The day broke tranquilly. There was a rosy light over all the earth. In
the cornlands a few belated sheaves stood alone on the reaping ground,
while children sought stray ears that might still be left among the wild
flowers and the stubble. The smell of millions of ripening autumn fruits
filled the air from the orchards. The women going to their labor in the
fields, gave each other a quiet good-day; whilst their infants pulled
down the blackberry branches in the lanes or bowled the early apples
down the roads. Great clusters of black grapes were ready mellowed on
the vines that clambered over cabin roof and farmhouse chimney. The
chimes of the Angelus sounded softly from many a little steeple bosomed
in the rolling woods.
An old man going to his work, passed by a girl lying asleep in a hollow
of the ground, beneath a great tree of elder, black with berries. She
was lying with her face turned upward; her arms above her head; her
eyelids were wet; her mouth smiled with a dreamy tenderness; her lips
murmured a little inaudibly; her bosom heaved with fast uneven
palpitating breaths.
It was sunrise. In the elder thicket little chaffinches were singing,
and a missel-thrush gave late in the year a song of the April weather.
The east was radiant with the promise of a fair day, in which summer and
autumn should be wedded with gorgeous pomp of color, and joyous chorus
of the birds. The old man roughly thrust against her breast the heavy
wooden shoe on his right foot.
"Get up!" he muttered. "Is it for the like of you to lie and sleep at
day-dawn? Get up, or your breath will poison the grasses that the cattle
feed on, and they will die of an elf-shot, surely."
She raised her head from where it rested on her outstretched arms, and
looked him in the eyes and smiled unconsciously; then glanced around and
rose and dragged her steps away, in the passive mechanical obedience
begotten by long slavery.
There was a shiver in her limbs; a hunted terror in her eyes; she had
wandered sleepless all night long.
"Beast," muttered the old man, trudging on with a backward glance at
her. "You have been at a witches' sabbath, I dare be bound. We shall
have fine sickness in the styes and byres. I wonder would a silver
bullet hurt you, as the fables say? If I were sure it would, I would not
mind having my old silver flagon melted down, though it is the only
thing worth a rush in the house."
She went on through the long wet rank grass, not hearing his threats
against her. She drew her steps slowly and lifelessly through the heavy
dews; her head was sunk; her lips moved audibly, and murmured as she
went, "A little gold! a little gold!"
"Maybe some one has shot her this very day-dawn," thought the peasant,
shouldering his axe as he went down into the little wood to cut
ash-sticks for the market. "She looks half dead already; and they say
the devil-begotten never bleed."
The old man guessed aright. She had received her mortal wound; though it
was one bloodless and tearless, and for which no moan was made, lest any
should blame the slayer.
The sense of some great guilt was on her, as she stole through the rosy
warmth of the early morning.
She had thought to take him liberty, honor, strength, and dominion among
his fellows--and he had told her that she had dealt him the foulest
shame that his life had ever known.
"What right have you to burden me with debt unasked?" he had cried out
against her in the bitterness of his soul. And she knew that, unasked,
she had laid on him the debt of life.
If ever he should know----
She had wandered on and on, aimlessly, not knowing what she did all the
night through, hearing no other sound but the fierce hard scathing scorn
of his reproaches.
He had told her she was in act so criminal, and yet she knew herself in
intent so blameless; she felt like those of whom she had heard in the
old Hellenic stories, who had been doomed by fate, guiltless themselves,
to work some direful guilt which had to be wrought out to its bitter
end, the innocent yet the accursed instrument of destiny, even as
Adrastus upon Atys.
On and on, through the watery moonlight she had fled, when she left the
water-tower that night; down the slope of the fields; the late blossoms
of the poppies, and the feathery haze of the ripened grasses tossed in
waves from right to left; the long shadows of the clouds upon the earth,
chasing her like the specter hosts of the Aaskarreya of his Scandinavian
skies.
She had dropped at last like a dying thing, broken and breathless, on
the ground. There she crouched, and hid her face upon her hands; the
scorch of an intolerable shame burned on it.
She did not know what ailed her; what consumed her with abhorrence of
herself. She longed for the earth to yawn and cover her; for the lilies
asleep in the pool, to unclose and take her amidst them. Every shiver of
a leaf, under a night-bird's passage, every motion of the water, as the
willow branches swept it, made her start and shiver as though some great
guilt was on her soul.
Not a breath of wind was stirring, not a sound disturbed the serenity of
the early night; she heard no voice but the plaintive cry of the cushat.
She saw "no snakes but the keen stars," which looked on her cold and
luminous, and indifferent to human woes as the eyes of Arslàn.
Yet she was afraid; afraid with a trembling horror of herself; she who
had once never known one pulse of fear, and who had smiled in the eyes
of death as children in their mother's.
The thrill of a new-born, inexplicable, cruel consciousness stole like
fire through her. She knew now that she loved him with that strange
mystery of human love which had been forever to her until now a thing
apart from her, denied to her, half scorned, half yearned for; viewed
from afar with derision, yet with desire, as a thing at once beneath her
and beyond her.
All the light died; the moon rose; the white lilies shivered in its
pallid rays; the night-birds went by on the wind. She never stirred; the
passionate warmth of her frame changed to a deadly cold; her face was
buried in her hands; ever and again she shivered, and glanced round, as
the sound of a hare's step, or the rustle of a bough by a squirrel,
broke the silence.
The calm night-world around her, the silvery seas of reeds, the dusky
woods, the moon in its ring of golden vapor, the flickering foliage, the
gleam of the glowworm in the dew, all the familiar things amidst which
her feet had wandered for twelve summers in the daily measure of those
beaten tracks; all these seemed suddenly strange to her--mysterious,
unreal.
She longed for the day to dawn again, though day was but an hour dead.
And yet she felt that at the first break of light she must flee and hide
from his and every eye.
She had meant to give him honor and he had upbraided her gift as shame.
The bitterness, the cruelty, the passion of his reproaches stung her
with their poison, as, in her vision of the reed, she had seen the
barbed tongues of a thousand snakes striking through and through the
frail, despised, blossomless slave of the wind.
She had thought that as the god to the reed, so might he to her say
hereafter, "You are the lowliest and least of all the chance-born things
of the sands and the air, and yet through you has an immortal music
arisen,"--and for the insanity of her thought he had cursed her.
Towards dawn, where she had sunk down in the moss, and in the thickets
of elder and thorn--where she had made her bed in her childhood many a
summer night, when she had been turned out from the doors of the
mill-house;--there for a little while a fitful exhausted sleep came to
her; the intense exhaustion of bodily fatigue overcoming and drugging to
slumber the fever and the wakefulness of the mind. The thrush came out
of the thorn, while it was still quite dark, and the morning stars
throbbed in the skies, and sang his day-song close about her head.
In her sleep she smiled. For Oneirus was merciful; and she dreamed that
she slept folded close in the arms of Arslàn, and in her dreams she felt
the kisses of his lips rain fast on hers.
Then the old peasant trudging to his labor in the obscurity of the early
day saw her, and struck at her with his foot and woke her roughly, and
muttered, "Get thee up; is it such beggars as thee that should be abed
when the sun breaks?"
She opened her eyes, and smiled on him unconsciously, as she had smiled
in her brief oblivion. The passion of her dreams was still about her;
her mouth burned, her limbs trembled; the air seemed to her filled with
music, like the sound of the mavis singing in the thorn.
Then she remembered; and shuddered; and arose, knowing the sweet mad
dream, which had cheated her, a lie. For she awoke alone.
She did not heed the old man's words, she did not feel his hurt; yet she
obeyed him, and left the place, and dragged herself feebly towards Yprès
by the sheer unconscious working of that instinct born of habit which
takes the ox or the ass back undriven through the old accustomed ways
to stand beside their plowshare or their harness faithfully and
unbidden.
Where the stream ran by the old mill-steps the river-reeds were blowing
in the wind, with the sunrays playing in their midst, and the silver
wings of the swallows brushing them with a sweet caress.
"I thought to be the reed chosen by the gods!" she said bitterly in her
heart, "but I am not worthy--even to die."
For she would have asked of fate no nobler thing than this--to be cut
down as the reed by the reaper, if so be that through her the world
might be brought to hearken to the music of the lips that she loved.
She drew her aching weary limbs feebly through the leafy ways of the old
mill-garden. The first leaves of autumn fluttered down upon her head;
the last scarlet of the roses flashed in her path as she went; the
wine-like odors of the fruits were all about her on the air. It was then
fully day. The sun was up; the bells rang the sixth hour far away from
the high towers and spires of the town.
At the mill-house, and in the mill-yard, where usually every one had
arisen and were hard at labor whilst the dawn was dark, everything was
still. There was no sign of work. The light blazed on the panes of the
casements under the eaves, but its summons failed to arouse the sleepers
under the roof.
The bees hummed around their houses of straw; the pigeons flew to and
fro between the timbers of the walls, and the boughs of the fruit trees.
The mule leaned his head over the bar of the gate, and watched with
wistful eyes. The cow in her shed lowed, impatient for some human hands
to unbar her door, and lead her forth to her green-clovered pasture. A
dumb boy, who aided in the working of the mill, sat astride of a log of
timber, kicking his feet among the long grasses, and blowing thistle
down above his head upon the breeze.
The silence and the inactivity startled her into a sense of them, as no
noise or movement, curses or blows, could have done. She looked around
stupidly; the window-shutters of the house-windows were closed, as
though it were still night.
She signed rapidly to the dumb boy.
"What has happened? Why is the mill not at work thus late?"
The boy left off blowing the thistle feathers on the wind, and grinned,
and answered on his hands, "Flamma is _almost_ dead, they say."
And he grinned again, and laughed, as far as his uncouth and guttural
noises could be said to approach the triumph and the jubilance of
laughter.
She stared at him blankly for awhile, bewildered and shaken from the
stupor of her own misery. She had never thought of death and her tyrant
in unison.
He had seemed a man formed to live on and on and on unchanging for
generations; he was so hard, so unyielding, so hale, so silent, so
callous to all pain; it had ever seemed to her--and to the country
round--that death itself would never venture to come to wrestle with
him. She stood among the red and the purple and the russet gold of the
latest summer flowers in the mill-garden, where he had scourged her as a
little child for daring to pause and cool her burning face in the
sweetness of the white lilies. Could that ruthless arm be unnerved even
by age or death?--it seemed to her impossible.
All was quite still. Nothing stirred, except the silvery gnats of the
morning, and the bees, and the birds in the leaves. There seemed a
strange silence everywhere, and the great wheels stood still in the
mill-water; never within the memory of any in that countryside had those
wheels failed to turn at sunrise, unless locked by a winter-frost.
She hastened her steps, and went within. The clock ticked, the lean cat
mewed; other sound there was none. She left her wooden shoes at the
bottom step, and stole up the steep stairs. The woman Pitchou peered
with a scared face out from her master's chamber.
"Where hast been all night?" she whispered in her grating voice; "thy
grandsire lies a-dying."
"Dying?"
"Ay," muttered the old peasant. "He had a stroke yester-night as he
came from the corn-fair. They brought him home in the cart. He is as
good as dead. You are glad."
"Hush!" muttered the girl fiercely; and she dropped down on the topmost
step, and rested her head on her hands. She had nothing to grieve for;
and yet there was that in the coarse congratulation which jarred on her
and hurt her.
She thought of Manon Dax dead in the snow; she thought of
the song-birds dead in the traps; she thought of the poor
coming--coming--coming--through so many winters to beg bread, and going
away with empty hands and burdened hearts, cursing God. Was this
death-bed all their vengeance? It was but poor justice, and came late.
Old Pitchou stood and looked at her.
"Will he leave her the gold or no?" she questioned in herself; musing
whether or no it were better to be civil to the one who might inherit
all his wealth, or might be cast adrift upon the world--who could say
which?
After awhile Folle-Farine rose silently and brushed her aside, and went
into the room.
It was a poor chamber; with a bed of straw and a rough bench or two, and
a wooden cross with the picture of the Ascension hung above it. The
square window was open, a knot of golden pear-leaves nodded to and fro;
a linnet sang.
On the bed Claudis Flamma lay; dead already, except for the twitching of
his mouth, and the restless wanderings of his eyes. Yet not so lost to
life but that he knew her at a glance; and as she entered, glared upon
her, and clinched his numbed hands upon the straw, and with a horrible
effort in his almost lifeless limbs, raised the right arm, that alone
had any strength or warmth left in it, and pointed at her with a shriek:
"She was a saint--a saint: God took her. So I said:--and was proud.
While all the while man begot on her _that_!"
Then with a ghastly rattle in his throat, he quivered, and lay paralyzed
again: only the eyes were alive, and were still speaking--awfully.
Folle-Farine went up to his bed, and stood beside it, looking down on
him.
"You mean--my mother?"
It was the first time that she had ever said the word. Her voice
lingered on the word, as though loath to leave its unfamiliar sweetness.
He lay and looked at her, motionless, impatient, lifeless; save only for
the bleak and bloodshot stare of the stony eyes.
She thought that he had heard; but he made no sign in answer.
She sank down on her knees beside his bed, and put her lips close to
him.
"Try and speak to me of my mother--once--once," she murmured, with a
pathetic longing in her voice.
A shudder shook his frozen limbs. He made no answer, he only glared on
her with a terrible stare that might be horror, repentance, grief,
memory, fear--she could not tell.
Old Pitchou stretched her head from the corner, as a hooded snake from
its hole.
"Ask where the money is hid," she hissed in a shrill whisper.
"Ask--ask--while he can yet understand."
He understood, for a smile grim and horrible disturbed his tight lips a
moment.
Folle-Farine did not hear.
"Tell me of my mother;--tell me, tell me," she muttered. Since a human
love had been born in her heart, she had thought often of that mother
whose eyes had never looked on her, and whose breast had never fed her.
His face changed, but he did not speak; he gasped for breath, and lay
silent; his eyes trembled and confused; it might be that in that moment
remorse was with him, and the vain regrets of cruel years.
It might be that dying thus, he knew that from his hearth, as from hell,
mother and child had both been driven whilst his lips had talked of God.
A little bell rang softly in the orchard below the casement; the clear
voice of a young boy singing a canticle crossed the voice of the linnet;
there was a gleam of silver in the sun. The Church bore its Host to the
dying man.
They turned her from the chamber.
The eyes of one unsanctified might not gaze upon mysteries of the blest.
She went out without resistance; she was oppressed and stupefied; she
went to the stairs, and there sat down again, resting her forehead on
her hands.
The door of the chamber was a little open, and she could hear the
murmurs of the priest's words, and smell the odors of the sacred chrism.
A great bitterness came on her mouth.
"One crust in love--to them--in the deadly winters, had been better
worth than all this oil and prayer," she thought. And she could see
nothing but the old famished face of Manon Dax in the snow and the
moonlight, as the old woman had muttered, "God is good."
The officers of the Church ceased; there reigned an intense stillness; a
stillness as of cold.
Suddenly the voice of Claudis Flamma rang out loud and shrill,--
"I loved her! Oh, God!--_Thou_ knowest!"
She rose and looked through the space of the open door into the
death-chamber.
He had sprung half erect, and with his arms outstretched, gazed at the
gladness and the brightness of the day. In his eyes there was a mortal
agony, a passion of reproach.
With one last supreme effort, he raised the crucifix which the priests
had laid upon his bare anointed breast, and held it aloft, and shook it,
and spat on it, and cast it forth from him broken upon the ground.
"Even _Thou_ art a liar!" he cried,--it was the cry of the soul leaving
the body,--with the next moment he fell back--dead.
In that one cry his heart had spoken; the cold, hard heart that yet had
shut one great love and one great faith in it, and losing these, had
broken and shown no wound.
For what agony had been like unto his?
Since who could render him back on earth, or in the grave, that pure
white soul he had believed in once? Yea--who? Not man; not even God.
Therefore had he suffered without hope.
She went away from the house and down the stairs, and out into the ruddy
noon. She took her way by instinct to the orchard, and there sat down
upon a moss-grown stone within the shadow of the leaves.
All sense was deadened in her under a deep unutterable pity.
From where she sat she could see the wicket window, the gabled end of
the chamber, and where the linnet sang, and the yellow fruit of the
pear-tree swung. All about was the drowsy hot weather of the fruit
harvest; the murmur of bees; the sweep of the boughs in the water.
Never, in all the years that they had dwelt together beneath one roof,
had any good word or fair glance been given her; he had nourished her on
bitterness, and for his wage paid her a curse. Yet her heart was sore
for him; and judged him without hatred.
All things seemed clear to her, now that a human love had reached her;
and this man also, having loved greatly and been betrayed, became
sanctified in her sight.
She forgot his brutality, his avarice, his hatred; she remembered only
that he had loved, and in his love been fooled, and so had lost his
faith in God and man, and had thus staggered wretchedly down the
darkness of his life, hating himself and every other, and hurting every
other human thing that touched him, and crying ever in his blindness, "O
Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief!"
And now he was dead.
What did it matter?
Whether any soul of his lived again, or whether body and mind both died
forever, what would it benefit all those whom he had slain?--the little
fair birds, poisoned in their song; the little sickly children, starved
in the long winters; the miserable women, hunted to their graves for
some small debt of fuel or bread; the wretched poor, mocked in their
famine by his greed and gain?
It had been woe for him that his loved had wronged him, and turned the
hard excellence of his life to stone: but none the less had it been woe
to them to fall and perish, because his hand would never spare, his
heart would never soften.
Her heart was sick with the cold, bitter, and inexorable law, which had
let this man drag out his seventy years, cursing and being cursed; and
lose all things for a dream of God; and then at the last, upon his
death-bed, know that dream likewise to be false.
"It is so cruel! It is so cruel!" she muttered, where she sat with dry
eyes in the shade of the leaves, looking at that window where death was.
And she had reason.
For there is nothing so cruel in life as a Faith;--the Faith, whatever
its name may be, that draws a man on all his years through, on one
narrow path, by one tremulous light, and then at the last, with a laugh,
drowns him.