When the dawn came, it found her lying face downward among the rushes by
the river. She had run on, and on, and on blindly, not knowing whither
she fled, with the strange force that despair lends; then suddenly had
dropped, as a young bull drops in the circus with the steel sheathed in
its brain. There she had remained insensible, the blood flowing a little
from her mouth.
It was quite lonely by the waterside. A crane among the sedges, an owl
on the wind, a water-lizard under the stones, such were the only moving
things. It was in a solitary bend of the stream; its banks were green
and quiet; there were no dwellings near; and there was no light
anywhere, except the dull glow of the lamp above the Calvary.
No one found her. A young fox came and smelt at her, and stole
frightened away. That was all. A sharp wind rising with the reddening of
the east blew on her, and recalled her to consciousness after many
hours. When her eyes at length opened, with a blank stare upon the
grayness of the shadows, she lifted herself a little and sat still, and
wondered what had chanced to her.
The first rays of the sun rose over the dim blue haze of the horizon.
She looked at it and tried to remember, but failed. Her brain was sick
and dull.
A little beetle, green and bronze, climbed in and out among the sand of
the river-shore; her eyes vacantly followed the insect's aimless
circles. She tried to think, and could not; her thoughts went feebly
and madly round and round, round and round, as the beetle went in his
maze of sand. It was all so gray, so still, so chill, she was afraid of
it. Her limbs were stiffened by the exposure and dews of the night. She
shivered and was cold.
The sun rose--a globe of flame above the edge of the world.
Memory flashed on her with its light.
She rose a little, staggering and blind, and weakened by the loss of
blood; she crept feebly to the edge of the stream, and washed the stains
from her lips, and let her face rest a little in the sweet, silent,
flowing water.
Then she sat still amidst the long rushlike grass, and thought, and
thought, and wondered why life was so tough and merciless a thing, that
it would ache on, and burn on, and keep misery awake to know itself even
when its death-blow had been dealt, and the steel was in its side.
She was still only half sensible of her wretchedness. She was numbed by
weakness, and her brain seemed deadened by a hot pain, that shot through
it as with tongues of flame.
The little beetle at her feet was busied in a yellower soil than sand.
He moved round and round in a little dazzling heap of coins and
trembling paper thin as gauze. She saw it without seeing for awhile;
then, all at once, a horror flashed on her. She saw that the money had
fallen from her tunic. She guessed the truth--that in his last embrace
he had slid into her bosom, in notes and in coin, half that sum whereof
he had spoken as the ransom which had set him free.
Her bloodless face grew scarlet with an immeasurable shame. She would
have suffered far less if he had killed her.
He who denied her love to give her gold! Better that, when he had kissed
her, he had covered her eyes softly with one hand, and with the other
driven his knife straight through the white warmth of her breast.
The sight of the gold stung her like a snake.
Gold!--such wage as men flung to the painted harlots gibing at the
corners of the streets!
The horror of the humiliation filled her with loathing of herself.
Unless she had become shameful in his sight, she thought, he could not
have cast this shame upon her.
She gathered herself slowly up, and stood and looked with blind, aching
eyes at the splendor of the sunrise.
Her heart was breaking.
Her one brief dream of gladness was severed sharply, as with a sword,
and killed forever.
She did not reason--all thought was stunned in her; but as a woman, who
loves looking on the face she loves, will see sure death written there
long ere any other can detect it, so she knew, by the fatal and unerring
instinct of passion, that he was gone from her as utterly and as
eternally as though his grave had closed on him.
She did not even in her own heart reproach him. Her love for him was too
perfect to make rebuke against him possible to her. Had he not a right
to go as he would, to do as he chose, to take her or leave her, as best
might seem to him? Only he had no right to shame her with what he had
deemed shame to himself; no right to insult what he had slain.
She gathered herself slowly up, and took his money in her hand, and went
along the river-bank. Whither? She had no knowledge at first; but, as
she moved against the white light and the cool currents of the morning
air, her brain cleared a little. The purpose that had risen in her
slowly matured and strengthened; without its sustenance she would have
sunk down and perished, like a flower cut at the root.
Of all the world that lay beyond the pale of those golden and russet
orchards and scarlet lakes of blowing poppies she had no more knowledge
than the lizard at her feet.
Cities, he had often said, were as fiery furnaces that consumed all
youth and innocence which touched them; for such as she to go to them
was, he had often said, to cast a luscious and golden peach of the
summer into the core of a wasps'-nest. Nevertheless, her mind was
resolute to follow him,--to follow him unknown by him; so that, if his
footsteps turned to brighter paths, her shadow might never fall across
his ways; but so that, if need were, if failure still pursued him, and
by failure came misery and death, she would be there beside him, to
share those fatal gifts which none would dispute with her or grudge her.
To follow him was to her an instinct as natural and as irresistible as
it is to the dog to track his master's wanderings.
She would have starved ere ever she would have told him that she
hungered. She would have perished by the roadside ere ever she would
have cried to him that she was homeless. She would have been torn
asunder for a meal by wolves ere she would have bought safety or succor
by one coin of that gold he had slid into her bosom, like the wages of a
thing that was vile.
But to follow him she never hesitated: unless this had been possible to
her, she would have refused to live another hour. The love in her, at
once savage and sublime, at once strong as the lion's rage and humble as
the camel's endurance, made her take patiently all wrongs at his hands,
but made her powerless to imagine a life in which he was not.
She went slowly now through the country, in the hush of the waking day.
He had said that he would leave at dawn.
In her unconscious agony of the night gone by, she had run far and fast
ere she had fallen; and now, upon her waking, she had found herself some
league from the old mill-woods, and farther yet from the tower on the
river where he dwelt.
She was weak, and the way seemed very long to her; ever and again, too,
she started aside and hid herself, thinking each step were his. She
wanted to give him back his gold, yet she felt as though one look of his
eyes would kill her.
It was long, and the sun was high, ere she had dragged her stiff and
feeble limbs through the long grasses of the shore and reached the
ruined granary. Crouching down, and gazing through the spaces in the
stones from which so often she had watched him, she saw at once that
the place was desolate.
The great Barabbas, and the painted panels and canvases, and all the
pigments and tools and articles of an artist's store, were gone; but the
figures on the walls were perforce left there to perish. The early light
fell full upon them, sad and calm and pale, living their life upon the
stone.
She entered and looked at them.
She loved them greatly; it pierced her heart to leave them there--alone.
The bound Helios working at the mill, with white Hermes watching, mute
and content;--and Persephone crouching in the awful shadow of the dread
winged King,--the Greek youths, with doves in their breasts and golden
apples in their hands,--the women dancing upon Cithæron in the
moonlight,--the young gladiator wrestling with the Libyan lion,--all the
familiar shapes and stories that made the gray walls teem with the old
sweet life of the heroic times, were there--left to the rat and the
spider, the dust and the damp, the slow, sad death of a decay which no
heart would sorrow for, nor any hand arrest.
The days would come and go, the suns would rise and set, the nights
would fall, and the waters flow, and the great stars throb above in the
skies, and they would be there--alone.
To her they were living things, beautiful and divine; they were bound up
with all the hours of her love; and at their feet she had known the one
brief dream of ecstasy that had sprung up for her, great and golden as
the prophet's gourd, and as the gourd in a night had withered.
She held them in a passionate tenderness--these, the first creatures who
had spoken to her with a smile, and had brought light into the darkness
of her life.
She flung herself on the ground and kissed its dust, and prayed for them
in an agony of prayer--prayed for them that the hour might come, and
come quickly, when men would see the greatness of their maker, and would
remember them, and seek them, and bear them forth in honor and in
worship to the nations. She prayed in an agony; prayed blindly, and to
whom she knew not; prayed, in the sightless instinct of the human heart,
towards some greater strength which could bestow at once retribution and
consolation.
Nor was it so much for him as for them that she thus prayed: in loving
them she had reached the pure and impersonal passion of the artist. To
have them live, she would have given her own life.
Then the bonds of her agony seemed to be severed; and, for the first
time, she fell into a passion of tears, and, stretched there on the
floor of the forsaken chamber, wept as women weep upon a grave.
When she arose, at length, she met the eyes of Hypnos and Oneiros and
Thanatos--the gentle gods who give forgetfulness to men.
They were her dear gods, her best beloved and most compassionate; yet
their look struck coldly to her heart.
Sleep, Dreams, and Death,--were these the only gifts with which the
gods, being merciful, could answer prayer?