

herself to wrestle with them; she could only deny them the sweetness of

wringing from her a single cry, and that she did. She was mute while the

rough hands flew at her, the sticks struck at her, the heavy feet were

driven against her body, and the fierce fingers clutched at her hair,

and twisted and tore it,--she was quite mute throughout.

"Prick her in the breast, and see if the devil be still in her. I have

heard say there is no better way to test a witch!" cried Flandrin's

wife, writhing in rage for the outrage to the Petrus.

Her foes needed no second bidding; they had her already prostrate in

their midst, and a dozen eager, violent hands seized a closer grip upon

her, pulled her clothes from her chest, and, holding her down on the mud

floor, searched with ravenous eyes for the signet marks of hell. The

smooth, soft skin baffled them; its rich and tender hues were without

spot or blemish.

"What matter,--what matter?" hissed Rose Flandrin. "When our fathers

hunted witches in the old time, did they stop for that? Draw blood, and

you will see."

She clutched a jagged, rusty nail from out the wall, and leaned over her

prey.

"It is the only babe that will ever cling to thee!" she cried, with a

laugh, as the nail drew blood above the heart.

Still Folle-Farine made no sound and asked no mercy. She was powerless,

defenseless, flung on her back amidst her tormentors, fastened down by

treading feet and clinching hands; she could resist in nothing, she

could not stir a limb; still she kept silence, and her proud eyes looked

unquailing into the hateful faces bent to hers.

The muscles and nerves of her body quivered with a mighty pang, her

chest heaved with the torture of indignity, her heart fluttered like a

wounded bird,--not at the physical pain, but at the shame of these

women's gaze, the loathsome contact of their hands.

The iron pierced deeper, but they could not make her speak. Except for

her eyes, which glowed with a dusky fire as they glanced to and fro,

seeking escape, she might have been a statue of olive-wood, flung down

by ruffians to make a bonfire.

"If one were to drive the nail to the head, she would not feel!" cried

the women, in furious despair, and were minded, almost, to put her to

that uttermost test.

Suddenly, from the doorway, Flandrin raised an alarm:

"There is our notary close at hand, on the road on his mule! Hist! Come

out quickly! You know how strict he is, and how he forbids us ever to

try and take the law into our own keeping. Quick--as you love your

lives--quick!"

The furies left their prey, and scattered and fled; the notary was a

name of awe to them, for he was a severe man but just.

They seized the children, went out with them into the road, closed the

hut door behind them, and moved down the hill, the two younger wailing

sadly, and the eldest trying to get from them and go back.

The women looked mournful and held their heads down, and comforted the

little ones; Flandrin himself went to his cattle in the meadow.

"Is anything amiss?" the old white-haired notary asked, stopping his

gray mule at sight of the little cavalcade.

The women, weeping, told him that Manon Dax was dead, and the youngest

infant likewise--of cold, in the night, as they supposed. They dared to

say no more, for he had many times rebuked them for their lack of

charity and their bigoted cruelties and superstitions, and they were

quaking with fear lest he should by any chance enter the cottage and see

their work.

"Flandrin, going to his cow, saw her first, and he came to us and told

us," they added, crossing themselves fervently, and hushing little

Bernardou, who wanted to get from them and return; "and we have taken

the poor little things to carry them home; we are going to give them

food, and warm them awhile by the stove, and then we shall come back and

do all that is needful for the beloved dead who are within."

"That is well. That is good and neighborly of you," said the notary, who

liked them, having married them all, and registered all their children's

births, and who was a good old man, though stern.

He promised them to see for his part that all needed by the law and by

the church should be done for their old lost neighbor; and then he urged

his mule into a trot, for he had been summoned to a rich man's sick-bed

in that early winter morning, and was in haste lest the priest should be

beforehand with him there.

"How tender the poor are to the poor! Those people have not bread enough

for themselves, and yet they burden their homes with three strange

mouths. Their hearts must be true at the core, if their tongues

sometimes be foul," he mused, as he rode the mule down through the fog.

The women went on, carrying and dragging the children with them, in a

sullen impatience.

"To think we should have had to leave that fiend of Yprès!" they

muttered in their teeth. "Well, there is one thing, she will not get

over the hurt for days. Her bones will be stiff for many a week. That

will teach her to leave honest folk alone."

And they traversed the road slowly, muttering to one another.

"Hold thy noise, thou little pig!" cried Flandrin's wife, pushing

Bernardou on before her. "Hold thy noise, I tell you, or I will put you

in the black box in a hole in the ground, along with thy

great-grandmother."

But Bernardou wept aloud, refusing to be comforted or terrified into

silence. He was old enough to know that never more would the old kindly

withered brown face bend over him as he woke in the morning, nor the old

kindly quavering voice croon him country ballads and cradle songs at

twilight by the bright wood fire.

Little by little the women carrying the children crept down the slippery

slope, half ice and half mud in the thaw, and entered their own village,

and therein were much praised for their charity and courage.

For when they praise, as when they abuse, villages are loud of voice and

blind of eye almost as much as are the cities.

Their tongues and those of their neighbors clacked all day long, noisily

and bravely, of their good and their great deeds; they had all the

sanctity of martyrdom, and all the glory of victory, in one. True, they

have left all their house and field-work half done. "But the Holy Peter

will finish it in his own good time, and avenge himself for his

outrage," mused the wife of Flandrin, sorrowing over her lost Petrus in

the snowdrift, and boxing the ears of little Bernardou to make him cease

from his weeping, where he was huddled in her chimney corner.

When they went back with their priest at noon to the hut of old Manon

Dax to make her ready for her burial, they trembled inwardly lest they

should find their victim there, and lest she should lift up her voice in

accusation against them. Their hearts misgave them sorely. Their priest,

a cobbler's son, almost as ignorant as themselves, save that he could

gabble a few morsels of bad Latin, would be, they knew, on their side;

but they were sensible that they had let their fury hurry them into acts

that could easily be applauded by their neighbors, but not so easily

justified to the law.

"For the law is overgood," said Rose Flandrin, "and takes the part of

all sorts of vile creatures. It will protect a rogue, a brigand, a

bullock, a dog, a witch, a devil--anything,--except now and then an

honest woman."

But their fears were groundless; she was gone; the hut when they entered

it had no tenants, except the lifeless famished bodies of the old

grandam and the year-old infant.

When Folle-Farine had heard the hut door close, and the steps of her

tormentors die away down the hill, she had tried vainly several times to

raise herself from the floor, and had failed.

She had been so suddenly attacked and flung down and trampled on, that

her brain had been deadened, and her senses had gone, for the first

sharp moment of the persecution.

As she lifted herself slowly, and staggered to her feet, and saw the

blood trickle where the nail had pierced her breast, she understood what

had happened to her; her face grew savage and dark, her eyes fierce and

lustful, like the eyes of some wild beast rising wounded in his lair.

It was not for the hurt she cared; it was the shame of defeat and

outrage that stung her like a whip of asps.

She stood awhile looking at the face of the woman she had aided.

"I tried to help you," she thought. "I was a fool. I might have known

how they pay any good done to them."

She was not surprised; her mind had been too deadened by a long course

of ill usage to feel any wonder at the treatment she had been repaid

with.

She hated them with the mute unyielding hatred of her race, but she

hated herself more because she had yielded to the softness of sorrow and

pity for any human thing; and more still because she had not been armed

and on her guard, and had suffered them to prevail and to escape without

her vengeance.

"I will never come out without a knife in my girdle again," she

thought--this was the lesson that her charity had brought her as its

teaching.

She went out hardening her heart, as she crept through the doorway into

the snow and the wind, so that she should not leave one farewell word or

token of gentleness with the dead, that lay there so tranquil on the

ashes of the hearth.

"She lied even in her last breath," thought Folle-Farine. "She said that

her God was good!"

She could hardly keep on her own homeward way. All her limbs were stiff

and full of pain. The wound in her chest was scarcely more than skin

deep, yet it smarted sorely and bled still. Her brain was dull, and her

ears filled with strange noises from the force with which she had been

flung backward on her head.

She had given her sheepskin to the children, as before her Phratos had

done; and the peasants had carried the youngest of them away in it. The

sharpness of the intense cold froze the blood in her as she crawled

through a gap in the poplar hedge, and under the whitened brambles and

grasses beyond, to get backward to the mill by the path that ran through

the woods and pastures.

The sun had risen, but was obscured by fog, through which it shed a dull

red ray here and there above the woods in the east.

It was a bitter morning, and the wind, though it had abated, was still

rough, and drove the snow in clouds of powder hither and thither over

the fields. She could only move very slowly; the thorns tearing her, the

snow blinding her, the icicles lacerating her bare feet as she moved.

She wondered, dimly, why she lived. It seemed to her that the devil when

he had made her, must have made her out of sport and cruelty, and then

tossed her into the world to be a scapegoat and a football for any

creature that might need one.

That she might end her own life never occurred to her; her intelligence

was not awake enough to see that she need not bear its burden one hour

more, so long as there was one pool in the woods deep enough to drown

her under its green weeds and lily leaves any cool summer night; or that

she had but to lie down then and there, where she was, on the snow,

beneath the ice-dropping trees, and let the sleep that weighed on her

eyelids come, dreamless and painless, and there would be an end of all

for her, as for the frozen rabbits and the birds that strewed the upland

meadows, starved and stiff.

She did not know;--and had she known, wretched though existence was to

her, death would not have allured her. She saw that the dead might be

slapped on their cheek, and could not lift their arm to strike again--a

change that would not give her vengeance could have had no sweetness and

no succor for her. The change she wanted was to live, and not to die.

By tedious and painful efforts, she dragged herself home by the way of

the lanes and pastures; hungry, lame, bleeding, cold and miserable, her

eyes burning like flame, her hands and her head hot with fever.

She made her way into the mill-yard and tried to commence her first

morning's work; the drawing of water from the well for the beasts and

for the house, and the sweeping down of the old wide court round which

the sheds and storehouses ran.

She never dreamed of asking either for food or pity, either for sympathy

or remission of her labors.

She set to work at once, but for the only time since Phratos had

brought her thither the strength and vigor of her frame had been beaten.

She was sick and weak; her hand sank off the handle of the windlass; and

she dropped stupidly on the stone edge of the well, and sat there

leaning her head on her hands.

The mastiff came and licked her face tenderly. The pigeons left the meal

flung to them on the snow, and flew merrily about her head in pretty

fluttering caresses. The lean cat came and rubbed its cheek softly

against her, purring all the while.

The woman Pitchou saw her, and she called out of the window to her

master,--

"Flamma! there is thy gad-about, who has not been abed all night."

The old man heard, and came out of his mill to the well in the

courtyard.

"Where hast been?" he asked sharply of her. "Pitchou says thou hast not

lain in thy bed all night long. Is it so?"

Folle-Farine lifted her head slowly, with a dazed stupid pain in her

eyes.

"Yes, it is true," she answered, doggedly.

"And where hast been, then?" he asked, through his clinched teeth;

enraged that his servant had been quicker of eye and of ear than

himself.

A little of her old dauntless defiance gleamed in her face through its

stupor and languor, as she replied to him with effort in brief

phrases,--

"I went after old Manon Dax, to give her my supper. She died in the

road, and I carried her home. The youngest child was dead too. I stayed

there because the children were alone; I called to Flandrin and told

him; he came with his wife and other women, and they said I had killed

old Dax; they set on me, and beat me, and pricked me for a witch. It is

no matter. But it made me late."

In her glance upward, even in the curtness of her words, there was an

unconscious glimmer of appeal,--a vague fancy that for once she might,

perhaps, meet with approval and sympathy, instead of punishment and

contempt. She had never heard a kind word from him, nor one of any

compassion, and yet a dim, unuttered hope was in her heart that for once

he might condemn her persecutors and pardon her.

But the hope was a vain one, like all which she had cherished since

first the door of the mill-house had opened to admit her.

Flamma only set his teeth tighter. In his own soul he had been almost

ashamed of his denial to his old neighbor, and had almost feared that it

would lose him the good will of that good heaven which had sent him so

mercifully such a sharp year of famine to enrich him. Therefore, it

infuriated him to think that this offspring of a foul sin should have

had pity and charity where he had lacked them.

He looked at her and saw, with grim glee, that she was black and blue

with bruises, and that the linen which she held together across her

bosom had been stained with blood.

"Flandrin and his wife are honest people, and pious," he said, in answer

to her. "When they find a wench out of her bed at night, they deal

rightly with her, and do not hearken to any lies that she may tell them

of feigned almsgiving to cover her vices from their sight. I thank them

that they did so much of my work for me. They might well prick thee for

a witch; but they will never cut so deep into thy breast as to be able

to dig the mark of the devil out of it. Now, up and work, or it will be

the worse for thee."

She obeyed him.

There, during the dark winter's day, the pain which she endured, with

her hunger and the cold of the weather, made her fall thrice like a dead

thing on the snow of the court and the floors of the sheds.

But she lay insensible till the youth in her brought back consciousness,

without aid. In those moments of faintness, no one noticed her save the

dog, who came and crept to her to give her warmth, and strove to wake

her with the kisses of his rough tongue.

She did her work as best she might; neither Flamma nor his servant once

spoke to her.

"My women dealt somewhat roughly with thy wench at break of day, good

Flamma," said the man Flandrin, meeting him in the lane that afternoon,

and fearful of offending the shrewd old man, who had so many of his

neighbors in his grip. "I hope thou wilt not take it amiss? The girl

maddened my dame,--spitting on her Peter, and throwing the blessed image

away in a ditch."

"The woman did well," said Flamma, coldly, driving his gray mare onward

through the fog; and Flandrin could not tell whether he were content, or

were displeased.

Claudis Flamma himself hardly knew which he was. He held her as the very

spawn of hell; and yet it was loathsome to him that his neighbors should

also know and say that a devil had been the only fruit of that fair

offspring of his own, whom he and they had so long held as a saint.

The next day, and the next, and the next again after that, she was too

ill to stir; they beat her and called her names, but it was of no use;

they could not get work out of her; she was past it, and beyond all

rousing of their sticks, or of their words.

They were obliged to let her be. She lay for nearly four days in the hay

in her loft, devoured with fever, and with every bone and muscle in

pain. She had a pitcher of water by her, and drank continually,

thirstily, like a sick dog. With rest and no medicine but the cold

spring water, she recovered: she had been delirious in a few of the

hours, and had dreamed of nothing but of the old life in the Liebana,

and of the old sweet music of Phratos. She remained there untended,

shivering, and fever-stricken, until the strength of her youth returned

to her. She rose on the fifth day recovered, weaker, but otherwise

little the worse, with the soft sad songs of her old friend the viol

ringing always through her brain.

The fifth day from the death of Manon Dax, was the day of the new year.

There was no work being done at the mill; the wheel stood still, locked

fast, for the deep stream was close bound in ice; frost had returned,

and the country was white with snow two feet deep, and bleak and bare,

and rioted over by furious cross winds.

Flamma and Pitchou were in the kitchen when she entered it; they looked

up, but neither spoke to her. In being ill,--for the first time since

they had had to do with her,--she had committed, for the millionth time,

a crime.

There was no welcome for her in that cheerless place, where scarcely a

spark of fire was allowed to brighten the hearth, where the hens

straying in from without, sat with ruffled feathers, chilled and moping,

and where the old Black Forest clock in the corner, had stopped from the

intense cold, and grimly pointed midnight, at high noon.

There was no welcome for her: she went out into the air, thinking the

woods, even at midwinter, could not be so lonesome as was that cheerless

house.

The sun was shining through a rift in the stormy clouds, and the white

roofs, and the ice-crusted waters, and the frosted trees were glittering

in its light.

There were many dead birds about the paths. Claudis Flamma had thought

their famine time a good one in which to tempt them with poisoned grain.

She wondered where the dog was who never had failed to greet her,--a

yard farther on she saw him. He was stretched stiff and lifeless beside

the old barrel that had served him as a kennel; his master had begrudged

him the little straw needful to keep him from the hurricanes of those

bitter nights; and he had perished quietly without a moan, like a

sentinel slain at his post--frozen to death in his old age after a life

of faithfulness repaid with blows.

She stood by him awhile with dry eyes, but with an aching heart. He had

loved her, and she had loved him; many a time she had risked a stroke of

the lash to save it from his body; many a time she had sobbed herself to

sleep, in her earlier years, with her arms curled round him, as round

her only friend and only comrade in bondage and in misery.

She stooped down, and kissed him softly on his broad grizzled forehead,

lifted his corpse into a place of shelter, and covered it tenderly, so

that he should not be left to the crows and the kites, until she should

be able to make his grave in those orchards which he had loved so well

to wander in, and in which he and she had spent all their brief hours of

summer liberty and leisure.

She shuddered as she looked her last on him; and filled in the snow

above his tomb, under the old twisted pear-tree, beneath which he and

she had so often sat together in the long grasses, consoling one another

for scant fare and cruel blows by the exquisite mute sympathy which can

exist betwixt the canine and the human animal when the two are alone,

and love and trust each other only out of all the world.

Whilst the dog had lived, she had had two friends; now that he slept

forever in the old gray orchard, she had but one left. She went to seek

this one.

Her heart ached for a kind glance--for a word that should be neither of

hatred nor of scorn. It was seldom that she allowed herself to know such

a weakness. She had dauntless blood in her; she came of a people that

despised pity, who knew how to live hard and to die hard, without murmur

or appeal.

Yet, as she had clung to the old mastiff, who was savage to all save

herself; so she still clung to the old man Marcellin, who to all save

herself was a terror and a name of foul omen.

He was good to her in his own fierce, rugged way; they had the kinship

of the proscribed; and they loved one another in a strange, silent,

savage manner, as a yearling wolf cub and an aged grizzled bear might

love each other in the depths of a forest, where the foot of the hunter

and the fangs of the hound were alike against the young and the old.

She had not seen him for six days. She felt ill, and weak, and cold, and

alone. She thought she would go to him in his hut, and sit a little by

his lonely hearth, and hear him tell strange stories of the marvelous

time when he was young, and the world was drunk with a mad sweet dream

which was never to come true upon earth.

Her heart was in wild revolt, and a futile hate gnawed ever in it.

She had become used to the indignities of the populace, and the insults

of all the people who went to and fro her grandsire's place; but each

one pierced deeper and deeper than the last, and left a longer scar, and

killed more and more of the gentler and better instincts that had

survived in her through all the brutalizing debasement of her life.

She could not avenge the outrage of Rose Flandrin and her sisterhood,

and, being unable to avenge it, she shut her mouth and said nothing of

it, as her habit was. Nevertheless it festered and rankled in her, and

now and then the thought crossed her--why not take a flint and a bit of

tow, and burn them all in their beds as they slept in that little hollow

at the foot of the hill?

She thought of it often--would she ever do it?

She did not know.

It had a taint of cowardice in it; yet a man that very winter had fired

a farmstead for far less an injury, and had burned to death all who had

lain therein that night. Why should she not kill and burn these also?

They had never essayed to teach her to do better, and when she had tried

to do good to one of them the others had set on her as a witch.

In the afternoon of this first day of the year she had to pass through

their hamlet to seek Marcellin.

The sun was low and red; the dusky light glowered over the white meadows

and through the leafless twilight of the woods; here and there a

solitary tree of holly reared itself, scarlet and tall, from the

snowdrifts; here and there a sheaf of arrowy reeds pierced the sheets of

ice that covered all the streams and pools.

The little village lay with its dark round roofs, cosy and warm, with

all the winter round. She strode through it erect, and flashing her

scornful eyes right and left; but her right hand was inside her shirt,

and it gripped fast the handle of a knife. For such was the lesson which

the reward for her charity had taught her--a lesson not lightly to be

forgotten, nor swiftly to be unlearned again.

In its simple mode, the little place, like its greater neighbors, kept

high festival for a fresh year begun.

Its crucifix rose, bare and white, out of a crown of fir boughs and

many wreaths of ruddy berries. On its cabin windows the light of wood

cracking and blazing within glowed brightly. Through them she saw many

of their interiors as she went by in the shadow without.

In one the children knelt in a circle round the fire, roasting chestnuts

in the embers with gay shouts of laughter. In another they romped with

their big sheepdog, decking him with garlands of ivy and laurel.

In one little brown room a betrothal party made merry; in another, that

was bright with Dutch tiles, and hung round with dried herbs and fruits,

an old matron had her arm round the curly head of a sailor lad, home for

a short glad hour.

In the house of Flandrin a huge soup-pot smoked with savory odor, and

the eyes of his wife were soft with a tender mirth as she watched her

youngest-born playing with a Punchinello, all bells and bright colors,

and saw the elder ones cluster round a gilded Jesus of sugar.

In the wineshop, the keeper of it, having married a wife that day, kept

open house to his friends, and he and they were dancing to the music of

a horn and a fiddle, under rafters bedecked with branches of fir, with

many-hued ribbons, and with little oil lamps that blew to and fro in the

noise of the romp. And all round lay the dark still woods, and in the

midst rose the crucifix; and above, on the height of the hill, the

little old hut of Manon Dax stood dark and empty.

She looked at it all, going through it with her hand on her knife.

"One spark," she thought, playing with the grim temptation that

possessed her--"one spark on the dry thatch, and what a bonfire they

would have for their feasting!"

The thought was sweet to her.

Injustice had made her ravenous and savage. When she had tried to do

well and to save life, these people had accused her of taking it by evil

sorcery.

She felt a longing to show them what evil indeed she could do, and to

see them burn, and to hear them scream vainly, and then to say to them

with a laugh, as the flames licked up their homes and their lives,

"Another time, take care how you awake a witch!"

Why did she not do it? She did not know; she had brought out a flint and

tinder in the pouch that hung at her side. It would be as easy as to

pluck a sere leaf; she knew that.

She stood still and played with her fancy, and it was horrible and sweet

to her--so sweet because so horrible.

How soon their mirth would be stilled!

As she stood thinking there, and seeing in fancy the red glare that

would light up that peaceful place, and hearing the roar of the lurid

flames that would drown the music, and the laughter, and the children's

shouts, out of the twilight there rose to her a small, dark thing, with

a halo of light round its head: the thing was little Bernardou, and the

halo was the shine of his curling hair in the lingering light.

He caught her skirts in his hands, and clung to her and sobbed.

"I know you--you were good that night. The people all say you are

wicked, but you gave us your food, and held my hand. Take me back to

gran'mère--oh, take me back!"

She was startled and bewildered. This child had never mocked her, but he

had screamed and run from her in terror, and had been told a score of

stories that she was a devil, who could kill his body and soul.

"She is dead, Bernardou," she answered him; and her voice was troubled,

and sounded strangely to her as she spoke for the first time to a child

without being derided or screamed at in fear.

"Dead! What is that?" sobbed the boy. "She was stiff and cold, I know,

and they put her in a hole; but she would waken, I know she would, if

she only heard _us_. We never cried in the night but she heard in her

sleep, and got up and came to us. Oh, do tell her--do, do tell her!"

She was silent; she did not know how to answer him, and the strangeness

of any human appeal made to her bewildered her and held her mute.

"Why are you out in the cold, Bernardou?" she asked him suddenly,

glancing backward through the lattice of the Flandrins' house, through

which she could see the infants laughing and shaking the puppet with the

gilded bells.

"They beat me; they say I am naughty, because I want gran'mère," he

said, with a sob. "They beat me often, and oh! if she knew, she would

wake and come. Do tell her--do! Bernardou will be so good, and never vex

her, if only she will come back!"

His piteous voice was drowned in tears.

His little life had been hard; scant fare, cold winds, and naked limbs

had been his portion; yet the life had been bright and gleeful to him,

clinging to his grandam's skirts as she washed at the tub or hoed in the

cabbage-ground, catching her smile when he brought her the first daisy

of the year, running always to her open arms in any hurt, sinking to

sleep always with the singing of her old ballads on his ear.

It had been a little life, dear, glad, kindly, precious to him, and he

wept for it, refusing to be comforted by sight of a gilded puppet in

another's hand, or a sugared Jesus in another's mouth, as they expected

him to be.

It is the sort of comfort that is always offered to the homeless, and

they are always thought ungrateful if they will not be consoled by it.

"I wish I could take you, Bernardou!" she murmured, with a momentary

softness that was exquisitely tender in its contrast to her haughty and

fierce temper. "I wish I could."

For one wild instant the thought came to her to break from her bonds,

and take this creature who was as lonely as herself, and to wander away

and away into that unknown land which stretched around her, and of which

she knew no more than one of the dark leaves knew that grew in the

snow-filled ditch. But the thought passed unuttered: she knew neither

where to go nor what to do. Her few early years in the Liebana were too

dreamlike and too vaguely remembered to be any guide to her; and the

world seemed only to her in her fancies as a vast plain, dreary and

dismal, in which every hand would be against her, and every living thing

be hostile to her.

Besides, the long habitude of slavery was on her, and it is a yoke that

eats into the flesh too deeply to be wrenched off without an effort.

As she stood thinking, with the child's eager hands clasping her skirts,

a shrill voice called from the wood-stack and dung-heap outside

Flandrin's house,--

"Bernardou! Bernardou! thou little plague. Come within. What dost do out

there in the dark? Mischief, I will warrant."

The speaker strode out, and snatched and bore and clutched him away; she

was the sister of Rose Flandrin, who lived with them, and kept the place

and the children in order.

"Thou little beast!" she muttered, in fury. "Dost dare talk to the witch

that killed thy grandmother? Thou shalt hie to bed, and sup on a fine

whipping. Thank God, thou goest to the hospital to-morrow! Thou wouldst

bring a dire curse on the house in reward for our alms to thee."

She dragged him in and slammed-to the door, and his cries echoed above

the busy shouts and laughter of the Flandrin family, gathered about the

tinseled Punch and the sugared Jesus, and the soup-pot, that stewed them

a fat farm-yard goose for their supper.

Folle-Farine listened awhile, with her hand clinched on her knife; then

she toiled onward through the village, and left it and its carols and

carouses behind her in the red glow of the sinking sun.

She thought no more of setting their huts in a blaze; the child's words

had touched and softened her, she remembered the long patient bitter

life of the woman who had died of cold and hunger in her eighty-second

year, and yet who had thus died saying to the last, "God is good."

"What is their God?" she mused. "They care for Him, and He seems to care

nothing for them whether they be old or young."

Yet her heart was softened, and she would not fire the house in which

little Bernardou was sheltered.

His was the first gratitude that she had ever met with, and it was sweet

to her as the rare blossom of the edelweiss to the traveler upon the

highest Alpine summits--a flower full of promise, born amidst a waste.

The way was long to where Marcellin dwelt, but she walked on through the

fields that were in summer all one scarlet group of poppies.

The day was over, the evening drew nigh, the sound of innumerable bells

in the town echoed faintly from the distance, over the snow: all was

still.

On the night of the new year the people had a care that the cattle in

the byres, the sheep in the folds, the dogs in the kennels, the swine in

the styes, the old cart-horses in the sheds, should have a full meal and

a clean bed, and be able to rejoice.

In all the country round there were only two that were forgotten--the

dead in their graves and the daughter of Taric the gypsy.

Folle-Farine was cold, hungry, and exhausted, for the fever had left her

enfeebled; and from the coarse food of the mill-house her weakness had

turned.

But she walked on steadily.

At the hut where Marcellin dwelt she knew that she would be sure of one

welcome, one smile; one voice that would greet her kindly; one face that

would look on her without a frown.

It would not matter, she thought, how the winds should howl and the hail

drive, or how the people should be merry in their homes and forgetful of

her and of him. He and she would sit together over the little fire, and

give back hate for hate and scorn for scorn, and commune with each

other, and want no other cheer or comrade.

It had been always so since he had first met her at sunset among the

poppies, then a little child eight years old. Every new-year's-night she

had spent with him in his hovel; and in their own mute way they had

loved one another, and drawn closer together, and been almost glad,

though often pitcher and platter had been empty, and sometimes even the

hearth had been cold.

She stepped bravely against the wind, and over the crisp firm snow, her

spirits rising as she drew near the only place that had ever opened its

door gladly to her coming, her heart growing lighter as she approached

the only creature to whom she had ever spoken her thoughts without

derision or told her woes without condemnation.

His hut stood by itself in the midst of the wide pastures and by the

side of a stream.

A little light was wont to twinkle at that hour through the crevices of

its wooden shutter; this evening all was dark, the outline of the hovel

rose like a rugged mound against the white wastes round it. The only

sound was the far-off chiming of the bells that vibrated strangely on

the rarefied sharp air.

She crossed the last meadow where the sheep were folded for the night,

and went to the door and pushed against it to open it--it was locked.

She struck it with her hand.

"Open, Marcellin--open quickly. It is only I."

There was no answer.

She smote the wood more loudly, and called to him again.

A heavy step echoed on the mud floor within; a match was struck, a dull

light glimmered; a voice she did not know muttered drowsily, "Who is

there?"

"It is I, Marcellin," she answered. "It is not night. I am come to be an

hour with you. Is anything amiss?"

The door opened slowly, an old woman, whose face was strange to her,

peered out into the dusk. She had been asleep on the settle by the fire,

and stared stupidly at the flame of her own lamp.

"Is it the old man, Marcellin, you want?" she asked.

"Marcellin, yes--where is he?"

"He died four days ago. Get you gone; I will have no tramps about my

place."

"Died!"

Folle-Farine stood erect and without a quiver in her face and in her

limbs; but her teeth shut together like a steel clasp, and all the rich

and golden hues of her skin changed to a sickly ashen pallor.

"Yes, why not?" grumbled the old woman. "To be sure, men said that God

would never let him die, because he killed St. Louis; but I myself never

thought that. I knew the devil would not wait more than a hundred years

for him--you can never cheat the devil, and he always seems stronger

than the saints--somehow. You are that thing of Yprès, are you not? Get

you gone!"

"Who are you? Why are you here?" she gasped.

Her right hand was clinched on the door-post, and her right foot was set

on the threshold, so that the door could not be closed.

"I am an honest woman and a pious; and it befouls me to dwell where he

dwelt," the old peasant hissed in loud indignation. "I stood out a whole

day; but when one is poor, and the place is offered quit of rent, what

can one do?----and it is roomy and airy for the fowls, and the priest

has flung holy water about it and purified it, and I have a Horseshoe

nailed up and a St. John in the corner. But be off with you, and take

your foot from my door!"

Folle-Farine stood motionless.

"When did he die, and how?" she asked in her teeth.

"He was found dead on the road, on his heap of stones, the fourth night

from this," answered the old woman, loving to hear her own tongue, yet

dreading the one to whom she spoke. "Perhaps he had been hungered, I do

not know; or more likely the devil would not wait any longer--anyways he

was dead, the hammer in his hand. Max Lieben, the man that travels with

the wooden clocks, found him. He lay there all night. Nobody would touch

him. They say they saw the mark of the devil's claws on him. At last

they got a dung-cart, and that took him away before the sun rose. He

died just under the great Calvary--it was like his blasphemy. They have

put him in the common ditch. I think it shame to let the man that slew a

saint be in the same grave with all the poor honest folk who feared God,

and were Christians, though they might be beggars and outcasts. Get you

gone, you be as vile as he. If you want him, go ask your father the foul

fiend for him--they are surely together now."

And she drove the door to, and closed it, and barred it firmly within.

"Not but what the devil can get through the chinks," she muttered, as

she turned the wick of her lamp up higher.

Folle-Farine went back over the snow; blind, sick, feeling her way

through the twilight as though it were the darkness of night.

"He died alone--he died alone," she muttered, a thousand times, as she

crept shivering through the gloom; and she knew that now her own fate

was yet more desolate. She knew that now she lived alone without one

friend on earth.

The death on the open highway; the numbness, and stillness, and deafness

to all the maledictions of men.

The shameful bier made at night on the dung-cart, amidst loathing

glances and muttered curses; the nameless grave in the common ditch with

the beggar, the thief, the harlot, and the murderer,--these which were

so awful to all others seemed to her as sweet as to sink to sleep on

soft unshorn grass, whilst rose-leaves were shaken in the wind, and fell

as gently as kisses upon the slumberer.

For even those at least were rest. And she in her youth and in her

strength, and in the blossom of her beauty, gorgeous as a passion-flower

in the sun, envied bitterly the old man who had died at his work on the

public road, hated by his kind, weighted with the burden of nigh a

hundred years.

For his death was not more utterly lonely and desolate than was her

life; and to all taunts and to all curses the ears of the dead are deaf.

BOOK III.

CHAPTER I.

Night had come; a dark night of earliest spring. The wild day had sobbed

itself to sleep after a restless life with fitful breaths of storm and

many sighs of shuddering breezes.

The sun had sunk, leaving long tracks of blood-red light across one-half

the heavens.

There was a sharp crisp coldness as of lingering frost in the gloom and

the dullness. Heavy clouds, as yet unbroken, hung over the cathedral and

the clustering roofs around it in dark and starless splendor.

Over the great still plains which stretched eastward and southward,

black with the furrows of the scarce-budded corn, the wind blew hard;

blowing the river and the many streamlets spreading from it into foam;

driving the wintry leaves which still strewed the earth thickly hither

and thither in legions; breaking boughs that had weathered through the

winter hurricanes, and scattering the tender blossoms of the snowdrops

and the earliest crocuses in all the little moss-grown garden-ways.

The smell of wet grass, of the wood-born violets, of trees whose new

life was waking in their veins, of damp earths turned freshly upwards by

the plow, were all blown together by the riotous breezes.

Now and then a light gleamed through the gloom where a little peasant

boy lighted home with a torch some old priest on his mule, or a boat

went down the waters with a lamp hung at its prow. For it grew dark

early, and people used to the river read a threat of a flood on its

face.

A dim glow from the west, which was still tinged with the fire of the

sunset, fell through a great square window set in a stone building, and,

striking across the sicklier rays of an oil lamp, reached the opposing

wall within.

It was a wall of gray stone, dead and lusterless like the wall of a

prison-house, over whose surface a spider as colorless as itself dragged

slowly its crooked hairy limbs loaded with the moisture of the place; an

old tower, of which the country-folk told strange tales where it stood

among the rushes on the left bank of the stream.

A man watched the spider as it went.

It crept on its heavy way across the faint crimson reflection from the

glow of the sunken sun.

It was fat, well nourished, lazy, content; its home of dusky silver hung

on high, where its pleasure lay in weaving, clinging, hoarding,

breeding. It lived in the dark; it had neither pity nor regret; it

troubled itself neither for the death it dealt to nourish itself, nor

for the light without, into which it never wandered; it spun and throve

and multiplied.

It was an emblem of the man who is wise in his generation; of the man

whom Cato the elder deemed divine; of the Majority and the Mediocrity

who rule over the earth and enjoy its fruits.

This man knew that it was wise; that those who were like to it were wise

also: wise with the only wisdom which is honored of other men.

He had been unwise--always; and therefore he stood, watching the sun

die, with hunger in his soul, with famine in his body.

For many months he had been half famished, as were the wolves in his own

northern mountains in the winter solstice. For seven days he had only

been able to crush a crust of hard black bread between his teeth. For

twenty hours he had not done even so much as this. The trencher in his

trestle was empty; and he had not wherewithal to refill it.

He might have found some to fill it for him, no doubt. He lived amidst

the poor, and the poor to the poor are good, though they are bad and

bitter to the rich.

But he did not open either his lips or his hand. He consumed his heart

in silence; and his vitals preyed in anguish on themselves without his

yielding to their torments.

He was a madman; and Cato, who measured the godliness of men by what

they gained, would have held him accursed--the madness that starves and

is silent for an idea is an insanity, scouted by the world and the gods.

For it is an insanity unfruitful, except to the future. And for the

future who cares,--save the madmen themselves?

He watched the spider as it went.

It could not speak to him as its fellow once spoke in the old Scottish

story. To hear as that captive heard, the hearer must have hope, and a

kingdom--if only in dreams.

This man had no hope; he had a kingdom, indeed, but it was not of earth;

and in an hour of sheer cruel bodily pain earth alone has dominion and

power and worth.

The spider crawled across the gray wall; across the glow from the

vanished sun; across a coil of a dead passion-vine that strayed over the

floor, across the classic shape of a great cartoon drawn in chalks upon

the dull rugged surface of stone.

Nothing arrested it; nothing retarded it, as nothing hastened it.

It moved slowly on; fat, lusterless, indolent, hueless; reached at

length its den, and there squatted aloft, loving the darkness; its young

swarming around, its netted prey held in its forceps, its nets cast

about.

Through the open casement there came in on the rising wind of the storm,

in the light of the last lingering sunbeam, a beautiful night-moth,

begotten by some cruel hot-house heat in the bosom of some frail exiled

tropic flower.

It swam in on trembling pinions, and lit on the golden head of a

gathered crocus that lay dying on the stones--a moth that should have

been born to no world save that of the summer world of a Midsummer

Night's Dream.

A shape of Ariel and Oberon; slender, silver, purple, roseate,

lustrous-eyed and gossamer-winged.

A creature of woodland waters and blossoming forests; of the yellow

chalices of kingcups and the white breasts of river lilies, of moonbeams

that strayed through a summer world of shadows, and dewdrops that

glistened in the deep-folded hearts of roses. A creature to brush the

dreaming eyes of a poet, to nestle on the bosom of a young girl

sleeping: to float earthwards on a falling star, to slumber on a

lotus-leaf.

A creature that, amidst the still soft hush of woods and waters, tells

to those who listen, of the world when the world was young.

The moth flew on, and poised on the fading crocus-leaves which spread

out their pale gold on the level of the floor.

It was weary, and its delicate wings drooped; it was storm-tossed,

wind-beaten, drenched with mist and frozen with the cold; it belonged to

the moon, to the dew, to the lilies, to the forget-me-nots, and the

night; and it found that the hard grip of winter had seized it whilst

yet it had thought that the stars and the summer were with it.

It lived before its time,--and it was like the human soul, which, being

born in the darkness of the world dares to dream of light, and wandering

in vain search of a sun that will never rise, falls and perishes in

wretchedness.

It was beautiful exceedingly; with the brilliant tropical beauty of a

life that is short-lived. It rested a moment on the stem of the pale

flower, then with its radiant eyes fastened on the point of light which

the lamp thrust upward, it flew on high, spreading out its transparent

wings, and floating to the flame, kissed it, quivered once, and died.

There fell among the dust and cinder of the lamp a little heap of

shrunken fire-scorched blackened ashes.

The wind whirled them upward from their rest, and drove them forth into

the night to mingle with the storm-scourged grasses, the pale, dead

violets, the withered snow-flowers, with all things frost-touched and

forgotten.

The spider sat aloft, sucking the juices from the fettered flies,

teaching its spawn to prey and feed; content in squalor and in

plenitude; in sensual sloth, and in the increase of its spawn and of its

hoard.

He watched them both: the success of the spider, the death of the moth.

Trite as a fable; ever repeated as the tides of the sea; the two symbols

of humanity; of the life which fattens on greed and gain, and the life

which perishes of divine desire.

Then he turned and looked at the cartoons upon the wall; shapes grand

and dim, the children of his genius, a genius denied by men.

His head sank on his chest, his hand tore the shirt away from his

breast, which the pangs of a bodily hunger that he scorned devoured

indeed, but which throbbed with a pain more bitter than that of even

this lingering and ignoble death. He had genius in him, and he had to

die like a wolf on the Armorican wolds yonder westward, when the snows

of winter hid all offal from its fangs.

It was horrible.

He had to die for want of the crust that beggars gnawed in the kennels

of the city; he had to die of the lowest and commonest need of all--the

sheer animal need of food. "_J'avais quelque chose là!_" was, perhaps,

the most terrible of all those death-cries of despair which the

guillotine of Thermidor wrung from the lips of the condemned. For it was

the despair of the bodily life for the life of the mind which died with

it.

When the man clings to life for life's sake, because it is fair and

sweet, and good to the sight and the senses, there may be weakness in

his shudder at its threatening loss. But when a man is loth to leave

life, although it be hard, and joyless, and barren of all delights,

because life gives him power to accomplish things greater than he, which

yet without him must perish, there is the strength in him as there is

the agony of Prometheus.

With him it must die also: that deep dim greatness within him which

moves him, despite himself; that nameless unspeakable force, which

compels him to create and to achieve; that vision by which he beholds

worlds beyond him not seen by his fellows.

Weary of life indeed he may be; of life material, and full of subtlety,

of passion, of pleasure, of pain; of the kisses that burn, of the laughs

that ring hollow, of the honey that so soon turns to gall, of the sickly

fatigues and the tired cloyed hunger that are the portion of men upon

earth.

Weary of these he may be; but still if the gods have breathed on him and

made him mad, with the madness that men have called genius, there will

be that in him greater than himself, which he knows--and cannot know

without some fierce wrench and pang--will be numbed and made impotent,

and drift away, lost for evermore, into that eternal Night which is all

that men behold of death.

It was so with this man now.

Life was barren for him of all delight, full of privation, of famine, of

obscurity, of fruitless travail and of vain desire; and yet because he

believed that he had it in him to be great, or rather because, with a

purer and more impersonal knowledge, he believed that it was within his

power to do that which when done the world would not willingly let die;

it was loathsome to him to perish thus of the sheer lack of food, as any

toothless snake would perish in its swamp.

He stood opposite to the great white cartoons on which his soul had

spent itself; creations which looked vague and ghostly in the shadows of

the chamber, but in which he saw, or at the least believed he saw, the

title-deeds of his own heirship to the world's kingdom of fame.

For himself he cared nothing; but for them, he smiled a little bitterly

as he looked:

"They will light some bake-house fire to pay those that may throw my

body in a ditch," he thought.

And yet the old passion had so much dominance still that he

instinctively went nearer to his latest and best-loved creations, and

took the white chalks up and worked once more by the dull sullen rays of

the lamp behind him.

They would be torn down on the morrow and thrust for fuel into some

housewife's kitchen-stove.

What matter?

He loved them; they were his sole garniture and treasure; in them his

soul had gathered all its dreams and all its pure delights: so long as

his sight lasted he sought to feed it on them; so long as his hand had

power he strove to touch, to caress, to enrich them.

Even in such an hour as this, the old sweet trance of Art was upon him.

He was devoured by the deadly fangs of long fast; streaks of living fire

seemed to scorch his entrails; his throat and lungs were parched and

choked; and ever and again his left hand clinched on the bones of his

naked chest as though he could wrench away the throes that gnawed it.

He knew that worse than this would follow; he knew that tenfold more

torment would await him; that limbs as strong, and muscles as hard, and

manhood as vigorous as his, would only yield to such death as this

slowly, doggedly, inch by inch, day by day.

He knew; and he knew that he could not trust himself to go through that

uttermost torture without once lifting his voice to summon the shame of

release from it. Shame, since release would need be charity.

He knew full well; he had seen all forms of death; he had studied its

throes, and portrayed its horrors. He knew that before dawn--it might be

before midnight--this agony would grow so great that it would conquer

him; and that to save himself from the cowardice of appeal, the shame of

besought alms, he would have to use his last powers to drive home a

knife hard and sure through his breast-bone.

Yet he stood there, almost forgetting this, scarcely conscious of any

other thing than of the passion that ruled him.

Some soft curve in a girl's bare bosom, some round smooth arm of a

sleeping woman, some fringe of leaves against a moonlit sky, some

broad-winged bird sailing through shadows of the air, some full-orbed

lion rising to leap on the nude soft indolently-folded limbs of a

dreaming virgin, palm-shadowed in the East;--all these he gazed on and

touched, and looked again, and changed by some mere inward curve or

deepened line of his chalk stylus.

All these usurped him; appealed to him; were well beloved and infinitely

sad; seemed ever in their whiteness and their loneliness to cry to

him,--"Whither dost thou go? Wilt thou leave _us_ alone?"

And as he stood, and thus caressed them with his eyes and touch, and

wrestled with the inward torment which grew greater and greater as the

night approached, the sudden sickly feebleness of long hunger came upon

him; the gravelike coldness of his fireless chamber slackened and numbed

the flowing of his veins; his brain grew dull and all its memory ceased,

confused and blotted. He staggered once, wondering dimly and idly as men

wonder in delirium, if this indeed were death: then he fell backwards

senseless on his hearth.

The last glow of day died off the wall. The wind rose louder, driving in

through the open casement a herd of withered leaves. An owl flew by,

uttering weary cries against the storm.

On high the spider sat, sucking the vitals of its prey, safe in its

filth and darkness; looking down ever on the lifeless body on the

hearth, and saying in its heart,--"Thou Fool!"

CHAPTER II.

As the night fell, Folle-Farine, alone, steered herself down the water

through the heart of the town, where the buildings were oldest, and

where on either side there loomed, through the dusk, carved on the black

timbers, strange masks of satyr and of faun, of dragon and of griffin,

of fiend and of martyr.

She sat in the clumsy empty market-boat, guiding the tiller-rope with

her foot.

The sea flowing in stormily upon the coast sent the tide of the river

inland with a swift impetuous current, to which its sluggish depths were

seldom stirred. The oars rested unused in the bottom of the boat; she

glided down the stream without exertion of her own, quietly, easily,

dreamily.

She had come from a long day's work, lading and unlading timber and

grain for her taskmaster and his fellow-farmers, at the river wharf at

the back of the town, where the little sea-trawlers and traders, with

their fresh salt smell and their brown sails crisp from fierce

sea-winds, gathered for traffic with the corn-barges and the egg-boats

of the land.

Her day's labor was done, and she was repaid for it by the free

effortless backward passage home through the shadows of the

water-streets; where in the overhanging buildings, ever and anon, some

lantern swinging on a cord from side to side, or some open casement

arched above a gallery, showed the dark sad wistful face of some old

creature kneeling in prayer before a crucifix, or the gold ear-rings of

some laughing girl leaning down with the first frail violets of the year

fragrant in her boddice.

The cold night had brought the glow of wood-fires in many of the

dwellings of that poor and picturesque quarter; and showed many a homely

interior through the panes of the oriel and lancet windows, over which

brooded sculptured figures seraph-winged, or carven forms helmeted and

leaning on their swords.

In one of them there was a group of young men and maidens gathered round

the wood at nut-burning, the lovers seeking each other's kiss as the

kernels broke the shells; in another, some rosy curly children played at

soldiers with the cuirass and saber which their grandsire had worn in

the army of the empire; in another, before a quaint oval old-fashioned

glass, a young girl all alone made trial of her wedding-wreath upon her

fair forehead, and smiled back on her own image with a little joyous

laugh that ended in a sob; in another, a young bearded workman carved

ivory beside his hearth, whilst his old mother sat knitting in a high

oak chair; in another, a Sister of Charity, with a fair Madonna's face,

bent above a little pot of home-bred snowdrops, with her tears dropping

on the white heads of the flowers, whilst the sick man, whom she had

charge of, slept and left her a brief space for her own memories, her

own pangs, her own sickness, which was only of the heart,--only--and

therefore hopeless.

All these Folle-Farine saw, going onward in the boat on the gloom of the

water below.

She did not envy them; she rather, with her hatred of them, scorned

them. She had been freeborn, though now she was a slave; the pleasures

of the home and hearth she envied no more than she envied the imprisoned

bird its seed and water, its mate and song, within the close cage bars.

Yet they had a sort of fascination for her. She wondered how they felt,

these people who smiled and span, and ate and drank, and sorrowed and

enjoyed, and were in health and disease, at feast and at funeral, always

together, always bound in one bond of a common humanity; these people,

whose god on the cross never answered them; who were poor, she knew; who

toiled early and late; who were heavily taxed; who fared hardly and

scantily, yet who for the main part contrived to be mirthful and

content, and to find some sunshine in their darkened hours, and to cling

to one another, and in a way be glad.

Just above her was the corner window of a very ancient house, crusted

with blazonries and carvings. It had been a prince bishop's palace; it

was now the shared shelter of half a score of lace-weavers and of

ivory-workers, each family in their chamber, like a bee in its cell.

As the boat floated under one of the casements, she saw that it stood

open; there was a china cup filled with house-born primroses on the

broad sill; there was an antique illuminated Book of Hours lying open

beside the flowers; there was a strong fire-light shining from within;

there was an old woman asleep and smiling in her dreams beside the

hearth; by the open book was a girl, leaning out into the chill damp

night, and looking down the street as though in search for some expected

and thrice-welcome guest.

She was fair to look at, with dark hair twisted under her towering white

cap, and a peachlike cheek and throat, and her arms folded against her

blue kerchief crossed upon her chest. Into the chamber, unseen by her,

a young man came and stole across the shadows, and came unheard behind

her and bent his head to hers and kissed her ere she knew that he was

there. She started with a little happy cry and pushed him away with

pretty provocation; he drew her into his arms and into the chamber, and

shut to the lattice, and left only a dusky reflection from within

shining through the panes made dark by age and dust.

Folle-Farine had watched them; as the window closed her head dropped,

she was stirred with a vague, passionate, contemptuous wonder: what was

this love that was about her everywhere, and yet with which she had no

share? She only thought of it with haughtiest scorn; and yet----

There had come a great darkness on the river, a fierce roughness in the

wind; the shutters were now closed in many of the houses of the

water-street, and their long black shadows fell across the depth that

severed them, and met and blended in the twilight. The close of this day

was stormy; the wind blew the river swiftly, and the heavy raw mists

were setting in from the sea as the night descended.

She did not heed these; she liked the wild weather best; she loved the

rush of a chill wind among her hair, and the moisture of blown spray

upon her face; she loved the manifold fantasies of the clouds, and the

melodies of the blast coming over the sands and the rushes. She loved

the swirl and rage of the angry water, and the solitude that closed in

round her with the darkness.

The boat passed onward through the now silent town; only in one other

place a light glowed through the unshuttered lattices that were ruddy

with light and emblematic with the paintings of the Renaissance. It was

the window of the gardener's wife.

At that season there could bloom neither saxifrage nor nasturtium; but

some green-leaved winter shrub with rosy-laden berries had replaced

them, and made a shining frame all round the painted panes.

The fair woman was within; her delicate head rose out of the brown

shadows round, with a lamp burning above it and a little oval mirror

before. Into the mirror she was gazing with a smile, whilst with both

hands about her throat she clasped some strings of polished shells

brought to her from the sea.

"How white and how warm and how glad she is!" thought Folle-Farine,

looking upward; and she rowed in the gloom through the sluggish water

with envy at her heart.

She was growing harder, wilder, worse, with every day; more and more

like some dumb, fierce forest beast, that flees from every step and

hates the sound of every voice. Since the night that they had pricked

her for a witch, the people had been more cruel to her than ever. They

cast bitter names at her as she went by; they hissed and hooted her as

she took her mule through their villages, or passed them on the road

with her back bent under some load of fagots or of winter wood. Once or

twice they stoned her, and chance alone had saved her from injury.

For it was an article of faith in all the hamlets round that she had

killed old Manon Dax. The Flandrins said so, and they were good pious

people who would not lie. Every dusky evening when the peasantry,

through the doors of their cabins, saw the gleam of her red girdle and

the flash of her hawk's eyes, where she plodded on through the mist on

her tyrant's errands, they crossed themselves, and told each other for

the hundredth time the tale of her iniquities over their pan of smoking

chestnuts.

It had hardened her tenfold; it had made her brood on sullen dreams of a

desperate vengeance. Marcellin, too, was gone; his body had been eaten

by the quicklime in the common ditch, and there was not even a voice so

stern as his to bid her a good-morrow. He had been a harsh man, of dark

repute and bitter tongue; but in his way he had loved her; in his way,

with the eloquence that had remained to him, and by the strange stories

that he had told her of that wondrous time wherein his youth had passed,

when men had been as gods and giants, and women horrible as Medea, or

sublime as Iphigenia, he had done something to awaken her mind, to

arouse her hopes, to lift her up from the torpor of toil, the lusts of

hatred, the ruinous apathy of despair. But he was dead, and she was

alone, and abandoned utterly to herself.

She mourned for him with a passionate pain that was all the more

despairing, because no sound of it could ever pass her lips to any

creature.

To and fro continually she went by the road on which he had died alone;

by the heap of broken stones, by the wooden crucifix, by the high hedge

and the cornlands beyond. Every time she went the blood beat in her

brain, the tears swelled in her throat. She hated with a hatred that

consumed her, and was ready to ripen into any deadly deed, the people

who had shunned him in his life, and in his death derided and insulted

him, and given him such burial as they gave the rotten carcass of some

noxious beast.

Her heart was ripe for any evil that should have promised her vengeance;

a dull, cold sense of utter desolation and isolation was always on her.

The injustice of the people began to turn her blood to gall, her courage

into cruelty; there began to come upon her the look of those who brood

upon a crime.

It was, in truth, but the despairing desire to live that stirred within

her; to know, to feel, to roam, to enjoy, to suffer still, if need be;

but to suffer something else than the endless toil of the field-ox and

tow-horse,--something else than the unavenged blow that pays the ass and

the dog for their services.

The desire to be free grew upon her with all the force and fury

inherited from her father's tameless and ever-wandering race; if a crime

could have made her free she would have seized it.

She was in the prison of a narrow and hated fate; and from it she looked

out on the desert of an endless hate, which stretched around her without

one blossom of love, one well spring of charity, rising in its deathlike

waste.

The dreamy imaginations, the fantastic pictures, that had been so strong

in her in her early years, were still there, though distorted by

ignorance and inflamed by despair. Though, in her first poignant grief

for him, she had envied Marcellin his hard-won rest, his grave in the

public ditch of the town, it was not in her to desire to die. She was

too young, too strong, too restless, too impatient, and her blood of the

desert and the forest was too hot.

What she wanted was to live. Live as the great moor-bird did that she

had seen float one day over these pale, pure, blue skies, with its

mighty wings outstretched in the calm gray weather; which came none knew

whence, and which went none knew whither; which poised silent and

stirless against the clouds; then called with a sweet wild love-note to

its mate, and waited for him as he sailed in from the misty shadows

where the sea lay; and then with him rose yet higher and higher in the

air; and passed westward, cleaving the fields of light, and so

vanished;--a queen of the wind, a daughter of the sun; a creature of

freedom, of victory, of tireless movement, and of boundless space, a

thing of heaven and of liberty.

The evening became night; a night rough and cold almost as winter.

There was no boat but hers upon the river, which ran high and strong.

She left the lights of the town behind her, and came into the darkness

of the country. Now and then the moon shone a moment through the

storm-wrack, here and there a torch glimmered, borne by some wayfarer

over a bridge.

There was no other light.

The bells of the cathedral chiming a miserere, sounded full of woe

behind her in the still sad air.

There stood but one building between her and her home, a square strong

tower built upon the edge of the stream, of which the peasants told many

tales of horror. It was of ancient date, and spacious, and very strong.

Its upper chambers were used as a granary by the farm-people who owned

it; the vaulted hall was left unused by them, partly because the river

had been known to rise high enough to flood the floor; partly because

legend had bequeathed to it a ghastly repute of spirits of murdered men

who haunted it.

No man or woman in all the country round dared venture to it after

nightfall; it was all that the stoutest would do to fetch and carry

grain there at broad day; and the peasant who, being belated, rowed his

market-boat past it when the moon was high, moved his oar with one

trembling hand, and with the other crossed himself unceasingly.

To Folle-Farine it bore no such terror.

The unconscious pantheism breathed into her with her earliest thoughts,

with the teachings of Phratos, made her see a nameless mystical and

always wondrous beauty in every blade of grass that fed on the dew, and

with the light rejoiced; in every bare brown stone that flashed to gold

in bright brook waters, under a tuft of weed; in every hillside stream

that leaping and laughing sparkled in the sun; in every wind that

wailing went over the sickness of the weary world.

For such a temper, no shape of the day or the night, no miracle of life

or of death can have terror; it can dread nothing, because every created

thing has in it a divine origin and an eternal mystery.

As she and the boat passed out into the loneliness of the country, with

fitful moon gleams to light its passage, the weather and the stream grew

wilder yet.

There were on both sides strips of the silvery inland sands, beds of

tall reeds, and the straight stems of poplars, ghostlike in the gloom.

The tide rushed faster; the winds blew more strongly from the north; the

boat rocked, and now and then was washed with water, till its edges were

submerged.

She stood up in it, and gave her strength to its guidance; it was all

that she could do to keep its course straight, and steer it so that it

should not grate upon the sand, nor be blown into the tangles of the

river reeds.

For herself she had no care, she could swim like any cygnet; and for her

own sport had spent hours in water at all seasons. But she knew that to

Claudis Flamma the boat was an honored treasure, since to replace it

would have cost him many a hard-earned and well-loved piece of money.

As she stood thus upright in the little tossing vessel against the

darkness and the winds, she passed the solitary building; it had been

placed so low down against the shore, that its front walls, strong of

hewn stone, and deep bedded in the soil, were half submerged in the

dense growth of the reeds and of the willowy osiers which grew up and

brushed the great arched windows of its haunted hall. The lower half of

one of the seven windows had been blown wide open; a broad square

casement, braced with iron bars, looking out upon the river, and lighted

by a sickly glimmer of the moon.

Her boat was swayed close against the wall, in a sudden lurch, caused by

a fiercer gust of wind and higher wave of the strong tide; the rushes

entangled it; it grounded on the sand. There was no chance, she knew, of

setting it afloat again without her leaving it to gain a footing on the

land, and use her force to push it off into the current.

She leaped out without a moment's thought among the rushes, with her

kirtle girt up close above her knees. She sank to her ankles in the

sand, and stood to her waist in the water.

But she was almost as light and sure of foot as a moor-gull, when it

lights upon the treacherous mosses of a bog; and standing on the soaked

and shelving bank, she thrust herself with all her might against her

boat, dislodged it, and pushed it out once more afloat.

She was about to wade to it and spring into it, before the stream had

time to move it farther out, when an owl flew from the open window

behind her. Unconsciously she turned her head to look whence the bird

had come.

She saw the wide dark square of the opened casement; the gleam of a lamp

within the cavern-like vastness of the vaulted hall. Instinctively she

paused, and drew closer, and forgot the boat.

The stone sills of the seven windows were level with the topmost sprays

of the tall reeds and the willowy underwood; they were, therefore, level

with herself. She saw straight in; saw, so far as the pale uncertain

fusion of moon and lamp rays showed them, the height and width of this

legend haunted place; vaulted and pillared with timber and with stone;

dim and lonely as a cathedral crypt; and with the night-birds flying to

and fro in it, as in a ruin, seeking their nests in its rafters and in

the capitals of its columns.

No fear, but a great awe fell upon her. She let the boat drift on its

way unheeded; and stood there at gasp like a forest doe.

She had passed this grain tower with every day and night that she had

gone down the river upon the errands of her taskmaster; but she had

never looked within it once, holding the peasants' stories and terrors

in the cold scorn of her intrepid courage.

Now, when she looked, she for the first time believed--believed that the

dead lived and gathered there.

White, shadowy, countless shapes loomed through the gloom, all

motionless, all noiseless, all beautiful, with the serene yet terrible

loveliness of death.

In their midst burned a lamp; as the light burns night and day in the

tombs of the kings of the East.

Her color paled, her breath came and went, her body trembled like a

leaf; yet she was not afraid.

A divine ecstasy of surprise and faith smote the dull misery of her

life. She saw at last another world than the world of toil in which she

had labored without sight and without hope, as the blinded ox labored in

the brick-field, treading his endless circles in the endless dark, and

only told that it was day by blows.

She had no fear of them--these, whom she deemed the dwellers of the

lands beyond the sun, could not be more cruel to her than had been the

sons of men. She yearned to them, longed for them; wondered with rapture

and with awe if these were the messengers of her father's kingdom; if

these would have mercy on her, and take her with them to their immortal

homes--whether of heaven or of hell, what mattered it?

It was enough to her that it would not be of earth.

She raised herself upon the ledge above the rushes, poised herself

lightly as a bird, and with deft soundless feet dropped safely on the

floor within, and stood in the midst of that enchanted world--stood

motionless, gazing upwards with rapt eyes, and daring barely to draw

breath with any audible sigh, lest she should rouse them, and be driven

from their presence. The flame of the lamp, and the moonlight, reflected

back from the foam of the risen waters, shed a strange, pallid, shadowy

light on all the forms around her.

"They are the dead, surely," she thought, as she stood among them; and

she stayed there, with her arms folded on her breast to still its

beating, lest any sound should anger them and betray her; a thing lower

than the dust--a mortal amidst this great immortal host.

The mists and the shadows between her eyes and them parted them as with

a sea of dim and subtle vapor, through which they looked white and

impalpable as a summer cloud, when it seems to lean and touch the edge

of the world in a gray, quiet dawn.

They were but the creations of an artist's classic dreams, but to her

they seemed to thrill, to move, to sigh, to gaze on her; to her, they

seemed to live with that life of the air, of the winds, of the stars, of

silence and solitude, and all the nameless liberties of death, of which

she dreamed when, shunned, and cursed, and hungered, she looked up to

the skies at night from a sleepless bed.

They were indeed the dead: the dead of that fair time when all the earth

was young, and men communed with their deities, and loved them, and were

not afraid. When their gods were with them in their daily lives, when in

every breeze that curled the sea, in every cloud that darkened in the

west, in every water-course that leaped and sparkled in the sacred cedar

groves, in every bee-sucked blossom of wild thyme that grew purple by

the marble temple steps, the breath and the glance of the gods were

felt, the footfall and the voice of the gods were heard.

They were indeed the dead: the dead who--dying earliest, whilst yet the

earth was young enough to sorrow for its heroic lives to embalm them, to

remember them, and to count them worthy of lament--perished in their

bodies, but lived forever immortal in the traditions of the world.

From every space of the somber chamber some one of these gazed on her

through the mist.

Here the silver dove of Argos winged her way through the iron-jaws of

the dark sea-gates.

Here the white Io wandered in exile and unresting, forever scourged on

by the sting in her flesh, as a man by the genius in him.

Here the glad god whom all the woodlands love played in the moonlight,

on his reeds, to the young stags that couched at his feet in golden beds

of daffodils and asphodel.

Here in a darkened land the great Demeter moved, bereaved and childless,

bidding the vine be barren, and the fig-trees fruitless, and the seed of

the sown furrows strengthless to multiply and fill the sickles with ripe

increase.

Here the women of Thebes danced upon Cithæron in the mad moonless

nights, under the cedars, with loose hair on the wind, and bosoms that

heaved and brake through their girdles of fawnskin.

Here at his labor, in Pheræ, the sun-god toiled as a slave; the highest

wrought as the lowest; while wise Hermes stood by and made mirth of the

kingship that had bartered the rod of dominion for the mere music which

empty air could make in a hollow reed.

Here, too, the brother gods stood, Hypnos, and Oneiros, and Thanatos;

their bowed heads crowned with the poppy and moonwort, the flowering

fern, and the amaranth, and, pressed to their lips, a white rose, in the

old sweet symbol of silence; fashioned in the same likeness, with the

same winged feet, which yet fall so softly that no human ears hear their

coming; the gods that most of all have pity on men,--the gods of the

Night and of the Grave.

These she saw, not plainly, but through the wavering shadows and the

halo of the vapors which floated, dense and silvery as smoke, in from

the misty river. Their lips were dumb, and for her they had no name nor

story, and yet they spoke to her with familiar voices. She knew them;

she knew that they were gods, and yet to the world were dead; and in the

eyes of the forest-god, who piped upon his reeds, she saw the eyes of

Phratos look on her with their tender laughter and their unforgotten

love.

Just so had he looked so long ago--so long!--in the deep woods at

moonrise, when he had played to the bounding fawns, to the leaping

waters, to the listening trees, to the sleeping flowers.

They had called him an outcast,--and lo!--she found him a god.

She sank on her knees, and buried her face in her hands and wept,--wept

with grief for the living lost forever,--wept with joy that the dead

forever lived.

Tears had rarely sprung to her proud, rebellious eyes; she deemed them

human things,--things of weakness and of shame; she had thrust them back

and bit her lips till the blood came, in a thousand hours of pain,

rather than men should see them and exult. The passion had its way for

once, and spent itself, and passed. She rose trembling and pale, with

her eyes wet and dimmed in luster, like stars that shine through rain,

and looked around her fearfully.

She thought that the gods might rise in wrath against her, even as

mortals did, for daring to be weary of her life.

As she rose, she saw for the first time before the cold hearth the body

of a man.

It was stretched straightly out on the stone floor; the chest was bare;

upon the breast the right hand was clinched close and hard; the limbs

were in profound repose; the head was lit by the white glimmer from the

moon; the face was calm and colorless, and full of sadness.

In the dim strange light it looked white as marble, colossal as a

statue, in that passionless rest,--that dread repose.

Instinctively she drew nearer to him, breathless and allured; she bent

forward and looked closer on his face.

He was a god, like all the rest, she thought; but dead,--not as they

were dead, with eyes that rejoiced in the light of cloudless suns, and

with lips that smiled with a serene benignity and an eternal love,--but

dead, as mortals die, without hope, without release, with the breath

frozen on their tired lips, and bound on their hearts eternally the

burden of their sin and woe.

She leaned down close by his side, and looked on him,--sorrowful,

because he alone of all the gods was stricken there, and he alone had

the shadow of mortality upon him.

Looking thus she saw that his hands were clinched upon his chest, as

though their latest effort had been to tear the bones asunder, and

wrench out a heart that ached beneath them. She saw that this was not a

divine, but a human form,--dead indeed as the rest were, but dead by a

man's death of assassination, or disease, or suicide, or what men love

to call the "act of Heaven," whereby they mean the self-sown fruit of

their own faults and follies.

Had the gods slain him--being a mortal--for his entrance there?

Marcellin in legends had told her of such things.

He was human; with a human beauty; which, yet white and cold and golden,

full of serenity and sadness, was like the sun-god's yonder, and very

strange to her whose eyes had only rested on the sunburnt, pinched, and

rugged faces of the populace around her.

That beauty allured her; she forgot that he had against her the crime of

that humanity which she hated. He was to her like some noble forest

beast, some splendid bird of prey, struck down by a bolt from some

murderous bow, strengthless and senseless, yet majestic even in its

fall.

"The gods slew him because he dared to be too like themselves," she

thought, "else he could not be so beautiful,--he,--only a man, and

dead?"

The dreamy intoxication of fancy had deadened her to all sense of time

or fact. The exaltation of nerve and brain made all fantastic fantasies

seem possible to her as truth.

Herself, she was strong; and desolate no more, since the eyes of the

immortals had smiled on her, and bade her welcome there; and she felt an

infinite pity on him, inasmuch as with all his likeness to them he yet,

having incurred their wrath, lay helpless there as any broken reed.

She bent above him her dark rich face, with a soft compassion on it; she

stroked the pale heavy gold of his hair, with fingers brown and lithe,

but infinitely gentle; she fanned the cold pain of his forehead, with

the breath of her roselike mouth; she touched him and stroked him and

gazed on him, as she would have caressed and looked on the velvet hide

of the stag, the dappled plumage of the hawk, the white leaf of the

lily.

A subtle vague pleasure stole on her, a sharp sweet sorrow moved

her,--for he was beautiful, and he was dead.

"If they would give him back his life?" she thought: and she looked for

the glad forest-god playing on his reed amidst the amber asphodels, he

who had the smile and the glance of Phratos. But she could see Pan's

face no more.

The wind rose, the moon was hidden, all was dark save the flicker of the

flame of the lamp; the storm had broken, and the rain fell: she saw

nothing now but the bowed head of Thanatos, holding the rose of silence

to his lips.

On her ear there seemed to steal a voice from the darkness, saying:

"One life alone can ransom another. Live immortal with us; or for that

dead man--perish."

She bowed her head where she knelt in the darkness; the force of an

irresistible fate seemed upon her; that sacrifice which is at once the

delirium and divinity of her sex had entered into her.

She was so lowly a thing; a creature so loveless and cursed; the gods,

if they took her in pity, would soon scorn her as men had scorned;

whilst he who lay dead--though so still and so white, and so mute and so

powerless,--he looked a king among men, though the gods for his daring

had killed him.

"Let him live!" she murmured. "It's for me,--I am nothing--nothing. Let

me die as the Dust dies--what matter?"

The wind blew the flame of the lamp into darkness; the moon still shone

through the storm on to the face of Thanatos.

He alone heard. He--the only friend who fails no living thing. He alone

remained, and waited for her: he, whom alone of all the gods--for this

man's sake--she chose.

CHAPTER III.

When the trance of her delirious imaginations passed, they left her

tranquil, but with the cold of death seeming to pass already from the

form she looked on into hers. She was still crouching by his body on the

hearth; and knew what she had chosen, and did not repent.

He was dead still;--or so she thought;--she watched him with dim

dreaming eyes, watched him as women do who love.

She drew the fair glistening hair through her hands; she touched the

closed and blue veined eyelids tenderly; she laid her ear against his

heart to hearken for the first returning pulses of the life she had

brought back to him.

It was no more to her the dead body of a man, unknown, unheeded, a

stranger, and because a mortal, of necessity to her a foe. It was a

nameless, wondrous, mystic force and splendor to which she had given

back the pulse of existence, the light of day; which was no more the

gods', nor any man's, no more the prey of death, nor the delight of

love; but hers--hers--shared only with the greatness she had bought for

him.

Even as she looked on him she felt the first faint flutter in his heart;

she heard the first faint breath upon his lips.

His eyes unclosed and looked straight at hers, without reason or luster

in them, clouded with a heavy and delirious pain.

"To die--of hunger--like a rat in a trap!" he muttered in his throat,

and strove to rise; he fell back, senseless, striking his head upon the

stones.

She started; her hands ceased to wander through his hair, and touch his

cold lips as she would touch the cup of a flower; she rose slowly to her

feet.

She had heard; and the words, so homely and so familiar in the lives of

all the poor, pierced the wild faiths and visions of her heated brain,

as a ray of the clear daybreak pierces through the purple smoke from

altar fires of sacrifice.

The words were so terrible, and yet so trite; they cleft the mists of

her dreams as tempered steel cleaves folds of gossamer.

"To die--of hunger!"

She muttered the phrase after him--shaken from her stupor by its gaunt

and common truth.

It roused her to the consciousness of all his actual needs. Her heart

rebelled even against the newly-found immortal masters, since being in

wrath they could not strike him swiftly with their vengeance, but had

killed him thus with these lingering and most bitter pangs, and had

gathered there as to a festival to see him die.

As she stooped above him, she could discern the faint earthy cavernous

odor, which comes from the languid lungs and empty chest of one who has

long fasted, almost unto death.

She had known that famine odor many a time ere then; in the hut of Manon

Dax, and by the hedge-rows and in the ditches, that made the sick-beds

of many another, as old, as wretched, and as nobly stubborn against

alms; in times of drought or in inclement winters, the people in all

that country-side suffered continually from the hunger torment; she had

often passed by men and women, and children, crouching in black and

wretched cabins, or lying fever-stricken on the cold stony fields, glad

to gnaw a shred of sheepskin, or suck a thorny bramble of the fields to

quiet the gnawing of their entrails.

She stood still beside him, and thought.

All light had died; the night was black with storm; the shadowy shapes

were gone; there were the roar of the rushing river, and the tumult of

the winds and rains upon the silence; all she saw was this golden head;

this colorless face; this lean and nerveless hand that rested on the

feebly beating heart;--these she saw as she would have seen the white

outlines of a statue in the dark.

He moved a little with a hollow sigh.

"Bread--bread--bread!" he muttered. "To die for bread!"

At the words, all the quick resource and self-reliance which the hard

life she led had sharpened and strengthened in her, awoke amidst all the

dreams and passions, and meditations of her mystical faiths, and her

poetic ignorance.

The boldness and the independence of her nature roused themselves; she

had prayed for him to the gods, and to the gods given herself for

him--that was well--if they kept their faith. But if they forsook it?

The blood rushed back to her heart with its old proud current; alone,

she swore to herself to save him. To save him in the gods' despite.

In the street that day, she had found the half of a roll of black bread.

It had lain in the mud, none claiming it; a sulky lad passed it in

scorn, a beggar with gold in his wallet kicked it aside with his crutch;

she took it and put it by for her supper; so often some stripe or some

jibe replaced a begrudged meal for her at Flamma's board.

That was all she had. A crust dry as a bone, which could do nothing

towards saving him, which could be of no more use to pass those clinched

teeth, and warm those frozen veins, than so much of the wet sand

gathered up from the river-shore. Neither could there be any wood,

which, if brought in and lit, would burn. All the timber was green and

full of sap, and all, for a score square leagues around, was at that

hour drenched with water.

She knew that the warmth of fire to dry the deadly dampness in the air,

the warmth of wine to quicken the chillness and the torpor of the

reviving life, were what were wanted beyond all other things. She had

seen famine in all its stages, and she knew the needs and dangers of

that fell disease.

There was not a creature in all the world who would have given her so

much as a loaf or a fagot; even if the thought of human aid had ever

dawned on her. As it was, she never even dreamed of it; every human

hand--to the rosy fist of the smallest and fairest child--was always

clinched against her; she would have sooner asked for honey from a knot

of snakes, or sought a bed of roses in a swarm of wasps, as have begged

mercy or aid at any human hearth.

She knew nothing, either, of any social laws that might have made such

need as this a public care on public alms. She was used to see men,

women, and children perishing of want; she had heard people curse the

land that bore, and would not nourish, them. She was habituated to work

hard for every bit or drop that passed her lips; she lived amidst

multitudes who did the same; she knew nothing of any public succor to

which appeal could in such straits be made.

If bread were not forthcoming, a man or a woman had to die for lack of

it, as Manon Dax and Marcellin had done; that seemed to her a rule of

fate, against which there was no good in either resistance or appeal.

What could she do? she pondered.

Whatever she would do, she knew that she had to do quickly. Yet she

stood irresolute.

To do anything she had to stoop herself again down to that sort of theft

to which no suffering or privation of her own had ever tempted her.

In a vague fierce fashion, unholpen and untaught, she hated all sin.

All quoted it as her only birthright; all told her that she was imbued

with it body and soul; all saw it in her slightest acts, in her most

harmless words; and she abhorred this, the one gift which men cast to

her as her only heirloom, with a strong scornful loathing which stood

her in the stead of virtue. With an instinctive cynicism which moved her

continually, yet to which she could have given no name, she had loved to

see the children and the maidens--those who held her accursed, and were

themselves held so innocent and just--steal the ripe cherries from the

stalk, pluck the forbidden flowers that nodded over the convent walls,

pierce through the boundary fence to reach another's pear, speak a lie

softly to the old grayheaded priest, and lend their ripe lips to a

soldier's rough salute, while she, the daughter of hell, pointed at,

despised, shunned as a leper, hunted as a witch, kept her hands soilless

and her lips untouched.

It was a pride to her to say in her teeth, "I am stronger than they,"

when she saw the stolen peach in their hand, and heard the lying word on

their tongue. It had a savage sweetness for her, the will with which

she denied herself the luxurious fruit that, unseen, she could have

reached a thousand times from the walls when her throat was parched and

her body empty; with which she uttered the truth, and the truth alone,

though it brought the blows of the cudgel down on her shoulders; with

which she struck aside in disdain the insolent eyes and mocking mouths

of the youths, who would fain have taught her that, if beggared of all

other things, she was at least rich in form and hue. She hated sin, for

sin seemed to her only a human word for utter feebleness; she had never

sinned for herself, as far as she knew; yet to serve this man, on whose

face she had never looked before that night, she was ready to stoop to

the thing which she abhorred.

She had been so proud of her freedom from all those frailties of

passion, and greed, and self-pity, with which the souls of the maidens

around her were haunted;--so proud, with the fierce, chaste, tameless

arrogance of the women of her race, that was bred in their blood, and

taught them as their first duty, by the Oriental and jealous laws of

their vengeful and indolent masters.

She had been so proud!--and this cleanliness of hand and heart, this

immunity from her enemies' weakness, this independence which she had

worn as a buckler of proof against all blows, and had girded about her

as a zone of purity, more precious than gold, this, the sole treasure

she had, she was about to surrender for the sake of a stranger.

It was a greater gift, and one harder to give, than the life which she

had offered for his to the gods.

She kneeled on one knee on the stone floor beside him, her heart torn

with a mute and violent struggle; her bent face dark and rigid, her

straight haughty brows knit together in sadness and conflict. In the

darkness he moved a little; he was unconscious, yet ever, in that

burning stupor, one remembrance, one regret, remained with him.

"That the mind of a man can be killed for the want of the food thrown to

swine!" he muttered drearily, in the one gleam of reason that abode in

the delirium of his brain.

The words were broken, disjointed, almost inarticulate, but they stung

her to action as the spur stings a horse.

She started erect, and crossed the chamber, leapt through the open

portion of the casement, and lighted again without, knee-deep in water;

she lost her footing and fell entangled in the rushes; but she rose and

climbed in the darkness to where the roots of an oak stump stretched

into the stream, and, gaining the shore, ran as well as the storm and

the obscurity allowed her, along the bank, straight towards Yprès.

It was a wild and bitter night; the rushing of the foaming river went by

her all the way; the path was flooded, and she was up to her ankles in

water at every step, and often forced to wade through channels a foot

deep.

She went on straight towards her home, unconscious of cold, of fatigue,

of her wet clinging clothes, of the water that splashed unseen in the

black night up against her face as her steps sank into some shaking

strip of marsh, some brook which, in the rising of the river, ran

hissing and swelling to twice its common height. All she was sensible of

was of one inspiration, one purpose, one memory that seemed to give her

the wings of the wind, and yet to clog her feet with the weight of

lead,--the memory of that white, sad, senseless face, lying beneath the

watch of the cruel gods.

She reached Yprès, feeling and scenting her way by instinct, as a dog

does, all through the tumult of the air and against the force of the

driving rains. She met no living creature; the weather was too bad for

even a beggar to be afoot in it, and even the stray and homeless beasts

had sought some shelter from a ruined shed or crumbling wall.

As softly as a leaf may fall she unloosed the latch of the orchard,

stole through the trees, and took her way, in an impenetrable gloom,

with the swift sure flight of one to whom the place had long been as

familiar by night as day.

The uproar of wind and rain would have muffled the loudest tread. The

shutters of the mill-house were all closed; it was quite still. Flamma

and his serving people were all gone to their beds that they might

save, by sleep, the cost of wood and candle.

She passed round to the side of the house, climbed up the tough network

of a tree of ivy, and without much labor loosened the fastenings of her

own loft window, and entering there passed through the loft into the

body of the house.

Opening the doors of the passages noiselessly, she stole down the

staircase, making no more sound than a hare makes stealing over mosses

to its form. The ever-wakeful lightly-sleeping ears of a miser were near

at hand, but even they were not aroused; and she passed down unheard.

She went hardily, fearlessly, once her mind was set upon the errand. She

did not reason with herself, as more timorous creatures might have done,

that being half starved as recompense for strong and continual labor,

she was but about to take a just due withheld, a fair wage long overdue.

She only resolved to take what another needed by a violence which she

had never employed to serve her own needs, and, having resolved, went to

execute her resolution with the unhesitating dauntlessness that was bred

in her, blood and bone.

Knowing all the turns and steps of the obscure passages, she quickly

found her way to the store-chambers where such food and fuel as were

wanted in the house were stored.

The latter was burnt, and the former eaten, sparingly and grudgingly,

but the store of both was at this season of the year fairly abundant. It

had more than once happened that the mill had been cut off from all

communication with the outer world by floods that reached its upper

casements, and Claudis Flamma was provided against any such accidents;

the more abundantly as he had more than once found it a lucrative matter

in such seasons of inundation to lower provisions from his roof to boats

floating below, when the cotters around were in dire need and ready to

sell their very souls for a bag of rice or string of onions.

Folle-Farine opened the shutter of the storeroom and let in the faint

gray glimmer from the clearing skies.

A bat which had been resting from the storm against the rafters

fluttered violently against the lattice; a sparrow driven down the

chimney in the hurricane flew up from one of the shelves with a

twittering outcry.

She paused to open the lattice for them both, and set them free to fly

forth into the still sleeping world; then she took an old rush basket

that hung upon a nail, and filled it with the best of such homely food

as was to be found there--loaves, and meats, and rice, and oil, and a

flask of the richest wine--wine of the south, of the hue of the violet,

sold under secrecy at a high charge and profit.

That done, she tied together as large a bundle of brushwood and of

fagots as she could push through the window, which was broad and square,

and thrust it out by slow degrees; put her basket through likewise, and

lowered it carefully to the ground; then followed them herself with the

agility born of long practice, and dropped on the grass beneath.

She waited but to close and refasten the shutter from without, then

threw the mass of fagots on her shoulders, and carrying in her arms the

osier basket, took her backward way through the orchards to the river.

She had not taken either bit or drop for her own use.

She was well used to carry burdens as heavy as the mules bare, and to

walk under them unassisted for many leagues to the hamlets and markets

roundabout. But even her strength of bronze had become fatigued; she

felt frozen to the bone; her clothes were saturated with water, and her

limbs were chill and stiff. Yet she trudged on, unblenching and

unpausing, over the soaked earth, and through the swollen water and the

reeds; keeping always by the side of the stream that was so angry in the

darkness; by the side of the gray flooded sands and the rushes that were

blowing with a sound like the sea.

She met no living creature except a fox, who rushed between her feet,

holding in its mouth a screaming chicken.

Once she stumbled and struck her head and breast with a dull blow

against a pile of wood which, in the furious weather, was unseen by her.

It stunned her for the instant, but she rallied and looked up with eyes

as used to pierce the deepest gloom as any goshawk's; she discerned the

outline of the Calvary, towering high and weirdlike above the edge of

the river, where the priests and people had placed it, so that the

boatmen could abase themselves and do it honor as they passed the banks.

The lantern on the cross shone far across the stream, but shed no rays

upon the path she followed.

At its foot she had stumbled and been bruised upon her errand of mercy;

the reflection of its light streamed across to the opposing shore, and

gave help to a boat-load of smugglers landing stolen tobacco in a little

creek.

She recovered herself and trudged on once more along the lonely road.

"How like their god is to them!" she thought; the wooden crucifix was

the type of her persecutors; of those who flouted and mocked her, who

flung and pierced her as a witch; who cursed her because she was not of

their people. The cross was the hatred of the world incarnated to her;

it was in Christ's name that Marcellin's corpse had been cast on the

dung and in the ditch; it was in Christ's name that the women had

avenged on her the pity which she had shown to Manon Dax; it was in

Christ's name that Flamma scourged her because she would not pass rotten

figs for sweet.

For the name of Christ is used to cover every crime, by the peasant who

cheats his neighbor of a copper coin, as by the sovereign who massacres

a nation for a throne.

She left the black cross reared there against the rushes, and plodded on

through sand and rain and flood, bearing her load:--in Christ's name

they would have seized her as a thief.

The storm abated a little, and every now and then a gleam of moonlight

was shed upon the flooded meadows. She gained the base of the tower,

and, by means of the length of rope, let by degrees the firewood and the

basket through the open portion of the window on to the floor below,

then again followed them herself.

Her heart thrilled as she entered.

Her first glance to the desolate hearth showed her that the hours of her

absence had brought no change there. The gods had not kept faith with

her, they had not raised him from the dead.

"They have left it all to me!" she thought, with a strange sweet

yearning in her heart over this life that she had bought with her own.

She first flung the fagots and brushwood on the hearth, and set them on

fire to burn, fanned by the breath of the wind. Then she poured out a

little of the wine, and kneeled down by him, and forced it drop by drop

through his colorless lips, raising his head upon her as she kneeled.

The wine was pure and old; it suffused his attenuated frame as with a

rush of new blood; under her hand his heart beat with firmer and quicker

movement. She broke bread in the wine, and put the soaked morsels to his

mouth, as softly as she would have fed some little shivering bird made

nestless by the hurricane.

He was not conscious yet, but he swallowed what she held to him, without

knowing what he did; a slight warmth gradually spread over his limbs; a

strong shudder shook him.

His eyes looked dully at her through a film of exhaustion and of sleep.

"J'avais quelque chose là!" he muttered, incoherently, his voice

rattling in his hollow chest, as he raised himself a little on one arm.

"J'avais quelque chose là!" and with a sigh he fell back once more--his

head tossing in uneasiness from side to side.

Amidst the heat and mists of his aching brain, one thought remained with

him--that he had created things greater than himself, and that he died

like a dog, powerless to save them.

The saddest dying words that the air ever bare on its breath--the one

bitter vain regret of every genius that the common herds of men stamp

out as they slay their mad cattle or their drunken mobs--stayed on the

blurred remembrance of his brain, which, in its stupor and its

helplessness, still knew that once it had been strong to create--that

once it had been clear to record--that once it had dreamed the dreams

which save men from the life of the swine--that once it had told to the

world the truth divested of lies,--and that none had seen, none had

listened, none had believed.

There is no more terrible woe upon earth than the woe of the stricken

brain, which remembers the days of its strength, the living light of its

reason, the sunrise of its proud intelligence, and knows that all these

have passed away like a tale that is told; like a year that is spent;

like an arrow that is shot to the stars, and flies aloft, and falls in a

swamp; like a fruit that is too well loved of the sun, and so, oversoon

ripe, is dropped from the tree and forgot on the grasses, dead to all

joys of the dawn and the noon and the summer, but alive to the sting of

the wasp, to the fret of the aphis, to the burn of the drought, to the

theft of the parasite.

She only dimly understood, and yet she was smitten with awe and

reverence at that endless grief which had no taint of cowardice upon it,

but was pure as the patriot's despair, impersonal as the prophet's

agony.

For the first time the mind in her consciously awoke.

For the first time she heard a human mind find voice even in its stupor

and its wretchedness to cry aloud, in reproach to its unknown Creator:

"I am _yours_! Shall I perish with the body? Why have bade me desire the

light and seek it, if forever you must thrust me into the darkness of

negation? Shall I be Nothing like the muscle that rots, like the bones

that crumble, like the flesh that turns to ashes, and blow in a film on

the winds? Shall I die so? I?--the mind of a man, the breath of a god?"

Time went by; the chimes from the cathedral tolled dully through the

darkness over the expanse of the flood.

The light from the burning wood shone redly and fitfully. The sigh and

moan of the tossed rushes and of the water-birds, awakened and afraid,

came from the outer world on the winds that blew through the desolation

of the haunted chamber. Gray owls flew in the high roof, taking refuge

from the night. Rats hurried, noiseless and eager, over the stones of

the floor, seeking stray grains that fell through the rafters from the

granaries above.

She noticed none of these; she never looked up nor around; all she heard

was the throb of the delirious words on the silence, all she saw was the

human face in the clouded light through the smoke from the hearth.

The glow of the fire shone on the bowed head of Thanatos, the laughing

eyes of Pan; Hermes' fair cold derisive face, and the splendor of the

Lykegènés toiling in the ropes that bound him to the mill-stones to

grind bread for the mortal appetites and the ineloquent lips of men.

But at the gods she barely looked; her eyes were bent upon the human

form before her. She crouched beside him, half kneeling and half

sitting: her clothes were drenched, the fire scorched, the draughts of

the air froze her; she had neither eaten nor drunk since the noon of the

day; but she had no other remembrance than of this life which had the

beauty of the sun-king and the misery of the beggar.

He lay long restless, unconscious, muttering strange sad words, at times

of sense, at times of folly, but always, whether lucid or delirious,

words of a passionate rebellion against his fate, a despairing lament

for the soul in him that would be with the body quenched.

After awhile the feverish mutterings of his voice were lower and less

frequent; his eyes seemed to become sensible of the glare of the fire,

and to contract and close in a more conscious pain; after a yet longer

time he ceased to stir so restlessly, ceased to sigh and shudder, and he

grew quite still; his breath came tranquilly, his head fell back, he

sank to a deep sleep.

The personal fears, the womanly terrors, which would have assailed

creatures at once less savage and less innocent never moved her for an

instant. That there was any strangeness in her position, any peril in

this solitude, she never dreamed. Her heart, bold with the blood of

Taric, could know no physical fear; and her mind at once ignorant and

visionary, her temper at once fierce and unselfish, kept from her all

thought of those suspicions which would fall on her, and chastise an act

like hers; suspicions such as would have made a woman less pure and less

dauntless tremble at that lonely house, that night of storm, that

unknown fate which she had taken into her own hands, unwitting and

unheeding whether good or evil might be the issue thereof.

To her he was beautiful, he suffered, she had saved him from death, and

he was hers: and this was all that she remembered. She dealt with him as

she would have done with some forest beast or bird that she should have

found frozen in the woods of winter.

His head had fallen on her, and she crouched unwearied in the posture

that gave him easiest rest.

With a touch so soft that it could not awaken him, she stroked the

lusterless gold of his hair, and from time to time felt for the

inaudible beating of his heart.

Innumerable dreams, shapeless, delicious, swept through her brain, like

the echoes of some music, faint yet unutterably sweet, that half arouses

and half soothes some sleeper in a gray drowsy summer dawn.

For the first time since the melodies of Phratos had died forever from

off her ear she was happy.

She did not ask wherefore,--neither of herself or of the gods did she

question whence came this wonder-flower of her nameless joy.

She only sat quiet, and let the hours drift by, and watched him as he

slept, and was content.

So the hours passed.

Whilst yet it seemed night still, the silence trembled with the pipe of

waking birds, the darkness quivered with the pale first rays of dawn.

Over the flood and the fields the first light broke. From the unseen

world behind the mist, faint bells rang in the coming day.

He moved in his sleep, and his eyes unclosed, and looked at her face as

it hung above him, like some drooped rose that was heavy with the too

great sweetness of a summer shower.

It was but the gaze of a moment, and his lids dropped again, weighted

with the intense weariness of a slumber that held all his senses close

in its leaden chains. But the glance, brief though it was, had been

conscious;--under it a sudden flush passed over her, a sudden thrill

stirred in her, as the life stirs in the young trees at the near coming

of the spring. For the first time since her birth she became wholly

human.

A sharp terror made her tremble like a leaf; she put his head softly

from her on the ground, and rose, quivering, to her feet.

It was not the gods she feared, it was herself.

She had never once known that she had beauty, more than the flower knows

it blowing on the wind. She had passed through the crowds of fair and

market, not knowing why the youths looked after her with cruel eyes all

aglow. She had walked through them, indifferent and unconscious,

thinking that they wanted to hunt her down as an unclean beast, and

dared not, because her teeth were strong.

She had taken a vague pleasure in the supple grace of her own form, as

she had seen it mirrored in some woodland pool where she had bathed

amidst the water-lilies, but it had been only such an instinctive and

unstudied pleasure as the swan takes in seeing her silver breast shine

back to her, on the glassy current adown which she sails.

Now,--as she rose and stood, as the dawn broke, beside him, on the

hearth, and heard the birds' first waking notes, that told her the sun

was even then touching the edge of the veiled world to light, a hot

shame smote her, and the womanhood in her woke.

She looked down on herself and saw that her soaked skirts were knotted

above her knees, as she had bound them when she had leaped from the

boat's side; that her limbs were wet and glistening with river water,

and the moisture from the grasses, and the sand and shingle of the

shore; and that the linen of her vest, threadbare with age, left her

arms bare, and showed through its rents the gleam of her warm brown skin

and the curves of her shining shoulders.

A sudden horror came upon her, lest he should awake again and see her as

she was;--wet, miserable, half-clothed, wind-tossed like the rushes,

outcast and ashamed.

She did not know that she had beauty in her; she did not know that even

as she was, she had an exquisitely savage grace, as storm-birds have in

theirs against the thunder-cloud and the lightning blaze, of their

water-world in tempest.

She felt a sudden shrinking from all chance of his clearer and more

conscious gaze; a sudden shy dread and longing to hide herself under the

earth, or take refuge in the depth of the waters, rather than meet those

eyes to which she had given back the light of life cast on her in

abhorrence and in scorn;--and that he could have any other look, for

her, she had no thought.

She had been an outcast among an alien people too long to dream that any

human love could ever fall on her. She had been too long cursed by every

tongue, to dream that any human voice could ever arise in honor or in

welcome to a thing so despised and criminal as she.

For the gift which she had given this man, too, would curse her;--that

she had known when she had offered it.

She drew her rude garments closer, and stole away with velvet footfall,

through the twilight of the dawn; her head hung down, and her face was

flushed as with some great guilt.

With the rising of the day, all her new joy was banished.

With the waking of the world, all her dreams shrank back into secrecy

and shame.

The mere timid song of the linnet in the leafless bushes seemed sharp on

her ear, calling on her to rise and go forth to her work, as the

creature of toil, of exile, of namelessness, and of despair, that men

had made her.

At the casement, she turned and cast one long but lingering glance upon

him where he slept; then once more she launched herself into the dusky

and watery mists of the cold dawn.

She had made no more sound in her passing than a bird makes in her

flight.

The sleeper never stirred, but dreamed on motionless, in the darkness

and the silence, and the drowsy warmth.

He dreamed, indeed, of a woman's form half bare, golden of hue like a

fruit of the south, blue veined and flushed to changing rose heats, like

an opal's fire; with limbs strong and yet slender, gleaming wet with

water, and brown arched feet all shining with silvery sands; with

mystical eyes, black as night and amorous-lidded, and a mouth like the

half-closed bud of a flower, which sighing seemed to breathe upon him

all the fragrance of dim cedar-woods shrouded in summer rains, of

honey-weighted heather blown by moorland winds, of almond blossoms

tossed like snow against a purple sea; of all things air-born, sun-fed,

fair and free.

But he saw these only as in a dream; and, as a dream, when he awakened

they had passed.

Though still dark from heavy clouds, the dawn grew into morning as she

went noiselessly away over the gray sands, the wet shore-paths, the

sighing rushes.

The river-meadows were all flooded, and on the opposite banks the road

was impassable; but on her side she could still find footing, for the

ground there had a steeper rise, and the swollen tide had not reached in

any public roadway too high for her to wade, or draw herself by the

half-merged bushes, through it on the homeward tracks to Yprès.

The low sun was hidden in a veil of water. The old convent bells of all

the country-side sang through the mists. The day was still young; but

the life of the soil and the stream was waking as the birds were. Boats

went down the current, bearing a sad freightage of sheep drowned in the

night, and of ruined peasants, whose little wealth of stack and henhouse

had been swept down by the unlooked-for tide.

From the distant banks, the voices of women came muffled through the

fog, weeping and wailing for some lost lamb, choked by the water in its

fold, or some pretty breadth of garden just fragrant with snowdrops and

with violets, that had been laid desolate and washed away.

Through the clouds of vapor that curled in a dense opaque smoke from the

wet earth, there loomed the dusky shapes of oxen; their belled horns

sending forth a pleasant music from the gloom. On the air, there was a

sweet damp odor from soaked grasses and upturned sods, from the breath

of the herds lowing hock deep in water, from the green knots of broken

primrose roots sailing by on the brown, rough river.

A dying bush of gray lavender swept by on the stream; it had the fresh

moulds of its lost garden-home still about it, and in its stems a robin

had built her little nest; the nest streamed in tatters and ruin on the

wind, the robin flew above the wreck, fluttering and uttering shrill

notes of woe.

Folle-Farine saw nothing.

She held on her way blindly, mutely, mechanically, by sheer force of

long habit. Her mind was in a trance; she was insensible of pain or

cold, of hunger or fever, of time or place.

Yet she went straight home, as the horse being blinded will do, to the

place where its patience and fealty have never been recompensed with any

other thing than blows.

As she had groped her way through the gloom of the night, and found it,

though the light of the roadside Christ had been turned from her, so in

the same blind manner she had groped her way to her own conceptions of

honesty and duty. She hated the bitter and cruel old man, with a passion

fierce and enduring that nothing could have changed; yet all the same

she served him faithfully. This was an untamed animal indeed, that he

had yoked to his plowshare; but she did her work loyally and doggedly;

and whenever she had shaken her neck free of the yoke, she returned and

thrust her head through it again, whether he scourged her back to it or

not.

It was partially from the force of habit which is strong upon all

creatures; it was partially from a vague instinct in her to work out her

right to the begrudged shelter which she received, and not to be

beholden for it for one single hour to any charity.

The mill was at work in the twilight when she reached it.

Claudis Flamma screamed at her from the open door of the loft, where he

was weighing corn for the grinding.

"You have been away all night long!" he cried to her.

She was silent; standing below in the wet garden.

He cast a foul word at her, new upon his lips. She was silent all the

same; her arms crossed on her breast, her head bent.

"Where is the boat?--that is worth more than your body. And soul you

have none."

She raised her head and looked upward.

"I have lost the boat."

She thought that, very likely, he would kill her for it. Once when she

had lost an osier basket, not a hundredth part the cost of this vessel,

he had beaten her till every bone in her frame had seemed broken for

many a week. But she looked up quietly there among the dripping bushes

and the cheerless grassy ways.

That she never told a lie he above in the loft knew by long proof; but

this was in his sight only on a piece with the strength born in her from

the devil; the devil had in all ages told so many truths to the

confusion of the saints God.

"Drifted where?"

"I do not know--on the face of the flood,--with the tide."

"You had left it loose."

"I got out to push it off the sand. It had grounded. I forgot it. It

went adrift."

"What foul thing were you at meanwhile?"

She was silent.

"If you do not say, I will cut your heart out with a hundred stripes!"

"You can."

"I can! You shall know truly that I can. Go, get the boat--find it above

or below water--or to the town prison you go as a thief."

The word smote her with a sudden pang.

For the first time her courage failed her. She turned and went in

silence at his bidding.

In the wet daybreak, through the swollen pools and the soaked thickets,

she searched for the lost vessel; knowing well that it would be scarcely

less than a miracle which could restore it to her; and that the god upon

the cross worked no miracles for her;--a child of sin.

For several hours she searched; hungry, drenched with water, ready to

drop with exhaustion, as she was used to see the overdriven cattle sink

upon the road. She passed many peasants; women on their mules, men in

their barges, children searching for such flotsam and jetsam as might

have been flung upon the land from the little flooded gardens and the

few riverside cabins that had been invaded in the night.

She asked tidings of the missing treasure from none of these. What she

could not do for herself, it never occurred to her that others could do

for her. It was an ignorance that was strength. At length, to her amaze,

she found it; saved for her by the branches of a young tree, which being

blown down had fallen into the stream, and had caught the boat hard and

fast as in a net.

At peril to her life, she dislodged it, with infinite labor, from the

entanglement of the boughs; and at scarce less peril, rowed on her

homeward way upon the swollen force of the turbid river; full against

the tide which again was flowing inland, from the sea that beat the bar,

away to the northward, in the full sunrise.

It was far on in the forenoon as she drew near the orchards of Yprès,

brown in their leaflessness, and with gray lichens blowing from their

boughs, like hoary beards of trembling paupers shaking in the icy

breaths of charity.

She saw that Claudis Flamma was at work amidst his trees, pruning and

delving in the red and chilly day.

She went up the winding stairs, planks green and slippery with wet river

weeds, which led straight through the apple orchards to the mill.

"I have found the boat," she said, standing before him; her voice was

faint and very tired, her whole body drooped with fatigue, her head for

once was bowed.

He turned with his billhook in his hand. There was a leap of gladness at

his heart; the miser's gladness over recovered treasure; but he showed

such weakness neither in his eye nor words.

"It is well for you that you have," he said with bitter meaning. "I will

spare you half the stripes:--strip."

Without a word of remonstrance, standing before him in the gray shadow

of the lichens, and the red mists of the morning, she pushed the rough

garments from her breast and shoulders, and vanquishing her weakness,

drew herself erect to receive the familiar chastisement.

"I am guilty--this time," she said to herself as the lash fell:--she was

thinking of her theft.

CHAPTER IV.

A score of years before, in a valley of the far north, a group of eager

and silent listeners stood gathered about one man, who spoke aloud with

fervent and rapturous oratory.

It was in the green Norwegian spring, when the silence of the winter

world had given way to a million sounds of waking life from budding

leaves and nesting birds, and melting torrents and warm winds fanning

the tender primrose into being, and wooing the red alpine rose to

blossom.

The little valley was peopled by a hardy race of herdsmen and of

fishers; men who kept their goat-flocks on the steep sides of the

mountains, or went down to the deep waters in search of a scanty

subsistence. But they were a people simple, noble, grave, even in a

manner heroic and poetic, a people nurtured on the old grand songs of a

mighty past, and holding a pure faith in the traditions of a great

sea-sovereignty. They listened, breathless, to the man who addressed

them, raised on a tribune of rough rock, and facing the ocean, where it

stretched at the northward end of the vale; a man peasant-born himself,

but gifted with a native eloquence, half-poet, half-preacher; fanatic

and enthusiast; one who held it as his errand to go to and fro the land,

raising his voice against the powers of the world, and of wealth, and

who spoke against these with a fervor and force which, to the unlearned

and impressionable multitudes that heard him, seemed the voice of a

genius heaven-sent.

When a boy he had been a shepherd, and dreaming in the loneliness of the

mountains, and by the side of the deep hill-lakes far away from any

sound or steps of human life, a madness, innocent, and in its way

beautiful, had come upon him.

He believed himself born to carry the message of grace to the nations;

and to raise his voice up against those passions whose fury had never

assailed him, and against those riches whose sweetness he had never

tasted. So he had wandered from city to city, from village to village;

mocked in some places, revered in others; protesting always against the

dominion of wealth, and speaking with a strange pathos and poetry which

thrilled the hearts of his listeners, and had almost in it, at times,

the menace and the mystery of a prophet's upbraiding.

He lived very poorly; he was gentle as a child; he was a cripple and

very feeble; he drank at the wayside rills with the dogs; he lay down on

the open fields with the cattle; yet he had a power in him that had its

sway over the people, and held the scoffers and the jesters quiet under

the spell of his tender and flutelike tones.

Raised above the little throng upon the bare red rock, with the vast

green fields and dim pine-woods stretching round him as far as his eye

could reach, he preached now to the groups of fishers and herdsmen and

foresters and hunters; protesting to this simple people against the

force of wealth, and the lust of possession, as though he preached to

princes and to conquerors. He told them of what he had seen in the great

cities through which he had wandered; of the corruption and the vileness

and the wantonness; of the greed in which the days and the years of

men's lives were spent; of the amassing of riches for which alone the

nations cared, so that all loveliness, all simplicity, all high

endeavor, all innocent pastime, were abjured and derided among them. And

his voice was sweet and full as the swell of music as he spoke to them,

telling them one of the many fables and legends, of which he had

gathered a full harvest, in the many lands that had felt his footsteps.

This was the parable he told them that day, whilst the rude toilers of

the forests and the ocean stood quiet as little children, hearkening

with upturned faces and bated breath, as the sun went down behind the

purple pines:

"There lived once in the East, a great king; he dwelt far away, among

the fragrant fields of roses, and in the light of suns that never set.

"He was young, he was beloved, he was fair of face and form; and the

people as they hewed stone or brought water, said among themselves,

'Verily, this man is as a god; he goes where he lists, and he lies still

or rises up as he pleases; and all fruits off all lands are culled for

him; and his nights are nights of gladness, and his days, when they

dawn, are all his to sleep through or spend as he wills.' But the people

were wrong. For this king was weary of his life.

"His buckler was sown with gems, but his heart beneath it was sore. For

he had been long bitterly harassed by foes who descended upon him as

wolves from the hills in their hunger, and plagued with heavy wars and

with bad rice harvests, and with many troubles to his nation that kept

it very poor, and forbade him to finish the building of new marble

palaces, and the making of fresh gardens of delight, in which his heart

was set. So he being weary of a barren land and of an empty treasury,

with all his might prayed to the gods that all he touched might turn to

gold, even as he had heard had happened to some magician long before in

other ages. And the gods gave him the thing he craved: and his treasury

overflowed. No king had ever been so rich, as this king now became in

the short space of a single summer-day.

"But it was bought with a price.

"When he stretched out his hand to gather the rose that blossomed in his

path, a golden flower scentless and stiff was all he grasped. When he

called to him the carrier-dove that sped with a scroll of love-words

across the mountains, the bird sank on his breast a carven piece of

metal. When he was athirst and shouted to his cup-bearer for drink, the

red wine ran a stream of molten gold. When he would fain have eaten, the

pulse and the pomegranate grew alike to gold between his teeth. And at

eventide when he sought the silent chambers of his harem, saying, 'Here

at least shall I find rest,' and bent his steps to the couch whereon his

best-beloved slave was sleeping, a statue of gold was all he drew into

his eager arms, and cold shut lips of sculptured gold were all that met

his own.

"That night the great king slew himself, unable any more to bear this

agony, since all around him was desolation, even though all around him

was wealth.

"Now the world is too like that king, and in its greed of gold it will

barter its life away.

"Look you,--this thing is certain: I say that the world will perish,

even as that king perished, slain as he was slain, by the curse of its

own fulfilled desire.

"The future of the world is written. For God has granted their prayer to

men. He has made them rich and their riches shall kill them.

"When all green places shall have been destroyed in the builder's lust

of gain:--when all the lands are but mountains of brick, and piles of

wood and iron:--when there is no moisture anywhere; and no rain ever

falls:--when the sky is a vault of smoke; and all the rivers rank with

poison:--when forest and stream, and moor and meadow, and all the old

green wayside beauty are things vanished and forgotten:--when every

gentle timid thing of brake and bush, of air and water, has been killed,

because it robbed them of a berry or a fruit:--when the earth is one

vast city, whose young children behold neither the green of the field,

nor the blue of the sky, and hear no song but the hiss of the steam, and

know no music but the roar of the furnace:--when the old sweet silence

of the country-side, and the old sweet sounds of waking birds, and the

old sweet fall of summer showers, and the grace of a hedge-row bough,

and the glow of the purple heather, and the note of the cuckoo and

cricket, and the freedom of waste and of woodland, are all things dead,

and remembered of no man:--then the world, like the Eastern king, will

perish miserably of famine and of drought, with gold in its stiffened

hands, and gold in its withered lips, and gold everywhere:--gold that

the people can neither eat nor drink, gold that cares nothing for them,

but mocks them horribly:--gold for which their fathers sold peace and

health, holiness and liberty:--gold that is one vast grave."

His voice sank, and the silence that followed was only filled with the

sound of the winds in the pine-woods, and the sound of the sea on the

shore.

The people were very still and afraid; for it seemed to them that he had

spoken as prophets speak, and that his words were the words of truth.

Suddenly on the awe-stricken silence an answering voice rang, clear,

scornful, bold, and with the eager and fearless defiance of youth:

"If I had been that king, I would not have cared for woman, or bird, or

rose. I would have lived long enough to enrich my nation, and mass my

armies, and die a conqueror. What would the rest have mattered? You are

mad, O Preacher! to rail against gold. You flout a god that you know

not, and that never has smiled upon you."

The speaker stood outside the crowd with a dead sea-bird in his hand; he

was in his early boyhood, he had long locks of bright hair that curled

loosely on his shoulders, and eyes of northern blue, that flashed like

steel in their scorn.

The people, indignant and terrified at the cold rough words which

blasphemed their prophet, turned with one accord to draw off the rash

doubter from that sacred audience-place, but the Preacher stayed their

hands with a gesture, and looked sadly at the boy.

"Is it thee, Arslàn? Dost thou praise gold?--I thought thou hadst

greater gods."

The boy hung his head and his face flushed.

"Gold must be power always," he muttered. "And without power what is

life?"

And he went on his way out from the people, with the dead bird, which he

had slain with a stone that he might study the exquisite mysteries of

its silvery hues.

The Preacher followed him dreamily with his glance.

"Yet he will not give his life for gold," he murmured. "For there is

that in him greater than gold, which will not let him sell it, if he

would."

CHAPTER V.

And the words of the Preacher had come true; so true that the boy Arslàn

grown to manhood, had dreamed of fame, and following the genius in him,

and having failed to force the world to faith in him, had dropped down

dying on a cold hearth, for sheer lack of bread, under the eyes of the

gods.

It had long been day when he awoke.

The wood smouldered, still warming the stone chamber. The owls that

nested in the ceiling of the hall were beating their wings impatiently

against the closed casements, blind with the light and unable to return

to their haunts and homes. The food and the wine stood beside him on the

floor; the fire had scared the rats from theft.

He raised himself slowly, and by sheer instinct ate and drank with the

avidity of long fast. Then he stared around him blankly, blinded like

the owls.

It seemed to him that he had been dead; and had risen from the grave.

"It will be to suffer it all over again in a little space," he muttered

dully.

His first sensation was disappointment, anger, weariness. He did not

reason. He only felt.

His mind was a blank.

Little by little a disjointed remembrance came to him. He remembered

that he had been famished in the coldness of the night, endured much

torment of the body, had fallen headlong and lost his consciousness.

This was all he could recall.

He looked stupidly for awhile at the burning logs; at the pile of

brambles; at the flask of wine, and the simple stores of food. He looked

at the gray closed window, through which a silvery daylight came. There

was not a sound in the house; there was only the cracking of the wood

and the sharp sealike smell of the smoking pine boughs to render the

place different from what it had been when he last had seen it.

He could recall nothing, except that he had starved for many days; had

suffered, and must have slept.

Suddenly his face burned with a flush of shame. As sense returned to

him, he knew that he must have swooned from weakness produced by cold

and hunger; that some one must have seen and succored his necessity; and

that the food which he had half unconsciously devoured must have been

the food of alms.

His limbs writhed and his teeth clinched as the thought stole on him.

To have gone through all the aching pangs of winter in silence, asking

aid of none, only to come to this at last! To have been ready to die in

all the vigor of virility, in all the strength of genius, only to be

saved by charity at the end! To have endured, mute and patient, the

travail of all the barren years, only at their close to be called back

to life by aid that was degradation!

He bit his lips till the blood started, as he thought of it. Some eyes

must have looked on him, in his wretchedness. Some face must have bent

over him in his misery. Some other human form must have been near his in

this hour of his feebleness and need, or this thing could never have

been; he would have died alone and unremembered of man, like a snake in

its swamp or a fox in its earth. And such a death would have been to him

tenfold preferable to a life restored to him by such a means as this.

Death before accomplishment is a failure, yet withal may be great; but

life paved by alms is a failure, and a failure forever inglorious.

So the shame of this ransom from death far outweighed with him the

benefit.

"Why could they not let me be?" he cried in his soul against those

unknown lives which had weighed his own with the fetters of obligation.

"Rather death than a debt! I was content to die; the bitterness was

passed. I should have known no more. Why could they not let me be!"

And his heart was hard against them. They had stolen his only

birthright--freedom.

Had he craved life so much as to desire to live by shame he would soon

have gone out into the dusky night and have snatched food enough for his

wants from some rich husbandman's granaries, or have stabbed some miser

at prayers, for a bag of gold--rather crime than the debt of a beggar.

So he reasoned; stung and made savage by the scourge of enforced

humiliation. Hating himself because, in obedience to mere animal

craving, he had taken and eaten, not asking whether what he took was his

own.

He had closed his mouth, living, and had been ready to die mute, glad

only that none had pitied him; his heart hardened itself utterly against

this unknown hand which had snatched him from death's dreamless ease and

ungrudged rest, to awaken him to a humiliation that would be as ashes in

his teeth so long as his life should last.

He arose slowly and staggered to the casement.

He fancied he was delirious, and had distempered visions of the food so

long desired. He knew that he had been starving long--how long? Long

enough for his brain to be weak and visited with phantoms. Instinctively

he touched the long round rolls of bread, the shape of the wine cask,

the wicker of the basket: they were the palpable things of common life;

they seemed to tell him that he had not dreamed.

Then it was charity? His lips moved with a curse.

That was his only thanksgiving.

The windows were unshuttered; through them he looked straight out upon

the rising day--a day rainless and pale, and full of cool softness,

after the deluge of the rains.

The faint sunlight of a spring that was still chilled by winter was shed

over the flooded fields and swollen streams; snow-white mists floated

before the languid passage of the wind; and the moist land gave back, as

in a mirror, the leafless trees, the wooden bridges, the belfries, and

the steeples, and the strange sad bleeding Christs.

On all sides near, the meadows were sheets of water, the woods seemed to

drift upon a lake; a swan's nest was washed past on broken rushes, the

great silvery birds beating their heavy wings upon the air, and pursuing

their ruined home with cries. Beyond, everything was veiled in the

twilight of the damp gray vapor; a world half seen, half shrouded,

lovely exceedingly, filled with all divine possibilities and all hidden

powers: a world such as Youth beholds with longing eyes in its visions

of the future.

"A beautiful world!" he said to himself; and he smiled wearily as he

said it.

Beautiful, certainly; in that delicious shadow; in that vague light; in

that cloudlike mist, wherein the earth met heaven.

Beautiful, certainly; all those mystical shapes rising from the sea of

moisture which hid the earth and all the things that toiled on it. It

was beautiful, this calm, dim, morning world, in which there was no

sound except the distant ringing of unseen bells; this veil of vapor,

whence sprang these fairy and fantastic shapes that cleft the watery

air; this colorless transparent exhalation, breathing up from the land

to the sky, in which all homely things took grace and mystery, and every

common and familiar form became transfigured.

It was beautiful; but this landscape had been seen too long and closely

by him for it to have power left to cheat his senses.

Under that pure and mystical veil of the refracted rain things vile, and

things full of anguish, had their being:--the cattle in the

slaughter-houses; the drunkard in the hovels; disease and debauch and

famine; the ditch, that was the common grave of all the poor; the

hospital, where pincers and knives tore the living nerves in the

inquisition of science; the fields, where the women toiled bent,

cramped, and hideous; the dumb driven beasts, patient and tortured,

forever blameless, yet forever accursed;--all these were there beneath

that lovely veil, through which there came so dreamily the slender

shafts of spires and the chimes of half-heard bells.

He stood and watched it long, so long that the clouds descended and the

vapors shifted away, and the pale sunrays shone clearly over a

disenchanted world, where roof joined roof and casement answered

casement, and the figures on the crosses became but rude and ill-carved

daubs; and the cocks crew to one another, and the herdsmen swore at

their flocks, and the oxen flinched at the goad, and the women went

forth to their field-work; and all the charm was gone.

Then he turned away.

The cold fresh breath of the morning had breathed upon him, and driven

out the dull delicious fancies that had possessed his brain. The simple

truth was plain before him: that he had been seen by some stranger in

his necessity and succored.

He was thankless; like the suicide, to whom unwelcome aid denies the

refuge of the grave, calling him back to suffer, and binding on his

shoulders the discarded burden of life's infinite weariness and woes.

He was thankless; for he had grown tired of this fruitless labor, this

abortive combat; he had grown tired of seeking credence and being

derided for his pains, while other men prostituted their powers to base

use and public gain, receiving as their wages honor and applause; he had

grown tired of toiling to give beauty and divinity to a world which knew

them not when it beheld them.

He had grown tired, though he was yet young, and had strength, and had

passion, and had manhood. Tired--utterly, because he was destitute of

all things save his genius, and in that none were found to believe.

"I have tried all things, and there is nothing of any worth." It does

not need to have worn the imperial purples and to be lying dying in old

age to know thus much in all truth and all bitterness.

"Why did they give me back my life?" he said in his heart, as he turned

aside from the risen sun.

He had striven to do justly with this strange, fleeting, unasked gift of

existence, which comes, already warped, into our hands, and is broken by

death ere we can set it straight.

He had not spent it in riot or madness, in lewd love or in gambling

greed; he had been governed by great desires, though these had been

fruitless, and had spent his strength to a great end, though this had

been never reached.

As he turned from looking out upon the swollen stream that rushed

beneath his windows, his eyes fell upon the opposite wall, where the

white shapes of his cartoons were caught by the awakening sun.

The spider had drawn his dusty trail across them; the rat had squatted

at their feet; the darkness of night had enshrouded and defaced them;

yet with the morning they arose, stainless, noble, undefiled.

Among them there was one colossal form, on which the sun poured with its

full radiance.

This was the form of a captive grinding at a millstone; the majestic

symmetrical supple form of a man who was also a god.

In his naked limbs there was a supreme power; in his glance there was a

divine command; his head was lifted as though no yoke could ever lie on

that proud neck; his foot seemed to spurn the earth as though no mortal

tie had ever bound him to the sod that human steps bestrode: yet at the

corn-mill he labored, grinding wheat like the patient blinded oxen that

toiled beside him.

For it was the great Apollo in Pheræ.

The hand which awoke the music of the spheres had been blood-stained

with murder; the beauty which had the light and luster of the sun had

been darkened with passion and with crime; the will which no other on

earth or in heaven could withstand had been bent under the chastisement

of Zeus.

He whose glance had made the black and barren slopes of Delos to laugh

with fruitfulness and gladness,--he whose prophetic sight beheld all

things past, present, and to come, the fate of all unborn races, the

doom of all unspent ages,--he, the Far-Striking King, labored here

beneath the curse of crime, greatest of all the gods, and yet a slave.

In all the hills and vales of Greece his Io pæan sounded still.

Upon his holy mountains there still arose the smoke of fires of

sacrifice.

With dance and song the Delian maidens still hailed the divinity of

Lètô's son.

The waves of the pure Ionian air still rang forever with the name of

Delphinios.

At Pytho and at Clarus, in Lycia and in Phokis, his oracles still

breathed forth upon their fiat terror or hope into the lives of men; and

still in all the virgin forests of the world the wild beasts honored him

wheresoever they wandered, and the lion and the boar came at his bidding

from the deserts to bend their free necks and their wills of fire meekly

to bear his yoke in Thessaly.

Yet he labored here at the corn-mill of Admetus; and watching him at his

bondage there stood the slender, slight, wing-footed Hermes, with a slow

mocking smile upon his knavish lips, and a jeering scorn in his keen

eyes, even as though he cried:

"O brother, who would be greater than I! For what hast thou bartered to

me the golden rod of thy wealth, and thy dominion over the flocks and

the herds? For seven chords strung on a shell--for a melody not even

thine own! For a lyre outshone by my syrinx hast thou sold all thine

empire to me! Will human ears give heed to thy song, now thy scepter has

passed to my hands? Immortal music only is left thee, and the vision

foreseeing the future. O god! O hero! O fool! what shall these profit

thee now?"

Thus to the artist by whom they had been begotten the dim white shapes

of the deities spoke. Thus he saw them, thus he heard, whilst the pale

and watery sunlight lit up the form of the toiler in Pheræ.

For even as it was with the divinity of Delos, so is it likewise with

the genius of a man, which, being born of a god, yet is bound as a slave

to the grindstone. Since, even as Hermes mocked the Lord of the Unerring

Bow, so is genius mocked of the world when it has bartered the herds,

and the grain, and the rod that metes wealth, for the seven chords that

no ear, dully mortal, can hear.

And as he looked upon this symbol of his life, the captivity and the

calamity, the strength and the slavery of his existence overcame him;

and for the first hour since he had been born of a woman Arslàn buried

his face in his hands and wept.

He could bend great thoughts to take the shapes that he chose, as the

chained god in Pheræ bound the strong kings of the desert and forest to

carry his yoke; yet, like the god, he likewise stood fettered to the

mill to grind for bread.

BOOK IV.

CHAPTER I.

A valley long and narrow, shut out from the rest of the living world by

the ramparts of stone that rose on either side to touch the clouds;

dense forests of pines, purple as night, where the erl-king rode and the

bear-king reigned; at one end mountains, mist, and gloom, at the other

end the ocean; brief days with the sun shed on a world of snow, in which

the sounds of the winds and the moans of the wolves alone were heard in

the solitude; long nights of marvelous magnificence with the stars of

the arctic zone glowing with an unbearable luster above a sea of

phosphorescent fire; those were Arslàn's earliest memories--those had

made him what he was.

In that pine-clothed Norwegian valley, opening to the sea, there were a

few homesteads gathered together round a little wooden church, with

torrents falling above them, and a profound loneliness around; severed

by more than a day's journey from any other of the habitations of men.

There a simple idyllic life rolled slowly on through the late and lovely

springtimes, when the waters loosened and the seed sprouted, and the

white blossoms broke above the black ground: through the short and

glorious summers, when the children's eyes saw the elves kiss the roses,

and the fairies float on the sunbeam, and the maidens braided their fair

hair with blue cornflowers to dance on the eve of St. John: through the

long and silent winters, when an almost continual night brooded over all

things, and the thunder of the ocean alone answered the war of the

wind-torn forests, and the blood-red blaze of the northern light gleamed

over a white still mountain world, and, within doors, by the warm wood

fire the youths sang Scandinavian ballads, and the old people told

strange sagas, and the mothers, rocking their new-born sons to sleep,

prayed God to have mercy on all human lives drowning at sea and frozen

in the snow.

In this alpine valley, a green nest, hidden amidst stupendous walls of

stone, bottomless precipices, and summits that touched the clouds, there

was a cottage even smaller and humbler than most, and closest of all to

the church. It was the house of the pastor.

The old man had been born there, and had lived there all the years of

his life,--save a few that he had passed in a town as a student,--and he

had wedded a neighbor who, like himself, had known no other home than

this one village. He was gentle, patient, simple, and full of

tenderness; he worked, like his people, all the week through in the open

weather among his fruit-trees, his little breadth of pasturage, his

herb-garden, and his few sheep.

On the Sabbath-day he preached to the people the creed that he himself

believed in with all the fond, unquestioning, implicit faith of the

young children who lifted to him their wondering eyes.

He was good; he was old: in his simple needs and his undoubting hopes he

was happy; all the living things of his little world loved him, and he

loved them. So fate lit on him to torture him, as it is its pleasure to

torture the innocent.

It sent him a daughter who was fair to sight, and had a voice like

music; a form lithe and white, hair of gold, and with eyes like her own

blue skies on a summer night.

She had never seen any other spot save her own valley; but she had the

old Norse blood in her veins, and she was restless; the sea tempted her

with an intense power; she desired passionately without knowing what she

desired.

The simple pastoral work, the peaceful household labors, the girls'

garland of alpine flowers, the youths' singing in the brief rose

twilight, the saga told the thousandth time around the lamp in the deep

midwinter silence; these things would not suffice for her. The old

Scandinavian Bersaeck madness was in her veins. The mountains were to

her as the walls of a tomb. And one day the sea tempted her too utterly;

beyond her strength; as a lover, after a thousand vain entreaties, one

day tempts a woman, and one day finds her weak. The sea vanquished her,

and she went--whither?

They hardly knew: to these old people the world that lay behind their

mountain fortress was a blank. It might be a paradise; it might be a

prison. They could not tell.

They suffered their great agony meekly; they never cursed her; they did

not even curse their God because they had given life to a woman-child.

After awhile they heard of her.

She wrote them tender and glowing words; she was well, she was proud,

she was glad, she had found those who told her that she had a voice

which was a gift of gold, and that she might sing in triumph to the

nations. Such tidings came to her parents from time to time; brief

words, first teeming with hope, then delirious with triumph, yet ever

ending with a short, sad sigh of conscience, a prayer for pardon--pardon

for what? The letters never said: perhaps only for the sin of desertion.

The slow salt tears of age fell on these glowing pages in which the

heart of a young, vainglorious, mad, tender creature had stamped itself;

but the old people never spoke of them to others. "She is happy, it does

not matter for us." This was all they said, yet this gentle patience was

a martyrdom too sharp to last; within that year the mother died, and the

old man was left alone.

The long winter came, locking the valley within its fortress of ice,

severing it from all the rest of the breathing human world; and the

letters ceased. He would not let them say that she had forgotten; he

chose to think that it was the wall of snow which was built up between

them rather than any division raised by her ingratitude and oblivion.

The sweet, sudden spring came, all the white and golden flowers breaking

up from the hard crust of the soil, and all the loosened waters rushing

with a shout of liberty to join the sea. The summer followed, with the

red mountain roses blossoming by the brooks, and the green mountain

grasses blowing in the wind, with the music of the herd-bells ringing

down the passes, and the sound of the fife and of the reed-pipe calling

the maidens to the dance.

In the midst of the summer, one night, when all the stars were shining

above the quiet valley, and all the children slept under the roofs with

the swallows, and not a soul was stirring, save where here and there a

lover watched a light glare in some lattice underneath the eaves, a

half-dead woman dragged herself feebly under the lime-tree shadows of

the pastor's house, and struck with a faint cry upon the door and fell

at her father's feet, broken and senseless. Before the full day dawned

she had given birth to a male child and was dead.

Forgiveness had killed her; she might have borne reproach, injury,

malediction, but against that infinite love which would bear with her

even in her wretchedness, and would receive her even in her abasement,

she had no strength.

She died as her son's eyes opened to the morning light. He inherited no

name, and they called him after his grandsire, Arslàn.

When his dead daughter lay stretched before him in the sunlight, with

her white large limbs folded to rest, and her noble fair face calm as a

mask of marble, the old pastor knew little--nothing--of what her life

through these two brief years had been. Her lips had scarcely breathed a

word before she had fallen senseless on his threshold. That she had had

triumph he knew; that she had fallen into dire necessities he saw.

Whether she had surrendered art for the sake of love, or whether she had

lost the public favor by some public caprice, whether she had been

eminent or obscure in her career, whether it had abandoned her, or she

had abandoned it, he could not tell, and he knew too little of the world

to be able to learn.

That she had traveled back on her weary way homeward to her native

mountains that her son might not perish amidst strangers; thus much he

knew, but no more. Nor was more ever known by any living soul.

In life there are so many histories which are like broken boughs that

strew the ground, snapped short at either end, so that none know the

crown of them nor the root.

The child, whom she had left, grew in goodliness, and strength, and

stature, until the people said that he was like the child-king, whom

their hero Frithiof raised up upon his buckler above the multitude: and

who was not afraid, but boldly gripped the brazen shield, and smiled

fearlessly at the noonday sun.

The child had his mother's Scandinavian beauty; the beauty of a marble

statue, white as the snow, of great height and largely moulded; and his

free life amidst the ice-fields and the pine-woods, and on the wide,

wild northern seas developed these bodily to their uttermost perfection.

The people admired and wondered at him; love him they did not. The lad

was cold, dauntless, silent; he repelled their sympathies and disdained

their pastimes. He chose rather to be by himself, than with them. He was

never cruel; but he was never tender; and when he did speak he spoke

with a sort of eloquent scorn and caustic imagery that seemed to them

extraordinary in one so young.

But his grandfather loved him with a sincere love, though it was tinged

with so sharp a bitterness; and reared him tenderly and wisely; and

braced him with a scholar's lore and by a mountaineer's exposure; so

that both brain and body had their due. He was a simple childlike broken

old man; but in this youth of promise that unfolded itself beside his

age seemed to strike fresh root, and he had wisdom and skill enough to

guide it justly.

The desire of his soul was that his grandson should succeed him in the

spiritual charge of that tranquil and beloved valley, and thus escape

the dire perils of that world in which his mother's life had been caught

and consumed like a moth's in flame. But Arslàn's eyes looked ever

across the ocean with that look in them which had been in his mother's;

and when the old Norseman spoke of this holy and peaceful future, he was

silent.

Moreover, he--who had never beheld but the rude paintings on panels of

pine that decorated the little red church under the firs and

lindens,--he had the gift of art in him.

He had few and rough means only with which to make his crude and

unguided essays; but the delirium of it was on him, and the peasants of

his village gazed awe-stricken and adoring before the things which he

drew on every piece of pine-wood, on every smooth breadth of sea-worn

granite, on every bare surface of lime-washed wall that he could find at

liberty for his usage.

When they asked him what, in his manhood, he would do, he said little.

"I will never leave the old man," he made answer; and he kept his word.

Up to his twentieth year he never quitted the valley. He studied deeply,

after his own manner; but nearly all his hours were passed in the open

air alone, in the pure cold air of the highest mountain summits, amidst

the thunder of the furious torrents, in the black recesses of lonely

forests, where none, save the wolf and the bear, wandered with him; or

away on the vast expanse of the sea, where the storm drove the great

arctic waves like scourged sheep, and the huge breakers seized the shore

as a panther its prey.

On such a world as this, and on the marvelous nights of the north, his

mind fed itself and his youth gained its powers. The faint, feeble life

of the old man held him to this lonely valley that seemed filled with

the coldness, the mystery, the unutterable terror and the majesty of the

arctic pole, to which it looked; but unknown to him, circumstance thus

held him likewise where alone the genius in him could take its full

shape and full stature.

Unknown to him, in these years it took the depth, the strength, the

patience, the melancholy, the virility of the North; took these never to

be lost again.

In the twentieth winter of his life an avalanche engulfed the pastor's

house, and the little church by which it stood, covering both beneath a

mountain of earth and snow and rock and riven trees. Some of the timbers

withstood the shock, and the roof remained standing, uncrushed, above

their heads. The avalanche fell some little time after midnight: there

were only present in the dwelling himself, the old man, and a serving

woman.

The woman was killed on her bed by the fall of a beam upon her; he and

the pastor still lived: lived in perpetual darkness without food or

fuel, or any ray of light.

The wooden clock stood erect, uninjured; they could hear the hours go by

in slow succession. The old man was peaceful and even cheerful; praising

God often and praying that help might come to his beloved one. But his

strength could not hold out against the icy cold, the long hunger, the

dreadful blank around as of perpetual night. He died ere the first day

had wholly gone by, at even-song; saying still that he was content, and

still praising God who had rewarded his innocence with shame and

recompensed his service with agony.

For two more days and nights Arslàn remained in his living tomb,

enshrouded in eternal gloom, alone with the dead, stretching out his

hands ever and again to meet that icy touch rather than be without

companionship.

On the morning of the third day the people of the village, who had

labored ceaselessly, reached him, and he was saved.

As soon as the spring broke he left the valley and passed over the

mountains, seeking a new world.

His old familiar home had become hateful to him; he had no tie to it

save two low graves, still snow-covered underneath a knot of tall

stone-pines; the old Norse passion of wandering was in his veins as it

had been in his mother's before him; he fiercely and mutely descried

freedom, passion, knowledge, art, fame, as she had desired them, and he

went: turning his face from that lowly green nest lying like a lark's

between the hills.

He did not go as youth mostly goes, blind with a divine dream of

triumph: he went, consciously, to a bitter combat as the sea-kings of

old, whose blood ran in his veins, and whose strength was in his limbs,

had gone to war, setting their prow hard against the sharp salt waves

and in the teeth of an adverse wind.

He was not without money. The pastor, indeed, had died almost penniless;

he had been always poor, and had given the little he possessed to those

still poorer. But the richest landowner in the village, the largest

possessor of flocks and herds, dying childless, had bequeathed his farm

and cattle to Arslàn; having loved the lad's dead mother silently and

vainly. The value of these realized by sale gave to Arslàn, when he

became his own master, what, in that valley at least, was wealth; and he

went without care for the future on this score into the world of men;

his mind full of dreams and the beautiful myths of dead ages; his temper

compounded of poetry and of coldness, of enthusiasm and of skepticism;

his one passion a supreme ambition, pure as snow in its instinct, but

half savage in its intensity.

From that spring, when he had passed away from his birthplace as the

winter snows were melting on the mountain-sides, and the mountain

flowers were putting forth their earliest buds under the pine-boughs,

until the time that he now stood solitary, starving, and hopeless before

the mocking eyes of his Hermes, twelve years had run their course, and

all through them he had never once again beheld his native land.

Like the Scandinavian Regner, he chose rather to perish in the folds,

and by the fangs, of the snakes that devoured him than return to his

country with the confession of defeat. And despite the powers that were

in him, his life had been a failure, an utter failure--as yet.

In his early youth he had voyaged often with men who went to the extreme

north in search of skins and such poor trade as they could drive with

Esquimaux or Koraks; he had borne their dangers and their poverty, their

miseries and their famine, for sake of seeing what they saw;--the

pathless oceans of the ice realm, the trailing pines alone in a white,

snow-world, the red moon fantastic and horrible in a sky of steel, the

horned clouds of reindeer rushing through the endless night, the arch of

the aurora spanning the heavens with their fire. He had passed many

seasons of his boyhood in the silence, the solitude, the eternal

desolation of the mute mystery of the arctic world, which for no man has

either sympathy or story; and in a way he had loved it, and was often

weary for it; in a way its spirit remained with him always; and its

inexorable coldness, its pitiless indifference to men's wants and

weakness, its loneliness and its purity, and its scorn, were in all the

works of his hand; blended in a strange union with the cruelty and the

voluptuousness, and the gorgeousness of color, that gave to everything

he touched the gleed and the temper of the case.

Thus, what he did pleased none; being for one half the world too chill,

and being for the other half too sensual.

The world had never believed in him; and he found himself in the height

and the maturity of his powers condemned to an absolute obscurity. Not

one man in a million knew his name.

During these years he had devoted himself to the study of art with an

undeviating subservience to all its tyrannies. He had studied humanity

in all its phases; he had studied form with all the rigid care that it

requires; he had studied color in almost every land that lies beneath

the sun; he had studied the passions in all their deformities, as well

as in all their beauties; he had spared neither himself nor others in

pursuit of knowledge. He had tried most vices, he had seen all miseries,

he had spared himself no spectacle, however loathsome; he had turned

back from no license, however undesired, that could give him insight

into or empire over human raptures and affliction. Neither did he spare

himself any labor however costly, however exhausting, to enrich his

brain with that varied learning, that multifarious scene which he held

needful to every artist who dared to desire greatness. The hireling

beauty of the wanton, the splendor of the sun and sea, the charnel lore

of anatomy, the secrets of dead tongues and buried nations, the horrors

of the lazar wards and pest-houses, the glories of golden deserts and

purple vineyards, the flush of love on a young girl's cheek, the

rottenness of corruption on a dead man's limbs, the hellish tint of a

brothel, the divine calm of an Eastern night; all things alike he

studied, without abhorrence as without delight, indifferent to all save

for one end,--knowledge and art.

So entirely and undividedly did this possess him that it seemed to have

left him without other passions; even as the surgeon dissects the fair

lifeless body of some woman's corpse, regardless of loveliness or sex,

only intent on the secret of disease, the mystery of formation, which he

seeks therein, so did he study the physical beauty of women and their

mortal corruption, without other memories than those of art. He would

see the veil fall from off the limbs of a creature lovely as a goddess,

and would think only to himself,--"How shall I render this so that on my

canvas it shall live once more?"

One night, in the hot, close streets of Damascus, a man was stabbed,--a

young Maronite,--who lay dying in the roadway, without sign or sound,

whilst his assassins fled; the silver Syrian moon shining full on his

white and scarlet robe, his calm, upturned face, his lean hand knotted

on the dagger he had been spared no time to use; a famished street dog

smelling at his blood. Arslàn, passing through the city, saw and paused

beside him; stood still and motionless, looking down on the outstretched

figure; then drew his tablets out and sketched the serene, rigid face,

the flowing, blood-soaked robes, the hungry animal mouthing at the

wound. Another painter, his familiar friend, following on his steps,

joined him a little later, and started from his side in horror.

"My God! what do you do there?" he cried. "Do you not see?--the man is

dying."

Arslàn looked up--"I had not thought of that," he answered.

It was thus always with him.

He was not cruel for the sake of cruelty. To animals he was humane, to

women gentle, to men serene; but his art was before all things with him,

and with humanity he had little sympathy: and if he had passions, they

had wakened no more than as the drowsy tiger wakes in the hot hush of

noon, half indifferent, half lustful, to strike fiercely what comes

before her, and then, having slain, couches herself and sleeps again.

But for this absolute surrender of his life, his art had as yet

recompensed him nothing.

Men did not believe in him; what he wrought saddened and terrified them;

they turned aside to those who fed them on simpler and on sweeter food.

His works were great, but they were such as the public mind deems

impious. They unveiled human corruption too nakedly, and they shadowed

forth visions too exalted, and satires too unsparing, for them to be

acceptable to the multitude. They were compounded of an idealism clear

and cold as crystal, and of a reality cruel and voluptuous as love. They

were penetrated with an acrid satire and an intense despair: the world,

which only cares for a honeyed falsehood and a gilded gloss in every

art, would have none of them.

So for these twelve long years his labor had been waste, his efforts

been fruitless. Those years had been costly to him in purse;--travel,

study, gold flung to fallen women, sums spent on faithless friends,

utter indifference to whosoever robbed him so long as he was left in

peace to pursue lofty aims and high endeavors; all these did their

common work on wealth which was scanty in the press of the world, though

it had appeared inexhaustible on the shores of the north sea. His labors

also were costly, and they brought him no return.

The indifference to fortune of a man of genius is, to a man of the

world, the stupor of idiocy: from such a stupor he was shaken one day to

find himself face to face with beggary.

His works were seen by few, and these few were antagonistic to them.

All ways to fame were closed to him, either by the envy of other

painters, or by the apathies and the antipathies of the nations

themselves. In all lands he was repulsed; he roused the jealousy of his

compeers and the terror of the multitudes. They hurled against him the

old worn-out cry that the office of art was to give pleasure, not pain;

and when his money was gone, so that he could no longer, at his own

cost, expose his works to the public gaze, they and he were alike

obliterated from the public marts; they had always denied him fame, and

they now thrust him quickly into oblivion, and abandoned him to it

without remorse, and even with contentment.

He could, indeed, with the facile power of eye and touch that he

possessed, have easily purchased a temporary ease, an evanescent repute,

if he had given the world from his pencil those themes for which it

cared, and descended to the common spheres of common art. But he refused

utterly to do this. The best and greatest thing in him was his honesty

to the genius wherewith he was gifted; he refused to prostitute it; he

refused to do other than to tell the truth as he saw it.

"This man blasphemes; this man is immoral," his enemies had always

hooted against him.

It is what the world always says of those who utter unwelcome truths in

its unwilling ears.

So the words of the old Scald by his own northern seashores came to

pass; and at length, for the sake of art, it came to this, that he

perished for want of bread.

For seven days he had been without food, except the winter berries which

he broke off the trees without, and such handfuls of wheat as fell

through the disjointed timbers of the ceiling, for whose possession he

disputed with the rats.

The sheer, absolute poverty which leaves the man whom it has seized

without so much as even a crust wherewith to break his fast, is commoner

than the world in general ever dreams. For he was now so poor that for

many months he had been unable to buy fresh canvas on which to work, and

had been driven to chalk the outlines of the innumerable fancies that

pursued him upon the bare smooth gray stone walls of the old granary in

which he dwelt.

He let his life go silently away without complaint, and without effort,

because effort had been so long unavailing, that he had discarded it in

a contemptuous despair.

He accepted his fate, seeing nothing strange in it, and nothing

pitiable; since many men better than he had borne the like. He could not

have altered it without beggary or theft, and he thought either of these

worse than itself.

There were hecatombs of grain, bursting their sacks, in the lofts above;

but when, once on each eighth day, the maltster owning them sent his men

to fetch some from the store, Arslàn let the boat be moored against the

wall, be filled with barley, and be pushed away again down the current,

without saying once to the rowers, "Wait; I starve!"

And yet, though like a miser amidst his gold, his body starved amidst

the noble shapes and the great thoughts that his brain conceived and his

hand called into substance, he never once dreamed of abandoning for any

other the career to which he had dedicated himself from the earliest

days that his boyish eyes had watched the vast arc of the arctic lights

glow above the winter seas.

Art was to him as mother, brethren, mistress, offspring, religion--all

that other men hold dear. He had none of these, he desired none of them;

and his genius sufficed to him in their stead.

It was an intense and reckless egotism, made alike cruel and sublime by

its intensity and purity, like the egotism of a mother in her child. To

it, as the mother to her child, he would have sacrificed every living

creature; but to it also, like her, he would have sacrificed his very

existence as unhesitatingly. But it was an egotism which, though

merciless in its tyranny, was as pure as snow in its impersonality; it

was untainted by any grain of avarice, of vanity, of selfish desire; it

was independent of all sympathy; it was simply and intensely the passion

for immortality:--that sublime selfishness, that superb madness, of all

great minds.

Art had taken him for its own, as Demeter, in the days of her

desolation, took the child Demophoon, to nurture him as her own on the

food of gods, and to plunge him through the flames of a fire that would

give him immortal life. As the pusillanimous and sordid fears of the

mortal mother lost to the child for evermore the possession of Olympian

joys and of perpetual youth, so did the craven and earthly cares of

bodily needs hold the artist back from the radiance of the life of the

soul, and drag him from the purifying fires. Yet he had not been utterly

discouraged; he strove against the Metaniera of circumstance; he did his

best to struggle free from the mortal bonds that bound him; and as the

child Demophoon mourned for the great goddess that had nurtured him,

refusing to be comforted, so did he turn from the base consolations of

the senses and the appetites, and beheld ever before his sight the

ineffable majesty of that Mater Dolorosa who once had anointed him as

her own.

Even now, as the strength returned to his limbs and the warmth to his

veins, the old passion, the old worship, returned to him.

The momentary weakness which had assailed him passed away. He shook

himself with a bitter impatient scorn for the feebleness into which he

had been betrayed; and glanced around him still with a dull wonder as to

the strange chances which the night past had brought. He was incredulous

still; he thought that his fancy, heated by long fasting, might have

cheated him; that he must have dreamed; and that the food and fuel which

he saw must surely have been his own.

Yet reflection told him that this could not be; he remembered that for

several weeks his last coin had been spent; that he had been glad to

gather the birds' winter berries to crush beneath his teeth, and gather

the dropped corn from the floor to quiet the calm of hunger; that for

many a day there had been no fire on the hearth, and that only a frame

which the long sunless northern winters had braced in early youth, had

enabled him to resist and endure the cold. Therefore, it must be

charity!

Charity! as the hateful truth came home to him, he met the eyes of the

white, slender, winged Hermes; eyes that from out that colorless and

smiling face seemed to mock him with a cruel contempt.

His was the old old story;--the rod of wealth bartered for the empty

shell that gave forth music.

Hermes seemed to know it and to jeer him.

Hermes, the mischief-monger, and the trickster of men, the inventive god

who spent his days in chicanery of his brethren, and his nights in the

mockery of mortals; the messenger of heaven who gave Pandora to mankind;

Hermes, the eternal type of unscrupulous Success, seemed to have voice

and cry to him:--"Oh, fool, fool, fool! who listens for the music of the

spheres and disdains the only melody that men have ears to hear--the

melody of gold!"

Arslàn turned from the great cartoon of the gods in Pheræ, and went out

into the daylight, and stripped and plunged into the cold and turbulent

stream. Its chillness and the combat of its current braced his nerves

and cleared his brain.

When he was clad, he left the grain-tower with the white forms of its

gods upon its walls, and walked slowly down the bank of the river. Since

life had been forced back upon him he knew that it was incumbent upon

his manhood to support it by the toil of his hands if men would not

accept the labor of his brain.

Before, he had been too absorbed in his pursuit, too devoted to it body

and soul, to seek to sustain existence by the sheer manual exertion

which was the only thing that he had left untried for self-maintenance.

In a manner too he was too proud; not too proud to labor, but too proud

to easily endure to lay bare his needs to the knowledge of others. But

now, human charity must have saved him; a charity which he hated as the

foulest insult of his life; and he had no chance save to accept it like

a beggar bereft of all shame, or to seek such work as would give him his

daily bread.

So he went; feebly, for he was still weak from the length of his famine.

The country was well known to him, but the people not at all. He had

come by hazard on the old ruin where he dwelt, and had stayed there full

a year. These serene blue skies, these pale mists, these corn-clad

slopes, these fields of plenteous abundance, these quiet homesteads,

these fruit-harvests of this Norman plain were in soothing contrast to

all that his life had known.

These old quaint cities, these little villages that seemed always hushed

with the sound of bells, these quiet streams on which the calm sunlight

slept so peacefully, these green and golden lands of plenty that

stretched away to the dim gray distant sea,--all these had had a certain

charm for him.

He had abided with them, partly because amidst them it seemed possible

to live on a handful of wheat and a draught of water, unnoticed and

unpitied; partly because having come hither on foot through many lands

and by long hardship, he had paused here weary and incapable of further

effort.

Whilst the little gold he had had on him had lasted he had painted

innumerable transcripts of its ancient buildings, and of its summer and

autumnal landscapes. And of late--through the bitter winter--of late it

had seemed to him that it was as well to die here as elsewhere.

When a man knows that his dead limbs will be huddled into the common

ditch of the poor, the nameless, and the unclaimed, and that his dead

brain will only serve for soil to feed some little rank wayside

poisonous weed, it will seldom seem of much moment in what earth the

ditch be dug, by what feet the sward be trod.

He went now on his way seeking work; he did not care what, he asked for

any that might serve to use such strength as hunger had left in him, and

to give him his daily bread. But this is a great thing to demand in this

world, and so he found it.

They repulsed him everywhere.

They had their own people in plenty, they had their sturdy, tough,

weather-beaten women, who labored all day in rain, or snow, or storm,

for a pittance, and they had these in larger numbers than their

field-work needed. They looked at him askance; this man with the eyes of

arctic blue and the grave gestures of a king, who only asked to labor as

the lowest among them. He was a stranger to them; he did not speak their

tongue with their accent; he looked, with that white beauty and that

lofty stature, as though he could crush them in the hollow of his hand.

They would have none of him.

"He brings misfortune!" they said among themselves; and they would have

none of him.

He had an evil name with them.

They said at eventide by their wood-fires that strange things had been

seen since he had come to the granary by the river.

Once he had painted a study of the wondrous child Zagreus gazing in the

fatal mirror, from the pretty face of a stonecutter's little fair son;

the child was laughing, happy, healthful at noon, crowned with

carnations and river-lilies, and by sunset he was dead--dead like the

flowers that were still among his curls.

Once a girl had hired herself as model to him for an Egyptian wanton,

half a singer and half a gypsy--handsome, lithe, fantastic, voluptuous:

the very night she left the granary she was drowned in crossing a wooden

bridge of the river, which gave way under the heavy tramp of a

fantoccini player who accompanied her.

Once he had sketched, for the corner of an Oriental study, a

rare-plumaged bird of the south, which was the idol of a water-carrier

of the district, and the wonder of all the children round: and from that

date the bird had sickened, and drooped, and lost its colors, and pined

until it died.

The boy's death had been from a sudden seizure of one of the many ills

of infancy; the dancing-girl's had come from a common accident due to

the rottenness of old worn water-soaked timber; the mocking-bird's had

arisen from the cruelty of captivity and the chills of northern winds;

all had been the result of simple accident and of natural circumstance.

But they had sufficed to fill with horror the minds of a peasantry

always bigoted and strongly prejudiced against every stranger; and it

became to them a matter of implicit credence that whatsoever living

thing should be painted by the artist Arslàn would assuredly never

survive to see the rising of the morrow's sun.

In consequence, for leagues around they shunned him; not man, nor woman,

nor child would sit to him as models; and now, when he sought the wage

of a daily labor among them, he was everywhere repulsed. He had long

repulsed human sympathy, and in its turn it repulsed him.

At last he turned and retraced his steps, baffled and wearied; his early

habits had made him familiar with all manner of agricultural toil; he

would have done the task of the sower, the herdsman, the hewer of wood,

or the charcoal-burner; but they would none of them believe this of one

with his glance and his aspect; and solicitation was new to his lips and

bitter there as gall.

He took his way back along the line of the river; the beauty of the dawn

had gone, the day was only now chilly, heavy with a rank moisture from

the steaming soil. Broken boughs and uprooted bushes were floating on

the turgid water, and over all the land there hung a sullen fog.

The pressure of the air, the humidity, the colorless stillness that

reigned throughout, weighed on lungs which for a score of years had only

breathed the pure, strong, rarefied air of the north; he longed with a

sudden passion to be once more amidst his native mountains under the

clear steel-like skies, and beside the rush of the vast wild seas. Were

it only to die as he looked on them, it were better to die there than

here.

He longed, as men in deserts thirst for drink, for one breath of the

strong salt air of the north, one sight of the bright keen sea-born sun

as it leapt at dawn from the waters.

The crisp cold nights, the heavens which shone as steel, the forests

filled with the cry of the wolves, the mountains which the ocean

ceaselessly assailed, the mighty waves which marched erect like armies,

the bitter arctic wind which like a saber cleft the darkness; all these

came back to him beloved and beautiful in all their cruelty; desired by

him, with a sick longing for their freshness, for their fierceness, for

their freedom.

As he dragged his tired limbs through the grasses and looked out upon

the sullen stream that flowed beside him, an oar struck the water, a

flat black boat drifted beneath the bank, a wild swan disturbed rose

with a hiss from the sedges.

The boat was laden with grain; there was only one rower in it, who

steered by a string wound round her foot.

She did not lift her face as she went by him; but her bent brow and her

bosom grew red, and she cut the water with a swifter, sharper stroke;

her features were turned from him by that movement of her head, but he

saw the Eastern outline of the cheek and chin, the embrowned velvet of

the skin, the half-bare beauty of the heaving chest and supple spine

bent back in the action of the oars, the long, slender, arched shape of

the naked foot, round which the cord was twined: their contour and their

color struck him with a sudden surprise.

He had seen such oftentimes, eastwards, on the banks of golden rivers,

treading, with such feet as these, the sands that were the dust of

countless nations; bearing, on such shoulders as these, earthen

water-vases that might have served the feasts of Pharaohs; showing such

limbs as these against the curled palm branches, and the deep blue sky,

upon the desert's edge. But here!--a face of Asia among the cornlands of

Northern France? It seemed to him strange; he looked after her with

wonder.

The boat went on down the stream without any pause; the sculls cleaving

the heavy tide with regular and resolute monotony; the amber piles of

the grain and the brown form of the bending figure soon hidden in the

clouds of river-mist.

He watched her, only seeing a beggar-girl rowing a skiff full of corn

down a sluggish stream. There was nothing to tell him that he was

looking upon the savior of his body from the thralls of death; if there

had been,--in his mood then,--he would have cursed her.

The boat glided into the fog which closed behind it: a flock of

water-birds swam out from the rushes and darted at some floating kernels

of wheat that had fallen over the vessel's side; they fought and hissed,

and flapped and pecked among themselves over the chance plunder; a large

rat stole amidst them unnoticed by them in their exultation, and seized

their leader and bore him struggling and beating the air with

blood-stained wings away to a hole in the bank; a mongrel dog, prowling

on the shore, hearing the wild duck's cries, splashed into the sedges,

and swam out and gripped the rat by the neck in bold sharp fangs, and

bore both rat and bird, bleeding and dying, to the land; the owner of

the mongrel, a peasant, making ready the soil for colza in the low-lying

fields, snatched the duck from the dog to bear it home for his own

eating, and kicked his poor beast in the ribs for having ventured to

stray without leave and to do him service without permission. "The

dulcet harmony of the world's benignant law," thought Arslàn, as he

turned aside to enter the stone archway of his own desolate dwelling.

"To live one must slaughter--what life can I take?"

At that moment the setting sun pierced the heavy veil of the vapor, and

glowed through the fog.

The boat, now distant, glided for a moment into the ruddy haze, and was

visible; the water around it, like a lake of flame, the white steam

above it like the smoke of a sacrifice fire.

Then the sun sank, the mists gathered closely once more, all light

faded, and the day was dead.

He felt stifled and sick at heart as he returned along the reedy shore

towards his dreary home. He wondered dully why his life would not end:

since the world would have none of him, neither the work of his brain

nor the work of his hands, it seemed that he had no place in it.

He was half resolved to lie down in the water there, among the reeds,

and let it flow over his face and breast, and kiss him softly and coldly

into the sleep of death. He had desired this many times; what held him

back from its indulgence was not "the child within us that fears death,"

of which Plato speaks; he had no such misgiving in him, and he believed

death to be a simple rupture and end of all things, such as any man had

right to seek and summon for himself; it was rather that the passion of

his art was too strong in him, that the power to create was too intense

in him, so that he could not willingly consign the forces and the

fantasies of his brain to that assimilation to which he would, without

thought or pause, have flung his body.

As he entered the haunted hall which served him as his painting-room, he

saw a fresh fire of logs upon the hearth; whose leaping flames lighted

the place with cheerful color, and he saw on the stone bench fresh food,

sufficient to last several days, and a brass flagon filled with wine.

A curious emotion took possession of him as he looked. It was less

surprise at the fact, for his senses told him that it was the work of

some charity which chose to hide itself, than it was wonder as to who,

in this strange land, where none would even let him earn his daily

bread, knew enough or cared enough to supply his necessities thus. And

with this there arose the same intolerant bitterness of the degradation

of alms, the same ungrateful hatred of the succor that seemed to class

him among beggars, which had moved him when he had awakened with the

dawn.

He felt neither tenderness nor gratitude, he was only conscious of

humiliation.

There were in him a certain coldness, strength, and indifference to

sympathy, which, whilst they made his greatness as an artist, made his

callousness as a man. It might have been sweet to others to find

themselves thus remembered and pitied by another at an hour when their

forces were spent, their fate friendless, and their hopes all dead. But

it was not so to him, he only felt like the desert animal which,

wounded, repulses every healing hand, and only seeks to die alone.

There was only one vulnerable, one tender, nerve in him, and this was

the instinct of his genius. He had been nurtured in hardihood, and had

drawn in endurance with every breath of his native air; he would have

borne physical ills without one visible pang, and would have been

indifferent to all mortal suffering; but for the powers in him for the

art he adored, he had a child's weakness, a woman's softness.

He could not bear to die without leaving behind his life some work the

world would cherish.

Call it folly, call it madness, it is both; the ivory Zeus that was to

give its sculptor immortality lives but in tradition; the bronze Athene

that was to guard the Piræus in eternal liberty has long been leveled

with the dust; yet with every age the artist still gives life for fame,

still cries, "Let my body perish, but make my work immortal!"

It was this in him now which stirred his heart with a new and gentler

emotion; emotion which, while half disgust was also half gladness. This

food was alms-given, since he had not earned it, and yet--by means of

this sheer bodily subsistence--it would be possible for him to keep

alive those dreams, that strength by which he still believed it in him

to compel his fame from men.

He stood before the Phoebus in Pheræ, thinking; it stung him with a

bitter torment; it humiliated him with a hateful burden--this debt which

came he knew not whence, and which he never might be able to repay. And

yet his heart was strangely moved; it seemed to him that the fate which

thus wantonly, and with such curious persistence, placed life back into

his hands, must needs be one that would bear no common fruit.

He opposed himself no more to it. He bent his head and broke bread, and

ate and drank of the red wine:--he did not thank God or man as he broke

his fast; he only looked in the mocking eyes of Hermes, and said in his

heart:

"Since I must live, I will triumph."

And Hermes smiled: Hermes the wise, who had bought and sold the

generations of men so long ago in the golden age, and who knew so well

how they would barter away their greatness and their gladness, their

bodies and their souls, for one sweet strain of his hollow reed pipe,

for one sweet glance of his soulless Pandora's eyes.

Hermes--Hermes the liar, Hermes the wise--knew how men's oaths were

kept.

CHAPTER II.

At the close of that day Claudis Flamma discovered that he had been

robbed--robbed more than once: he swore and raved and tore his hair for

loss of a little bread and meat and oil and a flagon of red wine. He did

not suspect his granddaughter; accusing her perpetually of sins of which

she was innocent, he did not once associate her in thought with the one

offense which she had committed. He thought that the window of his

storehouse had been forced from the exterior; he made no doubt that his

spoiler was some vagabond from one of the river barges. Through such

tramps his henhouse and his apple-lofts had often previously been

invaded.

She heard his lamentations and imprecations in unbroken silence; he did

not question her; and without a lie she was able to keep her secret.

In her own sight she had done a foul thing--a thing that her own hunger

had never induced her to do. She did not seek to reconcile herself to

her action by any reflection that she had only taken what she had really

earned a thousand times over by her service; her mind was not

sufficiently instructed, and was of too truthful a mould to be capable

of the deft plea of a sophistry. She could dare the thing; and do it,

and hold her peace about it, though she should be scourged to speak; but

she could not tamper with it to excuse it to herself; for this she had

neither the cunning nor the cowardice.

Why had she done it?--done for a stranger what no pressure of need had

made her do for her own wants? She did not ask herself; she followed her

instinct. He allured her with his calm and kingly beauty, which was like

nothing else her eyes had ever seen; and she was drawn by an

irresistible attraction to this life which she had bought at the price

of her own from the gods. Yet stronger even than this sudden human

passion which had entered into her was the dread lest he whom she had

ransomed from his death should he know his debt to her.

Under such a dread, she never opened her lips to any one on this thing

which she had done. Silence was natural to her; she spoke so rarely,

that many in the province believed her to be dumb; no sympathy had ever

been shown to her to woo her to disclose either the passions that burned

latent in her veins, or the tenderness that trembled stifled in her

heart.

Thrice again did she take food and fuel to the water-tower undetected,

both by the man whom she robbed, and the man whom she succored. Thrice

again did she find her way to the desolate chamber in its owner's

absence and refill the empty platters and warm afresh the cold blank

hearth. Thrice again did Claudis Flamma note the diminution of his

stores, and burnish afresh his old rusty fowling-piece, and watch half

the night on his dark staircase, and prepare with his own hands a jar of

poisoned honey and a bag of poisoned wheat, which he placed, with a

cruel chuckle of grim glee, to tempt the eyes of his spoilers.

But the spoiler being of his own household, saw this trap set, and was

aware of it.

In a week or two the need for these acts which she hated ceased. She

learned that the stranger for whom she thus risked her body and soul,

had found a boatman's work upon the water, which, although a toil rough

and rude, and but poorly paid, still sufficed to give him bread. Though

she herself was so pressed with hunger, many a time, that as she went

through the meadows and hedge-rows she was glad to crush in her teeth

the tender shoots of the briers and the acrid berry of the brambles, she

never again, unbidden, touched so much as a mouldy crust thrown out to

be eaten by the poultry.

Flamma, counting his possessions greedily night and morning, blessed the

saints for the renewed safety of his dwelling, and cast forth the

poisoned wheat as a thank-offering to the male birds who were forever

flying to and fro their nested mates in the leafless boughs above the

earliest violets, and whose little throats were strangled even in their

glad flood of nuptial song, and whose soft bright eyes grew dull in

death ere even they had looked upon the springtide sun.

For it was thus ever that Folle-Farine saw men praise God.

She took their death to her own door, sorrowing and full of remorse.

"Had I never stolen the food, these birds might never have perished,"

she thought, as she saw the rosy throats of the robins and bullfinches

turned upward in death on the turf.

She blamed herself bitterly with an aching heart.

The fatality which makes human crime recoil on the innocent creatures of

the animal world oppressed her with its heavy and hideous injustice.

Their God was good, they said: yet for her sin and her grandsire's greed

the harmless song-birds died by the score in torment.

"How shall a God be good who is not just?" she thought. In this mute

young lonely soul of hers Nature had sown a strong passion for justice,

a strong instinct towards what was righteous.

As the germ of a plant born in darkness underground will, by sheer

instinct, uncurl its colorless tendrils, and thrust them through

crevices and dust, and the close structure of mortared stones, until

they reach the light and grow green and strong in it, so did her nature

strive, of its own accord, through the gloom enveloping it; towards

those moral laws which in all ages and all lands remain the same, no

matter what deity be worshiped, or what creed be called the truth.

Her nascent mind was darkened, oppressed, bewildered, perplexed, even

like the plant which, forcing itself upward from its cellar, opens its

leaves not in pure air and under a blue sky, but in the reek and smoke

and fetid odors of a city.

Yet, like the plant, she vaguely felt that light was somewhere; and as

vaguely sought it.

With most days she took her grandsire's boat to and fro the town,

fetching or carrying; there was no mode of transit so cheap to him as

this, whose only cost was her fatigue. With each passage up and down the

river, she passed by the dwelling of Arslàn.

Sometimes she saw him; once or twice, in the twilight, he spoke to her;

she only bent her head to hide her face from him, and rowed more quickly

on her homeward way in silence. At other times, in his absence, and when

she was safe from any detection, she entered the dismal solitudes

wherein he labored, and gazed in rapt and awed amazement at the shapes

that were shadowed forth upon the walls.

The service by which he gained his daily bread was on the waters, and

took him often leagues away--simple hardy toil, among fishers and

canal-carriers and barge-men. But it left him some few days, and all his

nights, free for art; and never in all the years of his leisure had his

fancy conceived, and his hand created, more exquisite dreams and more

splendid fantasies than now in this bitter and cheerless time, when he

labored amidst the poorest for the bare bread of life.

"Des belles choses peuvent se faire dans une cave:" and in truth the

gloom of the cellar gives birth to an art more sublime than the light of

the palace can ever beget.

Suffering shortens the years of the artist, and kills him oftentimes ere

his prime be reached; but in suffering alone are all great works

conceived.

The senses, the passions, the luxuries, the lusts of the flesh, the

deliriums of the desires, the colors, the melodies, the fragrance, the

indolences,--all that make the mere "living of life" delightful, all go

to enrich and to deepen the human genius which steeps itself in them;

but it is in exile from these that alone it can rise to its greatest.

The grass of the Holy River gathers perfume from the marvelous suns and

the moonless nights, and the gorgeous bloom of the East, from the

aromatic breath of the leopard and the perfume of the fallen

pomegranate; from the sacred oil that floats in the lamps, and the

caress of the girl-bathers' feet and the myrrh-dropping unguents that

glide from the maidens' bare limbs in the moonlight,--the grass holds

and feeds on them all. But not till the grass has been torn from the

roots, and been crushed, and been bruised and destroyed, can the full

odors exhale of all it has tasted and treasured.

Even thus the imagination of man may be great, but it can never be at

its greatest until one serpent, with merciless fangs, has bitten it

through and through, and impregnated it with passion and with

poison--that one deathless serpent which is Memory.

Arslàn had never been more ceaselessly pursued by innumerable fantasies,

and never had given to these a more terrible force, a more perfect

utterance, than now, when the despair which possessed him was

absolute,--when it seemed to him that he had striven in his last strife

with fate, and been thrown never to rise again,--when he kept his body

alive by such soulless, ceaseless labor as that of the oxen in the

fields,--when he saw every hour drift by, barren, sullen, painful,--when

only some dull yet stanch instinct of virility held him back from taking

his own life in the bleak horror of these fruitless days,--when it

seemed to him that his oath before Hermes to make men call him famous

was idle as the sigh of a desert wind through the hollow ears of a skull

bleaching white on the sand.

Yet he had never done greater things,--never in the long years through

which he had pursued and studied art.

With the poor wage that he earned by labor he bought by degrees the

tools and pigments lacking to him, and lived on the scantiest and

simplest food, that he might have wherewith to render into shape and

color the imaginations of his brain.

And it was on these that the passionate, wondering, half-blinded eyes of

Folle-Farine looked with awe and adoration in those lonely hours when

she stole, in his absence, into his chamber, and touching nothing,

scarcely daring to breathe aloud, crouched on the bare pavement mute

and motionless, and afraid with a fear that was the sweetest happiness

her brief youth had ever known.

Though her own kind had neglected and proscribed her, with one accord,

there had been enough in the little world surrounding her to feed the

imaginative senses latent in her,--enough of the old mediæval fancy, of

the old ecclesiastical beauty, of the old monastic spirit, to give her a

consciousness, though a dumb one, of the existence of art.

Untaught though she was, and harnessed to the dreary mill-wheel round of

a hard physical toil, she yet had felt dimly the charm of the place in

which she dwelt.

Where the fretted pinnacles rose in hundreds against the sky,--where the

common dwellings of the poor were paneled and parquetted and carved in a

thousand fashions,--where the graceful and the grotesque and the

terrible were mingled in an inextricable, and yet exquisite,

confusion,--where the gray squat jug that went to the well, and the

jutting beam to which the clothes' line was fastened, and the creaking

sign that swung above the smallest wineshop, and the wooden gallery on

which the poorest troll hung out her many-colored rags, had all some

trace of a dead art, some fashioning by a dead hand,--where all these

were it was not possible for any creature dowered by nature with any

poetic instinct to remain utterly unmoved and unawakened in their midst.

Of the science and the execution of art she was still absolutely

ignorant; the powers by which it was created still seemed a magic

incomprehensible, and not human; but its meaning she felt with that

intensity, which is the truest homage of all homage to its influence.

Day after day, therefore, she returned and gazed on the three gods of

forgetfulness, and on all the innumerable forms and fables which bore

them company; the virgin field of her unfilled mind receiving the seeds

of thought and of fancy that were scattered so largely in this solitude,

lying waste, bearing no harvest.

Of these visits Arslàn himself knew nothing; towards him her bold wild

temper was softened to the shyness of a doe.

She dreaded lest he should ever learn what she had done; and she stole

in and out of the old granary, unseen by all, with the swiftness and the

stealthiness which she shared in common with other untamed animals,

which, like her, shunned all man- and womankind.

And this secret--in itself so innocent, yet for which she would at times

blush in her loneliness, with a cruel heat that burnt all over her face

and frame--changed her life, transfigured it from its objectless,

passionless, brutish dullness and monotony, into dreams and into

desires.

For the first time she had in her joy and fear; for the first time she

became human.

All the week through he wrought perforce by night; the great windows

stood wide open to the bright, cold moon of early spring; he worked only

with black and white, using color only at sunrise, or on the rare days

of his leisure.

Often at nightfall she left her loft, as secretly as a fox its lair, and

stole down the river, and screened herself among the grasses, and

watched him where he labored in the mingling light of the moon, and of

the oil-lamp burning behind him.

She saw these things grow from beneath his hand, these mighty shapes

created by him; and he seemed to her like a god, with the power to beget

worlds at his will, and all human life in its full stature out from a

little dust.

The contrast of this royal strength, of this supreme power which he

wielded, with the helpless exhaustion of the body in which she had found

him dying, smote her with a sorrow and a sweetness that were like

nothing she had ever owned. That a man could summon hosts at his command

like this, yet perish for a crust!--that fusion of omnipotence and

powerlessness, which is the saddest and the strangest of all the sad

strange things of genius, awoke an absorbing emotion in her.

She watched him thus for hours in the long nights of a slow-footed

spring, in whose mists and chills and heavy dews her inured frame took

no more harm than did the green corn shooting through the furrows.

She was a witness to his solitude. She saw the fancies of his brain take

form. She saw the sweep of his arm call up on the blank of the wall, or

on the pale spaces of the canvas, these images which for her had alike

such majesty and such mystery. She saw the faces beam, the eyes smile,

the dancing-women rise, the foliage uncurl, the gods come forth from the

temples, the nereids glide through the moonlit waters, at his command,

and beneath his touch.

She saw him also in those moments when, conceiving no eyes to be upon

him, the man whom mankind denied loosened rein to the bitterness in him;

and, standing weary and heartsick before these creations for which his

generation had no sight, and no homage, let the agony of constant

failure, of continual defeat, overcome him, and cursed aloud the madness

which possessed him, and drove him on forever in this ungrateful

service, and would not let him do as other men did--tell the world lies,

and take its payment out in gold.

Until now she had hated all things, grieved for none, unless, indeed, it

were for a galled ox toiling wounded and tortured on the field; or a

trapped bird, shrieking in the still midnight woods.

But now, watching him, hearing him, a passionate sorrow for a human

sorrow possessed her. And to her eyes he was so beautiful in that utter

unlikeness to herself and to all men whom she had seen. She gazed at

him, never weary of that cold, fair, golden beauty, like the beauty of

his sun-god; of those serene deep-lidded eyes, which looked so often

past her at the dark night skies; of those lithe and massive limbs, like

the limbs of the gladiator that yonder on the wall strained a lion to

his breast in the deadly embrace of combat.

She gazed at him until she loved him with the intense passion of a young

and ignorant life, into whose gloom no love had ever entered. With this

love the instinct of her womanhood arose, amid the ignorance and

savagery of her nature; and she crouched perpetually under the screen of

the long grass to hide her vigil, and whenever his eyes looked from his

easel outward to the night she drew back, breathless and trembling, she

knew not why, into the deepest shadow.

Meantime, with that rude justice which was in her, she set herself

atonement for her fault--the fault through which those tender little

bright-throated birds were stretched dead among the first violets of the

year.

She labored harder and longer than ever for her taskmaster, and denied

herself the larger half of even those scanty portions which were set

aside for her of the daily fare, living on almost nothing, as those

learn to do who are reared under the roof of the French poor. To his

revilings she was silent, and under his blows patient. By night she

toiled secretly, until she had restored the value of that which she had

taken.

Why did she do it? She could not have told. She was proud of the evil

origin they gave her; she had a cynical gladness in her infamous repute;

she scorned women and hated men; yet all the same she kept her hands

pure of thefts and her lips pure of lies.

So the weeks ran on till the hardness of winter gave way to the breath

of the spring, and in all the wood and orchard around the water-mill the

boughs were green with buds, and the ground was pale with primroses--a

spring all the sweeter and more fertile because of the severity of the

past winter.

It became mid-April, and it was market-day for Yprès, and for all the

other villages and homesteads lying round that wondrous cathedral-spire,

that shot into the air, far-reaching and ethereal, like some vast

fountain whose column of water had been arrested, and changed to ice.

The old quiet town was busy, with a rich sunshine shed upon it, in which

the first yellow butterflies of the year had begun to dance.

It was high noon, and the highest tide of the market.

Flower-girls, fruit-girls, egg-sellers, poultry-hucksters, crowds of

women, old and young, had jolted in on their docile asses, throned on

their sheepskin saddles; and now, chattering and chaffering, drove fast

their trade. On the steps of the cathedral boys with birds'-nests,

knife-grinders making their little wheels fly, cobblers hammering, with

boards across their knees, traveling peddlers with knapsacks full of

toys and mirrors, and holy images, and strings of beads, sat all

together in competition but in amity.

Here and there a priest passed, with his black robe and broad hat, like

a dusky mushroom among a bed of varihued gillyflowers. Here and there a

soldier, all color and glitter, showed like a gaudy red tulip in bloom

amidst tufts of thyme.

The old wrinkled leathern awnings of the market-stalls glowed like

copper in the brightness of the noon. The red tiles of the houses edging

the great square were gilded with yellow houseleeks.

The little children ran hither and thither with big bunches of primroses

or sheaves of blue wood-hyacinths, singing. The red and blue serges of

the young girls' bodices were like the gay hues of the anemones in their

baskets; and the brown faces of the old dames under the white roofing of

their headgear were like the russet faces of the home-kept apples they

had garnered through all the winter.

Everywhere in the shade of the flapping leather, and the darkness of the

wooden porches, there were the tender blossoms of the field and forest,

of the hedge and garden. The azure of the hyacinths, the pale saffron of

the primroses, the cool hues of the meadow daffodils, the ruby eyes of

the cultured jonquils, gleamed among wet ferns, gray herbs, and freshly

budded leafage. Plovers' eggs nestled in moss-lined baskets; sheaves of

velvet-coated wallflowers poured fragrance on the air; great plumes of

lilac nodded on the wind, and amber feathers of laburnum waved above the

homelier masses of mint and marjoram, and sage and saxafrage.

It was high noon, but the women still found leisure-time to hear the

music of their own tongues, loud and continuous as the clacking of mill

paddles.

In one corner an excited little group was gathered round the stall of a

favorite flower-seller, who wore a bright crimson gown, and a string of

large silver beads about her neck, and a wide linen cap that shaded her

pretty rosy face as a great snowy mushroom may grow between the sun and

a little ruddy wild strawberry.

Her brown eyes were now brimming over with tears where she stood

surrounded by all the treasures of spring. She held clasped in her arms

a great pot with a young almond-tree growing in it, and she was weeping

as though her heart would break, because a tile had fallen from a roof

above and crushed low all its pink splendor of blossom.

"I saw her look at it," she muttered. "Look at it as she passed with her

wicked eyes; and a black cat on the roof mewed to her; and that moment

the tile fell. Oh, my almond-tree! oh, my little darling! the only one I

saved out of three through the frosts; the very one that was to have

gone this very night to Paris."

"Thou art not alone, Edmée," groaned an old woman, tottering from her

egg-stall with a heap of ruffled, blood-stained, brown plumage held up

in her hand. "Look! As she went by my poor brown hen--the best sitter I

have, good for eggs with every sunrise from Lent to Noël--just cackled

and shook her tail at her; and at that very instant a huge yellow dog

rushed in and killed the blessed bird--killed her in her basket! A great

yellow beast that no one had ever seen before, and that vanished again

into the earth, like lightning."

"Not worse than she did to my precious Rémy," said a tanner's wife, who

drew after her, clinging to her skirts, a little lame, misshapen,

querulous child.

"She hath the evil eye," said sternly an old man who had served in the

days of his boyhood in the Army of Italy, as he sat washing fresh

lettuces in a large brass bowl, by his grandson's herb-stall.

"You remember how we met her in the fields last Feast-night of the Three

Kings?" asked a youth looking up from plucking the feathers out from a

living, struggling, moaning goose. "Coming singing through the fog like

nothing earthly; and a moment later a torch caught little Jocelin's

curls and burnt him till he was so hideous that his mother could scarce

have known him. You remember?"

"Surely we remember," they cried in a hearty chorus round the broken

almond-tree. "Was there not the good old Dax this very winter, killed by

her if ever any creature were killed by foul means, though the law would

never listen to the Flandrins when they said so?"

"And little Bernardou," added one who had not hitherto spoken. "Little

Bernardou died a month after his grandam, in hospital. She had cast her

eye on him, and the poor little lad never rallied."

"A _jettatrice_ ever brings misfortune," muttered the old soldier of

Napoleon, washing his last lettuce and lighting a fresh pipe.

"Or does worse," muttered the mother of the crippled child. "She is not

for nothing the devil's daughter, mark you."

"Nay, indeed," said an old woman, knitting from a ball of wool with

which a kitten played among the strewn cabbage-leaves and the crushed

sweet-smelling thyme. "Nay, was it not only this very winter that my

son's little youngest boy threw a stone at her, just for luck, as she

went by in her boat through the town; and it struck her and drew blood

from her shoulder; and that self-same night a piece of the oaken

carvings in the ceiling gave way and dropped upon the little angel as he

slept, and broke his arm above the elbow:--she is a witch; there is no

question but she is a witch."

"If I were sure so, I would think it well to kill her," murmured the

youth, as he stifled the struggling bird between his knees.

"My sister met her going through the standing corn last harvest-time,

and the child she brought forth a week after was born blind, and is

blind now," said a hard-visaged woman, washing turnips in a basin of

water.

"I was black-and-blue for a month when she threw me down, and took from

me that hawk I had trapped, and went and fastened my wrist in the iron

instead!" hissed a boy of twelve, in a shrill piping treble, as he slit

the tongue of a quivering starling.

"They say she dances naked, by moonlight, in the water with imps," cried

a bright little lad who was at play with the kitten.

"She is a witch, there is no doubt about that," said again the old woman

who sat knitting on the stone bench in the sun.

"And her mother such a saint!" sighed another old dame who was grouping

green herbs together for salads.

And all the while the girl Edmée clasped her almond-tree and sobbed over

it.

"If she were only here," swore Edmée's lover, under his breath.

At that moment the accused came towards them, erect in the full light.

She had passed through the market with a load of herbs and flowers for

one of the chief hostelries in the square, and was returning with the

flat broad basket balanced empty on her head.

Something of their mutterings and curses reached her, but she neither

hastened nor slackened her pace; she came on towards them with her free,

firm step, and her lustrous eyes flashing hard against the sun.

She gave no sign that she had heard except that the blood darkened a

little in her cheeks, and her mouth curled with a haughtier scorn. But

the sight of her, answering in that instant to their hate, the sight of

her with the sunshine on her scarlet sash and her slender limbs, added

impulse to their rage.

They had talked themselves into a passionate belief in her as a thing

hellborn and unclean, that brought all manner of evil fates among them.

They knew that holy water had never baptized her; that neither cross nor

chrism had ever exorcised her; that a church's door had never opened to

her; they had heard their children hoot her many a time unrebuked, they

had always hated her with the cruelty begotten by a timid cowardice or a

selfish dread. They were now ripe to let their hate take shape in speech

and act.

The lover of Edmée loosened his hand from the silver beads about her

throat, and caught up instead a stone.

"Let us see if her flesh feels!" he cried, and cast it. It fell short of

her, being ill aimed; she did not slacken her speed, nor turn out of her

course; she still came towards them erect and with an even tread.

"Who lamed my Rémy?" screamed the cripple's mother.

"Who broke my grandson's arm?" cackled the old woman that sat knitting.

"Who withered my peach-tree?" the old gardener hooted.

"Who freed the devil-bird and put me on the trap?" yelled the boy with

the starling.

"Who flung the tile on the almond?" shouted the flower-girl's lover.

"Who made my sister bring forth a little beast, blind as a mole?"

shrieked the woman, washing in the brazen bowl.

"Who is a witch?--who dances naked?--who bathes with devils at the full

moon?" cried the youth who had plucked the goose bare, alive; and he

stooped for a pebble, and aimed better than his comrade, and flung it at

her as she came.

"It is a shame to see the child of Reine Flamma so dealt with!" murmured

the old creature that was grouping her salads. But her voice found no

echo.

The old soldier even rebuked her. "A _jettatrice_ should be killed for

the good of the people," he mumbled.

Meanwhile she came nearer and nearer. The last stone had struck her upon

the arm; but it had drawn no blood; she walked on with firm, slow steps

into their midst; unfaltering.

The courage did not touch them; they thought it only the hardihood of a

thing that was devil-begotten.

"She is always mute like that; she cannot feel. Strike, strike, strike!"

cried the cripple's mother; and the little cripple himself clapped his

small hands and screamed his shrill laughter. The youths, obedient and

nothing loth, rained stones on her as fast as their hands could fling

them. Still she neither paused nor quailed; but came on straightly,

steadily, with her face set against the light.

Their impatience and their eagerness made their aim uncertain; the

stones fell fast about her on every side, but one alone struck her--a

jagged flint that fell where the white linen skirt opened on her chest.

It cut the skin, and the blood started; the children shrieked and danced

with delight: the youths rushed at her inflamed at once with her beauty

and their own savage hate.

"Stone her to death! Stone her to death!" they shouted; she only

laughed, and held her head erect and stood motionless where they

arrested her, without the blood once paling in her face or her eyes once

losing their luminous calm scorn.

The little cripple clapped his hands, climbing on his mother's back to

see the sight, and his mother screamed again and again above his

laughter. "Strike! strike! strike!"

One of the lads seized her in his arms to force her on her knees while

the others stoned her. The touch of him roused all the fire slumbering

in her blood. She twisted herself round in his hold with a movement so

rapid that it served to free her; struck him full on the eyes with her

clinched hand in a blow that sent him stunned and staggering back; then,

swiftly as lightning flash, drew her knife from her girdle, and striking

out with it right and left, dashed through the people, who scattered

from her path as sheep from the spring of a hound.

Slowly and with her face turned full upon them, she backed her way

across the market-place. The knife, turned blade outward, was pressed

against her chest. None of them dared to follow her; they thought her

invulnerable and possessed.

She moved calmly with a firm tread backward--backward--backward; holding

her foes at bay; the scarlet sash on her loins flashing bright in the

sun; her level brows bent together as a tiger bends his ere he leaps.

They watched her, huddling together frightened and silent. Even the

rabid cries of the cripple's mother had ceased. On the edge of the great

square she paused a moment; the knife still held at her chest, her mouth

curled in contemptuous laughter.

"Strike _now_!" she cried to them; and she dropped her weapon, and stood

still.

But there was not one among them who dared lift his hand. There was not

so much as a word that answered her.

She laughed aloud, and waited for their attack, while the bell in the

tower above them tolled loudly the strokes of noon. No one among them

stirred. Even the shrill pipe of the lame boy's rejoicing had sunk, and

was still.

At that moment, through the golden haze of sunbeams and dust that hung

above the crowd, she saw the red gleam of the soldiers of the state; and

their heavy tramp echoed on the silence as they hastened to the scene of

tumult. She had no faith in any justice which these would deal her; had

they not once dragged her before the tribunal of their law because she

had forced asunder the iron jaws of that trap in the oak wood to give

freedom to the bleeding hawk that was struggling in it whilst its callow

birds screamed in hunger in their nest in the branches above?

She had no faith in them; nor in any justice of men; and she turned and

went down a twisting lane shaded from the sun, and ran swiftly as a doe

through all its turns, and down the steps leading to the water-side.

There her boat was moored; she entered it, and pulled herself slowly

down the river, which now at noontide was almost deserted, whilst the

shutters of the houses that edged it on either side were all closed to

keep out the sun.

A boatman stretched half asleep upon the sacks in his barge; a horse

dozing in his harness on the towing-path; a homeless child who had no

one to call him in to shelter from the heat, and who sat and dappled his

little burning feet in the flowing water; these and their like were all

there were here to look on her.

She rowed herself feebly with one oar gradually out of the ways of the

town; her left arm was strained, and for the moment, useless; her

shoulders throbbed with bruises; and the wound from the stone still

bled. She stanched the blood by degrees, and folded the linen over it,

and went on; she was so used to pain, and so strong, that this seemed to

her to be but little. She had passed through similar scenes before,

though the people had rarely broken into such open violence towards her,

except on that winter's day in the hut of Manon Dax.

The heat was great, though the season was but mid-April.

The sky was cloudless; the air without a breeze. The pink blossoms of

peach-trees bloomed between the old brown walls of the wooden houses. In

the galleries, between the heads of saints and the faces of fauns, there

were tufts of home-bred lilies of the valley and thick flowering bushes

of golden genista. The smell of mignonette was sweet upon the languid

breeze, and here and there, from out the darkness of some open casement,

some stove-forced crimson or purple azalea shrub glowed: for the

people's merchandise was flowers, and all the silent water-streets were

made lovely and fragrant by their fair abundance.

The tide of the river was flowing in, the stream was swelling over all

the black piles, and the broad smooth strips of sand that were visible

at low water; it floated her boat inward with it without trouble past

the last houses of the town, past the budding orchards and gray stone

walls of the outskirts, past the meadows and the cornfields and the

poplars of the open country. A certain faintness had stolen on her with

the gliding of the vessel and the dizzy movement of the water; pain and

the loss of blood filled her limbs with an unfamiliar weakness; she felt

giddy and half blind, and almost powerless to guide her course.

When she had reached the old granary where it stood among the waterdocks

and rushes, she checked the boat almost unconsciously, and let it drift

in amidst the reeds and lie there, and pulled herself feebly up through

the shallow pools. Then she went across the stone sill of the casement

into the chamber where she had learned to live a life that was utterly

apart from the actual existence to which chance had doomed her.

It was the height of noon; at such an hour the creator of these things

that she loved was always absent at the toil which brought him his

bread; she knew that he never returned until the evening, never painted

except at earliest dawn.

The place was her own in the freedom of solitude; all these shapes and

shadows in which imagination and tradition had taken visible shape were

free to her; she had grown to love them with a great passion, to seek

them as consolers and as friends. She crept into the room; and its

coolness, its calm, its dimmed refreshing light seemed like balm after

the noise of the busy market-place and the glare of the cloudless

sunshine. A sick sense of fatigue and of feebleness had assailed her

more strongly. She dropped down in the gloom of the place on the broad,

cold flags of the floor in the deepest shadow, where the light from

without did not reach, and beneath the cartoon of the gods of Oblivion.

Of all the forms with which he had peopled its loneliness, these had the

most profound influence on her in their fair, passionless, majestic

beauty, in which it seemed to her that the man who had begotten them had

repeated his own likeness. For they were all alike, yet unlike; of the

same form and feature, yet different even in their strong resemblance;

like elder and younger brethren who hold a close companionship. For

Hypnos was still but a boy with his blue-veined eyelids closed, and his

mouth rosy and parted like that of a slumbering child, and above his

golden head a star rose in the purple night. Oneiros, standing next, was

a youth whose eyes smiled as though they beheld visions that were

welcome to him; in his hand, among the white roses, he held a black wand

of sorcery, and around his bended head there hovered a dim silvery

nimbus. Thanatos alone was a man fully grown; and on his calm and

colorless face there were blended an unutterable sadness, and an

unspeakable peace; his eyes were fathomless, far-reaching, heavy laden

with thought, as though they had seen at once the heights of heaven and

the depths of hell; and he, having thus seen, and knowing all things,

had learned that there was but one good possible in all the

universe,--that one gift which his touch gave, and which men in their

blindness shuddered from and cursed. And above him and around him there

was a great darkness.

So the gods stood, and so they spoke, even to her; they seemed to her as

brethren, masters, friends--these three immortals who looked down on her

in their mute majesty.

They are the gods of the poor, of the wretched, of the proscribed,--they

are the gods who respect not persons nor palaces,--who stay with the

exile and flee from the king,--who leave the tyrant of a world to writhe

in torment, and call a smile beautiful as the morning on the face of a

beggar child,--who turn from the purple beds where wealth, and lust, and

brutal power lie, and fill with purest visions the darkest hours of the

loneliest nights for genius and youth,--they are the gods of consolation

and of compensation,--the gods of the orphan, of the outcast, of the

poet, of the prophet, of all whose bodies ache with the infinite pangs