The summer day went by. No one sought her. She did not leave the
precincts of the still mill-gardens; a sort of secrecy and stillness
seemed to bind her footsteps there, and she dreaded to venture forth,
lest she should meet the eyes of Arslàn.
The notary had put seals upon all the cupboards and desks. Two hired
watchers sat in the little darkened room above. Some tapers burned
beside his bed. The great clock ticked heavily. All the house was
closed. Without burned the great roses of the late summer, and the
scorch of a cloudless sun. The wheels of the mill stood still. People
came and went; many women among them. The death of the miller of Yprès
was a shock to all his countryside. There was scarce a face that did not
lighten, as the peasants going home at the evening met one another in
the mellow fields, and called across, "Hast heard? Flamma is dead--at
last."
No woman came across the meadows with a little candle, and kneeled down
by his body and wept and blessed the stiff and withered hands for the
good that they had wrought, and for the gifts that they had given.
The hot day-hours stole slowly by; all was noiseless there where she
sat, lost in the stupefied pain of her thoughts, in the deep shadow of
the leaves, where the first breath of the autumn had gilded them and
varied them, here and there, with streaks of red.
No one saw her; no one remembered her; no one came to her. She was left
in peace, such peace as is the lot of those for whose sigh no human ear
is open, for whose need no human hand is stretched. Once indeed at
noonday, the old serving-woman sought her, and had forced on her some
simple meal of crusts and eggs.
"For who can tell?" the shrewd old Norway crone thought to
herself,--"who can tell? She may get all the treasure: who knows? And if
so, it will be best to have been a little good to her this day, and to
seem as if one had forgiven about the chain of coins."
For Pitchou, like the world at large, would pardon offenses, if for
pardon she saw a sure profit in gold.
"Who will he have left all the wealth to, think you?" the old peasant
muttered, with a cunning glitter in her sunken eyes, standing by her at
noon, in the solitude, where the orchards touched the mill-stream.
"The wealth,--whose wealth?" Folle-Farine echoed the word stupidly. She
had had no thought of the hoarded savings of that long life of theft,
and of oppression. She had had no remembrance of any possible
inheritance which might accrue to her by this sudden death. She had been
too long his goaded and galled slave to be able to imagine herself his
heir.
"Ay, his wealth," answered the woman, standing against the water with
her wooden shoes deep in dock-leaves and grass, gazing, with a curious
eager grasping greed in her eyes, at the creature whom she had always
done her best to thwart, to hurt, to starve and to slander. "Ay, his
wealth. You who look so sharp after your bits of heathen coins, cannot
for sure pretend to forget the value he must have laid by, living as he
has lived all the days from his youth upward. There must be a rare mass
of gold hid away somewhere or another--the notary knows, I suppose--it
is all in the place, that I am sure. He was too wise ever to trust money
far from home; he knew well it was a gad-about, that once you part with
never comes back to you. It must be all in the secret places; in the
thatch, under the hearthstone, in the rafters, under the bricks. And,
maybe, there will be quite a fortune. He had so much, and he lived so
near. Where think you it will go?"
A faint bitter smile flickered a moment over Folle-Farine's mouth.
"It should go to the poor. It belongs to them. It was all coined out of
their hearts and their bodies."
"Then you have no hope for yourself:--you?"
"I?"
She muttered the word dreamily; and raised her aching eyelids, and
stared in stupefaction at the old, haggard, dark, ravenous face of
Pitchou.
"Pshaw! You cannot cheat me that way," said the woman, moving away
through the orchard branches, muttering to herself. "As if a thing of
hell like you ever served like a slave all these years, on any other
hope than the hope of the gold! Well,--as for me,--I never pretend to
lie in that fashion. If it had not been for the hope of a share in the
gold, I would never have eaten for seventeen years the old wretch's
mouldy crusts and lentil-washings."
She hobbled, grumbling on her way back to the house, through the russet
shadows and the glowing gold of the orchards.
Folle-Farine sat by the water, musing on the future which had opened to
her with the woman's words of greed.
Before another day had sped, it was possible,--so even said one who
hated her, and begrudged her every bit and drop that she had taken at
the miser's board,--possible that she would enter into the heritage of
all that this long life, spent in rapacious greed and gain, had gathered
together.
One night earlier, paradise itself would have seemed to open before her
with such a hope; for she would have hastened to the feet of Arslàn, and
there poured all treasure that chance might have given her, and would
have cried out of the fullness of her heart, "Take, enjoy, be free, do
as you will. So that you make the world of men own your greatness, I
will live as a beggar all the years of my life, and think myself richer
than kings!"
But now, what use would it be, though she were called to an empire? She
would not dare to say to him, as a day earlier she would have said with
her first breath, "All that is mine is thine."
She would not even dare to give him all and creep away unseen,
unthanked, unhonored into obscurity and oblivion, for had he not said,
"You have no right to burden me with debt"?
Yet as she sat there lonely among the grasses, with the great
mill-wheels at rest in the water, and the swallows skimming the surface
that was freed from the churn and the foam of the wheels, as though the
day of Flamma's death had been a saint's day, the fancy which had been
set so suddenly before her, dazzled her, and her aching brain and her
sick despair could not choose but play with it despite themselves.
If the fortune of Flamma came to her, it might be possible, she thought,
to spend it so as to release him from his bondage, without knowledge of
his own; so to fashion with it a golden temple and a golden throne for
the works of his hand, that the world, which as they all said worshiped
gold, should be forced to gaze in homage on the creations of his mind
and hand.
And yet he had said greater shame there could come to no man, than to
rise by the aid of a woman. The apple of life, however sweet and fair in
its color and savor, would be as poison in his mouth if her hand held
it. That she knew, and in the humility of her great and reverent love,
she submitted without question to its cruelty.
At night she went within to break her fast, and try to rest a little.
The old peasant woman served her silently, and for the first time
willingly. "Who can say?" the Norman thought to herself,--"who can say?
She may yet get it all, who knows?"
At night as she slept, Pitchou peered at her, shading the light from her
eyes.
"If only I could know who gets the gold?" she muttered. Her sole thought
was the money; the money that the notary held under his lock and seal.
She wished now that she had dealt better with the girl sometimes; it
would have been safer, and it could have done no harm.
With earliest dawn Folle-Farine fled again to the refuge of the wood.
She shunned, with the terror of a hunted doe, the sight of people coming
and going, the priests and the gossips, the sights and the sounds, and
none sought her.
All the day through she wandered in the cool dewy orchard-ways.
Beyond the walls of the foliage, she saw the shrouded window, the flash
of the crucifix, the throngs of the mourners, the glisten of the white
robes. She heard the deep sonorous swelling of the chants; she saw the
little procession come out from the doorway and cross the old wooden
bridge, and go slowly through the sunlight of the meadows. Many of the
people followed, singing, and bearing tapers; for he who was dead had
stood well with the Church, and from such there still issues for the
living a fair savor.
No one came to her. What had they to do with her,--a creature
unbaptized, and an outcast?
She watched the little line fade away, over the green and golden glory
of the fields.
She did not think of herself--since Arslàn had looked at her, in his
merciless scorn, she had had neither past nor future.
It did not even occur to her that her home would be in this place no
longer; it was as natural to her as its burrow to the cony, its hole to
the fox. It did not occur to her that the death of this her tyrant could
not but make some sudden and startling change in all her ways and
fortune.
She waited in the woods all day; it was so strange a sense to her to be
free of the bitter bondage that had lain on her life so long; she could
not at once arise and understand the meaning of her freedom; she was
like a captive soldier, who has dragged the cannon-ball so long, that
when it is loosened from his limb, it feels strange, and his step sounds
uncompanioned.
She was thankful, too, for the tortured beasts, and the hunted birds;
she fed them and looked in their gentle eyes, and told them that they
were free. But in her own heart one vain wish, only, ached--she thought
always:
"If only I might die for him,--as the reed for the god."
The people returned, and then after awhile all went forth again; they
and their priests with them. The place was left alone. The old solitude
had come upon it; the sound of the wood-dove only filled the quiet.
The day grew on; in the orchards it was already twilight, whilst on the
waters and in the open lands farther away the sun was bright. There was
a wicket close by under the boughs; a bridle-path ran by, moss-grown,
and little used, but leading from the public road beyond.
From the gleam of the twisted fruit trees a low flutelike noise came to
her ear in the shadow of the solitude.
"Folle-Farine,--I go on your errand. If you repent, there is time yet to
stay me. Say--do you bid me still set your Norse-god free from the Cave
of the Snakes?"
She, startled, looked up into the roofing of the thick foliage; she saw
shining on her with a quiet smile the eyes which she had likened to the
eyes of the Red Mouse. They scanned her gravely and curiously: they
noted the change in her since the last sun had set.
"What did he say to you for your gold?" the old man asked.
She was silent; the blood of an intolerable shame burned in her face;
she had not thought that she had betrayed her motive in seeking a price
for her chain of coins.
He laughed a little softly.
"Ah! You fancied I did not know your design when you came so bravely to
sell your Moorish dancing-gear. Oh, Folle-Farine!--female things, with
eyes like yours, must never hope to keep a secret!"
She never answered; she had risen and stood rooted to the ground, her
head hung down, her breast heaving, the blood coming and going in her
intolerable pain, as though she flushed and froze under a surgeon's
probe.
"What did he say to you?" pursued her questioner. "There should be but
one language possible from a man of his years to a woman of yours."
She lifted her eyes and spoke at last:
"He said that I did him a foul shame: the gold lies in the sands of the
river."
She was strong to speak the truth, inflexibly, to the full; for its
degradation to herself she knew was honor to the absent. It showed him
strong and cold and untempted, preferring famine and neglect and misery
to any debt or burden of a service done.
The old man, leaning on the wooden bar of the gate among the leaves,
looked at her long and thoughtfully.
"He would not take your poor little pieces? You mean that?"
She gave a sign of assent.
"That was a poor reward to you, Folle-Farine!" Her lips grew white and
shut together.
"Mine was the fault, the folly. He was right, no doubt."
"You are very royal. I think your northern god was only thus cold
because your gift was such a little one, Folle-Farine."
A strong light flashed on him from her eyes.
"It would have been the same if I had offered him an empire."
"You are so sure? Does he hate you, then--this god of yours?"
She quivered from head to foot; but her courage would not yield, her
faith would not be turned.
"Need a man hate the dust under his foot?" she muttered in her teeth;
"because it is a thing too lowly for him to think of as he walks."
"You are very truthful."
She was silent; standing there in the shadow of the great mill-timbers.
The old man watched her with calm approving eyes, as he might have
watched a statue of bronze. He was a great man, a man of much wealth, of
wide power, of boundless self-indulgence, of a keen serene wisdom, which
made his passions docile and ministers to his pleasure, and never
allowed them any mastery over himself. He was studying the shape of her
limbs, the hues of her skin, the lofty slender stature of her, and the
cloud of her hair that was like the golden gleaming mane of a young
desert mare.
"All these in Paris," he was thinking. "Just as she is, with just the
same bare feet and limbs, the same untrammeled gait, the same flash of
scarlet round her loins, only to the linen tunic a hem of gold, and on
the breast a flame of opals. Paris would say that even I had never in my
many years done better. The poor barbarian! she sells her little brazen
sequins, and thinks them her only treasure, whilst she has all that! Is
Arslàn blind, or is he only tired?"
But he spake none of his thoughts aloud. He was too wary to scare the
prey he meant to secure with any screams of the sped arrow, or any sight
of the curled lasso.
"Well," he said, simply, "I understand; your eagle, in recompense for
your endeavors to set him free, only tears your heart with his talons?
It is the way of eagles. He has wounded you sorely. And the wound will
bleed many a day."
She lifted her head.
"Have I complained?--have I asked your pity, or any man's?"
"Oh, no, you are very strong! So is a lioness; but she dies of a man's
wound sometimes. He has been very base to you."
"He has done as he thought it right to do. Who shall lay blame on him
for that?"
"Your loyalty says so; you are very brave, no doubt. But tell me, do you
still wish this man, who wounds you so cruelly, set free?"
"Yes."
"What, still?"
"Why not?"
"Why not? Only this: that once he is let loose your very memory will be
shaken from his thoughts as the dust of the summer, to which you liken
yourself, is shaken from his feet!"
"No doubt."
She thought she did not let him see the agony he dealt her; she stood
unflinching, her hands crossed upon her breast, her head drooped, her
eyes looking far from him to where the fading sunlight gleamed still
upon the reaches of the river.
"No doubt," he echoed. "And yet I think you hardly understand. This man
is a great artist. He has a great destiny, if he once can gain the eye
and the ear of the world. The world will fear him, and curse him always;
he is very merciless to it; but if he once conquer fame, that fame will
be one to last as long as the earth lasts. That I believe. Well, give
this man what he longs for and strives for, a life in his fame which
shall not die so long as men have breath to speak of art. What will you
be in that great drunken dream of his, if once we make it true for him?
Not even a remembrance, Folle-Farine. For though you have fancied that
you, by your beauty, would at least abide upon his canvas, and so go on
to immortality with his works and name, you seem not to know that so
much also will do any mime who lets herself for hire on a tavern stage,
or any starveling who makes her daily bread by giving her face and form
to a painter's gaze. Child! what you have thought noble, men and women
have decreed one of the vilest means by which a creature traffics in her
charms. The first lithe-limbed model that he finds in the cities will
displace you on his canvas and in his memory. Shall he go free--to
forget you?"
She listened dumbly; her attitude unchanging, as she had stood in other
days, under the shadow of the boughs, to receive the stripes of her
master.
"He shall be free--to forget me."
The words were barely audible, but they were inflexible, as they were
echoed through her locked teeth.
The eyes of her tormentor watched her with a wondering admiration; yet
he could not resist the pleasure of an added cruelty, as the men of the
torture-chambers of old strained once more the fair fettered form of a
female captive, that they might see a little longer those bright limbs
quiver, and those bare nerves heave.
"Well; be it so if you will it. Only think long enough. For strong
though you are, you are also weak; for you are of your mother's sex,
Folle-Farine. You may repent. Think well. You are no more to him than
your eponym, the mill-dust. You have said so to yourself. But you are
beautiful in your barbarism; and here you are always near him; and with
a man who has no gold to give, a woman need have few rivals to fear. If
his heart eat itself out here in solitude, soon or late he will be
yours, Folle-Farine. A man, be he what he will, cannot live long without
some love, more or less, for some woman. A little while, and your
Norse-god alone here, disappointed, embittered, friendless, galled by
poverty, and powerless to escape, will turn to you, and find a sweetness
on your lips, a balm in your embrace, an opium draught for an hour, at
least, in that wonderful beauty of yours. A woman who is beautiful, and
who has youth, and who has passion, need never fail to make a love-light
beam in the eyes of a man, if only she know how to wait, if only she be
the sole blossom that grows in his pathway, the sole fruit within reach
of his hands. Keep him here, and soon or late, out of sheer despair of
any other paradise, he will make his paradise in your breast. Do you
doubt? Child, I have known the world many years, but this one thing I
have ever known to be stronger than any strength a man can bring against
it to withstand it--this one thing which fate has given you, the bodily
beauty of a woman."
His voice ceased softly in the twilight--this voice of
Mephistopheles--which tempted her but for the sheer sole pleasure of
straining this strength to see if it should break--of deriding this
faith to see if it would bend--of alluring this soul to see if it would
fall.
She stood abased in a piteous shame--the shame that any man should thus
read her heart, which seemed to burn and wither up all liberty, all
innocence, all pride in her, and leave her a thing too utterly debased
to bear the gaze of any human eyes,--to bear the light of any noonday
sun.
And yet the terrible sweetness of the words tempted her with such subtle
force: the passions of a fierce, amorous race ran in her blood--the
ardor and the liberty of an outlawed and sensual people were bred with
her flesh and blood: to have been the passion-toy of the man she loved
for one single day,--to have felt for one brief summer hour his arms
hold her and his kisses answer hers, she would have consented to die a
hundred deaths in uttermost tortures when the morrow should have dawned,
and would have died rejoicing, crying to the last breath,--
"I have lived: it is enough!"
He might be hers! The mere thought, uttered in another's voice, thrilled
through her with a tumultuous ecstasy, hot as flame, potent as wine.
He might be hers--all her own--each pulse of his heart echoing hers,
each breath of his lips spent on her own. He might be hers!--she hid her
face upon her hands; a million tongues of fire seemed to curl about her
and lap her life. The temptation was stronger than her strength.
She was a friendless, loveless, nameless thing, and she had but one
idolatry and one passion, and for this joy that they set to her lips she
would have given her body and her soul. Her soul--if the gods and man
allowed her one--her soul and all her life, mortal and immortal, for one
single day of Arslàn's love. Her soul, forever, to any hell they
would--but his?
Not for this had she sold her life to the gods--not for this; not for
the rapture of passion, the trance of the senses, the heaven of self.
What she had sworn to them, if they saved him, was forever to forget in
him herself, to suffer dumbly for him, and, whensoever they would, in
his stead to die.
"Choose," said the soft wooing voice of her tempter, while his gaze
smiled on her through the twilight. "Shall he consume his heart here in
solitude till he loves you perforce, or shall he go free among the
cities of men, to remember you no more than he remembers the reeds by
the river?"
The reeds by the river.
The chance words that he used, by the mere hazards of speech, cut the
bonds of passion which were binding so closely about her. As the
river-reed to the god, so she had thought that her brief span of life
might be to the immortality of his. Was this the fulfilling of her
faith,--to hold him here with his strength in chains, and his genius
perishing in darkness, that she, the thing of an hour, might know
delight in the reluctant love, in the wearied embrace, of a man
heart-sick and heart-broken?
She shook the deadly sweetness of the beguilement off her as she would
have shaken an asp's coils off her wrist, and rose against it, and was
once more strong.
"What have you to do with me?" she muttered, feebly, while the fierce
glare of her eyes burned through the gloom of the leaves. "Keep your
word; set him free. His freedom let him use--as he will."
Then, ere he could arrest her flight, she had plunged into the depths of
the orchards, and was lost in their flickering shadows.
Sartorian did not seek to pursue her. He turned and went thoughtfully
and slowly back by the grass-grown footpath through the little wood,
along by the riverside, to the water-tower. His horses and his people
waited near, but it suited him to go thither on this errand on foot and
alone.
"The Red Mouse does not dwell in that soul as yet. That sublime
unreason--that grand barbaric madness! And yet both will fall to gold,
as that fruit falls to the touch," he thought, as he brushed a ripe
yellow pear from the shelter of the reddening leaves, and watched it
drop, and crushed it gently with his foot, and smiled as he saw that
though so golden on the rind, and so white and so fragrant in the flesh,
at the core was a rotten speck, in which a little black worm was
twisting.
He had shaken it down from idleness; where he left it, crushed in the
public pathway, a swarm of ants and flies soon crawled, and flew, and
fought, and fastened, and fed on the fallen purity, which the winds had
once tossed up to heaven, and the sun had once kissed into bloom.
* * * * *
Through the orchards, as his footsteps died away, there came a shrill
scream on the silence, which only the sighing of the cushats had broken.
It was the voice of the old serving-woman, who called on her name from
the porch.
In the old instinct, born of long obedience, she drew herself wearily
through the tangled ways of the gardens and over the threshold of the
house.
She had lost all remembrance of Flamma's death, and of the inheritance
of his wealth. She only thought of those great and noble fruits of a
man's genius which she had given up all to save; she only thought
ceaselessly, in the sickness of her heart, "Will he forget?--forget
quite--when he is free?"
The peasant standing in the porch with arms akimbo, and the lean cat
rubbing ravenous sides against her wooden shoes, peered forth from under
the rich red leaves of the creepers that shrouded the pointed roof of
the doorway.
Her wrinkled face was full of malignity; her toothless mouth smiled; her
eyes were full of a greedy triumph. Before her was the shady, quiet,
leafy garden, with the water running clear beneath the branches; behind
her was the kitchen, with its floor of tiles, its strings of food, its
wood-piled hearth, its crucifix, and its images of saints.
She looked at the tired limbs of the creature whom she had always hated
for her beauty and her youth; at the droop of the proud head, at the
pain and the exhaustion which every line of the face and the form spoke
so plainly; at the eyes which burned so strangely as she came through
the gray, pure air, and yet had such a look in them of sightlessness and
stupor.
"She has been told," thought the old serving-woman. "She has been told,
and her heart breaks for the gold."
The thought was sweet to her--precious with the preciousness of
vengeance.
"Come within," she said, with a grim smile about her mouth. "I will give
thee a crust and a drink of milk. None shall say I cannot act like a
Christian; and to-night I will let thee rest here in the loft, but no
longer. With the break of day thou shalt tramp. We are Christians here."
Folle-Farine looked at her with blind eyes, comprehending nothing that
she spoke.
"You called me?" she asked, the old mechanical formula of servitude
coming to her lips by sheer unconscious instinct.
"Ay, I called. I would have thee to know that I am mistress here now;
and I will have no vile things gad about in the night so long as they
eat of my bread. Tonight thou shalt rest here, I say; so much will I do
for sake of thy mother, though she was a foul light o' love, when all
men deemed her a saint; but to-morrow thou shalt tramp. Such hell-spawn
as thou art mayst not lie on a bed of Holy Church."
Folle-Farine gazed at her, confused and still not comprehending;
scarcely awake to the voice which thus adjured her; all her strength
spent and bruised, after the struggle of the temptation which had
assailed her.
"You mean," she muttered, "you mean----What would you tell me? I do not
know."
The familiar place reeled around her. The saints and the satyrs on the
carved gables grinned on her horribly. The yellow house-leek on the roof
seemed to her so much gold, which had a tongue, and muttered, "You prate
of the soul. I alone am the soul of the world."
All the green, shadowy, tranquil ways grew strange to her; the earth
shook under her feet; the heavens circled around her:----and Pitchou,
looking on her, thought that she was stunned by the loss of the miser's
treasure!
She! in whose whole burning veins there ran only one passion, in whose
crushed brain there was only one thought--"Will he forget--forget
quite--when he is free?"
The old woman stretched her head forward, and cackled out eager,
hissing, tumultuous words:
"Hast not heard? No? Well, see, then. Some said you should be sent for,
but the priest and I said No. Neither Law nor Church count the
love-begotten. Flamma died worth forty thousand francs, set aside all
his land and household things. God rest his soul! He was a man. He
forgot my faithful service, true, but the good almoner will remember all
that to me. Forty thousand francs! What a man! And hardly a nettle
boiled in oil would he eat some days together. Where does this money
go--eh, eh? Canst guess?"
"Go?"
Pitchou watched her grimly, and laughed aloud:
"Ah, ah! I know. So you dared to hope, too? Oh, fool! what thing did
ever he hate as he hated your shadow on the wall? The money, and the
lands, and the things--every coin, every inch, every crumb--is willed
away to the Church, to the holy chapter in the town yonder, to hold for
the will of God and the glory of his kingdom. And masses will be said
for his soul, daily, in the cathedral; and the gracious almoner has as
good as said that the mill shall be let to Francvron, the baker, who is
old and has no women to his house; and that I shall dwell here and
manage all things, and rule Francvron, and end my days in the chimney
corner. And I will stretch a point and let you lie in the hay to-night,
but to-morrow you must tramp, for the devil's daughter and Holy Church
will scarce go to roost together."
Folle-Farine heard her stupidly, and stupidly gazed around; she did not
understand. She had never had any other home, and, in a manner, even in
the apathy of a far greater woe, she clove to this place; to its
familiarity, and its silence, and its old woodland-ways.
"Go!"--she looked down through the aisles of the boughs dreamily; in a
vague sense she felt the sharpness of desolation that repulses the
creature whom no human heart desires, and whom no human voice bids stay.
"Yes. Go; and that quickly," said the peasant with a sardonic grin. "I
serve the Church now. It is not for me to harbor such as thee; nor is it
fit to take the bread of the poor and the pious to feed lips as accursed
as are thine. Thou mayst lie here to-night--I would not be
overharsh--but tarry no longer. Take a sup and a bit, and to bed. Dost
hear?"
Folle-Farine, without a word in answer, turned on her heel and left her.
The old woman watched her shadow pass across the threshold, and away
down the garden-paths between the green lines of the clipped box, and
vanish beyond the fall of drooping fig-boughs and the walls of ivy and
of laurel; then with a chuckle she poured out her hot coffee, and sat in
her corner and made her evening meal, well pleased; comfort was secured
her for the few years which she had to live, and she was revenged for
the loss of the sequins.
"How well it is for me that I went to mass every Saint's-day!" she
thought, foreseeing easy years and plenty under the rule of the Church
and of old deaf Francvron, the baker.
Folle-Farine mounted the wooden ladder to the hayloft which had been her
sleeping-chamber, there took the little linen and the few other garments
which belonged to her, folded them together in her winter sheepskin, and
went down the wooden steps once more, and out of the mill-garden across
the bridge into the woods.
She had no fixed purpose even for the immediate hour; she had not even a
tangible thought for her future. She acted on sheer mechanical impulse,
like one who does some things unconsciously, walking abroad in the
trance of sleep. That she was absolutely destitute scarcely bore any
sense to her. She had never realized that this begrudged roof and scanty
fare, which Flamma had bestowed on her, had, wretched though they were,
yet been all the difference between home and homelessness--between
existence and starvation.
She wandered on aimlessly through the woods.
She paused a moment on the river-sand, and turned and looked back at the
mill and the house. From where she stood, she could see its brown gables
and its peaked roof rising from masses of orchard-blossom, white and
wide as sea-foam; further round it, closed the dark belt of the sweet
chestnut woods.
She looked; and great salt tears rushed into her hot eyes and blinded
them.
She had been hated by those who dwelt there, and had there known only
pain, and toil, and blows, and bitter words. And yet the place itself
was dear to her, its homely and simple look: its quiet garden-ways, its
dells of leafy shadow, its bright and angry waters, its furred and
feathered creatures that gave it life and loveliness,--these had been
her consolations often,--these, in a way, she loved.
Such as it was, her life had been bound up with it; and though often its
cool pale skies and level lands had been a prison to her, yet her heart
clove to it in this moment when she left it--forever. She looked once at
it long and lingeringly; then turned and went on her way.
She walked slowly through the cool evening shadows, while the birds
fluttered about her head. She did not comprehend the terrible fate that
had befallen her. She did not think that it was horrible to have no
canopy but the clear sky, and no food but the grain rubbed from the ripe
wheat-ears.
The fever of conscious passion which had been born in her, and the awe
of the lonely death that she had witnessed, wore on her too heavily, and
with too dreamy and delirious an absorption, to leave any room in her
thoughts for the bodily perils or the bodily privations of her fate.
Some vague expectancy of some great horror, she knew not what, was on
her. She was as in a trance, her brain was giddy, her eyes blind. Though
she walked straightly, bearing her load upon her head, on and on as
through the familiar paths, she yet had no goal, no sense of what she
meant to do, or whither she desired to go.
The people were still about, going from their work in the fields, and
their day at the town-market, to their homesteads and huts. Every one of
them cast some word at her. For the news had spread by sunset over all
the countryside that Flamma's treasure was gone to Holy Church.
They were spoken in idleness, but they were sharp, flouting, merciless
arrows of speech, that struck her hardly as the speakers cast them, and
laughed, and passed by her. She gave no sign that she heard, not by so
much as the quiver of a muscle or the glance of an eye; but she,
nevertheless, was stung by them to the core, and her heart hardened, and
her blood burned.
Not one of them, man or boy, but made a mock of her as they marched by
through the purpling leaves or the tall seed-grasses. Not one of them,
mother or maiden, that gave a gentle look at her, or paused to remember
that she was homeless, and knew no more where to lay her head that night
than any sick hart driven from its kind.
She met many in the soft gray and golden evening, in the fruit-hung
ways, along the edge of the meadows: fathers with their little children
running by them, laden with plumes of meadow-sweet; mothers bearing
their youngest born before them on the high sheepskin saddle; young
lovers talking together as they drove the old cow to her byre; old
people counting their market gains cheerily; children paddling knee-deep
in the brooks for cresses. None of them had a kindly glance for
her;--all had a flouting word. There was not one who offered her so much
as a draught of milk; not one who wished her so much as a brief
good-night.
"She will quit the country now; that is one good thing," she heard many
of them say of her. And they spoke of Flamma, and praised him; saying,
how pure as myrrh in the nostrils was the death of one who feared God!
The night came on nearer; the ways grew more lonely; the calf bleating
sought its dam, the sheep folded down close together, the lights came
out under the lowly roofs; now and then from some open window in the
distance there came the sound of voices singing together; now and then
there fell across her path two shadows turning one to the other.
She only was alone.
What did she seek to do?
She paused on a little slip of moss-green timber that crossed the water
in the open plain, and looked down at herself in the shining stream.
None desired her--none remembered her; none said to her, "Stay with us a
little, for love's sake."
"Surely I must be vile as they say, that all are against me!" she
thought; and she pondered wearily in her heart where her sin against
them could lie. That brief delirious trance of joy that had come to her
with the setting of the last day's sun, had with the sun sunk away. The
visions which had haunted her sleep under the thorn-tree whilst the
thrush sang, had been killed under the cold and bitterness of the waking
world. She wondered, while her face burned red with shame, what she had
been mad enough to dream of in that sweet cruel slumber. For him--she
felt that sooner than again look upward to his eyes she would die by a
thousand deaths.
What was she to him?--a barbarous, worthless, and unlovely thing, whose
very service was despised, whose very sacrifice was condemned.
"I would live as a leper all the days of my life, if, first, I might be
fair in his sight one hour!" she thought; and she was conscious of
horror or of impiety in the ghastly desire, because she had but one
religion, this--her love.
She crossed the little bridge, and sat down to rest on the root of an
old oak on the edge of the fields of poppies.
The evening had fallen quite. There was a bright moon on the edge of the
plain. The cresset-lights of the cathedral glowed through the dusk. All
was purple and gray and still. There were the scents of heavy earths and
of wild thymes, and the breath of grazing herds. The little hamlets were
but patches of darker shade on the soft brown shadows of the night.
White sea-mists, curling and rising, chased each other over the dim
world.
She sat motionless, leaning her head upon her hand.
She could not weep, as other creatures could. The hours drew on. She had
no home to go to; but it was not for this that she sorrowed.
Afar off, a step trod down the grasses. A hawk rustled through the
gloom. A rabbit fled across the path. The boughs were put aside by a
human hand; Arslàn came out from the darkness of the woods before her.
With a sharp cry she sprang to her feet and fled, impelled by
passionate, reasonless instinct to hide herself forever and forever from
the only eyes she loved.
Before her were the maze of the poppy-fields. In the moonlight their
blossoms, so gorgeous at sunset or at noon, lost all their scarlet gaud
and purple pomp, and drooped like discrowned kings stripped bare in the
midnight of calamity.
Their colorless flowers writhed and twined about her ankles. Her brown
limbs glistened in the gleam from the skies. She tightened her red
girdle round her loins and ran, as a doe runs to reach the sanctuary.
Long withes of trailing grasses, weeds that grew among the grasses,
caught her fleet feet and stopped her. The earth was wet with dew. A
tangle of boughs and brambles filled the path. For once, her sure steps
failed her. She faltered and fell.
Ere he could touch her, she rose again. The scent of the wet leaves was
in her hair. The rain-drops glistened on her feet. The light of the
stars seemed in her burning eyes. Around her were the gleam of the
night, the scent of the flowers, the smell of woods. On her face the
moon shone.
She was like a creature born from the freshness of dews, from the odor
of foliage, from the hues of the clouds, from the foam of the brooks,
from all things of the woods and the water. In that moment she was
beautiful with the beauty of women.
"If only she could content me!" he thought. If only he had cared for the
song of the reed by the river!
But he cared nothing at all for anything that lived; and a pursuit that
was passionless had always seemed to him base; and his feet were set on
a stony and narrow road where he would not incumber his strength with a
thing of her sex, lest the burden should draw him backward one rood on
his way.
He had never loved her; he never would love her; his senses were awake
to her beauty, indeed, and his reason awed it beyond all usual gifts of
her sex. But he had used it in the service of his art, and therein had
scrutinized, and portrayed, and debased until it had lost to him all
that fanciful sanctity, all that half-mysterious charm, which arouse the
passion of love in a man to a woman.
So he let her be, and stood by her in the dusk of the night with no
light in his own eyes.
"Do not fly from me," he said to her. "I have sought you, to ask your
forgiveness, and----"
She stood silent, her head bent; her hands were crossed upon her chest
in the posture habitual to her under any pain; her face was hidden in
the shadow; her little bundle of clothes had dropped on the grasses, and
was hidden by them. Of Flamma's death and of her homelessness he had
heard nothing.
"I was harsh to you," he said, gently. "I spoke, in the bitterness of
my heart, unworthily. I was stung with a great shame;--I forgot that you
could not know. Can you forgive?"
"The madness was mine," she muttered. "It was I, who forgot----"
Her voice was very faint, and left her lips with effort; she did not
look up; she stood bloodless, breathless, swaying to and fro, as a young
tree which has been cut through near the root sways ere it falls. She
knew well what his words would say.
"You are generous, and you shame me--indeed--thus," he said with a
certain softness as of unwilling pain in his voice which shook its
coldness and serenity.
This greatness in her, this wondrous faithfulness to himself, this
silence, which bore all wounds from his hand, and was never broken to
utter one reproach against him, these moved him. He could not choose but
see that this nature, which he bruised and forsook, was noble beyond any
common nobility of any human thing.
"I have deserved little at your hands, and you have given me much," he
said slowly. "I feel base and unworthy; for--I have sought you to bid
you farewell."
She had awaited her death-blow; she received its stroke without a sound.
She did not move, nor cry out, nor make any sign of pain, but standing
there her form curled within itself, as a withered fern curls, and all
her beauty changed like a fresh flower that is held in a flame.
She did not look at him; but waited, with her head bent, and her hands
crossed on her breast as a criminal waits for his doom.
His nerve nearly failed him; his heart nearly yielded. He had no love
for her; she was nothing to him. No more than any one of the dark, nude
savage women who had sat to his art on the broken steps of ruined
Temples of the Sun; or the antelope-eyed creatures of desert and plain,
who had come on here before him in the light of the East, and had passed
as the shadows passed, and, like them, were forgotten.
She was nothing to him. And yet he could not choose but think--all this
mighty love, all this majestic strength, all this superb and dreamy
loveliness would die out here, as the evening colors had died out of the
skies in the west, none pausing even to note that they were dead.
He knew that he had but to say to her, "Come!" and she would go beside
him, whether to shame or ignominy, or famine or death, triumphant and
rejoicing as the martyrs of old went to the flames, which were to them
the gates of paradise.
He knew that there would not be a blow his hand could deal which could
make her deem him cruel; he knew that there would be no crime which he
could bid her commit for him which would not seem to her a virtue; he
knew that for one hour of his love she would slay herself by any death
he told her; he knew that the deepest wretchedness lived through by his
side would be sweeter and more glorious than any kingdom of the world or
heaven. And he knew well that to no man is it given to be loved twice
with such love as this.
Yet,--he loved not her; and he was, therefore, strong, and he drove the
death-stroke home, with pity, with compassion, with gentleness, yet
surely home--to the heart.
"A stranger came to me an hour or more ago," he said to her; and it
seemed even to him as though he slew a life godlier and purer and
stronger than his own,--"an old man, who gave no name. I have seen his
face--far away, long ago--I am not sure. The memory is too vague. He
seemed a man of knowledge, and a man critical and keen. That study of
you--the one among the poppies--you remember--took his eyes and pleased
him. He bore it away with him, and left in its stead a roll of paper
money--money enough to take me back among men--to set me free for a
little space. Oh child! you have seen--this hell on earth kills me. It
is a death in life. It has made me brutal to you sometimes; sometimes I
must hurt something, or go mad."
She was silent; her attitude had not changed, but all her loveliness was
like one of the poppies that his foot had trodden on, discolored,
broken, ruined. She stood as though changed to a statue of bronze.
He looked on her, and knew that no creature had ever loved him as this
creature had loved. But of love he wanted nothing,--it was wearying to
him; all he desired was power among men.
"I have been cruel to you," he said, suddenly. "I have stung and wounded
you often. I have dealt with your beauty as with this flower under my
foot. I have had no pity for you. Can you forgive me ere I go?"
"You have no sins to me," she made answer to him. She did not stir; nor
did the deadly calm on her face change; but her voice had a harsh
metallic sound, like the jar of a bell that is broken.
He was silent also. The coldness and the arrogance of his heart were
pained and humbled by her pardon of them. He knew that he had been
pitiless to her--with a pitilessness less excusable than that which is
born of the fierceness of passion and the idolatrous desires of the
senses. Man would have held him blameless here, because he had forborne
to pluck for his own delight this red and gold reed in the swamp; but he
himself knew well that, nevertheless, he had trodden its life out, and
so bruised it, as he went, that never would any wind of heaven breathe
music through its shattered grace again.
"When do you go?" she asked.
Her voice had still the same harsh, broken sound in it. She did not lift
the lids of her eyes; her arms were crossed upon her breast;--all the
ruins of the trampled poppy-blossom were about her, blood-red as a field
where men have fought and died.
He answered her, "At dawn."
"And where?"
"To Paris. I will find fame--or a grave."
A long silence fell between them. The church chimes, far away in the
darkness, tolled the ninth hour. She stood passive, colorless as the
poppies were, bloodless from the thick, dull beating of her heart. The
purple shadow and the white stars swam around her. Her heart was broken;
but she gave no sign. It was her nature to suffer to the last in
silence.
He looked at her, and his own heart softened; almost he repented him.
He stretched his arms to her, and drew her into them, and kissed the
dew-laden weight of her hair, and the curling, meek form, while all
warmth had died, and the passionate loveliness, which was cast to him,
to be folded in his bosom or thrust away by his foot--as he chose.
"Oh, child, forgive me, and forget me," he murmured. "I have been base
to you,--brutal, and bitter, and cold oftentimes;--yet I would have
loved you, if I could. Love would have been youth, folly, oblivion; all
the nearest likeness that men get of happiness on earth. But love is
dead in me, I think, otherwise----"
She burned like fire, and grew cold as ice in his embrace. Her brain
reeled; her sight was blind. She trembled as she had never done under
the sharpest throes of Flamma's scourge. Suddenly she cast her arms
about his throat and clung to him, and kissed him in answer with that
strange, mute, terrible passion with which the lips of the dying kiss
the warm and living face that bends above them, on which they know they
never again will rest.
Then she broke from him, and sprang into the maze of the moonlit fields,
and fled from him like a stag that bears its death-shot in it, and knows
it, and seeks to hide itself and die unseen.
He pursued her, urged by a desire that was cruel, and a sorrow that was
tender. He had no love for her; and yet--now that he had thrown her from
him forever--he would fain have felt those hot mute lips tremble again
in their terrible eloquence upon his own.
But he sought her in vain. The shadows of the night hid her from him.
He went back to his home alone.
"It is best so," he said to himself.
For the life that lay before him he needed all his strength, all his
coldness, all his cruelty. And she was only a female thing--a reed of
the river, songless, and blown by the wind as the rest were.
He returned to his solitude, and lit his lamp, and looked on the
creations that alone he loved.
"They shall live--or I will die," he said to his own heart. With the war
to which he went what had any amorous toy to do?
That night Hermes had no voice for him.
Else might the wise god have said, "Many reeds grow together by the
river, and men tread them at will, and none are the worse. But in one
reed of a million song is hidden; and when a man carelessly breaks that
reed in twain, he may miss its music often and long,--yea, all the years
of his life."
But Hermes that night spake not.
And he brake his reed, and cast it behind him.